Wagner Without Fear

by William Berger

  The patrons plan did not work. Out of an original 1,300 patrons’ certificates, only around four hundred were ever sold. Nietzsche wrote pamphlets urging the people to support the venture and implying, in his usual endearing style, that they were cultureless slobs if they didn’t send money right away. Shockingly, this tactic failed to produce an avalanche of cash, and Wagner and Nietzsche decided the German people were as worthless as their new empire, since they so steadfastly refused to honor art and genius.

  Actually, many were willing to help, but they naturally required concessions from Wagner, and he was well beyond granting any. Friends in Berlin offered him everything—a new theater, whatever artists he desired, unlimited budget—if he would hold his festival in the now-imperial capital. Wagner refused. If the festival were held in a large city it would become something else entirely, with court and society vultures stopping by the theater on their way to smart parties, tired businessmen falling asleep, and no end of nonsense. No. The German Reich had to come to Bayreuth to glorify Wagner, not the other way around. The Berlin festival option should be borne in mind when people say, as they often do, that Wagner was capable of doing anything for money. He certainly compromised his honor in quest of financing, but he never once compromised his art.

  Meanwhile, Bayreuth was taking shape and running up debts. The Festival House was being constructed atop a hill just outside of the town according to Wagner’s wishes. A ceremony was held in August 1873 to mark the reaching of the construction’s high point, at which Wagner praised the king but said nothing about the kaiser. Using ideas Semper had incorporated into the planned theater in Munich, the structure was to be all of wood, with a sloped auditorium and, most radically, an entirely submerged orchestra pit. There was no horseshoe of boxes for society types to admire themselves—one either looked at the stage or at nothing at all. In any case, Wagner proposed to dim the lighting as much as possible in the auditorium itself.

  Ludwig began to vacillate. He made Wagner an outright gift of cash to build a suitable new home in Bayreuth just off the grounds of the rarely used Royal Palace. Wagner and Cosima built Villa Wahnfried, a large house in the heavy style of the times, but they were starting to worry about the king. He never saw anyone any more and stayed isolated in the mountains. What would become of him? Finally, Ludwig wrote a passionate letter on January 25, 1874, declaring that the dream must not end in infamy, and promising the necessary funds for the festival. Although there were a few more fits and starts from the king and the Treasury, it appeared that the festival would indeed happen. Time was taken out to visit Liszt in Weimar. Relations were improving in that direction.

  Rehearsals and production meetings began. Every singer and instrumentalist was individually “invited” to participate at less than their standard fees and, in some cases, for mere travel expenses. Machinists, designers, and costumers arrived. Cosima drew on her aristocratic education to juggle everything and everyone. Finally, the summer of 1876 arrived.

  THE BIG MOMENT

  Ludwig couldn’t wait to see the Ring at last, but let it be known that he would see nobody at Bayreuth, neither the kaiser nor cheering peasants nor anyone else in between. Wagner met his railroad carriage at a preappointed spot in the countryside, and accompanied the king to the local palace, where they talked late into the night. It was the first time they had seen each other in eight years. The dress rehearsals were to be given as “private performances” for Ludwig, with only Wagner in the secluded royal box and Cosima hidden underneath. After Rheingold, it was discovered that the acoustics were faulty in the empty theater, and people were allowed in to fill up the seats for the subsequent three performances, with strict orders not to look at the king.

  When the actual festival arrived, it was an “event.” Journalists from all over Europe and America wrote reports, and The New York Times carried reviews on the front page. Some were disappointed, others were in raptures, but everyone agreed that something major had happened in the realm of music and theater.

  Villa Wahnfried’s gardens were open every night. Artists hobnobbed with composers. Literati and glitterati brushed with royalty and nobility. Cosima handled artistic and aristocratic egos with an aplomb appropriate to her heritage, while Liszt charmed everyone in sight. His Roman collar only increased his appeal to the ladies. At one banquet, Wagner gestured toward his father-in-law, saying they all had him to thank, since without him no one would have ever heard a note of his music.

