Adorno's Wagner: History and the Potential of the Artwork

Bauer, Karin, 1958Cultural Critique, 60, Spring 2005, pp. 68-91 (Article)
Published by University of Minnesota Press DOI: 10.1353/cul.2005.0014

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ADORNOS WAGNER: HISTORY AND THE POTENTIAL OF THE ARTWORK

Karin Bauer

he work of Richard Wagner presents a lifelong challenge to Adorno. His reflections on music, modern art, and the culture industry are invariably informed by his stance vis--vis Wagner. As he did for Nietzsche, Wagner presents for Adorno an occasion for a case study, and in this sense, Adornos critique of Wagner exhibits a measure of supplementarity, for Wagner serves as a diagnostic surrogate and foil on which and against which to investigate aspects of modernity and the development of modern art. For instance, through his critical engagement with Wagner, Adorno has, as Andreas Huyssen has pointed out, opened up various avenues through which to question his seemingly rigid division between autonomous art and the culture industry. Through his analysis of Wagner, Adorno is able to ascertain the commodification of art as arising from aesthetic modernism itself. But beyond the interdependent emergence and genealogy of autonomous art and the culture industry, Wagner represents a significant marker in the development of modern art in a myriad of ways, and throughout his work, Adorno turned again and again to Wagner in order to work out issues that are preoccupying him. Adornos reception of Wagner has received critical attention from scholars in various disciplines, and for the most part cultural historians have been more receptive to Adornos accounts than musicologists, who have pointed out errors and misconceptions in Adornos musical analysis. Many musicologists object to Adornos method of intermingling aesthetic and ideological criteriaalthough this method mirrors, of course, Adornos argument that in the artwork aesthetics and ideology are inseparably intertwined. To analyze the entwinement of myth and enlightenment and aesthetics and ideology in the artwork thus requires a combination of critical approaches.
Cultural Critique 60Spring 2005Copyright 2005 Regents of the University of Minnesota

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What is most notable in the various discussions of Adornos reception of Wagner is, however, that critics treat it as if it presented a consistent body of work. This iscontrary to some of Adornos own claimsdecidedly not the case. Although all Adornos Wagner essays and lectures from 1933 to 1966 pursue similar topics and share certain methodological features, they exhibit remarkable shifts in emphases. There may be no direct contradictions between the early essays and the later lectures, but they clearly approach Wagner from differing vantage points, and the differences in Adornos Wagner reception say as much about Wagners work as they do about Adornos critical enterprise. The Notiz ber Wagner of 1933; the seminal In Search of Wagner, which was written in 193738 and reissued with an announcement (Selbstanzeige) in 1952; the lecture Wagners Aktualitt, published in the Bayreuth festival program of 1964; a postscript (Nachschrift) on the Wagner discussion that had ensued in Die Zeit as a result of his lecture; and a 1966 lecture entitled Wagner and Bayreuth present a mosaic of critical inquiries that may be seen as closely reflecting Adornos concerns at various moments in time. The interpretation of Wagner in these essays and lectures carry with them the particularity of the larger historical context, from the rise of National Socialism in the thirties to the rise of the protest movement in the sixties, and, partially in and partially out of sync with these political developments, they also carry with them the particularity of the shifting foci in Adornos work. As Adorno himself argues in the sixties, the historical circumstances had changed and with it the reception of Wagners work. This is not surprising; however, Adorno goes a step further by declaring that it is not only the effect and reception of Wagners work that has changed but the work itself (das Werk selber, an sich) and that a contemporary critique of Wagner must account for this change and for that which arises anew under these changed historical circumstances. This essay undertakes the task of tracing the shifts in Adornos Wagner reception with a particular focus on those elements that arise anew in it. Thus, in line with Adornos method of criticism, which always also sees itself as a rescue mission, the following seeks to trace not only the changes in emphasis from 1933 to 1966 but also to explicate what, during specific historical moments, Adorno sought to rescue in Wagner. By taking Wagner as a case

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study to exemplify larger aesthetic and ideological issues negotiated under specific historical circumstances, it will be possible to gain insight not only into the shifting ground of Adornos Wagner reception, but also into the shifting ground of cultural criticism. Adornos Notiz ber Wagner from 1933 praises Wagners musical accomplishments and damns the half-secular Wagner cult celebrated at the Bayreuth festival. To Adornos dismay, the cult of genius and the glorification of Wagner as one of us has obscured Wagners real accomplishments, namely his artistic and technical innovations. Adorno argues that the best way to honor Wagner is by performing him in a meaningful way, that is, by disregarding the Wagner cult and by emphasizing the progressive elements of his music. According to Adorno, these progressive elements include his use of dissonance, the polyphony of his melodies, the nuances of sound and color, his rigorous use of form, and the enigmatic connection between tradition and innovation in his music. Although Wagners music reflects the structures of the society in which and for which it was written, its dynamic moments point beyond contemporary reality to a possible future. Wagner is, as Nietzsche had claimed, a magician, and his treasures will be discovered by those who can read his secret writing and understand the stenography of runic inscription (Adorno, Notiz, 208). Although Wagners view of the world rests upon the antitheses of guilt and redemption, his use of myth also effects a demystification of the power of myth; however, this aspect is, according to Adorno, mostly overlooked by critics. Adorno defends Wagner against what he sees as the dominant trend in Wagner reception, namely, the emphasis on content and on a speciWc national substance. This emphasis comes at the expense of a sustained analysis of the aesthetic means through which Wagner conveys this content. In a statement prefiguring his debates with Walter Benjamin on truth and form, Adorno asserts, In truth, there exists no technical ability independent from content; for this reason also no artistic content without technique (205). The attempt by critics to separate form and content shortchanges the explosive nature of Wagners music and represents an illegitimate means through which to suppress the revolutionary aspect of his work. Against various critics, Adorno argues that Wagners work is neither a romantic

