by A. N. Wilson
Then the stage brightens and we are with Siegfried and Brünnhilde in their married bliss. The mortal hero whose sword has shattered the spear of Wotan is the embodiment of nineteenth-century man come of age – living without God. Siegfried gives the Ring of Power into Brünnhilde’s possession and she in return gives him her flying horse Grane to carry him on his adventures. There were several stage horses used at Bayreuth in those days. Nowadays I believe Wieland’s productions dispense with such stage business altogether and the Valkyries’ flying steeds are imagined by the audience. But in 1925 Cosima (though it was years since she had actually attended an opera) was still alive and her daughters Eva and Daniela made it their business to protest if there was the slightest variation to the staging of the operas from the days of the Master. The same moth-eaten old furs, the same cardboard swords, the same creaking chariots and the same unconvincing Rhine waves were in operation that had seemed ridiculous as long ago as 1876. Had he produced The Ring several years running, Wagner would surely himself have seen the difficulties of working with real horses and would have got round the problem somehow or other since, unlike his wife and daughters, he had the stage in his blood and he was also always wanting to change, to adapt, to innovate.
That night, every member of the audience for The Twilight of the Gods must have been aware that the horse playing Grane was in no mood for four or five hours of a loud musical meditation on the nineteenth-century metaphysical crisis. At its first appearance to the ecstatic Brünnhilde and Siegfried in Act One it was tetchy and whinnying, and as Siegfried led it down the ravine, it kicked one of the painted hardboard rocks with its back foot, then lifted its tail and defecated.
Winnie had expressed anxiety about the horse’s demeanour more than once when we met during the intervals. The animal waited, however, until the last scene, before it upstaged the singers. Wolf cannot have been alone in that packed theatre in feeling that the incident, as well as being alarming in itself, was full of portent. For several weeks afterwards, even after our star tenor was on the mend and the injured stagehand had come out of hospital, we were all upset. The incident increased that feeling, always so strong in Fidi and which optimistic, healthy-minded Winnie resisted, that we had set our feet on a path to peril, to destruction.
Two puppet ravens flew into the air towards Valhalla over Siegfried’s funeral pyre as Brünnhilde sang of her renunciation of the gold and of power. She sang of the end of the gods as lucre and struggle are overcome by the quiet music of nature. Olga Blomé’s piercing soprano, as she seized Grane’s bridle and asked, ‘Weisst du auch, mein Freund, wohin ich dich führe?’ was too much for the beast. Do you know, my friend, where I’m leading you now? The horse leaped on the corpse of Siegfried, crunching several of Rudolf Ritter’s ribs. It cantered towards the orchestra pit. Pio Jahn, an amiable stagehand, ran out to seize the horse, but it reared up, whinnying furiously and lashed at him with its hooves. He was lucky to escape with nothing worse than a broken ankle. At least he had turned the animal’s head and diverted its intention, which would truly have been disastrous, of charging into the sunken orchestra pit. But the horse’s behaviour had stopped the orchestra in their playing. Brünnhilde remained for ever poised on the edge of her husband’s pyre never to make her sacrifice. The opera is meant to end with the human race at last come of age. That night in the sixth year of the Weimar Republic we felt dread in our stomachs. We had witnessed destruction without resolution; loss of power because it had been wrenched from us rather than because we had had the wisdom to renounce it; noise rather than music; chaos come again.
Lohengrin
I have woken up, alone. My eyes focus on the battered old puppet of Mr Punch who sits sadly on the shelf at the end of my bed. He has been on many journeys with me. His nose, on which traces of papier-mâché add to its grotesqueness, is housed over the Voltaire grin of the lips, which seems to be full of contempt for me, for my and for my country’s history.
I have just dreamed of Lohengrin. When I say I was in it, I do not mean I dreamed that I was a famous tenor such as Max Lorenz, reedy, ethereal yet powerful singing that most beautiful of love duets –
Fühl ich zu dir so süss mein Herz entbrennen
– with Maria Müller. Rather my dream let me swim about in the music, a happy carp among flowing green plants and dark water, luxuriating in its lush sadness.
‘From the very first Lohengrin to me was a call to arms – it is a direct political –’ Wolf was not talking in my dream. The dream was pure delight, but as I come back to the waking world, memory superimposes itself upon dream and I hear again that rasping voice: ‘… in Linz at the age of twelve. It was my first experience of the work of Richard Wagner. Really – the whole story is there: the need for German reunification, for the strength of a Greater Germany.’
