by Simon Callow
He knew that his tenure at Dresden could not last much longer. On Palm Sunday 1849, despite the ever-growing turmoil all around, he went ahead with the scheduled performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; the finale, with its great hymn to brotherly love – ‘Seid umschlungen, millionen!’ (‘Be embraced, you millions!’) had an overwhelming – a desperate – intensity; spurred on by him, singers and players rose heroically to what he had said was required: ‘the correct state of ecstasy’.
Joy, O wondrous spark divine,
Daughter of Elysium,
Drunk with fire now we enter,
Heavenly one, your holy shrine.
Your magic powers join again
What fashion strictly did divide;
Brotherhood unites all men
Where your gentle wings spread wide.
During the fervent applause that followed, a colossal, bearded figure suddenly emerged from the audience. It was the Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, the most notorious terrorist in the world, the Osama bin Laden of his day, with a hefty bounty on his head. He strode down to the orchestra pit and, turning to the audience, announced in a loud voice that ‘even if everything else is going to be destroyed in the coming conflagration, we must save this’. Wagner had first met Bakunin at Röckel’s, where he had listened, half-enthralled, half-appalled, as the great bearded giant calmly proclaimed the destruction of the world: London, Paris, St Petersburg, all reduced to rubble. What place would art have then? Wagner thought to himself. He found it unbearable to contemplate the demolition of his ideals and hopes for the future of art, and yet the destruction of a corrupt and discredited world order was irresistibly attractive. Bakunin provoked constantly fluctuating emotions in Wagner: from involuntary horror to magnetic attraction, a not entirely dissimilar reaction to the emotions he himself provoked in others.
The political situation was heading towards a catastrophe. Wagner confessed to experiencing a strong impulse just to give himself over to the stream of events, wherever it might lead, as he had done twenty years earlier during the 1830 riots; something fundamentally inchoate in his temperament was excited by movement of any kind, activity, explosions, destruction. Things were moving at a giddying pace. Parliament had been dissolved by a new, reactionary ministry; Röckel was forced to escape. Wagner took over the running of his newspaper, the Volksblätter (the People’s Press); at a committee meeting of the Vaterlands-Verein which Wagner attended as the paper’s representative, there was a practical discussion about weapons, who should bear them and when. Wagner was loudly in favour of issuing guns to all the revolutionaries. In the middle of the discussion the tocsin bell sounded and they all rushed out onto the street. Wagner headed straight to Tichatschek’s house to borrow his rifle, but the singer, a keen hunter, was on holiday and had taken it with him. Frau Tichatschek was in a state of terror at what might happen – perfectly reasonable in the circumstances, but her fear unaccountably provoked Wagner to uncontrollable laughter. Over the next few days he allowed himself, unarmed, to be carried along by the crowd, keenly interested, but not participating, he said, though there is evidence that he and Röckel had ordered a substantial number of powerful hand grenades from the iron-founder Oehme; supposedly intended for Prague, they were in fact kept in the Volksblätter offices, where Oehme primed them.
As the situation grew more and more dangerous, the government appealed to Prussia for help in controlling it. There was a move among the radicals to persuade the Saxon troops to declare for the parliament. Wagner impulsively organised a demonstration in favour of this, getting the paper’s printer to run up a banner for him emblazoned with the words ‘ARE YOU ON OUR SIDE AGAINST THE FOREIGN TROOPS?’ As he stood holding the banner, out of the corner of his eye he saw Bakunin strolling around, chewing a cigar, and scoffing at the feebleness of the improvised barricades. A couple of days later, a large crowd proclaimed a pan-German constitution. Despite these dramatic developments, people continued ambling unhurriedly about the streets. It all felt like a fascinating piece of theatre, Wagner said, until the terrifyingly proficient Prussian troops arrived and shooting started in earnest. When this happened, Wagner climbed up the Kreuzkirche Tower in the centre of town to get a clear view of what was going on – or to save his bacon; either or both is possible. He kept vigil there all through the night, while the tower’s great bell clanged incessantly, and the Prussian rifle shot beat against its walls. The following day, after some particularly violent skirmishes, the old Opera House, the scene for Wagner of so much misery, intrigue, and frustration, went up in flames, which gave him deep satisfaction; the fire seemed to have taste, he noted, because once it had consumed the unlovely Opera House, it stopped short of the beautiful Natural History Museum and the formidable armoury. On Sunday morning he went home, to Minna, and their house in the suburbs, but later that day he went back to Dresden, irresistibly drawn to the battle, which the insurrectionaries were now losing. A provisional government had been established under the leadership of Otto Leonard Heubner; he had appointed Bakunin as his adviser. But this was fantasy: backed by the Prussian military, the Saxon government swiftly regained control and the revolution was over before it had begun.
