by A. N. Wilson
She was in no way inclined to soft-pedal her objections to Winnie’s politics. But nor was it a question of jettisoning her political convictions for the sake of a job in the orchestra. You knew Helga better than anyone and you know she would never have done that.
‘What you can’t get away from is that she’ – that is, Winnie – ‘is a decent person. How you explain her choice of friends – that’s a mystery.’
It is indeed, and I am certainly no nearer solving it, fifteen years after I last saw Winnie, than during that spring.
What Winnie had intuited, and I had not plumbed, was Helga’s longing for a child. Helga told me, some years after we had adopted you, that she had actually talked quite freely about this to Winifred Wagner. Unlike me, but like Winnie, Helga was a person of uncomplicated generosity of nature. If she saw someone in need, and she was in a position to satisfy that need, she would not hesitate, whereas I would always contrive to think of five good reasons why I should not force myself to perform a good deed. Helga did not have any problems with adopting a child. We had a (just about) big enough flat. We both wanted children. Here was a kid who wanted a home.
‘But what about when – if – what if I have…’ she had stammered to Winnie.
‘You want a child of your own very much, don’t you?’
I wasn’t present during this conversation, but I can see it, that sheepish grin which lit up Helga’s face when she was most serious.
‘I have known so many people’ – nod, nod, nod – ‘who have adopted a child and almost immediately found that they could conceive.’
Helga apparently then replied to Winifred that she too had heard this, but what would happen if, having adopted Senta and had a child of her own, she found that she loved her own child and neglected the one we were arbitrarily proposing to rescue from the nursery.
‘Look,’ Winnie had said, ‘life is full of mysterious emotional chances. You might have three or four children of your own and find that there is one whom you simply cannot love as you love the others. Or you might favour one and neglect the others. These things happen. Children learn to live with such problems. Do you think it would be better for little Senta to grow up in an institution or to have you as her mother?’
So the thing was settled, and soon after that you came to us and Helga bought you your first recorder, and your first triangle, and taught you your first exercises on the piano; and I read to you from Struwwelpeter and the fairy stories of the Brothers Grimm. And so our lives began.
Out of the primal, cloudless ether came a breath. It grew. As the movement of breathing swelled, so there grew a yearning cloud which, in its condensation, became our world. Being. So the process of yearning, apparent fulfilment and everlasting frustration is repeated, and repeated, an endless sad music filling all things. So – the origins of being. From cloudless infinity came being itself. From two yearning body-souls there came about the fusion which led to – you, me, all. Like all yearnings in a conscious being, they are doomed to be unsatisfied. For the two spirits and yearnings cannot escape their egotism, and for ever tug and strain. Out of an impersonal desire grew matter, moisture, the world. But in its later stages of evolution certain beings, endowed with consciousness and cursed to name their yearnings as hope and love, were doomed to an eternity of unhappiness until such desire could be numbed by acts of wisdom and of will. Only when we have so disciplined our minds as to be released from desire can we reach nirvana. Every instinct of nature teaches us the illusory opposite, never more so than when we fall in love, and it appears to our tormented and deceived souls that ‘happiness’ can be found with ‘another’. The Lord Buddha taught that if we reverence all things, forswear violence and practice meditation, we might learn how to renounce the ego itself and prepare ourselves for a purification in our next rebirth. Bayreuth-Boy Stirner taught the corollary (do I mean opposite?). That we should learn to swim happily in our own egos, not hoping to escape them by the means of systems, politics, religions, even in the modern religion of personal relationships.
Winnie, with some perhaps Celtic instinctual wisdom, knew that the fusion of human souls was illusory, that the best we could hope for on this planet was good-humoured friendships and partnerships, but that we ultimately remain alone. She was not He. He was not She. You were not They. The fusion of will, desire, energy which practised its deception upon them both, your blood parents, during those unhappy days of November 1931 could lead to the emergence of yet another yearning, dissatisfied soul into the universe of suffering; but it could not lead to an eternal union between the agents who brought you into being.
