For a revolution in art. The problem of capitalism and revolution in the political doctrine, creativity and activity of Richard Wagner The problem of capitalism and revolution in the political doctrine, creativity and activity of Richard Wagner

According to A. Blok, Wagner was deeply aware of the ideals of spiritual freedom. But while European philistinism has always ruined these kinds of artists, this is exactly what it did not achieve in the case of Wagner. Blok asks: “Why didn’t they manage to starve Wagner to death? Why was it not possible to devour it, vulgarize it, adapt it and hand it over to the historical archive, as an upset, no longer needed instrument?

It turns out that Wagner, according to Blok, not only created beauty and not only loved to contemplate it. He still desperately resisted the transformation of this beauty into petty-bourgeois and everyday vulgarity. He not only knew how to love, but he also knew how to hate. “This is the poison of hateful love, unbearable for the bourgeois even “seven cultural spans in the forehead,” and saved Wagner from death and desecration. This poison, spilled in all his creations, is that "new", which is destined for the future.

The aesthetics of Wagner is the aesthetics of revolutionary pathos, which he retained throughout his life and which he expressed with youthful enthusiasm as early as 1849 in the article "Art and Revolution". Wagner's ideal, in spite of any collisions in life, always remained "free united humanity", not subject, according to the composer, to "industry and capital", destroying art. This new humanity, according to Wagner, should be endowed with a "social mind" that has mastered nature and its fruits for the common good. Wagner dreams of "future great social revolutions" to which the transformative role of art points the way. He relies on human nature, from the depths of which a new artistic consciousness grows into the vast expanses of “pure humanity”. He places his hopes on the power of the "divine human mind" and at the same time on faith in Christ, who suffered for people, and Apollo, who gave them joy. The genuine revolutionary nature of Wagner in music, along with these contradictory but persistent dreams, as well as his deep antagonism with the bourgeois-merchant reality, led to a struggle over the work of the great composer that did not subside for more than a hundred years.

After all, no one could so masterfully fight against vulgarity in music and art, as Wagner managed to do. The tradesman will never forgive that internal fracture that was fatal for him, which was committed by the work of Wagner. In this sense, Wagner could never become a museum rarity; and to this day, every sensitive musician and listener of music has by no means been able to treat him calmly, academically, and historically dispassionately. Wagner's aesthetics is always a challenge to every bourgeois vulgarity, whether musically educated or musically uneducated.

Thus, we now have to briefly, but as clearly as possible, reveal the essence of Wagner's aesthetics and note in it some, although not numerous, but still the main features.

Before doing so, let us remind readers of some of Wagner's main biographical data. For our purposes, these data should be given not just factographically, but with a certain trend, namely, in order to clarify the historical meaning of Wagner's most important aesthetic aspirations. And they were associated with Wagner with the failures and death of the revolutionary movement of the 40s and romantic ideas about some other, by no means bourgeois, but that revolution that would renew and transform humanity with the help of new art.

Richard Wagner was born on May 22, 1813 in Leipzig into the family of a police officer who died the year his son was born. Wagner's family, his brother and sisters were all passionate theatergoers, actors and singers. Stepfather - L. Geyer, himself an actor, artist and playwright - encouraged the boy's theatrical interests. The composer spent his childhood in Dresden, where his family settled, and he returned to Leipzig only in 1828 to continue his studies at the gymnasium and then at the university. It is here that Wagner begins to seriously study music theory, harmony, counterpoint, preparing for his composing activity, which resulted in his early symphony (1832), the first opera - The Fairies (1833-1834), and writes the article "German Opera" (1834), in which Wagner's reflections on the fate of opera music are already felt.

Until 1842, Wagner's life was extremely unsettled. He visits Vienna, Prague, Würzburg and Magdeburg, where he conducts at the opera house and meets the actress Minna Planer (1817–1866), who became his wife in 1836. Wagner conducts in the theaters of Königsberg and Riga, cherishing the dream of creating a grandiose opera based on a romantic plot. In 1840, he completed his opera Rienzi, dedicated to the dramatic fate of a hero who tried to create a republic in medieval Rome in the 14th century. Wagner tries in vain to stage it in Paris, where he appeared for the first time in 1839, after he had to secretly leave Riga without a passport due to difficult financial circumstances (large debts and theatrical intrigues).