Bakunin, Röckel and their colleague Heubner fled by carriage to the Saxon city of Chemnitz for safety, but they were betrayed, arrested and condemned to death. Wagner was following just behind them in a second carriage; seeing what had happened to Bakunin, he hopped carriages and made a swift exit to the adjacent state of Weimar, where Franz Liszt – staunch champion of the musical avant-garde, whom Wagner had befriended in Paris – was planning, as ‘Kapellmeister Extraordinaire’ to the court, to stage Tannhäuser.
On arrival in Weimar, Wagner was warmly embraced by Liszt, and even shook hands with the art-loving grand duke and duchess, who were courtesy itself. It soon became apparent, however, that he would not be able to stay there: all the states of the German Confederation – including, in its polite, apologetic way, Weimar – were fiercely united against revolutionaries, and that was what Wagner was now. He had a secret meeting at the border with a tearful Minna, who was understandably reproachful: their comfortable, respectable life in Dresden, everything she had ever dreamed of for them, gone, and for what? But Wagner had no time to dawdle; flight was imperative. Liszt supplied him with a false passport, and he was smuggled out of the country in the guise of a certain ‘Professor Widmann’. This subterfuge appealed to Wagner immensely. Widmann, his passport declared, was Swabian, and so, with typically madcap humour Wagner, at this moment of possibly mortal peril, did his best to affect a Swabian accent. It defeated him; happily, none of the border guards noticed, and he slipped onto the waiting steamer. Before long he was on neutral Swiss soil, in Zurich. It was eleven years before he next set foot in Germany; and another two years after that before he was admitted back to Saxony.
SIX
Pause for Thought
Credit 9
If, as he says, he sleepwalked into the revolution, he now had a sharp awakening. He was an exile, a fugitive, and a marked man; the Saxon government issued a warrant for his arrest which applied across the confederation. Soon after arriving in Switzerland he went to Paris, but with only rudimentary French and all his contacts exhausted, he was wasting his time there. So back to Zurich he went. For a while he was exhilarated at what he called his bird-like freedom, though he admitted that even he was sometimes frightened by the outbursts of manic exuberance which accompanied his crazed, paradox-filled conversational riffs. On and on he talked, about art and revolution, about the theatre of the future, about the German soul, about politics, about history. Eventually, when people stopped listening, he started to write it all down, groping towards some sort of personal philosophy. He found a publisher in Leipzig who brought out his first extended pamphlet under the sensational title of Art and Revolution; largely because it was by a former Royal Kapellmeister and now notorious political refuge
e, it quickly went into a second edition.
In it and its many, many successors he was essentially talking to himself, thinking out loud. He was thirty-seven, and he’d written six lengthy operas, three of which are now cornerstones of the operatic repertory. But as far as he was concerned, he’d hardly begun. He knew that Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, for all their originality of orchestration, for all the heightened emotion, for all their high seriousness, were the end of a road for him; they were constructed according to what he now thought of as a discredited plan – arias, duets, ensembles, choruses, following one another with no unitary dramatic cohesion. But what should take its place? What kind of opera did he want to write? If he was to write the work of art of the future, as he fervently intended, he needed to be very clear about what it was. Exiled, of utterly uncertain future, he decided to write no more music until he had achieved that clarity. It took him five years.
For a man out of whom music had poured unstoppably for fifteen years, simply to switch off the flow and take stock for five entire years borders on the heroic. But there was no alternative. He was incapable of writing another note until he knew where he was coming from. So now he had some very hard thinking to do, and, being Wagner, he had to do it out loud, in a flood of pamphlets, essays, books. They are diffuse, repetitive, often obscure, but they faithfully convey what Wagner believed he was doing, had done and was about to do. Taken together, they add up to a major body of theoretical work unlike that of any other major composer, encompassing far more than music. This was the way his mind worked. He needed to articulate these things in order to move forward. What were the principles that informed the highest art? He probed this question relentlessly over five years of tireless reading, thinking, expounding. It is hard to think of any other great creative artist who has challenged him- or herself in this way. In order to achieve the clarity he needed, he fiercely drove his largely self-educated brain. He was an omnivorous reader, especially in philosophy and philology, though he was completely untrained in either. He believed that there was a Holy of Holies, an ultimate truth, to which all of his thinking and all of his creative energies were directed. But what was it? He was painfully aware that he had wasted his student years and was forever trying to make up lost ground, which made him almost promiscuously susceptible to new ideas.