The ‘love story’ of Tristan and Isolde, which began to occupy Richard Wagner in the middle of his long life’s work, the composition of The Ring, was, among other things, a discovery of our eternal separations, our tragic loneliness. For over a decade, from his mid thirties to his mid forties, Wagner, in poverty and exile, laboured on a work he had little hope of ever seeing performed: The Ring of the Nibelungs. By the year 1857 he had finished the first act of Siegfried. It would be years, twenty years, not until his marriage to Cosima, before he would see it to completion. Meanwhile, another music began to possess him, during this extraordinary time of creative fecundity mingled with gloom.
The whole world is tormented by words
And there is no one who does without words.
But insofar as one is free from words
Does one really understand words,
says Saraha’s ‘Treasury of Songs’.* To the daughter of Liszt’s mistress, Marie Wittgenstein, he wrote that he had ‘fallen into the Tristan subject … For the moment, music without words.’ It was the first of his stage works for which he wrote the music first, fashioning the words later.
Political hope, of a Social Democratic revolution and of a Socialist or Young Hegelian Germany, had long since vanished. So too had any hope of finding happiness with women. He knew that he had made Minna as miserable as she had made him with their ceaseless jealousies, squabbles, outright fights and infidelities. His adoration of Mathilde Wesendonck was a source of misery rather than joy, an obsession, a wound to whose scar he could not stop himself returning with agitated fingers, but which would have been better left alone. In addition to which the simple need to make some money was a recurrent and demeaning requirement. The Brazilian consul in Leipzig, Ernest Ferreira-Franca, had approached him to ask him to compose an opera for the Emperor Dom Pedro II in Rio de Janeiro and in the first instance he imagined that he might, from the old Celtic legend of Tristan and Isolde, fashion an ‘accessible’ Italian opera, almost another Rienzi, for the royal court there.
Only when one is free of words does one understand words. In this extraordinary furnace time of his creative life, none but the most prosaic biographer could imagine that his reading of Schopenhauer and Buddhist philosophy, or his unhappy relations with Mathilde, could be said to have ‘explained’ the miracle which was the Prelude to Tristan, from which all else follows with an intensity and an ingenuity unmatched. He can barely, quite, have known what it was himself that he was doing. Such turning points in the world happen very rarely. You could as well speak of an angel coming to guide his pen over the score, as you could suggest that the external circumstances of his marriage, or his reading, or his debts, made Tristan. The breath came forth and was condensed into being.
Just before he left Switzerland – the situation with Mathilde having become too sad, too hopeless, too embarrassing – he had a waking vision. Lying alone in his bed, he saw Mathilde come into his room late at night. She kissed him and, with the kiss, she as it were sucked out his soul. She put her arms round him and he died. He heard a shriek and turned up the gas light beside the bed. He was alone. It was the hour when ghosts walk. His ghost? Hers?
He went to Venice, the city where, twenty-three years later, his soul was in reality to depart his body, and there in freezing cold, in a rented apartment in the Palazzo Giustiniani overlooking the Grand Canal, he wrote the second
act of Tristan.
I never understood it until that hard, jokey Marxist, your adopted mother, gave me her curt commentary, one day in bed. We had had a good time and I murmured, ‘Second act of Tristan.’
Over a ciggy, she puffed and said, ‘Only that’s what’s so brilliant about it. The music is all about fucking and the story is all about separation. They can get it together, but their dream of staying together, of fusion, that’s all – twaddle.’ (One of her favourite German words, Quatsch.)
‘I’ll go.’
‘Where?’
‘Thought I heard her stirring.’
This was in the early days of your arrival and every time we heard you stir, one or other of us would go to you, in the little bed we’d put up at the end of our sitting room. But of course I had not heard you. I had merely felt a sudden chill and sorrow at Helga’s words. I had never felt for her the sort of yearning I felt in my calf love for Winnie, but I had so hoped she believed we were a sort of unit, a team. From her cold Marxist perspective, she suddenly seemed as detached as a Buddhist.
