6

Phantasmagoria

The occultation of production by means of the outward appear-
ance of the product—that is the formal law governing the works
of Richard Wagner.' The product presents itself as selfproducing:
hence too the primacy of chromaticism and the leading note. In
the absence of any glimpse of the underlying forces or conditions
of its production, this outer appearance can lay claim to the status
of being. Its perfection is at the same time the perfection of the
illusion that the work of art is a reality sui generis that constitutes
itself in the realm of the absolute without having to renounce its
claim to image the world. Wagner’s operas tend towards magic
delusion, to what Schopenhauer calls “The outside of the worth-
less commodity’, in short towards phantasmagoria. This is the basis

1 The term ‘phantasmagoria’ went into German from English, where it was first
used in 1802 as the name invented for an exhibition of optical illusions produced
chicfly by means of the magic lantern. In this chapter, its negative connotations
stem from Marx’s use of the word to describe commodity fetishism. Marx argues
that the form of the commodity diverges from the commodity itself as a result of
the concealment of the fact that the commodity is the product of human labour.
‘The commodity-form, and the value relation of the products of labour within
which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the
commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but a definite
social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the phantasmagoric
form of a relation between things.’ (Capital, Vol. 1, Harmondsworth 1976, p. 165).
Marx says further that these products of the human brain, like religious ideas, have
‘a life of their own’—a life explored in depth by Walter Benjamin in his study of
Baudelaire. Both Marx and Benjamin are relevant to Adorno’s use of the term
here. For a discusssion of the concept, see Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science:
An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, Macmillan 1978, pp. 30-1,
40-2, 47. Tianslator’s note.

Phantasmagoria 75

of the primacy of harmonic and instrumental sound in his music.
The great phantasmagorias that recur again and again occupy a
central position in his work, one where all movement has its
origins. They are all defined in terms of the medium of sound:
“Wondrously, from afar, the dulcet tones resound’, as it is put in the
Venusberg scene in Tannhduser, the phantasmagoria par excellence.
Until its dissolution with Schreker, the Neo-German school
remained loyal to the idea of ‘distant sound’, as the source of acous-
tic delusion; in it music pauses and is made spatial, the near and the
far are deceptively merged, like the comforting Fata Morgana that
brings the mirage of cities and caravans within reach and makes
social models appear magically rooted in nature. The phantasma-
gorical nature of the Venusberg music can be analysed technically.
Its characteristic sound is created by the device of diminution. A
diminished forte predominates, the image of loudness from afar. It
is executed by light wood winds. Chief among them is the piccolo
flute, the most archaic of all orchestral instruments and one almost
entitely unaffected by advances in instrumental technique. It is a
musical fairyland, not unlike the one that the young Mendelssohn
had created and which the older Wagner still cherished. The
Venusberg appears to Tannhiuser diminished in size. It is reminis-
cent of the distorting mirror effects of the Tanagra theatre that can
still be found in fairgrounds and suburban cabarets. Tannhiauser
mirrors the bacchanal from the remoteness of heathen prehistory
on the dream stage of his own body. The bass instruments that mark
the harmonic progression and hence the temporal character of
music are lacking; its miniature form stamps this music with the
imprint of an age now irredeemably lost. But when, in the
Venusberg part of the overture, the cellos and the basses enter at B,
with the ritardando, what they mark is the moment when the
dreamer becomes conscious of his own body and stretches in his
sleep. The technique of diminishing the sound by eliminating the
bass also confers the quality of phantasmagoria on a passage in
Lohengrin, one vahich, less obviously than in Tannhduser, determines
the character of the whole work. It is Elsa’s vision in which she
conjures up the knight and thus launches the entire action. Her
description of the knight resembles the picture of Oberon: the
inward Lohengrin is a tiny fairy prince.

 

 
76

Arrayed in shining armour a knight was approaching,

more virtuous and pure than any I had yet seen,

a golden horn at his hip and leaning on his sword.

Thus was this worthy knight sent to me from heaven. (Act I, sc. 2)

Such bass notes as occur are given once more to ethereal instru-
ments such as the bass clarinets or the harp. The sound of the bass
clarinets, which is particularly transparent, never descends below
the E flat below the middle C. The horn referred to in the text is
conveyed on a diminished scale in the music by a trumpet in pia-
nissimo. The entrance of the basses at the words ‘with courteous
bearing’ is equivalent to the one in the Tannhduser passage and
serves to relate the music, which had seemed to be floating spell-
bound in the air, to the body of the dreaming woman.

