by A. N. Wilson
It was not, however, the telling of this story that lifted Wolf out of that terrible depression. Winnie’s hands and Winnie’s hands alone could lead him from that slough of despond. In the intervals when she was busy he would sit around moping. The children were not at this stage about – it was the last phase of Winnie’s attempts to make them stay at boarding schools. Sometimes she sent Wolf out with his sketchbook and he would return with uninspired though reasonably accurate depictions of the buildings within a stone’s throw of the house. One of them was a postcard-sized watercolour of the orphanage just opposite the New Palace. Another is of the back of Wahnfried from the Hofgarten. There is one of the twin towers of the Stadtkirche and so on.
For much of the time, and I was slow to notice this, Winnie and Wolf were alone together. They were discreet about it, but there could not be any doubt that this was the week, some time in the October of 1931, that the relationship changed. I had been exercising the dogs, not my favourite task, in the Hofgarten one afternoon when, before opening the garden gate near the graves, I saw the pair of them, standing beside one another. There was an angle to Winnie’s gait, a freedom with which she stood close to him, which told me everything. I am not sure that they even noticed me, from afar, but I decided to take the pooches for an extra five-hundred-yards walk in the park before coming home. I had not needed to find them in flagrante. If lovers wish to keep secret the fact that they have crossed the border and actually begun to sleep together, they should avoid being seen together, especially in those first few days and weeks. Otherwise, they might as well go round with placards round their necks saying WE HAVE JUST BEEN TO BED TOGETHER; for it is always obvious. I have to say that, after all my self-protective jokes – about the flatulence and so on – I was amazed. I had come to believe in my own propaganda. I had imagined he would be Uncle Wolf for ever and nothing more.
He stayed in the house for a few days longer and I decided to make myself scarce. Where possible, I worked in Siegfried’s old office at the Festival Theatre and tried not to disturb the lovebirds. When he had gone back to Munich, I think it was said … I knew that everything had changed.
‘Oh yes,’ Winnie told Lieselotte with a confident smile. ‘His enemies might have thought he was finished. But now Our Leader is like a giant refreshed. He will ride on now, to redeem our fatherland.’
Mastersingers
I am sure I shouldn’t be writing this, but something compels my pen. And you shouldn’t be reading this; these pages contain a story that should be left untold. The burden is too great for you to carry – and for your children and children’s children. I should go silent to the grave. Although I am not old by modern standards, I know that in this pig of a town where the only consolation is to smoke, my emphysema and bronchitis will take me off soon. Whereas you … you will have to live with all this – if you read this book. Of course it was essential that your mother had no inkling whatsoever. Sometimes she taunted me for my sycophantic crush on Winnie. But what am I saying? I should be saying: sometimes my wife taunted me for my crush on your mother. Sometimes she said she hated the whole pack of the Wagners, but this wasn’t true. However low her opinion of me sank, my wife, your mother, as we always called her, retained a huge admiration for the Wagner boys, and for Friedelind, as opera directors, and for Winnie. But my wife is dead now and we need not worry about what that unhappy woman thinks of me any more. The funny thing is she just accepted your arrival as one of Winnie’s mad ideas. Winnie adopted another little girl for a few years, a child she had met in the hospital. Wieland was ill – an inflammation of the lungs – and at the small private hospital, Winnie also met this child, a three-year-old called Betty Steinlein, who was covered with the most unsightly skin disease. The family had a little smallholding just outside town. It was obvious they could not cope with the expense and distress of looking after this little toddler. Winnie simply had the girl to live with them – she was still living at Wahnfried, that child, when I went off to war. The place was alive with ‘Winnie’s lame ducks’, as Fidi always used to call them, sad students, children, friends of her own children. She was one of nature’s mothers.
So when Helga, your ‘mother’, was told that we would be adopting a child from the orphanage as soon as we had been married, she accepted it – simply accepted it. So did I. Only I suspected the truth. It would have been impossible to ‘confront’ Winnie with my knowledge. You do not ‘confront’ the Welsh. But she knew I knew and I know she chose us. It was a great position of trust. And the reason she chose us, my darling, was not that we were respectable or anything like that (though we were); it was because she had seen my capacity to love. She knew that I would love you, as I have done. And now we approach our leave-taking … because I am going to smoke one cig too many one of these days and we hardly ever see one another anyway. I will die in this dump of a town, and you will have a successful career as a musician, who knows, in the West? And I want to do the cruellest thing in the world; I want to tell you the truth.