Wagner's ambitious dreams of conquering Paris did not come true. But on the other hand, in the summer of 1841, he wrote The Flying Dutchman there, where he developed an old legend about an eternally wandering and vainly seeking redemption sailor. And although the return to Dresden with his wife (1842) without the slightest means and on the verge of disaster was rather deplorable, nevertheless his operas Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman were staged in Dresden (1842-1843).

Wagner's fascination with romantic opera does not end there. On the contrary, from the decorative heroics of Rienzi and the fantasy of The Flying Dutchman, Wagner moves on to the profound problems of the spirit, struggling with the irrationality of destructive feelings and winning in the radiance of goodness, beauty and moral duty. Wagner, who by this time had occupied the post of court bandmaster of the Dresden Theater, staged Tannhäuser (1845) there, wrote Lohengrin (1845–1848), which was staged in Weimar by his new friend, the famous pianist and composer F. Liszt (August 28, 1850). For decades, these two great artists walked hand in hand, having a huge beneficial effect on each other and on the musical culture of their time. By the way, Liszt's symphonic poems, along with Beethoven's last sonatas, had a great and already purely musical influence on Wagner, which, unfortunately, is written much less often than the subject deserves.

The obsession with medieval plots, so beloved by romantic poets (and Wagner showed himself as an outstanding poet and librettist of his own operas), does not in the least interfere with Wagner’s essentially romantic passion for the revolution of 1848 and meetings with the famous Russian anarchist M. Bakunin, who overthrew the tyranny of European thrones in his unbridled dreams and unrealizable plans. In the name of the rule of higher justice, Wagner participates in the Dresden popular uprising of May 3-9, 1849, which expelled the king from Dresden. However, a few days later the Prussian troops defeated the rebels, the provisional government headed by Bakunin was arrested; Bakunin was extradited to the Russian authorities, and Wagner hurriedly left Dresden for Liszt in Weimar, and then to Jena, in order to finally leave Germany secretly, with a false passport obtained for him with the help of the same Liszt.

FOR A REVOLUTION IN ART

Wagner arrived in Zurich with twenty francs in his pocket - all that he had left. In Dresden, his wife saved his manuscripts, including the score of Lohengrin; but the whole furnishings, the library, everything except Cornelius's engraving for the Nibelungen, went into the hands of creditors in Dresden. In Zurich, he was taken in by new Swiss friends. In July 1849, the lonely and free Wagner wrote a treatise that began a new period of his work. "Art and Revolution": under this heading are collected six small articles or chapters that Wagner intended for some French magazine. The need to speak out, to continue his revolutionary activity, does not allow him to withdraw into purely artistic experiences. Wagner sent the manuscript to Paris for translation into French.

It was returned to him with the indication that Art and Revolution was not suitable for the French press. Wagner sent it to Leipzig to the publisher Wiegand, known for his "leftist" sympathies. The name of the bandmaster who had fled was on everyone's lips. Wiegand sent Wagner five louis of royalties, and published the manuscript as a separate pamphlet, which was quickly sold out and caused a great deal of noise. Who understood her? Liszt, the intelligent and noble Liszt, in a hasty letter recommends that Wagner immediately abandon all "socialist nonsense." But during the revolution of 1905-06, Wagner's pamphlet was twice translated into Russian and again twice reprinted after October. Wagner's theory of art was rejected by the Western bourgeoisie, distorted by his school, and expressed by him in a far from perfect form. In the days of the French Revolution, David, a friend of Marat and Robespierre, gave examples of the practice of a revolutionary artist, but who, before Wagner, so linked the fate of the revolution and art?

