by Simon Callow
It now consisted of three enormous instalments, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and The Twilight of the Gods (as he now renamed Siegfried’s Death), telling the story of his hero, from conception to immolation. He had written the individual instalments in reverse order, discovering from each one how much further back into the story he needed to go. Then, in a totally original stroke, he added a shorter preliminary opera in one continuous act, a sort of introductory drama or prelude establishing the great themes of the cycle; this he called The Rhinegold. Weaving his complex sources together, he had created a sustained epic narrative derived from the Scandinavian sagas and the thirteenth-century German Nibelungenlied which spanned the worlds of dwarves, giants, heroes and gods, exposing the inexorably corrupting nature of power. Interwoven with this was the story of the hero who will transform the world through love – another story of redemption. Somewhat to Wagner’s surprise, he said, the flawed character of Wotan, chief of the Gods, had become the central figure, though it is his demise and the demise of everything for which he stands that offers hope for the future.
The titanic work of synthesis, of establishing the narrative, of articulating the themes, to say nothing of the creation of a huge cast of characters, was a massive undertaking even before a note had been written. Now it was done. Having conquered this artistic mountain, he felt compelled to ascend a real one – the Sidelhorn, from the top of which, dazzled, he surveyed the Italian Alps, Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa stretched out before him. He had brought a bottle of champagne with him, but, once at the top, he couldn’t think of anyone whose health he wanted to drink, so he brought it back down again. On he went, in the unrelaxing company of a silent guide – limping, one-eyed and possibly homicidal – through meadows and forests, across glaciers, down into valleys, across Lake Maggiore, to Lugano, where he finally rested. Friends announced that they were joining him, so he summoned Minna and together the party forged on, across the treacherous Mer de Glace, on to the Col du Géant with its unbroken wildness, then up La Flégère, all 2,595 metres of it. Descending, Minna sprained her ankle; so they went back to Zurich.
Once there, Wagner found himself still strangely restless and dissatisfied. His operas were being produced in all the smaller theatres in Germany, but he was banned from travelling to see them. Reports of the productions were not encouraging. It was now that he wrote On the Performing of Tannhäuser. It had always been the most problematic of his works, and he was still tinkering with it to the end of life. His guide was written because of what he described as an unexpected upsurge in demand for it. In it he states again in the strongest possible terms his conviction that his work is unlike any other that the performers will have encountered, requiring a unique approach:
I therefore entreat the director to cast to the winds that indulgence alas! too customarily shown to operatic favourites which leaves them almost solely in the hands of the musical director. Though, in their general belittlement of Opera as a genre, people have thought fit to let a singer perpetrate any folly he pleases in his conception of a situation, because ‘an opera-singer isn’t an actor, you know, and one goes to the opera simply to hear the singing, not to see a play’, – yet I declare that if this indulgence is applied to the present case, my work may as well be given up at once for lost.
The failure of opera houses to pay the slightest attention to his Tannhäuser manual scarcely surprised him. It simply confirmed him in his conviction that no conventional theatre would ever be able to do justice to the Art-work of the Future.
He now took the unprecedented step of having the finished text of The Ring of the Nibelung printed and distributed, then set about performing the entire libretto for small gatherings of people, all of whom reported themselves electrified. They left him, these readings, in a state of nervous exhaustion, hoarse and weary; after the first one he was so overwhelmed that he went home without saying anything to anyone. He performed them over and over, in this way creating a longing in his listeners – and himself – for him to start composing. Meanwhile, in line with his realisation in Dresden that audiences needed to be trained, quite as much as performers, he embarked on a radical and very twenty-first-century programme of education. Despite frequent offers of productions of his work from the Opera House in Zurich, he had refused, doubting its ability to do it justice. Instead he proposed that a crack band and chorus should be assembled from all over Switzerland to perform extracts from the operas in concert under his baton; earlier in the week of the concert, in a remarkable innovation, he gave readings of the relevant librettos to ensure that people knew what they were listening to. His audiences realised that they were taking part in something new, something unprecedented, especially since, seeking to make the concerts unique for their audiences, he refused to repeat them. Zurich made a great deal of the exiled composer: the local choral society gave him a diploma of honour, and a torchlight procession accompanied him home while the band played selections from his work. There were touching speeches: ‘In my reply,’ he wrote to Liszt, ‘I saw no reason, in fact, why Zurich should not be destined, in its solid bourgeois way, to offer an impetus toward the fulfillment of my higher aims, with respect to the artistic ideas I cherished.’ All very gratifying; but he was still not ready to compose.
