Being Wagner

by Simon Callow

  Just a year after the triumphant first night of The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, the relationship between idol and idolater was in shreds. Ludwig, impatient to see The Ring, which, after all, he owned, started to plan a production at the charming Greek Revival-style National Theatre in Munich. Wagner tried to dissuade him: The Ring could only work in a custom-built theatre, he patiently explained, for the hundredth time, and it had to be seen in its entirety. But Siegfried, the wonderful, impulsive boy, defied Wotan, and in due course rehearsals for Rheingold began in the face of Wagner’s violent opposition. The young Austrian-Hungarian conductor, Hans Richter, Wagner’s nominee and his representative during rehearsals, proved tiresome and was sacked. ‘Get your hands off my score, sir,’ Wagner growled at the cowering substitute conductor, ‘or may the devil take you!’ Even Ludwig’s patience with Wagner ran out: ‘in the end [this behaviour] will get out of control…it must be pulled up by the roots…j’en ai assez’. Fuming impotently, Wagner withdrew, boycotting the production, so the first instalment of the work over which Wagner had laboured for so many years had its world premiere – like Lohengrin – in the composer’s absence. When The Valkyrie was produced the following year, he boycotted that, too. To stop Ludwig from getting his hands on Siegfried, he delayed putting the finishing touches to it, even though he had already started composing The Twilight of the Gods. That was how petty, how childish, it had become. The fairy tale was going to have a drastically unhappy ending, it seemed, after all. But now at least he knew there was nothing for it: if The Ring was to make its proper effect – if it was to do its revolutionary work – he would have to build the theatre of which he had so long dreamed himself. No one was going to do it for him.

  At least he was not on his own any more. There had been more va-et-vient between Bülow’s household and Wagner’s, but in autumn of 1868, Cosima and the children settled in Tribschen for good; in 1870, Hans and Cosima finally divorced. ‘You are determined to devote your life to a man much greater than myself,’ Bülow wrote to her, ‘and I must admit that your choice is right. My one consolation is: Cosima is happy now. I now must separate myself completely and utterly from you and from Richard Wagner, the two inspirations of my life.’ Cosima confided in her diary: ‘It seems to me cruel that I had to leave Hans. I feel it keenly that a divine decree willed it so, and I had no choice.’

  A few months later, Cosima and Wagner married. She was thirty-three, he was fifty-nine. As he had said five years earlier: there was no question about it, she belonged to him. They made an odd couple to look at: she was Amazonianly tall, with severe, beaky features; he was uncommonly short, with a somewhat simian lope. But it was a perfect match. They were of one mind: his. She saw him as a Sublime Master, which helped him; Minna had always seen him as the needy, difficult, gifted boy she had first fallen in love with. Minna had tried to provide a nest for him; Cosima built him Valhalla. Intellectually and musically sophisticated, she was his help-meet, and Wagner welcomed her input; sometimes he even changed things on her advice. Before long, she gave him a son and heir. She gave him, in fact, a life fit for a hero. And she was always at his side.

  It was in 1869, after a gap of twelve years, having in the interim had a life-changing exposure to the work of Schopenhauer and written two massive and ground-breaking operas, that Wagner finally resumed his work on Siegfried. Ludwig was the first to know: ‘The Shining Light came to see me – moved, plans to complete the Ring des Nibelungen,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Joy Inconceivable.’ Wagner’s concept of music-drama, his political views, his understanding of the meaning of life, had all changed fundamentally. He made substantial amendments to the libretto: especially to The Twilight of the Gods. Now love – deep, transcendent self-obliviating physical love, in the Schopenhauerian sense – becomes the only reality. Power – all power – is not merely corrupting, it is an illusion. ‘I shall try to tell you today of Siegfried,’ he wrote to Ludwig before their falling-out:

  It is with dread and with trepidation that I approach the composition of Act III. Here I am face to face with the central point of the cosmic drama. The end of the world is at hand, but it will be followed by re-birth, by regeneration. All this is sublime, terrible and mysterious. The music of the end came to me on my lonely mountain walks, in a storm: the jubilation of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, the proud pair united beyond life, beyond death.

  As he finished the sketches for Act III of Siegfried, his son was born, and was inevitably given the young hero’s name. Because of the deep estrangement between Ludwig and Wagner over Munich productions of The Rhinegold and The Valkyrie, he went no further with Siegfried, instead rapidly sketching out The Twilight of the Gods and dreaming of the theatre in which it would eventually be heard.

