Richard Wagner: a life in music

Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813, a few months before Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Leipzig. He died in February 1883 having seen his last work Parsifal through to its first production, at his own “festival playhouse” in Bayreuth, in the previous summer. 

Wagner’s constantly expanding bibliog­raphy, swollen this year by his bicentenary, is now approaching the scale of Shakespeare’s. While Shakespeare’s biographers, for lack of information, have to imagine most of what they say about his life, biographers of Wagner have the opposite problem. Wagner never stopped telling everyone what he was doing and what it meant, in an enormous auto­biography, hundreds of surviving letters and huge essays. His second wife, Cosima, wrote a diary, mostly about him and what he was saying and doing, on practically every day of the last 16 years of his life. This mass of ma­terial has to be treated with circumspection: both Wagner and Cosima were adepts of spin long before the concept was named. ­To write a good new “life and works” of Wagner is an exceptionally difficult task, for this reason and several more: the controversy that has swirled round his music – did it complete or destroy the central tradition of Western music? or both? – at least since the first performances of Tristan and Isolde in 1865 and of the complete Ring of the Nibelung  in 1876; the controversy about his political and social views and their effect on his work: was Wagner a proto-fascist German nationalist whose works are vitiated for ever by what Hitler found in them? Did Wagner’s anti-Semitism find noxious expression in characters he invented and the music that brings them to life? How can contemporary directors cope with works combining Teutonic mythology, nineteenth- century realism, medieval chivalric lore, Schopenhauer’s recommendation of the renunciation of the will, and a lot more? What did Wagner’s projected replacement of religion with art, certain to fail as perhaps he eventually realised, actually mean?

With admirable balance and a sometimes amused wisdom, Martin Geck threads his way through all this and more. He is a senior Wagner scholar, an editor over decades of the complete Wagner edition, and also a writer on Bach, Mozart and Schumann. He brings to his book on Wagner’s “life in music” a rare combination of profound knowledge of Wagner and his work and an unfailingly intelligent capacity to select and to discriminate, so as to produce a clear account of all the operas and music dramas in the context of Wagner’s life and changing ideas. To have managed this, with interesting references to a wide range of other writers (Mann and Nietzsche of course, but also Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Proust, Bloch, Shaw, Musil, Lévi-Strauss and more), and with swift judgements of many productions showing how they have shed light or darkness on the works, is a very remarkable feat. His book is not even long.

There are deeply considered, constantly illuminating chapters on each of the works from The Flying Dutchman to Parsifal, with four chapters for The Ring, interrupted by one each for Tristan and The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, written by Wagner to make some money while his labours on the half-composed Ring were stalled. 

On the early works Geck is perceptive. He sees the significance of Leubald, the more than respectable Shakespearean tragedy Wagner wrote as a schoolboy: he was a dramatist before he was a composer. And Geck shows Rienzi to be no worse than Meyerbeer’s grand operas. It was Wagner’s jealousy of Meyerbeer’s success, and of Mendelssohn’s privilege and fame, which prompted the nasty anti-Semitic pamphlet that has damaged his reputation ever since. (Cosima, who died in 1930, and Nazi Bayreuth vastly compounded the damage.) Geck deals calmly and sensibly with this issue, which rages in the Wagner literature with little calm and less sense. Geck’s demolition of those who think Beckmesser, a character in the Mastersingers, a Jew and Parsifal an anti-Semitic work should, but alas will not, deal with these absurdities for good. Meanwhile, each of Geck’s chapters ends with a short piece on a Jewish friend, enemy, associate, admirer or critic of Wagner, indicating the unsurprising range and variety of contacts and responses with, to and from Jews during Wagner’s life and later. Nothing about Wagner is ever simple.

A brilliant chapter describes Wagner in revolutionary Dresden in 1848-49, his mind a jumble of ambitions and influences from Jesus to Bakunin. In this mind the conception of masterpieces which would take decades of application to deliver had already taken place. Geck’s admiration for Wagner, always tempered with sane judgement, is most of all for this application, for years of steadfast creative persistence in the face of daunting difficulties.
 

The most impressive achievement of this book is its explanation of Wagner’s journey in music from the tempestuous experiment of The Flying Dutchman to the subtleties of the score of Parsifal. Through some close commentary on selected scenes the particular musical atmosphere of each work is powerfully conveyed – anyone familiar with Wagner’s music can identify within three or four bars which work he or she has come upon on the radio – with deft demonstration not of what leitmotif is but of how Wagner, from The Rhinegold onwards, uses it with ever-increasing complexity and dramatic effectiveness. Fragments of music combining and recombining in a seamless texture of significance give us the depths of anguish, memory, guilt, decision and loss in Wotan’s soul, not only in his narration to Brünnhilde in Act II of The Valkyrie and in his Farewell in Act III, but throughout Twilight of the Gods, in which he does not appear. On Mastersingers, a musical masterpiece about music, of astonishing dramatic richness, and on the wonderful 44 bars of Parsifal’s wanderings in the Act III prelude, Geck writes beautifully. 

People who would like to know more about Wagner, and people who have loved his music for years but would like to know more about why they do, will find a great deal in this book to enjoy and to admire.