Being Wagner: The Triumph of the Will. Simon Callow
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Time, Wagner couldn’t help feeling, to leave. Minna was already in far-off Königsberg, working in the theatre there; Wagner darkly suspected her of being involved with another man. He got there as fast as carriage could take him and proposed to her. She accepted, but as they hurtled towards matrimony, Wagner found the whole thing increasingly unreal. They fought furiously all the way to the church and continued in the sacristy until the pastor came in, at which point they pretended that everything was going marvellously; that sent them into fits of giggles, from which they found it difficult to recover as they entered the church. The congregation consisted entirely of actors and singers from the theatre, dressed up to the nines; there was not a single real friend among them. The heartless frivolity of the event chilled Wagner, he said. The pastor, at least, took it seriously – maybe rather too seriously, delivering a severe sermon in which he warned them of dark days ahead. There was, he said, a glimmer of hope: they would be helped by an unknown friend. Wagner perked up at this: who was this mysterious benefactor, he wanted to know. To his considerable disappointment, it turned out to be Jesus. During the wedding ceremony itself, he was so dazed that Minna had to nudge him to put his ring on the book. At that moment, he reports, he knew he had made a monumental mistake, and that his life was now divided into two currents: one faced the sun and carried him on like a dreamer; the other held his nature captive, prey to some nameless fear. He noted the exact time at which this thought came to him: ‘It was eleven o’clock on the morning of the 24th November 1836 and I was twenty-three and a half years old.’
His forebodings were quickly confirmed. Neither as an artist nor as a woman was Minna his ideal, he knew that. She had no real talent for acting, and little interest in it; she was no Schröder-Devrient, not an artist, in any sense. All she wanted out of the theatre was to make a comfortable living. She had learned how to ingratiate herself with managements, deploying some fairly intense flirting, while keeping within the limits of respectability – just. She was physically attractive to Wagner, and her down-to-earth practicality and realism were useful. Her domesticity and comfortableness were the exact antipode of his own constantly striving nature and thus the perfect complement to him, but the temperamental gap jarred. In My Life, Wagner analyses all this with more than half a mind on the woman to whom he was dictating it, but it was very close to what he felt. His harsh analysis of Minna is typical of the way his brain worked, its maggoty, obsessive, unrelenting nature, even though the letters he and Minna sent each other tell a different story. ‘Dear Minna,’ he wrote a full seven years into their relationship, long past the first flush of lust, ‘we absolutely ought never to be parted for long; that I feel afresh once more, both deeply and sincerely. What you are to me, a whole capital of 70,000 cannot replace.’ She was not his muse; but he loved the sensual and domestic comforts she extended to him. For many years those comforts persuaded him to return to her; when they were together they often quarrelled; just as often, they experienced real companionship. But was companionship what a man like Wagner needed? In his analysis of Minna, he was, as so often, interrogating himself: what did he want from a woman? His relationship with them was always vexed. He seemed to be looking, not for a particular woman, but for women as archetypes, an unpromising basis for a relationship.
From the moment they were married, he and Minna fought; when they did, Wagner, it goes without saying, expressed himself with savage, vicious, brutal eloquence, making her weep bitterly; he would then apologise abjectly, treating her with an exaggerated tenderness, whose strained insincerity led to further and yet more savage outbursts; and so the cycle went on. After a year of this, Minna ran away, taking Nathalie with her. Wagner tracked Minna down to her parents’ house in Dresden; they resumed their married life. Then she bolted a second time, this time in company with an admirer. Wagner went to live with his brother and sister-in-law, while he waited to take up a new appointment in the distant then-Russian city of Riga, hired to provide the sizeable German community there with the art of which they had been starved. Meanwhile he put all his emotional energy into his next opera, Rienzi: the Last of the Tribunes, drawn from the recently published runaway best-seller of the same name by Dickens’s great friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The hero, a Coriolanus-like Roman tribune who is first acclaimed by the people, then despised and finally burnt to death by them, was the sort of man Wagner could readily identify with, but in reality he was drawn to the subject for one reason and one reason only: he thought it would give him a hit. He planned the opera, his third to be completed, on the grandest possible scale; disgusted with the inadequacy and parochialism of German provincial opera houses, he had no intention whatever of letting it be performed anywhere but on the largest stages in Europe. Giacomo Meyerbeer, the Andrew Lloyd Webber of grand opera, generating one smash hit after another, was his model; Paris, Meyerbeer’s base, his destination.
He meanwhile set off for Riga, to open its grand and well-equipped new theatre. With the giant score of Rienzi more than half complete, he made the long and perilous journey to the Baltic. He was pleased with what he found. The Riga audience had sophisticated expectations of its opera, and were prepared to pay for it; Wagner was able to do much better work there than he had elsewhere. The theatre itself was distinctly state of the art, and he remembered its provisions when, much later, he came to create his own theatre. He was particularly struck by the simplicity of the auditorium, the orchestra pit in which the majority of the players were tucked under the stage, and the practice of lowering the lights in the theatre during the performance. In due course, a repentant and heartbroken Minna went back to him. She joined the local company, playing starring roles, and their domestic life resumed rather more happily than before. They were joined by Minna’s sister, Amelia – a real sister, this time – and, for a brief period, a young wolf. Wagner was deeply fond of animals, and they of him; at various times he carted round a sort of domestic zoo, including hamsters and parrots. Throughout his life he was surrounded by dogs, the bigger the better. They were slavishly devoted to him, and fiercely protective. Wagner was fascinated by the wolf and tried to domesticate it; the creature proved untameable and was finally released back into the wild. After its departure, he acquired an enormous Newfoundland dog which he called Robber; he adored this animal, and the feeling was entirely mutual.
Wagner spent two long years in the snowbound, fogbound and rain-bound city. Despite his growing mastery over the orchestra, singers and chorus, the gap between what he was striving to create on stage and what his colleagues were either willing or able to achieve resulted in increasing agitation on his part. He now came to loathe what he disdainfully called ‘theatre people’; he fell out with the director of the theatre and avoided all off-stage contact with his fellow artists. His greatest satisfaction came not in the opera house but from a sensational series of orchestral concerts he gave featuring music by Mozart, Beethoven, Weber and, occasionally, himself; fewer compromises needed to be made when singers and scenery were taken out of the equation. He applied himself vigorously and with detailed thought to the question of building up knowledgeable audiences – ‘true lovers of art’ – while also encouraging the merely curious. Everything must be done to ensure that the greater part of the audience regards the concerts as agreeable entertainment ‘since we all know perfectly well that not every section of the audience has come to worship at the shrine of art’. A Swiss baker was engaged to take care of the buffet arrangements. The twenty-five-year-old conductor with his blazing ideals was also an entirely practical manager. His orchestra responded well to the demands that he made of them. ‘We are giving so perfectly organised a body (as our orchestra may justifiably be described at present) an opportunity to show its strengths … and to develop along independent lines; for what true musician would not be dismayed to be thinking of carrying out routine duties rather than achieving something that was genuinely enjoyable and edifying?’ It was the opera house that was driving him mad. The truth is that he had had enough of provincial theatres; his heart was set on the greater world, and Rienzi, on which he had for many months been toiling, was to be his passport to it. He dreamed only of Paris.
His departure from Riga was abrupt, amidst the intrigues and vituperations so characteristic of him; Minna gave her final performance as Schiller’s Mary Stuart, the proceeds of which enabled them to pay for their travel. Typically, Wagner was being energetically pursued by creditors, so in order to get past the Russian customs officers they needed to undertake an immensely complicated subterfuge, changing carriages and hiding in safe houses. The whole escapade took place under the beady eyes of heavily armed Cossacks.