Being Wagner

by Simon Callow

  Nobody understood it. Despite the triumphant presence of Schröder-Devrient as Senta, for the rest, as far as acting was concerned, it was woefully undercast; whole tranches of the first act passed by with no dramatic engagement whatever from the performers. The hearty histrionics that made Rienzi go with such a swing were death to The Flying Dutchman, which needed detailed, psychologically credible acting and subtle vocal colours. Above all, it needed an imaginative involvement from the singers, which no one but Schröder-Devrient was capable of. In the pit, Wagner made sure that the overture was electrifying, plunging the audience into the howling storms he had so vividly conjured up, but until Senta’s suicide leap at the end shook the audience from its lethargy, the dark and desperate story itself made little impact on the Dresden audience.

  Nonetheless, the continuing afterglow of Rienzi was enough to confirm Wagner’s status in Dresden, to the extent that, to Minna’s inexpressible joy and relief, he was now offered the post of Royal Conductor, a position with a lifelong annual salary and involving only modest duties. He almost immediately regretted accepting the job, he said, because his sudden new visibility brought all his creditors out of the woodwork, people from the most distant parts of his life who thought they had, and who probably did have, a claim on him. Some dated back to his student days – some his school days – until at last he cried out that any day now he expected to receive a bill from the nurse that suckled him. He focussed on his new duties, conducting both his own works and those of others, notably a highly charged performance of Weber’s Euryanthe, about which he had once been so rude. His absolute certainty about what he wanted and his ruthlessness in achieving it are remarkable – he was just thirty years old, had conducted a couple of seasons in some distinctly ropey provincial opera houses, and nothing at all during the last two and a half years. But the moment he arrived in Dresden he took the revered Royal Opera orchestra by the scruff of its neck and forced them to play the way he wanted. He insisted above all that they play with meaning; routine was intolerable to him. Expressiveness was everything. Naturally, they loathed him – to begin with, at least. But other people sat up. They saw that Wagner was something quite out of the ordinary, and they gave him loyal support. These were his first disciples, inspired both to champion and to protect him; from now on, he would always be surrounded by acolytes, with whom his relationship was, like everything else in his life, complicated. The curious combination of masculine and feminine elements in his nature – of ruthlessness and vulnerability, of attack and seduction – created relationships with his supporters which were unnaturally intense and frequently ended badly.

  In Dresden, in the early days, at any rate, he required neither protection nor championship: his job, being far from burdensome, afforded him plenty of time for reading. For the first time in his life he had exactly what he needed: time and money. He had been brooding over the story of Tannhäuser and finished writing the libretto – poem, as he insisted – exploring the minstrel’s conflicting impulses, but within the context of a great debate about art, embodied in the Minnesingers’ semi-historical song contest on the Wartburg. The artist was firmly at its centre – two artists, in fact, because Wagner had the remarkable idea of including among the characters the thirteenth-century poet and Minnesinger, Wolfram von Eschenbach, author of the great medieval German epic Parzival. He gave the opera the name Venusberg.

  Shortly after finishing the libretto, he received one of those seismic shocks to his imagination to which he was so peculiarly prone. He came across Jacob Grimm’s recently published study, Teutonic Mythology, and for the first time, agog, he encountered the Norse myths, the Eddas, the sagas of the Nibelungs and the Wälsungs. Greedily devouring the hefty tome, he experienced a sudden vertiginous plunge into the subconscious, finding things there which were at once completely new and long familiar:

  The baldest legend spoke to me of its ancient home, and soon my whole imagination thrilled with images; long-lost forms for which I had sought so eagerly shaped themselves ever more and more clearly into realities that lived again. There rose up soon before my mind a whole world of figures, which revealed themselves as so strangely plastic and primitive that, when I saw them before me and heard their voices in my heart, I could not account for the almost tangible familiarity and assurance of their demeanour. The effect they produced upon the inner state of my soul I can only describe as an entire rebirth. Just as we feel a tender joy over a child’s first bright smile of recognition, so now my own eye flashed with rapture as I saw a world, revealed, as it were, by miracle, in which I had hitherto moved blindly as the babe in its mother’s womb.

