Being Wagner

by Simon Callow

  But Wagner’s Meyerbeer-brokered meeting at the Opéra came to nothing. He wrote a number of entirely conventional songs for various singers as calling cards; he managed to get a rehearsal of his Columbus overture, but not a performance. He and Minna lived from hand to mouth; so dire was their situation that when one day Wagner’s faithful four-footed friend Robber loped off and never came back again they were actually relieved: it was one less mouth to feed. A little later Wagner’s old associate, the poet-novelist-critic Laube, newly released from the Prussian jail in which he had been incarcerated for his inflammatory writings against the Saxon government, blew into town and managed to persuade a rich friend to provide the composer with a six-month stipend, which provided some relief. Nothing fundamentally shifted in Wagner’s fortunes, however; he started to dream about going to live in America – in Maryland, about whose charms he entertained some imaginative notions. Money was again short. Still toiling over Rienzi, he started sketching a one-act curtain-raiser as a potboiler. He had come across his subject while browsing through the sardonic stories in Heine’s collection The Memoirs of Herr Schnabelewopski, in one of which the hero sees a dramatised version of the old legend of the Flying Dutchman. As Wagner wrote, he found himself fiercely gripped by the material, which engaged him at a deep level; Heine, for whom the story is a mere backdrop to a seduction, concludes the episode with the words: ‘The moral of the play is that women should never marry a Flying Dutchman, while we men may learn from it that through women one can go down and perish – under agreeable circumstances!’ Wagner felt none of Heine’s cynicism. He took the legend very seriously – and very personally – indeed. To him, the story of a man doomed to travel the world restlessly until he was redeemed by the love of a woman who entirely believes in him – who trusts him absolutely – stirred him profoundly. He wrote the libretto in a blaze of inspiration.

  The libretto was speculative, a shot in the dark. He needed ready cash. In the absence of musical commissions, he eagerly accepted an invitation from Meyerbeer’s friend and agent, Maurice Schlesinger, to write articles for his journal, the Revue et Gazette musicale. The tone of these pieces – unlike almost anything else in his vast literary output – is light and witty; accessible and provocative, they are excellent journalism showing him thinking sharply about the state of music in 1839, beginning to form an aesthetic, defining himself against other people. He writes about Italian composers, about his contemporaries Berlioz and Liszt, about the relationship between the public and the artist; he writes with intense feeling about Beethoven, and with great force about German music, whose future he clearly sees as being his responsibility; in ‘On German Music’, he is thinking out loud about his own needs and ambitions, trying to work out how he’s going to take over the operatic baton from Mozart and Weber; the fairy-tale world of folkish innocence evoked by Mozart in The Magic Flute and Weber in Oberon does not seem to him to be the way forward. Though he was profoundly interested in what it was that made German music German, Wagner was no musical nationalist: not a single folk song appears in his music, or ever would. The distinctiveness of German music, he felt, was to be found elsewhere. He discusses these matters elegantly and pithily, but they are clearly of pressing importance to him in articulating his own position – in coming to an understanding of who he was and what he was trying to do. Wagner may be unique among composers, as Bryan Magee remarks, in his inability to write music unless he has clarified his own philosophical position. Here, in Paris, that process begins in earnest.

  In one striking piece, the macabre story called ‘Death in Paris’, he writes about himself as if he were dead, which he must often have felt. It is a mordantly funny self-portrait, depicting a provincial German composer, ‘R.’, who mistakenly makes his way to Paris to seek his fortune, and includes a significant role for Robber, his fugitive Newfoundland dog. R passes through delusion and insanity until he ends up, starving and numb, on his deathbed in Montmartre, making a final statement which may well have represented Wagner’s own deepest feelings:

