Being Wagner

by Simon Callow

  Wagner’s professional life was no less vexing. Friedrich of Baden offered him a production of Lohengrin, to be supervised by Wagner personally; the great tenor Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld would sing the title role. This excellent offer was somewhat undermined by his having to deal with one his great bêtes noires, the theatre director, Eduard Devrient, whom he had once admired, but now demonised as the most pernicious of malevolent mediocrities. So frustrated was Wagner by Devrient’s manoeuvres, which included insisting on large cuts in the score, that he went to the grand duke and withdrew the opera; Devrient had the satisfaction of being able to report to Wagner that the duke – who, Devrient said, possessed the remarkable gift of being able to distinguish the art from the artist – had graciously proposed that Wagner should nevertheless be allowed to conduct a concert of his work. Wagner refused; the art and the artist, he proudly insisted, were indivisibly one. But now Baden was off the list for possible productions.

  Progress on Mastersingers was delayed by Wagner’s failure to find a suitable place to write, by his being bitten by a dog, which put his right thumb out of action (this greatly upset him: all dogs loved him, he firmly believed), and by the growing intensity of his relationship with Cosima von Bülow, whose marriage to the increasingly irascible and depressed Hans was becoming daily more strained. One day, when they were all together, Wagner was singing – as was his wont – Wotan’s fathomlessly complex farewell to Brünnhilde from the last act of the still unproduced Valkyrie, accompanying himself on the piano. As he sang the sublime phrases in which the father takes his leave forever from his best-beloved daughter –

  Farewell, you bold,

  wonderful child!

  You, my heart’s

  holiest pride.

  Farewell, farewell, farewell!

  – he noticed on Cosima’s face an expression he had seen once before, in Zurich, after the reading of Tristan. Everything connected with her expression, he said, was shrouded in silence and mystery, but the conviction that, as he put it, ‘she belonged to me’, grew to such certainty in his mind that he became quite giddy with joy.

  Meanwhile, Tristan was finally announced in Vienna, but it was some way off. Money had to be made, so Mastersingers was shelved again, while he conducted Lohengrin in Frankfurt. Wagner went from there to Leipzig – back home at last, though it may not have felt very much like it. Saxony was the last state in the confederation to rescind the order for his arrest. He received an initially frosty response from the orchestra, but they warmed up once the music-making got under way. He then went on to Dresden, where Minna had set up house; the city seemed frightfully dull, he wickedly noted, without the barricades. All his old colleagues had gone, retired or dead; he had hated most of them, anyway. The officials of the ministry of the interior, who had signed his amnesty, were still deeply suspicious of him, and there was considerable scepticism about his protestations of innocence and youthful foolishness at the time of the uprising: during his more than a decade of exile they had amassed a substantial amount of highly incriminating evidence about his activities – the guns and the hand grenades he had distributed were real and death-dealing. The events of ’49 would come back to haunt him before another decade was out. While he was in Dresden, he had a dalliance with a young actress called Friederike Mayer, but even that proved problematic; eventually he packed her off to Venice, himself heading for Vienna and Tristan.

  Once there Wagner did a remarkable thing: he arranged concerts of some of the orchestral music he had written during the years he’d been away, music neither he nor anyone else had ever heard played – from Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, Tristan and the overture to The Mastersingers, an astounding hoard of unheard masterpieces, most of which would become standard repertory items. For the Viennese it must have been like stumbling into an Aladdin’s cave of undreamed-of riches. To get the concerts together, he needed an army of copyists and proof-readers, which he chose from among the young musicians who always attached themselves to him; among them on this occasion was, astonishingly, Johannes Brahms, the monumental First Piano Concerto and a great deal of masterly piano and chamber music already under his belt. ‘Brahms’s behaviour proved unassuming and good-natured,’ said Wagner, ‘but he showed little vivacity and was often hardly noticed at our gatherings.’ Of course, when Wagner wrote that, Brahms was the mascot of the extremely vocal anti-Wagner lobby, which provoked him to spread a malicious rumour that Brahms was a cat-hater who used to shoot the creatures from his study window with a bow and arrow. ‘After spearing the poor brutes,’ Wagner alleged, ‘he reeled them in to his room like a trout-fisher. Then he eagerly listened to the expiring groans of his victims and carefully jotted down in his notebook their ante-mortem remarks.’ These sounds, Wagner claimed, Brahms worked into his chamber music.

