Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  By examining this subject in my chapter on Rienzi, I hope to do justice to the opera within the context of Wagner’s creative development. Whimsical dismissals of the work as “a political game of cowboys and Indians” and as “papier-mâché romanticism” completely miss the point, for Wagner gave far more serious thought to the political background of the plot than we normally expect from a librettist or a composer. From this point of view he was very much a political animal.

  On the other hand, the opera fails to pack any punch at all if it is dissected along politological lines, no matter how well-meaning such a surgical incision may be. Until he began to work on the Ring, Wagner invariably placed the human above the political and set the greatest store by an effective drama. This was his starting point when he set out to explain the role of Rienzi to Niemann or accused Tichatschek of failing to understand the part of Tannhäuser. Here, too, we find Wagner’s strengths: as we have already noted, Rienzi is far more subtly drawn as a character than a superficial observer may realize. And only by ensuring that his characters and the situations in which they find themselves are credibly portrayed in compelling psychological detail could Wagner motivate his performers to be consumed by the truth of their roles in terms of their singing, acting, and gestures. The large number of crowd scenes in Rienzi tends to obscure our appreciation of the fact that from this point of view, the work is closer to its successor, Der fliegende Holländer, than it is to its predecessor, Das Liebesverbot.

  What is it, then, that Rienzi lacks to make it truly great? In comparison to its potential rivals, the answer is not very much. The quip—attributed to Hans von Bülow—that Rienzi is Meyerbeer’s best opera is nothing if not shallow, for if we regard Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots of 1836 as competition, then this last-named work, which was hugely successful in its day, is by no means lacking in ideas in the sense that Wagner understood this term.39 Moreover, a glance at Meyerbeer’s letters and diaries indicates the depth of his interest in the historical background and the extent to which he discussed the precise characterization of the various roles with his distinguished librettist, Eugène Scribe.40 It is also worth asking whether Scribe and Meyerbeer, working as a team, showed more skill in handling the different strands in the plot and in arranging the crowd scenes than the still inexperienced Wagner was able to do in the case of Rienzi.

  At best this question can be answered only theoretically, for both Rienzi and Les Huguenots are bound to strike today’s operagoers as historical monstrosities that can no longer be salvaged as dramas of ideas, no matter what twenty-first-century directors may do to cast them in a more interesting light. And if Wagner himself had not recognized this for himself, his next opera would not have been Der fliegende Holländer. For it is very much in the nature of grand opera that the pomp and circumstance of its plot and music—Wagner’s own description of the onstage music in Rienzi41—are just as likely to kill the ideas as the lavishness of the sets. And all of this has the explicit approval of audiences who are willing to countenance lofty ideas only so long as they do not impair their enjoyment.

  In the twenty-first century this enjoyment is above all musical. And, like it or not, it is concentrated for the most part not on any coherent musical structures but on individual passages of striking beauty and originality. Such passages may be found in both Meyerbeer and Wagner, with Wagner banking in particular on Italianate melodies. Cosima Wagner’s decision to champion Rienzi after her husband’s death was undoubtedly well intentioned, and she was certainly right to claim that “I feel great affection for the work. With it, opera died the love-death of an over-abundance of melody.”42 She was less fortunate when it came to producing the version of the opera that is still usually performed today and that represents an attempt on her part to turn the opera into a music drama by means of clumsy changes to the score, not least the severely mechanical cuts to virtuoso solo passages and the attacca links between numbers designed to blur the outlines of what Wagner had intended as a number opera.

  It is not just from today’s perspective that such an undertaking is wholly unnecessary, for Wagner himself had already conceived the opera along dramaturgical lines, casting the opening act in the form of a single great scene and largely dispensing with large-scale arias and duets in favor of word-based melodies and succinct musical gestures, while tending to embed the hero’s entrances in crowd scenes. That he even shows signs of what Werner Breig has termed a “symphonic technique for the dialogue”43 does nothing, however, to alter the fact that it is the work’s highlights that retain a toehold in the present-day repertory in the form of two solo numbers and the overture. The overture features a “festive theme” that Wagner’s Dresden parrot, Papo, used to whistle when he heard his master returning home from work. Perhaps it is the following passage, which sounds strangely disjointed, especially in the wordless overture (music example 3).44 In the overture this theme is combined with the Rienzi theme in the manner of a development section. Here good old German counterpoint raises its head in the midst of the work’s Italianate melodies and verve (music example 4). But almost at once it is whistled back by Papo. Shortly after the first night Wagner cut this contrapuntal passage.

