The Pursuit of Laughter (39 page)

He abandoned all thought of finishing
The Ring
, four evenings, until the accession of Ludwig II to the throne of Bavaria, at the age of 20, solved the seemingly insuperable problem. Wagner was deeply in debt and very near despair when the ‘mad’ king, one of the rare examples of a ruler who spent his leisure and money on art rather than sport, gave him an allowance and subsidies which made
The Ring
and finally the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth possible.

Naturally this generosity caused intense jealousy. Wagner’s love of ‘luxury’ was
violently
attacked. (He needed quiet, a garden, silk clothes for an exceptionally delicate skin—not impossible demands in return for what he was giving the world.) His other need was for a loving and intelligent woman; his wife Minna had been neither. When he ran off with Hans von Bülow’s wife Cosima his enemies in Munich were given a wonderful excuse for their furious condemnation. Bülow himself, an ardent Wagnerian, wrote to Cosima:

But Cosima suffered from a bad conscience about Hans for years, hardly a day goes by when she does not moan in her diary. At Tribschen on a Swiss lake she and Wagner led an
idyllic family life. He loved the five children (two were Bülow’s and three his) so much that he even enjoyed hearing them romping on the stairs; a high test. He and Cosima read together in the evenings, Shakespeare, Goethe, Carlyle, Aeschylus, Schiller, Cervantes, all the classics. By day he went for long walks, and composed.

Before Ludwig appeared on the scene the man who had helped Wagner most with understanding and support had been Cosima’s father, Liszt. The great spirits of the age supported Wagner, it was the mean and petty who attacked him. As he said, Goethe had fared no better. After the famous riot at the Paris Opéra performance of
Tannhäuser
, when members of the Jockey Club shouted and whistled because they wanted a ballet, Baudelaire defended him. ‘What will people in Germany say about Paris?’ he wrote. ‘This handful of scoundrels has brought down infamy on the heads of all of us’.

When debts became pressing, as they did despite Ludwig’s help, Wagner gave
concerts
. He was evidently a conductor of genius; Cosima’s description of his way with an orchestra is deeply in teresting. His fame brought full houses, but he was a perfectionist who insisted on many rehearsals, and he rarely made much money in the end, though sometimes laurel wreaths were showered upon him in such profusion that players in the orchestra feared for their instruments. These concerts tired and exasperated him, he felt all his energies should be concentrated on his real work. Yet money had to be found, the builders of the Festspielhaus and of Wahnfried had to be paid. The King often gave only at the last moment; he was spending fortunes on building his palaces, now an asset for Bavaria but at the time the despair of his treasury officials.

Wagner’s gods were Beethoven, Mozart and Bach; and Goethe and Shakespeare, and Schopenhauer. He transformed the way Beethoven’s symphonies were played, in
particular
the choral symphony.

These two biographies inevitably cover much of the same ground, but they are aimed at different readers. Ronald Taylor modestly says his book might interest
someone
who had heard the prelude to
Tristan
, or Wotan’s farewell, and who wished to find out about the composer. It is very well done, although the slightly apologetic note, as though to excuse himself for admiring Wagner so much, is strange. He covers the whole life: family circle, disastrous marriage with Minna, all the operas, love affairs, the
trouble
in Dresden in 1848, exile; and then Ludwig, Cosima, and Bayreuth. The print is rather small, but it is a book that can be recommended.

Curt von Westernhagen is altogether more ambitious. He has written a splendid book to set beside Newman, and it includes all the latest discoveries in letters and diaries. He is excellent on the friendship with Nietzsche and its tragic end, and astute at exposing Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s lies. Above all he devotes many enlightening pages to the music.

Wagner often went to Italy to escape from Bayreuth’s harsh climate. He and his
family
were living in a villa at Posilippo when three young musicians, with the daughters of the house and Wagner himself playing and singing, performed the Grail scene from
Parsifal
in
the drawing room. As the young men left the villa they heard a voice singing the aria from
Zauberflöte: ‘Drei Knäblein, jung, schön, hold und weise
…’ [Three boys, young, beautiful, wise.] They looked back; it was Wagner, on the balcony. They immediately answered with Papageno and Tamino’s ‘
So lebet wohl! Auf Wiedersehen!
’ [Be well until we meet again.] Curt von Westernhagen, in such a typically German story, presupposes some knowledge of German culture because he is writing for Germans. (The translation is excellent.) His book will take its place in the library of every music lover.

When Wagner went to London to give concerts at the Albert Hall he met the
Pre-Raphaelites
, and Burne-Jones painted Cosima. Neither book tells what Wagner thought of the famous echo, of which Beecham said it ensured compositions by English composers would be heard at least twice.

Curt von Westernhagen relates how at the end of his life Wagner was persuaded by Renoir to give him a sitting. Renoir: ‘He was very cheerful, I very nervous and sorry that I was not Ingres… At least it’s some sort of souvenir of that wonderful head’. The
portrait
was said to have looked like a poached egg; nevertheless it is moving to think of these two great artists meeting for a brief moment.

Wagner died, in Venice, in 1883. Bruckner was working on his Seventh Symphony when the news reached him. ‘I wept! Oh how I wept!’ King Ludwig cried out: ‘Horrible! Dreadful! Now leave me alone.’ And he said proudly: ‘I was the first to recognize the artist whom the whole world now mourns. I saved him for the world.’ When Hans von Bülow’s second wife told him, he said he felt ‘as if his own spirit had died with the spirit of fire’, and hearing that Cosima could neither sleep nor eat, he sent her the famous telegram: ‘
Soeur, il faut vivre
’ [Sister, live]. And live she did, for another forty seven years. She, and her son Siegfried, and then his widow Winifred Wagner followed the Meister’s detailed
instructions
, and Bayreuth flourished, as it still does with the composer’s grandson in command.

