The Wagner Clan Read online

  Physically safe and halfway solvent in his Zurich oasis, Wagner struggled to create a work revolutionary in aim and form from a bewildering array of sources. The Greek example clearly played a big role in the forging of the Ring – surprisingly big, no doubt, for those who tend to think of the cycle as Teutonic through and through. It shows up in the bid to give music and words equal status, as well as in parts of the plot that echo the work of Aeschylus. It may even help account for the cycle’s four-part format, which recalls the tetralogies of Athenian drama. Nordic myth and Germanic saga went into Wagner’s crucible too. But what caused him to want to weld all this disparate material into shape in the first place? That is a dangerous question to ask about any creative artist. But it is surely plausible to conclude that without a deep sense of injustice and the yearning for a new order, bred by bitter personal experience and fostered by the philosophy of revolution, Wagner would not have begun the Ring as and when he did, perhaps not at all. His blueprint showing how disaster inevitably springs from greed for riches and lust for power would surely have drawn a nod of assent from Proudhon. Likewise Feuerbach would in principle have enthused over the fearless, taboo-breaking optimism of the Ring’s young Siegfried, though he might well have had doubts about the uses to which Siegfried put these qualities.

  In view of all that it seems sad, even tragic, that the leaders of the German Left did not try harder to adopt Wagner either during his lifetime or later. Didn’t the social and political views he held for much (perhaps most) of his life strongly resemble their own? Wasn’t this stance made manifest in the great parable of the Ring, at least in much of it? And surely the scheme for a ‘classless theatre’ making performances available even to the impecunious should have warmed the hearts of all leftist culture-vultures. In his incisive The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), the Irish socialist George Bernard Shaw brilliantly explored the Ring as an allegory of capitalism. No doubt he stressed that aspect too much at the expense of others. The tetralogy is a muddling (and muddled) beast that can be defined in many weird and wonderful ways. But the point is that no German figure of the left with remotely similar clout produced a thesis comparable to Shaw’s. Nor was it until 1976 that a Ring production taking the socialist approach, with all its insights and flaws, finally reached the Bayreuth stage – and then it came from a Frenchman, Patrice Chéreau. Instead Wagner disastrously became the hero of the conservative bourgeoisie and increasingly of the far right. That is partly because his widow Cosima and her Bayreuth disciples strenuously remoulded the Master’s image into one they approved of and wanted the world to believe in. But it is also because Wagner did what most people, including revolutionary firebrands, tend to do in the fullness of time. He changed.

  One reason why Wagner changed was that the world in the 1850s stayed much the same, or at least was not transformed in the way he yearned for. It was a good time for reactionaries, not revolutionaries. After a coup d’état in Paris in 1851, France’s short lived Second Republic gave way to a Second Empire with Napoleon III (Bonaparte’s nephew) at its head. Germany remained the patchwork Confederation that had emerged after 1815, with much the same sort of old guard in control. National unity and democratic reform seemed as far distant as ever. In fact the apparent lull in 1850s Germany was deceptive. Prussia became increasingly dominant, building up its industry and starting to modernise the army that would shortly humble first the Austrians (in 1866) and then the French (in 1870–1). Meanwhile, thanks not least to the ‘deregulation’ boost of the Zollverein, most of the Confederation enjoyed an economic boom. New factories were built, railways laid, banks founded to finance it all. In 1871 national unity emerged at last, driven by economics and sealed by Prussian military might. ‘Iron and blood’ proved more effective than ‘speeches and majority verdicts’ (not to mention revolutionary idealism), just as Otto von Bismarck, Prussia’s chancellor and master of Realpolitik, had predicted. Not surprisingly Wagner did not foresee all that in the early 1850s as he plugged away at his Ring in Zurich. He continued to pay lip service to the cause and kept in sporadic contact with old leftist pals. But his revolutionary ardour was fading.

