by A. N. Wilson
Anyway, coming in my early twenties to the realization that I was never going to get very far with philosophy, I came to believe more and more that very many of the problems confronting philosophers in the twentieth century had already been addressed by Wagner in the nineteenth century. And that process began, really, with The Dutchman. The story is a very simple one. Into a small Norwegian seaport comes a ship. The strange, pale, dark-clad captain approaches Daland, the captain of another ship, and makes him an offer. Daland can have all the treasures on the stranger’s ship – gold, pearls, precious trinkets – in exchange for a night in Daland’s house. Has Daland a daughter? He has. Then in exchange for Daland’s daughter, Senta, in marriage, the greedy sailor can have a shipload of treasure. Daland can’t believe his luck.
Senta, a dreamy maiden notionally the girlfriend of a dullard sailor called Erik, is obsessed by a picture on her father’s wall of a pale, dark figure, the legendary flying Dutchman. While the other girls merrily sing a chorus over their spinning wheel, Senta wants to sing the ‘Ballad of the Flying Dutchman’. This is the story of a man who has made a pact with Satan that he could achieve immortality and be able to sail and sail around the world. The privilege is of course a curse since he sails on and on unable to die. Every seven years he comes ashore to seek a faithful wife. Were he to find one his curse would end – but he never does so.
When Senta has finished the song she tells the other maidens that she would like to be that maiden. Needless to say, the stranger who has struck the bargain with Daland is the Dutchman. Although at the end he says he cannot involve his cursed life with that of the innocent Senta, she sacrifices herself voluntarily and hurls herself into the sea.
Until he wrote The Dutchman Wagner was still an apprentice, learning from the Italian bel canto composers and from Weber. Operas were dramatized stories, often very silly stories, interrupted by musical ‘numbers’. The heroine could sing a long aria while dying of stab wounds, fall to the stage, receive a round of applause, get up and sing her dying song as an encore. Wagner, compelled to earn his bread and butter conducting such absurdities in Leipzig, Riga, later Dresden, where he’d been to school, was to pioneer something quite new, the music drama in which the opera was seen as a whole and the music itself expressed the inner lives of the characters. In The Dutchman, the choruses of Norwegian sailors and their maidens with spinning wheels, and the raucous tenor Erik are all production line operatic types – they could have been dreamed up by Weber or Meyerbeer, a second-rate operatic composer whose success ate into Wagner’s soul. Senta and the Dutchman, doomed from the beginning to their fatal union – redemptive in her eyes, destructive in his – inhabit a new musical world and communicate their inner lives to and through us and themselves by a completely new music.
It is a strange fact that when my lovely Winnie, when Winifred Wagner first arrived in Germany, at the age of nine, her adoptive parents immediately changed her name and called her … Senta, Senta Klindworth. When they had journeyed over to England, the child they picked up at the orphanage door in East Grinstead was named Winifred Williams. Knowing no German, and no family affection or happiness either, Winnie discovered both in the company of this strange old couple, Henriette, who was also an English-speaker and some sort of cousin, then aged seventy, and her ancient, white-bearded husband, Karl Klindworth, then aged seventy-seven.
I remember once walking up the Green Hill in Bayreuth towards the Festival Theatre, alone with Winnie at my side. Visitors to our town will remember that at the foot of the gentle ‘Green Hill’, a little way out of the town centre, is a row of sedate villas, built shortly after the Wagners had established themselves here and set on the sloping Franconian hillside on which stands the opera house where his works might, at last, adequately be performed. One of these villas bears an inscription,
Deutches Haus im Deutschen Land
Schirm dich Gott mit starker Hand. 1900.
Standing beside the gate and lighting up yet another cigarette, Winnie declaimed the little prayer to me and then, with a theatrical swing of the arm, she giggled.
May God protect with Mighty hand
A German house in German land.
