by Simon Callow
Wagner read the libretto out loud, as he always did, to his friends and colleagues. The effect on them was overwhelming. More than one member of his little audience said that had he chosen to be an actor, he would have been the greatest of them all: people wept, they were compelled, disturbed, elated. And all this without a note of music. Schumann was among Wagner’s audience on that occasion; he was duly impressed. He had no doubt that Wagner was a remarkable composer, but found his volubility exhausting: ‘He possesses a tremendous gift of the gab and is full of oppressive ideas,’ he noted in his diary. ‘It’s impossible to listen to him for any length of time.’ Wagner, for his part, admired Schumann but found him baffling: ‘you can’t converse with Schumann…he never says anything’. Despite the success of the reading, Wagner was not yet ready to compose the music to Lohengrin; instead he immersed himself in yet more study – history, mythology, literature. He was especially taken by the Grimm Brothers’ great compilation of the factual records of German life in the Middle Ages. And, as so often when he wanted to drink deep from the well of German art, he turned to Beethoven, announcing his intention of conducting the opera orchestra, chorus and soloists in the Ninth Symphony.
The proposal met with immediate resistance. The work was virtually unknown in Dresden – the orchestra was nervous of it – no one would come to hear it – the only other time they had done it, it had been an embarrassing disaster – Beethoven’s last scores were known to be the work of a madman, a deaf madman, at that. Undaunted, Wagner proceeded with his plan. But first, before approaching the performers, he had to work on himself. In some mysterious way, he said, he identified with the score, as if it were a fragment of his own spiritual autobiography. This made for an emotional period of study. Anyone who had come upon him unexpectedly, he said, convulsed with sobs and tears, with the score open on his desk before him, might reasonably have asked if this was really fitting behaviour in the Conductor Royal of Saxony. Studying the score helped him to accept something he had previously been unable to admit to himself: how profoundly insecure he was both artistically and emotionally. Working on the symphony would somehow, he felt, exorcise this insecurity, dispel this anxiety.
When he was good and ready, and not a day before, he announced a lengthy schedule of rehearsals with the orchestra. He was determined to ensure that every strand of the work was given its due expressive weight. When, occasionally, Beethoven had, in Wagner’s view, got it wrong, he helped him out, clarifying or augmenting the orchestration as necessary. He worked with infinite patience to perfect the work’s many problematic sections. For the famously treacherous recitative passage for lower strings at the beginning of the last movement, he allowed an astounding twelve rehearsals, so that the orchestra could play it not only with complete freedom but also with exquisite tenderness and inner energy. Mitterwurzer made his electrifying intervention in the last movement, the baritone soloist’s great call to arms – ‘Friends! Not these sounds!’ – with all the flexibility of expression and focus on meaning he had learned as Wolfram in Tannhäuser. For this finale, Wagner beefed up the chorus to 300, reinforcing the Academy of Singing with choirs from the Kreuzschule and the Dresden Seminary, working them up into what he called ‘the correct state of ecstasy’. He demonstrated to the basses over and over again, until his own weak and rasping voice was spent, the feeling of rapture called for in ‘Be embraced, ye countless millions’, the tiny Napoleonic figure urging his forces on to greater and greater heights with a potent combination of high feeling and meticulous precision.
Preparing the performers was not enough: Wagner knew he had to prepare his audience, too, to teach them how to approach the work. Deploying the highly advanced showman’s instincts that were the obverse of his fanatical commitment to high art, he placed anonymous teasers – stories from rehearsals and so on – in the influential Dresden daily paper, the Anzeiger, in an attempt to pique the audience’s curiosity. He personally wrote the programme booklet, filling it with suggestions as to what he believed was the hidden programme of the music, echoing E. T. A. Hoffmann’s technicolored analyses of Beethoven:
At the heart of the first movement seems to lie a struggle of titanic proportions, in which the soul, striving for joy, wrestles against the oppression of that hostile power that interposes itself between us and earthly happiness. The mighty principal theme, which steps forward at the very beginning, naked and powerful, as if from behind some unearthly veil, could perhaps without detriment to the spirit of the work as a whole be translated by Goethe’s words: Renunciation! – Learn, man, to forgo!
