Being Wagner

by Simon Callow

  Meanwhile Lohengrin, of which he had only ever heard the first act’s finale, was about to be performed under Liszt’s baton in Weimar, where of course Wagner was forbidden to go for fear of being arrested. Determined nonetheless to mark the occasion, on the opera’s first night he and Minna went to stay in a hotel in Lucerne and sat, side by side, watching the hands of the clock go round, imagining each phase of the performance. Otherwise he diverted himself with conducting the modest forces of the Zurich Orchestra – ‘my facility in interpreting music at that time’, he casually remarks, ‘attained a degree of perfection I had not hitherto reached’ – and writing Opera and Drama, in which he makes his most complete statement concerning his vision. He read it out loud to his friends in Zurich over twelve consecutive evenings. Stuffed with the fruits of his reading over the previous decade, it is of almost impenetrable denseness; one can only admire the stamina of those early listeners. He had to write this book to push himself into the mental state necessary to create the vast work he was now planning: a piece of music-theatre on an unprecedented scale – epic beyond anything ever attempted in a theatre – which was both to pioneer and to exemplify the Art-work of the Future. Its basis would be Siegfried’s Death; it would present a devastatingly dystopian vision of human society, built on the ur-myths of the German people: the stories of his tribe. His purpose was revolution, nothing less. Art would once more be the unifying, cohesive dynamo of society, refreshing and purifying its audiences – the People, that is, the Volk. In this it would be the direct heir to the Greek theatre. The work’s profound grounding in German culture would guarantee its vitality and its authenticity. It would return to the roots of civilisation, embodied in the myths; spurning the merely realistic portrayal of human life, it would dig into the archetypes behind the surface, stirring up and confronting the deepest and darkest elements in man’s psyche. It would supplant religion; it would renew democracy. All of this was laid out in Opera and Drama.

  What he said was deeply radical. In the world of opera of 1850, the world of Gounod and Meyerbeer, it was seriously challenging, rigorous, hard-core stuff, as fundamental a rethink as Cubism. Or Darwin. Or Einstein. It’d be pretty radical today. To begin with, it appeared that he was not interested in writing opera at all. He saw himself, as he had done since Leubald and Adelaïde, not as a composer at all, but as a dramatist. All that interested him, he said, was the drama, of which opera as currently practised was a dilution and a perversion, swamped by superficial, purely musical effects. The decorative and the conventional were to be stripped away: texts would be set one note to a syllable; music should fulfil the text, not embellish it; its function was to express character, situation and intention in a series of recognisable musical motifs: character and action alone would drive the work. The job of the orchestra, meanwhile, was not simply to accompany or add colour to the sung texts: it would weave the musical motifs together in an almost infinite number of combinations, commenting on the action, underlining its meaning. Meaning was central to the drama. Wagner despised the idea of theatre as entertainment; but equally he despised the notion of art for art’s sake. The Greeks had got it right, he said. Their drama was a communal act, a sacred event, in which the ancient stories of the tribe were played out, enabling the audience to confront the deepest, most sublime and most terrible truths of human life, producing a profound, an overwhelming, release – a catharsis – which was the whole point of the drama. The Greeks had achieved this with an irresistible fusion of the combined arts of acting, gesture, scenic effect, poetry and music – what he called ein Gesamtkunstwerk: a total work of art. Anything less was trivial and not worth his or anyone else’s attention.

