by Simon Callow
And while one love affair, however platonic, blossomed, so did another. When Ludwig was away, Wagner invited the Bülows to stay with him in his splendid house on the lake. Hans was ill, yet again, so only Cosima and their two daughters came; during this time, Cosima became pregnant with Wagner’s child. This consummation had been a long time coming. Not a year earlier, they had admitted their love to each other: ‘We gazed speechless into each other’s eyes; an intense longing for an avowal of the truth mastered us and led to a confession – which needed no words – of the boundless unhappiness which oppressed us.’ Other people’s unhappiness was soon to follow.
Now that he had breathing space, that he was no longer on the run from either creditors or governments, and that his artistic ambitions seemed capable of fulfilment, Wagner began to feel his usual restless energy surging up within him. In such a state, he always needed to unsettle the status quo. Since he felt that his recent good fortune was simply his just dessert, and had been arranged by destiny, he was not in the least circumspect about flaunting it. First he moved into a magnificent new house in town; not only did he furnish it to the very height of luxury, it was minutes away from the house once lived in by Lola Montez, the hated mistress of Ludwig’s deposed grandfather, Ludwig I. The locals drew their conclusions: Wagner was quickly nicknamed Lola II, or Lolotte. He was oblivious; if he knew, he didn’t care.
Next, confident in the unwavering support of his royal best friend, he applied himself with expansive energy to reforming the culture of opera in Munich. He started with the singers: current practitioners, he said, were nothing but ‘a proletariat of the arts’. He needed a new breed of singer, an aristocracy of artists, and for that an opera academy like none other would be required; he set forth detailed and elaborate plans as to how it might be organised. Next he needed, he said, a new theatre capable of accommodating the titanic staging demands of The Ring; both the exquisite Cuvilliés theatre, one of the most beautiful in Europe, and the larger and brilliantly equipped National Theatre, were, he said, woefully inadequate. With each of these thrustful initiatives he instantly made himself a small army of enemies. Ludwig, besotted though he was, was no fool, and he saw that the proposed opera academy would annoy too many people with vested interests. He was not, however, at all averse to the idea of the new theatre. A site was found, and Wagner’s friend Gottfried Semper, the architect of the old Dresden opera house, was commissioned to design it. He produced a model of a magnificent theatre, with a dramatic approach from the royal palace, through the city, across the river Isar and up a slight hill to a superbly commanding position in Steinhausen. Wagner and Semper worked together closely; the composer had a thorough grasp of architectural principles absorbed during the severe bout of erysipelas he had endured ten years earlier. The auditorium was to be austere and uncluttered, and feature a sunken orchestra pit, a radical notion of the importance of which Wagner had long been convinced. He drew up a schedule of performances: only his operas, naturally. Not only did he programme Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and the still unperformed Tristan and Isolde, he scheduled The Ring of the Nibelung and The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (both as yet incomplete) as well as Parsifal and The Victors, neither of which existed except as mere sketches. It is a staggering six-year plan. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about it is that, with the exception of The Victors, he did it all, though not in Munich, and that each of the operas he planned proved to be a titanic masterpiece.
Ludwig was behind him all the way, and in one sense exceeded even Wagner’s ambition, because he planned to rebuild the playhouse at the same time, creating a huge repertory of classics from all over the world and from all periods; he even proposed staging Ibsen’s then wildly controversial plays. Together he and Wagner hatched a vision of Munich as a City of Art. For a while it seemed possible, though political opposition was fierce: Wagner was radical and expensive and, wholly confident of the king’s support, comported himself as though he were omnipotent. But he had a formidable enemy in Ludwig’s court: the Bavarian prime minister Baron Karl von der Pfordten had first encountered the composer in 1848 in Dresden as minister of education; he loathed Wagner, cordially detesting him for his part in the 1849 uprising. ‘If the princes would only hold together as democrats do,’ he had declared, ‘Wagner’s music would not be given anywhere.’ Wagner was a marked man from the moment he arrived in Munich.
