Being Wagner

by Simon Callow

  Throughout 1859 he worked on Act III of Tristan with an engulfing sense of sadness. He could not banish from his mind the long-drawn-out wail of the gondolieri he had heard in Venice at night, and he wove it into the score; death-haunted Venice permeates every death-haunted bar of Tristan. At length he finished, and immediately turned his attention again to making some desperately needed money. That meant Paris, still the musical centre of the world. He staged a series of concerts there to introduce his work to the French public. They succeeded brilliantly with audiences, who seemed surprised, he said, that his music contained tunes; but the management had neglected to invite the critics, who then attacked him anyway. Nonetheless, for the first time he began to gather a significant fan base in Paris, including the poet Baudelaire, whose rapturous response to the concerts acknowledged, in entirely non-technical terms, the fact that Wagner’s music was something quite new: ‘I had a feeling of pride and joy in understanding, in being possessed, in being overwhelmed,’ he wrote. ‘It is a truly sensual pleasure, like that of rising in the air.’ A striking feature of the response to Wagner’s music is that it often spoke more vividly to writers than to musicians. ‘A literary man can succeed in understanding Wagner,’ remarked the Parisian journalist and novelist, ‘Willy’, some years later, ‘but a musician, never!’ Failed by his manager, Wagner took to promoting himself, something at which he had always been a dab hand. He started holding a weekly salon in his little villa in the rue d’Aumale in the 9th arrondissement; everyone who was anyone was to be found there, including the young Camille Saint-Saëns, who astounded Wagner by sight-reading Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, and Tristan, on which the ink was barely dry. But all that ever came of the salon were yet more debts.

  Wagner’s main efforts were directed towards securing a production of Tannhäuser; finally, thanks to the influence of Princess Metternich, the Austrian ambassador’s wife, the Emperor, Napoleon III himself, commanded a performance of it at the Opéra. Wagner heartily despised the self-crowned emperor, the former President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who had seized power in a ruthless coup d’état, but a production was a production, and he bit his lip. Before he had time to rejoice at the news, however, he was firmly instructed that for the piece to succeed, it was essential that he should introduce a ballet at the end of Act II: that was the point in the evening at which the members of the famous Jockey Club liked to come to the theatre to see their girlfriends in the corps de ballet flashing their legs and hopping about a bit, after which they would take them out on the town. Wagner’s desire for a success in Paris was very great, but the final scene of Act II in Tannhäuser is the one in which the anguished hero repents his sins and vows to go to Rome to seek forgiveness; even Wagner’s all-encompassing imagination was stumped by the challenge of creating a ballet out of that. He thought he had a solution, however. Anticipating the situation, Wagner had ingeniously extended the opera’s opening sequence on the Venusberg to incorporate a bacchanalian orgy. This concession was a matter of supreme indifference to the members of the Jockey Club: they would rather have died than attend the beginning of an opera – that was when they took supper. Furthermore, Wagner was informed, the best dancers in the company would not be available to dance in the first act; at that point in the evening all the company could offer – desolé! – were three Hungarian peasant dancers. There was, moreover, no costume budget for the scene.

