Richard Wagner Read online

  Martin Geck is professor of musicology at the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany. His other books include Johann Sebastian Bach: Life and Work and Robert Schumann: The Life and Work of a Romantic Composer.

  Stewart Spencer is is an independent scholar and the translator of more than three dozen books.

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 2013 by The University of Chicago

  All rights reserved. Published 2013.

  Printed in the United States of America

  22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92461-8 (cloth)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92462-5 (e-book)

  DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226924625.001.0001

  Originally published as Wagner: Biografie. © 2012 by Siedler Verlag, a division of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH, Munich, Germany.

  The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International, translation funding for humanities and social sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT, and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers and Booksellers Association).

  Frontispiece: Bronze medallion by Anton Scharff (1845–1903) of Vienna. Wagner sat for him at Schloss Fantaisie near Bayreuth in June 1872 in the wake of the official ceremony accompanying the laying of the foundation stone of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on May 22, 1872. (Photograph courtesy of the author.)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Geck, Martin.

  [Wagner. English]

  Richard Wagner : a life in music / Martin Geck ; translated by Stewart Spencer.

  pages cm

  Translation of: Geck, Martin. Wagner. München : Siedler, 2012.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-226-92461-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-92462-5 (e-book) 1. Wagner, Richard, 1813–1883. 2. Composers—Germany—Biography. I. Spencer, Stewart, translator.

  II. Title.

  ML410.W1G2913 2013

  782.1092—dc23

  [B]

  2013014426

  Additional figure credits: Portrait of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, p. 18, photograph courtesy AKG-Images. Portrait of Giacomo Meyerbeer, p. 43, photograph courtesy of AKG-Images. Portrait of Heinrich Heine, p. 65, photograph copyright Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Rue des Archives. Portrait of Josef Rubinstein from a woodcut engraving, An Evening at Richard Wagner’s, p. 92, photograph courtesy Ullstein Bild / Roger Viollet. Portrait of Arnold Schoenberg, 1922, p. 123, photograph courtesy Interfoto—Imagno. Paul Bekker, 1920 (detail, reversed), p. 143, from a photograph with Oskar Kokoschka et al., photograph courtesy of AKG-Images. Portrait of Angelo Neumann, 1881, p. 169, photograph courtesy of AKG-Images. George Steiner, p. 196, photograph by Jürgen Bauer, courtesy of Ullstein Bild. Portrait of Sergei Eisenstein, 1929, p. 225, photograph courtesy of Ullstein Bild. Ernst Bloch, p. 259, photograph courtesy of Interfoto—Sammlung Karl. Berthold Auerbach, ca. 1865, p. 288, photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl, courtesy of Ullstein Bild—adoc photos. Theodor Adorno, ca. 1968, p. 315, photograph courtesy of AKG-Images. Gustav Mahler, 1907, p. 352, photograph courtesy AKG-Images.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  RICHARD WAGNER

  A Life in Music

  MARTIN GECK

  Translated by

  Stewart Spencer

  THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

  CHICAGO AND LONDON

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION: FIGURING OUT WAGNER?

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Archetypal Theatrical Scene: From Leubald to Die Feen

  A WORD ABOUT FELIX MENDELSSOHN

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Blandishments of Grand Opera: Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi

  A WORD ABOUT GIACOMO MEYERBEER

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Deep shock” and “a violent change of direction”: Der fliegende Holländer

  A WORD ABOUT HEINRICH HEINE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Rituals to Combat Fear and Loneliness: Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg

  A WORD ABOUT JOSEF RUBINSTEIN

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Bedtime Story with Dire Consequences: Lohengrin

  A WORD ABOUT ARNOLD SCHOENBERG

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Revolutionary Drafts: Achilles, Jesus of Nazareth, Siegfried’s Death, and Wieland the Smith

  A WORD ABOUT PAUL BEKKER

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “We have art so as not to be destroyed by the truth”: The Ring as a Nineteenth-Century Myth

  A WORD ABOUT ANGELO NEUMANN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “My music making is in fact magic making, for I just cannot produce music coolly and mechanically”: The Art of the Ring—Seen from the Beginning

  A WORD ABOUT GEORGE STEINER

  CHAPTER NINE

  “He resembles us to a tee; he is the sum total of present-day intelligence”: The Art of the Ring—Wotan’s Music

  A WORD ABOUT SERGEI EISENSTEIN

  CHAPTER TEN

  “A mystical pit, giving pleasure to individuals”: Tristan und Isolde

  A WORD ABOUT ERNST BLOCH

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “A magnificent, overcharged, heavy, late art”: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

  A WORD ABOUT BERTHOLD AUERBACH

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “They’re hurrying on toward their end, though they think they will last for ever”: The Art of the Ring—Seen from the End

  A WORD ABOUT THEODOR W. ADORNO

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “You will see—diminished sevenths were just not possible!”: Parsifal

  A WORD ABOUT GUSTAV MAHLER

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Wagner as the Sleuth of Modernism

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  GENERAL INDEX

  INDEX OF WAGNER’S WORKS

  INTRODUCTION

  FIGURING OUT WAGNER?

