by A. N. Wilson
‘“Not so faarst!” said the fisherman’s wife.’ Little Verena looked alarmed at the wife’s sternness but the other children wriggled with ecstatic amusement. ‘“You mus’ go back to thar that flow-undurr un’ you mus’ zay”’ – he paused. His extraordinary eyes flashed. I have never seen such eyes. It was the utter luminosity of a very bright moonlight night sky. He looked to each child in turn. Two of them were giggling, two were a little fearful. After all, the wife had been a king, an emperor, a pope – how much further could her ambition take her? Hitherto, in speaking the wife’s words, the great orator had rasped out her demands.
‘Now she whispered, “Oi want tew be – as Gard.”’
Absolute silence followed. Then came a giggle from the eight-year-old Wieland. ‘But she can’t be God!’
Uncle Wolf put a finger to his moustachioed upper lip and continued, ‘“Oi’m toired with a-watchin ur the zun a-comin’ up un the moon a-roisin’ – oi warnts to make the zun cum up uv a marnin’ un the moon tew cum up ut noights.”
‘“Oh woify, woify, oi beg yew”’ – for the husband’s voice Wolf took on a mincing effeminate tone, which bore perhaps an uncomfortable resemblance to my employer, Winnie’s husband, Herr Wagner. Maybe I was merely imagining this for surely Wolf, with his profound courtesy and with a reverence bordering on sycophancy for the Wagner family, would never be so ill-mannered as to mock, of all people, the son of his greatest hero? ‘“Please be content,” lisped the feeble husband, “please be content to stay as the pope.”
‘And at this’, continued Wolf, ‘the wife became extremely angry. Her hair flew wildly around her head and she ripped at her corsets and she gave the fisherman a great kick and she screamed and she yelled, “Oi won’t stand for this any more! Oi want to be Gard”’ – and then Wolf really bellowed. ‘“Oi want to be Gard.”’
Another long silence and everyone in the room, including myself, was spellbound, solemn.
He continued the story, not in the Pomeranian dialect in which it is preserved by the Brothers Grimm but in his own southern Bavarian voice, a voice that possessed an extraordinary range, both of tone and of pitch. ‘Outside, the storm raged on, as the fisherman made his way back to the seashore. And the houses and the trees were falling all around him, and the mountains, they shook, and the great boulders were rolling into the sea. The skies had darkened so they were black as pitch…’
If he had cleverly impersonated the fisherman and his wife, he did more than convey the storm. He became it. I think everyone in that room sensed Wolf’s tempest, his elemental powerfulness. When the fisherman had to shout against the noise of the billowing ocean, Wolf himself bellowed, and it was as if we heard in that cry, not only the noise of the man, but of the elements themselves against which he contended. For, of course, this time the flounder cannot answer the wife Ilsebill’s outrageous request, and replies, ‘“Go home, man! She is back sitting on her pisspot…” And there they sit to this very day!’
All the privileges the wife had won for herself had been withdrawn; she and the fisherman were back in the same abject squalor as before. The story was over and with something of the air of a great conductor who comes to the final bars of a symphony Wolf bowed his neck – as if it were over the score – and then threw back his head. His face was gleaming with sweat. For a few seconds he stared at the ceiling with an expression of such solemnity that I thought he was on the verge of tears. Then he looked around at his company and smiled at each child in turn.
Those who never met him suppose that Wolf, like Napoleon or Stalin, was noticeably small. This was not the case. He was an average sort of height. Winifred Wagner by contrast was tall, large-boned, with beautiful clear skin, high cheekbones, an aquiline nose and a well-developed chin. She invariably wore her blonde hair wound round her head in a loose bun reminiscent of pre-war, really of pre-twentieth-century, fashion.
Wolf’s friends in the Party, when they came to know Winnie, eulogized her Teutonic good looks, but she did not to my mind look remotely like a German. Archaeologists and anthropologists observe among the Celts two quite distinct physiological types. There are the short, squat brachycephalic Celts, usually dark-haired and recognisable in the Basque country, in Brittany and Ireland. There is also a quite different physiognomy, dolichocephalic, noticeably tall and usually with fair or light-brown hair. I imagine that it was to this body type that King Arthur’s Guinevere belonged, and if you think me fanciful you will at least concede that I had spent a very long time contemplating Winnie’s appearance. Even now, over twenty years after we last met, she fills my head. Perhaps one should not put down such thoughts on paper. The comrades have taught us all that the movements of the human heart are no more than the twitches of the bourgeois corpse in its death throes. For me, however, Winnie, whose father’s name had been Williams, was the embodiment of romance in its fullest sense. Her passion for Wolf caused me agonies of jealousy at the time, as did her other liaisons – of which we shall no doubt hear in the course of this narrative. But I reckoned that the pain of watching her devote so much intense emotional energy to the worship of another man, Wolf, was just about requited by the chance, almost daily, to be in her presence.
