The Wagner Experience

and its meaning to us

Paul Dawson-Bowling

• Publisher: Old Street Publishing
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781908699442
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critiques de la musique

People who take to the Wagner Experience encounter something wonderful, like gazing into a silver mirror which dissolves into a miraculous, self-contained world, glinting with life-changing possibilities. There are others who sense its appeal but find it difficult, and the first aim of this study is to provide an Open Sesame for anyone wanting it.' From the author's introduction In this bicentenary celebration of Wagner and his music, Paul Dawson-Bowling introduces, deepens and enriches the Wagner Experience for the newcomer and the seasoned Wagnerian alike. Expounding in colourful style the stories, the sources and the lessons of Wagner's great dramas, he offers unusual insights into the man, his works and their meaning, while grappling with the music's almost occult power. Before taking us through the ten great dramas themselves, he discusses Wagner's formative experiences, his aspirations and his mentality; also his first wife Minna and her immense but unrecognised impact. This sets up lenses through which the reader may more accurately view not only Wagner the man and his less appealing aspects, but, more importantly, his stage works, since, as Dawson-Bowling insists, the best encounter with Wagner's dramas is the direct one. Uniquely drawing on a lifetime's experience in General Medical Practice, the author brings a wisdom, humanity and psychological understanding to his study of the life and work of Wagner, with especial reference to the thought of Carl Jung. Above all, this book draws out the vital lessons which Wagner's extraordinary, didactic dramas can offer us. It reveals their lessons as life-enhancing: capable of transforming our society, our lives and ourselves. There is no other book about Wagner quite like it.

PART II

TEN

DER FLIEGENDE HOLLÄNDER

Wagner took the view that Der fliegende Holländer, or The Dutchman, as it is often affectionately known, was the first of his masterpieces. It was the first that he planned to include in his official canon, and the world has endorsed his opinion; it is the first to hold its own in opera houses across the globe. What gives The Dutchman its authentic Wagnerian stamp and its unassailable place in the repertoire is Wagner’s ability, fully evident here for the first time, to bring into being a complete new world. The Dutchman instantly seizes the imagination. The Overture bursts upon the listener with its shrill open fifths, winds shrieking in the rigging and mountainous seas surging up from the depths of the orchestra. They smash and crash and roar, as real as any reality we can know.

Wagner’s mesmerising powers extended to his treatment of the action. His plots were seldom original and the story of The Dutchman is no exception. It comes from Heinrich Heine’s pseudo-autobiographical Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski, a strange piece of writing, ironic and fragmentary, reading like a random sequence of episodes. At an early stage these memoirs describe an erotic encounter between Heine’s fictitious author and a Dutch blonde, which Heine frames with the legend of the Dutchman. The translation that follows1 is given in full because any attempt to shorten it takes away the flavour, and Wagner’s opera will mean less. A full rendering shows how faithfully Wagner kept to his source, at least for its storyline.

You certainly know the fable of the Flying Dutchman. It is the story of an enchanted ship which can never arrive in port, and which since time immemorial has been sailing about at sea. When it meets a vessel, some of the unearthly sailors come in a boat and beg the others to take a package of letters home for them. These letters must be nailed to the mast, else some misfortune will happen to the ship, above all if no Bible be on board, and no horse-shoe nailed to the fore-mast. The letters are always addressed to people whom no-one knows and who have long been dead, so that some late descendants get a letter addressed to a faraway great-great-grandmother who has slept for centuries in her grave. That timber spectre, that grim grey ship, gains its name from the captain, a Dutchman, who once swore by all the devils that he would round a certain promontory, whose name has escaped me, in spite of a fearful storm, though he should sail until the Day of Judgment.

The devil took him at his word and therefore he must sail forever, until set free by a woman’s faithfulness. The devil in his stupidity has no faith in women’s faithfulness, and lets the doomed captain land once in seven years and get married, and so find opportunities to save his soul. Poor Dutchman! He is often only too glad to be saved from his marriage and his wife-saviour and yet again return on board.

