The prophetic role of the arts, especially opera, in nineteenth-century culture1

Hislory of European Ideas, Vol. 13, No. 6, pp. 747-761, Printed in Great Britain

01914599/91 $3.00+0.00 0 1991 Pergamon Press plc

1991

THE PROPHETIC ROLE OF THE ARTS, ESPECIALLY OPERA, IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY CULTURE’ BERNARD

ZELECHOW*

Art plays an enduring social and political role in Western culture. An intimate conscious relationship exists between patron, patronage and the artist. Before the French Revolution art reflected the vision of the world as understood by the patron, Hence the art product had a deep-rooted relationship to entrenched social and political power. The artist deviated infrequently from the official understanding of reality. The artist rarely offered an overt critique of the socially given world view. Nor did the artist try to instruct the established order in alternate modes of existence.2 In traditional Western culture organised religion fulfilled the function of instructing the faithful in negotiating the pitfalls of existence. It had the task and mandate of providing meaning for the existential mysteries of origins, ends, birth and death, as well as a rationale for the human experience. However, the biblical paradox of freedom and its insistent critique of the insufficiencies of all culture3 was not part of the operative vocabularies in the empowered religious establishments of the ‘ancien regime’.4 The religious interpretation of existence by implication is political.5 In the nineteenth century organised religion ceased to perform its roles effectively for most of those who shaped the consciousness of modernity.6 Religious institutions did not lead the way after the upheavals of the French and Industrial Revolutions.7 The prophetic task of educating the great masses of Western Europeans in negotiating the dynamics of modernity fell to the artists.* The importance of the artist in the religious life of Europe is witnessed equally in Marxist theory, Mill’s liberalism and the romantic self-understanding.9 The artist stood as the metaphor for the unalienated life and for the authentic notion of personhood. Prophecy is the insight into the inauthentic in the human condition.i” Biblical prophecy plumbs the depths of the inadequacies and insufficiencies of all cultural forms. As such it is an illumination of the inexplicit and unexamined aspects of existence, and is always a demystification of social, political, economic and personal life and a call for transformation and redemption. By definition prophetic critique begins negatively. First it disturbs the social order when it breaks with the conspiracy of silence, the agreement to agree.” Second it explores the underside of social existence and the darker side of the human psyche. The modern secular artist as prophet is disadvantaged compared to the biblical prophet. The biblical framework provides the prophet with a platform adequate to the project. Paradoxically, by insisting that revelation is God’s story the *History and Humanities,

lP3, Canada.

York University, Vanier 235, North York, Toronto, M3J 747

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Zelechow

biblical authors provide an absolute platform so that the telling of the human story is possible. The absolute platform allows the possibility of redemption and salvation. By implication the prospect of future transformation sets the grounds for a human history. The crucial element of prophecy which saves it from despair is the historical concept of significance; that is, it infuses the human condition with meaning. Prophecy can never proclaim the meaninglessness of existence without falling into contradiction with itself. In the nineteenth century the prophetic artist chose overwhelmingly to generate a comparable secular framework mostly without reference to ‘God language’.i2 The task was to ground art in implicit biblical values but without any necessary reference and often in opposition to formal religious dogma or doctrine.i3 Hence we find the infusion of the religious task into arti and simultaneously the aestheticising of religion in the nineteenth century.i5 The nineteenth century unmasking tradition of critique is the secular version of biblical prophecy. I6 Artists, along with social thinkers, were equally engaged in the unmasking activity. The prophetic role of art required the artist not only to critique the inadequacies of all social and cultural endeavour, but to point the way to the possibilities of cultural and personal transformation. Without the biblical platform (i.e. that is that the story as God’s story is also the significant human story) the task of critique was dangerous in the extreme. The critical tradition was vulnerable to the possibility of falling into nihilism in relation to what it uncovered.” Not all artists in all art forms’* took up the challenge despite the general expectations that they would. lp Some purveyed of mere entertainment. Others had a different agenda. But without the commitment to the prospect of human transformation and redemption art falls either into contradiction or decadence. The decadent is the obverse of the prophetic. It denies that it speaks at all. At its best form for the sake of form is the exclusive preoccupation of decadence.20 The result is either sophisticated or trivial decoration. In its lowest form decadence mimics the religious in satanic fashion.2’ The dynamic instability and the rapidity of cultural change in the modern world made the issue of freedom central to nineteenth-century thinkers and artists. The concern was with the meaning of the paradox of freedom. Artists recognised the conditionalities of life as well as the volitional power of human action. The question was how are we to negotiate the pitfalls of existence?22 Not all attempts at artistic answers to this question are equally successful. Critique can lead as easily to paralysis and despair instead of a call for redemption and transformation. The works of Beethoven, Wagner, and Verdi illuminates the problematic of aesthetic prophecy. Beethoven acclaimed freedom as the most important value and made the aesthetic explicitly the religious.23 His single radically flawed opera has freedom as the central theme. Verdi was the reluctant prophet while Wagner like Beethoven saw his work as explicitly religious. Verdi, beginning with the premise of the iron conditionality of life, became paradoxically the great spokesman of the meaning of biblical freedom. Wagner, starting from the premise of free will (confusing the biblical insight that we are made in God’s image with the notion that we are God), ended in nihilism and destructive fatalism. Beethoven the prophet of abstract freedom, unwittingly justifies radical evil.

