Wagner's Sour Notes
GEWEN, BARRY
SPRING BOOKS WAGNER'S SOUR NOTES BY BARRY GEWEN The virtue of a good letter-collection is that it offers an intimate, unmediated glimpse into the personality of a major historical or...
...Nor would he be a crowd-pleaser like his bête noire, the king of the Paris Opera, Giacomo Meyerbeer...
...Nevertheless, he is utterly contemptuous of women— "in general [they] lack the most basic common sense...
...In 1830, at age 17, he is already fending off accusations of "self-conceit, " and two years later he confides to a friend that a girl who had rejected him "was not worthy of my love...
...Though Wagnerites have sometimes pointed to his 18 81 letter to a Jewish opera producer explaining that he has "absolutely no connection with the present 'anti-Semitic' movement, " his true feelings were expressed a few months later in a communication to Ludwig: " I consider the Jewish race the born enemy of pure humanity and all that is noble in man: There is no doubt but that we Germans especially will be destroyed by them, and I may well be the last remaining German who, as an artist, has known how to hold his ground in the face of a Judaism which is now all-powerful...
...It expected and prized "expression...
...Emile Zola spoke for his age when he said: "in the work of art, I search after and I love the man—the artist...
...Surely, those who have seen such productions as the Metropolitan Opera's Tristan and Busby Berkeley can appreciate the danger...
...The world is rotten and "only the feeling of my own purity gives me...
...His art was his raison d'être, his religion, and when he wasn't composing, he was writing like a demon, eight thick volumes of tortured prose and an estimated 30 volumes of correspondence—an elaborate, untiring justification of his work and his life...
...Because The Flying Dutchman was warmly received at the local opera house...
...Wagner had no tradition...
...In centuries past, composers survived through patronage, either from the Church or the aristocracy, until the social and economic upheavals accompanying the French and industrial revolutions changed everything...
...Shortly after reaching 40, he writes to Liszt that " not a year of my life has passed recently without finding myself at least once on the very brink of a decision to end my life...
...You would not have been wise to leave your wife or daughter alone with him for very long, as Hans von Bülow, Cosima's husband, found out...
...Such passages run through this collection like a leitmotif...
...A problem with this explanation is that the 19th century was hardly a classicist era...
...Cynics will simply assume that if he had conquered Paris when he was young, as he had set out to do, then we would be spared about eight of those 10 volumes, a great deal of the ranting, and perhaps several of the operas as well...
...Consumed by hate, he lashes out at all who will not give him their undying loyalty, and at some who do...
...I have never felt so listless and weary of life," he repeats in one way or another to various friends and acquaintances, anyone who would listen, over a period of 25 years, as if each passing moment constituted a new low...
...Peoples fare no better...
...In Wagner's case, more than in most, the man would appear to be inextricably intertwined with the work, and if that is in fact the truth of the matter, then this collection of letters gives Wagnerites a lot of explaining to do...
...Retreating ever further from society, he seeks comfort in the few friends who are ready to adore him—and yet (wouldn't you know) "it is a particular misfortune for me that most of my friends are philistines and that they cling to me with an affection that really has nothing to do with my true nature...
...On a different occasion he characteristically informs Franz Liszt, "You have moved me most profoundly each time you found yourself in complete agreement with me...
...Wagner was a notoriously offensive human being...
...Only he can save opera, lift music from its dismal state...
...Wagner has never lacked doubters or detractors, and skeptics will wonder about the source of his will, the basis of his belief in the "artwork of the future...
...Agreement was not something he experienced very often...
...The appetite for Italian opera, a synonym for triviality in Wagner's lexicon, has abated, and "in contrast to earlier times, what has emerged here is a genuine and universal longing for esthetic enjoyment of the highest kind...
...In music, this commonly meant becoming a virtuoso like Liszt on the piano or Paganini on the violin...
...The 19th century was a time that drove more than one talent to extremes, and a musician like Wagner was in an unusually precarious position...
...But Wagner was not a virtuoso...
...Following the disappointment of the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876, he contemplates forsaking everything by moving to America...
...strength...
...This combination of ego and alienation leads Wagner into an adolescent solipsism, and the more his frustration grows over his unrecognized and unrewarded genius, the more certain he becomes that he is right and everyone else wrong...
...In an 1843 letter to Robert Schumann, the 30-year-old composer writes that public tastes are changing for the better in Dresden...
