FOREWORD
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In the summer of 2012, Kasper Holten, then artistic director of the Royal Opera House in London, asked me to create a show to celebrate the Wagner bicentenary. I threw myself at the vast literature, and emerged astounded at what I had found. I knew his work very well – had been a Wagnerian since early adolescence, knew all about leitmotiven and the Tristan chord – but, apart from his notorious anti-Semitism, knew remarkably little about the man, his vast intellectual scope, his rascally sex life, his revolutionary
politics, his heroic struggle to create Bayreuth. In particular, I knew nothing about his quite extraordinary personality. I determined to put what I had discovered into the one-man show I was evolving, with the result that the text that I read out on the first day of rehearsals lasted four hours. People came and went, had lunch, returned, and came back to find me still droning on. I couldn’t bear to leave anything out. The moment we started rehearsing, of course, pretty well the whole of that text was jettisoned. With light, images, props and above all with music to evoke the man and his world, I pared it down and down. The first preview still lasted two and a half hours; I cut an hour from it overnight. The show we finally evolved –Inside Wagner’s Head, I called it – gave, I think, a pretty fair impression of the furor he generated, both in himself and in other people.
The play tried to answer the question of what it was about him that creates such violent emotions, even today, two hundred years after his birth. When I was working on it, I bumped into a friend, an eminent, an internationally famous musician, and told him what I was doing. ‘Why??’ he protested. ‘Dreadful music. Dreadful man.’ This book asks the same question, but in a different way and from another perspective. It offers a sustained though not, of course, comprehensive examination of how this diminutive and often rebarbative man, with only the sketchiest of formal musical training, imposed his work and his view of life on the world.
Wagner took matters into his own hands almost from the beginning, writing huge operas on spec without either commissions or particular artists or theatres in mind. He was determined to do things on his own terms and in his own way. To him, drama was everything: even music was its servant, and if music did not serve the purposes of expression, then music itself must be bent and changed. Very soon, he realised that his work made demands that the operatic theatre as it was presently constituted was incapable of fulfilling, so, instead of cutting his coat according to his cloth, he determined to remake the operatic theatre, both figuratively and literally. And he did, having created, by the time he died at the age of 69, in the teeth
of great hardship and often violently expressed opposition, a body of work on an unprecedented scale and of gigantic scope that affected its audiences deeply, trained a group of singers and players who could interpret it, and built a revolutionary new theatre in which to perform it. He had set out to impose his work and his view of life on the world, and he had succeeded; it might almost be said that, weaving together myth and legend and history, he had created an alternative universe. It is a safe bet to say that no other composer has achieved what Wagner achieved, not so much in point of musical greatness – though he is incontestably great – but in terms of reinventing his art at every level.
In unflagging pursuit of his goal, Wagner was titanic, demiurgic, super-human – and also, frankly, more than a little alarming. No one was ever neutral about him. His personality was so extreme, so unfettered, that he struck many people as teetering on the edge of sanity, both in the way he behaved and in the intemperate demands he made of them. He had, said Liszt, a ‘great and overwhelming nature, a sort of Vesuvius, which, when it is in eruption, scatters sheaves of fire and at the same time bunches of roses and elder’. Volcanic imagery abounds in recollections of him: ‘the little man with the enormous head, long body and short legs,’ wrote the painter Friedrich Pecht, ‘resembled a volcano spewing out fire and sweeping all before him…his true element was the most violent excitement’. Half-admiringly, Liszt described Wagner’s ability to work his way round a room, systematically alienating everyone in it. ‘It is his habit to look down on people from the heights, even on those who are eager to show themselves submissive to him. He decidedly has the style and the ways of a ruler, and he has no consideration for anyone, or at least only the most obvious.’
Many people ran a mile from him. But quite as many were hypnotised by him, eager to catch the bunches of roses and elder that accompanied the lava. However, they approached him closely at their peril. He sometimes had an annihilating effect on those who were drawn to him. ‘I am,’ he remarked to Cosima, ‘energy personified.’ He invited the composer Peter Cornelius, part of his circle of young
admirers, to stay with him and write music, but he laid out his terms in advance: ‘Either you accept my invitation and settle yourself immediately for your whole life in the same house with me,’ wrote Wagner, ‘or you disdain me, and expressly abjure all desire to unite yourself with me. In the latter case, I abjure you also, root and branch and never admit you again in any way into my life.’ Cornelius refused Wagner’s generous offer. ‘I should not write a note,’ he told a friend. ‘I should be no more than a piece of spiritual furniture to him.’ It sometimes seems as if Wagner were exaggerating his own ogreishness for comic effect, but if so, the joke was rarely perceived as such, and it often turned nasty. He was quite capable of being amusing, jovial, even, when he was in the mood. He was surprisingly capable of sending himself up. But even on such occasions, he could turn in an instant, suddenly spreading terror where mirth had been before.
