Leo Cabranes-Grant, Kierkegaard, Wagner and the Quest for Operatic Immediacy

July 2018, Volume 12, Number 2, 4–18.

The blatant anachronism inciting the title of this article should dispel any expectations of finding in these pages a philologically accurate rendition of an encounter between the Danish writer and the German composer. True, Kierkegaard and Wagner were born only a few weeks apart in May 1813. Der fliegende Holländer was performed in Berlin at the Schauspielhaus in the Gendarmenmarkt in January 1844. Kierkegaard had been in the city in May 1843, and the Gendarmenmarkt is admiringly described in his book Repetition, published that same year. It has even been suggested that Franz Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan might have influenced some rhetorical flourishes introduced in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. (But when the pianist toured Copenhagen in 1841, Liszt’s eventual role as Wagner’s father-in-law lay quite ahead in the future.) Wagner and Kierkegaard were both interested in the figurative potential of the legends of Faust and the Wandering Jew, and the revolutions of 1848 were an ideological turning point for each of them.