Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Berlioz was the first composer in history to express himself in music in a frankly autobiographical way, though he also ‘took his fire’ from Shakespeare, Byron and Goethe.95 He has been described as ‘the first truly wild man of music’, eclipsing even Beethoven on this score. A revolutionary, a mercurial figure who shared with Beethoven a self- consciousness about his genius that would become the hallmark of the romantic movement, he wrote a vivid autobiography but his music was autobiographical too. His first great work–and perhaps the greatest of his life, his ‘opium nightmare’, the Symphonie fantastique–recorded his passionate love affair with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson.96 The affair was hardly romantic to begin with, at least in the conventional sense. He saw her on stage and began to bombard her with letters before they had even met. These letters were so passionate and so intimate that she became bewildered, even frightened. (He would go to the theatre to watch her, only to scream in rage and leave when she was embraced by her stage lover.) So distressed was he by her behaviour that when he heard rumours that she was having an affair, he put her into the last act of his symphony as a whore. When he learned that the rumours were false, he changed the music. The afternoon when she finally consented to be seen in public at one of his performances set the seal, says David Cairns, ‘on one of the high dates of the romantic calendar’.97 Until Berlioz, music had never been made to tell a story to quite this extent and such an idea changed composers and audiences. Among those who was most impressed was Wagner, who thought there were only three composers worth paying attention to–Liszt, Berlioz and himself. This does little justice to Schumann and Chopin.

  Robert Schumann was in some ways the most complete romantic. Surrounded by insanity and suicide in his family, he was worried all his life that he too would succumb in one way or the other. The son of a bookseller and publisher, he grew up surrounded by the works of the great romantic writers–Goethe, Shakespeare, Byron and Novalis–all of whom exerted a great influence on him. (He burst into tears when he read Byron’s Manfred, which he later set to music.98) Schumann tried to write poetry himself and emulated Byron in other ways too, embarking on numerous love affairs. In the early 1850s he suffered a week of hallucinations, when he thought that the angels were dictating music to him, while he was threatened by wild animals. He threw himself off a bridge but failed to kill himself and, at his own request, was placed in an asylum. His best-known, and perhaps best-loved, work is Carnaval, in which he paints pictures of his friends, his wife Clara, Chopin, Paganini and Mendelssohn. (Carnaval was a great influence on Brahms.99)

  Though he was a friend of many of the great romantics, including Delacroix (who was the recipient of many letters regarding the love affair with George Sand), Chopin affected to despise their aims. He was polite–rather than enthusiastic–about Delacroix’s painting, he had no interest in reading the great romantic authors, but he did share with Beethoven, Berlioz and Liszt the awareness that he was a genius. Polish by birth, he moved to Paris in the 1830s and 1840s, when that city was the capital of the romantic movement, and at the musical evenings held at the salon of the musical publisher Pleyel he would play four-handed piano with Liszt, with Mendelssohn turning the pages.100 Chopin invented a new kind of piano playing, the one that we are familiar with today. He had certain reflexes in his fingers which set him apart from other players, at that time at least, and this enabled him to develop piano music that was both experimental and yet refined. ‘Cannon buried in flowers’ is how Schumann described it. (The sentiment was not returned.)101 Chopin introduced new ideas about pedalling, fingering, and rhythm, which were to prove extremely influential. (He preferred the English Broadwood pianos, less advanced than some available.)102 His pieces had the delicacy and yet the vivid colourings of impressionist paintings, and just as everyone knows a Renoir from a Degas, so everyone knows Chopin when they hear it. He may not have thought of himself as a romantic but his polonaises and nocturnes are romanticism implicit (after him and his polonaises, music was invaded by nationalism).103 The piano cannot be fully understood without Chopin.

