An A-Z of Wagner
This series ran in 2013, the bicentenary of Wagner’s birth
A is for Alberich, the vertically challenged, sex-crazed villain whose theft of the gold at the beginning of Das Rheingold – the prelude to the Ring Cycle – triggers a train of deranged events, which concludes four evenings and 15 hours later with the destruction of the realm of the gods, the creation of a new world of imperfect humanity, and the restoration of the gold to the Rhinemaidens.
The character is based on the dwarf of the same name in the German medieval epic poem The Song of the Nibelungs, overlaid with elements from the Norse sagas. Alberich is a Nibelung and dwells in Nibelheim, which most modern productions locate somewhere in the West Midlands. He has a brother called Mime, who is easily the most boring character in the Ring Cycle (Das Rheingold is followed in the sequence by Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung). Whenever Mime appears, take a toilet break.
Alberich might be more interesting than his steelworker brother, but we still await a truly challenging production that makes his pursuit of power – and willingness to renounce love in its pursuit – a noble and heroic act. No doubt it will come. Alberich also has a son called Hagen who is, if anything, even dodgier than his dad. Hagen makes his own bid to get hold of the supposedly power-giving ring forged from the Rheingold in Götterdämmerung, and meets a satisfyingly watery end. Oddly, Wagner fails to tell us what happens to Alberich, who, despite being responsible for all the Tarantinoesque mayhem, is the only character left standing by the end. Either his survival represents the continuance of evil in the new world or, more likely, it was an oversight by the composer, who had spent 25 exhausting years working on the Ring Cycle, mainly writing it backwards.
A is also for antisemitism, of which Wagner was unquestionably guilty (the philosopher Theodor Adorno saw Alberich as an antisemitic stereotype), and Apocalypse Now, the Francis Ford Coppola film that used Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries theme to lacerating effect.
B is for Bayreuth, the capital of Upper Franconia in southern Germany, but more to the point the capital of Wagneria – it styles itself “Wagnerstadt” on local signs. It is a pleasant, quiet, conservative town that would be as obscure as Leamington Spa were it not for the fact that in the 1870s Richard Wagner decided to build an opera house there.
Wagner visited Bayreuth in 1870, hoping to stage his works at the beautiful, jewel-like Margrave Opera House. But he decided it was too small to accommodate his wondrous inventions, so set about building his own at the top of a hill on the outskirts of the town, on land given to him by the burghers of Bayreuth, who cleverly realised that 130 years later worshipful Wagnerians would still be making the pilgrimage to the town for the summer festival.
The Festspielhaus, designed by Otto Brückwald to Wagner’s precise specifications, opened on 13 August 1876 with Das Rheingold. Early festivals were intermittent because of Wagner’s perpetual financial problems, but eventually they became annual and were hugely oversubscribed. Wagner also built a house in Bayreuth, and is buried there, at the bottom of the garden.
B is also for Brünnhilde, the pyromaniac who brings the Ring Cycle to an inflammatory end by immolating herself in a fire that consumes Valhalla. Brünnhildes are traditionally large women, with tremendously loud voices, and used to sport chain mail and a winged helmet, though increasingly these are being replaced by more feminine attire. Kirsten Flagstad and Birgit Nilsson would be popular choices as the best Brünnhildes, though the field is a competitive one.
C is for Cosima Wagner; AKA Francesca Gaetana Cosima Liszt, illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt; AKA Cosima von Bülow, wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow, who proved remarkably understanding when Cosima fell in love with the sexually rampant Wagner in 1863.
Cosima was tall, aloof, beak-nosed, antisemitic and altogether a bit weird. According to Wagner expert Barry Millington, she believed women could only fulfill themselves through suffering, and was determined to sacrifice herself on the altar of Wagner’s genius. She abandoned poor old Hans, with whom she had had two daughters; then, in an echo of her own chaotic upbringing, bore Wagner three illegitimate children (Isolde, Eva and Siegfried – each named after a Wagnerian character); only marrying him once Von Bülow had consented to a divorce in 1870, and thereafter put up with her new husband’s philandering. That same year she was the recipient on her birthday – which she celebrated on Christmas Day – of the so-called Siegfried Idyll; inspired Parsifal (which Nietzsche hated, arguing that the Francophone Cosima has corrupted Wagner’s German-ness); and played a key role in the mid-1870s in getting the Bayreuth festival off the ground and making a success of it after a financially disappointing first season.
Cosima was 24 years younger than Wagner, and outlived him by almost half a century, dying at the age of 92 in 1930. She devoted her life after Wagner’s death in 1883 to keeping the Wagnerian flame alive, honing the festival at Bayreuth into a celebration of the 10 works that became canonical – the four operas that make up the Ring Cycle, plus Tristan und Isolde, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, the Flying Dutchman, Meistersinger and Parsifal.
She was fanatical about following the Master’s stage directions – Bernard Shaw, a keen Wagnerian, derided her as the “chief remembrancer” – and was equally pathological in her antisemitism, laying down a template that would discredit Bayreuth for decades. Cosima has had her fans over the years – they have emphasised her wide artistic interests and argued that Wagner’s wayward genius relied on her sound business sense – but the writer Philip Hensher is not one of them. “Wagner was a genius, but also a fairly appalling human being,” he wrote in 2010. “Cosima was just an appalling human being.”
D is for Death. Wagner’s attitude to death is distinctly unhealthy. If he influenced Hitler in anything, it was in the idea of death and destruction as cathartic (as at the end of Götterdämmerung). Wagner, the apotheosis of romanticism, was looking for perfect love but never quite finding it. Or, rather, only finding it in death. Thus Isolde can finally consummate her union with Tristan in her ecstatic Liebestod after his death. Similarly, after Siegfried has been killed by a duplicitous world, Brünnhilde martyrs herself to cement their union and redeem humanity.