  3. Bars 155–58 from the overture to Rienzi and (beneath it) bars 1248–51 of the finale to act 2.

  Philipp Stölzl’s 2010 production of Rienzi at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin was inspired by the fact that this was one of Hitler’s favorite operas. Not all National Socialists shared that enthusiasm. Indeed, to the extent that the educated middle classes shared a love of Wagner’s music dramas, it was his Germanic heroes with whom they tended to identify rather than the Roman tribune. As a result, the idea of locating the entire opera within a National Socialist setting seems a little forced, and the distorted picture of the work presented by Stölzl’s production is hard to reconcile with the libretto. The present image depicts the führer’s bunker, with its associations of the hero’s downfall. (Photograph courtesy of Ullstein Bild—Lieberenz.)

  Of the two solo highlights, one is Rienzi’s Prayer, “Allmächt’ger Vater” (music example 5) which was a favorite of Berlioz’s. In spite of—or because of—its old-fashioned turn (in the musical sense), it is Wagner’s first brilliantly inspired idea in a genre that from then on was to be an integral part of his musical thinking: the hymn-like number that raises the onstage action to a higher plane of quasi-religious ecstasy at a prominent point in the score. Of course, such a device is familiar from an earlier period in operatic history—one thinks of Agathe’s “Leise, leise, fromme Weise” from Der Freischütz. And it recurs in the later period in Desdemona’s “Ave Maria” in Verdi’s Otello, to cite just a single example. What is original here is that it is a man who prays.

  4. Bars 251–58 of the composition draft of the overture to Rienzi, showing a contrapuntal passage that Wagner later struck out, reproduced here from the appendix to the critical commentary of the score.

  5. Bars 67–70 of Rienzi’s Prayer from act 5, with the turn written out in full, first from above, then from below.

  The counterpart of this prayer is Adriano’s aria “Gerechter Gott.” This role was written for a dramatic soprano and was evidently intended from the outset for Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, who had particularly impressed Wagner as Romeo in Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi. In his later works he would presumably have found it impossible to cast a woman in this “youthfully impassioned man’s role,” as he called it.45 But such alienation in terms of vocal casting is all part and parcel of grand opera, a genre in which characters may express their joy in “abstract” coloratura. It is no accident that Wagner’s stage action has no genuine “lovers”—Adriano cannot really be regarded as Irene’s lover, as she worships her brother above all else, her adulation transcending death and, indeed, finding its ultimate expression in her demise. And Rienzi loves only his sister and his “bride,” Rome. In creating this character, Wagner explicitly admitted to having “stepped outside the circle of received opinion” and ques
tioned “whether the tenor voice is exclusively suited to the character of a lover.” Instead, he wanted a hero “in the fullest sense of the word,”46 a claim that heralds the birth of what was to become the proverbial “heldentenor.”

  In answer to the question as to what Rienzi lacks as an opera for it to be truly great, we might reply that against the background of French grand opera, it lacks nothing. Only in the context of the demands that Wagner made of himself and of his mission may it be said to lack a good deal, if not everything.

