Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  In Wagner’s case, the gloomy and eerily morbid scenario is combined with the blissful transcendence of music that lends a greater luster to the human experience of adventure and love than the subject matter would suggest. Whether or not we agree with Ernst Bloch and hail it as the utopian power of all great music or—again echoing Bloch—respond to it as “conveying a sensational message in the best sense,”45 it is no accident that Der fliegende Holländer remains a powerful draw even among non-Wagnerians.

  In future, too, Wagner would succeed in clothing a mood of universal destruction in music of beguiling beauty. But never again would he be able to invest his music with such wild freshness. No doubt he was able to do so only because he was a young and literally hungry composer who, however much he may have despaired of the conditions in which he found himself, believed almost naïvely in his own future. Even by Tannhäuser he was already striking a more measured note—it is enough to compare their two overtures to appreciate the truth of this claim.

  A Word about Heinrich Heine

  Until the 1840s, when Wagner moved back to Dresden, relations between him and Heinrich Heine were amiable in the extreme—otherwise it is simply not possible to explain how he was able to write the following passage in a review that he submitted to the Dresden Abend-Zeitung, to which he began to contribute in February 1841:

  [In Germany] much has been written about an embarrassing affair affecting the poet Heinrich Heine; it seems that people are extraordinarily pleased about what has happened. [. . .] We Germans are clearly a generous nation! We see a talent rise up in our midst, the like of which is rare in Germany. [. . .] But we clap our hands for very joy when this same Heine finally receives the kind of treatment that we practice at home on our penny-a-liners! And in Germany we do so with such a rabid desire for scandal that we do not even have the time to ascertain the facts of so sad an affair, preferring to see in it, rather, the poet’s just deserts.1 The affair in question became known in Germany as the Ohrfeigenaffaire—literally, “the affair of the cuff on the ear.” In an invective directed at Ludwig Börne, Heine had made fun of a relationship between Börne, his lady friend Jeanette Wohl, and Salomon Strauß, whom she later married. Strauß immediately took Heine to task and may even have struck him in the street. But it was above all the ensuing duel, from which both participants escaped with only minor injuries, that excited the ridicule of the press. Wagner even suggested to his readers in Dresden that as a result of the duel Heine was close to death.

  It is entirely possible that it was Heine himself who prompted Wagner to go on the attack, for the two men were personally acquainted, having been introduced to each other by Heinrich Laube. Both had elected to live in Paris, and they shared a bond in their sympathy for the political and artistic theories of the Young Germany movement. Moreover, Wagner had not only modeled Der fliegende Holländer on one of Heine’s writings but had even set to music Heine’s poem The Two Grenadiers—though out of regard for local audiences in Paris, he used a French translation of the poem.

  On his return to Germany in 1842, Wagner had no qualms about submitting an autobiographical sketch to Laube’s Zeitung für die elegante Welt, from which it is clear that he had found in Heine’s Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski everything he needed to transform the legend into the basis of an opera. Only after 1849 and the failure of the Dresden Uprising did Wagner change his tack. Neither in his autobiography, My Life, nor in the version of his autobiographical sketch that he prepared for publication as part of his collected writings in 1871 is Heine’s name mentioned in the context of Der fliegende Holländer. Instead, Wagner claims that the opera marked his Pauline conversion from a “critical man of letters” to an “artist,” allowing him to cast aside the frivolous features of Das Liebesverbot once and for all.2 At the same time, he insisted that it was a “folk poem” about the Dutchman that had been his most important source.3 This was a claim that he owed to his newfound faith in the mythopoeic power of the people.

