by A. N. Wilson
But after the shaking hands, and bobbing to numbers of new people, Winnie had been led into the darkened amphitheatre. No aisles – but that did not strike her as odd since she had no theatrical experience with which to compare it. No orchestra. Where was the orchestra? There had been the thump, thump of doom decreeing the beginning of the drama, then the rustling closure of door curtains; still there was no sign of any players. Then the storm of The Flying Dutchman began. She knew it by heart as a piece for piano transcribed by Klindworth but nothing had prepared her for the effect the overture would have when played by an orchestra. It was transport. She, Senta Klindworth, was the Senta before her. When the curtain went up, over the invisible orchestra there was a direct and uninterrupted engagement between the audience and the drama. The noise, the sheer volume of the singing! Barbara Kemp was the soprano who played her. The music made the experience. No other music quite did this. When the Dutchman – Bennet Challis – began his bass-baritone offer to Daland – the purchase of his daughter with a shipload of treasure – Senta Klindworth knew the beginnings of surrender. No words were given – certainly not by the Klindworths! – for this particular swooning, but here was a hint of it, a weakness, a delicious sense of falling, a moisture. Whatever magic Wagner himself had possessed to convert his own sense of exile, his own self-hatred, his own self-awareness into musical myths, it now had a life of its own that possessed the audience. The applause at the end of each act testified to its power all right, but Senta Klindworth had a deeper sense that the mystery enacted before them all that afternoon on stage was the story of her own inner life. She had no beau like the boring Erik, who begs the stage Senta not to throw herself away on the Dutchman; but Senta Klindworth felt a no less passionate desire to cast away dull normality. The attraction for her was not the trivial jolly world of the Norwegian sailors and their spinning girlfriends – rather was she drawn to the great spectral ship. When it first appeared in Act One the wind instruments struck up a ghostly threatening chord, a harbinger of the ‘Valkyrie’ themes in The Ring. The ship is inhabited not so much by ghosts as by the undead; Senta is vulnerable youth about to be enmeshed in the spidery tyrannies of the very old.
Sie sind schon alt und bleich, statt rot,
und ihre Liebsten, ach! sind tot!
Snowy-haired white-bearded Klindworth bends over the veiny old fingers heavy with gold and amethyst rings of the divine Cosima, and Senta finds herself surveyed by the very sharp dark eyes of the old lady. The face is summing up the value of goods in a market. The old eyes run shamelessly up and down her future daughter-in-law’s face, bosom, legs. There is something enraging but also thrilling in this as beautiful youth stands with all its advantages before crumbling old age. And at some point – that evening? next morning? – youth is brought to Wahnfried, a flying Dutchman of a house positively peopled with ghosts and with the old: pasty, grey-complexioned servants; ashen-faced old Mr Chamberlain, already an invalid, with his uncompromisingly indoor pallor and indoor clothes – slippers, velvet smoking cap – his wife Eva – only forty-something but old to Senta – and her sister Isolde. And then – making her laugh almost at once with a joke and holding an ignited cigarette in one hand – Siegfried.
‘This is the child,’ says Cosima.
And, first among all these people, Siegfried says, ‘How awful for you, meeting us lunatics all at once,’ and he laughs and gently touches her right hand with smooth lips. The mingled smell of Senoussi cigarettes and Cologne water, always the Fidi smell.
She called it ‘love at first sight’ when she had made it all, the whole experience, into a story about herself.
Saying things could make them come true? Saying the right thing was better than experiencing it? Her façade of smiles was so very difficult to get behind. In love with Winnie, I wanted to tell myself that every word of enthusiasm about the man in her life was a brave carapace, that she did not love her husband, that her schoolgirl enthusiasm for Wolf was a pathetic substitute for ‘the real thing’ – whatever that would be. But I know now that what she said was true or as true as anything is – sort of true. Was not the trouble with Anglo-Saxon philosophy that it drove itself into the buffers with the all-out scepticism of David Hume? How can we know anything? Then Hume awoke Immanuel Kant from his dogmatic slumbers and our great German puzzled out the fascinating question for the length of his uneventful days in Königsberg, Prussia, now Soviet Kalinin. We Germans were off on our spiritual intellectual helter-skelter, with fichte paving the way for Hegel’s Great Schemes, with their idealism creating the modern world with our mysterious selves at the centre of it all – inventing our world as much as absorbing its mystery.