That is why, perhaps, despite the many volumes of interpretation of his work, the endless productions and recordings of Tristan, it is better not to try, except possibly in the most technically musicological detail, to expound his work, which nevertheless speaks. Anyone who has felt its power might, like Nietzsche or other lapsed Wagnerians, be ashamed of themselves for the extent to which they fell under his thrall. They might come to despise the narcotic of this music as unhealthy, as decadent, as pandering to all the negative sickness of Romanticism. Its bold redrawing of the history of music, leading to the atonal experiments of Schoenberg and Hindemith, to the Symbolist poets and the abstract painters, no doubt contributed to the dislocation between high culture and the popular imagination, which was one of the most sinister features of the twentieth century. Friedrich Nietzsche, himself no walking embodiment of the quality, looked for Heiterkeit in art and came to prefer Bizet’s Carmen. But here, simply to use the word ‘prefer’ is to enter a farcical non-debate. In Tristan there came a new planet into the sky, a new way of expressing what could not be expressed. The incoherent Ring cycle, begun by a young Hegelian optimist and finished by an old Schopenhauerian pessimist, is an imperfect masterpiece, a flawed giant, a collection of magnificences which never completely, any more than do the scrappy and carelessly composed plays of Shakespeare, achieve completion. But Tristan is a perfect statement, a soul-wrenching greatness.
His night vision, in which Mathilde, otherwise known as the Muse, kissed him and took his soul, was an accurate one. His soul is contained in it. He is there, the essence of him, wholly untouched by the assaults which envy or biography have tried to hurl at him. In gelid Venice, which would reclaim his soul, he sat and laboured in loneliness and cold, looking wistfully, as he wrote to Mathilde, ‘towards the land of Nirvana’.
In all the act which he so incomparably wrote out in that Venetian palazzo, nothing really happens. The lovers come together, the traitor Melot betrays them to King Marke, Melot wounds Tristan (fatally).
It was completed in the following year and it only had to wait six years before it was performed. Not an opera but ‘eine Handlung’, a bit of drama.
It was a year after his own miracle had occurred and the young Ludwig II had rescued him. Despite the chaos of his emotional situation – eine Handlung indeed – here was his chance not merely to see one of his works performed but to direct it. (He invented theatrical direction in the modern sense of the word – before Wagner there were no directors.)
It was an occasion of delirious excitement. The not quite twenty-year-old King was in such a state of frenzy that Pfistermeister and the other royal ministers feared for his safety. The boy was besotted with the fifty-two-year-old composer, bewitched by him, and the affection, in terms of verbal endearments and the times they spent in one another’s company, appeared to be reciprocated. Wagner was his ‘Beloved, his only Friend’. The King was, to the composer, ‘The Dear Exalted One – Lieber Erhabener!’ They were going to make beautiful music together and, much to the courtiers’ horror, the King did not mind how much it cost. Already Wagner’s enemies at court, and in the Munich newspapers, were saying that he was a Prussian spy, trying to bring down the kingdom of Bavaria, ruin its exchequer, send the already eccentric young monarch mad with his unhealthy and hypnotic musical emotionalism.
The King defied them all. Though Wagner was happy to stage his difficult masterpiece before a small audience, the little rococo theatre of the Residenz, Ludwig wanted it performed in the big Court Theatre, seating 2,000.
While the King pursued the love of Wagner, Wagner was deep in the beginnings of his love of Cosima, who gave birth to their first child, Isolde, on the day that the orchestral rehearsals began. The conductor was Hans von Bülow, Cosima’s husband. Such was Hans’s belief in Wagner that he felt guilt at the failure of his own marriage and did everything he could, until she wished to leave him, to support Cosima and protect her from the gossips – though quite to what extent he was aware of her infidelities at the time of the Tristan rehearsals it is difficult to say.