He sat bolt upright in the modern square-backed upholstered chair with which Winnie and Siegfried had lately furnished their wing of the house. You might consider it superfluous to describe his appearance. It was that, I should say, of a kindly soldier. The fine hair was as always immaculately combed and brushed with the parting on the right of his head. He wore a cheap navy-blue serge suit, shiny at the arse and frayed at the cuffs; a white shirt and a silk tie which must have been the gift of an admirer. His shoes were always highly polished and I used to wonder at what stage of his career he found someone else to shine them for him. At this date he was a mere thirty-six years old and although he had an entourage of followers, some of whom seemed sinister, some of whom were merely crackpots, we hardly ever saw or heard of them. His visits to our small town, certainly at this stage, were made alone and he was never to my knowledge anything but courteous and friendly to his company, preferring when he was among us to discuss music rather than politics, and enjoying – at the Villa Wahnfried, Richard Wagner’s house – the company of Winnie and her children or, when at the Golden Anchor Hotel in Market Place or one of the restaurants in the town, sitting around with the performers and members of the orchestra from the Festival Theatre discussing the finer points of Wagner’s musicology.
She was twenty-eight on that afternoon when Wolf told the story of the fisherman and his wife – and a very youthful twenty-eight, no more corpulent than suited a woman who had given birth to four children, all still quite young, in quick succession and who liked her food. She sat with little Verena on her lap and held the five-year-old’s hands in hers as she clapped and said rhythmically, ‘Bra-vo! Bra-vo!’ She lightly kissed the top of the child’s head.
It had been a truly bravura performance.
Of course, one of the great difficulties which faces me in setting down my recollections of these events is the knowledge brought from hindsight, in a divided, twice-defeated Germany. I live in D——— in the Communist East, where I have lately retired as a schoolmaster. I am in my mid sixties. I would not be writing these words to you if I did not want them to survive.
I call him Wolf, since that is what Winnie and the children called him. In other parts of this narrative, which will relate perhaps to his more public persona, I suppose I shall revert to the polite German convention of referring to him merely by the initial letter of his surname. I believe, even at the time in 1925, that I noted what a very distinctive interpretation Wolf had given of the famous Grimm tale. Is it a story about avarice, or about ambition, lust for power? One version, printed in 1814, two years after the Grimms printed it in their incomparable collection, sees it as an allegory of Napoleon’s ambitions and fall. Wolf was right to see it as something more than a misogynistic comedy about a man giving in to a nagging wife. Had I been
reading the story – and I would prosaically have read it to the children, rather than appearing to recite it, as Wolf did – I should, in common with almost all other readers or narrators, have made the fisherman and the flounder have reasonable voices; and I should have given to the wife an even more shrewish and irrational tone, as she played for ever bigger stakes and as the skies grew ever blacker. But the wife’s demands, culminating in her wish to displace the Godhead, were invested with something like heroism by Wolf’s rasping baritone. His smile was most triumphant when she had so overplayed her hand that the fisherman’s wife had lost everything – the lands, the castles, the imperial titles – and ended up back on the pisspot. Wolf made you feel that the struggle would not have been worth it unless it had gone too far. You sensed that he thought the wife a greater being than her husband for the very reason that she was prepared to stake all and to lose.
The sea storm provoked by the greed of the fisherman’s wife led my day-dreamy and instinctual mind to other wrecks and tempests, not least those evoked by Richard Wagner himself. As you may imagine, although he had been dead for a long time before I was born (eighteen years to be precise), his ghost haunted our town. I lived and breathed (much to my father’s scorn) Richard Wagner’s music. And now I was working in his house, and living among his books and pianos. His children, now grown-ups, and grandchildren still filled the place. His tall widow, now powdery, papery, wispy and vague, was still alive in her apartments at the top of the Villa Wahnfried, and Wagnerian ghosts and spirits were never far from us, not least when that most ardent of Wagnerians, Wolf, was among us.
