Wagner

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781848318090
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.
Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.
No other composer is at once so revered or so reviled as Richard Wagner. Yet his contribution to opera is immense. His reputation rests on ten epic operas which are constantly performed worldwide, without speaking of the annual festival of his music at Bayreuth, the opera house which he designed and built to stage his works. Four of these operas, Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung, make up the monumental 15-hour Ring cycle, based on old Norse-Germanic sagas. Many of the others hark back to medieval and Arthurian legends, often dramatising the conflict between the sacred and profane, the sensual and spiritual. Using leitmotifs – themes which symbolise characters and elements in his opera – Wagner introduced a new musical vocabulary.
Endless affairs, twice married, constantly on the run for either political or financial reasons, a prolific writer, an indefatigable composer, Wagner was also, as Michael Steen's narrative shows, a monster of egoism. A revolutionary in his youth, Wagner escaped to Zurich, only to be forced to move on when the businessman bankrolling him was about to uncover Wagner's affair with his wife. He was then lavishly supported in Munich by the 'Mad King' Ludwig II of Bavaria, until the king's ministers objected. Once in Switzerland, Wagner was joined by Cosima von Bülow, Liszt's daughter and the wife of a conductor, who became his second wife and helped him realise his dream at Bayreuth.

WAGNER

WHEREAS LISZTMAY have caused controversy, few composers are so lastingly controversial as his son-in-law, Richard Wagner. Bizet regarded him as the greatest living composer of his time. But for Berlioz, the Prelude to Tristan proceeded ‘with no theme other than a sort of chromatic groaning’. Scriabin thought that there were two or three enchanting moments in Die Walküre, but ‘all the rest is frightfully dull’. Indeed Verdi, no Wagner enthusiast, said that he dozed off during Tannhäuser. After watching Das Rheingold, Clara Schumann wrote: ‘The whole evening I felt as though I were wading about in a swamp.’ The 20th-century novelist Virginia Woolf disliked the ‘bawling sentimentality’. Leo Tolstoy thought the opera Siegfried was a ‘stupid Punch and Judy show, which is much too poor for children over seven years of age. Moreover’, he continued, ‘it is not music. And yet thousands of people sit there and pretend to like it.’¹

There are some matters on which people do tend to agree about Wagner – this extraordinary man who was five feet five inches tall with an outsize head and a vile temper.² That he was utterly unscrupulous, totally self-obsessed, and rapacious. That most of his voluminous writings are not only tedious but often virulently offensive.³ That there are stretches of his music, particularly during a description or explanation, when an ordinary listener becomes bored and the mind inevitably wanders.

Also, Wagner’s poor reputation can be attributed to his anti-Semitism: Hitler was a notorious fan of his works. Yet, many Jews have admired his irrepressible energy and charm. They recognised that Wagner’s genius and the beauty of his works overrode his views and character: the person whom he asked to lead the fund-raising for the enormous project to build an opera house at Bayreuth was Jewish;⁴ Hermann Levi conducted the pre-mière of Parsifal; Bruno Walter had no reservations about performing his operas; Georg Solti issued the first recording of the complete Ring;⁵ Daniel Barenboim conducts his works.

A mark of the great composer is to do something different. As such, Wagner was astonishingly ambitious and influential. Others before had thought of creating an amalgam of ‘philosophy, politics, history and literature, as well as myth, language, poetry, drama and music’⁶ – a Gesamtkunstwerk – but never with such imagination or such vision. In the first few bars of Tristan, Wagner takes us from the 19th century into the 20th, in one leap.⁷ It has been claimed that ‘never since Orpheus has there been a musician whose music affected so vitally the life and art of generations’. 8 His contemporaries were amazed; of course, those merely out for an evening’s entertainment knew that they were in the wrong place.

We shall follow Wagner’s struggle to build a career, and his part as a revolutionary in 1848. After a lucky escape, he settled in Zurich, where he wrote and read rather than composed.* When the businessman bankrolling him was about to discover that Wagner was having an affair with his wife, it was time to move on. The wanderer became increasingly desperate for his compositions to be performed. As is well known, King Ludwig II of Bavaria came to his help. But Ludwig’s support was unpopular and Wagner was thrown out of Munich. He moved to Switzerland, where Cosima von Bülow joined him and became his wife. We shall look at their life together and see him achieve his dream of building an opera house suitable for his works to be performed. We shall observe his total self-centredness, born not so much from the need to satisfy his personal desires but because he was one of those artists who ‘made their honey as do the bees, and in truth this honey benefited all others, but could be made only on condition of not thinking about others while they made it’.⁹ The Wagners moved to Bayreuth, but, like his Flying Dutchman, he was always on the move: his death was in Venice.

