Wagner

His second marriage was as mutually fulfilling as his first was frustrating. Cosima, illegitimate daughter of Liszt, had married early in her first attempt at self-sacrifice to a man of genius, Hans von Bülow. Unfortunately he was tormented by not being genius enough, and their marriage was, in its way, as unhappy as Wagner’s first. Since for Cosima, a woman of extraordinary gifts, it was inconceivable that she should not play the part of a George Eliot heroine to someone who needed her, it was inevitable that frequent contact with Wagner should lead to passion. As so often in such situations, the idea was that in concealing their relationship from Bülow they would spare his feelings, though of course that is never possible. Cosima’s guilt over the deception pervades her diaries, written after everything was in the open. She and Wagner would have been fools to refuse to enter into what became one of the most famously productive partnerships in history, Cosima giving him every kind of support, except financial, during the last eighteen years of his life when he was bearing crushing burdens of responsibility, creative and otherwise, and his health was in decline. Wagner had one last fling, with Judith Gauthier, in the period of the first Bayreuth Festival, an affair of which the remarkable Cosima was aware and which she sanctioned, knowing that it would not survive for long.

So if Wagner had ‘a passion for other men’s wives’, as the familiar account goes, that may be due to the fact that most women he met were married, a problem he wouldn’t encounter now. He certainly didn’t welcome the complications that they involved. Once more, I find it hard to understand the fuss.

But it is all too easy to understand the fuss about Wagner’s anti-Semitism, which was virulent even for the time, and moved from what seems to have been a mildly paranoiac state to one of obsession. That he was in the company of many of the most distinguished men of the day makes things no better, though racial theories are not evidently absurd, indeed the reverse. Wagner suffered from a lifelong need to locate the evils of life and society in one area, and it is not surprising that, in carrying through this boring programme, he should have selected the Jews. He was no more anti-Semitic than, say, Luther or Kant or Marx, but he was nearer in time, except for Marx, to the vilest of all racially-based political programmes and its enactment. And since the Nazis were so violently anti-Bolshevik, that has let Marx off the hook.

To say that many of Wagner’s best friends were Jews may sound like a weary defence, but it is not meant as a defence at all, merely as a sign that his attitudes towards Jews were inconsistent. The crucial question is whether his anti-Semitism invades his works. If it does, then they are even more controversial than they have always seemed, and in a way that is bound to take them finally beyond controversy into repugnance – except for those who thrill to the unsavoury. Though it is a crucial question, I believe it can be rapidly answered, as I indicated at the beginning of the chapter in mentioning Millington. If they are in any respect anti-Semitic, then that element in them is coded. They are, that is, to be sharply distinguished from The Merchant of Venice. But Wagner was the most explicit of men, both in the whole of his tactless life and in what is often thought to be his no less tactless art. Where are the Jews in his works, and how are we to recognise them? The chief focus, until recently, for Jew-spotting has been the Ring, since it is allegedly about the evil of possessions. That leads many commentators to claim that Alberich is a Jew, and even more obviously Mime. But if they are, so is the whole race of the Nibelungs, and they are depicted as pathetically downtrodden workers, the very image of the misery for which Jewish capitalism is responsible. Apart from which, Alberich is not as simple a villain in the Ring as casual acquaintance with it might lead one to think. He exists in intimate relationship to Wotan, who is referred to as ‘Licht-Alberich’ (Light-Alberich). The plot of the Ring simply can’t be worked out in racial terms. And the fact that Wagner devoted many pages in his letters to expounding its meaning, and that Cosima’s Diaries are full of references to it, without the question of its Jewish ‘sub-text’ ever cropping up, surely is decisive.

More recently – and it is interesting that it is after the Nazi period that most of this discussion has taken place, not during it, even on the part of the Nazis themselves, who would have been keenest on Jew-spotting – it has been alleged that some of Wagner’s other major villains are Jewish, for instance Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger and Klingsor in Parsifal. Once more, why did Wagner make the point so obscurely that we have had to wait more than a century for these ‘discoveries’ to be made? The very elaborateness, for all its fatuities, of Millington’s argument for Beckmesser’s Jewishness is a refutation of the claim.