  He knew perfectly well that none of the works he had so far written were in the league of Aeschylus or Sophocles. He would not stop until he had written something that was. This insistence on a return to ancient models was not motivated by reverence, much less by nostalgia. Wagner was no antiquarian. He was not in the least bit interested in resurrecting ancient forms of theatre. He believed that in his lifetime the drama had been emasculated, diminished, robbed of its potency, and that only a return to first principles could restore its force – its unique capacity both to bind society and to transform it. He was very much living in the real, modern world of the mid-nineteenth century, a world in conflict, in which battle lines were sharply drawn in terms of class and power. His purpose was to change that world through his art. This programme of Wagner’s was not only far ahead of his contemporaries; it was far ahead of his own practice, as he freely acknowledged. He spoke dismissively of his earlier works, based as they were on models that he now rejected: grand opera (Rienzi) and German Romantic opera (The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser). Lohengrin, which he had still not yet heard, was a step towards something different, but it was still divided up into arias and ensembles in a way that would be abolished in the Art-work of the Future, which would, needless to say, have nothing to do with opera houses – those desecrated temples, those whorehouses of sullied art. It would need a newly built performance space, erected in a meadow, perhaps; singers and orchestra and chorus would be recruited locally; the whole thing would be free of charge. There would be three performances – no more – of Siegfried’s Death, as he still thought of it, after which he would burn first the theatre, then the score and say to people: ‘If you enjoyed it, go and do it yourself!’ The whole of Wagner’s idealism is contained in this vision, a vision to which he adhered to the very end; it kept him going through the long, bitter decades of struggle and setback ahead of him.

  All of this was entirely new thinking. There were among Wagner’s contemporaries a select few musicians whose seriousness he admired – Spontini, for example, and Berlioz – but no one, and certainly no one writing operas, had thought so deep and so hard about opera or theatre; no one had a vision of its future. Like all true radicals, he went all the way back to first principles, to the origins, both of the theatre, and of opera. His theories, with their strict rules about the relationship between words and music, echo the ideas that led to the birth of opera in the late sixteenth century, though their outcome was entirely different. When the Camerata dei Bardi in Florence set out to reconstruct Greek theatre, they started from the conviction that all Greek classical plays had been through-sung, so they slavishly adhered to the rule of one note per syllable, aspiring to a ritualistic formality of action. But their engagement with the myths was precisely that: formal, not visceral, their purpose to create harmony and exalted feeling; Wagner was attempting to undo the surface, to transcend phenomenological perceptions and engage with the reality behind reality. This was, of course, a profoundly destabilising activity, and it was meant to be. Wagner sought to bring his audiences to his own level of emotional freedom, to sweep away bourgeois inhibitions, bourgeois society’s determination to live behind a mask. Art was the antidote to the discontents of civilisation: freedom was the goal.

  There is a distinctly 1960s quality to Wagner’s thinking around this time, which includes his thinking about being German. Back to nature – back to the good old pagan truths that have been hidden from view by Europeanism, by internationalism, by globalised values. Listen to the earth, feel your roots, man. All of which sounds pretty positive. A question inevitably arises, though: who are these people who have obscured the good old pagan truths? Who are the rootless, the foreign people who have diluted our heritage to the point where it’s invisible? Who are these outsiders? Well, guess who? The Jews, of course, who seemed to be everywhere after their so-recent liberation from the ghettoes – these people with their international connections, who exist beyond nation, beyond history. Wagner started to form a theory; he had theories about everything, and he committed this particular one to a pamphlet which he called Judaism in Music, published some four years before Opera and Drama. It is an alarming performance, but an entirely characteristic one.

  To his apparently genuine bewilderment, the effects of publishing the pamphlet dogged him
to the end of his life. It shows him rapidly developing from the casual anti-Semitism typical of the time into a fixed intellectual position, the dark corollary of his ever-growing embrace of Germanness. It is a remarkable document which offers a vivid glimpse of how Wagner’s mind worked. It is all there: the argument from false premises, the pseudo-scientific parallels, the casual offensiveness, and somewhere, behind it all, a genuine attempt to articulate something that would identify and tap the wellsprings of his own creativity. First he affects an analytical tone, then he becomes condescending, and is finally just crude. With a Hitler-like capacity for vertical take-off, he leaps from mere irrationality to hysteria, laying about him on all sides. He starts by observing with every air of reasonableness that music – the art, he says, rather curiously, which is the easiest to learn – has become increasingly colonised by Jews, but, just as they can never fully master the tongue of the country in which they happen to settle, they can do nothing more than imitate, in hollow and unconvincing fashion, its music. Now, it is self-evident, he notes, that the only art worth anything has to be rooted in its community and its culture; a Jew in Germany is, by definition, a foreigner, an alien, so even when – like Mendelssohn, for example, or Meyerbeer – they are sophisticated and cultured, they are merely posing as Germans, churning out shallow imitations of German art. Mendelssohn, having nothing to express, no roots in his adopted culture, simply hides behind forms created by Bach. This is the same Mendelssohn, incidentally, whose Hebrides and A Midsummer Night’s Dream overtures and Italian and Scotch symphonies Wagner frequently conducted; the same Mendelssohn who had died just three years before Wagner wrote his pamphlet, at the age of thirty-eight, universally mourned as the outstanding musician of his age.

