Being Wagner

by Simon Callow

  At the time he first read Schopenhauer’s book, Wagner was at the beginning of an intense friendship with Mathilde, the beautiful wife of the young Zurich silk merchant Otto Wesendonck, who had invited the Wagners to stay with him, offering Wagner generous financial support; over two or three years Wagner’s tendresse for Mathilde seems to have developed into a full-blown passion. Whether it progressed to physical consummation is impossible to know, but there is no question that Wagner had given himself over to a cauterising emotional and erotic experience. Early in his relationship with the young couple, he had written two pieces dedicated to Mathilde – the very first pieces he had written after his long sabbatical since finishing Lohengrin five years earlier; slight as they are, they have a certain unresolved intensity which presages the overwhelming emotions unleashed in Tristan three years later.

  It is, however, by no means certain whether the passion preceded the work or the work preceded the passion. Tristan and Isolde is at least as much inspired by Schopenhauer as it is by Mathilde Wesendonck. The World as Will and Presentation is profoundly preoccupied with aesthetics, especially with music. At times, Wagner almost seems to be illustrating what he has read in Schopenhauer’s pages, notably a passage concerning the essential tension in music, which he says is of all the arts best able to do justice to the nature of the human heart (that is, the will), which forever oscillates between satisfaction and dissatisfaction: ‘The constant disunion and reconciliation of its two elements…is, metaphysically considered, a copy of the origination of new wishes, and then of their satisfaction. Thus, by flattery, music penetrates into our hearts, for it presents the image of the complete satisfaction of its wishes.’ He continues with a description of musical suspension in formal and analytical terms. It is, he says, ‘a dissonance which delays the final consonance’. This consonance is awaited with certainty, which only strengthens the longing for it, causing its final appearance to be all the more satisfying. This, he says, is:

  clearly an analogue of the heightened satisfaction of the will through delay. The complete cadence requires the preceding chord of the seventh on the dominant; because the most deeply felt satisfaction and the most entire relief can only follow the most earnest longing. Thus, in general, music consists of a constant succession of more or less disquieting chords, that is, chords which excite longing, and more or less quieting and satisfying chords; just as the life of the heart (the will) is a constant succession of greater or less disquietude through desire and aversion, and just as various degrees of relief.

  This essentially sexual formulation by Schopenhauer of the effect of music on the listener – its direct visceral power of stirring the soul (or the will) – was so precisely how Wagner conceived of the way that music worked that he was, he said, ‘almost stupefied’ by it. The notion of delayed gratification, harmonically and in the melody itself, as an analogue of human desire, led absolutely directly to the composition of Tristan and Isolde – surely a unique example, as Bryan Magee suggests, of hard-core philosophical argument inspiring a specific piece of music.

  It is almost impossible to do justice to the richness and complexity of Wagner’s creative furor at this point in time. He was forty-three years old, was finally completing the orchestration of The Valkyrie and beginning to compose Siegfried, while germinating Tristan and actively contemplating Parsifal. It took its toll. He was almost continuously ill throughout the composition of The Ring, racked with erysipelas, for which he took endless water and sulphur cures. At such times he stopped composing, on one occasion taking advantage of the interruption in his work to familiarise himself with the rudiments of architecture: he planned to design a house, the cost of which he hoped would be met by the sale of his scores; it wasn’t, but Wagner tucked away his newly acquired knowledge until such time as he might have a use for it. He finally found a cure for his erysipelas – a simple water regimen, it turned out – and resumed composing; but now he was distracted by a tinker outside his house, and various amateur musicians within it, all of whom drove him mad (but provided him with the unconscionable racket of Mime’s forges at work in Siegfried). Desperate for somewhere quiet in which to write, he tried to persuade Wesendonck to buy him a large estate: ‘I gradually created in him a desire to purchase a wide tract of land,’ said Wagner, in a revealing turn of phrase; in the end it cost too much even for the millionaire silk merchant, so instead he bought a nice little summer country house for Wagner’s use, just over the road from the Wesendoncks’ own estate.

  Wagner and Minna, fighting furiously all the while, had the place refitted for all seasons, and moved in: they called it Asyl – asylum, a place of refuge, though with the perpetual running wars between them it must more often felt more like an asylum in its other sense. Nonetheless he continued working on Siegfried Act II, but then, on his forty-fourth birthday, hearing some friends singing sequences from The Valkyrie and The Rheingold, he was suddenly repulsed with the idea of continuing work on Siegfried. Head and heart brimming with Mathilde and with Schopenhauer, it was Tristan and Isolde that he wanted to write – or rather, that he needed to write; as he struggled with Siegfried, a quite different music was forming in his head, demanding to be written. So, in mid-scene, just before the end of Act II, when Siegfried says of Mime ‘Dass der mein Vater nicht ist’ – ‘this is not my Father’ – he suddenly stopped writing Siegfried, scribbling on the score ‘When shall we meet again? RW.’ In fact, he could not forbear from leaving Act II just hanging, so he finished it a few days later, but did not come back to the score for a full twelve years. That is artus interruptus on a titanic scale.