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lart pour lart nor is it a communal art project. Wagners work transcends the existing social structure by virtue of its innovative technique. The musics dissonant character and the chromatic innovations overcome a static perception of the present in favor of dynamic possibilities of the future. In Wagners work, as Adorno will affirm in all his critical engagements, there exists a mystifying entwinement of the ancient and the modern, and he expresses his disapproval of those admirers of Wagners work who in 1933 attempt to dissolve the ambiguity of this entwinement in favor of a nostalgic traditionalism that is, according to Adorno, alien to Wagners music. In contrast, Adorno sees this ambiguity precisely as an opportunity to effect enlightenment of the world through the shafts of subconscious depth (209). Like all great art, Wagners surpasses its own limits by dragging along what is normally discarded. Risking the banal, the exceptional, and incommensurable, Wagner nurtures excess. Yet, it is out of this excess that the new arises. Adorno disagrees with Nietzsches negative assessment of Wagners excessive exuberance, and he disagreesmore forcefully still in In Search of Wagner than in the Notizwith the negative connotations of Nietzsches critique of Wagner as a decadent. However, as we shall see, on this issue of excess, innovation, and the new, Nietzsches critique presents interesting points of convergence and divergence with Adornos. Written in London and New York, In Search of Wagner is marked by the experience of fascism and exile. In the announcement of the book from 1952, Adorno describes its subjectWagneras the classic of the Third Reich (Versuch ber Wagner, 504). Adorno explains that his work is part of the interdisciplinary effort of the Institute of Social Research to resist National Socialism by converting indignation and shock toward the rise of Nazism into an understanding of its origins. Considering the magnitude of the collective repression of the past, Adorno finds that this task had not lost its urgency by the time the Wagner book was published in its present form in 1952. His aim was to shake off the notion that fascist totalitarianism was a mere historical accident and to uncover its origin within the social processes that supported it. The source of Hitlers ideology was to be researched without regard for its relation with appropriated cultural values. The work of Richard Wagner forced itself to the forefront of this task (Versuch ber Wagner, 504).

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Adorno conceives Wagners aesthetics as rooted in the primal landscape of fascism, and the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk becomes a politically suspect authoritarian structure. However, instead of associating Wagner directly with National Socialism, he attempts to search for its roots in the historical decline of bourgeois culture in the nineteenth century. Thus, Adorno is not interested in investigating Hitlers instrumentalization of Wagner and Bayreuth; rather, he is concerned with the dialectical relationship between art and society and between Wagners music and its affirmation and negation of the larger social order within which it functions. As do all Adornos writings on music, In Search of Wagner transcends traditional categories of music criticism. All of Adornos analyses of music consistently relate music back to society by drawing parallels between the development of music and social processes. Considering Adornos preoccupation with music, it could be argued that in many of his writings, especially the Aesthetic Theory, art becomes synonymous with music. Several music critics, such as Carl Dahlhaus and Rainer Cadenbach, have pointed out the limitations of Adornos Wagner critique in terms of music theory. Whatever its shortcomings, his criticism of musicand of cultural phenomena in generalis at once immanent and transcendental; it is a philosophically eclectic approach that makes, as Martin Jay points out, Adornos writings on music difficult to classify. Music theorists point out that this eclectic strategy leads Adorno to formulate inaccuracies, misjudgments, and misinterpretations of musical phenomena. Moving from a micrological examination of the smallest detail of the individual work to the larger socioeconomic context, from intrinsic to extrinsic analysis, Adornos thinking recognizes, in the words of Fredric Jameson, an obligation to transcend the limits of specialized analysis at the same time that it respects the objects integrity as an independent entity (4). Adorno begins his search for Wagner with an analysis of Wagner as social character. In contrast to the tendencies of the Wagner cult, on the one hand, and the critics of Wagner, on the other, Adorno attaches significance to Wagners personality only in as far as it is revealed through his work, and he refrains by and large from indulging in overtly personal recriminations regarding Wagners character. Of course, Wagner the man cannot be separated from Wagner

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the artist, just as the artist cannot be considered separately from his work: Wagners tyrannical mentality finds reflection in the Gesamtkunstwerk, the leitmotif, and the preoccupation with effects in the musical compositions as well as in the stage productions, all of which can be seen as expressions of the totalitarian aspects of his work. Adorno defends his interest in Wagner as a social character by maintaining the distinction between forms of biographical inquisitiveness that invade the private sphere unnecessarily and a legitimate interest in the social character of the artist. According to Adorno, In Search of Wagner explores the relationship between the person and the work down to the smallest detail of musical gesture. While biographical criticism may end up as cheap gossip, his investigation into social character aims to bring to light the issues through which the private person can be identified as an exponent and site of social tendencies. Adorno describes Wagners social character as that of a hypocritical beggar. Wagner, who came from the Bohemian milieu of dilettantish artists, begs for sympathy and for money (Search, 15). There he developed a virtuosity that enabled him to achieve bourgeois goals at the cost of his bourgeois integrity (Search, 16). Wagner was deceptive and lacked character, two weaknesses that lead deeply into his work. His lack of restraint in begging, which suggests his identification with those in power and his dependence upon bourgeois norms, finds expression in the absence of tension in his musical harmonies:
The power of the existing order over the protester is so great that he is no longer capable of separating himself from it or even of putting up any genuine resistance: and in the same way there is an absence of tension in Wagners harmony as it descends from the leading note and sinks from the dominant into the tonic. It is the fawning stance of the mothers boy who talks himself and others into believing that his kind parents can deny him nothing, for the very purpose of making sure that they dont. (Search, 16)

