Today, I thought I would just focus on the phrase "Siegfried Bakoonin" in George Bernard Shaw's The Perfect Wagnernite (please click on the link to see where the quote comes from). For those who read every post published here in great detail, forgive me as this will be old hat. For the majority of those who have not followed every post, this may be of interest, as well as providing a good introduction to Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung.
On page 49 Shaws uses the enigmatic expression "Siegfried Bakoonin", when discussing Siegfried from Richard Wagner's Ring cycle. The reference is to Wagner's anarchist friend, who took part alongside Bakunin in the European uprisings of 1848. His full name is Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (Михаи́л Алекса́ндрович Баку́нин). His Russian surname Бакунин can be written Bakoonin or Bakunin depending on what method of Romanisation you use (and his first name is also often Westernised to Michael). Today his name is usually written as Mikhail Bakunin. He was born into an aristocratic family, but because of his political idealism, the Tsar stripped him of his noble titles and property.
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| Mikhail Bakunin as a young man |
Richard Wagner and Mikhail Bakunin became friends. Together they dreamt of revolution to bring democracy to Central Europe. During the 1848 pro-democracy uprisings, Bakunin supported the German Democratic Legion. Bakunin fought side by side beside Wagner. Like Wagner, he demanded parliamentary democracy. After the counter revolutionary backlash, Wagner managed to escape capture by fleeing into Switzerland, but Bakunin was less fortunate and he was captured. Bakunin was given a death sentence that was never carried out, but he was handed over to the Russians. He was imprisoned in the dungeons of St Peter and St Paul, then later in Shlisselburghe. Bakunin was so badly mistreated in prison that he developed scurvy, and all of his teeth fell out. He was then forced into a work camp in Siberia, until he managed to escape.
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| Bakunin as an older man looks weary after years of mistreatment |
For a while, Bakunin was friendly with Karl Marx. However, they eventually parted company due to a growing ideological rift between them. Bakunin disliked Marx's communism because he thought it was just another form of totalitarianism. He thought that it would be just as oppressive as monarchism. Bakunin developed a system of thought he called anarchism. This does not mean he advocated chaos and disorder. Rather, anarchism is about a spontaneous social order built from the bottom up, rather than being imposed from the top down. Bakunin thought that political parties in so-called democracies tended to become too powerful, corrupt, and authoritarian. In other words, "anarchism" is meant to be a purer form of democracy.
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| Wagner and Bakunin dreamt of destroying the old regime and replacing it with a true democracy ruled from the bottom up and not ruled over by an oppressive system |
The reason that Shaw uses the phrase "Siegfried Bakunin" is because Siegfried is an anarchistic destroyer of the power of the old order, or l’ancien regime, including the power of religious institutions. The symbol of the oppressive power over mankind is Wotan's spear. This spear has all of the oaths (or in our world, contracts, laws, rules, treaties etc) carved into it. When Siegfried's sword shatters Wotan's spear, he shatters the power of the gods over mankind. Siegfried is a wild and unruly anarchist hero without the slightest respect for traditional authority.
For some people, this interpretation may come as a shock. However, the correctness of Shaw's interpretation is confirmed by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche started out as a devout disciple of Wagner. Nietzsche was almost young enough to be his son, and he used to address Wagner as "Meister". The once close friends eventually had a terrible falling out, and Nietzsche spent the rest of his life writing a lot of bitter things about his former friend, although he eventually admitted that his time as Wagner's disciple changed his life.
Nietzsche wrote:
Wagner had believed in the Revolution all his life, as only a Frenchman* could ever have believed in it. So he searched through all the mythic runes, and believed that in Siegfried he had found his perfect revolutionary.
The Case of Wagner
Or to use Shaw's expression he is "Siegfried Bakunin". Siegfried is the anarchist destroyer of the old order.
It is certain that Wagner confided the insight about Siegfried being an anarchist revolutionary hero directly to Nietzsche. Wagner never told this directly to the rest of the world, because in those days censorship made it dangerous to speak too frankly. Wagner was already in enough trouble for taking part in the Dresden uprisings, and understandably did not wish to end up in prison like his friend Bakunin. This meant that Wagner had to hide revolutionary ideas under the disguise of ancient myths and legends. Wagner was also dependent on patronage from a monarch, who would have been deeply offended if he found out he was paying large sums of money to stage anarchist revolutionary artworks. Wagner was using his art to spread his revolutionary message because he had learned that taking up arms often lead to failure. Wagner took up his pen as a mightier alternative to the sword.
Nietzsche goes on:
‘Whence comes all evils in the world?’ Wagner asked himself. From ‘ancient oaths,’ he answered, like all ideologues of Revolution. Put plainly: from conventions, laws, moralities, institutions — everything that the old world, the old society is supported by. ‘How can one rid the world of its evils? How can one do away with the old society?’ Only by declaring war against ‘oaths’ (traditions, morals).
The Case of Wagner
The term "old world, the old society" means l'ancien regime, to use the French revolutionary term. Part of the old order includes the religious order, which Marx famously called the "opiate of the people". Marx, Bakunin and other revolutionaries thought that the corrupt old order had to be destroyed to make way for a new society:
This is just what Siegfried does. He starts on that precociously, very preciously: even his origin is already a declaration of war on morality. . . Siegfried continues as he has begun: he merely follows his first impulse, he throws everything traditional, all respect, all fear overboard. . . He irreverently runs down ancient deities.
The Case of Wagner
At the end of the Ring cycle, Wagner sets l’ancien regime on fire. There is good reason to think that he was setting fire to God, and that Nietzsche got the idea of the Death of God from Wagner's Twilight of the Gods. By placing the story in a setting of ancient German tribes, Wagner is suggesting that the religious order of his day is hardly better than barbaric paganism.
Wagner knew that the God of the Bible was originally the tribal God (Stammgott) of the Jewish people. In the Old Testament, God is called Yahweh Elohim, and He is described as a God of war and vengeance. Yahweh and Wotan were both God of storms and war. Yahweh was the chief war God to the Jewish tribes, just as Wotan was the chief war God of the Germanic tribes. When Wagner destroys Wotan in fire, he also had the God of the Bible in mind.
Once again, Wagner never tells us this directly because he would have offended too many people. Even today, many religious and conservative people would be deeply shocked to discover such revolutionary ideas being expressed in Wagner's works. If modern audiences find ideas like this shocking, many old fashioned people in the nineteenth century would have found it even more shocking.
Wagner was a pacifist. One of the reasons that Wagner objected to the idea of God in the Bible was because Yahweh was a God of war. He thought that this was the reason why religion is always used to sanctify war. Wagner thought this was not only true of the God of the Bible but also of the God of Islam.
Years later, Nietzsche wrote his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The main character Zarathustra, who is a kind of prophet, proclaims that "God is dead". Nietzsche probably got the idea of the death of God from his old Meister — Wagner.
The opening of Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Richard Strauss
This is why I conclude that George Bernard Shaw's interpretation of The Ring of the Nibelung is correct. Shaw's phrase "Siegfried Bakunin" accurately captures Wagner's intention to create an anarchist revolutionary hero. In the counter-revolutionary Nazi regime, they foolishly thought that they were on a God-given mission of war, and they mistook Siegfried for an aggressive German military hero. The evidence shows that Wagner had the opposite in mind. That is why Wagner wrote his Ring cycle on the destruction of the God of war. However, even today many conservative opera goers find the revolutionary idea of God and the old order going up in flames in The Ring to be so shocking that they would much rather prefer to believe in perverse fairy-tale Nazi counter-revolutionary interpretations of Wagner.
Notes:
* Wagner tended to go on rampant tirades against the French, Islam, the Orthodox Church, the Jews and the Jesuits (Catholics), and often even the Germans. He had a "thing" about all of them. Nietzsche knew Wagner's thoughts intimately, so he makes fun of Wagner "thing" about the French by accusing him of being just like a French revolutionary opposed to l'ancien regime. It is meant to be an insult, since Nietzsche hated liberal revolutionary politics. Despite having a "thing" about the French, there is no more reason to think that he wanted all Frenchmen exterminated in death camps than he wanted either Jews, Muslims, Germans or Catholics to be murdered en masse. Wagner was quite egalitarian in his tirades. The only exception is the people of Hindu and Buddhist origin in India, whose spirituality, pacifism and vegetarianism he held in profound reverence – higher even than that for Germanic people. Wagner would have regarded Gandhi with great awe and reverence, the very model of "pure humanity" (reine Menschlichkeit).
Further reading
For a similar highly accessible introduction discussing Wagner's involvement in the Dresden uprising, and how it inspired the Ring cycle, please try the following thread:
http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2014/03/liberty-leads-people.html
I also highly recommend the following article which explores the same themes as this present post:
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/2651/1/WagnerArticle.pdf
The themes in this post have also been explored in greater detail previously. Some older posts of note are as follows:
http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/01/fatherland-union-paper.html
http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2011/12/wotan-lives.html
http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/02/wotan-wandering-jew-and-his-untergang.html
http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/02/book-review-wagner-and-philosophy-by.html
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