Being Wagner

by Simon Callow

  At the last performance of the season, Wagner slipped unseen into the orchestra pit during Act III and took over from Levi for the opera’s final scene, for the savage and terrible transformation music that brings the Grail Hall into view. Some of the knights carry in the coffined body of the just-deceased Grail King, Titurel; others bear the litter of Titurel’s ailing son and heir, Amfortas. The furious knights hurl out stentorian protests at being denied sight of the Grail. Amfortas, racked with pain from his ever-bleeding wound, is desperately begging to be allowed to die:

  Come! You heroes!

  Slay now the sinner and end his woe,

  On you once more the grail then will glow!

  Unnoticed, Parsifal appears in their midst; touching Amfortas with ‘the wondrous, wounding holy spear’, he heals him in an instant:

  O supreme joy of this miracle!

  This that could heal your wound

  I see pouring with holy blood

  yearning for that kindred fount

  which flows and wells within the Grail.

  No more shall it be hidden:

  uncover the Grail, open the shrine!

  Parsifal mounts the altar steps, taking the Grail for the first time from the shrine opened by the squires, and falls to his knees in silent prayer and contemplation. The Grail gradually glows with a soft light; the darkness below intensifies, while the light above grows brighter and brighter.

  Miracle of supreme salvation!

  Our Redeemer redeemed!

  A beam of light catches the Grail; it glows brighter than ever. From the dome a white dove descends and hovers over Parsifal’s head. Kundry, relieved of the agony of her lust-torn existence, slowly sinks lifeless to the ground, her eyes lifted up to Parsifal; Gurnemanz and Amfortas, now healed, kneel in homage to him. He holds the Grail in blessing over the worshipping brotherhood of knights. The eighteenth-century Dresden Amen, which has constantly appeared during the opera – and which had figured in The Ban on Love and Tannhäuser – triumphs as the voices of the squires and the knights soar heavenward. When Wagner took over from Levi at the beginning of this ecstatic, unearthly sequence, the apotheosis of all the many redemptions in Wagner’s work, he broadened the tempo hugely, challenging his singers’ and his wind-players’ lungs to breaking point. The expressive force of it was overwhelming, both to those on stage and to those in the auditorium. ‘What that hour revealed to us,’ wrote one of the audience, ‘never came back.’ Wagner himself stayed in the pit with the musicians, refusing to take a curtain call; he was in a mood of the greatest affability. He eventually made his way to the stage, and spoke to the artists and the company with such warmth that, according to Levi, they all dissolved into tears.

  The festival had been a financial, an artistic and, for many, a spiritual success. Wagner and the family went back to Venice yet again; they took the entire mezzanine floor of the magnificent Ca’ Vendramin Calergi on the Grand Canal. Liszt joined them there for eight weeks. Wagner started tinkering with Tannhäuser all over again, hoping to clarify its meaning for good and all. But there would be no new operas, he told Cosima; now he would turn his attention to writing symphonies. Perhaps to put himself in a symphonic frame of mind, he arranged, on Christmas Eve of 1882, as a birthday treat for Cosima, a performance of the fresh-faced Symphony in C he had written as a lad of nineteen. For the first time in many decades, he had no project. He was in poor health, with stomach cramps and chest pains. Often he would sing to himself. More than once, the family overheard him intoning the dead Commendatore’s terrible invitation from beyond the grave in Don Giovanni: ‘Don Giovanni a cenar teco m’invitasti e son venuto!’ His thoughts turned again and again to death, here in Venice. There were rumours of disease in the city; the perpetual blowing of the cool damp sirocco wind kept him at home, though he made an exception so the children could see the carnevale: he watched gloomily as the figure of Carnival was carried to its grave to the accompaniment of the tacky old tunes while the bells tolled midnight and all the brilliant flares of the processions were suddenly extinguished across the city. He felt, he told Cosima, like Othello, the Moor of Venice: ‘the long day’s task is done’. He wondered whether she still loved him: he knew how difficult he was. They lay in bed one night, Cosima told her diary, ‘and as I go to sleep, I hear him speaking divine words to me, words I may not repeat, words which wrap me around like guardian angels and settle deep, deep in my heart like the most sacred of my treasures. “Good night, my angel,” I say. “Good night, my dear wife,” he replies. “That means so much more.”’