But ———, what can I call you? I dare not write down your name. If the Stasi were to find what I have written so far, it would be compromizing enough, I know – compromizing to me. But at least I have left you largely out of the narrative. But you are there, a small tadpole in Winnie’s womb. I shall continue to say ‘Winnie’, rather than ‘your mother’. The latter phrase, between us, will always denote the sad, cross person with whom we shared this flat until she applied for a divorce and successfully moved to Leipzig, and then died.
Which is where, of course, the scene now takes us. Oh, darling girl, I shall not bring you into this book by name, but since you are always in my thoughts, I cannot entirely keep you out of the pages of this story. For, in a way, you are the story. Yes, I know there is the damage done to our poor country by … by … by Wolf, by everything that happened. There is the sad story of my own family, and I shall wish to lay a wreath beside the noble memory of my father, mother and brother before I have finished writing these pages. But at the time of writing, you are twenty-eight years old. I entirely support your desire to leave for the West. I do not want to stymie that in any way. And yet – you do see this, don’t you, my darling – although it would be better for you not to know, you do need to know?
I watched you growing as an infant and I thought to myself, this is going to be so blindingly obvious to everyone. The eyes. Even as a baby you had the eyes. The rest – your thick, wavy golden hair, your long face, your long hands – they all came from your mother. But how could anyone look into your night-sky, hypnotic, all-but-world-conquering eyes and not see what is looking back at them so clearly?
They looked at me the other day some months ago, through those earnest, Marxist-made steel-rimmed spectacles, and your lips, which are the lips of Winnie, said, in the voice that is very much your own, ‘Vati, I so very much want you to come to this Meistersinger.’
You know what has happened in my life. It isn’t that I had made a self-conscious decision to give up attending the operas of Richard Wagner. You might as well say that the inhabitants of your local town gaol had decided to lay off the pâté de foie gras. I do not know what productions are on at what passes for a theatre in this ‘town’ – some dreary renditions of Bertolt Brecht whenever I see the posters flapping about in the fog. The only music worth hearing is at church, which I attend for that reason and for that reason alone. You believe – you seem to have believed since childhood – my church attendance loses me points with the comrades, but I know that I am already deep into minus points. My pupils at school complain about me for teaching the lyrics of Heine and Hölderlin rather than ploughing through the idiotic socialist-realist tales that are our set texts. My wife always attributed the absolute, the particular, lousiness of my job, my flat, everything, to the fact that I had hung out before the war with Nazis; and I attributed it to the fact that she hadn’t been a good Communist, and for once in our marital strifes I think you could probably say that we were both right.
Anyway, it wasn’t surprising that you became a musician like Helga; and there you are, playing in the orchestra at the Leipzig Opera House, and telling me about this fantastic new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
I have been bad at keeping records, bad at dating, and I find this gives me a confused impression of the past. Here perhaps I can make a late start and say that we are now in 1960 and the production in which you played was staged in June 1960, with Joachim Herz as the young director. (I reckon Herz is – what? – about six or seven years older than you? He’s in his mid to late thirties.)
Before we set out for Leipzig we had an extraordinary conversation about Wagner and Meistersinger, and about the uses to which it had been put by ‘my friends’ in the 1930s. But not, of course, by the Wagner family. The extraordinarily paradoxical consequence of the friendship between Winnie and Wolf was that the Bayreuth Festival Theatre was almost the one area of artistic freedom left in Germany after H became Chancellor.
