At the close of the nineteenth century, in his little book The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), George Bernard Shaw wanted to redeem Wagner from the endless images of buxom, bull-horned blondes with spears and shields that had already become a parodic symbol of all “serious art.” To do it he took Wagner’s four-paneled portrait of eternity, the Ring cycle — where the human, the superhuman, and the subhuman (this last in the form of giants and dwarves) lived, lusted, and battled in a world before time — and tried to read some socialist awareness into it. Was there, anywhere in that great, mythic allegory of history and psychology, some understanding — international understanding, that is — of the new currents of socialism that had blown from west to east and were now blowing back again? Shaw was certain that there were. There seemed to be everything else.
Eighty years later, in 1979 at Bayreuth, the French enfant terrible, then thirty-year-old Patrice Chereau, tried to do much the same.
Allegories being what they are, especially well-articulated ones, it is not too hard to read anything one wants into Wagner’s panorama of the intricate and interconnected failures of gods, men, and women.
But we can reasonably ask, in historical terms, if any of these socialist ideas were, indeed, Wagner’s.
It’s customary to turn to the Dresden Uprising of May, 1849, as the rack on which Wagner’s true political colors were displayed — or the forge at which his political convictions were hammered out. Wagner devotes considerable space to it in his autobiography Mein Leben (My Life). The book is a massive, colorful, sweeping account by a vigorous, inexhaustibly energetic man, as much a document of “the European century,” the century of revolutions, as Hugo’s Les Misérables.
Wagner’s twentieth-century biographers have gone on endlessly about the ways Wagner suppressed, colored, or outright lied in his book. His account of the spring of ’49 in Dresden, and what led up to the calamitous events there, has fallen under particular censure. But the shortcomings of Mein Leben are basically two. First, Wagner wrote it at the personal request of a king, so that it is really a letter to his most powerful and influential fan. Second, he dictated it to his second wife, Cosima. The three things the book is traditionally taken to task for are, first, its incomplete coverage of Wagner’s debts; second, its fragmentary account of his love affairs; and, third, its muting (and many have used much stronger words) of the active and energetic part he took at Dresden.
Feelings for his amanuensis certainly explain the second reticence. And even there, considering to whom he was dictating, I find Wagner remarkably honest: the only affair he wholly represses (and he had many), so that one cannot even read it between the lines, was his most recent one (at the time of the writing) with Mathilde von Wesendonk. But that, of course, is the one we are most interested in, since it so deeply influenced the writing of Tristan und Isolde, the opera of Wagner’s that, today, we are most ready to concede greatness to in purely musical terms.
Also missing is, of course, the alleged affair with the young Judith Gautier. But Cosima, who is supposed to have known of it, kept up a warm correspondence with Judith through the whole of it till well after Wagner’s death. I suspect this was more likely one of Wagner’s intense friendships that he instituted with young men and, more and more frequently as he grew older, young women all through his life.
If one reads only his biographers, however, one can get the notion that Wagner never once, in Mein Leben, mentions debt at all. Or one begins to assume that, indeed, by 1865 (when, at the request of young King Ludwig II, who had rescued Wagner and Cosima from Wagner’s creditors in a move that was quite like something out of a fairy tale, Wagner began these memoirs) Wagner was presenting himself merely as a spectator to the 1849 events at Dresden. I have seen the whole book dismissed as an unreadable tissue of fabrications. But while, in his theoretical writings, Wagner’s style takes on a Germanic academic recomplication that veers toward the incomprehensible, if not the meaningless, the king Mein Leben was written for was not yet twenty-one; and while he was “artistically sensitive” enough, he was not, in Wagner’s private estimation, overly bright. Wagner was, by this time, a comparatively experienced journalist as well as a musician, and the account is straightforward and (at least in its current Andrew Gray translation — Cambridge University Press: 1983) reads far more easily today than, say, any number of Dickens’s novels.
In Mein Leben hardly a year goes by in which Wagner does not recount some creditor or other harassing him with a bill for one or another loan. The agony of financial embarrassment seems to be his constant companion. His most famous biographer, Ernest Newman (who most rigorously and famously challenged this aspect of Mein Leben), seems to be trying to say that, with all the debts Wagner recounts, there were simply dozens more left unmentioned — and, frequently, unpaid. My own estimation, on considering both Newman’s and Wagner’s versions, is that if Wagner was not accurate to the letter in his autobiographical tally of his financial extravagances, he certainly gave the feel of his debts and doubtless recounted, if not the largest ones, the ones he remembered suffering over most.
There are, of course, numerous inaccuracies all through Wagner’s account of his life. Toward the beginning of autumn in 1847 Wagner left Dresden, the capital of Saxony, where he had been Second Royal Kapellmeister since 1843, to visit Berlin, where he had been asked to conduct several performances of his early and (moderately) popular opera Rienzi. The invitation had come as a result of an audience with the Queen. Wagner felt the trip would further his career and that he might even meet with the King and thus interest Friedrich August II and other powerful people in supporting performances of his newer works, Tannhäuser (which had already had some success in Dresden) and Lohengrin (on which he was still working). Though Wagner liked the man personally well enough, the Berlin tenor, around whom Rienzi turned, was simply inadequate — in an otherwise passable production. But King Friedrich did not attend any of the performances he himself had, at the Queen’s request, commanded. Wagner was obliged to borrow money against his Kapellmeister salary to get back to Dresden, and the trip had to be written off largely as a failure — and a dismal one, given the financial considerations. Wagner came back to his Kapellmeister job that Christmas season deeply dejected. Within days of his return, he learned that his mother had died in Leipzig.
We know Wagner’s mother died on January 9, 1848.
But Wagner recounts making the comparatively brief rail journey to the funeral, in time to view her remains and see her buried, as taking place in February. Doubtless he is a couple of weeks off. But the feel of the winter funeral is still there:
It was a bitingly cold morning when we lowered the casket into the grave in the churchyard; the frozen clumps of earth, which we scattered on the lid of the casket instead of the customary handfuls of loose soil, frightened me by their ferocious clatter. On the way back to the house of my brother-in-law Hermann Brockhaus, where the family got together for an hour, my sole companion… Heinrich Laube… expressed anxiety about my unusually exhausted appearance. Then he accompanied me to the railway station… On the short trip back to Dresden the realization of my complete loneliness came over me for the first time with full clarity, as I could not help recognizing that the death of my mother had severed all the natural ties with my family, whose members were all preoccupied with their own special affairs. So I went coldly and gloomily about the sole task that could warm and cheer me: the orchestration of my Lohengrin score…