WAGNER’S RING CYCLE AND PARADE’S END

Abstract

It might seem at first glance fanciful to suggest that a work of music can constitute a major influence upon a purely literary work, such as Ford's Parade's End. Victor Hugo said 'Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent',1 arguing that music and language are fundamentally distinct and separate. Walter Pater suggested that all art aspires towards the condition of music2 - but it might equally be argued that if it were possible to paraphrase in language what a piece of music means then there would be no need for the music itself to exist. A verbal description would do just as well. The catalogue entry would usurp the work of art exhibited in the gallery, rendering it redundant. Or, the programme notes would suffice and we would never bother to listen to the music itself. This is a point noted by Ford's own father, the musicologist and composer Franz, or Francis, Hueffer, who left Germany in the mid-nineteenth century to take up residence in England. He was a leading advocate of Wagner, writing in 1874 Wagner and the Music of the Future. Hueffer, invoking the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, makes the following comment:There is no sound in nature fit to serve the musician as a model, or to supply him purpose. He approaches the original sources of existence more closely than all other artists - nay, even than Nature itself. His harmonies and melodies are, to speak with Schopenhauer 'as immediate and direct an objectification or copy of the will of the world as the world itself is, as the ideas are of which the universe of things is the phenomenon. Music is not the copy of ideas, like the other arts, but a representation of the cosmical will coordinate with the ideas themselves.' In this sense the musical composer is the only creative artist. While the painter or sculptor must borrow the raiment for his idea from the human form or the landscape the musician is alone with his inspiration.3Yet Wagner's cycle of four operas Der Ring Des Nibelungen - composed 1848-1874, and premiered at the theatre Wagner built specially for it at Bayreuth - is music of a particular kind. It is an example of Wagner's concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or all- embracing work of art, where the composer is responsible not only for the music but also the libretto and the staging and set designs. More than any other composer, Wagner, within the context of this Gesamtkunstwerk, provides a fascinating example of the interdependence of words and music.Surveying the literature on the subject, there prove to be many literary works besides Ford's, from his period, which are, in varying degrees, indebted to Wagner's operas. John Di Gaetani4 and William Blissett,5 as well as Raymond Furness6 and the critic of Conrad and Ford, Paul Wiley,7 have written extensively on the subject, and Ford's name has on occasion come into the discussion. Indeed, Blissett suggests that Ford's Wagnerian credentials, as the son of Francis Hueffer, are excellent, although he confines himself to observing Ford's use of Tannhauser, rather than considering the Ring Cycle. Besides Ford, Gaetani and Furness give examples of continental novelists such as, most notably, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann - who called one of his most celebrated short stories 'Tristan' (1903) - but there are also many British writers. E. F. Benson, in his novel Mike (1916), describes visits to Bayreuth, which serves as a poignant reminder of a cultural bond between Britain and Germany, jeopardized by the First World War. Over twenty years earlier, Benson had produced one of the first examples of Wagner-influenced fiction in English with his novel The Rubicon (1894). Between Benson in 1894 and Ford in the mid-1920s there had been a plethora of English novels modelled on Wagnerian themes. Blissett and Di Gaetani cite Arnold Bennett, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and E. M. Forster, as well as Virginia Woolf. Wagner's influence in these works varies. In some novels actual visits to Wagner operas, even to Bayreuth, occur. …