Wagner once said, referring to the orchestra pit at the Festspielhaus, ‘I have hidden the orchestra, now I should like to hide the singers’. After the advent of electricity, with clever use of light and dark, mostly dark, Bayreuth partly succeeded in doing this, particularly in the 30s. Wagner also said he did not want only an audience rich enough to pay for the very expensive seats. This wish of his also came true for a time, during the last war when Winifred Wagner was in control. The State paid for the Festivals, the Festspielhaus was filled with soldiers and nurses and factory workers on leave; all the seats were free.

In the frenzy of destruction at the end of the war Wahnfried and the eighteenth-
century
Eremitage at Bayreuth were bombed. Fortunately, with the best will in the world, you cannot bomb music.

Wagner: A Biography
, von Westernhagen, C., trans. Whittall, M.;
Richard Wagner, His Life, Art and Thought
, Tayler, R.
Books and Bookmen
(1979)

Wagner deprecated Jewish influence in theatre and music; he wrote
Judaism and Music
to make his opinion clear. In private life he had many Jewish friends, as well as admirers and disciples. Hermann Levi, one of his conductors, wrote: ‘That he is not just narrowly
anti-Semitic
is shown by his attitude to me… The most wonderful thing I have experienced in my life is the privilege of being close to such a man, and I thank God for it every day.’

Wagner was extremely kind and patient with Joseph Rubinstein, a Russian Jew who idolized him and caused him and Cosima acute anxiety, because of the unbalanced
character
and suicidal tendencies of this talented young man.

Yet the author of
Wagner: Race and Revolution
says he believes that had Wagner been alive in the 30s instead of dying two generations earlier, he would have admired Hitler as much as Hitler admired his music, and that he is therefore in some way guilty of crimes committed by Hitler. It seems a far-fetched hypothesis, for even supposing Wagner had joined the Nazi party, which is unlikely, he would quite obviously have been horrified by genocide; his life is well-documented enough for this guess at least to be valid.

Mr Rose quotes Berthold Auerbach, who wrote in 1881: ‘Is it compatible with the last remnant of honourable feeling for the Jews to throng to performances of Wagner’s works?’ This, because of Wagner’s outspoken views in
Judaism and Music
. And here we have the point of Mr Rose’s book. It is a plea to Israel to keep its ban on Wagner’s music, and thus hardly affects Europeans either way. It is a matter on which Israelis have to make up their own minds.

Auerbach wrote in Wagner’s lifetime; his words were not published. Since then, as everybody knows, terrible things have been done, and Mr Rose angrily disapproves of modern Jews who go to Berlin ‘for the music’. According to him, all Wagner’s operas are shot through with an anti-Semitic message, even
Tristan
, even
Parsifal
. There are also
caricatures
of Jews: Alberich, Mime, Beckmesser in particular. They were not given Jewish names, because the composer relied on the ‘subliminal’ level to convey his hateful
message
. Another hypothesis.

In Cosima Wagner’s diary, 26 November 1878, she and Wagner are reading Disraeli’s novel
Tancred
, and Wagner remarks: ‘The whole thing is so unsettled because of its
message
. Conveying messages always fails in art, however good the intention.’ Clear enough?

Rose’s message is explicit, there is nothing subliminal about it. It is even suggested that as Wagner called his works ‘the music of the future’, he wished to dispense with the music of the past. Given his well-known and frequently expressed love of Bach, Mozart, Weber and Beethoven, this is another theory not to be taken seriously.

Does this book succeed in making its point? It reads like a rather clumsy translation from German. Will it be read, taken to heart, and shorten queues for
The Ring
? Perhaps so; but it would take a very credulous person to swallow the wild guesses.

Wagner: Race and Revolution
, Rose, P.L.
Evening Standard
(1992)

To write a biography of Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche it was not necessary for the author to visit the failed colony she and her husband founded in the 1880s. She only stayed a few years; it was a hare-brained undertaking. After the inevitable financial disaster, Forster committed suicide, leaving the unfortunate colonists to exist in appalling
conditions
. He had issued a false prospectus, of a land flowing with milk and honey, and
during
an agricultural slump a few dozen Saxon peasants, rather like the Irish in similar
circumstances
, decided to leave Germany for what Forster promised would be a prosperous and easy life. That he was an anti-Semite had little to do with it. Peasants in Saxony in the eighties were of German stock. Where anti-Semitism was rife, and Jews numerous, as in Berlin, the Germans laughed at Forster’s colony.

In any case, Ben Macintyre went to Paraguay. For days he journeyed up a river on a filthy boat, eaten alive by mosquitoes. Then, with a guide, he rode many miles through a forest on a jogging nag—‘the inside of my knees were raw’—and he finally found a few Germans, scratching a living from intractable soil, plagued by insects, snakes, unbearable heat, and tropical rain. He lived in a chicken coop for the weeks he was there. All it tells us about Elisabeth Nietzsche is that she was rather brave about all the miseries, and very dense not to have seen at once that the venture was doomed. The few remaining Germans had been too poor to leave, apparently.