The Bülows, meanwhile, had moved there; at Wagner’s urging Hans was appointed Court Pianist. Wagner conducted The Flying Dutchman at the Court Theatre, its first outing in Munich; it was a triumph. Tristan and Isolde was announced for the following year, with Bülow conducting. On the first day of rehearsals, 10 April 1865, the child Wagner had given Cosima was born; she was named Isolde, after the heroine of the opera in which, of course, a man betrays his best friend. The child’s second name was Ludowika, after Ludwig. Bülow, who seems to have been unaware that Isolde was not his daughter, conducted the premiere of the opera superbly; the singers, carefully coached, acquitted themselves gloriously. The central characters were sung by the husband and wife team of Ludwig and Malwine Schnorr von Carolsfeld, and Tristan’s faithful servant Kurwenal by Anton Mitterwurzer (the original Wolfram in Tannhäuser), all of them entirely to Wagner’s satisfaction. The press, unsettled both by the plot and the unprecedented intensity and adventurousness of the music, was hostile. ‘We think that the stage presentation of the poem Tristan und Isolde amounts to an act of indecency,’ harrumphed the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. ‘Wagner does not show us the life of heroes of Nordic sagas which would edify and strengthen the spirit of his German audiences. What he does present is the ruination of the life of heroes through sensuality.’ Hanslick remarked that the prelude reminded him of ‘the Italian painting of the martyr whose intestines are slowly being unwound from his body on a reel’. Such comments attempted to shut the barn door after the horse had bolted. The damage, if damage it was, had been done. Musicians everywhere were astounded at what Wagner had opened up with his harmonic audacity: the famous chord in the fourth bar of the Prelude which resolves itself into a dissonance – the famous Tristan chord – leads on to a series of unresolved cadences which do not find resolution until the very end of the opera. This is the apotheosis of suspension, both in the musical and the Schopenhauerian sense. And music would never be the same again.
Ludwig and Wagner were delirious. ‘My Unique one! My Holy one!’ wrote Ludwig, orgasmically, as if he were Isolde himself:
How blissful!
Perfect. So overcome with delight!
To drown…to sink – unconscious – highest pleasure – Divine work!
Eternally
true to – beyond
the grave.
But a black cloud descended: just six weeks after the first night the Tristan, Schnorr von Carolsfeld, a giant of a singer who had, despite delicate health, performed superbly, died – exhausted, it was darkly rumoured, by the impossible demands of the part; he was twenty-nine. ‘Farewell Siegfried!’ he cried, at the end, from his deathbed. ‘Console my Richard!’
Ludwig knew very well how to console his Richard. Wagner went to stay with the king at the perfectly Wagnerian castle of Hohenschwangau, in the centre of the old Swan district, its walls covered with murals depicting the German legends, notably Parzival and Lohengrin; it was here, surrounded by images of swans, that the young Ludwig had grown up. Here he and Wagner held lofty discourse into the small hours; at sunrise, oboists carefully placed across the castle turrets played themes from Lohengrin. Ludwig wrote to Cosima: ‘Oh, he is godlike! Godlike! My mission is to live for him, to suffer for him, if that be necessary for his full salvation.’ That was precisely Cosima’s mission, as it happens, though Ludwig was blissfully ignorant of the now all-consuming relationship between them, a relationship that was already the subject of scandal in the coffee houses of Munich and even in the press; Wagner’s personal extravagance and the prohibitive cost of staging his operas w
ere the subject of further angry gossip. At this point, Wagner, with his total inability to gauge a situation except in his own terms, started enthusiastically meddling in Bavarian politics, writing ‘anonymous’ articles in the press, whose authorship was an open secret. Before long, Ludwig’s exasperated prime minister delivered the king an ultimatum: he had to choose between the love of his people and his friendship with Richard Wagner. Ludwig was smart enough to know that, realistically speaking, he had no choice. That evening, while the composer was sitting in his splendid home by his magnificent fireside, an official came to inform him that the king had decreed that he must leave immediately. Dumbfounded, Wagner showed the official a passionate letter from the king signed: ‘yourself unto death, until we cross to the next world, eternally, eternally, your truest Ludwig’. The official, unmoved by these sublime sentiments, was adamant: he must go. Two days later, Wagner was yet again on a train to Switzerland, with servant and dog. The fairy tale had been ruptured; he was an exile once more.
