Being Wagner: The Triumph of the Will. Simon Callow
latest Viennese musical comedy hit, that ‘dust cloud of frivolity and vulgarity’, as he called it, Nestroy’s Lumpazivagabundus, in which Minna Planer played the Amorous Fairy, a role she was very soon to assume in his life.
The sexual pull between him and Minna was very strong, but what he was really after was a woman who had the qualities he lacked. At twenty-one, he was barely house-trained, arrogant, impetuous, outspoken. His face was often covered in ugly red blotches, lesions and pustules, the effects of the distressing dermatological condition erysipelas, otherwise known as Holy Fire, which at times of tension (or inspiration) erupted all over him from head to toe. He was still in the grip of a Bohemian contempt for anything bourgeois: on the road with the company he and his friend the poet Guido Apel had somehow managed after a boozy supper to reduce the huge, massively built Dutch tile-stove in their room to rubble. On the same tour he pitched into another riot, fists flying, with a few like-minded spirits, and for a while he took up gambling again. This prolonged adolescence, he realised, could not go on. Minna offered the stability he knew he needed. She was twenty-five, exceptionally pretty and completely unfazed by his facial blotches and swellings. Nor was she perturbed by his stone-age social demeanour; she could take it all in her stride. She was a natural homemaker, she was socially skilful, and, on some fairly slender evidence, she believed in him absolutely. She herself was not without emotional baggage: when she was fifteen she had had a child, Nathalie, from a liaison with a blackguardly aristocratic guardsman, who immediately dumped her and their daughter; the girl had been brought up believing that she was Minna’s sister, not her daughter. Wagner was more than happy to accept this situation. For an apostle of free love, such trifles were neither here nor there. An effective operator and a brilliant diplomat, Minna eased his path in the theatre, introducing him to the people that mattered, making sure he was properly turned out, smoothing feathers he’d ruffled.
This was necessary because he was in a state of permanently boiling rage. Conducting a repertory which, by and large, he despised, was bad enough; but the impossible conditions backstage, the wretched quality of the singers, the comic inadequacy of the chorus and orchestra, all drove him to the brink, to say nothing of the fact that his Amorous Fairy was, at this early point in their relationship, by no means his alone. Minna and he broke up, temporarily, the first of many such ruptures; when they got together again, he told himself that what she felt for him was neither passion nor genuine love, nor was she capable of such a thing; her feeling for him, he decided, was one of heartfelt goodwill, sincere desire for his success, and genuine delight at and admiration for his talents. On that basis, they became an official couple, though the absence of passionate and fervent commitment rankled at subterranean levels. His account of his early relationship with Minna was admittedly dictated twenty years later to his then-mistress, for the gratification of his royal master, but his analysis is typical of the way his mind worked, ruthlessly weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of every situation in which he found himself. What did he need? And was he getting it?
The Leipzig theatre, meanwhile, reneged on the promise Rosalie had wrested from it to stage The Fairies. Wagner was unmoved by the cancellation. He conducted the evocative, Weber-like overture in Magdeburg, where the Lauchstädt company were wintering, and then promptly dismissed the rest of the opera from his mind, even banishing it from the catalogue of his works; it was not performed complete until five years after his death. It has hints throughout, both orchestrally and dramatically, of elements that Wagner would later develop. But simply having written it was enough for him. He had no further use for it: on, on. He threw himself into finishing The Ban on Love, and then helped out with incidental music for the local theatre. The overture he composed for Columbus, an historical drama written by his drinking companion Apel, shows his passion for innovative effects: he was attempting, he said, to depict both the ship and the ocean, simultaneously. Out of the orchestral commotion emerges what he called an ‘exquisite, seductively dawning theme’, representing a bewitching, chimerical vision, a Fata Morgana. This theme – suggesting the promised land towards which Columbus and his crew are speeding through choppy waters – is first stated by three pairs of trumpets each of a different pitch; after many adventurous modulations, the theme finally appears at the end of the piece triumphantly blazoned forth in the same key on all six trumpets: America in the sailors’ sights as the sun rises over the ocean. To ensure maximum impact, he imported half a dozen trumpeters from the local barracks. The effect was, as intended, overwhelming, and completely upstaged the play, Wagner reports with some satisfaction.
