by A. N. Wilson
‘Herr Wagner? Please?’
It did not sound like a policeman. The voice was that of a gentleman. The accent was that of Munich.
‘Herr Wagner – please. I have a message for you from His Majesty King Ludwig of Bavaria.’
The day before, in a café in Stuttgart, a stranger had accosted him and offered him a card, inscribed with the same words.
If you are on the run, anything and everything seems like a threat. And at fifty, Richard Wagner was yet again on the run. He had been living in Vienna. Work had not been going well. He had not finished the orchestration, either of Tristan or of The Ring of the Nibelungs. But what was the point? The more revolutionary and innovative his musical conceptions, the less likelihood there appeared of his ever being able to see them realized on the stage. It was twenty years since he had sketched out Meistersinger and although he had conducted concert performances of the overture, no one had seen the opera. No one had seen Tristan, though he had more or less finished writing it five years ago, in 1859. It was his fate not to see his work performed. Even with the popular early work, his life of political exile had made it hard for him to see his compositions on the stage. (Lohengrin had been completed in 1848, and first performed in Weimar in 1850, conducted by the Abbé Liszt; but Wagner himself did not see it until 1861, performed in Vienna.)
When his nerves were frayed, when his belief in himself was challenged, when it seemed as if life was stacking all the cards against him, he needed to cosset himself. Since his motherly elder sister had died, there had been no one to cosset him; not really to treat him, as he wished to be treated, like a tender little baby. That was why he indulged in what his enemies supposed to be an extravagant way of life. True, the walls of his apartment were lined with silk. The floor was covered with innumerable soft rugs. The enormous bed, and the little sofas, were all festooned with silks and satins. Above and around the bed were enormous looking-glasses. In his bedchamber, into which no one was admitted except himself and a few intimates, were closets stuffed with women’s clothes, flounces, frilly silk drawers, Russian bootees, suspenders, satin petticoats.
In Vienna he had linked up once more with a friend of his Leipzig adolescence, Marie Loewe. He had developed an obsessive crush on Marie’s daughter Lilli* – lovely Lilli, with her delicate little lips and her translucent skin. Marie had brought the daughter to see him one day in his apartments. He had been dressed in a yellow damask dressing gown, over which he had thrown a black cloak lined with pink satin. Unfortunately, he had kissed Lilli with too much ardour and she had not come again. But Marie came, Marie who understood. Before he returned of an evening to the overheated Vienna apartment, Marie would spray it, over and over, with the most expensive scent until it reeked like a seraglio. And she would lay out ‘his’ clothes for him on the silken bedspread. Drinking champagne together (only the best), Marie would soothe him by dressing him as he liked to be dressed. She wore soft cotton-velvet black gloves, buttoned to the elbow, as she helped him into his tailor-made silken drawers, lingering as she pulled them over his thighs, and slowly buttoned them at the front. Then, there would be the laced liberty bodices, the negligées, decorated with ruches, tassels and rosettes. Over all this he would throw one of the many brightly coloured silk dressing gowns which the Viennese tailors made for him at huge cost. And while he lay there, sometimes being stroked and fondled by Marie, sometimes alone, he drank bottle after bottle of champagne.
He had no income and no means of paying for all this. Without it, however, there was no hope of finishing his life’s work. How could you explain this to the cretins who had never composed a page of music in their lives?
Eventually the predators, the money-grubbers, closed in. The extraordinary and trivial matter of his owing them some thousands egged on their malice to persecute him. So had they persecuted Beethoven before him. All right, all right, so Beethoven died in an austere room, and lived a life of abject discomfort and poverty, but was that a reason for Germany to persecute all the great musicians? As in Riga, when he was a very young man, so in Vienna, when tiredness and dissipation made his fifty years seem much older, there was only one solution: flight. Clad in the comfort of women’s clothes, though with a heavy travelling cloak round him, and with one of his large velvet berets on his head, he had fled Vienna by dead of night, on 23 March, hoping to get over the Swiss border to Zurich before he was apprehended by the police.
He broke his journey in Stuttgart and it was there that he had the nasty shock of being recognized. He had imagined he was travelling incognito. But the messenger had approached him with the card: I have a message for you from His Majesty King Ludwig of Bavaria.
