Being Wagner: The Triumph of the Will

Being Wagner: The Triumph of the Will Simon Callow Simon Callow plunges headlong into Wagner’s world to discover what it was like to be Wagner, and to be around one of music’s most influential figures.A hundred and thirty-five years after his death, Richard Wagner’s music dramas stand at the centre of the culture of classical music. They have never been more popular, nor so violently controversial and divisive. His music is still banned in Israel – the only classical composer whose music is banned in the western world. His ten great mature masterpieces constitute an unmatched body of work, created against a backdrop of poverty, revolution, violent controversy, critical contempt and hysterical hero-worship.As a man, he was a walking contradiction, aggressive, flirtatious, disciplined, capricious, heroic, visionary and poisonously anti-Semitic. At one point, he had four lengthy operas written with no hope of being performed when, as if in a fairy-tale, he was rescued by a beautiful young king with limitless wealth which he bestowed on the composer. When one of those works, Tristan and Isolde, was at last performed, it revolutionised classical music at a stroke. Finally he fulfilled his lifelong dream of creating a vast epic to rival the work of the great Greek playwrights, a music drama in four massive segments, ushering gods and dwarves, heroes and thugs, dragons and rainbows onto the stage, the apotheosis of German art as he saw it, so extreme in its demands that he had to train a generation of singers and players to perform it, and erect a custom-built theatre to house it. Wagner died, exhausted, after creating one final piece – Parsifal – that seems to point to an even more radical new future for music.Simon Callow recalls the intellectual and artistic climate in which Wagner worked, recording the almost superhuman effort required to create his work, and evoking the extraordinary effect he had on people – this composer like no other who ever lived, extreme in everything, creator of the most sublime and most troubling body of work ever known. (#u2ce00f4f-8c2f-5343-a266-c58acf6bf2d5) COPYRIGHT (#u2ce00f4f-8c2f-5343-a266-c58acf6bf2d5) William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com) This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017 Copyright © 2017 Simon Callow Cover photograph of Simon Callow © Richard Pohle Simon Callow asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers will mbe glad to rectify any omissions in future editions. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Source ISBN: 9780008105716 Ebook edition: January 2017 ISBN: 9780008105709 Version: 2017-12-07 DEDICATION (#u2ce00f4f-8c2f-5343-a266-c58acf6bf2d5) To David Hare, friend, adviser, beacon. EPIGRAPH (#u2ce00f4f-8c2f-5343-a266-c58acf6bf2d5) ‘Only those friends, however, who feel an interest in the Man within the Artist, are capable of understanding him.’ Richard Wagner, A Communication to My Friends, 1851 CONTENTS Cover (#ua802bef7-4ccd-5d26-bf3d-0d1e72571ec7) Title Page (#u5e7db4f3-eed5-5fff-aae2-394efd989c04) Copyright (#u0e5247ec-39b5-553a-998a-46ff8fa7c5c2) Dedication (#u7d4bba34-5334-5cc7-8581-cf52475e378e) Epigraph (#uaf679743-439b-54d4-92cb-93db0551a5dc) Foreword (#ub8fe514b-338f-5b7f-b4f5-71fd49a45b92) Vorspiel (#uac594e4e-6ac2-50fc-825b-058dbace7689) 1 Young Richard (#u85c70131-f528-5a83-9d93-bfbc38ba1a9f) 2 Out in the World (#u963001ae-537f-53b0-a698-241e8a6e95dd) 3 Doldrums (#uf20edfb6-58b8-55bc-8f8f-f029b8834a84) 4 Triumph (#litres_trial_promo) 5 The World in Flames (#litres_trial_promo) 6 Pause for Thought (#litres_trial_promo) 7 It Begins (#litres_trial_promo) 8 Suspension (#litres_trial_promo) 9 Limbo (#litres_trial_promo) 10 Enter a Swan (#litres_trial_promo) 11 Towards the Green Hill (#litres_trial_promo) 12 The Long Day’s Task is Done (#litres_trial_promo) Coda (#litres_trial_promo) Chronology (#litres_trial_promo) Wagner’s Works (#litres_trial_promo) Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo) List of Illustrations (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) FOREWORD (#u2ce00f4f-8c2f-5343-a266-c58acf6bf2d5) In the summer of 2012, Kasper Holten, then artistic director of the Royal Opera House in London, asked me to create a show to celebrate the Wagner bicentenary. I threw myself at the vast literature, and emerged astounded at what I had found. I knew his work very well – had been a Wagnerian since early adolescence, knew all about leitmotive and the Tristan chord – but, apart from his notorious anti-Semitism, knew remarkably little about the man, his vast intellectual scope, his rascally sex life, his revolutionary politics, his heroic struggle to create Bayreuth. In particular, I knew nothing about his quite extraordinary personality. I determined to put what I had discovered into the one-man show I was evolving, with the result that the text that I read out on the first day of rehearsals lasted four hours. People came and went, had lunch, returned, and came back to find me still droning on. I couldn’t bear to leave anything out. The moment we started rehearsing, of course, pretty well the whole of that text was jettisoned. With light, images, props and above all with music to evoke the man and his world, I pared it down and down. The first preview still lasted two and a half hours; I cut an hour from it overnight. The show we finally evolved – Inside Wagner’s Head, I called it – gave, I think, a pretty fair impression of the furor he generated, both in himself and in other people. The play tried to answer the question of what it was about him that creates such violent emotions, even today, two hundred years after his birth. When I was working on it, I bumped into a friend, an eminent, an internationally famous, musician, and told him what I was doing. ‘Why??’ he protested. ‘Dreadful music. Dreadful man.’ This book asks the same question, but in a different way and from another perspective. It offers a sustained though not, of course, comprehensive examination of how this diminutive and often rebarbative man, with only the sketchiest of formal musical training, imposed his work and his view of life on the world. In unflagging pursuit of his goal, he was titanic, demiurgic, super-human – and also frankly, more than a little alarming. No one was ever neutral about him. His personality was so extreme, so unfettered, that he struck many people as teetering on the edge of sanity, both in the way he behaved and in the intemperate demands he made of them. He had, said Liszt: ‘A great and overwhelming nature, a sort of Vesuvius, which, when it is in eruption, scatters sheaves of fire and at the same time bunches of roses and elder’. Volcanic imagery abounds in recollections of him: ‘the little man with the enormous head, long body and short legs,’ wrote the painter Friedrich Pecht, ‘resembled a volcano spewing out fire and sweeping all before him … his true element was the most violent excitement’. Half-admiringly, Liszt described Wagner’s ability to work his way round a room, systematically alienating everyone in it. ‘It is his habit to look down on people from the heights, even on those who are eager to show themselves submissive to him. He decidedly has the style and the ways of a ruler, and he has no consideration for anyone, or at least only the most obvious.’ Many people ran a mile from him. But quite as many were hypnotised by him, eager to catch the bunches of roses and elder that accompanied the lava. However, they approached him closely at their peril. He sometimes had an annihilating effect on those who were drawn to him. ‘I am,’ he remarked to Cosima, ‘energy personified.’ He invited the composer Peter Cornelius, part of his circle of young admirers, to stay with him and write music, but he laid out his terms in advance: ‘Either you accept my invitation and settle yourself immediately for your whole life in the same house with me,’ wrote Wagner, ‘or you disdain me, and expressly abjure all desire to unite yourself with me. In the latter case, I abjure you also, root and branch and never admit you again in any way into my life.’ Cornelius refused Wagner’s generous offer. ‘I should not write a note,’ he told a friend. ‘I should be no more than a piece of spiritual furniture to him.’ It sometimes seems as if Wagner were exaggerating his own ogreishness for comic effect, but if so, the joke was rarely perceived as such, and it often turned nasty. He was quite capable of being amusing, jovial, even, when he was in the mood. He was surprisingly capable of sending himself up. But even on such occasions, he could turn in an instant, suddenly spreading terror where mirth had been before. This temperamental excess was not a case, as in Peter Shaffer’s presentation of Mozart, of a contradiction between the man and the artist: in Wagner they were one, as he insisted again and again. His temperament and the circumstances of his upbringing gave him access to parts of his psyche that most people – most nice people – put away from themselves. When he wrote music, it was his subconscious, with which he was on such familiar terms, that he sought to express. He went straight to the archetype, and he went in deep. Though his music contains ideas, it deals not just with the ineffable, but with the unspeakable. It unearths what has been buried within us. And some people found it intolerable, right from the moment his true voice as a composer was heard. Critics felt assailed by it, to an uncommon degree. A famous cartoon published in Paris in 1861 when Tannh?user was first performed there shows a demonic, bug-eyed Wagner climbing inside a huge ear, armed with a hammer and driving a nail through the eardrum, as blood spurts out in all directions. His music was, many critics thought, right from the beginning, in some way unhealthy. Eduard Hanslick dismissed the music of the composer’s highly original spiritual odyssey Lohengrin as ‘mawkish, spineless and often affected: it is like the white magnesium light into which it is not possible to gaze for long without hurting one’s eyes’. Some people took it even worse: in a letter to his friend Edvard Grieg, the Norwegian poet Bj?rnstjerne Bj?rnson wrote of Tristan and Isolde that it was ‘the most enormous depravity I have ever seen or heard, but in its own crazy way it is so overwhelming that one is deadened by it, as by a drug’. He found the plot to be immoral, he continued, ‘but even worse is this seasick music that destroys all sense of structure in its quest for tonal colour. In the end one just becomes a gob of slime on an ocean shore, something ejaculated by that masturbating pig in an opiate frenzy.’ When Wagner published the libretto of his gargantuan epic The Ring of the Nibelung, before he had written a note of the score, it provoked the pioneer psychiatrist Theodor Puschmann to publish a pamphlet called Richard Wagner: A Psychiatric Study, which roundly described its subject as a monomaniac and a psychopath. Nietzsche, too, after succumbing for a while to extreme Wagnolatry, turned violently away from him, proclaiming that Wagner was not a composer at all, comparing him unfavourably to Bizet. Recently, the British composer Thomas Ad?s described Wagner’s music as a fungus. ‘It’s a sort of unnatural growth. It’s parasitic in a sense – on its models, on its material. His material doesn’t grow symphonically – it doesn’t grow through a musical logic – it grows parasitically. It has a laboratory atmosphere.’ By contrast, Baudelaire said, after hearing the overture to Tannh?user for the first time, that the music expressed ‘all that lies most deeply hidden in the heart of man’. This was something quite new. Or maybe something very old. Something like Dionysiac possession, perhaps. From the beginning, Wagner got under people’s skin. He didn’t care whether his music gave formal satisfaction, or whether it struck people as being beautiful or exciting or dramatic. He was trying to bypass the audience’s analytical brain. His aim was the unconscious, the emotional underbelly, the murky depths of human experience. Feelings were what interested him, he said, not understanding. So it’s hardly surprising that Wagner’s music bothers people. It was meant to. It’s what he set out to do. He wanted to overwhelm his audiences – literally, to knock them off centre. He was a man without boundaries, and he wanted his audience’s boundaries to overflow too. No wonder that the theatre was where he found himself. The theatre was, indeed, at his very core. He came from a theatrical background: his stepfather was an actor, as were several of his brothers and sisters. He wrote plays from an early age, he staged shows in his model theatre, he gave highly charged recitations. All his life, he acted, joyously giving himself over to amateur theatricals and giving electrifying performances of his own librettos. As with Charles Dickens, it was said of him by shrewd judges that had he chosen to make a living in the theatre, he would have been the greatest actor of his time. There are similarities between the two men. Like Wagner, Dickens created epics from his imagination by sheer willpower, epics teeming with archetypal figures; both men were given to great treks up mountains and down valleys; both of them had an uncanny relationship to animals. These parallels only go so far; the contrasts between them are sharp, but in their way, equally illuminating – Dickens with his essentially comic vision, Wagner with his tragic view of life; Dickens’s art at heart carnival, Wagner’s profoundly hieratic; Dickens deeply in touch with his inner child, Wagner directly connected to his inner infant. The book I have tried to write aims to give a sense of what it was like to be near that demanding, tempestuous, haughty, playful, prodigiously productive figure, but also to place him in his world. Wagner belongs as much to the history of ideas and indeed to the history of the nineteenth century as he does to the history of music. I am not a musician, either as performer or as musicologist. I am a well-informed music lover, but it would be entirely inappropriate for me to attempt musical analysis. All I can write about is the effect of the music. I am slightly comforted by the fact that this is the only way Wagner ever wrote about music. You will search his copious writings in vain for an analysis of his highly idiosyncratic and complex compositional practice. This originality of procedure is a vital part of what makes him extraordinary, and I have noted the evolution of his musical means. But what has fascinated me above all has been how Wagner served his talent, his exceptional loyalty to it, however rackety a life he might have been leading, however much pressure there might have been to betray it, however hopeless his situation might have seemed. Wagner is in some senses an unlikely hero, but his custodianship of his gifts, despite the reverses of fortune and the vagaries of his temperament, counts as heroic and inspiring, while his personality in all its extremity belongs to one of the most fascinating of all the occupants of the human zoo. *** Wagner has been written about at greater length than any other composer. Superb books, some short and some hernia-inducingly long, have covered him from every possible angle; primarily interested as I am in how he lived his life day-to-day, my main source has been his own words, in his copious published writings and especially, perhaps, in the letters, great tracts of which have been translated into English. Above all, I found that my most sustained sense of the man came from a book I had somewhat dreaded reading – his two-volume autobiography, My Life, published privately from 1870 to 1880. In the event, it turned out to be as vivacious and candid as the greatest artists’ autobiographies, every bit as compelling and stimulating as Benvenuto Cellini’s or Berlioz’s – and about as reliable. The circumstances of the book’s writing (dictated to his then mistress, Cosima von B?low, at the behest of his besotted patron Ludwig II, edited and brought to press by an equally – at that stage – doting Nietzsche) mean that its truth is rarely pure and never simple, but it leaps off the page. At the very least, it tells us how he wanted to be seen by the world, which was by no means as a plaster saint. It is the work of a master dramatist, which is how he saw himself. VORSPIEL (#u2ce00f4f-8c2f-5343-a266-c58acf6bf2d5) On 26 August 1876, as the last notes of the first performance of The Twilight of the Gods died away in the newly built Festspielhaus, in the tiny Bavarian town of Bayreuth, 2,000 people sat shaken, inspired, enchanted – or appalled. Among them were the musical aristocracy of Europe: Liszt, Saint-Sa?ns, Tchaikovsky, Anton Rubinstein, Grieg and Bruckner, along with a good sprinkling of the actual aristocracy of Europe, two emperors, three kings, a handful of princes, two grand dukes. All of them, or almost all of them, were swept along on a cataclysm of emotion to equal anything that happened on stage that evening. As the applause grew and grew, and before singers or conductor or designer or choreographer had appeared in front of the curtain to acknowledge it, a diminutive, stooping figure, familiar not just to the faithful but to the cultured world at large, the subject of a dozen photoshoots, two dozen portraits and a thousand cartoons, made his way somewhat lopsidedly to the front of the stage; his disproportionately huge head with its madly bulging eyes was topped by a floppy velvet cap set at a rakish angle. This man, this tiny man, sixty-three years old, but looking, Tchaikovsky thought, ancient and frail, was the hero of the hour, the sole architect of the vast four-day, fifteen-hour epic, every one of whose thousands and thousands of words and thousands and thousands of notes he had created, unleashing onto the vast stage gods and dwarves, dragons and songbirds, women warriors on horseback and maidens disporting themselves in the Rhine, digging deeply and unsettlingly into the subconscious, discharging in his audience emotions that were oceanic and engulfing – this man was the architect of all that; the architect, indeed, in all but name, of the very theatre in which the heaving, roaring audience sat. There he stood before them, the self-proclaimed Musician of the Future. He held a hand up, and in the ensuing silence, in the marked Saxon accent which he never made the slightest attempt to lose, he said: ‘Now you’ve seen what I want to achieve in Art. And you’ve seen what my artists, what we, can achieve. If you want the same thing, we shall have an Art.’ That was the way he spoke. By we, he meant, of course, the German people. The first, the most important thing he had to say, was that the great work he had brought into existence was, above all else, German. At a celebratory banquet the following night, after an interminable and obscure speech by a Reichstag deputy, the Hungarian politician Count Albert Apponyi leaped to his feet unannounced and said: Br?nnhilde – the new national art – lay asleep on a rock, surrounded by a great fire. The god Wotan had lit this fire, so that only the victorious and finest hero, a hero who knew no fear, would win her as his bride. Around the rock were mountains of ash and clinker – the cross-breeding of our own music with non-German elements. Along came a hero, the like of whom had never been seen before, Richard Wagner, who forged a weapon from the fragments of the sword of his fathers – the classical German masters – and with this sword he penetrated the fire, and with his kiss he awoke the sleeping Br?nnhilde. ‘Hail to you, victorious light!’ she cried and with her we join our voices: ‘Three cheers to our master, Richard Wagner! Hip hip! Hip hip! Hip hip!’ So that was it: Wagner was the hero of the newly unified German Reich, which had come into being just five years earlier, and his music was its music. Many people, including many Germans, felt very uncomfortable about this new Germany, and The Ring of the Nibelung seemed to embody, in its grandiosity, its self-celebrating Teutonic tub-thumping, its primitivism, everything that worried them about it. Wagner himself, after a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with the masters of the new establishment, was already somewhat unenamoured of their policies: to his immeasurable disgust, one of Reichskanzler Bismarck’s first acts had been to give the vote to Jews. Wagner also, more surprisingly, loathed the new climate of militarism and imperialism. He withdrew back into the kingdom of art where he would always be absolute monarch, where his will would always prevail, where he could explore the depths and the heights of human experience – by which he meant, of course, his own experience. None of this – Wagner’s creation of a new national art, his acclaim as the greatest German artist of his times, the creation of his custom-built theatre – could possibly have been predicted at any point in the composer’s life up to that point. It was, to be sure, exactly what he set out to do, almost to the letter. But there was nothing inevitable about it whatever. The massive solidity of his achievement grew out of and existed in the face of profound instability, both internal and external, an instability which characterises every stage and every phase of his life and which indeed is at the very heart of his music. At every turn of the way, his vision, and he was nothing if not visionary, was in danger of being sabotaged, either by circumstances, or by other people, or – more often than not – by himself. We know all this because he told us. We know everything about this extraordinary man, everything, that is, except the most important thing: how he created his music. Because even he, the great motor-mouth, the obsessive self-analyst, was unable to explain that. But everything else, we know. Not just because of the memoirs, the reviews, the police records, the biographies, but because, in a way unusual in a musician – almost unknown, in fact – he was driven to communicate verbally, to explain himself in conversation, in letters, in speeches, in diaries, in pamphlets, in books. He wrote about art, music, theatre, history, politics, race, language, anthropology, myth, philosophy. Above all he wrote about himself. All this self-centredness was not simple egomania, though it was that too. It was how he engaged with his creativity. Before he could compose a note he needed to articulate his position, to formulate his philosophy, to put himself in relation to the work and to the world – to dramatise himself as an artist, one might say. And for those who were susceptible, this torrent of words and this vision of himself was bewitching – positively hypnotic. For others (including some of his closest associates) it was unnerving, dangerous, overwhelming, almost life-threatening. His production of himself was inextinguishable. Many people tried to stop him, to suppress him, to silence him. Nothing but death could stem the flow. Where did it all come from? What was going on inside Wagner’s head? ONE Young Richard (#u2ce00f4f-8c2f-5343-a266-c58acf6bf2d5) In 1813, when Wagner was born, the instability which is at the heart of his temperament and his work was the universal condition. Napoleon’s plans for world dominion were unravelling, but not quickly, and not without massive fallout. A year after their humiliating defeat in Russia in 1812, in October 1813 the French, fielding an army of young untried soldiers, fought a savage battle almost literally on Wagner’s doorstep, right in the centre of the city of Leipzig where he had been born, five months earlier, on 22 May, in a modest apartment over a pub in the Jewish district. Leipzig was the second city of the newly created kingdom of Saxony-Anhalt, one of the nearly forty sovereign states that constituted the hollow remnant of the Holy Roman Empire, itself the heir to the Western Roman Empire. Germany as such existed only as an idea. An increasingly potent idea, but an idea nonetheless. The Saxons were Napoleon’s allies, and along with the French they were brutally crushed in October 1813 by the brilliantly organised coalition of Prussian, Swedish, Austrian and Russian forces; during the battle – the biggest engagement in military history before the First