  Or without Liszt. Like Chopin he was a brilliant technician (he gave his first solo at ten), and like Beethoven (whose Broadwood he acquired) and Berlioz, he had charisma.104 Good-looking, which was part of that charisma, Liszt invented bravura piano playing. Before him, pianists had played from the wrist, holding their hands close together and near the keyboard. He, however, was the first of the pianists whose performance would begin with his arrival on stage. He would sit down, throw off his gloves, dropping them anywhere, hold his hands high, and then attack the keyboard (women would fight to obtain one of Liszt’s gloves).105 He was, then, a showman, and for many people that has made him a charlatan.106 But he was undoubtedly the most romantic of piano players, arguably the greatest there has ever been, who absorbed the influence of Berlioz, Paganini and Chopin. He invented the solo recital and pianists from all over Europe flocked to study with him. He influenced Wagner enormously, introducing new musical forms, in particular the symphonic poem–one-movement programme music with great symbolism inspired by a poem or a play.107 In his bold chromaticism, he introduced dissonances that were copied by everyone from Chopin to Wagner. Liszt grew into the grand old man of music, outliving most of his contemporaries by several decades. One of ‘the snobs of history’, his flowing white hair and ‘collection of warts’ gave his head as distinctive an appearance in old age as it had had in his youth.108

  Felix Mendelssohn was possibly the most widely accomplished musician after Mozart. A fine pianist, he was also the greatest conductor of his day and the greatest organist. He was an excellent violinist and was well read in poetry and philosophy. (He was the romantic classicist, says Alfred Einstein.109) He came from a wealthy Jewish banking family, and was the grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. A fervent German patriot, he believed that his compatriots were supreme in all the arts. Indeed, if there is such a thing, Mendelssohn was over-cultured. As a boy he was made to get up at 5.00 am to work on his music, his history, his Greek and Latin, his science and his comparative literature. When he had been born his mother had looked at his hands and remarked ‘Bach fugue fingers!’110 Like so many of the other romantic musicians, he was a child prodigy, though he was doubly fortunate in that his parents could afford to hire their own orchestra and he could have them play his own compositions, where he would conduct. He went to Paris and met Liszt, Chopin and Berlioz. For his first work he took as his inspiration Shakespeare: this was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a fairyland that was perfect romantic material (though Mendelssohn never had much in the way of internal demons).111 After Paris, he went to Leipzig as musical director and in a short while made it the musical capital of Germany. One of the first conductors to use the baton, he employed it to turn the Leipzig orchestra into the foremost instrument of music of the day–precise, sparing, with a predilection for speed. He increased the size of the orchestra and revised the repertoire. In fact, Mendelssohn was probably the first conductor to adopt the dictatorial manner that seems so popular today, as well as being the main organiser of the basic repertoire that we now hear, with Mozart and Beethoven as the backbone, Haydn, Bach (whose St Matthew Passion he rescued from a hundred years’ slumber) and Handel not far behind, and with Rossini, Liszt, Chopin, Schubert and Schumann also included.112 It was Mendelssohn who conceived the shape of most concerts as we hear them: an overture, a large-scale work, such as a symphony, followed by a concerto. (Until Mendelssohn, most symphonies were considered too long to hear at one go: interspersed between movements there would be shorter, less demanding pieces.)113

  The seal was set on the great romantic onslaught in music by developments in what is possibly the most passionate of all art forms–opera. The nineteenth century produced the two great colossi of opera, one Italian, the other German.

  Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) was unlike most of his musical contemporaries in that he was no child prodigy. His piano playing was weak and he failed to get into the
Milan conservatory at his first attempt. His first opera was a modest success, his second a failure but his third, Nabucco, made him famous throughout Italy. During rehearsals for this opera no work was done off-stage because the painters and machinists were so excited and so moved by the music they heard being put together that they left their tasks to crowd round the orchestra pit. Besides the music, and the fact that Verdi used a larger than conventional orchestra, Nabucco became popular in Italy because it was seen as symbolic of the Italian resistance to Austrian domination and occupation of the country. ‘The “Va, pensiero” chorus, which concerns the longing of the Jewish exiles for home, was identified by all Italian listeners with their own longing for freedom.’114 On the first night the audience stood up and cheered.115 Verdi was a fervent nationalist himself, who lived to see the unification of Italy, and later became a (reluctant) deputy in the new parliament. The letters V.E.R.D.I., scratched on a wall in any Italian town under Austrian occupation, were understood to mean: ‘Vittorio Emmanuele, Re d’Italia’.116