This temperamental excess was not a case, as in Peter Shaffer’s presentation of Mozart, of a contradiction between the man and the artist: in Wagner they were one, as he insisted again and again. His temperament and the circumstances of his upbringing gave him access to parts of his psyche that most people – most nice people –put away from themselves. When he wrote music, it was his subconscious, with which he was on such familiar terms, that he sought to express. He went straight to the archetype, and he went in deep. Though his music contains ideas, it deals not just with the ineffable, but with the unspeakable. It unearths what has been buried within us. And some people found it intolerable, right from the moment his true voice as a composer was heard. Critics felt assailed by it, to an uncommon degree. A famous cartoon published in Paris in 1861 when Tannhäuser was first performed there shows a demonic, bug-eyed Wagner climbing inside a huge ear, armed with a hammer and driving a nail through the eardrum, as blood spurts out in all directions. His music was, many critics thought, right from the beginning, in some way unhealthy. Eduard Hanslick dismissed the music of the composer’s highly original spiritual odyssey Lohengrin as ‘mawkish, spineless and often affected: it is like the white
magnesium light into which it is not possible to gaze for long without hurting one’s eyes’.
Some people took it even worse: in a letter to his friend Edvard Grieg, the Norwegian poet Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson wrote of Tristan and Isolde that it was ‘the most enormous depravity I have ever seen or heard, but in its own crazy way it is so overwhelming that one is deadened by it, as by a drug’. He found the plot to be immoral, he continued, ‘but even worse is this seasick music that destroys all sense of structure in its quest for tonal colour. In the end one just becomes a gob of slime on an ocean shore, something ejaculated by that masturbating pig in an opiate frenzy.’ When Wagner published the libretto of his gargantuan epic The Ring of the Nibelung, before he had written a note of the score, it provoked the pioneer psychiatrist Theodor Puschmann to publish a pamphlet called Richard Wagner: A Psychiatric Study, which roundly described its subject as a monomaniac and a psychopath. Nietzsche, too, after succumbing for a while to extreme Wagnolatry, turned violently away from him, proclaiming that Wagner was not a composer at all, comparing him unfavourably to Bizet. Recently, the British composer Thomas Adès described Wagner’s music as a fungus. ‘It’s a sort of unnatural growth. It’s parasitic in a sense – on its models, on its material. His material doesn’t grow symphonically – it doesn’t grow through a musical logic – it grows parasitically. It has a laboratory atmosphere.’ Adès’s remarks oddly echo Wagner’s view of Jewish composers in his nakedly anti-Semitic pamphlet Judaism in Music, which provoked furious resistance to his music in his lifetime and continues to have a deep impact on his legacy today. By contrast, Baudelaire said, after hearing the overture to Tannhäuser for the first time, that the music expressed ‘all that lies most deeply hidden in the heart of man’.
This was something quite new. Or maybe something very old. Something like Dionysiac possession, perhaps. From the beginning, Wagner got under people’s skin. He didn’t care whether his music gave formal satisfaction, or whether it struck people as being beautiful or exciting or dramatic. He was trying to bypass the
audience’s analytical brain. His aim was the unconscious, the emotional underbelly, the murky depths of human experience. Feelings were what interested him, he said, not understanding. So it’s hardly surprising that Wagner’s music bothers people. It was meant to. It’s what he set out to do. He wanted to overwhelm his audiences – literally, to knock them off centre. He was a man without boundaries, and he wanted his audience’s boundaries to overflow too.
No wonder that the theatre was where he found himself. The theatre was, indeed, at his very core. He came from a theatrical background: his stepfather was an actor, as were several of his brothers and sisters. He wrote plays from an early age, he staged shows in his model theatre, he gave highly charged recitations. All his life, he acted, joyously giving himself over to amateur theatricals and giving electrifying performances of his own librettos. As with Charles Dickens, it was said of him by shrewd judges that had he chosen to make a living in the theatre, he would have been the greatest actor of his time. There are similarities between the two men. Like Wagner, Dickens created epics from his imagination by sheer willpower, epics teeming with archetypal figures; both men were given to great treks up mountains and down valleys; both of them had an uncanny relationship to animals. These parallels only go so far; the contrasts between them are sharp, but in their way, equally illuminating – Dickens with his essentially comic vision, Wagner with his tragic view of life; Dickens’s art at heart carnival, Wagner’s profoundly hieratic; Dickens deeply in touch with his inner child, Wagner directly connected to his inner infant.
The book I have tried to write aims to give a sense of what it was like to be near that demanding, tempestuous, haughty, playful, prodigiously productive figure, but also to place him in his world. Wagner belongs as much to the history of ideas and indeed to the history of the nineteenth century as he does to the history of music. I am not a musician, either as performer or as musicologist. I am a well-informed music lover, but it would be entirely inappropriate for me to attempt musical analysis. All I can write about is the effect of
the music. I am slightly comforted by the fact that this is the only way Wagner ever wrote about music. You will search his copious writings in vain for an analysis of his highly idiosyncratic and complex compositional practice. This originality of procedure is a vital part of what makes him extraordinary, and I have noted the evolution of his musical means. But what has fascinated me above all has been how Wagner served his talent, his exceptional loyalty to it, however rackety a life he might have been leading, however much pressure there might have been to betray it, however hopeless his situation might have seemed. Wagner is in some senses an unlikely hero, but his custodianship of his gifts, despite the reverses of fortune and the vagaries of his temperament, counts as heroic and inspiring, while his personality in all its extremity belongs to one of the most fascinating of all the occupants of the human zoo.