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The number of apocryphal and factual stories which celebrate Beethoven’s political and social radicalism and his commitment to freedom attests to the link between Beethoven’s art and the historical epochs of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period. Beethoven was not self-consciously a philosophical romantic. He didn’t think in such categories. Nonetheless European romantics recognised Beethoven as one of their own. They embraced his music as well as his biography. Therefore, an examination of Fidelio illuminates some aspects of romantic thinking about freedom, political structures and the problem of radical evil. Convention understands Fidelio as a typical romantic ‘rescue’ opera and places the interpretive emphasis on Leonora’s fidelity and heroism. However, the opera communicates a powerful ‘subtext’ which teaches us about Beethoven’s implicit misunderstanding of freedom and political action. A more appropriate title for Beethoven’s work would have been Rocco and the Conspiracy of Silence. Beethoven’s compassion for Rocco, his treatment of the prisoners, his deus ex machina liberator illuminate a romantic failure to come to grips with the ambiguity of freedom (intentionality), the unwillingness to recognise that the active imperatives of freedom apply to all, that personhood is not a value applicable only to the ‘genius’ and to those deemed noble’. Beethoven’s ‘false consciousness’ provides inadvertent justification for personal and social passivity as well as the creation of an environment which allows evil to flourish. The reception history of the opera mirrors the tension between subtext and surface text. It is ironic that Beethoven’s Fidelio received its first success as part of Metternich’s celebrations in honour of the restoration of the ancien regime at the Congress of Vienna. Obviously, despite the most repressive and restrictive censorship laws in Europe, the Imperial censors saw nothing revolutionary or threatening in Beethoven’s opera.24 Beethoven’s political naivete and his inadequate conception of existential freedom is responsible for the incoherence of his political, religious, and operatic agenda. The continual incongruities between its musical and verbal messages manifests the theoretical confusion of the opera. Whether Beethoven intends farce or metaphysics, musical comedy or grand opera is not apparent from the words or music. The disparity between Beethoven’s theoretical awareness and his inability to create an authentic existential environment flaws Fidelio from the moment the curtain rises. The moral centre of the opera is the response to monstrous evil on the part of those who interact with the arch villain Don Pizarro. The Don’s introduction illustrates the lack of focus of Beethoven’s thinking dramatically as well as musically. Pizarro strides in to a March which is ludicrously inappropriate to the action. It is jovial and smart-it is music which parodies the pomposity of a military parade. The March suggests an encounter with a comic military police governor out of late nineteenth century operetta. 25 What follows however is something which is positively terrifying in what it expresses musically and psychologically. Evocative, powerful demonic music that reveals the maniacal Pizarro replaces the musical satire and laughter of the March. His talking/singing marks an enigmatic alienation. As he tortures his helpless

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prisoners he insists that he is the victim. As he demonstrates his inability to recognise human dignity in any other person he complains that the world denies him respect and dignity. Beethoven displays elegantly the disconnectedness between his judgement and his action. His speech underlined by Beethoven’s music expresses a rage which is simply unwarranted by the grievances he describes. When he sings/speaks we recognise the presence of an irrational nightmare. The protagonist who most consistently relates to Pizarro is the jailer Rocco. Rocco is the anonymous man who facilitates the action of the great historical players. Nonetheless Beethoven’s delineation of Rocco is a veritable positive apology for irresponsibility and the necessity and pervasiveness of evil. Rocco is the everyman caught in the web of coercive power and authority which is invested sui generis in established government. His existential position is a universally real one. He must act or re-act within the context of the dangerous conditionalities of life. It is not Leonora or the arch monster Pizarro but Rocco, the jailer who stands at the centre of the action of the opera. Rocco, the loyal servant who does his duty, recognises his place in society, bows to superior authority and obeys all orders regardless of how immoral he knows them to be. He acts out of the conviction that obedience in itself is the highest and ultimate human value. It is Rocco who knows about Pizarro’s plans, it is Rocco who is willing to remain silent in face of what he knows; it is Rocco who is willing to follow orders without question; it is Rocco who despite his conscience is willing to execute Pizarro’s orders with the justification that he is doing his duty. The interaction between Pizarro and Rocco tells us much about the moral dilemma posed by the opera Fidelio. Pizarro’s madness explains Rocco’s ambivalence and his complicity and faithfulness to Pizarro. While Rocco’s plight reflects accurately an aspect of the conditionality of existence, his actions bear little relationship to a meaningful notion of freedom. Beethoven, on some vague and unthought-out level, knows this. He simply refuses to excuse Rocco’s unwillingness to act against Pizarro’s overwhelming power. Life is full of unequal risks and that Pizarro’s apparent tyranny requires complicity. However, Beethoven through Pizarro makes explicit Rocco’s willing complicity. Pizarro acknowledges that he cannot carry out his plans to murder Florestan without Rocco acquiesence and help. Beethoven has an elitist conception of freedom and morality. He does not expect responsible action from Rocco. Beethoven is in no way a democrat or egalitarian. The portrait Beethoven draws of the prisoners clearly states his position. 26The prisoners’ chorus comes near the end of the first act. The chorus is musically wonderful, and dramatically irrelevant. It doesn’t move the action along at all. It reveals Beethoven’s attitude to the great masses of humanity. The masses are to be loved abstractly, as noble and good, but existentially Beethoven denies them all power of action. They remain a passive inert mass even after liberation. Beethoven’s notion of liberation is that of passive peacefulness. The chorus which sings out superficially for freedom communicates the message that for the mass of humanity freedom is the exchange of a literal peace of the tomb for one which is metaphoric.27 Beethoven reserves nobility of character and action for Leonora/Fidelio and for her husband, the honourable political prisoner Florestan. The problem with