  He concluded that these unknown but familiar figures who spoke to him were his ancestors, the shadows, he said, of his own soul. Wagner was a Jungian before Jung; reading Grimm suddenly connected him to the collective unconscious. His inner life, for so long an unknown, disturbing territory to him, was becoming coherent. He was moving forward very rapidly. As far as he was concerned, The Flying Dutchman was the first real music he had ever written, the first music, as he put it, that he had written not from his conscious but from his unconscious mind. Its failure taught Wagner a lesson. The singers in the Dresden Dutchman had had no idea what to do with the music or the words he’d written for them. How could they? They’d never come across anything like it. He began to understand that, if the work he intended to write was to make its due effect, he was going to need a new kind of singer, a new kind of orchestral playing, a new kind of production, a new kind of theatre. Above all, he was going to need a new kind of audience, one educated by him. And he was going to have to do all this by himself – he understood that very clearly. It was a matter of willpower. ‘To present a work in public,’ he said, ‘is to assert your superiority. The public resists. You have to fight and conquer them, win them over by violent efforts.’

  These huge shifts in his inner life did not help him to write Tannhäuser, as he now called it; it was not coming easily. And they sat uncomfortably with his new respectability. Minna was thrilled to be the wife of the Royal Conductor, and busily set about furnishing their splendid new apartments appropriately: everything, Wagner noted scornfully, was good and substantial, as was only right, he noted with dread, for a man of thirty who was settling down at last for the rest of his life.

  You can feel the rising panic, the claustrophobia as he describes his newfound stability. He has a magnificent grand piano, he has a fine writing desk, he has a library filled with works on German history, as well as the masterpieces of German literature, and those of ancient Greece, Italy, France and England. His plan was to work through them all, ideally in the original languages, none of which he spoke. But he was kept from his books by the small matter of having to compose Tannhäuser and attend new productions of Rienzi in Hamburg and The Flying Dutchman in Berlin, both of which, critically successful though they were, only confirmed him in his conviction of the hopelessness of the German operatic stage. Rienzi had meanwhile become a staple of the repertory in Dresden, and on the strength of it, some people had begun to speak of Wagner as the great white hope of German music. ‘I am of the firm opinion that [Rienzi] is the finest thing achieved in grand opera in the last twelve years,’ wrote the young critic Eduard Hanslick, who would before long come to articulate the opposition to Wagner, ‘that it is the most significant dramatic creation since Les Huguenots, and that it is just as epoch-making for its own time as were Les Huguenots, Der Freischütz and Don Giovanni, each for its respective period of musical history.’ These opinions were useful to Wagner, but he did not share them. He found the success of Rienzi pretty funny, in fact. To him it was passé, dead, history. He had moved on.

  Encouraged by Minna, he took trouble to keep in with his royal employers, despite his essentially radical and revolutionary sympathies. His initial interview with Friedrich Augustus II was somewhat discouraging – the king amiably advised him to try to differentiate the characters in his operas rather bet
ter – but Wagner nonetheless developed a fondness for His Majesty. When the king came home from a sightseeing visit to England, the composer welcomed him back with a newly composed march: the celebrated march, in fact, from the as yet unfinished Tannhäuser, scored for 120 bandsmen with a 300-strong chorus from the local glee club. Wagner staged it himself – with unceasing activity and ever-present help, he says; no doubt he understates – arranging things so that at the second verse the performers processed off through the royal garden, gradually receding into the middle distance, allowing the final notes to reach the royal ears ‘as an echoing dream-song’. It was a brilliant stroke of stage management, which enchanted the royal party, and enraged everyone else. Wagner had, in the most literal sense, stolen a march over those whose life’s work it was to flatter their royal employers. From this point on, he became aware of undercurrents of resentment. His immediate boss, the director of the theatre, having earlier told him that he was a great man, and that he would soon be universally admired and loved, swiftly turned against him. ‘Nevertheless,’ Wagner remarked, ‘a certain peculiar tenderness towards me on the part of this singular man was always clearly perceptible. Indeed, I might almost say that much of his subsequent abuse of me sounded more like the strangely perverted plaints of a love that met with no response.’ It is entirely characteristic of Wagner to have seen the relationship in these terms; but it also seems, to a large extent, to have been true: all his life he provoked, almost flirtatiously, love and hate simultaneously. You never knew where you were with Wagner, which was how he liked it. Destabilisation was his primary modus operandi, in life as in art.