Wagner has been written about at greater length than any other composer. Superb books, some short and some hernia-inducingly long, have covered him from every possible angle; primarily interested as I am in how he lived his life day-to-day, my main source has been his own words, in his copious published writings and especially, perhaps, in the letters, great tracts of which have been translated into English. Above all, I found that my most sustained sense of the man came from a book I had somewhat dreaded reading – his two-volume autobiography, My Life, published privately from 1870 to 1880. In the event, it turned out to be as vivacious and candid as the greatest artists’ autobiographies, every bit as compelling and stimulating as Benvenuto Cellini’s or Berlioz’s – and about as reliable. The circumstances of the book’s writing (dictated to his then mistress, Cosima von Bülow, at the behest of his besotted patron Ludwig II, edited and brought to press by an equally – at that stage – doting Nietzsche) mean that its truth is rarely pure and never simple, but it leaps off the page. At the very least, it tells us how he wanted to be seen by the world, which was by no means as a plaster
saint. It is the work of a master dramatist, which is how he saw himself.
VORSPIEL
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On 26 August 1876, as the last notes of the first performance of The Twilight of the Gods died away in the newly built Festspielhaus, in the tiny Bavarian town of Bayreuth, 2,000 people sat shaken, inspired, enchanted – or appalled. Among them were the musical aristocracy of Europe: Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky, Anton Rubinstein, Grieg and Bruckner, along with a good sprinkling of the actual aristocracy of Europe, two emperors, three kings, a handful of princes, two grand dukes. All of them, or almost all of them, were
swept along on a cataclysm of emotion to equal anything that happened on stage that evening.
As the applause grew and grew, and before singers or conductor or designer or choreographer had appeared in front of the curtain to acknowledge it, a diminutive, stooping figure, familiar not just to the faithful but to the cultured world at large, the subject of a dozen photoshoots, two dozen portraits and a thousand cartoons, made his way somewhat lopsidedly to the front of the stage; his disproportionately huge head with its madly bulging eyes was topped by a floppy velvet cap set at a rakish angle. This man, this tiny man, sixty-three years old, but looking, Tchaikovsky thought, ancient and frail, was the hero of the hour, the sole architect of the vast four-day, fifteen-hour epic, every one of whose thousands and thousands of words and thousands and thousands of notes he had created, unleashing onto the vast stage gods and dwarves, dragons and songbirds, women warriors on horseback and maidens disporting themselves in the Rhine, digging deeply and unsettlingly into the subconscious, discharging in his audience emotions that were oceanic and engulfing – this man was the architect of all that; the architect, indeed, in all but name, of the very theatre in which the heaving, roaring audience sat. There he stood before them, the selfproclaimed Musician of the Future. He held a hand up, and in the ensuing silence, in the marked Saxon accent which he never made the slightest attempt to lose, he said: ‘Now you’ve seen what I want to achieve in Art. And you’ve seen what my artists, what we, can achieve. If you want the same thing, we shall have an Art.’
That was the way he spoke.
By we, he meant, of course, the German people. The first, the most important thing he had to say, was that the great work he had brought into existence was, above all else, German.
At a celebratory banquet the following night, after an interminable and obscure speech by a Reichstag deputy, the Hungarian politician Count Albert Apponyi leaped to his feet unannounced and said:
Brünnhilde – the new national art – lay asleep on a rock, surrounded by a great fire. The god Wotan had lit this fire, so that only the victorious and finest hero, a hero who knew no fear, would win her as his bride. Around the rock were mountains of ash and clinker – the cross-breeding of our own music with non-German elements. Along came a hero, the like of whom had never been seen before, Richard Wagner, who forged a weapon from the fragments of the sword of his fathers – the classical German masters – and with this sword he penetrated the fire, and with his kiss he awoke the sleeping Brünnhilde. ‘Hail to you, victorious light!’ she cried and with her we join our voices: ‘Three cheers to our master, Richard Wagner! Hip hip! Hip hip! Hip hip!’
So that was it: Wagner was the hero of the newly unified German Reich, which had come into being just five years earlier, and his music was its music. Many people, including many Germans, felt very uncomfortable about this new Germany, and The Ring of the Nibelung seemed to embody, in its grandiosity, its self-celebrating Teutonic tub-thumping, its primitivism, everything that worried them about it. Wagner himself, after a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with the masters of the new establishment, was already somewhat unenamoured of their policies: to his immeasurable disgust, one of Reichskanzler Bismarck’s first acts had been to give the vote to Jews. Wagner also, more surprisingly, loathed the new climate of militarism and imperialism. He withdrew back into the kingdom of art where he would always be absolute monarch, where his will would always prevail, where he could explore the depths and the heights of human experience – by which he meant, of course, his own experience.
None of this – Wagner’s creation of a new national art, his acclaim as the greatest German artist of his times, the creation of his custombuilt theatre – could possibly have been predicted at any point in the composer’s life up to that point. It was, to be sure, exactly what he set out to do, almost to the letter. But there was nothing inevitable about it whatever. The massive solidity of his achievement grew out of and existed in the face of profound instability, both internal and external, an instability which characterises every stage and every phase of his life and which indeed is at the very heart of his music. At every turn
of the way, his vision, and he was nothing if not visionary, was in danger of being sabotaged, either by circumstances, or by other people, or – more often than not – by himself.