He started on his travels again, undertaking another long and strenuous trip to Italy, this time alone. Almost immediately he fell ill with dysentery (the result, he said, of eating too many ice creams). Then he took a steamer to La Spezia; a violent headwind made his stomach worse. On land at last, he staggered into the town, only to find that his hotel was located in a particularly narrow and noisy street. After a night of fever and sleeplessness, feeling wretched, he forced himself to go for a long hilly walk in the nearby forests, then lay down to sleep, which refused to come. He fell into a half-awake state in which he felt he was sinking in water. The rushing of this water resolved itself in his brain into a musical sound, the chord of E-flat major, which kept re-echoing in broken forms, creating a sense of increasing motion; but the pure and unchanging triad of E-flat major seemed to give huge weight and substance to the water, into which he felt himself sinking ever more deeply. He awoke from his doze in terror, feeling as though the waves were rushing high above his head. Once he calmed down, he understood that he was ready to compose and immediately telegraphed Minna to prepare his study.
This ripely romantic account of the process of composition is the stuff of a New Age ‘Hero’s Journey’ textbook, or perhaps a Hollywood biopic – the illness, the voyage across water, the epic trek into the wilderness, the inspiration rising up from the subconscious – but it appears, in all its essentials, to be true. Whether or not it is slavishly accurate is less important than that it is how Wagner chose to remember it. Self-dramatisation was his essential mode, here on an epic scale; he had to believe in himself as an artist-hero, or nothing would happen. Mere craftsmanship (of which he was perfectly capable) was not creatively productive for him. ‘The stream of life, I realised, was not to flow to me from outside, but from inside.’ The orchestral prelude to The Rheingold, the great pedal point out of which the whole subsequent epic grows, must have long lain latent within him, only now finding definitive form.
Once activated, his energy was prodigious. His five-year self-imposed silence was over. He wrote The Rheingold, in full score, over eight weeks without a break. Or so he said. John Deathridge and other scholars have discovered that the process was more spread out than Wagner claimed. The achievement – whether it took ten weeks, twelve or even fourteen – remains astounding. It was, perhaps, the hardest of all to compose, containing as it did – as it had to, to fulfil his newly articulated system of leading motifs, each attached to a different character or a different idea – all the thematic seeds from which the rest of the work would grow. It was like nothing else that had ever been written. Wagner strictly followed the rules he had made for himself: no chorus; not an aria, a duet or an ensemble in sight; no embellishment
, no decoration; one note to a syllable; character and intention alone driving the action; the musical material exclusively derived from the motifs associated with particular characters and ideas. And it embodied with amazing dexterity, within its unbroken two-and-half-hour span, Wagner’s tragic critique of modern capitalism, grounded in his understanding of Feuerbach, and channelled through figures derived from the ancient myths of the German people. A theoretical, a creative, an expressive, a dramatic, a musical, an unparalleled intellectual triumph: the Art-work of the Future. In the most literal sense, as it happens: neither Wagner nor anyone else was to hear it for twenty years.
Once The Rheingold was completed, he immediately began composing The Valkyrie, but work on it was interrupted by the old familiar need to make money. He was writing, after all, for an imaginary theatre, and imaginary theatres have no budget for commissions. In March 1855 he was lured to London by the prospect of what was then a very large sum of money: £200. The Royal Philharmonic Society invited Wagner to conduct eight concerts for them over four months, including Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a piece the society had commissioned, it is worth remembering, only thirty years earlier. It was modern music. Wagner battled with the English weather and English musical life as best he could. The orchestra, largely composed of foreign musicians, responded enthusiastically to Wagner’s injunction to them at rehearsals: ‘Gentlemen, play like artists!’ The concerts went exceptionally well with everyone except for the press: J. W. Davison of The Times was unremitting in his hostility both to Wagner’s music – ‘the nauseous compound he manufactures’ – and his conducting. ‘The more we see and hear of Herr Richard Wagner, the more we are convinced that…however extraordinary a man he may be in other things, music is not his special birthright.’ He was, Davison continued, either a desperate charlatan or a self-deceived enthusiast.