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Beethoven’s conception of Leonora is that he simplifies the tensions and ironies of her role. He fails to present the ambiguity and risks in all human action in his portrait of Leonora/Fidelio. For example in one scene Beethoven has Fidelio/Leonora announce to Rocco that he/she must speak honestly about his/her real desires. Honesty, in this context, means that Leonora/Fidelio must lie. The double irony is that Leonora as the deceiver and the creator of the deception asks Rocco for the gift of trust, yet Beethoven does not ‘read’ Leonora’s deceptions or actions. Her deception remains unredeemed at the end of the opera. Beethoven hopes to instruct us in a celebration of freedom and fidelity by making Leonora into an exemplar of morality and right action. However, her perfection makes her an unilluminating vehicle for an understanding of how problematic acts of freedom are. The finale is a confirmation that Beethoven’s vision of freedom lacks social and historical grounding. As the scene opens Rocco now identifies himself with Leonora’s heroic action in liberating her husband. He denounces Pizarro to the governor. The governor’s response to Pizarro when he tries to disclose Rocco’s complicity is revealing. Pizarro is literally silenced. The implicit silence exonerates Rocco. For in fact with the liberation of Florestan and his reunion with Leonora, Rocco becomes irrelevant and invisible to Beethoven. Instead of a critique of Rocco’s world the opera concludes with a hymn of deliverance based on the union of clemency and justice and brotherhood. Beethoven has chosen a false and inauthentic happy ending. He ostensibly affirms human freedom and dignity, love as mutuality, and the existence of a relationship of mutuality between man and God. Beethoven’s affirmation masks a prevalent romantic misconception of social reality and political freedom. Beethoven’s explicit ecstatic affirmation. Beethoven equates erroneously the monstrous with radical evil thereby obscuring vitally important different aspects of both. The authenticity of what Beethoven captures about individual madness and singular behaviour deflects our attention from the reality that individuals do not live in a vacuum. Radical evil exists not in the specificity and explosion of the individual id but rather in the complicity and duplicity of the community which refuses to bear witness. The larger category of the social subsumes the idea of purposeful action. The individual and the social cannot be separated yet many romantics along with Beethoven were prone to do this. Discussions of gratuitous evil must relate the social conditionality of individual action to the social response to all the consequences of action. The locus of radical evil is not in the aberrant and ineradicable action of the individual but rather in the failure of the social response. Social silence is the epitome of radical evil. To redeem root evil requires speech and an historical memory which allows for redemption of the past. The conception of radical or irreducible root evil paradoxically can only occur within a culture which espouses authentic biblical values which embodies a notion of the sacredness of history. That means that what happens existentially has meaning and significance. The concept of root evil presupposes the notion that the individual can consciously will to do evil. Knowledge is an essential part of action. It means that the evil one consciously understands the human

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construction of culture and is prepared to manipulate it for whatever ends. However, this conception of evil collides with the biblical values which command an acknowledged social recognition of evil and a commitment to a notion of effective redemption. By implication no human action can be conceptualised biblically as irreducible and irredeemable. Beethoven does not express an authentic notion of historical redemption. Instead Beethoven opts for the conspiracy of silence, the social agreement to agree that all is well. The final irony is that Pizarro speaks and Beethoven prescribes that the community remains silent, wills silence. Beethoven to is silent. The man on the white horse is no substitute for the hard labour which redemption demands. ** An examination of the text of the final scene of the opera indicates no understanding that Pizarro’s actions must be ‘bought back’ if one is to fight tyranny. Instead of remembering the past in an active fashion to insure a different kind of future Beethoven counsels a deliberate and explicit silence. Beethoven is remembered as a great revolutionary. The warrant for this judgement is the final ensemble which extols the virtues of human equality and brotherhood. Nonetheless Beethoven, in what he discloses in Fidelio, believes in brotherhood and humanity only in the abstract. Beethoven understands ROCCO, exclusively and unfavourably, in class terms. He is a servant with the values of a servant. By implication Beethoven asserts that we cannot expect more from Rocco. Servants do not bear the burden of freedom. Concomitantly, servants are not particularly endowed with human dignity. Beethoven’s conception of Rocco does not contain a radical critique. It merely reflects a rigid class society within a political vacuum. Beethoven honestly reflects the real conditions of the society in which he found himself. However, his explicit agenda, as an apostle of human freedom and dignity, demands a critique which transcends the limits of a mere reflection of social conditions. Beethoven wished to be a prophet of the new order but in effect he merely reflects the general cultural confusion of the times. He has all the ideas necessary for an explication of freedom but he fails to ground them in a coherent viable manner. To be sure to act freely is heroic in the way Leonora as a special human being is heroic. But freedom is much more the heroic inherent potential in everyman. Without a conception of the heroism of everyman the understanding of political life remains almost universally ungrounded. It would be comforting if we could say that Beethoven failed because opera is incapable of expressing such complex ideas of freedom, morality, and political responsibility. But the evidence doesn’t warrant such a conclusion. Wagner particularly in The Ring explores the underside of the human psyche. All of the protagonists share the rage and insatiable desires of Pizarro. However, despite the nihilism inherent in The Ring the cycle Wagner does not allow for silence. Each of the protagonists reads the monstrous qualities of his/her antagonist. Wagner was enthusiastic about the role of prophet. He embraced with gusto the task of prophecy. He conceived of The Ring Cycle as a religious experience and ritual festival of death and destruction. Like most artists in the nineteenth century, including Verdi, he sought to disengage himself from organised Christianity. Wagner’s religious perspective was decidedly also not biblical. He self-consciously modelled the Ring CycZe on classical pagan Greek tragedy as

