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Bryan Magee has had a many-sided career as a university teacher of philosophy, critic of music and theatre, broadcaster, Member of Parliament and author. His best-known TV programmes are two fifteen-part series on philosophy made for the BBC. Among his books, which together have been translated into over twenty languages, are Aspects of Wagner, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer and Confessions of a Philosopher.

Wagner and Philosophy

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‘I had always felt an inclination to try to fathom the depths of philosophy.’

Wagner, My Life, p. 429

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

5. Arthur Schopenhauer, c.1818, painting by Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl in the Schopenhauer-Archiv, Frankfurt am Main (AKG London)

8. Adolf Hitler with Winifred Wagner and her sons at the Bayreuth Festival, 1938 (© Corbis, London)

9. Act III of Siegfried, Bayreuth, 1954 (Siegfried Lauterwasser/© Bildarchiv Bayreuther Festspiele, Bayreuth)

10. Act II of Tristan and Isolde, Bayreuth, 1952 (Schwennicke/© Bildarchiv Bayreuther Festspiele, Bayreuth)

PREFACE

When I began work on this book my intention was to write about the influence of philosophy on Wagner's operas. Wagner was the only one of the great composers who studied philosophy seriously over any length of time; and what gives this fact more than passing interest is that the philosophers who were of special importance to him exercised more than a casual influence on his work. In fact their influence on his mature operas was so great that Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal, at least, could not have been recognizably as they are without it; and the same is almost certainly true of The Ring. My original intention, then, was to consider each of the philosophers in question and show in what ways their ideas got into Wagner's work.

That remains my central theme; but as it developed in the course of writing I found it necessary to deal with other things too. Wagner's attitudes to politics were of decisive significance here. In the libretto of The Ring they are probably the most important single ingredient as far as ideas are concerned, and they are intermingled with philosophical ideas. Later, Wagner's disillusionment with politics caused him to turn in on himself, and this opened the way for acceptance of a philosophy which was totally at variance with his former beliefs and which enormously affected his work. None of this can be understood without extensive consideration of his politics – which in turn calls for discussion of some of his more general social attitudes. Eventually I found that what I was writing about was his ‘philosophy’ in the popular as well as the academic sense of that word – his attitude to life, to things in general, his Weltanschauung or world-view. But I have investigated it only in so far as it was an influence on his operas. I have not, to give an example, gone into Wagner's proselytizing vegetarianism; but I have discussed the belief about the oneness of all living things, with its consequent requirement of compassion for animals, on which his vegetarianism was based, and which found expression in Parsifal.

Because the book deals with ideas and beliefs in this general philosophical sense it does not attempt to go into such matters as Wagner's studies in medieval German and Nordic legend, or his experiences of other composers' music, or his views about conducting, singing, acting and stage production, despite the fact that he did indeed have strongly held views about all these things which fed massively into his work. ‘Ideas’ in the familiar general sense are my concern in this book, though they are not by any means the only things that matter to an understanding and appreciation of Wagner's operas.

For many people the most attractive way into this whole subject will be through Wagner's interest in politics. He is a classic example of someone who, when young, is a passionately committed and active left-wing revolutionary, but then becomes disillusioned with politics and turns away from it altogether in middle age. Former comrades who retain their left-wing commitment usually see such a person as ‘moving to the right’, and of course some do, they become conservatives. But in most cases this is an uncomprehending way of seeing what is happening. For most such people are not switching from one political allegiance to another, they are becoming disillusioned with politics as such. They are ceasing to believe that the most important of human problems have political solutions. They are acquiring a different sort of outlook on life, one that does not see politico-social issues as primary. And this is what happened to Wagner. He did not ‘move to the right’ in the sense of becoming a conservative: never at any time in his life was he conservative in his views or attitudes: to the end of his days he remained radically critical of the society he knew, and never from a right-wing point of view. But he became disillusioned, and bitterly so, with the possibilities of idealistic change. The unforgiving bitterness of the disappointed left-winger is a quite different phenomenon psychologically from the curmudgeonliness of the reactionary, even if in elderly people the two often show some of the same symptoms. One is bitterness at the loss of a past, the other bitterness at the loss of a future. What they have in common is dislike of the present, but in one case this is based on traditional values and in the other on the pain of having relinquished hopes for a radically different future. Be all this as it may, Wagner certainly ceased to be a revolutionary, or a socialist, or anything other than a spasmodic and atavistic devotee of the residual values of failed leftism in the later part of his life, without becoming conservative or right-wing or reactionary – none of those last three epithets ever applied to him. His significant movement was not from left to right but from politics to metaphysics.

