Being Wagner
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Simon Callow
BEING WAGNER
Simon Callow is an actor, director, and writer. He made his stage debut in 1973 and came to prominence in a critically acclaimed performance as Mozart in the original stage production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus at the Royal National Theatre in 1979. He is well known for a series of one-man shows that have toured internationally and featured subjects including Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Jesus, and Richard Wagner. Among his many film roles is the character Gareth in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Callow simultaneously pursued careers as a director in theater and opera and an author of several books, including the biographical trilogy Orson Welles, Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, My Life in Pieces (winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize), Shooting the Actor, Being an Actor, and the biography Charles Laughton.
www.simoncallow.com
ALSO BY SIMON CALLOW
Being an Actor
Acting in Restoration Comedy
Orson Welles, Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu
Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor
The Night of the Hunter (BFI Film Classics)
Dickens’ Christmas: A Victorian Celebration
Shooting the Actor
Orson Welles, Volume 2: Hello Americans
Love Is Where It Falls
Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World
Orson Welles, Volume 3: One Man Band
A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, FEBRUARY 2018
Copyright © 2017 by Simon Callow
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by William Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, London, in 2017.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Callow, Simon, 1949– author.
Title: Being Wagner : a larger-than-life biography of a short man / by Simon Callow.
Description: New York : Vintage Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017036465
Subjects: LCSH: Wagner, Richard, 1813– 1883. | Composers—Germany—Biography.
Classification: LCC ML410.W1 C3 2018 | DDC 782.1092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036465
Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525436188
Ebook ISBN 9780525436195
Cover design by Linda Huang
Cover images: face © SZ Photo/ Scherl/Mary Evans; body © Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo
www.vintagebooks.com
v5.2
a
To David Hare,
friend, adviser, beacon.
‘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
About the Author
Also by Simon Callow
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
Vorspiel
1 Young Richard
2 Out in the World
3 Doldrums
4 Triumph
5 The World in Flames
6 Pause for Thought
7 It Begins
8 Suspension
9 Limbo
10 Enter a Swan
11 Towards the Green Hill
12 The Long Day’s Task is Done
Coda
Chronology
Wagner’s Works
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
FOREWORD
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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 leitmotiven 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.
Wagner took matters into his own hands almost from the beginning, writing huge operas on spec without either commissions or particular artists or theatres in mind. He was determined to do things on his own terms and in his own way. To him, drama was everything: even music was its servant, and if music did not serve the purposes of expression, then music itself must be bent and changed. Very soon, he realised that his work made demands that the operatic theatre as it was presently constituted was incapable of fulfilling, so, instead of cutting his coat according to his cloth, he determined to remake the operatic theatre, both figuratively and literally. And he did, having created, by the time he died at the age of 69, in the teeth of great hardship and often violently expressed opposition, a body of work on an unprecedented scale and of gigantic scope that affected its audiences deeply, trained a group of singers and players who could interpret it, and built a revolutionary new theatre in which to perform it. He had set out to impose his work and his view of life on the world, and he had succeeded; it might almost be said that, weaving together myth and legend and history, he had created an alternative universe. It is a safe bet to say that no other composer has achieved what Wagner achieved, not so much in point of musical greatness – though he is incontestably great – but in terms of reinventing his art at every level.
In unflagging pursuit of his goal, Wagner 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 a
t 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 Tannhäuser 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 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 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 Adès 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.’ Adès’s remarks oddly echo Wagner’s view of Jewish composers in his nakedly anti-Semitic pamphlet Judaism in Music, which provoked furious resistance to his music in his lifetime and continues to have a deep impact on his legacy today. By contrast, Baudelaire said, after hearing the overture to Tannhäuser 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 Bülow, 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
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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-Saëns, 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.