  Nevertheless, despite this apparent impasse, things proceeded efficiently enough, Venusberg bacchanale and all. Wagner attended rehearsals, though he proved a somewhat disconcerting presence. ‘What a devil of a man!’ remarked the ballet master, Lucien Petipa, who arranged the bacchanale. ‘When he wanted to come down to the orchestra pit to make remarks to the artists, instead of taking the aisles, he would step over the seats, walking as much on his hands as on his feet, and risking breaking both arms and legs.’ Generally, he kept himself to himself, though what he saw often frustrated him. Apparently the only rehearsal technique known either to the director or to the conductor was simply to do it over and over again, with the result that the company became deeply dispirited; needless to say, no one had read On the Performing of Tannhäuser, and there were most certainly no textual analysis sessions, though the young singers Wagner had cast were lively and enthusiastic and engaged vividly with the words (it was sung in French, of course). Albert Niemann, the excellent German tenor (also very young) imported to sing the title role, was less sanguine: he had given a number of interviews to local journalists who had assured him that with no stars in the cast it would be a flop. Niemann sank into despair, cutting more and more of his role, reasoning that the sooner the inevitable catastrophe was over, the better. As for the orchestra, it proved impossible to get the ten horns called for in the first act, so Wagner found himself dealing with ‘that terrible man’, Adolphe Saxe, who tried to fob him off with a variety of saxhorns and saxophones. The crucial problem was that the conductor, Pierre-Louis Dietsch – the same Pierre-Louis Dietsch who had written Le Vaisseau fantôme more or less inspired by Wagner’s scenario fifteen years earlier – was entirely unable to maintain any given tempo, with the result that the musical performance constantly fell apart; Wagner offered to take over, which predictably provoked a mutiny among the players. A message came to the composer from the emperor himself, suggesting that if he wanted a success he would be well advised to give up his pernickety demands. Eventually he resigned himself to the situation, and went to the first night with his friends, determined simply to enjoy it for what it was. At this point he discovered that he had not been allocated any tickets, so his friends all went home. The performance was a predictable shambles at every level. Nonetheless, and despite a certain amount of prearranged barracking, a few discerning members of the audience were gripped by the fervour and originality of the piece; over the evening the house began to warm to it, till by the end they were cheering.

  Minna came to Paris for the second performance, sitting with Wagner and Princess Metternich. There was more barracking; at one point Minna, identified as the composer’s wife, was attacked by some members of the audience, until the Wagners’ faithful servant girl silenced them with a resounding Schweinhund! In general, though, the performance went much better than it had on the first night, with the audience genuinely rapt during Act II – until, that is, the sublime final scene, when the Landgrave commands Tannhäuser to travel to Rome with the pilgrims and ask absolution from the pope:

  At the sublime festival of clemency and grace

  I will atone for my sin in humility

  sing the younger pilgrims, filled with humility and hope:

  Blessed is he who truly believes!

  He shall be saved through penitence and repentance.

  At this moment, the Jockey Club made its entrance in full cry and official garb, whooping out hunting cries and playing penny whistles, and demanding their ballet. They managed to stop the performance for a full ten minutes; it never recovered. An appeal to the emperor to control them at subsequent performances failed when it turned out that most of the Jockeys were in fact members of the royal household; at the third performance the police made an appearance, but they had come, it transpired, to protect, not the public or the performers, but the soi-disant Jockeys. The press, which Wagner insisted was entirely under the control of Meyerbeer, was hostile, but he was encouraged by the support of the smaller journals – ‘of which Meyerbeer’, he darkly observed, ‘had as yet taken no account’. In the circumstances, and given the uncontrollability of the Jockey Club, Wagner withdrew Tannhäuser, to the dismay of the management, who insisted that it had been a triumph. Various later attempts were made to revive it in Paris; one certifiably optimistic entrepreneur tried to start a ‘Théâtre Wagner’. None of these schemes prevailed; for Wagner, Paris yet again proved itself to be the boulevard of broken dreams.

  NINE

  Limbo

  Credit 12

  Despite these rever
ses, things suddenly seemed to be looking up for Wagner at the end of 1861. After twelve years, the warrant for his arrest was at last rescinded. He had never lacked influential and high-powered supporters and their sustained lobbying on his behalf finally paid off: he was now once again at liberty to travel throughout the states of the German Confederation – all of them, that is, except the one in which he was born, Saxony. His exile had lasted a quarter of his entire life – during which time he had never had a place he could call his own. The man whose whole purpose in life was, as he saw it, to honour the German soul was now finally readmitted to his own country. He was not as pleased as might have been expected. ‘I feel terrified when I think of Germany and my future enterprises there,’ he wrote to Liszt. ‘God forgive me! I can see nothing there but miserable pettiness, a mere show and boast of sterling worth, without any real foundation, everything and everybody half finished. I must confess that my return to German soil did not make the slightest impression on me. Believe me, we have no real country! And if I am a German,’ he added, tellingly, ‘I carry my Germany in my heart.’ It was the idea of Germany, of Germanness, that inspired him, not the vulgar, tedious reality.