‘Shall I tell you something, Wolf?’ Winnie replied.
‘King Henry comes to tell the fractious little people of Brabant that a German sword alone will unite them…’
‘… I don’t think’ – she chuckled and lit a cigarette. ‘When I finally sit down and hear Lohengrin or any of the other operas, I don’t think. The drama is something that happens.’
‘So long ago. He saw it, the Master…’
‘There was no Germany ninety years ago,’ Fidi interrupted. ‘All those choruses in Lohengrin … it’s like Verdi’s choruses hoping for an Italian nation. There’s the world of difference between aspiring for national unity you don’t have and throwing your weight about when you do have it.’
‘But your great father…’ said Wolf.
‘Daddy hated’ – Fidi’s voice rose to a squeak – ‘Bismarck’s Reich – in some ways as much as the old…’
‘But in 1870, he and his ever-esteemed … your ever-gracious…’ – there was something so oily about Wolf’s manner with them – ‘mother…’
‘Everyone rejoices in a victory,’ said Fidi, ‘of course my parents were pleased that France was defeated in 1870 – all the more remarkably since she is French!’ He squeaked with amusement.
One could never tell whether he noticed that his little interjections into Wolf’s monologues sometimes had a deflating effect. The reminder, for example, that his father – our reason for all being in Bayreuth – had entertained many political views, some of them self-contradictory, in the course of a seventy-year-old life, but that by the time he came to Bayreuth for the sole purpose of staging music and drama he had developed quasi-mystic views, a sort of Schopenhauerish blend of Buddhism and Christianity, if that doesn’t sound too much like nonsense. He practised vegetarianism, believed in peace through the relinquishment of power, hated political parties. He even repented of his strident former anti-Semitism and conducted, with admiration, the Italian Symphony of Mendelssohn. None of this deflected Wolf in his view that the legend of Lohengrin, a mysterious figure arriving by water and drawn by a swan, to rescue Elsa of Brabant from a charge of fratricide, contained messages about rearming post-war Germany.
‘Was it not’ – again Wolf adopted his oleaginous butler manner – ‘your brother-in-law’ – as he spoke his eyes brightened and looked first to Winnie, then to Fidi as if the very words ‘brother-in-law’ were a cue for the orchestra to strike up – ‘who said that the whole future of Europe – the civilization of the world itself – rests in the hands of Germany and Germany alone?’
‘Houston said that?’ Fidi pursed his lips. Whereas Wolf’s eye movements and the flicker of podgy fingers suggested an impatient desire for universal recognition, Fidi’s lips and florid cheeks, and somehow his whole quivering pose, suggested dissension, at least in the matter of seeing his English brother-in-law as the fount of all wisdom. ‘Do we have to exclude all the other nations? Eh? Italy has taught us a thing or two? About opera? Cooking? French cooking: not so bad. Come to that where would we Germans be without you, my dear Austrian Wolf, and Houston and Winnie who are pure English, coming and telling us how wonderful we are?’ His laughter at this outburst
was not appreciated.
‘Now work, my boy, work!’ He patted my bottom. We put down our coffee cups (no acorn-muck for the Wagners) and retreated to his study for an afternoon composing letters to some Americans, mostly Jews, begging for more cash and assuring them of the essentially international flavour of the Bayreuth proceedings.
As we left the room, Winnie had advanced upon Wolf and placed her hand on his. ‘Don’t mind Fidi’s teases – he’s on our side. Truly.’
It was true that Siegfried Wagner was an unsatisfactory mouthpiece for what might be called Wagnerian propaganda since (like Winnie, really) he was primarily interested in the operas as things to be performed rather than as encoded political programmes. Even Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Siegfried’s brother-in-law, in his book about Wagner, admits that the composer’s ‘views’ and ‘philosophy’ were a muddle. ‘Art’ – a product of genius which reflects general and absolute beauty and truth – can never act as a vehicle for a particular and specific teaching – that was what he thought once, anyway, though by the time he had become a Nazi prophet Chamberlain’s views had probably modified somewhat.
Chamberlain’s own views on Germany, on racial questions and on the Jews were not merely similar to Wolf’s. They could be said to have fashioned them. If any one individual can be credited with the invention of National Socialism it must be this extraordinary Englishman.