The change was part of an all-embracing shift in outlook. When he was young, Wagner regarded social reality as the whole of reality. He saw no reason to believe that anything existed other than this world; and in this world there was nothing, he thought, ‘higher’ than humanity. He believed that morals and values were human creations – not made separately by each individual for himself, but evolved by humans collectively over successive generations. For this reason he regarded the deeper values and meanings of life as essentially social in character. The highest activity of all was creative art, he believed, and this too he saw as inherently a social activity. The function of serious art, in his opinion, was to reveal to human beings the most fundamental truths about their own innermost nature. But because this innermost nature was that of an essentially social being, an understanding of it called primarily for an understanding of the relationship of the individual to society.

The young Wagner did not at all like the society in which he found himself; in fact he detested it, and he regarded the relationship to it of most of its members as distressed and unacceptable. But he believed that this majority, being the majority, had at its disposal the power collectively to change society in the direction of its own wishes. So although he was antagonistic to existing society he believed that the society of the future, after the revolution, was going to be wonderful, not least for creative art and artists. And so, although he was a bitter social critic, he was at the same time a social optimist: he believed that the hateful society in which he was living was destined, inevitably and very soon, to undergo a radical transformation into one that would make human fulfilment possible for all or most of its members.

Being the sort of person he was, the young Wagner held these views with brimming confidence and enthusiasm, and was active in their pursuit. He discussed them endlessly with friends, sometimes at meetings held specially for the purpose. He became an avid reader of the most up-to-date writings propounding them, and himself published articles putting them forward. For a brief period he even helped to edit a revolutionary socialist paper. Most proactively of all, he helped to lead the revolutionary uprising in Dresden in May 1849, and stood at the barricades shoulder to shoulder with Bakunin, the most famous anarchist of the day. It is a colourful story in itself; but an even greater reason that we today have for being interested in it is that these beliefs and assumptions of Wagner's found their way into his work as an artist, so that the libretti of some of the greatest operas ever composed were informed and nourished by them. But then came a sweeping change in Wagner's outlook, after which he no longer held most of the beliefs I have listed, and took a very different view of his own work. The new libretti he then went on to write reflected these differences, so that fully to understand the later works we need to understand the nature of this change in his outlook.

To anyone interested in Wagner it is indeed a fascinating story. But I would ask the reader to bear two things in mind. First, it involves us in dealing with only some of the tributaries that flowed into the vast river of Wagner's creative activity. There is never any suggestion that I am giving a full explanation of his works by what I say in these pages: I am merely drawing attention to some of the ideas that went into them, always mindful that there is more to the works than I am discussing. In any case one could never encapsulate the ‘meaning’ of a work of art in words: if one could, we should not need the work of art – indeed, it would not be a work of art.

My second warning has to do with the particular nature of these works. They are dramas whose chief means of dramatic expression is music. With them it is not the case that the ‘drama’ consists of characters acting out a text on a stage, where perhaps instead of saying the words they are singing them to an accompaniment of orchestral music. The music is itself the primary locus of the drama. This has implications for everything said in this book, because it means that what is expressed in words has a subordinate role even within the works themselves.

This being so, I want to begin by considering the relationship between words and music in opera, then particularly this relationship in Wagner's operas, and then move on to consider some of the ideas that find expression in this complex medium of his – and by no means only in the words.

Chapter One

FIRST THE MUSIC

The key to the nature of opera in general is that it is a form of drama in which the primary means of expression is music. The point is a relative one. Words, staging, acting, scenery, costumes – all have important contributions to make; but whereas in both poetic drama and prose drama the inwardness of situations, characters and emotions, the quality and mutation of personal relationships, the underlying truth about what is happening on the stage, and the differing responses to it of the individuals concerned – not to mention such intangibles as atmosphere and mood – are communicated by words more than by anything else, in opera they are communicated by music more than by anything else. The dramatic content may often be much the same, but the primary medium of expression is different. And if it is true, as has been said so often, that music has the power to go deeper than words, this means that opera can go deeper than non-musical forms of drama, at least in some respects. There are many who believe that it does, and for whom the greatest of operas – for instance some of Mozart's and Wagner's – are among the very greatest works of art that there are.

