By then Wagner and his brand of romanticism were already dead. Whether or not Wagner is a bigger musician than Verdi, he was certainly a bigger and more complex man, Falstaffian in dimensions and perhaps as hard to warm to. Character-wise, Wagner was in the Beethoven/Berlioz mould, even eclipsing them, and always very self-conscious about his genius. Drama was in his very bones.122 ‘I am not made like other people. I must have brilliance and beauty and light. The world owes me what I need. I can’t live on a miserable organist’s pittance like your master, Bach.’123 Like Verdi he was a slow starter and it was not until he heard Beethoven’s Ninth symphony, and Fidelio, when he was fifteen, that he decided to become a musician. He could never do more than tinker with the piano, and admitted he was not the greatest of score readers. His early works, says Harold Schonberg, ‘show no talent’.124 As with Berlioz, Wagner’s intensity filled some of his early lovers with fear, and as with Schubert he was constantly in debt, at least in the early years of his career. In Leipzig, where he received some tuition (but was dismissed), he was known as a heavy drinker, a gambler and a compulsive and dogmatic talker.
But after a series of adventures, when his creditors pursued him from pillar to post, he eventually produced the five-act Rienzi and this made him famous, as Nabucco had made Verdi famous.125 It was staged at Dresden, which immediately secured the rights to Der fliegende Holländer, after which Wagner was appointed Kapellmeister there. Tannhäuser and Lohengrin followed, which were well received, the latter especially, with its novel blend of woodwind and strings, though he himself had to flee Dresden after he sided with the revolutionaries during the uprising of 1848.126 He decamped to Weimar, staying with Liszt and then moved on to Zurich, where for six years he produced next to nothing. He was trying to work out his artistic theories, familiarised himself with Schopenhauer, and this eventually generated a number of written works, Art and Revolution (1849), The Art Work of the Future (1850), Judaism and Music (1850) and Opera and Drama (1851), but also a big libretto based on the medieval Teutonic legend, Nibelungenlied. This was Wagner’s concept of what he called the Gesamtkunstwerk, the unified art work, in which he claimed that all great art – words, music, settings and costumes, fused together – must be based on myth, as the first recorded utterances of the gods, as a modern (and romantic) gloss on holy scripture. For Wagner, it was necessary to go to pre-Christian traditions because Christianity had perverted what had gone before. One possibility, as the Oriental renaissance had shown, was the Aryan myths of India but Wagner, following the German Indics, preferred the Northern tradition, which played counterpoint with the classical Mediterranean tradition. This was how he arrived at the Teutonic Nibelungenlied.127 In addition to the new myth, Wagner developed his ideas of a new form of speech, or rather he recreated on old form, Stabreim, which recalls the poetry found in the sagas, in which the vowels at the end of one line are repeated in the first syllables or words of the next line. On top of this came his new ideas for the orchestra (even bigger for Wagner than for Beethoven and Berlioz). Here he developed his concept of music unbroken throughout a composition. The orchestra thus became as much a part of the drama as the singers. (Wagner was proud of never having written ‘recitative’ over any passage, and he himself called this ‘the greatest artistic achievement of our age’.128)
The effect of all this, says one critic, is that while Europe was whistling Verdi, it was talking about Wagner. Many people hated the new sounds (many still do), and another (British) critic dismissed Wagner as ‘simply noise’. But others thought the composer was ‘an elemental force’ and when Tristan und Isolde was produced this view was confirmed. ‘Never in the history of music had there been an operatic score of comparable breadth, intensity, harmonic richness, massive orchestration, sensuousness, power, imagination and colour. The opening chords of Tristan were to the last half of the nineteenth century what the Eroica and Ninth Symphonies had been to the first half – a breakaway, a new concept.’ Wagner later said he had been in some sort of trance when he produced the opera. ‘Here, in perfect trustfulness, I plunged into the inner depths of soul-events and from the innermost centre of the world I fearlessly built up to its outer form.’ Tristan is a relentless work, ‘gradually peeling away layers of the subconscious to the abyss within’.129
Wagner’s unique position was revealed most clearly in the last phase of his life when he was saved, appropriately enough, by the mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Ludwig, a homosexual, was certainly in love with Wagner’s music, and may just have been in love with Wagner himself. In any event, he told the composer that he could do more or less what he wanted in Bavaria and Wagner didn’t need to be asked twice. ‘I am the most German of beings. I am the German spirit. Consider the incomparable magic of my works.’130 Although he was forced into exile for a while, on account of his extravagance and a scandalous foray into politics, his involvement with Ludwig did lead eventually to the culmination of his career and another culmination of romanticism. This was his idea of a festival theatre dedicated to his works alone – Bayreuth, and to the Ring. The first Bayreuth Festival was held in 1876, and it was here that Der Ring des Nibelungen – the fruit of twenty-five years’ work – was first performed.131 For the first festival, some four thousand disciples descended on Bayreuth, along with the emperor of Germany, the emperor and empress of Brazil, seven other royals, and some sixty newspaper correspondents from all over the world, including two from New York who were allowed to use the new transatlantic cable to get their stories published almost immediately.132
Although he had his critics, and would always have his critics, the magisterial sweep of the Ring was another turning-point in musical ideas. An allegory, a ‘cosmic drama of might redeemed by love’, which explained why traditional values were the only thing which could rescue the modern world from its inevitable doom, it also gave no comfort to Christianity.133 Though set in myth, it was curiously modern, and this was its appeal. (Nike Wagner also says the story has many parallels with the Wagner family itself.) ‘The listener is swept into something primal, timeless, and is pushed by elemental forces. The Ring is a conception that deals not with women but Woman; not with men, but with Man; not with people, but with the Folk; not with mind, but with the subconscious; not with religion, but with basic ritual; not with nature, but Nature.’134 Wagner lived from then on like a cross between royalty and deity, fêted, lauded, dressed in the finest silks, doused in the finest incense, and took the opportunity to develop his writing as much as his music. These views – on the Jews, on craniology, on the claim that the Aryans had descended from the gods – have weathered less well, much less well, than his music. Some of them were frankly ludicrous. But there is no question that Wagner, by his very self-confidence, his Nietzschean will, by his creation of Bayreuth as an asylum from the everyday world, did help to establish a climate of opinion, particularly in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 36).135 In music he was a strong influence on Richard Strauss, on Bruckner and Mahler, on Dvořák, and even on Schoenberg and Berg. Whistler, Degas and Cézanne were all Wagnerians, while Odilon Redon and Henri Fantin-Latour painted images inspired by his operas. Mallarmé and Baudelaire declared themselves won over. Much later, Adolf Hitler was to say, ‘Whoever wants to understand National Socialistic Germany must know Wagner.’136