Being Wagner: The Triumph of the Will. Simon Callow
Wagner. Weber had remarked on hearing the first performance of the Seventh Symphony that Beethoven was ‘ripe for the madhouse’; and the Ninth went further. It was the nineteenth century’s Rite of Spring, considered unplayable, incoherent, crude, the ne plus ultra of all that was fantastic and incomprehensible. To Wagner it became, in his own words, ‘the mystical goal of all the strange thoughts and desires’ he had concerning music; the opening sustained fifths, he said, seemed to him to be the spiritual keynote of his own life. Its darkness, its mystery, its implication of profound chaos, found an answering echo in his teenage soul, and never ceased to connect to him at the deepest level. He returned to this music again and again throughout his life; it was played at the opening of the first Bayreuth Festival and has been played at every opening since. It was, he felt, what music should be. What his music should be, though he had no idea how that might come to pass. The adolescent Wagner was almost morbidly susceptible to impressions; they overwhelmed his mind and his imagination, entering him like viruses, stirring up an inner furor, stoking his heightened sense of being, setting him on fire, mentally and physically. Encountering the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven was the overwhelming experience of his young manhood.
The next massive hit his system took, he said, was seeing the soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient in Fidelio, in the Leipzig theatre. Schröder-Devrient, then just twenty-eight, was the Maria Callas of her day: vocally unreliable, but expressively thrilling, every note, every word, every gesture deeply imbued with meaning. He despised the operatic performers he had seen up to that point: staring straight out at the audience, rooted to the spot, playing to the gallery, straining for stratospheric top notes. The vehicles in which they performed were equally beneath contempt; to the young Wagner, opera was a cartoon medium. But this was different. Every note, every word, every gesture meant something. The combination of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient and Beethoven convinced him that opera was the greatest form of human communication available. Forty years later he claimed that no event in his life produced so profound an impression upon him as seeing Schröder-Devrient on stage; he spoke about ‘the almost satanic ardour’ which the intensely human art of this incomparable actress (as he called her: actress, not singer) poured into his veins.
As it happens, it seems that Wagner could not have seen Shröder-Devrient sing Leonora. But to spur himself on, he linked his two gods together. Schröder-Devrient in whatever it was she sang knocked him sideways: the thought of Schröder-Devrient in Beethoven was tantamount to ecstasy. Having imagined it, it became real for him. That was the combination he sought in his work, for the rest of his life: sublime performance allied to supreme imagination.
He wrote her a passionate letter – of course he did! – telling her briefly (he says) that he now knew what he had to do with the rest of his life, and that if in the future she ever chanced to hear his name praised in the world of art, she must remember that she had, that evening, made him what he then swore it was his destiny to become. The great singer had revealed his mission to him. But what to do about it? He knew perfectly well that he was utterly incapable at that moment of producing anything worthy of her. Nor did he know how to go about learning to. He despised the bourgeois world around him; above all he despised the education system, which had rejected him and everything that interested him. What did it have to do with the dark beauty he lived with in his imagination? He dismissed it with contempt.
He was by now more or less semi-detached from his family. He had been chucked out of one school and walked out of another. He gave himself over to what he called the dissipations of raw manhood, the student life of his day. He wasn’t a student, as it happens, but he plunged in regardless. If he had had access to drugs, he would certainly have funnelled them into his system; as it was he drank, he fornicated, he debauched, he partied in the taverns and the whorehouses. He hung out with dangerous, crazy people; he talked, talked, TALKED, about the subject of subjects: himself – and of course, art, inseparable notions in his mind. He was Rimbaud; he was Kurt Cobain; he was James Dean. His companions in debauchery turned out to be rather disappointing: he poured out his confidences, his dreams, his desires, his analyses of the world’s ills without caring what effect they would have. His excitement in expressing his ideas was the only reward he received; when he turned to his listeners, expecting them to confide in him as he had done in them, it appeared that they had nothing to say. They just liked horsing around. In the midst of all the ragging and the rowdyism, surrounded by so-called friends, he found himself, he said, quite alone. But these adolescent activities were not just indulgences: they formed a protective hedge – a ring of magic fire, he might just as well have said – around what he called his ‘inner life’. Instinctively he knew that this inner life had to grow to its natural strength in its own good time. Even at that early age, running in parallel to the recklessness, the debauchery, the over-exuberance, was a beady instinct for protecting his gift, his genius, and what fed it, even though at this stage it was, even to him, totally invisible.
Having been thrown out of school, he embarked on private tuition, paid for by his mother. He tried learning Classical Greek but gave up almost as soon as he started. Johanna’s patience, and her money, were not limitless: she told him he had to find a job. His publisher brother-in-law offered him work as a proof-reader on a new edition of Karl Friedrich Becker’s monumental World History; reading this was, Wagner said, his first real experience of education. For the first time he got a sense of the broad sweep of human history – just at the moment, as it happens, that it was passing through one of its periodic crises. Louis XVIII, the last of the Bourbons, fell in 1830; he was replaced by the so-called bourgeois king, Louis-Philippe, which provoked a wave of democratic solidarity across Europe, in particular across the thirty-nine member states of the fragile German Confederation. Kings, grand dukes, electors all felt the ground trembling under their feet. Saxony felt especially vulnerable. The reactionary King Anton shrewdly invited his liberal nephew, Friedrich Augustus, to become co-regent; a constitution was established.
At eighteen, restless, volatile Wagner sided with change. He quickly knocked off a Grand Overture to celebrate the new order; in it he graphically depicted the darkness of oppression giving way to the joyful new dispensation, the latter represented by a theme unambiguously marked Friedrich und Freiheit – Friedrich and Freedom – which blazed forth in triumph at the end. It was not performed.
Meanwhile, despite the new liberal constitution, the revolutionary aspirations of the student body in Leipzig rumbled on; there was unrest, swiftly quelled by the arrest of a number of students. Wagner, still working in his brother-in-law’s publishing house, attached himself to them, fell in with their protest marches, sang along with them as they bawled out the great student anthem ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’:
Down with sadness, down with gloom,
Down with all who hate us;
Down with those who criticise,
Look with envy in their eyes,
Scoff, mock and berate us.
He joined their angry demands for the release of the arrested students, and was with them when they descended on the house of the magistrate who had ordered the arrest. Finding that the place had already been lightly trashed, they plunged in and finished the job off. Wagner was among the most uninhibited of the rioters, intoxicated, as he put it, by the students’ unreasoning fury: he smashed and pillaged with the best of them, drawn into the vortex – his words – ‘like a madman’. The frenzy only grew; he and his fellows moved across the town, slashing and burning. They weren’t drunk; this was a self-generating rampage. All the latent violence that was in Wagner found an outlet. The formless resentments that had been germinating through his childhood and youth – his fatherlessness, his mother’s narrow outlook, his hatred of authority, his frustration at having no proper channel for the expression of his artistic dreams and fantasies – erupted in rampant destruction as he threw his lot in with the student rioters.
These exploits were viewed indulgently by the city: it was just the young gentlemen letting off steam, people felt. But when the workers started rioting, there was universal outrage. Indeed, Wagner drily noted, the student body offered itself as temporary policemen, in which capacity, drunk and disorderly themselves, they imposed the rule of law, stopping travellers and inspecting their visas. How Wagner longed to be one of these lords