by Simon Callow
Meanwhile the work that Bayreuth had been built to accommodate, the Art-work of the Future for which the Theatre of the Future had been conceived and constructed, and which Wagner had never intended to be played anywhere else, was released by Wagner into general circulation. Before long, there were stagings of The Ring of the Nibelung in Berlin and in Vienna; the impresario Neumann (a Jew) fearlessly took a touring version of the tetralogy, based on the Bayreuth production, to opera houses across Europe, including Paris and London, for which Wagner was deeply grateful: ‘Neumann sees it as his calling in life to ensure that I am recognised throughout the world.’ The work entered the mainstream. Wagner lost control of it, unable to guarantee for it, as he had so fervently hoped, a mentally and spiritually receptive audience for whom the performance would have been a sacred event. It had become part of the operatic marketplace, a commodity to be bought by the rich for money. Dreams of that theatre in the meadow, with its non-paying audiences, finally died. ‘After a year’s preparation,’ he had said, ten years earlier, when staging The Ring had seemed like an impossible dream, ‘I shall over four days present my complete work: with it I shall reveal to the people of the revolution the meaning of this revolution in its noblest sense…wild as this plan is, it is the only one on which I can stake my life, my work and my endeavour.’ By the time the Bayreuth theatre was built, the people of the revolution had been replaced by the crowned heads of Europe and the entire musical establishment.
Another casualty of that first season was Wagner’s relationship with Nietzsche. In fact, Nietzsche, though he had tickets, never saw The Ring. Repelled by the audience, he never crossed the threshold. ‘The mistake was to go to Bayreuth with an ideal, so the result was bitter disappointment,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘All Europe’s lazy rich vagabonds were there, together with that miserable pack of patrons and patronesses, all bored to death and totally uninterested in music. Wagner’s ideal? The rabble didn’t want to know.’ There had been rumblings of rebellion from Nietzsche in the face of the evident lack of respect extended to him by the Wagners. His mutiny began in somewhat veiled form in ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, one of a series of essays called Untimely Meditations. The essay is described as a Festschrift, but its tone of celebration is undercut by a series of observations about Wagner which are at the very least equivocal and in some cases overtly hostile. The tone is essentially passive-aggressive, and can scarcely have been designed to please its subject: ‘In fact, Wagner is not a composer at all,’ writes Nietzsche, advancing a perception that he would elaborate over and over again in book after book, ‘but an instinctive theatrical who, dissatisfied with the easy pickings that lay readily to hand, has forced his way into the other arts.’ His characterisation of Wagner the man pulled no punches, either: ‘deep down’, he writes, ‘there surges through Wagner a mighty will with a boundless, ruthless craving for power, working its way along paths, through caves and ravines, ever upwards towards the light, with the brutality of a horned Minotaur’. Wagner wrote to Nietzsche to congratulate him on the book; one can only assume that he had not yet read it. Not long after its appearance, Wagner wrote to Nietzsche’s doctor to tell him that he believed Nietzsche to be seriously unstable mentally, and that this was doubtless due to excessive masturbation. Nietzsche was forgivably enraged both by the suggestion and by Wagner’s having written to his doctor. The personal relationship between the two men was virtually at an end, but the image of Wagner as the mythic man-bull, at the centre of a terrifying labyrinth, preyed on Nietzsche’s increasingly disturbed mind; by extension, he identified Cosima as Ariadne, guardian of the labyrinth. But Ariadne was also the lover of Dionysus, the destructive-creative, male-female, god of fertility, of ritual madness, of wine and of theatre – Wagner in yet another form. And so down the labyrinth of his own mind he chased these people who had so comprehensively penetrated his inner life. Wagner is never far from the surface of Nietzsche’s books, and often he is their explicit subject, The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner among them. This was vexing to Wagner, but scarcely impinged on his ‘mighty will’; as Bryan Magee has pointed out, it is perfectly possible to write about Wagner without mentioning Nietzsche, but impossible to write of Nietzsche without mentioning Wagner. It was a possession, which never let up till the day Nietzsche died.
