The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (88 page)

Richard Wagner’s aims were cosmic and metaphysical. He was plagued by twin talents, for words were as much his medium as music. He left twelve volumes of prose and poetry, a diary, and a seven-hundred-page autobiography, which he dictated in his last years to Cosima, “my friend and wife, who wished me to tell her the story of my life.” Unlike Verdi’s, Wagner’s musical works had a conscious coherence and focus, which he tried also to express in writing. And he remains the only great composer meriting a place in the history of literature. His struggle to see the world whole haunted him, and eventually governed his musical genius. While his writings remain known only to scholars, his music reaches across languages into concert halls, living rooms, and airwaves everywhere. His versatility was his burden. And in Wagner raged the age-old Western conflict between the music of the word and the music of instruments, between ideas and feeling, thought and sound. This too explained his unique creations.

Still, even if he had never come to the idea of the
Gesamtkunstwerk
(unified work of art), he would be among the great composers. Before he made his grand synthesis of the arts he had paid his dues to the conventions of operatic tradition.

It was appropriate that Wagner’s birth at Leipzig on May 22, 1813, was encompassed in mystery. His mother, Johanna Wagner, never gave her eight children a full account of her own origins. Her parents were bakers, but her mother may have been an illegitimate daughter of a prince of Weimar. It is not even certain whether Richard’s father was Johanna Wagner’s husband, Friedrich, the police official charged with keeping order during the turbulent days of Napoleon’s occupation of the city. Or was Richard the son of Johanna’s intimate friend and frequent visitor Ludwig Geyer, a painter-actor-singer who took the numerous family under his care on the death of Friedrich Wagner by typhus in November 1813? Richard himself harbored, and perhaps enjoyed, the suspicion that Geyer was his father, but near the end of his life (1878) he seems to have changed his mind. The question had an added piquancy, which attracted Nietzsche, for the Geyer paternity seemed to raise the possibility that Wagner was a Jew.

Apart from the Napoleonic turbulence of his surroundings, little was unusual about Richard Wagner’s boyhood. Johanna married Geyer and moved the family to Dresden. Geyer died in 1821 but left his influence on the young Wagner through his friendship with Carl Maria von Weber. “Look, there’s the greatest man alive!” Richard would exclaim to his little sister when Weber passed their house, “You can’t have any idea how great he is!” While he was no prodigy, he early discovered a passion for the theater. Exploring backstage in Geyer’s theater, he never forgot “something mysteriously ghostly about the beards, wigs, and costumes, which the addition of music only intensified.” He early conceived an enthusiasm for Greek
history and mythology, and at thirteen translated the first three books of the
Odyssey
. When the family moved back to Leipzig in 1827, his classical interests were stirred by a literary uncle, and he developed an adolescent passion for Shakespeare. At fourteen he had decided to be a poet.

It was a performance of Beethoven’s
Fidelio
in Leipzig in 1829, by Wagner’s own account, that awakened his interest in music. And he developed a crush on the famous prima donna who played the title role. He recalled this as the most important single experience of his life. When he learned of Beethoven’s life and struggles, he was impressed by “the most sublime, transcendental originality.” Wagner had found the polestar by which he would chart his new course for music. Teaching himself, he found music his “daemonium.” Plunging into Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at seventeen, he made a piano arrangement. His earliest surviving letter is his unsuccessful effort to persuade a Mainz publisher to issue the work. A decade later Wagner would write a short story with the title that might have been given to his whole musical autobiography,
A Pilgrimage to Beethoven
(1840). “I don’t really know what career had been planned for me,” a German musician in the story recalls, “I only remember that one evening I heard a Beethoven symphony for the first time, that I thereupon fell ill with a fever, and when I recovered, I had become a musician.”

At the University of Leipzig he studied music and enjoyed the romantic student life. But his real master remained Beethoven, whose quartets and symphonies he studied obsessively. Wagner’s own symphony was performed in Leipzig when he was twenty. In that year he composed an opera for which, as would be his lifelong custom, he wrote his own libretto. But
Die Feen
(The Fairies) was not produced till a half century later. His second opera
Das Liebesverbot
(The Ban on Love, following Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure
) failed after a single disastrous performance. The next six years he spent conducting small-town opera companies around Germany. In 1836 he married the self-centered and erratic actress Minna Planer. Their turbulent off-and-on life together would bring him unhappiness till her death in 1866. They went to Riga, where he conducted concerts and opera, but soon had to flee to escape his creditors.