Winnie, who took Chamberlain’s pretensions with a pinch of salt and who openly disliked his wife, the burping Eva, used to say that he had the air of a sanctimonious clergyman. Once, when in a confiding mood – for she sometimes did and sometimes did not speak openly of her life in the orphanage – she would name one of these ‘black crows’: Father Carter-Bown, a prison-pallid man apparently who enjoyed the sycophantic attentions of some of the nuns. There was, as many visitors to Bayreuth noted, a quasi- or pseudo-religious atmosphere and in Chamberlain’s smooth cheeks, extreme pallor, and fussy, slightly effeminate mannerisms you could have seen him as a man of the Church.
Not that I would suggest, by applying the epithet effeminate to Chamberlain, any hint of Fidi-like fondnesses for chorus boys. On the contrary, he had dropped Anna, the wife who was ten years his senior (he was twenty when they first met) and Lili Petri, his mistress of several years’ standing, in order to leap at the possibility of marrying one of Richard Wagner’s daughters – which he had done at Christmastime 1908 when she was forty-one. The marriage caused considerable scandal in conventional circles. Chamberlain’s English family, from whom he had been long estranged, expressed horror at his easy abandonment of his legal wife and no Protestant pastor in Bayreuth could be found who would solemnize his union. Eva’s mother, who had abandoned her husband in order to run off with Richard Wagner forty years before, was perhaps not in a position to take a strong moral line, but even she expressed reservations – especially when she heard of Lili Petri. But Lili was merely Venus: Houston assured his future mother-in-law she represented his imprisonment in the lustful lure of Venusberg, projecting himself as another Tannhäuser – not perhaps a very plausible role for a valetudinarian man of fifty-three whom I never saw out of carpet slippers and not very reassuring, for who would want Tannhäuser as a son-in-law? He assured Cosima that, whereas Lili had been Venus, in Eva he had ‘found his holy Elisabeth’.
There was bad blood between Siegfried and his sister, and when Winnie married into the family she took her husband’s side against the burping Eva. Such was her essential good nature, however, that Winnie was the soul of kindness to Eva in her widow’s distress when Chamberlain died, cosseting her, taking her little meals on trays and doing everything short of verbal disloyalty to Fidi by way of listening to Eva’s disgruntled complaints about family papers and about money.
Nowadays, of course, the only Chamberlain linked in history’s ear with H is the British Prime Minister who declared war on our country in 1939. Thirty years before, however, Houston Stewart Chamberlain was one of the most revered thinkers in Germany, with disciples as famous as our exiled Emperor – who wrote long credulous letters in response to Chamberlain’s idea that Jesus was not a Jew – or Albert Schweitzer who believed that ‘what he had done for the advancement of knowledge will exist as a noble contribution for the good of the Volk’.
After his English boyhood (he was an admiral’s son) Chamberlain had spent his life as a man of letters on the Continent, only interrupting his gentle existence (writing books and articles on poetry and philosophy) for a misguided spell of financial speculation on the Paris Stock Exchange during which he managed to lose his substantial personal fortune and become someone for whom money was always a worry. It was pure greed that made him a speculator but inevitably, perhaps, he blamed his folly on the evils of capitalism and on the Jews who supposedly control the mysterious movements of financial markets. Thereafter he saw the Jews as the enemies of culture, spirituality and all that is good. By one of those perverse contradictions which committed anti-Semites are often obliged to overlook, it was actually owing to two Jews that he was introduced to the music of Richard Wagner. The first was a Sephardic Jew whom he met at Interlaken, a music teacher named Löwenthal who played to him the Prelude to Lohengrin on the piano, following it up with some Klindworth arrangements of Tannhäuser. Once the sublime chords had seeped into Chamberlain’s soul he was a converted Wagnerite, though it was not until he had met a second Jew, a Herr Blumenfeld from Vienna, that he heard about Bayreuth and the Wagner Circle. (Blumenfeld was a member of the Vienna Academic Wagner Society, which helped to finance the Bayreuth Festivals.)
The fact that Chamberlain owed his conversion to these two gentlemen in no way softened his hatred of Jews, and might even have increased it. (People have sometimes expressed surprise at H’s ingratitude: they ask if he did not remember the Jewish owners in Vienna of small galleries who were the only ones prepared to buy his unremarkable architectural drawings, when he was an indigent doss-house dweller with holes in his boots. But would it not take prodigious levels of humility and gentleness, neither qualities obvious in H’s character, to love those who had been such close witnesses of his life of abject humiliation?)