  As he predicted, freedom of movement did not bring any immediate material gains. He constantly hustled from pillar to post, trying to secure productions and failing. The first thing he did was to approach the new Grand Duke of Baden, Friedrich I, to try to reanimate a formerly scheduled production of Tristan and Isolde which had been unaccountably shelved. The duke agreed to reschedule it, duly authorising him to contract the best singers from Vienna, but the theatre there refused to release their artists, offering instead to mount the opera themselves; the duke graciously acceded. Wagner went back to Paris to wind up his affairs there, among them his marriage. The dog Peps had died, and with it, Wagner thought, the last remnants of the relationship. He promised to provide Minna with 3,000 marks a year for the rest of her life; she accepted the inevitability of the situation and traipsed sadly back to Dresden. Wagner went to Weimar, where Liszt ensured that he was received like a conquering hero, then on to Vienna for Tristan. But in Vienna the Tristan was ill with some nameless vocal condition; rehearsals proceeded, tenorlessly, in a desultory sort of way. At this point, the orchestra insisted that the score was unplayable. Despairing, Wagner escaped to Venice, where so much of the opera had been conceived and written; he was the guest of the Wesendoncks, who had now put the little upset precipitated by Minna behind them. Venice did nothing to cheer his spirits, until one day Wesendonck took him to the Gallerie dell’Accademia, where he saw Titian’s explosive altarpiece, The Assumption of the Virgin, which so stimulated him that his old creative energies revived, as though in a sudden electric flash of inspiration, and he at once determined to go back to the libretto for The Mastersingers of Nuremberg he had sketched out sixteen years earlier. All it had taken to reanimate his divine afflatus was an injection of art.

  This is where Wagner becomes almost incomprehensible to mere mortals. His domestic affairs in tatters; the Paris production of Tannhäuser, on which he had pinned such high hopes, a spectacular disaster; Tristan and Isolde, The Rheingold, The Valkyrie and two thirds of Siegfried complete but unperformed – and he embarks on yet another massive project with no prospect whatever of a production. For a confirmed pessimist he seems to have had astonishing reserves of optimism – or perhaps simply a blind belief in himself and his mission. ‘I know what I’ll do!’ he seems to say to himself when things are going particularly badly, ‘I’ll write a four-and-a-half-hour opera!’ The next day he was on the carriage back to Vienna to drop in on rehearsals for Tristan; on the journey, he says, the entire overture to The Mastersingers came to him. Still of no fixed abode, and penniless, he then set off for Paris. Why? He had known only humiliation there. He had been hoping to stay with Princess Metternich at the Austrian embassy, but that proved impossible, for typically Wagnerian reasons: the princess’s father-in-law, a dangerous Hungarian lunatic, had to be kept under armed guard twenty-four hours a day and the only place where that was possible was the embassy; clearly there was only room there for one lunatic at a time, so Wagner had to find lodgings for himself. Wherever he went, whatever he did, Wagner seemed to encounter or possibly to create extraordinary and volatile situations: if he went up a mountain, the guide was inevitably one-eyed, malevolent and in touch with the spirit world; if he sat at an outdoor table in an ordinary Weinstube, a flock of thirty birds would immediately descend from the skies and share his sandwich with him. He was in a state of constant self-dramatisation and the universe around him seemed only too willing to connive in the process. The results were not normally benign: ‘Every man has his daemon, and mine is a frightful monster,’ he admitted to a friend. ‘When he is hovering about me a catastrophe is in the air. The only time I have ever been on the sea I was nearly shipwrecked; and if I were to go to America, I am sure I should be met with a cyclone.’ By those standards, the Hungarian lunatic was a minor inconvenience.