Approaching the great thinkers of the modern age, he started with Hegel. He was awestruck by what he called the mysterious power of the philosopher’s writing, a power he thought comparable to Beethoven’s in his Ninth Symphony, but, on his own admission, he barely understood a word of it. Then his attention was drawn by a Catholic priest and political agitator named Menzdorff to the work of Ludwig Feuerbach; Feuerbach, Menzdorff told him, was ‘the only real philosopher of modern times’. Wagner eagerly seized on the philosopher’s first book, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, finding it a model of lucidity after Hegel. This he could understand, and it gave him a massive jolt. He fervently embraced its proposition that individual human consciousness is part of an infinite consciousness into which it will be absorbed at death, and that belief in immortality and a personal deity are merely expressions of egoism. What he saw as the tragic dimension of this argument appealed greatly to Wagner. Above all, he endorsed Feuerbach’s rejection of the tyranny of accepted ideas based on a blind belief in authority. Authority had been the bane of Wagner’s life, humiliating him and acting as a check on the free expanse of his creative spirit – ‘art made tongue-tied by authority’, as Shakespeare has it. Oscar Wilde’s observation that, ‘the form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all’, exactly expresses Wagner’s sentiments. Authority was the problem; it should simply be abolished, because, left to their own devices, people naturally live together in productive harmony. Power was mankind’s great enemy. Thus he worked himself round to Bakunin’s anarchist position. He warmed particularly to Feuerbach’s contention that the best philosophy was to have no philosophy, and that only what could be ascertained by the senses was real, thus abolishing the authority even of philosophy. This translated into a mandate for the demolition of society’s structures.
Art and Revolution is profoundly indebted to Death and Immortality, most notably in its enthusiasm for communism – a coinage of Feuerbach’s. But then his enthusiasm began to wane. The philosopher’s next book, The Essence of Christianity, rocked the religious establishment to its foundations; Wagner dismissed it as prolix, and when presented with the book after that, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, he snapped it shut and cast it aside – terrified, he said, by the dullness of its title alone. Intellectually insatiable though he was, there was nothing dilettante about Wagner’s approach to books. His aim was to create an all-embracing work of art, a perfect drama which would appeal to the simplest, deepest and most human emotions: that was what he meant by the ‘Art-work of the Future’, the title of another of his pamphlets. If he could use the ideas contained in the books he read to create that work, he would; if not, not.
Alternating in his mind with these lofty preoccupations was the ever-pressing question of money and how to get it. He was now no longer gainfully employed. Pretty well every second paragraph in Wagner’s autobiography is about money. Although large sums of it, often paid on a regular basis, passed through his hands, it was never enough. Such performances of his works as took place rarely raised much by way of royalties; his journalism was modestly remunerated, and paid late; and since his rapid exit from Dresden he had no prospect of work as a conductor. He constantly made the rounds of his friends, begging bowl in hand; his own family, he said, treated him much as one treats an invalid by whom one dreads to become infected. Somehow money kept appearing. People were moved to proffer him loans, even regular allowances. These all came to an end, sooner or later, sometimes acrimoniously, sometimes with apologies, or else the money just disappeared into the great fathomless sump of his debt. After a few arid months in Zurich, he was so desperate that he went back to Paris, scene of his greatest humiliations, in the belief that someone was going to perform the overture to Tannhäuser (nobody did) and with a vague and unconvincing plan to write an opera for the city that had so comprehensively ignored him. Nothing came of that either. He was adopted by various young couples: the husbands would give him money and houses to live in; they were his patrons. The wives would receive his erotic attentions; they were his muses. This seemed to him to be an admirable and equitable arrangement. Alas, few husbands seemed to grasp the favour he was doing them and when the wealthy wine-merchant husband of one muse began to suspect (not altogether wrongly) that Wagner was amorously involved with his wife, and threatened to put a bullet through his head, he decided it was time to go back to Zurich.
Minna was waiting for him there. She had tried to find him in Paris, but he evaded her; later he wrote her a letter saying that he would perfectly understand if she wanted a divorce. It turned out that she didn’t; she wanted to look after him, and at this moment in his life, he was prepared to be looked after. The unrelenting soap opera of his emotional life was too much even for him. He was not feeling too good about himself in general. In Paris, when he had heard the news of the death sentences passed on Bakunin, Heubner and Röckel after the Dresden uprising, he felt acutely that he should have been there in the dock with them, and determined to break with everything and everyone; he suddenly lost all desire to learn anything more about life or art. With a certain moody theatricality, he prepared Siegfried’s Death for publication, adding a preface dedicating it to his friends ‘as a relic of the time when I had hoped to devote myself entirely to art, and especially to the composition of music’. Henceforward, he said, he just wanted to trust to chance and put himself beyond the reach of everybody – in Greece, perhaps, or Asia Minor, where he hoped to forget and be forgotten. He had already spent time wandering aimlessly in the mountains, reading the Odyssey, with whose hero he naturally strongly identified.
Minna did a pretty good impersonation of Penelope,
welcoming back her errant husband. She lavished all her considerable domestic skills on prettifying their modest accommodation. She had brought their little dog, Peps, and their parrot, with her. The parrot, which knew quite large chunks of Rienzi by heart, greeted Wagner when he came home by calling out his name, then whistled the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The dog, by contrast, collapsed into paroxysms of howling and sobbing whenever addressed. An additional complication in the ménage was the presence of Nathalie, Minna’s daughter, who, still believing that she was Minna’s sister, resented the discipline which the older woman tried to exercise over her; she was twenty-five by now, and vicious spats between them were a regular part of daily life. Wagner learned to ignore what was going on around him, immersing himself ever more deeply in his reading.