To his friend Uhlig, a young Dresden musician, Wagner writes: "My job is to create a revolution wherever I go." In September 1850, he wrote to Uhlig about his complete disbelief in all kinds of reforms and about his only faith in the revolution. "Art and Revolution" contains an indignant analysis of modern society and the assertion of a new creative ideal in which artistic and social interests shake hands. The work was preceded by an epigraph, omitted in all later reprints of the work, including Russian ones: “Where art once was silent, state wisdom and philosophy began; where the state sage and philosopher have now come to an end, there the artist begins again. All the bitter experience of the Parisian starvation and the Dresden hardships brings Wagner into his first revolutionary theoretical work. He seeks not an abstract definition of art, but the elucidation of art as a product of social life. He contrasts the art of the modern system - industrial capitalism - with the art of ancient Greek democracy. This immediately reveals in Wagner's views their Hegelian basis; Wagner studied Hegel's "Philosophy of History" while still in Dresden; this commonality of the school brings Wagner close to Marx as well. In the preface to the Critique of an Introduction to Political Economy, Marx, like Wagner, speaks of Greek art as "an almost unattainable model." Wagner connects art with the economic factor (“Industry is stagnant, art has nothing to live on”) and sees the essence of contemporary capitalist art in its “striving for extreme individualization”, that “its true essence is industry, its moral goal is profit, its aesthetic pretext is entertainment”. Wagner knows how to distinguish between social formations: art, instead of freeing itself from “allegedly enlightened rulers, such as the church” (the stage of feudalism) and “educated princes (absolutism), “sold itself body and soul to a much worse master: “industry” (industrial capitalism). - "Art has always been a wonderful mirror of the social system," says Wagner a few years before Chernyshevsky. Years will pass, and the old Wagner, almost on the eve of his death, will define modern civilization with words repeated in a different combination in his first pamphlet: “This is a world of riot and robbery, organized by lies, deceit and hypocrisy.” Falsity is revealed by Wagner in advertising and fame, which can be bought "along with other entertainments", in "patriotism" and "legality". In the theater, the modern capitalist state “finds a means of distraction, relaxation of the mind, absorption of energy, which can serve against the threatening agitation of “revolutionary” thought. Meyerbeer is only a refined and improved successor to Kotzebue. "True art these days can only be revolutionary." “It doesn’t exist in today’s society.”

To this repudiation of capitalist art, in which Wagner extends his hand to our day, he opposes Greece. He sees the main essence of Greek art in the image of Apollo, who killed the dragon of Chaos: Apollo for Wagner is a collective ideal. "He embodies the Greek people." In tragedy, the Greek "merged closely with society." "The nation itself ... saw itself depicted in a work of art, knew itself." At the same time - here Wagner takes a liberating step in relation to Hegelianism - he is not at all inclined to consider Greece and its art to be truly ideal. Wagner emphasizes that the basis of the social formation, the expression of which was Greek culture, was slavery. “The slave has become the fatal axis of the destinies of the world ... revealed all the instability of beauty and the particularistic humanism of the Greeks and proved once and for all that beauty and strength, as the foundations of social life, can create lasting well-being only if they belong to all people.” - "Art has never been a free expression of a free society, for true art is the highest freedom, and it can only proclaim the highest freedom." - "Only a revolution can give us the greatest work of art ... the work of art of the future must contain the spirit of all mankind, free and without any national borders." - "We have another task before us, which has nothing to do with an attempt to restore Greek art."

Wagner defines the main essence of art as “joy” (“Art is the joy of being oneself, living and belonging to society”), thus responding to the aesthetics of Feuerbach, Schiller, bearing in mind the end of Beethoven’s IX symphony. But this “joy” has been extinguished by Christianity (against which Wagner revolts with particular vigor in his pamphlet) and by capitalism. Christianity brought hypocrisy with it. The contrast between the ideas of Christianity (on the one hand, “contempt for everything earthly”, on the other, “brotherly love”) and their implementation is explained by the fact that “the idea of ​​Christianity was unhealthy”, born in opposition to the “true nature” of man. Two thousand years of Christian hegemony - the realm of philosophy, but not of art. “Only by experiencing an inexpressible joy in front of the physical world can a person use it for art.” Emphasizing the specifics of Christianity, the denial of physical being, Wagner points out that "the art of the Christian world could not be an expression of the complete harmonious unity of the world ... because in the depths of itself there was an irreconcilable discord between consciousness and life instinct." The author of "Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin" is not afraid to point out that all "knight's poetry was honest hypocrisy of fanaticism, the delirium of heroism, replacing nature with conventionality."

The weakness of Wagner's concepts is revealed at the end of his work, when he accepts nature as the main content of the revolutionary art of the future. Revolution is the movement, as he puts it, of the "elastic" force of nature, striving to throw off the weight of the heap of culture. The bearer of this revolutionary force is "the most suffering part of our society", i.e., the proletariat. But in striving to rise "to the height of free human dignity," the revolutionary proletariat needs a real road to be shown to its social instinct. To do this is the task of art. It is here that Wagner confines himself to general words, reminiscent of the fact that all his criticism remained bourgeois-radical, class-conditioned. Wagner can only repeat the thesis of the Romantics that "only strong people know love, only love understands beauty, only beauty creates art." How then can art be the organizer of social forces? Standing on the point of view of Wagner, one has to admit some “non-class” forces of the arts, to recognize the role of the artist as a leader and organizer of the public, to forget what Wagner himself said about the collective beginning of art as an ideal. - "Art and Revolution" ends unprecedentedly - after all that Wagner said clever and critically true about Christianity, with a call to "erect an altar of the future" "To Christ, who suffered for humanity, and to Apollo, who raised him to a height" ... Wagner's lively, agitated, illogical, but brilliant work is more than just a stage of his personal path, this is an event of European aesthetic thought.