We know all this because he told us. We know everything about this extraordinary man, everything, that is, except the most important thing: how he created his music. Because even he, the great motor-mouth, the obsessive self-analyst, was unable to explain that. But everything else, we know. Not just because of the memoirs, the reviews, the police records, the biographies, but because, in a way unusual in a musician – almost unknown, in fact – he was driven to communicate verbally, to explain himself in conversation, in letters, in speeches, in diaries, in pamphlets, in books. He wrote about art, music, theatre, history, politics, race, language, anthropology, myth, philosophy. Above all he wrote about himself. All this selfcentredness was not simple egomania, though it was that too. It was how he engaged with his creativity.
Before he could compose a note he needed to articulate his position, to formulate his philosophy, to put himself in relation to the work and to the world – to dramatise himself as an artist, one might say. And for those who were susceptible, this torrent of words and this vision of himself was bewitching – positively hypnotic. For others (including some of his closest associates) it was unnerving, dangerous, overwhelming, almost life-threatening. His production of himself was inextinguishable. Many people tried to stop him, to suppress him, to silence him. Nothing but death could stem the flow. Where did it all come from? What was going on inside Wagner’s head?
Young Richard
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In 1813, when Wagner was born, the instability which is at the heart of his temperament and his work was the universal condition. Napoleon’s plans for world dominion were unravelling, but not quickly, and not without massive fallout. A year after their humiliating defeat in Russia in 1812, in October 1813 the French, fielding an army of young untried soldiers, fought a savage battle almost literally on Wagner’s doorstep, right in the centre of the city of Leipzig where he had been born, five months earlier, on 25 May, in a modest apartment over a pub in the Jewish district. Leipzig was the
second city of the newly created kingdom of Saxony-Anhalt, one of the nearly forty sovereign states that constituted the hollow remnant of the Holy Roman Empire, itself the heir to the Western Roman Empire. Germany as such existed only as an idea. An increasingly potent idea, but an idea nonetheless. The Saxons were Napoleon’s allies, and along with the French they were brutally crushed in October 1813 by the brilliantly organised coalition of Prussian, Swedish, Austrian and Russian forces; during the battle – the biggest engagement in military history before the First World War –Napoleon’s armies were in and around the city, fighting and losing the heaviest pitched battle of the entire interminable war. Over the three days of the battle there were 100,000 losses, near enough: 45,000 French, 54,000 allies; just disposing of the corpses was a huge undertaking, and rotting bodies were still visible six months after the cessation of hostilities. The citizens were in a state of abject terror. The world seemed to be falling apart: and it was. Nothing would be the same again. Wagner claimed that his father, Carl Friedrich Wagner, a clerk in the police service, died during the hostilities as a result of the stress – that, and the nervous fever which had seized the city.
Richard, no stranger himself to nervous fever, of both the physical and the creative variety, was the ninth and last of the Wagners’ children. He was baptised in St Thomas’s church, the very church where Johann Sebastian Bach, in the previous century, had served as cantor for twenty-five years. This omen was not followed any time soon by evidence of musical gifts in the child; indeed, as a little boy Richard’s inclination and talent were all for the theatre, no doubt because his mother’s new husband, Ludwig Geyer, a family friend, was an actor. Wagner’s mother Johanna had remarried just nine months after her first husband’s death; young Richard was given his stepfather’s name and was accordingly known for his first fourteen years as Richard Geyer. Some fifty years later, Wagner came upon passionate letters from Geyer written to Johanna while her first husband was still alive; it was clear from them that she and Geyer were already lovers. So whose son was he? The police clerk’s, or the
actor’s? Who was he? Like more than one of his characters, he could never be entirely sure, but it was Ludwig Geyer’s portrait he carried around with him to the day he died – not Carl Friedrich Wagner’s.
After the marriage, the newly-weds moved, with the children, to the Saxon capital, Dresden, where Geyer was a member of the royal theatre company. Little Richard’s new life was highly agreeable to him: Geyer, a deft and successful portrait painter as well as an actor, was a kind, funny stepfather and the house was always aswarm with theatre people and musicians, among them Carl Maria von Weber. The great composer was music director of the Dresden opera, but also conductor of the theatre company, for whose productions he wrote incidental music. Wagner remembered him being in and out of the house all day long, hobbling around bandy-legged, his huge spectacles on the end of his large nose and wearing a long, grey, oldfashioned coat like something out of one of Wagner’s favourite E. T. A. Hoffmann stories. The boy was an insatiable reader, losing himself in the newly published fairy tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm; though showing no gift for performing music, he was obsessed by it, listening spellbound to the military brass bands which paraded up and down the streets, tootling out good old German folk tunes. Best of all, he had easy access to the theatre, where he could play as long as he liked in the props shop and the wardrobe department; he had no skills as a painter, Geyer noted, but his imagination knew no bounds, and his stepfather encouraged it.
