Richard Wagner was a colossus not only in the music of the nineteenth century but in its drama, literature, visual art, and culture in general—and he achieved this level of fame and influence partly because he set out to. It can be argued that it was necessary for Wagner to be that kind of figure to do the work he was born to do: write gigantic music dramas, including the four-evening, seventeen-hour Ring of the Nibelung. A piano sonata or a string quartet were simply not grand enough for Wagner’s gift, nor his ego. To find his métier as an artist, he had to invent a new kind of art. As pervasive myth and sacred monster, Wagner looms large over the Western tradition not only in music but in all the arts.
The Ring took him twenty-six years to complete. Bringing it to fruition and then marshaling the forces to mount it was a project of unprecedented ambition in the history of music. At the same time, Wagner was one of the most innovative composers who ever lived, and in his work he had the tenacity and courage to make the world accept whatever he chose to do. The effects of his achievements reverberated throughout the rest of Western music; the next generation including Brahms and Verdi show the impact of his genius. His Ring meanwhile is a wellspring of epics and satires of epics ever since, from superhero comic books to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Given that this book is not concerned with opera—that would be a book in itself—I won’t go into Wagner’s full operas. Rather, I’ll concentrate on his orchestral music, all of it excerpted from the operas. Together with Franz Liszt, Wagner headed a movement calling itself “The Music of the Future.” By way of a mountain of polemical prose the two men put forward the idea of leaving traditional classical forms behind and basing both vocal and instrumental music on stories and literature. Liszt invented the orchestral symphonic poem, essentially a program piece for orchestra; this new genre began the great age of romantic program music. Beyond that, Liszt and Wagner maintained an image of the artist as a kind of hero-priest, the spiritual leader of society, his work changing and renewing society. The new artist was to be not merely a genius, but a “world-historical” one.
The opposing faction lined up behind Brahms, though led not by the composer but largely by Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick. For years the critic mounted a relentless resistance to Wagner, not only fulminating against his music but the “Dalai Lama cult” around him. Elsewhere whole books were written against Wagner. Deploring program music, the Brahmsians proclaimed allegiance to the old abstract classical forms and genres: sonata form, theme and variation, symphony, string quartet, piano sonata, and so on.
As I’ve noted, the bitter struggle of the two factions, which included critical diatribes on both sides and gangs trying to break up the other side’s performances, is remembered as the War of the Romantics. It raged well past the deaths of Wagner, Liszt, and Brahms. For himself, Wagner not only survived but thrived in this atmosphere. He prospered partly because he was a tougher and meaner son of a bitch than any of his critics. And some of the most bitter denunciations from the deep wells of his vituperation were directed against Jews. Whether Wagner contributed to the horrors of the next century, whether he can be blamed for being Hitler’s favorite composer, is a question that will be debated forever, without resolution. It will, in any case, not affect Wagner’s importance.
Wagner was born into a theatrical family in Leipzig. In his youth he became passionate about music, but he had no patience with teachers or schools. He did spend a short interlude at the University of Leipzig, studying mainly wine, women, and song. He taught himself piano (he would remain a terrible pianist throughout his life) and studied scores to learn how to compose. He took up conducting early on, and married Minna Planer, a successful actress. Minna earned most of the wages in their first years as he worked his way up in theaters.
Wagner’s first opera was never produced, the second one enough of a fiasco on its single performance to bring the company down. He decided to try his luck in Paris; he and Minna spent three years more or less starving there. All the same, in Paris he composed his farewell to traditional opera, Rienzi, and his first truly Wagnerian work, The Flying Dutchman, an opera based on an old legend of a ghost ship. Listen to the Dutchman overture. It marks the first emergence of a bold new voice in music, with a gift for spine-tingling orchestral moments and brilliant tone-painting. After his return to Germany at age twenty-nine, Rienzi was mounted to acclaim and the Dutchman found a modest success.
In 1842 Wagner was appointed conductor of the court opera in Dresden. With two big premieres under his belt and his new professional position, he seemed on his way to a comfortable career. But his progressive politics, his radical music, his operatic reforms, his ego, his excesses and fractiousness would allow him little peace in the next decades. Already Wagner had a talent for setting everything and everybody around him ablaze. In 1848 revolutions against a repressive status quo flared all over Europe. Wagner, who was a fierce socialist, took a leading role in the Dresden uprising, which among other things led to the burning of his own opera house. When the uprisings failed, he fled over the border with an arrest warrant behind him. While he was in exile, in 1850 Liszt premiered Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, a story of a mysterious knight who cannot reveal his name, to great success in Weimar. Wagner would not hear the opera until he returned to German lands, fifteen years later.