  Even his feelings for the dead were complex. In Paris, he had turned against Weber, but now, newly converted to all things German, and filling the position Weber himself had once occupied, he enthusiastically committed himself to the ghoulish undertaking of returning his mortal remains to Dresden from London, where the great composer had died twenty years earlier after the disastrous first night of Oberon at Covent Garden. Wagner, determined to mark the great man’s return with some splendour, specially composed two pieces for the exequies: the first a Berliozian Funeral Symphony, based on themes from Euryanthe, scored for eighty wind instruments, to accompany the ashes from the landing stage to the Catholic cemetery; the other a part-song for male voices to be performed at the grave the following day. The occasion was doubly sombre: the composer’s son had died only a few days before. Weber’s widow tearfully begged Wagner to postpone the event but he insisted that the ceremony must continue. He delivered the oration, too. This made a great effect. It was Wagner’s first outing as a public speaker; more, much more, was to follow. Honouring Weber was not simple piety on his part: it publicly confirmed his embrace of all things German.

  Meanwhile, he finished the score of Tannhäuser, and had it printed. Exhausted by his labours, he was ordered strict rest by the doctors and duly set off for Marienbad with Minna to take the waters; he was under strict instructions to avoid anything that might excite him. It was not to be. In his rucksack he had brought with him Eschenbach’s medieval romances Titurel and Parzival, plus a story concerning Nuremberg’s mastersingers which he’d found in a History of German Literature, along with another about the sixteenth-century cobbler-poet Hans Sachs. These utterly disparate stories, about Knights of the Round Table in mythical Camelot, and craftsmen-singers in a bustling bourgeois community, swirled around and around in his imagination, until he felt compelled to find paper and pen and note down what were, in effect, the plot and characters of Lohengrin and The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. The doctors at the spa were highly displeased with all this activity and crossly told him that he was unfit for water cures.

  Back in town, Tannhäuser was in rehearsal, and Wagner was forcefully reminded that he was now writing operas which demanded singers (and directors) who did not exist. Schröder-Devrient, cast as Venus, despite her ever-thickening girth and somewhat unstable vocal production, had what was needed: a powerful sense of character and passionate engagement with both text and music. But to explain the complex spiritual journey of Tannhäuser to the naïve giant Tichatschek, Wagner’s original Rienzi, was a hopeless undertaking; to elucidate and dramatise the subtle shifts in the Song Contest in Act II impossible with the journeyman singers that were all the company could field. Wagner wanted to compel the audience – for the first time in the history of opera, he said – to take an interest in a poetical idea, by making them follow its every twist and turn. By miraculous good fortune, he found one singer in the resident company – just the one – who understood what he was talking about: the baritone Anton Mitterwurzer, who sang the pivotal role of Wolfram von Eschenbach. This shy, unsociable young man listened intently to what Wagner told him, at first with bafflement and frustration, finding himself unable to do what Wagner suggested, but going away every night and working towards it, until finally he had discovered a new way of singing and a new way of thinking; Wagner demanded nothing less. Mitterwurzer transformed himself in bearing, voice and appearance, convincing Wagner that it was, after all, possible to train singers to become artists; a natural genius like Schröder-Devrient might always come along, but he knew that his work would never make its proper impact until he had bred up a generation of new singers.