  To Wagner he was the epitome of a ‘vapid, neutered composer’. But the appearance of a Mendelssohn was merely symptomatic of the present age: in the good old days, says Wagner, right up to the time of Mozart and Beethoven, when music had possessed what he calls ‘a real organic life-need’, the idea of a Jewish composer would have been absurd. No foreign element can become part of the life of a truly living organism. Only when a body is dying can extraneous elements become part of it, and then only to destroy it. The body’s flesh then dissolves into a swarming colony of insect life, he says, active, but scarcely alive. The soul of art can only survive in living bodies, and not within what he calls its ‘worm-befretted carcass’. Consciously or unconsciously, he seems to be echoing the words of Martin Luther in his savage 1543 tract On the Jews and Their Lies, in which he describes Jews as ‘poisonous envenomed worms’. The notion of the Jews as a rotten part of the body politic which needed to be excised was enthusiastically taken up by the Nazis.

  In a parting shot, he directs an envenomed dart at the poet Heine, on whose journalistic style he had consciously modelled his own, and to whom he was indebted for the plots of two of his operas, The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser – with whom, indeed, he had passed many convivial and stimulating evenings in Dresden. ‘Whoever heard of a poetry-writing Jew,’ Wagner asks, ‘while Goethe and Schiller sang among us?’ But when they fell silent and German poetry ‘became a lie’, then it was left to ‘a highly gifted Jew’ to expose what Wagner calls ‘the bottomless aridity and Jesuitical hypocrisy of our versifying’; Heine himself attacked his famous ‘musical co-religionists’, mercilessly mocking them for pretending to be artists. But then, having performed this useful service, Heine convinced himself that he was a poet, and was rewarded by having his ‘versified lies’ set to music by German composers. Up to that point, says Wagner, Heine had been the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism was the evil conscience of our modern civilisation. Now he was just another fraudulent pretender to the great heritage of German poetry. Wagner does not mention that he himself had made a setting of Heine’s ‘The Two Grenadiers’. Nor of course does he allude to a remarkably prescient letter Heine had written in 1832, warning the French of the ‘demonic powers of ancient German pantheism’. One day, he said, their German neighbours, ‘fired by a terrible combination of absolutist metaphysics, historical memories and resentment, fanaticism and savage strength and fury, would fall upon them, and would destroy the great monuments of Western civilisation’. In Judaism in Music, Wagner distils many of the elements of the lethal cocktail that Heine identifies with such unnerving precision.

  No doubt he felt a great deal better after delivering himself of it. Not for long; the reaction was immediate and overwhelmingly hostile. Those closest to him were appalled. He read the essay out loud, as he read everything he wrote out loud, to Minna, who was dismayed, and told him so, accusing him of offending whole generations of people who had shown him nothing but kindness. He rewarded her for her honesty by never again reading or playing her anything he had written. The pamphlet created a wave of revulsion and animosity; soon – even though he had taken the precaution of using a Bunyanesque pseudonym: K. Freigedank – ‘K. Freethought’ – it threatened to engulf him. The publisher was hounded nearly to the point of ruin, and the circle of generous friends Liszt had connected to Wagner now abandoned him. He was widely criticised in the press. Commenting on his sudden unpopularity, he remarks casually in My Life, ‘Of course, it must be remembered that almost all the newspapers in Europe were in the hands of Jews.’ His attitude to Jews was increasingly pathological: it was a subject to which he reverted again and again. He appeared to be devoid of self-censorship, seemingly in the grip of a form of Asperger’s syndrome, something that appeared to be beyond his control. In his calmer moments, he told many people that he disapproved of the modern anti-Semitic movement, and many of his best friends – or, more accurately, his closest musical associates – were Jewish. They were surprisingly untroubled by his venomous tirades: ‘there he goes again’, seemed to be their attitude. Where did it come from, all this bile? Had Jews ever done him any harm, or slighted him? On the contrary, every Jew he had ever met had bent over backwards to help him. It was entirely thanks to Meyerbeer’s warm recommendation that Rienzi got its premiere, which firmly put him on the map just at the moment when he thought he was washed up. Heine and Mendelssohn were courteous and encouraging when he was still a young and untried composer, treating him as if he were their equal. His first girlfriend, Leah David, was Jewish.

