RICHARD WAGNER

A Life in Music

By Martin Geck, Stewart Spencer

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-92461-8

Contents

INTRODUCTION: FIGURING OUT WAGNER?…………………………………..ixCHAPTER ONE The Archetypal Theatrical Scene: From Leubald to Die Feen…..1CHAPTER TWO The Blandishments of Grand Opera: Das Liebesverbot and
Rienzi……………………………………………………………23CHAPTER THREE “Deep shock” and “a violent change of direction”: Der
fliegende Holländer………………………………………………..47CHAPTER FOUR Rituals to Combat Fear and Loneliness: Tannhäuser und der
Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg……………………………………………69CHAPTER FIVE A Bedtime Story with Dire Consequences: Lohengrin…………97CHAPTER SIX The Revolutionary Drafts: Achilles, Jesus of Nazareth,
Siegfried’s Death, and Wieland the Smith……………………………..127CHAPTER SEVEN “We have art so as not to be destroyed by the truth”: The
Ring as a Nineteenth-Century Myth……………………………………147CHAPTER EIGHT “My music making is in fact magic making, for I just cannot
produce music coolly and mechanically”: The Art of the Ring—Seen from the
Beginning…………………………………………………………173CHAPTER NINE “He resembles us to a tee; he is the sum total of
present-day intelligence”: The Art of the Ring—Wotan’s Music……………199CHAPTER TEN “A mystical pit, giving pleasure to individuals”: Tristan und
Isolde……………………………………………………………229CHAPTER ELEVEN “A magnificent, overcharged, heavy, late art”: Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg………………………………………….263CHAPTER TWELVE “They’re hurrying on toward their end, though they think
they will last for ever”: The Art of the Ring—Seen from the End…………291CHAPTER THIRTEEN “You will see—diminished sevenths were just not
possible!”: Parsifal……………………………………………….319CHAPTER FOURTEEN Wagner as the Sleuth of Modernism……………………357NOTES…………………………………………………………….367BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………405GENERAL INDEX……………………………………………………..425INDEX OF WAGNER’S WORKS…………………………………………….439

CHAPTER 1

The Archetypal Theatrical Scene

FROM LEUBALD TO DIE FEEN

“The wildest anarchy”—The paternity issue—Sense ofseparation in early childhood—Early enthusiasm for thetheater—The “more intimate objects” in his sisters’ wardrobeand Proust’s madeleine—The schoolboy drama Leubald—Themyth of Hero and Leander as Wagner’s archetypal theatricalscene—Composition exercises to set Leubald to music—Beethoven’sincidental music to Egmont as a model—Earlysonatas, overtures and a C-major symphony for the LeipzigGewandhaus—A “wedding” not to the liking of Wagner’s sisterRosalie—Die Feen: a respectable first opera for a twenty-year-oldcomposer—Wagner’s discovery of the redemptive powerof music as the embodiment of love—An anticipatory glanceat Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music—A lookahead to later chapters: “Redemption through Destruction” asa leitmotif—Congruence between Wagner’s life and works?

Wagner’s childhood memories revolve constantly around two keyideas—chaos and the theater: “I grew up in the wildest of anarchy,”he told his second wife, Cosima, in July 1871. And in his autobiography hespeaks of a mother whose “anxious and trying relations with a large family”were never conducive to a “comforting tone of motherly solicitude,” stillless to feelings of tenderness: “I hardly remember ever being caressed byher, just as outpourings of affection did not take place in our family; onthe contrary, quite naturally a certain impetuous, even loud and boisterousmanner characterized our behaviour.”