But how, one might wonder, could anyone be as obsessively anti-Semitic as Wagner without its entering his works? One might well wonder, but the gulf between the life and opinions of an artist and his creative work has surely been sufficiently established by now for us to admit that such extraordinary discrepancies are more frequent than the congruities we obstinately continue to expect. If we don’t accept that, we are going to lapse into the circularity of claiming that Wagner thought Jews were bad, and so the villains in his works are Jewish; and you can tell how much he disliked Jews from the ghastliness of the bad characters in his works. That is the level of sophistication at which these arguments operate.

That was originally all I was going to say on the subject, since I have already had to repeat myself in order to appear to take the issue seriously. But of course it has to be taken seriously, in some sense. Since I wrote this chapter there have been two books on the subject in English alone, and in a series of programmes on Channel 4 on English television, called ‘Wagnermania’, it was clear that Wagner’s anti-Semitism is the one aspect of him which the series’ sponsors felt guaranteed an audience. Not that anything new is forthcoming. In fact, the presenters of the argument that Wagner’s works are insidiously anti-Semitic, including the ubiquitous Millington, were at pains to point out that the ‘fact’ might all too easily be overlooked by audiences, unless they were instructed in what Wagner wrote in his pamphlets, and said to Cosima. The authors of the two books have to adopt a similar line. One might feel, under the circumstances, that it would be better if they kept the information to themselves: not because it damages Wagner, but because it is unclear how informing people that Alberich is ‘really’ a Jew is giving them anything which serves any purpose in understanding the Ring. Supposing that Wagner intended that he should be seen in that way. In the first place, it is only within a certain framework that calling someone a Jew has any significance. It isn’t as if the rest of the characters in the Ring are threatened Aryans, or uncorrupted until Alberich takes his decisive action. In the second place, the advocates of the final solution to the Wagner problem, as one might call them, are all arguing on the basis of Wagner’s alleged influence on the Nazis. It might be thought scandalous to say ‘alleged’; but only Hitler was an enthusiastic Wagnerian, insisting that the functionaries of the Third Reich attend performances of the dramas which bored them stiff. And if Hitler had taken the dramas seriously, he would hardly have felt encouraged to pursue his policies, since Wagner shows the futility of political action in dealing with the world’s evils. He might have noticed, too, that the only major character in the Ring who survives it is Alberich, and been disheartened.

That there are some similarities between the Nazis’ proclaimed ideology and some of the conclusions which Wagner may be suggesting in his dramas – though as we are about to discover, that is no simple matter – I am not disposed to deny. But to attempt to draw any systematic conclusions from that is futile, especially if it is a matter of blaming Wagner for their outlandish views. Oddly, it is widely agreed that there neither was, nor could have been, any great Nazi art. But the people who say that are prepared, nonetheless, to say that there was – avant la lettre.

Basta! No one ever changes sides on these issues. I just hope that I have got in first for people who have not yet taken sides, and provided them with some rudimentary equipment.

3 Getting under Way

Having in the first chapter floated a fair number of ideas, and in the second sunk, I hope, several of the most popular misconceptions about Wagner, I can now move on to a discussion of what is in the first place important about him: his musical works, which I shall designate as dramas, music-dramas or operas indifferently. His first artistic impulses were theatrical, music entering at a slightly later stage. Enormously excited as a boy by the sheer atmosphere of the theatre, and then finding the music of, above all, Beethoven deeply moving, it was clear that he would, if he was to be creative, combine thrills and emotions in the most popular contemporary form, that of opera. Contrary to the impression he sometimes gives in his many autobiographical retrospectives, Wagner received a thorough training in the elements of composition, through assiduous study of the masters of counterpoint. When he came, at the age of twenty, to compose his first opera Die Feen (‘The Fairies’), the chief constraints on what he wrote were those of having no very urgent need to communicate anything. It is very rare in Wagner that we feel a gap between his aspirations and his capacities – but all he aspired to at this stage was to be an opera-composer, with no particular subjects or themes in mind. As an ardent admirer of E. T. A. Hoffmann, and in love with the atmosphere of early German Romanticism, he sedulously devoted himself to producing a work which caught the spirit of Weber as fully as possible. The opening bars of the Overture to Die Feen, and much else besides in the work, might have come from Weber working at less than full pressure.

