Winnie and Wolf

by A. N. Wilson

  Wolf had been following every stage of the row with the aunts about the new production of Parsifal heralded for the next Festival. He had been very supportive of Winnie. ‘They are driving me to distraction,’ she said. ‘You know about this petition? I told you about it – nine hundred and something names saying that we can’t alter a flipping thing in the designs of the sacred Parsifal.’

  Wolf was the same person as H, but he kept H very well hidden from us. One of the reasons, I suspect, that Winnie was able to continue loving Wolf, and admiring him even when the extent of H’s atrocities had become obvious to everyone else in Germany, was that Wolf so much needed a place in the world where he could be normal, gentle, playful. It was a side of his nature which in other phases of existence he had only ever shown to dogs. He needed, when with Winnie and the children, to be someone who was, quite genuinely, as amiable as he almost always was with her. It was not that he was putting on an act. His Wolf-in-Bayreuth self was one of the things which held in check H’s capacity for truly monstrous behaviour. But when he had heard about the Eva Chamberlain petition one saw the corner of the curtain lifted. He pressed the table so hard that the various stage designs for Parsifal began to flutter, judder, fall over.

  ‘This petition, this attempt to thwart the will of the Director of the Bayreuth Festival – and you, Winnie, were made the Director quite specifically by the son of Richard Wagner…’ There were veins sticking out of the side of his head and the deep-blue eyes which, in Winnie’s gaze, were enchanting in a purely romantic sense now took on a shamanic fierceness. They were eyes which could turn you to snakes.

  ‘It is not tolerable that your plans should be upset in this way. So let me tell you now…’ Realizing that the fit of anger was not suitable for a Wagner family lunch party, remembering that he was with his old friends, that he was Uncle Wolf with the children, he visibly controlled himself. One hand went to his throat and stayed there for a while almost as if he were preventing the demons from rising in his gorge, then he smoothed the back of his head as he spoke: ‘The new production of Parsifal will go ahead and the money will be no problem, because even if all thousand who signed this monstrous petition were to stay away, I could fill their seats five times over. I guarantee we will underwrite every seat in the house. Have no fear of financial failure in the 1934 Festival.’

  This was an extraordinary undertaking and, incidentally, it was one he fulfilled. The KEH inside my head furiously began to kick me when I allowed myself the thought that here was a man who already, within a year of taking office, had reduced unemployment by over half, who seemed to have turned the economy round, who had revivified German industry and was also preparing to bring to pass what Richard Wagner had proposed, but only dreamed of: state subsidy of the arts. Today, in the 1960s, on our side of the border we take it for granted – but that is because if something in the DDR isn’t subsidized by the state it doesn’t exist.

  ‘I want you to look at these.’ His eye strayed nervously to the large clock on the mantelpiece. It was half past twelve. ‘They are drawings I have been doing over the last few weeks of possible set designs.’

  ‘Your own?’

  Winnie’s question was pertinent. I had been wondering who had done the drawings. My first hunch, that he had drawn them himself, was dismissed, partly because they looked too professional and secondly because I could not see how, on top of saving the Fatherland, he would have had the time. And then, as he began to show her the drawings, I remembered that saying which, as Uncle Wolf in the family circle, he must have quoted to us about the time of his poverty in Vienna, when he and friend Kubizek passed the hurdy-gurdy man playing ‘La donna e mobile’. Was Wolf the monkey or the organ grinder? Here he was, almost within grasp of total power. Only feeble old General von Hindenburg, lingering on as President, stood between him and – what was inevitable – his becoming the Head of State. Yet there was this world we hardly ever saw. Winnie saw much, much more of it than I ever did, all Wolf’s creepy friends in the Party, little Ernst Röhm, with his scarred face; the heavily eyebrowed Hess; the fat gamekeeper Göring, with his high complexion and his extraordinary country clothes, alternating with Ruritanian uniforms; the hideous bespectacled figure of Himmler, whom I once saw in Bayreuth, but who tended to stay away (like the pack of them, he hated Wagner); and most sinister of them all, Nosferatu himself, the evil genius of the whole propaganda machine. What if all these men – and the legions beneath them in the Party hierarchy throughout the ranks of the SA, the SS and all the sinister organizations of police, murder squads, private armies, and all the local administrators and youth leaders – what if they all, who were now enjoying their day of triumph in Germany, what if they were the power in the Movement? What if H was necessary to them only as a voice, as a figurehead, as a monkey gyrating to the music of the hurdy-gurdy?