And then, quite suddenly, Geyer was gone, when Richard was just eight, struck down at the age of forty-two. Arriving at the deathbed, the boy was sent to the room next door by his sobbing mother and told to play something: he had had some elementary lessons in the little country school he attended, and obliged with ‘Üb immer treu und Redlichkeit’, a sober transformation of Papageno’s playful ditty ‘Ein mädchen oder Weibchen’ from The Magic Flute, with pious words to match:
Use always fidelity and honesty
Up to your cold grave; And stray not one inch
From the ways of the Lord
Hearing the lad play the sombre little piece, Geyer murmured, as he slipped away, ‘Is it possible the boy has some talent?’
Once Geyer was dead – the second father Wagner had lost – little thought was given to his dying question: her youngest son’s musical abilities was low on the widow’s list of priorities. The decent sum of money Geyer had left her soon ran out; Johanna took in lodgers, including, for a time, the distinguished composer and violinist Louis Spohr, so music was always in the air. In a household filled with musically gifted children, only Richard had shown no aptitude for performing it, as his mother helpfully informed Weber, in Richard’s presence. In fact, apparently unnoticed by Johanna, he was utterly consumed by music. The sound of a brass band tuning up put him, he said, into a state of mystic excitement; the striking of fifths on the violins seemed to him like a greeting from the spirit world. Later he developed a crush on a young man who played the overture to Weber’s new opera Der Freischütz on the piano. Whenever the hapless youth came to the house, Richard begged him to play it over and over and over again. At twelve, he finally persuaded his mother to let him have piano lessons, which he continued with only up to the point where he was able to bash out the Freischütz overture for himself. From then on he bashed out every score he could get his hands on; his skill at the piano never improved to the end of his days. All his performances – and he was a compulsive performer – were a triumph of feeling over technique and mind over fingers; the same effort of will and imagination somehow, fifty years later, enabled him to play and sing through the entire Ring cycle, evidently to overwhelming effect.
For a year after Geyer’s death, to save money, young Richard had been shunted aimlessly around his relatives, from Eisleben to Leipzig and back again; en route he picked up the art of acrobatics, a skill he proudly displayed to the end of his life, manifesting startling flexibility in his late sixties. Back in Dresden at last, he was sent to the city’s famous old grammar school, the Nicolaischule. Johanna was determined that he should be properly educated, desperate
above all else that he should never become an actor. Three out of her nine children had done so, with some success, but to her the theatre was beneath contempt, barely an art at all, certainly not to be compared with the poetry or the painting she so admired. Severe –Wagner said he could never once remember her having embraced him – and strongly pious, she was given to leading impromptu family prayer sessions from her bed, dispensing moral precepts to each of her children in turn. She was determined to make a serious young man out of Richard.
All in vain. He was a terrible student, lazy and wilful, refusing to study anything that failed to engage his imagination, which left exactly two subjects: history and literature – ancient Greek history and literature to be precise, with a bit of Shakespeare thrown in. His forte was recitation. At twelve, he made a big success speaking Hector’s farewell from the Iliad, followed by ‘To be or not to be’ – in German, of course, both of them: languages, he said, were too much like hard work. Nevertheless, even in translation, Greek plays, Greek myths, and Greek history grabbed him by the throat from an early age. He wrote copiously himself, great poetic screeds, bloodspattered epics: it was the gruesome, he said, that aroused his keenest interest, invading his dreams, and giving him, night after night, shattering nightmares from which he would wake shrieking; understandably his brothers and sisters refused to sleep in the same room with him. He seems to have been, to put it mildly, a bit of a problem child. There may have been some anxiety – some uncertainty – in the air. There was very likely a sense in the household that Richard was Geyer’s son. Nor did he fit in at school: a histrionic, hyper-active, oversensitive little chap with a nasty habit of bursting into tears every five minutes, but nonetheless he somehow managed to corral some of his school fellows into giving a performance (heavily abridged, one can only assume) of his favourite opera, Weber’s Der Freischütz. In the opera a young man with ambitions to succeed the Head Forester and marry his daughter is outshot by a rival; frustrated, he turns to his saturnine colleague Kaspar, who gives him a magic bullet, promising to give him more if
he will come with him to the Wolf’s Ravine, which is where they go at the end of the second act.
In that famous scene, which terrified its first audiences and positively obsessed the young Wagner, the central characters, the hero Max and his darkly brooding friend Kaspar, repair at midnight to the fearsome ravine, deep in the woods. The clearing they are heading for is a vertiginously deep woodland glen, planted with pines and surrounded by high mountains, out of which a waterfall roars. The full moon shines wanly; in the foreground is a withered tree struck by lightning and decayed inside; it seems to glow with an unearthly lustre. On the gnarled branch of another tree sits a huge owl with fiery, circling eyes; on another perch crows and wood birds. Kaspar, in thrall to the devil, is laying out a circle of black boulders in the middle of which is a skull; a few paces away are a pair of torn-off eagle’s wings, a casting ladle, and a bullet mould:
Moonmilk fell on weeds!
Uhui!
moans a chorus of Invisible Spirits,
Spiders web is dewed with blood!
Uhui!