  Then he came across the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. That discovery has been seen by one scholar after another, not to mention the composer himself, as a ‘road to Damascus’ revelation after which Wagner was never the same again. Up to a point that seems true. In late 1854 a friend gave him a copy of Schopenhauer’s massive Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), which Wagner promptly devoured although he was in the throes of composing. Suddenly, it seemed to him, the clouds rolled away and the largely unpalatable truth about the world and himself became clear. He read the work four times within a year, went on reading it for the rest of his life and tried with typical fervour to ram what he took to be its message down as many throats as possible. His keenness was not misplaced. Whatever its flaws, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung is almost uniquely wide-ranging and, unlike most of Wagner’s own pseudo-philosophical writings, a pleasure to read. Schopenhauer’s relentless logic brought perceptions like those of Buddhism but by the unexpected route of western thought. His insights into the power of the subconscious presaged those of Sigmund Freud. His analysis of matter and energy, fantastic though it seemed at the time, fits uncannily well into the world of quantum physics. All in all, a startling achievement for an odd little man with a near-insatiable appetite, at least for food and intellectual activity, who preferred his cat to people and who was widely ignored for much of his life.

  In a nutshell, Schopenhauer argued that the world we poor humans perceive with our limited faculties and different standpoints is our own representation of reality, but not reality itself. Behind this empirical world, the one our senses and intellect register, lies what Schopenhauer (and in part Immanuel Kant before him) calls the ‘thing in itself’. This ‘real reality’ is not strictly knowable but it distressingly manifests itself through what Schopenhauer confusingly calls ‘Will’, best thought of as energy or force, not conscious intent. This force is all-encompassing. People can dimly see it at work within themselves in the urge to live, to reproduce, to ‘get on’. But for Schopenhauer it drives everything animate and inanimate; the whole universe is engaged in a blind and ceaseless chase to satisfy desires that, if met at all, are at once replaced by new ones. Result – misery. Is there no escape? Schopenhauer sees two possible ways. One is that people can by a process of self-denial withdraw from the eternal rat race into something much like the Buddhist state of Nirvana. This rather optimistically implies that, like Schopenhauer, they realise the awful truth and that, rather unlike him, they fully apply the appropriate remedy. The other way to win an at least short-term respite is, as it were, to lose oneself in art. Schopenhauer greatly valued the arts and judged much the greatest to be music – a direct manifestation, he believed, of inner consciousness.

  For Wagner, Schopenhauer was the right philosopher at the right time. The aging revolutionary was starting to despair and here was Schopenhauer telling him, in a sense, not to worry because the whole struggle was useless anyway. Overturn one system and the next one will be no better, nor the one after that and so on ad infinitum. Moreover, Wagner had spent immense time and energy telling himself and other people that music and words were equal partners in the Gesamtkunstwerk, and here was Schopenhauer saying instead that music was best by far. On the face of it that looks inconvenient. But hadn’t Wagner in his heart of hearts believed it anyway, whatever his intellect had tried to tell him? He was first and foremost a musician. And if he had fancied himself as a writer too, every one of Schopenhauer’s clear and elegant sentences put him firmly in his lowly place.

  Wagner readily agreed that Schopenhauer had a key impact on his work, but he did not, perhaps could not, fully and frankly state what that impact was. When he came across Die Welt he had just completed the music for Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold), the first part (or so-called Vorabend – ‘preliminary evening’) of the Ring,
and was hard at work on the next part, Die Walküre (The Valkyrie). In Mein Leben, he admits that after reading Die Welt he at first felt embarrassed because much of the theory behind his Nibelung project did not match what he felt Schopenhauer was telling him. However, when he took a further look at his own ‘poetical conception’ he concluded there was no contradiction after all. In other words, at a deeper level than that of conscious theory he had really been a Schopenhauerian all along.

  Stretching a point, you can indeed fit much of Wagner’s earlier work into the gospel according to Schopenhauer, especially the struggle between flesh and spirit in Tannhäuser. As for the Ring, Wagner found it terribly hard to cobble together a libretto consistent with his revolutionary ideals, and rewrote the ending of the whole cycle several times even before he read Die Welt. The truth is that Schopenhauer jerked the rug from under a concept for the Ring that had already been made shaky by Wagner’s growing pessimism about his own future, and the world’s. Why did he largely drop the project (tinkering apart) in 1857 for twelve whole years, when he was already well into Siegfried, the next-to-last part of the cycle? One all-too-familiar reason was that he needed cash, and clearly the Ring would not be complete and available as a money-spinner for ages, if at all. Besides, Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger were welling up in him, both works that with crass misjudgement he reckoned almost any opera house would be able to stage with ease. Although it demands some intellectual effort (and self-deception?) to find a place for the often buoyant Meistersinger in Schopenhauer’s bleak universe, the desolate Tristan – fusing love and death in music of agonising intensity – seems to slot into it rather well. And in the late 1850s after his doomed affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, Wagner was in a near-suicidal mood – arguably ideal for Tristan.

  Above all, though, Wagner simply became bored with the Nibelungs. He admitted as much almost in passing in a letter in 1856, and when he finally got the cycle under way again his style as well as his world-view had changed. His music dramas, he blithely claimed in 1872 – in flat contradiction to his Gesamtkunstwerk theories of two decades before – were ‘deeds of music made visible’. He never did wholly solve the knotty problem of the Ring’s ending (optimistic or pessimistic, Feuerbachian or Schopenhauerian?) to his own satisfaction. When asked what it meant, he rather testily replied that the meaning was in the music. A very sensible remark. Theories about Wagner come and go, some edifying, many absurd. ‘Explaining’ his work is a serious industry offering employment to legions of scribes who might otherwise go hungry. But what really counts is the music. Sir Thomas Beecham, that master of barbed wit and backhanded compliment, once said of the British that they knew nothing about music but loved ‘the noise it makes’. By no means everyone loves the noise Wagner makes, but as a rule simply listening to it is more rewarding than imbibing any of the theories that circulate around it, including Wagner’s own.

  The amazing thing is that Wagner managed to produce so much ‘noise’ at all, especially in the post-Dresden era when he was a wanted man. The last music he managed to compose before scuttling off to Zurich with the police at his heels was Lohengrin, finished in 1848. The faithful Liszt premiered the work in Weimar in 1850, but Wagner did not attend for fear of arrest. Even in Venice, part of the Austrian empire, he was harassed by police (admittedly rather cultured and understanding police) while working on Tristan in 1858–9. He was safe enough in London, where in 1855 he conducted a few concerts panned by the press and even got to meet Queen Victoria (‘not at all pretty with, I am sorry to say, a rather red nose’10). The longish arm of Saxon law could not catch up with him in Paris either, but he grew to hate the city more than ever, especially after the performances of Tannhäuser in 1861 were drowned in an uproar organised by political foes and nitwit aristocrats. A year before that debacle, Wagner had at last been granted a partial amnesty, allowing him to visit most of Germany again, but the full pardon that included his home state of Saxony came through only in 1862.

  Apart from being on the run for so long, there was much else to keep Wagner from his work. His health was dreadful for most of his life; typhoid fever in France, dysentery in Italy, boils, colds, stomach troubles, haemorrhoids – it would be rather easier to list what he did not suffer from. Persistent rashes, probably of psychosomatic origin, at least gave him a fine excuse to do something he loved anyway – wear silk and satin against his skin. In later years he suffered growing chest pains, foreshadowing the heart attack that killed him. All this discomfort helps explain his frequent bouts of foul temper, but it did not stop him plunging into one affair after another. How many of his ‘conquests’ he actually slept with is unclear and hardly important, except to those who claim that much of his work, especially Tristan, is a product of sublimated physical passion. Would the pieces have been very different, or even failed to emerge at all, if the passion had not been sublimated? Leaving aside that fruitless question, Cosima quotes Wagner in her diary as saying that a tall story he had once told about composing part of Parsifal was ‘as far-fetched as my love affairs’.11 Admittedly, he may well have told Cosima what he thought she wanted to hear, or she may have reported what she chose to remember.