  Of course, it was the possibility of asking this question that in part contributed to H’s preternatural popularity with the masses, since they did think of him as a creature apart from the Movement, just as the Saviour was distinguished from the errant and even treacherous Apostles. ‘If the Leader knew of this…’ That familiar phrase … Winnie herself used it, but his adorers all over Germany did so too. In this sense Winnie was entirely typical. So his strength lay in part in his detachment from the thugs, creeps, killers and controllers who believed in Nazism; while of course he knew, better than any of them, better perhaps than anyone who has ever lived, how to manipulate and exercise power over people. He was in fact both organ grinder and monkey, but it was necessary for his maintenance of power to pose as monkey; a high-risk strategy which led him to an everlasting paranoia about those closest to him in the Party, fearful that they wished to do away with him once he had delivered to them the only thing they craved: power itself.

  ‘Here, for example, is Act One – and you see, at the moment when the door opens in the rocky cliff and the knights walk in procession to the Chamber of the Most Sacred Grail, we have…’ He produced another drawing proudly. ‘This. Something very simple, something magisterial – and you see…’ He pointed with his stubby finger. ‘This is the grave-like chamber where Titurel has been lying, then the old man comes out of there and greets his wounded son, Amfortas.’ He rolled his ‘r’ when he said ‘Amfortas’ and looked at the ceiling with a hieratic expression, which would not have been unfitting on the face of the Pope while saying a public mass, and he muttered, in words which were perhaps almost a prayer, the old king’s words ‘O! Heilige Wonne! Wie hell grüsst uns heute der Herr!’ (Holy rapture! How brightly the Lord greets us today!).

  * * *

  It was never possible for a work to move forward unless Richard Wagner was immersed in what he called a musical aroma. The Parsifal story, in the medieval poem of Wolfram von Eschenbach, had been a sketch for an opera ever since that pregnant decade the 1840s, but it did not belong to the time of revolutions. The completed opera was not performed until 1882, at Bayreuth. His grown-up lifetime of spiritual and emotional experience had to be poured into the music. The long rambling narrative of the medieval poet had to be compressed, compressed, compressed into myth. The only thing in the history of the performing arts to be compared with the Greek tragedies is Bach’s passion music – but it was all composed at a time when myth had been changed into dogma. It must be Wagner’s task, after the storm clouds of the nineteenth century had darkened the skies, to refashion all that stuff as myth. ‘I do not believe in God, but I believe in Godliness, which reveals itself in the sinless Jesus,’ he said.

  * * *

  Wolf was saying, and Winnie stared at him with some anxiety as he expatiated upon the theme, ‘You want to know why the Roman Catholic Church has been so strong for so many centuries – where its hard inner core of strength resides? A celibate clergy. The Popes knew a thing or two, I’m telling you. By compelling them to be celibate, the Church has built up huge reserves of power, emotional, spiritual power. This, undoubtedly, is one of the themes of Parsifal, I fi
nd. Amfortas is wounded, kaput because he has yielded to seduction. Parsifal can raise the sacred spear because it has not been tainted by…’

  * * *

  But the aroma, he could sense it, Richard Wagner, but not catch it. There were too many themes to be compressed. One day he told Cosima it was a purely technical matter: ‘Stupid fellow, not D minor, it must be C minor – and then when I’d seen that everything was all right.’

  Yet for years the words and the music failed to come together. He could not instinctually feel where the music was leading. Only with the chorus of the flower Maidens in the second act, the girls who dance about the doltish Parsifal and try to seduce him, did words and music come together. And after that, though with painful slowness, ‘everything was all right’.

