The Wagner Clan Page 7
He need not have worried. The project flopped, though it proved a headache for years to Gottfried Semper, one of Wagner’s old revolutionary friends from his Dresden days who was drafted in as designer. Another Munich scheme, for a new school whose prime aim was to teach the art of singing German music properly, was much closer to Wagner’s heart, but it too came to nothing. Well after the Ludwig era Munich did in fact get round to building a theatre meant mainly for performing Wagner – despite fierce opposition from Cosima, who by that time (the turn of the century) had long since been running the Bayreuth festival and abhorred competition. Her concern was far from groundless. With its shell-shaped auditorium and steeply rising rows of seats allowing an unimpeded view of the stage, the Munich house (the Prinzregententheater that exists to this day) was plainly a clone of the Bayreuth one and might just have emerged as a real rival to it. In fact it never did so. Bayreuth’s status for perfect Wagnerites as a place of pilgrimage, largely free of big city distractions, turned out to be unbeatable.
Ludwig got his Ring bit by bit almost despite Wagner. Tired of waiting until all four parts were available for performance together, as the composer intended, he insisted in 1869 that the world premiere of Rheingold be given at the Munich Court Theatre. Wagner collaborated with intense reluctance, drafting in the devoted young Hans Richter to conduct, replacing von Bülow, who had left town close to a nervous breakdown. When rehearsals went badly Wagner, pulling the strings from Tribschen, tried to stop the whole thing unless all his demands were met to the letter. He hastened to Munich but Ludwig refused to see him. ‘The behaviour of Wagner and the theatre rabble is absolutely criminal and impudent,’ wrote the king. ‘It is an open revolt against my orders and this I will not stand.’15 Rheingold was finally premiered on 22 September under Franz Wüllner, a local conductor, but without Wagner present. Wüllner also premiered Walküre in Munich nine months later, on 29 June 1870. Again Wagner stayed away, thus missing a performance hailed as a triumph by the public and much of the press. When Ludwig demanded a year later that Siegfried be staged too, Wagner told him the score was not yet complete – although in fact it was.
Ironically, when the premiere of the whole Ring cycle was finally given in August 1876 under Wagner’s aegis in his ‘own’ Bayreuth festival theatre and with Richter conducting, it was Ludwig who was absent. He came to the general rehearsals and returned for the third and final performance of the cycle at the end of the month. But he was determined to avoid ‘first night’ fuss and in particular the company of Kaiser Wilhelm, who had done nothing to help bring the work to the stage but had agreed to drop by from Berlin for the premiere. Ludwig regarded the Ring as his creation as much as Wagner’s. He believed in it, bought it and pushed it. He injected extra funds after Wagner had repeatedly lied to him and had decided, without adequate finance, to set up his theatre in provincial Bayreuth, not in Munich as Ludwig had offered. The king could well understand Wagner’s point that the music dramas would make their full impact only before an audience not distracted by big city temptations, but he found the choice of Bayreuth hard to accept all the same. The town was in the far north of Bavaria, on the road to Berlin – a point that had certainly not escaped Wagner when, with an eye on possible Prussian largesse, he had chosen it in 1871 as his future headquarters. Indeed, it was the Margravine Wilhelmine, the favourite sister of Frederick the Great of Prussia, who had really put Bayreuth on the artistic map in the eighteenth century with, among other things, an opera house that was acoustically unsurpassed (though too small for Wagner’s needs). Despite these irritating Prussian connections, Ludwig even put up the cash that enabled Wagner to build Wahnfried, his unlovely but roomy Bayreuth villa by the Hofgarten in the centre of town. Whatever else the king may have been (the diagnosis of ‘madness’ was made by doctors who never examined him), he was certainly not petty. In Wagner he backed a winner, however volatile and disreputable – and whatever the flaws of those first Bayreuth Rings.
