Wagner

When we are dealing with a mixed art-form, such as opera, not to speak of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a kind of art which combines all the other forms, which is what Wagner wanted his mature works to be, the question evidently becomes more complex still. If we divide opera into action (or plot), text and music, then the crucial issue is the role that music plays. In his most famous dictum, Wagner claimed that in traditional opera music, which should be the means, had become the end, while drama, which should be the end, was merely the means. His revolution in opera, as opposed to all the other revolutions which he hoped to effect, was to be the placing of music and drama in the right order. To establish from first principles what that order was, Wagner was driven to his heroic amount of theorising, much of it unacceptable because it is so vague and groundlessly speculative. But what we can certainly agree with is that however much music is in the service of drama, it has, in the hands of all the operatic composers whose work survives, a capacity to direct our sympathies which none of them has failed to exploit. It may well be that opera is all the more effective when that is not what it appears to be doing, but that is chiefly to say that we admire the cunning of self-concealing enterprise.

It can seem that Wagner refuses to join in the time-honoured procedures of the artist, that he manifests in his dramas the lack of tact which was so striking a feature of his personality in general, and that his reverence for Beethoven is most apparent in his taking over the insistent nature of Beethoven’s music, a source of pain to his most fastidious listeners. We shall have to see about that. But it is an impression which many people have gained from listening, in the first place, to highlights from his works, the usual way, perhaps, of hearing things by him. Which brings me to the topic which someone who hasn’t yet seriously encountered Wagner’s art, but is thinking of doing so, is likely to be preoccupied by.

2 Prejudices and Banalities

What I would like to do now is move immediately to a consideration of key aspects of Wagner’s work, by discussing some of his dramas and the themes with which they are concerned. But at some point I have to deal with an enormous amount of controversy that still rages about many aspects of his life and personality, and which, if one ignores it, is brought up as something which renders pointless any other discussion. Of course one can’t hope to transcend the controversy: Olympian postures in relation to it merely fuel it further. Nor, given the questions around which it revolves, can one hope to settle it. The only course is to wade in and make, as succinctly as possible, what one regards as the crucial points, emerging on the other side in as decorous a state as one can contrive.

It is presumably some evidence of what is taken to be a strikingly direct mode of statement in Wagner’s works which leads people to feel that the alleged facts of his life are relevant to understanding and judging them in a way that doesn’t occur elsewhere in music, music-drama, or literature – and this in the case of a dramatist whose sympathies might be expected to be distributed among his characters. There wouldn’t be a ‘case of Wagner’ if he had not been one of the most significant figures in the development of music and opera. But if he had led a life of sufficient ordinariness for his biography to be a bore, the case of Wagner would be much less insistent and incessant than it is.

A few recent examples, to show the level to which one has to descend if one is not to be felt to be just condescending. In his strikingly intelligent and serious A Guide to Opera Recordings (Oxford University Press, 1987), Ethan Mordden writes: ‘Parsifal is a lie, for Wagner was a sinner: hypocrite, bigot, opportunist, adulterer’ (p. 170). That telling ‘for’ could only have been used on the assumption that Parsifal is meant to be a proclamation of belief, and that if someone doesn’t behave in the way which he is taken to be recommending, he is a hypocrite. There are many disputable remarks in Mordden’s book, but this is the only one that seems to be evidently inane. Only about Wagner would anyone venture to make it.

In The Times of 15 February 1993, Rodney Milnes, one of the most earnest of opera reviewers, wrote apropos of Tristan und Isolde: ‘Nearly six hours spent in the theatre being buttonholed with long-winded and specious justification of the composer’s taste for other people’s wives in general and Mathilde Wesendonck in particular is wearing on one’s patience.’ So that’s what Tristan is! Probably Milnes would claim that he was only high-spiritedly letting off steam, taunting those members of the audience who might be taking the work too seriously: ‘Tristan und Isolde, an obsessively morbid and unhealthy work…’ the paragraph containing the previous quotation begins. But why the rage, why the dragging in of Wagner’s private life (actually a grotesque version of it)?