  In the operas that followed Nabucco–ILombardi and Ernani, and inparticular Macbeth–Verdi produced a type of opera music that hadn’t been heard before, but took as its cue what was happening among the romantic composers. Instead of pretty, melodious, controlled music, Verdi was looking for the sounds produced by the singers’ voices to reflect their inner states, their turmoil, their love, their hate, their psychological stress and distress. Verdi himself explained this explicitly in a letter he wrote to the director of the Paris Opera just as Macbeth was about to go into rehearsal. Among other things, he objected to the choice of Eugenia Tadolini, one of the great singers of the day. ‘Tadolini has too great qualities for this role [as Lady Macbeth]. Perhaps you think that is a contradiction! Tadolini’s appearance is good and beautiful, and I would like Lady Macbeth twisted and ugly. Tadolini sings to perfection, and I don’t wish Lady Macbeth to sing at all. Tadolini has a marvellous, brilliant, clear, powerful voice, and for Lady Macbeth I should like a raw, choked, hollow voice. Tadolini’s voice has something angelic. Lady Macbeth’s voice should have something devilish…’117 Verdi was moving toward musical drama, melodrama, in which raw emotion is presented on stage ‘in great primary colours: love, hate, revenge, lust for power’.118 It was led by melody rather than the harmony of the orchestra and so has a humanism that is lacking in Wagner.119 Even so, it was quite different from anything that had gone before, and meant that while his operas were hugely popular with audiences (the doors for the first performance had to be opened four hours in advance, the crush was so great), they received an unprecedented critical onslaught. For one performance of Rigoletto, in New York in 1855, two men tried to take the production to court, to have it banned on grounds that it was too obscene for women to see it.120

  At the end of his long life, when he was an institution in Italy, Verdi returned to Shakespeare, with Otello and Falstaff. As in the original Shakespeare story, Falstaff is both a comedy and a tragedy, perhaps the hardest of genres to pull off (it was in Verdi’s contract that he could withdraw the opera after the dress rehearsal if it wasn’t right). We do and we do not like Falstaff. It is hard to feel that a fool can be a tragic character, but of course he is to himself. Verdi’s music–its very grandeur–adds to Shakespeare’s stories, to enable us to see that tragedy can indeed take place, even when there is no tragic hero in an obvious way. In this sense, Verdi’s Falstaff, premiered at La Scala in Milan in February 1893, brings romanticism to a close.121

  By then Wagner and his brand of romanticism were already dead. Whether or not Wagner is a bigger musician than Verdi, he was certainly a bigger and more complex man, Falstaffian in dimensions and perhaps as hard to warm to. Character-wise, Wagner was in the Beethoven/Berlioz mould, even eclipsing them, and always very self-conscious about his genius. Drama was in his very bones.122 ‘I am not made like other people. I must have brilliance and beauty and light. The world owes me what I need. I can’t live on a miserable organist’s pittance like your master, Bach.’123 Like Verdi he was a slow starter and it was not until he heard Beethoven’s Ninth symphony, and Fidelio, when he was fifteen, that he decided to become a musician. He could never do more than tinker with the piano, and admitted he was not the greatest of score readers. His early works, says Harold Schonberg, ‘show no talent’.124 As with Berlioz, Wagner’s intensity filled some of his early lovers with fear, and as with Schubert he was constantly in debt, at least in the early years of his career. In Leipzig, where he received some tuition (but was dismissed), he was known as a heavy drinker, a gambler and a compulsive and dogmatic talker.

  But after a series of adventures, when his creditors pursued him from pillar to post, he eventually produced the five-act Rienzi and this made him famous, as Nabucco had made Verdi famous.125 It was staged at Dresden, which immediately secured the rights to Der fliegende Holländer, after which Wagner was appointed Kapellmeister there. Tannhäuser and Lohengrin followed, which were well received, the latter especially, with its novel blend of woodwind and strings, though he himself had to flee Dresden after he sided with the revolutionaries during the uprising of 1848.126 He decamped to Weimar, staying with Liszt and then moved on to Zurich, where for six years he produced next to nothing. He was trying to work out his artistic theories, familiarised himself with Schopenhauer, and this eventually generated a number of written works, Art and Revolution (1849), The Art Work of the Future (1850), Judaism and Music (1850) and Opera and Drama (1851), but also a big libretto based on the medieval Teutonic legend, Nibelungenlied. This was Wagner’s concept of what he called the Gesamtkunstwerk, the unified art work, in which he claimed that all great art–words, music, settings and costumes, fused together–must be based on myth, as the first recorded utterances of the gods, as a modern (and romantic) gloss on holy scripture. For Wagner, it was necessary to go to pre-Christian traditions because Christianity had perverted what had gone before. One possibility, as the Oriental renaissance had shown, was the Aryan myths of India but Wagner, following the German Indics, preferred the Northern tradition, which played counterpoint with the classical Mediterranean tradition. This was how he arrived at the Teutonic Nibelungenlied.127 In addition to the new myth, Wagner developed his ideas of a new form of speech, or rather he recreated on old form, Stabreim, which recalls the poetry found in the sagas, in which the vowels at the end of one line are repeated in the first syllables or words of the next line. On top of this came his new ideas for the orchestra (even bigger for Wagner than for Beethoven and Berlioz). Here he developed his concept of music unbroken throughout a composition. The orchestra thus became as much a part of the drama as the singers. (Wagner was proud of never having written ‘recitative’ over any passage, and he himself called this ‘the greatest artistic achievement of our age’.128)

