ROUGH DEBUTS AS COMPOSER AND HUSBAND
Wagner composed a second opera, Das Liebesverbot (“The Ban on Love”), based on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and he prepared the Magdeburg theater for its premiere. Everything went wrong. A grand total of three people (all Jewish, incidentally) bought tickets for the performance. Directly before the curtain was scheduled to rise, the husband of the prima donna thought this would be a good time to confront her with her extramarital activities, which included the opera’s star tenor. An actual fistfight broke out backstage. The three people in the audience were informed that Das Liebesverbot was postponed. It never saw the light of day in Wagner’s lifetime, either. Few people today have anything positive to say about this work, and while Die Feen contains some lovely music, Das Liebesverbot has been consigned to the music schools, if anywhere.
The second interesting development in Magdeburg was Minna Planer. She was a pretty, emotional actress a few years older than Wagner who traveled about with her “younger sister” (actually, her illegitimate daughter). Their relationship was shaky from the start. Minna always wanted a stable home life. From that point of view, she couldn’t have made a worse choice of husband.
Wagner followed Minna to Königsberg, where she had an acting job and where Richard promised to find some work. (You won’t find Königsberg on the map. It’s now a gray, concrete-filled post-socialist question mark on the Baltic Sea named, for the moment, Kaliningrad.) They were married in November 1836, bickering right through the wedding ceremony. In the following months, Minna was underwhelmed by Richard’s efforts to find work, as she would remain for the rest of her life, and promptly split town with a well-off businessman. After a few weeks of cat and mouse, they decided to reunite. Minna joined her husband in Riga, where he had actually landed a job as music director.
RIGA
Riga was the capital of the Russian province of Livonia (present-day Latvia), with a sizable German colony dating from the Middle Ages that congregated around the theater. Minna withdrew from the stage to keep house while Wagner, it was said, worked wonders with the small orchestra. He also noted three features of the theater itself: the auditorium was steeply raked and very dimly lighted, and the orchestra pit was at a lower level. Wagner told people that if he ever participated in the design of an ideal theater, he would remember these qualities.
Although the theater kept him busy enough, the sleepy town gave Wagner plenty of time to work on Rienzi, a five-act grand opera in the style of the very popular French operas of the time, notably by the German-Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. Based on an English novel, Rienzi told the story of the fourteenth-century Roman commoner who united the people against corrupt nobles and briefly resurrected the republic before being assassinated. Wagner conceived a ripping spectacle, including a ballet, climaxing in a big onstage fire. Riga, obviously, was no place to stage Rienzi.
ACROSS EUROPE
Two years in Riga were enough for the Wagners, and they concluded it was time to play the “big game,” which could only mean Paris. Friends advised them that their application for a passport would be advertised, by law, in the papers, bringing an avalanche of debt collectors who would block their exit. Why not sneak over the border to Prussia, make a fortune in Paris, and pay off all their debts afterward? Wagner loved the idea, and he, Minna, and their big Newfoundland dog Robber made for the border.
What followed was one of the most famous episodes of their frantic lives. After hiding out in a smugglers’ den of Polish Jews, the three ran across the wide ditch marking the border, evading the Cossack patrols whose orders were to shoot to kill, even after fugitives had crossed over. The dog, luckily, remained silent through the adventure. They were met on the other side by a friend in a light carriage, and took back roads to the coast to avoid creditors in Königsberg. The carriage turned over on one of these roads, luckily throwing Wagner into a heap of manure but injuring Minna, who may have been made infertile by the accident. Finally, they made their way to the Baltic port of Pillau, where a small merchant ship, the Thetis, was waiting to depart for London.
The presence of Robber made a sea voyage, rather than overland journey, the sole option. The Thetis took almost a month to make the trip, fighting storms the whole way. Wagner claimed much of the music for The Flying Dutchman was inspired by this harrowing journey, including echoes of the sailors’ cries off the fjord cliffs of Norway. Scholars have pointed out that Wagner may have been self-dramatizing a bit, but the trip clearly made a large impression on him. He never boarded another sailing ship in his life. A few years later, the Thetis sank with all hands.