  EIGHT

  Suspension

  Credit 11

  Wagner being Wagner, his motives for embarking on Tristan were neither purely artistic nor exclusively erotic: he had a commercial motive too. He knew that no regular opera house could contemplate staging The Ring, nor indeed did he want one to; only a theatre expressly designed by him could do it justice. Meanwhile, he needed to make money, so an opera with a small cast and simple scenic needs might be a sensible, saleable proposition. Since he was still banned from the German Confederation, he thought of doing it perhaps in Strasbourg, or even Brazil. When an old colleague, now working for the Duke of Baden, suggested that he might do it there, Wagner immediately set to work full time on the libretto. He wrote no music. Before starting on The Rhinegold he had written a simple little polka for Mathilde Wesendonck, followed by a rather more feeling piano sonata, his second: it is the best of his piano pieces. But in November 1857, as a sort of warm-up for Tristan, and no doubt to flatter Mathilde, he set three Schopenhauerian poems she had written.

  The second of the poems, ‘Stand Still!’ suggests the extraordinary intensity between them:

  Roaring and rushing wheel of time,

  You are the measurer of Eternity;

  Shining spheres in the wide universe,

  You who surround the world globe,

  Eternal creation, halt!

  Enough development, let me be!

  Cease, generative powers,

  The primal thoughts which you are ever creating!

  Slow your breathing, still your urge

  Silently, only for a second long!

  Swelling pulses, fetter your beating,

  End, o eternal day of willing!

  That in blessed, sweet forgetfulness,

  I may measure all my bliss!

  When one eye another drinks in bliss,

  And one soul into another sinks,

  One nature in another finds itself again,

  And when each hope’s fulfilment is finished,

  When the lips are mute in astounded silence,

  And no wish more does the heart invent,

  Then man recognises the sign of Eternity,

  And solves your riddle, holy Nature!

  He set two more of Mathilde’s poems, ex
plicitly designated studies for Tristan, quoting the score of the opera itself – or perhaps it is the score which quotes the songs. It is music pregnant with yearning and unresolved emotional complexity – music, supremely, of suspension. Now he and Mathilde were indissolubly bound together in art. Wagner made a luscious transcription of one of the songs, ‘Träume’, for violin and small orchestra, which he conducted with a group of Zurich musicians under Mathilde’s bedroom window on her birthday, in December 1857; Minna no doubt watching it all, remarks Wagner’s biographer Ernest Newman, ‘as suspiciously as Melot watched the lovers in the opera’. Unconsummated the relationship may have been, but it powerfully fed his imagination. ‘As I have never in life felt the real bliss of love,’ he wrote to Liszt, ‘I must erect a monument to the most beautiful of all my dreams, in which, from beginning to end, that love shall be thoroughly satiated. I have in my head Tristan and Isolde, the most full-blooded musical conception.’

  The moment he finished the text of Tristan, he gave Mathilde first sight of it, and then, shortly after, as was his wont, he read it out loud for a small group of intimates, consisting of Minna, the Wesendoncks, Liszt’s twenty-year-old daughter Cosima, and her new husband, the virtuoso pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow. Wagner had known both Cosima and Hans since they were very young. Cosima he had first met at her father’s house in Paris when she was ‘an anxious, ugly child’; Wagner entertained her and the other children by reading them the libretto of The Ring. None of them spoke a word of German, but he held them all gripped, none more so than Cosima. As for Hans, Wagner had met him in Dresden when the boy was sixteen and been astonished by his pianistic prowess. Bülow later became a pupil of Liszt, giving the first public performance of the Piano Sonata in B minor; and it was hearing Liszt conduct the first performance of Lohengrin in Weimar that had decided the young man to give up the law, in defiance of his parents, and become a professional musician. Wagner himself even wrote to Bülow’s parents, urging them to let him follow this course.

  So everyone in the little audience who heard him read the Tristan libretto with his customary brilliance and emotional force had a strong personal investment in him. Each of them, in different ways and for different reasons, was visibly shaken by the story of overwhelming adulterous sexual passion, especially the three women: his past, his present and his future. Wesendonck no doubt had suspicions about Wagner’s relationship with Mathilde, though he said nothing. Mathilde herself was dreadfully upset by the last act, with both lovers dead; Wagner cheered her up by telling her that things normally ended up that way in ‘those sort of stories’. Cosima sat silent with her head bowed; when pressed for an opinion, she began to cry. If Minna said anything, it was not reported, but she knew in her gut that something was going on; the songs Wagner had written for Mathilde can only have confirmed her suspicions – he certainly wasn’t writing songs like that for her.

