Living with Ghosts

Beethoven and Wagner shared a lifelong passion for the plays of Shakespeare, but their enthusiasm took different forms and enjoyed contrasting relationships to the German critical tradition. Where Beethoven only contemplated setting Macbeth, Wagner completed an opera based on Measure for Measure; where Beethoven had no great literary ambitions, Wagner wrote drama and fiction influenced by Shakespeare. To Beethoven, Shakespeare offered prompts that ultimately were transcended by music; Wagner, while increasingly finding source material in German mythology, continued to see in Shakespeare proof of the transcendence of the artist. Speculation about sources for the works of both composers has often assumed a Shakespeare unmediated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy, literary criticism, and theatre performance. This chapter describes what Beethoven and Wagner knew of Shakespeare and reviews critical opinion on how that knowledge may have informed their music. An account of trends in German literary criticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with particular reference to the spectral, leads to distinctions between Beethoven’s and Wagner’s engagement with Shakespeare and concepts of the ghostly and the heroic.