After a week in the awesome metropolis of London, where linguistic limitations hampered the Wagners’ sightseeing, they boarded a steamer for the French side of the channel. Wagner visited Meyerbeer at the seaside resort of Boulogne, received letters of introduction, and moved on to modest quarters in Paris.
PARIS, ACT ONE
Two things are clear about Wagner’s early years in Paris: he was enormously impressed by the level of musical production and performance there, and he was equally embittered by his own tepid reception. Beyond this, it is very difficult to make sense out of these murky years. In his autobiography Wagner lies repeatedly about this period, since he wanted to minimize the effect any non-German music had on him. Meyerbeer was all the rage at the great Paris Opéra, and there is every indication that he went out of his way to help the young Wagner, to whom the truth was always incidental. Wagner believed that the entire musical establishment of Paris, which he perceived as Jewish, was out to get him, and he ended up writing about them in paragraphs that rank among the most disgraceful words ever penned by an artist. To make some money while in Paris, Wagner wrote several articles for German music journals, which are actually quite lucid and interesting. He also did musical hackwork. This involved making solo-instrument reductions of popular operatic melodies, and Wagner resented working on such “trash” as Donizetti. The work was foisted upon him by the music publisher Maurice Schlesinger, who was Jewish and “too powerful to offend.” This, at least, is how he chose to remember it twenty years later. The truth seems to be that Wagner begged Schlesinger for the work.
In any case, Wagner did not have an easy time of it in Paris, though he managed to write The Flying Dutchman at this time. Das Liebesverbot was accepted for production at the Théâtre de la Renaissance, which promptly went bankrupt before they were able to perform it (Wagner was convinced Meyerbeer knew this would happen). Minna did wonders at home with no money. Robber, the dog who escaped from Riga with them, ran away, evading Wagner months later when their paths crossed. The one positive relationship of this time was with Samuel Lehrs, a fellow “Bohemian” and good friend to Wagner, who always remembered him with great warmth. Lehrs, interestingly, was Jewish.
Meanwhile, Wagner’s huge Meyerbeerian grand opera Rienzi was accepted for production in Dresden. Dutchman was shortly after accepted by Berlin, largely through the influence of Meyerbeer. Wagner realized his future lay in Germany, and he and Minna took the five-day stagecoach ride to Dresden.
DRESDEN
Rienzi, despite its insane length of nearly six hours, was a huge hit in Dresden. Several performances were given, as was the custom, each a greater success than the one before. When the position of Royal Kapellmeister became vacant, Wagner was enthusiastically named to it. This involved directorship of all music in the theater, palace, and church, and Dresdeners were proud of the level of culture in their elegant, Italianate city.
Minna was thrilled to have an employed husband at last, and if Wagner bucked against the idea of wearing servant’s livery (as was expected of salaried musicians at that time), she loved her new status as the Frau Kapellmeisterin of royal Dresden. Now, if only Richard would do his job, not upset everybody, and write more operas people could enjoy …
Not likely. Wagner began to feel underappreciated perhaps ten minutes into his new job, a feeling he would retain to the end of his life even aft
er he became the most celebrated musician in the world. But Dresden gave him some reason for dissatisfaction. Theater life was in disarray everywhere in those years, having lost the old aristocratic patronage and not yet having achieved modern systematization. Dutchman was produced in 1843, since Berlin had been dithering with it and Dresden wanted another hit from its almost-native son.
