by Simon Callow
Inexplicably even to him, the reviews were deemed rather good, enough to warrant a second performance, but word of mouth had done its deadly work. He peered out into the auditorium and saw just two people in the stalls: his wealthy patroness, a certain Mme Gottschalk, and a Polish Jew dressed in full traditional garb. No one else. As Wagner made his way to the podium there was a piercing scream from behind the curtain: the prima donna’s husband, believing that the very handsome second tenor had seduced her, had punched him in the face, which was now covered in blood. The prima donna noisily remonstrated with her husband, who then punched her too, at which point she went into convulsions. The rest of the company joined in, some on the husband’s side, some on the wife’s; at the end of this fracas, so many people were injured that the diminutive stage manager had to go before the curtain to announce that, due to circumstances beyond his control, the performance would not be taking place; the four people in the auditorium (two more had by then slipped into the circle) didn’t seem to mind at all.
Thus Wagner’s career in Magdeburg collapsed into farce. His hopes of a fortune from the benefit were dashed. His creditors nailed a summons to his door, and, as if in disgust, his brown poodle, which he loved deeply, ran away. The following day, looking out of the window of a friend’s house, where they were hiding from the creditors, he and Minna saw a man fling himself into the river Elbe; then, a few days later, in accord with the odd aura of violence which always seemed to accompany him, Wagner found himself in a large and appreciative crowd witnessing the punishment of a soldier who had murdered his sweetheart. The luckless man was strapped to a wheel and crushed under it, breaking every bone in his body, which was then twisted, still breathing, through the spokes of the wheel.
Time, Wagner couldn’t help feeling, to leave. Minna was already in far-off Königsberg, working in the theatre there; Wagner darkly suspected her of being involved with another man. He got there as fast as carriage could take him and proposed to her. She accepted, but as they hurtled towards matrimony, Wagner found the whole thing increasingly unreal. They fought furiously all the way to the church and continued in the sacristy until the pastor came in, at which point they pretended that everything was going marvellously; that sent them into fits of giggles, from which they found it difficult to recover as they entered the church. The congregation consisted entirely of actors and singers from the theatre, dressed up to the nines; there was not a single real friend among them. The heartless frivolity of the event chilled Wagner, he said. The pastor, at least, took it seriously – maybe rather too seriously, delivering a severe sermon in which he warned them of dark days ahead. There was, he said, a glimmer of hope: they would be helped by an unknown friend. Wagner perked up at this: who was this mysterious benefactor, he wanted to know. To his considerable disappointment, it turned out to be Jesus. During the wedding ceremony itself, he was so dazed that Minna had to nudge him to put his ring on the book. At that moment, he reports, he knew he had made a monumental mistake, and that his life was now divided into two currents: one faced the sun and carried him on like a dreamer; the other held his nature captive, prey to some nameless fear. He noted the exact time at which this thought came to him: ‘It was eleven o’clock on the morning of the 24th November 1836 and I was twenty-three and a half years old.’
His forebodings were quickly confirmed. Neither as an artist nor as a woman was Minna his ideal, he knew that. She had no real talent for acting, and little interest in it; she was no Schröder-Devrient, not an artist, in any sense. All she wanted out of the theatre was to make a comfortable living. She had learned how to ingratiate herself with managements, deploying some fairly intense flirting, while keeping within the limits of respectability – just. She was physically attractive to Wagner, and her down-to-earth practicality and realism were useful. Her domesticity and comfortableness were the exact antipode of his own constantly striving nature and thus the perfect complement to him, but the temperamental gap jarred. In My Life, Wagner analyses all this with more than half a mind on the woman to whom he was dictating it, but it was very close to what he felt. His harsh analysis of Minna is typical of the way his brain worked, its maggoty, obsessive, unrelenting nature, even though the letters he and Minna sent each other tell a different story. ‘Dear Minna,’ he wrote a full seven years into their relationship, long past the first flush of lust, ‘we absolutely ought never to be parted for long; that I feel afresh once more, both deeply and sincerely. What you are to me, a whole capital of 70,000 cannot replace.’ She was not his muse; but he loved the sensual and domestic comforts she extended to him. For many years those comforts persuaded him to return to her; when they were together they often quarrelled; just as often, they experienced real companionship. But was companionship what a man like Wagner needed? In his analysis of Minna, he was, as so often, interrogating himself: what did he want from a woman? His relationship with them was always vexed. He seemed to be looking, not for a particular woman, but for women as archetypes, an unpromising basis for a relationship.