Goethe’s Faust was the key to Wagner’s understanding of the music. Throughout the programme booklet he laced his commentary with quotations from the great play-poem, framing the symphony in the epic context of Man’s struggle with himself. Faust, probing, questioning, lurching manic-depressively from ecstasy as he contemplates the wonder of creation to abject despair at the impossibility of engaging directly with its primal energy, is the German Hamlet; Wagner, with his own deep instability, saw himself clearly in the figure of the philosopher. In his Parisian journalism, he had already scornfully rejected rule-bound erudition: formal learning – ‘our German curse’; Faust, too, bitterly dismisses the way of scholarship, which he feels has lied to him and cheated him, giving him mere knowledge without power. Instead, he embraces direct exposure to the dazzling truths that underpin life itself. In Paris, Wagner had started work on a Faust symphony of which only the first movement, a portrait of Faust himself oscillating between ecstasy and despair, survived in the form of an intensely evocative overture; to it he attached a Goethean epigraph:
…The indwelling spirit
Whose temple is my heart, who rules its powers,
Can stir the bosom to its lowest depths,
But has no power to move external nature,
And therefore is existence burdensome,
And death desirable, and life detested.
This is the heroically unsettled spirit he discerned in Beethoven’s last symphony. In the programme booklet, he sought to illuminate the sublime slow movement with a further quotation from Faust’s huge monologue at the beginning of the play, a despairing survey of his life which leads him to the brink of suicide, from which he is only pulled back by the sound of the Easter bells:
I do not ask for joy.
I take the way of turmoil’s bitterest gain,
I sicken, long revolted at all learning;
Then let us quench the pain of passion’s burning
In the soft depth of sensual delight.
Now let your muffled mysteries emerge,
Breed magic wonders naked to our glance,
Now plunge we headlong in time’s racing surge,
Swung on the sliding wave of circumstance.
Bring now the fruits of pain or pleasure forth,
Sweet triumph’s lure, or disappointment’s wrath,
A man’s dynamic needs this restless urge.
Such were the thoughts with which he prepared his listeners for the experience they were about to undergo. This was no mere concert – it was intended to be a life-changing experience. Now, with the intellectual, spiritual and musical preparations complete, it was necessary to ensure that every note of the music so carefully and passionately prepared reached the ears of the audience with maximum impact, so he turned himself into an acoustician, reconstructing the whole concert platform, converting the rectilinear hall into a semi-circular amphitheatre, with the choir raised behind the orchestra, surrounding it.
His work paid off spectacularly. The audience was staggered, knocked sideways by a piece they had expected to find risible. In effect, with this and his many subsequent performances of Beethoven’s Ninth, he not only transformed the reputation of the piece, turning it, for more than a hundred years, into what was universally believed to be the pinnacle of Western classical music, he also invented the modern art of cond
ucting, working with the musicians as a director works with actors, not simply co-ordinating them but compelling them to engage with the meaning behind the notes. Creating the notion of the conductor as puppet master, he aggregated all power into his own hands, controlling every element, infusing it with his own vision, co-creating with the composer. ‘You seemed to me like a god,’ Minna wrote to him after the concert, ‘ruling the mighty elements and bewitching the audience.’ There were fine conductors before Wagner – his fellow composers Spohr, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Liszt had brought formidable intelligence and profound musicality to the task. But Wagner was the first of the maestros, the conductor-wizards, the alchemists of the orchestra.
