instrument to emphasise a single word! Instead of throwing off a whole emotion with one bold freehand stroke, [Weber] minces the impression into little details and detailed littlenesses. How hard it comes to him, to give life to his Ensembles; how he drags the second Finale! And since the audience is bound to admit in the end that it hasn’t understood a note of it, people have to find their consolation in dubbing it astoundingly learned, and therefore paying it a great respect. – O this wretched erudition – the source of every German ill!
He ends with a barely concealed self-advertisement:
Only by a lighter and freer touch can we hope to shake off an incubus that has held our music by the throat, and especially our operatic music, for many a year. For why has no German opera-composer come to the front since so long? Because none knew how to gain the ear of the people – none has seized Life as it is: true and warm.
To put his new passion for Mediterranean art into effect, he immediately embarked on a new opera, based on Shakespeare – Measure for Measure, of all chilly, harsh plays, transposed to Sicily, with only one German character, based on Angelo, Shakespeare’s hypocritical Puritan: the governor, Friedrich, who epitomises the life-negating Teutonic world view. The play’s complex and bitter working out of its themes he discarded: all twenty-one-year-old Richard Wagner was interested in was exposing the sinfulness, hypocrisy and unnaturalness of what in Germany passed for morality. His purpose was simple: to celebrate free love, lauding the sexy values of the south – sensuality, romance, passion. He called his opera The Ban on Love and this time when he wrote, he ripped off the gloomy mask of Marschner, pretending instead, remarkably convincingly, to be Donizetti or Bellini in their sunnier moments.
By the time he started writing The Ban on Love he had been offered a new job as chief conductor of the opera house in the once-splendid watering hole of Bad Lauchstädt in Saxony-Anhalt. Visiting the place for the first time, Wagner was dismayed by the dreariness and dowdiness of both the town and the theatre, once the stomping ground of Schiller and Goethe. In My Life he describes with grim relish the Dickensian scene that awaited him. The madly quirky director of the theatre introduced him to his gargantuan wife, who, crippled in one foot, lay on an enormous couch, while an elderly bass – her admirer – smoked his pipe beside her. The stage manager told Wagner that he would be expected to conduct Don Giovanni in two days’ time; rehearsing it, he warned, might be difficult because of the intermittent availability of the town bandsmen, who formed the bulk of the orchestra. Appalled, Wagner made his excuses and was about to leave when he bumped into the company’s exceedingly pretty leading actress, Fräulein Minna Planer. After a five-minute conversation with her, he changed his mind about going, and three days later, Wagner found himself leading the company, to some acclaim, in Mozart’s most complex and demanding score; he had never conducted anything before in his life. The following night he was on the podium again for the latest Viennese musical comedy hit, that ‘dust cloud of frivolity and vulgarity’, as he called it, Nestroy’s Lumpazivagabundus, in which Minna Planer played the Amorous Fairy, a role she was very soon to assume in his life.
The sexual pull between him and Minna was very strong, but what he was really after was a woman who had the qualities he lacked. At twenty-one, he was barely house-trained, arrogant, impetuous, outspoken. His face was often covered in ugly red blotches, lesions and pustules, the effects of the distressing dermatological condition erysipelas, otherwise known as Holy Fire, which at times of tension (or inspiration) erupted all over him from head to toe. He was still in the grip of a Bohemian contempt for anything bourgeois: on the road with the company he and his friend the poet Guido Apel had somehow managed after a boozy supper to reduce the huge, massively built Dutch tile-stove in their room to rubble. On the same tour he pitched into another riot, fists flying, with a few like-minded spirits, and for a while he took up gambling again. This prolonged adolescence, he realised, could not go on. Minna offered the stability he knew he needed. She was twenty-five, exceptionally pretty and completely unfazed by his facial blotches and swellings. Nor was she perturbed by his stone-age social demeanour; she could take it all in her stride. She was a natural homemaker, she was socially skilful, and, on some fairly slender evidence, she believed in him absolutely. She herself was not without emotional baggage: when she was fifteen she had had a child, Nathalie, from a liaison with a blackguardly aristocratic guardsman, who immediately dumped her and their daughter; the girl had been brought up believing that she was Minna’s sister, not her daughter. Wagner was more than happy to accept this situation. For an apostle of free love, such trifles were neither here nor there. An effective operator and a brilliant diplomat, Minna eased his path in the theatre, introducing him to the people that mattered, making sure he was properly turned out, smoothing feathers he’d ruffled.
This was necessary because he was in a state of permanently boiling rage. Conducting a repertory which, by and large, he despised, was bad enough; but the impossible conditions backstage, the wretched quality of the singers, the comic inadequacy of the chorus and orchestra, all drove him to the brink, to say nothing of the fact that his Amorous Fairy was, at this early point in their relationship, by no means his alone. Minna and he broke up, temporarily, the first of many such ruptures; when they got together again, he told himself that what she felt for him was neither passion nor genuine love, nor was she capable of such a thing; her feeling for him, he decided, was one of heartfelt goodwill, sincere desire for his success, and genuine delight at and admiration for his talents. On that basis, they became an official couple, though the absence of passionate and fervent commitment rankled at subterranean levels. His account of his early relationship with Minna was admittedly dictated twenty years later to his then-mistress, for the gratification of his royal master, but his analysis is typical of the way his mind worked, ruthlessly weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of every situation in which he found himself. What did he need? And was he getting it?
The Leipzig theatre, meanwhile, reneged on the promise Rosalie had wrested from it to stage The Fairies. Wagner was unmoved by the cancellation. He conducted the evocative, Weber-like overture in Magdeburg, where the Lauchstädt company were wintering, and then promptly dismissed the rest of the opera from his mind, even banishing it from the catalogue of his works; it was not performed complete until five years after his death. It has hints throughout, both orchestrally and dramatically, of elements that Wagner would later develop. But simply having written it was enough for him. He had no further use for it: on, on. He threw himself into finishing The Ban on Love, and then helped out with incidental music for the local theatre. The overture he composed for Columbus, an historical drama written by his drinking companion Apel, shows his passion for innovative effects: he was attempting, he said, to depict both the ship and the ocean, simultaneously. Out of the orchestral commotion emerges what he called an ‘exquisite, seductively dawning theme’, representing a bewitching, chimerical vision, a Fata Morgana. This theme – suggesting the promised land towards which Columbus and his crew are speeding through choppy waters – is first stated by three pairs of trumpets each of a different pitch; after many adventurous modulations, the theme finally appears at the end of the piece triumphantly blazoned forth in the same key on all six trumpets: America in the sailors’ sights as the sun rises over the ocean. To ensure maximum impact, he imported half a dozen trumpeters from the local barracks. The effect was, as intended, overwhelming, and completely upstaged the play, Wagner reports with some satisfaction.
He was heavily in debt, as he had been more or less continuously since leaving home – and even before. His idol, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, who was passing through Magdeburg, generously offered to take part in a benefit for him. The programme was ambitious, and very, very noisy. In addition to Schröder-Devrient’s contributions, there was his own Columbus overture, with its screaming trumpets, followed by Beethoven’s brass-heavy Victory Symphony, which calls for alarming artillery effects. Expecting capacity business, he had hugely augmented the orchestra; the firing of the cannon and musketry in the Beethoven was organised with the utmost elaboration, by means of specially and expensively constructed apparatuses; trumpets and bugles, on both French and English sides, had been doubled and trebled. Alas, almost nobody came. The monstrously inflated orchestra, to say nothing of the volleys of ammunition,