Sex, love and death form a trinity in Wagner’s operas. “My own body longs to share the hero’s holiest honour,” cries Brünnhilde as the logs are piled on her funeral pyre. “Feel my bosom, how it burns. A bright fire fastens on my heart, to embrace him, to be one with him in the intensity of love.” Did this emotional outpouring turn Hitler’s head? He staged his own Götterdämmerung in his Berlin bunker as if it were a Wagnerian epic, even marrying Eva Braun the day before the two of them committed suicide. The ultimate Liebestod.
D is also for the mysterious Dutchman in Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), the first of Wagner’s mature operas, and the one with which he said he ceased to be a concocter of operatic texts and became a poet. Premiered in Dresden in 1843, it draws on the ancient tale of the captain of a ghostly ship, doomed to sail the seas forever unless he finds a woman who will be faithful to him.
We are back in sex/love/death territory. The Dutchman is looking for the perfect union with an adoring woman. He believes he has found her in Senta and they swear eternal love, but, overhearing her talking to her former fiance, he thinks she has betrayed him and resumes his wanderings. The hysterical Senta throws herself off a cliff, the ghostly ship suddenly vanishes, and the opera ends with the couple ascending to heaven in each other’s arms. For Wagner, the happiest of endings – death and transfiguration.
E is for Eva, Elsa and Elisabeth. Wagner definitely had a thing about the letter E as far as his winsome heroines are concerned.
Eva Pogner is the love interest in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, fought (or rather sung) over by the noble Walther von Stolzing and the comic stereotype Sixtus Beckmesser, Wagner’s revenge on music critics. Eva is an archetypal Wagnerian heroine – beautiful, desirable and entirely forgettable. Eva is also the name Wagner gave to his second (illegitimate) daughter with the then Cosima von Bülow, and of one of his great-granddaughters, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, today joint director of the Bayreuth Festival with her half-sister Katharina Wagner.
Elsa, the heroine in Lohengrin, is more interesting: a medieval noblewoman with a knight fixation. After being accused by her evil guardian Telramund of murdering her brother Gottfried, she summons up the knight of her dreams to protect her honour. He arrives on a boat pulled by a very large swan, and asks only one thing – that she never asks his name. This is fine at first, but when they get married it naturally starts to bother Elsa. When she at last poses the fatal question, Lohengrin says the pernickety rules governing the Knights of the Grail have been broken and he has to go home, and poor Elsa drops dead. But at least Gottfried returns, released from the curse of Telramund’s witch-like consort Ortrud, who had turned him into … you guessed it … a swan.
In Tannhäuser, Elisabeth also performs the role of sacrifice, dying so that her knightly lover – the eponymous Tannhäuser – can be redeemed after spending a dirty weekend in Venusberg. The opera combines the Eurovision elements of Meistersinger with the courtly romance of Lohengrin. It’s a preposterous confection, but as usual with Wagner the magnificence of the music more than makes up for the absurdities of the plot.
E is also for Erda, the earth goddess in the Ring cycle, who is not at all winsome. She is wise, tough, all-seeing and usually wrapped in Miss Havisham-style gauze. She is the mother of Brünnhilde and possibly of the latter’s eight Valkyrie sisters – the text is inconclusive. She is also indisputably mother of the three Norns. How she has managed to produce so many children while spending most of her time asleep is another mystery.
F is for Die Feen (The Fairies), the first opera Wagner completed, at the age of just 20. It is an everyday story of fairy folk, with a libretto by Wagner based on Carlo Gozzi’s play La Donna Serpente (the Serpent Woman, though Wagner wisely chose to dispense with the serpent).
The plot is romantic mumbo-jumbo. Ada, a well-connected fairy, has fallen in love with Prince Arindal. Everyone in fairyland is suspicious of the union and mortal-land has descended into chaos in Arindal’s absence, but the pair are gloriously happy together until (prefiguring Lohengrin) Arindal breaks the rules by asking Ada who she is. Boff! She disappears and he’s suddenly pitched into a wilderness.
Ada reappears in Act II and sets Arindal various tests, all of which he fails, leading Ada to be turned to stone and Arindal to be driven insane. Despite his feeble grasp on what might loosely be called reality, Arindal pursues Ada to the underworld, defeats a variety of demons, and (shades of Orpheus) uses the power of song to free his beloved from her entombment. They return to fairyland, the fairy king grants Arindal immortality, and there is general rejoicing.
Wagner came to dislike the opera, probably because he felt he had been leaned upon on by his bourgeois relatives to produce a defence of marriage, and it was never performed in his lifetime. But the overture is delightful and there are winning passages elsewhere. Critics have noted the influence of Weber, but there is also much that is characteristic of the mature Wagner: the testing of the lover; the Brünnhilde-like willingness of Ada to renounce immortality for love; magic shields and swords; a transformation wrought by art. It is also significant that Wagner had already decided to be his own librettist. The ego had landed.
Die Feen is rarely staged in opera houses – maybe Covent Garden should give it a whirl – but it gets the odd concert performance, and a recent one by the Chelsea Opera Group received largely enthusiastic notices. Martin Kettle, writing in the Guardian, said it “will never be a repertoire piece, but it is a unified work with some powerful and accomplished music”. For all the nonsense in the libretto, Die Feen has been unjustly neglected and deserves a director who can sprinkle some fairy dust over it.
F is also for Fasolt and Fafner, the two truculent, gold-fixated giants in the Ring cycle, and for Froh (god of spring), Freia (goddess of youth and beauty) and Fricka (goddess of marriage, wedded to Wotan and a right nag), all of whom have walk-on parts in the Ring.
G is for Gesamtkunstwerk. Wagner couldn’t spell it – he wrote “Gesammtkunstwerk” – but he knew what he meant by it, and the word could be said to sum up his entire aesthetic philosophy once he had decided to cast off what he came to see as the shackles of Italianate opera. It means “total work of art”, and Wagner introduced the term in 1849 in a series of essays in which he decried the fragmentation of the arts and argued it had been downhill all the way since the Greeks.