...Wagner was a strenuous nationalist, particularly after the Prussian victories of 1866 and 1870 over Austria and France, but when his countrymen fail to give him the adulation he thinks he deserves, then Germany becomes "one of the stupidest of all nations...
...He was among those helping to construct one, and possessed only his amazing, unyielding will, his belief in his art and in his mission...
...It was there at the beginning, and was nurtured by failure...
...Wagner has the sexual magnetism of a mass murderer, a Charles Manson or Theodore Bundy, capable of attracting many a female moth to his fatal flame...
...More to the point, what is the relation of this artist's personality and ideas to his work...
...Everything I undertake is a failure—rejection on all sides—no idea what to do with myself...
...No security, no income, hardship and care: no home, no family, nothing...
...The tensions upon him were obviously enormous, taking him to the breaking point...
...These letters are fascinating, yes, but repellent—pompous, bathetic, histrionic— and by the time the last page has been turned, one is happy to be done with them and eager for a bath...
...SPRING BOOKS WAGNER'S SOUR NOTES BY BARRY GEWEN The virtue of a good letter-collection is that it offers an intimate, unmediated glimpse into the personality of a major historical or cultural figure...
...Reading through these 500 pieces of correspondence (gleaned from over 10,000 separate documents), one is obliged to spend days alone with the Great Man, fretting with him about his perpetual indebtedness, listening to him gripe about the injustices he is forever being made to suffer, cringing with embarrassment as he fawns over a potential benefactor or with disgust at his diatribes against the Jews...
...To be sure, there was a reason for his frenzies...
...The Jews, of course, are the worst...
...Yet knowing it is one thing, enduring it across more than half a century quite another...
...His narcissism did not surface with his success...
...For the most part, at least until he discovered a patron in King Ludwig of Bavaria, he laments that his work is unappreciated...
...Wagner's champions generally rush to distance the distasteful individual from the compositions, falling back on the classicist argument that a piece of art stands apart from—or in spite of—the person who made it...
...What, precisely, was it that he knew which others did not, and how did he know it...
...More troubling for the Wagnerites, the composer himself shared Zola's perspective: "I have most emphatically rejected any suggestion that I might agree with the view that the 'man' be distinguished from the 'artist.'" Wagner always believed that content was important—no formalist art for art's sake credo for him—and he clearly felt that anyone who ignored him or his ideas ran the risk of misunderstanding his operas, or, worse, turning them into "mere entertainment...
...But whether one accepts the judgment of Ernest Newman, the composer's biographer, that Wagner is "acolossus bestriding a century," or agrees with Nietzsche that "he has made music sick," after reading these letters one is compelled to confront an old question: What is the relation of an artist's personality and ideas to his work...
...Instead of snapping, he became a monster...
...All that I now seek is inner composure in order to be able to complete my works: Fame no longer has any effect upon me, and I despair of ever seeing my works successfully performed—nothing, nothing save for work, creative work itself, can keep me alive...
...He was more serious than that, uncompromising, certain of himself and of his mission to create the "artwork of the future," and as a result he gazed into an abyss...
...The whining is incessant...
...Today, with more than a hundred y ears of the avant garde behind us, we are accustomed to the idea of the alienated, impoverished artist vindicated by posterity, and people in the arts who choose that lonely path at least have a tradition of heroes and martyrs to console and inspire them...
...That Wagner was a supreme egotist hardly comes as news...
...There is "insensitivity wherever I turn," and happiness is a lost hope...
...Incapable of living within his means, he is constantly having money problems and whines about being hounded by " rapacious creditors" (that is, those who expect him to pay his debts...
...Not surprisingly, a number of his letters complain that he has no one to complain to, and at his most bombastic, he edges toward the pathological: "My views on the human race are growing increasingly gloomy: On the whole I cannot help feeling that this race of ours has no alternative but to perish utterly...
...Wagner is a kvetch...
...As the Selected Letters of Richard Wagner (Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington, eds., Norton, 1,030 pp., $35.00) shows, that virtue can also be a vice...
...The English are "repugnant," the French "decadent," their language "detestable gibberish...
...Artists lost their foundation and were forced into the marketplace, compelled to sell themselves...
...Were he not an artist, he confesses, "I could become a saint...
...How does he know...
...Still, "whoever accuses me of arrogance is a stupid fool...
Vol. 71 • May 1988 • No. 9