‘What Herz was faced with,’ you told me, ‘was the perception of Meistersinger as a Nazi work. Nuremberg was the Nazi town, it was in Nuremberg that they held their rallies, it was in Nuremberg that they had their come-uppance in the trials. And here is this opera, set in the bloody place, with honest old Hans Sachs the German cobbler coming on at the end and saying, Forget the glories of the old Roman Empire, forget European art – stick to German art and German thought and German everything and you will be saved. It is practically Nazi, yet how was Herz to make out of this glorious music something that could be of relevance to us today in the East with our very different Germany and our…’
‘But hang on. Stop! You don’t think you’ve just given a fair summary of what Meistersinger is about? You know something? When all this nationalist nonsense was beginning, and Fidi and Winnie Wagner had just been round the USA raising money to revive the Festival, they opened again in 1925 and one of the operas they opened with was Meistersinger. After Hans Sachs’s song, you know, “zerging in Dunst / das Heil’ge Röm’sche Reich, / uns bliebe gleich / die heil’ge deutsche Kunst!”, the audience started singing “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles”. So for all subsequent performances Fidi had leaflets put on every seat asking people not to sing, and he put up posters saying, “Here we only support art”.’
‘That didn’t stop people seeing the Mastersingers as Nazi-singers, did it?’
‘It’s so ridiculous, that. It’s the supreme example of their genius, their absolute genius, the Nazis’, for taking hold of something, adopting it as their own and making it say the precise opposite, the complete and precise opposite of what it actually says.’
‘Well, that’s what Herz thinks too. That’s what he’s going to do in this new Meistersinger in Leipzig, which is why, Dad, you’ve got to get on a train with me and come and see it.’
‘I mean, here he is – Richard Wagner. It is the expression, really, of his whole credo; and OK, that credo kept changing, he was an intelligent man. The human mind doesn’t stand still.’
‘Try telling that to Ulbricht!’
‘But there are shifts we make that are true reversals – we start believing in God, we end up as atheists; we start as Communists, we turn into high Catholic monarchists. Actually those sorts of conversions are rare, and even in those cases, when you examine them, you find that the minds in question are, as it were, in love with the same ideas, but seeing them from different angles. Wagner wasn’t that sort of a mind anyway. He wasn’t an analytical intelligence – he thought with his heart, as Tolstoy said of some other thinker. And all his life I think he was trying to work out why he was being led further and further into music itself. Not music as propaganda. Not music as an accompaniment for someone else’s pretty words. Music. And it had begun during his theatrical boyhood when no one could have predicted what lay ahead for him – a life in the theatre, obviously, like his sisters, his mum, his stepfather. He was born with the smell of greasepaint. But you’d have expected something much blowzier, much more rough and tumble – until the conversion – when he heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as a boy, and transcribed it not once but six times, and became possessed by the knowledge that whatever it was he wanted to say, it was going to be in music. I think Richard Wagner’s life is as simple as that in some ways, and all the talk I’ve heard in my lifetime about whether he was a radical, or a Marxist, or a Nazi, or a this or a that – it’s so much balls. But when he wrote the sketch for Meistersinger in 1845, without the last speech of Hans Sachs, of course, it was just a latent idea. There had been the singing competition in Tannhäuser, and this was a sort of comic afterthought. He’d invent the…’
‘Yes, Dad.’
You were smiling at me. It was one of those conversations we used to have when you were a little girl and you would interrupt me by saying, ‘Daddy! You’re telling me things.’
* * *
Remember the letter Cosima – Wagner’s second wife, aged twenty-nine – wrote to King Ludwig II (aged twenty-one) about the ending of Meistersinger? Whereas the composer thought ‘The drama is actually over with Walther’s poem and that Sachs’s great speech is irrelevant – it was the poet’s address to the audience and he was thinking of omitting it – I argued the opposite. I pulled such a pitiful face that Wagner got no rest all night. He wrote the strophe out, deleted what I had indicated and sketched the music to it in pencil’ (January 1867).
He did not do so because he feared the lines would be interpreted as ultranationalist. He just didn’t think they were necessary in the opera. But insofar as they do correspond to anything he felt, either when he wrote them just after the failed revolution in 1848, or nearly twenty years later when he was orchestrating the completed Meistersinger poem, it is quite clear what Richard Wagner thought.
