Wagner had already conceived of his Nibelung project when he met Bakúnin. He had written a strangely confused essay, “The Wibelungs: World History as Revealed in Saga,” in which he played with spurious etymologies of the word Nibelung, deriving from it everything from the Wibelungen ancestors of Frederick Barbarossa, or as we are more likely to know them today, the Ghibellines in the Ghibelline/Guelph conflict of Dante’s era, to “Nabelon”—Napoleon! (And, of course, the Gibichungs of the Ring.) It was mystical nonsense, but it fascinated Wagner.
Bakúnin arrived in Dresden in the high summer of 1848.
Because there was so definitely an influence on Wagner from the brilliant, burly, bearded Russian, even if it did not extend as far as Shaw thought it did, it’s instructive to look at Wagner’s portrait of him.
When I now met him, under the humble shelter of Röckel’s roof, I was at first truly amazed by the strangely imposing personality of this man, who was then in the prime of his life, aged somewhere between thirty and forty. Everything about him was on a colossal scale, and he had a strength suggestive of primitive exuberance. I never got the impression that he set much store by my acquaintance, for by then he appeared to be basically indifferent to spiritually gifted people, perferring on the contrary ruthless men of action exclusively; as occurred to me later, he was more profoundly dominated in such things by abstract theory than by personal feelings, and could expatiate on these matters at great length:… He argued that the only thing necessary to conjure up a world-wide movement was to convince the Russian peasant, in whom the natural goodness of oppressed human nature had survived in its most childlike form, that the incineration of the castles of his masters, together with everything in them, was entirely just and pleasing in the eyes of God, and that the least to be expected from such a movement would be the destruction of all those things which, deeply considered, must appear even to Europe’s most philosophical thinkers as the real cause of all the miseries of the whole modern world. To set this destructive force in motion seemed to him the only goal worthy of a reasonable person. (While Bakúnin was preaching these horrendous doctrines at me, he noticed that my eyes were troubling me as a result of the bright light, and despite my protests, held his hand before it to shield me for a full hour.) The annihilation of all civilization was the objective on which he had set his heart; to use all political levers at hand as a means to this end was his current preoccupation, and it often served him as a pretext for ironic merriment… [But] Bakúnin offered the consolatory thought that the builders of the new world would turn up of their own accord; we, on the other hand, would have to worry only about where to find the power to destroy. Was any of us insane enough to believe that he would survive after the goal of annihilation had been reached? It was necessary, he said, to picture the whole of the European world, with Petersburg, Paris, and London, transformed into a pile of rubble: how could we expect the arsonists themselves to survey these ruins with the faculty of reason intact?
What Wagner has recounted Bakúnin describing is, of course, the ending of Götterdämmerung, the final opera in Wagner’s four-part Festival Play, with both the earthly city and the heavenly city in ruins. I think Wagner wanted his readers, royal or otherwise, to know this was where the notion came from. But what has to be stressed here is that the idea that an effective revolution required an absolutely clean slate and the violent destruction of all previous civilization was not Bakúnin’s personal property — any more than it was Wagner’s. It was, indeed, an idea — or at least an image — widely abroad in the European imagination.
In France at about the same time, Baudelaire was writing, “I say, ‘Long live the revolution!’ as I would say, ‘Long live destruction! Long live penance! Long live chastisement! Long live death!’ I would be happy not only as a victim; it would not displease me to play the hangman as well — so as to feel the revolution from both sides! All of us have the republican spirit in our blood as we have syphilis in our bones…”
In the iconography of the Romantic period, the ruin was a backward- looking and melancholy image because it spoke of vanished glories. But it was also a spiritual, uplifting, and sublime image because it alone on the crowded European landscape, in that age of science and industry, vouchsafed the possibility of progress, of building anew, of greater glories to come. (The terrifying ruin, the ruin of ghosts and unspeakable horrors, was the isolated ruin, the forgotten ruin, the ruin where the modern scientific and industrial spirit had not yet come to gaze, and, after gazing, establish its reassuring and progressive erections in the shadow of the old: the materialist reading of that horror is an unsettling projection of wasted real estate without any “spirit” of potential.) The destruction of the Great War of 1914 obliterated this positive reading of the ruin — by saturating the landscape with so many of them, all associated with real and recent death, that we can hardly see the ruin today as the nineteenth century saw it, as redolent of potential as it was of mystery. Similarly, it is only the twentieth century’s critique of so many revolutions accomplished and revolutions failed that makes this demand for a totally clean slate, which the ruin represented, seem like the ultimate in political naïveté—rather than the ultimate modern image, as it marked a locus where new building might begin, absorbing as it did so the spirit of the old.
By October ’48, in addition to his political articles and speeches for the Voksblätter and the Vaterlands-Verein, Wagner had also completed his “Prose Sketch” for the Ring. Commentators have seen that practically everything we can find in the finished Ring is there in one form or another in the “Prose Sketch.” What they have not stressed quite as much is to what extent we can find the situation of Saxony in general and Dresden in particular in the same essay. The Nibelungs of the “Prose Sketch” are laborers and miners, as were many of the working class of Dresden and many of the other small towns in Saxony.
The “Prose Sketch” begins:
Out of the Womb of Night and Death there came into being a race dwelling in Nibelheim (Nebelheim) [Home — or Place — of Mist, Fog, or Obscurity], i.e., in gloomy subterranean clefts and caverns. They are known as the Nibelungs: feverishly, unrestingly, they burrow through the bowels of the earth like worms in a dead body: they anneal and smelt and smith hard metals…
The last day of October brought news of the murder of the revolutionaries Blum, Becher, Jellinek, and Messenhauer in Vienna, and of the bombardment there. Robert Blum was a Saxon, and his body was returned to Dresden for a funeral where liberal cabinet members joined the funeral procession, fearful of both the people on the one side and the king on the other.
There were more clashes in Berlin in November, and the Prussian National Assembly was finally dissolved. Now, just before beginning the libretto, Siegfrieds Tod (“Siegfried’s Death,” the first version of what was to become the last of the four operas in the Ring cycle), Wagner received the news that the promised Lohengrin premiere had been officially canceled at the Opera, even though the sets had been begun.
No doubt the conservative theater management felt that the more and more radical Kapellmeister had to be disciplined; besides, there were not enough royal funds for producing new operas. Only four new operas were produced in all of Germany that year. Everyone involved had read the libretto and certainly no conservative official wanted to chance King Heinrich’s exhortation, from the opening minutes of the opera, “Let all who are German be prepared to fight / That none will ever again affront German soil,” going out to an audience that might take it as a rebel call to arms.