A very comfortable one, it has to be said. He soon settled in Lucerne, in a luxurious villa called Tribschen, with a superb view of the lake; it was all paid for, of course, by Ludwig, who, in his dejection at the turn of events, threatened to renounce the throne altogether. ‘If it is the wish of the Dear One,’ he wrote to Wagner, ‘I will gladly renounce the throne and its barren splendour, come to him and never part from him.’ Wagner swiftly dissuaded him: an ex-king was of no use to him. But for Ludwig being king had ceased to be fun: scheduled to open parliament, he chose instead to visit Wagner in Tribschen on his birthday. He stayed for two nights, after which, refreshed and restored, he went back to Munich, only then condescending to perform his official duties. The story slipped out; there was outrage. The press openly attacked Wagner, exposing his relationship with Cosima; Bülow caught wind of the accusations. After challenging the editor of one of the offending newspapers to a duel, he went to Switzerland to confront the guilty couple, who denied everything. Wagner got Ludwig to sign a letter he had drafted for him, denouncing the press’s claims. That, too, would eventually blow up in Wagner’s face, but for the time being, some sort of normality resumed.
For him, that is. In the non-fairy-tale world, a very real dragon was abroad, breathing fire: Prussia, having steadily built up its military might, was beginning to move in on the rest of the German-speaking world. In July 1866, Bavaria fought in the Austro-Prussian war on the Austrian side – an alliance of weakness that presented the Prussians with no challenge. ‘A Bavarian,’ remarked Bismarck, the Prussian chancellor, ‘is someone halfway between an Austrian and a human being.’ Ludwig was not, to put it mildly, of a military disposition, though he was rather keen on soldiers. Once, he spotted a sentry at the Residenz who looked tired, so he sent out a sofa for him. At first Ludwig wanted to have nothing to do with the war, and was reluctant to sign the mobilisation order, preferring to divert himself with firework displays; but Wagner persuaded him to be a king and lead his army, which he did, briefly. Even the soldiers were astonished by his youthful beauty, which momentarily rallied them; but the Bavarian army in its operetta uniforms (designed by Ludwig) had no hope against the streamlined forces that Prussia, with its universal conscription, its needle guns and its dedicated railways, could command. From now on Prussia’s imperial ambition would dominate Bavarian public affairs; war was constantly on the agenda. Ludwig loathed it, and so, more surprisingly, did Wagner.
Wagner’s domestic life had meanwhile undergone a transformation: Minna, worn out by illness and disappointment, but never having entirely given up on Wagner, had died in Dresden, at the age of fifty-seven. ‘May the pitiful woman’s tormented heart finally find rest!!’ Wagner wrote to her doctor, with genuine feeling. He never got over the conviction that he had done her a disservice by marrying her, despite the fact that that she was, for a sizeable portion of the twenty years of their marriage, exactly what he needed – a provider of domestic comfort and companionship. ‘Right from the beginning,’ Minna had written fifteen years earlier, ‘I did everything for love of you. My independence which I treasured so much, I gave up gladly, so that I really could be yours alone. As for your intellectual development, I am happy in the knowledge that all the beauty you created had come to life in the home that I had made.’ And he knew it was true. She had kept him going. But now he had found someone very different who would guarantee the final triumph of his work; she was the person he now needed. ‘Cosima must be with me. Always,’ he wrote. ‘Without her, nothing can be done. With her, I believe, I shall be able to work at my artistic productions until the end.’