EARLY DAYS

On 22 May 1813, Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, in Saxony. This was shortly before Napoleon’s Grand Army was defeated in the battle there.* In the wake of military action there was usually an epidemic: so, typhus killed Wagner’s supposed father, a policeman who enjoyed amateur dramatics. Wagner’s mother then married Ludwig Geyer, an actor in the court theatre in Dresden who had comforted her while the policeman was away with one of the amateur actresses. Geyer was very attached to her son, and fulfilled the role of father. As a consequence, for a long time the boy was known as ‘Geyer’ rather than ‘Wagner’.¹⁰ He was a lively lad: there is a drawing of him fooling around with his sister, imitating fairground tightrope walkers, dressing in masks and ambushing passers-by.¹¹

The family moved to Prague, where his sister Rosalie, one of the family’s main breadwinners, had a job as an actress. When Wagner was fifteen, they moved on to Leipzig, where he went to the St Nicolas school. There, he was more interested in writing a play which he tried to set to music, than in the normal curriculum. He studied counterpoint and piano with the Cantor of St Thomas’, and he made a piano transcription of Beet-hoven’s Ninth Symphony, but he had no formal musical education as such.

As he grew up, he seems to have been boisterous, and joined his fellow-students in their gambling, swaggering and brawling.¹² He was involved in five duels.¹³ These were a regular feature of Teutonic student life, and the wounds were regarded as a mark of honour.** Wagner was involved in proper street-fighting in July 1830, in response to the revolutionary events in France. But he seems to have suffered little more than a hangover the next day. Around this time he became interested in politics, and associated with members of the pro-democratic and subversive group called Young Germany.

THE STRUGGLE TO GET GOING

In January 1833, Wagner left Leipzig to stay with his brother Albert at Würzburg, where he was appointed chorus master and was responsible for taking the singers through their parts in spectaculars such as Marschner’s Der Vampyr and Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable. Wagner disliked these operas; he considered that the audience simply gaped at the usually absurd and crude spectacle in front of them, and were not emotionally or intellectually involved.¹⁵ Also, he much preferred the musical style of Weber, and particularly admired his opera Euryanthe. The following year, Wagner wrote the music for his first opera, Die Feen (The Fairies). Two years later, he wrote Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love, or Measure for Measure).

Around this time, Wagner first heard the soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, whom Beethoven had asked to perform Leonore in the revival of Fidelio. She had also created the role of Agathe for Weber’s Der Freischütz.¹⁶ She inspired Wagner so much that he eventually had her portrayed as Tragedy over the door of his house in Bayreuth; and she was even in his thoughts a few days before he died.¹⁷ Not everyone admired her. Berlioz disliked her way of interspersing her singing ‘with spoken phrases and interjections, like our vaudeville actors in their couplets, the effect of which is execrable … she never sings such words as O God; yes; no; impossible. They are always spoken or rather shouted in the loudest voice.’ He dismissed her style as ‘most anti-musical and trivial, and beginners ought to be warned against imitating it’.¹⁸

Wagner reluctantly took a job as musical director of a fleapit in tiny Lauchstädt, near Handel’s birthplace of Halle. The theatre company moved on to Magdeburg, where Wagner built a reputation as a good conductor and staged Das Liebesverbot. Schröder-Devrient took part in a benefit concert for him; but it was not a success because many did not expect her to turn up, and so stayed away. Those who attended were deafened by the sound effects and cannon in a performance of Beethoven’s ‘Battle’ Symphony.

In Lauchstädt, Wagner met Christine Wilhelmine Planer, known as Minna, and her daughter Natalie, who had been fathered by an officer who had deserted her. After the theatre company went bust, Wagner joined Minna in the Baltic port of Königsberg, where she was already involved with another man. Nevertheless, she and Wagner were married in November 1836 and began their quarrelsome life together. Six months later, she went off with a merchant. Wagner traced her to Dresden; they were reconciled, yet soon she was off again. He then became conductor at Riga for two seasons, and hoped that his marriage would become more stable.¹⁹ The relationship cannot have been eased by Minna’s miscarriage, caused by their escape across the border into East Prussia in order to avoid their creditors. The cart toppled over and the Wagners landed in a heap of manure. They then stowed away on a ship bound for London, a journey which gave him some ideas for Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman).²⁰