After Art and Revolution, the publisher Wiegand accepted Wagner's Wibelungs for publication. At the end of 1849, his family arrived in Zurich: his wife, the dog Peps and the parrot Papo; Wagner was particularly pleased with the latter. Wagner at this time occasionally makes music, conducts a modest orchestra in Zurich - and withstands the persistent onslaught of his wife, who demanded a trip to Paris. Struggling with a new cruel need, suffering from the cold in a small apartment, Wagner is hard at work on his new article. His "Art of the Future" is already a book of 135 pages. He also arranges for her at the same Wigand in Leipzig for a fee of twenty louis, of which he received, however, only half.

In The Art of the Future, Wagner draws practical conclusions from his theory. The book is addressed to a new readership and is dedicated to Ludwig Feuerbach.

Wagner considers his problem in five main parts. He analyzes the relationship between nature, social life, science and art. Wagner recognizes the “people”, the broad masses, not spoiled by the anti-artistic constructions of modern life under the dominion of abstraction and the fashion of capitalism, as the main force that determines works of art. The measure of art is its social significance. All arts are considered by Wagner in two divisions: firstly, "three purely human arts" - namely, dance, music and poetry, and, secondly, "arts on the material of nature": architecture, sculpture, painting. "The Art of the Future" "Gezamkunst" is based on the fusion of all these elements. Wagner's main thoughts can be stated as follows: in the present era of "anti-revolution" arts are dying, they do not exist. They fell wholly under the corrupting influence of capitalist venality and professional individualism (Wagner says everywhere "selfishness"). Only a return to the unity of the arts, realized in ancient Greek artistic creativity, can save art. The Art of the Future, however, will be more than a mere return to antiquity, it will be a new synthesis of all the arts, a union of dance, music, poetry, architecture, sculpture, painting. The ideal of this synthesis is drama. It will be realized by the transition of human society from individualism to communism.

In his new work, Wagner is more decisive than before, based on concrete moments of the socio-political order. “The police are forbidden to use the word 'communist', writes Wagner in a footnote to the third chapter of The Art of the Future; he borrows the very concept of "communism" from Feuerbach. It is more about the opposition to "individualism" than about the creative ideal of the revolutionary order. Wagner was still a friend of Bakunin in 1849, through him he was obviously familiar with the views of Weitling, one of the first utopian communists who came out of the working class, who began his revolutionary work precisely in Zurich, where Wagner could thus hear something about him. In his unwritten third work on The Art Society of the Future, Wagner was going to talk more about communism as he understood it. - “Do you think that with the death of our current system and with the beginning of a new, communist world order, history will end?” - Wagner asks in one passage: “just the opposite, then a real clear life will begin ... modernity rests on an arbitrary fantastic invention, like a monarchy, hereditary property” ... “The most perfect satisfaction of egoism (as a feeling of “I”) will be given just in communism, that is, through the complete negation (dialectical removal) of egoism ...” In his drafts, Wagner uses many techniques and terms of young Hegelianism.

Wagner's "communism" is closely intertwined with the concept of "the people"; the future system is the "triumph of the people's principle." "The people is a common concept for all those who experience a common need." In the sketches, this idea is expressed in more detail: “what is a people? All those who experience need or their own need are recognized as common, or feel themselves embraced by it. The people are "all those who can hope to overcome their need only from overcoming the common need." Under; By "the people" Wagner thus understands the exploited workers. This ideal will subsequently be replaced by him with a nationalist one; but in 1849 Wagner continues to be true to the principles of the liberation movement. From this exploited, but in the future victorious people, working in modern times, Wagner expects great collective art, overcoming individualistic creativity, a community of artists for a single common - "cathedral" - artistic work; to a certain extent, this echoes the idealization of the handicraft and guild system of the medieval bourgeoisie, an idealization very common among Wagner's predecessors in the field of "true" socialism, which in the future found its most consistent expression in the utopias of William Morris. Of the writers of the forties, Grun had the most influence on the social theories of Wagner, characterized by Mehring as a "philosophical wit."