The result is a work of considerable charm, not much originality, and a pervasive uncertainty about how seriously it wants to be taken. One of Wagner’s most important statements of his development, A Communication to my Friends, written nineteen years later in 1851, makes a good deal of the fact that some of the central themes of his later works are adumbrated in Die Feen. Up to a point that is true, but as always the question is at what level they are dealt with, and the level of Die Feen is nothing to get worked up about; though it is certainly as enjoyable an opera as many that are revived these days to cries of the thrills of rediscovery. It is rather a long work for its slender substance, but it is at least as well worth hearing as most of Mozart’s or Verdi’s early operas, to take a couple of cases of severe contemporary overvaluation.

Despite its irrelevance for any serious consideration of Wagner, Die Feen is a plausible starting-point for a composer whose preoccupations were later to be with the supernatural, with the centrality of love as leading towards some mode of redemption, and with the expression of his dramatic themes in a German musical idiom. His next opera, Das Liebesverbot (‘The Ban on Love’), based loosely on Measure for Measure, can only be seen as an act of fairly gross infidelity to his muse. True, there are some passages that give a foretaste of Wagner’s later works more strongly than anything in Die Feen, and the tumescent motif which appears in the Overture, and in the scene between Friedrich (the Angelo figure) and Isabella, is strikingly characteristic. But the whole ambience of the work, its celebration of uninhibited hedonism, is utterly remote from anything that one thinks of as Wagnerian. In fact Wagner was going through a rebellious period, in which ‘German’ signified for him what it vulgarly does for many people – heaviness, soul-searching, and in musical terms a lack of interest in sustained singable melody. He was infatuated with the music of Bellini, the supreme bel canto composer, and a love-worthy object. But although Wagner never lost his affection for Bellini’s work. he soon came to realise that he was not destined for that path – or rather, that for all its appeal it wouldn’t serve his purposes. And in fact he was only able to use Bellini by misunderstanding him. He even went so far as to write an alternative aria for Oroveso, to be inserted in Norma, Bellini’s masterpiece. Listening to that aria one is amazed that Wagner thought he had captured the flavour of Bellini.

In Das Liebesverbot, which is once more an enjoyable opera, though again somewhat overlong, it is possible to feel that the young Wagner was putting up a misguided battle with his destiny. It manifests, if not with consummate skill, at least with gusto, many of the things which he was to spend the rest of his life fighting against with single-minded dedication. The theme of the ban on love itself he revisited in one work after another, but in his mature output the various ways in which the ban is brought into operation are seen as deep elements of human nature, as the concept of love itself becomes something of increasingly daunting complexity. But in Das Liebesverbot the figure of Friedrich, who imposes the ban, is a one-dimensional caricature, and a hypocrite to boot. He merely provides what suspense there is in the plot, while Wagner is mainly keen to express a mood of carnival and enthusiastic youthful rebelliousness. No comparison with the Shakespeare play would have any point: Shakespeare produced a deep, and in my view deeply flawed, work. Wagner produced something which doesn’t reach a level where serious criticism is appropriate. He was, as it were, shopping around. His first opera was an attempt in the German mode, reflecting what Wagner took to be his concerns; his second was one of those trips across the Alps which Goethe seems to have made obligatory for Germans at some stage of their career.

