Who Was Richard Wagner?

WAGNER QPAC INTERNATIONAL SERIES 2012 23 AUGUST TO 5 SEPTEMBER Who was Richard Wagner? Photographs of Wagner taken in later life give the impression of a prosperous patriarch, content with his lot and settled in his ways. Nothing could be further from the truth, for Wagner was a restless spirit to the end. He was also one of the most influential and controversial figures in European culture. …Read more Born in Leipzig in the Kingdom of Saxony on 22 May 1813 and baptised Wilhelm Richard, he was the youngest of nine children of Registrar of Police and notary Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Wagner and his wife Johanne Rosine, née Pätz. Friedrich and Johanne had met through the theatre; he was passionate about the stage and had many theatrical friends, and she had once expected to pursue a theatrical career. Their eldest son became a singer and producer, and four daughters (named after heroines of Goethe and Schiller) also pursued musical or theatrical careers. Friedrich Wagner died during a war-time typhus epidemic when Richard was just six months old. Johanne married the actor and painter Ludwig Geyer, a close friend of Friedrich’s the following year but Geyer died when Richard was just eight. The boy found himself passed from one place to another with constant changes of schools. A period with his uncle, the scholar Adolf Wagner, made a lasting impression, for it was then that he encountered the literary world of the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare and Dante. With his intellectual interests thus stimulated, and inspired by the works of Weber and Beethoven, the young Richard sought refuge in the world of his imagination. He began to study composition, firstly with the help of a borrowed textbook and then for the best part of three years (1828-31) with Gottlieb Müller, instrumentalist and conductor in the Gewandhaus Orchestra. He matriculated at the University of Leipzig in 1831 although he seems to have been more attracted to student camaraderie (substituting perhaps for family life) than serious lectures. He studied counterpoint and composition with Theodore Weinlig, Cantor of the Thomasschule, and dedicated his first Piano Sonata to Weinlig who arranged for its publication by Breitkopf & Härtel. After six months, Weinlig declared that he had nothing more to teach his young pupil. By the end of 1838 – that is, before the age of twenty-six – Wagner had composed 12 concert overtures, 2 symphonies (the second unfinished), vocal fugues, incidental music for plays, a string quartet, 5 arias (usually for insertion into works by others), 11 songs, 7 piano sonatas and incidental pieces, 6 arrangements and transcriptions of works by other composers, 5 unfinished dramatic works, the full operas Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot and a large part of Rienzi. He had also translated the first three books of Homer’s Odyssey into German (at the age of thirteen) and written 11 prose works including essays, reviews and performance notes. He would always write his own operatic texts. In 1836 in Königsberg, Wagner married the actress Minna Planer and accepted the post of music director in Riga, which was then within the Russian empire. He remained in Riga for two incident-filled years, giving subscription concerts and conducting fifteen operas during his first year and twenty four during his second. Practical experience of this kind with provincial orchestras and opera houses provided an invaluable training ground for the budding composer. A flight from creditors took him to Paris via the Norwegian fjords and London, during which ideas for The Flying Dutchman took root in his imagination. His experience in Paris, where he had hoped to make his mark, was a miserable and frustrating one, for he encountered a musical world where patronage was vital and ways were set. Inevitably, the self-confident but naïve young man from the provinces found himself out of his depth, and his spirit was almost crushed. It was an experience he would neither forget nor forgive. From Paris, the next move in 1842 was back to Dresden where Rienzi was performed with tremendous success, followed by Der fliegender Holländer. Lohengrin was written and the first sketches of what would eventually become Der Ring des Nibelungen were drafted. He became involved with the revolutionary uprising in Dresden in 1848-49 and a warrant was issued for his arrest. With the help of Franz Liszt, he managed to escape to Switzerland. Once again he was on the run, but out of this exhilarating and perilous chain of events soon emerged the tremendous enterprises of the Ring, Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The most astonishing turn of fortune occurred in May 1864. With ruin and a debtors’ prison looming, Wagner was tracked down by the Cabinet Secretary to the eighteen year old Ludwig II of Bavaria who told him of the King’s determination to do everything in his power to help him. The young King was as good as his word, and the first performance of Tristan und Isolde took place at the Court theatre in Munich on 10 June 1865. It was, Wagner wrote afterwards, ‘an unbelievable miracle’. The first performance of Die Meistersinger followed in 1868, but by then scandal was swirling around Wagner’s relationship with Cosima von Bülow, Liszt’s daughter and wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow. Together they would have three children out of wedlock. There was also press criticism of Wagner’s perceived influence over the King. A period of exile followed in Luzern, culminating in 1871 in the family settling in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth and the commencement of work on a house ‘Wahnfried’ and a Festival Theatre. Wagner’s relations with Ludwig had cooled somewhat, not least because the King had wanted the Festival Theatre to be built in his capital, Munich. In desperation the composer turned to the new imperial government in Berlin in the hope of obtaining finance, but to no avail. Eventually Ludwig’s old enthusiasm for Wagner and their great project returned and building work was completed in time for the first performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen in August 1876. Parsifal was ready in 1881 and was performed at Bayreuth in 1882. Wagner died while on holidays in Venice on 13 February 1883, a few months short of his seventieth birthday. His remains were brought back to Bayreuth and interred in the grounds of Haus Wahnfried. Cosima survived him by 47 years. Wagner’s influence was felt not only in music and the theatre but also in the other arts, especially literature – French and English as much as German. He was a prolific writer of essays, articles and letters. However, it was into thirteen completed works for the stage that he poured his most focussed energies; and seven of these – the four dramas of the Ring, Tristan, Meistersinger and Parsifal – rank with the greatest achievements of human creativity. Peter Bassett.

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