  I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven, likewise in their disciples and apostles; I believe in the Holy Ghost and in the truth of the one and indivisible Art; I believe this Art to be an emanation of God that dwells in the hearts of all enlightened men; I believe that whoever has steeped himself in its holy joy must dedicate himself to it forever and can never deny it; I believe that all men are blessed through Art and that it is therefore permissible to die of hunger for its sake; I believe that in death I shall attain the highest bliss – that in my life on earth I was a dissonant chord, which death will resolve in glorious purity…I believe in a Day of Judgement upon which all who dared to exploit this chaste and noble Art for the sake of profit, and all who in the baseness of their hearts dishonoured and disgraced it for the sake of sensual pleasure will be fearfully punished; I believe that they will be condemned to listen to their own music for all eternity. On the other hand I believe that the souls of Art’s true disciples will be transfigured in a shining heavenly fabric of glorious harmony and be united therein forever – may such a lot be mine! Amen!

  Like his alter ego R, he felt certain that if he could only achieve one drop-dead, knock-down mega-hit, he could then enter the kingdom of Art. Rienzi was to be that mega-hit. It was now at last – in all its vastness (three and three-quarter hours long, not counting intervals, of which there were four) – finished, replete with big fat tunes, huge public scenes, heroic arias and noisy ensembles in the manner of his ‘noble Protector’ Meyerbeer, on whose influence he continued to rely. His confidence in him was sorely tested the next time they met, when Meyerbeer helpfully suggested that Wagner should write a ballet, perhaps in collaboration with another composer, an idea – or rather two ideas, ballet and collaboration – which left Wagner speechless, an uncommon condition for him. While he was recovering from this affront, Meyerbeer recommended Rienzi to Dresden, an excellent suggestion, because the company had a tenor who could do justice to the massively demanding leading role. There was a problem, though: Wagner had no money to send the massive score to Dresden, so he set off around a heavily fogbound Paris trying to raise extended loans – in vain. A cheesemonger in the Cité was his last hope. Hurrying past the church of St Roch, guardian saint of plague victims – the statue of the saint on the outside of the church, his body covered in sores, his dog at his side – Wagner was startled to glimpse, peering through the dense fog which enveloped the city, his beloved Newfoundland, Robber, who had decamped months before. Clutching the large metronome he happened to have with him, Wagner gave the animal chase all over Paris, but finally it eluded him, never to return. It seemed a horrible omen to Wagner. The whole scene – the distracted, bug-eyed composer, the fog, St Roch, the Newfoundland dog, the cheesemonger, the metronome – combine in a surreal image that in no way answers to the word Wagnerian, but My Life is full of such passages, suggesting a hallucinatory element in the composer’s psyche which should by no means be discounted.

  He finally raised the money and the score was sent. Life carried grimly on for the Wagners. He eked out some kind of a living by transcribing arias from the operas of Donizetti for piano, violin and cornet. No single fact can more vividly convey the depths to which he had descended. Occasionally he went to concerts. He was drawn to the music of Berlioz. Roméo et Juliette, Symphonie fantastique and Harold en Italie, all excited him, but it was the massive public lamentation of the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale for large military band and strings that shook him to the core; hearing Berlioz’s work, he said, made him feel like a little schoolboy by comparison. Meanwhile, financial desperation bore inexorably down upon him and Minna. They moved out of the city into the suburbs, withdrawing from all society; he grew a full beard for the only time in his life. Fun was had sometimes in rare gatherings of friends, where he would give dazzling impersonations of the grotesque vocalisations so extravagantly applauded by canary-fanciers at the Opéra, but there was a bitter edge to the humou
r. Then, at long last, some luck, of sorts: he submitted his libretto for The Flying Dutchman to the director of the Opéra, who liked it, but wanted another composer, Pierre-Louis Dietsch, the theatre’s chorus master, to write the music. Wagner gladly took the money: it bought him time to knock off the vocal score for his own opera to the same libretto in seven weeks.

