Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  This leads me on to a third point: Wagner refused consistently to distinguish between “life” and “art.” For him, there was only one truth: the truth of his mission. It was against this background that he interpreted his life and works as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of all the arts that did not preclude the depiction of embarrassing or even catastrophic events but which never called into question the higher meaning of that mission. There is little point, therefore, in distinguishing—as Martin Gregor-Dellin does—between “the everyday world” and “art” and between “character” and “works.”9 The German political theorist Udo Bermbach argues that in writings such as Art and Revolution Wagner was drawing up “plans for an art—his art—that would be capable of governing our lives.”10 Christian Kaden likewise believes that myth, as expounded in the Ring, for example, does not abandon itself to otherworldly illusions but deals, rather, with “the threat to the world of appearances and the destabilization of illusion.” As a result, it remains “true to life.”11

  In spite of interpretations such as these, there is no way of resolving the tension between Wagner’s life and works. On the one hand the German medievalist Peter Wapnewski has argued in favor of the view that these works may be seen as “a monumental attempt to come to terms with feelings of guilt and deceit” and as a “great call for redemption,” while at the same time warning—quite rightly—against the desire to impose the winding pathways of life and works on one another as if they were somehow congruent: “Wotan’s guilty conscience is not that of a man like Wagner sinning against his Bavarian God or betraying Otto Wesendonck’s magnanimity or Minna’s or Mathilde’s love.”12

  Wagner himself was aware of these ambivalences. On one occasion we find him insisting that it was not necessary to have suffered everything oneself in order to write about it. Goethe, for example, had had enough “wisdom” in his youth to write the first part of Faust in an emotional vacuum: “One sees how stupid it is to assume that poets must first live through what they write.”13 But while working on Parsifal, he was moved to say almost the exact opposite: “I have always been fated to carry out in prose (in life) what I have put into my poetry—that scene with the swan, people will think it came from my views on vivisection!”14

  The title page of the first, privately printed edition of Wagner’s autobiography, Mein Leben (My Life), shows a vulture (in German: Geyer or Geier) as a heraldic bird. Published in 1870, this was the first of four volumes and covered the period from Wagner’s birth in 1813 to his return to Germany from Paris in 1842. At the time of its publication, Wagner was living in Switzerland and so he used the services of the Basel printer G. A. Bonfantini, prevailing on Nietzsche to see the proofs through the press. Wagner dictated the text to Cosima and then revised her manuscript. The original print run was limited to fifteen copies intended for Wagner’s patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, and for a small number of “trusted” friends. After Wagner’s death, Cosima tried to round up all the surviving copies with the intention of destroying them, but Bonfantini had secretly run off an extra copy, and this was acquired by Wagner’s early biographer, Mary Burrell. It was in order to quell speculation about its contents that Cosima authorized the first official publication in 1911. A few sentences that she had suppressed were made available in 1929–30. The first fully authentic edition appeared in 1963. (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: A4295-I.)

  Musicologists can, of course, avoid the pitfalls that confront Wagner’s biographers by concentrating on the music and examining the specifics of Wagner’s harmonic writing, for example. But by limiting ourselves to a single moment in the history of modern composition, we cannot hope to do justice to the “Wagner phenomenon,” since even the most fundamentalist music theorist must have realized by now that Wagner’s music cannot be interpreted simply on the basis of the notes on the printed page—even when the music is examined on its own terms, many compositional decisions can be understood only when seen, as it were, from the stage. (Whereas Theodor Adorno struggled to come to terms with this phenomenon, Robert Schumann was more than happy to revise his initially unfavorable view of Tannhäuser once he had attended a performance of the work.)

  There is little point in asking whether Bach or Mozart scholarship is confronted by similar problems, for whereas we know little about the biographical and contemporary context of The Art of Fugue and the Jupiter Symphony, our knowledge of Wagner fills many real and imaginary volumes. Or to put it in postmodern terms: even during his own lifetime Wagner was consciously ”tweeting” his own life and works. In certain cases we may be able to get behind his imaginary web pages, but we shall never do so in a more generalized way. We can only attempt to make meaningful use of these pages.

