Winnie and Wolf

by A. N. Wilson

  Upon sober reflection over many years I still believe in my flatulence theory as a general explanation of why he appears to have slept with few women. Such a man would never have been able to endure laughter at that point and there can be no doubt that his own explosion would have been met by a trumpet of mirth from his partner no less uncompromising than the outburst that provoked it.

  But Winnie was different – there was the non-noticing side; there was also her hero-worship of Wolf; and there was her great warmth of heart.

  This is a leap ahead too fast in a story that is principally meant for you.

  Whatever the truth of his relationship with Winnie I offer my flatulence theory to the biographers and, historians as an essential factor in determining his relations with other women. Those who dismissed him as a neuter with no interest in the physical aspects of love perhaps overlook how very carefully he would have to look about for a woman who could be relied upon to be neither disgusted nor amused when the explosion took place. In the time I knew him, over about a decade, the flatulence problem grew ever more pronounced and it is impossible to detach it from whatever thoughts he might have had about sex.

  Perhaps Fidi, in his very Fidi-ish way, hit the nail on the head when he stood in one of his most characteristic postures one day in the salon. His right hand was balanced on the waist of his yellow shooting jacket. The left, between whose fingers dangled the ever-present Sanoussi cigarette, was laid with the back of the hand against his brow. Winnie, or the children’s governess Lieselotte Schmidt, must have been indulging in one of their periodic encomiums in praise of their hero and Siegfried listened with that amused expression on his face. After a while, when Wolf’s eloquence, courage, wisdom etc. etc. had been eulogized, Fidi chirruped – in his fluty tones – ‘Of course, my dears. I agree with every word you say. But – great as he is – it’s very hard to imagine anyone fancying Wolf.’ His face, unhealthily florid and glistening with sweat, was wreathed with merriment as he said it, his lips pursed against any contradiction.

  Winnie flashed a glance at her husband which was angry, defiant; but he was much too experienced a marital fencer to allow her to dissent from his words. ‘Winnie, have you been on to Urchs?’

  ‘I spoke to him yesterday–’

  ‘But still no bloody cheque…’

  Ernest Urchs was an American who had helped raise the funds for the Festival when Winnie and Siegfried made their tour of the States in the previous year.

  ‘We’re all going to bloody starve … We need money, Winnie, money.’

  ‘I rang Zurich yesterday,’ said Winnie patiently.

  ‘What good is bloody Zurich…’

  ‘Zurich is where the money is deposited.’

  When Fidi began one of his tirades, Winnie sometimes fought back, but more often she used the ploy of sweet reasonableness calming a tantrum.

  Although Fidi liked expressing the idea that without him the Festival would collapse, it was in fact Winnie who patiently ensured that all the details dovetailed.

  ‘If we converted the money into Reichsmarks it would be valueless by the end of the week – then we’d find ourselves without any money to pay the orchestra and Wotan would understandably be staying in Munich.’

  ‘Is Friedrich’s’ – he spoke of Friedrich Schorr – ‘room booked at the Anchor?’

  ‘Of course. He’s coming to dinner tonight here. Tomorrow you have piano rehearsals with him in the morning. In the afternoon an orchestra rehearsal with him and Olga.’*

  It was the first year that Friedrich Schorr was to sing Wotan at Bayreuth and I was keenly looking forward to the privilege of sitting in on the rehearsals. I had heard him sing Sachs at a Meistersinger performed in Munich, and I had also heard him sing Lieder in a concert in Berlin which – it being chiefly songs by Schubert and Schumann – my parents had consented to attend. His voice survives, so you can decide for yourselves by playing the discs if, unlike me, you possess a turntable. There’s no music in this flat outside my head. In my opinion, there has never been a more warm-hearted depiction of Sachs, nor a more touching Wotan in that scene, the greatest in the whole Wagner canon, of Wotan’s Farewell in Die Walküre. The bass-baritone was played like an instrument over which he had pure control. The voice, velvety and rich, has great steadiness, total purity of legato.

  And this I was able to hear, not just in the dress rehearsals and grand performances that summer, but also in the many smaller rehearsals upon which Siegfried allowed me to sit in.

  Schorr was a good man. This was one of his palpable qualities: perhaps it is why some purists think he is at his best in the genial role of Sachs and lacks the treachery, duplicity or sheer cruelty necessary to play Wotan. I don’t agree; I had heard, by then, Fidi conduct many rehearsals. He was a brilliant conductor and director: I never saw any of the great singers whom it was my privilege to hear with a more total grasp of a part than Schorr – and he built up his effects, patiently accepting every bit of direction and advice Fidi could offer him. It was during these rehearsals too that one was able to learn so much about the genius of Wagner himself, the way he had translated into incomparable musical innovation such a multiplicity of complicated thoughts and ideas and emotions with a kind of instinctual cleverness. Yes – there. Yes – that’s right. As Fidi and Schorr took the score to pieces and reconstructed it again one was witness to the dissection of pure genius, interpreted with astounding penetration.