He was especially critical of the way opera had become a vehicle for showy effects rather than a deep, unified statement of cultural truths. “In opera, hitherto, the musician has not so much as attempted to devise a unitarian form for the whole artwork,” he wrote in The Artwork of the Future. “Each vocal piece is a form filled out for itself, and merely hung together with the other tone pieces of the opera through a similarity of outward structure. The disconnected is peculiarly the character of operatic music.”
The working out of Wagner’s vision in these essays led directly to the Ring cycle – he was sketching Siegfried as he wrote them – in which he gave up writing operatic “numbers” and sought to integrate music and drama. “Wagner claimed that in traditional opera, music, which should be the means, had become the end, while drama, which should be the end, was merely the means,” explains Michael Tanner in his pithy, provocative book on the composer. “His revolution in opera, as opposed to all the other revolutions which he hoped to effect, was to be the placing of music and drama in the right order.”
It was this integration of music and drama that George Bernard Shaw, one of Wagner’s most influential early proselytisers, most admired. “There is not a single bar of ‘classical music’ in the Ring … that has any other point than the single direct point of giving musical expression to the drama,” he wrote in The Perfect Wagnerite. Shaw said Wagner was not striving for musical effect “any more than Shakespeare in his plays is driving at such ingenuities of verse-making as sonnets, triolets and the like.” There could be no higher praise.
H has, unfortunately, to be for Hitler. No programme note about a Wagner performance is complete without an analysis of the question of whether he was anti-semitic (yes, undoubtedly), an influence on Hitler (yes, probably, in some difficult-to-define way), and thus a Nazi (absolutely not). On the latter point, it would be mad to condemn Wagner for a movement that came to power 50 years after his death, however much we might speculate on the ways in which the nationalistic strain in his thinking fed into Nazi notions of pure, organic German nationhood.
The beauty of the Ring is that it can withstand a Hitlerian reading – Siegfried as stormtrooper; a revolutionary reading – Siegfried as subverter of the established order; a green reading – Siegfried as child of the forest standing up to the forces of industrial capitalism. Like all great art, it is many-sided, and the preoccupation with the links between Wagner and Hitler has become hackneyed.
For sure, the young Hitler idolised the composer. “Hitler’s passion knew no bounds,” writes Ian Kershaw in his great biography of the dictator. “A performance could affect him almost like a religious experience, plunging him into deep and mystical fantasies.” But many of us have that feeling when we listen to Wagner, and it doesn’t mean we want to invade Poland. And Hitler loved art and architecture, too, so perhaps the whole artistic establishment stands condemned.
Hitler was a fantasist, and Wagner’s epic creations fuelled those fantasies, but that doesn’t mean the latter can be held responsible for Nazism, even if he did supply much of the soundtrack in the 1930s when Hitler was a devoted pilgrim at Bayreuth. Hitler may also have had Götterdämmerung in mind as Berlin burned in the spring of 1945. But during the war it seems he preferred to be charmed by The Merry Widow rather than intoxicated by Lohengrin. Hitler had always adored that operetta, but has anyone ever accused Franz Lehár of laying the ideological foundations of the Third Reich?
H is also for Eduard Hanslick, the music critic, friend of Brahms and champion of “pure music” who became Wagner’s arch-enemy in the 1850s, and for Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), Wagner’s first stab at writing an opera. It was begun in the early 1830s, when Wagner, barely 20, was studying at the University of Leipzig, but abandoned because his family found the subject matter – the death of two lovers whose relationship is thwarted by social pressures – unsavoury.
I is for Isolde, the greatest female figure in the Wagnerian canon (some might choose Brünnhilde, but she seems to me more symbol than flesh-and-blood character). The seven-minute Liebestod (love-death) at the end of Tristan und Isolde never fails to move, and it is almost worth sitting through the tedious first act of the opera to hear it. (I jest! Tristan und Isolde is a gripping opera, and perhaps the most significant musical work produced in the 19th century.)
The peculiar thing about the opera is that the back story – war, slayings, the murder of the Irish princess Isolde’s betrothed by the Cornish knight Tristan, her determination to kill the latter, her failure to do so, the way she healed Tristan’s wounds and kept his identity secret – is more interesting than the story itself, which revolves around the pair not quite being able to make love despite drinking a love potion (substituted by Isolde’s lady-in-waiting Brangäne for the poison with which Isolde intended to kill both Tristan and herself as they journeyed to Cornwall, where she was to marry boring old King Marke). But let’s not complain. If Wagner had done what he did with the Ring and got so interested in the story that he felt the need to recount everything, composing backwards from Siegfried’s death, we would probably have ended up with half a dozen operas and had to spend a week in the theatre. At least T&I weighs in at a breezy four and a bit hours.
The opera was written in the 1850s and inspired by Wagner’s infatuation with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of one of his patrons – the composer was never shy of pursuing his friends’ and colleagues’ wives. It is not known whether Wagner consummated his passion for Mathilde, but it is tempting to assume not, so overwhelming is the sexual yearning in the opera, a yearning that can only be fulfilled in death – hence that devastating Liebestod. The work was completed in 1859 but not premiered until June 1865 in Munich, courtesy of Ludwig II of Bavaria who supplied the money. Who said Ludwig was mad?
I is for Isolde, the greatest female figure in the Wagnerian canon (some might choose Brünnhilde, but she seems to me more symbol than flesh-and-blood character). The seven-minute Liebestod (love-death) at the end of Tristan und Isolde never fails to move, and it is almost worth sitting through the tedious first act of the opera to hear it. (I jest! Tristan und Isolde is a gripping opera, and perhaps the most significant musical work produced in the 19th century.)