In London there was no welcome, so they crossed the Channel to Boulogne where they met Meyerbeer, who gave them introductions to officials at the Paris Opéra. Wagner wanted to get his opera Rienzi staged in Paris, where they now spent two and a half poverty-stricken years. Some writers attribute Wagner’s anti-Semitism to his perception that a clique of powerful Jews was responsible for rejecting his opera, and also to his annoyance at his dependence on money-lenders, mostly presumably Jewish, at this time. ‘He knew what it was like to have no soles to his shoes, to have pawned most of his furniture, to live on bread and potatoes for six months and have cheeks sunken with hunger, to be threatened with imprisonment for debt.’²¹ He borrowed off the husband of his stepsister Cécile, who lived in Paris. He did hack work doing piano arrangements of popular works by other composers such as Donizetti, and he prepared vocal scores. He also earned fees for articles in journals such as the Revue et Gazette Musicale.²² In June 1840, he obsequiously sent to Meyerbeer a sketch for a one-act opera based on Der Fliegende Holländer. He was rebuffed; and he did not endear himself to the leaders of the Paris opera world by subsequently sending a review to Schumann’s journal in which he reported that Fromental Halévy, the distinguished composer of La Juive, was ‘not a deliberately cunning swindler like Meyerbeer’.²³

There was no hope of getting the Paris opera community to stage Rienzi, but the Dresden Opera agreed to it being performed. In April 1842, the Wagners travelled across Germany for its première. Wagner subsequently wrote: ‘I saw the Rhine for the first time; with tears swelling in my eyes I, a poor artist, swore eternal loyalty to my German fatherland.’²⁴

The story of Rienzi, in which the hero brings to an end the corrupt rule of the aristocracy, struck a chord in these increasingly troubled times, and was a success in Dresden. At last, Wagner’s position was beginning to improve. Schröder-Devrient, who took part in Rienzi, sang the role of Senta in Der Fliegende Holländer, which followed in January 1843. She also lent Wagner money. Persuaded by Minna and by Weber’s widow, the 30-year-old Wagner accepted an appointment as one of the conductors at Dresden.

Tannhäuser, his ‘first fusion of lust and piety’,²⁵ was completed and staged in Dresden in 1845. Lohengrin was written in the following year, while Wagner was spending the summer in a small house just outside the city, near the royal palace of Pillnitz.

THE 1848 REVOLUTIONARY

It was to be expected that Wagner, by now prominent as composer, conductor and journalist, would be drawn into the circle of intellectuals who met at a restaurant in Dresden. There they discussed political and philosophical issues of the time, such as Hegel’s novel view that the world is always in a process of change. One member of the group was August Röckel, a failed musician and political activist who had been involved in Paris in ‘Les Trois Glorieuses’ of 1830. He was a nephew of the composer Hummel, and son of the first Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio. Wagner found a position for him at the Dresden Opera. Röckel introduced Wagner to the arch-revolutionary anarchist, Michael Bakunin.²⁶

In the mid-1840s, Wagner believed that soon there was bound to be an upheaval, which was not an unreasonable view to take.²⁷ Various forces – industrial, agricultural and religious – were contributing to the growing unrest. Germany, still a conglomeration of many antiquated states, had been experiencing the pressures and tensions arising from industrialisation. Some of the businesses which are now so familiar – Krupp and Siemens for example – began to appear. The first railway was built in 1834, and during the 1840s the length of track (if Austria is included) grew from 600 to 4,000 miles. Just as the mechanisation of the textile industry in England forced down wages, so the German textile workers’ incomes were squeezed below subsistence levels.²⁸

With food accounting for 80 per cent of the spending of poor families, agricultural stability was crucial.²⁹ But there were harvest failures in 1845–7, years which many associate with the appalling famine in Ireland when nearly 29 per cent of the population died in the province of Connaught, following the import of potato blight from North America.³⁰ In Continental Europe, when the price of rye and potatoes doubled, parts of the rural population had to resort to eating grass, clover and potato peelings. There were sporadic outbreaks of trouble with peasant revolts, and considerable disruption among the weavers. In parallel, there were also rumblings from Protestants who were concerned about the revival of Roman Catholicism.*

The usual sleaze at the top level of society attracted publicity. The Prussian king was known as the ‘red-nosed king’ because of his liking for drink; one of his brothers was embroiled in financial scandals; another’s wife had an affair with a huntsman that led to a messy divorce. The 60-year-old King Ludwig I of Bavaria, creator of 19th-century Munich, went off with the ‘Spanish’ dancer and adventuress, Liszt’s girlfriend, Lola Montez.

All this provoked considerable dissent, but the regimes cracked down on it. When the professors in Göttingen protested against the abolition of the constitution in 1837, the King of Hanover** dismissed them, and remarked that ‘professors and whores can always be had for money’.³² Austria banned 5,000 books, including works by Spinoza, Rousseau, Goethe and Schiller; censors even monitored inscriptions on gravestones, cuff-links and tobacco boxes. Because people had no right to ...

Table of contents

• INTRODUCTION
• EARLY DAYS
• Notes
• Other Books in the Series