En route to London, Wagner experienced the storm that drove his ship into a Norwegian fjord and stirred the crew to sing and tell the stories of the flying Dutchman that became material for his opera. Then on to Paris, the opera mecca of the age. The misery of his three years in Paris was compounded of starvation and professional failure. But it was rich in preparation. There he completed
Rienzi
(after a novel by Bulwer-Lytton about fourteenth-century Rome), which ends with the Capitol in flames consuming the hero and others. And he came to know Berlioz. At this time, too, he had the leisure to be stimulated by Friedrich Raumer’s history of the
Hohenstaufens and by a classical-scholar friend from Königsberg, Samuel Lehrs, to explore medieval Germany. There he discovered the folk ballad of Tannhäuser and Venus, and the story of Lohengrin. He also composed
Der fliegende Holländer
(The Flying Dutchman), his first opera to enter the permanent repertory, and his first statement of the theme of redemption through love and sacrifice that would occupy him throughout his life.

When Dresden accepted
Rienzi
for performance in 1842, it was lucky for Wagner, freeing him at twenty-nine from the orbit of the Paris Opéra and returning him to Germany, where he belonged. He happened upon a copy of
German Mythology
, by Jacob Grimm (1795–1863), which, along with a bottle of mineral water, he would take on his solitary walks. For him, he recalled, Grimm was “a complete rebirth,” an “intoxicating joy” at perceiving “a world in which, until then, I had been like a child in the womb, apprehending but blind.”

Rienzi
, still in the Parisian grand opera tradition, was Wagner’s first triumph. After
Der fliegende Holländer
he was appointed a conductor of the Dresden Opera, where he developed the medieval mythological themes to which he had been awakened in Paris.
Tannhäuser
showed him already struggling toward his “unified” concept of opera, which would not depend on featured arias and “numbers,” and used orchestral motifs for continuity.
Lohengrin
, usually considered the last of the great German Romantic operas, advanced from the theme of personal renunciation to the myth of the Holy Grail and to cosmic issues. But the Dresden Court Opera forbade its performance, with personal objections to Wagner for his project of a new autonomous national theater and for his political activities.

These next years were revolutionary not only for European politics but for Wagner and the future of music. The “specter” that Marx and Engels saw “haunting Europe” in their
Communist Manifesto
of 1848 was also haunting Wagner. He published three revolutionary articles and distributed incendiary handbills during the Dresden uprising of May 1849. Luckily he was not shot by the Saxon soldiers and escaped arrest, but fled for his life. He had been impressed by the flowing hair and energy of Mikhail Bakunin, a most unlikely companion—for Bakunin envisioned a revolution that would destroy all cultural institutions, while Wagner foresaw a society newly shaped by artists. Ironically, it was the long-dead Beethoven who brought them together. After secretly attending Beethoven’s “Choral Symphony” conducted by Wagner on Palm Sunday, 1849, Bakunin exclaimed, “All, all will perish, not only music, the other arts too … only one thing will not perish but last forever: the Ninth Symphony.”

Wagner’s flight from Dresden and his detachment from the German opera and concert halls opened an interlude when he did not compose.
Arriving in Zurich in May 1849, he began a decade of Swiss exile. Removed from the familiar competitive musical scene, he was forced to seek expression in his other medium, and immediately began writing. These years of exile would produce some of his most interesting observations on life, art, and civilization. Wagner was as much intoxicated by his power with words as by the power of his music. Frantically he sought to unify the two worlds within him and make them collaborate. Wagner struggled, yearned, and wrote for a coherent world of the arts. The traditional opera would be no more than his point of departure. He now wrote a series of essays—
Art and Revolution
(1849),
The Art Work of the Future
(1850),
Opera and Drama
(1850–51)—a credo for his future composing. As a practicing composer of opera in the traditional mold he was painfully aware of the competition in the past between the two musics, the music of words and the music of instruments. He now used his talent with words to declare a truce and create a theory marrying them in a new art form. And he would then prove his theory by his own monumental creation in that mold. What Wagner would call the Art Work of the Future was foreshadowed in his own.