World War – Napoleon’s armies were in and around the city, fighting and losing the heaviest pitched battle of the entire interminable war. Over the three days of the battle there were 100,000 losses, near enough: 45,000 French, 54,000 allies; just disposing of the corpses was a huge undertaking, and rotting bodies were still visible six months after the cessation of hostilities. The citizens were in a state of abject terror. The world seemed to be falling apart: and it was. Nothing would be the same again. Wagner claimed that his father, Carl Friedrich Wagner, a clerk in the police service, died during the hostilities as a result of the stress – that, and the nervous fever which had seized the city. Richard, no stranger himself to nervous fever, of both the physical and the creative variety, was the ninth and last of the Wagners’ children. He was baptised in St Thomas’s church, the very church where Johann Sebastian Bach, in the previous century, had served as cantor for twenty-five years. This omen was not followed any time soon by evidence of musical gifts in the child; indeed, as a little boy Richard’s inclination and talent were all for the theatre, no doubt because his mother’s new husband, Ludwig Geyer, a family friend, was an actor. Wagner’s mother Johanna had remarried just nine months after her first husband’s death; young Richard was given his stepfather’s name and was accordingly known for his first fourteen years as Richard Geyer. Some fifty years later, Wagner came upon passionate letters from Geyer written to Johanna while her first husband was still alive; it was clear from them that she and Geyer were already lovers. So whose son was he? The police clerk’s, or the actor’s? Who was he? Like more than one of his characters, he could never be entirely sure, but it was Ludwig Geyer’s portrait he carried around with him to the day he died – not Carl Friedrich Wagner’s. After the marriage, the newly-weds moved, with the children, to the Saxon capital, Dresden, where Geyer was a member of the royal theatre company. Little Richard’s new life was highly agreeable to him: Geyer, a deft and successful portrait painter as well as an actor, was a kind, funny step-father and the house was always aswarm with theatre people and musicians, among them Carl Maria von Weber. The great composer was music director of the Dresden opera, but also conductor of the theatre company, for whose productions he wrote incidental music. Wagner remembered him being in and out of the house all day long, hobbling around bandy-legged, his huge spectacles on the end of his large nose and wearing a long, grey, old-fashioned coat like something out of one of Wagner’s favourite E. T. A. Hoffmann stories. The boy was an insatiable reader, losing himself in the newly published fairy tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm; though showing no gift for performing music, he was obsessed by it, listening spellbound to the military brass bands which paraded up and down the streets, tootling out good old German folk tunes. Best of all, he had easy access to the theatre, where he could play as long as he liked in the props shop and the wardrobe department; he had no skills as a painter, Geyer noted, but his imagination knew no bounds, and his stepfather encouraged it. And then, quite suddenly, Geyer was gone, when Richard was just eight, struck down at the age of forty-two. Arriving at the deathbed, the boy was sent to the room next door by his sobbing mother and told to play something: he had had some elementary lessons in the little country school he attended, and obliged with ‘?b immer treu und Redlichkeit’, a sober transformation of Papageno’s playful ditty ‘Ein m?dchen oder Weibchen’ from The Magic Flute, with pious words to match: Use always fidelity and honesty Up to your cold grave; And stray not one inch From the ways of the Lord Hearing the lad play the sombre little piece, Geyer murmured, as he slipped away, ‘Is it possible the boy has some talent?’ Once Geyer was dead – the second father Wagner had lost – little thought was given to his dying question: her youngest son’s musical abilities was low on the widow’s list of priorities. The decent sum of money Geyer had left her soon ran out; Johanna took in lodgers, including, for a time, the distinguished composer and violinist Louis Spohr, so music was always in the air. In a household filled with musically gifted children, only Richard had shown no aptitude for performing it, as his mother helpfully informed Weber, in Richard’s presence. In fact, apparently unnoticed by Johanna, he was utterly consumed by music. The sound of a brass band tuning up put him, he said, into a state of mystic excitement; the striking of fifths on the violins seemed to him like a greeting from the spirit world. Later he developed a crush on a young man who played the overture to Weber’s new opera Der Freisch?tz on the piano. Whenever the hapless youth came to the house, Richard begged him to play it over and over and over again. At twelve, he finally persuaded his mother to let him have piano lessons, which he continued with only up to the point where he was able to bash out the Freisch?tz overture for himself. From then on he bashed out every score he could get his hands on; his skill at the piano never improved to the end of his days. All his performances – and he was a compulsive performer – were a triumph of feeling over technique and mind over fingers; the same effort of will and imagination somehow, fifty years later, enabled him to play and sing through the entire Ring cycle, evidently to overwhelming effect. For a year after Geyer’s death, to save money, young Richard had been shunted aimlessly around his relatives, from Eisleben to Leipzig and back again; en route he picked up the art of acrobatics, a skill he proudly displayed to the end of his life, manifesting startling flexibility in his late sixties. Back in Dresden at last, he was sent to the city’s famous old grammar school, the Nicolaischule. Johanna was determined that he should be properly educated, desperate above all else that he should never become an actor. Three out of her nine children had done so, with some success, but to her the theatre was beneath contempt, barely an art at all, certainly not to be compared with the poetry or the painting she so admired. Severe – Wagner said he could never once remember her having embraced him – and strongly pious, she was given to leading impromptu family prayer sessions from her bed, dispensing moral precepts to each of her children in turn. She was determined to make a serious young man out of Richard. All in vain. He was a terrible student, lazy and wilful, refusing to study anything that failed to engage his imagination, which left exactly two subjects: history and literature – ancient Greek history and literature to be precise, with a bit of Shakespeare thrown in. His forte was recitation. At twelve, he made a big success speaking Hector’s farewell from the Iliad, followed by ‘To be or not to be’ – in German, of course, both of them: languages, he said, were too much like hard work. Nevertheless, even in translation, Greek plays, Greek myths, and Greek history grabbed him by the throat from an early age. He wrote copiously himself, great poetic screeds, blood-spattered epics: it was the gruesome, he said, that aroused his keenest interest, invading his dreams, and giving him, night after night, shattering nightmares from which he would wake shrieking; understandably his brothers and sisters refused to sleep in the same room with him. He seems to have been, to put it mildly, a bit of a problem child. There may have been some anxiety – some uncertainty – in the air. There was very likely a sense in the household that Richard was Geyer’s son. Nor did he fit in at school: a histrionic, hyperactive, oversensitive little chap with a nasty habit of bursting into tears every five minutes, but nonetheless he somehow managed to corral some of his school fellows into giving a performance (heavily abridged, one can only assume) of his favourite opera, Weber’s Der Freisch?tz. In the opera a young man with ambitions to succeed the Head Forester and marry his daughter is outshot by a rival; frustrated, he turns to his saturnine colleague Kaspar, who gives him a magic bullet, promising to give him more if he will come with him to the Wolf’s Ravine, which is where they go at the end of the second act. In that famous scene, which terrified its first audiences and positively obsessed the young Wagner, the central characters, the hero Max and his darkly brooding friend Kaspar, repair at midnight to the fearsome ravine, deep in the woods. The clearing they are heading for is a vertiginously deep woodland glen, planted with pines and surrounded by high mountains, out of which a waterfall roars. The full moon shines wanly; in the foreground is a withered tree struck by lightning and decayed inside; it seems to glow with an unearthly lustre. On the gnarled branch of another tree sits a huge owl with fiery, circling eyes; on another perch crows and wood birds. Kaspar, in thrall to the devil, is laying out a circle of black boulders in the middle of which is a skull; a few paces away are a pair of torn-off eagle’s wings, a casting ladle, and a bullet mould: Moonmilk fell on weeds! Uhui! moans a chorus of Invisible Spirits, Spiders web is dewed with blood! Uhui! Ere the evening falls again – Uhui! Will the gentle bride be slain! Uhui! E’re the next descent of night, Will the sacrifice be done! Uhui! Uhui! In the distance, the clock strikes twelve. Kaspar completes the circle of stones, pulls his hunting knife out and plunges it into the skull. Then, raising the knife with the skull impaled on it, he turns round three times and calls out: Samiel! Samiel! Appear! By the wizard’s cranium, Samiel, Samiel, appear! Samiel appears. Kaspar, who has already sold his soul to this woodland devil, tries to do a deal with it: Samiel can have Max instead of him. The Spirit agrees; Max, knowing nothing of this, arrives and together – in spite of a scary warning from his mother’s ghost, which suddenly looms up – he and Kaspar cast seven magic bullets, six of which will find their mark, the seventh will go wherever Samiel decrees. Finally, at the very last moment, and thanks to the intervention of an ancient hermit, the seventh bullet, instead of killing Max, finds its way into Kaspar’s heart. Max is redeemed, and is free to marry his beloved Agathe. Despite the redemptive ending this is gruesome stuff, all right, and strangely disturbing. The old story stirs up memories of a pagan German past, of nomadic warriors who come from the dark and terrible forest, where, in the grip of demonic powers, they commune with spirits. Weber tapped into all of that, creating German Romantic opera at a stroke, and scaring the pants off his audiences, not least sixteen-year-old Richard Wagner; its atmosphere, and its music, entered into his soul. Meanwhile his flagrant neglect of his schoolwork finally forced a crisis, which he precipitated by disclosing to his family that he had written a play, Leubald and Adela?de, loosely based, he said, on Hamlet, King Lear, Richard III and Macbeth, with a few bits of Goethe’s G?tz von Berlichingen thrown in for good measure. It was essentially Hamlet, he said, with the interesting difference that the hero, visited by the ghost of his murdered father, is driven to acts of homicidal revenge and goes mad – really mad, unlike Hamlet: in a frenzy, he stabs his girlfriend to death then, in a final blood-drenched tableau, he kills himself. The total roll call of the dead by the end of the play is forty-two. Or so Wagner said. In fact, as the recently rediscovered text reveals, it was no more than twelve, which tells us that Wagner was not averse to sending up his youthful self. Whether it was twelve corpses or forty-two, the family were horrified to think what dark and desperate thoughts, how much violence and death, were swirling around inside the sixteen-year-old’s brain. Not least disturbing among the play’s catalogue of murders, rape and incestuous love – Adelaide is Leubald’s half-sister – is the prominence given to the Hamlet-like murder of Leubald’s father by his own brother; he then swiftly marries the widow, which might have seemed rather close to home for Johanna Wagner. All through the outraged tirades which rained down on his head, Wagner was laughing inwardly, he said, because they didn’t know what he knew: that his work could only be rightly judged when set to music, music which he himself would write – was indeed about to start composing immediately. The fact that he had no idea how to go about such a thing was a minor obstacle. Under his own steam, he found a fee-paying music lending library and took out Johann Bernhard Logier’s elementary compositional handbook, Method of Thorough-bass. He kept it so long, studying it so intently, that the fees accumulated alarmingly; the words ‘borrow’ and ‘own’ were always interchangeable in Wagner’s mind. This particular music lending library was, as it happens, run by the implacable Friedrich Wieck, whose daughter Clara was before very long about to defy him by marrying Robert Schumann; Wagner failed to deflect him, and so, at the age of sixteen, he found himself being pursued for debt, an experience with which he would become all too familiar. His family was eventually called on to bail him out; that too was a pattern that became wearyingly familiar. His family’s dismay at having to pay was matched by their horror at discovering the nature of Richard’s musical ambitions: to be an aspiring performer is one thing – at least there is a chance of earning a living. But to want to be a composer is quite another thing, a recipe for penury. He was not to be gainsaid: the willpower that was to drive his life forward was already fully formed: he was going to be a composer. Faced with the inevitable, the family procured him lessons in harmony (which bored him) and in violin (which tortured them), but neither the boredom nor the torture lasted very long: no sooner were both begun than they were abandoned. He went his own way; for him it was the only way possible. What really mattered to him was cultivating his imagination. He immersed himself in the writing of that phenomenal figure Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann – critic, composer, storyteller, journalist, embodiment and avatar of everything that was dark and fantastical in German Romanticism. Above all for the young Wagner, Hoffmann was the creator of the misunderstood musical genius Johannes Kreisler, rejected by society but certain of his own greatness; for Kreisler music is nothing less than a form of possession: Unable to utter a word, Kreisler seated himself at the grand piano and struck the first chords of the duet as if dazed and confused by some strange intoxication … in the greatest agitation of mind, with an ardour which, in performance, was certain to enrapture anyone to whom Heaven had granted an even passable ear … soon both voices rose on the waves of the song like shimmering swans, now aspiring to rise aloft, to the radiant, golden clouds with the beat of rushing wings, now to sink dying in a sweet amorous embrace in the roaring currents of chords, until deep sighs heralded the proximity of death, and with a wild cry of pain the last Addio welled like a fount of blood from the wounded breast. Young Wagner gobbled up these stories, as well as devouring Hoffmann’s intensely imagined analyses of Beethoven’s music – less critical appreciation than Dionysiac trance. Beethoven’s instrumental music unveils before us the realm of the mighty and the immeasurable. Here shining rays of light shoot through the darkness of night and we become aware of giant shadows swaying back and forth, moving ever closer around us and destroying us but not the pain of infinite yearning, in which every desire, leaping up in sounds of exultation, sinks back and disappears. Only in this pain, in which love, hope and joy are consumed without being destroyed, which threatens to burst our hearts with a full-chorused cry of all the passions, do we live on as ecstatic visionaries – which could easily be a description of Wagner’s own mature music. Intoxicated with all this, the seventeen-year-old plunged in at the deep end, applying himself to the monumental task of making a piano transcription of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – a work written, in the view of most contemporary musicians, when the composer was already half mad. That was in itself enough to recommend it to Wagner. Weber had remarked on hearing the first performance of the Seventh Symphony that Beethoven was ‘ripe for the madhouse’; and the Ninth went further. It was the nineteenth century’s Rite of Spring, considered unplayable, incoherent, crude, the ne plus ultra of all that was fantastic and incomprehensible. To Wagner it became, in his own words, ‘the mystical goal of all the strange thoughts and desires’ he had concerning music; the opening sustained fifths, he said, seemed to him to be the spiritual keynote of his own life. Its darkness, its mystery, its implication of profound chaos, found an answering echo in his teenage soul, and never ceased to connect to him at the deepest level. He returned to this music again and again throughout his life; it was played at the opening of the first Bayreuth Festival and has been played at every opening since. It was, he felt, what music should be. What his music should be, though he had no idea how that might come to pass. The adolescent Wagner was almost morbidly susceptible to impressions; they overwhelmed his mind and his imagination, entering him like viruses, stirring up an inner furor, stoking his heightened sense of being, setting him on fire, mentally and physically. Encountering the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven was the overwhelming experience of his young manhood. The next massive hit his system took, he said, was seeing the soprano Wilhelmine Schr?der-Devrient in Fidelio, in the Leipzig theatre. Schr?der-Devrient, then just twenty-eight, was the Maria Callas of her day: vocally unreliable, but expressively thrilling, every note, every word, every gesture deeply imbued with meaning. He despised the operatic performers he had seen up to that point: staring straight out at the audience, rooted to the spot, playing to the gallery, straining for stratospheric top notes. The vehicles in which they performed were equally beneath contempt; to the young Wagner, opera was a cartoon medium. But this was different. Every note, every word, every gesture meant something. The combination of Wilhelmine Schr?der-Devrient and Beethoven convinced him that opera was the greatest form of human communication available. Forty years later he claimed that no event in his life produced so profound an impression upon him as seeing Schr?der-Devrient on stage; he spoke about ‘the almost satanic ardour’ which the intensely human art of this incomparable actress (as he called her: actress, not singer) poured into his veins. As it happens, it seems that Wagner could not have seen Shr?der-Devrient sing Leonora. But to spur himself on, he linked his two gods together. Schr?der-Devrient in whatever it was she sang knocked him sideways: the thought of Schr?der-Devrient in Beethoven was tantamount to ecstasy. Having imagined it, it became real for him. That was the combination he sought in his work, for the rest of his life: sublime performance allied to supreme imagination. He wrote her a passionate letter – of course he did! – telling her briefly (he says) that he now knew what he had to do with the rest of his life, and that if in the future she ever chanced to hear his name praised in the world of art, she must remember that she had, that evening, made him what he then swore it was his destiny to become. The great singer had revealed his mission to him. But what to do about it? He knew perfectly well that he was utterly incapable at that moment of producing anything worthy of her. Nor did he know how to go about learning to. He despised the bourgeois world around him; above all he despised the education system, which had rejected him and everything that interested him. What did it have to do with the dark beauty he lived with in his imagination? He dismissed it with contempt. He was by now more or less semi-detached from his family. He had been chucked out of one school and walked out of another. He gave himself over to what he called the dissipations of raw manhood, the student life of his day. He wasn’t a student, as it happens, but he plunged in regardless. If he had had access to drugs, he would certainly have funnelled them into his system; as it was he drank, he fornicated, he debauched, he partied in the taverns and the whorehouses. He hung out with dangerous, crazy people; he talked, talked, TALKED, about the subject of subjects: himself – and of course, art, inseparable notions in his mind. He was Rimbaud; he was Kurt Cobain; he was James Dean. His companions in debauchery turned out to be rather disappointing: he poured out his confidences, his dreams, his desires, his analyses of the world’s ills without caring what effect they would have. His excitement in expressing his ideas was the only reward he received; when he turned to his listeners, expecting them to confide in him as he had done in them, it appeared that they had nothing to say. They just liked horsing around. In the midst of all the ragging and the rowdyism, surrounded by so-called friends, he found himself, he said, quite alone. But these adolescent activities were not just indulgences: they formed a protective hedge – a ring of magic fire, he might just as well have said – around what he called his ‘inner life’. Instinctively he knew that this inner life had to grow to its natural strength in its own good time. Even at that early age, running in parallel to the recklessness, the debauchery, the over-exuberance, was a beady instinct for protecting his gift, his genius, and what fed it, even though at this stage it was, even to him, totally invisible. Having been thrown out of school, he embarked on private tuition, paid for by his mother. He tried learning Classical Greek but gave up almost as soon as he started. Johanna’s patience, and her money, were not limitless: she told him he had to find a job. His publisher brother-in-law offered him work as a proof-reader on a new edition of Karl Friedrich Becker’s monumental World History; reading this was, Wagner said, his first real experience of education. For the first time he got a sense of the broad sweep of human history – just at the moment, as it happens, that it was passing through one of its periodic crises. Louis XVIII, the last of the Bourbons, fell in 1830; he was replaced by the so-called bourgeois king, Louis-Philippe, which provoked a wave of democratic solidarity across Europe, in particular across the thirty-nine member states of the fragile German Confederation. Kings, grand dukes, electors all felt the ground trembling under their feet. Saxony felt especially vulnerable. The reactionary King Anton shrewdly invited his liberal nephew, Friedrich Augustus, to become co-regent; a constitution was established. At eighteen, restless, volatile Wagner sided with change. He quickly knocked off a Grand Overture to celebrate the new order; in it he graphically depicted the darkness of oppression giving way to the joyful new dispensation, the latter represented by a theme unambiguously marked Friedrich und Freiheit – Friedrich and Freedom – which blazed forth in triumph at the end. It was not performed. Meanwhile, despite the new liberal constitution, the revolutionary aspirations of the student body in Leipzig rumbled on; there was unrest, swiftly quelled by the arrest of a number of students. Wagner, still working in his brother-in-law’s publishing house, attached himself to them, fell in with their protest marches, sang along with them as they bawled out the great student anthem ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’: Down with sadness, down with gloom, Down with all who hate us; Down with those who criticise, Look with envy in their eyes, Scoff, mock and berate us. He joined their angry demands for the release of the arrested students, and was with them when they descended on the house of the magistrate who had ordered the arrest. Finding that the place had already been lightly trashed, they plunged in and finished the job off. Wagner was among the most uninhibited of the rioters, intoxicated, as he put it, by the students’ unreasoning fury: he smashed and pillaged with the best of them, drawn into the vortex – his words – ‘like a madman’. The frenzy only grew; he and his fellows moved across the town, slashing and burning. They weren’t drunk; this was a self-generating rampage. All the latent violence that was in Wagner found an outlet. The formless resentments that had been germinating through his childhood and youth – his fatherlessness, his mother’s narrow outlook, his hatred of authority, his frustration at having no proper channel for the expression of his artistic dreams and fantasies – erupted in rampant destruction as he threw his lot in with the student rioters. These exploits were viewed indulgently by the city: it was just the young gentlemen letting off steam, people felt. But when the workers started rioting, there was universal outrage. Indeed, Wagner drily noted, the student body offered itself as temporary policemen, in which capacity, drunk and disorderly themselves, they imposed the rule of law, stopping travellers and inspecting their visas. How Wagner longed to be one of these lords of misrule. Soon enough, despite lacking the slightest qualifications, Wagner became an undergraduate of the University of Leipzig, not on the academic course, but as a student of music – just in time to realise his supreme aspiration: membership of the Saxonia fencing club. The moment he enrolled, he challenged as many people as he could to duels. None of these challenges materialised, which is just as well, since he knew nothing whatever about fencing. Instead he took up gambling, to which he soon became addicted. The more he lost, the more he gambled. Pale, sunken-eyed and haggard, like something out of Balzac or Dostoevsky, he lived only to gamble; finally, he stole his mother’s savings and bet them, convinced that with a high enough stake he could make a large sum of money. Miraculously, this is what happened, and he returned his mother’s savings to her, considerably richer. When he told her what he had done, she fainted. He experienced a moment of celestial benison: ‘I felt as if God and His angels were standing by my side and whispering words of warning and consolation in my ears.’ From his earliest years, Wagner saw everything in his life as happening sub specie aeternitatis; destiny was always pulling the strings. Thus redeemed by divine intervention, he hurled himself into creative activity: his purpose was nothing less than to turn the world of music upside down. Among the first fruits of his inspiration was an overture in B-flat major. To ensure that it made its full revolutionary impact, he used different colours for the various instruments, drawing attention to the mystic meaning of his orchestration: strings were red, brass was black. If he had been able to get hold of any green ink, he said, he would have used that for the winds. Astonishingly, the young Leipzig conductor Heinrich Dorn agreed to programme the piece. During rehearsals Wagner was forced to acknowledge to himself that the technicolor scoring made no appreciable difference to the playing, and anxiously noted that the big effect he had planned, whereby after every four bar phrase there would be a loud thwack on the kettledrum, simply did not work. The conductor, however, insisted it would be splendid. At the concert, the audience were enchanted by this wonderfully predictable effect. He heard them calculating its return; dum dum, dum dum, dum dum, dum dum THWACK, they would chant along with the music; seeing how unerringly accurate their calculations were, he suffered, he said, ten thousand torments, almost passing out with misery. The audience was delighted; it could have gone on forever as far as they were concerned. And then quite suddenly, the overture came to a halt, Wagner having disdained to provide it with anything as bourgeois an ending. A silence ensued. There were no exclamations of disapproval from the audience, no hissing, no comments, not even laughter: all he saw on their faces was intense astonishment at a peculiar occurrence, which impressed them, as it did him, like a horrible nightmare. He was then obliged to take his sister Ottilie, the only member of the family who had come to the concert, back home, through the puzzled crowd. The strange look the usher gave him on the way out haunted him ever afterwards, he said, and for a considerable time he avoided the stalls of the Leipzig theatre. This event hastened his realisation that without skill, craft, or technique he would never write anything remotely worthy of Schr?der-Devrient. The idea of actually attending the classes he’d enrolled in at the university was, of course, beneath consideration. Instead, he made his way to Bach’s old church (where he had, after all, been baptised) and sought out the cantor, Theodor Weinlig, and asked him to take him on. Weinlig agreed – on one condition: that he would give up composing for six months. Wagner accepted the condition: for half a year he wrote nothing but fugues, day in and day out; he and Weinlig would engage in counterpoint duels. Under this highly practical tutelage, he finally began to get a feel, he said, for melody and vocal line. Once the six months were up, his self-denying ordinance was over, and music poured out of him: symphonies, overtures, marches, arias, sonatas – all entirely faceless. His Opus 1 was, in fact, a piano sonata; it is almost comically lacking in personality. For some years, Wagner would set his own highly original musical identity to one side; he would learn by imitating other people. Not a hint of experiment, nothing to mark his work out as his. That was how he taught himself, as he told the very young Hugo Wolf at the end of his life: by imitating other composers, often those whose music he despised. ‘You can’t be original straightaway,’ he told Wolf. In his first three operas, he systematically impersonated Marschner, Meyerbeer and, of all people, Donizetti. This is quite extraordinary. Because, like it or loathe it, Wagner’s music is unmistakeably his. To eliminate all traces of personality from it must have taken a considerable effort of will. TWO Out in the World (#u2ce00f4f-8c2f-5343-a266-c58acf6bf2d5) In a very short space of time Wagner wrote three overtures and a bonny, rather Schubertian Symphony in C. All of these decently crafted pieces were performed in Leipzig, and were well received; the symphony was played by the great and renowned Gewandhaus Orchestra. Now nineteen, and with a beard coming, he set to work sketching out the libretto of his first opera, The Wedding. It is heavily indebted to Hoffmann: a drama of the night, erupting with violent love, the betrayal of a best friend, sudden death and coffin-side revelations. The story was taken from Johann Gustav Gottlieb B?sching’s pioneering account of chivalry in the Germany of the Middle Ages, and Wagner determined that his first venture into opera would avoid easy effects or operatic embellishments: he would write it, he said, in ‘the blackest possible vein’. The story was almost as violent as that of Leubald and Adela?de: a bride is powerfully attracted to a stranger whom she sees at her wedding procession; the frenzied man later climbs up into her bedroom; she struggles with the madman, hurling him down into the courtyard where every bone in his body is broken. At his funeral, the young woman throws herself at the coffin; she sinks, dying, onto his lifeless body. Love and death intertwined: Wagner started as he meant to go on. The first person to whom he showed the libretto was his elder sister Rosalie. His various delinquencies had taken a terrible toll on his relationship with his family; Rosalie – ten years his senior – was the one through whom he hoped to repair it. He had an intense affection for her, revering her exquisite taste, her cultivated circle of acquaintance, her sweetness and depth of soul; a successful actress, she was also the chief breadwinner of the family – though, he casually remarks in his autobiography, she had no talent. He harboured the most powerful feelings for her, feelings, he said, which could vie with the noblest form of friendship between man and woman. ‘I really am a spoilt child, because I fret every moment I am away from you!’ he wrote to her. ‘I hope, my Rosalie, that we two shall spend much time together in this world. Would you like that? … You will always be my angel, my one and only Rosalie!’ She had neither husband nor lover; Wagner made it his task to bring joy into her life, principally by making a name for himself. So when he handed her The Wedding, it was a present heavily burdened with hope and significance. She didn’t like it. Couldn’t he, she asked him, write something a little more conventional? Hearing this, Wagner there and then, in front of her very eyes, tore up the precious manuscript, declaring that he would write something that did please her. He had not yet turned twenty, but the certainty, the intensity, the ruthlessness so characteristic of him are all fully present in this action. He was to offer further proof of his uncommon strength of mind when Rosalie later introduced him to the admired poet, critic and theatre director Heinrich Laube. Wagner was mightily impressed by the sardonic, Byronic young star; this impression was heightened by the glowing review Laube gave the young composer’s Symphony in C. Not long after, Laube offered Wagner a libretto he had originally written for Giacomo Meyerbeer, then the most successful, most admired, opera composer of the age. Without a moment’s hesitation, Wagner turned it down. With absolute confidence, the twenty-year-old boy rejected a libretto written by one of the most important hommes de lettres of the day. Wagner knew what a libretto needed to be, and he was pretty sure this was not it. Laube had not written a libretto at all, Wagner felt: he had written a chunk of poetry. As such, it was no use to him. He now began work on his next opera by writing the text himself, as he would henceforth do for everything he ever wrote. This one – The Fairies, specially designed to please Rosalie, and convince his family that he was not a dangerous revolutionary – would be set in the Fairy Kingdom, and be composed (with more than a nod towards Weber, whom he continued to revere) in the then popular High German Romantic manner of Heinrich Marschner, composer of the current smash hit The Vampire. Wagner cordially despised Marschner, but he wanted to find out how he did what he did. And if the piece turned out to be a smash hit, so much the better. His libretto was adapted from The Serpent Lady, a dramatic fable by the eighteenth-century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi most famous for the plays The Stag King and Turandot; he had been introduced to it by his scholarly uncle Adolf, his father’s antiquarian brother, who had translated the play. Wagner’s adaptation was loose: the title role is dropped in the opera and the names of the central characters are changed to Ada and Arindal, the bridal couple, as it happens, in The Wedding, which suggests that he had not utterly dismissed the earlier work from his mind. Ada is half-woman, half-fairy; Arindal a young mortal king who loves her. After overcoming a hundred obstacles of increasing impossibility, they marry and live happily ever after in Fairyland, not a resolution to be found in any other work of Wagner’s. He was writing it for his family, after all. Wagner had by now realised that as well as mastering the art of composition he needed to learn his craft in a practical context, so when he was offered a job as chorus master and general factotum at the opera house in the small Bavarian town of W?rzburg he accepted it with alacrity, brushing the dust of Leipzig University off his feet without so much as a backward glance. He owed the job to the good offices of his eldest brother, Albert, who was a tenor in the company. The job in W?rzburg was the beginning of a prolonged provincial apprenticeship in the course of which Wagner acquired a remarkable variety of compositional skills that in the fullness of time he would cunningly deploy in his own work. The bulk of the repertory at W?rzburg consisted of bel canto operas, principally those of Bellini and Donizetti, and Wagner was immediately pitched into preparing the chorus for them; from time to time he was called on to orchestrate – sometimes even to compose – interpolated arias for the operas. He took the work seriously – he was there to learn, after all – but despite his new sense of responsibility and his growing ambition, his former wildness was still liable to break out: one afternoon in a beer garden, he found himself irresistibly drawn into a brawl, taking great pleasure in landing a vicious blow on a totally unknown man to whose face he had taken an instant dislike. It was in W?rzburg that he first discovered his powers of seduction, triumphantly snatching a young woman away for a night of love while her hapless fianc? was playing the oboe in the band at a country wedding, for all the world as if he were Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, a character – voluptuous, arrogant, fantastical, visionary – with whom he had much in common. Short, oddly disproportionate and prone to an unsightly skin condition, he had never thought of himself as good-looking, but in W?rzburg he discovered that he had a certain charisma that women found attractive; he also learnt that he could impress his male companions with his flights of verbal bedazzlement – when, that is, he wasn’t bewildering them. Ideas, opinions, impersonations, cascaded out of him, unless he was being moodily silent, which was frequently the case. It was in W?rzburg that he composed The Fairies. He brought the finished score home to Leipzig, where he sang and played it for the family, pounding away at the piano, belting out all the parts. His skills as an executant were so dismally lacking, he said, that it was only when he had worked himself, like Hoffmann’s Kreisler, into a state of absolute ecstasy that it was possible for him to do justice to anything. Fortunately, a state of absolute ecstasy came very naturally to him. For the rest of his life, he performed his operas for friends and family, always at full tilt. This particular performance had a special intensity about it: the entire thing, and the piece itself, were for Rosalie. It was meant, he said, to provoke some sort of declaration of love from her, and she knew it. When it was over, she gave him a kiss; was it a kiss of real emotion, or just affectionate regard? He never knew, he said. As a result of his performance, she used her influence to secure him the promise of a production of the piece, in Leipzig, for the following year. Back in W?rzburg, unstimulated by his duties, he gave himself over to reading, which threw him into a state of more or less continuous intellectual turmoil, a condition which persisted to the day he died. Driven by the autodidact’s desperate desire to catch up, he read greedily and indiscriminately, snatching at everything that came his way – history, philosophy, poetry, novels. Laube, whose libretto the very young Wagner had so airily rejected, was writing a sensational novel in three parts, Young Europe, which became a rallying cry for a new generation of Germans, sick of being weighed down by the burden of the past. Wagner devoured the book, along with the still-popular Ardinghello, Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse’s sexually charged novel from thirty years earlier, which had contrasted the oppressive joylessness of German life with the voluptuous naturalness of the Mediterranean. Eagerly embracing the cause of free love and rejecting the tyranny of authority, Wagner determined to translate the literary revolution into a musical one and throw off the heaviness and tedium of German opera. He saw Schr?der-Devrient again, this time in Bellini’s Romeo and Juliet opera, I Capuleti e i Montecchi; the daring, romantic youthfulness of her Romeo, he said, drove him nearly mad with excitement – her performance made all the German operas he had seen (apart, of course, from Fidelio) seem feeble, stuffy, undramatic. For the first, but by no means the last, time, Wagner took to print to express himself, in a little essay called ‘On German Opera’, in which he tore into the fairy opera Euryanthe by his former hero Weber: What splitting of hairs in the declamation, what fussy use of this or that instrument to emphasise a single word! Instead of throwing off a whole emotion with one bold freehand stroke, [Weber] minces the impression into little details and detailed littlenesses. How hard it comes to him, to give life to his Ensembles; how he drags the second Finale! And since the audience is bound to admit in the end that it hasn’t understood a note of it, people have to find their consolation in dubbing it astoundingly learned, and therefore paying it a great respect. – O this wretched erudition – the source of every German ill! He ends with a barely concealed self-advertisement: Only by a lighter and freer touch can we hope to shake off an incubus that has held our music by the throat, and especially our operatic music, for many a year. For why has no German opera-composer come to the front since so long? Because none knew how to gain the ear of the people – none has seized Life as it is: true and warm. To put his new passion for Mediterranean art into effect, he immediately embarked on a new opera, based on Shakespeare – Measure for Measure, of all chilly, harsh plays, transposed to Sicily, with only one German character, based on Angelo, Shakespeare’s hypocritical Puritan: the governor, Friedrich, who epitomises the life-negating Teutonic world view. The play’s complex and bitter working out of its themes he discarded: all twenty-one-year-old Richard Wagner was interested in was exposing the sinfulness, hypocrisy and unnaturalness of what in Germany passed for morality. His purpose was simple: to celebrate free love, lauding the sexy values of the south – sensuality, romance, passion. He called his opera The Ban on Love and this time when he wrote, he ripped off the gloomy mask of Marschner, pretending instead, remarkably convincingly, to be Donizetti or Bellini in their sunnier moments. By the time he started writing The Ban on Love he had been offered a new job as chief conductor of the opera house in the once-splendid watering hole of Bad Lauchst?dt in Saxony-Anhalt. Visiting the place for the first time, Wagner was dismayed by the dreariness and dowdiness of both the town and the theatre, once the stomping ground of Schiller and Goethe. In My Life he describes with grim relish the Dickensian scene that awaited him. The madly quirky director of the theatre introduced him to his gargantuan wife, who, crippled in one foot, lay on an enormous couch, while an elderly bass – her admirer – smoked his pipe beside her. The stage manager told Wagner that he would be expected to conduct Don Giovanni in two days’ time; rehearsing it, he warned, might be difficult because of the intermittent availability of the town bandsmen, who formed the bulk of the orchestra. Appalled, Wagner made his excuses and was about to leave when he bumped into the company’s exceedingly pretty leading actress, Fr?ulein Minna Planer. After a five-minute conversation with her, he changed his mind about going, and three days later, Wagner found himself leading the company, to some acclaim, in Mozart’s most complex and demanding score; he had never conducted anything before in his life. The following night he was on the podium again for the latest Viennese musical comedy hit, that ‘dust cloud of frivolity and vulgarity’, as he called it, Nestroy’s Lumpazivagabundus, in which Minna Planer played the Amorous Fairy, a role she was very soon to assume in his life. The sexual pull between him and Minna was very strong, but what he was really after was a woman who had the qualities he lacked. At twenty-one, he was barely house-trained, arrogant, impetuous, outspoken. His face was often covered in ugly red blotches, lesions and pustules, the effects of the distressing dermatological condition erysipelas, otherwise known as Holy Fire, which at times of tension (or inspiration) erupted all over him from head to toe. He was still in the grip of a Bohemian contempt for anything bourgeois: on the road with the company he and his friend the poet Guido Apel had somehow managed after a boozy supper to reduce the huge, massively built Dutch tile-stove in their room to rubble. On the same tour he pitched into another riot, fists flying, with a few like-minded spirits, and for a while he took up gambling again. This prolonged adolescence, he realised, could not go on. Minna offered the stability he knew he needed. She was twenty-five, exceptionally pretty and completely unfazed by his facial blotches and swellings. Nor was she perturbed by his stone-age social demeanour; she could take it all in her stride. She was a natural homemaker, she was socially skilful, and, on some fairly slender evidence, she believed in him absolutely. She herself was not without emotional baggage: when she was fifteen she had had a child, Nathalie, from a liaison with a blackguardly aristocratic guardsman, who immediately dumped her and their daughter; the girl had been brought up believing that she was Minna’s sister, not her daughter. Wagner was more than happy to accept this situation. For an apostle of free love, such trifles were neither here nor there. An effective operator and a brilliant diplomat, Minna eased his path in the theatre, introducing him to the people that mattered, making sure he was properly turned out, smoothing feathers he’d ruffled. This was necessary because he was in a state of permanently boiling rage. Conducting a repertory which, by and large, he despised, was bad enough; but the impossible conditions backstage, the wretched quality of the singers, the comic inadequacy of the chorus and orchestra, all drove him to the brink, to say nothing of the fact that his Amorous Fairy was, at this early point in their relationship, by no means his alone. Minna and he broke up, temporarily, the first of many such ruptures; when they got together again, he told himself that what she felt for him was neither passion nor genuine love, nor was she capable of such a thing; her feeling for him, he decided, was one of heartfelt goodwill, sincere desire for his success, and genuine delight at and admiration for his talents. On that basis, they became an official couple, though the absence of passionate and fervent commitment rankled at subterranean levels. His account of his early relationship with Minna was admittedly dictated twenty years later to his then-mistress, for the gratification of his royal master, but his analysis is typical of the way his mind worked, ruthlessly weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of every situation in which he found himself. What did he need? And was he getting it? The Leipzig theatre, meanwhile, reneged on the promise Rosalie had wrested from it to stage The Fairies. Wagner was unmoved by the cancellation. He conducted the evocative, Weber-like overture in Magdeburg, where the Lauchst?dt company were wintering, and then promptly dismissed the rest of the opera from his mind, even banishing it from the catalogue of his works; it was not performed complete until five years after his death. It has hints throughout, both orchestrally and dramatically, of elements that Wagner would later develop. But simply having written it was enough for him. He had no further use for it: on, on. He threw himself into finishing The Ban on Love, and then helped out with incidental music for the local theatre. The overture he composed for Columbus, an historical drama written by his drinking companion Apel, shows his passion for innovative effects: he was attempting, he said, to depict both the ship and the ocean, simultaneously. Out of the orchestral commotion