This could only be some cruel joke by the creditors, who were homing in upon him. He had retreated to his hotel, shivering, and so much in need, in need of comfort. Most of his clothes had had to be left behind in Vienna, but he had enough here to bring some measure of peace. He had lain on the bed, wearing magenta silk stockings, tied at the thigh with scarlet silk bows. His drawers, as slinky and soft as an adolescent girl’s palms, clung to his loins. Over them were draped two layers of silk petticoat, and above was a tightly waisted liberty bodice, again, of pink silk.
The thunderous knock at his door was like the Commendatore at the end of Don Giovanni. It was a judgement, a visitation of doom.
He did not know that the Norns who had been weaving his Rope of Destiny had changed ill fortune to fair. This was the year when the miracles, all at once, began to appear. Though he did not know it as he lay there in his hotel bedroom in Stuttgart, his old enemy Meyerbeer had just died in Paris and Cosima, not long afterwards, was destined to conceive Isolde, his first child.
‘Herr Wagner!’
He hastily put on one of his silk dressing gowns and added a velvet beret to conceal the fact that it was days since he had groomed his hair. Then, with a self-conscious glimpse at his small feet, still ribboned into the pink Russian bootees, he opened the door.
The flunkey who stood there was called Herr Pfistermeister and he was indeed Private Secretary to the newly crowned King Ludwig II of Bavaria.
The Immortals exact strange bargains from their puppets. When we contemplate the strange relationship between Richard Wagner and his royal patron it is difficult to know who was exploiting whom, which of them came off worse. Wagner (whatever ghastly views he might sometimes have expressed about Jews, revolution, Germany etc. etc.) was fundamentally a free creative spirit, a mind on the move. He accepted King Ludwig’s patronage in 1864 and immediately had to set to work denying his revolutionary past, which he did in a huge, fascinatingly dishonest autobiography, My Life, which he dictated to Cosima, to give the King the impression that he had played almost no part in the 1848 uprisings. He also omitted to mention that he was a lifelong republican. Had Bavaria been a stable and completely independent kingdom, had Ludwig been a stable and completely independent political leader, Wagner’s career, and particularly his career post-mortem in the twentieth century, might have been very different. But six years after Herr Pfistermeister knocked on Wagner’s hotel bedroom door in Stuttgart, the twenty-six-year-old Bavarian monarch in effect wound up his kingdom, sent his troops to France to fight alongside the Prussians and capitulated to Prussian-dominated German unification post-1870. Lurching from one psychological crisis to the next, the King was eventually proclaimed insane and took his own life (or was murdered by his doctors) three years after Richard Wagner’s death. By then the sentiments expressed in Wagner’s pamphlets and prose writings could be enlisted as propaganda for the new militaristic Prussian state of Germany. And gentle Hans Sachs’s plea for Germany to drop its revolutionary-political aims in favour of art could be twisted into a belligerent militaristic claim that just as the newly created Germany had the fastest-growing economy, the largest army in mainland Europe, the fastest-growing navy and the biggest industrial plants, so it was also best at art. The Wagnerians who guarded the shrine of Bayreuth after the Master’s demise did nothing t
o dispel the idea of Wagner as a tub-thumping Bismarckian nationalist (even though he had detested Bismarck). Cosima and her son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain represented this capricious rebel against political systems as an arch-reactionary. His splenetic and poisonous outbursts of anti-Semitism became part of the programme, rather than aberrations from the purer side of his nature. And so the stage was set, after the calamities of 1919, for new nationalists and new breeds of Wagnerian, to take the thing yet further and create the image of Wagner the National Socialist.
All these things, in a way, were the inevitable consequence of his opening that hotel door in Stuttgart on April 1864. But at the time it seemed like the most wonderful stroke of good fortune, that after waiting for years without hope that he would ever find the financial support or the artistic enthusiasm, or the physical venue to make the staging of his later operas a possibility, he had found … his Lohengrin, his magic prince.