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well as ancient Germanic myths. The Ring Cyde purports to reveal beginnings and ends, creation and redemption, love and salvation. Wagner sets out to celebrate life allegedly without Christian guilt. Yet, in the final analysis Wagner’s music dramas always fall into unintended contradictions. Wagner does not seem aware of the implications of despair in his decision to ground his work in pagan and Germanic myth rather than in biblical values.29 The darkness of Wagner’s critique is not the sotuce of the nihilism of his music dramas. Indeed the elements of authenticity in his work result from his insights into the mystified unspoken aspects of the human id and in his graphic critique of the bourgeois social order. Wagner was a genius at making explicit the underside of the human psyche. He explores the confusion of love and lust in sexual desire. He sheds light on the compulsive need for individuals to consume one another. He shows us the human wish to be God and the yearning for an illusory at-onement. He spotlights human greediness and the longing for the undifferentiated void prior to creation. His work offers us an anatomy and frightening profile of the murky unspoken side of the European mind in the nineteenth century.30 However, Wagner is unable to encompass what he has discovered. He identifies wholly with many of his protagonists. Their urges and drives are also Wagner’s. He yearns in the same way as his creations. He proposes no standard whereby we can differentiate between those he wishes us to admire and those he means us to hate. We are supposed to feel compassion for Wotan and Siegfried but not Frika and Mime and so on. However, since all the characters are equally unpalatable, unscrupulous, greedy and solipsistic, it is unfathomable what criteria supports favourable and unfavourable judgements. Wagner does not provide a platform from which the listener stands in relation to the protagonists. For example, when Mime complains of his brother’s brutality, momentarily empathy is possible. However, he quickly reveals that his complaint is one of pure jealousy. He merely wishes that the tables would turn. Wagner repeats the same syndrome in depiction of Mime’s relationship to Siegfried. Both protagonists have their legitimate complaints but their beastly response to one another makes it impossible to follow Wagner’s partiality for Siegfried. Nonetheless Wagner offers us unyielding critique. His protagonists all ‘read’ one another. They are experts in pointing up the offensive qualities of their adversaries. However the perspective is always the same. We are offered offensiveness from the perspective of offense. Hence without a platform Wagner finds himself trapped in the sewer he so explicitly describes. The upshot is that his descriptive account is transformed into prescription which he cannot bear. Destruction and total devastation of the gods and man is all there is. How does a message meant to celebrate life turn into a festival of death? Wagner conceives of humankind in its original state to be endowed with free will. His characters all act as if they can do everything they desire and will. They act, or more appropriately, they react compulsively. They deceive themselves into believing that they control the consequences of their wilfulness. When things go wrong they project all blame externally. But Wagner’s astute description of the anatomy of illusion of free will is not merely descriptive. It bears the weight of an exclusive definition of human nature. There is an inexorable logic which follows from not recognising that free will is

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illusory and from casting the narrative in the form of a myth. If one operates with the belief that one is capable of doing all that one wishes one inevitably comes up against the conditionality of existence. In such circumstances it is not possible to deal with the consequences which thwart our wilfulness. To be simply thwarted means not to recognise one’s involvement in the act. It implies that one does not bear responsibility for one’s act. The frustration which comes from not recognising the illusory quality of free will leads inevitably to fatalism. Not one of the characters in The Ring Cycle can sustain dealing with the implications of his or her actions. Rather disappointment leads to further wilfulness until frustration reaches the breaking point and the characters fall into destructive nihilism or despair. Wotan the only protagonist who Wagner endows with a glimmer of understanding that he must redeem his original errors can think of nothing more imaginative than salvation by total destruction. Wagner re-iterates this attitude which leads to the vicious circle in his treatment of Brunhilde. After seeking revenge against Siegfried which leads to his death, Brunhilde’s throws herself along with her horse onto her beloved’s funeral pyre. Wagner’s characters see salvation and redemption only in death. To link death and salvation is a dubious but authentic existential message. It rests on the presupposition that life is a veil of tears with redemption in the future. It offers succour and justification for the pains of existence. However, such a message is not possible within the Wagnerian scheme. By locating his drama in an archetypical,” timeless, static, mythic world there is no future. There is only the endless repetition of yearning and desire, despair and nihilism. To speak of redemption or salvation, one needs a notion of history, a future which buys back the past. To speak of acts of redemption requires a demystification of the illusion of free will and an acknowledgement of the paradox of freedom. Man cannot redeem the world without God’s help but without man’s willingness to act and bear responsibility for his actions the world will never be redeemed. Unlike Wagner Verdi offers no religious manifestos. He turns to Shakespeare, and Schiller22 for inspiration. Verdi is ambivalent and secretive about his personal religious conviction. But his operas express a decided explicit anticlericalism and an implicit presupposition of biblical values.33 Death and selfsacrifice are as much present in Verdi’s lexicon as in Wagner’s vocabulary. But they function differently. For Verdi death is an existential fact. What counts is the way in which we live and not that we must die eventually. Don Carlos34 is Verdi’s most explicitly political opera as well as his most religious work.35 Verdi casts the opera historically in the sixteenth century but its politics are liberal and democratic. Religiously the opera is explicitly antiCatholic but its existential message is biblical. Verdi matched Wagner in presenting the dark side of existence. Don Carlos is probably the bleakest work in the whole repertory. All that is good in the world, all who are willing to take on the task of redemption die. Don Carlos matches the conflagration of Gotterdammerung with an onstage grisly auto-de-fe. The opera concludes with the apparent triumph of the authoritarian king and the life denying Grand Inquisitor. Yet, we come away from Don Carlos not in despair that hope is illusory and life is meaningless but with the message that the task remains. The communication in Don Carlos is authentically biblical. While all of the