  Cosima Wagner’s diaries run to nearly one million words—over 2,500 pages in the two-volume German edition and only slightly less in Geoffrey Skelton’s English-language translation. The first entry is dated January 1, 1869, the last one February 12, 1883. Barely a day is omitted. Moreover, Wagner himself—and it is around him that these entries revolve—kept a close eye on his wife’s record of their lives together, a point confirmed by entries in his own hand. At first sight, then, the final fifth of Wagner’s life seems to be seamlessly documented, so much so, indeed, that it appears to require little effort to figure out who Wagner was.

  But what does the term “document” mean in such a context? Of course, these diaries include many undisputed facts. And yet how many of the incidents related here are given a tendentious gloss? And how many are simply suppressed? The main problem is that Cosima dedicated her diaries to her children: “You shall know every hour of my life, so that one day you will come to see me as I am.”1 But she was writing these lines at the very time that she and her two illegitimate daughters by Wagner (Isolde and Eva), were fleeing from a loveless marriage with Hans von Bülow and moving to Tribschen on Lake Lucerne in order for her to live with him in what was pilloried at the time as “sin.”

  Her daughters were too young to be able to make any sense of this information. But her diary was in any case never designed to leave any trace of the intimate affair between its author, Cosima von Bülow, and its subject, Richard Wagner. As a result, their eldest daughter Isolde, affectionately known as “Loldi,” is passed off as the daughter of Hans von Bülow. Even as late as 1914, when Isolde—pro
mpted by her husband, who was anxious to advance his claim to his Wagnerian inheritance—took her mother to court in an attempt to prove who her father was, Cosima won the case on a technicality but was forced to admit under oath that she had slept with Wagner at the time of the child’s conception. In the wake of this public revelation, Isolde’s name could never again be mentioned in Cosima’s presence. Yet how can we square even this one tiny detail with the line from Cosima’s diary, “You shall know every hour of my life”?

  But are not the many thousands of comments that Wagner himself made between 1869 and 1883 about his life and works, about art, politics, and religion, about the “Jewish question” and about vivisection—everything, in short, about God and the world—a veritable mine of information? Not only are they a mine, they are also a minefield. After all, these remarks—at least to the extent that they were made within the family circle—are known to us almost entirely through Cosima’s record of them. It appears that she made these entries in her diary at irregular intervals, often days apart, relying on the notes that she jotted down in the meantime. But how reliable was this method? And which remarks did she record without any explanation? Which did she suppress? And which did she alter in keeping with her own interpretation of them?

  As we have seen, Richard Wagner read her jottings, at least from time to time, but not once did he make any attempt to correct them. And yet this does not mean that he never felt that Cosima had misunderstood him throughout these final fourteen years of his life—to assume otherwise would fly in the face of reason. Rather, he evidently had no desire to meddle in his wife’s affairs but preferred on this point at least to leave her to her own devices. We do not need to interpret this, as many of Cosima’s biographers have done, as an instance of her iron rule: marital relations can rarely be reduced to such simplistic terms. But we would certainly not be wrong to speak of Cosima and her husband inhabiting parallel worlds. And these two worlds cannot be aligned simply by our arguing that Cosima regarded herself as Wagner’s mouthpiece.

  Can we expect a greater degree of authenticity from the new critical edition of Wagner’s nine thousand or so surviving letters, an edition that now runs to twenty-two volumes and has reached the year 1870? And what about the “truth” of Wagner’s autobiography, My Life, in which the composer devotes some eight hundred pages to an account of the first four-fifths of his life, leaving a gap of only four years before Cosima’s diaries take over? The mere fact that Wagner dictated his memoirs to Cosima and intended them to be read above all by King Ludwig II suggests that his interpretation of the “truth” was occasionally fast and loose. This does not mean that we must necessarily accuse Wagner of wanting to present an unduly flattering picture of himself. If we ignore simple gaps and genuine lapses of memory, then his conscious or unconscious desire to surround himself and the creative process with an aura of mystery will have played a greater role here.

  Here, too, there are various traps lying in wait to catch the unwary biographer. Even such an intelligent writer as Martin Gregor-Dellin, whose contribution to Wagnerian literature cannot be dismissed out of hand, is repeatedly guilty of falling under the narcotic spell of Wagner’s life and works and, like Isolde, sinking and drowning in this sea of self-mystification. While on the one hand claiming to maintain a certain skepticism toward Wagner’s own account of his life, there are times when Gregor-Dellin identifies so intensely with his subject that he gives the impression that he actually witnessed the events he is describing. And where Wagner and Cosima remain monosyllabic, Gregor-Dellin becomes positively voyeuristic: “As for Wagner, he succumbed to the lure of her shapely breasts, drew her to him and smothered her with passionate kisses.”2 Thus Gregor-Dellin describes Wagner’s late infatuation for Judith Gautier, a relationship that remains, at best, a matter for speculation.

