Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s Nicholas Frankel (bio) Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s, by Emma Sutton. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, £40.00, $72.00. Aubrey Beardsley's art has long been recognized as a dramatic example of what Walter Pater termed Anders-streben: the innately transdisciplinary tendency within all artworks to "pass into the condition of some other art, by...a partial alienation from [their] own limitations." Regarded with suspicion by professional art historians for much of the twentieth century, Beardsley's oeuvre has frequently been judged for its aspirations towards the "textual" condition of literature and its reliance on the printed book. And with some notable exceptions, much of the finest recent scholarship about Beardsley has been produced by figures associated with literature departments and the rare books room: Linda Gertner Zatlin, Stanley Weintraub, Ian Fletcher, Robert Langenfeld, Chris Snodgrass, Lorraine Kooistra, Margaret Stetz, and Mark Samuels Lasner. To this list must now be added Emma Sutton, of the English department at the University of Edinburgh, whose book is a model of precisely the kind of interdisciplinary criticism Beardsley's imagination demands. Sutton is the first to study the visual implications of Beardsley's fascination with music—in particular, with the work of Richard Wagner, which Beardsley frequently heard and saw performed. Building on the new musicology associated with Phyllis Weliver, Susan McClary, Philip Brett, and others, Sutton has written a groundbreaking book that richly amplifies our view of Beardsley as an artist in black and white. Beardsley's fascination with music, and Wagner in particular, has been frequently observed but till now never closely studied. He "had a genius for music," Beards- ley's mother recalled: "When a baby of less than a year old,...he would crawl across the [End Page 532] carpet to the piano and sit close beside it waiting for me to play, when he would beat time with his toy." He avidly collected Wagner's essays, scores, and libretti, as well as biographies and criticism on Wagner; and six months prior to his death from tuberculosis in 1898, he specified that Wagner's prose works should, with three exceptions (all spiritual works), be the only books held back from the sale of his library. After his death, Gleeson White recalled seeing Beardsley at a performance of Tristan, his "transparent hands clutching the rail in front, and thrilling with the emotion of the music....No instrument in the orchestra vibrated more instantly in accord with the changes of the music" (qtd. in Sutton 78-79). But it is with the implications of Beardsley's Wagnerism for understanding of his visual and literary work, as well as with the complex, shifting meanings of "Wagnerism" and "Wagnerite," that Sutton is chiefly concerned here. Sutton shows that in his complicated love for Wagner—at once passionate and critical, reverent and mocking—Beardsley was both responding and giving new shape to a cultural movement of tremendous breadth and depth. For Sutton, "Wagnerism was central...not only to the cultural history of 1890s Britain but to the reputation of fin-de-siècle aestheticism" (199). Wagner's reputation had been steadily growing in Britain since the first English performances of his works in the 1870s. By the 1890s, Wagner and Wagnerism had become fiercely contested signifiers: "British Wagnerism took many forms" and had effectively "become a self-propelling cultural movement, at times only loosely related to the expressed theories and intentions of Wagner himself" (3). For Shaw the Ring cycle was a work of prescient topicality, a socialist allegory of striking modernity. For others Wagner's works elicited a blind enthusiasm bordering on religious zealotry or, still worse, a musical conservatism and defensive hostility directed at either Wagner's structural and harmonic innovations or the philosophical apparatus surrounding Wagner's works (or both). By the 1890s, in short, Wagner's works had become deeply divisive: "labeling oneself a Wagnerite...was an act replete with political (in the broadest terms) resonance" (2). This attention to the broadly political implications of even the most professedly "aesthetic" responses to Wagner's work distinguishes Sutton from previous critics of Victorian Wagnerism...