From this collective artistic creativity, Wagner expects a maximum of ideological content, content, and significance. The art of the future in his eyes will be close to science and will replace philosophy.

Wagner's teaching about the "synthesis" of the arts, about their fusion in drama, caused the greatest number of controversies. Wagner was reproached that he completely underestimated the specifics of each art, unduly striving for the hegemony of the drama, and, moreover, the drama of "his own", of the type that he subsequently developed in Bayreuth. To a certain extent, it is necessary to protect the views of the young Wagner, a utopian communist (who had not yet heard of the "Communist Manifesto" at the time of writing "The Art of the Future") from his subsequent own convictions, when he firmly believed that "the art of the future" is his own musical and dramatic art. The main misunderstanding that is revealed immediately, as soon as we stop perceiving Wagner 1849-50. through the prism of Wagner of later years, lies in the fact that the "art of the future", the synthesis of all arts, is something completely different from "drama", as it was understood until then. "People's" theatre, the work of a united and artistically equal team; drama as the highest quality point of unification of poetry, music, movement, facial expressions, spectacle - this is something that only Wagner really dreamed of. The idea of ​​a simple community of arts in the theater is not new. In the same Bayreuth, where the Richard Wagner Theater would later be erected, Jean-Paul Richter dreamed of a musician who would himself be the poet of his own opera. The same was said, for example, by the author of Aesthetics published in 1805, a follower of Schelling, Ast; Herder and Goethe - the two pillars of "Weimar" - the center of the artistic culture of Europe in the era of classicism - dreamed of buildings that would serve for the "lyrical unification" of the arts; finally, aesthetics has long established the origin of all the arts from some initial synthesis of them; but Wagner's "Art of the Future" is still something more than a mechanical unification of various arts in the theater. Wagner always uses Hegelian terminology, speaks of the "sublation" or "liberation" of each individual art in their highest unity, which can only be imagined by humanity, which has overcome within itself the centrifugal forces of individualistic culture. Wagner does not deny the independent existence of the arts. He allows for the flourishing of each individual art form in the future, while at the same time recognizing “drama” as the highest hierarchical level of art in general, takes into account the specific moments of each individual art form, when none of them can be replaced by another, and warns against their mechanical “dumping into one heap”. But perhaps even he himself did not imagine precisely and quite concretely this future work of art.

The establishment of the unity of music, dance and poetry at the beginning of rhythm, the recognition of the enormous educational and agitational power of the arts, are the indisputable services of Wagner's book. At the end of it, Wagner places the myth of "Wieland the blacksmith", which he read from the transcriptions of the ancient sagas made by Zimrok. The skillful blacksmith Wieland was captured by a hostile king, who, so that Wieland would not run away, crippled him; but Wieland managed to forge his wings, and flew away, lame, captive - freed, having achieved his goal in spite of everything, “He did it, he did it, prompted by the highest need. Raised by a work of his art, he flew into the heights ... Oh, the people, the only one. splendid people!.. You are your own Wieland! Forge your wings - and fly up on them!

Wagner's biography brings us back to earth. - Cold Zurich winter; malaise, a wife "unwilling to witness how Wagner ekes out the existence of a miserable scribbler" ... Paris still seems to be the only place where Wagner could achieve any success. No money... Wagner enters a period of his life when he exists almost exclusively on the personal support of art friends. First, Julia Ritter, mother of a young Dresden admirer and friend of Wagner, Karl Ritter, sends Wagner 500 thalers. Wagner takes all these handouts for granted. For him, a difficult period of worries and new wanderings in search of work began. In Paris, where Wagner came a second time at the beginning of 1850, he had to experience a series of bitter disappointments again. He took there a draft libretto on the theme of the myth of Wieland; but no one wanted to deal with him. Wagner's only income during this period remained literary: for a German magazine published in Zurich, he writes an article "Art and Climate", developing thoughts that were partly touched upon in "The Art of the Future".

In the first two theoretical works, Wagner talked a lot about "nature". The fact that he was asked the question of "art and climate" was due to the often expressed consideration that in the North the flowering of art is impossible due to unfavorable natural conditions: "Greece cannot be transferred to Germany."

