Johanna was determined that he should be properly educated, desperate above all else that he should never become an actor. Three out of her nine children had done so, with some success, but to her the theatre was beneath contempt, barely an art at all, certainly not to be compared with the poetry or the painting she so admired. Severe – Wagner said he could never once remember her having embraced him – and strongly pious, she was given to leading impromptu family prayer sessions from her bed, dispensing moral precepts to each of her children in turn. She was determined to make a serious young man out of Richard.
All in vain. He was a terrible student, lazy and wilful, refusing to study anything that failed to engage his imagination, which left exactly two subjects: history and literature – ancient Greek history and literature to be precise, with a bit of Shakespeare thrown in. His forte was recitation. At twelve, he made a big success speaking Hector’s farewell from the Iliad, followed by ‘To be or not to be’ – in German, of course, both of them: languages, he said, were too much like hard work. Nevertheless, even in translation, Greek plays, Greek myths, and Greek history grabbed him by the throat from an early age. He wrote copiously himself, great poetic screeds, blood-spattered epics: it was the gruesome, he said, that aroused his keenest interest, invading his dreams, and giving him, night after night, shattering nightmares from which he would wake shrieking; understandably his brothers and sisters refused to sleep in the same room with him. He seems to have been, to put it mildly, a bit of a problem child. There may have been some anxiety – some uncertainty – in the air. There was very likely a sense in the household that Richard was Geyer’s son. Nor did he fit in at school: a histrionic, hyperactive, oversensitive little chap with a nasty habit of bursting into tears every five minutes, but nonetheless he somehow managed to corral some of his school fellows into giving a performance (heavily abridged, one can only assume) of his favourite opera, Weber’s Der Freischütz. In the opera a young man with ambitions to succeed the Head Forester and marry his daughter is outshot by a rival; frustrated, he turns to his saturnine colleague Kaspar, who gives him a magic bullet, promising to give him more if he will come with him to the Wolf’s Ravine, which is where they go at the end of the second act.
In that famous scene, which terrified its first audiences and positively obsessed the young Wagner, the central characters, the hero Max and his darkly brooding friend Kaspar, repair at midnight to the fearsome ravine, deep in the woods. The clearing they are heading for is a vertiginously deep woodland glen, planted with pines and surrounded by high mountains, out of which a waterfall roars. The full moon shines wanly; in the foreground is a withered tree struck by lightning and decayed inside; it seems to glow with an unearthly lustre. On the gnarled branch of another tree sits a huge owl with fiery, circling eyes; on another perch crows and wood birds. Kaspar, in thrall to the devil, is laying out a circle of black boulders in the middle of which is a skull; a few paces away are a pair of torn-off eagle’s wings, a casting ladle, and a bullet mould:
Moonmilk fell on weeds!
Uhui!
moans a chorus of Invisible Spirits,
Spiders web is dewed with blood!
Uhui!
Ere the evening falls again –
Uhui!
Will the gentle bride be slain!
Uhui!
E’re the next descent of night,
Will the sacrifice be done!
Uhui! Uhui!
In the distance, the clock strikes twelve. Kaspar completes the circle of stones, pulls his hunting knife out and plunges it into the skull. Then, raising the knife with the skull impaled on it, he turns round three times and calls out:
Samiel! Samiel! Appear!
By the wizard’s cranium,
Samiel, Samiel, appear!
Samiel appears. Kaspar, who has already sold his soul to this woodland devil, tries to do a deal with it: Samiel can have Max instead of him. The Spirit agrees; Max, knowing nothing of this, arrives and together – in spite of a scary warning from his mother’s ghost, which suddenly looms up – he and Kaspar cast seven magic bullets, six of which will find their mark, the seventh will go wherever Samiel decrees. Finally, at the very last moment, and thanks to the intervention of an ancient hermit, the seventh bullet, instead of killing Max, finds its way into Kaspar’s heart. Max is redeemed, and is free to marry his beloved Agathe.
Despite the redemptive ending this is gruesome stuff, all right, and strangely disturbing. The old story stirs up memories of a pagan German past, of nomadic warriors who come from the dark and terrible forest, where, in the grip of demonic powers, they commune with spirits. Weber tapped into all of that, creating German Romantic opera at a stroke, and scaring the pants off his audiences, not least sixteen-year-old Richard Wagner; its atmosphere, and its music, entered into his soul.
Meanwhile his flagrant neglect of his schoolwork finally forced a crisis, which he precipitated by disclosing to his family that he had written a play, Leubald and Adelaïde, loosely based, he said, on Hamlet, King Lear, Richard III and Macbeth, with a few bits of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen thrown in for good measure. It was essentially Hamlet, he said, with the interesting difference that the hero, visited by the ghost of his murdered father, is driven to acts of homicidal revenge and goes mad – really mad, unlike Hamlet: in a frenzy, he stabs his girlfriend to death then, in a final blood-drenched tableau, he kills himself. The total roll call of the dead by the end of the play is forty-two. Or so Wagner said. In fact, as the recently rediscovered text reveals, it was no more than twelve, which tells us that Wagner was not averse to sending up his youthful self.
Whether it was twelve corpses or forty-two, the family were horrified to think what dark and desperate thoughts, how much violence and death, were swirling around inside the sixteen-year-old’s brain. Not least disturbing among the play’s catalogue of murders, rape and incestuous love – Adelaide is Leubald’s half-sister – is the prominence given to the Hamlet-like murder of Leubald’s father by his own brother; he then swiftly marries the widow, which might have seemed rather close to home for Johanna Wagner. All through the outraged tirades which rained down on his head, Wagner was laughing inwardly, he said, because they didn’t know what he knew: that his work could only be rightly judged when set to music, music which he himself would write – was indeed about to start composing immediately. The fact that he had no idea how to go about such a thing was a minor obstacle. Under his own steam, he found a fee-paying music lending library and took out Johann Bernhard Logier’s elementary compositional handbook, Method of Thorough-bass. He kept it so long, studying it so intently, that the fees accumulated alarmingly; the words ‘borrow’ and ‘own’ were always interchangeable in Wagner’s mind. This particular music lending library was, as it happens, run by the implacable Friedrich Wieck, whose daughter Clara was before very long about to defy him by marrying Robert Schumann; Wagner failed to deflect him, and so, at the age of sixteen, he found himself being pursued for debt, an experience with which he would become all too familiar. His family was eventually called on to bail him out; that too was a pattern that became wearyingly familiar.
His family’s dismay at having to pay was matched by their horror at discovering the nature of Richard’s musical ambitions: to be an aspiring performer is one thing – at least there is a chance of earning a living. But to want to be a composer is quite another thing, a recipe for penury. He was not to be gainsaid: the willpower that was to drive his life forward was already fully formed: he was going to be a composer. Faced with the inevitable, the family procured him lessons in harmony (which bored him) and in violin (which tortured them),