  The effect of all this, says one critic, is that while Europe was whistling Verdi, it was talking about Wagner. Many people hated the new sounds (many still do), and another (British) critic dismissed Wagner as ‘simply noise’. But others thought the composer was ‘an elemental force’ and when Tristan und Isolde was produced this view was confirmed. ‘Never in the history of music had there been an operatic score of comparable breadth, intensity, harmonic richness, massive orchestration, sensuousness, power, imagination and colour. The opening chords of Tristan were to the last half of the nineteenth century what the Eroica and Ninth Symphonies had been to the first half–a breakaway, a new concept.’ Wagner later said he had been in some sort of trance when he produced the opera. ‘Here, in perfect trustfulness, I plunged into the inner depths of soul-events and from the innermost centre of the world I fearlessly built up to its outer form.’ Tristan is a relentless work, ‘gradually peeling away layers of the subconscious to the abyss within’.129

  Wagner’s unique position was revealed most clearly in the last phase of his life when he was saved, appropriately enough, by the mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Ludwig, a homosexual, was certainly in love with Wagner’s music, and may
just have been in love with Wagner himself. In any event, he told the composer that he could do more or less what he wanted in Bavaria and Wagner didn’t need to be asked twice. ‘I am the most German of beings. I am the German spirit. Consider the incomparable magic of my works.’130 Although he was forced into exile for a while, on account of his extravagance and a scandalous foray into politics, his involvement with Ludwig did lead eventually to the culmination of his career and another culmination of romanticism. This was his idea of a festival theatre dedicated to his works alone–Bayreuth, and to the Ring. The first Bayreuth Festival was held in 1876, and it was here that Der Ring des Nibelungen–the fruit of twenty-five years’ work–was first performed.131 For the first festival, some four thousand disciples descended on Bayreuth, along with the emperor of Germany, the emperor and empress of Brazil, seven other royals, and some sixty newspaper correspondents from all over the world, including two from New York who were allowed to use the new transatlantic cable to get their stories published almost immediately.132

  Although he had his critics, and would always have his critics, the magisterial sweep of the Ring was another turning-point in musical ideas. An allegory, a ‘cosmic drama of might redeemed by love’, which explained why traditional values were the only thing which could rescue the modern world from its inevitable doom, it also gave no comfort to Christianity.133 Though set in myth, it was curiously modern, and this was its appeal. (Nike Wagner also says the story has many parallels with the Wagner family itself.) ‘The listener is swept into something primal, timeless, and is pushed by elemental forces. The Ring is a conception that deals not with women but Woman; not with men, but with Man; not with people, but with the Folk; not with mind, but with the subconscious; not with religion, but with basic ritual; not with nature, but Nature.’134 Wagner lived from then on like a cross between royalty and deity, fêted, lauded, dressed in the finest silks, doused in the finest incense, and took the opportunity to develop his writing as much as his music. These views–on the Jews, on craniology, on the claim that the Aryans had descended from the gods–have weathered less well, much less well, than his music. Some of them were frankly ludicrous. But there is no question that Wagner, by his very self-confidence, his Nietzschean will, by his creation of Bayreuth as an asylum from the everyday world, did help to establish a climate of opinion, particularly in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 36).135 In music he was a strong influence on Richard Strauss, on Bruckner and Mahler, on Dvor?ák, and even on Schoenberg and Berg. Whistler, Degas and Cézanne were all Wagnerians, while Odilon Redon and Henri Fantin-Latour painted images inspired by his operas. Mallarmé and Baudelaire declared themselves won over. Much later, Adolf Hitler was to say, ‘Whoever wants to understand National Socialistic Germany must know Wagner.’136