On the occasion of the first La Scala performance of Götterdämmerung, we consider it appropriate to publish an article addressing the aesthetics of this great composer, who revolutionized the musical world of the nineteenth century.

“The true work of art is produced precisely only by progressing from imagination to reality, that is, to sensibility.”

Richard Wagner still often undergoes a dichotomous division today, appearing in history alternately as a musician or as an essayist. In doing so, on one hand his theatrical output is reduced to the cursory, almost apocryphal definition of Gesamtkunstwerk, while on the other, his writings are interpreted as deriving from a transcendent theoretical system, detached from practical implementation and the concrete reality of the stage. In short, it is as if one were facing a two-faced Wagner: one eager to unite the arts to forge a new theater without particular hermeneutical ambitions, and another, the philosopher, absorbed in an idealistic intellectual world far from reality.

It is therefore necessary to find a synthesis that demonstrates how Wagner felt the need to present his perspective on musical theater not as an a priori exercise but as an intense—and not always orderly—exposition on a dramaturgy that was laying the foundations of a new artistic canon. If one assumes that Wagner’s dramaturgical conception is aimed primarily or exclusively at the intellect and imagination (as Einbildungskraft) without correspondence to the concrete realm, there is a risk of becoming lost in abstractions detrimental to the contemplation and discernment of the German master’s work. Imagination, for Wagner, is indeed a productive activity of the mind that requires a further and decisive step to manifest in sensory perception and thus reveal itself to other knowing subjects. Wagner, as a true man of theater, expressed the concern of reaching the audience, understood not as a collection of paying spectators but as a people—a community participating in the theatrical celebration—who, in the manner of Greek classicism, gather on the green hill of Bayreuth to witness the Ring des Nibelungen, the cosmic scenic festival of the beginning and end of the world.

In 1840, the young Wagner was in Paris and, at the height of his despair in the French capital, believed his mission would be to present himself to the world as a modest writer and music critic, explaining the European musical scene of the mid-19th century to his readers. In July of that year, the Revue et Gazette musicale published in two installments (on the 12th and 24th) a long letter entitled De la musique allemande, in which Wagner sought to explain to Parisians the particularity of German music, clearly distinguishable from compositions of other European nations. The letter was translated into Italian and published in three installments between January and February 1842 (specifically, on January 30, February 15, and February 20) in the prestigious Gazzetta Musicale di Milano, published by Giovanni Ricordi, in which Wagner was presented not as a musician but as a “learned German music critic.”

“The German not only wants to hear music but also to think it,” Wagner wrote explicitly, continuing: “For him, the pleasure of physical sensation must yield to the need for intellectual satisfaction.” In short, the German seeks to immerse himself in musical composition to analyze “the secret organism” and find in the strict mechanism of counterpoint the source of the emotions subsequently evoked by the compositions of the great masters. This is why, unlike Italians and French, devoted to the sensuality of music overflowing from opera, the German, more cerebral and abstract in contemplating the science of sounds, primarily engages with instrumental compositions. Musical art is therefore not a worldly diversion but a science to be practiced in the silent retreat of the domestic space, in absolute concentration—on the piano keyboard, for example, or on the strings of a violin. Theater, conversely, with its pompous sets, lavishly paid singers, and full orchestras, is a superficial source of distraction, reducing music to mere ornament.

The statements of the 1840 Wagner as a music critic seem to clash with what his career would later reveal. Once back in Germany from his exhausting and disappointing stay in Paris, he began in Dresden the first phase of an intense musical career expressly devoted to musical dramas, culminating with the composition of Lohengrin, staged in Weimar by his friend Liszt on August 28, 1850. Sought by the Saxon police for his participation in the Dresden uprisings of May 1849, Wagner fled to Switzerland, and once settled in Zurich, returned to writing, driven by the need to articulate his complex dramaturgical poetics. The musician was no longer the nearly thirty-year-old critic of the Gazette Musicale, but a German composer who, contrary to what he had stated in 1840, had based his career not on instrumental music but on musical theater. At this point, a provocative objection may arise: from Rienzi onwards, all Wagnerian compositions are broadly considered operas, seemingly worldly distractions meant to entertain paying audiences. Yet, the Wagner preparing to write Oper und Drama was not contradicting the Parisian Wagner: with the exception of Rienzi, a French-style grand opera, from Der fliegende Holländer onward, he devoted all his efforts to structuring a new way of thinking about musical theater, distinctly different from the Italian and French operatic tradition. Musikdrama required a new framework demonstrating how the imaginative faculty of the intellect, understood as a means, reveals itself ultimately to sensibility, for the German musician, devoted to the science of music and contemplative analysis of counterpoint, must be definitively perceived by an audience capable of receiving the dramaturgical complexity through the senses—sight and hearing.