  At the same time, the anti-Semitism that Wagner espoused after 1848–49 played its part, with the result that Heine—a writer he had formerly admired—was now tarred with the same brush. Although he had earlier set The Two Grenadiers, Wagner now vented his spleen on those composers who set Heine’s “versified lies” to music.4 In spite of these strictures, Wagner continued to find “things of incomparable genius” in Heine’s writings: on the one hand, they represented “the bad conscience of our whole era, [. . .] the most unedifying and demoralizing matters one can possibly imagine,” while at the same time “one feels closer to him than to the whole clique he is so naïvely exposing.”5

  This “clique” inevitably included Meyerbeer, whom Heine had no hesitation in attacking in a particularly undignified way: the beneficiary of Meyerbeer’s financial largesse, he began by praising Les Huguenots, while simultaneously demonstrating his power as a journalist by means of little digs at his benefactor. But when Meyerbeer—known for his generosity and, like most members of his profession, open to bribery—began to withhold his payments, Heine threatened to humiliate him publicly. And even after Heine’s death in 1856, his widow, Mathilde, extorted a large sum of money from the pathologically insecure Meyerbeer in return for the assurance that she would withhold a number of lampoons that were directed against him.

  Wagner’s bust has been in Walhalla—the temple to German art near Regensburg—since 1913, Heine’s since 2010.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Rituals to Combat Fear and Loneliness

  TANNHÄUSER UND DER SÄNGERKRIEG AUF WARTBURG

  Wagner’s return to Germany—Discovery of the subject of Tannhäuser—Manifold strands in the plot—The ideological gulf between Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser—The German Middle Ages as a source of nationalist ideas—Catholic elements—Contradictions in the redemption motif—The Venusberg: natural or perverted sexuality?—Wagner’s dream about Nietzsche’s contempt for the work—The Paris version—Baudelaire’s décadent view of the opera—Attempts at deconstruction: Tannhäuser as a man driven to extremes and finding support in ritual—Adolescent enthusiasm for Tannhäuser on the part of Schweitzer and Brecht—Specific features of the score—Advanced harmonic writing and the use of sonority—The Bacchanal from an aesthetic point of view and as a commodity—The genre of “tone painting”—Tannhäuser’s Pilgrimage and the Rome Narration as the work’s artistic and dramatic high points—On the road to the musical drama

  Photographed in the spring of 1860 in the Paris studio of Pierre Petit & Trinquart, this is the first surviving photographic portrait of Wagner. Even at this date Wagner already preferred to cast himself in the role of Wotan, prompting him to write to Mathilde Wesendonck on May 23, 1860: “Without my being aware of it, the brute of an artist thought it appropriate to force me into a highly affected pose, with my eyes cocked sideways: I loathe the resulting portrait and told him that it made me look like a sentimental Marat” (SB 12:164). (Photography courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: N 1279.)

  What dismal experiences Herr Richard Wagner was forced to endure when, heeding the voice of reason and of his stomach, he sensibly abandoned his dangerous project of gaining a foothold on the French stage and fluttered back home to the land of German potatoes.”1 Who could have written these lines but Heinrich Heine, a man never at a loss for a wounding witticism? And he was right. Wagner had been forced to admit that no Paris theater was interested in either Rienzi or Der fliegende Holländer and that he could no longer bear to remain in the capital of European culture, to which he had been powerfully drawn only a few years earlier. And when two German court theaters—Berlin and Dresden—signaled their interest in these two operas, there was no holding him back any longer. He and his wife left Paris on April 7, 1842, and returned to Dresden, still so heavily in debt that his relatives in the city had to advance his travel expenses.

  He no longer coveted international fame but wanted only to be German—to think like a German and to serve th
e cause of German art. Even in Paris he had already drawn inspiration from the subject of Tannhäuser—not in the modernized adaptation by Ludwig Tieck, whom he accused of “coquettish mysticism and Catholic frivolity,”2 but in the form of a simple “chapbook” like the version found in Ludwig Bechstein’s collection of Thuringian legends. Fired by the “involuntary urge” to embrace all that he felt to be “German” “with an increasingly inner warmth and desire,” Wagner alighted on “the simple account of this legend based on the ancient, well-known ballad of Tannhäuser.”3

  On passing the Wartburg castle “during the only sunlit hour” of his journey back to Dresden, he “constructed” the relevant scene in the final act of his new opera—or so he later claimed in his autobiography.4 Soon afterward he had the idea of combining the legend of Tannhäuser at Venus’s court in the Venusberg with that of the song contest at the Wartburg but needed more time to examine the various sources before he drafted his libretto in the early part of 1843. By then both Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer had been staged in Dresden. Rienzi, indeed, was so successful that in February 1843 Wagner was appointed court kapellmeister—a good enough reason to embrace the German national, Catholic mentality of the local court, a shift in outlook that may not have been as opportunistic as it seems to us now but which could certainly not have been predicted after Der fliegende Holländer.