In The Times of 13 July 1993, another critic, Barry Millington, one of the leading ‘experts’ on Wagner of the present time, acclaimed a production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg for revealing ‘the dark underside of the opera’. ‘In short,’ Millington writes, ‘the opera is the artistic counterpart of the ideological crusade launched by Wagner in the 1860s: a crusade to urge Germany to awaken, to expel alien elements and honour the “German spirit”. The characterisation of Beckmesser is demonstrably anti-Semitic.’ The ‘demonstration’ which is supposed to support that adverb is contained in an article by Barry Millington, published in the most self-consciously high-brow of contemporary opera journals, Cambridge Opera Journal. Clearly the tone is a more solemn one than Milnes’s, but that shouldn’t conceal the crass confidence with which Millington presents as fact his own preposterous opinions. To demonstrate their absurdity would be out of place here; I will merely point out that to the extent that the article in the learned journal claims to make its point, it is by the accumulation of a large number of clues which no one has ever picked up on before, and that by its very ingenuity it refutes itself: Wagner was often subtle, but he didn’t write in code. It might have occurred to Millington alias Holmes that Wagner, in the cause of his crusade, should have rendered his message to the German nation somewhat more accessible.

To grasp fully what leads people to write about Wagner in this way – and every reader will agree that there is no other major artist who elicits remarks of this kind, as methodologically absurd as they are deliberately provocative – we shall have to wait until examining some of Wagner’s art in some detail. But we don’t need to wait until then before acknowledging the strangeness of the hostility, its intensity and its reaching for any weapon that comes to hand (minds hardly seem to be involved) to clobber Wagner with. The most obvious feature of all the remarks quoted, and one that pervades anti-Wagnerian polemic, is the simplicity of the transition from features of Wagner’s extra-musical activities to animadversions on his art. One doesn’t need to have been involved in the intricacies of the dispute about the ‘Intentional Fallacy’, the tersest statement of which was ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’, to feel that the relationship between an artist’s life, including his intentions in producing his art, and his actual artistic productions, must be a matter of some complexity. Yet though this is widely accepted for virtually every other case in the history of art, it is utterly ignored when we come to Wagner. This would be, perhaps, understandable if he had been a villain on a prodigious scale (some people think that he was). But adulterers, hypocrites, opportunists, even anti-Semites, are not all that uncommon in the artistic community or outside it. Wagner never behaved with such extravagant malignity as Beethoven, for example, in relation to his sister-in-law, or so dishonestly as Beethoven to his publishers. But though Beethoven’s biographers tend to deplore his irrational behaviour, amounting sometimes to insanity, they, and other people, never, so far as I know, find that a reason for questioning the greatness of Fidelio or the Missa Solemnis or the Ninth Symphony. And those who are favourably impressed by Peter Shaffer’s portrayal of Mozart in Amadeus tend, like its author, to find an extra frisson in celebrating the achievements of so otherwise comprehensively idiotic a figure as that play depicts, not to feel that they are diminished.

So is it simply that there is something uniquely unattractive about Wagner’s character, which puts him in a category by himself? And what kind of thing is it? As I quoted Hans Keller saying, people do find his consciousness of his own genius distasteful. The reiterated charges about his emotional, libidinal life seem absurd, since he was not promiscuous on a particularly large scale, or as much as many artists, and others, who have been are accorded forgiveness by their virtuous commentators. But there is the impression that his various unattractive facets somehow – no one has said exactly how – add up to, are part of, an integrated character which is, again somehow congruent with his music, or the dramas of which it is a crucial part. It is thought to be, especially by those who have heard little of it, overbearing, noisily emphatic, erotically charged even in the most inappropriate passages, and effusive in a way that leads to suspicions about its sincerity.