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protagonists, those who celebrate death and those who celebrate life, use ‘God language’ Verdi’s communication is clear. He commands us to participate in the work of worldbuilding despite our inadequacies, imperfections and personal desires. There are two crucial related sets of presuppositions which separate Wagner and Verdi. Verdi’s worldview begins with the notion that humankind is born into the iron conditionality of history and the social world. Humankind does not have free will. Rather the human drama takes place within the confines of the structure of history. Nonetheless Verdi empowers his characters with the dignity of human freedom. He works implicitly within the biblical paradox of freedom with its synthesis of intentionality and conditionality. Hence despite the presupposition of the iron prison of conditionality, Verdi recognises that human beings act, must act. Verdi recognises the fragility and vulnerability of the human capacity for successful action. He never fails to recognise that consequences of actions are eternal and infinite and mostly beyond human control. Nonetheless he insists that we bear responsibility for our actions. Verdi charges us with the responsibility of redeeming the errors of the past in light of the not yet, or future. In Don Carlos Verdi explores the various ways in which we respond to the conditional structure of existence. In the Fontainebleu scene Verdi introduces the distinction between human freedom and the illusions of free will. He sheds light on the relationship between human freedom and living in the world as opposed to the link between the illusion of free will and the yearning for life in the Garden.36 In this first scene Elizabeth must choose between her personal passion and desire and a political commitment to bring peace between Spain and France. The condition is coercive but nonetheless she must choose. Throughout the opera Elizabeth confronts the consequences of her decision with enormous strength and dignity.-” In contrast Don Carlos lives with the illusion of free will and the desire to live in the Garden. He wants what he wants. He yearns and desires without any sense that desire has consequences or that he must bear responsibility. His desire is entirely solipsistic. Throughout the opera he knows only his own pain. He feels thwarted but, he is incapable of action. He whines and remains immobilised through most of the opera. In this sense, although he lacks viciousness he is very much like the actors in The Ring Cycle. But Verdi’s treatment of Carlos is different from Wagner’s approach to his protagonists. Verdi drags Carlos out of his solipsism. At the conclusion of the opera Carlos reconciles himself to existential realities that Elizabeth will never be his and it is more important that there are human tasks which transcend mere personal desire. Verdi plays the question of responsible action on a large canvas as well as within the intimate relationship between Don Carlos and Elizabeth.38 Verdi contrasts intimacy with an illumination of the meaning of power and authority, secular and religious. He juxtaposes these values against authoritarianism and the religion of death. The Marquis de Posa reads the distinctions between values which celebrate life and those which preach death in his relationship with the Grand Inquisitor and King Philip II. He is a passionate human being. Posa turns his power and passion towards living in the world and the desire to bring into being the biblical/Kantian kingdom of ends. His highest goal is to insure the

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dignity and personhood of the subjects of the Spanish empire. He confronts the king, who in spite of his awesome power, wishes only the peace of the tomb in which he need bear no responsibility for his actions. Through an interplay between personal desire and political events in which the highest values are constantly thwarted, Verdi insists that failure is no excuse for avoiding the human task of world building. He accomplishes this by rooting his action in history which links the eternal present to the past and the future. The description of life-denying powers doesn’t become Verdi’s prescription. Despite the victory of authoritarian, life-denying values, Verdi insists that things can be different. The past can be redeemed, must be redeemed in light of the vision of the meaning of human freedom, the highest aspect of personhood. He insists that transformation is necessary and possible.3g Verdi does not draw his characters as caricatures. He reads their inadequacies from the perspective of human dignity. Verdi ‘reads’ Carlos and Eboli from the ethical stance of Elizabeth and Posa. Similarly Verdi ‘reads’ the totalitarianism of Philip and the Grand Inquisitor from the platform of personhood. The Inquisitional Church is read from the standard of revelation.40 There is as much carnage in Don Carlos as there is in the Ring Cycle. Verdi confronts death with as much clarity as Wagner. But the inevitability of death does not lead him to despair and hopelessness. Human suffering as well as joy has significance and meaning. The confrontation with death is the vehicle for the illumination of the ways to live authentically and hopefully. Mutuality between persons annuls the false vision of at-one-ment, human dignity suspersedes yearning and desire, and personhood replaces the compulsive explosiveness of the id. The concluding scene is a grand explication of the messianic vision4’ Despite their intentions Wagner and Beethoven fail to present an authentic prophetic message. Setting the drama mythically thwarts Wagner’s attempt to celebrate life. Myth denies the future and insists that what is all there is. In myth genuine transformation is impossible. Despair and the cycle of death is all there is. Beethoven, in limiting the capacity for freedom to the heroic genius inadvertently justifies a world of silent evil. Verdi beginning from the perspective of the grim necessities of the human condition nonetheless finds the way to negotiate existence authentically. By using the structure of historicity he shows that what is not all that there is. The past need not have been the way it was nor need the future repeat the present. Verdi’s message, is always where there is life, there is hope, and there is celebration. Bernard York