  This brings me to my book. For many years I toiled in the field of Wagner scholarship and helped to lay the foundations of the weighty Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis, the standard catalogue of Wagner’s works and their musical sources. But then I no longer felt any great desire to make any more sense of the composer. To find meaningful access to the sources that continue to produce a veritable wealth of new information now means trying to forge a link between two different kinds of Wagnerian discourse separated by a period of over two decades. In my own view, the older discourse has now acquired a historical aspect and can no longer be adequately experienced and described except to the extent that it is reflected in its present-day counterpart. It is a truism that as ordinary mortals we cannot jump into the same river twice or see from its banks where the waves of the sea originate. We can only watch those waves breaking on the beach.

  Any such discourse is a language game on a particular subject, guided by particular interests and necessarily incomplete. And the very term “language game” implies that there is no point in seeking to distinguish between truth and untruth, justice or injustice, right or wrong. Of course, the author has the right to applaud certain events or to shake his head at others. But essentially he will limit himself to observing the game’s rules and practicalities and then reflect on what that game means to him personally. Nor will this discourse be confined to Wagner and his stage works. Creativity itself is a language game and, indeed, one of the most meaningful conceivable.

  In order to prevent my interest in those language games that bear the label “Wagner” from degenerating into vagueness, I should like to end these remarks by stating my ethos as an author: it is not Wagner that I want to figure out but myself and my age. What is it that continues to fascinate us about Tristan und Isolde and the Ring? What ideas and ideologies are conveyed by the artist and his work? Does Wagner’s anti-Semitism detract from his works? Are there central messages in Wagner to offset the postmodern arbitrariness of “anything goes”? Or, to put it another way, what is it that motivates us when we draw closer to Wagner or turn away from him? What values, good and bad, do we consciously assimilate through the medium of his operas and music dramas? Which values are subliminally brought home to us through his world of music theater?

  As I say, we are dealing with values both good and bad. Walter Benjamin once wrote that “without exception the cultural treasures” that the historical materialist “surveys have an origin that he cannot contemplate without horror.”15 And Joachim Kaiser, the doyen of German-language music critics, begins his book on the composer with the sentence “Our love of Wagner is as infected as the wound that is suffered by Amfortas.”16 As for my own perception of Wagner’s works, I feel both fascination and horror in equal measure. At the same time, I admit that my way of writing about Wagner is guided more by the kind of sympathetic interest felt by Thomas Mann than by the anger evinced by those two disappointed admirers Nietzsche and Adorno: I can write only about the art that ultimately fascinates me in all its contradictory complexity.

  The present account draws on the theory and aesthetics of music as well as on philosophy, cultural history, and biography, but even though it seeks to combine these various disciplines, this does not make it a Gesamtk
unstwerk. It does, however, illustrate my own misgivings about filtering complex processes to such an extent that they finally disappear down a black hole of blank abstraction. This would be an accurate reflection neither of Wagner’s view of art nor of our own particular experience of it.

  As for the factual information contained in the following pages, I can vouch for it with all the seriousness of a Wagner scholar. The rest is “poetry” in the sense understood by the American historian Hayden White in his book, Tropics of Discourse, in which Clio, the oft-neglected muse of history, is rehabilitated as a writer of poetry.17 With the exception of the framework of facts within which he operates, the historian, in White’s view, is no more than an interpreter. May Clio help me to ensure that my self-imposed task of interpreting Wagner for my readers turns out to be tolerably successful.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Archetypal Theatrical Scene

  FROM LEUBALD TO DIE FEEN

  “The wildest anarchy”—The paternity issue—Sense of separation in early childhood—Early enthusiasm for the theater—The “more intimate objects” in his sisters’ wardrobe and Proust’s madeleine—The schoolboy drama Leubald—The myth of Hero and Leander as Wagner’s archetypal theatrical scene—Composition exercises to set Leubald to music—Beethoven’s incidental music to Egmont as a model—Early sonatas, overtures and a C-major symphony for the Leipzig Gewandhaus—A “wedding” not to the liking of Wagner’s sister Rosalie—Die Feen: a respectable first opera for a twenty-year-old composer—Wagner’s discovery of the redemptive power of music as the embodiment of love—An anticipatory glance at Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music—A look ahead to later chapters: “Redemption through Destruction” as a leitmotif—Congruence between Wagner’s life and works?