  One thing seems sure. Wagner invested at least as much time and effort in his lady friends as he did in pondering Schopenhauer’s counsel about self-denial. He did, in fact, once write a letter to Schopenhauer arguing that since the sexual act induced a sense of other-worldly peace, it should be seen as a road to salvation from the near-irresistible pressures of Will. But he never posted this ingenious document, perhaps fearing the great man might judge the argument a mite self-serving. Be that as it may, although the names of all Wagner’s amours will never be known, the spectrum even of the identifiable ones is wide indeed. There was Mathilde Wesendonck with her delicate beauty and literary pretensions; and there was Marie Völkl with more tangible assets, including ‘pink drawers’ that Wagner begged her by letter to make ready for his impending arrival. There was Jessie Laussot, a Bordeaux wine merchant’s English-born wife with whom Wagner briefly planned to elope to some distant spot in Asia Minor; and there was the ‘obliging’ teenager Seraphine Mauro, much beloved by the composer Peter Cornelius, one of the many friends Wagner betrayed but who trotted back for more. There was the temperamental actress Friederike Meyer from Frankfurt, not to be confused with the sweet-natured Mathilde Maier from Mainz who was rather deaf (no liability, cynics may feel, for anyone spinning in Wagner’s immediate orbit). The list is easily expandable.

  Wagner’s insecure childhood offers a happy hunting ground for all those seeking to explain (away?) his later instability in general and partner-swapping in particular. His mother was, without a shadow of doubt, Johanna Rosine Wagner (née Pätz), a baker’s daughter from Wessenfels near Leipzig. But was his real father the Leipzig police actuary Carl Friedrich Wagner, who died six months after Richard’s birth on 22 May 1813? Or was it the actor, writer and painter Ludwig Geyer, a close family friend (sometimes claimed contrary to the evidence to have been Jewish), who married Johanna when Richard was a year old? Nobody knows for sure and, barring exhumation and DNA tests, presumably no one ever will. Wagner was not sure either. In Mein Leben he claims he was baptised two days after birth but in fact the ceremony took place only three months later, after Johanna had made an unexplained trip through war-torn territory to visit Geyer, who was on tour with his theatre troupe. For much of his childhood, the boy was called Richard Geyer rather than Richard Wagner. Uncertain of his identity, brought up by a ‘stepfather’ who was a rival for his mother’s attention; no wonder, the theory goes, that Wagner spent his life seeking the love he lacked in childhood, and that redemption thanks to self-sacrificing women is such a big theme in his operas.

  There may be something in that. But it is not clear that Wagner really was starved of affection by his mother, busy woman with a big family (Richard was her ninth child) though she was. And throughout his life he referred to his ‘rival’ Geyer with respect and gratitude,
not sentiments he often mustered for anyone else. Perhaps being ‘flighty’ simply ran in the family. Johanna had been a mistress of a local prince in earlier years and Carl Friedrich dilly-dallied with local actresses, often returning home after supper-time with the less than original excuse that he had been kept late at the office. As for the handsome, articulate, multi-talented Geyer, he could and did charm the ladies with a snap of his elegant fingers.

  Besides, for all his roving eye and hands Wagner did stay true to Minna in his own erratic fashion, and she evidently stayed true to him, that one affair in the first year of marriage apart. Every one of their ‘kiss and make-up’ bids over the decades ended in hellish scenes but they never divorced. He continued to support her financially and when his foes claimed otherwise shortly before her death in Dresden in 1866, she issued a furious public rebuttal. From the first, he played along with the fiction that Natalie was Minna’s sister, not her illegitimate daughter, and he continued to support her even after Minna died. Natalie seems to have learned the truth about her birth only late in life. In any case she rarely had anything bad to say of ‘kind Richard’. To her he was a generous protector, hard used by the world and at the mercy of his volatile temperament. In a way so he was, just as he was also a lying, spiteful philanderer. One moment he would drown anyone who dared to contradict him under torrents of words so emotional that they emerged as gulps and barks; the next he would act like a mischievous schoolboy who thinks the girls are watching, sliding about the floor and shinning up drainpipes. And always he adored the sensuous; the sweetest of perfumes, the thickest of rugs, the softest of – just everything.