TWELVE
The Long Day’s Task is Done
Credit 15
Wagner reflected bleakly on the first season. Just as in The Ring, gold had poisoned everything. If the festival was to continue – and however corrupted it had been, however far from what he had imagined, he still held faith with the idea – he needed a great deal more money. He knew now that there were no more hidden patrons, no more mad kings with limitless funds waiting in the wings. He must raise the cash himself. He went back to London to conduct eight concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, under somewhat bizarre circumstances. His faltering health prevented him from conducting an entire concert, so after he had conducted an overture or an orchestral interlude, he would go and sit in an armchair at the side of the stage and listen, somewhat abstractedly, according to reports, while Richter conducted the rest of the programme. His old admirer, Queen Victoria, twenty-two years after their last meeting, with Prince Albert now long dead, invited him to Windsor Castle, where he conducted a whole concert for her. He went to a performance of Tannhäuser at Covent Garden of such ineptitude – it was in Italian, apart from anything else – that Wagner fled with some of his friends and holed up in a German restaurant in the Strand, where, over a chop and a pint of Bass’s ale, he regaled them with Jewish folk tales, replete with authentic accents. As on his previous money-making visit to the city, he came away with much less cash than he had expected.
The Flying Dutchman opened in New York, to enormous acclaim, and Wagner again contemplated emigrating to the United States, the only place on the whole map, he told Cosima ‘again and again’, on which he could look with any pleasure: ‘What the Greeks were among the peoples of this earth, this continent is among its countries.’ He actively tried to frame a deal whereby his American fans would raise a million dollars, ‘half of which would buy me a suitable residence in a part of the States with a decent climate, while the other half would be deposited with a state bank, a capital investment, with an annual yield of five per cent’. In return, his investors would get the proceeds from Parsifal, which he was then writing, and any other work he might write. ‘Thus would America have bought me from Europe for all time,’ he said. The idea of buying a share in Wagner is a beguiling one, but it came to nothing. He had by now, after years of contemplation and distillation of myths and wide-ranging ritual imagery, finished the libretto for Parsifal, which in time-honoured fashion he now read to his friends. Weakened though he was – creating Bayreuth had taken a terrible toll of him – he cast his usual spell. ‘The great actor-poet at his best,’ said an English admirer. ‘An improvisation perfectly balanced – every part stood forth as that of an individual – voice, enunciation, moderation, exquisite – especially Act II, the flower maidens and Amfortas. One heard the words, and one heard the latent music. Bayreuth in miniature.’
Bayreuth, of course, was conceived for The Ring; but Parsifal was conceived for Bayreuth. Next time they would do it all differently, he had said, and they did. No more spectaculars. The physical action was limited; atmosphere was paramount, inner life made manifest, the past permeating everything. The seeds of the libretto, which had lain dormant within him since that fertile summer of 1841 when the German legends started to take root in his subconscious, now flowered into a kind of luxuriant sick beauty. Wagner’s libretto – poem – was a synthesis of legends and characters from different sources and diverse cultures, fused together by a sense of the desperation of the human condition and an excruciating longing for transcendence. The revivifying power of the Grail; the stuttering progress of the Holy Fool – Parsifal himself – towards enlightenment; the devastating illness of th
e wounded king, Amfortas; the impotent destructiveness of the castrated magician Klingsor; the paralysing self-loathing of Kundry, the sexually ravenous woman who saw Christ and was condemned never to die – all these archetypal images of suffering, bewildered mankind woven into a symphonic tissue of unearthly translucence.
