Richard Wagner: A Life in Music

by Martin Geck

  Even in Tannhäuser’s Pilgrimage, Wagner’s use of orchestral melody already adumbrates the procedures found in the Ring, and this is even more true of the Rome Narration, for here we have not only the orchestral part with its illustrative elements that plainly look forward to Wagner’s later use of the leitmotif, but above all the listener is held in thrall by the vocal line, the declamatory nature of which clearly anticipates the later Ring. Although this section of the score begins like a song or aria, it quickly becomes—in Carolyn Abbate’s words—the “voice of musical anarchy.”53 Not only does Tannhäuser report on the failure of his pilgrimage in melodramatic and gestural terms, but Wagner even reflects his foundering on ecclesiastical institutions in his actual composition of this scene, the “institution” of traditional harmony and periodicity being deconstructed to such an extent that the failure of Tannhäuser’s enterprise and the resultant chaos are palpable in the music.

  The end of act 2 in Jan Fabre’s 2010 production of Tannhäuser at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels depicts Elisabeth as a bellicose mater dolorosa protecting Tannhäuser from the unforgiving members of the Wartburg court. (Photograph courtesy of the Archives of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels. Photographer: Johan Jacobs.)

  The process of disorientation gets under way only gradually, before culminating in Tannhäuser’s hallucinatory vision of Venus. But this makes perfect sense from a dramaturgical point of view, for whereas Tannhäuser initially addresses Wolfram in well-ordered verse, he is increasingly overwhelmed by his own memories and by the associations bound up with them, until madness finally breaks out. We need only to compare Tannhäuser’s Rome Narration with Lohengrin’s Grail Narration to appreciate its avant-garde nature. In both cases the verse consists of iambic pentameters, but Lohengrin is an ambassador from a world beyond our own, and so his narration has many of the formal qualities of a song or aria, whereas the Rome Narration tends in the direction of the eccentricity of musical prose of a kind that is the exception in Wagner’s work. Listeners should harbor the illusion that the Rome Narration was not composed by Wagner but is being ecstatically improvised by Tannhäuser. In this context it is worth reminding ourselves of Wagner’s own admission in this regard: “The peculiar thing about me as an artist, for instance, is that I look on each detail as an entirety and never say to myself, ‘Since this or that will follow, you must do thus and such, modulate like this or like that. [. . .] And yet I know I am unconsciously obeying a plan.’”54 It makes perfect sense in this context that Wagner struggled to find singing actors who had not only learned the standard gestures and facial expressions but were able to practice “the art of sublime illusion,” an art that in Wagner’s view had nothing to do with mere acting but involved “truthfulness” first and foremost.55 By examining the “tone paintings” of the Bacchanal and Tannhäuser’s Pilgrimage, together with the Rome Narration, from one and the same standpoint, we may be reminded of a passage from Nietzsche’s posthumously published writings: “Wagner knows what effects opiates and narcotics can have, and he uses them to combat the nervous distractedness of his powers of musical invention, a distractedness of which he is very well aware.”56 Although Nietzsche was thinking of Lohengrin, his comment can be applied equally well to Tannhäuser, at least if we ignore the popular crowd-pleasers such as the two Pilgrims’ Choruses, Tannhäuser’s Hymn to Venus, the Entry of the Guests, Elisabeth’s Prayer and Wolfram’s Ode to the Evening Star. Whether these numbers would have sufficed to guarantee the work a prominent place in an operatic history of the nineteenth century must remain an open question, but it is a part of Wagner’s genius that he was able to incorporate these popular numbers within a context that lacks nothing in musicodramatic verve. Even his rival Meyerbeer, who stopped off in Hamburg in 1855 specially to hear a performance of the opera and who was critical of the work’s “formlessness and lack of melody,” praised the “great flashes of genius in the conception and orchestral color.” In particular, he was impressed by the instrumental passages, including, no doubt, Tannhäuser’s Pilgrimage.57 And it is no accident that the anti-Wagnerian Schumann admitted to Felix Mendelssohn: “I have to take back much of what I wrote after reading through the score; from the stage, everything looks very different. I was very moved by much of it.”58

  When Schumann saw Tannhäuser, it was in a production that reflected Wagner’s own intentions, which ensured that plot, stage action, and music were fully synchronized. Modern directors would find themselves in extreme difficulty if they were to attempt to replicate every aspect of Wagner’s aesthetic approach to staging his works. But at least their modern approach would register the losses that ensue when Wagner’s music tries to illustrate something that is neither shown onstage in many modern productions nor depicted by the gestures of his performers—or “mimes,” as he preferred to call them. A Rome Narration performed by a singer introspectively cowering on the ground considerably circumscribes the gestural range of the music. Something that would have been unthinkable to Wagner should at least give modern directors pause for thought.

  A Word about Josef Rubinstein

  As pianist in residence at the Villa Wahnfried, Josef Rubinstein often performed the “tone painting” The Venusberg, reminding Wagner on one such occasion of the rehearsals for Tannhäuser in Paris during the winter of 1860–61 and of a comment made by Otto Wesendonck, who had been present at that time: “What utterly voluptuous sounds these are!” “I suppose he was afraid I had been dancing something like that in front of his wife,” Wagner quipped to Cosima.1 In general, Wagner was happy with these tone paintings from his own works—characteristic excerpts suitable for the piano. Wagner, who spent most of his evenings in Bayreuth with his family or a small circle of friends, would then revel in the past, while also finding new ideas for future projects and seeing himself above all as a musician who traded in sounds. But he also enjoyed hearing Rubinstein performing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Chromatic Fantasy, piano sonatas by Beethoven, a polonaise by Chopin, a waltz by Johann Strauß, and much else besides. The repertory even included pieces by Rossini, Berlioz, and Auber. In particular he was fond of playing arrangements of operas and symphonies for piano duet with his “pet Israelite,” as Rubinstein was called by way of a joke within the family circle.2 But was it really just a joke?

  Supported by his wealthy father, Rubinstein, who had previously worked as chamber pianist to the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna of Russia, no less, spent a whole decade trailing in the wake of the vast ocean liner that was Wagner before finally being sucked beneath the waves. His name occurs frequently in the pages of Cosima’s diaries, beginning with an entry dated March 7, 1872: “Letters arrive, among others a very remarkable one from Josef Rubinstein, beginning ‘I am a Jew’ and demanding salvation through participation in the production of the Nibelungen. R. sends him a very friendly reply.”3

  Within weeks the twenty-five-year-old Rubinstein was knocking at Wagner’s door, acting as répétiteur at the rehearsals for the Ring, and even preparing a copy of the short score of act 3 of Götterdämmerung to be presented to Ludwig II. He then spent some time giving concerts with Liszt, before returning to Bayreuth in 1874 and working as a copyist in the “Nibelung chancellery,” while once again demonstrating his proficiency as a rehearsal pianist. In the spring of 1876 an article appeared in the popular periodical Über Land und Meer describing life at Wahnfried and mentioning Rubinstein by name. But Rubinstein left Bayreuth before the first festival opened in the summer of that year, mortified that Wagner had used a speech thanking his assistants for their help to expatiate on his xenophobic racist theories in the presence of the whole company.4

  But Rubinstein found it impossible in the longer term to survive without Wagner, and by the following year he had written to ask forgiveness for his behavior the previous summer. By 1878 he had not only been restored to favor but had become a part of the Wagners’ entourage, performing each evening at Wahnfried for weeks at a time. He was also invited to
accompany the family to Naples, Palermo, and Venice. Back in Bayreuth, he joined Wagner over a drink at the local hostelry, and—just as Nietzsche had helped to decorate the Christmas tree at Tribschen—so he was coerced into playing whist with Hans von Wolzogen and, more frequently, drawn into conversation with Wagner about God and the world. A letter from Rubinstein prompted Wagner to speak of his “extraordinary culture.”5 Even more surprisingly, Wagner prevailed on Rubinstein to write three articles on the aesthetics and politics of music for the Bayreuther Blätter, the in-house journal from which Jewish writers were later to be banned.

  At the same time, however, it is clear from Cosima’s diaries that Rubinstein was cast in the role of the outsider, who, according to Siegfried Wagner’s reminiscences, was loved only by the family’s English governess.6 “If he knew how difficult we find him,” Wagner told his wife in 1881, “he would make things easier for us.”7 There were times when the Wagners found Rubinstein’s interpretation of the “Hammerklavier” Sonata impressive, while on other occasions they felt it was misconceived. One day the young man was incorrigibly fixed in his views; the next day those views were entirely other people’s. Of course, everything and everyone at Wahnfried was the subject of carping criticisms, but what makes it all the more disagreeable in Rubinstein’s case is the reason that the Wagners gave: the “poor man” simply couldn’t help it because he was Jewish.8 This rendered him just as incapable of coping with life’s pressures as of mastering the triplets in the Siegfried Idyll. Throughout all this he was nonetheless useful as a lightning conductor. If Wahnfried had not had its “pet Israelite,” it would have had to invent him.

  Clearly subject to bouts of depression and suffering from an inferiority complex, Rubinstein went on tour after Wagner’s death, only to shoot himself near Lucerne on August 23, 1884. Cosima had his body brought back to Bayreuth and placed a simple tombstone over his grave in the town’s Jewish cemetery.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Bedtime Story with Dire Consequences

  LOHENGRIN

  The old theme in a new context—Christian romanticism: just a front?—Lohengrin as Wagner: a stranger in the here and now—The historical and political dimension: “For German lands with German swords”—Wagner’s utopian vision of a popular monarchy—His medieval studies—Lohengrin and its consequences: Thomas and Heinrich Mann contest the moral high ground—Hitler as Lohengrin reborn—Is the opera damaged beyond repair?—Ideas on staging the work—Elsa: condemned to remain a woman?—Wagner as director of Lohengrin—The work’s musical innovations: leitmotifs and musical fabric illustrated by the scene between Friedrich and Ortrud—Liszt: “A single chord” says all that needs to be said about Wagner—The prelude: “Utopia in A major”—Wagner’s Lohengrin: a literary fairy tale about black and white magic—Can Wagner’s music heal the wounds that the work has been dealt?—Elsa’s “Einsam in trüben Tagen” as an illustration of Wagner’s “subtle art of transition”—The lyricism of Lohengrin

  This crayon portrait of Wagner is the work of Ernst Benedikt Kietz and dates from the spring of 1850, when Wagner was briefly visiting Paris. Within days of its completion, Wagner had left for Bordeaux, where he fell hopelessly in love with Jessie Laussot née Taylor and presented her with the original. This original is now believed lost, but a daguerreotype prepared from it has survived and has served as the basis of all later reproductions. (Photograph courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth: Bi 151-l.)

  In each of his self-styled “romantic” operas Wagner reacted directly to his own situation as man and artist—this is something that we find not only in Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser but also in Lohengrin. True, the opera appears at first sight to be a purely romantic fairy tale remote from all current concerns, but on closer inspection we can discover in it a whole nexus of motifs drawn from Wagner’s life and times. Some of them complement one another, while others run counter to each other.

  It is hard not to be impressed by the persistence with which Wagner, having completed Tannhäuser, remained true to his basic theme: Lohengrin deals with the corruption of modern society that no longer has time for “purely human” love, condemning obvious outsiders to failure and even encouraging them in their death wish. Of course, Lohengrin is not Tannhäuser “sinking to his ruin in all that the modern world has to offer by way of sensuality and hedonism,” but the Christian morality that underpins the piece is impossible to ignore. As with Tannhäuser, Wagner vigorously resisted all attempts to reduce Lohengrin to the “category” of “Christian romanticism.”1 And yet Christian miracle and pagan magic are so clearly contrasted in the work that the figure of Ortrud, whose magic is pagan in origin, has negative associations. Elsa even feels obliged to win over her rival to her own faith, hoping in that way to teach Ortrud true charity and what she calls “happiness without remorse.” And in a passage that Wagner finally decided against setting to music, Lohengrin, having been driven away by Elsa’s curiosity about his background, was for a time intended to say:

  O Elsa! Was hast du mir angethan!

  Als meine Augen dich zuerst ersahn,

  Fühlt’ ich, zu dir in Liebe schnell entbrannt,

  Mein Herz des Grales keuschem Dienst entwandt!

  Nun muß ich ewig Reu’ und Buße tragen,

  Weil ich von Gott zu dir mich hingesehnt,—

  Denn ach! der Sünde muß ich mich verklagen,

  Daß Weibeslieb’ ich göttlich rein gewähnt!2

  [O Elsa! What have you done! When first my eyes beheld you, I felt inflamed at once by my love for you, my heart abjured the Grail’s chaste service! Forever must I now repent and atone for having turned from God, for, ah! the shameful sin I must confess of deeming woman’s love divinely pure!]

  These lines not only look forward to the “sinful worlds” that Lohengrin’s father, Parzival, will have to resist in Wagner’s last completed music drama, it also, and above all, recalls the “blasphemous gazes” that Tannhäuser once cast at Elisabeth. Of course, Lohengrin has taken a further step down the road that leads to the renunciation of women’s love for he has been sent by God, and, as such, his problem differs from Tannhäuser’s. On this occasion we are only peripherally concerned with resisting the temptations of insidious sensuality. Rather, “the tragedy of the situation of the true artist in the present age” consists in the fact that his “most necessary and most natural desire to be unconditionally accepted and understood by feeling” is constantly frustrated.

  The modern artist is under a “constraint to communicate not to the emotions but almost entirely to the critical intellect.”3 Wagner is keen to apply this to the figure of Lohengrin, arguing that his hero could have saved Elsa and, indeed, the whole of Brabant if she had trusted him on an emotional level and listened to her “unconscious, involuntary” nature instead of her “critical intellect,” which made her insist on asking him about his origins. In this context it is worth recalling Nietzsche’s polemical remark that “Wagner thus represents the Christian concept, ‘you ought to and must believe.’ It is a crime against what is highest and holiest to be scientific.”4

  Although a certain amount of caution is advisable in this context, it may be possible to interpret Wagner’s standpoint here as a reflection of his own mission as he saw it particularly while he was working on Lohengrin between 1845 and 1848. He was no longer the stranger that he had been in Paris, when his role had been similar to that of the homeless Flying Dutchman. But nor was he like Tannhäuser, fighting against his country’s institutions, wanting on the one hand to comply with them, while on the other hand opposing them. The sufferings caused by society were of a higher order but also—by his own lights—more “tragic.” Although Wagner was now an established composer, he still felt that he and his mission were misunderstood, for the prevailing music industry in Germany had no time for the sort of music theater whose task was to allow its audiences to experience metaphysical truths for themselves. (In order to make any headway institutional
ly, Wagner would have to found the Bayreuth Festival.) Although Dresden audiences had not rejected Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser out of hand, they had been less than fulsome in their praise of either piece, and while it is not possible to attribute their lack of enthusiasm to an excess of “critical intellect,” it was undoubtedly due, in Wagner’s eyes, to a lack of feeling and a lamentable absence of blind faith in his message, according to which art was the new religion.

  In February 1879, Wagner’s pianist in residence in Bayreuth, Josef Rubinstein, claimed that in his youth he had not known where to begin with Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, prompting Wagner to comment, ironically, that “it is intellect which has brought this poor man to his feeling for these works,” by which he evidently meant that in exceptional cases even the calculating Jew could see that in Wagner’s music dramas what mattered was the “emotionalizing of the intellect,” to quote from Opera and Drama.5 If this assessment seems above all to be an example of Wagner’s paranoid conviction that he was regularly misunderstood by the emotionally cold Jewish intelligentsia, another detail throws significant light on the limited intelligence of Wagner’s professional colleagues at the time of the work’s Dresden premiere. At the very end of his life, Wagner recalled that the theater’s general administrator, Baron August von Lüttichau, had suggested in all seriousness that “Tannhäuser should be pardoned in Rome and should marry Elisabeth.”6