A demonstration external to the works themselves that music is the decisive ingredient in opera is the fact that whether or not an individual opera survives is determined by its music and its music alone. It can survive with a fatuous story, incredible situations, scarcely any plot, cardboard characters, and words too silly to be spoken, just so long as its music is good enough, in which case it may hold the stage internationally for generation after generation. Quite a few well known operas fit this description. But there is not one single instance of the opposite, an opera whose music is generally agreed to be worthless but whose other ingredients are good enough, or interesting enough, to sustain it in the international repertoire.

The fact that operatic music is music that functions as the primary means of expression in a staged drama means that beauty is not the only requirement it has to meet. It must also be dramatically expressive – not just in general but in particular: it must express the feelings of this particular character in this particular situation, and do so convincingly – while being beautiful music (or at the very least interesting music) at the same time. One might say that it is music, but not music alone: it has also to function as something else; and the greatest masters of the form were masters also of the something else. Mozart had an exceptional understanding of the psychology of sexual relationships, and also of class relationships – no doubt helped in the latter by his personal situation as a genius and international celebrity at a time when musicians were at best minor courtiers, if not liveried servants. Although he did not write his own libretti he co-operated very closely with those who wrote them for him, and was always demanding, sometimes dictating, of their efforts. He had a highly sophisticated dramatic sense that enabled him to filter emotional insight through compositional technique into music that was compellingly effective in the theatre, articulating not just character, motive, emotion and situation, but complex character, ambiguous motive, conflicting emotion and unresolved situation. At one moment the music soars with open, full-hearted rapture – and then a shift in the harmony casts doubt on a relationship; or the cut of a phrase will open up the difference between confidence and swagger, or between indifference and insensitivity; or perhaps something unnameable in the orchestral sound suggests a bubble of hollowness in a declaration of love. As well as being able to depict, support and assert, this music can also allude, undercut and evade. Often it goes against the words: while a character is assuring us of something, his music may convey to us that he intends something different. Given that, in addition to the music, the whole gamut of words and verse forms is also lying there for the using, a medium of dramatic expression of almost unlimited complexity and potential is made available to those who know how to use it.

Its possibilities were perceived from the beginning. In one of the earliest of all operas, L'Incoronazione di Poppea, which Monteverdi, with the help of others, composed in 1642, a character called Otho tells one called Drusilla that he is going to expunge Poppea from his affections for ever, but the music tells us not so much that he has no intention of doing so as that he wishes he could but knows that he will not be able to. In this opera characterization in music is already a developed art: each character has his or her own distinctive and revealing music. Otho's is noticeably circumscribed in range; and, even within its limitations, irresolute, not fully focused. That of the philosopher Seneca, by contrast, is securely centred in itself, and surefooted, purposeful in its movements. There is a character called Octavia, the wronged wife, who never sings out freely at all but expresses herself only in biting recitative. And the magnificent love music of her husband Nero and his mistress Poppea is erotic in an ironically particularized way: lasciviousness, self-aggrandisement, and a triumphalism of the emotions betray themselves to us musically, although the words are only of love.

A good opera libretto is one that makes such things possible. It must not itself aim to be the finished work of art. A libretto that stood on the printed page as a fully achieved drama, and whose poetry filled out the expressive potential of the characters, would already be a successfully brought-off verse play, and would not need music; indeed, there would be nothing for the music to do. An opera is not a play set to music. The text of a good play rarely makes a good libretto. Attempts to turn Shakespeare's plays into operas by setting the existing texts to music usually founder for this reason. (Exceptions, like Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, are based on plays in which music is already a fourth dimension, as it is in most of Shakespeare's comedies, an uncomposed but implied constituent for which empty poetic space has been left, a space normally filled by our imaginations.) Normally a libretto is not, and should not try to be, a work of literature: it is scaffolding for the construction of a musical drama. Only rarely is a successful dramatist or poet good at producing one. It needs to be conceived not merely in terms of live theatrical performance but with a full understanding of the role that music has to play, so that it calls for completion by music into what will then be a satisfying whole. It exists to be musicalized, and must therefore be in need of musicalization before it can become what it is for. This means that the skilled librettist must understand how to produce an organized structure of words that will give the composer full rein. Knowing in specific terms what to put in and what to leave out means knowing not just what opportunities can be created for a composer but how to create them, how to vary them, how to lay them out in a coherent musico-dramatic structure in such a way that they weave out of and back into a continuously interesting musico-dramatic texture. In addition to all this it has to perform certain indispensable functions that the music can do little to help it with: among others the narration of the story as it appears on the surface; the naming, and social or historical placing, of the characters; the filling-in of their back-histories. The combination of all these skills is an uncommon gift. Good librettists have always been scarcer than good playwrights. The craft is one that requires its masters to produce something that they know to be unsatisfying to read, something unable to stand by itself.

