The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner's Life and Music

"Because it’s compendious. It does have a lot of contributors, edited by Barry Millington. He has some useful things in there, like a very good chapter about mistakes that everybody makes about Wagner, for example, that more books have been written about Wagner than anyone else in history apart from Napoleon, Hitler, and Christ. He points out that it’s nonsense. It’s just a folk myth. Millington is very good on lots of other famous myths about Wagner’s character, his womanising, and stuff like that. You can look up the plot of any opera and you’ll find a succinct account of the plot and of the musical structure and of the development of Wagner’s art. If you want just to know something about the name of anybody who played a really significant part in Wagner’s life, you’ll find that there. And it’s all economically put. There are some longer chapters, for example on Wagner and Schopenhauer, which are not so successful but it doesn’t matter. It’s still a useful book to have. The best chapters are the ones on the operas, the basic elements of the plot, their scoring, where they come from, and the way they were received and so forth. It would be an understatement. He’s always going to be controversial and one cannot regret that he is, because it means that he is eternally fresh. The esteem for him is so high, or so furious. This is a point adumbrated by Brian Magee in his little volume Aspects of Wagner (1968), but he doesn’t press the point. Wagner seems to operate at a certain level that excites some people enormously and upsets other people. The idea of Wagner as a bore is no longer tolerable as a thought by any musically educated person. No sane musical person would say that Wagner was negligible. It is perfectly clear that Wagner is an astonishing creative genius. “Wagner seems to operate at a certain level that excites some people enormously and upsets other people” As for the negative controversy, it’s partly the extra-musical dimension and the fact that we know so much about him in every respect. That’s a great shame, in my opinion. The main claims against him are womanizing. Stealing his best friend’s wife is the normal cliché. It is not true, or at least a shallow and silly reading of what happened. In the case of Cosima—who was the most significant woman in the second part of Wagner’s life—she said that her ideal from the word go was to devote her life to a man of genius. She met Hans von Bülow, who was unquestionably a man of genius, and married him when she was very young. He was absolute hell and acknowledged this himself. He was a great composer, pianist, proselytiser for Wagner and other composers, and selfless in many ways, but he was a terrible husband. He made such a fuss about Cosima having their first child—because the noise disturbed him—that when Cosima was pregnant with their second child, she didn’t dare tell him. She went into labour whilst pretending she wasn’t and trying not to scream so that she wouldn’t annoy him. Cosima fell hopelessly in love with Wagner and Wagner fell in love with her—though never in the way that he had done with Mathilde Wesendonck. And Bülow, shattered as he was that Cosima left him, nevertheless approved in a certain sense. Wagner was, in most respects, an extremely nice man. He was a wonderful father and very anarchic, whereas Cosima wanted the children brought up strictly. Wagner believed in giving them their freedom and romping around and so forth. People who knew Wagner were completely charmed, including people who thought they were going to be hostile to him. Nietzsche was prepared to be charmed by him but when he met him was just bowled; he wrote to a friend that he was the most delightful, witty, fast-talking person. In small gatherings, he kept everybody entertained and was wonderful. He had such supernatural energy, he was just brimming over the whole time. People couldn’t believe how entertaining he was. Everyone always talks about his megalomania, but is a person a megalomaniac if they have ridiculously vast ambitions all of which are completely fulfilled? One reason that Wagner is so controversial is that people are annoyed that he had these world-conquering ambitions all of which he managed to fulfil completely. He surpassed anything anyone could imagine. There’s still no musical or dramatic achievement to compare with The Ring , for example. Tristan und Isolde is a particular miracle of art, as everybody will agree. Even people who can’t bear Wagner or can’t bear Tristan will still agree that music is either pre-Tristan or post-Tristan. Stravinsky, for example, clearly wasn’t influenced by Tristan but he was influenced to be extremely anti-Tristan as it were, to write music that was as anti-Romantic as possible. Without Tristan , the whole of late Romantic music would have been impossible. “Is a person a megalomaniac if they have ridiculously vast ambitions all of which are completely fulfilled?” Shocking eroticism was another charge against him. Clara Schumann, who attended a performance of