… And an unpublished personal description (quoted in his biography by Martin Gregor-Dellin) goes on: “Eyebrows: brown. Eyes: gray-blue. Nose and mouth: well proportioned. Chin: rounded. Wears glasses. Special characteristics: movements and speech abrupt and rapid. Clothing: overcoat of dark green buckskin, trousers of dark cloth, velvet waistcoat, silk cravat, ordinary felt hat and boots.”
But Wagner was now more or less safe in Zurich, where he began writing what turned out to be nearly 700 pages in his collected works: Art and Revolution, The Artwork of the Future, the notorious anti-Semitic article “Jewry in Music,” and Opera and Drama, a theoretical outpouring which was apparently necessary before he could move onward with the music of the Ring. There is a great deal of social observation in all of these works, much of it very modern. All of it has been commented on, at length.
But we must examine the Dresden events and what led up to them if we really are to learn of Wagner’s politics. We must also examine them because in the year that preceded them and, arguably, during the Dresden Uprising itself, the ideas that shaped the Ring were fired, forged, and annealed.
VI
With all the criticism that has fallen on Mein Leben’s account of Dresden, I can find only three places where Wagner has inarguably omitted pertinent facts.
His most eyebrow-raising abridgement is this: Wagner and Röckel ordered a large number of hand grenades from a brass founder, Karl Oehme, and on May 4th (so Oehme claimed at Röckel’s trial for treason) Wagner placed an order for them to be filled with gunpowder.
This is not mentioned in Mein Leben.
Whether the grenades were used in the Dresden fighting at all is not, in fact, known. One theory is that the men placed the order for their friend Bakúnin and that the grenades ultimately went to Prague, where Bakúnin also had his finger in the fighting. While such an interpretation may be bending over backwards to exonerate Wagner, what I think we can be sure of is that, even if he ordered them, whether subsequently they went off in the streets of Dresden or in the streets of Prague, he did not throw them. And if, by some chance, during the fighting he did, while it pertains to whether, at the time, he did or did not commit a criminal act during the fighting that warranted his imprisonment, in terms of what we are interested in today — the political ideas behind his involvement in the uprising as they were to be expressed in his later work, particularly the Ring —, it only makes the extremity of his beliefs that much more intense (and Wagner was nothing if not intense). But it does not change their basic nature.
Wagner’s second suppression in Mein Leben is not so cataclysmic.
Days after the second Palm Sunday concert, on April 8th, 1847, Wagner and his wife, the former actress Minna Planer, with Minna’s illegitimate daughter from an adolescent liaison, Natalie (who was raised all her life to believe she was Minna’s younger sister), a parrot, and a dog, moved into their new quarters in the second floor apartments of Dresden’s beautiful Palais Marcolini, upstairs from a sculptor named Hänel. The palace’s spacious French-style gardens were at their disposal, where Wagner would sometimes go out to sit on the Triton in one of the dried-up fountains, orchestrating. The rent was low. The only drawback to the location, Wagner writes, was its inordinate distance from the theater, where he had to go to rehearse the orchestra and conduct performances.
“… I often found the cabfare,” Wagner remarks in Mein Leben, “a serious problem.”
Just after Wagner returned from his mother’s funeral in Leipzig, the news of Louis Philippe’s flight and the proclamation of a Republic in France (February 24, 1848) reached Dresden. February gave way to March, and with it came Germany’s March Revolution. King Friedrich August was besieged with petitions to recreate Germany’s government structure in a more liberal form, on the French model, while he stubbornly withstood all such demands. “On the evening of one of these really anxious days,” writes Wagner, “when the very air seemed heavy and full of thunderclouds, we gave our third big concert, which was attended, like the first two, by the King and his court.” The program was Mendelssohn’s A-minor Symphony (Mendelssohn had died that past November while Wagner was in Berlin and the choice was commemorative) and Beethoven’s Fifth. Just before the concert, Wagner wondered out loud if two such pieces, both in minor keys, might not seem too grim to the audience. His first-chair violinist and concertmaster, Lipinski, quipped to him, however, that after the two opening bars (it was already a performance warhorse), no one ever heard the rest of the Fifth Symphony anyway.
Minutes later, Wagner ascended the podium.
As the eighth note of the Fifth rang through the house, someone from the balcony shouted down, “Long live the king!” and the rest of the audience (bourgeois, paying) seemed to hear the remainder of the rich and sprightly music as a paean to, and an expression of, the unified German spirit — breaking into spontaneous and vociferous applause at every stirring passage! What did the thirty-four-year-old conductor actually think of the audience’s response, so clear in the house behind him — other than that he was off the hook of having to please them with two major works in minor keys? Was he amused at their simple-minded chauvinism? Was he repelled by the anti-republican sentiments their response was clearly based on? Was he annoyed at the interruptions? Did his own spirits, at the same time (politically? aestheticically?), soar along with theirs? Was he pleased with his own powers, in such a charged field, to move his hearers so? In Mein Leben he is, of course, writing for Ludwig. I think we can read his silence on the topic, there — as well as the fact that the incident stayed vividly enough in his memory for him to recount it at all — as a sign that his feelings, as he conducted that evening, probably contained elements of all, and were more complex than any, of these.
Between Leap Day and March 13, Saxony found herself in a sort of mini-revolution, which ended with Friedrich August II, self-styled “the Beloved,” dismissing his cabinet and calling in the opposition. Government censorship was relaxed in the city of Dresden. Trial by jury was introduced there. Electoral reforms were guaranteed, and feudal rights and tithes were abolished. It wasn’t a republic, but it was a step in the republican direction.
The night of the 13th, lights burned late in the Dresden streets, and the king was cheered and applauded by the crowds as he moved about the city that evening. One of the most vociferous cheerers was Second Royal Kapellmeister Richard Wagner, who moved through the crowds to catch yet another glimpse of the king and shout his approbation of the new freedoms.
But while this was going on, the Paris situation was producing even more reactions throughout Europe. Only five days after that exciting Dresden night of March 13, Metternich was thrown out in Leipzig; barricades had gone up in Frankfurt and Berlin, and the fighting there, so ran the reports back in Dresden, was vicious and bloody.
Meanwhile the Dresden newspapers urged the city’s citizens to eat stale bread and make chicken soup with particularly old and tough fowl. For despite the new political freedoms, economically these months were hard.
Though Dresden was the Saxon capital and the seat of King Fried- rich August, it was a small city of only 70,000. Many of the laboring men in the vicinity worked in the mines. Now two parties formed in Dresden, the comparatively conservative Deutsches-Verein (The German Association) and the more radical Vaterlands-Verein (The Fatherland Association — which Gray translates, somewhat disingenuously, as “The Patriotic Union”). Wagner makes no secret that his good friend August Röckel was the head of the Vaterlands-Verein. Wagner attended Vaterlands-Verein meetings, made speeches, published articles in Röckel’s newspaper, Die Volksblätter, and, toward the end, took over the editorship of the paper, when Röckel was put out of commission. All this is in Mein Leben. Wagner mentions that he attended “some” of the meetings when they were held in “a public garden.” What he does not mention is that the particular public garden was the French garden behind the Marcolini palace, with its non-working fountain and its Triton, and that Wagner himself had invited them to meet there. What does not come across at all is that Wagner was, for all practical purposes, the host for at least some of these meetings.