  He dreamed a great deal – of Schopenhauer, but also of Wilhelmina Schröder-Devrient. ‘All my women are now passing before my eyes.’ He and Cosima read books out loud together, as they had always done. Wagner was especially taken by Fouqué’s Undine, about a water nymph, ‘the being who longed for a soul’. One afternoon, Cosima overheard him talking at the top of his voice. ‘I was talking to you,’ he said when she came in. Then he went over to the piano and played the music of those other briny creatures, the Rhinemaidens: their refrain, ‘Rheingold, Rheingold’, followed by their next phrase, ‘False and base all those who dwell up above.’ ‘I feel loving towards them,’ he told Cosima, ‘these subservient creatures of the deep, with all their yearning.’ That day, Levi, who had come to stay with them in Venice for a few days, took his leave. Wagner threw his arms round him, and showered him with kisses – the scion of a race he despised. Paradoxical to the last. The next day, 13 February, the sky was black with clouds, the rain torrential. Wagner, feeling unwell, retired to his room to work on his paper for the Bayreuther Blätter: ‘The Feminine Element in Mankind’. ‘The process of emancipation of the Woman,’ he wrote, ‘takes place amid ecstatic throes.’ And then he wrote: ‘Love – Tragedy.’ In due course, the maid, Betty, heard him pacing rapidly up and down, then she heard him call her name; she ran for Cosima. ‘I shall never forget the sight of my mother rushing out through our door,’ wrote Siegfried Wagner. ‘It expressed the force of the most passionate anguish; and she ran into the half-open door so hard it almost broke.’ On his arrival, the doctor pronounced the composer dead.

  ‘It is self-evident,’ said the doctor’s report, ‘that the numerous psychical agitations to which Wagner was daily disposed by his peculiar mental constitution and disposition, his sharply defined attitude to a number of burning questions of art, science and politics, and his remarkable social life did much to hasten his unfortunate end.’ In other words, Wagner died of being Wagner.

  Cosima fell prostrate upon his lifeless body with a great cry and no persuasion could induce her to leave the corpse, which she continued to embrace for a whole day and night; then she cut off all her hair and placed it in the coffin. Neither food nor water passed her lips for four days. It appeared that she wanted to die.

  She lived for another forty-seven years.

  When Ludwig, now stout, toothless and doubtful of his own sanity, was told of Wagner’s death, he stamped the floor so hard that the floorboard gave way. ‘His corpse belongs to me,’ he screamed. All the pianos in all his residences were draped in black crêpe thenceforth. Fifteen years earlier, he had told Sophie Charlotte that he would have a short life, linked as it was to the continued existence of Wagner. As he predicted, his star no longer shone, sundered from the remarkable, sweeping destiny of R. Wagner.

  He lived for another three increasingly bewildered years after Wagner’s death.

  Hans von Bülow, who had suffered at Wagner’s hands as much as anyone, fell into a profound depression. When he was told of the composer’s death, all he was able to say – the words torn from him with great difficulty – was that ‘he felt as if his soul had died with that fiery spirit, and that only a fragment of his body still wandered upon the earth’.

  Nietzsche, on hearing of Wagner’s death, misremembered how close they had been: ‘like brothers’, he said. When, six years later, he was admitted
to the asylum at Jena, he told the doctors that ‘it was my wife Cosima Wagner who brought me here’. He died in 1900, in the grip of howling insanity.

  On hearing of Wagner’s death, Verdi, Wagner’s chief rival as an opera composer, wrote to his publisher, Giulio Ricordi: ‘Sad, sad, sad. Wagner is dead. When I read the news yesterday I may truly say that I was completely crushed. Let us not discuss it. It is a great personality that has disappeared. A name which leaves a mighty imprint upon the history of art.’ Verdi outlived Wagner, his exact contemporary, by 18 years, during which time he wrote his masterpieces, Otello and Falstaff.