Zelechow

University, Canada

NOTES 1. Parts of this essay were presented at the American Academy of Religion (Chicago, 1988), The International Conference on Romanticism and Revolution (Lancaster, 1989) and TARS (New Hampshire, 1989). This essay is a summary of three chapters of a manuscript entitled Opera, The Arts, and Nineteenth Century Culture: Reflections on Faith, History and Existence.

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2. For an interesting analysis of patronage in relation to art both before the French Revolution and after see Braudy, L. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Braudy’s unique angle of vision illuminates the development of advertising industry which emerges as a response to the artist’s need to sell his wares. We need only to note that Paganini refused to publish his music for fear that others might learn to play as well as he did and hence steal his thunder. The same motives operate in Liszt’s stunts which usually resulted in the destruction of the instrument upon which he performed. Steinway, not to be outdone, reaped an enormous advantage with the introduction of the steel bar piano frame. Further Braudy argues that the rhetoric used by the art community to justify itself is a secularised version of traditional justifications for an afterlife. To point to the relative freedom of the artist vis-a-vis his audience does not mean that official patronage ceased to exist. The myth of the starving ignored artistic genius is unmasked by Rosen, C. and Zerner, H. Romanticism andRealism: The Mythology of Nineteenth Century Art (New York: Viking Press, 1980). The situation in opera was less clear. The Paris Opera House was a government controlled theatre but its management was not subsidised. Berlioz throughout his career had difficulty with the management of the Paris Opera. He inventively redefined the relationship between opera and symphony in order to mount performances of his work. The classic biography of Berlioz is Barzun, J. Berlioz andHis Century: An Introduction to the Age of Romanticism (New York: Meridian Books, 1956). 3. The prophetic is usually suppressed by political power. That is precisely what makes the Bible such a subversive and liberating document. For an interesting and provocative exploration of this theme see Shneidau, H.N. Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. l-49. 4. I make a distinction between biblical values and codified dogma and doctrine. 5. Verdi was aware very early on that the religious was also always political. He also knew that art too was both religious and political. See Verdi, G. ‘Autobiographical Narrative’ in Weaver, W. Verdi: A Documentary Study (London: Thames and Hudson, n.d.), pp. 11-14. 6. An interesting examination of modernity is found in Karl, F.R. Modern and Modernism: The Sovereignty of the Artist 1885-1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1988). 7. This does not mean that there was an absence of religious activity. It does mean that religious ferment was at the fringe of the mainstream of European events. Indeed, the most vigorous religious activity defined itself in opposition to modernity. We need only note the Papal ‘The Syllabus of Modern Errors’ (1864), the withdrawal of Hasidim, ‘Old Believers’, and Mennonites from the problems engendered by the two revolutions. There were ‘reform’ Jews and ‘liberal’ Catholics and many ‘mainstream’ Protestants who tried to become engaged. The results of their actions are not particularly impressive. 8. For a study of the centrality of opera in the political life of Europe, especially Italy, see Kimbell, D.R.B. Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 198 1). Also Garibaldi and Mazzini worried over which composer would be the most politically effective. Garrabaldi chose Donizetti over Bellini while Mazzini opted for Verdi over Bellini. In North America Walt Whitman, the great poet of democracy, declared that Leaves of Grass would not have been written without inspiration from the world of opera. 9. Respectively, see Marx, K. The German ZdeoIogy (New York: International Publishers 1960), Mill, J.S. OnLiberty(New York: Bantam Books, 1965). Balzac is a good source of understanding the process of unmasking as well as the esteem with which the nineteenth century held artists. See especially his Cousin Pons with its scathing attack on all social classes. The only actors to escape Balzac’s scalpel are significantly the two