But then why not just write it off? When one contemplates the immense annual production of anti-Wagnerian propaganda, the suspicion becomes inescapable that for many listeners his art presents a threat, if not a temptation. Among other things, to admire it seems to be committing oneself to allowing him to take up more emotional space than one artist, or at least one artist who practises his peculiar forms of persuasion, should be allowed to do. A striking moralism comes into play in his case, as it rarely does elsewhere. Perhaps the fundamental anti-Wagnerian argument can be fairly presented in these terms: even though he is writing dramas, Wagner himself is omnipresent in them, in a way that Shakespeare impressively is not in his dramas, or even Racine in his. So the total effect of any of them, at any rate the mature ones, is of coming into contact with a personality all the more powerful for dispersing himself into all his characters. And such is the force of his art that he turns his listeners/spectators into accomplices. Becoming a Wagnerian is, at least incipiently, becoming like Wagner. That was, once again, Nietzsche’s claim.

But why becoming like Wagner, as opposed to becoming like what Wagner presented himself as, granted that one accepts the argument at all? For the difference seems to be immense. The staple of Wagnerian drama, the whole idiom, is one of nobility.

All the worse, the reply comes back; by a variety of means Wagner conveys the impression of an earnest orator. But what he really is is a brilliant demagogue, whose rhetoric is so resourceful that we naturally find it suspect. Anyone who genuinely believes what he says – this is our prejudice, unexamined and even sacrosanct – can communicate it without going into constant overdrive. Nietzsche, the incomparable and tireless exposer of our prejudices in all fields, subscribed uncritically to this one. Contrasting Mozart and Wagner, he cleverly takes the music that Mozart gives the Commendatore when he appears in the Supper Scene of Don Giovanni, a passage of most atypical violence and emphasis, and writes: ‘Apparently you think that all music is like the music of the “Stone Guest” – all music must leap out of the wall and shake the listener to his very intestines. Only then you consider music “effective”. But on whom are such effects achieved? On those whom a noble artist should never impress: on the mass, on the immature, on the blasé, on the sick, on the idiots, on Wagnerians!’ (Nietzsche contra Wagner). Once more, as so often with Nietzsche’s sweeping charges, this contains illuminating truth as well as outrageously unfair falsehood. But it does rely on the view that the genuineness of a conviction can be assessed by its mode of communication, and that the extreme nature of Wagner’s art, ‘espressivo at all costs’, as Nietzsche puts it elsewhere, betrays an uncertainty. Either that, or it hides something. Wagner’s surface of nobility conceals his underlying insecurity and egoism, not to mention his pusillanimity.

It is almost impossible to find out whether these things would be said about Wagner if his well-advertised personality defects weren’t known about, because the advertisement has been so successful that no one has escaped hearing about it. Even people who take no interest in music can retail odd facts about Wagner. So I shall now do two things, for the rest of this chapter: first, consider some aspects of Wagner’s life and character. Secondly, see to what extent his alleged views and vices are thought to be evident, in more or less indirect ways, in his work. There is, to begin with, his overbearing personality and strength of will, remarked on by everyone who knew him, and one of the most powerful sources of his fascination for them. This urge to dominate, combined with a charm which he could exercise whenever he felt inclined, and which he is claimed to have used to manipulate people with the sole aim of furthering his own ends, was realised by many of those in thrall to him, and even accounted for their willingness to serve him until, as with Nietzsche, they revolted against such tyranny. But some who had problems reconciling their own need to create with moving in Wagner’s orbit found that it was, in the end, possible to do both, and a risk worth taking. Peter Cornelius, composer of the winning comic opera The Barber of Baghdad for instance, broke with Wagner and then went back to him. He wrote to his future wife: ‘I am quite determined to stick to him steadfastly, to go with him through thick and thin, partisan to the last ditch. When I see how others, like Bülow, Liszt, Berlioz, Tausig, Damrosch treat me, ignore me, forget me, and how he, the moment I show him even a hint of my heart, is always ready to give me his full friendship, then I tell myself that it is Fate that has brought us together.’

Next, there is Wagner’s financial history, a spectacular affair, certainly. From an early age he was in debt, chronically so, partly because he rarely had a settled source of income, partly because he never ceased to indulge his love of luxury, one of the traits which earned him most ridicule as well as disapproval from his contemporaries, as one can see in many cartoons. Anyone who lent him money, and most of the people who came into contact with him did, was foolish to expect that they would ever see it again.

