Drama and the World of Richard Wagner

"This traces the development of major obsessions of Wagner’s or, at least, strong themes that go through his work. For example, a lot of his characters tend to not know who their mother or their father was – sometimes both, sometimes one or the other. Siegfried cries for his mother in his hour of need when he’s trying to waken Brünnhilde, Parsifal feels extremely unhappy when he’s reminded about his mother Herzeleide, the Wälsung twins in Die Walküre are unclear about their parentage except in vague terms, and so on. That was clearly a big preoccupation of Wagner’s, where he came from. You can relate this to the fact that he wasn’t sure who his father was. It might have been his official father but it could have been Ludwig Geyer whom his mother went on to marry. “ Wagner was a huge reader and very enthusiastic and impatient” There are various other themes such as redemption through or by or from love, in a broad sense, which pervades the works. There’s this need for redemption. I think Borchmeyer’s book is the best introductory guide to these themes that go through his work in relation to what Wagner was reading and what he was thinking about. Wagner was a huge reader and very enthusiastic and impatient. As soon as he thought he got hold of an idea that excited him, he didn’t bother to check whether it actually was the idea or his idea of the idea. It makes for a convincing study of Wagner and his development in each individual work and what gives it its individual character as well as belonging to the whole corpus of Wagner’s work. He’s not anchoring them, but he’s doing them in parallel. Where it’s interesting to do so, he will go across from one parallel line to another and then come back again. It’s not of the psycho-biographic kind where he analyses the works in terms of the character and the character in terms of the work and that sort of thing, going around in a vicious circle—or even a virtuous one. He doesn’t do that. It’s just intelligent and very well informed. Yes, of course. That’s probably the case with any artist. We just have the good fortune or bad fortune of knowing a lot about Wagner. There really can’t have been any artist until, maybe, the twentieth century who was so astoundingly documented. This was partly because of his copious letter writing and partly because he made such an enormous impression on anybody who ever met him. They all wrote about him. So, there’s this simply fantastic quantity of material to struggle with and get some general picture of. He was a man of the theatre, through and through and through. It’s said that when he wanted to show the first Elsa how to walk across the stage to the wonderful music for the procession to the minster in Act II of Lohengrin , he ‘became’ Elsa. He walked across the stage and nobody ever did it with such dignity and humility and grace as Wagner. He terrified people when he was producing The Ring by jumping up onto the scenery and staging the battle between Siegmund and Hunding. He was pretty old by then—he was about 62-3 and his health was already shaky—and there he was jumping up on top of cardboard scenery. He would turn himself into a toad or into a dragon for Das Rheingold . He just loved acting. He was most at home on the boards. If he could have done, he would have conducted The Ring but he wasn’t in a state of health where he could. “He would have done everything if he could have done. He’d have been the conductor, the producer, and all the performers” He couldn’t conduct the first Lohengrin because he was banned from Saxony because of his revolutionary activities, so Franz Liszt did it for him – although he did it far too slowly according to Wagner. He tended to like very brisk tempi, or at least he said he liked brisk tempi. For example, the only time in his later life that he conducted part of his operas was the famous occasion of the last performance of the first run of Parsifal in 1882. He went down into the orchestra pit and conducted for the transformation music to the final scene. He moved up to Levi who was conducting and gently pushed him aside and took up his baton and conducted to the end. Levi stood by in case Wagner made a mistake of some kind, which he might have done because he hadn’t conducted anything for a long time. And Wagner took it so slowly that the singers would nearly have died except it was him conducting so, of course, they were prepared to do anything for him. So, they did them at this incredibly slow tempo that Wagner adopted. But, yes, ‘hands-on’ isn’t even the word. He would have done everything if he could have done. He’d have been the conductor, the producer, and all the performers. There’s this reputation of being long, loud, Teutonic, turgid, pretentious, and kind of metaphysical. People are frightened by opera anyway, I think. Many people have said to me, ‘how on earth can I start to listen to opera?’ as though it’s something incredibly mysterious. Wagner is like that only with knobs on. I think people are just scared by the size, the amount of commitment that you have to make in order to get to know his works. Although almost everybody claims that The Ring Cycle lasts for seventeen to eighteen hours, it actually lasts for fifteen – even in slow performances. That’s still pretty immense, of course – more immense than anything else in opera is or ever will be—but, as he wrote to Liszt, he’s dealing with the beginning and end of the world. So that immensity is one factor to start with. And then there’s the enormous propaganda about Wagner and Hitler. For me, that’s just a bore. I’m not saying that it’s a coincidence that Hitler liked Wagner rather than, say, Mozart or Haydn. You can see that there are things in Wagner that would appeal to somebody who had world-dominating delusions. But to say that Wagner was responsible for Hitler, which Joachim Köhler claimed for a long time, is just astounding. Köhler wrote a disgraceful book called Wagner’s Hitler: The Prophet and his Disciple , before suddenly changing his mind utterly in an article about three or four years ago in The Wagner Journal."