  AFTER THE PARTY

  When it was over, Wagner was left with a sense of post-partum depression and a mountain of debt. The festival had been a disappointment in many ways. The Ring looked a whole lot like opera after all, and, for all its originality, was not immune to the screw-ups that accompany any production. Wagner went to wealthy London to conduct a series of concerts, but they were badly planned on the English side and failed to produce much net income. It was during this trip that the novelist George Eliot cornered Cosima at a party and said bluntly, “I hear your husband doesn’t like Jews. Well, my husband is a Jew!” Unfortunately, we don’t know how or if Cosima responded to this.

  Wagner complained of illness and talked incessantly about emigrating to America, where, indeed, there were plenty of people willing to throw piles of money at him. Instead, he went to Italy, that time-honored destination of Germans-in-crisis. Naples cheered him up considerably, and he worked on Parsifal, the poem of which he had been reading to friends for years. It was on one of these trips that Wagner and Nietzsche broke relations for good.

  Angelo Neumann, a former singer turned manager, paid a nice fee to Wagner and successfully produced the Ring at Leipzig in 1878 and triumphantly in Berlin in 1881. Wagner’s other operas, especially Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, were being performed everywhere, including Italy, Britain, and the United States. Wagner could concentrate on Parsifal, which would constitute the entire next Bayreuth festival. It was six years in the making.

  THE LATE YEARS

  Wagner’s output of essays reached staggering proportions in these years, as he tried to clarify his philosophy. Every essay found him “more misunderstood than ever,” and he would write another. He founded the Bayreuther Blätter, a newspaper to propogate his confusing ideas, and issued proclamations on vegetarianism and antivivisectionism. He also continued to plead for a Germany without Jews, or, at least, without Judaism. At the same time, he was distancing himself from the anti-Semitic movement, which had become a significant political faction in national politics, and relied more than ever on the talents of individual Jews. (Bülow, in perhaps his lowest moment, complained to a friend at this time that he should have had himself circumcised if he had wanted to be successful in Wagner’s circle.) Amidst all this, Wagner worked on Parsifal.

  From the start, Parsifal was meant to be something entirely unique. Wagner wrote the music specifically for the miraculous acoustics of the Bayreuth Festival House, and insisted this work never be performed anywhere else. He worked at great leisure, which is apparent in the score, reflecting his new life style. Ludwig paid off the debts from the first festival, and Wagner spent comfortable time in Italy with Cosima and the children. The king also placed the personnel of the Munich Opera at Wagner’s disposal for the next festival, including the brilliant conductor Hermann Levi. The fact that Levi was Jewish was the ultimate irony for this final chapter of Wagner’s artistic life.

  Sixteen performances of Parsifal were given in the summer of 1882. King Ludwig did not attend, even though Wagner had constructed a special private entrance to the Festival House for him. Bülow intended to go, but never made it. Otherwise, almost everybody else from musical Europe was there. The audiences were struck dumb by this masterpiece, and the whole festival was more like a strange religious rite than anything else. One devotee shocked his friends at a dinner party by declaring that Wagner would surely be dead soon. After Parsifal, there was nothing left to say. Wagner may have agreed with this sentiment. He and the family went to Venice and moved into the Pala
zzo Vendramin (the present Winter Casino) in September. There they received visitors, including Liszt and Levi, and people noted that Wagner talked more and more of the past. On February 13, 1883, he died of heart failure.

  Cosima appeared to die with him. She would not leave the body and refused to eat or drink. Bülow sent a telegram that may have been that pathetic man’s finest moment. It read simply, “Soeur, il faut vivre.” She cut off her hair, placed it in the casket, and began the journey to Bayreuth with the body.

  Wagner was buried in the garden at Wahnfried while Cosima watched from the upstairs bedroom. Later, she spent a few hours at the gravesite, returning to total seclusion in her room. Her grieving exceeded the already heavy standards of the time. What outsiders couldn’t see, however, was that she was already planning the next festival. The continuation of Wagner’s life work was soon firmly under her own control.

  Richard Wagner, Superstar

  By the time Wagner died in 1883, he was the most talked-about composer in the world. Everybody had an opinion about him, either extremely positive or just the opposite. Plus ça change … He stood for something to almost everybody.