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idealistic musicians Balzac, H. Cousin Ports (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1985). 10. For a thoughtful discussion of prophecy see Baly, Denis God and History in the Old Testament: The Encounter with the Absolutely Other in Ancient Israel (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), pp. 159-206. 11. For a discussion of the meaning of the agreement to agree see especially ‘the greatest danger’ in Nietzsche, F. JoyfiI Wisdom (New York: Ungar, 1981), pp. 106-108. Also Schneidau is instructive on the relationship between the agreement to agree and mythology. Schneidau, op. cit., pp. 50-103. 12. One notable exception is the group of French artists at the end of the nineteenth century who call themselves the Nabis, the transliteration of the Hebrew word denoted the prophets. They knew what they were doing. They define their task as critique. 13. Artists do not often advertise the way in which they conceive their vocation. A rare exception is the group of French painters and print makers who self-consciously call themselves the nabis, nabi being the Hebrew word for prophet. This group also understood explicitly that its task was critique. 14. Marcel Proust, the son of an unconverted Jewish mother and a Catholic father, was raised as a Catholic. As an adult he left the Church. The decision to leave the Church coincides with Proust’s the effective beginning of his life’s work. As bizarre as his project was it does twin the biblical and the aesthetic. The idea of remembering is central to the biblical mentality. For a recent discussion of Proust’s position in French culture at the turn of the century see Cronin, V. Paris on the Eve: 1900-1914 (Collins: London, 1988). 15. Traditional religious themes abound in the art of the nineteenth century. Ironically Wagner recognised that Meyerbeer, the Jew, made explicit religious content respectable on the stage. A distinction should be made between content and communication. The content may be superficially religious while its communication may be pagan or nihilistic. For the use of religious imagery in the political arena see Clark, T.J. The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). Schleiermacher is the archetypical religious figure who aestheticises religion. 16. For a discussion of the tradition see Hughes, H.S. Consciousness and Society: Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890-1920 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960). 17. This was understood by some artists. Ibsen was known to quip that both he and Zola descended into the sewer. The difference between them, according to Ibsen, was that he descended into the abyss in order to redeem the world while Zola took the plunge in order to revel in the muck. 18. Not all of the arts participated in the prophetic role equally. Theatre during much of the nineteenth century had little or no role to play. Goethe and Schiller recognised that the dramatic prophetic task belonged to the opera composer. It is not accidental that opera and the novel divided the spotlight while the theatre languished. The opera and novel, less constrained by the rules of aristocratic culture, explored the problem of freedom within the framework of the structure of history (not necessarily being historical in the technical sense). The theatre is scandalously weak in the nineteenth century despite the efforts of the major poets and novelists to write for it. See Steiner, G. The Death of Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961). My understanding of the weakness of theatre is radically different from Steiner’s, The success of opera and the failure of theatre is found in the dramatic tradition of tragedy, particularly in the aesthetic and dramas of French classicism. For a succinct summary of vicissitudes of classicism from the seventeenth century down to Hugo’s Hernani see Jones, H.M. Romanticism and Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard

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University Press, 1974). German thinkers put their fingers on the reasons for the failure of the theatre in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period. Lessing in The Hamburg Dramaturgy pointed out that Christian (biblical) tragedy was a contradiction in terms. Schelling amplified what the collision between the notions were. Tragedy, by definition, denies freedom. By definition it extols fatalism and its corollary resignation and despair. Schelling was astute in his analysis. Death and an unhappy ending was not the central elements of the Greek tragic mode. Greek tragedy could end ‘happily’ in marriage. The failure of tragedy in the modern world was that it was based on a vision of completely arbitrary fate. Even the Gods were subject to the absolutely certain prediction and dictum that we are doomed if we do and we are doomed if we don’t. In other words in tragedy human existence is devoid of purpose. Further neo-classical ideas mired the theatre in the contradictions of drama as classical tragedy. Tragedy with its insistence on arbitrary fate collided in neo-classical drama with the prevailing notions of rational free will in which protagonists necessarily controlled completely their actions in the world. Opera and the novel avoided the aesthetic pitfalls of tragedy. For differing reasons they were able to encompass the paradox of freedom necessary as the content of authentic art in a dynamic age of revolutions. Opera seria shared the rational assumptions of neo-classical tragedy. The limitations of the form were overcome by the middle of the eighteenth century when the invention and refinement of sonata form provided the opera composer with new modes of expression capable of embodying the problematic of the paradox of freedom. See Rosen. C. The Classical Sty/e. The novel because it was not burdened by a traditional mode was equally flexible in exploring freedom with its paradox between intentionality and conditionality, wilfulness and paralysis, centitude and anxiety. 19. European governments recognised that the arts were potent means of communication. These governments tried to contain the arts by licensing productions, holding monopolies on theatres, and the all pervasive censorship. Opera, oddly enough, seems to have fared better than drama in its confrontation with the censors. While Verdi was often plagued by censors, contrast his experience with that of Victor Hugo. Le Roi s’dmuse was suppressed after one performance but lives on in Verdi’s Rigoletto. 20. This is a very complex issue. While some artists explicitly stated that their aim was form for the sake of form they nonetheless communicate powerful messages which transcend their explicit claims that no communication is intended. I am thinking of Flaubert, Manet and Degas. At the turn of the century the self-conscious experiments with the grounds of the various arts did lead to much art which can be described as form for the sake of form. See Vargas Llosa, M. The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987) and Lipton, E. Looking into Degas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 21. See Huysmans, J.K. Against Nature (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1959). Also one notes the obsession among some writers and musicians with Gustave Moreau’s depiction of Salome. 22. The question was not asked explicitly. Rather it was embodied in a variety of themes. Notably there are two operas which address the issue of freedom directly. Beethoven’s Fidelio and Rossini’s William Tell. Ironically neither is very successful in dealing with the problematic of freedom. Beethoven demonstrates a ‘false consciousness’ about politics and the embodiment of freedom. His opera tells us more about the radical evil of a silent community than it does about freedom. 23. Mellers, W. Man and His Music: The Sonata Principle (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), Ch. 4. 24. Here is a section of the Imperial rules governing the importation of books. ‘All books are subject to the I.R. Censorship. They will be taken in custody and examined by the