  By then in his sixties, Wagner used the Bayreuth factotum Bernhard Schnappauf as a go-between, and the latter dutifully delivered the composer’s little love letters to his beautiful and cultured French admirer after she had visited him during the 1876 Bayreuth Festival. Even after Judith had returned to Paris, Wagner continued to place orders for silk fabrics, cosmetics, and perfumes with her, until Cosima discovered what was going on behind her back and, having made a scene, ensured that in future the correspondence was conducted through her. The historian may report this with a tolerably clear conscience even though he or she is bound to rely on Cosima’s diaries in support of his or her account. But practically everything else about this “affair,” if such it was, is speculation, albeit speculation that has long since become an integral part of the myth surrounding the composer. Does it make any sense to counter this version of events in an attempt to demythologize Wagner? Is it worth our while to do so in the case of Mathilde Wesendonck, toward whom Cosima harbored such ill feelings that she destroyed all her late husband’s letters to his muse from the time when he had been working on Tristan und Isolde, even though the letters in question had already been published, albeit in censored form, so that we shall presumably never know the true facts of the matter? “Wahn, Wahn, überall Wahn!,” one is tempted to echo Hans Sachs’s despair at the universality of human folly.

  I earned my spurs as a Wagner scholar while working on Parsifal as part of the Wagner Collected Edition. This was at a time when there was already a lively debate about Wagner’s works and their influence and about the institution of “New Bayreuth,” but as yet there was no serious Wagner scholarship that was worthy of that name. As a result, I was not a little proud when, together with my colleague Egon Voss, I was able to uncover an act of self-mystification on Wagner’s part dating from the time of his work on Parsifal. In spite of his claims to the contrary in his autobiography, the first prose sketch of the work was produced not on a “sunny” Good Friday following Wagner’s move into his new home—his “Asylum” or “Refuge” in the grounds of the Wesendoncks’ villa in Zurich—but some weeks later. His autobiographical account is intended to invest the event with a symbolism that it did not have at the time. When our edition of Parsifal was published in 1970, it was not yet possible to consult Cosima Wagner’s diaries, which were still locked away in the vaults of a bank. Had we been able to do so, we would have stumbled across an entry for April 22, 1879: “R. today recalled the impression which inspired his ‘Good Friday Music’; he laughs, saying he had thought to himself, ‘In fact it is all as far-fetched as my love affairs, for it was not a Good Friday at all—just a pleasant mood in Nature which made me think, “This is how a Good Friday ought to be.”’”3

  This does not need to be seen as an expression of cynicism on Wagner’s part. Perhaps he was trying to say: “I know that I am guilty of mystifying certain incidents in my life.” In that case the sentence might continue: “But I need to do so.” Or take another example: Wagner was fond of stressing that he often wrote his music “in a sort of insane, somnambulistic state.”4 And in his autobiography he recalls very specifically how, after a lengthy search, the orchestral prelude to Das Rheingold suddenly “dawned” on him in September 1853, when, after a tiring walk, he sank into a “kind of somnambulistic state” and collapsed on a couch in the northern Italian resort of La Spezia, with “the feeling of being immersed in rapidly flowing water.”5

  As Wagnerians now know, this is a belated attempt to cast a veil of mystery over the true facts of the matter, for the first draft of the prelude to Das Rheingold, which was written two months after his visit to La Spezia, is less specific than Wagner’s description of his déjà-vu experience would require it to be. But Wagner needed to mystify the compositional process6 in order to dispel any possible self-doubts about his working method. After all, it required a certain courage to persuade future audiences to accept 136 bars of pure E-flat major as a meaningful opening for the four evenings that make up the Ring. But he may also have been prompted to surround the work’s genesis with this aura of mystification by his reading of Schopenhauer’s “Essay on Spirit Seeing and Everything Concerned Therewith.�
� Here the Sage of Frankfurt discusses somnambulism and “visions of all kinds” that take place beyond the laws of time and space and, regardless of physical causality, occur within a nonindividual space.7

  Wagner saw himself as the champion of a new mythology and seized on such notions with palpable glee—not just in this particular case but with regard to his whole life and creative output. It would be naïve to accept all his comments at face value, just as it would be foolhardy to accuse him of systematic lying. And however much credit I am willing to give Wagner scholars for attempting to reach increasingly “sound” conclusions by continuously assessing the available material, I do not expect that this process will produce any significant results. There are two reasons for this, one of them general, the other specific.

  In general, our memories are fallible. “The Veil of Memory” is the title of a book by the medievalist Johannes Fried that deals with the habitual unreliability of our powers of recollection. Fried draws attention not only to the vagueness of the surviving medieval sources but also to striking gaps in the memory of even our close contemporaries. To take a single example: the accounts put forward by the two nuclear physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg of their conversations about the possible development of nuclear weapons in Germany and the United States differ in astonishing ways—within years of their meeting in the autumn of 1941 they were no longer able to agree on what they had discussed or even on where and when they had met. And yet there is no need to accuse either of them of malicious intent.8

  In the specific case of Wagnerian research, this means that because the most important statements about Wagner’s life and works are almost always based on individual recollections and personal opinions, it is impossible to use them to establish an objective and at the same time meaningful picture of Wagner. This aim is all the more futile in that Wagner himself was unwilling to distinguish between reality and dreams. Indeed, we should be guilty of seriously misjudging him if we were to adopt a superior tone and insist on drawing such a distinction.