What he had done, in effect, was to dramatise the music, to make it tell a story: his story. He knew the scale of what he had achieved. By sheer force of will, he had galvanised recalcitrant and sceptical performers and a resistant audience. This experience with Beethoven’s Ninth confirmed in him the belief that if he wanted anything enough, he could get it. How to transfer this success to his proper sphere, that of the opera house? And in particular, the production of his own works? He got close to what he was after in a production of Gluck’s Iphigenia in Aulis, for which he composed new recitatives, re-orchestrating the piece, reshaping it to make it coherent, both musically and emotionally. In preparation for this, he had read deeply in ancient Greek history and culture, becoming ever more obsessed by it. He felt that he could not understand German culture until he had begun again, as he said, from the beginning. He read Plato. He read every extant Greek play, delighting above all in Aeschylus and, perhaps less predictably, Aristophanes. He immersed himself in world history, reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Niebuhr’s Roman History and The History of Greek Heroes and Plutarch’s Life of Alexander. And then, to re-Germanise himself, he moved on to the Scandinavian sagas and the commentaries.
And at the same time, he was composing Lohengrin. It is, like Tannhäuser, like The Flying Dutchman, a story of redemption, but this time illuminated by the irradiating power of the Holy Grail. To express this power he summoned up from the profoundest depths of his imagination a palette of sound like nothing that had ever been conjured from any orchestra ever before. Wagner described the overture in unabashedly narrative and pictorial terms:
Out of the clear blue ether of the sky there seems to condense a wonderful, yet at first hardly perceptible, vision; and out of this there gradually emerges, ever more and more clearly, an angel host bearing in its midst the sacred Grail. As it approaches earth, it pours out exquisite odours, like streams of gold, ravishing the senses of the beholder. The glory of the vision grows and grows until it seems as if the rapture must be shattered and dispersed by the very vehemence of its own expansion. The vision draws nearer, and the climax is reached when at last the Grail is revealed in all its glorious reality, radiating fiery beams and shaking the soul with emotion. The beholder sinks on his knees in adoring self-annihilation. The Grail pours out its light on him like a benediction, and consecrates him to its service; then the flames gradually die away, and the angel-host soars up again to the ethereal heights in tender joy, having made pure once more the hearts of men by the sacred blessing of the Grail.
This is how he conceived of his own music. It was twelve years before he was to hear it.
FIVE
The World in Flames
Credit 8
At the beginning of 1848, as Wagner put the finishing touches to his new opera, the world was falling apart again, insurrection erupting volcanically all across Europe like Holy Fire. Wagner’s old revolutionary sympathies flickered back to life. He had rejoiced when attempts to restore the old dispensation had been thwarted in Austria, where students and workers had fought side by side. Wagner celebrated his newfound solidarity by quickly knocking off an incendiary poem which a prominent Viennese newssheet printed. In Saxony, meanwhile, Friedrich Augustus II responded to events by installing a new liberal ministry, which put a fully democratic constitution in place. Not everybody was convinced. Popular opinion in Dresden quickly polarised between constitutional monarchists and out-and-out republicans. The latter established a party which called itself the Patriotic Union (Vaterlands-Verein); August Röckel, Wagner’s associate conductor at the Court Theatre, was its leading spirit. Röckel invited Wagner to air his views, which – his taste for public speaking having been whetted by the Weber celebrations – he was only too willing to do.
Addressing some 3,000 people, Wagner argued for a form of constitutional monarchy in which the king was an equal with his subjects; as part of the new dispensation, what he called ‘the demonic concept of money’ would be abolished. The speech roused his listeners to wild enthusiasm, especially passages concerning the ‘sycophantic’ courtiers by whom the king, he said, was surrounded: this was particularly gratifying, of course, coming from the Orchestral Conductor Royal and it went round the city like wildfire. The excitement of the event seems to have gone to Wagner’s head. Never popular in court circles, he was now acquiring serious enemies; that night at the theatre he was due to conduct Rienzi, of all things, with its spectacular scenes of popular turbulence. He was warned that there might well be a demonstration against him; instead, he was greeted with a roar of approval. The press entered the fray on the other side, along with the court officials who had borne the brunt of his coruscating oratory; for them he was public enemy number one. He quickly knocked off a letter to the king, pleading thoughtless indiscretion rather than deliberate offence, and was assured that, despite pressure from courtiers, his job was safe. He went to Vienna to try, unsuccessfully, to whip up a production of something of his own there; failing to do so, he seized the opportunity of dropping in on a meeting of one of the most radical groups in the city, blissfully oblivious that his every move was being monitored and reported.
