by Martin Geck
But what was all this when set beside the intimacies of his sisters’ boudoir! There, according to Wagner’s later account,
it was the more delicate costumes of my sisters, on which I often observed my family working, that stimulated my imagination in the most subtly exciting ways. It was enough for me to touch these objects, and my heart would beat anxiously and wildly. Despite the fact that, as I have already said, there was little tenderness in our family, particularly as expressed in the form of hugging and kissing, my exclusively feminine surroundings were bound to exert a powerful influence on my emotional development.14
Readers so inclined may see in this passage a justification for Wagner’s later fondness for choice silks and exquisite perfumes and may dismiss that predilection as feminine or even abnormal. In this they would be following a well-worn path. But it would be more helpful in this context to follow up a remark that the composer made to the music critic Karl Gaillard at the time he was working on Tannhäuser: “And so, even before I set about writing a single line of the text or drafting a scene, I am already thoroughly immersed in the musical aura of my new creation.”15 He was aware of his “foolish fondness for luxury,”16 he admitted to his benefactress Julie Ritter in 1854, but he needed it to survive. Less than a week earlier he had told Liszt: “I cannot live like a dog, I cannot sleep on straw and drink common gin. Mine is an intensely irritable, acute, and hugely voracious, yet uncommonly tender and delicate sensuality which, one way or another, must be flattered.”17
We are still concerned with the young Wagner’s most basic question: what prospects did he have within his own anarchistic milieu? We are dealing here not with titillating biographical details but with the impulses that triggered Wagner’s creativity. Here our principal witnesses are Marcel Proust and Baudelaire. In a famous passage in À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust recounts the way in which a madeleine dipped in tea could activate his “mémoire involontaire” and usher in an act of spontaneous memory. He goes on to explain how
Above all in Baudelaire, where they are more numerous still, reminiscences of this kind are clearly less fortuitous and therefore, to my mind, unmistakable in their significance. Here the poet himself, with something of a slow and indolent choice, deliberately seeks, in the perfume of a woman, for instance, of her hair and her breast, the analogies which will inspire him and evoke for him
the azure of the sky immense and round
and
a harbour full of masts and pennants.18
Proust’s remarks about Baudelaire could equally well apply to Wagner, whom he idolized for a time. And when Wagner, writing in his autobiography, recalls the sensual stimuli that were triggered when he touched his sisters’ “more delicate costumes,” this is more than a mere reminiscence of his childhood and adolescence: it is also an aesthetic reflection on the part of the composer of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde concerning the synesthetic potential of his works. According to Proust, Baudelaire’s linguistic images were the result of a “slow and indolent choice,” and it is in this spirit that we should read the above passage from My Life, a memoir by no means intended for a mass readership eager for gutter-press sensationalism. In writing this, Wagner was seeking reassurance and expressing his wish that “life” and “art” should be in harmony. If, in his adolescence, he had not known the stimulus of the items in his sisters’ wardrobe, he would presumably have invented it or at least devised something similar to clarify his conviction that the oneness of life and art was no accident but was predetermined by fate: everything had to happen just as it did indeed happen.
The reader may find this hubristic, and yet we cannot fail to admire the consistency with which the young Wagner approached his life’s work. While still at school, he not only developed a burning enthusiasm for the stage as the only thing that gave meaning to his life—after all, many other budding actors have felt the same—but he also wanted to write his own plays and in that way to create his own world of the theater both as an actor and in his own imagination. He was not content to declaim Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” from the classroom lectern. Rather, he perfected his knowledge of Greek in order to be able to read Sophocles and translate passages from the Odyssey. And if his account in My Life is not an exaggeration, then he was still in his early teens when, an otherwise poor pupil, he wrote a vast epic poem on the Battle of Parnassus.
Whereas we know about such feats only from Wagner’s own much later account of them, his five-act tragedy Leubald allows us to test its author’s claims for ourselves. In maturity Wagner himself no longer had access to the manuscript, which he believed had been lost, and this may explain why he adopted such a mocking tone when referring to a youthful “misdemeanor” that he claimed represented an amalgam of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear and Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen.19 The rediscovery of the manuscript allows us to form an impression of what Wagner was capable of achieving between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. Leubald is no naïve schoolboy play, as it is usually described by writers on Wagner, but an example of its author’s ability to maintain three stylistic registers over an extended period—the play would last around six hours in performance. For the lofty style deemed appropriate to the characters who inhabit the highest echelons of feudal society, Wagner prefers blank verse—iambic pentameters—in the tradition of Shakespeare’s plays. The common people, by contrast, speak in coarse prose that is again modeled on Shakespeare. Between these two extremes is a third stylistic register that Wagner reserves for members of the spirit world, who converse with one another in rhyme and in song.