His treatment of the women who played so large and indispensable a part in his life is also a subject of self-righteous recrimination. Once more, it may not be the sheer number that were involved, but rather the ruthlessness with which, if they had more than a one-night stand with him, they tended to get treated. This is supposedly true of his first wife, Minna, to the most extreme degree, but of at least half a dozen others too.

Last, most serious and now most often used as conclusive evidence against him, there is his racism, of which the two correlative elements were an ever more virulent anti-Semitism and an insistence on the necessity of the purity of Aryan blood if mankind was not to degenerate (a concept that was becoming very fashionable towards the end of Wagner’s life) to a point where it was irredeemable.

The strength of will and ruthlessness in pursuit of his aims is something we may freely grant. The question, insofar as it concerns a moral judgement on Wagner’s character, is whether it was exercised only for his own gratification, or whether it was of the kind which anyone with a serious and radical programme of reform of what they regard as vitally important is bound to employ. Whatever one thinks of Wagner’s attitudes, artistic and socio-political, he was an idealist. He was by no means bent only on the furtherance of his own fame, glory, and so on. He was, to a remarkable degree for a revolutionary artist, a hero-worshipper of his greatest predecessors. During the period of his life when he did have one job, as director of Dresden’s musical life, from 1843 to 1849, he raised standards of musical, especially operatic, performance and production to a level which had not previously been envisaged. In order to get for Gluck the recognition which Wagner felt he deserved and lacked then (as to some extent now), he not only gave what seem to have been exemplary performances of his works, but in the case of Iphigénie en Aulide, which he felt was flawed in ways that obscured its merits, he extensively rewrote it. A misconceived enterprise, it might be thought. But it was carried through without thought of his own interests, and at the expense of his own creative work, for which he had far too little time, since his administration of the opera house was so conscientious. These things need bearing in mind. For what we routinely find in scholarly works is this kind of claim: ‘Wagner’s monomania is well known. In his whole life there seem to have been hardly any occasions when he was capable of disinterested co-operation’ (M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern: Nietzsche on Tragedy, p. 216). The authors proceed to cite a rare exception; but note the shape of the argument. They don’t need to give any evidence for Wagner’s monomania, since it is ‘well known’. So the counter-example must be an exception. It is in that way that myths become history.

What galls people even more than Wagner’s idealism is that he was a practical idealist. He succeeded in making real what his contemporaries regarded as ludicrous pipe-dreams. But many of them were in the interests not only of great art, with which his only connection was passionate devotion, but in the interests of those who were performing it. He had a lifelong concern with the welfare of the musicians with whom he performed, and who idolised him. He drew up detailed and carefully worked-out plans for the betterment of the Dresden orchestra, and did a great deal to put the careers of the musicians in Zurich, when he was exiled there, on a secure financial footing. He believed, from extensive experience, that they were unlikely otherwise to give of their best, but there is no reason to think that that was his only or primary motive; unless one is determined to see him as ‘an absolute shit’ and ‘a very bad hat indeed’, to invoke two of W. H. Auden’s judgements on his character.

Wagner’s preparedness to be as hard on other people, in the fulfilment of what he saw as his mission, as he invariably was on himself, is undeniable. And it is easy to slide from that to his ‘using’ people. The prize example here is King Ludwig II, and it is worth looking at his relationship with Wagner in a bit of detail because it is so common to regard the King as the pathetic but rich host, Wagner as the impoverished but triumphant parasite. In the most famous single episode of his life, Wagner, in 1864, was in hiding from his creditors, at the end of his financial and all other tethers, when the eighteen-year-old Crown Prince came to the Bavarian throne, and as his first act sent his cabinet secretary in search of the composer whom he had idolised since early adolescence. Having finally run Wagner to ground, the secretary Pfistermeister conveyed his royal master’s greetings, Wagner went off to Munich the next day, and Ludwig promised to settle all his debts, set him up in the comfort he needed for completing the Ring, and ensure its production. A Platonic honeymoon ensued, but was short-lived. The populace of Munich was scandalised by Wagner’s behaviour, he made enemies in the cabinet by attempting to influence Ludwig’s political opinions, and later on he lied to him about whether he was having an affair with Cosima, the wife of Hans von Bülow, the conductor who was tirelessly preparing the first performance of Tristan und Isolde. Their relationship continued until Wagner’s death, but Ludwig was, for all his passion for Wagner’s art (more its scenic than its musical aspects), sadly disillusioned with its creator, whom he once included in a denunciation of ‘the theatre rabble’.