The new work of Wagner, without giving anything fundamentally new, clarifies some of his provisions. He emphasizes that the art of the future is not dependent on any climate. Our clergy-judicial civilization is to blame for the fall of art. To understand the significance of such a transfer of the question from the field of geography to the plane of human relationships, it is worth remembering how the rationalists of the 18th century, led by Winckelmann, and the bourgeois positivists of the 19th century, following Taine, insisted on the decisive importance of the climate for art. The reference to "climate" is a typical excuse for anyone who denies the importance of social moments that define culture. But Wagner is guilty of something else - he goes too far in the direction of biologism (“What is higher than man?”) Without taking into account the fact that “man in general” is an empty and unscientific abstraction.

Wagner felt lonely and abandoned in Paris, in spite of his friends, of whom Kitz made a portrait of him "under Napoleon"; here Wagner met Semper, who had emigrated after the uprising. The family of one of his admirers in Dresden, Madame Losso, invited him to Bordeaux. By agreement with Madame Ritter, the Losso family also agreed to subsidize Wagner with three thousand francs a year until a better time came. Jessie Losso was young and beautiful. With her, Wagner began one of his now frequent romances, which took place for him with great internal tension and anguish. The "romance" with Jessie Losso, with whom he even wanted to flee to Constantinople, ended in nothing. Expelled by the police from Bordeaux, Wagner is back in Switzerland, with only hope for the support of the Ritter family, who has achieved nothing and is half sick.

The summer of 1850 is a significant and sad turning point in Wagner's ideological path.

In September of this year, Wagner's article "Jewry in Music" appeared in K. Brendel's "New Journal for Music", signed with the pseudonym "K. Freygedank"; “free-thinking”, and dedicated to the “exposing” of Meyerbeer and other major figures of contemporary art to Wagner. Here, the biographer of Wagner faces the inevitable and sad need to raise the question of his anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitism of a revolutionary who only yesterday demanded the violation of all national boundaries in the art of the future ...

Let us immediately make a decisive reservation. In this article, Wagner does not yet appear as an irrevocable anti-Semite, which we will have to consider him on one of the facets of his future development. The article on "Jewishness in Music", oddly enough, continues Wagner's "rebellion". It is directed against the venality of the capitalist system, and the "attack" on Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer is partly a protest against the social domination of money in art. Wagner, who had never been involved in scientific socialism, naively - along the line of least resistance, like many other representatives of the radical petty bourgeoisie of his time, sank to the identification of the social system with the random national composition of a certain group of the ruling class. He still wants to be objective and sets the example of Jews in Berne, who has overcome his nationality. But one must not close one's eyes to the fact that Wagner "broke down", that his revolutionary spirit is degenerating into reactionary nationalism, which has earned him the honors which the Hitlerite fascists are now giving him. This breakdown is essentially tragic. Wagner, left alone, deprived of any connection with the collective, is experiencing the drama of a petty-bourgeois rebel who turns from genuine and lofty goals to false and base goals. Wagner's article gave rise to one hundred and seventy articles against him; in some of these protests the spearhead is actually directed against him, as an enemy on the front of art and social struggle. Wagner's anti-Semitism is a shameful stain on his name and cannot be justified. One should only take into account the spread of anti-Semitic sentiments among the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia in which Wagner moved (for example, among the poet Herweg, with whom Wagner became friends in Zurich, and partly among Bakunin). The last theoretical work of Wagner of this time is his book “Opera and Drama”, completed in February 1851. “This is my testament, now I can die” ... “Opera and Drama” is more extensive than all Wagner's previous works; it was printed at the end of 1851 by Weber's publishing house in Leipzig. It is considered to be the most valuable of all Wagner's theoretical works. There is no doubt that it is important for establishing his own plans and tasks. Wagner appears here as a versatile (and biased!) music critic. The ideal of the art of the future, which Wagner thought could be realized only in connection with the triumph of a peculiarly understood communism, is here replaced by another, namely, a musical drama, which Wagner himself promises to give now. He hardly speaks of the synthesis of all the arts. Drama is for him the true end of expression, music is its means; The great sin of opera before Wagner was, in his opinion, that it placed the means (music) above the end (drama). Wagner goes on to give a historically incorrect and one-sided outline of the history of operatic music, from Gluck to Meyerbeer. In the field of drama, Wagner recognizes only the Greeks as exemplary; even Shakespeare and Goethe seem to Wagner to be underweight and unable to embody his true ideal. Word and music must be fused together; apart, they cannot achieve their true value. Demanding the fusion of music and poetry in drama, Wagner develops a whole theory about the once-obvious unification of sound, thought, word, gesture, in a “primal melody” that explains the possibility of that union, which is mentioned in his theses on drama. Wagner puts forward demands for the reform of poetic speech itself: the replacement of rhyme with the sounding initial letters of words (alliterations, the ancient German "Stabreim"), the rejection of the classical metric of verse. The content of the drama should be maximally generalized and transformed into a myth, made "universal", obligatory and important. In his future work, Wagner the artist will apply all these theses, but with varying degrees of success.