Richard Wagner was one of the most interesting manifestations of this great revolution in perceiving the world. Reality is not, as the empiricists and realists wanted to say, a fixed given. Reality is a perceived truth, about life itself. Our perspective on the world remakes it every time we see it.
Winnie was too stylish ever to complain about her lot, though later years, the years of her widowhood, would cause her some tears. She found Fidi’s incurable quest for boys, throughout their marriage, a menace and an embarrassment. The endless behind-the-scenes gossip in the Festival Theatre, who had or hadn’t, among orchestra or chorus boys, granted him a little favour continued all the time. Because these players and singers became Winnie’s life, her extended family, she could not fail to have been irritated. It hardly ever showed, in any of my observations. Coming to Bayreuth was love at first sight for her and that was certainly true. Becoming part of the Wagner family was daunting. She found her sisters-in-law forbidding and jealous, her beaky old mother-in-law, who taught her French and made her do the dusting, an object of amused terror. None of them could have known, when they brought in ‘the child’ as Cosima called her, what an extraordinary stroke of luck was coming their way. Not only did she provide the family with a future – four children born either during or just after the Great War. Not only did she supply Fidi with loving, good-humoured companionship, which silenced the newspaper scandal mongers. She possessed what neither old Klindworth nor Cosima could possibly have seen in her seventeen-year-old self: the extraordinary skills required to run an opera company and keep Bayreuth alive. Cosima, who had preserved Bayreuth as a shrine to her husband’s memory, thereby destroying the spirit of his injunction – Kinder, schaff neues! – was too old to do it. Fidi had struggled until he met Winnie. To run an opera house you do not merely need to love music and to have a good ear. You need to be able to co-ordinate an enormous assembly of often highly temperamental people – conductors, stage designers, producers, singers, musicians. When one of them goes off sick or quarrels with you, you need to know whom to ring up as a replacement. You need to know how to do auditions and how to arrange the complicated timetables of rehearsals and rehearsal rooms. You need the self-confidence to be able to hire the big stars as singers and conductors, and the strength to stand up to their grotesque egos. You need to be patient, imaginative and greedy enough to be a good fund-raiser. Go to any opera house in Germany today – or go to New York or Milan if, unlike me, you are allowed to travel – and you will find one variety or another of chaos. You would not find anyone, at the Met or the Berlin State Opera or La Scala, with quite Winnie’s preternatural range of abilities. Wotan or whatever god smiles on the Wagners assuredly brought her to Bayreuth.
In that first experience of the Festival Theatre, a couple of weeks before war broke out in 1914, she had her vision, and remained for ever true to it. And I sometimes ask myself whether even Wolf himself was not simply yet another of the army of helpers enlisted by Winnie to keep the show on the road. That first experience of The Flying Dutchman was an enchantment, an epiphany. Senta Klindworth was led into the dark ship to lift its curse and to live among the spectral old crew who inhabited it. But if it was Senta who was led into the drawing room at Wahnfried, a timeless spectacle in her bridal costume, incomprehensively innocent, it was Winifred Williams who d
rew back the bridal veil. Fidi did not persist in old Klindworth’s ‘Senta’ nonsense. (They’d died, the Klindworths, they’d done their task in the Divine Scheme and could sing their Nunc Dimittis – old Karl went to Valhalla in 1916 and neither lived to see the miracle they had enabled: the four children.) Fidi called her Winnie and so she remained.
The last Wagner Festival at Bayreuth was in 1915 and thereafter the stage Richard Wagner built fell silent. There was talk of reviving it after the war, but with what? As fast as they tried to save money raised in Germany by Fidi’s operas, the faster did inflation destroy it. It was Winnie who urged Fidi on and Winnie who accompanied him to America in 1924 to raise the necessary six or seven million marks needed.
