Abstract

This article takes a close look at a pair of well-known works by Gustav Klimt, the Nuda Veritas (1898) and the Beethoven Frieze (1902), and argues that the Schopenhauerian worldview evident in them testifies to the underappreciated influence of Richard Wagner on the Viennese artistic scene circa 1900. I begin by isolating previously unnoticed strains of Schopenhauerian iconography evident in the Nuda Veritas pertaining to the source and value of artistic creativity. I proceed by demonstrating that Klimt's peculiar use of that iconography conflicts with Schopenhauer's own theories of art, although it hews closely to Wagner's idiosyncratic interpretation of Schopenhauer's ideas outlined in his Beethoven essay and enacted in Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. After surveying evidence of Klimt's familiarity with Wagner's works, I turn to Die Meistersinger, highlighting the unacknowledged ways in which that opera dramatically enacts Wagner's theories of creativity. I conclude by suggesting that some of those same theories underlie the imagery of Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, and by suggesting more broadly that the Beethoven Frieze and the Nuda Veritas testify to the vital role played by Wagner's music dramas in mediating and popularizing a quasi-Schopenhauerian worldview in the creative culture of the turn of the century.

Keywords: Richard Wagner, Gustav Klimt, Arthur Schopenhauer, creativity, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg

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In a recent follow-up to his classic study Wittgenstein's Vienna, the Austrian historian of" philosophy Allan Janik astutely observes that "Richard Wagner's role as the philosophical father of Viennese modernism has been completely overlooked by cultural historians." To be sure, Janik exaggerates a bit. But it is certainly true that Wagner's influence on the period has not received much consideration. (1) Janik's principal concern is with the visual arts, and he attributes Wagner's absence from art-historical narratives to the "uncritical reception" of Carl E. Schorske's pioneering study of the Vienna Secession. That study appeared in 1979, in Schorske's Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, a volume widely regarded as having founded the field of modern Austrian cultural studies, and one whose influence continues to dominate scholarship in the field today. (2) In this work, Schorske emphasized the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, both early and late, upon Gustav Klimt and other Secession artists. But he paid little attention to Wagner, who was the source of many of Nietzsche's ideas, or to the philosopher who inspired both Nietzsche and Wagner: Arthur Schopenhauer. (3) The problem with Schorske's book, Janik argues, is that the ideas of Wagner, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche simply cannot be isolated from one another. Most importantly, they simply were not isolated from each other in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, Janik continues, of the three, it was Wagner whose work most successfully delivered aspects of their intertwined philosophical convictions to a mass audience during the period. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, though gifted writers both, are difficult and require significant effort and commitment to understand. Wagner's statements, as Janik has it, "were so crude that they...