Friedrich Wagner died six months after Wagner’s birth, and ninemonths later his widow, Johanna Rosine, married a family friend, LudwigGeyer, and, together with the rest of her family, moved from Leipzig toDresden. Wagner was known as Richard Geyer until his fifteenth year andin maturity he was never entirely certain if he was in fact Geyer’s son. Butit may be significant that he chose a vulture (German Geyer, or Geier) as aheraldic beast on the first page of his privately published autobiography,the initial volume of which appeared in 1870. And in 1879, in a letter to KingLudwig II, he described a family celebration held to mark his sixty-sixthbirthday in the following words: “In front of a new painting of my wife byLenbach […] stood my son Siegfried in black velvet, with blond curly hair(just like the portrait of the young Van Dyck): he was intended to representmy father Ludwig Geyer, reborn to significant effect.”

The real Geyer seems to have been a good replacement as a father figure,albeit extremely strict. In August 1873 Wagner spoke about his childhoodover lunch and recalled (via Cosima) “how he was thrashed by his fatherGeyer with the whip he had bought with stolen money, and how his sisterscried outside the door.” Known to his sisters as “Master Moody” on accountof his hypersensitivity, Wagner was seven when he was sent to boardwith Pastor Christian Ephraim Wetzel in Possendorf near Dresden. WhenGeyer died a year later, the boy found board and lodging with Geyer’syounger brother, Karl, in Eisleben, where he spent the next thirteenmonths. He then spent a brief period with his Uncle Adolf in Leipzig, butwas obliged to sleep in a large, high-ceilinged room whose walls were hungwith sinister-looking paintings of “aristocratic ladies in hooped petticoats,with youthful faces and white (powdered) hair.” According to his—muchlater—reminiscences, not a night passed without his waking up “bathed insweat at the fear caused by these frightful ghostly apparitions.”

Adolf Wagner was unwilling to undertake any real responsibility for hisnephew’s education, and so at the end of 1822 Wagner returned to live withhis family in Dresden, where he attended the city’s Kreuzschule. In 1826his mother moved to Prague with four of his sisters, Rosalie, Clara, Ottilie,and Cäcilie, and the now thirteen-year-old youth was offered a room in thehome of one Dr. Rudolf Böhme, whose family life was later described byWagner as “somewhat disorderly.” At the end of 8 7 he finally movedback to Leipzig, where his mother and sisters had settled following theirBohemian adventure. He attended St. Nicholas’s School, and it was duringthis time as a fifteen- and sixteen-year-old schoolboy that he wrote his”great tragedy” Leubald.

A decade later we find Wagner writing to his fiancée, Minna Planer: “OGod, my angel, on the whole I had a miserable youth.” His youth may nothave been any harsher than that of many another adolescent from his socialbackground, but there is no doubt that it was anarchically unsettled:”Who is my father?,” “Does my mother love me?,” “Where is my home?,”and “Who are my models?”—these are questions that the young Wagnerpresumably asked himself more frequently than most other children of hisage. And if he was dissatisfied with having to swim with the tide, then hehimself would have to provide his existence with a sense of direction andopen up new horizons.

Such views are never conjured out of thin air but are found within thesubject’s own immediate environment, and this brings us to the second ofthe key ideas that emerge so forcefully from Wagner’s reminiscences of hisyouth: the theater. It would be wrong to lay undue emphasis on FriedrichHölderlin’s lines, “But where there is danger, rescue, too, is at hand,” yetas far as Wagner is concerned, there is no doubt that the theater saved hislife in the deepest sense, especially during his early years. From the veryoutset the anarchy of his environment was directly related to his tendencyto indulge in theatrical, self-promotional behavior. More specifically, it wasrelated to his love of the stage. Although his mother warned all her childrenagainst the godlessness of a life in the theater, she was so lacking in thecourage of her own convictions that four of Wagner’s six elder siblings embarkedon such a career: Rosalie was to be the Gretchen in the first Leipzigproduction of Goethe’s Faust in 1829; Clara was only sixteen when she sangthe title role in Rossini’s La Cenerentola; and Rosalie was seventeen whenshe took the main part in Weber’s Preciosa. Wagner’s elder brother Albert,finally, enjoyed a successful operatic career in Leipzig in a repertory thatincluded Mozart’s Tamino and Belmonte.