The genre has had its geniuses, such as Da Ponte and Boito, who not only understood this but were able to do it to near-perfection. At their level, though, it can be brought off only through a symbiotic relationship with a composer, something which is itself a rare thing to achieve. The most detailed knowledge we have of the working relationship between a first class opera composer and his librettist is of that between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Fortunately for us they met seldom, so their collaboration had to be carried on mostly by a correspondence which went on altogether for nearly twenty-five years, and which survives. Again fortunately for us, they were disparate artistic personalities, and their relationship was often contentious: repeatedly they had to thrash out incompatible requirements, or conceptions, or assumptions; and so we often get impassioned expositions of opposing arguments, each by a master of his craft. Hofmannsthal was that rarest of creatures, a distinguished poet and dramatist who was also a successful librettist. As an artist he was refinement to the fingertips: cosmopolitan, sophisticated, fastidious; also highly intellectual, and to an unusual degree self-aware. Simplicity did not come easily to him: what came naturally was artifice. His libretti must be the most highly bred there are. By contrast Strauss had a personality like that of many a successful businessman: bourgeois, practical, impatient, highly intelligent but not intellectual, uninterested in abstractions, not particularly verbal, sometimes seemingly philistine, yet with a penetrating understanding of what needs to be done, and how to do it, that make him exceptional and formidable. Strauss felt more secure than Hofmannsthal in his own genius, but each respected and admired the gifts of the other while at the same time harbouring in secret a sense of partial superiority to the other. All this is betrayed in the letters, to the eyes of the impartial reader if not to their recipients, and the correspondence illuminates more than the creation of six operas.

Because the younger Strauss had been so obviously a follower of Richard Wagner he had received the nickname Richard the Second. Unlike Wagner, though, he wrote the libretto for only one of his mature operas, Intermezzo. It was, perhaps rather surprisingly, effective, and yet he never attempted to do it again, though he did make some contribution to the libretto of his last opera, Capriccio. It has to be said that these two works are both (in a sense that is not derogatory) conversation pieces, and this fact has something to do with Strauss's ability to supply the words for them. His only other attempt was for his very first opera, Guntram, which had not been a success. He had started out as an opera composer wanting to be as much like Wagner as possible, but his recognition of his limitations as a librettist was one of the things that warned him away from that line of development. This meant that Wagner remained unique among the truly outstanding composers of opera in that he wrote all his own libretti. There have been some lesser though still good composers who did the same, such as Michael Tippett, but none remotely comparable in calibre to Wagner.

Since this is a book about Wagner, and since it would not be reasonable of me to expect all my readers to have already in their heads an outline chronology of Wagner's life and works, perhaps a few paragraphs of background at this point would be helpful. He was born in 1813 and died, at the age of sixty-nine in 1883. In his teens he decided that what he wanted to do with his life was be a composer of operas, and he was still in his teens when he began work on the first one. When he looked around him there were three recognizably different models of contemporary opera that he could relate himself to. Nearest to hand was German romantic opera as represented by Weber and such lesser figures as Marschner and Lortzing. This tended to use natural settings for supernatural events; the orchestra took a prominent role, and there was a recognizably ‘German’ richness to the orchestration. Then there was Italian opera, which went in much more for romantic realism – love stories in unusual settings, whether contemporary or historical. The musical style was altogether more lyrical, and in keeping with this the voices were given greater prominence as against the orchestra, which for most of the time was little more than accompaniment, with correspondingly light orchestration. The masters of this genre were Bellini, Rossini and Donizetti. Then there was French opera. This based its appeal on star singers and stage spectacle, characteristically using historical subjects that offered opportunities for panoramic sets, crowd scenes, parading armies, church processions and the like. The operas were long – nearly always in five acts, and nearly always including a ballet – and expensive to stage. The combination of stars, expense and spectacle made them prominent as social events, and in keeping with this almost as much interest attached to the audience as to what was happening on the stage. This activity had its international centre in Paris. The money and fame that it offered made it an irresistible magnet for talent: it was typical of what used to happen in those days that when Rossini had made his name in Italy he moved to Paris and spent most of the rest of his life there. International success in opera meant success in Paris. The masters there were Meyerbeer, Auber and Halévy, with Spontini as a still-famous but departed figure.