  In fact, the arrival of Schorr for rehearsals, with his high straight brow, hooded eyes, barrel chest and genial smile, made everyone feel confident about that year’s Festival. The daily, often hourly, crises – two female harpists eloped, by bicycle, to Austria and another suffered from appendicitis; a major quarrel broke out among scene builders; one of the prettier boys in the chorus (Norwegian Sailor and Grail Knight) claimed Fidi had given him the clap, provoking one of his better put-downs: ‘Now, dear, you’re just showing off’; and the endless money worries – all calmed down since we knew, we at Wahnfried, that with Schorr singing in The Ring the Festival, which had been revived the previous year for the first time since the war and which had got off to a rocky start, was now destined to be a triumph.

  The levels of stress and tension before the Festival would be difficult to exaggerate and we were all extremely busy, so that although I continued to love Winnie in the same tormented way, the emotional torture was numbed for much of the time by the narcotic of work. She, Fidi and I worked the hardest – in the household – though the Festival Theatre itself, its warren of offices, sewing rooms and rehearsal rooms, was a positive anthill of activity.

  One feature of Winnie’s character which I should perhaps have sketched in earlier was a capacity for besotted crushes. The Wolf-mania was something a little different, or so I have concluded, though obviously it was of a piece with the ease with which she fell in love with people – with anyone but me. Her current crush was a young visitor from England, Hugh Walpole, destined to be celebrated in his day as a novelist. I never read him and I found his epicene and self-satisfied manner annoying. To make matters worse, I could not really understand what he said since he spoke English at all times: it is a language which I read with difficulty and which I have never had much occasion to speak.

  In all the agitation, the daily small crises leading up to the Festival, I was painfully aware that Winnie was emotionally fixated on Hugh. Whenever I came upon them they were talking in the man’s language and often laughing. It was at the height of the Norwegian-Sailor-Grail-Knight-clap business. Winnie as usual took no notice and one could not tell whether she did not know her husband had been messing about with a man in the chorus – whether, moreover, she genuinely did not know that the entire orchestra and chorus spoke of little else for about ten days – or whether she simply chose to rise above it. That is what I meant earlier when I spoke of her Welsh reserve. Perhaps she was trying to make her husband jealous by the hours of English conversation with Hugh Walpole? If so she did not noticeably
succeed since Fidi appeared quite at ease with Hugh, perhaps too much so, and spoke perfect English.

  Anyhow that Festival is defined for me by two robust exchanges in which I saw Winnie at her most magnificent. You may wonder, as I did then, how she found time or energy for such spats on top of her busy preparations for the Festival, but perhaps it was precisely the anxiety caused by the Festival that gave force to her outbursts?

  The first was a row whose gist I did not really catch since it was conducted in English. It happened about a week before the Festival began. I had left Fidi in the orchestra pit doing a choral rehearsal and had pedalled the mile or so from the Festival Theatre into town and down to Wahnfried where, over a cup of lemon tea, I had intended to address some of the correspondence that mountained on his desk. Tea, with a selection of cakes and biscuits, was put out in the salon at about half past four and it was to that room that I made my way first, hoping to take my tea into Fidi’s study. As I entered the room Hugh Walpole and Winnie were not merely having a heated exchange. They were having a row.

  I dare say that the real reason she was angry with him was emotional disappointment. She must have hoped for an intense and unrealistic period that Hugh might have become her lover. The fact, obvious to the rest of us, that if he had chosen to have an affair with either of the Wagners it would unquestionably have been with the husband might at last have dawned on her mysterious Welsh soul. Whatever the truth of that, she had chosen to quarrel with him about Wolf. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the phrases Landberg – where Wolf had been imprisoned – and Mein Kampf were discernible. Later – years later – when Hugh Walpole was just a memory, Winnie would tell me how angered she had been by his snobbery about Wolf, wondering how anyone could seriously imagine a man ‘like that’ becoming a great political leader. (‘Like that’ meaning a poor man, of no family.) Walpole stayed on in the house for about ten days afterwards and attended Schorr’s performances in The Ring, but it was clear, and a source of satisfaction to me, that he had gone too far. She did not forgive his slighting references to Wolf.

  As for the hero himself, however, even he was subjected to one of Winnie’s rebukes. Just as I felt her anger with Hugh Walpole was inspired by emotional disappointment, so I wondered how much this unwonted snappishness with Wolf was not in part inspired by resentment that when he came to the Festival that summer, rather than staying at the Villa Wahnfried, Wolf was put up in a house very nearby which had been taken by Helene Bechstein.

  Frau Bechstein, thirteen years older than Wolf, had seen both him and Winnie in their as it were unformed or unfinished state. As wife to the most distinguished piano manufacturer in Berlin she was bound to know pianist Klindworth and had seen the spindly-legged East Grinstead orphan soon after her arrival in the homeland. Little ‘Senta’ had been astounded, after the exigencies of the orphanage, to step into the villa which stood in the park of that piano factory and to see its wide marble staircase, its thirty-six rooms, its panelled walls hung with tapestries and paintings by Velásquez. In summer the Klindworths had been invited to the Bechsteins’ country estate. It was there that Senta had flown her first kite, a gift from Frau Bechstein, and learnt to row a little skiff on the boating lake.