With almost too handy comprehensiveness, Wagner’s next effort, Rienzi, the last of what have been widely and rightly agreed to be his juvenilia, was an emulation of grand French opera. Though it is artistically the least satisfactory of these three works, it provides more interesting food for thought than do the first two. Wagner tried to produce a grand historical tragedy, basing it on the novel by Bulwer Lytton. On its own terms – or rather those of Meyerbeer, who had set the fashion for this kind of oversized period drama, with its compulsory ballets, spectacular scenery and vast cataclysms – it is successful to a degree that makes one fear for Wagner’s integrity at this stage. Perhaps it is fairer to say that since he still lacked an artistic identity, there was nothing to be single-minded about. And yet the beginning of the Overture, the first piece of Wagner’s music to have retained its place in the repertoire, is original, moving and unmistakable. It starts with a long-held trumpet note, evocative both of majesty and suspense, and then moves into the first great arch-Wagnerian melody, richly scored for strings. That melody, which provides Rienzi with the material for his Prayer at the beginning of Act V, has a nobility which almost everything else in the work betrays, including most of the rest of the Overture, a blowsy piece which, once it moves into its allegro stride, skirts vulgarity with a Verdian brio, though it is much more heavily scored than anything by the Italian master.

This theme, which can’t be called a motif, since it is too fully-formed and monolithic to be plastic enough for that purpose, clearly indicates the hero’s greatness of soul. But in the work itself Rienzi has to become a figure who has been forced to sink to the level of the intriguers around him, so that there is a disjunction between his portrayal in the opening section of the Overture and everything that comes later, apart from the recapitulatory prayer. The only way that Wagner can resolve the action is through a suitably apocalyptic conflagration, as the Capitol is ignited by the angry crowd and Rienzi is immolated along with his visions. Once more, if one were so inclined – many commentators are – one could trace connections between elements in Rienzi and the later works, including, very obviously, the conflagration at the end of the Ring. But such comparisons are more likely to subtract from the sublimity of Götterdämmerung than to add to the stature of Rienzi. That Wagner was fascinated by certain types, and by what might happen to them, is clear enough. But it is merely confused to think that later versions are nothing more than the earlier ones with sophisticated and far greater music to lend them glamour and plausibility. In the case of many of the greatest artists who can, in a sensible way, be said to have subjects, they show what those subjects are going to be from their earliest works. But what makes them great is their capacity for working with certain terms and endlessly exploring and deepening them, until the connections with what they started out from are better disregarded. Otherwise we get nothing more than an example of the ‘fallacy of origins’, by which the developed form of something is alleged to be no more than its elementary form cosmeticised.

Unfortunately this tendency is especially pronounced with Wagner’s critics, and all the more so since it was attending a performance of Rienzi in Linz which set Hitler, so he often claimed, his goal of absolute power. It may have done, though if he fancied himself as a reincarnation of Rienzi he must have paid scant attention to the action. Perhaps this is one thing for which Hitler can be forgiven, since Rienzi is written in an idiom which discourages concentration. With its spectacle and its elaborate diversions, it was the ideal work for those who went to the opera for ‘effects without causes’ – Wagner’s cruel and famous characterisation of Meyerbeer’s operas, which also applies in large part to Rienzi. In fact one wishes that the opening weren’t so arresting; it raises expectations and suggests a degree of seriousness which are willingly granted. But when they aren’t fulfilled, what may happen is that instead of spending five hours being disappointed, one takes the actuality of the work at a higher value than it deserves, lapsing again into the mistake of thinking there are such things as serious subjects, as opposed to serious treatments of them.

All of Wagner’s three early operas are on a virtually unprecedented scale, at any rate in the history of German opera. He indulged himself in them, letting an impressively far-ranging imagination have its head, at the same time that he was developing his capacity for thinking in long time-scales. Their organisation is rudimentary, but they must have given him confidence in his ability not to let things simply get out of hand. Prentice-work though they are, and worth only occasional airings, they would have established him as a composer of unusual ambitions. But the work which, even if Wagner had never written another, would have remained permanently among the great operas, was his next and most evidently concise drama, and the one in which, at one bound, he found himself – by no means all of himself, but what he did find was wholly genuine and strikingly deep. There may be no other example of a composer so suddenly moving from competence in various idioms of his day to commanding mastery which was partly rooted in tradition, but equally impressive for its necessary departures from it.