The young Wagner surveyed this whole scene, and decided in due course to try his hand at all three models. His first completed full-length opera, Die Feen (The Fairies, 1834), was a German romantic opera; his second, Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love, 1836), was Italianate in style and setting, while the third, Rienzi, 1840, was a ‘Paris’ opera. (Dates indicate the completion of first versions.) On the basis of the experience that the writing of these gave him he decided that the French and Italian models were ‘decadent forms’, by which he meant that each of them represented the end of a line of development, and therefore was now looking to its own past rather than to the future: there was no longer anything new to be done with it. By contrast a great deal could still be done with German romantic opera, he decided, so he went back to that and created his next three operas in that form: The Flying Dutchman (1841), Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1848). In these works he did indeed develop German romantic opera beyond anything that had been done with it before: to this day they remain the most loved and most often performed works of that kind that there are. However, by the time he had finished Lohengrin he felt that he himself had now exhausted the possibilities of the genre: he could see nothing new he could do with it, nowhere left to go.

So he took three paces back and reviewed his situation. For five and a half years he composed scarcely any music at all. Instead, he studied, reflected and theorized about the nature of opera, and its possible future development. These years produced the most famous of his prose writings, apart from his autobiography. The big book among them, lastingly influential, is Opera and Drama (1850–51); but also interesting and important are The Work of Art of the Future (1849) and A Message to My Friends (1851). In these he worked out, on a large scale and in great detail, his new theories concerning the possibilities of opera. Then he set himself to the task of creating operas in this new form. The rest of his output is different in kind from anything he had done before, and constitutes a revolutionary development not only in the history of opera but in the history of music. These are the works to which people are referring when they talk of Wagner's ‘mature operas’, or ‘the later Wagner’. He began by writing the libretti of the four operas that constitute The Ring: The Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (usually translated as Twilight of the Gods), and completed the music of the first two. After Act II of Siegfried he broke off for what proved to be a period of twelve years, during much of which he believed he was never going to return to The Ring at all. During this time he composed Tristan and Isolde and The Mastersingers. Then he went back to The Ring, finished Siegfried, and composed Götterdämmerung. After this he wrote only one opera, Parsifal, which was performed in 1882, the year before his death.

Alongside his creative life he lived one of the most colourful, one might say operatic personal lives that any artist has ever lived. He loved many women, and more women loved him. He was married twice, first to an actress who was beautiful but ordinary and had no idea of the staggering genius of her husband: she constantly nagged him to go after the conventional success that she wanted them both to enjoy and thought he could so easily win if he tried. Then he was married happily to an illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt, Cosima, plain but formidable, who understood his genius and devoted her life unconditionally to his. For his first fifty years his borrowing was gargantuan, equalled in audacity only by his failure to repay. For him the ideal couple to befriend consisted of a husband from whom he could borrow money and a wife to whom he could make love, if possible under the same roof, where he could also do them the honour of staying with them and living off them as a long-term guest. As a young man he was an active left-wing revolutionary, a friend of Bakunin, and a leading figure on the barricades in the Dresden uprising of 1849. This was followed by eleven years as a wanted man, living the life of a political exile in Switzerland, unable to set foot in his native Germany. By the time he reached the age of fifty-one his personal situation appeared hopeless: he had composed Rhinegold, Valkyrie and Tristan without any of them having been performed or possessing any prospect of performance; he had abandoned work on The Ring, seemingly for good; and he had just been compelled to flee Vienna (where he was by that time living), to avoid imprisonment for debt, and was now on the run. At precisely this point in his life an angelic looking eighteen-year-old king who worshipped his work appeared out of the blue on to a throne, showered him with money, and began to stage his operas. This gave him the opportunity, during rehearsals, to start an affair with the conductor's wife, who produced three illegitimate children by him before becoming his wife. He then, with the king's money, built his own opera house and launched the Bayreuth Festivals, which continue to this day. At the same time he formed one of the most notable friendships in the history of European culture, with the philosopher Nietzsche. By the time he died he was world famous, widely regarded as the greatest living composer. His 750-page autobiography Mein Leben (My Life), a surprisingly entertaining book, is itself a large-scale achievement, unsurpassed by the autobiography of any other composer, even that of Berlioz. It gives us not only his life story but a panorama of his age, and is an important document in European cultural history.

That Wagner was a person of the highest intellectual ability there is no room for doubt; but his ability found its consummation in works of art, not in works of scholarship. This was one of the many things he had in common with Shakespeare. He was a compulsive talker and writer, yet for all his endless talking and writing the workings of his mind were not, at their deepest level, verbal but musical; or perhaps, rather, musico-dramatic; and this meant that, although indeed dramatic, they operated not in a medium that is conceptual, as verbal language is, but in the non-conceptual medium of music. The nourishment he derived from years of reading, study and learning, and years of discussion and reflection, was thus metabolized into works of art whose primary constituent was itself not conceptual. An overmastering inner drive led him to study what he needed in order to produce his art, and in this he was successful. People who judge Wagner's writings or his libretti as if they were self-standing creations in language, and then base their idea of his abilities on such judgements, are making a mistake. It is rather as if they were to rate Shakespeare low because of the many historical inaccuracies in his plays. Shakespeare's plays are to be judged as plays, not as history: as history they are second-rate, but as plays they are uniquely marvellous. Geniuses of such magnitude take as much of whatever they need from wherever they can get it. I have heard professors of mathematics pooh-pooh Einstein's abilities as a mathematician, and it is indeed true that he was not a particularly wonderful mathematician: he just knew as much mathematics as he needed to produce his physics.

In such cases the individual's awareness of what it is that he needs seems to be intuitive. It comes from somewhere deep within, and often seems to become conscious even before there is any awareness of what it is he is going to need it for. In Wagner's case some of his most needful perceptions seem to have been spontaneous and very early, not learnt from without. For instance, although he was only nineteen and twenty when he composed his first opera, he seems already to have understood something unobvious about the nature of libretti. As he expressed it later in his autobiography, after a passage recalling the plot of his teenage work: ‘As to the poetic diction and the verses themselves, I was almost intentionally careless about them. I was not nourishing my former hopes of making a name as a poet; I had really become a “musician” and a “composer” and wanted simply to write a decent libretto, for I now realized nobody else could do this for me, inasmuch as an opera book is something unique unto itself and cannot be easily brought off by poets and literati’ (Richard Wagner, My Life, p. 72).

What Wagner realized from the beginning was that a libretto, being a matrix for music, ought properly to be shaped and informed to accommodate the music it is for, even if it is written before the music is composed; and therefore that its conception and generation should be dominated by musical considerations, to an extent that makes it part of a musical process. Sometimes with him the music would come before the words in time: the extended melody of the Prize Song in The Mastersingers was written a long time before the words. More revealing is the fact that the overture to that opera was composed and publicly performed before most of its libretto had been set to music and yet contains all the most important musical themes of the work except for the one associated with Hans Sachs – themes that belong with complete naturalness to specific characters and situations, and seem indeed to arise out of them, weaving in and out of the texture as if the whole musical drama had been conceived at once. Neither of these examples quite encapsulates the point, though. All his life after reaching maturity as an artist Wagner found difficulty in getting people to understand that the original act of fertilization producing the seed-germ from which each of his operas developed was musical. He meant, among other things, that his first inkling of the new work was of a sound-world, or rather the possibility of a particular sound-world. And it usually had to develop very slowly from that point, becoming specific in the sort of way a child is formed, or forms itself, in the womb. Months after beginning work on Tristan and Isolde he wrote to a friend that it was ‘only music as yet’. This means – and he said so – that when he wrote a libretto he knew already what the music for it was, not note for word but the sort of music it was, the sound-world it inhabited; and this became more and more particularized as the libretto developed under his hand.

When he was still only thirty he wrote in a letter to a music critic: ‘Before starting to write a verse, or even to outline a scene, I am already intoxicated by the musical aroma [Duft] of my subject. I have all the notes, all the characteristic motives in my head, so that when the verses are ready and the scenes ordered, the opera proper is finished for me. The detailed musical treatment is more of a calm and considered finishing-off job, which the moment of real creation has preceded.’

Although he was never able to express more adequately than by such words as Duft what this apprehension of a new sound-world without precursor was like, we after the event are in a position to know precisely what it was that he knew, even though we can no more put it adequately into words than he could. There is an utterly distinctive Lohengrin sound, and a Tristan sound, and a Mastersingers sound, and a Parsifal sound. To any experienced music-lover these sound-worlds are a recognizable part of his own life. Even people who do not like Wagner's works recognize the sound of each one immediately, once they have heard it. Wagner was only twenty-eight and twenty-nine when he composed The Flying Dutchman, but from the very first chord of the overture the listener is in a world of sound unlike any other in music, including any other in Wagner's music. The creation not just of a world but of worlds, a unique world with each work, is something few artists achieve. Shakespeare did it, but not many others have. Most great artists inhabit a world of the imagination that is distinctively and recognizably theirs, and from which all their works come.

A myth has grown up of Wagner the late developer. The picture is of someone who was self-taught and took a long time to find his feet, coming eventually into his own in early middle age. Wagner himself encouraged this view partly because he so often felt an urge to play down his indebtedness to people he knew (not always – in his autobiography he is open and generous about how much he owes to Berlioz) and partly because he did not want the belated popularity of his early works to impede the success of his maturer ones. There was also the fact that he had come so far since those early operas that he did not want to be judged by them. But I think it is the sheer magnitude of Wagner's development process more than anything else that is responsible for his being seen as a late starter. He developed to its limits first of all German romantic opera as he found it, then the quite different form of music drama that he invented; in doing so he developed the symphony orchestra to its maximal size, inventing new instruments in the process; and most important of all, he carried Western music to the outermost frontiers of tonality, so that successors who felt called on to go beyond him were forced over that frontier into atonality – and themselves gave ‘the need to go beyond Wagner’ as the reason for the plunge. Because his destination was so ‘modern’ people have always been inclined to think of his starting point in time as a long way forward, when actually it was a long way back. No one, not even Mozart or Rossini, had written a better opera than Die Feen by the age of twenty; and they alone had written operas as good as The Flying Dutchman by the age of twenty-nine. In Die Feen the choral writing, something Wagner was always good at, is startlingly assured. (His job at the time, his first one, was that of chorus master at Würzburg.) The orchestration also is surprisingly adequate for someone with so little experience – never less than effective, even if somewhat basic. Many of the tunes are memorable – often too symmetrical, sometimes square, but good tunes nevertheless. Most important of all, the whole thing is stageworthy: it works in live performance. It is very much a young man's work, with a forward-driving energy, and a fresh breeze blowing through it. It is worth seeing, and therefore worth staging, on its own merits. But we, like Wagner, underrate it because we judge it by comparison with his later work. Looked at in its own light, it is as good as any German romantic opera to be found by a composer other than Weber – except of course for Wagner's own. It was his first attempt at a form to be taken up again in The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser, and consummated in Lohengrin. When that astute Wagnerian Andrew Porter described it as the best opera Wagner wrote before Lohengrin he was being carried away a little, but this was an understandable reaction against unjustified neglect. The earliest operas of Mozart and Verdi are staged in major opera houses to great acclaim, and rightly so, but in my lifetime, up to the time of this writing, Britain has never seen a professional production of Die Feen, which is a better work than any of those.

Die Feen showed Wagner's natural bent for opera to be prodigious. From the very beginning he deployed the technical skills required to make a work stageworthy – libretto construction, the handling of voices, choral writing, orchestration. One is reminded that by the age he had reached when he finished it, twenty, he had already had several works publicly performed, including a symphony at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. More interesting than his technical skill, though, is the fact that two dramatic ideas are central to the work which were to recur in nearly all his subsequent operas that hold the stage, one concerning a man being saved by the self-sacrificing love of a woman (‘redemption through love’ is a tag that has been put on this in innumerable published writings), the other being love between a human being and a being who is more than human (a god or ex-god, or someone possessed of magic powers, or a person who does not die) in a mixing of the natural and the supernatural that is presented naturalistically, as if this is the way things are.

These themes are familiar elsewhere in German romanticism, and the second of them also in ancient Greek mythology. But Wagner seems to have had a special obsession with them. It is not as if he just took them over from outside himself and made use of them, but rather as if they came from inside him. And some rather obvious explanations, of a personal nature, immediately present themselves. (These should not be denied merely because they are obvious: they may represent only the surface of a truth, but they are, I believe, true.) From an early age Wagner had felt himself to be different from other people, possessed of more than ordinary powers, marked out for immortality. But this gave him problems at the level of personal relations that almost intolerably weighed down his life, before his marriage to Cosima in his fifties enabled him to come to terms with them. He felt unable to relate to other people; they did not understand him, he could not communicate with them. As a result, the world always seemed to him an alien place, both puzzling and hostile. He did not understand it, was not at home in it, did not like it. He wanted to escape from it. Until his fifties not a year of his adult life went by in which he did not seriously contemplate suicide. In the short section of his autobiography devoted to his childhood he tells how, as a small child, the uncontrollable vividness of his imagination had given him nightmares every night from which he would awake screaming, with the result that none of his brothers or sisters would sleep near him, and he was made to sleep by himself at the farthest end of the family's apartment, where his total cut-offness in the dark served only to increase his nightmares and worsen his screaming. All his life, until he began to share it with Cosima, he longed for an end to his psycho-emotional isolation; and because the erotic played such a powerful role in his life, what he wanted above all else was a woman who would love him without regard to whether she understood him or not; who would just accept him as he was and devote herself to him unquestioningly, renouncing her own life for his, in effect. His first wife, Minna, was very much not like this. Genuinely devoted to him, she uncomplainingly endured the most appalling privations while he was making his name, convinced that popular acceptance would one day be his. She felt proud when he rose to be Kapellmeister in Dresden, proud of him and proud of being the Kapellmeister's wife. But she never then forgave him for meddling in politics and ruining both their lives by getting himself thrown out of a good job into a life of poverty and exile – and then continuing to sacrifice both their lives to the writing of avant-garde operas that nobody wanted to put on, when any reasonable person would have been only too delighted to repeat successes like Rienzi and Tannhäuser. As an explanation of a recurrent topic in his operas all this touches only the tip of an iceberg, I know, but it is continuous with a larger mass of more hidden material.

Wagner regarded the libretti of his first three operas - Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi – as ‘manufactured’, by which he meant that they were not spontaneous products of his artistic intuition but artefacts put together by his conscious mind, trying to calculate what would work, what would be successful. And the same went for the music. When in later years he described certain other composers disparagingly as ‘manufacturers of operas’ he meant that this was what they were doing. He viewed the famous opera composers of Paris, especially, in this light, such people as Meyerbeer, Auber, Halévy. He thought operas composed in their way were not works of art but consumer products manufactured to meet a demand. It was not until his fourth opera, The Flying Dutchman, that he let his intuitions take over the reins from his conscious mind, and followed them wherever they might lead him, even when he did not himself fully understand what he was writing. It represented a kind of abandonment to his own unconscious. That amazing instrument his conscious mind still had an enormous amount of work to do in handling the material, but no longer tried to create it out of nothing. He allowed the raw material to form itself spontaneously in his own depths and present itself to his conscious mind in its own good time, then applied to it all his prodigious skills of orchestration, stagecraft and the rest to produce the finished work. His largest-scale operas – The Mastersingers, Götterdämmerung and Parsifal – were gestating inside him for literally decades before they were composed. It is self-evident, I take it, that this fact is intimately bound up with their unparalleled complexity and depth.

Rienzi was a self-conscious attempt to write a successful opera of the kind that went down well in Paris. It did succeed, though elsewhere, and was the opera that made the breakthrough for Wagner, the one that first made him known. Yet he was aware how empty a work it was; and because of this he felt what he later described as a ‘secret shame’ at its success. In spite of the crucial importance of Rienzi to his career he later struck it out of what he hoped would be the accepted canon of his works – struck out that and also the first two operas. So the canon begins with The Flying Dutchman. It is in that work that the unique Wagner magic first appears, the direct communication to us of elemental emotion still hot from the unconscious (ours, perhaps, as well as his), arresting, incredible, fulfilling. None of the operas written before it have ever been performed at Bayreuth, though Rienzi continues to be performed in other opera houses, especially in Germany.

Wagner and Philosophy

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

Chapter One

FIRST THE MUSIC