  Wagner’s concerts were well attended, provoking great excitement among Viennese concertgoers, but due to the usual financial bungling – like many people chronically short of money, Wagner never knew how to handle it when it came his way – the season ended up with him out of pocket, so he went off on an extensive conducting tour to Prague, St Petersburg, and Budapest, which for once proved highly lucrative. Somewhere along the way, though, he was tricked out of some of his rightful income by a local conductor; shortly afterwards the man fell ill. ‘As a retribution for this encroachment on my rights,’ Wagner noted with grim satisfaction, ‘he was suddenly summoned to another world.’ You crossed Wagner at your peril.

  By the time he returned to Austria, the promised production of Tristan and Isolde had again been abandoned. He determined to settle in Vienna to try to move things forward, finding himself a modest place in the suburb of Penzing: not a castle, to be sure, and with no view of the Rhine, but with a sizeable garden. He furnished it lavishly according to his requirements – just in time for his fiftieth birthday on 23 May 1863, the occasion marked by the singers of the Merchants’ Choral Society, who serenaded him at twilight, each carrying a Chinese lantern. Charming, no question; but such gestures, increasingly common as his fame grew, buttered no parsnips. Wagner was still financially desperate, an indigent musician, dropping heavy hints about his poverty at social occasions, hoping for aristocratic favour, schmoozing dukes and princes, who fobbed him off with gold snuff boxes containing silver coins, for all the world as if he were the infant Mozart a hundred years before. Wagner usually rapidly disposed of these princely and ducal gifts, raising a couple of hundred marks or so, enough to buy a much-needed coat or a travelling bag. Where, he wanted to know, was his official recognition? He felt ignored by the great. His financial situation got worse and worse; his importuning of his friends became more and more desperate, until people simply told him to go away. He could get no more credit, he could not sustain his establishment at Penzing, he could not afford to continue to support Minna, which, up till now, he had been surprisingly punctilious in doing.

  Flight was the only option; Switzerland the only possible destination. He asked Otto Wesendonck for refuge in his house, and was refused point blank. He then appealed to his doctor’s wife, Elisabeth Wille, to allow him to stay with them, however briefly. She moved him into the house next door, which they owned; there he sat, sick and cold, glumly reading the collected works of Sir Walter Scott. Mathilde Wesendonck provided some furniture for the place, and eventually she and Otto came to see him. It was a deeply uncomfortable encounter. Later, wrapped up in a blanket, half in anger, half with what he called ‘condemned-cell cynicism’, he had a conversation with Frau Wille about what he should do: divorce, and marry a rich wife, perhaps? Luxury was not a luxury to Wagner, he explained: it was a necessity: ‘I am differently organised; I have excitable nerves; I must have beauty, brilliancy, light! The world ought to give me what I need. I cannot live in a wretched organist’s loft like your Meister Bach. Is it an unheard-of demand if I hold that the little luxury I like is my due? I, who am procuring enjoyment to the world and to thousands?’ His sister
Ottilie sent a letter helpfully suggesting that he should write something which would make him rich and famous; meanwhile, she wondered, why didn’t he apply for the post of conductor she had seen advertised in the small provincial city of Darmstadt? Every mail brought bad news. From Vienna, he heard that friends who had advanced him money in the past were now in deep trouble themselves; another closed door. At this point, Dr Wille returned home and made it abundantly clear that he wanted Wagner gone. Mathilde Wesendonck promised him a small stipend, which was welcome but not enough to cover either his debts or his expenses. Racking his brains, Wagner sought out his acquaintance Karl Eckert, the resident conductor at Stuttgart. He was desperate to resume work on Act III of The Mastersingers at the point where he had left off, just as Hans Sachs, the cobbler-poet, is meditating on human affairs at the beginning of the last act of the opera:

  Mad! Mad!