  A Word about Giacomo Meyerbeer

  An entry in Cosima Wagner’s diary for March 30, 1869, mentions the recent republication of her husband’s diatribe on “Jews in Music”: “R. tells me he recently read somewhere that he had written [the essay] because he envied Mendelssohn his genius and Meyerbeer his success,” prompting him to ask: “What, not Hiller his wife?—for he could envy Hiller neither for his genius nor for his success.”1

  As far as Wagner’s personal animosities were concerned, this is rich: Ferdina nd Hiller was the son of a Jewish businessman and highly regarded throughout Europe as a composer, conductor, and pianist, even being granted a patent of nobility for his services to music, and yet he was no competition for Wagner in the way that Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer were. And it was Meyerbeer’s successes that rankled most with Wagner. When the latter sought to gain a foothold in Paris in 1839, it was Meyerbeer—his elder by twenty-two years—who did what he could to help his compatriot. Already internationally renowned as the composer of Robert le diable and Les Huguenots and the holder of the Prussian order Pour le mérite, Meyerbeer had yet to enjoy his greatest triumph, which did not come until 1849 with the world premiere of Le prophète, the receipts for the first ten performances of which at the Paris Opéra amounted to almost 100,000 francs, while the publishing rights brought in another 44,000. Further honors were quick to follow, including the titles of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, Knight of the Saxon Order of Merit and of the Austrian Order of Franz Joseph, Commander of the Order of the Württemberg Crown, Commander (First Class) of the Order of Duke Ernst of Saxony, an honorary doctorate from the University of Jena, and membership of the Senate of the Berlin Academy of the Arts.

  Meanwhile, Wagner had written a series of letters to Meyerbeer, their obsequious tone barely mitigated by ironic exaggerations: “The feelings of gratitude that inspire me toward you, my high-minded patron, know no bounds. I foresee that from age to age I shall pursue you, stammering my thanks,” we read in a letter written in February 1840.2 It was at around this time that Wagner sent his patron a copy of his essay on Les Huguenots that may in fact reflect his genuine admiration for the work: “Meyerbeer wrote world history, the history of hearts and emotions, he demolished the barriers of national prejudice, and destroyed the confining boundaries of linguistic dialects, he wrote deeds of music.”3

  Even as late as 1846, by which date he was working in Dresden as kapellmeister to the royal court of Saxony, Wagner was still writing to Meyerbeer and professing his “most loyal gratitude and admiration.”4 Secretly, however, his feelings had cooled, and those feelings turned to sheer hatred when he arrived in Paris in June 1849 as a failed revolutionary with a price on his head and discovered a city in a state of frenzy inspired by Meyerbeer’s new opera. It was, he believed, a symptom of a capitalist music industry that was rotten to the core and where there was no place for works like Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. In the course of a further flying visit to Paris in February 1850, he attended a performance of Le prophète, summing up his reaction in a letter to one of his Dresden friends, Theodor Uhlig, and holding out the work’s hero, John of Leyden, as the true “prophet of the new world”: “I felt happy and exalted, abandoned all my subversive plans, which struck me as profane now that the pure, noble, and most holy Truth, together with the divinely human, lives so directly and warmly in the blessed and immediate present. [. . .] I can see that I am becoming increasingly fanatical when I recall that evening of revelation: forgive me!”5

  Astonishingly, it seems as if practically everyone who has ever written about Wagner has taken this at face value.6 But what we find here is pure contempt, which is why Wagner was able to write to Liszt the following year describing Meyerbeer as “this perpetually kind and obliging man [who] reminds me of the darkest—I might almost say the most wicked—period of my life, a period of connections and back-staircases, when we were treated like fools by patrons whom we inwardly despised.”7

  At least to the extent that he was familiar with Wagner’s operas, Meyerbeer was not uncomplimentary about them, while Wagner, too, retained a high opinion of certain aspects of his rival’s works, even in later years. In Opera and Drama, for example, he praises the “wonderfully affecting melody in G-flat major” in the love duet for Raoul and Valentine in act 4 of Les Huguenots. It has sprung, he wrote, “like the most fragrant flower from a situation that stirs every fiber of the human heart with blissful anguish.”8 On the other hand, this did not prevent Wagner from striking out two bars in the score of Parsifal when they reminded him too clearly of Isabelle’s cavatina “Robert, toi que j’aime” from Robert le diable.9

