Being Wagner: The Triumph of the Will - Simon Callow

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Wagner became an undergraduate of the University of Leipzig, not on the academic course, but as a student of music – just in time to realise his supreme aspiration: membership of the Saxonia fencing club. The moment he enrolled, he challenged as many people as he could to duels. None of these challenges materialised, which is just as well, since he knew nothing whatever about fencing. Instead he took up gambling, to which he soon became addicted. The more he lost, the more he gambled. Pale, sunken-eyed and haggard, like something out of Balzac or Dostoevsky, he lived only to gamble; finally, he stole his mother’s savings and bet them, convinced that with a high enough stake he could make a large sum of money. Miraculously, this is what happened, and he returned his mother’s savings to her, considerably richer. When he told her what he had done, she fainted. He experienced a moment of celestial benison: ‘I felt as if God and His angels were standing by my side and whispering words of warning and consolation in my ears.’

      From his earliest years, Wagner saw everything in his life as happening sub specie aeternitatis; destiny was always pulling the strings. Thus redeemed by divine intervention, he hurled himself into creative activity: his purpose was nothing less than to turn the world of music upside down. Among the first fruits of his inspiration was an overture in B-flat major. To ensure that it made its full revolutionary impact, he used different colours for the various instruments, drawing attention to the mystic meaning of his orchestration: strings were red, brass was black. If he had been able to get hold of any green ink, he said, he would have used that for the winds. Astonishingly, the young Leipzig conductor Heinrich Dorn agreed to programme the piece. During rehearsals Wagner was forced to acknowledge to himself that the technicolor scoring made no appreciable difference to the playing, and anxiously noted that the big effect he had planned, whereby after every four bar phrase there would be a loud thwack on the kettledrum, simply did not work. The conductor, however, insisted it would be splendid. At the concert, the audience were enchanted by this wonderfully predictable effect. He heard them calculating its return; dum dum, dum dum, dum dum, dum dum THWACK, they would chant along with the music; seeing how unerringly accurate their calculations were, he suffered, he said, ten thousand torments, almost passing out with misery. The audience was delighted; it could have gone on forever as far as they were concerned. And then quite suddenly, the overture came to a halt, Wagner having disdained to provide it with anything as bourgeois an ending. A silence ensued. There were no exclamations of disapproval from the audience, no hissing, no comments, not even laughter: all he saw on their faces was intense astonishment at a peculiar occurrence, which impressed them, as it did him, like a horrible nightmare. He was then obliged to take his sister Ottilie, the only member of the family who had come to the concert, back home, through the puzzled crowd. The strange look the usher gave him on the way out haunted him ever afterwards, he said, and for a considerable time he avoided the stalls of the Leipzig theatre.

      This event hastened his realisation that without skill, craft, or technique he would never write anything remotely worthy of Schröder-Devrient. The idea of actually attending the classes he’d enrolled in at the university was, of course, beneath consideration. Instead, he made his way to Bach’s old church (where he had, after all, been baptised) and sought out the cantor, Theodor Weinlig, and asked him to take him on. Weinlig agreed – on one condition: that he would give up composing for six months. Wagner accepted the condition: for half a year he wrote nothing but fugues, day in and day out; he and Weinlig would engage in counterpoint duels. Under this highly practical tutelage, he finally began to get a feel, he said, for melody and vocal line. Once the six months were up, his self-denying ordinance was over, and music poured out of him: symphonies, overtures, marches, arias, sonatas – all entirely faceless. His Opus 1 was, in fact, a piano sonata; it is almost comically lacking in personality. For some years, Wagner would set his own highly original musical identity to one side; he would learn by imitating other people. Not a hint of experiment, nothing to mark his work out as his. That was how he taught himself, as he told the very young Hugo Wolf at the end of his life: by imitating other composers, often those whose music he despised. ‘You can’t be original straightaway,’ he told Wolf.

      In his first three operas, he systematically impersonated Marschner, Meyerbeer and, of all people, Donizetti. This is quite extraordinary. Because, like it or loathe it, Wagner’s music is unmistakeably his. To eliminate all traces of personality from it must have taken a considerable effort of will.

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      TWO

       Out in the World

      In a very short space of time Wagner wrote three overtures and a bonny, rather Schubertian Symphony in C. All of these decently crafted pieces were performed in Leipzig, and were well received; the symphony was played by the great and renowned Gewandhaus Orchestra. Now nineteen, and with a beard coming, he set to work sketching out the libretto of his first opera, The Wedding. It is heavily indebted to Hoffmann: a drama of the night, erupting with violent love, the betrayal of a best friend, sudden death and coffin-side revelations. The story was taken from Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büsching’s pioneering account of chivalry in the Germany of the Middle Ages, and Wagner determined that his first venture into opera would avoid easy effects or operatic embellishments: he would write it, he said, in ‘the blackest possible vein’. The story was almost as violent as that of Leubald and Adelaïde: a bride is powerfully attracted to a stranger whom she sees at her wedding procession; the frenzied man later climbs up into her bedroom; she struggles with the madman, hurling him down into the courtyard where every bone in his body is broken. At his funeral, the young woman throws herself at the coffin; she sinks, dying, onto his lifeless body. Love and death intertwined: Wagner started as he meant to go on.

      The first person to whom he showed the libretto was his elder sister Rosalie. His various delinquencies had taken a terrible toll on his relationship with his family; Rosalie – ten years his senior – was the one through whom he hoped to repair it. He had an intense affection for her, revering her exquisite taste, her cultivated circle of acquaintance, her sweetness and depth of soul; a successful actress, she was also the chief breadwinner of the family – though, he casually remarks in his autobiography, she had no talent. He harboured the most powerful feelings for her, feelings, he said, which could vie with the noblest form of friendship between man and woman. ‘I really am a spoilt child, because I fret every moment I am away from you!’ he wrote to her. ‘I hope, my Rosalie, that we two shall spend much time together in this world. Would you like that? … You will always be my angel, my one and only Rosalie!’ She had neither husband nor lover; Wagner made it his task to bring joy into her life, principally by making a name for himself. So when he handed her The Wedding, it was a present heavily burdened with hope and significance. She didn’t like it. Couldn’t he, she asked him, write something a little more conventional? Hearing this, Wagner there and then, in front of her very eyes, tore up the precious manuscript, declaring that he would write something that did please her.

      He had not yet turned twenty, but the certainty, the intensity, the ruthlessness so characteristic of him are all fully present in this action. He was to offer further proof of his uncommon strength of mind when Rosalie later introduced him to the admired poet, critic and theatre director Heinrich Laube. Wagner was mightily impressed by the sardonic, Byronic young star; this impression was heightened by the glowing review Laube gave the young composer’s Symphony in C. Not long after, Laube offered Wagner a libretto he had originally written for Giacomo Meyerbeer, then the most successful, most admired, opera composer of the age. Without a moment’s hesitation, Wagner turned it down. With absolute confidence, the twenty-year-old boy rejected a libretto written by one of the most important hommes de lettres of the day. Wagner knew what a libretto needed to be, and he was pretty sure this was not it. Laube had not written a libretto at all, Wagner felt: he had written a chunk of poetry. As such, it was no use to him. He now began work on his next opera by writing the text himself, as he would henceforth do for everything he ever wrote. This one – The Fairies, specially designed to please Rosalie, and convince his family that he was not a dangerous revolutionary – would be set in the

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