Tristan was an extraordinary shape, vast and full-bearded, but with the most magnificent of tenor voices – Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, he was a twenty-nine-year-old who had first enchanted his namesake the King with his interpretation of Lohengrin. His wife Malvina made the perfect Isolde. The audience had been drummed up from potentially sympathetic Wagnerians from around Europe. Wagner sensed that this was not a work of art with an immediate appeal to a wide public. Indeed, when von Bülow had asked for an extension of the orchestra pit, and been told that this would mean losing thirty seats out of the auditorium, Wagner, on a lighted stage during rehearsal, exclaimed, ‘What on earth does it matter whether we have thirty more or less Schweinhunde in the place?’ The remarks got written up in the next day’s paper, fuelling the anti-Wagnerians’ case at court. Very few, however appreciative, of the first audiences could have imagined that the ‘Handlung’ stood a chance of being performed in a commercial theatre and attracting enough audience to pay its way. The King was happy – ‘Unique One! Holy One! How glorious! Perfect! So full of rapture!’ But the luck of Wagner, and of Tristan und Isolde, did not last long. Three months after his creation of the role, the gigantic young Tristan contracted rheumatic fever and was dead. And it was not long before Wagner, bitterly aggrieved at the machinations of the ministers against him, left Munich for Switzerland, accompanied by his servant Franz and his poor sick old friend Pohl. Perhaps only in the wordless love of dogs could the kind of yearning of which Tristan speaks ever hope, however briefly, to be satisfied.
* * *
I normally approached the house from the back, cycling up Ludwigstrasse, under the stable arch of the Neues Schloss and through the Hofgarten. It was a superb early morning. Helga and I had parted happily; I had left her, and you, sitting at the breakfast table, drinking chocolate and eating fresh rolls – for yes, even Helga had to admit, we Germans were now drinking real coffee again, real chocolate. There was pork in the sausages rather than cat’s meat and we went to work with full bellies.
It was not yet eight in the morning as I rode through the Hofgarten. It was one of my days for doing correspondence in the office at Wahnfried before I rode over to the Festival Theatre. Only dogs and their owners were about in the fresh summer air. It wasn’t until I drew level with the garden gate, which led through the shrubbery to the graves of Russ, Wagner and Cosima, that I saw Sussi hunched on the greensward, completing her morning dump. The intense concentration visible in her eyes at the actual moment of evacuation made one have one of those moments of questioning about the whole business of consciousness, which so interests students of psychology and philosophy alike. Dog lovers probably think that their friends in such moments are ‘thinking’, or having mental processes comparable to our own. Others, myself in some moods, will suppose that the existence of some form of ‘consciousness’ in dogs, horses, mice, birds,
so observable from their features and expressions, is something for which natural historians have formulated entirely functional explanations. What entitles us, then, to suppose that our ‘thoughts’ and ‘ideas’ are anything more than the vibrations of our mental faculties urging us on to eat, survive and avoid our predators? The arrangement of data in our brains might be more extensive and ingenious than that of dogs or honey bees, but isn’t that all we are doing? Who is to say we are ‘thinking’? On some days such ‘thoughts’ lead down the old blind alleys of philosophy, for example, prompting me to pointless speculations about how my mind knew that it was contemplating itself thinking. On other days – this morning was one – I merely note the expressions in an animal’s face and say to myself inwardly, ‘This is having its doggy expression, its doggy thoughts, and I am having my man-thoughts and they could never meet.’ This, of course, is precisely what dog lovers will never do.
‘Ah! Now you feel better.’
Sussi’s owner – master, companion, he would probably have preferred to say – stood there, typical dog lover, having her thoughts for her. ‘Now you feel equal to the day, my Sussi.’
‘Good morning,’ I said.
I had not expected the Siegfried House to be occupied. It was the wing Winnie had rebuilt to accommodate the Chancellor whenever he chose to come to Bayreuth. Sometimes, even nowadays, he came alone, though this ‘alone’ meant merely that he was unaccompanied by any of his entourage; there were always SS guards everywhere. I spotted two of them standing beside the garden gate.