  So here he was, yet again, adrift in Paris. Denied a bed at the embassy, he holed himself up with his Erard in a third-floor room in a little hotel on the Quai Voltaire, from which he surveyed the crowds teeming over the bridges and the quays, revelling in a prospect which embraced the Tuileries, the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville. There, close to the epicentre of Paris, he wrote the libretto of the most locally German of all his operas. He had a breeze writing it; new tunes kept coming to him as he strolled whistling down the boulevards. On the other hand, he found himself cold-shouldered by pretty well everyone he’d ever known in Paris; so after a couple of months he left. Still desperate for somewhere to live free of charge, he went the rounds of the many people who had fulsomely invited him to stay with them, but drew a blank. He was rather taken aback, having assumed that in inviting himself he had been conferring an honour on them. When he sued for favours, he had two modes: one, grovelling, the other haughty. ‘My dear Hornstein,’ he writes to one such individual in an approach which, if scarcely ingratiating, is at least to the point:

  I hear that you have become rich. In what a wretched state I myself am you can readily guess from my failures. In order to make possible this way to my preservation – that is to say, to lift me above the most distressing obligations, cares, and needs that rob me of all freedom of mind – I require an immediate loan of ten thousand francs. With this I can again put my life in order, and again do productive work. It will be rather hard for you to provide me with this sum; but it will be possible if you WISH it, and do not shrink from a sacrifice.

  Hornstein, bewildered rather than offended, replied:

  Dear Herr Wagner You seem to have a false idea of my riches. I have a modest fortune on which I can live in a plain and decent style with my wife and child. You must therefore turn to really rich people, of whom you have plenty among your patrons and patronesses all over Europe. I regret that I cannot be of service to you. As for your long visit to ‘one of my estates’, at present I cannot contrive a long visit; if it should become possible later, I will let you know.

  This provoked a sharp reproof from Wagner:

  Dear Herr von Hornstein It would be wrong of me to pass over without censure an answer such as you have given me. Though it will probably not happen again that a man like me will apply to you, yet a perception of the impropriety of your letter ought of itself to be a good thing for you. You should not have presumed to advise me in any way, even as to who is really rich; and you should have left it to myself to decide why I do not apply to the patrons and patronesses to whom you refer. If you are not prepared to have me at one of your estates, you could have seized the signal opportunity I offered you of making the necessary arrangements for receiving me in some place of my choice. It is consequently offensive of you to say that you will let me know whenever you will be prepared to have me.

  Hornstein’s commiseration at the latest cancellation of the premiere of Tristan is roughly brushed aside: ‘You
should have omitted the wish you express with regard to Tristan; your answer could only pass muster on the assumption that you are totally ignorant of my works. Let this end the matter. I reckon on your discretion, as you can on mine.’ Astonishingly – and this gives some measure of the force of Wagner’s personality – he and Hornstein remained on friendly terms.

  He thought again of Baden, where he had once had a very sympathetic reception, and was granted an interview with Grand Duke Friedrich. Wagner was struck, he said with elaborate irony, by the sympathetic concern of the duke as to how he could meet the cost of his arduous life, or even his travelling expenses (questions which Wagner often asked himself). Wagner replied that he had an advance from his publisher. On hearing this, the duke was much reassured; neither the money nor the position Wagner was angling for materialised. He worked his way round the German Confederation, passing from duke to duke, trying to secure himself a place in which to write; nothing came of it. He was baffled. His needs were so simple: a view of the Rhine, preferably from a medieval tower; a large garden; space for the Erard. Until something which met his specifications turned up, he lived in temporary accommodation in the unremarkable little town of Biebrich in Wiesbaden, where Minna joined him for ‘ten days of hell’, as he put it. After she’d gone, the Wesendoncks came to visit and commissioned a portrait of him from Cäsar Willich, like Wagner, a suspected revolutionary recently granted amnesty. The Bülows visited, too; Cosima read to Wagner while he was being painted. The result is a rather waxy daub, giving little indication of his vitality, but Wagner liked it well enough to have a copy made for Minna. Thus the strange vexed triangle connecting him to Mathilde, Minna and Cosima was re-established. Nothing in his personal life was simple.