Shortly after getting to know the Wagner family, H was passing through Bayreuth with a rich young American admirer of his called Putzi Hanfstaengl. I came to know Putzi quite well a little later and it was from him I heard this story. Winnie and Fidi were away, so H did not go to Wahnfried to pay his respects. Rather he asked Putzi, an enormously tall, suave, musical young man, to drive his sports car to the other end of town to look at the opera house. H, you realize, had by now become an acquaintance of the Wagners but in all his time there had been no operas at Bayreuth. He’d only known the place post-war.
The two men drove up the Green Hill and parked outside the theatre. Hanfstaengl was glad to park the car and get out for fresh air. H had been at his most charmless on the long drive from Munich, talking on and on about his political scheme to defeat Social Democracy, restore the former glories of 1914 and conquer new lands. All the time he’d talked, neither wanting nor noticing answers, and as he talked he had farted for the Fatherland, filling the little car with a scarcely endurable sulphurous atmosphere.
The two men, Hanfstaengl towering over his companion, had slammed the car shut and approached the doors under the front loggia and found them locked. A side door was open, however, and they had managed to get inside. It was a mid-morning in spring. An eerie greyish-green light came from windows far to the back of the stage, while, front of house, the amphitheatre was in pitch darkness. By trial and error, through various doors, they found one marked STAGE. NO ENTRY – and entered.
They found themselves on a vast stage seemingly festooned with dust and cobwebs. To their left, carefully constructed in wood, was the house front of Daland, the Norwegian sailor. Behind, looming against the flat of the northern ocean, brooded the huge spectre-ship.
Putzi, whose American money put him in a different league from most of the Nazis, had a theatrical and musical background in his German family past. His great-grandfather Ferdinand Heine had designed the costumes for the première of The Flying Dutchman and for Rienzi. The overbearing, flatulent bully who had accompanied Hanfstaengl in the car became a different person, quietly and humbly fascinated by everything Putzi had to tell him.
Never forget this when you think of Winnie and Wolf. Those who suppose her a wicked person do not understand that the ‘Wolf’ she saw was the gentle opera lover who revealed himself to Hanfstaengl that cool spring day. We all present different selves to others. Sometimes we do it consciously, sometimes not. Winnie brought out the best in the man she idolized as Wolf. Maybe that was the worst thing anyone could have done. By allowing H to put aside the bullyism and the capacity to murder, and to become the polite, charming, opera ‘geek’ who remembered the names of contraltos in long-gone provincial productions, maybe she did herself, and the world, an injustice? H’s niece who committed suicide must have seen things about her uncle which made death alone the salve to her pain. The woman unlucky enough to be made his wife on the last day of his life saw very little in those last so fully documented days except a raving fanatic whose megalomania had been responsible for tens of millions of deaths and the total destruction of our country. He almost never showed this side of his nature to Winnie.
My shame is that in the moods when I hated him I did so for all the wrong reasons. I did not hate him because of his poisonous opinion of the Jews, or his more generalized contempt for humanity: I did not hate him for his vaunting pride, which enabled him, a no more than average architectural draughtsman, to compare his artistic achievements to Michelangelo. As a matter of fact his ludicrously high opinion of himself, believing that he was a Frederick the Great redivivus, for instance, could be seen, in a poverty-stricken Austrian corporal, to have something touching about it. I only loathed him because Winnie loved him. Because Winnie loved him, I would not admit there was anything wrong with loving him, a contorted state of mind that led me to the ludicrous and disgraceful position of defending H when he was attacked by my scrupulous and morally intelligent family.
Love’s obsessiveness forces us into the most painful imaginative experiments. A friend is absent and we think of him with fondness or not at all. A love object is absent and it is a gnawing ache. We envy all who are with her – her children, her friends, her dogs. Anything she touches, we envy. How much, that afternoon when Wolf enacted the fisherman and his wife, did I envy baby Verena on Winnie’s lap, her hands enclasped in Winnie’s hands, her bottom slithering between Winnie’s thighs, her back pressed to Winnie’s breasts.
