Being Wagner

by Simon Callow

  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 Würzburg 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 Würzburg 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 Würzburg 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 Würzburg that he first discovered his powers of seduction, triumphantly snatching a young woman away for a night of love while her hapless fiancé 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 Würzburg 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 Würzburg 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 Würzburg, 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 Schröder-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 whi
ch 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 Lauchstädt 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, Fräulein 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 Lauchstädt 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 Schröder-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 ad
dition to Schröder-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.