Although Friedrich Wagner was a police actuary by profession, he camefrom a family of artists and academics. He studied law and had an amateur’slove of the theater. Among his circle of acquaintances were Goethe,Schiller, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. But in this regard he could not begin tocompete with his eccentric brother Adolf, a well-known figure in Leipzigwho held a doctorate in philosophy and was a distinguished translator ofSophocles and the proud possessor of a silver beaker presented to him byGoethe as a token of the poet’s gratitude for the dedication of a collectionof Italian verse. According to his autobiography, the young Wagnerenjoyed listening to his uncle’s effusions. In the course of their extendedwalks together, Adolf also declaimed Shakespeare’s plays to him.

Wagner’s surrogate father, Ludwig Geyer, was the quintessential bohemian.A successful playwright, actor, and portrait painter, he also helped totrain Wagner’s older brother and sisters for their careers in the theater. Itseemed only natural that Wagner himself would follow in their footsteps.In adulthood he recalled “how at the age of 5, since he could not sing, heimitated Caspar’s piccolo and flute trills with ‘Perrbip,’ climbed on a chairto represent Samiel looking over an imaginary bush, and said, ‘Perrbip, perrbip.'”In point of fact Wagner must have been seven when he first encounteredDer Freischütz, but there is no doubt that he came into contact withleading musicians such as Weber at a very early age. “If I had never had theexperience of Weber’s things,” he told Cosima in October 1873, “I believe Ishould never have become a musician.”

Initially it was his love of the theater in general that proved the dominantfactor:

What attracted me so powerfully to the theatre, by which I include thestage itself, the backstage area and the dressing rooms, was not so muchthe addictive desire for entertainment and diversion that motivates today’stheatregoers, but rather the tingling delight in my contact with an elementthat represented such a contrast to normal life in the form of a purely fantasticalworld whose attractiveness often bordered on horror. In this way apiece of scenery or even a flat—perhaps representing a bush—or a theatricalcostume or even just a characteristic piece of a costume appeared to meto emanate from another world and in a certain way to be eerily interesting,and my contact with this world would serve as a lever that allowed me torise above the calm reality of my daily routine and enter that demoniacalrealm that I found so stimulating.

Nor was it long before Wagner had had his first taste of the theater: “Afterbeing terrified by The Orphan and the Murderer and The Two Galley Slavesand similar plays that traded in gothic horror and that featured my father[Ludwig Geyer] in the role of the villains, I was obliged to appear in a numberof comedies. […] I recall featuring in a tableau vivant as an angel, entirelysewn up in tights and with wings on my back. I had to adopt a gracefulpose that I had found hard to learn.” When he was twelve, he recalledreading aloud from Schiller’s The Maid of Orleans to the “well-educated”wife of his godfather, Adolf Träger. That his godfather gave him not onlya pike-gray dress coat with an impressive silk lining but also a red Turkishwaistcoat may well have helped to blur the distinction between “art” and”life.”

But what was all this when set beside the intimacies of his sisters’ boudoir!There, according to Wagner’s later account,

it was the more delicate costumes of my sisters, on which I often observedmy family working, that stimulated my imagination in the most subtly excitingways. It was enough for me to touch these objects, and my heart wouldbeat anxiously and wildly. Despite the fact that, as I have already said, therewas little tenderness in our family, particularly as expressed in the form ofhugging and kissing, my exclusively feminine surroundings were bound toexert a powerful influence on my emotional development.

Readers so inclined may see in this passage a justification for Wagner’slater fondness for choice silks and exquisite perfumes and may dismiss thatpredilection as feminine or even abnormal. In this they would be followinga well-worn path. But it would be more helpful in this context to followup a remark that the composer made to the music critic Karl Gaillard atthe time he was working on Tannhäuser: “And so, even before I set aboutwriting a single line of the text or drafting a scene, I am already thoroughlyimmersed in the musical aura of my new creation.” He was aware of his”foolish fondness for luxury,” he admitted to his benefactress Julie Ritterin 1854, but he needed it to survive. Less than a week earlier he had toldLiszt: “I cannot live like a dog, I cannot sleep on straw and drink commongin. Mine is an intensely irritable, acute, and hugely voracious, yet uncommonlytender and delicate sensuality which, one way or another, must beflattered.”

