Being Wagner

by Simon Callow

  Finally, on his fifty-ninth birthday, 22 May 1872, the foundation stone for the Festspielhaus was laid, in pouring rain; the ceremony then transferred to the opera house, where, incongruously surrounded by the gilt exuberance of its great baroque interior, the apostle of the work of art of the future spoke. He was deeply moved, saying how honoured he was, honoured as no other artist in history had been, which was true enough, though he had in fact bestowed the honour on himself. The theatre they were now starting to build, he said, was a temporary one, a mere makeshift: that, he tartly explained, was because the German parliament had refused to pay for it, and because of the deplorable condition of German art at present. Nonetheless, he said, in the proportions of the interior and in its seating arrangements, ‘you will find the expression of an idea which, once grasped, will transform your expectations into something quite different from anything you have ever before experienced in visiting a theatre. If this effect is fully achieved,’ he went on, ‘the mysterious entry of the music will prepare you for the unveiling and display of scenic pictures which, by appearing to emanate from an idealistic dream world, should demonstrate to you the complete reality of the stimulating powers of a noble art.’

  When he spoke of the ‘mysterious entry of the music’, he was, of course, referring to the famous invisible orchestra, hidden away under the stage, a long-held idea of his, originally inspired by the opera house in Riga, which was intended not simply to enhance the balance with the singers’ voices, but to eliminate anything which came between the audience and the story. The purpose of theatre, he insisted, was not to engage with the analytical mind, but with the subconscious; the dream-like state he described offered access to deep, buried, maybe inchoate, emotions. This, he says, is the source of its power and profundity, and this is why theatre is central to society: it binds us together at the deepest level. Wagner used the speech to nail his theatrical colours to the mast. The form of theatre that he was seeking to create, that the Festspielhaus existed to realise, is the polar opposite of the sort of theatre – Brecht’s for example, or George Bernard Shaw’s – which strives to engage the conscious mind, to stimulate consciousness, in fact, in the political as well as the mental sense. In Brecht’s theatre, every member of the audience is a critic. In Wagner’s the artist/priest/conjuror is in total command; your job as a member of the audience is to submit. So whatever the political agenda of The Ring might have been – and as we have seen, that had changed over the years of composition – the theatrical means Wagner employed could never have bred an assessing, an analytical, attitude in the audience. His aim was spiritual and visceral; his was an anti-Socratic theatre, neither rational nor optimistic. Wotan is the loser in The Ring because ‘he resembles us to a tee; he is the sum total of present-day intelligence, whereas Siegfried is the man of the future whom we desire and long for but who cannot be made by us, since he must create himself on the basis of our own annihilation’.

  Wagner ended his speech at the Margravial Theatre with a ringing assertion of the standards he intended to maintain: ‘Here nothing must be permitted to speak in mere provisional, sketchy forms; in scenery and in acting you will be offered the best that the artistic skills of our times can achieve.’ In response to this promise, the chorus – specially assembled, like the orchestra – gave hearty vent to Wacht auf!, the great cry with which Sachs is greeted at the end of The Mastersingers of Nuremberg:

  Wake up! dawn is drawing near;

  I hear a blissful nightingale

  singing in the green grove,

  its voice rings through hill and valley;

  night is sinking in the west,

  the day arises in the east,

  the ardent red glow of morning

  approaches through the gloomy clouds.

  Then, as a ringing assertion of what German art could be, and should be, he conducted Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. ‘Everything that had happened up to now,’ wrote Nietzsche, in a pamphlet to accompany the occasion, ‘was a preparation for this moment.’