‘It’s just what I felt about Germany, almost the moment I arrived,’ she said. ‘Safe. No more cruelty. No more nuns’ – the orphanage was run by a Church of England sisterhood – ‘devising punishments simply for being alive. In this country I found safety. Security. Kindliness. That was what I found.’ Looking up at the house again: ‘Seven years after that was built.’
On another occasion, during a rehearsal for The Dutchman in the Festival Theatre, she told me, ‘They called me Senta because old Grandpa Klindworth was transcribing the opera for the piano when I arrived in the house. Was he preparing to offer me up as a sacrifice, a ransom, to a dark stranger?’
Questions like this from Winnie’s lips were always answered by chesty laughs interrupted by coughing.
* * *
One of my earliest jobs had been playing the piano at the old Electric Odeon, the first cinema to open in our small town. Naturally, the early Wagner films were shown there. It might strike the modern reader as paradoxical that silent movies were made of Wagner’s operas, and there would no doubt be those, my father among them, who considered the silence an improvement on the music. My father was shocked by my earning my living in a cinema, a place he considered on the edges of seediness; not completely respectable if not actually immoral. He minded even more that when I might have been perfecting Beethoven’s sonatas for piano, or mastering another piece by Haydn, I was working up Karl Klindworth’s piano version of the Ring cycle for regurgitation in the cinema.
Karl Klindworth was one of the star pupils of the Abbé Liszt and he had founded the Karl Klindworth Music Conservatory in Berlin. My father, with his intense fastidiousness, had been aware of the group during his own upbringing and education in Berlin, and viewed their ideas, both about politics and about music (the two intermingled) with shuddering disdain.
At the time they adopted Winnie, Karl and Henriette Klindworth lived in a cranks’ commune where they could devote themselves to fruit-growing, vegetarianism, extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism. Each member of the group lived in his or her own little house, but the fruit-growing was communal, and the different members of the group came together in the evenings for music and conversation. Klindworth was a star among them, not only because he had been taught by Liszt, but also because he had been part of Wagner’s inner circle, and he was still in close epistolary touch with the widow of their hero, Cosima. It was this tall, beaky-nosed, strong-minded woman, Liszt’s daughter and Wagner’s second wife, who was regarded as the High Priestess of the Wagner shrine.
Winnie, or Senta, as she had now become, learnt German at Klindworth’s piano stool. He read to her from Grimm’s fairy tales. Among her very first German words were those drawn from the Grimms’ magical folkloric compilations. She learnt of witches, wicked stepmothers, magic forests and talking animals before she knew the German for train or hatpin. Sword, wolf, curse and gold were more serviceable words than living room, table lamp or left luggage office. Whereas most foreigners learning a language might master as their first sentence ‘My luggage is at the main station. Please have it brought to this hotel,’ Senta could say, ‘Though I have the appearance of a Swan, I am really an enchanted Prince.’ Klindworth also taught her folk songs and ballads. The ballad, says Hegel in his Ästhetik, comprises ‘the entirety of a complete event’. Wagner used to say that the whole of The Flying Dutchman was encapsulated in Senta’s Ballad sung in Act Two:
Traft ihr das Schiff im Meere an,
blutrot die Segel, schwarz der Mast?
When Senta sings this ballad about the legendary Dutchman, condemned to endless wandering unless he can find the love of a faithful wife, does she know that she is singing her own story? Does she know that the stranger who has offered her father money in exchange for her hand is the Dutchman? Did Senta Klindworth know, as
the ancient pianist began to unfold to her the story of the Master, of his long years of exile from Germany, of his second marriage and eventual settling in the small Franconian town of Bayreuth, did she know then that it was her destiny to become the matriarch of the new generation of Wagners, she the stranger, she the orphan of East Grinstead?
When it was felt that she spoke good enough German, the old people denied themselves their rural idyll in Oranienburg and returned to the city, where they took a flat and sent her to school.
‘Grandpa, when are you going to take me to the opera?’ she would plead. Or, ‘Grandpa, they are performing Lohengrin at the opera – please take me.’
‘You must wait, Senta. Your first experience of the opera must be in Bayreuth. That is where the Master intended his operas to be heard.’