Wolf supposedly told his Viennese flatmate (as far as we can tell the only friend of his youth) that it was while attending a performance of Rienzi at the Linz opera house that ‘it’ began – whatever ‘it’ was. His power mania, one must assume. Yet Rienzi is poor stuff compared with the opera composed only a year or so later, The Flying Dutchman. Rienzi, which tells the story of a medieval demagogue being swept to power by a wave of popular support, would have an obvious appeal to our friend, but the music is pastiche, mingling Weber and Donizetti. It is in The Dutchman that you first hear the authentic Wagnerian noise. In this piece for the first time we have the winning formula of mythologized autobiography translated into tormented musical language of tragic intensity.
Richard Wagner was twenty-four when he was engaged as a conductor in Riga. He had lately married the leading actress at the theatre in Königsberg – Immanuel Kant’s home town – Minna Planer, a woman older than himself. From the start it was a difficult marriage. Wagner, considerably shorter than his long-haired beautiful wife, feared, with every justification, that she was unfaithful to him. She found his attitude to money intolerable – from the earliest days together they were always on the run from creditors. In Germany it was bad enough, but in Riga, then in the Russian Empire as it is once more today, heavy penalties awaited anyone arrested for debt. Wagner’s passport was confiscated and he was told that his contract as conductor at the Riga theatre would not be renewed.
How much of the catastrophe of the nineteenth century can be measured in terms of its attitude to debt. For Karl Marx it was the capitalist’s ultimate whip hand over the debt-laden bourgeoisie, ultimately to be withdrawn when capital itself imploded. For hundreds of nineteenth-century families the ignominy of debt shaped the whole character of life itself. It was a world without state support or state benefits. If you fell out of work and into debt you were a non-person: if you were proletarian you were fit only for the workhouse; if bourgeois for the gaol.
And in my time, the time which I am describing and in which I first met Wolf, our country itself was a debtor. Germany had become like one of those grotesques in the novels of Dostoevsky or Dickens, like the Marmeladovs in Crime and Punishment reduced to any level of indignity by sheer inability to pay for food, beer, coal, clothing. We felt ourselves, we the impeccably respectable and provident middle-class Germans, free-falling with the giddy improvidence of paupers. Money in the bank is more than the ability to buy a new suit of clothes or a leg of pork for dinner. It creates, or at any rate confirms, a solid attitude of mind, a belief in family, the Ten Commandments, cleanliness, order. You put your solid handmade leather shoe in front of you and knew you trod on solid German ground.
When, lo and behold – after the Versailles Treaty and our betrayal by the November criminals – that political sole trod not earth but air. France had insisted upon war reparations. Our economy was in ruins. Inflation had soared to surreal levels. The life savings in the bank, which before the war would have been enough to maintain an entire Buddenbrook household of respectability, were no longer enough to buy a box of matches. We fell, fell, fell all of us, Icaruses, bits of papery ash falling through dusk after the German Reich had been bonfired out of existence by French and Bolshevist guile.
No wonder, in 1925, we heard the youthful Wagner of 1839 speaking to us. Minna had returned to her young husband from one of her amorous escapades and he persuaded her that the only way out of the present crisis was flight. A friend from Königsberg offered to whizz the Wagners across the Russian border to East Prussia in his coach. It was a tight squeeze since Wagner, ever the obsessive dog lover, could not be parted from Robber, his Newfoundland, which was the size of a small donkey: almost taller than he was.
Wagner was naturally accident prone. At the Prussian port of Pillau the coach overturned, hurling him out into a pile of manure. Eventually, Minna, Robber and Wagner got on board the Thetis, a small package sailing boat whose captain agreed to let them make the eight-day voyage to London without passports. The weather in the Baltic was fine when they set out on their voyage westward, but squalls soon broke out and a journey that should have lasted a little over a week took three times as long. The dog was half-starved. Richard and Minna Wagner were devastated by seasickness. The weather became so bad that the captain eventually decided to put in to a Norwegian harbour.