Wagner immediately attributed this attitude to resentment over Judaism in Music, and he may not have been wrong: the pamphlet had been widely read even in England and caused almost universal revulsion. He had also refused to kowtow to Davison, who expected to be courted. In general, he was unimpressed by the English. ‘Your typical Englishman is your typical sheep. They both have a practical mind which makes them find their fodder in the meadow. But they have no eyes for the beautiful meadow and the sky above. Poor me, who knows all about beautiful meadows and blue skies but can’t get at the fodder.’ Wagner preferred to spend time with Prosper Sainton, the naïve and fiery French leader of the orchestra, and his partner, Herr Lüders, a full-blooded German musician from Hamburg, brusque but friendly, who lived together, Wagner said, like a married couple, each tenderly concerned for the other’s welfare; sex seems always to have been in the air when Wagner was about. He was notably relaxed about homosexuality, and throughout his career owed a great deal to gay enthusiasts of his work.
Despite the critical denunciation of his performances, according to which every concert he conducted was a fiasco, they were exceptionally well attended. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert attended the last but one; Albert had particularly requested the overture to Tannhäuser. They had an agreeable conversation afterwards, in which the prince consort lamented that Wagner’s operas would never succeed in English because all the singers here were Italian, to which the queen riposted rather wittily – and accurately – that most of the Italian singers in London were in fact German. The queen told him that she was pleased to make his acquaintance. ‘Just think,’ Wagner wrote to Minna, ‘in Germany, the police are after me and treat me like a highway robber, and the Queen of England is pleased to make my acquaintance.’ The queen invited him to Windsor Castle, where he conducted a programme consisting of music by Spohr, Weber, and Cherubini, in addition to Mozart’s Jupiter symphony and Beethoven’s Eighth, ending with the overture to Tannhäuser. She was delighted, telling her diary that the overture was ‘quite overpowering, so grand and in parts wild, striking and descriptive’. The royal family were a little German oasis for Wagner; for the rest he had to deal with English puritanism as best he could: he wrote a brief introduction to the Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin, only to find that the words ‘God’ and ‘Holy Grail’ had been deleted, leaving his audience in some confusion as to what the piece could possibly be about. For the rest, the cliques and the cabals of the music world confirmed his view that in the vauntedly free land of England, things were done pretty much as they were done everywhere else. Berlioz was in town, and they commiserated over the situation; Meyerbeer was conducting his recent L’Etoile du Nord at Covent Garden, which the press tumbled over itself to praise. Wagner strictly avoided opera houses during his visit, instead enjoying the boulevard theatre and such Shakespeare as he could catch.
All his impressions of London, he said, merged into a memory of almost uninterrupted ill-health, caused, he did not doubt, by the London climate. He had a perpetual cold; his friends’ advice to follow a heavy English diet in order to resist the effect of the capital’s polluted air did not improve matters in the least. Nor could he get his lodgings warm. His one consolation was the zoo in Regent’s Park: ‘the animals are magnificent’. The task he had brought with him – the orchestration of The Valkyrie, which he had hoped to finish off in London – only advanced a paltry hundred pages. He had left it too long since composing it, he realised, and sat for hours in front of the pencil-scrawled pages covered in meaningless hieroglyphics, which he was now incapable of deciphering. He took to reading Dante, finding the descriptions of hell in Inferno curiously realistic as he peered out of the window at the London fog in the middle of June.
Back in Zurich he was assailed by a particularly brutal attack of erysipelas; he blamed the English climate for that too. It stopped him from working; all he could manage in this state was reading. He immersed himself in an introduction to Buddhism, which had immediate issue in a never-finished sketch for a play about spiritual transformation called The Victors. Wagner was much taken with Buddhist philosophy, struck above all by the notion that to the mind of Buddha the past lives of every being appear before him as plainly as the present one. He saw at once that this had a musical implication: the continuous reminiscence in the music of this double existence, past and present, he said, would carry a powerful emotional charge. This was clearly consonant with the cumulative effect of the leitmotifs in The Ring: as the story progresses, the music carries with it the memory of all that has happened. But his encounter with Buddhism also found its way into the libretto he was simultaneously evolving on the subject of the Irish princess Isolde and her Cornish lover Tristan. For Wagner, the very essence of the story was contained in the Buddhist notions of the suspension of time – the eternal here and now, or sunyata – and the interpenetration of inner and outer worlds.
