7. ‘Regeneration’ writings.

In January 1878 appeared the first issue of the Bayreuther Blätter, a journal devoted to the Wagnerian cause, set up by Wagner under the editorship of Hans von Wolzogen. Its viewpoint was described, by Wagner, as ‘the decline of the human race and the need for the establishment of a system of ethics’. That ‘system of ethics’ was expounded in the series of essays known as the ‘regeneration’ writings, beginning with Modern (1878) and ending with Heldentum und Christentum (1881). The salient themes are as follows. The human species has degenerated by abandoning its original, natural vegetable diet, and absorbing the corrupted blood of slaughtered animals. Regeneration may be effected only by a return to natural food and it must be rooted in the soil of a true religion. Even the most degenerate races may be purified by the untainted blood of Christ, received in the sacrament of the Eucharist. The miscegenation of the pure Aryan race with the Jews has also contributed to the degeneration of the species.

The last notion Wagner owed to Count Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, whose acquaintance in these years he greatly valued. Their respective philosophies diverged, however, in as much as Gobineau held that miscegenation was a necessary evil for the continuation of civilization, whereas in Wagner’s more optimistic view the human race was redeemable by Christ’s blood. Racialist philosophies of this kind were rampant in Wilhelminian Germany. With the unification finally achieved in 1871, there had emerged an industrial bourgeoisie that usurped the privileged position of the former liberal nationalists who had struggled for it. Wagner was one of many whose allegiance shifted from liberalism to a form of romantic conservatism. A new wave of anti-Semitic sentiment swept Germany, if anything intensified rather than tempered by the emancipation legislation of the early 1870s. This is the ideological background against which Parsifal was written.

Wagner: (1) Richard Wagner

8. The final years: 1878–83.

The Bayreuth deficit was eventually cleared by an agreement, dated 31 March 1878, according to which Wagner confirmed Ludwig’s right to produce all his works in the Hoftheater without payment, the king voluntarily setting aside 10% of all such receipts until the deficit was discharged. In a further clause, Wagner agreed that the first performance of Parsifal (either in Bayreuth or Munich) should be given with the orchestra, singers and artistic personnel of the Hoftheater, after which Munich was to have unrestricted rights over the work. It was this clause that compelled Wagner to accept the Jewish Hermann Levi as the conductor of Parsifal in 1882.

In August 1879 Wagner responded to an appeal for his support in a campaign against vivisection by writing a sympathetic open letter to Ernst von Weber on the subject (fig.7). However, he refused to sign Bernhard Förster’s ‘Mass Petition against the Rampancy of Judaism’, partly out of self-interest and partly out of a preference for addressing the issue in a more theoretical manner. In the early 1880s his health began to deteriorate: cardiac spasms were followed by a major heart attack in March 1882. After the second Bayreuth festival, consisting of 16 performances of Parsifal in July and August 1882, Wagner and his family took up residence in the Palazzo Vendramin, Venice. His final, fatal heart attack occurred there on 13 February 1883, following an uncharacteristically bitter row with Cosima, apparently provoked by the announcement of a visit from one of the Parsifal flowermaidens, Carrie Pringle, with whom it has been alleged Wagner may have been unduly intimate. His body was taken in a draped gondola to the railway station, from where it was conveyed to Bayreuth. The burial was a private ceremony held in the grounds of Wahnfried.

Wagner: (1) Richard Wagner