In the time I was in love with her – is that time over? I will rephrase that. In the time when love was at its most persistently, gnawingly obsessive, I imagined her actually doing it, promiscuously, as Fidi did. If, cig between her fingers, she touched another man’s arm in casual social conversation or if a male member of the opera company called her ‘dear’ or ‘dearest’ – many did, for she was an affectionate, bubbling, laughing girl – I winced with pain. Sometimes I actually imagined that these innocent exchanges, touches, glances were clues of a carnal relationship she could scarcely bother to keep secret. Later, of course, when her entire existence was dominated by just such a liaison, I could see the world of difference that exists between a woman under another man’s thrall and one who merely enjoys male company.
At this first and early stage of loving Winnie, however, I was tormented by jealousy of all: but her passion for Wolf, as she always called him while he was alive, caused me particular complications of pain. Contrary to my own sensible family, I could entirely see why Winnie idolized him – and this even before he had performed the political and economic miracles, as they seemed at the time, of his early years in office. To tell the truth, although old Mr Chamberlain spoke of H as a national saviour in the early 1920s, I do not believe any of them really thought then he was going to get anywhere. At the time we are talking about his ‘party’ consisted of at most a few hundred activists – a mixture of thugs and harmless cranks. No – it was not the Party – it was he who captivated.
Yet the fact that he captivated her, as it seemed to me in a particular way, made me have the most complicated feelings towards him. As a member of the Wagner family circle now, albeit as amanuensis to Siegfried a very minor one, I naturally felt ashamed to differ from them in their views. They all adored ‘Wolf’, especially the children, and his visits had become high spots. Contrary to my own family, I moreover believed, roughly speaking, in the völkisch solutions to our poor nation’s problems: a restoration of our borders, an end to ‘reparations’, anything to stop the economic chaos and the ever-present threat that we should become a Communist, anarchist state, embroiled in civil war as Russia had been, with millions killed. Pride in our nation, language, traditions – belief in our future – where was the harm in that?
So yes, I saw the nationalist programmes as the only ones – most Germans did except for Communists and perverse and fastidious people like my family. This did not remove the knot of pain that came into my chest when I thought of Winnie in Wolf’s arms. Whole love scenes between them played in my head.
I tortured myself by envisaging, during one of those winter nights when he arrived alone at Wahnfried, that they had consummated their union. So fixedly had this fantasy lodged itself in my skull that I could follow every stage of the evening as if watching it on film. An abrupt tel
ephone call ‘Hello’. This Winnie.
‘It’s Thou’ – from their first meeting they had dispensed with the formality of the second person plural.
‘Where?’
He would be saying that he had put up at an hotel a few miles out of town where they were sympathetic to him and where he could feel secure from the Secret Police who did indeed watch him carefully after his release from prison. I imagined her cranking her car, which she nicknamed Presto, into action – she was the first woman in Bayreuth to get a driver’s licence – and when the engine was running, taking her seat behind the wheel, driving at full throttle to the hotel a few miles out of town, which was Wolf’s favoured hiding place at this date. The fact that this fantasy caused so much pain did not prevent me from revisiting it repeatedly. I saw, or felt, or imagined, the excited embrace between the two of them in the darkened hotel courtyard. I saw her being led into the hotel, hurrying furtively hand in hand with her lover down the corridor – and then, as the lederhosen or blue serge trousers of our future Leader fell to the ground, I forced myself to imagine her moans of pleasure. The only relief to my agony as these painful images filled my mind would come at the conclusion of the business. Winnie and Wolf would by then be completely undressed and on the bed. My tortured brain could even hear the squeaking bedsprings and see her ringed fingers clutching his mole-dotted naked back. But then at his moment of release there would come one of his explosive farts and I could hear Winnie laughing. Winnie had an earthy sense of humour and any bodily malfunction – for example, Eva Chamberlain’s tendency to burp – always made her chuckle uncontrollably. Wolf’s flatulence was out of control. I imagine that for most of his early visits to the Villa Wahnfried he was just about able to hold it all in with one of those preternatural displays of will-power that enabled him in different contexts to face down opponents, to conquer nations. But there are some occasions when all the muscles in the body relax and when wind, however fiercely held in, would be bound to burst forth. The moment of sexual ecstasy must be such a moment.