  All the world’s mad!

  he sings:

  Where’er inquiry drives

  In town or world’s archives

  And seeks to learn the reason

  Why people strive and fight,

  Both in and out of season,

  In fruitless rage and spite.

  What do they gain

  For all their pain?

  And then, at this lowest ebb, something wonderful happened to Wagner. The King of Bavaria died.

  TEN

  Enter a Swan

  Credit 13

  Eckert received Wagner warmly enough in Stuttgart, but there was little he could do for him beyond giving him a meal and a drink and a sympathetic ear. While they were chewing the fat over supper, a messenger came into the restaurant and presented Wagner with a card marked ‘Secretary to the King of Bavaria’. Wagner immediately assumed it was from a creditor, so he sent the man off, making a furtive getaway as soon as possible. When he got back to his hotel, he found that the man had followed him. Fearing the worst, Wagner made an appointment to meet him the following morning. When they met it turned out that the man, Franz von Pfistermeister, stiff and formal in his court uniform, was indeed secretary to the newly crowned King of Bavaria, Ludwig II, who was all of eighteen years of age, his father, King Maximilian, having died suddenly at the age of fifty-three, after a three-day illness.

  One of the first actions of the young king was to send Pfistermeister to find Wagner. From that point on events took on the character of a late Shakespeare romance. The elderly courtier had found the composer after an epic quest across several kingdoms and countries, going first to Vienna, then to Mariafeld in Zurich, finally locating him in Stuttgart. With due formality, the royal secretary handed Wagner a ring and a photograph from the strikingly handsome young monarch, with an accompanying letter, in which it transpired that His Majesty was greatly partial to Wagner’s work and sought to advance it in every way he could. Everything Wagner needed would be provided for him in Munich, where the king very much hoped that The Ring of the Nibelung would be staged. The king wished to keep Wagner near him as his friend, the letter concluded, so that he might protect him from any malignant stroke of fate. Perfectly understandably, on reading the letter, Wagner cried. As if to set a symbolic seal on his triumph, while he and his Stuttgart chums were celebrating this astounding turn of events at supper that evening, news came that Giacomo Meyerbeer had just died.

  Wagner knew better than most how to recognise the intervention of fate. At the end of the introduction to the published version of the Ring librettos, he had written: ‘Will there ever come a Prince who could provide the resources necessary to bring this vast work to the stage?’ But even he could scarcely have contrived such a sequence of events: to have met at his absolute lowest, with five massive unperformed operas in his bag, no prospect of productions, sub-zero credit rating, a poisonous reputation among managements, friends and, particularly, husbands – to have met at that point, not just a rich patron but a fabulously wealthy young king, one who, moreover, as Wagner would soon discover, had been obsessed by him since the age of twelve, who had memorised the texts of his all operas, even the unperformed ones, who had read and digested the longest and most intractable of his treatises, who knew all the German myths and sagas by heart, who identified personally with Lohengrin, and more particularly with the swan that bears Lohengrin, pictures of which had adorned his nursery walls when he was a baby, who was a natural hero-worshipper – to have met just that person at just that moment would only, of course, have confirmed everything Wagner believed about his destiny.

  He knew exactly how to respond to the opportunity that confronted him. He sat down and dashed off a letter:

  Dear, Gracious King

  These tears of heavenly emotion I send to you tell you that now the marvel of poetry has come as a divine reality into my poor, love-thirsty life! And that this life, until its final outpouring of poetry and music, belongs now to you my gracious young King: dispose of it as you would your own property!

  In the utmost ecstasy, faithful and true,

  Your obedient Richard Wagner

  The heraldic language might have come from the mouth of one of his own characters; the master touch is the phrase ‘love-thirsty’, an unerring description, not of himself, but of the letter’s addressee. Wagner settled his hotel bill by handing over a snuff box he’d been given by some Russian grand duke, borrowed the fare for a railway ticket (first-class) to Munich, and took the next step on the dangerous road along which, as he put it, fate beckoned him to such great ends.