‘And how relieved I was,’ Wagner tells us,
to behold that far-reaching rocky coast, towards which we were being driven at such speed! A Norwegian pilot came to meet us in a small boat and, with experienced hand, assumed control of the Thetis, whereupon in a very short time I was to have one of the most marvellous and most beautiful impressions of my life. What I had taken to be a continuous line of cliffs turned out on our approach to be a series of separate rocks projecting from the sea. Having sailed past them, we perceived that we were surrounded, not only in front and at the sides, but also at our back by these reefs, which closed in behind us near together that they seemed to form a single chain of rocks. At the same time the hurricane was so broken by the rocks in our rear that the further we sailed through this ever-changing labyrinth of projecting rocks, the calmer the sea became, until at last the vessel’s progress was perfectly smooth and quiet as we entered one of those long sea-roads running through a giant ravine – for such the Norwegian Fjords appeared to me. A feeling of indescribable content came over me when the enormous granite walls echoed the hail of the crew as they cast anchor and furled the sails. The sharp rhythm of this call clung to me like an omen of good cheer, and shaped itself presently into the theme of the seaman’s song in my Flying Dutchman.
Here he is before us, Richard, and I dare say that his ghost will often visit these pages, as it visited Wahnfried in those days when I observed its day-to-day life, and as he visits this earth each time one of his music dramas is once again performed on the stage. He came to our little town of Bayreuth when his career as a composer was all but over. He had endured exile, poverty, vilification; but the worst torment of all was that he had been unable to find any theatre suitable for the performance of his Ring cycle. Eventually, the means came to build a theatre and a stage to his own specification. But this was in the 1870s when Wagner was tired, prematurely old and married to the much younger Cosima.
The Flying Dutchman is the work of a young man. A child of the theatre, a man of the theatre, he was born into a family w
here money was always uncertain. He was in exile from the solid commercial middle class. If we were being loyal comrades we should no doubt see the exiles who people his works as economic projections. He knew what it was to be a wandering Jew, an accused outcast. As with all great artists his life was an allegory of his time so that his actual exile from Germany post-1848 – his life as a political revolutionary – is mirrored by the extraordinary mythological projection of his own socio-economic exclusion. Shaw – foolish old bearded Irishman – and the comrades here see Wagner’s allegories as to be explained in terms of capital and class struggle. When he went on to rewrite the medieval legends of The Ring of the Nibelungs Wagner was, as they would think, drawing an allegory of the rise of capitalism – (the gods, that is the old aristocratic order of Europe, making spurious contracts with capital – Alberich the dwarf who will exploit the masses, the Nibelungs, for the enrichment of both). The struggle between Old Order and New Money will ultimately lead to the destruction of both. Yet if this was all Wagner’s music dramas were about, why did he go to the immense labour of orchestrating them, why not simply write a political pamphlet? Do not these ‘political’ readings of Wagner get things precisely the wrong way around? Is he not a great artist precisely because he sees so clearly what all the revolutions and changes of his time had done to the soul – are we allowed to use that word these days? – of humanity itself?
One of the things which, in those days (when I still thought of myself as a philosopher) interested me about The Flying Dutchman was Wagner’s extraordinary dramatization of something, as far as I know, not represented on the stage since Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. It is actually a very simple and daily observable fact, about which philosophy has never really made up its mind, namely that there is a gulf fixed between our interior world – our psychological history, our daydreams, our preoccupations – and the world out there – the world of that elusive concept, an objectivity, a reality. Most, but by no means all, philosophers have taken it for granted that the world out there – matter etc. – has a reality. One of the problems of philosophy, known as epistemology, was to ask how what is going on inside our head – our thoughts, perceptions, ideas – relates to that reality: how we can be said to know that the table or the garden exist. My friend from university days, who had helped me with my own thesis and was about to become a philosopher of fame, Martin H———, thought that the problems of knowledge were not ‘problems’ at all; that the ‘problem’ stemmed from the Plato who had set the whole of Western philosophy on a wild-goose chase with the observer, the human mind or eye or senses as subject taking in the object – the external reality. The Greek philosophers who were earlier than Plato, the pre-Socratics, had – in common with some of the great texts of Hinduism and Buddhism – not made this distinction. The real mystery was Being itself and we were all, observers and observed, part of this ‘Being’. (I think Martin H——— derived some of his earliest thoughts about all this from Schopenhauer, whom Richard Wagner claimed to be the guide of his second phase of life.)