Leubald contains much that is hugely impressive alongside other passages that are inconsistent, long-winded or linguistically awkward. And—in spite of Wagner’s own claim in his “Autobiographical Sketch”—it is not true that forty-two people die in the course of the play.20 The actual figure is fourteen. And yet the piece teems with all manner of acts of violence and crudity. Nonetheless, questions of plagiarism and immaturity pale into insignificance beside the undoubted fact that Wagner has succeeded with breathtaking skill in introducing his archetypal scene into the piece and, as it were, fixing it once and for all. In brief, the plot revolves around Leubald’s infatuation with Adelaide. At this stage he does not know that her father, Roderich, secretly poisoned Leubald’s own father. But his father then appears to him as a ghost to demand revenge not only on Roderich but on his whole clan. It is not long before Leubald does as his father’s ghost bids and murders Roderich and his family. Only Adelaide, who has been hopelessly in love with Leubald since their earlier brief encounter, is able to escape. Even though her father informs her with his dying breath that it is Leubald who has visited so terrible a punishment on her family, nothing will sway her in her love for him.
But Leubald himself grows increasingly unhinged as it becomes clear to him that Adelaide belongs to the very family that he has sworn to destroy. His father’s ghost continues to urge him to acts of bloody revenge, driving him to the point of madness and persuading him to consult a witch in the hope of exorcising his father’s spirit. But in the witch’s mirror he sees himself lying lifeless in his dead lover’s arms, whereupon he kills the witch. He is then pursued by a whole army of ghosts demanding his own blood in addition to that of Adelaide. In his deluded frenzy he fatally injures her and dies in her arms.21
On the basis of this outline scenario it is possible to reconstruct an archetypal scene grounded as much in the ancient Greek legend of Hero and Leander as in Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet: love is invariably bound up with tragedy, and ultimate union is possible only in death. It is against this background that we should see Wagner’s drama about Leubald and Adelaide: two lovers united by destiny are destroyed by the hostility between their two families. In the case of Leubald, Wagner took over this structural obstacle from Romeo and Juliet. Although it was to assume different forms in his later stage works, it remains ever present. Only the emphasis was to change, for alongside the t
ragedy that is found when the lovers’ happiness is thwarted we increasingly find the sense of foreboding inherent in love itself. This is what Wagner was referring to in the case of the Ring, when he spoke of the way in which the “love which alone brings happiness” had emerged “in the course of the myth as something utterly and completely destructive.”22 In the 1865 prose draft of Parsifal, the hero similarly announces that “strong is the magic of him who desires, but stronger is that of him who renounces.”23
It would be naïve to assume an unthinking connection between Wagner’s archetypal scene and his childhood reminiscences concerning the “wildest anarchy” of his upbringing, to say nothing of his unsatisfactory bond with his mother, the lack of intimacy within the family circle, and his uncertain picture of his father. After all, there are enough imaginative people in the world who have a similar childhood but who do not feel impelled to write plays on the subject. At the same time, Wagner was not dependent on the circumstances of his own life in his quest for models for this scene: the motif of Hero and Leander is found not only in the writings of his favorite authors from Sophocles to Shakespeare and Schiller but also in the gothic novels and dramas about fate by many of his contemporaries. And yet it is difficult not to be impressed by the young Wagner’s powers of self-portrayal and his ability to impose a sense of structure on his life and art. And our admiration increases when we note how consistent is his continuing commitment to his plan to turn his own private myth into one that is universal in its appeal.
What was still missing was the music. But even while he was working on Leubald, it was already becoming clear to Wagner that a spoken drama was not enough, for although such a work might exorcise the anarchy of an existence overshadowed by baleful ill fortune, it could not redeem such a life. Wagner was not joking when, years later, while he was working on Götterdämmerung, he noted with a sigh: “I am no composer, [. . .] I wanted only to learn enough to compose Leubald und Adelaïde.”24 Even at that early date he needed music to open up the drama to the world of myth, for in his eyes myth alone was capable of propelling it in the direction of “redemption.”
Within days of this reminiscence of Leubald, Wagner was visited at Tribschen by Nietzsche, and the two men discussed Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, prompting Wagner to comment: “One has only to compare Beaumarchais’s (incidentally excellent) play with Mozart’s operas to see that the former contains cunning, clever, and calculating people who deal and talk wittily with one another, while in Mozart they are transfigured, suffering, sorrowing human beings.”25 A year earlier, while working on a particularly somber passage in act 3 of Siegfried, he had told Cosima that “music transfigures everything, it never permits the hideousness of the bare word, however terrible the subject.”26
Even as a fifteen-year-old boy whose technical abilities were nowhere near good enough for him to set Leubald to music, Wagner was already dimly aware that his future lay in the field of music drama. He was not simply a composer. Rather, his musical creativity would be fired by the stage—one is almost tempted to say that this was the only way in which it would be fired. In Opera and Drama he described music explicitly as a “woman” who may have needed the poet to “impregnate” her, but who ultimately “gives birth” to the musical drama on her own.27
It is against this background that we should see Wagner’s encounter with Beethoven’s music in 1827—the year of Beethoven’s death. If Wagner had any clearer ideas about the music he planned to write for Leubald, then those ideas may have been inspired by Beethoven’s incidental music to Goethe’s Egmont, which would from an early date have encouraged him to believe that music and drama could be combined to create a unique new synthesis of the arts.