‘He gave me consolation’ —a consolation that derives from the
Fata Morgana. The consoling phantasmagoria is that of the Grail
itself, and just as Elsa’s vision contains motivs related to the Grail
theme, so, too, the Lohengrin prelude, which is an allegorical rep-
resentation of the Grail, contains the same technical features as
Elsa’s vision. Even the caesura in the harmonic progression at the
beginning of the Lohengrin prelude becomes meaningful in terms
of phantasmagoria. The absence of any real harmonic progression
becomes the phantasmagorical emblem for time standing still.
Tannhiuser says in the Venusberg:

The time I dwell here with thee, by days I cannot measure,
seasons pass me, how, I scarcely know,

—the radiant sun I see no longer,

strange hath become the heaven’s starry splendour—

the sweet verdure of spring, the gentle token

of earth’s renewing life.”

The standing-still of time and the complete occultation of nature
by means of phantasmagoria are thus brought together in the
memory of a pristine age where time is guaranteed only by the
stars. Time is the all-important element of production that phan-
tasmagoria, the mirage of eternity, obscures. While days and

? Act I, sc. 2.

 

 

Phantasmagoria 77

months run into each other and vanish as in a moment, phantas-
magoria makes up for this by representing the moment as that
which endures. This is the case with The Flying Dutchman. The
opera was originally conceived as a One-Acter with its roots in
Senta’s ballad. Even as a complete work it could be reduced to the
moment when the Dutchman steps beneath—one could almost
say, steps out from—his picture, as Senta, who has conjured him
up as Elsa had conjured up the knight, stands gazing into his eyes.
The entire opera is nothing more than the attempt to unfold this
moment in time and, in its feebler passages, particularly in the case
of a dramatic prop like Erik, the traces of the effort this entailed are
all too obvious. The later works have greater success in articulating
the phantasmagoria as drama without falsifying it. In Parsifal the
phantasmagoria is transferred into the realm of the sacred which,
for all that, retains elements of magical enchantment. On the way
to the Grail the following conversation takes place:

GURNEMANZ: Methinks I knew you aright:
No way leads through the land to it,’ [—to the Grail]
‘And no one could find it,
Save the Grail lead him there.
PARSIFAL: I hardly move,
Yet far I seem to have come.
GURNEMANZ: You see, my son, time
changes here to space.°

The characters cast off their empirical being in time as soon as the
ethereal kingdom of essences is eptered. If, in his last years, Wagner
flirted with the idea of metempsychosis, there is scant need to
attribute this to the stimulus provided by Schopenhauer’s Buddhist
sympathies. Phantasmagoria had already enabled the pagan goddess
Venus to migrate into the Christian era; she is reborn there just like
Kundry, whom Klingsor conjures up as he lies sleeping in the blue
light:

Herodias you were—and what besides?
Gundryggia there, Kundry here! (Act II)

3 Act I, sc. 1.

 

 

 
78

Even the Ring gives evidence of a like intention when Briinnhilde’s
love for SiegEried turns out to be primordial in nature, referring
to his image rather than his empirical self:

I fed your tender being

Before you were begotten;

Even before you were born

My shield protected you:

So long have I loved you Siegfried! (Siegfried, Act III, sc. 3)

The only reason why Wagner’s characters can function as universal
symbols is that they dissolve in the phantasmagoria like mist.
Briinnhilde too is detached from time, sleeping like Kundry, in
the abruptly invoked phantasmagoria of the magic fire—the dom-
inant phantasmagoria of the Ring and the one from which, musi-
cally, the image of the twilight of the Gods is ultimately derived.
While the manner of its production is completely concealed in its
string sections, harmonically, its progression is most ingeniously
that of a state of rest. Not only do the constant harmonic changes
produce new progressions; at the same time, systematic modulation
through the changing surfaces of the different keys makes the music
dance round the basic harmonies which remain constant at any
given moment, like a fire that perpetually flickers without ever
moving from the spot. As a metaphor for fire, the final 60 bars of
The Valkyrie provide crucial insight into the nature of phantasma-
goria. Wagner’s successors have termed them magic, but this is
really valid only in the inauthentic sense of theatrical illusion. They
belong with the series of dramas whose elements the Dutchman first
illustrates, and which continues with the storm in the ride of the
Valkyries, where the allegory ceases to be mere atmospheric back-
ground and actually enters into the action. The final stage is
reached in the Good Friday music in Parsifal where no more is said
of the miracle than that ‘forest and meadow glisten in the morning
light’. As a natural phenomenon the light touches them, imbuing
them with the expression of reconciliation proper to the dew and
tear. But Wagner’s phantasmagorias are normally worlds removed
from such unassuming appearances. One is tempted to derive them
from the magic formula of earlier Romantic music; from
Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music as well as the spirit

