Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  By way of a contrapuntal rejoinder, we may end by quoting a critical comment made by Mendelssohn when discussing the soprano soloist in the acclaimed first performance of his oratorio Elijah: “Everything was sung so daintily, so pleasingly, so elegantly, so messily, so soullessly and so mindlessly that the music acquired a kind of charming expression that drives me mad even to think about it now.”8

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Blandishments of Grand Opera

  DAS LIEBESVERBOT AND RIENZI

  Wagner conducting “loose-limbed fashionable French operas”—Das Liebesverbot—His later attempt to distance himself from this early work—A “frivolous” plot in the spirit of “Young Germany”—Minna Planer—“Political” compositions—Enthusiasm for “mass outbursts” of popular anger in the years between 1830 and 1848—The tragic “archetypal scenario” and the comic Liebesverbot—The opera’s disastrous premiere in March 1836—Wagner and Minna married in Königsberg—Minna runs away—Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Rienzi—Wagner and his wife reconciled—Musical director in Riga—Debts—Escape from the Baltic—Rienzi, a charismatic tribune of the people—Hitler’s admiration for the role—“A political game of cowboys and Indians”—Wagner’s characterization of his hero—His aversion to “singing idiots”—Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient as his ideal singer—His views on singers and actors—Meyerbeer and grand opera—Les Huguenots as a “drama of ideas”—Cosima’s failed attempt to turn Rienzi into a music drama—Papo whistling a tune from Rienzi—Rienzi’s Prayer—Adriano’s bravura aria—Adriano as a trouser role

  A caricature by one of Wagner’s friends in Paris, Ernst Benedikt Kietz, dating from 1840–41 and anticipating basic themes of later cartoons of the composer: his imperious attitude, the woman’s long-suffering role, financial difficulties, the material power of music, and the imaginative nature of the total artwork. A playbill held by demons predicts that by 1950 there will have been 3,790 performances of Wagner’s works, a figure far outstripped by reality. (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: N 2468.)

  The “sacred seriousness” of Die Feen was immediately followed by the “frivolousness” of Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love)—or so Wagner was to view the situation from the standpoint of two decades later. Back in 1835, the then twenty-two-year-old musical director of Heinrich Bethmann’s touring opera troupe was working on his third opera. The company was based in Magdeburg but was visiting Bad Lauchstädt when Wagner made his debut in the August of that year. It was a difficult time for all concerned, albeit one that was typical of the age, for at this date in the country’s history there were permanent companies only in the larger towns and cities. Wagner, too, was soon to be thrown in at the deep end. New singers were hired and fired at short notice, and he was required to bring to Bethmann’s provincial company something of the glamour of the Paris Opéra described in such enthusiastic terms in the arts pages of the German newspapers of the period. “Rehearsing and conducting those loose-limbed fashionable French operas, with the piquant prurience of their orchestral effects, often gave me childish pleasure when, from my position at the conductor’s desk, I was able to let go,” Wagner recalled in A Communication to My Friends, his account lacking nothing in graphic realism.1

  By the time he was working on Parsifal, his earlier memories were colored by a sense of reserve that almost smacks of bigotry, at least as transmitted by Cosima:

  When I say I like the Overture to Die Feen better, R. observes that the other (L.-Verb.) shows more talent. He searches out a few passages, but apart from the “Salve Regina” [the duet, no. 3, that anticipates the religious worlds of Tannhäuser and Parsifal] he finds it all “horrible,” “execrable,” “disgusting.”—It is well orchestrated, he says—“That I could do in my mother’s womb.”2

  One would dearly like to know if Wagner really expressed himself in such dismissive terms or whether Cosima somehow added to the acerbic quality of his comments in the pages of her diary. This is certainly possible, but so, too, is the alternative explanation, whereby Wagner was particularly keen to distance himself from his early opera in the presence of the high priestess of his art.