We are still concerned with the young Wagner’s most basic question:what prospects did he have within his own anarchistic milieu? We are dealinghere not with titillating biographical details but with the impulses thattriggered Wagner’s creativity. Here our principal witnesses are MarcelProust and Baudelaire. In a famous passage in À la recherche du temps perdu,Proust recounts the way in which a madeleine dipped in tea could activatehis “mémoire involontaire” and usher in an act of spontaneous memory. Hegoes on to explain how

Above all in Baudelaire, where they are more numerous still, reminiscencesof this kind are clearly less fortuitous and therefore, to my mind, unmistakablein their significance. Here the poet himself, with something of aslow and indolent choice, deliberately seeks, in the perfume of a woman,for instance, of her hair and her breast, the analogies which will inspire himand evoke for him

the azure of the sky immense and round

and

a harbour full of masts and pennants.

Proust’s remarks about Baudelaire could equally well apply to Wagner,whom he idolized for a time. And when Wagner, writing in his autobiography,recalls the sensual stimuli that were triggered when he touched hissisters’ “more delicate costumes,” this is more than a mere reminiscence ofhis childhood and adolescence: it is also an aesthetic reflection on the partof the composer of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde concerningthe synesthetic potential of his works. According to Proust, Baudelaire’slinguistic images were the result of a “slow and indolent choice,” and it is inthis spirit that we should read the above passage from My Life, a memoir byno means intended for a mass readership eager for gutter-press sensationalism.In writing this, Wagner was seeking reassurance and expressing hiswish that “life” and “art” should be in harmony. If, in his adolescence, hehad not known the stimulus of the items in his sisters’ wardrobe, he wouldpresumably have invented it or at least devised something similar to clarifyhis conviction that the oneness of life and art was no accident but was predeterminedby fate: everything had to happen just as it did indeed happen.

The reader may find this hubristic, and yet we cannot fail to admirethe consistency with which the young Wagner approached his life’s work.While still at school, he not only developed a burning enthusiasm for thestage as the only thing that gave meaning to his life—after all, many otherbudding actors have felt the same—but he also wanted to write his ownplays and in that way to create his own world of the theater both as an actorand in his own imagination. He was not content to declaim Hamlet’s”To be or not to be” from the classroom lectern. Rather, he perfected hisknowledge of Greek in order to be able to read Sophocles and translate passagesfrom the Odyssey. And if his account in My Life is not an exaggeration,then he was still in his early teens when, an otherwise poor pupil, he wrotea vast epic poem on the Battle of Parnassus.

Whereas we know about such feats only from Wagner’s own much lateraccount of them, his five-act tragedy Leubald allows us to test its author’sclaims for ourselves. In maturity Wagner himself no longer had accessto the manuscript, which he believed had been lost, and this may explainwhy he adopted such a mocking tone when referring to a youthful “misdemeanor”that he claimed represented an amalgam of Shakespeare’s Hamlet,Macbeth, and Lear and Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen. The rediscovery ofthe manuscript allows us to form an impression of what Wagner was capableof achieving between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. Leubald is nonaïve schoolboy play, as it is usually described by writers on Wagner, but anexample of its author’s ability to maintain three stylistic registers over anextended period—the play would last around six hours in performance. Forthe lofty style deemed appropriate to the characters who inhabit the highestechelons of feudal society, Wagner prefers blank verse—iambic pentameters—inthe tradition of Shakespeare’s plays. The common people,by contrast, speak in coarse prose that is again modeled on Shakespeare.Between these two extremes is a third stylistic register that Wagner reservesfor members of the spirit world, who converse with one another inrhyme and in song.
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