The appeal of Richard Wagner explained
How could such an awful anti-Semite as Wagner compose music that endures to this day? Simon Callow’s delightful little book explains...
‘Had he been anything other than a musical genius, he would have been locked up’
Being Wagner: The Triumph Of The Will Simon Callow William Collins €14.09
Wagner is loved and loathed in roughly equal measure. His music has been compared by the doubters to the noise of a finger rubbed round the edge of a glass, or a cat scampering over the keys of a piano.
Many complain that he goes on and on and on. ‘Damned German stuff,’ harrumphed the iconoclastic British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. ‘They’ve been at it for two hours and they’re still singing the same tune.’
Others are spooked out by the strange hold it has over its fans, the most famous of whom was Adolf Hitler. ‘I can’t listen to too much Wagner, y’know?’ Woody Allen once observed, ‘or I start to get the urge to conquer Poland.’
Yet you only have to look at the long, long list of those who have picked his music for their Desert Island Discs to realise that his appeal is widespread, and not confined to those who want to rule the world. Among them are Jennifer Saunders, Stephen Hawking, Alfred Hitchcock, Zadie Smith, Pete Waterman, Robertson Hare… and, of course, the actor Simon Callow, who loves Wagner’s music so much that he has been driven to write a biography.
You might expect a book called Being Wagner to weigh in at a million pages or so, with no commas or full stops. But this one is short and sweet. At 200 pages it is the perfect introduction for those, like me, who may not be obsessives but who sense that something profound is going on, and would like to know more.
Speaking for myself, I broadly agree with Mark Twain, who once said that Wagner’s music ‘is better than it sounds’. A few years ago, I went to see Tristan And Isolde at Glyndebourne. I started out fidgety but, across four hours, ended up mesmerised, almost physically subsumed by its strange, unearthly power, yet unable to explain it.
Would Callow be able to fill this gap? Would he be able to tell me, in layman’s language, what it is about Tristan that makes it so powerful? The answer, I am happy to say, is yes: he suggests that it is the intense expression of emotional and erotic desire, the recreation in music of ‘the notion of delayed gratification, harmonically and in the melody itself’.
And what of the man himself? Though he admits to being a Wagnerian since early adolescence, Callow is not one of those fans who refuses to hear a word against his idol.
Far from it. He is clear that Wagner was one of the most impossible human beings ever to have lived: angry, selfobsessed, neurotic, money-grabbing, unreliable, ungrateful, treacherous and pathologically offensive. ‘Had he been anything other than a musical genius,’ he concludes, ‘he would have been locked up.’
He was physically off-putting, too; short but with a huge head and bulging eyes, his face often covered in ugly red blotches, lesions and pustules. Yet he had a mad energy, which in turn lent him charisma. Women flocked to him.
The ninth child of a police clerk, Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813, either on May 25, as Callow says on page 1, or on May 23, as he says on page 135, or on May 24, as he says on page 201. It’s a shame an editor failed to spot such a very basic inconsistency. It makes you wonder, perhaps unfairly, what else Callow has got wrong. Some things are certain. Wagner was a nightmarish child, in fact literally so: he would wake up in the middle of the night shrieking in terror, so that his siblings refused to sleep in the same room. At school, he was abominably lazy until the age of 12, when he started insisting on music lessons. Aged 16, he wrote a play, a bizarre mish-mash of all the murders in King Lear, Hamlet, Richard III and Macbeth, with a bit of rape and incest thrown in for good measure. His imagination was always larger-thanlife, broad and loud rather than quiet and particular. He was never going to be the next Jane Austen.
‘His imagination was larger than life. He was never going to be the next Jane Austen’
He spent most of his youth in bars and brothels and gambling dens, talking non-stop, ‘mainly about himself’. He joined in the student riots, even though he wasn’t a student, leading the mob in the smashing and the pillaging. He behaved like a drunken yob, by turns destructive and self-destructive, and picking fights. Useless at fencing, he kept challenging people to duels.
‘He was Rimbaud; he was Kurt Cobain; he was James Dean,’ writes Callow. Stuffier Wagnerians – and, despite his own best efforts, Wagner is a firm favourite with the Stuffy Community – will doubtless disapprove of such topical allusions, but for others they will help the book come alive. At another point, Callow summarises the composer’s anarchistic urge to sweep away bourgeois ambitions as: ‘Listen to the earth, feel your roots, man’ – not a turn of phrase to appear in many books about the great composer.
Thankfully, rather than burning himself out, the young Wagner channelled all that manic energy. He was taken on by a music teacher who agreed to teach him the basic disciplines, just so long as he composed nothing for six months.
Once that time had passed, the music poured out of him, regardless of whether anyone wanted to listen to it: by the age of 28, he had written four full-length operas, only one of which had been performed, and that disastrously. On its first night, the singers missed all their cues, and the show collapsed into mayhem. Word got round, so that for the next performance the audience consisted of just two people, one of them Wagner’s patroness.
What happened next takes pride of place in the annals of great opera disasters. Callow relates it with characteristic gusto: ‘As Wagner made his way to the podium there was a piercing scream from behind the curtain: the prima donna’s husband, believing that the very handsome second tenor had seduced her, had punched him in the face, which was now covered in blood. The prima donna noisily remonstrated with her husband, who then punched her, too, at which point she went into convulsions. The rest of the company joined in, some on the husband’s side, some on the wife’s; at the end of this fracas, so many people were injured that the diminutive stage manager had to go before the curtain to announce that, due to circumstances beyond his control, the performance would not be taking place.’
Wagner was one of those artists whose vision is so powerful that it transforms the world around him: in his presence, even the most humdrum types would find themselves turning, as if by magic, into gods, dwarves, dragons or giants. He even managed to conjure up the perfect patron, in Mad King Ludwig, who gave him everything he needed, and more.
‘Wagner seemed to encounter or possibly to create extraordinary and volatile situations,’ writes Callow. ‘If he went up a mountain, the guide was inevitably one-eyed, malevolent and in touch with the spirit world: if he sat at an outdoor table... a flock of 30 birds would immediately descend from the skies and share his sandwich with him.’ The world danced to his tune, no matter how demonic it grew. And the demon in him was very strong indeed. He was hooked on hatred. ‘The grudge is as necessary to my nature as gall is to blood,’ he once said.
His anti-Semitism is well known, the subject of endless debate between those who feel it contaminates his music, and those who regard it as entirely separate. But until reading this book, I hadn’t realised how virulent it was. The Jews were, he once said, ‘the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble about it’, adding that, ‘there is no doubt that we Germans especially will be destroyed by them’.
He once described himself, with some accuracy, as ‘the maddest person imaginable’.
Yet the music endures, regardless of its composer, and Simon Callow has now written a delightful little book explaining why.