The peculiar thing about the opera is that the back story – war, slayings, the murder of the Irish princess Isolde’s betrothed by the Cornish knight Tristan, her determination to kill the latter, her failure to do so, the way she healed Tristan’s wounds and kept his identity secret – is more interesting than the story itself, which revolves around the pair not quite being able to make love despite drinking a love potion (substituted by Isolde’s lady-in-waiting Brangäne for the poison with which Isolde intended to kill both Tristan and herself as they journeyed to Cornwall, where she was to marry boring old King Marke). But let’s not complain. If Wagner had done what he did with the Ring and got so interested in the story that he felt the need to recount everything, composing backwards from Siegfried’s death, we would probably have ended up with half a dozen operas and had to spend a week in the theatre. At least T&I weighs in at a breezy four and a bit hours.
The opera was written in the 1850s and inspired by Wagner’s infatuation with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of one of his patrons – the composer was never shy of pursuing his friends’ and colleagues’ wives. It is not known whether Wagner consummated his passion for Mathilde, but it is tempting to assume not, so overwhelming is the sexual yearning in the opera, a yearning that can only be fulfilled in death – hence that devastating Liebestod. The work was completed in 1859 but not premiered until June 1865 in Munich, courtesy of Ludwig II of Bavaria who supplied the money. Who said Ludwig was mad?
Tristan und Isolde is based on the Arthurian legend Tristan and Iseult, a favourite romance in early medieval French poetry. The ideal Isolde is flame-haired, fiery, indomitable yet vulnerable, stern yet tender, and a standout dramatic soprano. It is a huge dramatic and musical challenge. The all-time greats in the role are Kirsten Flagstad and Birgit Nilsson. Powerful modern interpreters include Waltraud Meier and Nina Stemme.
J is for Jews, a controversial subject that cannot be ignored. While we may reject a mechanistic link between Wagner and Hitlerism, there is no denying the composer was a virulent antisemite. Nor is it any defence to say that antisemitism was widespread in the second half of the 19th century – one of the arguments offered by Wagner expert Barry Millington in his recent book The Sorcerer of Bayreuth. Even by the putrid standards of his time, Wagner was appallingly prejudiced, egged on in the last part of his life by his wife Cosima, who if anything was even more antisemitic than her husband.
In 1850, Wagner wrote a long, rambling and repulsive essay titled Das Judenthum in der Musik, variously translated as Jewishness in Music, Judaiasm in Music, and Jews in Music. It was published in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New New Journal of Music), and reproduced in revised (and unapologetically expanded) form in 1869. The essay argued that because Jews always live outside a society, they can never produce authentic art but merely skitter across the surface. “The Jewish musician hurls together the diverse forms and styles of every age and every master,” wrote Wagner. “Packed side by side, we find the formal idiosyncrasies of all the schools, in motleyest chaos.” He singles out Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer for particular obloquy. Incredibly, Wagner had been an acolyte of Meyerbeer a few years earlier, and the latter had given him help with his early work.
The prompt for his attacks may have been personal – this was a low point in Wagner’s life and he resented the success others were enjoying – but the essay encapsulates one of his key philosophical tenets. He believed authenticity in art depended on the artist being able to engage with and articulate the feelings of the community, the “volk”. That was why he admired Greek art, which he saw as embodying communal feeling. By contrast, he argued that because Jews were outsiders and even spoke the language as foreigners, they could never represent the community in which they lived. Jewish artists, he concluded, contributed towards “our modern self-deception”, and “Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern civilisation”.
Some have argued that Wagner’s villains – Beckmesser in Meistersinger, Alberich and Mime in the Ring – are representations of Jewishness. The contention is hard to prove either way, which is fortunate for Wagnerians or these works would truly be tainted. Millington makes a clever, if perverse, case for Wagner’s antisemitism being crucial to him artistically because it gave him a context in which to define German-ness. “Wagner’s output acquired its distinctive characteristics precisely because of his antisemitism,” he concludes. This is intended as a defence, yet it is one that makes it all the more necessary we see Wagner’s rebarbative essay for what it is: a racist tract that no amount of contextualising can redeem.
K is for Kundry, the “wild woman” central to Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal. She is the ultimate dual woman, both the devoted messenger of the Grail knights and a dangerous seductress in the power of another K, Klingsor, a failed knight now determined to undermine the order, which is charged with looking after the goblet from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper and which was then used to collect his blood as he died on the cross. Kundry has been condemned to live forever because she mocked Christ at the crucifixion, and she now desires only death and redemption.
Parsifal was premiered at Bayreuth in the second festival in 1882 (the year before Wagner’s death). It brings together many of the themes of his previous music dramas. The rootless Kundry is the female equivalent of the Flying Dutchman, except in her case she can find redemption only when she encounters a man who is able to resist her. Klingsor is an Alberich figure, embittered, twisted and determined to destroy all that is good in the world. Parsifal is another incarnation of Siegfried, the “pure fool” whose noble deeds can save the world.
The character of Kundry, an amalgam of several female figures in the Grail myths, was crucial to the evolution of Wagner’s conception of the opera. “Parsifal has occupied my thoughts a great deal,” he wrote to his muse Mathilde Wesendonk in 1859, more than 20 years before it was completed, “and one particular creation, a demonic woman, is dawning upon me with ever greater life and fascination.”
Her meeting with Parsifal in Klingsor’s magic garden in Act II is the central confrontation in the opera. The kiss with which she attempts, unsuccessfully, to woo him unlocks his compassionate feelings towards Amfortas, the keeper of the Grail and one of Kundry’s previous conquests, and makes possible everything that follows – the restoration of the holy spear to the knights, the healing of Amfortas, and Kundry’s longed-for death.