‘But Grandpa…’
‘No buts. What is on display in the Berlin opera house is not real opera. These so-called opera companies, they are just the Jewish Appreciation Society. They pretend to admire the Master but ultimately they try to undermine him.’
‘How?’
‘By promoting so-called modern tripe, meretricious stuff which is subversive of music itself. These operas by Richard Strauss, for example. People maintain he is the heir to the Master. But they are terrible works, infected by Judaism, so are the so-called symphonies of Mahler.’
‘Are all the bad people Jews, Grandpapa?’
‘Strauss isn’t a Jew, but he is promoted by the fan club. These modernists and the international Hebrews who finance them are undermining all that makes Germany German. The Master long ago wrote a pamphlet called “Judaism in Music” and they will never forgive him for it. But he was right – the Jews are not a creative race, they are parasites, they sponge off other cultures, they suck them for what they can get out of them.’
‘So, Mahler is…’
‘Don’t even think about such unhappy things, my child.’
She was trained up, first at a local school and then, when Henriette Klindworth fell ill, at a boarding school, where she was disruptive and rebellious. (Shades of the orphanage.) She grew fast and by thirteen she had reached her full height. As she came and went, between school and the Klindworths, she began to hear, like the distant chorus of pilgrims drifting over the morning air in Tannhäuser, the story of the Wagner family. To the child Senta, who heard their names at almost every meal, the Wagners were the stuff of Story. As the old man talked on and on, only shadowy distinctions existed in her mind between the stories of the operas, which were already part of her inner life, and the inhabitants of Wahnfried. Indeed, for a long time she supposed that Wahnfried was a separate realm, such as Nibelheim or Klingsor’s Castle of Enchantment, rather than being the name the composer had given to his house (with a typical coinage meaning what? Peace after madness? Rest after chaos? Or mad chaos leading in the end to a sort of peace? Passion-Peace).
When the maid brought in the letters on the small silver salver to the Berlin apartment there would always be a particular happiness in his expression as old Klindworth said quietly, ‘Ah! A letter from Wahnfried.’
A letter from Wahnfried inevitably meant a letter from Cosima Wagner. Her letters to Klindworth concerned the crises and problems inescapable for anyone trying to run an opera house. She asked Klindworth’s advice about the music school she had set up in Bayreuth in the 1890s – a place where the Master’s opposition to the ‘false’ singing traditions of bel canto could be imparted to any young person prepared to endure a daily diet of physical jerks and readings from the Master’s prose works. Even this place, however, bred up its traitors. Alois Burgstaller, a former farmworker trained at Cosima’s school, sang the role of Siegfried in 1896 – when he was only twenty-five – but he committed a doubly unforgivable sin: he sang in New York. Since Cosima regarded Wagner’s works and the singers at the Festival Theatre and the members of the orchestra as her property, it was intolerable to her that a protégé should sing anywhere else. Worse, and this compounded the offence, he sang in an opera so sacred that until 1913, when the copyright ran out, Cosima would allow it to be performed only in Bayreuth – Parsifal.
The ‘treachery’ of Burgstaller happened when Senta was a little child, before her arrival in Germany, but it must have entered the canon of Wagner stories since she could afterwards remember Klindworth saying later, as he sat at the table reading the epistle (my father’s daily reading in Martin Luther’s translation of the Scriptures could not have been more reverent), ‘Ah! A letter from Wahnfried – they have reinstated Burgstaller!’ In other households in Germany comparable remarks might have been made about shifts in the Cabinet or scandals at the court of our beloved Emperor Wilhelm II.