  Anyone listening to Das Liebesverbot in the light of one hundred and eighty years of musical history may be reminded not so much of the title of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing but rather of his comedy Measure for Measure, which was the source of Wagner’s libretto. In other words, the work is more than passably written when compared with the efforts of his contemporaries. The “flickering, prickling restlessness” that he later associated with the score and that he ascribed to French and Italian models3 was a quality he still found so appealing in 1840 that he sought by every means in his power to have the work performed in the Paris of Meyerbeer, Halévy, and Donizetti. While he was working on Das Liebesverbot, he was clearly fascinated by Auber’s La muette de Portici and Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, although little would be gained by scouring vocal scores in search of passages that might have served as detailed models for Wagner’s comic opera, for even at this early date he was already adept at skillfully incorporating heterogeneous elements into his works. According to his own much later admission, even the final scene of Tristan und Isolde contains traces of Bellini (music example 1).4

  1. Bars 3–5 of Alaide’s Scena e romanza (“È sgombro il loco”) from act 1 of Bellini’s La straniera.

  Wagner’s aim in writing his new opera was to sound modern and elegantly cosmopolitan, for he had only recently turned his back on the provincialism of German romantic opera in an essay published in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt on June 10, 1834. Here he had argued that neither Spohr nor Weber knew “how to treat song.”5 In spite of this, Das Liebesverbot not only breathes a French and Italian spirit that in the overture sounds even a little effortful and overexcited, it also contains numbers that are emphatically “German” in character. Note, for example, the Beethovenian and Weberian passage for Mariana in A-flat major in the second-act finale (music example 2):

  Welch wunderbar’ Erwarten,

  Gefühl voll Lust und Schmerz,

  ich zieh’ für eine andre

  den Gatten an mein Herz.

  [What wondrous expectation, a sense of joy and smart, I draw for another woman my husband to my heart.]

  2. Mariana’s A-flat major solo from the second-act finale of Das Liebesverbot.

  In writing Das Liebesverbot, Wagner hoped to throw open the gates on another world while avoiding the danger of being branded French or Italian. His music was not to be instantly pigeonholed as an example of grand opera or opéra comique but to display his original genius. His lifelong fear of being misunderstood in this respect emerges from a nightmare that he suffered in June 1872, when he dreamed about a performance of Tannhäuser in Vienna:

  Suddenly, after Elisabeth’s exit, he heard a cabaletta being sung which he had found inserted in the theater score and had cut; speechless with rage, he leaped onto the stage and there encountered his sister-in-law, Elise Wagner, who said to him, “But it all sounds very lovely,” while he, searching desperately for words, at last said loudly and clearly, “You swine!” and woke up.6

  As for the plot of Das Liebesverbot, the later Wagner simply dismissed it all as “frivolous.” His “grand comic opera,” he insisted, dated from a period when he had broken free from his family’s sheltering hearth and, sensing the bohemian in himself, was enjoying the “motley life of the theater,”7 indulging in intimate relationships with singers in his company and courting its most attractive and successful leading actress, Minna Planer. Initially spurned, he still found it in him to boast to his friend Theodor Apel: “You should also get Fräulein Planer—she has already given me a couple of moments of sensual transfiguration.”8 A year later, when he was feeling more confident of victory, he asked Apel: “What do you think? If I were to deceive her on purpose, would that not be a masterpiece of deception on my part? Or should I become a philistine?”9

  That in
spite of its adolescent aspects, this liberal attitude also had a political dimension to it is clear from the exclamation “Long live Young Germany” that occurs in an earlier letter to Apel.10 Associated with artists and intellectuals, the Young Germany movement had not only nailed its colors to the mast of greater liberalism, it also proposed the idea of social reform in general. One of the movement’s spokesmen was Heinrich Laube, a friend of the family and editor in chief of the influential Zeitung für die elegante Welt, whose support of the politically active student societies of the time and attempts to foment discontent with the reactionary German Confederation resulted in periodic stretches in prison, prompting Wagner to inquire of Apel: “How are things with Laube?—I think of him constantly and am very much afraid for his wellbeing.”11