L is for Lohengrin, the opera that – in the prelude to Act III – bequeathed the world the “Here Comes the Bride” theme. Here, the bridal chorus is played in honour of the ill-fated union of Lohengrin, knight of the Grail, and Elsa, daughter of the late Duke of Brabant.
The death of the Duke has prompted a crisis in the land – we are in downtown Antwerp in the late 10th century. Gottfried, the boy-heir to the dukedom, has disappeared (turned into a swan by the evil Ortrud), and his sister Elsa is accused of his murder by the man she was betrothed to marry, Friedrich von Telramund, who has renounced Elsa to marry Ortrud and now has designs on Brabant itself.
Telramund demands that Elsa name a champion to fight for her honour. She relates a dream in which she has seen a knight. Twice she calls for him to come to her aid, but no one comes. Then, on her third appeal, Lohengrin appears in a barge pulled by, you guessed it, a swan.
Lohengrin fights with Telramund and has him at his mercy but spares his life – otherwise this would be a one-acter. Lohengrin and Elsa agree to marry, but he lays down one condition – she must never ask who he is or where he comes from. Ortrud immediately spots the chink in his gleaming armour and plants a seed of doubt in Elsa, which leads her on the couple’s wedding (k)night to ask the fateful (indeed fatal) question.
Lohengrin tells her he is a knight of the Grail, but that now the secret is out he will have to leave, though not before killing Telramund, and then summoning the power of prayer to defeat Ortrud’s spells and turn the swan back into Gottfried, at which point Elsa (one of Wagner’s dispensable women) collapses and dies.
As usual, the plot sounds ludicrous, but Lohengrin – the key opera in Wagner’s transition from romantic composer to sui generis creator of vast music dramas – is radiant, lyrical and moving. Along with Die Meistersinger, it is probably the best place for the Wagnerian wannabe to start.
L is also for Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), Wagner’s second opera and the first to be performed. A comedy (not Wagner’s forte) based on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, it was a fiasco when it was premiered in 1836 and never thereafter performed during Wagner’s lifetime. It’s wonderful to listen to its febrile, Rossini-esque overture and contrast it with what Wagner was to become.
There are plenty of other significant Ls – Liebestod, Leitmotif, Ludwig II of Bavaria, Loge, but we have to draw the line somewhere so reduce these to a Liszt.
M is for Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Wagner’s sunniest opera (if you ignore the dodgy political statement so beloved of the Nazis at the end) and a work that to some degree stands outside the rest of the late-Wagnerian canon, being about real people rather than gods, knights and sorceresses.
Wagner conceived the idea of a comedy about the cobbler-poet Hans Sachs and the mastersingers of Nuremberg – an artistic guild that held Eurovision-style song contests – in 1845, but didn’t do anything about it until 1861 when he offered it as a sop to his publisher, who was buckling under the weight of the Ring. He wrote it through the 1860s while juggling other projects and dealing with his complex private life, and it was premiered in Munich in 1868, meeting immediate acclaim.
It is in many ways a reversion to the early Wagnerian style, with arias and choruses rather than the integrated music-drama approach he had favoured from 1850 on. It is still vast in scale, running to four and a half hours, but more conventional than Wagner’s other late works and enduringly popular in opera houses, with a rousing overture that is frequently played in concerts.
The opera tells of the travails of Eva Pogner and Walther von Stolzing, a young knight with whom she has fallen in love. The problem is that her father has promised her hand in marriage to the winner of a song contest to be held on Midsummer Day (you have to ignore the sexist absurdity on which the work is premised). Walther sets out to learn the mastersinger’s art and join the guild, but is thwarted by Sixtus Beckmesser, the pernickety old chief judge who intends to win Eva for himself. Beckmesser contemptuously rejects the beautiful but rule-breaking love song Walther has written in his attempt to join the guild.
Walther and Eva try to elope, but are stopped by the wise Sachs, who tutors Walther so he can write a new prize song that retains the spirit of his original while obeying the form required by the mastersingers. Beckmesser purloins the song but makes a complete hash of it, leaving Walther to show how it should be sung. The people declare him victor, Beckmesser is humiliated, and the happy young couple can now wed. Hurrah!
Hans Sachs, a Schopenhauerian hero and Wagnerian alter ego who could himself have wed Eva if he hadn’t been so sensible about the age gap (he says at one point that he doesn’t want to be like old King Marke in Tristan und Isolde), then delivers a peroration in praise of Germany’s cultural tradition, telling Walther all artistic innovation should come within that framework.
“Beware! Evil tricks threaten us,” Sachs warns. “If the German people and kingdom should one day decay under a false, foreign rule, soon no prince will understand his people any more, and foreign mists with foreign vanities they will plant in our German land; what is German and true no one would know any more, if it did not live in the honour of the German masters.” It is an extraordinary coda to the opera, seized on by German nationalists in the 1870s and by Nazis later, and remains a curious note on which to end what is supposed to be a tale of love fulfilled.
N is for Nietzsche, the German philosopher and near-contemporary of Wagner who went from being one of the composer’s staunchest supporters to one of his most outspoken critics. Friedrich Nietzsche met Wagner in Leipzig in 1868 and became a close ally, but the relationship soured and the philosopher was ostracised after the publication in 1878 of Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, which while still admiring of the composer’s work was less than complimentary about Wagner the man.
After the composer’s death, Nietzsche and the composer’s widow, Cosima, descended into open warfare. In 1888 he published The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem, in which he attacked the composer’s anti-semitism and reliance on folklore, following it soon after with an even more explicit attack, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, which lamented the religiosity of the composer’s later works.
Nietzsche especially objected to the nihilism of late Wagner, with what he saw as its parroting of Schopenhauerian pessimism and asceticism. The essence of life was to resist the inevitable sorrows, to rise above them – “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” in Nietzsche’s famous formulation – not to submit to them for some greater good.
