Being Wagner

by Simon Callow

  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 was seeing the soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient in Fidelio, in the Leipzig theatre. Schröder-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 Schröder-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 Schröder-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.

  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 Rimbau
d; 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 Schröder-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 coun
terpoint 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

  Credit 5

  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 Büsching’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 Adelaïde: 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.