Ere the evening falls again –
Uhui!
Will the gentle bride be slain!
Uhui!
E’re the next descent of night, Will the sacrifice be done!
Uhui! Uhui!
In the distance, the clock strikes twelve. Kaspar completes the circle of stones, pulls his hunting knife out and plunges it into the skull. Then, raising the knife with the skull impaled on it, he turns round three times and calls out:
Samiel! Samiel! Appear!
By the wizard’s cranium, Samiel, Samiel, appear!
Samiel appears. Kaspar, who has already sold his soul to this woodland devil, tries to do a deal with it: Samiel can have Max instead of him. The Spirit agrees; Max, knowing nothing of this, arrives and together – in spite of a scary warning from his mother’s ghost, which suddenly looms up – he and Kaspar cast seven magic bullets, six of which will find their mark, the seventh will go wherever Samiel decrees. Finally, at the very last moment, and thanks to the intervention of an ancient hermit, the seventh bullet, instead of killing Max, finds its way into Kaspar’s heart. Max is redeemed, and is free to marry his beloved Agathe.
Despite the redemptive ending this is gruesome stuff, all right, and strangely disturbing. The old story stirs up memories of a pagan German past, of nomadic warriors who come from the dark and terrible forest, where, in the grip of demonic powers, they commune with spirits. Weber tapped into all of that, creating German Romantic opera at a stroke, and scaring the pants off his audiences, not least sixteen-year-old Richard Wagner; its atmosphere, and its music, entered into his soul.
Meanwhile his flagrant neglect of his schoolwork finally forced a crisis, which he precipitated by disclosing to his family that he had written a play, Leubald and Adelaïde, loosely based, he said, on Hamlet, King Lear, Richard III and Macbeth, with a few bits of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen thrown in for good measure. It was essentially Hamlet, he said, with the interesting difference that the hero, visited by the ghost of his murdered father, is driven to acts of homicidal revenge and goes mad – really mad, unlike Hamlet: in a frenzy, he stabs his girlfriend to death then, in a final blooddrenched tableau, he kills himself. The total roll call of the dead by the end of the play is forty-two. Or so Wagner said. In fact, as the recently rediscovered text reveals, it was no more than twelve, which tells us that Wagner was not averse to sending up his youthful self.
Whether it was twelve corpses or forty-two, the family were horrified to think what dark and desperate thoughts, how much violence and death, were swirling around inside the sixteen-yearold’s brain. Not least disturbing among the play’s catalogue of murders, rape and incestuous love – Adelaide is Leubald’s half-sister – is the prominence given to the Hamlet-like murder of Leubald’s father by his own brother; he then swiftly marries the widow, which might have seemed rather close to home for Johanna Wagner. All through the outraged tirades which rained down on his head, Wagner was laughing inwardly, he said, because they didn’t know what he knew: that his work could only be rightly judged when set to music, music which he himself would write – was indeed about to start composing immediately. The fact that he had no idea how to go about such a thing was a minor obstacle. Under his own steam, he found a fee-paying music lending library and took out Johann Bernhard Logier’s elementary compositional handbook, Method of Thorough-bass. He kept it so long, studying it so intently, that the fees accumulated alarmingly; the words ‘borrow’ and ‘own’ were always interchangeable in Wagner’s mind. This particular music lending library was, as it happens, run by the implacable Friedrich Wieck, whose daughter Clara was before very long about to defy him by marrying Robert Schumann; Wagner failed to deflect him, and so, at the age of sixteen, he found himself being pursued for debt, an experience with which he would become all too familiar. His family was eventually called on to bail him out; that too was a pattern that became wearyingly familiar.
His family’s dismay at having to pay was matched by their horror at discovering the nature of Richard’s musical ambitions: to be an aspiring performer is one thing – at least there is a chance of earning a living. But to want to be a composer is quite another thing, a recipe for penury. He was not to be gainsaid: the willpower that was to drive his life forward was already fully formed: he was going to be a composer. Faced with the inevitable, the family procured him lessons in harmony (which bored him) and in violin (which tortured them), but neither the boredom nor the torture lasted very long: no sooner
were both begun than they were abandoned. He went his own way; for him it was the only way possible. What really mattered to him was cultivating his imagination. He immersed himself in the writing of that phenomenal figure Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann –critic, composer, storyteller, journalist, embodiment and avatar of everything that was dark and fantastical in German Romanticism. Above all for the young Wagner, Hoffmann was the creator of the misunderstood musical genius Johannes Kreisler, rejected by society but certain of his own greatness; for Kreisler music is nothing less than a form of possession:
Unable to utter a word, Kreisler seated himself at the grand piano and struck the first chords of the duet as if dazed and confused by some strange intoxication…in the greatest agitation of mind, with an ardour which, in performance, was certain to enrapture anyone to whom Heaven had granted an even passable ear…soon both voices rose on the waves of the song like shimmering swans, now aspiring to rise aloft, to the radiant, golden clouds with the beat of rushing wings, now to sink dying in a sweet amorous embrace in the roaring currents of chords, until deep sighs heralded the proximity of death, and with a wild cry of pain the last Addio welled like a fount of blood from the wounded breast.