The ideal of a single unified work that would consummate all the arts was far from new. Ancient Greek drama had been such a synthesis of ritual, poetry, music, and dance. It was an obvious model for the
camerata
, the groups of musicians and literary figures who met in Florence in the late sixteenth century, discussing the music of the ancient Greeks. Members of the group collaborated on
Dafne
, performed in 1598, which survives only in fragments but which some give the title of the “first opera.” Others in Germany, reacting against the Italian operas that had become mere showcases for singers’ arias, sought a better balance of the arts. Weber, the idol of Wagner’s youth, back in 1816 had envisioned “a self-sufficient work of art in which every feature and every contribution by the related arts are moulded together in a certain way and dissolve to form a new world.”

The German language could provide a single word for this unifying concept,
Gesamtkunstwerk
, and Wagner described the ideal art work of the future (
Gesamtwerk der Zukunft
) (1849). His view is ambitious and universal. He wants to add to the “three purely human arts” (music, poetry, dance) “the ancillary aids of drama” (architecture, sculpture, painting).
Oper und Drama
(Opera and Drama) in 1851 elaborated his art ideal. “It is a very remarkable work,” he recalled to Cosima, “and I was very excited when I wrote it, for it is without a predecessor in the history of art, and I was really aiming at a target no one could see.” Fanatic in pursuit of his idea, he prescribed a “radical” water cure for himself and friends, and a “fire cure” for mankind, which started with setting fire to Paris to serve as a beacon. “How much better we shall be after this fire cure!”

The dogma he now expounded was carefully developed, analytical, historical,
and full of examples. Through it all runs his effort to reconcile word and music, in a new all-encompassing art form. In Part One, “Opera and the Essence of Music,” Wagner focused on the cardinal weakness of all opera before his time. “A means of expression (music) has been made the object; and … the object of expression (drama) has been made the means.” Gluck’s reform, “the revolt of the composer against the singer,” aimed to rescue opera from singers trying to show off. Mozart was indifferent to the words of the libretto and “all he did was to pour the fiery stream of his music into the operatic forms, developing their musical possibilities to the utmost.” But the drama was still only an excuse for the music. “Up to now this melody has been merely song-melody.” Then Beethoven discovered and developed a new more expressive kind of instrumental melody. “In his grandest work,” the Choral Symphony, finding the “absolute-musical,” the “instrumental language,” inadequate to his message he “at last felt the necessity of throwing himself into the arms of the poet” to clarify the meanings of his melody. Wagner went on with his customary extravagance, “The organism of music is capable of bearing living melody only when fructified by the poet’s thought. Music is the female, destined to bring forth—the poet being the real generator; and music reached the very peak of madness when it aspired not only to bear but also to beget.”

Moving on to “The Drama and the Essence of Dramatic Poetry,” Wagner described the unified art work of the future. It will not be a mere mixture of the arts, not merely “reading a romance by Goethe in a picture gallery adorned with statues, during the performance of a Beethoven symphony,” but a merging of all arts into a new form. Drama, till now drawn from romance and Greek drama, has been “an appeal to understanding, not to feeling.” The future must “return from understanding to feeling.” The poet-dramatist must rise above the drab “commonplaces, intrigues, etc., things which modern comedy and drama without music are far more successful in presenting” to “the holy spirit of poetry as it comes down to us in the sagas and legends of past ages.” This required a new collaboration of word-language and tone-language. Poetry, which has mistakenly become only the medium for “understanding,” must be recalled to be the medium of feeling. “The inner man’s most primitive medium of utterance,” “the first emotional language of mankind,” was a language of melody consisting only of vowels. It acquired rhythm by adding gestures. By adding consonants this primitive tone-language became a full-fledged word-language. And when common consonants were grouped together in different words they helped produce a coherent mental picture by alliteration (
Stabreim
) and made poetry the vehicle of understanding. “Feeling sought refuge from an absolute speech of this intellectual kind and sought it in that absolute tone-language which constitutes our music of the present day.”