  And so it was that there in Paris, poor, desperate, angry, isolated – he could barely form a sentence in French – with three massive scores behind him, only one of which had been performed, and that only once, he wrote the first music which could only have been written by him. For the first time he had found a subject that stirred his deepest creative processes. And though the hero was Dutch, and the story set in Norway (eventually – it was Scotland to begin with), the music was unmistakeably German. And when he came to orchestrate it, he summoned up out of the orchestra pit a whole new world of sound. From now on that would be the way it happened for him. After writing the libretto – the poem, as he preferred to call it – he would wait for its atmosphere, its colour, its tonal flesh and blood to manifest itself. Sometimes it came quickly, sometimes it took years. With The Flying Dutchman, it surged up out of him; the terrible sea passage from Riga he and Minna had endured had already furnished him with the idea for the overture. The rest followed irresistibly and authentically. After years of trying on other voices for size – Marschner, Donizetti, Meyerbeer – when he finally spoke with his own, it proved to be a profoundly stirring one.

  There is nothing remotely anonymous about The Flying Dutchman; on the contrary, it is unmistakeably personal. The story of Vanderdecken, forced to roam the world until he finds redemption through love, obviously spoke to Wagner deeply: he could relate to that. But the figure of Senta, the woman prepared to give herself utterly and totally, up to and beyond the point of death, drew from him an act of intense imaginative identification. Wagner is both Vanderdecken and Senta; the redeemer and the redeemed. From now on the idea of redemption – through love, through sex, through God, through art – underpinned everything he ever wrote, with himself in it, right at the thick of things. He is both the one who needs redemption and the redeemer. What had he done that was so bad? And what qualified him to redeem, not just himself, but the nation, perhaps the world? Whatever it was, it was a destiny he embraced, the destiny, as he saw it, of the artist. The artist is he who suffers on behalf of humanity, and whose work is the cure for its ailments. Art was the only hope for mankind. It should therefore be at the centre of society. And at the centre of art was the artist. That was the logic that kept him going.

  In the real world of Paris 1841, he and Minna, very far from the centre of society, eked out what was left of the money from the sale of the libretto. It was not enough to pay for shoe repairs: for a while, Wagner’s boots had no soles. They were always, always hungry.

  More pressing even than physical hunger, his desperation for intellectual nourishment drove him to read the subjects he had neglected at school: history and philosophy. His interest in these matters was not academic. He was looking for something: himself. The humiliations Paris had heaped on his head, and the contempt he felt for what Paris admired, led him to dig back into his roots, to reaffirm his identity and to delve into what he now recognised as the underlying source of all his artistic energies – his Germanness. Reverting to his youthful description of himself as a dramatist, he started writing a play, The Saracen, based on the life of the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II, that universal man – King of Germany, of Sicily, and of Jerusalem – who seemed to Wagner to embody the German mind and what he called its capacity to encompass purely human qualities, beyond the narrow bounds of nationality. This capacity he likened to that of the Greek mind, the ultimate praise from the young Wagner. The central relationship in the play, though, was between the emperor’s lovechild, Fatima, ‘the fruit of the embraces of Friedrich and a daughter of Araby’, as Wagner put it, ‘during a peaceful stay in Palestine’, and his legitimate son and heir, Manfred, King of Sicily. Fatima is revered as a prophetess; when she and Manfred encounter each other, they experience an immense but unconsummated sexual charge. At the end of the play, she deflects a sword intended for him into her own breast. Wagner was nothing if not constant in his preoccupations – the erotic prophetess, sibling passion, impossible love, selfless salvation – but his vision of a multilingual, multicultural German world order belongs to the mindset that produced The Ban on Love, with its embrace of Mediterranean values.