Young Wagner gobbled up these stories, as well as devouring Hoffmann’s intensely imagined analyses of Beethoven’s music – less critical appreciation than Dionysiac trance.
Beethoven’s instrumental music unveils before us the realm of the mighty and the immeasurable. Here shining rays of light shoot through the darkness of night and we become aware of giant shadows swaying back and forth, moving ever closer around us and destroying us but not the pain of infinite yearning, in which every desire, leaping up in sounds of exultation, sinks back and disappears. Only in this pain, in which love, hope and joy are consumed without being destroyed, which threatens to burst our hearts with a full-chorused cry of all the passions, do we live on as ecstatic visionaries
– which could easily be a description of Wagner’s own mature music. Intoxicated with all this, the seventeen-year-old plunged in at the deep end, applying himself to the monumental task of making a
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look more natural. I had just finished when I heard a knock and knew it was Brown.
“I waited sufficient time, as I thought for Mr. Halley to be outside, then went to the door and turned on the Dictaphone, and came back for Brown—but in my excitement I made one fatal mistake, I forgot to open the French window. I could have kicked myself, but it was too late.
“While Brown was examining the body I whipped off the record and hid it. That was all. I waited each day, hoping Mr. Halley would be arrested, and then I hoped to get a chance of killing him. If I had known that it was he who was sitting in that chair he would have been a dead man. But I am glad now. After hearing his story I felt he too had suffered, and I should have been content with my revenge. It was only when you accused Mr. Cook, and I thought an innocent man might suffer for my crime that I determined to tell the whole truth. I am an old man and shall not live long now in any case.”
He ceased and Sinclair took the statement from Fletcher, who had written it down.
“Sign this statement,” he said “if you are satisfied with it.”
The old man read it through carefully, and signed it with a firm hand.
“Now Giles—or Mr. Wheatland—if you wish to make an act of reparation—it lies in your power. Do you know where the marriage certificate is hidden?”
“Why of course. My wife told me when she was dying. I never touched it as I felt it was a magnet which would bring the other Reckavile home some day.”
He rose and went to the old desk. Brown carefully walking beside him. Stooping down he touched a secret spring, and a drawer, carefully hidden in the carving at the back, sprang open. Giles drew out a faded package and a record, and placed them on the table.
Sinclair opened the packet and handed the contents to Halley who turned white with relief.
“At last,” he said taking out the faded document, which meant so much to him. Without a word he handed it to Ena. It was much faded, and had been soaked with sea water, but was still readable.
Sinclair rose and put the record on the Dictaphone which he wound up and started. Of all the gruesome things that this room had witnessed this was the strangest. The now familiar words of the quarrel were repeated between the dead and the living.
Brown was shaking as though he had seen a ghost, and the others were strangely moved.
“Oh, shut it off, for Heaven’s sake,” said Sefton, and at the moment with the final shriek it ceased with a click.
All eyes had been rivetted on the instrument, when Sinclair rose with a cry of alarm.
“Stop him,” he shouted, pointing a finger at Giles.
Brown and Andrews seized the old man, who made no resistance, but smiled at them.
“No, you fools, he’s taken poison,” and Sinclair rushed round the table, and forced open the grim jaws, but it was too late, and with a heavy groan the old man collapsed. Sefton sprang to Sinclair’s side and ripped open Giles’ waistcoat. A moment’s examination was sufficient.
“He’s dead,” he said solemnly, “it must have been a terribly rapid poison.”
Ena had burst into tears, the strain had been too great, and Halley rose and went to her side.
“Fool that I was,” said Sinclair. “I might have guessed. This was what was contained in that little leather case we found. Reckavile must have carried it about with him for such a crisis as he knew might occur. You know suicide is in the family,” he added in a low voice so that Halley should not hear. “I have seen something like that in India. It was probably some deadly alkaloid. Giles must have got hold of it from Reckavile, and kept it for such a contingency. Still,” he said musingly “perhaps it is for the best. The old man had become a monomaniac brooding over his revenge, and it would have been dreadful to have sent him to the gallows.”
Brown and Andrews carried the body, already stiffening, into the bedroom, and covered it with a sheet.
The rest rose to their feet.
“You will make a full report on this, Andrews,” said Sinclair when the officer returned, “and I will report in London. There is no
particular object in making more of a sensation than we are obliged, but the whole thing will have to come out when Lord Reckavile here makes his claim to the title.”
“I will go back to London, sir,” said Fletcher, and his face was white. “I seem to have made a pretty mess of things all round.”
Sinclair laid a kindly hand on his shoulder. “Don’t take this too much to heart, my boy, we all have to learn, and you are young yet. Only I think you owe an apology to Lord Reckavile.”
Fletcher looked with gratitude at his Chief.
“I owe an apology all round, and I tender it now,” he said.
He shook hands with each, and when he came to Ena, he smiled sadly, “I wish you both the greatest happiness.”
Chapter XIII.
The Last
The sun was sparkling on the sea, and all nature was rejoicing as though pleased that the black shadow had been lifted at last.
Southgate and his wife were setting luncheon in the old timbered room at the Black Horse, with great care. There were flowers on the table, and a row of bottles on the sideboard.