  It remains only to mention one of Wagner’s dreams from his years in Bayreuth. He had seen himself in Paris, “walking arm in arm with Meyerbeer, and M. had smoothed for him the paths to fame.”10 By then, Wagner’s antithesis had been dead for eight years: Meyerbeer’s final diary entry relating to Wagner is dated 1855 and refers to a chance encounter in London: “We greeted each other coldly and without speaking.”11

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Deep shock” and “a violent change of direction”

  DER FLIEGENDE HOLLÄNDER

  Paris between 1839 and 1842: futile attempts to stage Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi—Hackwork for the music publisher Maurice Schlesinger—Liszt, Heine, and the Saint-Simonians—Der fliegende Holländer—An “outsider” as an alternative to fashionable French grand opera—Heine’s Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski as the inspiration for the opera—“Redemption through destruction” as a leitmotif—The godless ending of the original—Wagner engaging with the ideas of Baudelaire and Byron—The Dutchman as Senta’s vision—Wagner distancing himself from the traditional formal language of opera—Senta’s “stage ballad” as the heart of the opera—Wagner’s leitmotif technique in embryo—A sense of musical time dictated by myth—Inspired ideas in the overture—Naturalism in the orchestral tone painting—Wagner later distancing himself from his early masterpiece—The freshness and actuality of the opera

  This pencil drawing by Ernst Benedikt Kietz depicts Wagner wearing a dressing gown—a favorite piece of apparel—and sporting side whiskers. Completed in June 1842, it was reproduced in newspaper articles in 1843 and on wanted posters in 1849. While living in exile in Switzerland, Wagner arranged for the original to be lithographed and sent copies to friends and admirers in Germany whom he was unable to visit in person. He regarded the expedient as no more than a makeshift solution in view of what he described as his “laboriously and powerfully changed appearance” (SB 4:208). (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: Bi 2321.)

  There were few other times in Wagner’s life when he reacted with such seismographic sensitivity to the conditions in his life and in the age in general as he did with Der fliegende Holländer. He had moved to Paris in September 1839 in the hope of finding his fortune in a city that has been described as the “capital of the nineteenth century” but failed to discover it there. Anyone inclined to read an autobiographic element into two of the short stories that he wrote in Paris, “An End in Paris” and “A Happy Evening,” will no doubt dismiss their critique of a music industry run along exclusively economic lines as the self-pity of a misprized genius. Yet behind the description of individual fates lie the problems of the age. In his article “On the Situation of Artists and Their Condition in Society” (1835) Liszt had already lamented the “brutal preponderance of material interests,” the “petty mercantil
e egoism” of a large number of artists, and their “lack of faith.” It was these ills, he concluded, that were “the great scar on our age.”1 Two decades later Wagner’s admirer Charles Baudelaire was to bewail the decline of the modern artist to the point where he became the prostitute of his public.

  Between Liszt the Parisian by choice and Baudelaire the archetypal Frenchman, Wagner, newly arrived from the Baltic, cuts an unusual figure. Preferring the company of his fellow countrymen to having his pitiful French ridiculed by the city’s prominent musicians, he nonetheless put his shoulder to the wheel, initially trying to capitalize on Meyerbeer’s letters of recommendation but quickly being put off or shot down with his ambitious operatic plans, which involved performances of Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi—he had hurriedly completed the latter in a French translation. All that remained was hackwork in the form of feature articles for Maurice Schlesinger’s Gazette musicale and August Lewald’s Europa. He also turned his hand to arranging the latest operas (WWV 62), preparing piano transcriptions for two and four hands, and arranging individual numbers for piano, string or flute quartet, and two violins. In this way he came to know intimately Donizetti’s La favorite and Halévy’s Le guitarrero and La reine de Chypre. A particularly droll commission, an instruction manual for the cornet à pistons, remained unfinished.

  Wagner was now twenty-six and felt called to greater things, with the result that he regarded this wearisome labor as a humiliation requiring him to serve the current stars of the operatic scene and present himself at Schlesinger’s offices to deliver his completed commissions and receive a new advance. This drudgery continued even after Wagner had taken up his new post as assistant conductor in Dresden, for not all the advance payments that he had received had been worked off, and the arm of his French employers was long.