  The following day, Wagner and Ludwig met for the first time; the relationship started at a level of intensity which it never entirely lost. Ludwig had first seen Lohengrin at the age of fifteen; he read Opera and Drama at sixteen, then worked his way through all the rest of the prose. Tannhäuser he first saw when he was seventeen. Wagner and everything Wagner had wrought filled his every waking minute. So to see the source of all this wonder standing before him was overwhelming. For Wagner, it was as if his lifelong dream of the artist’s place in the scheme of things had at last become a reality. The diminutive composer bowed low over the immensely tall king’s hand and remained a long time in that position without saying a word. ‘I felt as if we had exchanged roles,’ wrote Ludwig. ‘I stooped down to him and pressed him to my heart, feeling that I was speaking a formal oath to myself: to remain loyal to him all my life.’ The meeting was, Wagner said, like one great love scene; it seemed as though it would never end. Ludwig showed the deepest understanding, Wagner said, of his nature and his needs: the king promised to give him everything he required in order to live; he would enable him to create and stage his own works, with no formal appointment or any duties to fulfil. ‘And for this to have happened now –’ cried Wagner, ‘now – in the blackest night of death in my whole existence!’ The entire encounter, both verbally and in its long-drawn-out intensity, might have been an extract from the still-unperformed love duet from Tristan and Isolde. Ludwig had (severely repressed) homosexual inclinations, but it is hard to believe that the tall, slim, charismatic youth desired the fifty-year-old hunched little composer with his huge head and popping eyes. It is rather Wagner, with his odd sensual ambivalence, who seems aroused: ‘You can have no idea of the magic of his eyes!’ he wrote to a friend. He feared that with his youth, beauty, soul and splendour, ‘his life must run away like a fleeting, heavenly dream in this common world…he is the one we were waiting for and whose existence was never in doubt, but it fills me with awestruck admiration to find him so fair of form’. It is the language of the fairy tale. Or myth: Wagnerian myth. ‘If I am Wotan,’ said Wagner, ‘he is Siegfried.’ He later came to refer suggestively to Ludwig as Parzival, the sacred fool who heals the world. For his part, Ludwig immediately ordered a portrait and a bust of Wagner to place alongside the ones he already had of Beethoven and Shakespeare. At last Wagner’s life and his work were in step with each other. At last, the world was taking him at his own valuation.
Or so it seemed.

  For the time being, the fairy tale continued: by a wave of the Bavarian treasury’s wand, Wagner’s Viennese debts were wiped out in an instant, and he was awarded a handsome annual salary of 4,000 florins; the king bought the as yet incomplete Ring of the Nibelung for 30,000 florins (Otto Wesendonck had already bought the rights some years earlier, but now graciously waived them in favour of the king); Wagner was installed in a three-storey house on Lake Starnberg. Ludwig was staying nearby in Berg Castle, and Wagner was taken there every day in a royal carriage, so that Ludwig might delve deep into his soul. Wagner took this very seriously. He had met a psychic who told him it was his duty to look after Ludwig. ‘The fate of this wonderful, unique youth, who is profoundly linked with me by a mystical magic, is entrusted to me, me…the profound meaning of my duty to the King, which is of significance to the whole people, nay to Germany itself, has been revealed to me by an almost supernatural experience.’ In their sessions together, it wasn’t Wagner’s music or his theories they discussed: he instructed Ludwig in his sacred duties as a king. As Ludwig well knew from Wagner’s pseudo-historical essay ‘The Wibelungs’, written in the revolutionary year of 1848, he had traced the lineage of the Germany monarchy back to the Frankish kings, ‘the oldest lawful race of Kings in all the world’, which had issued, according to Wagner, from a son of God ‘called by his nearest kinsmen Siegfried but Christ in the remaining nations of the earth’. This race was the Nibelungs, ‘to whom the earth belongs in name and for the happiness of every nation’. All this Ludwig had read and absorbed and by it he lived his life. For Ludwig, Wagner was as much a thinker and a prophet as he was a musician or an artist. Enabling the operas to be produced was simply a way of promoting the world view they contained. These teaching sessions were blissful for both men: whether they were the ideal preparation for a newly enthroned constitutional monarch may be questioned.