What Wagner sought to present to the people attending his Theatron, a space literally dedicated to viewing, is the dramaturgical movement as perceived and contemplated by the senses, engaged in reconstructing the narrative flow of the staged event. The arts are thus called to a work that becomes generative and fertile in creative action, culminating in the performance of the drama, which in turn can be said to be Gesamt, global and integral, at the very moment of staging.

In this regard, the opening of the second part of Oper und Drama immediately clarifies the distance Wagner establishes from the perspective expressed in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s seminal essay Laocoön (first published in 1766), which posits an insurmountable boundary between the arts, separating the senses from the intellect. In brief, according to Lessing’s Enlightenment viewpoint, letters (literature) appeal not to the senses but to the imaginative faculty of the intellect; painting and the plastic arts, by contrast, are static representations for the eye, capturing a frozen moment of action. Wagner sought to overcome this boundary through the concept of Gefühlswerdung des Verstandes, or “the intellect becoming feeling,” a daring solution that clearly establishes the basis on which the composer intended to refound musical theater. The intellect must embody the sensitivity of feeling, manifesting in the fullness of representation, generating the drama on stage that “must reach its conclusion” through the concreteness offered by the theatrical performance, which, as such, has a beginning and an end. The next step in Wagnerian theory was to clarify who bears the responsibility to reveal, or better, generate thought on the stage.

“Wherever Lessing assigns boundaries and barriers to poetic art, he does not have in mind the dramatic work of art directly observed and presented to the faculties of the senses […] but the miserable mortal shadow of such a work of art, the literary poem, which narrates and describes, manifesting not to the senses but to the imaginative faculty.” Wagner concisely grasps Lessing’s perspective to introduce the peculiar function of organic synthesis inherent to dramatic art, allowing the movement of the narrative to be communicated to the senses, thereby overcoming the limitations of the individual arts. The “inner” intellectuality of poetry and the “outer” static nature of plastic and visual arts, Wagner observes, refer to movement—the most important element of art—achieved only by appealing to imagination, that is, the productive function of the intellect, which enables thought to create a representation awaiting expression to the senses, thus enabling the communicative revelation of the drama.

Thus, Musikdrama is not a mere sum of poetry and visual arts but the result of a special “pollination,” in which poetry fertilizes music, generating the drama. Music becomes visible movement emerging from the mysterious depths of the mystical gulf, up to the three-dimensional stage space where figurative and plastic elements come alive. Theater becomes a revealing space for poetry perceived through the senses, music made visible to the eye in motion, real and perceptible on stage. It is the purely human element arising from love, sanctifying the fertilization of music, “the splendid beloved woman,” or “the influence of the eternal feminine seducing the egoistic male intellect,” which is none other than the poetic text.

Musical theater, which will later be more clearly defined in the short essay On the Designation “Musikdrama”, as visible musical action, is again established by Wagner as the offspring of music, which is both “maternal breast [and] mother” of the drama itself—an allegorical device already used in Oper und Drama to untangle the ancient aporetic knot first expressed in the 1840 article. Musikdrama is thus the artistic expression of life’s miracle, a plausible scenic representation, within the hortus conclusus of the Festspielhaus, of the act of love—that is, the speculative dialectic of the “sensitive intellect” played out in the instant when the fertilizing seed, bestowed by the poet upon the musical maternal element, flourishes each time the theatrical event recurs.