N is also for Nibelungs, the race of dwarfs who live in the subterranean world of Nibelheim in the Ring cycle, and for Norns, three daughters of the earth goddess Erda who have a walk-on (or more usually sit-down) part in the Ring, where they are engaged in weaving the rope of destiny. The rope suddenly breaks in Götterdämmerung, and that’s the end of their role – they can no longer foresee the future because the structured and predictable world of the gods is about to be replaced by the chaos of human existence.
O is for Ortrud, the wicked sorceress in Lohengrin. Wagner wrote the part for a soprano, but it is often sung by a mezzo, who tend to have a monopoly on wicked sorceresses. Christa Ludwig and Waltraud Meier have enjoyed great success in the role, but so have dramatic sopranos such as Eva Marton, Gwyneth Jones, Astrid Varnay and Anja Silja.
Ortrud is the daughter of Radbod, pagan king of Frisia – the action take place in the Low Countries in the latter part of the 10th century. She plays a role similar to that of Lady Macbeth, seeking to screw her husband Count Friedrich von Telramund’s courage to the sticking place.
After the death of the Duke of Brabant, Telramund has designs on the dukedom. He had been betrothed to Elsa, the mildly hysterical daughter of the Duke, but ditched her for Ortrud, who, usefully from Telramund’s point of view, has turned the real heir, Gottfried, into a swan. Attractive, stately, but not ruler material.
The Grail knight Lohengrin turns up in response to Elsa’s prayers and defeats Telramund in battle, but the irrespressible Ortrud isn’t finished yet. She encourages her husband not to give up and swears vengeance – “From this lustre of our foes’ revels / let me suck a fearful deadly poison / which will end out shame and their joy!” She manages to make Elsa doubt her new husband Lohengrin and ask the one question he has told her she must never pose – who is he and where does he come from?
Doubting him and exposing his status as a knight of the Grail means he must leave Elsa, who collapses and dies, but Telramund, too, is killed in a second combat with Lohengrin and, again by the power of prayer, Gottfried is restored to human form to claim the dukedom. What happens to old Ortrud is unclear. According to the libretto, when Gottfried is freed from her spell she “sinks down with a shriek”. Sinks down on her knees or sinks down into the river? I prefer to think she is eventually burned at the stake by an enraged populace. They were an unforgiving lot in the 10th century.
P is for Parsifal, Wagner’s final music drama and the one most adored by obsessive Wagnerians. “I love all Wagner,” one aficionado (male and middle-aged of course) said to me once, “but sometimes only Parsifal will do.”
Wagner worked on it intermittently for almost 40 years. In his autobiography, he recalls that as early as 1845 he read Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “strange yet deeply intimate” poem Parzival, probably written in the early 13th century and drawing on Arthurian legends and the quest for the holy grail. Much of Parsifal was written in the 1860s, but it was not premiered in Bayreuth until 1882, the year before Wagner’s death.
Wagner saw it not as an opera but as “ein Bühnenweihfestspiel” (“a festival play for the consecration of the stage”). It is as much ritual as music drama, and non-Wagnerians may recoil from its slow unfolding – the old knight Gurnemanz’s recitation of the backstory can drive even the aficionados potty. At Bayreuth, for reasons that are obscure and nothing to do with Wagner, there is a tradition of not applauding at the end of the first act. Parsifal is treated with even greater reverence than his other work at the shrine.
The story is essentially the Christian one, though one should not assume he was writing from an explicitly Christian perspective. An order of knights has been charged with looking after the Holy Grail, from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper and in which the blood which seeped from his wounds on the cross was collected. But the knights are being undermined by Klingsor, who had himself once wanted to be a knight but failed because he could not suppress his sexual urges.
Klingsor is using a band of beautiful maidens to tempt the knights, and even their king, Amfortas, has fallen prey to their wiles, and been speared by Klingsor with the stolen holy spear into the bargain. Amfortas has a wound that won’t heal, the brotherhood of knights is disintegrating, the world has been corrupted. Enter Parsifal, a “pure fool” and Christ-like redeemer figure, who alone can resist the lure of Klingsor’s harpies, restore the spear to the knights, cure Amfortas and give Klingsor’s arch-temptress Kundry the release from earthly life she so ardently desires.
It is not a bundle of laughs, Wagner was going a bit loopy by the time he completed it, the opera is underpinned by distasteful theories of racial cleansing (directed, as ever, against the Jews), and there is an unremitting asceticism and Schopenhauerian rejection of the physical world. But the soundworld is extraordinary, luminous and transcendent. Even Nietzsche, who loathed the philosophy that underpinned the opera, found the music “incomparable and bewildering”.
Q is, surprisingly enough, for Queen Victoria. In the 1850s Wagner was exiled from Germany because of his involvement with radical political groups in Dresden, largely friendless and strapped for cash. He relied on conducting to raise money, and in the early summer of 1855 visited the UK to conduct with the Philharmonic Society of London. The concerts were, however, not very well received. “A more inflated display of extravagance and noise has rarely been submitted to an audience,” thundered the Times, “and it was a pity to hear so magnificent an orchestra engaged in almost fruitless attempts at accomplishing things which, even if really practicable, would lead to nothing.”
But Wagner did have one fan – Queen Victoria. She attended a concert on 11 June and talked to the beleaguered maestro afterwards. The Queen noted the meeting in her diary, describing Wagner as “short, very quiet, wears spectacles and has a very finely-developed forehead, a hooked nose & projecting chin.”
Wagner was delighted by the meeting. “You have probably heard how charmingly Queen Victoria behaved to me,” he wrote to Franz Liszt. “She attended the seventh concert with Prince Albert … I really seemed to have pleased the Queen. In a conversation I had with her after the first part of the concert, she was so kind that I was really quite touched. These two were the first people in England who dared to speak in my favour openly and undisguisedly, and if you consider that they had to deal with a political outlaw, charged with high treason and wanted by the police, you will think it natural that I am sincerely grateful to both.”