He was now in constantly poor health; work on Parsifal proceeded slowly, informed by the pain he was never without: uncannily and disturbingly drawing forth from his orchestra the music of suffering, pain clothed in sound. He cancelled the announced 1880 festival, spending most of that year in Italy, with Cosima and the children, returning to Munich to attend performances of The Flying Dutchman, Tristan and Isolde and Lohengrin in the Court Theatre; he continued to be ill, and Parsifal proceeded, bar by bar, with agonising slowness. From November 1881 to April of the following year, the family, escaping the bleak Bayreuth climate, which Wagner had always detested, wintered in Italy: the work took shape under the inspiration of its light, its air, its churches, its gardens. In Ravello, on the Amalfi coast, he found Klingsor’s magic garden; in Siena’s cathedral he found the prototype for the Temple of the Grail. The painter and poet Paul Joukowsky was engaged to design the opera, in collaboration with Max Brückner, and he and his boyfriend travelled round with the Wagners, faithfully reproducing in the designs what they had seen. Parsifal was finally completed in Sicily, in the city of Palermo, after which they moved on to Acireale in Catania, and then on to Venice – always Venice.
Intensive preparations had begun the year before for the second festival; the Wagners returned to Bayreuth in May of 1882 for rehearsals for Parsifal, which, to fierce opposition from Wagner, was to be conducted by Ludwig’s chief conductor, Hermann Levi, the son of a rabbi; since Ludwig had provided the court orchestra and chorus free of charge for the festival, Wagner had no option but to accept him, at which Ludwig wrote to him, delighted, he said, that Wagner made ‘no distinction between Christian and Jew’, which suggests an unsuspected capacity for irony in the king’s temperament. ‘There is nothing so nauseous, so unedifying, as disputes of this sort,’ Ludwig continued, firmly. ‘At bottom, all men are brothers, whatever their confessional differences.’ In his reply to this letter, Wagner told Ludwig that the king’s sympathetic view of Jews was due to the fact that he rarely met any: for him they were simply a concept, ‘whereas for us, they are an empirical fact’. The Jewish race, he continued, was ‘the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble about it…there is no doubt that we Germans especially will be destroyed by them, and I may well be the last German who, as an artist, has known how to hold his ground in the face of a Judaism which is now all powerful…’. He consoled himself by trying, unsuccessfully, to convert Levi to Christianity.
The conductor seems to have taken it all in good part. Wagner reposed absolute trust in him musically and Levi adored Wagner, insisting in a letter to his father, the Rabbi, that the composer was, essentially, a good man; indeed, he stayed in Wagner’s apartment on more than one occasion as a house guest. Rubinstein, the rehearsal pianist, was equally devoted to him, despite Wagner’s insane racial tirades. On one occasion, the composer stood up and warmly thanked Rubinstein for his work, then said: ‘If we never got closer as human beings, the fault is not mine but yours. You belong to a foreign race with which we have no sympathy.’ From there his speech of thanks developed into a rant which embarrassed everyone, including himself. Never far from the surface of the towering visionary genius lurked the hooligan. At one point during rehearsals, Wagner pleasantly remarked that it would be no bad thing if a few stout local lads were to give Herr Hanslick – his critical nemesis – a sound thrashing next time he came to Bayreuth. That there should be a latent streak of violence in the composer of The Ring of the Nibelung is scarcely surprising. But Wagner’s anti-Semitism, as the account of his speech to Rubinstein suggests, was more than a bizarre peccadillo, beyond a prejudice: it was an obsession, a monomania, a full-blown neurosis. No conversation with Wagner ever occurred without a detour on the subject of Judaism. When, towards the end of Wagner’s life, the painter Renoir had a sitting with him, Wagner interrupted his own pleasant flow of small talk with a sudden unprovoked denunciation of Jews which rapidly became rancid; after it subsided, he resumed the chit-chat. Sometimes the tone would be light and reasonable, but more often than not it would rapidly develop into hysteria.