  To German nationalists, he was the culmination of the cultural spirit of the people, a crystallization of all German aspiration. The extremists claimed Wagner as their own, the bulwark of Aryan defiance against Jewish intrigue, American materialism, French decadence, and Catholic despotism (in roughly that order). The paper Wagner founded, the Bayreuther Blätter, became the main perpetrator of this line of thought for several decades after Wagner’s death under the leadership of Hans von Wolzogen, to whom Hitler himself acknowledged a great debt. The faction that grew around this paper was far-right even by Second Reich standards, and they thought the foreign-born Cosima, with her Jewish and American musicians, was far too cosmopolitan.

  Thus the serpent’s egg was laid right from the start, but it would be a mistake to think of Wagner as the exclusive property of the far right at any point in history. In fact, Wagner’s art was also claimed by much of the left, which is at least equally logical. Wagner himself had once been a revolutionary, and his art certainly fit in that category. Many of his French fans preferred to see him in this way. His failure in Paris had been largely caused by the old aristocracy (i.e., the Jockey Club), to whom many French Wagnerites were automatically opposed, both politically and culturally.

  In America, Wagner’s popularity started in the large German immigrant community, but quickly spread far and wide. Americans were able to look at the operas from a slightly more removed vantage point than their European counterparts. As Dr. Joseph Horowitz has pointed out, the “newness” of Wagner’s music won thousands of fans from surprising segments of society. The women of the suffragette movement, particularly, were devoted Wagnerians in America.

  In Russia, too, Wagner’s music found a home among the educated of the left. Italians approached Wagner cautiously but respectfully (as they still do); Verdi, for one, was extremely careful in his public statements about this composer whom he so clearly respected, if never actually adored. Legend has it that the score of Parsifal was on Verdi’s piano when he died. The English reaction to Wagner was varied, though generally enthusiastic.

  If critics were often hostile to Wagner early on, musicians tended to worship his music beyond the bounds of reason. Many took it on faith that this music really was “of the future,” and had little patience for those who had trouble following the new sounds. This worshipful wave, in which Wagner’s devotees regarded his music as more like a crusade, became known as Wagnerismus (“Wagnerism,” but everyone used the German word to describe the phenomenon), and peaked around the turn of the century. The fanaticism of the Wagnerites and their condescension toward the less illuminated did much to alienate the general public in these years. Thus Mark Twain’s brilliant deflation of Wagnerismus, “I’m told Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” In fact, Wagnerismus played a large role in developing the gap between “high” and “low” culture, a problem that continues to plague the arts today worse than ever before.

  Reaction, of a sort, set in. The early decades of the twentieth century saw people striving to lighten the burden of the Victorian years. This was also evident in clothes and interior design, and, for many people, works like Meistersinger went out of style along with bustles and velvet drapes. Nietzsche, one of the first to rebel against the “disease” of Wagner, called for more “light and air” (quoting Isolde, no less). The philosopher recommended the opera Carmen, with its vitality, as the real music of the future.

  Whatever Nietzsche’s qualifications as a music critic (and it’s a murky subject), many agreed with his call for more light and air. Even musically sophisticated people found themselves able to enjoy Bizet’s Carmen and newer works like Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, without necessarily having to swear off Wagner. Composers took note. They learned their lessons from Wagner, but wrote as they saw fit. Mahler conducted Wagner everywhere (except Bayreuth, where he was not welcome—one Jewish conductor was quite enough for that crew), but wrote symphonies. Richard Strauss, who also conducted Wagner all over, responded with Salome and Elektra, two of the shortest operas ever written. Stravinsky hit the world like a tornado with his Rite of Spring, and spent much of his career trying to write distinctly unlike Wagner.

  Brevity was not the only reaction. People had come to see Wagner as heavy in every sense of the word. To some extent, this impression still holds true in the popular vocabulary. When the adjective “Wagnerian” is used in any context, it means plodding, overlong, and ham-fisted, at best. Strauss responded yet again with a “chamber opera,” Ariadne auf Naxos, which calls for an orchestra of merely thirty-six members. (Ariadne also quotes Rheingold to take a dig at a plodding, ham-fisted character in its story.)