  It was four years before the theatre was ready to open. Wagner spent all of 1873 touring Germany, partly to enlist singers and players, mostly to raise money by conducting concerts and giving electrifying fundraising readings of the libretto of The Twilight of the Gods. But however much he raised it was never enough, and two years after the laying of the foundation stone, and despite Nietzsche’s exhortation to the public ‘to support to the fullest extent possible this great artistic act of the German genius’, building ground to a halt. For the second time in his life, Wagner was saved by Ludwig, still, despite their estrangement, the perfect Wagnerite. The king bailed him out again with an enormous loan. ‘No, no, and again no!’ he wrote to Wagner, ‘It should not end thus! Help must be given! Our plan dare not fail. Parzival knows his mission, and will offer whatever lies in his powers.’ Building resumed. Through all of this, Wagner continued toiling over the vast score; by 1874, a quarter of a century after the first sketch had been made, The Twilight of the Gods was finally complete. There were more and more fundraising concerts, in extended tours across Europe: he was becoming an international superstar. ‘When he conducts he is almost beside himself with excitement,’ wrote the American pianist Amy Fay. ‘That is one reason why he is great as a conductor, for the orchestra catches his frenzy, and each man plays under a sudden inspiration. He really seems to be improvising on his orchestra.’ In early 1876, he staged both Lohengrin and Tannhäuser in Vienna, with Richter conducting; the following year, the city finally saw Tristan and Isolde. The proceeds of these productions were, like everything else, gobbled up into the all-consuming Festspielhaus fund.

  Meanwhile, a full two years before the first public performances, preliminary rehearsals began under Richter. Rehearsals continued throughout 1875. ‘It is perhaps for the first time in your artistic careers, that you are called to dedicate your powers to the realisation of such a unique artistic objective,’ Wagner wrote to the singers he invited to be part of the first festival, detailing the extensive work that would be required; care would be taken, he said, not to overwork and fatigue any of the artists. ‘We wish to demonstrate to German audiences what German artists can achieve in their own native art. I now expect your declaration to the effect that you pledge your willingness to help realise a unique artistic ideal.’ The orchestra, selected and led by the great violinist August Wilhelmj, was recruited from all over Germany, as were the singers and the dancers and the acrobats who played Hunding’s horde and operated the dragon. At the end of the 1875 rehearsals, Wagner threw a party at the Haus Wahnfried for no less than 140 artists.

  The scale of what they were undertaking is mind-boggling: merely opening a new theatre, with all its operational teething problems, is quite challenging enough, but to do so with not one but four new operas, on four consecutive nights – each one with staging nightmares on every page – dragons breathing fire, horses flying through the air, descents into the underworld, a rainbow bridge, roofs flying off huts, funeral pyres and stage-engulfing floods – with a huge cast and an army of stage technicians, to say nothing of the musical demands of an unknown, immensely long and very complex score – verges on the insane. But there was a mad idealism in the air. No one was paid – ‘anyone who does not come out of esteem and commitment,’ Wagner declared, ‘I shall leave where he is’ – but they eagerly flocked from all over Germany, the best designers, singers, players in the land, while the entire musical world held its breath. The Ring of the Nibelung had been a long time coming.

  The theatre, the largest half-timbered building erected up to that point, was ready on time, but only just. A month before rehearsals began, Wagner had been trying to play off the Prussian and Bavarian governments against each other in the hope of squeezing some money out of them, but failed. At last, humiliatingly, he begged Ludwig personally for a small further bridging loan, which that saintly monarch unhesitatingly extended to him. Final rehearsals could begin, two mo
nths of what Wagner called ‘further study’ of the cycle, with orchestra, scenery and costumes – an unparalleled luxury. Months, even years, of preparation had preceded the actual staging. Vast numbers of costumes, huge tracts of set, great hanging backcloths and a plethora of special effects had been designed and sent for construction. The latter were particularly troublesome: rainbows, dragons, magic fire, flying Rhinemaidens, collapsing palaces. They were farmed out to workshops all over Europe: the dragon, for example, was built by the pantomime specialist Richard Keene, of Milton Street, Wandsworth, in south London: it was deemed a great success, despite the non-arrival of its neck, which had been sent not to Bayreuth but to Beirut. Richter struggled with the singers, some of whom were grievously stretched by their roles, as were the orchestra, all 115 of them. Wagner advised, inspired and terrorised, directing, occasionally conducting, attending to every detail, no matter how small, despite having, throughout the rehearsal period, a raging abscess, to abate which his head was permanently wrapped in a bandage and cotton wool.

