with archetypal figures; both men were given to great treks up mountains and down valleys; both of them had an uncanny relationship to animals. These parallels only go so far; the contrasts between them are sharp, but in their way, equally illuminating – Dickens with his essentially comic vision, Wagner with his tragic view of life; Dickens’s art at heart carnival, Wagner’s profoundly hieratic; Dickens deeply in touch with his inner child, Wagner directly connected to his inner infant.
The book I have tried to write aims to give a sense of what it was like to be near that demanding, tempestuous, haughty, playful, prodigiously productive figure, but also to place him in his world. Wagner belongs as much to the history of ideas and indeed to the history of the nineteenth century as he does to the history of music. I am not a musician, either as performer or as musicologist. I am a well-informed music lover, but it would be entirely inappropriate for me to attempt musical analysis. All I can write about is the effect of the music. I am slightly comforted by the fact that this is the only way Wagner ever wrote about music. You will search his copious writings in vain for an analysis of his highly idiosyncratic and complex compositional practice. This originality of procedure is a vital part of what makes him extraordinary, and I have noted the evolution of his musical means. But what has fascinated me above all has been how Wagner served his talent, his exceptional loyalty to it, however rackety a life he might have been leading, however much pressure there might have been to betray it, however hopeless his situation might have seemed. Wagner is in some senses an unlikely hero, but his custodianship of his gifts, despite the reverses of fortune and the vagaries of his temperament, counts as heroic and inspiring, while his personality in all its extremity belongs to one of the most fascinating of all the occupants of the human zoo.
***
Wagner has been written about at greater length than any other composer. Superb books, some short and some hernia-inducingly long, have covered him from every possible angle; primarily interested as I am in how he lived his life day-to-day, my main source has been his own words, in his copious published writings and especially, perhaps, in the letters, great tracts of which have been translated into English. Above all, I found that my most sustained sense of the man came from a book I had somewhat dreaded reading – his two-volume autobiography, My Life, published privately from 1870 to 1880. In the event, it turned out to be as vivacious and candid as the greatest artists’ autobiographies, every bit as compelling and stimulating as Benvenuto Cellini’s or Berlioz’s – and about as reliable. The circumstances of the book’s writing (dictated to his then mistress, Cosima von Bülow, at the behest of his besotted patron Ludwig II, edited and brought to press by an equally – at that stage – doting Nietzsche) mean that its truth is rarely pure and never simple, but it leaps off the page. At the very least, it tells us how he wanted to be seen by the world, which was by no means as a plaster saint. It is the work of a master dramatist, which is how he saw himself.
On 26 August 1876, as the last notes of the first performance of The Twilight of the Gods died away in the newly built Festspielhaus, in the tiny Bavarian town of Bayreuth, 2,000 people sat shaken, inspired, enchanted – or appalled. Among them were the musical aristocracy of Europe: Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky, Anton Rubinstein, Grieg and Bruckner, along with a good sprinkling of the actual aristocracy of Europe, two emperors, three kings, a handful of princes, two grand dukes. All of them, or almost all of them, were swept along on a cataclysm of emotion to equal anything that happened on stage that evening.
As the applause grew and grew, and before singers or conductor or designer or choreographer had appeared in front of the curtain to acknowledge it, a diminutive, stooping figure, familiar not just to the faithful but to the cultured world at large, the subject of a dozen photoshoots, two dozen portraits and a thousand cartoons, made his way somewhat lopsidedly to the front of the stage; his disproportionately huge head with its madly bulging eyes was topped by a floppy velvet cap set at a rakish angle. This man, this tiny man, sixty-three years old, but looking, Tchaikovsky thought, ancient and frail, was the hero of the hour, the sole architect of the vast four-day, fifteen-hour epic, every one of whose thousands and thousands of words and thousands and thousands of notes he had created, unleashing onto the vast stage gods and dwarves, dragons and songbirds, women warriors on horseback and maidens disporting themselves in the Rhine, digging deeply and unsettlingly into the subconscious, discharging in his audience emotions that were oceanic and engulfing – this man was the architect of all that; the architect, indeed, in all but name, of the very theatre in which the heaving, roaring audience sat. There he stood before them, the self-proclaimed Musician of the Future. He held a hand up, and in the ensuing silence, in the marked Saxon accent which he never made the slightest attempt to lose, he said: ‘Now you’ve seen what I want to achieve in Art. And you’ve seen what my artists, what we, can achieve. If you want the same thing, we shall have an Art.’
That was the way he spoke.
By we, he meant, of course, the German people. The first, the most important thing he had to say, was that the great work he had brought into existence was, above all else, German.
At a celebratory banquet the following night, after an interminable and obscure speech by a Reichstag deputy, the Hungarian politician Count Albert Apponyi leaped to his feet unannounced and said:
Brünnhilde – the new national art – lay asleep on a rock, surrounded by a great fire. The god Wotan had lit this fire, so that only the victorious and finest hero, a hero who knew no fear, would win her as his bride. Around the rock were mountains of ash and clinker – the cross-breeding of our own music with non-German elements. Along came a hero, the like of whom had never been seen before, Richard Wagner, who forged a weapon from the fragments of the sword of his fathers – the classical German masters – and with this sword he penetrated the fire, and with his kiss he awoke the sleeping Brünnhilde. ‘Hail to you, victorious light!’ she cried and with her we join our voices: ‘Three cheers to our master, Richard Wagner! Hip hip! Hip hip! Hip hip!’
So that was it: Wagner was the hero of the newly unified German Reich, which had come into being just five years earlier, and his music was its music. Many people, including many Germans, felt very uncomfortable about this new Germany, and The Ring of the Nibelung seemed to embody, in its grandiosity, its self-celebrating Teutonic tub-thumping, its primitivism, everything that worried them about it. Wagner himself, after a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with the masters of the new establishment, was already somewhat unenamoured of their policies: to his immeasurable disgust, one of Reichskanzler Bismarck’s first acts had been to give the vote to Jews. Wagner also, more surprisingly, loathed the new climate of militarism and imperialism. He withdrew back into the kingdom of art where he would always be absolute monarch, where his will would always prevail, where he could explore the depths and the heights of human experience – by which he meant, of course, his own experience.
None of this – Wagner’s creation of a new national art, his acclaim as the greatest German artist of his times, the creation of his custom-built theatre – could possibly have been predicted at any point in the composer’s life up to that point. It was, to be sure, exactly what he set out to do, almost to the letter. But there was nothing inevitable about it whatever. The massive solidity of his achievement grew out of and existed in the face of profound instability, both internal and external, an instability which characterises every stage and every phase of his life and which indeed is at the very heart of his music. At every turn of the way, his vision, and he was nothing if not visionary, was in danger of being sabotaged, either by circumstances, or by other people, or – more often than not – by himself.
We know all this because he told us. We know everything about this extraordinary man, everything, that is, except the most important thing: how he created