 

 

Phantasmagoria 79

passages in Euryanthe, the musical visions of Oberon, and especially,
the chthonic second themes in Schubert. And the heritage of that
Romanticism is undeniably present in the dualism of waking and
dreaming music that governs the overture to Tannhduser, to name
but one example, where the Pilgrims’ procession fades away only
to conjure up the Venusberg, as if in a dream.

But the specific quality of the Wagnerian phantasmagoria can
only be discovered once it parts company with the magic music of
Romanticism. Paul Bekker has made the extremely important
observation that what separates Wagner from earlier Romanticism
is that his music no longer contains ‘real spirits’. ‘By locating the
miraculous in the human soul, he endows it with truth in the artis-
tic sense and intensifies the world of saga and fairy-tale into the illu-
sion of the absolute reality of the unreal.’* If we leave aside the
dubious notion of ‘truth in the artistic sense’ and discard the cate-
gory of interiorization as irrelevant to Wagner, the concept of illu-
sion as the absolute reality of the unreal grows in importance. It
sums up the unromantic side of the phantasmagoria: phantasma-
goria as the point at which aesthetic appearaace becomes a function
of the character of the commodity. As a commodity it purveys illu-
sions. The absolute reality of the unreal is nothing but the reality of
a phenomenon that not only strives unceasingly to spirit away its
own origins in human labour, but also, inseparably from this process
and in thrall to exchange value, assiduously emphasizes its use value,
stressing that this is its authentic reality, that it is ‘no imitation’ —
and all this in order to further the cause of exchange value. In
Wagner’s day the consumer goods on display turned their phenom-
enal side seductively towards the mass of customers while diverting
attention from their merely phenomenal character, from the fact
that they were beyond reach. Similarly, in the phantasmagoria,
Wagner’s operas. tend to become commodities. Their tableaux
assume the character of wares on display. As it flares up into a vast
magic conflagration, the little Romantic flame of Hans Heiling? is

+ Bekker, p. 128.

5 An opera by Marschner to a libretto by Devrient that was originally written
for Mendelssohn. Hans Heiling was a gnome king who unsuccessfully courts a
human girl. Translator’s note.

 
 

80

transformed into the prototype of future illuminated advertise-
ments. Wotan’s slogan —

Whoever fears the tip of my spear

Shall never pass through the fire! (Valkyrie, Act III, sc. 3)

—could easily be supplemented by copy in praise of a piece of
equipment that would enable the cautious but resolute buyer to
pass through the fire notwithstanding. The Wagnerian phantasma-
gorias are among the earliest ‘wonders of technology’ to gain
admittance to great art, and Wotan is not just the allegory of the
self-denying will to live, but also the reliable exponent of a natural
world that has been perfectly reproduced and wholly mastered.
The phantasmagorical style immortalizes the moment between the
death of Romanticism and the birth of realism. Its miracles have
become as impenetrable as the daily reality of a reified society and
hence enter into the inheritance of the magic powers that the
Romantics had assigned to the transcendental sphere. But in their
magic they simultaneously function as commodities that satisfy the
needs of the culture market. The Venusberg, which was perfected at
the climax of Tristan and was recalled yet again as a pale echo in the
flower-girl scene in Parsifal, arose out of the ordinary theatrical
requirements of the ballet. These are the only scenes in which
Wagner's work is directly affected by the conditions of commodity
production; but it is precisely these scenes in which the music takes
the greatest care to disguise its production in a passive, visionary
presence. Where the dream is at its most exalted, the commodity
is closest to hand. The phantasmagoria tends towards dream not
merely as the deluded wish-fulfilment of would-be buyers, but
chiefly to conceal the labour that has gone into making it. It
mirrors subjectivity by confronting the subject with the product of
its own labour, but in such a way that the labour that has gone into
it is no longer identifiable. The dreamer encounters his own image
impotently, as if it were a miracle, and is held fast in the inexorable
circle of his own labour, as if it would last for ever. The object that
he has forgotten he has made is dangled magically before his eyes,
as if it were an absolutely objective manifestation.

