The Wagner Clan Read online

  After dodging Cossack guards on the border with East Prussia, hiding in the hold of a small merchant ship and surviving a storm-wracked, zigzag voyage, the dazed couple arrived in London barely able to stand upright. Wagner aimed to make some useful contacts there and also to track down the score of his grandiose overture Rule Britannia, which had vanished into thin air after he had posted it two years before to the Philharmonic Society. Having failed in London on both counts (though the score, worth an occasional outing at the Last Night of the Proms, did eventually reappear), Wagner pressed on with wife and hound to Paris. His hopes of a breakthrough there were still high, but not for much longer. Even allowing for Wagner’s often deliberate distortions in Mein Leben, from which he tends to emerge as a victim of idiot critics and envious rivals, there is little doubt that his two and a half years in the French capital were among the most frustrating and degrading he ever suffered. He spent much of the time begging for cash, writing articles (some still gripping, many hack-work) and knocking on doors of the music establishment, which usually stayed shut.

  One door that opened more than a crack, however, was that of Giacomo Meyerbeer, born Jakob Liebmann Beer into a wealthy Jewish family near Berlin, who had lived in Paris for years and whose grand operas were the toast of much of Europe. In one sickeningly sycophantic letter, a genre of which he proved a lifelong master, Wagner offered to become Meyerbeer’s ‘slave, body and soul, in order to find food and strength for my work, which will one day tell you of my gratitude’.1 Meyerbeer’s genuine efforts on Wagner’s behalf brought little direct result in the French capital; but they did help get Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), both completed in Paris, to the stage in Germany. Wagner was later to repay this backing not with the promised gratitude but with some of the most vindictive attacks even he could muster. Deeply envious of Meyerbeer’s success, he was also filled with self-hatred; not just because he had felt forced to beg (he was often doing that), but because in Rienzi he came close to producing the kind of superficial spectacle he despised in contemporary opera in general – and in his benefactor’s work in particular. Did Wagner come to hate Meyerbeer so much because he was Jewish, or did he come to hate Jews because of Meyerbeer? Of that grubby question, alas, more later.

  With such a long march of misery behind him, Wagner could hardly believe it when his luck began to turn and Dresden agreed to stage Rienzi. After agonies of apprehension before the premiere on 20 October 1842, he stopped the clock in the Court Theatre during the six-hour marathon for fear an impatient public might bolt before the end. He need not have worried. Nearly everyone stayed until after midnight to cheer. It was one of the biggest first-night successes Wagner ever had, paving the way for his appointment as Hofkapellmeister. Three months later Dresden premiered Holländer (to less acclaim) and in 1845 Tannhäuser, the latter even drawing a reluctant salute from Robert Schumann, influential both as critic and composer, who claimed to have little against Wagner except that he ‘never stops talking’.2 Wagner’s income still far from matched his spending, but that apart he seemed to have real cause to celebrate. Minna was clearly overjoyed and, after the vagabond existence since Magdeburg, who could blame her? From her point of view, only a fool would deliberately endanger a ‘good life’ so hard won; but then her point of view was emphatically not her husband’s. If that had not been wholly plain in the years of shared privation, it became so in the relative security of Dresden. For Minna, the world at large could more or less drift on as it was. For Wagner it had to change.

  And changing it was, despite all the efforts of the old order to maintain the status quo. Germany still existed merely as a Confederation of grotesquely unequal parts – including five kingdoms, six grand duchies, eleven duchies, ten principalities, one landgraviate and four free cities – created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 after Napoleon’s final defeat. The continued division of a potentially serious rival suited the big powers like Russia, Britain and Austria (the latter formally part of, and dominant within, the Confederation). It did not suit Germans fired by the ideals of the 1789 French Revolution, who reckoned liberal reforms could only make headway if the petty potentates in the regions lost their clout in a truly united nation. Nor did it remotely suit German business, envious of Britain’s economic success but trapped in a web of customs tariffs between and sometimes even within the member states. There was no common currency and no uniform system of weights and measures.