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Bernard Zelechow I.R. Centra-Book-Revision-Bureau . Books that are permitted will immediately be restored to their owner. Those which are prohibited remain in the Bureau either until the traveller begins his return journey or until the I.R. Police ruled that they may be imported. Books in Hebrew or prayer or religious books printed abroad are banned under all circumstances. The Turkish March was used by Mozart to indicate characters who are meant to be understood as figures of fun. Rocco repeats the sentiments expressed by the chorus. The great mass of humanity equates freedom with peaceful passivity. Beethoven has Rocco repeat this equation. Rocco brings this vision of peace and death in relationship in his apology for his own actions. He euphemistically refers to Florestan’s soon to come murder as a way of liberation. Death is identified with freedom. Further he self-righteously boasts that he has slowly starved Florestan to death but denies indignantly that he is a murderer. Since the end of the second World War many commentators have remarked that Beethoven reflects the German political reality. Doubtless that is true. However, the man on the white horse syndrome is endemic in French history from the Revolution to the present. Beethoven reflects a general European phenomenon. Gounod in his ever popular Faust presents the same misconceptions about the meaning of freedom, morality, and political responsibility. There is much controversy over this issue. The Ring Cycle was composed over so long a period of time that it is difficult to determine what Wagner’s intentions were. Further his work is multi dimensional. We cannot dismiss G.B. Shaw’s powerful reading of The Rhine Gold as a social critique gone sour. Albert Goldman and Evert Sprinchorn assert that Wagner was aware of the contradiction in his work between the revolutionary critique and the demands of classical tragedy. They argue that he opted consciously for a Greek tragic vision. They apparently see no problem. See Goldman, A. and Sprinchorn, E. Wagner: On Music andDrama (New York: de Capo Press, 1988), pp. 1 l-36. Wagner was not the only one to explore the dark side of European psyche. Flaubert in a short early novella November links death, love, and lust in a morbid manner. Flaubert, G. November (Toronto: Penguin Books: n.d.). There are other similarities between Wagner and Flaubert. Flaubert’s work totters at the edge of despair. A Simple Heart is one of the few takes where Flaubert commits himself to a notion of redemption albeit a perverse one. Flaubert, G. A Simple Heart in Three Tales (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1987). For a sympathetic reading of the meaning of archetypes see Cooke, D. I Saw the World End (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Of course Shakespeare is a religious author. His work is an implicit critique of the tragic mode. Shakespeare explores in great depth all aspects of the meaning of personhood. See Danby. J.F. Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature London: Faber and Faber, 1948). Schiller was a disciple of Kant’s philosophy of freedom. He was also a professional historian. It is not surprising that his plays were such successful texts for operatic adaptation. Verdi was a lifelong reader of the Bible. See the ‘authobiographical fragment’ opcit. There is no definitive version ofDon Carlos. My reading is based on the most complete libretto available, the so called Paris version of 1867. Even in this version there is controversy about how one plays out the final scene. While this is not a crucial issue the choice made shapes the interpreters vision of redemption. The Paris libretto is available with the recording of Don Carlos conducted by Claudio Abbado for Deutsche Grammophon, 1985. I disagree with William Weaver who ostensibly classifies Verdi’s early operas into

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‘political pageants’ and everything else. The everything else begins with Louisa Miller. The classification works only if one defines the political narrowly in terms of specific legislative agendas. See Weaver, W. The Golden Century of Italian Opera (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980). It is worth noting that the opening scene of Don Carlos contrasts the forest against the Garden. We forget that the forest was a source of sustenance for those who worked hard. The people of the forest also managed to escape most political oppression. For a graphic rendering of life in the forest see Hugo, V. Ninety-Three (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1988). Hugo understood the relationship between history, biblical values, and personal freedom. The motif of the Garden was never far from Verdi’s mind. In La Traviata act two begins with the illusory happiness of life in the Garden. Alfredo, who is like Carlos in his solipsism, significantly wishes to hide Violetta away in a country garden. The wish to remain in the Garden rather than to observe the biblical injunction to go forth is a driving motif in La Forza del Destino. It is worth contrasting Elizabeth and Tatiana in Eugen Onegin for the light they shed on different facets of the problematic of freedom. Elizabeth responds to a fait accompli but treats it as a volitional act. Tatiana responds to possiblility. She sees an opportunity to create a new condition. Both women accept responsibility for the consequences of the different conditional situations. Verdi felt that there was an abundance of historical events which could be usable in opera. However, he had greater difficulty in finding personal relationship which were dramatically suitable. See his letter to Ricordi in Buch, H. Verdi’sAida: TheHistory of an Opera in Letters and Documents (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979). Letter # 8. In Don Carlos both Carlos and Eboli recognise that they must redeem their errors. It is worth noting that Elizabeth does not automatically forgive Eboli. She recognises that forgiveness alone does not redeem the past. We see a similar situation in La Traviata. Verdi reads the action through Germont’s recognition that he had wronged Violetta. Violetta accepts Germont’s rationale for the sacrifice that he had demanded. Finally he wishes to redeem his error but of course it is too late. Without an explicit word, using Germont’s desire to repent, Verdi makes it clear that a loving relationship, one of mutuality, transcends the bourgeois preoccupation with capital. Philip makes explicit reference to the Prophet Samuel in his angry dialogue with the Grand Inquisitor. The prophet Samuel has a dark side in his dealings with King Saul. There are other allusions (not analogies) to biblical actors i.e. Philip and Carlos (Saul and David), Jonathan and David (Carlos and Posa). The final messianic vision can be read either in terms of the traditional dogma of an afterlife or existentially. In the latter version, the eternal now of history, replaces the afterlife. God’s hiddenness will end when the world is redeemed.