LITMIR.BIZ

      THREE

       Doldrums

      London – the greatest city in the world, as Wagner called it – thrilled them. Even the traffic jams were impressive: it took the Wagners an hour to get from Tower Bridge to Old Compton Street, where they happily installed themselves with Robber, who then decided to do a bit of unilateral tourism – strolling back, two hours later, having had a good look at Oxford Street. The Wagners followed suit, doing some sightseeing themselves. Richard was trying to find the author of Rienzi, Baron Bulwer-Lytton, so, very sensibly, he went to the House of Lords; there he caught sight of the Duke of Wellington, and the prime minister Viscount Melbourne, but no sign of the celebrated author. He and Minna wandered the streets, surviving what Wagner calls the ghastly English Sunday, and took a train (their first ever) to Gravesend. Then, with Robber still at their side, they crossed the Channel by steamer, arriving at Boulogne, where they planned to stay for a few days. By remarkable coincidence, the man whose career Wagner intended to emulate – and then eclipse – was there. Giacomo Meyerbeer was, at the age of forty-eight, the most successful and influential composer in Europe, the toast of Paris (Robert le Diable and Les Huguenots, both global smash hits, had their premières there) and also the court Kapellmeister in Berlin. He inspired both the admiration and the envy of his colleagues, not only in the ambitiousness and scope of his work, but for his ability to turn composing into a profit-making concern: he was a shrewd businessman and a master of the arts of publicity, and he had the press neatly stitched up. This was a man from whom a struggling young composer had much to learn, one way and another. During his time in Riga, Wagner had sent him a letter in which he told the great man that ‘you can hardly rise to greater artistic fame, for you have already reached the most dazzling heights; you are almost a god on earth. I am not yet 24 years old,’ he continued, cheerfully ditching his former god:

      I was born in Leipzig, and when I attended university there I decided to pursue a career in music. My passionate admiration of Beethoven impelled me to take that step, which explains why my first works were extremely one-sided. Since then, and since I have gained experience of life and of the musical profession, my views about the present state of music, particularly dramatic music, have changed considerably. Need I deny that it was your works, more than anything else, that showed me a quite new direction …

      Understandably, Meyerbeer had not replied to this rhapsody. What would he have said? ‘You’re right. I am a god on earth’? Whatever his merits or demerits as composer or as a man, Meyerbeer had no delusions about himself. Having struggled to succeed, he was always willing to help out nascent talent: here in Boulogne, Wagner managed to get an appointment with him without much difficulty. He was impressed by the older composer. Meyerbeer’s Jewishness did not escape his attention; stick in Wagner’s craw though it might, it was no obstacle to his pursuit of him. ‘The years had not yet given his features the flabby look which sooner or later mars most Jewish faces,’ he said, graciously, ‘and the fine formation of his brow round about the eyes gave him an expression of countenance that inspired confidence.’

      Wagner brought the libretto of Rienzi to the meeting, along with the score of the two acts (out of five) that he had already completed. Meyerbeer listened attentively and with great courtesy to Wagner’s spirited rendition of three acts of the libretto, and kept the score to study; in addition, he gave him letters of introduction to the manager of the Opéra in Paris and introduced him to his friends in Boulogne, including the great virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles, with whom Wagner spent some pleasant musical evenings. Wagner thanked Meyerbeer in language of some extravagance, bordering on the erotic. ‘The gratitude I carry in my heart for you, my noble Protector, knows no bounds,’ he wrote. ‘I foresee that I shall be pursuing you, muttering my thanks, in this world and the next. I assure you that even in hell I shall be muttering it.’ He signed himself off as ‘your subject, forever bound to you, body and soul’. Later, when things hadn’t moved forward as quickly as he might have hoped, he wrote: ‘My head and my heart are no longer my own – they are already your property, my Master … I realise that I shall have to be your slave in mind and body … I shall be a faithful and honest slave.’ This shameless effusion evidently worked. Even Wagner, who assumed that it was the responsibility of everyone he ever met to advance his career, was astounded at Meyerbeer’s kindness. And of course he never forgave him for it. One of Meyerbeer’s first and greatest successes had been Robert le Diable. Had he lived to see the wholesale destruction of his reputation and legacy that Wagner was to engineer, he might have reflected that in Boulogne, he had met Richard le Diable, his nemesis.

      From Boulogne, the Wagners made for Paris, the epicentre of the operatic world. This was the old Paris of 1839, Louis Philippe’s Paris: the Paris of a thousand little alleys and passages, before Napoleon III and his Prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, swept the old streets away. The Wagners stayed in an apartment in the house where Molière had been born, and soon formed a lively circle of acquaintance. Among them was Franz Liszt, whom he had met in Berlin, just two years older than Wagner, but an international superstar, a pianist of superhuman brilliance, who was just beginning to compose music himself. Wagner was at first resentful of Liszt’s celebrity status, but quickly acknowledged the charm, the originality, and the generosity of the man. He is the only individual of comparable power with whom he maintained a relationship that could in any way be described as an equal one.

      But Wagner’s Meyerbeer-brokered meeting at the Opéra came to nothing. He wrote a number of entirely conventional songs for various singers as calling cards; he managed to get a rehearsal of his Columbus overture, but not a performance. He and Minna lived from hand to mouth; so dire was their situation that when one day Wagner’s faithful four-footed friend Robber loped off and never came back again they were actually relieved: it was one less mouth to feed. A little later Wagner’s old associate, the poet-novelist-critic Laube, newly released from the Prussian jail in which he had been incarcerated for his inflammatory writings against the Saxon government, blew into town and managed to persuade a rich friend to provide the composer with a six-month stipend, which provided some relief. Nothing fundamentally shifted in Wagner’s fortunes, however; he started to dream about going to live in America – in Maryland, about whose charms he entertained some imaginative notions. Money was again short. Still toiling over Rienzi, he started sketching a one-act curtain-raiser as a potboiler. He had come across his subject while browsing through the sardonic stories in Heine’s collection The Memoirs of Herr Schnabelewopski, in one of which the hero sees a dramatised version of the old legend of the Flying Dutchman. As Wagner wrote, he found himself fiercely gripped by the material, which engaged him at a deep level; Heine, for whom the story is a mere backdrop to a seduction, concludes the episode with the words: ‘The moral of the play is that women should never marry a Flying Dutchman, while we men may learn from it that through women one can go down and perish –

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