  The creation under Prussian pressure in 1834 of the Zollverein, a customs union that included much of the Confederation but not Austria, went some way to meet German business demands. Arguably it gave a more decisive prod to the cause of German unity than any of the philosophies, speeches and demonstrations then current (a point not lost just over a century later on those who set up the Common Market while seeking a united Europe). But economics and pragmatism alone could not satisfy those Germans genuinely seeking liberal reform, let alone those impatient for a powerful base, democratic or not, from which to repay the French for past humiliation. It was around this time that Wagner became involved with Junges Deutsch-land (Young Germany), a loose literary grouping at odds in detail on many things but broadly united in a yearning for the overthrow of the existing order – political, artistic and moral. In Germany pressure for change built up slowly like distant thunder, noted Heinrich Heine, the Jewish-born poet who was the group’s most distinguished adherent; but one day a drama would be enacted there ‘compared with which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless idyll’.3

  Wagner’s political stance was not at first as radical as that, although part of Junges Deutschland’s ‘free love’ philosophy quickly flowed into Das Liebesverbot and some of Heine’s work later served as a source for Holländer and Tannhäuser. But his views hardened under the humiliating blows he suffered in hated Paris and, more surprisingly at first glance, they continued to do so even in Dresden. Why? For one thing Wagner failed to win reform even in the limited field in which he fondly imagined that, as Hofkapellmeister, he had direct influence. In 1846 he produced a report proposing ways to rationalise the hiring of orchestral players and boost their salaries while offering more concerts. It is one of a handful of constructive, practical documents that show that Wagner did not always have his head in the clouds or the slime of the Rhine. But it did not persuade local bureaucrats who carefully mulled over the scheme for a year, then carefully shelved it. Nothing loath, Wagner came up with another even more far-reaching plan two years later. Under it the Court Theatre was to be renamed the National Theatre and given a form of collective self-management that would remove it from direct political or royal infuence, though Wagner cannily built in a clause that would have enhanced his own position. No doubt a servant (even a superior one) who thinks he can afford to bite his master’s hand so blithely must be judged more than a bit naive. At any rate nothing came of this scheme either.

  Those setbacks alone would hardly have taken Wagner to the barricades, but there was much else simmering in his head and heart. Perhaps already in Paris, but at the latest in Dresden, he was fired by the ideas of the contemporary French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, now most widely remembered and falsely judged for his unsubtle remark that ‘property is theft’. What Proudhon really opposed was not property earned by personal effort, but the kind used to exploit the labour of another. No wonder that struck a chord with Wagner, who had so often felt forced to sell his compositions for a pittance, pawn his pathetic belongings and beg for help in cash and kind, not least from Jews. But he was even more decisively influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, one of whose key works, Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity), was published in 1841 just before Wagner and Minna packed their bags in Paris and retreated to the Fatherland. Claiming that man created God in his own image, Feuerbach urged people to stop projecting their own highest qualities, and shuffling off responsibility, onto a non-existent deity. In a nutshell, he issued a clarion call to human beings to g
row up and take their lives into their own hands.

  For Wagner Feuerbach was simply, as he put it in Mein Leben, ‘the ideal exponent of the radical release of the individual from the thraldom of accepted notions’.4 Many budding revolutionaries of the time felt the same. One was Marx, a keen Feuerbach admirer at least for a while. Another was August Röckel, deputy conductor in Dresden, a man of minor musical talent but such explosive eloquence on his favourite topic of insurrection that even Wagner sometimes found it hard to get a word in edgeways. It was thanks to Röckel that in 1849 Wagner fell in with Mikhail Bakunin, the very model of a Russian anarchist (and naturally a Proudhon fan), who was always looking for trouble and found plenty of it in Dresden that year.