Mention of the word scandal will naturally, for readers who know anything about such matters, prompt the question of what passed between Cosima and Klindworth over the matter of her son? Scandals at the court of the Emperor, although they obsessed the newspapers, would never have been mentioned at the unworldly table of Karl and Henriette Klindworth. If, for example, in 1902 they had even been aware of the malicious exposé by the journalist Maximilian Harden about Prince Philipp von Eulenberg they would almost certainly have dismissed the filth as lies put about by Jewish republicans. Eulenberg was one of the closest friends and courtiers of the Emperor. It was Eulenberg who had introduced the Emperor to the works of Wagner’s son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain from whose learned pages Wilhelm II had imbibed the comforting intelligence that Our Saviour had not been Jewish at all – the Galilee in Roman times being a largely Jew-free and Hellenized place. When the scandal burst and the Emperor was at last told he was totally incredulous: 144 allegations of improper conduct, mainly with fishermen and peasants from the Starnberger See! Some said Wilhelm passed out when told what Eulenberg and the peasants had actually done, unable to believe that anyone, still less any of his own circle, could indulge in such filthiness. One can be certain that Henriette Klindworth and her snowy-bearded husband had never discussed such matters with the growing ‘Senta’.
Certainly, my own strait-laced parents in Bayreuth, who neither liked Wagner’s music nor approved his cult, would never have spoken openly about what they would have deemed unnatural vice. Yet somehow, to those of us who grew up in that town, there was nothing very surprising about the stories that eventually became common knowledge about ‘Fidi’, as he was always known in the family. When at the age of twenty-four, after a number of false starts in my career, I told my friends that I had been engaged as Siegfried Wagner’s secretary, there was no need for them to explain the raised eyebrows or the smiles. Needless to say, being uncertain at this date where my own emotional preferences might come to be directed, I found such unspoken assumptions about Siegfried – hence any young man in his employ – to be deeply offensive. Yet who, seeing him in the town in the early years of our century, could fail to have the amused thoughts which my engagement as his secretary (in 1924) evidently provoked in the minds of my friends?
Long before I ever met a member of the Wagner family, and even longer before the thought crossed my mind that my destiny might be entwined with theirs, I remember, when quite a little child, being taken by my nurse to play with my wooden hoop in the Hofgarten, the gardens of the splendid baroque palace laid out by Wilhelmine the Margravine of Bayreuth-Brandenburg in the eighteenth century when that intelligent sister of Frederick the Great chose, rather than marrying her pudding cousin George and becoming the Queen of England, to come south to this charming little town and to live a civilized life. The Palace Gardens had for a couple of generations been a public park, around which the elegant streets of our town are arranged. The Wahnfried villa backs onto the gardens, and I must often have seen Cosima and Siegfried taking their constitutional down the central Allée of chestnut trees or crossing one of the small ornamental bridges in their … well, in their ornamental fashion. Siegfried and his mother were immediately conspicuous for their clothes, as well as for the strange figure they cut, the old lady so not
iceably taller than her son. If they walked in bright sunshine he might be delegated to hold a parasol over her veiled and bonneted head. If a light drizzle threatened, he would be the bearer of an umbrella. But these solicitudes on his mother’s behalf were always in danger of injuring her as the spokes of either covering device threatened her eyes rather than reaching above her stately head.
Cosima carried with her as an accompaniment to her expensive clothes of a thirty-year outmoded fashion an air of immense stateliness. If you had been told she was our now dethroned, then still regnant Queen of Bavaria you would have believed it. The train of her skirts swept behind her, gathering all the dust of the gravel walks but she showed no consciousness of this on her very long, very pale, very bony face whose nose in old age was a beak, to my child’s eyes, of almost incredible size. Whereas old Cosima’s costumes were of a consistency of style, her son’s were suggestive of a variety of roles, not always convincingly played. Sometimes he would be the dapper figure of a boulevardier, with grey Homburg, matching grey calf gloves, frock-coat and striped trousers. At other times he would appear, equally incongruously in a small town where a certain small-town respectability made any deviation from the sartorial norm conspicuous, in waisted hunting coat, with striped jodhpurs or breeches and stockings to the knee. The hats he wore when out with his mother were as various as the other clothes, straw boaters and panamas favoured in the summer months, and a curly bowler, even a silk top hat not being unknown as he tiptoed – I would almost say minced – along.