  He was always more than willing to stop and put to rights anyone who was unclear about anything. At the first rehearsal of The Valkyrie, Wagner described to the struggling Sieglinde the precise gesture with which she should pass from frozen despair to startled joy and enraptured exultation, and when he demonstrated it, he made everyone cry. ‘What an inspiring director he was!’ wrote the impresario Angelo Neumann. ‘How well he understood the art of spurring on his men, getting the best work out of each one, of making every gesture, each expression tell! These rehearsals convinced me that he was not only the greatest dramatist of all time, but also the greatest of directors, and a marvellous actor as well.’ Wagner’s unflagging energy was indispensable once the whole great leviathan was finally assembled: the technical rehearsals were every backstage nightmare rolled into one – or rather into four. Half the set was unfinished; the dragon (minus neck) arrived from Keene’s workshops in London at the very last minute; singers were constantly losing their voices or their nerve; one of the orchestral violinists dropped dead; the Sieglinde, despite Wagner’s personal input, was a catastrophe, and temperamental with it; the all-important technical manager, Herr Brandt, who co-ordinated the whole giant event, walked out when he discovered that he was described on the programme as a ‘machinist’; the costumes for The Twilight of the Gods made the singers look like Red Indian chieftains; the Rhinemaidens were terrified of the flying devices they had to harness themselves to; they were rapidly running out of money, prompting Cosima to try to get her inheritance money from Paris to throw into the kitty; Brünnhilde’s horse was too frisky, so had to be led off before she sang; the brilliant but overworked rehearsal pianist Joseph Rubinstein – ‘who once more,’ remarked Cosima, pleasantly, ‘displayed all the dismal characteristics of his race’ – was dismissed, again, and reinstated, again.

  To everyone’s amazement the magic fire actually worked.

  Finally, ready or not, the first outing of the biggest single piece of theatre in the history of Western culture approached. One notable member of the audience jumped the queue. Ludwig of Bavaria came to the dress rehearsals to avoid having to fraternise with his fellow royals. ‘They bore me to death,’ he said. ‘If they molest me, call the police.’ Outwitting his adoring subjects, many of whom were milling around the streets of Bayreuth in anticipation of the great event, he got off the train a couple of stops up the line, where he was greeted by Wagner alone, and escorted in a closed carriage to the theatre and slipped into his box. He was utterly overwhelmed by what he saw. ‘You are a god-man,’ he wrote to Wagner afterwards, ‘the true artist by God’s grace who brought the sacred fire down from heaven to earth, to purify, to sanctify and to redeem! The god-man who truly cannot fail and cannot err!’ Not words anyone ever addressed to Verdi – or indeed to Mozart or to Beethoven. But none of them had ever attempted what Wagner had at last achieved. The day before the first public performance of The Rhinegold, by which time Ludwig had disappeared, Wagner greeted the new Kaiser along with sundry grand dukes and duchesses. ‘Well,’ said Wilhelm to Wagner, ‘you’ve finally done it.’ Wagner somehow managed to refrain from answering: ‘Yes, and with no help from you.’

  Just before the curtain rose, Wagner pinned up a message for the cast, eminently practical: ‘Clarity! The big notes will take care of themselves; the small notes and the text are the main thing. Never address the audience but only one another; in monologues, always look up or down, never straight ahead. Last request! Be faithful to me, dear Friends.’ Another went up in the orchestra pit: ‘No prelude playing! Piano pianissimo – then all will be well.’ Which admonition, as Frederic Spotts notes, remained there for nearly a hundred years.

  At long last – at 6.30 p.m., on 12 August 1876, four years after the foundation stone of the theatre had been laid – the great unending triad of E-flat major which in a feverish half-awake state Wagner had heard with his inner ear in a seedy Italian hotel room twenty-three years earlier, finally seeped into the listeners’ consciousness and The Ring of the Nibelung began its long journey in circumstances that, as Wagner had correctly predicted, no one had ever before experienced in a theatre: in the great austere amphitheatre, with its severely undecorated walls, the lights dimmed to invisibility and the orchestra nowhere to be seen, the Rhinemaidens swam into view from beyond the receding proscenium arches, emerging from endless black space, apparently underwater, singing their siren song. As Wagner said they would, they seemed to emerge from within a dream.

  From that breathtaking moment on, pretty well everything that could go wrong did go wrong, most devastatingly when just before the first scene change the stagehands raised the backcloth too soon, revealing the back wall of the theatre, with the crew standing around in shirt sleeves and singers waiting to go on, suddenly caught like rabbits in the headlights. Wagner was consumed with rage, hurling down bitter imprecations on everyone’s heads. Though the audience roared and roared for him at the end of the performance, he refused to come out, storming off into the night. He cheered up only when, a little later, he chanced upon Dom Pedro II, the Emperor of Brazil, who, unannounced and unattended, was staying at a local hotel, to which Wagner now escorted him. Dom Pedro was asked to sign the hotel register; under ‘Occupation’ he wrote ‘Emperor’, which amused Wagner inordinately. As he had told Judith Gautier, in the letter in which he had confessed to her that he was ‘the maddest person imaginable’, he had a vivid sense of humour ‘which again and again helps me over abysses that the wisest man does not even see’.

  Each of the three subsequent nights had their successes and their failures, but the cumulative effect was overwhelming, musically, dramatically and theatrically. In every area, Wagner had revolutionised the art. Even sceptics like Tchaikovsky had finally to acknowledge the grandeur of the enterprise: ‘I think that everyone who believes in the civilising effect of art will agree that the Bayreuth Festival is a stupendous achievement…one thing that we can be sure of: that out children and their children will still be talking of Bayreuth.’ Tchaikovsky was mildly cynical about Wagner, but even hostile witnesses were forced to admire what he had done. ‘Whether or not the work meets all the expectations of the Bayreuth pilgrims,’ wrote Eduard Hanslick, Wagner’s most relentless critic, ‘there is one thing in which all will be of one mind: in admiration of the extraordinary energy and capacity for work and agitation of the man who, on his own, conceived this phenomenon and carried it through to its conclusion.’ This was magnanimous, since it was widely believed (by Hanslick, for one) that Wagner had based the character of the pernickety killjoy Beckmesser in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg on him. Grieg said that The Ring was ‘the creation of a true giant in the history of art comparable in innovation only to Michelangelo’. Ludwig of Bavaria, now that the danger of bumping into another king or an emperor had receded, came back for more, attending the third and final cycle. At the end of The Twilight of the Gods, as the waters of the Rhine flooded the stage and the Rhine
maidens recovered their gold and love reigned triumphant, the king stood up in the royal box – specially installed for him – to applaud. Then Wagner took to the stage to acknowledge the ovation. Stilling the audience, he said: ‘The Festival was embarked on in the German spirit and completed for the glory of the King of Bavaria, who has been not only a benefactor and a protector to me, but a co-creator of my work.’ Which was handsome indeed. The applause went on and on.

  Wagner was unmoved. The day after this last performance, Cosima noted in her diary: ‘R is very sad, says he wishes he could die.’ The effect over the four evenings had been stupendous: a wonder of the world. But it fell so far short in so many ways of what he had willed. The physical production, with designs by the Viennese landscape painter Josef Hoffmann, had been too literal – ‘an archaeologist’s fantasy’, thought Cosima; ‘fantasy in chains’, Nietzsche called it. Everything, Wagner said, should have been simpler, more primitive. As it was, it was just pretend. The singers failed to penetrate to the heart of their characters; Richter’s tempi were wayward. Next year, Wagner told Cosima, they would ‘do it all differently’. But there was no next year, or the year after. The financial deficit was vast; they had not managed to shift all the seats, and it would be many years before they did on a regular basis. Wagner told his loyal supporters at Bayreuth that the next festival would not be until 1880, after which all his operas would be performed over three years, culminating in Parsifal, the work he was now actively engaged on. In fact, the next festival was in 1882, and it consisted of just that one work, which Wagner now brought forth with agonising difficulty and in intense physical pain, all the while trying to raise money.