From the moment they were married, he and Minna fought; when they did, Wagner, it goes without saying, expressed himself with savage, vicious, brutal eloquence, making her weep bitterly; he would then apologise abjectly, treating her with an exaggerated tenderness, whose strained insincerity led to further and yet more savage outbursts; and so the cycle went on. After a year of this, Minna ran away, taking Nathalie with her. Wagner tracked Minna down to her parents’ house in Dresden; they resumed their married life. Then she bolted a second time, this time in company with an admirer. Wagner went to live with his brother and sister-in-law, while he waited to take up a new appointment in the distant then-Russian city of Riga, hired to provide the sizeable German community there with the art of which they had been starved. Meanwhile he put all his emotional energy into his next opera, Rienzi: the Last of the Tribunes, drawn from the recently published runaway best-seller of the same name by Dickens’s great friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The hero, a Coriolanus-like Roman tribune who is first acclaimed by the people, then despised and finally burnt to death by them, was the sort of man Wagner could readily identify with, but in reality he was drawn to the subject for one reason and one reason only: he thought it would give him a hit. He planned the opera, his third to be completed, on the grandest possible scale; disgusted with the inadequacy and parochialism of German provincial opera houses, he had no intention whatever of letting it be performed anywhere but on the largest stages in Europe. Giacomo Meyerbeer, the Andrew Lloyd Webber of grand opera, generating one smash hit after another, was his model; Paris, Meyerbeer’s base, his destination.
He meanwhile set off for Riga, to open its grand and well-equipped new theatre. With the giant score of Rienzi more than half complete, he made the long and perilous journey to the Baltic. He was pleased with what he found. The Riga audience had sophisticated expectations of its opera, and were prepared to pay for it; Wagner was able to do much better work there than he had elsewhere. The theatre itself was distinctly state of the art, and he remembered its provisions when, much later, he came to create his own theatre. He was particularly struck by the simplicity of the auditorium, the orchestra pit in which the majority of the players were tucked under the stage, and the practice of lowering the lights in the theatre during the performance. In due course, a repentant and heartbroken Minna went back to him. She joined the local company, playing starring roles, and their domestic life resumed rather more happily than before. They were joined by Minna’s sister, Amelia – a real sister, this time – and, for a brief period, a young wolf. Wagner was deeply fond of animals, and they of him; at various times he carted round a sort of domestic zoo, including hamsters and parrots. Throughout his life he was surrounded by dogs, the bigger the better. They were slavishly devoted to him, and fiercely protective. Wagner was fascinated by the wolf and tried to domesticate it; the creature proved untameable and was finally released back into the wild. After its departure, he acquired an enormous N
ewfoundland dog which he called Robber; he adored this animal, and the feeling was entirely mutual.
Wagner spent two long years in the snowbound, fogbound and rain-bound city. Despite his growing mastery over the orchestra, singers and chorus, the gap between what he was striving to create on stage and what his colleagues were either willing or able to achieve resulted in increasing agitation on his part. He now came to loathe what he disdainfully called ‘theatre people’; he fell out with the director of the theatre and avoided all off-stage contact with his fellow artists. His greatest satisfaction came not in the opera house but from a sensational series of orchestral concerts he gave featuring music by Mozart, Beethoven, Weber and, occasionally, himself; fewer compromises needed to be made when singers and scenery were taken out of the equation. He applied himself vigorously and with detailed thought to the question of building up knowledgeable audiences – ‘true lovers of art’ – while also encouraging the merely curious. Everything must be done to ensure that the greater part of the audience regards the concerts as agreeable entertainment ‘since we all know perfectly well that not every section of the audience has come to worship at the shrine of art’. A Swiss baker was engaged to take care of the buffet arrangements. The twenty-five-year-old conductor with his blazing ideals was also an entirely practical manager. His orchestra responded well to the demands that he made of them. ‘We are giving so perfectly organised a body (as our orchestra may justifiably be described at present) an opportunity to show its strengths…and to develop along independent lines; for what true musician would not be dismayed to be thinking of carrying out routine duties rather than achieving something that was genuinely enjoyable and edifying?’ It was the opera house that was driving him mad. The truth is that he had had enough of provincial theatres; his heart was set on the greater world, and Rienzi, on which he had for many months been toiling, was to be his passport to it. He dreamed only of Paris.
His departure from Riga was abrupt, amidst the intrigues and vituperations so characteristic of him; Minna gave her final performance as Schiller’s Mary Stuart, the proceeds of which enabled them to pay for their travel. Typically, Wagner was being energetically pursued by creditors, so in order to get past the Russian customs officers they needed to undertake an immensely complicated subterfuge, changing carriages and hiding in safe houses. The whole escapade took place under the beady eyes of heavily armed Cossacks. The roads were bumpy and dangerous. At one point, Minna was thrown out of the carriage; she later attributed her failure to conceive during their marriage to this incident. The journey, already quite dangerous and alarming enough, was rendered almost hallucinatory by Wagner’s stubborn determination to travel with the dog, Robber, from whom at no cost would he be parted. The great shaggy beast sometimes loped alongside the carriage; sometimes they managed to bundle him into it. Life would be easier for the dog, they decided, if they were to abandon the carriage and complete the journey by sea, stopping at London en route for Paris, so they smuggled him on board, where he terrorised crew and passengers alike, taking up residence in front of the ship’s grog, which thereupon became the exclusive preserve of the Wagners.
The crossing was, at first, becalmed, and then terrifyingly storm-tossed. Even the crew were unnerved, and began darkly to suspect that the Wagners and their dog had brought bad luck with them. Finally, after weathering these storms, the ship approached the English coast, whereupon the vessel ran aground on sandbanks. As they at last reached the mouth of the Thames, Wagner, despite Minna’s bitter reproaches, fell into a deep and contented sleep, emerging from it shortly afterwards refreshed and full of energy. His powers of renewal remained prodigious to the end of his life.
