/lit/ - Literature

>Yet the beautiful Zurich-Frankfurt relationship wouldn't have been quite the same if Wagner had known how Schopenhauer the reader reacted to the copy of Der Ring des Nibelungen that Wagner had sent him in December 1854 "in veneration and gratitude," as the autograph dedication of the Houghton copy proclaims. Wagner's autobiography discloses a slightly embarrassing secret: Schopenhauer never did send a written reply. Like the good Schopenhauerian that he was, Wagner claimed in Mein Leben that he had "resigned himself" from the outset to the prospect of not receiving a reply. But in fact he did suffer from Schopenhauer's chilling silence; Cosima Wagner's diary records his grief and chagrin as late as March 1878-a generation after the fact.
>It is obvious from the start that it is Schopenhauer the famed stylist, the universally acknowledged master of German prose, who was wielding the pencil. Wagner's language was offensive to Schopenhauer-as it still is to many readers for precisely the same peculiarities that irritated Schopenhauer. And the sage of Frankfurt read the text most carefully. Of course, much of Schopenhauer's criticism loses its pungency in translation, but a few examples of his stylistic comments may give anglophone readers some idea of his objections.
>Schopenhauer was particularly annoyed, as his vigorous question marks and critical underlinings (sometimes accompanied by multiple exclamation marks) suggest, by Wagner's artificially archaic vocabulary. Nobody but an expert in things medieval would know today, any more than Schopenhauer did then, that a freislicher Streit is a "terrifying quarrel." Nor did infelicitous constructions, stylistic awkwardness, and illogical turns of phrase escape Schopenhauer's angry pencil. Some of these passages are mildly funny, like the one suggesting that Erda does not know--to judge by her syntax in Rheingold--whether she gave birth to her three daughters or whether they were created at the dawn of time. Another such stylistic aberration, which rated one of Schopenhauer's quizzically amused exclamation marks, eventually caught the dull eye of Wagner himself when he revised his text slightly: Wotan originally says about Wala in Walküre, "News I received from her; / but from me she received a child."

>What Schopenhauer found consistently exasperating about Wagner's style were his characteristic composite nouns, like Felssteine, Felsensaum, Felsspitze (rocks, rocky edge, rocky peak). "Ears!" Schopenhauer repeatedly penciled in the margin in his powerful hand, "he has no ears! the deaf musician." It is the sound of these and other such difficult words that go against Schopenhauer's grain. The implication is, clearly, that Wagner is a poet-composer who is at odds with the building materials of his trade, "the deaf musician." Schopenhauer summed up this criticism in large letters: "Language should be the serf of the master."