The play I saw in Amsterdam was based on this legend. Another seven years have passed; the poor Dutchman is more weary than ever of his endless wandering; he lands, becomes intimate with a Scottish nobleman, to whom he sells diamonds for a mere song; and when he hears that his customer has a beautiful daughter he asks that he may wed her. This bargain also is agreed to. Next we see the Scottish home; the maiden with anxious heart awaits the bridegroom. She looks with strange sorrow at a great timeworn picture which hangs in the hall and represents a handsome man in the Netherlandish-Spanish garb. It is an old heirloom, and according to legend of her grandmother, is a true portrait of the Flying Dutchman as he was seen in Scotland 100 years before, in the time of William of Orange. And with it has come down the warning that the women of the family must beware of the original. This has naturally enough had the result of deeply impressing the features of the picture on the heart of the romantic girl. When the man himself makes his appearance, she is startled, but not with fear. The Dutchman is moved on beholding the portrait. But when he is informed whose likeness it is, he with tact and easy conversation turns aside all suspicion, jests at the legend, laughs at the Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew of the ocean, and yet, as if moved by the thought, passes into a pathetic mood, depicting how terrible the life must be of one condemned to endure unheard-of tortures on the wild waste of waters – how his body itself is his living corpse wherein his soul is terribly imprisoned – how life and death and alike reject him, like an empty cask scornfully thrown by the sea on the shore, and as contemptuously repulsed again into the sea – how his agony is as deep as the sea on which he sails – his ship without anchor, and his heart without hope.

I believe that these were nearly the words with which the bridegroom ends. The bride regards him with deep earnestness, casting glances meanwhile at his portrait. It seems as though she has penetrated his secret; and when he afterwards asks, ‘Will you be true to me, Katharina?’ she answers ‘true unto death!’

(At this point Heine’s story moves to its main theme, the erotic encounter with a Dutch blonde.)

I remember that just then I heard a laugh and that it came not from the pit but from the gallery of the gods above. As I glanced up I saw a wondrous lovely Eve in paradise, who looked seductively at me, with great blue eyes. Her arm hung over the gallery, and in her hand she held an apple, or rather an orange. But instead of symbolically dividing it each with me, she only cast the peel on my head. Was it done intentionally or by accident? That I had to know! But when I entered the paradise to cultivate the acquaintance, I was not a little startled to find a white soft creature, a wonderfully womanly tender being, not languishing, but delicately clear as crystal, a form of homelike propriety and fascinating amiability. Only that there was something on the left upper lip which curled or twined like the tail of a slippery gliding lizard. It was a mysterious trait, something such as is not found in pure angels and just as little in mere devils. The expression comes not from evil, but from the knowledge of good and evil – it is a smile which has been poisoned or flavoured by tasting the apple of Eden. When I see this expression on soft, full, rosy ladies’ lips, then I feel in my own a cramp-like twitching, and compulsive yearning to kiss those lips: it is our elective affinity.

I whispered into the ear of the beauty:

‘Yuffrou, I will kiss your mouth.’

‘Bei Gott, Mynheer, that is a good idea,’ was the hasty answer which rang with bewitching sound from her heart.

But – no. I would here draw a veil over, and end the story or picture of which the Flying Dutchman was the frame. Thereby will I revenge myself on the prurient prudes who devour such narratives with delight, and are enraptured with them in their heart of hearts, et plus ultra, and then abuse the narrator, and turn up their noses at him in society, and decry him as immoral. It is a nice story too, as delicious as preserved pineapple or fresh caviar or truffles in Burgundy, and would be pleasant reading after prayers; but out of spite and to punish old offences, I will suppress it. Here I will make a long dash ------------, which may be supposed to be a black sofa on which we sat as I wooed. But the innocent must suffer with the guilty, and I dare say that many good souls look bitterly and reproachfully at me. However, for those of the better kind I will admit that I was never so wildly kissed as by this Dutch blonde, and that she most triumphantly destroyed the prejudice which I had hitherto held against blue eyes and fair hair. Now I understand why an English poet has compared such women to frozen champagne. In the icy crust lies hidden the strongest extract. There is nothing more piquant than the contrast between external cold and the inner fire which, Bacchante-like, flames up and irresistibly intoxicates the happy carouser. Yes, far more than in brunettes does the fire of passion burn in many a sham-calm holy image with golden-glory hair, and blue angel’s eyes, and pious lily hands. I knew a blonde of one of the best families in Holland who at times left her beautiful chateau on the Zuyder-Zee and went incognito to Amsterdam, and there in the theatre threw orange peel on the head of anyone who pleases her, and gave herself up to the wildest debauchery, like a Dutch Messalina! …

When I re-entered the theatre, I came in time to see the last scene of the play, where the wife of the Flying Dutchman on a high cliff wrings her hands in despair, while her unhappy husband is seen on the deck of his unearthly ship, tossing on the waves. He loves her, and will leave her lest she be lost with him, and he tells her all his dreadful destiny, and the cruel curse which hangs above his head. But she cries aloud, ‘I was ever true to you, and I know how to be ever true unto death.’