  He abandoned the play when he hit on another subject which was altogether closer to home, expressing both the German spirit and his own personal preoccupations: most particularly the eternal struggle between sensuality and spirituality. In Ludwig Bechstein’s collection of medieval tales of Thuringian knights, he came across an account of the mythical court of the goddess Venus located on Hörselberg (otherwise known as Venusberg, the hill of Venus) between the towns of Gotha and Eisenach; he was fascinated by Bechstein’s description of the minstrels’ contest on the Wartburg, which he connected with the medieval legend of Tannhäuser, the thirteenth-century minstrel torn between the carnal delights of the Venusberg and the hope of forgiveness and redemption. Tannhäuser’s dilemma had recently been the subject of a characteristically sardonic poem in Heine’s extended essay Elementargeister, while the song contest had featured in stories by Tieck and Hoffmann. Wagner absorbed all of this into the compost heap of his imagination. As if this stimulation were not enough, at around the same time he came across a study of the legend of Lohengrin, the Swan Knight, son of Parzival and guardian of the Holy Grail. Here in Paris, a whole new world opened up to him – a whole new German world. The idea of Germany was growing apace. Beyond the classical achievements of the German Enlightenment – Goethe, Schiller, Lessing – there was a sense of a more or less mythical time when all German-speaking peoples were one, united by common assumptions, common experience. There was a distant memory of a pagan past, of a culture of nomadic warriors, whose lives were predicated based on a sort of heroic pessimism: there is no escape, in myths of these people, from recurring patterns of revenge and destruction. Connecting to all of this, Wagner felt his self-respect returning.

  In his imagination, that is. The actual position was that at the age of twenty-eight, he had written four operas, only one of which had been performed, and that only once, and in chaotic circumstances. Three other operas, one of them four hours long, the second six, and the third of more modest duration, remained unperformed. He had no prospects and, cripplingly, no money. But then everything suddenly started to look up.

  FOUR

  Triumph

  Credit 7

  In quick succession, and thanks largely to Meyerbeer’s persuasive championship, Rienzi was accepted for production by Dresden, and The Flying Dutchman by Berlin. In April 1842, after two and a half years of frustration, rejection and abject poverty in Paris, the Wagners set off for Dresden in triumph. The weather grew wintry as they headed eastward, away from the City of Light and towards driving snow and rain, but as they passed the Wartburg castle at Eisenach, home of the Minnesingers’ contest, they found it flooded in sunshine. ‘The view so warmed my heart against wind and weather, Jews and the Leipzig Fair,’ he said, ‘that I arrived safe and sound.’ In which particular way Jews had exacerbated his temper Wagner does not specify – merely by existing, no doubt – but the symbolism of the sunshine in that particular place was profound for him: it was in Eisenach that Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German, and it was there that Johann Sebastian Bach had been born. This was the German heartland, and the sun was shining on it. Once in Dresden, Wagner rolled up his sleeves and got to work. The first thing he did was to start cutting large chunks of the score he nicknamed ‘The Monster’, then started rehearsing intensely with his two leading singers: Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, no less, as the page Adriano, and the trumpet-voiced tenor Joseph Tichatschek as Rienzi. The entire company was enchant
ed by the score; they so loved the rum-ti-tum finale to Act III that whenever there was a run through of it in rehearsal, everyone put a silver penny in a pot for the composer. None of them realised, he said, that had it not been for those silver pennies he would never have survived the rehearsal period.

  The first performance was a roaring triumph. ‘In trying to recall my condition that evening,’ he wrote, ‘I can remember it possessing all the features of a dream.’ The audience, swept away by the splendid tunes, the heroic singing and the spectacular staging, applauded and cheered throughout a piece which, Wagner noted with rising anxiety, was, despite his savage cuts, very long indeed. The first two acts, which included a thirty-minute ballet, were as long as the whole of Weber’s Der Freischütz. By the end of Act III it had clocked up four hours; the final curtain fell six hours after it had first risen. The following day, Wagner went to the theatre, possessed, despite the acclaim he had received, by a blind raging determination to strike out great chunks of what he called his ‘convolution of monstrosities’, bringing it down to a tolerable length. But the theatre and Tichatschek were appalled, refusing to allow him to cut a note. The success of the first night was repeated night after night; even the usually frosty Saxon royal family became fans. It was Wagner’s first success, and nothing of his ever again received quite such unqualified approbation. But even as he was writing it he knew that he had outgrown its grandstanding style; he was already, in The Flying Dutchman, pushing towards a different kind of opera. The Dresden theatre, exhilarated by the unprecedented popularity of Rienzi, now asked Berlin for the privilege of giving the premiere of Dutchman, which was granted; the first performance duly took place a mere three months after the debut of Rienzi.