  They came to him, the flower Maidens, in London of all god-and music-forsaken places. The London Philharmonic Society, in 1855, asked him to conduct a season of concerts, a selection of his own works. It was an interruption to life – he was finally getting down to the orchestration of his central, finest work, Die Walküre. His emotional life was, as ever, in chaos, with love for Mathilde Wesendonck and guilt about Minna, and an irrepressible lust that led to all kinds of more furtive encounters all taking possession of him. And his mind was not so much on the march as in a whirlwind, the old revolutionary certainties having been blown away by Schopenhauer; the somewhat clunking rejection of religion and its mythologies in the writings of Feuerbach giving place to a rediscovery of what all that religious stuff was – not God or dogmas but our relationship with Out There, our lonely and intolerable awareness of our place in an indifferent universe of unexhausted suffering, a place where our own consciousness scalded us with the awareness, not only of our own unhappiness but that of others, and not merely of human beings, but of sentient animals.

  Walking on a terrace during a reception at Holland House, some grandees’ mansion in London, he had heard a peacock shrieking and formed the curious sensation that it might be trying to speak to him in Sanskrit, the ancient Aryan tongue, the ur-language of religious experience and of the Upanishads, the language of the murmuring Rhine water.

  God, that concert season in London was hell! The publication of his pamphlet ‘Judaism in Music’ had guaranteed him a sticky reception in the London press, so that his concerts received terrible notices. Wherever he went he met admirers of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer. Prince Albert and Queen Victoria had attended one of his concerts and when he had been presented to them afterwards the Prince had said, speaking of course in their own language, ‘I especially liked the Prelude to Lohengrin. It had quite something of Meyerbeer about it.’ Though a musical amateur himself, the Prince had clearly acquired the English cloth ears since marrying his quite monstrously plain little cousin, the Queen of England.

  Richard had spent as much time as possible with his own countrymen. He had met the young man who was destined to be a close friend and interpreter of his work, Karl Klindworth. A young pupil of Liszt’s, Klindworth had come to London under the mistaken impression that he could live as a pianist and a teacher of the piano. Liszt’s concerts in England were always a sell-out, but the entire musical life of the country took place in cliques and you could not rely on any interest in music on behalf of the generality of people. It was indeed a Land Without Music. Klindworth was leaving as soon as possible and going back to Germany.

  Naturally, Wagner avoided the Royal Opera House where Meyerbeer was god and where the quality of singing was appalling. Those evenings not spent conducting selections of his work, he contrived more and more to spend alone. He paced the streets of London, a shocking mixture of unparalleled opulence and squalor. He fell – as who could not, they were so thick on the ground you literally had to press your way through them to get into a café or chophouse – for the charms of the whores, some of whom were friendly but most of whom were ill-mannered, greedy, quick, incompetent. He took boat trips on the Thames and the vast brooding warehouses, the ships coming in from every corner of the Empire and the fetid squalid tenements in which the poor were crammed like unhappy zoo animals all seemed an embodiment of the Nibelung slavery. No wonder that boring materialist Karl Marx had taken up residence here and saw it all leading to an inevitable collapse.

  But one aspect of London was to be commended. The middle and lower classes knew how to enjoy themselves, and the pubs, the music halls and the popular theatres were all delightful. It was the time of year when Christmas was approaching and many of the theatres had enactments from Grimm and other fairy tales. There was a superb Little Red Riding Hood, which he attended more than once, and a very good Cinderella. Here, at last, was what was so lacking in any of the ‘musical’ circles he had discovered in England, a genuine connection between audiences and performance, a real appreciation of what was going on in a story.

  Best of all was Mother Goose. The figure of the Bird Herself, in her silky festoons of artificial feathers, was a man, who sang ribald songs. Much of the meaning was impossible for a foreign-language speaker to catch, but the atmosphere was clear enough. And there was then the most sublime dance of flower Maidens on the stage. He went back to watch them again and again. They exuded good humour, easy sensuality and that feeling of lift which good art always gives you, of taking off into the air. Here was something sublimely well done.