Full of self-praise and pomp, features that Wagners productions share with the fascist mass spectacle, Wagner denounces the victims in private and in his work. Wagner has the sadistic desire to humiliate through his cruel sense of humor. Adorno cites numerous characters from Wagners music dramas that are insulted and ridiculed,

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including Mime and Alberich of the Ring. The object of Wagners insults is not simply ridicule: in the excitement caused by the laughter at his expense the memory of the injustice that he has suffered is obliterated. The use of laughter to suspend justice is debased into a charter for injustice (Search, 21). Wagners anti-Semitism constitutes itself from this contradiction between mockery of the victim and self-denigration. His seemingly idiosyncratic hatred of Jews is of the type that Walter Benjamin had in mind when he defined disgust as the fear of being thought to be the same as that which is found disgusting (Search, 24). Adorno contends that the rumors about Wagners Jewish ancestry can be explained with Benjamins insight into the transference of fear and disgust. Adorno sees Wagners musical gestures as manifestations of the unlimited symbolic power Wagner held over his audience. Wagner was the first composer to write in the grand style music for the bourgeois profession of the conductor. The fundamental gesture of Wagners music is beating and striking blows, and through such a system of gestures Wagners social impulses are translated into technique (Search, 30). The beat of Wagners music exemplifies his regression to the elementary and the barbaric. Wagners music has the tendency to disguise the estrangement between the composer and the listener by incorporating the listener into his work as an element of effect: As an advocate of effect, the conductor is the advocate of the public in the work. However, as the striker of blows, the composer-conductor gives the claims of the public a terroristic emphasis (Search, 31). Other Wagnerian gestures are mere translations onto the stage of the imagined reactions of the audience, such as murmuring, applause, the triumph of self-confirmation, and the waves of enthusiasm. Thus the archaic muteness of the gestures is a highly contemporary instrument of domination (Search, 35). In this way the composer-conductor both represents and suppresses the bourgeois individuals demand to be heard. For Adorno, Wagner is a Hegelian Weltgeist-Regisseur, for whom the individual is a mere puppet in the hands of the World-Spirit, which manipulates him or her by means of technological rationality. Wagners work is a metaphor for the totality of world history, but it fails to articulate dialectically the antagonism between the universal and the particular, just as it is devoid of any hope for an altered

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condition in which the recurrent antagonism might vanish. Wagners flight from the philosophy of history ends, beyond self-glorification and the legitimization of claims to power, at the identification of resistance with domination. Adornos rejection of Wagners Gesamtkunstwerk might well be seen as the most pointed instance of his famous critique of totality in Minima Moralia, in which he converts Hegels dictum The whole is the true to The whole is the untrue (Minima Moralia, 44). The Gesamtkunstwerk not only expresses metaphysics but produces it, and can be seen as no longer in conformity with the Hegelian definition of art as the sensuous manifestation of the idea. Instead, the sensuous is arranged as to appear to be in control of the idea. The technological intoxication is generated from the fear of sobriety and the need to feel in control. Adorno will later insist that he did not call Wagneras Thomas Mann and Nietzsche hada dilettante. However, in the context of questioning Wagners integrity, he does speak of dilettantish features: Wagner sold himself out by appealing to the taste of the masses and by taking a self-satisfied and complacent attitude toward authority.
The dilettantish features in Wagners character are inseparable from those of his conformism, of his resolute collusion with the public. Enthroned as conductor, he is able to enforce this collusion whilst maintaining the appearance of strongly individual opposition, and to establish the power of impotence in the realm of aesthetics. (Search, 30)

Behind Wagners aesthetization of powerlessness, Adorno suspects economic self-interest. His eagerness to please his audience and his sponsor plays a role in Wagners rather cynical self-immolation. Wagners artistic productions are driven by the prospect of success. Like the consumers of the products of the culture industry, Wagners audience is the object of calculation: democratic considerateness towards the listener is transformed into connivance with the powers of discipline: in the name of the listener, anyone whose feelings accord with any yardstick other than the beat of the music is silenced (Search, 31). The audiences estrangement from the composer-conductor is inseparable from the calculation of the effect on this audience, and like the consumers of the culture industrys products, the audience itself becomes the reified object of calculation by the artist (Search, 31). Wagner overwhelms his audience, just as the

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individual characters in his works are overwhelmed by powerful forces. The pretentious quality of his work heightens the impression of futility and defeat and satisfies the need for a bourgeois mythology. Ironically, the power of the bourgeoisie over Wagner is so complete that it is impossible for him to achieve the ideals of bourgeois propriety. Adorno sees Wagners promotion of the ascetic ideal as part of his self-denunciation. Adorno contends that Wagners self-proclaimed attempt to find a balance between the unrestrained sexuality of his early work and the ideal of asceticism in the later work has nothing to do with a mature artistic development, because this balance is achieved in the name of death (Search, 14). For Adorno, Wagners adherence to the ascetic ideal parallels his struggle with bourgeois morality, a collusion ultimately affirmed by his siding with those in power. By reproducing Schopenhauers pessimism, Wagner dissents from the rebellion against the deleterious conditions of society. In Wagner, the will itself is not negated, but only
the objectification of the Will in the Idea, in the phenomenal world. The Will itself, in other words the essence of the undirected social process, continues to be accepted in a spirit of compliant admiration. The individual then acquiesces without demur in his own annihilation, deeming it the work of that Will which has ceased to oppose itself to itself as Nature. (Search, 145)

Adorno sees a contradiction between Wagner and Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer, the ideas renunciation of its own Will-to-Life comes from its recognition of injustice and therefore represents a break with the vicious circle of blind fate, while in Wagner the will turns into blind fate. For Wagner, pleasure assumes the features of death and destruction, and in return death, serving as an advertisement for itself, is celebrated as a soaring joy and the greatest good. In contrast, Adorno notes that in Schopenhauer, suffering appears as a mere phenomenon, its very shabbiness and meanness make its seriousness evident. In Wagner it is trivialized by the accoutrements of grandeur (Search, 146). According to Adorno, Wagners role as an artist exemplifies the changing function of the individual under bourgeois ideology. The bourgeois individual seeks to escape destruction in the hopeless

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struggle with the authorities by siding with them. In this way Wagners own career parallels and reflects the decay of the bourgeoisie and the rise of fascism. The impotent petitioner becomes the tragic panegyrist: For the focal points of decay in the bourgeois character, in terms of its own morality, are the prototypes of its subsequent transformation in the age of totalitarianism (Search, 17). In the central chapter on phantasmagoria, Adorno delivers a sharp critique of the medium of phantasmagoria, the Gesamtkunstwerk. For Adorno, it is a representation of power demanding obedience, a rationally constructed artificial wholeness repudiating free will. By disregarding particularity and the interest of the individual, Wagner creates false identities. Without realizing that the social conditions necessary for the survival of unity are absent, Wagner wants to will an aesthetic unity into being. The stylistic failure of the music drama results from an arbitrary combination of different elements and genres that ignores the internal requirements of the artistic material. Instead of creating style, Wagner strives for stylization: The whole no longer achieves unity, because its expressive elements are made to harmonize with each other according to a pre-arranged design. . . . The formal premises of an internal logic are replaced by a seamless external principle in which disparate procedures are simply aggregated in such a way as to make them appear collectively binding (Search, 102). Adorno contends that Wagners seemingly unified totality, which turns out in the end to be a mere illusion, owes its existence to the extirpation of the individual. Wagner was the first to place the uneven development of the arts, and indeed irrationality itself, into a rationally constructed framework. For Adorno, the basic idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk is revealed in the mental flight, the abdication of everything unequivocal. Adorno links the Gesamtkunstwerk directly to totalitarian ideology and the regression of listening. Evocative of the fascist dictum that subordinates the particular to the so-called common good, the Gesamtkunstwerk forces a reconciliation between its various artistic elements and its genre. Its eclectic combination of old and new elements offers constantly new stimuli that nevertheless never affront the well-worn habits of regressive listening (Search, 49). Wagners music dramas pave the way for the listeners adaptation to the order of bourgeois rationality, i.e., the culture industry, which privileges sight over

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hearing. Hearing becomes a kind of dozing that is subject to psychorational control. They construct something resembling an epic totality and simulate the unity of the internal and external, the subject and the object, instead of giving shape to the rupture between them. In this way, the process of composition becomes the agent of ideology (Search, 38). As Adorno sees it, the principle of false identity forbids the construction of a unity from the contradictions of art forms alienated from each other. The Gesamtkunstwerk signifies the victory of technology and rationality over the aesthetic and foreshadows the technical productions of the culture industry. Similar to the products of the film industry, Wagners elaborate and phantasmagoric stage productions aim toward a total illusion, and Adorno, using a Nietzschean turn of phrase, speaks of the birth of film out of the spirit of music (Search, 107). Wagner thus becomes not just the site of a confrontation between art and fascist ideology but also between the avant-gardist, high art of modernity and the products of the culture industry of late capitalism. As Huyssen points out, In Search of Wagner undermines the absolute, irreconcilable opposition between high and low culture by showing their common origin. Wagners music dramas demonstrate the entwinement of the two and attest to the paradoxical nature of modern culture. According to Huyssen, Adornos essay can thus not only be read as an account of the birth of fascism out of the spirit of the Gesamtkunstwerk, but also as an account of the birth of the culture industry in the most ambitious high art of the nineteenth century (11). Through their phantasmagoria, Wagners total works of art are the early miracles of modern technology, which immortalize the moment in history between the death of Romanticism and the birth of realism. They anticipate the products of the culture industry, because the miracles and wonders of technology render the works as impenetrable as the daily reality of reified society. The works, through their magic, function like commodities that satisfy the needs of the culture market. Adorno contends that certain scenes in Wagners work are directly affected by the conditions of commodity production. The music in these scenes takes the greatest care to disguise its production in a passive, visionary presence. The phantasmagoria gives Wagners work dreamlike features that pose as the deluded wish fulfillment of potential buyers. However, phantasmagoria commodifies

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art not so much by producing illusions and promising the consumer gratification but more by concealing the labor that has gone into making it. Thus, the use of phantasmagoria fetishizes the products of labor while rendering them no longer identifiable as such. Wagners technologically induced miracles are works of deception (Blendwerk), and by erasing the traces of production, aesthetic illusion takes on the character of the commodity. The quantification of industrial labor parallels the fragmentation into minute parts: Broken down into the smallest units, the totality is supposed to become controllable, and it must submit to the will of the subject who has liberated himself from all existing forms (Search, 49). In addition to the technique of phantasmagoria, the leitmotif further enhances the commodification of art. Wagners compulsive and repetitive musical gestures, in Adornos opinion, evade the necessity of creating musical time, thus violating musical characterization. Adorno compares the leitmotif with an ide fixe that denies the possibility for change, since this particular musical gesture favors repetition over development. Wagners repetition of musical motifs merely poses as development and raises the expectations of something new, which fails to materialize. According to Adorno, in this discovery lies the grain of truth in the otherwise unfounded charge of formlessness. Wagner operates with musical formulas that function like commercials: anticipating the universal practice of mass culture later on, the music is designed to be remembered, it is intended for the forgetful (Search, 31). In the leitmotif, genuinely constructed motifs are replaced by repetitious associations. Adorno contends that psychology later refers to this phenomenon as ego-weakness, a psychological state on which Wagners music is predicated (Search, 31). By hiding the traces of production, the music dramas present themselves as self-producing, and in the absence of any glimpse of the underlying forces or conditions of production, aesthetic illusion claims the status of being. Hiding the processes of labor and production also implies concealing the intensified division of labor connected to the stage productions:
The flawed nature of the whole conception of music drama is nowhere more evident than where it comes closest to its own foundations: in the concealment of the process of production, in Wagners hostility towards the division of labour on which it is agreed that the culture

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industry is based. In theory and in the ideology of his works, he rejected the division of labour in terms that recall Nationalist Socialist phrases about the subordination of private interests to the public good. (Search, 108)

Adorno views works of art as the consistent result of the social division of intellectual and physical labor. The idea of sound from which the traces of production are removed leads more deeply into the commodity, and by exaggerating its claim to a natural character, Wagners works actually become artificial. Wagners oeuvre resembles the consumer goods of the nineteenth century, which attempted to conceal every sign of the labor gone into producing them, perhaps because any such trace reminded people too vehemently of the appropriation of the labour of others, of an injustice that could still be felt (Search, 83). The concealment of labor is the contradiction of all autonomous art, but in high capitalism, with the complete hegemony of exchange-value and with the contradictions arising out of that hegemony, autonomous art becomes both problematic and programmatic at the same time (Search, 83). Wagner does not have the good conscience to admit that his works are illusions and thereby confirms what his ideology of artistic creation denies: work is degrading (Search, 84). Adorno remarks that Wagners pessimism and the immutability of conditions portrayed in his works, which create the need for redemption, hypostasizes the metaphysical principle of meaninglessness into a meaning endowed upon a meaningless, empirical reality. Wagners pessimism is the philosophy of the apostate rebel:
What he retains from his rebellion is his insight into the evil nature of the world as such, as an extrapolation from an evil present, as well as the further insight into the inexorable reproduction of that evil. He defects from rebellion simply by elevating this process to the status of an all-embracing metaphysical principle. As something immutable to all eternity, it derides all efforts to alter it and acquires the reflected glory of a dignity which it withholds from man. (Search, 143)

However, not all is lost for Wagner. Adorno argues that the ambiguities and breaks of Wagners work reflect the historical moment of their production, and he makes the interesting move of reaffirming the critical potential of decadence. Where the breaks become visible,

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Wagners works genuinely reflect the modern condition: But the fault-line discernible in Wagners workhis impotence in the face of the technical contradictions and the social conflicts underlying them, in short all the qualities that prompted his contemporaries to speak of decadenceis also the path of artistic progress (Search, 44). Adorno takes up once again the connection between decadence and artistic progress in his 1952 announcement, where he argues that the morbid and nihilistic quality of decadent art constitutes precisely this point of resistance to the requirements of the healthy, strong, and all-powerful blond beast. Here Adorno creates a space for criticism, a space where, against its own intentions, Wagners work refuses to sanction the fascist ideologies of power and health. Adorno does not condemn decadence as self-destructive, but instead maintains that it contains the seeds of the new and different. By affirming its critical potential, Adorno follows in the footsteps of Baudelaires positive reevaluation of decadence. Critics should be careful with their judgment of decadence with regard to Wagner, Adorno maintains, because
whatever makes Wagner better than the social order (to whose dark powers he aligned himself) owes itself to decadence, to the damaged subjects incapability of playing sufficiently by the rules of the existing social order. In this way he fails to meet the expectations of health, cleverness, communication, and mutual understanding, and turns silently against the power in whose service his language stands. It is not the unshakably self-assertive form, but rather the decaying form that indicates the coming of the new. (Versuch ber Wagner, 507)

Despite his outspoken opposition to Nietzsches critique of decadence, Adornos argument very much follows a Nietzschean line of thought. Nietzsche, too, opened up a positive reevaluation of decadence by contending that sickness can be a stimulant to life. As SilkeMaria Weineck has pointed out, decadence for Nietzsche does not denote a lack but rather an excess, a too-much (30). It is the expansive and excessive qualities, the exuberance and over-fullness that give rise to the new. For Adorno, the refusal of the social requirement for health, efficiency, communication, and consent constitutes the critical moment of modern art. It is the decaying form and the injured subject that give expression to the nonidentical and give rise

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to the new and the different by revealing, to use the phrase from the essay on the culture industry, the trace of something better (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 143). Adorno values decadence as a form of negationthe negation of existing conditions and claims to power. In his laudatory review of Ernest Newmans Wagner biography entitled Wagner, Nietzsche, and Hitler and published in The Kenyon Review in 1947, Adorno expresses his agreement with many of Newmans findings. While he agrees with many of Newmans characterizations, Adorno finds Newmans study too apologetic and wants to radicalize its results. In contrast to his earlier essays on Wagner, in this review Adorno draws explicit parallels between Wagner and Hitler. He maintains that Newmans book shows that the private life of Wagner resembled the Fascist agitator (Hitler, 406). Who would not think of Hitler, Adorno asked, when reading about Wagner holding court, monopolizing the conversation, indulging in tantrums, alienating and insulting people, sensing conspiracies everywhere. Although Adorno contends that Newman himself might dispute this, his biography of Wagner demonstrates that Wagner, as a human being, crystallized to an amazing extent the Fascist character long before Fascism was ever dreamed of (Hitler, 406). According to Adorno, Wagner displays the same mixture of the ideology of faith and the readiness to betray his closest friends so significant for the sociology of the Fascist racket (Hitler, 406). Adorno further interprets Wagners choice of Bayreuth as the home of the Wagner festivals as a confirmation of the politico-fascist motive in the desire for the monopolization of public opinion (406). Anticipating the patterns of National Socialist anti-Semitism, Wagner brings forth the argument that Jews provoke anti-Semitic reactions against them due to their feelings of inferiority and oversensitivity. According to Adorno, these patterns reveal their full meaning only fifty years after Wagners death with Hitlers rationalization of his persecution of the Jews as defensive action. Wagner shows one of the most sinister features of the fascist character, the paranoid tendency of projecting upon others ones own violent aggressiveness (Hitler, 407). Adorno disagrees with Newmans dismissive charges against Nietzsche, and in the Wagner-Nietzsche dispute, he mostly takes

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Nietzsches side. While he agrees with Newman and attests to Nietzsches musical backwardness, he defends Nietzsche against various other charges and asserts that Nietzsche, one of the most advanced enlighteners of all, sensed in the system and what it entailed the same apologetic desire he sensed in the religion of redemption, or, for that matter, in the truly systematic totality of the Wagnerian Music drama (Hitler, 410). While Nietzsche became, like Wagner, a victim of National Socialist propaganda, Adorno aligns himself with the enlightener, who likewise disregards the strict borders of academic disciplines, resists systematization and condemns systematic totality. Nietzsche turned against the accepted values of society that Wagner ultimately reaffirmed, such as Christian love and pity, because Nietzsche recognized the barbarian momentum inherent in official cultural values (Hitler, 410). Like Wagners work, some of Nietzsches positive doctrines fell prey to fascist ideology: But his negativism, with regard to the logico-systematic tradition of philosophy, to traditional morality and to affirmative art, nevertheless also expressed the humane in a world in which humanity had become a sham (Hitler, 410). To be sure, Adorno resists judging either Wagners or Nietzsches works on the basis of their manipulative acceptance by fascism and insists on the relevance of the works objective implications. For him, there is no doubt that Wagners work down to the most intimate details of musical technique, lends itself eagerly to Nazi falsification while conversely, Nietzsche was overtly opposed to the Nazi in Wagner and everywhere (Hitler, 411). Unlike Nietzsche, Wagner encouraged Nazi falsification through the propagandist gestures in his art and through his person. In the end, however, Adorno engages in a characteristic rescue effortthis time only briefly and through the medium of Nietzscheby maintaining that some aspects of Nietzsches Wagner critique are misdirected and that, in the final analysis, Nietzsche failed to recognize those elements in Wagners works that transcend, against Wagners conscious will, his bombastic Germanic Weltanschauung. Adornos comments on Newmans biography follow the strategy of In Search of Wagner, as they move freely among ideological, social, and aesthetic considerations. In his rescue efforts, Adorno focuses on those aspects of Wagners work that have either escaped ideology or can, against Wagners own intentions, be turned against

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its ideological underpinnings. However, while In Search of Wagner wants to examine the primal landscape of fascism through one of its key figures, the 1947 review of Newmans biography situates Wagneragainst Newmans intentionsin the concrete environment of Hitler and National Socialism. The Notiz stays clear of a concrete political grounding of Wagners work and takes issue instead with Wagners critics and admirers. In Search of Wagner avoids the name of Hitler and speaks mostly in a more abstract manner of fascism. By drawing, still under the shock and in the immediate aftermath of the war, direct connections between Wagner and the historical reality of the Third Reich, the review of Newmans book deviates from the Adornos other writings on Wagner. Adorno returns to Wagner in the 1960s. Wagners Aktualitt was a lecture delivered at the Berlin Wagner festival in 1964 and printed in the program of the Bayreuth festival. Wagners Aktualitt provoked a lively discussion, some of which took place in Die Zeit, and participants included Joachim Kaiser, Gerhard Szczesny, and Johannes Jacobi. The Zeit discussion ended with a response by Adorno in the form of a postscript. In Wagners Aktualitt, Adorno defends himself against the charges that he had changed his mind about Wagner and was now engaged in a trivializing reappropriation of his work. Adorno asserts that he continues to stand behind his earlier work on Wagner but that he sees much of it now from a different perspective. As the Wagner of the sixties no longer represents the generation of parents, but rather of the grandparents, there no longer exists, according to Adorno, the need to reject Wagner as a sign of revolt in the conflict between the generations. This historical distance brought about an affective distance to Wagners work, and although his works still possess potentially nationalistic elements, they begin to recede, because the immediate political threat of nationalism has abated (Aktualitt, 544). Politically, Wagner is no longer a threat, and while the politically suspect aspects of his work cannot be overlooked, they retreat to open up new layers of meaning and relevance. Adorno distances himself from much of Wagner criticism as he observes that the anti-Wagnerian critiques focusing on aesthetic rather than political considerations were largely carried out by neoclassicists and not by progressive forces. In Wagners Aktualitt, anti-Wagnerianism is no longer associated

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primarily with antifascism but is now identified as a broadly articulated, conservative resentment against modern art. Most striking in Wagners Aktualitt, however, is Adornos claim that not only the historical circumstances, and with it the reception of Wagner, has changed but that the work itself has changed and that it is precisely this objective change in Wagners work that constitutes Wagners importance for our time. From Adornos argument emanates an antiessentialism regarding the artwork that is consistent with the theoretical impetus of Aesthetic Theory, where a genuine experience of art is bound to the artworks truth content and the unfolding of this truth content over time. Works of art, Adorno maintains in the Wagner lecture, are spiritual entities and not something finished and completed (Aktualitt, 546). They form a field of tension of all possible intentions and forces, of internal tendencies and contradictory impulses, and accomplishments and failures. Objectively new layers peel away and come forward; others become irrelevant and die (Aktualitt, 456). The correct relationship to an artwork is not to adopt it to new circumstances but rather to locate in the artwork itself that to which one reacts differently under a different historical circumstance. Wagner thus becomes, again, a case study, this time not a case study for the exploration of fascism or commodification but for the project of formulating a theory of the modern artwork. In Aesthetic Theory, too, Adorno contends that artworks are transformed objectively, on no account simply in terms of their reception: The force bound up in them lives on (Aesthetic Theory, 193). This transformation of the artwork over time is not prevented by a fixation in clay, stone, or on paper, as for instance in a literary text or in a musical score; rather, that which is fixed on paper is to be seen as a sign and function, not something in-itself (Aesthetic Theory, 193). Artworks are alivealbeit, as Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Lambert Zuidervaart, and others have shown, not in an organic senseand are subject to a constant process of becoming. There is no artwork in itself divorced from history or the historical moment within which interpretation occurs. Thus, to assign an artwork rigidly to a historical period is to subsume it to history rather than to liberate its relevant layers of truth within a particular moment in time. What works say through the configuration of their elements in different epochs means something objectively different,

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and this ultimately affects their truth content (Aesthetic Theory, 194). However, to effect this dynamic transmutation, the artwork depends on a process of interpretation, commentary, and critique that crystallizes and releases its truth content. Truth content is thus not only inextricably entwined with history, but also with criticism and interpretation. Therefore, it is not only the aging artwork that is transformed but criticism, too. Since philosophy, theory, and criticism offer the discursive means to explicate the truth content and to make the artwork speak, philosophy and art converge in their truth content. The progressive self-unfolding truth of the artwork is none other than the truth of the philosophical concept (Aesthetic Theory, 130). The artworks dependence on philosophy leads Adorno to affirm that aesthetic experience is not genuine experience unless it becomes philosophy (Aesthetic Theory, 131), and, consequently, it is only through a historically situated critique that new layers of the artworks truth content are disclosed, old layers fall off, new ones emerge, and others become obsolete and extinct. In taking seriously Adornos claims about the aging of the artwork, on the one hand, and the interdependence of art and philosophy, on the other, it becomes necessary to reflect on the possible implications for his own practice of criticism and for his critique of Wagner in particular. Since the truth content of art and philosophy converge as the artwork ages, so does the philosophical and critical impetus and framework for its explication. It is thus not only the artwork that is engaged in the paradoxical task of continually renewing itself while aging; philosophy and criticism must do the same. While affirming philosophys dialectical task in the engagement with the artwork, philosophy may not violate the artwork or subsume it. On the contrary, philosophy must respect the primacy of the object within the dialectical subject-object relation. In this way, Adorno justifies his claims that the changes in the artwork are objective changes rather than changes in perception and reception, and this allows him, for instance, to insist that the politically suspect elements of Wagners work have lost their menacing threat and relevance. Despite this loss of immediate danger, Wagners work can never be entirely free of their regressive potential, and the ambiguity toward Wagners work, the oscillation between attraction and

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repulsion, arises from the ambiguity inherent in Wagners work. Oscillating between the modern and musically progressive and innovative, on the one hand, and the archaic and repressive, on the other, Wagners work will never lose its ambiguous character, just as a critical engagement with Wagner can never lose its ambivalent stance. Ambivalence, Adorno maintains, is a sign of a relationship toward something with which one has not come to terms (Aktualitt, 547), and ambivalence is thus a sign that the artwork is not dead but still in the process of becoming and in the process of realizing its potential. In Search of Wagner, too, maintained the entwinement of progress and regression in Wagner and rescued Wagner, albeit only at its conclusion, by way of recognizing that the Wagnerian surplus occasioned breaks and gaps in the works ideological character. Yet in Wagners Aktualitt the emphasis has shifted from a rescue effort at the conclusion of a piercing critique to a reinstatement of Wagner as a modern artist par excellence. Here Wagners modernity lies not just in his progressive use of technique or in the breaks arising from the surplus of effects and mythological posturing, but it lies in the potentialities that have become recognizable only now. Just as certain breaks and antagonisms come to the fore only now, the extent of the progressive potential of Wagners musical innovations, such as the potential and tendency toward atonality, can be recognized only because other elements of the artwork retreat. Likewise, Wagners use of myth is no longer associated mainly with a regressive gesture in the manner outlined in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, but the very citation of myth now turns into a protest against it. Myth is no longer a manifestation of barbarism but a reflection through which barbarism ceases to be barbaric. To activate the historically relevant truth content and emancipatory potential of Wagner in the now, Adorno recommends experimental solutions. Wagners work, Adorno maintains, shows a tendency toward narration and the epic theater; it is wordy and could in certain places use some red ink. However, Adorno immediately raises the concern that certain other parts are indispensable and that it may in fact be impossible to separate the dispensable from the indispensable, just as it is impossible to separate truth and untruth, success and failure, and progress and regression in Wagner. The solution

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lies not in covering up and smoothing over the breaks but in radicalizing them. By accentuating the incommensurable, the antinomies, and the contradictions, Wagner can be actualized in a contemporary context. Adorno further defends this necessity to break away from Wagnerian orthodoxies in the Nachschrift, were he emphatically statesin a manner that recalls his discussions with Benjaminthat the ideological failure of Wagners politics of the apocalypse calls for insurgencies into the aesthetics of form, because the failure of the political content is also always a failure on the level of form. Thus the actualization of Wagner requires not merely a departure from tradition but a departure from what is written on the page. While Adornos demand for an experimental actualization of Wagner may seem to hold promising possibilities, the possibilities he actually outlines may, at least from a contemporary point of view, appear somewhat less promising. InWagner and Bayreuth, Adorno takes up the challenge to push further the idea of an actualization of Wagner that had remained rather abstract and intangible in the earlier essay. Wagner and Bayreuth repeats much of what was said about the possibility of actualizing the musical material in Wagners Aktualitt and in the Nachschrift and suggests few new ideas on how to actualize Wagner. However, it concretizes where this actualization may take place. The surprising proposal is to turn Bayreuth into a forum for this experimental task. Within the Adornean universe of commodification, half education (Halbbildung), and the regression of listening, Bayreuth is seen as a possibility for a countercultural alternative to the universal context of delusion within the music industry. Wagners music stood in opposition to the dominant modes of musical productions in his own time, and with the rapidly growing commodification of art, this opposition has grown in scope. Adorno maintains that todayin the sixties, that isthe name Bayreuth stands for musical standards (musikalische Bildung) that have been in decline nearly everywhere else. Bayreuth is the place for musical reflection, where productions can be done with diligence and care in an exceptional atmosphere that fosters inspiration and artistic reflection rather than quick fixes and superficial spectacles. Bayreuth could become a microcosm of a progressive musical practice that is elsewhere impeded by social and economic circumstances. It could become a model for the way music dramas

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are to be staged (Bayreuth, 224). Bayreuth must not be a tourist destination and Mecca for the petit bourgeoisie but instead should become an enclave amid the all-pervasive tradition of sloppiness and negligence (Bayreuth, 224). Against commercialization and superficiality, Bayreuth can embody aesthetic seriousness and that part of the artistic tradition worthy of rescue. Musical productions must not be perceived as a museum for outdated emotions and cultural values, but instead they must begin to transform the damaged relationship to the audience (Bayreuth, 224). Adorno maintains that the actualization of Wagners work is inseparable from the actualization of Bayreuth, since the actualization of Bayreuth appears the appropriate forum to actualize Wagners work. Had he lived longer, Adorno most likely would have been disappointed by Bayreuths failure to meet his challenge for renewal. Adornos hopes for Bayreuth show a considerable nostalgic longing for the repair of high modernism, and it becomes apparent that Adorno wants to rescue modernism through modernism. Modernism thus is, to use Jrgen Habermass famous phrase, an incomplete project. Just as the artwork is transformed not merely as a sign of the times but objectively, so it would seem that the larger project of modernity must also undergo a constant process of revision. In Adornos critique, Wagners work transforms itself from representing the primal landscape of fascism and the birth of the culture industry out of the spirit of high art to embodying the hope for a rebirth of modern art. While the essays and lectures on Wagner share many themes and arguments that weave themselves like leitmotivs through the texts, the shifting emphases are remarkable because they also indicate the shifting concerns of Adornos work. Not only does Wagners work change, but Adornos does as well. New layers appear, and others fall away. In the later essays, phantasmagoria and the forced unity of the Gesamtkunstwerk no longer pose a direct threat, as they are no longer grounded in the historical moment of a totalitarian system. Increasingly, the breaks, contradictions, and raptures are foregrounded inWagners work, and it is thus not surprising that Wagner should serve Adorno as a foil for the formulation of his aesthetic theory. However, what may be surprising is that the critique of Wagner finally leads Adorno to abandon his characteristically uncompromising negativity in favor of the rare formulation

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of a utopian vision. This affirmative postulation of a utopian vision which he criticized so harshly in other thinkers, such as Nietzsche betrays his desire to effect a renewal of art and music. Through his affirmative postulation of Bayreuths and Wagners potentiality, he voices what may also be the aspiration of Aesthetic Theory and thus perhaps the Mnchhausian aspiration of his late work: the rebirth of art out of the spirit of theory.

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. . In Search of Wagner. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: New Left Books, 1981. . Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jepfcott. London: Verso Press, 1978. . Notiz ber Wagner. In Gesammelte Werke, 18:2049. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984. Translations from this text are my own. . Wagners Aktualitt. In Gesammelte Werke, 16:54364. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984. Translations from this text are my own. . Wagner und Bayreuth. In Gesammelte Werke, 18:21025. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984. Translations from this text are my own. . Wagner, Nietzsche, and Hitler. In Gesammelte Werke, 19:40412. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984. Translations from this text are my own. . Versuch ber Wagner. Vol. 13, Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971. Translations from the announcement of the book (Selbstanzeige) by Matthew Pollard. Cadenbach, Rainer. Theodor W. Adornos Versuch ber Wagner. In Zu Richard Wagner, ed. Helmut Loos and Gnther Massenkeit, 14559. Bonn: Bouvier, 1984. Dahlhaus, Carl. Soziologische Dechiffrierung von Musik. Zu Theodor W. Adornos Wagner-Kritik. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 1 (1970): 13746. Habermas, Jrgen. ModernityAn Incomplete Project. In The Anti-Aesthetic, 315. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1984. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1993. Huyssen, Andreas. Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner. New German Critique 29 (1983): 838. Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971. Jay, Martin. Adorno. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.

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Nicholsen, Shierry Weber. Exact Imagination, Late Work. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Weineck, Silke-Maria. Loss of Outline: Decadence as the Crisis of Negation. Pacific Coast Philology 29, no. 1 (1994): 3750. Zuidervaart, Lambert. Adornos Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.