R is of course for Ring, Der Ring des Nibelungen, to give Wagner’s grandest conception its proper title. He announced the notion in A Communication to My Friends in 1851. “I shall write no more operas. As I have no wish to invent an arbitrary title for my works, I will call them dramas. I propose to produce my myth in three complete dramas, preceded by a lengthy prelude. At a specially appointed festival, I propose, at some future time, to produce those three dramas with their prelude, in the course of three days and a fore-evening.”
All this came to pass. Wagner was always a great carrier out of his intentions, however monumental and improbable they looked on paper. He wrote the tetralogy backwards starting with Siegfried’s death, delving ever deeper into the Norse legends and medieval German poems on which the work was based.
Das Rheingold forms the prelude to the work, weighing in at a breezy two and a half hours, followed by the three epic dramas – Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, each at four hours plus. If you ever see people arriving at an opera house at 5 in the afternoon, you can bet it’s for a performance of Wagner’s Ring. The composer wanted them played on successive evenings, but they rarely are. The demands on the singers are too great. Indeed, they are often given as standalone operas, or a house will (for financial and logistical reasons) premiere them one per season and then eventually put on the whole cycle, though almost certainly not on successive nights.
In his excellent book on Wagner, Michael Tanner has a chapter with the endlessly debated question: “What is the Ring About?” There are so many ways of interpreting the Ring – pro-ecology, anti-capitalist, anti-Jewish, anti-marriage – that it has allowed directors a more or less free hand to do what they want. Tanner says most authorities agree it hinges on a battle between love and power, though he warns against too glib an acceptance of that proposition.
In essence, it is a creation myth. In Rheingold we are confronted with a structured world of gods, giants and dwarfs (the Nibelungs) who battle for control of a ring forged by the evil Alberich from gold stolen from the Rhinemaidens. That ring gives its owner control of the world. Alberich renounces love when he steals the gold, and the gold (and the quest for power which it represents) destroys each of those who take possession of it. Only Brünnhilde, daughter of chief god Wotan and the earth goddess Erda, stands outside the power madness, renounces her demi-god status and eventually returns the ring to the Rhinemaidens.
Brünnhilde is, in effect, the first woman, killing herself because she has lost the man she loved (Siegfried) but at the same time ushering in humanity in all its glorious imperfection as the old world of the gods burns. If the immolation scene doesn’t make you cheer and cry at the same time (and not just with relief at the end of 15 hours of music), the Ring has failed to work its magic.
R is also for Anna Russell, the Anglo-Canadian comedian who made a career out of boiling the Ring Cycle down into a brilliant 30-minute sketch. It is an affectionate parody of Wagner’s excesses, and still guaranteed to raise a laugh, 50-plus years later. Le Figaro called The Ring “the dream of a lunatic”, and the late Ms Russell captures that madness superbly.
Oh, almost forgot. R is also for Rienzi, an early and little performed opera (premiered in 1842) but with a tremendous overture that is frequently heard in concert. Wagner disowned the work later in life, but Hitler was keen on it and is even said to have owned the autograph score.
S is for Schopenhauer, a key influence on the mature Wagner. The composer was introduced to the work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer by the poet Georg Herwegh, a friend of Wagner’s, in 1854, and later called this the most significant event of his life. “The impact was extraordinary and decisive,” he wrote.
From Schopenhauer’s pessimistic worldview, Wagner derived the ideas of subjection and redemption that are apparent in Tristan und Isolde, the Ring and Parsifal. Human desires and actions are largely futile and destined to lead to suffering. Only by sublimating our will can we achieve peace. Hence the Liebestod at the end of Tristan, with its renunciation of earthly love and striving for something more transcendent. Brünnhilde, too, must die in order to redeem the world, and Parsifal (the pure fool and Christ-figure who saves the brotherhood of Guild knights) has to reject physical love in order to save Amfortas and free Kundry.
Wagner shared with Schopenhauer an interest in Buddhism – he sketched an opera about the Buddha called The Victors but did not live to complete it – and came to reject western materialism, which is why the Ring lends itself to both environmentalist and anti-capitalist readings. Wagner, through Schopenhauer, became preoccupied with making the world whole; with escaping from the trivialities and torments of mortal life; with achieving something close to godliness.
Schopenhauer also reassured him that music was the supreme artform and could itself encapsulate meaning – Wagner’s soundworld can always be trusted even when the text seems to go off the rails – and taught him that compassion should be at the centre of the human experience. Only by suppressing the self (embodied in the individual will with its desire for sex, money and power) and showing compassion for your fellow man can the individual free himself. That’s the theory, anyway.
S is also for Siegfried, Siegmund and Sieglinde, key characters in the Ring and rather too intimately related for their own genetic good.
T is for Tannhäuser, an earlyish opera (premiered in 1845) but one that prefigures many of Wagner’s later themes. Knights, pilgrims, a singing contest, a man torn between sexual and spiritual love, bit of paganised Christianity – Tannhäuser has the whole Wagnerian shooting match, as well as some wonderful tunes – the pilgrims’ chorus has to be close to the top of the Wagnerian pops.
The young knight Tannhäuser has gone off to Venusberg for a dirty weekend with the goddess of love. Sated, he heads back (after a quick prayer to the Virgin Mary requesting release) to rejoin his old singing chums at the Wartburg Castle. Elisabeth, the pure-as-the-driven-snow daughter of the Landgrave, is in love with him and happy to see his return, but no one else is when, at the next song contest, he sings a ditty in praise of sexual love. “Poor wretches who have never tasted love / away! Hasten to the hill of Venus!” he instructs his horrified fellow knights.