In Zurich and other cities around Europe during his exile, Wagner wrote as much polemic as music, and premiered no new work. In the treatises—the prose in his trademark turgid and obscure style—he laid out his conception of what came to be called music drama. As its thematic material this new kind of opera uses leitmotifs (leading motifs) that represent characters and images. (For example in the Ring Siegfried has his personal leitmotif; his horn and his sword have their own.) Besides tone-painting, these motifs were to function like themes in a gigantic symphony. Moreover, this new kind of theater would be a Gesamtkunstwerk, total work of art, unifying music, drama, poetry, and the visual arts. The music would be continuous, not divided into numbers like traditional opera. The orchestra in this new art form was to function like the ancient Greek chorus, commenting on and amplifying the story; the characters would move and act within the orchestral fabric. The stories would be drawn from myth, fairytale, nationalistic legend, epic poetry. The goal, in short, was to ravish audiences in all their senses, and in the process renew not only opera but society as a whole. The ultimate goal of the artist-hero was to change the world.
Meanwhile, over in Vienna, Johannes Brahms, who had no use for Wagner’s politics or his personality but deeply respected his music, did not believe art could change history. For his part, Wagner had nothing but contempt for his rival and everything he represented. He declared Brahms “a Jewish czardas-player,” referring to Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, which Wagner considered trivial. Brahms, of course, was not Jewish; the slur was thrown in for effect.
In Zurich during his exile Wagner began a heated affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, lamentable poet and wife of a rich patron of his. The ensuing amour fou sparked a new epic stage work, an exploration of helpless love embodied in the medieval story Tristan und Isolde. Here, to represent the restlessness of desire, Wagner at times suspended tonality, writing unresolved, keyless stretches. When he finished the libretto, he assembled his wife and Mathilde and her husband for a reading, plus his conductor champion Hans von Bülow and his wife. Thus, as Victor Borge once summarized: “He read it aloud to his wife, his mistress, his mistress’s husband, his future mistress, and his future mistress’s husband. They all said they liked it.”
The Tristan score was not only revolutionary, it was apparently unperformable; the first attempt, in Vienna, was abandoned after seventy rehearsals over two years. Here we see one of Wagner’s great virtues: he had a steely courage of conviction. He refused to simplify the score or admit that it was unplayable—and he was right; it is performed regularly today.
The affair with Mathilde petered out, but did relieve him of his fractious marriage. Minna wrote Mathilde with bitter irony: “I must tell you with a bleeding heart that you have succeeded in separating my husband from me after nearly twenty-two years of marriage. May this noble deed contribute to your peace of mind, to your happiness.”
In 1861 Wagner finally received amnesty from Germany and was able to return. He lived in Vienna, Austria, for a year, where he first heard Lohengrin, and began what was intended as a relatively practical and popular little opera, which became instead the massive comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. In Vienna Wagner was quite broke but still spent extravagantly, writing his milliner to order expensive silks and satins and oriental slippers and wall hangings. (The letters eventually got into the hands of Brahms, who gave hilarious readings of them to friends.) Wagner had to flee Vienna to escape debtor’s prison.
He arrived penniless in Stuttgart. But salvation was at hand. By this point the Wagner cult was in full bloom, with fanatics all over Europe. Chief among them was a youth who had the resources to pursue his obsession: King Ludwig II, a.k.a. the “mad king of Bavaria.” He came to the throne in 1864 and invited his hero to live in Munich. Wagner played the young king as the prize catch he was, and never mind his own socialist politics. The next years saw acclaimed performances in Munich, including Tristan, Meistersinger, and the first two installments of the Ring. Ludwig came close to emptying his royal coffers by bankrolling Wagner; meanwhile the king spent huge sums erecting fantastical castles based on the operas. Eventually Wagner was forced out of Munich, but Ludwig continued his support. (Having finally been declared insane and deposed, Ludwig would die in 1886 under mysterious circumstances.)
For his part, under the king’s extravagant patronage Wagner still managed to spend beyond his means. He meanwhile attempted to use his position to influence the government. His enemies mounted. To complete the trifecta, he stole the wife of his most loyal conductor. This was the aforementioned Hans von Bülow, one of the founders of the virtuoso conducting tradition that began in the nineteenth century. The lady was Cosima, daughter of Franz Liszt. For a while Hans played along, pretending Cosima’s latest child was his, before decamping to the other side—he became a champion of Brahms. “If it had been anybody but Wagner,” Hans declared, “I would have shot him.”