  Tannhäuser tells of a medieval bard, or minstrel, who, sated with his life of voluptuous pleasure in the Venusberg, returns to the real world. But at the traditional song contest at the Wartburg Castle he again steps out of character, and while the other contestants sing of the nature of love in eloquent, well-turned phrases, he recalls his experiences in the Venusberg, holding them up as an expression of true—purely physical—love. The apostate is exiled from Wartburg society but is persuaded by the landgrave’s niece, Elisabeth, who loves him in secret, to go to Rome and seek forgiveness from the pope. When the pope refuses to grant him clemency, Tannhäuser returns to his native Thuringia a broken man. Only with difficulty can Wolfram prevent him from seeking refuge once more in the Venusberg, which appears before him shrouded in a seductive “roseate dusk.” Dying, Tannhäuser sinks down beside the body of Elisabeth, who in the meantime has died a saint. Her intercession with the Virgin Mary may finally allow him to find “the peace of the blessed.”

  This brief summary of the opera’s contents fails to bring out the explosive nature of the subject matter, which emerges only from its biographical and conceptual context. In reconstructing his artistic development Wagner drew a clear line between Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer. We do not have to question this assessment to see a further momentous caesura between Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser, even if such a break remained more or less hidden from the composer himself. The Ur-Holländer is as concise as it is inspired: it tells the story of a man driven from pillar to post and under a curse, a man who discovers “redemption through destruction” only as a result of a woman’s willingness to sacrifice her own life for his. The narrative avoids all superfluous flourishes: the nature of the Dutchman’s curse is not explained, and no attempt is made to invest the couple’s leap into oblivion with any psychological depth. The “myth”—which is how Wagner classifies these events—is unmotivated and ahistorical. It is the myth of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, a myth no less lapidary than that of Prometheus, who is punished by the gods for his pride.

  We may also be reminded of Sisyphus, who for the rest of time was made to atone for his guile and treachery. And we may further recall the philosophy of the theater of the absurd that Camus defined by reference to this figure: in a nonsensical world, we humans seek in vain to invest our lives with a sense of meaning. Wagner’s solution to the problem was to believe that we may be pleased when death finally releases us from our sufferings. Ever since the days of the early romantics, it had been possible to identify with this vague feeling of negative sublimity. Every individual fate could be effortlessly incorporated into it, something of the absurdity of existence continuing to resonate in the twentieth century in the characters of Kafka and Beckett.

  From this point of view, Tannhäuser may be seen as a second Dutchman, for he too is a man hounded by destiny and, dependent on a woman’s willingness to sacrifice herself for him, able to find redemption only in death. But the timeless and unfathomable events that unfold in Der fliegende Holländer and that evince the simplest of structures are given a historical and social context in Tannhäuser and located within a space in which the depicted phenomena are brightly lit. But the more basic this process, the more obviously the action becomes caught up in contradictions, the more ideological its context becomes, and the more the music has to struggle not to lose sight of the overall drama as a result of the sheer variety that informs its manifold episodes.

  First and foremost there is the matter of the work’s “Germanness.” Scarcely had Wagner set foot on German soil and, having acquired the status of a well-paid kapellmeister, started to enjoy a run of early successes in German opera houses, when his artistic leitmotif of “redemption through destruction,” which had previously been grounded in the purely existential, acquired a nationalist dimension. We are no longer dealing with a Dutchman wandering through world history under the impulse of timeless instinctual drives in the spirit of Schopenhauer. No, Tannhäuser is “a German from head to toe,” as Wagner insisted in a letter to the Berlin critic Karl Gaillard, before going on: “May he be capable of winning me the hearts of my fellow Germans in far greater numbers than my earlier works have succeeded in doing!”5

