The Wagners:The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty.(Brief Article)(Review)

The Wagners: The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty by Nike Wagner Trans. by Ewald Osers and Michael Downes Princeton University Press, 384 pp. $29.95

Daughter of Wieland, great-granddaughter of Richard, Nike Wagner has a mind unmistakably cast from the family mold: wide-ranging, endlessly curious, insistently theoretical, frequently verbose, apparently humorless. Her book, The Wagners: The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty, is all these things, too, except that the absence of humor is not apparent but real. Like many things Wagnerian, the book is at once exasperating and fascinating, and people who care anything about Wagner or his works ought to read it.

The Wagners comes in two parts. Part I, called "Wagner's Theatre," is an assemblage of essays about the works performed at Bayreuth. No musical expertise is required to read these pieces, but a knowledge of the stories and principal characters certainly helps. So does a tolerance for literary psychoanalysis, which is Nike Wagner's chief critical tool. At the outset, one may groan to read a sentence such as the following: "In the context of the mausoleum, where a weakened Grail-principle is sacrosanct, the morally questionable Ring -- and robbery-principle reveals its necessity as a safeguard against bad myth; through death, it is a font of new life." Press on, though, and the ponderous language becomes a serviceable vehicle for conveying provocative thoughts. The author tells us that religious scholar Klaus Heinrich called the Ring "a spectacle of incest." In "Incest in the Ring," she leads us through that spectacle, shedding facts and ideas right and left through a chapter of just thirteen pages. Incest is taboo in almost all societies, but there were "sibling marriages in various dynasties among the ancient Egyptians, Persians, Incas and Ptolemies," and "not all types of incest are regarded with equal disgust." Brother-sister relationships are half-tolerated; father-daughter is "slightly more acceptable than an erotic relationship between mother and son...." To palliate the loathsomeness of the latter, stepmothers are frequently substituted when writers must touch on them. In the Ring, "any transgression of the incest taboo -- whether actual or metaphorical -- signals a relapse into the anarchy of nature, the prehistoric, mythical state that precedes history and culture." The fire that Wotan lights around Brunnhilde is like a "flaming chastity belt."

Part II of The Wagners is titled "The Theatre of the Wagners" and covers the dysfunctional family that has ruled the Bayreuth Festival since its inception in 1876. It concludes with a manifesto by Nike Wagner setting forth her plan for revitalizing Bayreuth should she be chosen to succeed Uncle Wolfgang. "Beware of Germans citing Hegel" is a generally useful monition, nowhere more valuable than in Nike Wagner's psychological dissection of her father. Wieland, she says, "was not at all concerned with realising the `spirit of history,' in his productions: he was interested solely in himself." Hegel, she continues, teaches that negative ...