In several ways, the 1876 festival was a compromise. That was certainly true of the performances, despite all that Wagner could do. Having composed the music, written the texts, helped design the theatre and raise the funds, he would surely have liked to play all the instruments, take every role and coordinate his manifold selves from the conductor’s perch. He came quite close to doing just that during rehearsals. Now aged sixty-three, he leapt about the stage like a mountain goat, as one eyewitness put it, teaching giants how to lumber, Rhinemaidens how to swim and lovers how to embrace. When Sieglinde failed to clasp Siegmund to her bosom with adequate ardour, Wagner thrust her to one side and hurled himself with passion on the startled tenor, almost knocking him down. When the mist machine began to leak vapour into the sunken orchestra pit, Wagner had the hole plugged. But once the cycle began even Wagner could not exercise total control. In Rheingold a premature scene change revealed embarrassed workmen standing around in shirtsleeves. In Siegfried the mechanical dragon Fafner aroused more titters than terror. Made in Wandsworth in south London, it lacked a vital part of its anatomy, which had apparently been despatched by mistake to Beirut. The Ring’s ring itself went missing several times, bringing unscheduled treasure hunts in the wings. As for maestro Richter, Wagner complained, no doubt a trifle unfairly, that he had not been sure of a single tempo.
The 1876 public represented, if anything, a still bigger compromise. Wagner had originally aimed to attract post-revolutionary, non-paying pilgrims who would flock to the theatre to confront the underlying realities of life and death. But there had been no successful revolution and, since the festival project hovered on the brink of bankruptcy, most of those who attended had to pay for their seats. They could well afford it. Many of the audience were rich bourgeois, titillated by Wagner’s scandalous reputation and looking for a novel ‘event’ to help bridge the summer doldrums. Droves of German aristocrats were initially there too, drawn mainly by the knowledge that their peers – and above all Kaiser Wilhelm – planned to be present. Their attendance did not signal a taste for marathon music drama, any more than did that of the prominent Nazis who some six decades later glumly accompanied their fanatically Wagnerian Führer on his Bayreuth trips. The Kaiser, in fact, stuck it out only for Rheingold and Walküre, then left for military manoeuvres. The ranks of the assembled grandees promptly thinned.
Naturally some visitors really did come for Art’s sake. Fellow composers who sweated their way up to the suburban ‘temple on the Green Hill’ included Liszt (of course) as well as Anton Bruckner, Edvard Grieg, Camille Saint-Saëns and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – the latter sighing even more than most over cramped lodgings and the daily battle for food in Bayreuth’s gravely overstretched restaurants. There were painters, poets and, less to the Master’s taste, around sixty reviewers – among them the redoubtable Eduard Hanslick from Vienna, whose critical but perceptive pieces are well worth rereading and belie his notoriety as an incorrigible Wagner-basher. Although this was not a point he would have cared to stress to Cosima, Wagner must also have been tickled by the presence of lady friends including Mathilde Wesendonck, Mathilde Maier, Jessie Laussot (now in love with a historian in Florence whom she later married) and – above all – Judith Gautier. But all in all the assembled throng was hardly a cross-section of that ‘German nation being reborn through art’ about which Wagner had enthused to Bismarck in an unanswered letter a year before.
One of those most shocked by the festival was Friedrich Nietzsche, that former devotee from the ‘Tribschen Idyll’ days who attended some rehearsals and the first Rheingold but gave away the tickets he had for other performances. He also avoided most of the receptions – ‘papal audiences’, he called them – that Wagner hosted almost daily at Wahnfried. Nietzsche was already suffering from those agonising headaches, possibly caused by syphilis, that presaged the onset of his madness more than a decade later, but his conduct in, and abrupt departure from Bayreuth cannot only be put down to disgust at what he saw and heard there. Even before his arrival N
ietzsche had begun to have grave doubts about his former mentor, as his notebooks in particular show. Wasn’t Wagner’s art so much rhetoric, the work of an undeniably brilliant but tyrannical dilettante? Wasn’t he becoming a banner-waver for just that kind of society he had aimed to overthrow? Where was that cosmopolitanism once meant to be at the core of the enterprise? After all Wagner had once claimed, and Nietzsche had endorsed, that whilst Greek art had ‘expressed the spirit of a fair and noble nation, the artwork of the future must embrace the spirit of free people unshackled from all national boundaries’.16 The festival, with its superficial German pomp and circumstance, did not mark the final break between the two men, but it was a key stage on the way to it. ‘What had happened?’ Nietzsche later wrote, using italics for emphasis. ‘Wagner had been translated into German! The Wagnerian had become master of Wagner! – German art! The German Master! German beer!’17
However just Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner and Bayreuth may be in other respects, this particular charge misses the point. Five years after the surge of patriotism that accompanied victory over the French and the founding of the empire, Germany had by no means embraced Wagner despite all Wagner’s admittedly intense efforts at courtship. Of course he had many German friends and disciples, among them real nationalist tub-thumpers; but Bismarck had shunned him and the Kaiser had largely ignored him. Nor did a patrons’ scheme launched in 1871 to bring in funds for the great Bayreuth enterprise have anything like the success hoped for. Only about a third of the offered certificates, entitling their holders to festival seats, were actually sold. Hard cash stayed just as scarce after the premieres as before them, despite the well-heeled public, the endless receptions and the pats on the back. ‘What was my reward for it all?’ Wagner snapped later. ‘Baa baa! I thought they would simply make up the deficit for me – oh yes, they came along, the women with their trains, the men with their moustaches, enjoyed themselves, and, since emperors and kings were also there, people ask: My God, what more does Wagner want?’18
The answer was simple. Wagner wanted to die, or so he told Cosima soon after the last visitors had gone home. He had had his grave dug in the garden behind Wahnfried a few years before and had clambered into it once or twice while the workmen were still shovelling. Now he felt like staying there. When all the sums were totted up, the festival turned out to be 148,000 marks in the red. Eight fund-raising concerts given in 1877 by Wagner and Richter in London’s Royal Albert Hall netted just seven hundred pounds, less than a tenth of the sum essential to keep the Bayreuth show going. An anguished appeal to the patrons brought in exactly a hundred marks. Disgusted with Germany, Wagner considered emigrating. He even tried to negotiate a deal via his American dentist, under which the United States would gain his services ‘for all time’ and the right to the first performance of Parsifal, his latest (and last) work, for a price of one million dollars. America oddly failed to snap up the bargain. In 1878 more financial backing from Ludwig finally saved the day. But the theatre stayed closed until 1882 and the Ring was not staged there again until 1896, by which time Wagner had long since been lowered into his tried and trusted Wahnfried grave.
4
The Fortress on the Hill
At the second Bayreuth festival in 1882 nearly everything went right that had gone wrong at the first one. Sixteen performances of a single work, Parsifal, were on offer, instead of the total of twelve performances of the four parts of the Ring given in 1876; the technical challenges were easier to master and the singers had more chance to dig deeper into their roles. As for the conductor Hermann Levi and the orchestra – supplied to Bayreuth, thanks to King Ludwig, by the Munich Court Theatre – both proved more expert than Richter and his players had been six years earlier. Not that this caused Wagner unalloyed joy. He hated having to entrust his Bühnenweihfestspiel (Stage-Consecrating Festival Play), as he grandly called Parsifal, to the Jewish Levi; but he feared with good reason that if he refused the conductor on non-musical grounds then the king would deny him the orchestra. That outcome would, in fact, have delighted many of the players, who abhorred having to trek off to a provincial outpost for extra work in the summer heat. As one cellist scrawled with relief on his score at the end of the ordeal: ‘Ende! Gott sei Dank. Auf nach München’ (It’s over! Thank God. Let’s be off to Munich).
Something else Wagner found irritating was the applause, or rather the lack of it. Because of misunderstandings, for which his own garbled announcements were in part responsible, audiences sometimes stayed reverently silent when the cast and the composer would have loved them to cheer – Bühnenweihfestspiel or no. To the Master’s particular chagrin he found himself hissed by several over-pious souls when, unrecognised in the gloom of the theatre, he bestowed an excited ‘Bravo’ on the flower maidens undulating sensuously around Parsifal in Act II.
