eighteen, restless, volatile Wagner sided with change. He quickly knocked off a Grand Overture to celebrate the new order; in it he graphically depicted the darkness of oppression giving way to the joyful new dispensation, the latter represented by a theme unambiguously marked Friedrich und Freiheit – Friedrich and Freedom – which blazed forth in triumph at the end. It was not performed.
Meanwhile, despite the new liberal constitution, the revolutionary aspirations of the student body in Leipzig rumbled on; there was unrest, swiftly quelled by the arrest of a number of students. Wagner, still working in his brother-in-law’s publishing house, attached himself to them, fell in with their protest marches, sang along with them as they bawled out the great student anthem ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’:
Down with sadness, down with gloom,
Down with all who hate us;
Down with those who criticise,
Look with envy in their eyes,
Scoff, mock and berate us.
He joined their angry demands for the release of the arrested students, and was with them when they descended on the house of the magistrate who had ordered the arrest. Finding that the place had already been lightly trashed, they plunged in and finished the job off. Wagner was among the most uninhibited of the rioters, intoxicated, as he put it, by the students’ unreasoning fury: he smashed and pillaged with the best of them, drawn into the vortex – his words – ‘like a madman’. The frenzy only grew; he and his fellows moved across the town, slashing and burning. They weren’t drunk; this was a self-generating rampage. All the latent violence that was in Wagner found an outlet. The formless resentments that had been germinating through his childhood and youth – his fatherlessness, his mother’s narrow outlook, his hatred of authority, his frustration at having no proper channel for the expression of his artistic dreams and fantasies – erupted in rampant destruction as he threw his lot in with the student rioters.
These exploits were viewed indulgently by the city: it was just the young gentlemen letting off steam, people felt. But when the workers started rioting, there was universal outrage. Indeed, Wagner drily noted, the student body offered itself as temporary policemen, in which capacity, drunk and disorderly themselves, they imposed the rule of law, stopping travellers and inspecting their visas. How Wagner longed to be one of these lords of misrule. Soon enough, despite lacking the slightest qualifications, Wagner became an undergraduate of the University of Leipzig, not on the academic course, but as a student of music – just in time to realise his supreme aspiration: membership of the Saxonia fencing club. The moment he enrolled, he challenged as many people as he could to duels. None of these challenges materialised, which is just as well, since he knew nothing whatever about fencing. Instead he took up gambling, to which he soon became addicted. The more he lost, the more he gambled. Pale, sunken-eyed and haggard, like something out of Balzac or Dostoevsky, he lived only to gamble; finally, he stole his mother’s savings and bet them, convinced that with a high enough stake he could make a large sum of money. Miraculously, this is what happened, and he returned his mother’s savings to her, considerably richer. When he told her what he had done, she fainted. He experienced a moment of celestial benison: ‘I felt as if God and His angels were standing by my side and whispering words of warning and consolation in my ears.’
From his earliest years, Wagner saw everything in his life as happening sub specie aeternitatis; destiny was always pulling the strings. Thus redeemed by divine intervention, he hurled himself into creative activity: his purpose was nothing less than to turn the world of music upside down. Among the first fruits of his inspiration was an overture in B-flat major. To ensure that it made its full revolutionary impact, he used different colours for the various instruments, drawing attention to the mystic meaning of his orchestration: strings were red, brass was black. If he had been able to get hold of any green ink, he said, he would have used that for the winds. Astonishingly, the young Leipzig conductor Heinrich Dorn agreed to programme the piece. During rehearsals Wagner was forced to acknowledge to himself that the technicolor scoring made no appreciable difference to the playing, and anxiously noted that the big effect he had planned, whereby after every four bar phrase there would be a loud thwack on the kettledrum, simply did not work. The conductor, however, insisted it would be splendid. At the concert, the audience were enchanted by this wonderfully predictable effect. He heard them calculating its return; dum dum, dum dum, dum dum, dum dum THWACK, they would chant along with the music; seeing how unerringly accurate their calculations were, he suffered, he said, ten thousand torments, almost passing out with misery. The audience was delighted; it could have gone on forever as far as they were concerned. And then quite suddenly, the overture came to a halt, Wagner having disdained to provide it with anything as bourgeois an ending. A silence ensued. There were no exclamations of disapproval from the audience, no hissing, no comments, not even laughter: all he saw on their faces was intense astonishment at a peculiar occurrence, which impressed them, as it did him, like a horrible nightmare. He was then obliged to take his sister Ottilie, the only member of the family who had come to the concert, back home, through the puzzled crowd. The strange look the usher gave him on the way out haunted him ever afterwards, he said, and for a considerable time he avoided the stalls of the Leipzig theatre.
This event hastened his realisation that without skill, craft, or technique he would never write anything remotely worthy of Schröder-Devrient. The idea of actually attending the classes he’d enrolled in at the university was, of course, beneath consideration. Instead, he made his way to Bach’s old church (where he had, after all, been baptised) and sought out the cantor, Theodor Weinlig, and asked him to take him on. Weinlig agreed – on one condition: that he would give up composing for six months. Wagner accepted the condition: for half a year he wrote nothing but fugues, day in and day out; he and Weinlig would engage in counterpoint duels. Under this highly practical tutelage, he finally began to get a feel, he said, for melody and vocal line. Once the six months were up, his self-denying ordinance was over, and music poured out of him: symphonies, overtures, marches, arias, sonatas – all entirely faceless. His Opus 1 was, in fact, a piano sonata; it is almost comically lacking in personality. For some years, Wagner would set his own highly original musical identity to one side; he would learn by imitating other people. Not a hint of experiment, nothing to mark his work out as his. That was how he taught himself, as he told the very young Hugo Wolf at the end of his life: by imitating other composers, often those whose music he despised. ‘You can’t be original straightaway,’ he told Wolf.
In his first three operas, he systematically impersonated Marschner, Meyerbeer and, of all people, Donizetti. This is quite extraordinary. Because, like it or loathe it, Wagner’s music is unmistakeably his. To eliminate all traces of personality from it must have taken a considerable effort of will.
TWO
In a very short space of time Wagner wrote three overtures and a bonny, rather Schubertian Symphony in C. All of these decently crafted pieces were performed in Leipzig, and were well received; the symphony was played by the great and renowned Gewandhaus Orchestra. Now nineteen, and with a beard coming, he set to work sketching out the libretto of his first opera, The Wedding. It is heavily indebted to Hoffmann: a drama of the night, erupting with violent love, the betrayal of a best friend, sudden death and coffin-side revelations. The story was taken from Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büsching’s pioneering account of chivalry in the Germany of the Middle Ages, and Wagner determined that his first venture into opera would avoid easy effects or operatic embellishments: he would write it, he said, in ‘the blackest possible vein’. The story was almost as violent as that of Leubald
