Carolyn Abbate (Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor, Harvard University), ‘Wagnerian Biochemistries’

Abstract: In the 1860s Richard Wagner met biochemist Justus Liebig in Munich. Though he would eventually dismiss Liebig as a political enemy, the initial attraction was tied to Wagner’s own interest in biochemistry. Yet what of that? There was hardly any hot cultural topic Wagner did not at some point pontificate about, “climate, nutrition, Buddhism, gender theory, steam technologies, political rebellion, racist pamphleteering, mercery, and animal wrangling, to name but a few of his side trips from opera” (Parker 2021). The question is not how these enthusiasms crop up in Wagner’s writings (self-evident), nor how they shaped his libretti (easy target). No, the fata morgana is how they might have shaped his music. That this shaping took place was widely believed, “the German, who is indebted to the icy climates of the north for his coarser fibres, will require his music to be noisier. Further, this same cold climate conspired with the absence of wine to deprive him of any singing voice” (Stendhal 1824). Remarks connecting operatic genius to food and drink seem to represent a comic sidecar to aesthetic disquisitions about German and Italian opera, or to contemporary medical theories about local air and breath forming styles of vocal production (Steege 2019; Davies 2023). But before we laugh and move on, remember the context: environmental determinism, which sculpted nineteenth-century European debates about racial-ethnic differences. Environmental determinism was behind Wagner’s amateur enthusiasms about nutrition, but as climate, geological terrain, and plant biology grew more measurable and quantifiable over the course of the nineteenth century, fantasies about measuring the imperceptible sounds of these phenomena developed in tandem. Wagner’s artistic investment in unheard sound is legendary. But this investment got entangled with his espousal of environmental determinism, specifically of a supposed alchemy that led from what one consumed, via waystations, to how one’s singing voice sounded, to the musical sounds one invented. To seek and locate operatic music’s specific reflections of cultural immensities (of technologies, of racial fantasies, of economic substructures, of scientific innovations, of gender clichés): is this not to embrace Wagnerian biochemistry, mixing mysticism with determinism, in troubling ways?

Biography: Carolyn Abbate, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard University, writes about and teaches classes centered on opera as it has evolved over the past four centuries, with special emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work ranges widely, drawing from disciplines including linguistics and semiotics, philosophy, film sound and music, and the history of science. Outside academia, she has worked as a dramaturge and director, and as a translator. Forthcoming projects include essays on microphonics in past historical eras, on musical efficacy, and on Richard Wagner’s entanglements with nineteenth-century organic chemistry.