Governed by the logic of dreams, the phantasmagoria succumbs

 

Phantasmagoria 81

to its own particular dialectic. This is most fully developed in
Tannhduser. With his very first words the enchantment is seen to be
a dream:

Too much, too much! Oh that I now might waken! (Act I, sc. 2)

The mainspring of the action is encapsulated in that “Too much’.
Like the victims of oppression, Tannhiuser is not equal to his own
demands for pleasure. Nothing less than the ideal of freedom itself
is used to justify his turning towards asceticism:
4

And yet for earth, for earth I’m yearning,

In thy soft chains with shame I’m burning,

Tis freedom I must win or die,

For freedom I can all defy. (Ibid.)

‘ This is Tannhauser’s reply to Venus’s Feuerbachian promise of bliss:

Thou shalt no more love’s timid victim be
Rejoice with love’s goddess in harmony! (Ibid.)

His wish is to take the image of pleasure away from the Venusberg
and return with it to earth: his parting from Venus is one of the
authentic political moments in Wagner’s works. But, significantly,
it becomes ambiguous. For fidelity to Venus is a commitment not
to pleasure, but only to the phantasmagoria of pleasure. As he takes
his leave, he vows:

To strife and glory, forth I go
Come life or death, come joy or woe! (Ibid.)

But, as it turns out, he keeps his other promise better:
While I have life my harp shall praise but thee alone. (Ibid.)

His betrayal is not that he returns to the knights, but that with his
mind still fixed on his dream, he naively sings them the hymn in
praise of Venus—the same hymn that exposes him for a second
time to the reproaches of the world from which he had once before

=
 

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82

fled into the phantasmagoria. But his outburst is a pretence: it leads
from the Venusberg to the song contest, from dream to song, and
the only surviving trace of what had originally led him to rebel is
the beautiful song of the shepherd who celebrates the productivity
of nature herself, beyond dream and captivity, as the work of the
same power that had seemed mere slavery to the enchanted
Tannhiuser. Venus is vindicated not by Tannhiuser’s treacherous
praise, but by the words,

Dame Holda stepp’d from the mountain’s heart . . . (Act I, sc. 3)

The socially determined experience of pleasure as unfreedom
transforms libido into sickness, and so we see how, with the cry of
“Too much!’, Tannhiuser becomes conscious of his own enjoyment
as a weakness while he is still in the kingdom of Venus. The expe-
rience of pleasure as sickness permeates Wagner’s entire oeuvre.
Those who refuse to resign themselves—Tannhiuser, Tristan,
Amfortas—are all ‘sick’. In the story of Tannhiuser’s pilgrimage to
Rome we hear, to the accompaniment of music of the greatest
power, music whose force is surpassed in Wagner only in Tristan’s
curse:

Then I drew near,—my glances earthward bending,

I made my plaint, despair my bosom rending;

I told what mad desires my soul had darken’d,

What longing by no atonement yet appeas’d. (Act IIL, sc. 3)

Sickness and desire become confounded in a point of view that
imagines that the forces of life can only be maintained by the sup-
pression of life. In the Wagnerian theatre desire sinks to the level of
caricature: to that image of bloated pallor that seems the perfect
complement to the castrati-like physique of the tenors. In a regres-
sion familiar from the process of bourgeois education and known
to psychoanalysis as ‘syphilophobia’, sex and sexual disease become
identical. It is no accident that one of Wagner's objections to vivi-
section was that the knowledge gleaned from such experimenta-
tion might lead to the’curing of diseases that had been contracted
through ‘vice’. The conversion of pleasure into sickness is the
denunciatory task of phantasmagoria. If two of the Wagnerian

 

Phantasmagoria 83

phantasmagorias, the Venusberg and Klingsor’s enchanted garden,
are reminiscent of dreamland brothels, these are simultaneously
calumniated as places that no one can leave unscathed. And
without a doubt all of Wagner's profound ingenuity was required
to reconcile us to the flower girls® when he had condemned them
from the outset as ‘worthless sirens’.’ It has been observed that the
flutes that are heard throughout the Venusberg seldom recur as solo
instruments in Wagner’s later work. They too are victims of the
denigration of pleasure in the phantasmagoria, the same pleasure
that it was their function to represent. Nietzsche was well aware of
this: ‘What do I suffer from when I suffer from the fate of music?
From the fact that music has been stripped of its ability to
transfigure and affirm the world, that it is decadent music and no
longer the flute of Dionysus.”® The Wagnerian Hute is that of the
Pied Piper of Hamelin, but as such it is instantly tabooed.