  ELEVEN

  Towards the Green Hill

  Credit 14

  At Tribschen the household consisted of Wagner, Cosima, Daniela and Blondine (Cosima’s daughters from von Bülow), Isolde, Eva, and Siegfried, a governess, a housekeeper, a nanny, a manservant, two stable lads, a parlourmaid and a French cook, in addition to another Newfoundland dog, a terrier, two peacocks (Wotan and Erda), two golden pheasants, a cat, and an assortment of sheep and hens. In the house itself, Cosima created the environment in which Wagner could flourish, socially and creatively, which was a curious mixture of classical severity and intense voluptuousness. The latter he required for his work:

  If I am to do this, if I am once more to renounce reality – if I am to plunge once more into the woes of artistic fancy in order to find tranquillity in the world of imagination, my fancy must at least be helped. I cannot live like a dog; I cannot sleep on straw and drink bad liquor. My excitable, delicate, ardently craving and uncommonly soft and tender sensibility must be coaxed in some ways if my mind is to accomplish the horribly difficult task of creating a non-existent world.

  Ernest Newman noted that in his last years Wagner could not work at all unless surrounded by soft lines and colours and perfumes. ‘Such was the creator of the heroic, athletic, boy Siegfried,’ wrote Ernest Newman, ‘this poor little sickly, sensitive, self-indulgent neurotic who could hardly deny himself the smallest of his innocent little voluptuousnesses.’ In the living room were tapestries, a Buddha, Chinese incense burners, cabinets with butterflies pinned to cards; in the study itself, heavy draperies, two book-lined walls, the Erard piano (made to look like an altar, with drawers and a table-top) and a portrait of Ludwig. This voluptuousness extended to Wagner’s taste in garments, notably undergarments, which was widely discussed after the sensational appearance in 1877 of Wagner’s Letters to a Seamstress, which revealed in extraordinary detail his requirements; initially, at least, it seems to have been a means of relieving the endless itch of erysipelas, but even after that was vanquished he insisted on having only silk close to his skin, and everything lined with satin, to keep him warm; unexpectedly, according to the seamstress in question, Berthe Goldwag, he was always cold. His outer garments, self-designed, were eccentric in the extreme: loose, flowing, somehow medieval while at the same time being raffishly bohemian; an unholy amalgam of the wardrobes of The Mastersingers and La Bohème, always capped by what might be described as his trademark beret, which he would take off and put back on a hundred times in the course of a conversation. Conversation with Wagner was a bit of a rollercoaster: the French poet Catulle Mendès described him as being in perpetual motion, striding about, putting his hat on, taking it off, talking, talking, talking: ‘sublime images, puns, turns of phrase, an endless flood, always disjointed, never repeating himself, words that were proud or tender, violent or comic. And now, laughing till you thought he would split his sides, now growing tearfully tender, now rising to the heights of prophetic ecstasy.’

  The unending flow took in tales of his political life in Dresden, his childhood dreams, his escapades, sitting in the back row of the stalls and seeing Weber conduct, Schröder-Devrient (‘the tenderest and grea
test memory of his whole existence’), and the death of Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who had created the role of Tristan: ‘and as he spoke the word “Tristan”, one felt a tremendous all-consuming sense of exaltation at the febrile eternity of the Liebestod, a state of frenetic nirvana! And all the while we sat there, dazed and bemused, laughing with him, weeping with him, sharing his feelings of joy, seeing his visions and submitting to the terror and charm of his imperious words like sun-flecked motes of dust at the tempest’s mercy.’

  Mendès’s wife, the poet Judith Gautier, wrote that ‘in the face of the Master, his beaming eyes, were blended the most beautiful shades of sapphire – that is what I saw, and I said to Mme Cosima, who thought quite as I did – “Now, at last, I comprehend that happiness of paradise, so extolled by believers, the seeing of the god face to face.”’ (Gautier had a brief affair with Wagner but Mme Cosima quickly nipped that in the bud.) Ludwig described him as ‘the Shining Light’, the ‘Sun of Life’, and much else besides of an equally elemental nature. This is the effect he had on those who were susceptible to him. Others found him simply alarming.