emerges what he called an ‘exquisite, seductively dawning theme’, representing a bewitching, chimerical vision, a Fata Morgana. This theme – suggesting the promised land towards which Columbus and his crew are speeding through choppy waters – is first stated by three pairs of trumpets each of a different pitch; after many adventurous modulations, the theme finally appears at the end of the piece triumphantly blazoned forth in the same key on all six trumpets: America in the sailors’ sights as the sun rises over the ocean. To ensure maximum impact, he imported half a dozen trumpeters from the local barracks. The effect was, as intended, overwhelming, and completely upstaged the play, Wagner reports with some satisfaction. He was heavily in debt, as he had been more or less continuously since leaving home – and even before. His idol, Wilhelmine Schr?der-Devrient, who was passing through Magdeburg, generously offered to take part in a benefit for him. The programme was ambitious, and very, very noisy. In addition to Schr?der-Devrient’s contributions, there was his own Columbus overture, with its screaming trumpets, followed by Beethoven’s brass-heavy Victory Symphony, which calls for alarming artillery effects. Expecting capacity business, he had hugely augmented the orchestra; the firing of the cannon and musketry in the Beethoven was organised with the utmost elaboration, by means of specially and expensively constructed apparatuses; trumpets and bugles, on both French and English sides, had been doubled and trebled. Alas, almost nobody came. The monstrously inflated orchestra, to say nothing of the volleys of ammunition, attacked the tiny audience with such overwhelming superiority of numbers that they swiftly gave up all thought of resistance and took flight. The net result was that he ended up infinitely worse in debt. For want of any other work, and desperately in need of money, Wagner returned to Magdeburg the following season; on the way he stopped overnight in the medieval city of Nuremberg, where – somehow inevitably – he got caught up in a riot: it suddenly raged across the town, and equally suddenly dispersed, so that he and his brother-in-law were able to stroll arm in arm through the moonlit streets, quietly laughing; that, too, logged itself in his voluminous memory for future use, until, thirty years later, it turned up in Act II of The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. During his second season in Magdeburg he strengthened the repertory, the orchestra and the chorus, importing Prussian army singers and players. As a reward for all this, they let him put on the now-completed Ban on Love as a benefit. It’s a busy, witty, bubbly, interminable score, drenched in southern sunshine. Rehearsals proceeded well enough, with Wagner inspiring the ill-prepared singers to some semblance of accuracy and lightness of touch, but when they actually started performing in the theatre, in front of an audience, vainly trying to keep abreast of the complex action and listen out for their musical cues, the whole thing collapsed into musical and dramatic mayhem. The revolutionary content of his opera, Wagner drily remarked, was lost on both authorities and audience, since what they saw on stage was completely unintelligible. Inexplicably even to him, the reviews were deemed rather good, enough to warrant a second performance, but word of mouth had done its deadly work. He peered out into the auditorium and saw just two people in the stalls: his wealthy patroness, a certain Mme Gottschalk, and a Polish Jew dressed in full traditional garb. No one else. As Wagner made his way to the podium there was a piercing scream from behind the curtain: the prima donna’s husband, believing that the very handsome second tenor had seduced her, had punched him in the face, which was now covered in blood. The prima donna noisily remonstrated with her husband, who then punched her too, at which point she went into convulsions. The rest of the company joined in, some on the husband’s side, some on the wife’s; at the end of this fracas, so many people were injured that the diminutive stage manager had to go before the curtain to announce that, due to circumstances beyond his control, the performance would not be taking place; the four people in the auditorium (two more had by then slipped into the circle) didn’t seem to mind at all. Thus Wagner’s career in Magdeburg collapsed into farce. His hopes of a fortune from the benefit were dashed. His creditors nailed a summons to his door, and, as if in disgust, his brown poodle, which he loved deeply, ran away. The following day, looking out of the window of a friend’s house, where they were hiding from the creditors, he and Minna saw a man fling himself into the river Elbe; then, a few days later, in accord with the odd aura of violence which always seemed to accompany him, Wagner found himself in a large and appreciative crowd witnessing the punishment of a soldier who had murdered his sweetheart. The luckless man was strapped to a wheel and crushed under it, breaking every bone in his body, which was then twisted, still breathing, through the spokes of the wheel. Time, Wagner couldn’t help feeling, to leave. Minna was already in far-off K?nigsberg, working in the theatre there; Wagner darkly suspected her of being involved with another man. He got there as fast as carriage could take him and proposed to her. She accepted, but as they hurtled towards matrimony, Wagner found the whole thing increasingly unreal. They fought furiously all the way to the church and continued in the sacristy until the pastor came in, at which point they pretended that everything was going marvellously; that sent them into fits of giggles, from which they found it difficult to recover as they entered the church. The congregation consisted entirely of actors and singers from the theatre, dressed up to the nines; there was not a single real friend among them. The heartless frivolity of the event chilled Wagner, he said. The pastor, at least, took it seriously – maybe rather too seriously, delivering a severe sermon in which he warned them of dark days ahead. There was, he said, a glimmer of hope: they would be helped by an unknown friend. Wagner perked up at this: who was this mysterious benefactor, he wanted to know. To his considerable disappointment, it turned out to be Jesus. During the wedding ceremony itself, he was so dazed that Minna had to nudge him to put his ring on the book. At that moment, he reports, he knew he had made a monumental mistake, and that his life was now divided into two currents: one faced the sun and carried him on like a dreamer; the other held his nature captive, prey to some nameless fear. He noted the exact time at which this thought came to him: ‘It was eleven o’clock on the morning of the 24th November 1836 and I was twenty-three and a half years old.’ His forebodings were quickly confirmed. Neither as an artist nor as a woman was Minna his ideal, he knew that. She had no real talent for acting, and little interest in it; she was no Schr?der-Devrient, not an artist, in any sense. All she wanted out of the theatre was to make a comfortable living. She had learned how to ingratiate herself with managements, deploying some fairly intense flirting, while keeping within the limits of respectability – just. She was physically attractive to Wagner, and her down-to-earth practicality and realism were useful. Her domesticity and comfortableness were the exact antipode of his own constantly striving nature and thus the perfect complement to him, but the temperamental gap jarred. In My Life, Wagner analyses all this with more than half a mind on the woman to whom he was dictating it, but it was very close to what he felt. His harsh analysis of Minna is typical of the way his brain worked, its maggoty, obsessive, unrelenting nature, even though the letters he and Minna sent each other tell a different story. ‘Dear Minna,’ he wrote a full seven years into their relationship, long past the first flush of lust, ‘we absolutely ought never to be parted for long; that I feel afresh once more, both deeply and sincerely. What you are to me, a whole capital of 70,000 cannot replace.’ She was not his muse; but he loved the sensual and domestic comforts she extended to him. For many years those comforts persuaded him to return to her; when they were together they often quarrelled; just as often, they experienced real companionship. But was companionship what a man like Wagner needed? In his analysis of Minna, he was, as so often, interrogating himself: what did he want from a woman? His relationship with them was always vexed. He seemed to be looking, not for a particular woman, but for women as archetypes, an unpromising basis for a relationship. From the moment they were married, he and Minna fought; when they did, Wagner, it goes without saying, expressed himself with savage, vicious, brutal eloquence, making her weep bitterly; he would then apologise abjectly, treating her with an exaggerated tenderness, whose strained insincerity led to further and yet more savage outbursts; and so the cycle went on. After a year of this, Minna ran away, taking Nathalie with her. Wagner tracked Minna down to her parents’ house in Dresden; they resumed their married life. Then she bolted a second time, this time in company with an admirer. Wagner went to live with his brother and sister-in-law, while he waited to take up a new appointment in the distant then-Russian city of Riga, hired to provide the sizeable German community there with the art of which they had been starved. Meanwhile he put all his emotional energy into his next opera, Rienzi: the Last of the Tribunes, drawn from the recently published runaway best-seller of the same name by Dickens’s great friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The hero, a Coriolanus-like Roman tribune who is first acclaimed by the people, then despised and finally burnt to death by them, was the sort of man Wagner could readily identify with, but in reality he was drawn to the subject for one reason and one reason only: he thought it would give him a hit. He planned the opera, his third to be completed, on the grandest possible scale; disgusted with the inadequacy and parochialism of German provincial opera houses, he had no intention whatever of letting it be performed anywhere but on the largest stages in Europe. Giacomo Meyerbeer, the Andrew Lloyd Webber of grand opera, generating one smash hit after another, was his model; Paris, Meyerbeer’s base, his destination. He meanwhile set off for Riga, to open its grand and well-equipped new theatre. With the giant score of Rienzi more than half complete, he made the long and perilous journey to the Baltic. He was pleased with what he found. The Riga audience had sophisticated expectations of its opera, and were prepared to pay for it; Wagner was able to do much better work there than he had elsewhere. The theatre itself was distinctly state of the art, and he remembered its provisions when, much later, he came to create his own theatre. He was particularly struck by the simplicity of the auditorium, the orchestra pit in which the majority of the players were tucked under the stage, and the practice of lowering the lights in the theatre during the performance. In due course, a repentant and heartbroken Minna went back to him. She joined the local company, playing starring roles, and their domestic life resumed rather more happily than before. They were joined by Minna’s sister, Amelia – a real sister, this time – and, for a brief period, a young wolf. Wagner was deeply fond of animals, and they of him; at various times he carted round a sort of domestic zoo, including hamsters and parrots. Throughout his life he was surrounded by dogs, the bigger the better. They were slavishly devoted to him, and fiercely protective. Wagner was fascinated by the wolf and tried to domesticate it; the creature proved untameable and was finally released back into the wild. After its departure, he acquired an enormous Newfoundland dog which he called Robber; he adored this animal, and the feeling was entirely mutual. Wagner spent two long years in the snowbound, fogbound and rain-bound city. Despite his growing mastery over the orchestra, singers and chorus, the gap between what he was striving to create on stage and what his colleagues were either willing or able to achieve resulted in increasing agitation on his part. He now came to loathe what he disdainfully called ‘theatre people’; he fell out with the director of the theatre and avoided all off-stage contact with his fellow artists. His greatest satisfaction came not in the opera house but from a sensational series of orchestral concerts he gave featuring music by Mozart, Beethoven, Weber and, occasionally, himself; fewer compromises needed to be made when singers and scenery were taken out of the equation. He applied himself vigorously and with detailed thought to the question of building up knowledgeable audiences – ‘true lovers of art’ – while also encouraging the merely curious. Everything must be done to ensure that the greater part of the audience regards the concerts as agreeable entertainment ‘since we all know perfectly well that not every section of the audience has come to worship at the shrine of art’. A Swiss baker was engaged to take care of the buffet arrangements. The twenty-five-year-old conductor with his blazing ideals was also an entirely practical manager. His orchestra responded well to the demands that he made of them. ‘We are giving so perfectly organised a body (as our orchestra may justifiably be described at present) an opportunity to show its strengths … and to develop along independent lines; for what true musician would not be dismayed to be thinking of carrying out routine duties rather than achieving something that was genuinely enjoyable and edifying?’ It was the opera house that was driving him mad. The truth is that he had had enough of provincial theatres; his heart was set on the greater world, and Rienzi, on which he had for many months been toiling, was to be his passport to it. He dreamed only of Paris. His departure from Riga was abrupt, amidst the intrigues and vituperations so characteristic of him; Minna gave her final performance as Schiller’s Mary Stuart, the proceeds of which enabled them to pay for their travel. Typically, Wagner was being energetically pursued by creditors, so in order to get past the Russian customs officers they needed to undertake an immensely complicated subterfuge, changing carriages and hiding in safe houses. The whole escapade took place under the beady eyes of heavily armed Cossacks. The roads were bumpy and dangerous. At one point, Minna was thrown out of the carriage; she later attributed her failure to conceive during their marriage to this incident. The journey, already quite dangerous and alarming enough, was rendered almost hallucinatory by Wagner’s stubborn determination to travel with the dog, Robber, from whom at no cost would he be parted. The great shaggy beast sometimes loped alongside the carriage; sometimes they managed to bundle him into it. Life would be easier for the dog, they decided, if they were to abandon the carriage and complete the journey by sea, stopping at London en route for Paris, so they smuggled him on board, where he terrorised crew and passengers alike, taking up residence in front of the ship’s grog, which thereupon became the exclusive preserve of the Wagners. The crossing was, at first, becalmed, and then terrifyingly storm-tossed. Even the crew were unnerved, and began darkly to suspect that the Wagners and their dog had brought bad luck with them. Finally, after weathering these storms, the ship approached the English coast, whereupon the vessel ran aground on sandbanks. As they at last reached the mouth of the Thames, Wagner, despite Minna’s bitter reproaches, fell into a deep and contented sleep, emerging from it shortly afterwards refreshed and full of energy. His powers of renewal remained prodigious to the end of his life. THREE Doldrums (#u2ce00f4f-8c2f-5343-a266-c58acf6bf2d5) London – the greatest city in the world, as Wagner called it – thrilled them. Even the traffic jams were impressive: it took the Wagners an hour to get from Tower Bridge to Old Compton Street, where they happily installed themselves with Robber, who then decided to do a bit of unilateral tourism – strolling back, two hours later, having had a good look at Oxford Street. The Wagners followed suit, doing some sightseeing themselves. Richard was trying to find the author of Rienzi, Baron Bulwer-Lytton, so, very sensibly, he went to the House of Lords; there he caught sight of the Duke of Wellington, and the prime minister Viscount Melbourne, but no sign of the celebrated author. He and Minna wandered the streets, surviving what Wagner calls the ghastly English Sunday, and took a train (their first ever) to Gravesend. Then, with Robber still at their side, they crossed the Channel by steamer, arriving at Boulogne, where they planned to stay for a few days. By remarkable coincidence, the man whose career Wagner intended to emulate – and then eclipse – was there. Giacomo Meyerbeer was, at the age of forty-eight, the most successful and influential composer in Europe, the toast of Paris (Robert le Diable and Les Huguenots, both global smash hits, had their premi?res there) and also the court Kapellmeister in Berlin. He inspired both the admiration and the envy of his colleagues, not only in the ambitiousness and scope of his work, but for his ability to turn composing into a profit-making concern: he was a shrewd businessman and a master of the arts of publicity, and he had the press neatly stitched up. This was a man from whom a struggling young composer had much to learn, one way and another. During his time in Riga, Wagner had sent him a letter in which he told the great man that ‘you can hardly rise to greater artistic fame, for you have already reached the most dazzling heights; you are almost a god on earth. I am not yet 24 years old,’ he continued, cheerfully ditching his former god: I was born in Leipzig, and when I attended university there I decided to pursue a career in music. My passionate admiration of Beethoven impelled me to take that step, which explains why my first works were extremely one-sided. Since then, and since I have gained experience of life and of the musical profession, my views about the present state of music, particularly dramatic music, have changed considerably. Need I deny that it was your works, more than anything else, that showed me a quite new direction … Understandably, Meyerbeer had not replied to this rhapsody. What would he have said? ‘You’re right. I am a god on earth’? Whatever his merits or demerits as composer or as a man, Meyerbeer had no delusions about himself. Having struggled to succeed, he was always willing to help out nascent talent: here in Boulogne, Wagner managed to get an appointment with him without much difficulty. He was impressed by the older composer. Meyerbeer’s Jewishness did not escape his attention; stick in Wagner’s craw though it might, it was no obstacle to his pursuit of him. ‘The years had not yet given his features the flabby look which sooner or later mars most Jewish faces,’ he said, graciously, ‘and the fine formation of his brow round about the eyes gave him an expression of countenance that inspired confidence.’ Wagner brought the libretto of Rienzi to the meeting, along with the score of the two acts (out of five) that he had already completed. Meyerbeer listened attentively and with great courtesy to Wagner’s spirited rendition of three acts of the libretto, and kept the score to study; in addition, he gave him letters of introduction to the manager of the Op?ra in Paris and introduced him to his friends in Boulogne, including the great virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles, with whom Wagner spent some pleasant musical evenings. Wagner thanked Meyerbeer in language of some extravagance, bordering on the erotic. ‘The gratitude I carry in my heart for you, my noble Protector, knows no bounds,’ he wrote. ‘I foresee that I shall be pursuing you, muttering my thanks, in this world and the next. I assure you that even in hell I shall be muttering it.’ He signed himself off as ‘your subject, forever bound to you, body and soul’. Later, when things hadn’t moved forward as quickly as he might have hoped, he wrote: ‘My head and my heart are no longer my own – they are already your property, my Master … I realise that I shall have to be your slave in mind and body … I shall be a faithful and honest slave.’ This shameless effusion evidently worked. Even Wagner, who assumed that it was the responsibility of everyone he ever met to advance his career, was astounded at Meyerbeer’s kindness. And of course he never forgave him for it. One of Meyerbeer’s first and greatest successes had been Robert le Diable. Had he lived to see the wholesale destruction of his reputation and legacy that Wagner was to engineer, he might have reflected that in Boulogne, he had met Richard le Diable, his nemesis. From Boulogne, the Wagners made for Paris, the epicentre of the operatic world. This was the old Paris of 1839, Louis Philippe’s Paris: the Paris of a thousand little alleys and passages, before Napoleon III and his Prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eug?ne Haussmann, swept the old streets away. The Wagners stayed in an apartment in the house where Moli?re had been born, and soon formed a lively circle of acquaintance. Among them was Franz Liszt, whom he had met in Berlin, just two years older than Wagner, but an international superstar, a pianist of superhuman brilliance, who was just beginning to compose music himself. Wagner was at first resentful of Liszt’s celebrity status, but quickly acknowledged the charm, the originality, and the generosity of the man. He is the only individual of comparable power with whom he maintained a relationship that could in any way be described as an equal one. But Wagner’s Meyerbeer-brokered meeting at the Op?ra came to nothing. He wrote a number of entirely conventional songs for various singers as calling cards; he managed to get a rehearsal of his Columbus overture, but not a performance. He and Minna lived from hand to mouth; so dire was their situation that when one day Wagner’s faithful four-footed friend Robber loped off and never came back again they were actually relieved: it was one less mouth to feed. A little later Wagner’s old associate, the poet-novelist-critic Laube, newly released from the Prussian jail in which he had been incarcerated for his inflammatory writings against the Saxon government, blew into town and managed to persuade a rich friend to provide the composer with a six-month stipend, which provided some relief. Nothing fundamentally shifted in Wagner’s fortunes, however; he started to dream about going to live in America – in Maryland, about whose charms he entertained some imaginative notions. Money was again short. Still toiling over Rienzi, he started sketching a one-act curtain-raiser as a potboiler. He had come across his subject while browsing through the sardonic stories in Heine’s collection The Memoirs of Herr Schnabelewopski, in one of which the hero sees a dramatised version of the old legend of the Flying Dutchman. As Wagner wrote, he found himself fiercely gripped by the material, which engaged him at a deep level; Heine, for whom the story is a mere backdrop to a seduction, concludes the episode with the words: ‘The moral of the play is that women should never marry a Flying Dutchman, while we men may learn from it that through women one can go down and perish – under agreeable circumstances!’ Wagner felt none of Heine’s cynicism. He took the legend very seriously – and very personally – indeed. To him, the story of a man doomed to travel the world restlessly until he was redeemed by the love of a woman who entirely believes in him – who trusts him absolutely – stirred him profoundly. He wrote the libretto in a blaze of inspiration. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/simon-callow/being-wagner-the-triumph-of-the-will/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.