But he needed a practical basis on which to implement this idea. A gothic drama like Leubald, in which the lovers’ ultimate death was preceded by a veritable spree of serial killings and by scenes of sexual violence, chuckle-headedness, and ghostly apparitions, was hardly suited to such a treatment. At the same time Wagner needed a knowledge of music. He was in fact already attempting to learn the fundamentals of composition, initially on his own and then, willingly or otherwise, through private lessons. It was on this basis that he wrote his first songs, sonatas, and overtures between 1829 and 1832. Although most of these early works have been lost, one of them has survived in the form of a Symphony in C Major (WWV 29). It was even performed at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in January 1833 and, according to a letter that Wagner wrote to his publisher in March 1878, continued to engage his “powerful interest” to such an extent that only weeks before his death in 1883 he conducted a performance of it at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice as a birthday present for his wife.28
Following the success of his symphony, the nineteen-year-old Wagner felt ready to face the challenges of his first opera, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), the subject of which was inspired by Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen (The Age and Essence of Chivalry) by the German medievalist and folklorist Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büsching: Ada and Arindal are planning a conventional wedding, but on the eve of the ceremony she is almost raped by one of the wedding guests, Kadolt. She manages to force her attacker onto the balcony and catapults him over the parapet. But at his funeral service she sinks lifeless beside his body.
Wagner later destroyed the libretto of Die Hochzeit, but it seems clear from his incomplete account of its plot that in death Ada is united with the man with whom she had secretly been smitten—namely, Kadolt.29 If so, the story bears striking similarities to Wagner’s archetypal scene in which desire is associated with tragedy, and union is possible only in death. But Wagner’s favorite sister, Rosalie, was so appalled by its antinuptial message that Wagner quickly abandoned the project: without the support of his sister, who was one of the stars of the Leipzig stage in addition to being the family’s principal breadwinner and spokesperson, the work of the inexperienced twenty-year-old composer stood little chance of acceptance.
Astonishingly, Wagner not only took over the names of Ada and Arindal when drafting a libretto for his next opera, Die Feen (The Fairies), he also—and above all—remained true to his archetypal scenario: while trying to make amends to his sister and the rest of his family, he was evidently not prepared to do anything that would compromise his calling. On this occasion no rival seeks to interpose himself into a legitimate relationship. Rather, the plot revolves around the clash between the fairy realm and the world of human beings: the King of the Fairies looks askance at the fact that the fairy Ada is happily married to Arindal, the mortal king of Tramond. He agrees to release her into the world of human beings only on condition that Arindal pass a series of tests, but these are so cruelly demanding that Arindal fails, whereupon Ada is turned to stone. The spell is broken by music when Arindal’s enchanted singing restores his bride to life and he can belong to her for all eternity as the immortal ruler of the fairy kingdom. The work ends with a chorus of celebration:
Ein hohes Loos hat er errungen,
Dem Erdenstaub ist er entrückt!
Drum sei’s in Ewigkeit besungen,
Wie hoch die Liebe ihn beglückt!
[He’s won a great reward indeed and shaken off this mortal coil. And so until the end of time we’ll sing of love’s most joyous boon!]
But is there really cause for celebration here? In ending the work on this note, Wagner departed radically from his source in Carlo Gozzi’s La donna serpente. In Gozzi’s tragicomic fairy tale, the female protagonist becomes human alongside her human husband, whereas Arindal, having led a relatively unhappy life in his earthly kingdom, is spirited away to fairyland and to a world that is evidently superior to the one he has left behind. The moral of the story is that for mortals true happiness in love can be found only in a world beyond our own.
This is a conciliatory variant of Wagner’s archetypal scene, for although the characters are denied happiness in the human world, there is at least the prospect of a higher world by way of consolation. And it almost goes without saying that it is music that mak
es this conciliatory ending possible, for it is music that allows Arindal to gain access to the higher world.
In Die Feen, “redemption through music” is first and foremost dramaturgical in character: musically speaking, Wagner is less successful at depicting the redemptive function of music than he was to be in Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) and Tristan und Isolde or at the end of Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). At the same time we have no reason to be patronizing toward a work which, however much it may reflect the influence of Spohr, Weber, or Marschner, has been described by Carl Dahlhaus as one of “the typical products of a composing kapellmeister who made ready use of ideas from various quarters.”30 Other representatives of what was then the new medium of the German-language “grand romantic opera,” as Wagner called Die Feen, were likewise struggling at this time to produce works capable of meeting the demands of the sentimental German singspiel in the tradition of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) and Der Freischütz, while not forfeiting the verve that audiences found so appealing in the operas of Bellini and Auber.
The twenty-year-old Wagner proved surprisingly adept at achieving this twofold aim, and in his depiction of mystic events using “‘magic’ combinations of chords,”31 he stumbled upon “the foundations of his own genius.”32 The magic formula of the overture’s opening bars recalls not only Die Zauberflöte but also the opening of Mendelssohn’s inspired overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a piece that Wagner presumably already knew at this time. In later life Wagner sought to distance himself from Die Feen, while nonetheless stressing its importance as an example of the “sacred seriousness” of his “original feelings.”33