  A silhouette of Wagner by an unknown artist dating from the late fall of 1835. The first known likeness of the composer, it was a gift to the actress Minna Planer, whose favors he was currently courting, while simultaneously working on his opera Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love). The couple married in November 1836. (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: Bi 3228.)

  Wagner’s childhood memories revolve constantly around two key ideas—chaos and the theater: “I grew up in the wildest of anarchy,” he told his second wife, Cosima, in July 1871.1 And in his autobiography he speaks of a mother whose “anxious and trying relations with a large family” were never conducive to a “comforting tone of motherly solicitude,” still less to feelings of tenderness: “I hardly remember ever being caressed by her, just as outpourings of affection did not take place in our family; on the contrary, quite naturally a certain impetuous, even loud and boisterous manner characterized our behaviour.”2

  Friedrich Wagner died six months after Wagner’s birth, and nine months later his widow, Johanna Rosine, married a family friend, Ludwig Geyer, and, together with the rest of her family, moved from Leipzig to Dresden. Wagner was known as Richard Geyer until his fifteenth year and in maturity he was never entirely certain if he was in fact Geyer’s son. But it may be significant that he chose a vulture (German Geyer, or Geier) as a heraldic beast on the first page of his privately published autobiography, the initial volume of which appeared in 1870. And in 1879, in a letter to King Ludwig II, he described a family celebration held to mark his sixty-sixth birthday in the following words: “In front of a new painting of my wife by Lenbach [. . .] stood my son Siegfried in black velvet, with blond curly hair (just like the portrait of the young Van Dyck): he was intended to represent my father Ludwig Geyer, reborn to significant effect.”3

  The real Geyer seems to have been a good replacement as a father figure, albeit extremely strict. In August 1873 Wagner spoke about his childhood over lunch and recalled (via Cosima) “how he was thrashed by his father Geyer with the whip he had bought with stolen money, and how his sisters cried outside the door.”4 Known to his sisters as “Master Moody” on account of his hypersensitivity,5 Wagner was seven when he was sent to board with Pastor Christian Ephraim Wetzel in Possendorf near Dresden. When Geyer died a year later, the boy found board and lodging with Geyer’s younger brother, Karl, in Eisleben, where he spent the next thirteen months. He then spent a brief period with his Uncle Adolf in Leipzig, but was obliged to sleep in a large, high-ceilinged room whose walls were hung with sinister-looking paintings of “aristocratic ladies in hooped petticoats, with youthful faces and white (powdered) hair.” According to his—much later—reminiscences, not a night passed without his waking up “bathed in sweat at the fear caused by these frightful ghostly apparitions.”6

  Adolf Wagner was unwilling to undertake any real responsibility for his nephew’s education, and so at the end of 1822 Wagner returned to live with his family in Dresden, where he attended the city’s Kreuzschule. In 1826 his mother moved to Prague with four of his sisters, Rosalie, Clara, Ottilie, and Cäcilie, and the now thirteen-year-old youth was offered a room in the home of one Dr. Rudolf Böhme, whose family life was later described by Wagner as “somewhat disorderly.”7 At the end of 1827 he finally moved back to Leipzig, where his mother and sisters had settled following their Bohemian adventure. He attended St. Nicholas’s School, and it was during this time as a fifteen- and sixteen-year-old schoolboy that he wrote his “great tragedy” Leubald.

  A decade later we find Wagner writing to his fiancée, Minna Planer: “O God, my angel, on the whole I had a miserable youth.”8 His youth may not have been any harsher than that of many another adolescent from his social background, but there is no doubt that it was anarchically unsettled: “Who is my father?,” “Does my mother love me?,” “Where is my home?,” and “Who are my models?”—these are questions that the young Wagner presumably asked himself more frequently than most other children of his age. And if he was dissatisfied with having to swim with the tide, then he himself would have to provide his existence with a sense of direction and open up new horizons.

