Being Wagner: The Triumph of the Will - Simon Callow

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1813, when Wagner was born, the instability which is at the heart of his temperament and his work was the universal condition. Napoleon’s plans for world dominion were unravelling, but not quickly, and not without massive fallout. A year after their humiliating defeat in Russia in 1812, in October 1813 the French, fielding an army of young untried soldiers, fought a savage battle almost literally on Wagner’s doorstep, right in the centre of the city of Leipzig where he had been born, five months earlier, on 22 May, in a modest apartment over a pub in the Jewish district. Leipzig was the second city of the newly created kingdom of Saxony-Anhalt, one of the nearly forty sovereign states that constituted the hollow remnant of the Holy Roman Empire, itself the heir to the Western Roman Empire. Germany as such existed only as an idea. An increasingly potent idea, but an idea nonetheless. The Saxons were Napoleon’s allies, and along with the French they were brutally crushed in October 1813 by the brilliantly organised coalition of Prussian, Swedish, Austrian and Russian forces; during the battle – the biggest engagement in military history before the First World War – Napoleon’s armies were in and around the city, fighting and losing the heaviest pitched battle of the entire interminable war. Over the three days of the battle there were 100,000 losses, near enough: 45,000 French, 54,000 allies; just disposing of the corpses was a huge undertaking, and rotting bodies were still visible six months after the cessation of hostilities. The citizens were in a state of abject terror. The world seemed to be falling apart: and it was. Nothing would be the same again. Wagner claimed that his father, Carl Friedrich Wagner, a clerk in the police service, died during the hostilities as a result of the stress – that, and the nervous fever which had seized the city.

      Richard, no stranger himself to nervous fever, of both the physical and the creative variety, was the ninth and last of the Wagners’ children. He was baptised in St Thomas’s church, the very church where Johann Sebastian Bach, in the previous century, had served as cantor for twenty-five years. This omen was not followed any time soon by evidence of musical gifts in the child; indeed, as a little boy Richard’s inclination and talent were all for the theatre, no doubt because his mother’s new husband, Ludwig Geyer, a family friend, was an actor. Wagner’s mother Johanna had remarried just nine months after her first husband’s death; young Richard was given his stepfather’s name and was accordingly known for his first fourteen years as Richard Geyer. Some fifty years later, Wagner came upon passionate letters from Geyer written to Johanna while her first husband was still alive; it was clear from them that she and Geyer were already lovers. So whose son was he? The police clerk’s, or the actor’s? Who was he? Like more than one of his characters, he could never be entirely sure, but it was Ludwig Geyer’s portrait he carried around with him to the day he died – not Carl Friedrich Wagner’s.

      After the marriage, the newly-weds moved, with the children, to the Saxon capital, Dresden, where Geyer was a member of the royal theatre company. Little Richard’s new life was highly agreeable to him: Geyer, a deft and successful portrait painter as well as an actor, was a kind, funny step-father and the house was always aswarm with theatre people and musicians, among them Carl Maria von Weber. The great composer was music director of the Dresden opera, but also conductor of the theatre company, for whose productions he wrote incidental music. Wagner remembered him being in and out of the house all day long, hobbling around bandy-legged, his huge spectacles on the end of his large nose and wearing a long, grey, old-fashioned coat like something out of one of Wagner’s favourite E. T. A. Hoffmann stories. The boy was an insatiable reader, losing himself in the newly published fairy tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm; though showing no gift for performing music, he was obsessed by it, listening spellbound to the military brass bands which paraded up and down the streets, tootling out good old German folk tunes. Best of all, he had easy access to the theatre, where he could play as long as he liked in the props shop and the wardrobe department; he had no skills as a painter, Geyer noted, but his imagination knew no bounds, and his stepfather encouraged it.

      And then, quite suddenly, Geyer was gone, when Richard was just eight, struck down at the age of forty-two. Arriving at the deathbed, the boy was sent to the room next door by his sobbing mother and told to play something: he had had some elementary lessons in the little country school he attended, and obliged with ‘Üb immer treu und Redlichkeit’, a sober transformation of Papageno’s playful ditty ‘Ein mädchen oder Weibchen’ from The Magic Flute, with pious words to match:

      Use always fidelity and honesty

      Up to your cold grave;

      And stray not one inch

      From the ways of the Lord

      Hearing the lad play the sombre little piece, Geyer murmured, as he slipped away, ‘Is it possible the boy has some talent?’

      Once Geyer was dead – the second father Wagner had lost – little thought was given to his dying question: her youngest son’s musical abilities was low on the widow’s list of priorities. The decent sum of money Geyer had left her soon ran out; Johanna took in lodgers, including, for a time, the distinguished composer and violinist Louis Spohr, so music was always in the air. In a household filled with musically gifted children, only Richard had shown no aptitude for performing it, as his mother helpfully informed Weber, in Richard’s presence. In fact, apparently unnoticed by Johanna, he was utterly consumed by music. The sound of a brass band tuning up put him, he said, into a state of mystic excitement; the striking of fifths on the violins seemed to him like a greeting from the spirit world. Later he developed a crush on a young man who played the overture to Weber’s new opera Der Freischütz on the piano. Whenever the hapless youth came to the house, Richard begged him to play it over and over and over again. At twelve, he finally persuaded his mother to let him have piano lessons, which he continued with only up to the point where he was able to bash out the Freischütz overture for himself. From then on he bashed out every score he could get his hands on; his skill at the piano never improved to the end of his days. All his performances – and he was a compulsive performer – were a triumph of feeling over technique and mind over fingers; the same effort of will and imagination somehow, fifty years later, enabled him to play and sing through the entire Ring cycle, evidently to overwhelming effect.

      For a year after Geyer’s death, to save money, young Richard had been shunted aimlessly around his relatives, from Eisleben to Leipzig and back again; en route he picked up the art of acrobatics, a skill he proudly displayed to the end of his life, manifesting startling flexibility in his late sixties. Back in Dresden at last, he was sent to the city’s famous old grammar school, the Nicolaischule. Johanna was determined that he should be properly educated, desperate above all else that he should never become an actor. Three out of her nine children had done so, with some success, but to her the theatre was beneath contempt, barely an art at all, certainly not to be compared with the poetry or the painting she so admired. Severe – Wagner said he could never once remember her having embraced him – and strongly pious, she was given to leading impromptu family prayer sessions from her bed, dispensing moral precepts to each of her children in turn. She was determined to make a serious young man out of Richard.

      All in vain. He was a terrible student, lazy and wilful, refusing to study anything that failed to engage his imagination, which left exactly two subjects: history and literature – ancient Greek history and literature to be precise, with a bit of Shakespeare thrown in. His forte was recitation. At twelve, he made a big success speaking Hector’s farewell from the Iliad, followed by ‘To be or not to be’ – in German, of course, both of them: languages, he said, were too much like hard work. Nevertheless, even in translation, Greek plays, Greek myths, and Greek history grabbed him by the throat from an early age. He wrote copiously himself, great poetic screeds, blood-spattered epics: it was the gruesome, he said, that aroused his keenest interest, invading his dreams, and giving him, night after night, shattering nightmares from which he would wake shrieking; understandably his brothers and sisters refused to sleep in the same room with him. He seems to have been, to put it mildly, a bit of a problem child. There may have been some anxiety – some uncertainty – in the air. There was very likely a sense in the household that Richard was Geyer’s son. Nor did he fit in at school: a histrionic, hyperactive, oversensitive little chap with a nasty habit of bursting into tears every five minutes, but nonetheless he somehow managed to corral some of his school

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