What can be summed up under this exposition of Wagner's philosophy? First of all, we have to note that he was the first not only among musicians, but also among artists of the 19th century in general, who formulated in his theoretical works a whole worldview, generalized his views on art to the extent of a large system. It requires a lot of criticism. Wagner, as a thinker, does not always stand at the same height. He did not have a systematic philosophical education. He himself admits that Hegel was difficult for him. At the same time, Wagner has to be reckoned to a certain extent with the school of the great Berlin dialectician. It is in Hegel that Wagner could have found recognition for art of its “nationwide” role (“Art is present not for a small vicious circle of a few predominantly educated people, but for the nation as a whole,” says Hegel, arguing with the romantics) and taking into account the fact that each art has its own flourishing era, that the hegemony of the arts changes in connection with the ruling system. Not the plot, but the worldview is the real content of art, the task of art is to reveal the idea hidden in the "basis of things"; and at the same time, Hegel has not only this consistently held view of the functions of the arts, but also a critical attitude towards modernity, the question of what role, what ideas art should embody today. "Now our factories and our machines with their products ... are inconvenient for the mores that the ... epic demands," says Hegel. - How to reconcile Homer with rapid printing presses, Marx will also ask. But it is here that Wagner breaks with Hegel. Wagner in his early theoretical works is an optimist who believes in a great future for art. Here he follows that of the disciples of Hegel, who for the 1940s was the representative of a more progressive current, Feuerbach.

There are plenty of traces of Wagner's borrowing from Feuerbach. "Music is the language of feeling," says Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity (1843), and asks, "Who is stronger, love or the individual man?" "Feeling is the musical force in man." Feuerbach's view of the role and meaning of the image is related to the "myth-making" of Wagner. "The image inevitably takes (in art) the place of the object itself." The great anti-religious Feuerbach again defines Wagner's attitude to the mythological content of his future artistic practice by pointing out that "art arises from polytheism ... frank ... understanding of all that is beautiful." Feuerbach emphasizes the consoling role of art, and Feuerbach’s words sound almost like an illustration to Tannhäuser that “the artist involuntarily takes up the lute in order to pour out his grief in sounds. His grief dissipates when he brings it to his ears and objectifies it. Feuerbach defined himself as a "public man". “Only the individual is limited, the genus is not limited,” from which Wagner could draw the doctrine of the collectivity of artistic creativity in the future. The doctrine of genius (here Feuerbach more or less repeats what was said by other, earlier thinkers, even Schopenhauer), and of course the whole concept of Christianity was taken by Wagner from Feuerbach. True, Wagner could also find a warning to the artist from him: "Everyone ... considers his art to be the highest." Wagner, on the other hand, sharply repels romantic aesthetics, which taught about the "isolation of art from social life" (Schelling), that "art does not have the task of evoking volitional movements" (Schleiermacher). The polemic against “egoism” might suggest that Wagner knew and also drew on Stirner, in the analysis of which, in the German Ideology, Marx was the first of all thinkers in Europe to clearly formulate the tasks and methods of the sociology of art. “The true form of existence of ... art is ... the philosophy of art,” writes Marx as early as 1844, and Wagner in his theoretical writings - and in his practice, essentially speaking - follows this thesis.

The critical part of Wagner's theoretical works is based on the personal and deeply experienced experience of a petty-bourgeois artist in the conditions of a growing capitalist clampdown. Here with Wagner for one thing are all the best artists of his generation. On the positive side of Wagner's theory, “the future is all tinged with utopianism; all the limitations of Wagner's philosophy are determined by biologism, the naturalistic mechanism and the abstractness of his "man" and "artist of the future." But Wagner always remembered that not a man for art, but art for a man.