  People still appreciated Wagner’s music, but it was clear that he would not be imitated directly in the future. While composers were and are quite willing to use effects and discoveries from Wagner’s scores, nobody outside of the asylums has attempted to write their own Ring or Parsifal. And no one worried about the issue of opera versus music drama anymore. A newer generation took this another step away from what Wagner had envisioned. Arnold Schoenberg and his students Anton Webern and Alban Berg moved toward atonality and the twelve-tone system. Many scholars can determine the points of origin of this development in the scores of Tristan and Parsifal, which is clear enough. But the spirit of the modernists was entirely different from Wagner—except in one important respect. The gap between “music experts” and “normal people” became wider than ever. Suddenly, with “serious” music being seriously beyond most people, Wagner was starting to look relatively easy, and conservative, to most people.

  Meanwhile, weird things were happening in Bayreuth. Cosima retired in favor of her son Siegfried, who enjoyed moderate success from 1906 until his death, a few months after Cosima, in 1930. (There had been no festival from 1914 until 1924.) Siegfried married a young Englishwoman named Winifred, who had grown up in Germany since she was nine years old. They promptly had four children, which was something of a duty for the predominantly gay Siegfried. In the uncertain postwar years, when nobody knew if there would ever be another Bayreuth festival, Winifred met a young misfit named Adolf Hitler—and promptly flipped over him. Their friendship would never fail, and Hitler was treated as a member of the family. Winifred took the reins of the Bayreuth festival in 1930. She counted on her friend Hitler for support, and he, in turn, took a keen interest in the festival after he became chancellor in 1933.

  One thing everybody can tell you about Adolf Hitler is that his favorite composer was Wagner. Actually, Anton Bruckner, the benign Austrian of childlike faith, whose music offends no one except by its length, was Hitler’s favorite composer. (Hitler’s favorite movie was King Kong, by the way.) The Führer, whose title may well have been suggested by the libretto of Lohengrin, was certainly a Wagner devotee, but there is some question about how much of the music actually inter
ested him. (His favorite opera was Wagner’s early success Rienzi, never produced at Bayreuth.)

  The relationship between Winifred Wagner and the festival on the one hand and Hitler and the Nazi Party on the other side is complex and full of paradoxes. In a way, the personal friendship between Winifred and Hitler saved the festival from the direct party control imposed on every other theater in Germany. There were no Nazi banners in the Festival House, nor were party songs sung at performances. A few Jews and other political undesirables even continued to perform at Bayreuth for a while. Yet there can be no question of one irreducible fact: Bayreuth was entirely compromised by its Third Reich associations. Thomas Mann, in exile, called it “Hitler’s Court Theater.”

  Hitler worked hard to subsume Wagner into his own world vision, and co-opted the composer into his culture war. The choice of Wagner was not random, whatever Hitler’s musical acumen—the basic material for a Nazi icon was there. The anti-Semitism, the disparaging of all cultures and races beyond the largely imaginary Aryans, and the desperate nationalism were fixed features of Wagner’s thought. Even Wagner’s support of vegetarianism fit in nicely with Hitler’s world view. It didn’t matter that Wagner contradicted almost every pronouncement he ever made with an equal and opposite pronouncement elsewhere; the Nazi mind was incapable of grasping such complexities. Hitler famously said that whoever “wishes to understand National Socialism must first understand Wagner.”

  This had two long-lasting results for the world outside of Germany. First, Wagner has become permanently associated with fascism in the popular imagination. In 1990, the architectural writer Alan Balfour could blithely call the buildings of Third Reich architect Albert Speer “Wagnerian,” and not give it a second thought. Nothing could be farther from the cold, neoclassical, inhumane rigidity of Speer’s designs for the Reich Chancellery in Berlin or the Nazi Party rally grounds at Nuremberg than the form-defying “infinite melody” of Tristan, to cite just one obvious example. But there’s no arguing this sort of thing. It is convenient to understand Wagner as aesthetically fascist because of his own revolting politics and because of his association with Hitler’s Germany.