Dutchman received a decent if not fanatical response, being an entirely different creature from the conventional Rienzi. Tannhäuser appeared in 1845. This work left the audience even more bewildered, being farther even than Dutchman from typical opera of the time. Though Wagner was happy with his excellent lead singers, the production values of the theater left him dissatisfied. With his typical monomaniacal energy, Wagner submitted a thorough plan for the restructuring of the Saxon state theater system. It called for an enlarged orchestra, more rehearsal time, the establishment of music schools and scene shops, and much more. The motive behind this, of course, was to ensure better performances of the works of Richard Wagner, and all the new system needed was huge funding from the State Treasury. Self-serving as it all was, almost everything in Wagner’s plan was absolutely right and logical. Pensions, minimum wages, and sick leave for employees, from prima donnas to janitors, were included as necessary improvements. The plan was trashed, and many at court labeled Wagner an ungrateful malcontent. The king of Saxony personally rejected the idea of closing the theater for two or three nights a week (as Wagner had suggested, to have more rehearsal time and better performances) for the sensible reason that there was absolutely nothing else to do in Dresden if the theater wasn’t open.
Any chance for a rapprochement between Wagner and the government was gone by 1848. Far from letting himself become more docile and writing more operas people liked, as Frau Wagner hoped, Wagner was beginning to conceive of an opera on a whole different level from anything ever seen. In 1848 he wrote a Sketch of the Nibelung Myth as Basis for a Drama, in which he outlined his idea for a sort of festival where the people (all of them) would celebrate their heritage and art, as he imagined was done in ancient Athens. He also saw how this could be done in a musical sense, and produced the outline of Siegfrieds Tod, which would become Götterdämmerung, and, eventually, the massive, four-part epic Ring of the Nibelung. To create this new spectacle, he proposed to invent a new relationship between words, music, and staging, but it would require a new sort of effort on the part of the audience as well. The world, rather than just the theater of Dresden, would have to change. Wagner had become a revolutionary.
1848
It’s hard to fathom the degree of Wagner’s involvement with the revolutionary movement of the late 1840s, since he tried like hell to downplay it in later years when he depended on royal patronage. We know he became friends with the famous Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who arrived in Dresden at this time, and Wagner was busy writing revolutionary pamphlets through this period. His political pronouncements at this point reflect the confused times as well as his confused mind. At one point, he advocated overthrowing the Saxon monarchy and establishing a republic—with the king of Saxony as its first president! No writer of comic operettas could have topped this solution.
Talk turned to action all over Europe in 1848. The French monarchy was overthrown for, presumably, the last time, and there were revolutions in virtually every country on the continent. The German states proposed a united constitution, which the Saxon government appeared to approve. Dresdeners watched events with cautious optimism, and quietly armed themselves, a process in which Wagner was involved. The heady times were too much for him to ignore, and he began preaching revolution more blatantly in pamphlets and speeches. He called loudly for utter destruction of the old to make way for the new.
The “old,” inconveniently, did not wish to be swept aside so easily, and reaction set in across Europe. The revolution broke out in Dresden after Easter 1849, just as it was dying out around the rest of the continent. The armed citizens rose up and appeared to sweep the government away. Wagner held a legal position in the Communal Guard, which was intended to keep order in such an event. He always maintained he had only done his Guard job according to the law, but it was clear that he was caught up in the excitement. He was seen shouting encouragement from the bell towers to the marauding revolutionaries below. Prussian troops arrived early in May, and the revolt was quelled. Many revolutionaries, real or suspected, were shot on the spot. An order was issued for Wagner’s arrest. He escaped from Saxony and showed up in nearby Weimar, where Franz Liszt was installed as a music director. It is worth digressing a bit at this point to take a look at the extraordinary man Wagner turned to at this point in his life.
FRANZ LISZT
Liszt was born in 1811 in the village of Raiding, which was part of Austria at the time, later to become part of Hungary. (Central Europe is filled with towns whose countries shift borders under them, as recent history continues to show.) His father, who managed an estate for the fabulously wealthy Eszterhazy family, and his mother were of German and Austrian descent and spoke only German. Liszt did not recreate himself as a Hungarian until years later. The child Franz was endowed with a peerless gift for piano playing. After years of hard work, the local Eszterhazys gave the young prodigy some chances to show his abilities and sent him to their even richer relatives in Vienna. The Vienna Eszterhazys decided Franz was too great even for their city, and promptly sent him with his father off to Paris to conquer the musical world.