With the anathematizing of the very pleasure it puts on display,
the phantasmagoria is infected from the outset with the seeds of its
own destruction. Inside the illusion dwells disillusionment. Within
Wagner’s work this phenomenon has its own highly recondite
model: that of Don Quixote, a book that Wagner held in particular
esteem. The phantasmagoria of The Mastersingers, in Act II, puts its
hero into the role of the man who fights against windmills. Walther
Stolzing who wishes to re-establish the old feudal immediacy, as
opposed to the bourgeois division of labour enshrined in the
guilds, becomes a potential figure of comedy in the face of a bour-
geois reality in which the feudal world is transformed into myth
before his very eyes. At the call of the night-watchman ‘he claps
his hand to his sword and stares wildly before him’, while the bour-
geois Eva instructs him:

Beloved, spare your anger!
It was only the night watchman’s horn. (Act II, sc. 5)

The Beckmesser scene and the scene of the brawl are enacted
within the confines of ordinary reality and only a Don Quixote like

6 See Parsifal, Act U.
7 Hildebrandt, p. 377-
8 Quoted by Hildebrandt, p. 440.
 

84

Walther could experience them as uncanny or nightmarish.
However, the bourgeois world generates elements from within
itself that objectively assume the very quality of illusion that is
created subjectively in the dreamworld of Romantic protest. A pre~
established harmony is created between the monad that seeks
refuge from the guild-masters in the vanished world of castle, court
and troubadour song, and the bourgeois world of the masters
themselves which adopts the mask of a bygone age because it does
not feel at home in the present. Since the guilds can no longer
understand each other’s point of view and so accuse each other of
the dishonesty that characterizes them all, there is a momentary
flare-up of prehistoric anarchy in the street brawl, which is merely
a poor substitute for political action; and similarly in the song
contest on the Wartburg which The Mastersingers had set out to
parody. Bourgeois innovation and archaic regression meet in the
phantasmagoria, so that objectively the knight’s dream is vindi-
cated. The spooky nature of the phantasmagoria in Act HI is
confirmed by Sachs, and thereby the ultimate ground of the dream
is reached:

A goblin must have helped!
A glow-worm could not find its mate;
It set the trouble in motion. (Act III, sc. 1)

The dream of Act II is interpreted by Sachs as the product of
repression; but glow-worms are Nature’s own Chinese lanterns:
phantasmagoria comes into being when, under the constraints of
its own limitations, modernity’s latest products come close to the
archaic. Every step forwards is at the same time a step into the
remote past. As bourgeois society advances it finds that it needs its
own camouflage of illusion simply in order to subsist. For onl

when so disguised does it venture to look the new in the face. That
formula, ‘it sounded so old, and yet was so new’, is the cypher of
a social conjuncture. When the generous Pogner, who said himself
that God had made him a wealthy man, wants to break out of the
narrow confines of the petty bourgeoisie and prove that he is not
avaricious and small-minded, the only means at his disposal is the
farce of the mythic song contest. The impoverished imaginative

 

 

Phantasmagoria 85

world of the bourgeois produces an image of itself in the phantas-
magoric, and Wagner’s work serves this image as it serves the bour-
geois. As the blueprint of a pristine bourgeois world The
Mastersingers is therefore his central work: “Thus in the completion
and production of The Mastersingers, which I at first desired in
Nuremberg, I was governed by the idea of offering the German
public an image of its own true nature, so botched for it before;
and cherished the hope of winning from the nobler, stouter class
of German burghers a hearty salutation in return.”? However, this
salutation is the expression of gratitude both for the dream and for
its destruction, and the asceticism which Wagner takes upon
himself for the sake of freedom finally turns against freedom. By
appealing to the Virgin Mary he destroys the image of beauty that
promises more than an ideal belonging to the past, and when the
sacred spear hovers phantasmagorically above Parsifal’s head, he
incorporates it in a curse:

Let it destroy this fraudulent luxury
In rack and ruin! (Act II)

It is the curse of the rebel who in his youth had stormed the unfor-
gotten brothels.

° Richard Wagner's Prose Works, Vol. 6, p. 114.

neo