It is, in many respects, a painful story. But the truth is that Ludwig, in his lonely misery, found his chief consolation in watching Wagner’s dramas. He wanted them finished and performed for himself alone – his preferred way of seeing them was in a theatre in which he constituted the sole audience. He was one of the first of the breed of people who have found Wagner’s dramas superior to life, and in straightforward competition with it, and was unusual among them only in that he had the means at his disposal to build himself a Venus Grotto, a Hunding’s Hut (both in the grounds of his pleasure palace Lindenhof), and to spend a large part of the time which should have been occupied in affairs of state pretending to be Lohengrin. There is no single piece of evidence that he wanted ‘to save Wagner for the world’, as he put it on hearing of Wagner’s death, to which his immediate reaction was, ‘Oh! I’m sorry, but then again not really. Only recently he caused me trouble over Parsifal.’ And as for the expense which Wagner caused him – and it does seem very unlikely that without Ludwig’s aid Wagner’s later works could have been written – the decorations for Ludwig’s bedroom in Herrenchiemsee, his recreation of Versailles, cost considerably more than all the money and gifts in kind that he gave Wagner over nineteen years; and his wedding coach, never used, three times as much as he gave Wagner. The treatment he received from the composer was compounded of genuine gratitude, warm affection and concern at the start, and exploitation in the service of his art.

Admittedly Wagner wrote in a letter to Liszt: ‘If I am obliged to plunge once more into the waves of an artist’s imagination in order to find satisfaction in an imaginary world, I must at least help out my imagination and find means of encouraging my imaginative faculties. So I cannot live like a dog, I cannot sleep on straw and drink common gin: mine is an intensely irritable, acute and hugely voracious, yet uncommonly tender and delicate sensuality which, one way or another, must be flattered if I am to accomplish the cruelly difficult task of creating in my mind a non-existent world.’ That does strike me as candid. If, on the basis of it, hostile judgement of Wagner is in place, he would even so not be worse than many people who escape the criticism that is heaped on him because he told the truth and was incessantly in the limelight; quite apart from the reputation he has earned from producing his works under the conditions, some of the time, which he tells Liszt he craves. Quite a lot of the time he managed to create them despite poverty and discomfort, but I don’t see that he should have had to endure more of that than he did. All told, I’m inclined to feel that Wagner’s capacity for making writers on him, many of them securely established in academic jobs, reveal their priggish and disapproving lack of imagination is his most vexing feature.

However, on to Wagner and sex. After some youthful gallivanting of a commonplace kind, he married a woman who was in no respect suitable for him, and their life together was unhappy for the most part. Very shortly after the marriage his wife Minna ran away with another man, twice. Her sexual history had begun distressingly, with a seduction which led to the birth of a daughter, Nathalie, whom Minna always passed off as her sister, and thanks to Wagner’s loyalty, the secret was not discovered during her lifetime. Minna was a great admirer of Wagner’s worst work, Rienzi, and was unable to understand why he felt the need to write operas vastly different from it, which were less successful at the box office and led to lengthy periods of near-destitution. That they didn’t give up the effort to live together until decades of misery had passed is a mystery. Under the circumstances, Wagner’s intermittent passions – he always needed a muse – are in no wise surprising. And what was certainly the grand passion of his life, for Mathilde Wesendonck, though it caused all the parties concerned great pain, was hardly anyone’s fault. Its connections with Tristan – was Wagner in love with Mathilde because he was writing Tristan, was it the other way round, or a mixture of the two? – can never be sorted out, if only for the reason that this is one of those matters in which there is no such thing as the truth.