  Edouard Schuré, esotericist and dramatist, was so overpowered by his experience of Tristan that he determined to make Wagner’s acquaintance. He subsequently wrote a two-volume work on music-drama (Richard Wagner: His Work and Ideas), but later fell out with the composer as the cult around him grew. It was to Schuré that Wagner had confessed that his daemon was ‘a frightful monster’. Schuré provides ample proof of it. ‘To look at him,’ wrote Schuré, ‘was to see turn by turn in the same visage the front face of Faust and the profile of Mephistopheles…one stood dazzled before that exuberant and protean nature, ardent, personal, excessive in everything, yet marvellously equilibrated by the predominance of a devouring intellect.’ Wagner had, it seemed, no inhibitions whatever, his qualities and defects on open display, to the delight of some and the deep repugnance of others. ‘His gaiety flowed over in a joyous foam of facetious fantasies and extravagant pleasantries; but the least contradiction provoked him to incredible anger. Then he would leap like a tiger, roar like a stag. He paced the room like a caged lion, his voice became hoarse and the words came out like screams; his speech slashed about at random. He seemed at these times like some elemental force unchained, like a volcano in eruption. Everything in him was gigantic, excessive.’ It is this very disinhibition that is at the root of his work: a willingness – indeed, a compulsion – to share what is deepest within him with the world at large.

  If by any chance he did not find himself the centre of attention, he took swift remedial action. Robert von Hornstein (recipient of one of Wagner’s most egregiously haughty begging letters, as we have seen) describes a pleasant gathering at Wagner’s house which was suddenly interrupted by a blood-curdling scream. Electrified, the guests turned to see what the problem was, only to find the composer, sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, quite unperturbed. ‘I’ve just been re-reading The Golden Pot by E. T. A. Hoffmann,’ he remarked, pleasantly. ‘I’ll read it to you.’ It is not a short story. When he eventually came to an end, Otto Wesendonck, who was present, mildly commented that he had no time for that sort of romanticism, at which Wagner fell into a ranting tirade that had still not subsided by the time the traumatised guests crept away. Often he would sing for his guests. The composer-journalist Ferdinand Praeger compared his singing to the barking of a Newfoundland dog; it was nonetheless strangely compelling, said Praeger, and invariably accompanied by large inhalations of snuff. On one occasion he ran out of it, refusing to continue until more was found. ‘No snuff,’ he said, ‘no singing.’ A midnight search for the precious substance began, and when some was found, he started up again.

  He seems to have delighted in presenting different faces to different people. To the intense young philology teacher, Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he met on a visit to Leipzig during a brief escape from the endless emotional turmoil at Tribschen, he spoke in the measured tones of a great philosopher. Nietzsche, shy and almost monosyllabic in his presence, instantly fell under the spell of the Master. After he took up an appointment as the youngest professor at the University of Basel, he became a regular visitor of the Wagners in nearby Lucerne. ‘Tribschen,’ Nietzsche wrote to his intimate friend, Rohde, ‘has become a second home for me. In recent weeks I have been there four times in rapid succession, and a letter passes between us at least once a week. My dearest friend, what I learn and see there is indescribable. Schopenhauer and Goethe, Aeschylus and Pindar are still alive, believe me.’ It swiftly became the central relationship of Nietzsche’s life, emotionally and intellectually, even after – particularly after – he had turned against Wagner; almost his last words, as he lay dying of the ravages of what appears to have been a virulent form of syphilis, were of Cosima. In fact, it was a three-way relationship, what psychoanalysts refer to as a double cathexis, in which Nietzsche made a huge emotional investment in both Wagners. With Cosima the relationship was semi-erotic; with Wagner himself it was a relationship of service, verging on servility, in which Nietzsche was tasked with writing articles and delivering speeches which expressed the official view, which was often explicitly anti-Semitic. Nietzsche kow-towed, though he had no previous record of anti-Semitism, and later abhorred it. He was also given small domestic errands to perform – getting Wagner’s books rebound, for example, or tracking down a portrait of Adolf Wagner, Wagner’s beloved antiquarian uncle – a surprising use of his time for a doctor of philosophy and professor of philology.

  By far the most significant outcome of Nietzsche’s devotion to Wagner was his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, in which he first adumbrates his famous opposition between Apollonian and Dionysiac modes, introducing Socrates as anti-hero, the enemy of tragedy, forever rationalising life, striving for optimism (as a result of which the drama takes what he calls ‘the death-leap into bourgeois theatre’). Anyone familiar with Wagner’s table-talk would have concluded that Nietzsche had been listening to it keenly; in his first book, Art and Revolution, Wagner had made much of the opposition between Dionysus and Apollo. Seeing that The Birth of Tragedy admirably promoted the Master’s view of life and art – notably the supremacy of the latter over the former – Wagner and Cosima, on the whole, approved of the book. From Nietzsche’s point of view, Wagner perfectly embodied the quest for the ecstatic with which the philosopher scornfully contrasted the Socratic, rational approach that Wagner expressly renounced. ‘What makes you see or wish to see a wise man in me?’ he had written to Judith Gautier during their brief liaison: ‘How can I be a wise man, I who am myself only when in a state of raving frenzy?’