No doubt you’ve gotten the idea by now: Wagner was a piece of work on a monumental scale, a monomaniac, a cad, a user, a virulent anti-Semite—and a brilliant, revolutionary, overwhelming artist who believed the world owed him a living. Perhaps the world did, but still. His infamous 1850 essay “Judaism in Music,” which branded Jews an alien race in Germany, contributed to a rising tide of anti-Semitism in Germany. In the article Wagner laid out a cultural anti-Semitism: Jews, he said, must renounce their religion and become fully German, or else. In person, though, Wagner was a gut-level racial anti-Semite. Cosima, if anything, was worse. Perhaps nowhere else has an artist of his caliber had such irrational malevolence woven into his character.
But none of this was simple. Many of Wagner’s supporters were wealthy Jews, who prospered in what in fact was a liberal atmosphere for them in Germany at that time. Meanwhile there was a good chance that Wagner himself was born illegitimate, his actual father a possibly Jewish actor named Geyer. Wagner suspected as much, and kept Geyer’s portrait in the house. Cosima would tease him about it, saying how Semitic the man’s features were and how much Richard looked like him. Wagner’s was a house full of both genius and madness.
The rest of Wagner’s story is more or less of triumph: with support from Ludwig II and admirers around the world, he built his own theater in Bayreuth, Germany, and began to mount productions of the completed Ring series and his other operas, to wild acclaim. Bayreuth is still going strong—and still run by the Wagner family, which inherited a streak of the brilliance and the craziness of its forebear. Wagner died of heart failure in February 1883, in the middle of an argument with Cosima about a singer Wagner was paying too much attention to. His last words were among the truest and most to the point of his life: “I feel lousy.” Brahms was told in the middle of a choral rehearsal that his greatest enemy had passed. He put down his baton and said, “The rehearsal is over. A master has died.” When Hans von Bülow heard the news, he fell down in a fit, clawing and gnawing the carpet.
For a sample of Wagner’s music I’ll suggest some of the familiar orchestral excerpts. If you don’t know them, give yourself a treat and put on “Siegfried’s Funeral March” from Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), and turn up the volume. It’s Wagner’s elegy for his great, flawed, murdered operatic hero. It mounts steadily, interweaving various leitmotifs to a hair-raising climax of cinematic vividness. If this piece doesn’t give you goosebumps and visions of a solemn procession in a dark forest, maybe Wagner is not for you. Nearly everybody knows the soaring “Ride of the Valkyries,” which was blasted from an attacking helicopter in the movie Apocalypse Now and now has become one of those cultural clichés that are both regrettable and inevitable. (Recall 2001: A Space Odyssey and Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra.) In Die Walküre the “Ride” depicts the Valkyries galloping across the sky to gather the souls of fallen heroes and bring them to Valhalla.
Other excerpts show how remarkably far-reaching Wagner’s instrumental imagination was. “Forest Murmurs” from Siegfried is an unprecedented and astonishing piece, as if made from wind in the trees and the songs of birds. I believe that the exquisite end of Brahms’s Third Symphony is indebted to it. And for all Debussy’s eventual hatred of Wagner, his innovations with the orchestra are unimaginable without that model. For another look at music from the Ring, there’s the apparently triumphant, resounding “Entry of the Gods into Valhalla.” Except in the opera it encloses a brutal irony: as Wotan leads the gods over a rainbow bridge into his shiny new palace, he knows Valhalla was built with the proceeds of a crime, gold stolen from the Rhine Maidens, and he already knows that someday that crime will bring down the gods and their palace together. In the opera the triumphant music is interrupted by the Rhine Maidens below, crying for their gold. Seeing those moments at the end of Das Rheingold in Vienna was one of the most transcendent, hair-raising moments I’ve ever experienced in the theater.
Two more remarkable pieces. The Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin begins with a sublime texture of high strings that depicts the descent of the Holy Grail from heaven to earth. Finally, try the Prelude and “Love-Death” from Tristan und Isolde, which is about hopeless love and helpless desire, which is to say about sex at its most supreme. As noted earlier, this is essentially atonal music, here wielded to express the sense of an endless yearning that can only be consummated in death. If you want to take on a full opera, I’d suggest Lohengrin, because it’s gorgeous, and Die Meistersinger, because it’s great fun. Brahms agreed—in one year he went to see Meistersinger over forty times. (The early Tannhäuser has some fine music, but I find Wagner’s libretto… how to put it… pretty silly.)
Wagner lived in a century where music was the king of the arts, largely because German music had seen a series of towering geniuses from Bach and Handel and through the romantic period that was perhaps the most remarkable such streak since the visual artists of the Renaissance. In the nineteenth century, music was closer to the center of Western culture than it has been before or since, and Wagner placed himself at the center of music. That there was corruption at the core of Wagner’s personality, which rose from and contributed to a corruption in his culture, is something that will forever be debated and never resolved. In any case, Wagner will not be forgotten, for well and for ill. He saw to that.
More Wagner: Complete operas: start with Lohengrin and Die Meistersinger, then try the whole Ring.