Wagner returned to Dresden to discover the entirely unsurprising fact that there were intrigues afoot to eject him from the Court Theatre. Instead of lying low, he sought out Röckel, now dismissed from his job at the theatre and editing a firebrand socialist newspaper; Wagner felt an urgent need to discuss the political situation with him. Persuaded by Röckel’s arguments, he became increasingly radicalised, connecting his idealistic views of the position of art in society with Röckel’s vision of a world where the power of capital was annihilated, and class, position and family prejudices would disappear. In the new order, Röckel assured him, everybody would participate in labour according to their strength and capacity, work would cease to be a burden and would eventually assume a purely artistic character.
Inspired by all this, Wagner drew up a plan for a national theatre which would be independent of the court, and approached some of the radical new deputies to discuss it. They gave him to understand that determining the position of art, or theatre, in the new world they were seeking to bring into being was a rather low priority. Shortly after, he participated in a musical gala at which he conducted the tumultuous, ecstatic finale to Act I of Lohengrin – the first time it had been heard in public. Trumpets blaze and cymbals crash as the king and his men hail the swan-borne hero:
Raise a song of victory
loud in highest praise to the hero!
Acclaimed be your journey!
Praised be your coming!
Hail to your name,
protector of virtue!
You have defended
the right of the innocent;
praised be your coming!
Hail to your race!
To you alone we sing in celebration,
to you our songs resound!
Never will a hero like you
come to this land again!
The women join in, singing:
O that I could find songs of rejoicing
to match his fame,
worthy to acclaim him,
rich in highest praise!
You have defended
the right of the innocent;
praised be your
coming!
Hail to your journey!
This viscerally exciting, headlong climax to the first act of Wagner’s as yet unperformed piece was greeted with muted applause. Nonetheless, he made a fiery speech, sharing with his fellow guests his vision of how the members of the orchestra might be directly and democratically involved in their own destinies. The applause for this was even more muted than for Lohengrin. Heinrich Marschner, composer of The Vampire, who was sitting at the same table, drily expressed doubts as to the desire or ability of orchestral musicians to function democratically. The revolution in the arts, he felt, would not be so easily achieved. In the streets outside the concert hall, revolution seemed all too probable. They were milling with demonstrators, among them Austrian dissidents Wagner had met during his recent visit to the radical cell in Vienna. They appeared at the theatre one night asking for tickets for Rienzi, which he duly arranged. That night in the theatre, and indeed whenever Rienzi and Tannhäuser were performed, Wagner was cheered to the echo. He had become something of a popular hero. He knew this could bode no good for him, so he was deeply surprised when, during this period of political uncertainty, he was asked by the Opera Intendant to submit Lohengrin for production. The offer was withdrawn almost immediately: the court was now, as he suspected, implacably opposed to him.
Against this incandescent backdrop, he continued to discharge his duties as conductor punctiliously, conducting Bellinis and Meyerbeers as required; but the theatre, with all its inadequacies and intrigues, utterly disgusted him: he was now dead to the job. As the political situation grew edgier by the day, he started writing a new libretto based on a story of which, he said, he had been half-afraid, but which now demanded to be written: the fifteenth-century saga of the Nibelungen, which describes the turbulent life and death of the great hero, Siegfried, against a backdrop of gods and dwarves, dragons and giants. Writing flat out, he compressed the vast mass of material into a fast-moving text, starting with Norns spinning the web of destiny, and ending with Rhinemaidens reclaiming the gold stolen from them by the Nibelungs, as Brünnhilde, lover of Siegfried and daughter of Wotan, chief of the gods, triumphantly conveys her lover’s dead body to heaven in her chariot. Despite its provenance, Wagner’s libretto was no antique fable: in it he was graphically describing what he saw all around him: the collapse of the old world order. Siegfried’s Death, he called it; he wrote as if possessed. And then, as an afterthought, he knocked off a treatment for a play about Jesus Christ as a social revolutionary.