  The power of censorship was something that Laube had to face every day of his working life and which was shortly to affect Wagner, too. According to his much later account in his autobiography, the municipal authorities in Magdeburg agreed to the first performance of his new opera, Das Liebesverbot oder Die Novize von Palermo (The Ban on Love, or The Novice of Palermo) only on condition that it was staged under the abbreviated title of The Novice of Palermo. Although there is some doubt as to the reliability of Wagner’s recollection of these events,12 what is beyond question is that it accurately reflects the political climate of an age when a title such as The Ban on Love could trigger a defensive response on the part of the authorities.

  If the official in question had looked at Wagner’s libretto in detail, he would indeed have found reasons to be suspicious, for the ban is enacted by Friedrich, a German governor on the island of Sicily who is depicted in an altogether unsympathetic light: during the annual carnival he calls down the full rigor of the law on all illicit liaisons and amorous goings-on, only to be exposed in turn as a hypocrite and lawbreaker. But in response to his fatalistic demand “Judge me according to my own law,” the populace exclaims: “No! The law is repealed! We mean to be more merciful than you!” And since the opera is concerned with glorifying “free love,” the novice Isabella is allowed to renounce her life as a nun and sink into the arms of her admirer, Luzio.

  In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, the conflict is resolved thanks to the intervention of the Duke of Vienna. In Wagner’s case, conversely, the denouement is brought about by a popular revolution, a change that Wagner specifically stressed as a feature of his libretto13 and that is significant for two reasons. First, he reveals himself in this way as a champion of the July Revolution that broke out in Paris in 1830, prompting him to write in his autobiography: “The world of history came alive to me from that day on; and naturally I became a fervent partisan of the revolution, which I now regarded as an heroic, popular and victorious struggle, unstained by the terrible excesses of the first French revolution.”14 When the effects of the July Revolution first made themselves felt in Saxony, Wagner wrote his “Political Overture” (WWV 11), a work that is no longer extant, and shortly afterward he composed two polonaises for the piano (WWV 23) as an expression of his enthusiasm for the wars of liberation waged by the Poles in their attempt to throw off the czarist yoke. Conversely, an opera on the subject of the Polish freedom fighter Tadeusz Kościuszko that Laube had suggested came to nothing.

  In all of this, Wagner was a true child of the Vormärz—the period in German history between the Congress of Vienna of 1814–15 and the March Revolution of 1848. He was born to the sound of cannon fire during the Napoleonic Wars of Liberation and sympathized with the many volunteers who freed their princes from the burden of Napoleonic tyranny but who were now waiting in vain for the fruits of their actions: instead of liberty, equality, and fraternity they knew only despotism, repression, and censorship, a state of affairs all too familiar to composers such as Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, and Schumann. At the same time, however, Wagner’s sympathy for the revolutionary movements of the period was very much in line with the tenets of Young Germany, being anything but concerned with class warfare or even social change, but representing a kind of student cultural revolution with a streak of libertine sensuality.

  This interpretation of the situation is confirmed by Wagner’s own account of political conditions in Leipzig in 1830:

  The undergraduates, who had been in a state of turmoil for some days, assembled one night in the market square [. . .], the proceedings being marked by a certain measured solemnity that impressed me deeply: they sang Gaudeamus igitur, formed columns, and marched determinedly off, reinforced by all other young men who sympathized with them, heading for the university building to spring the arrested students from their cells there. My heart beat wildly as I marched with them to this storming of the Bastille.15

  Fascinated by the “purely demonic element in such mass outbursts,” the seventeen-year-old Wagner also took part in the storming of a brothel that enjoyed the protection of an unpopular local councilor. The next day he woke up “as if from a hideous nightmare,” only the sight of a “trophy in the form of a tattered red curtain” reminding him of the previous night’s events.16

  Wagner’s youthful advocacy of “free love” seems like a theatrical prelude to Das Liebesverbot, the subject matter of which reflects the progressive thinking of the Young Germans: art and culture were well suited to promoting the social trend toward freedom and progress, ideals that would then be taken up by the nation and invested with a whole new sense of dynamism. It is because of this that Das Liebesverbot is the first and last of Wagner’s stage works to manage—by and large—without a hero. Instead, it relies above all on the common people to resolve the conflict that is inherent in its plot.