He was heavily in debt, as he had been more or less continuously since leaving home – and even before. His idol, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, who was passing through Magdeburg, generously offered to take part in a benefit for him. The programme was ambitious, and very, very noisy. In addition to Schröder-Devrient’s contributions, there was his own Columbus overture, with its screaming trumpets, followed by Beethoven’s brass-heavy Victory Symphony, which calls for alarming artillery effects. Expecting capacity business, he had hugely augmented the orchestra; the firing of the cannon and musketry in the Beethoven was organised with the utmost elaboration, by means of specially and expensively constructed apparatuses; trumpets and bugles, on both French and English sides, had been doubled and trebled. Alas, almost nobody came. The monstrously inflated orchestra, to say nothing of the volleys of ammunition, attacked the tiny audience with such overwhelming superiority of numbers that they swiftly gave up all thought of resistance and took flight. The net result was that he ended up infinitely worse in debt.
For want of any other work, and desperately in need of money, Wagner returned to Magdeburg the following season; on the way he stopped overnight in the medieval city of Nuremberg, where – somehow inevitably – he got caught up in a riot: it suddenly raged across the town, and equally suddenly dispersed, so that he and his brother-in-law were able to stroll arm in arm through the moonlit streets, quietly laughing; that, too, logged itself in his voluminous memory for future use, until, thirty years later, it turned up in Act II of The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. During his second season in Magdeburg he strengthened the repertory, the orchestra and the chorus, importing Prussian army singers and players. As a reward for all this, they let him put on the now-completed Ban on Love as a benefit. It’s a busy, witty, bubbly, interminable score, drenched in southern sunshine. Rehearsals proceeded well enough, with Wagner inspiring the ill-prepared singers to some semblance of accuracy and lightness of touch, but when they actually started performing in the theatre, in front of an audience, vainly trying to keep abreast of the complex action and listen out for their musical cues, the whole thing collapsed into musical and dramatic mayhem. The revolutionary content of his opera, Wagner drily remarked, was lost on both authorities and audience, since what they saw on stage was completely unintelligible.
Inexplicably even to him, the reviews were deemed rather good, enough to warrant a second performance, but word of mouth had done its deadly work. He peered out into the auditorium and saw just two people in the stalls: his wealthy patroness, a certain Mme Gottschalk, and a Polish Jew dressed in full traditional garb. No one else. As Wagner made his way to the podium there was a piercing scream from behind the curtain: the prima donna’s husband, believing that the very handsome second tenor had seduced her, had punched him in the face, which was now covered in blood. The prima donna noisily remonstrated with her husband, who then punched her too, at which point she went into convulsions. The rest of the company joined in, some on the husband’s side, some on the wife’s; at the end of this fracas, so many people were injured that the diminutive stage manager had to go before the curtain to announce that, due to circumstances beyond his control, the performance would not be taking place; the four people in the auditorium (two more had by then slipped into the circle) didn’t seem to mind at all.
Thus Wagner’s career in Magdeburg collapsed into farce. His hopes of a fortune from the benefit were dashed. His creditors nailed a summons to his door, and, as if in disgust, his brown poodle, which he loved deeply, ran away. The following day, looking out of the window of a friend’s house, where they were hiding from the creditors, he and Minna saw a man fling himself into the river Elbe; then, a few days later, in accord with the odd aura of violence which always seemed to accompany him, Wagner found himself in a large and appreciative crowd witnessing the punishment of a soldier who had murdered his sweetheart. The luckless man was strapped to a wheel and crushed under it, breaking every bone in his body, which was then