Tristan, said that she had never been so shocked in her life. And you should be shocked by Tristan , not because it’s erotic to an extreme degree, but because it extends the notion of what is erotic. It’s proto-Freudian in the sense that it suggests that Frau Minne – the goddess of love – is the surging force beneath everything that we do. There’s not very long in any of Wagner’s music where the erotic isn’t suggested. You feel with other composers—even ones who are dealing with love and so forth—that there are quite long passages where there is no sense of an underlying erotic surge in the music. With Wagner, there constantly is. Whether it’s between brother and sister in Die Walküre , or a couple who aren’t so intimately related, or between father and daughter. He explores it to extreme and sometimes alarming lengths, as in, for example, Kundry’s narration to Parsifal in Act II of Parsifal. She’s trying to seduce Parsifal who doesn’t even seem to know what it is to have a hard-on. There he is, lying on the floor in a state of extreme weakness because she has explained how his mother Herzeleide died because he deserted her, and she pined and waited and he never turned up again. Parsifal goes in for this orgy of self-reproach and then collapses. And Kundry bends over and says ‘but before Herzeleide died, she asked me to give you her last kiss which can also be love’s first kiss’, planting a kiss on his lips which is his real awakening. He realises that you can’t know anything if you don’t know about sex, which is rather shocking in the context of Wagner’s contemporaries. The main thing about Tristan is that you are waiting for it to reach some kind of conclusion which is endlessly postponed. The very opening phrase – the famous yearning opening phrase – is then repeated with long silences and repeated again, which gives the basis for the whole. You could almost say that there is only one motif in Tristan and that is the opening one which just gets endlessly repeated, apart from the music that emphatically is opposed to it, such as Kurwenal’s music which is emphatically diatonic. Even King Marke’s music is still in the Tristan idiom; he’s in their world to that extent. It’s the fact that it’s ceaselessly chromatic in a way that western music hadn’t ever been before. And this means that you’re always hanging on and waiting for something to resolve; and it’s only four hours later that it actually does. That creates an extreme feeling of unease and ecstasy combined, at least in the sympathetic listener. Brilliantly. Wagner had to work with these extremely elaborate and confusing and confused medieval sources and he just got right in there, stripped them all down, and got to the barebones. So, there’s just Tristan, Isolde, their two factotums Kurwenal and Brangäne, Melot, and King Marke. There’s no messing with any complications. The only really quaint relic from any medieval version, of course, is Tristan as narrated by Isolde going to Ireland and calling himself ‘Tantris’ instead, which is comic really as a disguise. Imagine Churchill smuggling himself into Germany and calling himself ‘Chinston Wurchill’. Apart from that, the quaintness has all gone and it’s deadly serious. For me, Wagner is the most perfect dramatist there is – even greater than Shakespeare in sheer construction. For example, after the shattering power of the Tristan prelude which never quite resolves, you have the very beautiful unaccompanied song of the sailor singing in the rigging. This gives you aural relief and is enormously potent in establishing the atmosphere: the young sailor in the rigging is so evocative, which is why it is so annoying in modern productions to find that it’s all taking place in a stag party or whatever it may be. The only person who wasn’t shattered by Tristan and completely influenced by it was Wagner, who calmly and immediately went on to write Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg of which the mood is completely different throughout, apart from the few bars where Tristan is quoted. Apart from that, it’s as diatonic as a work can be. A lot of people have said – and I think I probably agree – that you need to know Tristan in order to enjoy Meistersinger to the full, to see what an astonishing contrast there is between the two. Not like that, no. The only thing I can think of that’s comparable is the swan motif from Lohengrin which occurs when Parsifal arrives in Act I of Parsifal having just shot a swan. He’s reproached by Gurnemanz and you get the swan motif from when Lohengrin arrived in Act I of Lohengrin . But I think that’s just Wagner being self-indulgent. Parsifal itself breaks entirely new harmonic ground, especially the third act which is the object of universal devotion among musicians. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Debussy particularly, who disliked the ethos of Parsifal intensely, made those famous remarks about the orchestration as being ‘lit up from the inside’ and one of the greatest monuments ever erected to the glorious art of music. It is just radiant and amazing, having a luminous quality with trumpet piercing through it in that strange and unease-making way. The concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk is a bit of a bore actually, as Thomas Mann points out in his great essay. Wagner’s theoretical works are prodigiously long and written in almost Hegelian prose; they are really hard-going. He needed to work himself through this kind of cumulative view that the more arts you could get into one package, the more exciting it would be. The main thing comes down to action, music, and words being as integrated as possible. But this is what Monteverdi wanted, what Gluck wanted, and what Mozart certainly wanted. This is what all the people one most values in opera wanted. I don’t think there’s anything more to it than that. Wagner just rigged it up like mad because he couldn’t stop conceptualising everything. He had a desperately overactive mind. But I don’t think that Gesamtkunstwerk is an interesting thing at all as a cumulative project. You could say that Gesamtkunstwerk is a useful context in opposition to the deconstruction – as we now have to say – of Regietheater where everything is as un-gesamt as possible: you’re hearing enormously noble music and you’re seeing some gangster messing around in a brothel. That’s the anti-Gesamtkunstwerk with a vengeance. Yes, he certainly wanted to react against the prioritisation of the voice just idly doing things to show off. My feelings about Handel , for example, is that a great deal of it is someone standing still and emoting with floods of coloratura. And coloratura drives me mad, except if sung in certain Italian operas and if sung by Maria Callas. The whole thing about vocal gymnastics, which is really what it comes down to, in Rossini or Donizetti, makes me feel that this should really be in the Olympics, not in the opera house. Wagner went back to the old line of dramma per musica , the original thing: drama through the music, opera as drama. That is the only idea that matters. The music is subservient in the sense that its point is to articulate the drama, not subservient in the sense that you hardly notice the music at all because you’re so interested in the drama. Wagner, up to a point, I think was confused about that. I always think it’s amazing that he finished writing Rheingold and then went on to Walküre the next day, as it were, because Walküre immediately takes you into a different world. The most extraordinary thing about Act I of Die Walküre is the way that after the storm when Siegmund comes in and says Ein Quell!’, and Sieglinde replies ‘Erquickung schaff’ich’, there’s a long orchestral section, she brings it in, and then there’s that long cello solo. There’s so much music in between everything they say. And that’s unlike any other opera, to have that amount of orchestral music in between each interchange, which depicts this growing sense that they’re very attracted to one another in a way that they don’t understand. That’s a miracle, I think. And that’s not like anything in Rheingold . I think the arguments in Rheingold are so interesting and compelling. You have this hammer and tongs quality that is unlike any opera by anybody. There’s an intellectuality about it, the sheer level at which they discuss these things. You have giants complaining about keeping contracts. It’s not the stuff that opera is normally made of. But it keeps the music down a lot of the time. Quite a lot of Rheingold is something near the recitative. Well, in Tristan there’s a good reason why they are singing together because, of course, they claim that they’ve lost their personal identity and, actually, they are merging. You have this extraordinary metaphysical stuff of ‘Tristan du, / ich Isolde, / nicht mehr Tristan’ and so forth. So, there’s a good reason why they should merge. But, of course, you can’t follow everything, like ‘O sink hernieder nacht der liebe’ partly because it’s so stretched out, and then you have Brangäne’s watch-song. Yes, there can’t be any question. He’s incredibly intellectual and he combined intellectuality and extreme sensuality. The Ring is the opera of his with the most evident argumentation. For example, you have the argument between Fricka and Wotan in Act II of Die Walküre which is a debate that you could follow and get engaged in without any music. There’s the scene between Wotan and Brünnhilde too, when he’s trying to make sense of it all and fails, and the big scene in Act III becomes very philosophical when she’s pleading that she did what he really wanted to do but couldn’t. Parsifal carries you into some pretty abstract areas too, such as the nature of the relationship between sin, redemption, chastity, sensuality, and conquering base impulses in the interest of higher ones. It’s a heavy agenda. Wagner is interested in myth in general and Christianity has been the central myth of the western world. He wanted to work with the Norse myths for The Ring for all kinds of reasons, including nationalistic feeling, but you can’t be a western man without Christianity being your fundamental myth whether you take it to be factual or not."