Buddhism was just one of many intellectual avenues he pursued at this time. Wagner had always longed to understand what he called the real value of philosophy. He had attended lectures on the subject in Leipzig, he had struggled with Hegel and Schelling; he had read Feuerbach, as we have seen, initially with delight, then with impatience. Philosophy somehow failed to yield its secrets to him. This frustrated him, because it was in his nature to seek underlying patterns and overarching structures; his mind, though completely untrained, was instinctively of a theorising bent. In his writings from this period he weaves and ducks his way inexpertly through history, philology, archaeology and linguistics, plucking from here and there, backtracking, going round in circles, until he reaches conclusions which provide him with a solid foundation from which at last to start work. Both his instinctively revolutionary social thinking and his newly evolved artistic theories postulated an ideal organisation of society; these were the underpinnings of the Art-work of the Future, which pointed strongly towards the creation of a new world order. However trenchant its criticism of the old order, his libretto for The Ring of the Nibelung was grounded in a profound optimism for mankind. But even as he was composing The Rheingold, which is in many ways the purest embodiment of his artistic a
nd political theories – a narratively driven piece, in which everything is at the service of the text, which makes no concession to operatic form, and is entirely epically impersonal, sharply analysing the untenability of current social relations – his friend, the radical poet Georg Herwegh, casually tossed him an intellectual hand grenade, which almost instantly exploded his carefully constructed philosophical and political positions.
* * *
Arthur Schopenhauer was thirty when, the year after Wagner was born, he began writing the first volume of his masterpiece, The World as Will and Presentation; its publication in 1819 was barely noticed, nor was that of part two, published twenty-five years later. Herwegh handed Wagner the book a decade after that, in 1854, by which time it was just beginning to impinge on German intellectual life. It marks a radical break with the whole German philosophical tradition, subjecting Kant’s transcendental idealism to a comprehensive overhaul, and rejecting wholesale both Hegel’s dialectical materialism and Feuerbach’s theory of the primacy of the senses. Schopenhauer describes the world as an illusion, and an enslaving one at that, which can only be escaped by connecting to another dimension – that of erotic love. The will, which seeks to conquer the external world, is an obstacle to connecting with this reality; the task of life, says Schopenhauer, is in fact to suspend the will. Any notion of political progress, of reshaping society, is both absurd and impossible.
These propositions – so strikingly similar to the Buddhist world view in which Wagner had recently immersed himself – are clearly in flat contradiction to the materialist philosophical position out of which Wagner’s libretto for The Ring of the Nibelung had arisen, and to which he was still deeply committed when he started composing it. Nonetheless he found himself eagerly imbibing Schopenhauer’s propositions, feeling, indeed, as if he had known them at some subconscious level all his life. The sense that life is experienced as pain, frustration, compulsion; that it is a shoddy charade; and that the only human experience that is in any sense real is sexual love, which, in its all-consuming intensity, obliterates the material world – all this was exactly how Wagner understood the world. Schopenhauer even went so far as to compare the illusory quality of human experience to a theatre performance: the world that we perceive, as his translator Richard E. Aquila says, ‘is a “presentation” of objects in the theatre of our own mind’. Wagner realised with a jolt that he had unconsciously imbued his Wotan in the Nibelung tetralogy with just the sense of inner despair that Schopenhauer describes in his great book. He read the entire massive work over and over again – four times, from beginning to end, allowing it to infuse him with its language and its world view. He was a changed man after his immersion in Schopenhauer, and longed to express himself in poetry: the serious mood created by what he had read, he said, was trying to find ecstatic expression. By chance his young friend and general musical dogsbody, Karl Ritter (another gay member of his entourage), had shown Wagner his treatment of the story of Tristan and Isolde; in it, he had focussed on the comedy of the cuckolded king. It was no laughing matter to Wagner: he saw only the tragedy in it, and immediately started writing his own poem-libretto on the subject, at the heart of which were the ideas he had absorbed from Buddhism and from Schopenhauer concerning the suspension of time and the interpenetration of inner and outer worlds. In his shaping of the material, the lovers, enemies when the opera begins, and determined to kill themselves by taking a poisoned draught, are instead given a love potion; from that moment each longs to be united in the timeless reality of death.