  The fact is that Wagner was unable to function, as a man or as an artist, without a sense of mission, a sense of being for something which others were – supposedly – against. Having a whole race at his disposal for that purpose was wonderfully convenient. He admits as much in a remarkable letter he wrote to Liszt shortly after the appearance of the article:

  You ask me about the anonymous article, Judaism and Music. You must have known that I wrote it, so why ask? For a long time now I have harboured a growing resentment against the Jews. This grudge is as necessary to my nature as gall is to blood. Their damned scribblings kept annoying me, so at last I fired with all guns blazing. It seems I have hit my target. This pleases me, for all I wanted was to terrify them a little.

  Actually, as far as Wagner was concerned, his comments on Jews and music were completely subsidiary to his main point: the fact – surely incontrovertible, he felt – that German art was in decline. It needed rescuing and he was the man to do it. He was psyching himself up to the role of superhero: only when he believed he was Siegfried would he be able to liberate Brünnhilde; Jews were merely the dragon. Among other things, Judaism in Music was a declaration of independence, a statement of intent: he had now finally ended his long apprenticeship, using the work of others as a basis and starting point. He had found his identity, his method, which was to draw his music from inside himself, nourishing himself in his native soil, sinking deep roots into his culture. As ever, he needed to dramatise himself and his situation in the world before he could believe in it. Now, at last, he was ready to embark on his life’s work.

  On the most basic level, of course, his noxious little pamphlet expressed a sense of profound injustice:
Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn were successful and rich, and he wasn’t. His poverty during his exile and beyond it was grinding and perpetual.

  And all the time, in the midst of this rackety life of scrounging and seducing, hustling and pamphleteering, his creative mind was functioning profoundly at subterranean levels; The Ring of the Nibelung was slowly germinating.

  SEVEN

  It Begins

  Credit 10

  It was a long time before he was ready to write it. Liszt, who, despite his frequent disapproval of Wagner’s behaviour, was unwavering in advancing his work, secured a commission from the Grand Duke of Weimar for Siegfried’s Death; Wagner started composing it, but gave up the attempt, he said, when he realised that there was no one who could possibly embody the Brünnhilde of his imagination. Now that Schröder-Devrient was hors de combat, her vocal instrument hopelessly frayed by the intense expressive demands she had made of it, there was no one else: all the female singers he knew were just fastidious schoolgirls, he said. He needed a truly heroic figure. And as he thought of these inadequate singers, and the woeful insufficiency of the stage as it was, he broke out in a painful rash all over his body. He immersed himself in hot sulphur baths, which relaxed his mood enough for him to conceive of a playful prequel to Siegfried’s Death which would be called Young Siegfried. He started taking greater care of his health, giving up alcohol, tea and coffee; but, partly because of a mood of political despair induced by Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état in 1851, which seemed to him to usher back into political life all the corruption, superficiality and reaction that the 1848 revolutions had sought to abolish, he was depressed, physically and mentally, for almost a year. And then, out of the blue, on 23 May 1852, his thirty-ninth birthday, he sat down to write; in just over a month he had completed the poem-libretto for the monumental work he called The Ring of the Nibelung.