  The Bechsteins were fervent conservative nationalists and, after the war, Helene had welcomed the young H to her salon when he had been brought along by the novelist Dietrich Eckart. Enchanted by the orator, Frau Bechstein conceived it her duty to make this Man of the People acceptable in society. She taught H how to bow and kiss a lady’s hand. She explained to him how to sit at a table, how to take the napkin and unfold it on his knee, how to hold a knife and fork. There were occasional lapses. His tutor had difficulty explaining that a knife is not held in the same way as a pen; but on the whole Helene Bechstein was proud of her Pygmalion role in transforming him.

  There was more than a little rivalry between the two ladies, Frauen Wagner and Bechstein, when it came to offering Wolf accommodation, though Winnie could see that while she was so busy with the Festival it made sense for Wolf to stay with the Bechsteins and come round to Wahnfried for visits. These visits themselves, sometimes made when Winnie was at the theatre, gave unfailing delight to the children, but were greeted with stiffness or even downright hostility by the old ladies. ‘Winnie, my dear,’ Eva remarked acidly over luncheon one day, ‘shorts!’

  ‘What is that?’ Winnie’s response to the sisters-in-law whom she detested was to assume her impenetrable grin and to ‘humour’ them as a form of humiliation.

  ‘We thought…’

  ‘We, in this context, being?’

  ‘Only, in the house.’ She simpered and attempted to subdue one of those irrepressible burps, which never failed to entertain Winnie and which always came upon her after food. ‘I mean he was even … the Divine Mother’ – burps – ‘suggesting he visit the Divine Mother wearing … lederhosen.’

  It is true that in the intense heat of our Franconian August, Wolf had abandoned the navy-blue serge suit of a previous visit in favour of traditional Bavarian costume – stockings to the noticeably hairless white knees, leather shorts, embroidered braces and a white shirt. Winnie once told me that when he was doing one of his public performances he could drink as many as twelve bottles of mineral water, sweating it all out as he roared his message of salvation to the crowds. She spoke as if all he did – even sweating – was an achievement worthy of congratulation. True it was hot and we were all sticky in those weeks, but even without the mineral water and the public oratory, Wolf’s face was always glistening, the armpits of his shirt two splodgy maps of the Greater Germany. There was a pungency about his presence which was almost of the farmyard. It was not to this that Eva, on behalf of the Divine Mother, objected, however. It was the bare flesh. No one older than a child had ever worn Bavarian National Costume in the house before.

  Whether he really penetrated to the Divine Mother’s quarters remained for the duration of the Festival, by the way, quite a mystery. Old Cosima was not demented, but even more than most members of the household at that stage, she lived in a world of dream. Her German, when spoken at all, was more and more accented and idiosyncratic, and much of the time she drifted into French. On a number of occasions during the Festival it was I who was designated to take her for one of her little walks in the Hofgarten. Sometimes she managed the 500 metres or so to the New Palace but more often we just walked past the graves of her husband, of her parrots, and his faithful Newfoundland Russ and pottered to the ornamental bridge beneath the chestnuts. She might be silent or speaking quietly in the French which was my second language but of which my mastery was far from perfect. ‘Et quand nous sommes arrivés à cet endroit-ceci’ – she teetered by the stone grave slab – ‘il m’a dit – le Maître – nous appellerons la maison la Bonheur finale – zum letzten Glück … Le professeur a-t-il nous visité aujourd’hui?… oui, oui, pauvre petit Professeur Nietzsche … si triste … pauvre professeur … ah, mes jardins … si parfaits, si parfaits avec … les Luxembourgs … Le Père, il est ici? Le Père? Depuis quelques heures je n’ai pas vu Le Père…’

  The characters who swam in and out of her consciousness, and to whose presence her semi-audible commentaries attested, had most of them been dead for years. Nietzsche came, as did Wagner and Liszt – and sometimes her first husband Hans von Bülow put in an appearance to convey forgiveness or blame, depending on her mood.

  But there was another presence today in her mind and one could tell that he agitated her by refusing to leave her head. ‘Un jeune homme si – si –’ It was, however, as if no French word quite suited this particular visitant and she eventually settled for our German ‘weird’ or ‘strange’: seltsam. ‘Der Himmel hing voller Geigen. Il me l’a dit!… Mais il me semble qu’il se croit une espèce de génie – il m’a raconté l’histoire d’un opéra qu’il a composé lui-même…’ During the walk itself the identity of a young man who thought himself a genius and who had composed an opera was completely myst
erious to me. It was only a few weeks later that Kiki, the Divine Mother’s parrot, remarked in Wolf’s most oleaginous drawing-room manner, ‘Gracious Lady!’ followed by the inevitable raspberry noise.

  But I was in the middle of explaining the extraordinary little squall which blew up between Winnie and Wolf. It happened at the Festival Theatre about half an hour before the first day of the Ring cycle. We were all very excited. I had heard Schorr now many times in rehearsal and with each performance his Wotan grew in terrible authority. It was cast iron clad in rich velvet.