  Unlike Wagner, Nietzsche’s entire experience of ecstasy seems to have been confined to art, and Wagner’s music purveyed it in its most concentrated form. Of Tristan he said: ‘I am still looking for a work with as dangerous a fascination, with as terrible and as sweet an affinity. I simply cannot bring myself to remain critically aloof from this music; every nerve in me a-twitch, and it has been a long time since I had such a lasting sense of ecstasy.’ Apart from the incident in which, presumably, he had contracted syphilis (although there is a suggestion that he may have inherited it from his clergyman father), Nietzsche seems never to have known a consummated love, though his male friendships were of exceptional intensity. ‘Everything my friend Rohde feels,’ he told Wagner and Cosima, ‘I feel also, thus doubling my pleasure.’ Cosima replied that – ‘as our liege has told us’ – Wagner entirely approved of such relationships; after all, he said, ‘the adoration of women is a completely new phenomenon which radically divides us from the ancient world’. Nietzsche felt approved of, endorsed, empowered by both Cosima and Richard. He became absorbed into the household: he was in Tribschen during the agonising birth of Siegfried, and he was among the select few to be present at the famous first performance of the Tribschen Idyll with Fidi’s birdsong and the orange sunrise, as symphonic birthday greeting (later known as the Siegfried Idyll) w
ith which thirteen musicians, ranged all the way up the staircase, awoke Cosima on Christmas Day 1870, her thirty-third birthday. That night they performed a dramatisation of Wagner’s favourite E. T. A. Hoffmann story The Golden Pot in which, with none too subtle symbolism, Wagner took the leading part of the magician Archivarius Lindhorst, while Nietzsche – Professor Nietzsche – played the idiot factotum who copies the master’s manuscripts and trips over apple baskets. Wagner saw a great deal of potential in Nietzsche – he could, for example, be very useful in bringing up the boy-hero to whom Cosima had so recently given birth; he even laid plans for the child to travel to whatever academic seat Nietzsche might occupy. As it happens, Nietzsche never occupied another university chair: The Birth of Tragedy, a philosophical fantasia devoid of scholarship and savagely criticised by his colleagues, had destroyed his academic future, though he continued to teach at Basel for another decade. This was neither here nor there from Wagner’s point of view; as far as he was concerned he had acquired an assistant and occasional mouthpiece, who would come in very handy during the great task Wagner was about to take up: the creation of the theatre of the future.

  Cosima and Wagner had already embarked on the Great Task. They had been invited by the town council of the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth to look at the beautiful baroque Markgräfliches Opernhaus – the Margravial Opera House – but despite the uncommon size of its stage it was clearly no more suitable for The Ring than the Court Theatre in Munich; Wagner dismissed it out of hand. Instead, he decided he would build a new theatre on a little hill he had spotted just beyond the town centre. The town council, delighted and honoured, gave him the land. At the same, Wagner bought a nearby plot on which to build a house for himself, to which he gave the Wagnerian-Schopenhauerian name of Wahnfried: ‘rest from illusion’. Ludwig, now slowly warming to Wagner again, gave him 25,000 thalers to build it. But rest was the last thing Wagner got. Money had to be raised, large amounts of it. He conducted a concert in Berlin, attended by the newly created Kaiser, Wilhelm I; unsolicited, he wrote a wildly bombastic Kaisermarsch for the inauguration of the newfangled German Reichstag and the newfangled German monarchy. It was rejected. He met the chancellor, Bismarck, architect of the new German Empire, and tried to convince him to invest, on behalf of the new German nation, in the great German work of art he was creating; but Bismarck demurred. Wagner roamed Europe, and beyond, conducting concerts and addressing the faithful, all the while toiling over the still incomplete scores of Siegfried and The Twilight of the Gods; his health was not good. At one point, not for the first or the last time, he toyed with moving to America, where there were enthusiastic Wagner societies comprised largely of German expatriates, eager to welcome him. Instead he threw his energy into encouraging the formation of Wagner societies around the world.