  This nationalist impulse also helps to explain why Wagner combined the legend of Tannhäuser in the Venusberg with the legends surrounding the song contest at the Wartburg. Carl Dahlhaus has pointed out that the contest, which makes up most of act 2, would be nothing more than an “effective tableau” “filled with theatrical parades” of no real consequence to the action if the relationship between Tannhäuser and Elisabeth were not spelt out and defined here.6 By declaiming his offensive song in praise of Venus, Tannhäuser “stabs” Elisabeth “to the heart,” “exulting” as he does so. In that way he prepares the ground for her assumption of a martyr’s crown and his own ability to find peace in death. It is entirely possible that Wagner would have been able to present this dramaturgically important element in the story without a song contest, if he had not needed the contest to stress the German aspects of his opera. In his autobiography, he noted retrospectively that a monograph on Der Wartburgkrieg—a didactic poem from the late thirteenth century—had shown him “the German Middle Ages in a significant coloring,” a quality of which he had by his own admission been ignorant until that date.7

  As a result, the second act is set in the great banqueting hall of the venerable Wartburg, where the Landgrave of Thuringia, apostrophized as the “protector of art,” acclaims the assembled knights and minstrels:

  Wenn unser Schwert in blutig ernsten Kämpfen

  stritt für des deutschen Reiches Majestät,

  wenn wir dem grimmen Welfen widerstanden

  und dem verderbenvollen Zwiespalt wehrten:

  so ward von euch nicht mind’rer Preis errungen.

  [When in deathly earnest battles our sword fought for the majesty of the German Empire and we resisted the grim-hearted Guelf and prevented disastrous discord, you won no less praise for yourselves.]

  The doyen of aristocratic singers, Wolfram von Eschenbach, rises to this challenge in the opening lines of his reply:

  Blick’ ich umher in diesem edlen Kreise,

  welch’ hoher Anblick macht mein Herz erglüh’n!

  So viel der Helden, tapfer, deutsch und weise,—

  ein stolzer Eichwald, herrlich, frisch und grün.

  [When I gaze around me in this noble circle, what a lofty sight sets my heart ablaze! So many heroes, doughty, German and wise—a proud forest of oaks, glorious, fresh and green.]

  In writing these lines, Wagner was echoing the spirit of the age at a time when i
t was fashionable to appeal to German history and glorify Germanic virtues in a language in which the “German oak” figured prominently. And this was true of every ideological and philosophical camp. It is no accident that in 1842 Schumann, for example, admitted to the critic Carl Koßmaly: “Do you know my morning and evening prayer as an artist? It is German opera.”8 And yet it is impossible not to be impressed by the resolve with which Wagner invested the subject matter—still called The Mount of Venus in the prose draft of 1842—with a markedly “German” component by introducing the Wartburg song contest. And this had consequences for the music: in Wagner’s hands the world of the Wartburg was transformed into a tableau with positive, affirmative features familiar from the grand operas that he affected to despise. An onstage band, elaborate choruses, and insertion arias are entirely comparable in their basic outline to Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable,9 and as such they have always appealed to their audiences. Of course, Wagner achieves far more than that in Tannhäuser, but the largely unquestioning display of pomp and pageantry in act 2 undoubtedly confirms the impression left on Max Maria von Weber—the son of the composer of Der Freischütz, Carl Maria von Weber—at the Dresden premiere in 1845: “Not even the most willing and most lively imagination of a later generation can conceive the extent to which this work struck its early listeners as a mixture of the great, the sublime, and the beautiful and, at the same time, the bizarre, the artistically well-nigh impossible, and even the trivial and almost laughable.”10

  There is another instance of the “significant color” with which the German Middle Ages is invested in Tannhäuser—this is a quality that Wagner called the “purely human” and that was gaining increasing importance in his thinking. Ultimately the sinful hero receives absolution not from the pope in Rome who, in keeping with the traditional narrative, remains implacable, but from Elisabeth, a German saint, who finds a way out of the impasse and—or so the libretto would seem to imply—intercedes with Heaven and gains forgiveness for Tannhäuser.