HERMANN HESSE AND THE DIALECTICS OF TIME Salvatore C. P. ...

die Neigung zu Lebenslust, Sinnenlust, Luxus - Wagner war der
Sammelname fur alles Unterdriickte, Untergesunkene, zu kurz Gekommene in
dem ehemaligen Beamten Friedrich Klein. Und »Lohengrin« - war nicht auch
das er selbst, Lohengrin, der irrende Ritter mit dem geheimnisvollen Ziel, den
man nicht nach seinem Namen fragen darf?45 (SW 8, 262-63)
Hesse's grounds for disliking Wagner were both aesthetic and moral: in his opinion,
Wagner had brought Romanticism to its highest and lowest point. 46 He regarded
Wagner's musical texture as magniloquent and redundant, as the character of Mozart
notes in his evaluation of the music of Wagner and Brahms in Der Steppenwolf: 'zu
dick instrumentiert, zuviel Material vergeudet' (SW 4,193). On an ethical plane,
Hesse, who was a pacifist and a firm opponent of the Nazi regime, associated
Wagner's music with the composer's glorification during the Third Reich. As Hesse
puts it in a letter to Mann dated 1934:
Ich kann [Wagner], offen gesagt, nicht ausstehen. Und vermutlich empfand
ich beim Blick auf jene Zeitung mit Hitlers Superlativen iiber Wagner Ihnen
gegeniiber etwas wie »Da haben Sie ihren Wagner! Dieser gerissene und
gewissenlose Erfolgmacher ist genau der Gotze, der ins jetzige Deutschland
pafit«.47 (Musik, 159)
From Hesse's perspective, Wagner's grandiose aesthetics and poetics seemed the
antithesis of his own beliefs, centred on the individual who follows an inconspicuous
path of growth and comes to grips to the problematic dimension of the self. On closer
scrutiny, however, unexpected connections between Wagner and Hesse emerge and
a parallel can be drawn between Der Steppenwolf (1927) and Wagner's Tristan und
Isolde (1865). Both works incorporate the most advanced formal elements of their
respective authors, while they also serve the purpose of illustrating the gulf
separating their poetic aims.
45 Weibel underlines the symbolic function of Wagner and his music within Hesse's work: '[Richard Wagner
steht] auch hier [in Klein und Wagner]—wie grundsatzlich schon in Gertrud— [...] als Symbolzeichen' (135).
Wagner's Parsifal offers a further element of comparison with Hesse in the context of our discussion on the
concept of eternity in Chapter 5, section 4.
46 Musicologists tend to agree that Wagner is the composer who took Romanticism to its ultimate conclusion. As
Cardinal points out, 'it was in Wagner that Romanticism achieved its musical apotheosis, for in his vast music-
dramas, Wagner embraced all the Romantic preoccupations with medievalism, German myth, passionate love
and the temptations of death and night, in a synthesis of the verbal, the musical and the visual media, the
Gesamtkunstwerk or total art-work' (22-23).
47 In another letter of the same year, he vents his feelings describing Wagner as 'den Rattenfanger und
Leibmusikanten des Zweiten und noch mehr des Dritten deutschen Reiches' (GS VII, 571).
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