In Paris he gave virtuoso concerts, at which he began to affect colorful Hungarian details of costume. Liszt was learning that there was more to being a famous musician than talent, and being Hungarian in no way hurt his audience appeal. A celebrity was born. Although only fourteen, he loved the attention. As he matured, attention became adulation, and Liszt found himself chased by a wide variety of women. Half the time he returned their ardor, the rest of the time he spoke of becoming a priest. Then he met Marie d’Agoult, who was a story in herself.
She was born in 1805 into the old French aristocracy, even though her maternal grandfather was of the apparently Jewish Frankfurt banking family of Bethmann (this interesting fact is missing from many biographies of Wagner, Liszt, and even Cosima). Married off to the decrepit Count d’Agoult in 1828 in an impossibly chic ceremony attended by the king and queen of France, Marie soon tired of married life and sought her thrills in Paris nightlife. When she met the irresistible Liszt in 1833, sparks flew. He was always awed by the nobility, and Marie was beautiful to boot. They were living together within a few months, and moved out of Paris. For years they wandered all over France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, hobnobbing with various personalities of the time. Quite incidentally, Marie bore three children, the middle of whom, Cosima, was born at Lake Como in 1837.
Liszt needed money for this life style, and began giving concerts all over Europe. He basically invented the piano recital as we know it, but his concerts were much more than the genteel evenings we associate with that form of entertainment. Liszt’s audiences cheered and screamed. Fatherhood had done nothing to diminish his attractiveness to women, and it was fashionable for them to pass out when he walked onstage. Liszt may have been the world’s first great pop star. Marie and the children were left at home, wherever home happened to be, during these tours, and the tours grew longer and longer.
By 1842, the two acknowledged that their liaison was finished, and Marie returned to Paris with the children. It didn’t take long for the separation to become bitter, and the hapless children became emotional footballs for their two self-consumed, larger-than-life parents. Liszt, who held all parental rights by French law of that time, sent his antique country mother to Paris to keep house for the children, away from Marie. Meanwhile, he gave concerts, traveling by coach to every two-mule town in Europe. By 1847, he was worn out, and wanted to devote more time to composing. He decided that a few concerts in the Ukraine would be his last. There, he met the woman who would dominate the rest of his life.
; The two towering passions in the life of Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein are best illustrated by the story that she first bedded Liszt under a ten-foot-high crucifix. Liszt was still trying to balance his Catholic mysticism with his active libido. They were made for each other. The princess also owned a hefty chunk of the Ukraine. The only minor inconvenience was her husband, an advisor to the czar. Certain a divorce was around the corner, she persuaded Liszt to take a full-time position as a sort of music director at the small but refined court of Weimar, in Germany, where he was “guesting” for a few months every year. The princess met up with him in Weimar to await the divorce papers. The papers never came.
On February 26, 1849, Liszt successfully produced Tannhäuser at Weimar, despite the pitifully small orchestra. Wagner was extremely grateful for this token of favor from one of the world’s most famous musicians; although they had met in Paris years before, this production sealed their friendship. Liszt wrote Wagner, expressing his admiration for the music and telling Wagner to count on him if he needed any favors in the future.
A MEETING IN WEIMAR
Wagner needed plenty of favors in 1849. As soon as he showed up in Weimar, in flight from the arrest warrant in Dresden, he turned to Liszt. “Admit it,” said the pianist. “You’ve done something very foolish.” Wagner asked for money to escape to Switzerland, which Liszt gave him even though he wasn’t very flush at the moment. The czar had declared Princess Carolyne AWOL and confiscated her lands, including her 30,000 or so serfs. Wagner called on the princess before leaving Weimar: they were unimpressed with each other, remaining so for the rest of their lives. Four days later, Wagner was in Switzerland, banished from Germany for the next eleven years.
Wagner Without Fear Page 3