  By that time Wagner was more than ready to back an uprising with action as well as words. Back in 1846 he had told a fellow radical, Alfred von Meissner, that there had already been a revolution in people’s heads and that ‘the new Germany was ready and waiting like a bronze cast that needed only a hammer blow on its clay shell in order for it to emerge.’5 Two years later, with Europe increasingly in turmoil, Wagner went public with his view of what this ‘bronze cast’ should look like. In a speech in June 1848 to more than a thousand backers of the fiercely republican Vaterlandsverein (Fatherland Union), he called among other things for national unity, universal suffrage, abolition of censorship and removal of the aristocratic ‘lackeys and flunkies’ at court (though not of the king himself). He also came close to demanding the abolition of money, a step that presumably would have seen off his ineluctably rising debts, which already far exceeded his annual salary. Out of all that, Wagner claimed, a new and free Germany would emerge, which would establish colonies and thus carry civilisation across the globe. ‘The sun of German freedom and German gentleness’, as he put it, ‘should alike warm and elevate Cossack, Frenchman, Bushman and Chinese … ’6

  With the sad benefit of hindsight, it is hard not to sneer at Wagner’s vision of Germanic global warming. As for his other points, the woolly ranting against money was much in tune with the times and the call for greater unity and democracy surely justified. But bit by bit that year the conservatives in much of Europe steadied themselves and began to take back concessions they had promised in the initial panic. A national assembly began meeting in Frankfurt to try to unite Germany and produce a constitution, but to the frustration of many – including Wagner – it proved unrepresentative and ultimately powerless. Finally, in May 1949, violence came to the streets of Dresden at last and the court composer, along with his pals Röckel and Bakunin, was in the thick of it. Exactly what part Wagner played is not clear and presumably never will be. But he certainly issued leaflets to Saxon soldiers urging them not to make common cause with Prussian forces called in by the King to help put down the uprising. He also reported on troop movements from the steeple of a Dresden church with bullets pinging about him, and he may have helped order hand grenades for the rebels.

  Anyway, the rebellion flopped and a warrant was issued for Wagner’s arrest. He narrowly escaped capture and thanks to help from Franz Liszt, then music director in Weimar, he managed to make it with false papers over the border to Switzerland. There poor Minna, her worst fears confirmed, later joined him. Wagner stayed in exile for eleven years, sometimes with Minna, often without her. Röckel was not so lucky. Caught and tried, he was condemned to death, a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment. Bakunin was jailed for seven years, then exiled to Siberia. He escaped in 1861 and popped up in Europe again to spread more unrest, still trumpeting that ‘the passion for destruction is also a creative passion’.7

  The tale so far might seem to suggest that Wagner was dropping composing to become a professional revolutionary. Almost the opposite is true, although he did spend his first period in exile turning out one theoretical tract after another but no music. He had come to believe that only through revolution would a society emerge in which true art, notably his own, was able to flourish. It was therefore wholly in his interest to spend some time giving revolution a helping hand. What good were all those pathetically provincial and near-bankrupt little theatres, Wagner fumed, or those grand opera houses crawling with bureaucrats and subject to the patronage of musically illiterate grandees? He had seen more than enough of both from the inside. Not for him the superficial gestures and empty pomp of works by Meyerbeer and his ilk – mere sops tossed into a gilded trough for frivolous audiences that tended to come late, leave early and chatter in between. What a difference, he reflected, to the role of art in ancient Greece, where works fusing instrumental music, singing, poetry and drama had touched the deepest human thoughts and feelings. Moreover, the performances had been given in theatres of a practical design where all present could see and hear well, not in ornate buildings with tiered boxes that emphasised wealth and social status. The Greeks who imbibed all-encompassing art under ideal conditions came away feeling uplifted and united, with a better understanding of the world and of themselves. That at least is how Wagner saw it, so fired during his last years in Dresden by reading Greek texts, especially the Oresteia of Aeschylus, that he later claimed, ‘I have never since been really able to reconcile myself with modern literature.’8