  The drama of the Three Wishes, and the Golden Egg that results, would itself make a good opera. But as he sat, rather drunk, in the stalls, waiting for the coming of the flower Maidens afternoon by afternoon, and night after night, a whole jumble of thoughts spread before him. Their mouths half open, their wavy, thick hair, braided with paper flowers, suggestive of the triangles of warm, moist hair and the caves of delight they curtained, beneath their floral costumes; their breasts not visible but evident as they danced. And yet what they represented was both an escape into paradise and a journey towards further and further enslavement to the world of sense; and if one could only rise above those feelings and be detached from them; if the everlasting tug of lust could be removed and we could see life clearly, as Buddhist monks, high above the mountains in the cloud-capped monasteries of the Himalayas, ancient seat of the Aryan purity, saw life; if we could be detached from lust, but not detached from pity – might we not enter into life, the true eternal life, which was not the infantile fantasies of the Christian Church, an everlasting hallelujah, but a still, deep awareness of Being itself, of life, such as patient dogs know, and show to us in their watery eyes and gentle faces?

  Those flower Maidens in Mother Goose never left him, and when the time came twenty years later to orchestrate Parsifal, they returned full blast into his mind, carrying with them mysteriously both the allurement they had held then and the message of detachment which, at the time, had seemed to be at war with them.

  Yet nearly thirty years of experience after those London evenings had altered all perspectives. Young Klindworth had become old Klindworth, a close and dear friend. The Abbé Liszt his master had become Wagner’s most tiresome father-in-law, and Cosima had become his muse: religious and tormented Cosima. After they had brought the children back to Germany and settled in Bayreuth, and she had left (or hoped to leave) her Catholicism behind her, she took the children to the Lutheran church, the Stadtkirche. After a life-time of staying away from church, Wagner took to going with them, able at last to find in Christianity the core-myth without being distracted by the false dogmas. And she had said to him, one Communion Sunday when the dean had given them both the sacred bread and the cup, that the experience had given her greater rapture than anything except their wedding itself.

  He knew she was being tactful. He knew that for her, as for her father the never-quite-reformed Abbé-roué or roué-Abbé, the religious ecstasy quite rivalled and at times obscured the pleasures of the flesh; that, more than that, the pleasures of the flesh merely provided a vehicle for yet more ecstatic religious guilt.

  The wound of Amfortas – old Wagner carried that, ever more subject to wheezing, t
o bowel complaints, to sleeplessness, to exhaustion which made composition all but impossible. The energy of the celibate Parsifal, akin to the powerful energy of Jesus or Joan of Arc. So, little by little, and at the ever more frantic demand of his royal patron, he laboured on to complete that strange, incoherent, but everlastingly haunting work.

  * * *

  ‘And then, you see, in the second act – the Garden of Klingsor!’ Wolf had it all worked out. ‘Do you remember, when he was in the final stages of composing Parsifal, Wagner was so ill that he had to recuperate in Italy and eventually he reached the Palazzo Rufolo in Ravello. He said, “Klingsor’s magic garden is found!” I have asked to be taken there when I make a visit to Mussolini in Rome later this year. Naturally, my Cabinet think I am mad – Heinrich –’ For a moment I was startled, thinking he meant my brother, because he added, ‘You haven’t met the faithful Heinrich, have you?’

  Himmler was meant. ‘… wants the performance of Parsifal banned. He thinks that his own Grail Knights in the SS are stronger than the knights in this drama. We shall see about that.’

  After this surprising little revelation he smirked. A lackey entered and murmured, ‘Professor Roller, My Leader.’

  ‘Ah yes.’

  Wolf had been beside himself with excitement and glee all morning, ever since I’d found him putting the finishing touches to his table decorations. When he was showing Winnie his sketches for the new production, I had put his good spirits down to the fact that he had been able to come up with designs that pleased him so much. I had not realized, nor had any of us, that he planned a spectacular little ‘coup’ which would, as he put it on another occasion, ‘thoroughly scotch the 900 petitioners’.

  The lackey led into the room the bearded, elderly figure of Alfred Roller. In 1908, aged eighteen, Wolf had been too shy to approach this man’s door, for here was the king of opera design, who had created the sets on which Mahler’s interpretation of Wagner had been staged. Now, as his country’s Chancellor, Wolf welcomed the old man.