Although the ‘underlying meaning’ of Parsifal (Christian, Buddhist, racist?), is at least as hotly disputed among aficionados as that of the Ring, even a single hearing should be enough to convince most people that the work has much to do with redemption through compassion and renouncing the ‘sins of the flesh’. As such, the ‘sacred drama’ is probably Wagner’s deepest bow before Schopenhauer – which is not to suggest that the aged but still lustful composer now found the stringent counsel of his favourite philosopher any easier to follow. Did Wagner really have an affair with Carrie Pringle, an enticing soprano from England who was one of the solo flower maidens? The claim has been made so often down the years that it seems a shame to cast doubt on it (as serious researchers now do1) – all the more so since it rescued Miss Pringle from the oblivion into which history would otherwise have cast her. Levi, for one, judged her to lack talent and her conduct at rehearsals to be unseemly. But if the evidence that Wagner adored Carrie Pringle looks flimsy, the proof that he fell in a big way for Judith Gautier is overwhelming.
Falling for Mademoiselle Gautier was in any case a sweet fate to which many men, before and after Wagner, blissfully succumbed. Besides her striking southern looks – jet-black hair, ivory teeth and golden skin – she was one of the most temperamental and talented young women of her generation. Nicknamed ‘the hurricane’ (who would sink many) by Charles Baudelaire and the inspiration for one of Victor Hugo’s finest love poems, Judith inherited much of the literary skill of her father, Théophile Gautier, as well as the musical sensibility of her mother, the Italian opera singer Ernesta Grisi. Her links to Wagner’s cause went right back to 1861 when, as a precocious teenager, she had heaped scorn on the numbskulls who barracked Tannhäuser in Paris. Eight years later when she first visited Tribschen with her husband, the writer Catulle Mendès, she had already produced several articles on Wagner – forerunners of her three-volume book about him more than a decade later. By the time she visited the first Bayreuth festival she had separated from Mendès and, now aged thirty, had begun an affair with Louis Benedictus, an amateur composer. That new liaison did not deter Wagner. On the contrary, the lovely lady of Tribschen days, for whom he had performed cartwheels and climbed trees to show off his still-youthful vigour, suddenly seemed to him more desirable than ever.
Judith later claimed that she was never Wagner’s mistress, and that may be true. Dazzled though she had been by him at Tribschen, and devoted though she remained to his art (even translating Parsifal into French), there was more than a touch of farce about their relationship in the Bayreuth period. At one point during the Ring, Wagner eased himself into the seat he had arranged to be free between Judith and Benedictus, seized her hand and whispered that he yearned to hear all his works in her arms (a feat that, even assuming the swiftest of tempi, would have lasted well over fifty hours). One evening, it seems, he went to her rooms and fell prostrate at her feet, weeping. After she returned to Paris he plied her with letters in comical French, begging her to send him perfumes, oils and various exotic materials, including six metres of silk to cover a chaise longue that he dubbed ‘Judith’. Remarkably, most of this at first escaped Cosima�
�s eagle eye, mainly because Wagner and Judith conducted their correspondence via a Bayreuth barber and general factotum called Schnappauf. When Cosima did realise in early 1878 what was going on she firmly rapped the Master across his roving fingers. Judith may well have felt some relief that her more taxing duties as postmistress were now at an end and, with an eye on her planned Wagner book, she seems to have reached a wary ‘business understanding’ with Cosima. At any rate, she was back at Bayreuth in 1881 with Benedictus. In a diary entry dated 27 September and oozing unstated reproof, Cosima noted that ‘When I come downstairs I discover R. at the piano and our friend Judith in rich, rather revealing finery: “I was taken by surprise,” he tells me.’2 Was the discomfited Master sent to bed without any supper, one wonders?
Since Wagner composed the music for Parsifal between 1877 and early 1882 – the ‘late Gautier era’, as it were – it is tempting to identify him with Amfortas, the tormented ruler of the Knights of the Grail, who longs to die, and Judith with Kundry, the eternal seductress. But such simple connections rarely convince, not even in the case of Mathilde Wesendonck and Tristan und Isolde, let alone here. There is, of course, something tragi-comic about Wagner composing his sternly Schopenhauerian epic while yearning for Judith and stuffing his trousers with her perfumed powder sachets. Perhaps it was exactly the hypertension between spiritual idealism and all-too-human desire that caused Wagner’s long-dormant scheme for a work based on the Parsifal legend to erupt when it did. Perhaps that familiar dichotomy accounts for much artistic creativity, not just Wagner’s. Who really knows, even after Freud? And if the information were available would it help us better appreciate the works themselves?