  Despite his rose-tinted view of antiquity, Wagner did admit that economically Greek society had been flawed because it was based on slavery. But so too, he argued, was the modern world, in which all had become slaves to capital in one way or another. What’s more, over the centuries ‘the great synthesis of the arts’ that had plumbed and reflected the public consciousness of the Greeks had split apart. What remained were mere fragments such as opera, plays and ballet – superficial and commercialised like the alienated, class-ridden society they intermittently titillated. The answer? Overthrow capitalism, stop treating culture as a commodity and reunite the sadly splintered arts as co-equal partners. And who, despite two years of largely abortive revolution in Europe, might be bold or crazy enough to try his hand at forging a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) modelled on that long-shattered Greek ideal? Why, the all-but jobless, henpecked exile Richard Wagner. In Dresden he had already sketched part of the plot for a suitable opus; a parable of human kind eventually called Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), beginning in primeval slime, ending in fire and showing how greed for power and wealth destroys love. He also had some original ideas about how this colossus should be displayed; over four evenings before an audience that did not have to pay, and in a wooden building designed along the lines of a Greek theatre, which would be burned down after the last night. All that remained to be settled were the practical details like composing the music and raising the money. And in the latter skill, as in the former, Wagner was a much-practised virtuoso.

  He needed to be. Zurich is a city where traditionally much money can indeed be raised (and hidden from prying eyes), but not by just anyone. And here among its solid citizens was a perfect example of the sort of person seemingly bound not to get a sou; a rather undersized (not quite five feet seven inches) Saxon musician with an oversized head, a thick accent, dreadful manners and an often venomous glare, who wrote and babbled incessantly about chimeras like Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Artwork of The Future). His marriage was clearly shaky and he had no fixed address. Yes, he had had some success and status in Dresden and he had made something of a mark since arriving in Zurich, both as a conductor and as actor/narrator of his near-interminable Nibelung tale – recited to a dogged little throng over four nights in the luxury Hotel Baur au Lac. But surely one would sooner invest in an enterprise to make silver from moonbeams than inject cash into this Saxon windbag?

  And yet Wagner – the master-pumper from Leipzig – extracted a steady stream of loans and largesse, even managing repeatedly to tap a canny silk merchant, Otto Wesendonck, while dallying with Otto’s young and lovely wife Mathilde. Much of Wesendonck’s backing was, in fact, pledged only in exchange for future income from performances of Wagner’s works. But since most of the latter had so far proved any
thing but box-office hits, and the projected Gesamtkunstwerk was of unparalleled length and complexity, to be staged in a theatre that did not yet exist, Wesendonck’s ‘security’ looked shaky indeed. How did Wagner manage to turn so many usually steady heads? Some well-wishers, of course, quickly grasped that his was music for the ages; most people were anyway susceptible to his silver tongue, his air of life-or-death conviction and his sheer effrontery: ‘I must have beauty, radiance, light. The world owes me a living.’9 Like all the greatest actors he did not so much charm and bully his audiences (onstage and off) as spellbind them. Of all the roles he created, from the ever-wandering Dutchman through the passionate outsider Tannhäuser to the lovesick knight Tristan, perhaps the one that matches Wagner best is Klingsor – the wizard in Parsifal, making magic from a dark tower above his dangerously seductive magic garden.

  Although still smarting under the Dresden setback, living from hand to mouth and close to the age of forty, Wagner remained committed – fiercely for a time – to leftist revolution. It is true that he condemned communism (but capitalism too!) and that when he invoked the Volk, a dangerously vague word easily misused, he was thinking not of the working masses but of a kind of German spiritual brotherhood. Moreover, he claimed to favour a continued role for monarchs (not to mention a special place for outstanding artists – like himself) in the post-revolutionary world he dimly foresaw. All that might seem to show that Wagner was more of a bourgeois-liberal reformer than a socialist rebel, that like many of his countrymen he favoured a soft ‘revolution from above’ over a violent French-style one from below. It is often claimed that this national trait – in principle endearing but in practice calamitous – helps explain why Germany never had a thoroughgoing revolution and stayed all too vulnerable to authoritarian and dictatorial regimes. Be that as it may, Wagner surely does not fall under Lenin’s caustic definition of Germans as people so law-abiding that they will first buy platform tickets before storming a railway station. He really had been penniless and hungry and he had seen at close quarters the stifling power of entrenched privilege. He could easily have chosen to throw in his lot with the establishment for good, but instead he risked jail and even his life to try to overturn it. He was certainly not averse to violence, except against animals.