They round on him and draw their swords, but the Landgrave intervenes and sends him on a pilgrimage to Rome instead. The pilgrimage is outwardly unsuccessful – the Pope is not in a forgiving mood – and he comes back intending to head off to Venusberg for good (or, more likely, ill), but stops when he sees the body of Elisabeth being borne to her funeral, having died of sorrow for her lost love. He collapses and dies beside her, and a minor miracle involving some sprouting greenery occurs indicating that, whatever the Pope thinks, God has forgiven Tannhäuser. A young woman may have died of a broken heart, but the key thing is the lustful bloke’s soul is saved.
Wagner was never really satisfied with Tannhäuser and revised it throughout his life: as well as the 1845 version, there is an 1861 version made for Paris (its premiere ended in one of those audience riots in which Paris specialised) and another for Vienna in 1875, the version most often performed today. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but played with the necessary degree of campness can be magnificent. The overture, the pilgrims’ chorus and Tännhauser’s friend (and rival) Wolfram’s Act III aria, “O du, mein holder Abendstern” (Song of the Evening Star) are all corkers.
T is also for Tristan und Isolde, Wagner’s most perfectly realised opera – long but without any of the longueurs you might experience in the Ring and Die Meistersinger. “Despite all the misery and distress,” Wagner wrote to his muse Mathilde Wesendonck in 1859, “the end should be so beautiful and persuasive that the audience’s heart is touched without them noticing what terrible stuff it is.”
U is for Upbringing, which in Wagner’s case was messy. His father Carl Friedrich Wagner, a clerk in the Leipzig police service, died of typhus six months after the composer was born, and his mother, Johanna Rosine, immediately moved in with Ludwig Geyer, an artist and playwright who was a friend of Friedrich. When he was writing his autobiography, Wagner’s step-sister Cäcilie gave him some letters which convinced him Geyer was his natural father, though the letters have been lost and there is no hard evidence for this. He also came to believe, erroneously, that Geyer was Jewish. Until the age of 14, took the name Geyer but then reverted to Wagner.
The confusion had artistic consequences, as Michael Tanner points out in his Faber Pocket Guide to Wagner. “Though Wagner’s relations with his mother and his stepfather were invariably good,” writes Tanner, “his operas are filled with characters whose paternity is unknown, who find it very difficult to ascertain anything about their early years, and who wonder about why they have the name they do.”
From Geyer, Wagner absorbed a love of the theatre – the family moved to Dresden, where Geyer’s theatre company was based. But in most respects he was self-taught and received only a rudimentary musical education as a child. Only in his teens did he start to receive proper instruction, and then mainly because he insisted on it. He was in every sense self-created, and the unorthodoxy and dogmatism which marked his career may be the result of the act of will which produced the dramatist-composer Richard Wagner.
V is for Valkyrie, which in Old Norse means “chooser of the slain”. The valkyries’ job was to carry off the heroes of the battlefield and take them to Valhalla, where they would have a high old time singing, drinking and remembering the old times. Wagner relied on the Norse sagas, principally the Volsunga Saga and the Poetic Edda, for the plot of Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second and best-loved instalment of the Ring cycle – certainly it is the one most often given as a standalone opera.
Brünnhilde and her eight valkyrie sisters are the daughters of chief god Wotan and the earth goddess Erda. They enjoy a sort of demigod status in return for their demanding job of ferrying round body parts, and Brünnhilde’s willingness to relinquish her immortality to save Siegmund and then her love for Siegfried are the crux of the cycle and the key to the creation myth it encapsulates.
The Ride of the Valkyries, the stirring prelude to Act III of Die Walküre, is the most famous part of the Ring cycle, probably the most famous passage Wagner wrote, and possibly the most famous piece of classical music ever written. It was used to powerful effect as an accompaniment to an horrific helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village in Apocalypse Now.
W is naturally very big in the world of Wagner. There is Wagner himself, of course, and all his descendants, notably the double Ws – Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner, his grandsons, who shaped the modern Bayreuth, and his daughter-in-law Winifred, the English-born wife of Wagner’s bisexual son Siegfried. Winifred ran the festival in the 1930s after Siegfried’s death, and became alarmingly close to Adolf Hitler. There was even talk of marriage at one point.
Not can we forget Wotan, the wilful chief god in the Ring cycle, and Die Walküre, the most popular of the Ring tetralogy. But from a strong field, we will choose Wahnfried, the name Wagner gave to the imposing villa he built for himself in Bayreuth.
Wagner had the house constructed in the early 1870s when he settled on Bayreuth as the place to build the opera house in which he would present his works as he wished to see them staged. The name is a Schopenhauerian one: “Wahn” means delusion or madness; “Fried” means both freedom and peace. The world is a madhouse prone to illusion, Wagner is saying, but here is a repository of wisdom and, through wisdom, contentment. He spelt this out in an inscription on the front of the house: “Hier wo mein Wähnen Frieden fand – Wahnfried – sei dieses Haus von mir benannt.” “Here where my delusions have found peace, let this place be named Wahnfried.”
The house is now a museum devoted to Wagner, and you will indeed find peace there, sitting among his artefacts and listening to recordings of his music played continuously over the sound system. Wagner and his wife Cosima are buried in the grounds of the house, beneath a mound that is topped by flowers left by well-wishers. Their dog Russ has a little memorial close by. It is a very touching, fitting rest place for this strange, irritating, inspiring genius.
X is, as tradition dictates, for xylophone, of which Wagner would have been an accomplished player if he had learned the instrument.
Y is for yachting, an activity which, as far as we know, Wagner never pursued.
Z is for Zzzzzzzzzzzz, which is the state 15 hours of the Ring can reduce you to, especially at the air conditioning-less Festspielhaus in Bayreuth in the middle of summer, unless you prepare yourself rigorously for the ordeal – calisthenics, jogging, don’t eat carbohydrates, don’t drink champagne, get plenty of sleep, get to know the libretto inside out so you can understand every nuance. It’ll be worth it. Hey, wake up there at the back!
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