  Such views are never conjured out of thin air but are found within the subject’s own immediate environment, and this brings us to the second of the key ideas that emerge so forcefully from Wagner’s reminiscences of his youth: the theater. It would be wrong to lay undue emphasis on Friedrich Hölderlin’s lines, “But where there is danger, rescue, too, is at hand,” yet as far as Wagner is concerned, there is no doubt that the theater saved his life in the deepest sense, especially during his early years. From the very outset the anarchy of his environment was directly related to his tendency to indulge in theatrical, self-promotional behavior. More specifically, it was related to his love of the stage. Although his mother warned all her children against the godlessness of a life in the theater, she was so lacking in the courage of her own convictions that four of Wagner’s six elder siblings embarked on such a career: Rosalie was to be the Gretchen in the first Leipzig production of Goethe’s Faust in 1829; Clara was only sixteen when she sang the title role in Rossini’s La Cenerentola; and Rosalie was seventeen when she took the main part in Weber’s Preciosa. Wagner’s elder brother Albert, finally, enjoyed a successful operatic career in Leipzig in a repertory that included Mozart’s Tamino and Belmonte.

  Although Friedrich Wagner was a police actuary by profession, he came from a family of artists and academics. He studied law and had an amateur’s love of the theater. Among his circle of acquaintances were Goethe, Schiller, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. But in this regard he could not begin to compete with his eccentric brother Adolf, a well-known figure in Leipzig who held a doctorate in philosophy and was a distinguished translator of Sophocles and the proud possessor of a silver beaker presented to him by Goethe as a token of the poet’s gratitude for the dedication of a collection of Italian verse. According to his autobiography, the young Wagner enjoyed listening to his uncle’s effusions. In the course of their extended walks together, Adolf also declaimed Shakespeare’s plays to him.

  Wagner’s surrogate father, Ludwig Geyer, was the quintessential bohemian. A successful playwright, actor, and port
rait painter, he also helped to train Wagner’s older brother and sisters for their careers in the theater. It seemed only natural that Wagner himself would follow in their footsteps. In adulthood he recalled “how at the age of 5, since he could not sing, he imitated Caspar’s piccolo and flute trills with ‘Perrbip,’ climbed on a chair to represent Samiel looking over an imaginary bush, and said, ‘Perrbip, perrbip.’”9 In point of fact Wagner must have been seven when he first encountered Der Freischütz, but there is no doubt that he came into contact with leading musicians such as Weber at a very early age. “If I had never had the experience of Weber’s things,” he told Cosima in October 1873, “I believe I should never have become a musician.”10

  Initially it was his love of the theater in general that proved the dominant factor:

  What attracted me so powerfully to the theatre, by which I include the stage itself, the backstage area and the dressing rooms, was not so much the addictive desire for entertainment and diversion that motivates today’s theatregoers, but rather the tingling delight in my contact with an element that represented such a contrast to normal life in the form of a purely fantastical world whose attractiveness often bordered on horror. In this way a piece of scenery or even a flat—perhaps representing a bush—or a theatrical costume or even just a characteristic piece of a costume appeared to me to emanate from another world and in a certain way to be eerily interesting, and my contact with this world would serve as a lever that allowed me to rise above the calm reality of my daily routine and enter that demoniacal realm that I found so stimulating.11

  Nor was it long before Wagner had had his first taste of the theater: “After being terrified by The Orphan and the Murderer and The Two Galley Slaves and similar plays that traded in gothic horror and that featured my father [Ludwig Geyer] in the role of the villains, I was obliged to appear in a number of comedies. [. . .] I recall featuring in a tableau vivant as an angel, entirely sewn up in tights and with wings on my back. I had to adopt a graceful pose that I had found hard to learn.”12 When he was twelve, he recalled reading aloud from Schiller’s The Maid of Orleans to the “well-educated” wife of his godfather, Adolf Träger.13 That his godfather gave him not only a pike-gray dress coat with an impressive silk lining but also a red Turkish waistcoat may well have helped to blur the distinction between “art” and “life.”