And Wagner being Wagner it came with a huge apparatus of pseudo-science, pseudo-history and pseudo-psychology, much of it drawn from the toxic writings of the French racial theorist, Count Arthur de Gobineau, author of the pernicious Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Such was Wagner’s admiration of the book that he befriended the good count. Indeed, Gobineau stayed with him in Bayreuth for the month preceding the rehearsals for Parsifal, a curious preparation for work on the nineteenth century’s greatest expression of redemption, transcendence and forgiveness. A year earlier, Wagner told Cosima: ‘if I were ever to write about the Jews again, I would say that I had nothing against them; the trouble is that they approached us Germans prematurely, when we were not sufficiently able to assimilate this element’. But it was untrue; to the end he was raging against Jews both in his salon and in the pages of his magazine Bayreuther Blätter, which was edited by his acolyte, Hans von Wolzogen, a strident and virulent racist, who defined Wagner’s life work as ‘reforming the world of the emotions along artistic lines’ – code for de-Semitisation. Wagner’s last contribution but one to the paper was as nauseatingly gung-ho anti-Judaic as ever. And even at the dress rehearsal of Parsifal, as Levi made his way to the podium, Wagner remarked to Cosima in his uniquely penetrating voice, ‘If I was an orchestral musician I’m not sure how I’d feel about being conducted by a Jew.’ This is a sort of madness. Working on Parsifal, both Levi and Rubinstein preferred, they said, to look for the man in his work, rather than his work in the man. Wagner’s son Siegfried thought that Rubinstein was a kind of Kundry figure, yearning for redemption, which he hoped to find through Wagner and his work, which is perfectly possible: this is the kind of overheated relationship that many people had with Wagner – ‘the Master’.
The rehearsal period was infinitely calmer than that for The Ring; it was, after all, only one opera rather than four. The technical aspect was better managed, and Brandt’s great moving diorama – vast in dimensions – worked triumphantly; the musical performance was astoundingly assured (thanks in large part to Levi) and many of the singers penetrated to the fathomless depths of their roles. Wagner was at last happy. And it had been achieved, he said, ‘by anarchy’: everyone doing just what he or she wanted to do, which happened to be the right thing. Clearly everyone involved, he said, had understood the entire undertaking and its purpose. The idea of Bayreuth – the re-consecration of music-drama – had triumphed. He had given Parsifal the unwieldy and almost untranslatable designation of Bühnenweihfestspiel – stage festival dedication piece – to signal that he had taken the operatic stage to an entirely new place, somewhere between religion and theatre. This horrified some people and intoxicated others. There were those who preferred to listen literally with their eyes closed, separating the subject matter from the astonishing world of sound he had conjured, a translucent musical fabric constantly on the point of disintegration. It seemed to many of those first listeners to point to an unknown future for music. For Wagner, it was simply the achievement of his life’s goal: he had translated the spirit of the Greek theatre into German form, rescuing German art and the art of the stage from the triviality and mediocrity which threatened to engulf both. It offered an antipode to life as it actually was: a world, he said, of ‘murder and robbery, which were organised and legalised by lying, swindling and hypocrisy’. The opera draws on Christian imagery and myths, but it is not a Christian piece. It is, at its absolute core, a Schopenhauerian piece: it rejects the world as nothing but a tragic illusion. It offers no comfort, only the unearthly radiance that comes from acknowledgement of the unavoidable pain of exis
tence.
There were seventeen performances. At the opening, there was none of the civic razzamatazz of the first festival. There were no emperors, no kings; not even Ludwig. Parzival did not attend his own opera. Musicians, especially young ones, flocked from all over Europe – Hugo Wolf, Mahler, Reger, Sibelius, Debussy. ‘Incomparable and bewildering, splendid and strong,’ wrote the Frenchman. ‘Parsifal is one of the loveliest monuments of sound ever raised to the serene glory of music.’ But at the heart of the audience was that new phenomenon, the hard-core Wagner audience sometimes kitted out with Wotan hats and berets in homage to the Master: the faithful, irresistibly drawn to the sensual and emotional immersion that his work offered. It was a sort of drug, or a spell; exactly as he had planned, when they entered the Festspielhaus, people were tranced, taken to another world, their own inner world, to such an extent that they refrained from applauding, under the mistaken impression that it was what Wagner had decreed. When he shouted ‘Bravo!’ after the Flower-Maidens’ exit on the first performance, he was shushed by the rest of the audience. Afterwards, he complained that without hearing applause he didn’t know how the piece had gone down. Lofty as his intentions were, Wagner was still, to his fingertips and to the very end, a man of the theatre.