THREE
Doldrums
Credit 6
London – the greatest city in the world, as Wagner called it – thrilled them. Even the traffic jams were impressive: it took the Wagners an hour to get from Tower Bridge to Old Compton Street, where they happily installed themselves with Robber, who then decided to do a bit of unilateral tourism – strolling back, two hours later, having had a good look at Oxford Street. The Wagners followed suit, doing some sightseeing themselves. Richard was trying to find the author of Rienzi, Baron Bulwer-Lytton, so, very sensibly, he went to the House of Lords; there he caught sight of the Duke of Wellington, and the prime minister Viscount Melbourne, but no sign of the celebrated author. He and Minna wandered the streets, surviving what Wagner calls the ghastly English Sunday, and took a train (their first ever) to Gravesend. Then, with Robber still at their side, they crossed the Channel by steamer, arriving at Boulogne, where they planned to stay for a few days. By remarkable coincidence, the man whose career Wagner intended to emulate – and then eclipse – was there. Giacomo Meyerbeer was, at the age of forty-eight, the most successful and influential composer in Europe, the toast of Paris (Robert le Diable and Les Huguenots, both global smash hits, had their premières there) and also the court Kapellmeister in Berlin. He inspired both the admiration and the envy of his colleagues, not only in the ambitiousness and scope of his work, but for his ability to turn composing into a profit-making concern: he was a shrewd businessman and a master of the arts of publicity, and he had the press neatly stitched up. This was a man from whom a struggling young composer had much to learn, one way and another. During his time in Riga, Wagner had sent him a letter in which he told the great man that ‘you can hardly rise to greater artistic fame, for you have already reached the most dazzling heights; you are almost a god on earth. I am not yet 24 years old,’ he continued, cheerfully ditching his former god:
I was born in Leipzig, and when I attended university there I decided to pursue a career in music. My passionate admiration of Beethoven impelled me to take that step, which explains why my first works were extremely one-sided. Since then, and since I have gained experience of life and of the musical profession, my views about the present state of music, particularly dramatic music, have changed considerably. Need I deny that it was your works, more than anything else, that showed me a quite new direction…
Understandably, Meyerbeer had not replied to this rhapsody. What would he have said? ‘You’re right. I am a god on earth’? Whatever his merits or demerits as composer or as a man, Meyerbeer had no delusions about himself. Having struggled to succeed, he was always willing to help out nascent talent: here in Boulogne, Wagner managed to get an appointment with him without much difficulty. He was impressed by the older composer. Meyerbeer’s Jewishness did not escape his attention; stick in Wagner’s craw though it might, it was no obstacle to his pursuit of him. ‘The years had not yet given his features the flabby look which sooner or later mars most Jewish faces,’ he said, graciously, ‘and the fine formation of his brow round about the eyes gave him an expression of countenance that inspired confidence.’
Wagner brought the libretto of Rienzi to the meeting, along with the score of the two acts (out of five) that he had already completed. Meyerbeer listened attentively and with great courtesy to Wagner’s spirited rendition of three acts of the libretto, and kept the score to study; in addition, he gave him letters of introduction to the manager of the Opéra in Paris and introduced him to his friends in Boulogne, including the great virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles, with whom Wagner spent some pleasant musical evenings. Wagner thanked Meyerbeer in language of some extravagance, bordering on the erotic. ‘The gratitude I carry in my heart for you, my noble Protector, knows no bounds,’ he wrote. ‘I foresee that I shall be pursuing you, muttering my thanks, in this world and the next. I assure you that even in hell I shall be muttering it.’ He signed himself off as ‘your subject, forever bound to you, body and soul’. Later, when things hadn’t moved forward as quickly as he might have hoped, he wrote: ‘My head and my heart are no longer my own – they are already your property, my Master…I realise that I shall have to be your slave in mind and body…I shall be a faithful and honest slave.’ This shameless effusion evidently worked. Even W
agner, who assumed that it was the responsibility of everyone he ever met to advance his career, was astounded at Meyerbeer’s kindness. And of course he never forgave him for it. One of Meyerbeer’s first and greatest successes had been Robert le Diable. Had he lived to see the wholesale destruction of his reputation and legacy that Wagner was to engineer, he might have reflected that in Boulogne, he had met Richard le Diable, his nemesis.
From Boulogne, the Wagners made for Paris, the epicentre of the operatic world. This was the old Paris of 1839, Louis Philippe’s Paris: the Paris of a thousand little alleys and passages, before Napoleon III and his Prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, swept the old streets away. The Wagners stayed in an apartment in the house where Molière had been born, and soon formed a lively circle of acquaintance. Among them was Franz Liszt, whom he had met in Berlin, just two years older than Wagner, but an international superstar, a pianist of superhuman brilliance, who was just beginning to compose music himself. Wagner was at first resentful of Liszt’s celebrity status, but quickly acknowledged the charm, the originality, and the generosity of the man. He is the only individual of comparable power with whom he maintained a relationship that could in any way be described as an equal one.