Saying this, she throws herself into the waves, and then the enchantment is ended. The Flying Dutchman is saved, and we see the ghostly ship slowly sink into the abyss of the sea.

The moral of the play is that women should be should never marry a Flying Dutchman, while we men may learn from it that one can through women go down and perish – under favourable circumstances!

For his opera Wagner took the frame but threw away the picture. He made full use of the doomed sailor but jettisoned the Dutch blonde, and he fleshed out Heine’s story and transformed it. He turned Heine’s pallid Katharina into a real character, Senta; he added two sailors’ choruses, Daland’s crew and the Dutchman’s ghostly troop; and for Act II he devised a chorus of spinning girls and Senta’s nurse, Mary. These homely girls and Mary provide a foil for Senta, and they provide the audience for her ballad, the song where she tells the story of the Dutchman. Wagner also added a new character, Erik, Senta’s childhood sweetheart. After she has sung her ballad it is Erik who tries to browbeat her out of her daydreams of the Dutchman; and it is Erik who triggers the final crisis in Act III. It is his hot-headed remonstration with Senta over her marrying the Dutchman that the latter overhears and misinterprets as betrayal. Senta flings herself into the sea and the Dutchman’s ship sinks, as happened in Heine; but then comes Wagner’s big change: he has Senta and the Dutchman reappearing in the heavens, redeemed and floating blissfully into the new dawn.

Not for nothing did Wagner style Der fliegende Holländer a Romantische Oper, a romantic opera. It is its conclusion that epitomises the gulf between Heine and Wagner. Heine’s memoir is marinated in irony and made a mockery of redemption through love, but Wagner exploited to the full its possibilities for romantic idealism. Heine was still sympathetic to the Young German ideals of unfettered hedonism and promiscuity which had been spearheaded by Heinrich Laube,2 just as Wagner himself had been until Minna changed everything. The memoirs of Schnabelewopski amount to a travelogue describing a connoisseur’s classification of female charms by nationality. Like Katharina, the women are all cardboard cut-outs, lists of physical attributes, and Schnabelewopski shows no interest in their personalities. In Senta, however, Wagner did envisage a real personality, describing her as a determined Nordic girl, physically hale, emotionally vigorous, and not normally given to mawkish daydreams, even though he could not yet bring her to life in music of such vividness as gave his later heroines their striking identities.

In his fashioning of Senta, Wagner’s imagination was influenced by Beethoven’s heroine in Fidelio, Leonora, and by Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, who gave him his youthful ideal of all that drama might be. Wagner’s imagination was even more influenced by the ideal of womanhood emblazoned in his psyche by his first wife, Minna. Schröder-Devrient, Leonora and Minna came together in the Dutchman’s redemptive angel, Senta. As this implies, he steeped The Dutchman in experiences that were very personal. At the time of writing it, he desperately needed to be saved from life’s shipwrecks, and part of the reason why the Dutchman is so compelling is that he poured into it all his experience of the sea and tempests, both in the world and in his inner life. He recreated the crisis and dangers he and his wife Minna had experienced on the voyage that they themselves had made. He had been a ‘flying German’, flying from his creditors in Riga on the Baltic coast, and after the illegal and terrifying escape described in Chapter 7, they had set sail on the Thetis for London.

Instead storms drove them right up to Norway, and the Thetis found shelter at Norwegian Sandwike (Sandvika). Wagner described how it was there that they heard the crew, the men, calling out a sharp call of three descending notes which he would recreate in The Dutchman. These experiences resonated with him so closely that shortly before the opera’s premiere he felt impelled to personalise the action further by changing its location. Sandwike, Wagner’s haven on this voyage, replaced Heine’s vague Scottish port as the harbour where the Dutchman’s ship first comes upon Daland and his crew. His autobiographical sketch just before The Dutchman’s first performance emphasised the parallels between his life and his opera in a self-dramatisation, but the parallels were real and continued real. There is a telling letter to Liszt of ten years later – private correspon...