We Germans – what have we got to give the rest of the world? Napoleonic-style world domination? No – we are a collection of kingdoms and duchies and states, and our revolutionary idea of becoming one people of free-thinking republicans in 1848 is a dream, it’s never going to happen. So let’s forget our political ambitions and our military ambitions, and continue to be proud of what we are good at, always have been good at: music, art, philosophy. That is what Wagner thought. OK, like any man getting on in years, he became more ‘reactionary’; OK, in 1870 he cheered when his own country won a war – who wouldn’t? – and he was momentarily excited by the creation of a German state. But he never supported a political party and he was fundamentally anti-Bismarck. He was no more ‘political’ than any great man or woman has ever been – Goethe, Tolstoy, Dante. Dante learnt to hate the political party to whose membership he owed his life of heartbroken exile. Roughhewn cobbler-poet Sachs sings that though the Holy Roman Empire – that is the military and political might of old Germany from Charlemagne down to the seventeenth century – fades into mist, German art will always be supreme. It may be a bit childish, this sentiment, and maybe that’s why Wagner wasn’t keen on putting it into the finalized version of Meistersinger. But the notion that it was a political manifesto…!
He was in mourning while he finished the composition of Meistersinger, in 1866. Two deaths. Pohl – a pointer – had died at the villa just outside Geneva, where Wagner was then living, Les Artichauts. He was absent when the poor creature died. Cosima, not yet his domestic companion, though she had become his lover, suggested he ‘get away from it all’ and go to … Lyon, of all godforsaken places. ‘These childish monstrous cities like a thousand-voice Italian opera unison! Not a sign of life!’ It had been impossible to work there, and he had been preparing himself to leave his lodgings and return to Geneva when on the evening of 25 January 1866 he received a telegram from his friend and doctor in Dresden, Anton Pusinelli: ‘Your wife died last night.’
Minna! Minna gone! Minna, with whom he had endured such humiliating struggles, and quarrels and journeys; such midnight flits from cheap hotels where they couldn’t afford the rent; such terrible pointless rows in awful bare rented rooms; such bad se
x, such resentment, such hate and yet … You can’t be married to someone and not at some residual level love them more deeply than any friend or family or hero. You’ve been through so much. (That’s certainly true of me and Helga, though you, who had the bad luck to see our quarrels, would find this hard to believe.)
When he heard the news he did not think of Minna alone, drunken and ill, so ill as now to be dead, in Dresden. He had not seen that Minna in … what? Four years nearly. Poor Minna. His consciousness filled with the years of implacable struggle in Paris.
That horrible little flat in the rue du Helder, and someone in the room next door, practising Liszt’s Fantasy on Lucia di Lammermoor over and over and over again until they were both driven mad. It was the autumn of 1840. He was twenty-seven, she was thirty-one. They were days of great pain, but it was before the worst days, the days of their estrangement. Still recovering from her miscarriage, Minna was gauntly beautiful and in her chaotic way protective of him. He remembered huddling in smelly blankets, as they both drank from a bottle of spirits she had bought down the road, and the insults they shouted at the piano player next door until anger and despair turned to laughter.
He remembered, of course, Robber. Oh, how they’d both loved that dog, Robber. The gigantic Newfoundland which had come with them on their flight from Riga, shared the terrifying sea voyage which inspired The Flying Dutchman and come to London with them. Robber had endured such adventures. Wagner could remember himself and Minna arriving in a pathetically dingy lodging house in Soho – Dean Street. The luggage had been deposited by a surly cabbie, who had hovered, expecting a tip. Minna had turned to him with uplifted hands – ‘What do you think I’m made of? Money?’ People! The way they expected you to pay them for everything. She had always been very good at that, Minna – seeing off the brutes who expected payment. She’d got them into that three-wheeler – Richard, herself, the dog, the portmanteaux and cases. She’d shrilly insisted in three languages that they be taken to the centre, the centre. ‘Whazzat? So-oh, yer min?’ ‘Ja, ja, Soho will do us well!’ And so there they were, and after she had given him an earful instead of payment he had gone off, the menace, deciding as the weak usually did that you couldn’t force payment if people hadn’t got it. And she’d negotiated herself into the lodging house. And they’d stared at the English room – perhaps the nastiest yet in their whole downward spiral of humiliation – a room whose spirit memories would drown with sorrow if taped, for it was here, eight years later, that Karl and Jenny Marx would fetch up with their sick, only too mortal brood of children – and Richard and Minna Wagner had looked at the large blue-black patches of damp staining the wallpaper, the yellowing pillowcases where a hundred greasy heads had lain before them, the rags representing blankets on the beds, the hole-torn dusty rugs on the dusty floorboards – and suddenly both had cried out, ‘Where’s Robber?’