  As far as Tannhäuser was concerned, two expressive, intelligent singers out of twenty was not enough. The first performance so deeply dismayed Wagner that he postponed the second for a week, during which time, in an effort to limit the damage Tichatschek’s remorselessly jolly singing was inflicting on it, he made substantial cuts in the piece. By the third performance the theatre had a hit on its hands; Mitterwurzer, in particular, was acclaimed. But Wagner was profoundly dissatisfied. He had been trying to put onto the stage a story which had the power and poetry of the original sources. In Dresden, nothing – the scenery, the lighting, the singers’ movements, their sense of character, their connection to the text – was remotely satisfactory. It was of no consolation to him that the singers sang well, or that the orchestra gave it their all: for Tannhäuser or The Flying Dutchman to work at all every element had to be right. Some years later, his frustration became so great that he insisted that whenever a company undertook to perform the score of Tannhäuser, a booklet of ‘How To’ instructions – Tannhäuser for Dummies – nicely bound in leather should be sent with it; On the Performing of Tannhäuser, was what he actually called it. It was not much appreciated. Not a single company to which the booklet had been sent, he noted, had even so much as opened it, which is a shame, because it is a remarkably clear guide to how the piece works, physically, musically and in terms of character. It shows, with great precision, how all these things are mutually interdependent and that the loss of any one of them means the collapse of them all. It reveals the degree to which, perhaps uniquely among opera composers, he saw that the theatrical manifestation of the work was not a bonus or an embellishment – it was the work. Everything in Wagner’s operas is theatrically conceived; they are as far from pure music as can be imagined. Context is all. And he understood very clearly that theatre, musical or otherwise, is always a collaborative art; all the participants have to be involved, bringing their intelligence with them. He proposed – an unheard of suggestion, which would be radical even today – that before musical rehearsals had even begun, the singers (including the chorus) should sit down and read the whole libretto out loud, approaching the text as actors would approach a play, striving to make it as natural and as real and as characterful as possible. ‘What I ask of the performer,’ he says in the booklet, ‘will certainly not be drummed into him by sheer weight of talk; and the whole course of study laid down by me, especially the holding of reading-rehearsals, aims at making the performer a fellow-feeling, a fellow-knowing, and finally, from his own convictions, a fellow-creative partner in the production.’ He was asking a great deal of the theatre of his time, where such ideas were so far from conventional practice as to be thought almost risible. But he stuck at it, as h
e stuck at everything. And in the end, he transformed the entire approach to what he was already describing not as opera, but as music-drama.

  In Dresden he associated with the intellectual crème de la crème; but he soon tired of their elegant polemics. They were, he felt, nonentities, and as often as not, he pleasantly remarked, Jewish nonentities. After Tannhäuser he was in the grip of intense, if frustrated, creative energy; he felt impelled to compose something to rid himself of the disturbing and painful excitement writing it had produced in him. Composition for Wagner caused a neurotic disturbance within which could only be cured by more composition. Out of the several projects simmering on the hob of his creative imagination, it was the story of Lohengrin which spoke to him most urgently. He started to write the poem – the libretto – immediately after the premiere of Tannhäuser; it was done in four weeks. In it, the hero, clad in bright shining armour, appears in a boat drawn by a swan, as if in answer to Elsa of Brabant’s dream of a champion who will save her from the cruel attentions of a man she hates. The swan-knight promises to marry her, as long as she never asks his name or where he has come from; he then fells the man who has been tormenting her, but spares his life. The knight from nowhere and Elsa marry; but she is unable to resist asking his name, whereupon he abandons her: they can never be together as man and wife. In parting he reveals his identity: he is Lohengrin, a Knight of the Grail, and the son of Parzival. Sorrowfully, he bids Elsa farewell, and prepares to leave on the boat that brought him, drawn, as before, by a swan. As he is about to leave, the Holy Grail hovers over the swan, which sinks into the water, to be replaced by Elsa’s lost brother, into whose arms she sinks, lifeless. If Tannhäuser was about the makers of myth, Lohengrin is myth itself.