My father was not really capable of malice, but there was undoubted pleasure in his eyes when he used to recall the fact that King Ludwig II was almost completely unmusical. His music tutor used to say that the boy could not tell the difference between a Strauss waltz and a Beethoven sonata. The only composer who interested him was Wagner. My father liked to state that this was highly usual among Wagnerians.
It was Ludwig’s grandfather, the great builder and aesthete King Ludwig I, who had built the Swan Palace in the mountains, the Hohenschwangau, whose walls were decorated with murals of the Grail Legend and Tannhäuser. This was allegedly the site of Lohengrin’s palace, and there were swans painted on cornices, ceiling roses and vases. The lakes in the grounds were full of live swans. As a boy, Ludwig had feasted on these stories and, aged about thirteen, he had discovered the libretti of Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, which he learnt by heart. He was sixteen when he first saw Lohengrin in Munich and not long afterwards he heard Tannhäuser. Those sitting beside the youth in the royal box were afraid he was about to have an epileptic convulsion when Tannhäuser re-entered Venusberg.
His father died young, Ludwig inherited the throne when he was aged eighteen, and his first act was to dispatch Pfistermeister to find Wagner.
Thereafter began the partnership that ultimately enabled Wagner’s operas to be staged. But nothing in the composer’s life was easy. If he had been prepared to sit down and finish the orchestration of his operas, and get von Bülow to conduct them in Munich, probably all would have been well. But the young King was besotted with the older man. They in effect fell in love with one another (though of course Wagner, unlike Ludwig, was not homosexual) and the proud royal patron could not hold back from giving the greedy protégé everything he desired. Not only did he pay off Wagner’s debts, but he gave him a huge stipend, paid for out of the public purse, a large house overlooking Lake Starnberg and another large house in the centre of Munich which, naturally, had to be decorated with silken wall hangings and all the softest and most expensive upholstery. The first performance of Tristan, the first great work of ‘modern art’, took place in Munich on 10 June 1865, and it did nothing to make Wagner popular. Indeed, hostility to Wagner, both in court circles and among the general public, grew to such a degree that the King was forced to ask him to leave.
This was not without its conveniences. Although the King was an ingénu (he asked one of his courtiers ‘What is a natural child?’ and on another occasion appeared not to understand when someone tried to tell him what rape was), it would not have been possible for long to disguise from him the nature of the relationship between Wagner and Cosima von Bülow. They continued to assure him, even as Wagner’s child grew in her womb, that they had no more than a comradely relationship and Frau von Bülow’s presence in Wagner’s houses was often concealed from the King. But this was more easily done when he had gone into exile once more and they were living together in the Villa Tribschen on the banks of Lake Lucerne.
Meanwhile, with the King’s desperate pleading and Cosima’s firm insistence that he finish his great works, Wagner had Meistersinger ready by October 1867 (it was performed in Munich under von Bülow on 21 June 1868 and, unlike Tristan, it was an instant success with the public).
The patron – a harbinger of Bayreuth in the 1930s – took obsessive interest in the staging of the opera. In this – again, foreshadowing Wolf’s Bayreuth – the crazed monarch perhaps understood more of the audience’s response to Meistersinger than did its composer. Wagner wanted his work to be a generalized, all but a mythological work of art about art. To use the title of one of his prose works, it was concerned with the artwork of the future. King Ludwig insisted that Angelo Quaglio and Heinrich Döll, who were constructing the sets, be sent to Nuremberg and re-create an exact replica of the elaborately Gothic St Catherine’s Church for the opening scene. Though the opening night took place two years before the birth of Germany as a modern nation, this opera was to be the rallying cry of German patriots forever afterwards. What had been conceived as a statement about the transcendent power of art, a power that crossed national boundaries, was doomed to become the ultimate expression of strident nationalism.