“That will do I think,” he said, standing back to admire his work. A sound of voices outside announced the coming of the guests, and the Southgates melted away to smarten up.
Ena and her brother came in with Lord Reckavile and she looked a pretty sight in the sunlit room, a picture of happiness, now that the clouds had gone. In Reckavile also there was a subtle change. He appeared younger and the sad look had given place to a merry twinkle of the eye. He walked more briskly, and with a self assurance unknown before.
Sefton was thoroughly contented. There was a very good prospect of being able to go back to the Hospital to qualify, and his experience had taught him that his father’s discovery was no idle dream. They took their seats and waited for Sinclair who was due to complete the party
Reckavile rang the bell, and Southgate appeared.
“Have you no servants?” asked Reckavile in mock anger.
“Yes, sir—I mean, my lord,” stammered the landlord.
“ ‘Sir’ will do Southgate, for the present—why do you not do as I asked you?”
“What was that, sir?”
“Lay two places more for yourself and Mrs. Southgate.”
“Oh sir! We couldn’t.”
“Nonsense, either you lunch with us, or we don’t have any meal at all.”
“Very good, sir,” said the gratified man “I will tell the missus.”
A car drove up to the door, and Sinclair came in.
“I hope I’m not late,” he said shaking hands.
“Not a bit, you’re just in time,” said Reckavile.
Soon they were gathered round the table, as merry a party as one could wish to see.
“How are things going, Lord Reckavile?” asked Sinclair, when Southgate had uncorked the bottles.
“It will take some time to get these matters settled, as the whole question will have to come before the House of Lords, but my lawyers think there will be no real difficulty, and have been very good in covering my temporary needs. Now tell us all about the case, as you promised to do, you know we all want to know how you managed to solve the problem.”
“There is no magic about it,” said Sinclair modestly. “You see from the very first I saw clearly that, as we do not live in the age of witches and magic, there was only one man who could have had access to Reckavile, and that was old Giles, however much the problem was surrounded with difficulties. When I got Fletcher’s report, I saw the whole thing. Don’t misunderstand me. It is a matter of experience, not of cleverness. Fletcher had all the clues in front of him. The mention of a Dictaphone told me all I wanted to know. I had given him a broad hint when I told him the history of the Reckaviles, and I will admit that I thought he had committed suicide, a diabolical suicide to get his half brother hanged. I am not at all certain even now that that was not his real intention. He would have hidden the record, and swallowed the poison—you saw how quickly it worked— and things would have looked very bad for you, Lord Reckavile.”
“I wonder,” said the latter. “I saw something in his eyes at the last interview which made me suspicious of such a plot.”
“Well,” Sinclair continued “my mind being set on Giles, I pursued the usual practice, for which I take no credit, in hunting up his antecedents, and traced him as Wheatland. Then the whole thing was clear as daylight, but there was not a shadow of real evidence.”
“You remember,” said Reckavile, taking up the tale, “Southgate came to your bungalow, Ena, with important news that Sunday morning. The police had been down there making enquiries about me, and things were getting warm, so I thought the wisest course was to go to London and see Sinclair, and tell him the whole story. That was why he came down, but of course I knew nothing of his suspicions.”
“I see,” said Sefton “that was why you disguised yourself the second time.”
“It was my suggestion,” said Sinclair “if my theory was correct I saw that he was in very great danger from Giles, and the only way was to keep up the disguise till we had forced a confession from him, or got hold of such evidence that we could obtain an arrest. The record, which I was certain had not been destroyed, as Giles had no chance of doing so, and the certificate, were the things we were after, and I was so convinced that they were in the desk that we were prepared to break it to pieces if necessary, but Fletcher interfered, and afterwards Giles saved us the trouble. That I think explains the whole thing. I can only say how thankful we ought to be to have come out without another tragedy. But come, let’s talk of something more pleasant.”
Southgate rose at a signal from Sinclair, and filled their glasses with a very extra special champagne.
Sinclair rose. “To the health of the future Lord and Lady Reckavile,” he said.
The toast was drunk with enthusiasm. Sinclair set his glass down with deliberation, and said musingly “Good stuff that. I wonder how much it paid towards the revenue,” and he grinned broadly at Southgate who looked sheepish.
“Come along,” he said with a wink to Sefton “let’s examine Southgate’s cellars,” and with a laugh they went out, leaving Reckavile and Ena alone.
“We will go to Italy, dear,” he said taking her hand.
“Yes, I want to see your mother’s grave, and the little cottage where you were born. How happy she would be if she knew everything had come right,” and her eyes were wet.
“Perhaps she does. If you will take me as I am, we will get married, and get away from this place with its evil memories.”
“Yes, Mr. lord,” she said, making him a curtsey “but don’t forget it was here you met me, is that one of the evil memories?”
“That is the happiest memory I have ever had,” he made answer, catching her to him. “I came here in winter, and now spring has come, and soon it will be summer. When another winter comes it will find us together. The Curse has died out in one fiendish act of evil, and revenge, but by God’s grace we will establish a new line with nobler thoughts.”
He kissed her then, and she hid her blushes in his passionate embrace.
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