She had come to stay in Tribschen, with her three daughters. Bülow joined them after a month, then they all left; four weeks later, Cosima came back without Bülow, but with the girls. In the midst of all this, Wagner, after a two-year gap, again picked up work on The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. In February, Cosima gave birth to Wagner’s second daughter, whom they named Eva after the heroine of the new opera; six months later, he finally completed the score, which he presented to Ludwig on Christmas Day – Cosima’s birthday, as it happens (or at least the day on which she celebrated it. She was born on 24th December, but both she and Wagner, bent on endowing everything in their lives with significance, always spoke of the 25th as her birthday). But this year, she was no longer with Wagner: she and the girls had gone back to Munich, to the Bülow family home. Wagner himself returned to Munich to supervise the first production of The Mastersingers, which Bülow conducted; Wagner stayed with the Bülows. Rehearsals were not without tension. Things between Wagner and Hans were predictably difficult, and Wagner’s constant interventions in the musical rehearsals finally drove the orchestra to go on strike, led by the fiery horn player, Franz Strauss, whose four-year-old boy, Richard, would before very long become Wagner’s operatic heir.
The Munich audience was enchanted by The Mastersingers of Nuremberg – and surprised, as the rest of the world has been ever since. It was so unexpected. Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, The Ring, Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal – even The Flying Dutchman – are all obviously the work of the same man, radically different from each other though they may be. They come from the same dark visionary imagination; they dwell in extremes. But Mastersingers, that cornucopious work, which is everything Wagner said an opera shouldn’t be – brimming with tunes, arias, duets, ensembles, counterpoint, a huge chorus, spectacular public scenes, jokes, hijinks – recognisable human beings – which wraps tendrils of voluptuous melody all around the work, casting a golden glow over the bourgeois communal life it celebrates – where was all that lurking inside the difficult, rebarbative, violently prejudiced, myth-forging, subconscious-probing, serially betraying, Schopenhauer-gorging, Feuerbach-chomping pessimist with his tragic view of life? In fact, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg is Wagner’s most personal, most autobiographical work: he is both Sachs, the kindly but grizzled master, and Stolzing, the radical young pretender. It is also his most philosophically profound work, the one which embodies and exemplifies the idea to which he devoted his life, the idea of German art. But – with the exception of the punishment meted out to the reviled pedant, Beckmesser, on whom Wagner visits all his deep hatred of critics, punishing him as surely as Shakespeare punishes Malvolio in Twelfth Night – German art proves benevolent, embracing, capable of change and development, extending its blessing across the whole community. And at the end the community honours the great and wise artist at its centre:
‘Hail Sachs! Hail Sachs!
Nuremberg’s darling Sachs!’
It is true, of course, that if you probe the work, you will find melancholy, rage and an assertiveness about the supremacy of German art that is, on reflection, and in the light of events in the twentieth century, uncomfortable. The work has been probed in all these ways, not least at Bayreuth, but nobody was probing on that June night in 1868. There was a new element in the applause that night – affection. Wagner and the king risked disapproval by sitting together, si
de by side, in the royal box, in which, till then, only royalty and its descendants had ever sat; the aristocracy were even more deeply scandalised when Ludwig encouraged the composer to stand up at the end of each act to accept the generous applause, which he, Ludwig, led – this ‘wonderful, unique’ boy, still only twenty-two – whom Wagner loved as deeply and as tenderly as he had loved anyone.
Ludwig was more than ever dependent on his relationship with Wagner. In 1867, under huge ministerial pressure to produce an heir, he had become engaged to the Duchess Sophia Charlotte in Bavaria, an excellent dynastic match: her sister was the Empress of Austria. It was a mutual passion for Wagner that had brought them together: in his letters Ludwig addressed her as ‘my dear Senta, Elisabeth, Isolde, Eva, Brunnhilde’, which was quite something to live up to. It must have been a form of play-acting for both of them: Ludwig had told her, before their engagement, that he would never marry her because he would not live long, his life being linked to the continued existence of Wagner – ‘the Friend’ – who would, alas, inevitably perish before him. After that, Ludwig told Sophie Charlotte, his star would no longer shine, sundered from ‘the remarkable, sweeping destiny of R Wagner’. He even addressed her in the letter in which (to the dismay of his subjects) he broke off the engagement as Elsa, the heroine of Lohengrin, signing himself Heinrich, the Fowler king from the same opera. None of this will have come as a surprise to Sophie Charlotte. Wagner, Ludwig had told her at the beginning of their relationship, was the God of his life.