The famous opening of Der fliegende Holländer has the hallmarks of all Wagner’s openings from now on: it compels attention, and lets one know instantly what the matter in hand is. Viewed with hindsight, it achieves other ends too. It sounds not only as if Wagner is making a declaration of having found his real self as a composer, but is also showing how he relates to the most admired figures and works in the tradition from which he emerges. For the raging first pages are in D minor, the demonic key of Mozart and Beethoven. Don Giovanni opens in it, and equally cataclysmically. No other operatic overture before Holländer begins so arrestingly, and with music that is part of the fabric of the main action. And Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a talismanic work for Wagner, and one which he had made a piano arrangement of when he was seventeen, has given nineteenth-century music its definitive D minor statement. Though Beethoven begins almost inaudibly, while Wagner’s Overture rages, they are both elemental, and both use the same material and some of the same devices. Wagner, as always, has his roots in the physical, even though his ultimate intentions are metaphysical; Beethoven evokes a primeval chaos which has no truck with physicality. It would be pointless to press the similarities, but if they were not conscious, that is all the more striking. At any rate, the demands Wagner is going to make on us are clear, and they are immense.

But it is not the Overture that I want to dwell on, rather the drama it portends: for, quite apart from the elemental sweep of Holländer, it is a simple, but certainly a serious treatment of a subject which is at the top of Wagner’s agenda throughout the whole oeuvre, and so, besides its intrinsic compellingness, it is a valuable way into his world, as the three works which precede it are not.

The story is familiar. The Flying Dutchman, whose story Wagner took from Heine, but without the irony – Wagner is the least ironic of artists, at least within his individual works: the ironies exist in their relationship to one another – is, in crude outline, the prototype of the Wagnerian protagonist: someone who has done something so terrible that he has to spend the rest of his existence looking for salvation, or redemption, which comes only through the agency of another human being, even when, as in Wagner’s first three and last dramas, there is a certain amount of theological background (usually vague and non-specific). Though it is characteristic of Wagner’s central figures that they have committed a crime – in the Dutchman’s case, an oath that he would round the Cape at any cost, for which Satan doomed him to eternal voyaging; in Tannhäuser’s that of sojourning with Venus; in Wotan’s that of making a bargain which he has no intention of keeping – it seems that really Wagner was a Schopenhauerian from the start. He only read Schopenhauer in 1854, instantly becoming a disciple.

Schopenhauer claims that living itself is the original sin. That Wagner always held a position which amounts to that comes out in the fact that the ‘redeemers’ in his works long to redeem just as much as the sinners long to be redeemed. Hence it is entirely appropriate, and could well have been a planned effect, unquestionably casting light back over a lifetime’s work, that the final words of Parsifal, intoned by the chorus, are ‘Erlösung dem Erlöser’ (‘Redemption to the redeemer’). Taken by themselves, or just in the context of Parsifal, they are a riddle. But it may not be too difficult to solve it if one surveys the series of characters, often though not always female, who do the redeeming. In Der fliegende Holländer Senta needs the Dutchman quite as badly as he needs her. Her life is without a genuine purpose, it only has a visionary one until he appears on the scene. The various ways in which the sinner/redeemer relationship is worked through is among the great fascinating topics for meditating on Wagner’s works – and one that, in the notoriously vast ‘literature’ on them, is weirdly neglected.

So the Dutchman himself, given a teasing chance every seven years of setting foot on land to find a woman who will sacrifice herself for him, begins the Duet with Senta, which is the heart of the work, with an unaccompanied solo which is more groan than song, and more interiorised recitative than melody. But it does move, gradually, into song, quietly punctuated by the orchestra, as he feels the faintest stirrings of hope, exhaustion hardly daring to give place to a new attempt at salvation. Then, to tense tremolandi from the strings, he moves into a statement of what he feels, which is expressed by a slowly rising melodic line and then a declamatory mode which hovers between song and enhanced speech. The words: