Symphony of Seduction

by Christopher Lawrence

  ‘I think she said it was a cantata or something. She swore she could hear the angels weeping, it was so beautiful.’

  ‘Big fucking deal. What’s a cantata?’

  ‘Buggered if I know. But you know why we’re doing this.’

  ‘He ran off with the Doge’s girl, didn’t he?’

  ‘Sure did. Only after he’d fucked half of the women in Venice.’

  ‘I hope your wife was safe, then. Now, that’s impressive.’

  ‘You bastard.’ He laughed. ‘Let’s get on with it. Remember: when it’s done, we’re supposed to go to the French ambassador’s and claim asylum.’

  ‘Got it. We’re using knives?’

  ‘No knives. The Contarinis want it to be slow.’

  Stradella glanced at the two men while passing, just in time to see one of them raise a fist. He jumped back, parried the blow and reached for his own dagger.

  The reflex wasn’t fast enough to stave off the second man’s kick to his groin. The composer felt the pain suck the air from his lungs. His legs began to crumple. Finally extracting the knife from its scabbard, Stradella swivelled enough to slash wildly through the air, the arc of the blade catching one of the men across the cheek. The wound was superficial, but had a sting.

  ‘You fucker,’ the man said angrily. The two closed in on Stradella as he slumped onto the flagstones, raining kicks and punches upon their quarry until their fists were slimy with his blood.

  POSTSCRIPT

  The near-fatal beating of Stradella became an international diplomatic incident when Maria Giovanna of Savoy complained to the French King Louis XIV about his ambassador’s complicity in the illegal actions of a foreign power.

  After his recovery, Stradella left Turin, arriving alone in Genoa in early 1678. Nothing more was ever heard about Agnese Van Uffele.

  His reception in the port town was more welcoming. A group of nobles provided an annuity for the provision of a house and fellow servant to Guido. Commissions came in by the boatload, including one from a Roman duke for an opera set to Stradella’s own libretto, called Dark Love.

  Stradella was stabbed to death on 25 February 1682 in Genoa’s Piazza Banchi. He was forty-two. The assassin’s identity and reasons for the murder remain unknown. It was rumoured at the time that the composer was having an improper relationship with a married woman of the influential Lomellini family.

  LOVED TO DEATH

  Richard Wagner was the most controversial composer who ever lived. His masterpiece, Tristan and Isolde, foreshadows psychoanalysis in peeling back the layers between the external world and the unconscious. For Wagner, there was only one way to prepare for his exploration of transcendent love …

  ‘Since I have never in my life enjoyed the real happiness of love, I wish to create a monument to this, the most beautiful of all dreams, in which this love shall have its proper fill, from beginning to end.’

  Richard Wagner (1813–1883) to Franz Liszt, 1854

  ZURICH, APRIL 1857

  ‘I’m going to call this place “Asyl” – short for asylum – because it will be a refuge,’ said Richard Wagner, doffing his velvet beret. He looked for the first time through the freshly painted windows of the house and across the patch of garden to the waters of the lake beyond, dulled by the rain of early spring.

  There was a clatter of activity in the entrance hall as their luggage was brought in from the carriage outside.

  ‘This is all unbelievable, Richard,’ said his wife, following him into the room, patting her chest to calm her palpitations. ‘These people must adore you.’

  ‘The Wesendoncks know how much the world will benefit from their common sense in giving me the space I need for my work,’ he announced.

  ‘By common sense, I presume you mean generosity?’ said Minna, knowing that gratitude was something Richard considered the sentimental reaction of lesser mortals.

  ‘That too,’ said Wagner. ‘Their demands are modest. Herr Wesendonck is asking for a peppercorn rent of only a thousand francs a year.’

  ‘It probably is modest by the standards of accommodation around here,’ said Minna, aware that the cottage was a small place in a rich neighbourhood, ‘but still more than we can manage. How will you pay?’

  ‘I won’t, of course. After all, the world owes me a living, and the Wesendoncks are the ones honoured to repay this debt at present. One day they will boast that Wagner was their tenant.’

  Bloody Richard, she thought. If we’re not careful, he’s going to put us back in the same position we’ve suffered time and time again: letters from the creditors, a summons from the bailiff, the inevitable midnight flit out of town with our belongings and the dog crammed into a cart.

  And that was often the best outcome; sometimes the Wagners weren’t even that lucky. In Paris, Richard had ended up in a debtor’s prison while his wife passed the hat around.

  Minna sighed, thinking yet again she should really have stayed with the businessman who lured her away just six months after she and Wagner were married. Life would have been so much easier. Instead, they had been virtually homeless after only just getting out of Dresden in the wake of the uprising there in 1849, Richard with an arrest warrant over his head, a political exile who dreamed of changing the world by writing an enormous series of works about its destruction, all the time spending every penny he could cajole from starstruck admirers, many of them women. Oh yes, Minna knew something about them.

  One of those admirers was Otto Wesendonck, a wealthy silk merchant who had encountered Richard at the Hotel Baur au Lac up the road some years earlier. The successful capitalist held anti-monarchist views similar to those of the artistic revolutionary, and soon Richard was casting his spell, describing his vision for the future of music and drama and its liberating impact on the world. All it would take for this vision to become a reality were a few loans while he waited for his circumstances to improve, or until the cheques rolled in from the theatres of Europe. It was inevitable, Wagner believed.

  Otto obliged in the form of a large advance against future performance royalties. Now came this – an offer of the small house adjacent to the sprawling Wesendonck estate, where the building of a new grandiose villa for its owners was almost finished. Richard would become the captive creative spirit at the bottom of a rich man’s garden.

  Nobody was happier at the prospect of such a ménage than Otto’s young wife, Mathilde. Minna could see that Mathilde was infatuated with Richard. It was obvious in the way she stared at him when he launched into one of his tiresome set pieces about reforming the theatre by returning to ancient Greek models, or the need to shatter present-day operatic conventions, or how dogs were better companions than people, or something to do with renouncing the will, and sundry other bits of philosophical claptrap Minna couldn’t understand. Then Mathilde would look back at her rich husband with wide eyes as if to say Darling, we could have this all the time, our very own genius, creating the artworks of the future, right here at our back door! Don’t you just love it? And he – besotted with her oval face, rich brown hair, poetic leanings and complete lack of guile, wanting more than anything to make her happy – would nod his assent.

  This infatuation was a problem, Minna reasoned, but a house was a house, and with her in Asyl and Otto in the mansion up the hill it would be surely be difficult for anything to happen. Still, she was nearly forty-eight, and there was temptation for Richard only a few flower beds away in the form of a beautiful other woman nearly twenty years Minna’s junior. She would have to keep an eye on things, unlike that unfortunate business back in 1850 when her husband almost ran off to the Orient with the twenty-one-year-old Jessie Laussot hussy.

  This time, Minna would be more vigilant. Richard’s pants would stay firmly fastened unless he lowered them for his wife (never, these days) and he might even stop tinkering with his Ring of the Nibelung folly to write a smash hit that would make them some money. A nice comedy, perhaps, with real people in it, instead of gods and dwarfs.
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br />   Then he could damned well pay the rent.

  Peps the King Charles spaniel gave his gasping bark at the sound of footsteps on the gravel path outside the front door.

  ‘Ah! The Wagners are here!’ said Mathilde Wesendonck as she fluttered into the room, her cheeks reddened by the dash through the rain. ‘Richard – welcome. And you, Frau Wagner.’ Minna did not fail to notice how different the two greetings sounded.

  ‘My dear Mathilde, we have taken up residence ahead of you!’ said Wagner, kissing her hand.

  ‘Our new home won’t be ready for a few months yet,’ she said, blushing further, ‘but I’ll make a point of seeing you every day.’ Wagner kissed her hand again, and Minna felt another of those pangs of jealousy.

  ‘That’s too kind of you, Frau Wesendonck, but we wouldn’t wish to burden you with our company all the time, would we, Richard?’ This was more of a prompt than a question.

  Wagner would not be prompted.

  ‘Frau Wesendonck’s presence is essential to my peace of mind and the quality of my work,’ he said. ‘She is my Muse.’ At this, Mathilde’s flush extended all the way down her neck to the beginning of her décolletage.

  She’s your landlady, Minna thought.

  Only the landlady.

  Richard set up his writing table near one of the larger windows so that the view of the lake and distant mountains would inspire him. ‘I must have beauty, splendour and light!’ he insisted, a challenging requirement from someone who was penniless.

  He set to work with discipline and speed, writing on vast pages of manuscript paper each morning. Best of all as far as Minna was concerned was that he looked to be moving on from the Nibelung project that had preoccupied him for years; it was now so enormous that only an opera house out of its mind could contemplate taking it on. She left that sort of sort of insanity to Richard himself when he said that the Ring would eventually require a theatre to be purpose-built for its production.

  One morning he suggested this elephantine conceit might rest for a while. Other ideas were crowding in.

  ‘I’ve started on a treatment for a new work called Parsifal,’ he announced.

  ‘Just the one opera?’ Minna asked.

  ‘Just the one.’

  ‘Any gods or dwarfs?’

  ‘Probably God himself, but there’s a magician. Oh – and some flower maidens.’

  ‘How delightful! It’s a comedy then,’ she said brightly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘That’s not all. I’ve finally decided to start work on something else: a love story. It’s been in the back of my mind ever since we met the Wesendoncks a few years ago. Now that we are here in Asyl it has become an impulse I can’t ignore any more.’

  ‘Richard, that sounds splendid!’ said Minna, sensing that her husband was finally showing some awareness of public taste. ‘People adore a love story! Who is the gorgeous couple?’

  ‘Tristan and Iseult, from medieval times. She’s a princess.’

  ‘I love it! Do they end up happily ever after?’

  ‘Possibly – but not in this world. He’s killed by a sword.’

  ‘And the princess?’

  ‘Well, it’s been an adulterous love, so she can’t just go back to her husband. She sublimates herself.’

  ‘Sublimates herself?’

  ‘She is absorbed into the higher reality and renounces everything, including life.’

  ‘Meaning …?’

  ‘She drops dead. Minna, my dear, you can’t understand unless you’ve been there,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t see why it should be so difficult, Richard,’ she said. ‘We’ve both been there as far as the adultery is concerned. It wouldn’t have been all that helpful to me if I’d gone out and sublimated myself.’

  ‘Mathilde understands, though,’ said Richard, unable to conceal the reverential tone in his voice. ‘We’ve discussed transcendental love at length, and she thinks I should start without delay. She has almost put the poem in my head.’

  ‘I suppose she had to put it somewhere,’ said Minna, without a trace of reverence.

  And sure enough, within a couple of weeks Wagner announced that his Siegfried was now under a tree, and would stay there at least until the new Tristan story had been told. The massive sheaf of Ring manuscript was placed in an armoire and replaced by a clean sheet of writing paper.

  He worked feverishly for almost a month, his brow shining with the heat of late summer. After lunch, he cleared his head by taking a walk through a forest near the estate, and then dashed across the Wesendonck lawn to meet Mathilde, waiting on a bench near a copse of trees, to read her that morning’s work.

  As he did so, she sat there looking at him in a way that Minna found deeply irritating whenever she contrived to peer at them unseen from a nearby hedge. Sometimes Mathilde would avert her gaze to the lake and exhale softly, all the while mouthing the words ‘Yes, Richard – yes, yes, yes.’ If Minna had heard the same from behind a closed door she would have sworn that something less cerebral had taken place, but here was Frau Wesendonck in the open air, responding with something resembling post-coital gasps to the mere sound of Richard’s words. God knows what she might do when she eventually heard the music.

  In September, with the first trees beginning to turn, Richard said the poem was done. When Minna asked if perhaps she could hear the result, he announced that he would read it to an assembly of visitors.

  ‘I don’t receive a private rendition, Richard?’ she said reproachfully.

  ‘Mathilde has already assured me that the poetry is there,’ he said. ‘Now Tristan must be performed before an audience. You are to be a part of history, my dear.’

  Minna attempted to console herself with this when the three couples retired to Asyl’s small salon after dinner later that week. Joining the Wagners were the Wesendoncks, of course – Minna hoped that Mathilde would suppress her gasps in mixed company for the sake of propriety – and the Wagners’ own houseguests, fresh from a honeymoon: young Hans von Bülow, a brilliant pianist and conductor who worshipped her husband, and the new Frau von Bülow.

  Cosima was not only one of Franz Liszt’s daughters, but seemed to have inherited an even larger version of her father’s already significant nose. She was remarkably quiet for someone who should have been bubbling with a newlywed’s enthusiasm, keeping her eyes averted from almost everyone except Richard, only to stammer something unintelligible and look away whenever he asked her a question.

  Darkness closed in while Wagner intoned his poetry. Tristan and Isolde declared the night to be the only true home for their love. The glow of a single lamp in the darkness, the cadence of the author’s voice as it rocked to the alliterations in the text, and the stillness outside punctuated only by the distant slush of water from the lake transported everyone back in time; Tristan lying dead on a Brittany shore, his lover standing alongside in an ecstatic trance.

  After the final words:

  To drown

  To sink

  Unconscious –

  Supreme bliss!

  … a silence fell over the company as they imagined Isolde falling lifeless onto Tristan’s body.

  Minna thought the whole thing was indecently passionate, almost disgusting, and looked at the faces of the other women in the room.

  Mathilde’s expression had followed Isolde into the cosmos, her eyes closed, her mouth open. Cosima, on the other hand, burst into tears.

  The whole thing was rather confusing.

  Within days Wagner began writing the music. The notes flew onto the paper with such speed that Minna suspected the beginning of Tristan’s gestation went back much further than their arrival at Asyl.

  ‘This idea isn’t new to you, is it, Richard?’ she said.

  ‘I wrote to Liszt about it years ago,’ he said. ‘I’ve wanted to do a love story like this ever since I started reading Schopenhauer.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Around the sa
me time as meeting the Wesendoncks, I suppose.’

  You mean around the same time you met her, Minna thought.

  Now and then she heard him trying out some of the music on his piano, sometimes taking on a vocal line in his strange, hectoring voice. Minna had grown up listening to some beautiful parlour songs about love, but for the life of her, she couldn’t hear much romance in whatever Richard was dreaming up. The music didn’t seem to start anywhere, and it certainly didn’t know where it was going. There wasn’t the comfort of a tonal centre; none of the chords resolved in such a way that her ears could take a rest. She hoped that Tristan and Isolde would sound a bit happier later on, because nobody would pay money to go to a theatre and eavesdrop on this miserable affair.

  Five months after moving in, Richard had stayed true to his word and not paid a single franc in rent, so Minna could hardly complain about Mathilde’s daily visits to his workroom for a progress report on the work. It was hard to tell what was going on behind his closed door – even with one’s ear pressed very close to the keyhole – but she appeared to be urging him to continue along the strange path he was beating.

  ‘Oh Richard, you make me feel it – right here,’ she would murmur. ‘I have written poetry to match. Please, take it.’

  Minna took a discreet look at some of Frau Wesendonck’s literary efforts strewn over the top of the piano when the pair had concluded one of their ‘artistic’ rendezvous. It was the usual nonsense full of angels, sunsets, crowns of leaves, dreams vanishing into the soul; if anything, even worse than Richard’s opera. Closer inspection showed musical notation scribbled around the margins on some pages. My God! she thought, he’s actually toying with the idea of setting some of this to music.

  Otto was strangely mute during these early days in Tristan’s life. At first he was preoccupied with the move into Villa Wesendonck that August; but by November he had more urgent matters on his mind. His business was in trouble, and he needed to travel to the US to sort out the mess.

  Richard Wagner prepared himself to step into the breach.