As in a scene change during one of the old bel canto operas, which Richard Wagner saw off, we have been in front of the curtains for most of this chapter. In 1932 there was no Bayreuth Festival. In consequence there were no raised eyebrows about the fact that Winnie spent so much of the spring and summer of 1932 ‘away on business’. For five or six months I hardly saw her, though she sent me letters that I treasured:
It’s about time, tell Lieselotte, that the children’s nursery is to have a complete clear-out. Get it done before they come back from boarding school …
When you are next at the office in the theatre, give some thought to whether we should get new filing cabinets before the coming season …
Tietjen tells me there’s been a nasty outbreak of flu among the chorus. Thank heavens it did not happen in a Festival year. Avoid getting it yourself. There is no need to be an out-and-out vegetarian, but a diet largely restricted to fruit and vegetables is highly beneficial and anyone can tell you that …
Don’t let Eva bully you. I have given you authority to tell the Wardrobe Mistress to get rid of all those tunics which had moths. In last year’s Lohengrin, by the final performances, you could see the holes in the Brabantian soldiers!!
I am sorry you are tired. Much of this is attributable to diet. You should not stuff yourself with fruit and vegetables all the time. Protein is what you need – as much meat as you can afford.
Why throw away perfectly good costumes just because they have a few holes? I detect Eva’s extravagant hand here! Ask around and see if you, or she, cannot get a team of good needlewomen to mend some of the more basic items of costume – those tunics, for example, which we used for the Brabantians in L., and for the pilgrims in Tannhäuser, are perfectly usable for the Grail Knights in P.
And so on.
There were seldom specific addresses at the top of these letters – ‘Zurich’ or ‘Berlin’ or ‘In transit’ was all the clue they gave of her whereabouts.
When Helga and I rescued you from the orphanage in Bayreuth in 1935, I noticed that your birth, which occurred on 10 July 1932, was recorded as having taken place in Berlin. Your parents were described as Anna Schmidt and an unknown father. But your first name – Senta – gave a pretty heavy clue.
All my letters from Winnie were lost in the conflagrations and air raids of 1945. But I have a distinct memory of a letter from her in what must have been a few days after you were born. The reason I remember it so clearly is that, unlike the other letters, so vaguely dated from ‘Zurich’, ‘Berlin’ etc., this was from a clinic, with a number and a postal code.
No one is to worry about me. I am perfectly well, just exhausted. The doctors say I shall be back on my feet in a week. I think I had been trying to do too much, but some of the burden which I was carrying has now been delivered from me …
I distinctly remember punning words to this effect, though o
f course I did not recognize them as such. And also I remember – ‘Wolf, even at this busy time, has been to see me, and brought fruit and flowers. This is of inexpressible comfort to me.’
* * *
The year of your birth was one of near anarchy in our country. Even in sedate little Bayreuth the poverty was terrible to behold. Some weeks there was very little food in the shops. Those who were lucky enough to be able to buy food would find themselves being waylaid by beggars as they came out of the shop. I can remember my dear mother once coming home empty-handed, admitting that a woman had stopped her outside the butcher’s and implored her to give away her shopping bag – a nasty cut of mutton, some potatoes – to feed a hungry family.
In the bigger towns things were much worse. On my visits to Nuremberg, either on business or for shopping, it was common to see fights. At the station buffet when I was eating a bun and drinking a cup of chocolate, I saw a man draw a knife on the waiter and demand to be fed. The police were called, but before they came a small riot had broken out, with chairs being thrown and food grabbed from behind the counter.
The Communists were very strong, but their street fights with the Nazis were only the most conspicuous focus of our national divisions. The truth is division and chaos were everywhere, and many of us who were actually neither Communist nor Nazi felt ourselves torn apart. We wanted justice for the poor. We wanted to avoid the slavery Lenin had imposed on Russia.
You cannot imagine unless you lived through it the sheer level of chaos. I cannot remember how many elections there were that year – old General Hindenburg’s statutory term of office came to an end, so there was a presidential election. (He stood again and remained in office.) There were state elections, Reichstag elections, elections every few months; riots every few months; murders every few months. Hundreds of murders. Reds and Nazis fought on the streets of our towns, openly firing at one another and killing dozens on each side. But quite apart from politics there was an atmosphere of murderous mayhem. Many deaths took place that had no obvious political connection at all. Even in our small town a youth was found, in the small alley which joins Friedrichstrasse and Dammallee, his shirt open, his guts spilling onto the pavement. He had a deep knife wound from diaphragm to groin. Such deeds would have been unthinkable in our gentle little town until these times. Now – I will not say we took them for granted, but they seemed in keeping with the desperate spirit of the times.