Chamberlain’s magnum opus and the work which in his lifetime in Germany made him a household name was The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in Munich in 1899. Here in these pages may be found all the racialist doctrines that underpinned the government’s policies from 1933 to 1945. I can’t claim to have read all this book. It is very long and it is written in a high hortatory style, which I find rebarbative. What struck me, when I attempted to finish it long ago, was that this foreigner’s vision of my country in the last decade or so of the Emperor was not my vision. When I think of that Germany, the decade before I was born and when my parents were in love in Berlin, I think of travelling salesmen in curly bowler hats with curly waxed moustaches going from town to town on marvellous steam trains. I think of Adolf Harnack teaching my father and many students like him that Jesus was a gentle, ethically minded Hegelian. I think of stern schoolmasters teaching grammar and mathematics in every Gymnasium in the Reich. I think of neat small people in neat small towns having neat small thoughts. I think of clockmakers in low-eaved half-timbered buildings, of dreamers, philanthropists, scientists. I think of brilliant engineers and pioneer physicists. I think of superb bakers and proud glistening brewers. I think of miners and smelters and factory owners in the Ruhr. I think of families hiking on the banks of the Rhine or trying out new and superbly designed bicycles. I think perhaps above all of music, of little girls with blonde plaits thumping the heart out of Mozart sonatas as they sat at the piano, of choral societies roaring forth the sublime chorales of Bach, of families in chamber groups, of every small town with its symphony orchestra, and of course I think of the opera houses and the sea of sound that poured from them.
And yes, surely, when I think of Germany I think with pride of our united country … There’s nothing belligerent or sinister in that. I so vividly remember my brothers in
their uniforms on the day that war broke out. I was twelve years old, Ernst was eighteen, Heinrich twenty. My parents and I joined the crowds to cheer on the departing troops. There was such ecstatic hope in those cheers of 1914. My mother’s eyes were moist. My father, as always, looked steely and gave nothing away, but even he admitted later that evening that it had been ‘very moving’, a remark which in his scale of emotionalism was positively Dionysian. My brothers were risking their lives for good things. That was what they, and I, and my parents believed. They were fighting for the preservation of the Austrian Empire against terrorism and Slavs, for the preservation of the Ottoman Empire against the chaos that ensued once the war was over; and in our own Germany they were fighting for our Bavarian King, for our royal family. Heinrich, who has already appeared in this narrative as the shy schoolmaster playing music with our parents, survived the war, in spite of being gassed at Mons. Ernst died at the Battle of the Somme. As in most families to whom that has happened, my mother was never happy again. Germany itself when the first World War broke out was forty-four years old; exactly my father’s age.
My dear old father never really wanted to live in the kingdom of Bavaria, still less in Franconia. He was through and through a Prussian, on his mother’s side from a respectable family of yeoman farmers in East Prussia – all part of the Soviet Union now – and on his father’s side, two or three generations of Berlin scholars. He had fallen in love with my mother when she was in Berlin, visiting relations. When his studies were complete, he had hoped to pursue his academic career in Berlin, but the illness of Mother – I never really understood the details – led them south. My mother came from a small town in Franconia. After my father had been ordained in the Lutheran Church, he took the pastorate of the Peterkirche in Bayreuth as a stopgap. He was thirty, my mother had two small children and another on the way, they were both kindly to my impoverished and sick grandmother. Somehow or other they got stuck in the city adopted by and for ever associated with Richard Wagner. Still, decades after his ‘mistake’ (coming to live here in the first place) my father loved the Peterkirche. And that too was an embodiment of a Germany you would not find in the pages of Chamberlain – its high baroque ceiling dotted with heraldic devices of the local nobility who had endowed the church; its superb eighteenth-century organ case; and its choir, who in the course of every couple of years sang through the body of work which, to my father’s way of looking at things, constituted the most sublime productions of the human brain or heart: the cantatas and chorales of J. S. Bach. But Chamberlain, who had lived in Switzerland and France and England for most of his life, saw a quite different Germany – a racialist empire of conquest whose most typical representative was not the clockmaker or the theologian but the soldier.