  This essentially optimistic idea for social change is clad in the guise of a comedy whose music echoes the fashionable style of the age. Other composers would have regarded this approach as self-evident, but for the later Wagner it represented a fall from grace and a departure from the straight and narrow path of his true vocation, with its commitment to higher ideals and its quest for metaphysical truth. Although this may strike some readers as inflated, it is impossible not to admire the resolve with which Wagner went on to pursue this belief in his own mission and to rise above the level of the ideas contained in Das Liebesverbot.

  Free love was, of course, to play a triumphant role in Wagner’s later works, not least in the fate of the siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde. But whereas tragedy was later to become the dominant mode, in Das Liebesverbot Wagner resolves the contradiction between desire and fulfillment inherent in his archetypal scenario by opting for a happy ending in the spirit of the traditional commedia dell’arte. And in the character of the prudish governor Friedrich he holds up a German to public ridicule. In short, the Wagner of the post-Holländer period was no longer interested in the “un-German” frivolousness of Das Liebesverbot.

  The Magdeburg premiere of Das Liebesverbot took place in adverse circumstances in March 1836. According to Wagner’s later account in A Communication to My Friends, the first-night audience failed to understand the subject matter—so important to the composer at this time—because of its “wholly unclear presentation,”17 and, according to My Life, a second performance was prevented from taking place by a fistfight among the cast.18 Although this version of events may be anecdotally exaggerated, it does at least reflect Wagner’s disgust at the thought of having to work with third-rate actors for any length of time. It was at this juncture that by a fortunate coincidence Minna Planer received an attractive offer of work in Königsberg, whither Wagner accompanied her, only to find himself unemployed. The couple were married in November 1836, although this served, in fact, to make the situation worse, for Minna—almost four years older than Wagner—now had to accept liability for her husband’s debts and stand by while the local court impounded their furniture, leaving her feeling so buffeted by the ill wind of fate that after six months of married life she fled to her parents in Dresden—apparently in the company of an admirer.

  Falling lamentably short of the ideals of the permissiv
e Young Germans, Wagner set off in pursuit of his errant wife, his personal misfortune paradoxically bearing artistic fruit when he began to read Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Rienzi: The Last of the Roman Tribunes and felt impelled to turn it into a new “grand heroico-tragic opera.” Writing retrospectively, he claimed that

  from the misery of our private lives in the modern world, from which I could glean not even the slightest subject suitable for artistic treatment, I was carried away by the idea of a grand historical and political event, in savoring which I would surely find a salutary distraction from cares and conditions that could strike me only as utterly fatal to art.19

  In the autumn of 1837 the Wagners—now back together again—moved to Riga, where Wagner took up the post of musical director at the town’s recently reorganized theater. In general, the conditions seemed tolerable, although he was required to cut his cloth according to the tastes of his superior, Karl von Holtei, a writer famous in his day as the inventor of the popular genre of the Liederspiel, a kind of sentimental comedy with vocal numbers. It was to please Holtei that Wagner drafted the libretto for a comic opera, Männerlist größer als Frauenlist oder Die glückliche Bärenfamilie (Men’s Cunning Greater Than Women’s, or The Happy Family of Bears, WWV 48). He even began to set the opening numbers to music—the sketches have recently resurfaced in the form of an autograph short score—but then he realized “with horror that I was once again on the way to composing music à la Auber; my spirit and my deeper feelings were desperately hurt by this discovery.”20