Being Wagner: The Triumph of the Will. Simon Callow
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to revere) in the then popular High German Romantic manner of Heinrich Marschner, composer of the current smash hit The Vampire. Wagner cordially despised Marschner, but he wanted to find out how he did what he did. And if the piece turned out to be a smash hit, so much the better. His libretto was adapted from The Serpent Lady, a dramatic fable by the eighteenth-century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi most famous for the plays The Stag King and Turandot; he had been introduced to it by his scholarly uncle Adolf, his father’s antiquarian brother, who had translated the play. Wagner’s adaptation was loose: the title role is dropped in the opera and the names of the central characters are changed to Ada and Arindal, the bridal couple, as it happens, in The Wedding, which suggests that he had not utterly dismissed the earlier work from his mind. Ada is half-woman, half-fairy; Arindal a young mortal king who loves her. After overcoming a hundred obstacles of increasing impossibility, they marry and live happily ever after in Fairyland, not a resolution to be found in any other work of Wagner’s. He was writing it for his family, after all.
Wagner had by now realised that as well as mastering the art of composition he needed to learn his craft in a practical context, so when he was offered a job as chorus master and general factotum at the opera house in the small Bavarian town of Würzburg he accepted it with alacrity, brushing the dust of Leipzig University off his feet without so much as a backward glance. He owed the job to the good offices of his eldest brother, Albert, who was a tenor in the company. The job in Würzburg was the beginning of a prolonged provincial apprenticeship in the course of which Wagner acquired a remarkable variety of compositional skills that in the fullness of time he would cunningly deploy in his own work. The bulk of the repertory at Würzburg consisted of bel canto operas, principally those of Bellini and Donizetti, and Wagner was immediately pitched into preparing the chorus for them; from time to time he was called on to orchestrate – sometimes even to compose – interpolated arias for the operas. He took the work seriously – he was there to learn, after all – but despite his new sense of responsibility and his growing ambition, his former wildness was still liable to break out: one afternoon in a beer garden, he found himself irresistibly drawn into a brawl, taking great pleasure in landing a vicious blow on a totally unknown man to whose face he had taken an instant dislike. It was in Würzburg that he first discovered his powers of seduction, triumphantly snatching a young woman away for a night of love while her hapless fiancé was playing the oboe in the band at a country wedding, for all the world as if he were Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, a character – voluptuous, arrogant, fantastical, visionary – with whom he had much in common. Short, oddly disproportionate and prone to an unsightly skin condition, he had never thought of himself as good-looking, but in Würzburg he discovered that he had a certain charisma that women found attractive; he also learnt that he could impress his male companions with his flights of verbal bedazzlement – when, that is, he wasn’t bewildering them. Ideas, opinions, impersonations, cascaded out of him, unless he was being moodily silent, which was frequently the case.
It was in Würzburg that he composed The Fairies. He brought the finished score home to Leipzig, where he sang and played it for the family, pounding away at the piano, belting out all the parts. His skills as an executant were so dismally lacking, he said, that it was only when he had worked himself, like Hoffmann’s Kreisler, into a state of absolute ecstasy that it was possible for him to do justice to anything. Fortunately, a state of absolute ecstasy came very naturally to him. For the rest of his life, he performed his operas for friends and family, always at full tilt. This particular performance had a special intensity about it: the entire thing, and the piece itself, were for Rosalie. It was meant, he said, to provoke some sort of declaration of love from her, and she knew it. When it was over, she gave him a kiss; was it a kiss of real emotion, or just affectionate regard? He never knew, he said. As a result of his performance, she used her influence to secure him the promise of a production of the piece, in Leipzig, for the following year.
Back in Würzburg, unstimulated by his duties, he gave himself over to reading, which threw him into a state of more or less continuous intellectual turmoil, a condition which persisted to the day he died. Driven by the autodidact’s desperate desire to catch up, he read greedily and indiscriminately, snatching at everything that came his way – history, philosophy, poetry, novels. Laube, whose libretto the very young Wagner had so airily rejected, was writing a sensational novel in three parts, Young Europe, which became a rallying cry for a new generation of Germans, sick of being weighed down by the burden of the past. Wagner devoured the book, along with the still-popular Ardinghello, Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse’s sexually charged novel from thirty years earlier, which had contrasted the oppressive joylessness of German life with the voluptuous naturalness of the Mediterranean. Eagerly embracing the cause of free love and rejecting the tyranny of authority, Wagner determined to translate the literary revolution into a musical one and throw off the heaviness and tedium of German opera. He saw Schröder-Devrient again, this time in Bellini’s Romeo and Juliet opera, I Capuleti e i Montecchi; the daring, romantic youthfulness of her Romeo, he said, drove him nearly mad with excitement – her performance made all the German operas he had seen (apart, of course, from Fidelio) seem feeble, stuffy, undramatic.
For the first, but by no means the last, time, Wagner took to print to express himself, in a little essay called ‘On German Opera’, in which he tore into the fairy opera Euryanthe by his former hero Weber:
What splitting of hairs in the declamation, what fussy use of this or that instrument to emphasise a single word! Instead of throwing off a whole emotion with one bold freehand stroke, [Weber] minces the impression into little details and detailed littlenesses. How hard it comes to him, to give life to his Ensembles; how he drags the second Finale! And since the audience is bound to admit in the end that it hasn’t understood a note of it, people have to find their consolation in dubbing it astoundingly learned, and therefore paying it a great respect. – O this wretched erudition – the source of every German ill!
He ends with a barely concealed self-advertisement:
Only by a lighter and freer touch can we hope to shake off an incubus that has held our music by the throat, and especially our operatic music, for many a year. For why has no German opera-composer come to the front since so long? Because none knew how to gain the ear of the people – none has seized Life as it is: true and warm.
To put his new passion for Mediterranean art into effect, he immediately embarked on a new opera, based on Shakespeare – Measure for Measure, of all chilly, harsh plays, transposed to Sicily, with only one German character, based on Angelo, Shakespeare’s hypocritical Puritan: the governor, Friedrich, who epitomises the life-negating Teutonic world view. The play’s complex and bitter working out of its themes he discarded: all twenty-one-year-old Richard Wagner was interested in was exposing the sinfulness, hypocrisy and unnaturalness of what in Germany passed for morality. His purpose was simple: to celebrate free love, lauding the sexy values of the south – sensuality, romance, passion. He called his opera The Ban on Love and this time when he wrote, he ripped off the gloomy mask of Marschner, pretending instead, remarkably convincingly, to be Donizetti or Bellini in their sunnier moments.
By the time he started writing The Ban on Love he had been offered a new job as chief conductor of the opera house in the once-splendid watering hole of Bad Lauchstädt in Saxony-Anhalt. Visiting the place for the first time, Wagner was dismayed by the dreariness and dowdiness of both the town and the theatre, once the stomping ground of Schiller and Goethe. In My Life he describes with grim relish the Dickensian scene that awaited him. The madly quirky director of the theatre introduced him to his gargantuan wife, who, crippled in one foot, lay on an enormous couch, while an elderly bass – her admirer – smoked his pipe beside her. The stage manager told Wagner that he would be expected to conduct Don Giovanni in two days’ time; rehearsing it, he warned, might be difficult because of the intermittent availability of the town bandsmen, who formed the bulk of the orchestra. Appalled, Wagner made his excuses and was about to leave when he bumped into the company’s exceedingly pretty leading actress, Fräulein Minna Planer. After a five-minute conversation with her, he changed his mind about going, and three days later, Wagner found himself leading the company, to some acclaim, in Mozart’s most complex and demanding score; he had never conducted anything before in his life. The following