Romeo was the other reason I relished my trips to Munich. He was a remarkable dog, and not only because of his taste for fillet steak, or the uncanny way in which his moods would mirror Ursel’s. Musically, too, he seemed to have very clear preferences. He loved opera but found piano sonatas and chamber music boring. He listened quietly to Mozart for hours, curled up on his cushion, occasionally half opening his eyes to check in with his boss; but he appeared to find Wagner intolerable. If I persuaded her to play a recording of Parsifal, his luxuriant little body would freeze, he would look uneasily around him, shoot us a disapproving glance, uncurl himself, and lumber sufferingly out of the room.
Here, as in many things, he was perfectly attuned to Ursel, who also loathed Wagner. She was repelled, it seemed to me, by what she saw as the solemnity and mystery, the sacred dignity, with which his music invests melancholy, vengefulness, and insatiable eros; and by the bogus, indeed dangerous, way in which, she thought, it fetishizes ancient Teutonic myths.
For many years, my mother, brother, and I were the beneficiaries of her Wagner aversion, for she gratefully offloaded onto us the tickets she received for the festival at Bayreuth from two kind-hearted doctors, Jochen and Eva Kabelitz, who invited us to stay with them for the week-long pilgrimages we ended up making each summer.
The tickets, rare as gold dust in those days – the waiting list was said to be eight years from the time you first applied – cascaded down to us along a line of Wagner refuseniks, who seemed to treat them as temptations to histrionic degradation, to be handled with gloves and pinched noses. The Kabelitzs, who were offered the tickets by neighbours, passed them on to Ursel, and from her they found their way to us, but not before being rejected by her close friend, a doctor called Charlotte Pommer.
Charlotte had first met Ursel through Lexi Alvensleben – and was the original source of her connection to the Kabelitzs. Enormously courageous, ethical, and sensitive, she had been one of the few doctors in Nazi Germany to refuse to work on the bodies of executed victims of the regime. As a young graduate in Berlin in 1941, assigned to the laboratory of Hermann Stieve, a distinguished anatomist who regularly received the corpses of freshly hanged prisoners from the nearby Plötzensee Prison, she one day saw the bodies of three dissidents whom she personally knew lying on the dissection table. She resigned at once, only to be moved to the surgical department at the state hospital of the police in Berlin, where she did all she could to support and protect those in the resistance movement who crossed her path. In March 1945, she was arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to prison, which she escaped a few weeks later amid the chaos of the collapsing Nazi state.38
It was thanks to Charlotte Pommer’s rejected tickets for Bayreuth that I fell in love with Wagner’s music. Not that my devotion to the cult was immediate. When my mother first took me and my brother to worship at the temple, I was seventeen, and found the Ring, with its four operas over sixteen hours, unbearable not only in length but also in what I then took to be their baroque, self-indulgent kitsch, the tedious grandiloquence of their motifs and heroes, and the way the music could endow the pettiest emotion with heaven-smashing grandeur. After the first act of Siegfried, my brother and I went on strike. We told our mother that we wouldn’t be going back after the interval, and instead curled up in front of our hosts’ television and watched thrillers and action movies. Until, returning in raptures to the Kabelitzs’ house in the second interval of the final opera, Götterdämmerung, and finding us playing with Romeo in the garden, our mother demanded that we attend the last, climactic act. ‘Children,’ she announced, ‘you cannot miss this. You will not know why until you hear it!’
Her summons had a quality I knew well: it opened my eyes and ears to a liberating realm of sensibility – a realm ignored, so she seemed to say, at the risk of becoming a stunted person. I was smitten from the first moment of that act, unable to understand why I had been so bored. Despite the troubling appeal of Wagner’s music to the baser instincts as well as to the noblest, its conjuring of purity out of corruption or decay, and its capacity to disorient, even degrade, ethical sense, since that evening I have never ceased to feel emancipated by its bewitching evocation of intimacy – lost, craved, attained, unattainable.
Ursel usually drove over from Munich to join us on those magical days, and would sit on the terrace of the Kabelitzs’ house smoking cigarettes and picking the meat and smoked salmon out of the sandwiches that Eva had prepared for the hour-long intervals. Romeo was at her feet, warming himself in the sun that seemed to shine with particular gentleness over Bayreuth and the hills around it, snapping into alertness only to receive morsels of unwanted food that his mistress dropped onto the flagstones.
Not that Romeo always waited for delicacies to be tossed into his mouth. Though he preferred being fed to feeding himself, and was a deft catch even from the far side of a room, he sometimes found the temptation to grab irresistible. One of those moments was at a birthday party I had in the countryside near Munich, where a magnificent Black Forest cake awaited me.
We were chatting under the afternoon sun on that summer’s day, and I was about to be marched into the house to inspect the multi-layered construction that had taken many hours to prepare, when Romeo slunk out of the kitchen pointedly averting his head. Something was clearly amiss. We called and whistled to attract his attention, but he continued tracing a wide arc around us, ignoring even Ursel’s summons of last resort: a stern tone of voice which he generally knew to obey. Only when she surprised him from behind did he spin anxiously towards us, his eyes sunken and guilty – and his snout snow white.
He was still trying to lick the incriminating evidence from his whiskers as we rushed into the kitchen to find the cake’s three layers meticulously separated from one another and the cream cleaned off both sides of each layer, leaving only the liqueur-infused chocolate sponge. Stray cherries soaked in kirsch were lying rejected on the counter, which glistened with Romeo’s saliva.
The entire birthday cake had to be abandoned. But what again impressed me was his discernment. He drew the line at alcohol: like Wagner, it just wasn’t for him.