  CODA

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  Wagner’s coffin was solemnly conveyed by gondola to the Venice railway station and thence by train to Bayreuth, where it was interred in the garden at Wahnfried, in the tomb which he had made sure was completed at the same time as the house, so that he could spend time in it. The path through the garden to the vault was his favourite walk. Sometimes he invited other people to join him there, while he discoursed on death and dying. ‘Ah, I wish I was already in it!’ was his frequent cry. Death had been his constant companion for over twenty years. The stupendous achievements of those years had been a result of willpower – nothing else. He had lived, in the words of Faust he chose for the epigraph to his overture on the subject, with the feeling that:

  the hell that is inside me sends

  terrible dreams to fill my head.

  Deep in my soul, God stirs the springs,

  but cannot move external things.

  Existence is become a mere, dead weight:

  Would death could free me from the life I hate.

  Wahnfried was rapidly converted by Cosima into a hero’s mausoleum. The restless, unsettling, destructive, sublime, dynamic spirit of Richard Wagner turned to stone. But what he wrote cannot be confined. It remains as restless, unsettling, destructive, sublime and dynamic as it ever was. He is everywhere. Music was changed utterly by him, in the work both of those who followed the path he opened up – Mahler, Strauss, Schönberg – and those, like Debussy and Stravinsky, who redefined themselves to escape his influence. He transformed opera. He revolutionised theatre. He entered the collective unconscious of twentieth-century literature in the work of Claudel and Yeats and Pound and Eliot; Thomas Mann, appalled and fascinated by him in equal measure, confronted him head on again and again, above all in his great lecture ‘The Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner’, which, in 1933, earned him thirteen years’ exile from Germany.

  After Wagner’s death, his creation, Bayreuth, was stopped in its tracks by Cosima, who tried to preserve it exactly as he had left it; it catered to the faithful, for whom attending his works was a religious experience, more Lourdes than Epidaurus. This is scarcely what Wagner had intended. In time, Wagner’s son, Siegfried, homosexual and liberal, took over from his mother and attempted to distance Bayreuth from some of his father’s positions, notably his anti-Semitism: ‘whether a person is a Chinese, a Negro, an American, a Red Indian or a Jew, is a matter of complete indifference to us’, he wrote to a racial purist who had complained at the presence of Jews in the audience. But Siegfried was dead by 1930, and the wife he had been forced to marry to escape scandal grasped the helm. Winifred Wagner, English-born and single-minded, threw in her lot with the now irresistibly rising Nazi party, forming an intensely close relationship with the man she called ‘Wolf’. Hitler had been a fervent Wagnerian from his youth in Vienna, when he had been overwhelmed by Rienzi. As Winifred Wagner told the film-maker Jürgen Syberberg, he extended his personal protection to Bayreuth, which included waiving the strict racial laws, with the result that even during the war, Jewish singers and players received special dispensations to perform there. As it happens, Hitler’s enthusiasm for Wagner was shared by few of his associates; he tried to impose his passion on the party, but it didn’t work. After the Nuremberg rally, he made a block booking for The Mastersingers of Nuremberg at Bayreuth, filling the theatre with party members. Ensconced in the stalls, they quickly got bored, fell asleep, or talked amongst themselves; at the interval they drank themselves into a stupor. In a fit of pique, the Führer cancelled all further party visits to Bayreuth. But the rank and file’s boredom and boorishness were the least of the problem: the more intellectually acute of the high command pointed out that The Ring of the Nibelung was a proto-Marxist text, and that Parsifal was dangerously close to a religious experience, which was equally repugnant to the Nazi ethos. In fact, Parsifal was banned during the war years. But performances of Wagner’s music in extract – in concerts, especially and most prominently those conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler with the Berlin Philharmonic – were identified throughout the free world as synonymous with the Nazi regime, especially since the Allies had cleverly appropriated Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for their own purposes.