  Aware of the manifold tensions in Zurich, Wagner slipped off to Paris, for inconclusive talks about a potential production of Tannhäuser. He was in need of a piano, and he knew just how to get it. ‘I say, Franz,’ he wrote to Liszt, with whom he had a voluminous correspondence, largely taken up with the ways in which Liszt could be of assistance to him, ‘I’ve just had a divine idea. YOU MUST GET ME AN ERARD GRAND!’:

  Write to the widow and tell her that you visit me THREE TIMES every year, and that you must absolutely have a better grand piano than the old and lame one in my possession. Tell her a hundred thousand fibs, and make her believe that it is for her a point of honour that an Erard should stand in my house. In brief, do not think, but act with the impudence of genius. I MUST HAVE AN ERARD. If they will not give me one let them lend me one on a yard-long lease.

  The phrase ‘impudence of genius’ must have struck Liszt with some irony. Wagner had discovered that when that great man, now more renowned as a conductor and an increasingly influential composer than as a pianist, recognised exceptional gifts in a fellow musician, he felt compelled to advance that person, even if, as was the case with Wagner, his demands were exorbitant. He must have prevailed on la veuve Erard, because when Wagner met her, she did indeed offer him a piano, which was duly shipped to Switzerland, and from then on followed him wherever he went, battered from without by travel and from within by his savage assaults on the keyboard.

  Back in Zurich, at that same piano, he started work – vaguely, he said, and somewhat hopelessly – on the score of Tristan. He finished the first act in a little over three months and despatched it to the engraver; to mark the event he sent a pencil sketch of one of the themes to Mathilde with a rather steamy note: ‘Everything seems so indisputably true to me, and I am so sure of myself,’ he wrote, ‘whenever your wonderful, sacred eyes rest upon me, and I sink into them. Then there are no more objects and subjects; then everything is one and the same, deep and immeasurable harmony! Today I’ll be in the garden, and I hope to find a moment alone with you.’ He signed off: ‘Take my entire soul for a morning’s greeting!’ Minna intercepted the letter, with predictable consequences. She was quite incapable, Wagner said when she confronted him with it, of understanding the state of mind he had described in the letter, so she gave it what he called ‘a vulgar interpretation’. He advised her not to take the matter any further, but she did, marching over to the Wesendoncks and confronting them with her suspicions – ‘doing’, as she told Wagner, ‘what any wise woman would do’. He immediately packed her off early to a spa she had been booked into; the Wesendoncks, meanwhile, banned her from their house. Minna delivered a parting shot to her rival: ‘I must tell you with a bleeding heart that you have succeeded in separating my husband from me after nearly twenty-two years of marriage. May this noble deed contribute to your peace of mind, to your happiness.’ In this poisoned atmosphere, Wagner sat down at his new Erard piano, and seemed, he said, to drift quite naturally into the nocturnal sound world of Act II of Tristan.

  It was clearly time to leave Zurich. When Minna returned from the spa, Wagner immediately banished her back home to her parents in Saxony, but not before she had enraged him all over again by taking an advertisement in the local papers offering their domestic effects at cut prices ‘owing to sudden departure’. The Wesendoncks left town at the same time, and Wagner set off for Italy – for Venice, which was under Austrian rule, but Austria was a relatively relaxed member of the German Confederation, so Wagner felt safe from arrest there. Nonetheless, the sombre spectacle of the gondolas with their black awnings filled him with premonitions: he felt, he said, that he was taking part in a funeral procession during a pestilence. It proved hard for him to dispel the melancholy which seemed to envelop the city. The police kept a watchful though distinctly benevolent eye on him: they were rather excited to have such a celebrity in their midst, ‘the central figure of the new musical movement’, as the chief of police describes him in a despatch, ‘the begetter of the so-called “music of the future”’. The report continues, ‘as a proof of the overwrought state of his nerves, we may mention that on the day of his arrival at the Palazzo Giustiniani he asked his landlord’s permission to change the wallpaper of his apartment, which was too red for his taste, and the very next day he had the rooms repapered’. He sent for his Erard and his bed; he avoided the social and musical life of the city – though he was not displeased to be regaled by passing brass bands bashing out the overtures to Rienzi and Tannhäuser – and set to work on the second act of Tristan, in which the lovers are united in their timeless ecstasy, sunk in deepest night, until discovered by Tristan’s liege, King Mark. Despite enduring an agonising carbuncle on his leg, and receiving intimations that the Saxon court was applying pressure on the Venetian authorities for him to be extradited, Wagner lingered in Venice through the whole of the winter, alone and rootless. War between France and Piedmont made the situation more and more unstable; troops flooded the streets. The officers made a pleasant impression on him; less so the conscripted rank and file, cursed as they were with wh
at he called the ‘dull servile features’ of certain Slav countries within the Austrian Empire. He headed off back to safe, racially pure Switzerland, to Lucerne; the Erard was sent ahead, by way of the snowbound Gotthard mountain pass, until finally it arrived at the Schweizerhof Hotel and he could begin working again. He felt, he said, like the goddess Leto, roaming the world, heavily pregnant, trying to find a place in which to give birth to Zeus’s children.