  When the Allies took Germany in the summer of 1945, the Wagner family was unceremoniously turfed out and the Festspielhaus turned, with brutal symbolism, into an entertainment venue; the only opera performed in the theatre built to accommodate The Ring and Parsifal was Die Fledermaus. Just five years later, as part of the general reconstruction of post-war Germany, Bayreuth and Wagner were rehabilitated. Winifred’s sons Wieland and Wolfgang were installed as artistic directors, though their mother was banned in perpetuity from even entering the building; to the end of her enormously long life, she insisted that Hitler had been a dear, good, misunderstood man. With her out of the way, something astonishing happened at Bayreuth in that first post-war season: Wieland, the elder of the brothers, had spent the war working in a non-military capacity at the nearby Institute for Physical Research, and used the facilities available to him to construct set models and experiment with lighting, as he pondered how to progress the staging of his grandfather’s work. His first post-war production – of The Ring of the Nibelung – jettisoned the entire Nordic and Teutonic imagery Bayreuth had so long cultivated, shifting decisively away from either historicism or realism. The stage picture was of the utmost simplicity, greatly dependent on light and the expressive physical movement created by Wieland’s wife, the dancer and choreographer Gertrud Reissinger; in Patrick Carnegy’s vivid phrase, he pioneered the ‘opera as mystery play’, thus bringing the work infinitely closer to the composer’s vision. Many people detected a Jungian dimension to Wieland’s approach, an engagement with archetypes and a universal symbology. It was radical not only in terms of staging Wagner’s work, but for the theatre generally. Halfway through the twentieth century, Wagner was again at the forefront of the avant-garde.

  The operas continued to stimulate a huge variety of interpretations wherever and whenever they were performed. After Wieland’s early demise, Wolfgang assumed sole and highly autocratic control of Bayreuth, but continued to invite provocative directors to stage productions there; Bayreuth was never safe, artistically. The family meanwhile fell into vicious in-fighting, which finally resolved itself with the appointment of Wolfgang’s two daughters (from different wives) as co-directors of the festival. But this appointment too turned savage, with Katharina before long banning her half-sister from attending rehearsals. The Wagnerian dimension of all this, with rival siblings and half-siblings and a patriarch losing control, was lost on no one; but under Katharina’s sole command, Bayreuth has evolved to a startling degree into a forum in which Germany could confront its past – which is not exactly what Wagner had in mind, but it was, in another sense, exactly what he wanted: music drama at the centre of society.

  Before Freud and Jung, Wagner made the old myths mean something again; like them, he looked beyond the rational brain. He saw man as a turbulent, troubled, writhing, longing, betraying, creating, destroying, loving, loathing mess of instincts and impulses so deeply buried within us that we scarcely dare look at them. He forced us to do so. He was all of these things himself. Had he been anything other than a musical genius, he would have been locked up.

&n
bsp; He cannot bring comfort.

  Which is why people fight over him, why they always have done and why they always will do, now and forever. He upsets people because that is precisely what he set out to do. Despite the fact that the moment a Ring cycle is announced it sells out, whatever the price of tickets (usually inordinate) – despite 5,000 people a night choosing to swelter, spellbound, through concert performances of the operas at the BBC Proms in London, with twenty times that number clinging to their radios to listen to it at home and even more watching worldwide on television – there are still people who do not simply dislike his music, they find it intolerable, unendurable, offensive. His music is banned, for goodness’ sake. We understand why. But his capacity for upsetting people long pre-dates its association with the Nazis (whom he would have despised, loathing as he did both militarism and imperialism). Wagner is like the wolf he once tried to tame – he cannot be house-trained. As long as what we call classical music exists, Wagner will be performed, but he will never be a classic, comfortably installed in the pantheon. He is a whirlpool at the centre of musical culture, dangerous and dynamic. He is the discomfort we must live with, taking us perhaps reluctantly away from the songs of sun-infused Apollo and towards the darker, differently blissful turmoil of Dionysus. Only a truly uncommon human being could have been the conduit for this work. Anyone less extraordinary would have been destroyed by it. But he rode the dragon with skill and guile and tenacity, while lesser men would have been thrown at the first canter. We should be grateful, even if we may be glad that we don’t have to spend too much time in his company.