Michael Henderson has been to 100 operas by Wagner. He wasn’t always an admirer of the music
When sceptics ask how I ‘found’ the music dramas of Richard Wagner there is an obvious, contrary answer: I didn’t; he found me. As a young music-lover I was certainly no Wagnerian in the making. Although I had always had a love of the orchestra, and slipped easily into the initially perplexing world of opera, I had little knowledge of Wagner, and no desire to find out.
If anything I felt hostile. A master at prep school had entertained some of us 12-year-olds one Sunday afternoon, and popped on an LP called, improbably, Wagner’s Greatest Hits. One day, he counselled, as we tittered, we would grow out of pop, and open our ears to other kinds of music. His intentions were noble but the famous blast of trumpets that heralds the third act of Lohengrin nearly put me off Wagner for life. What a racket!
The operas were long, I knew that much, and rooted in baffling mythology. And weren’t those Wagnerians slightly unhinged, the way they banged on about their man? When the Royal Opera visited Manchester in 1982 I went to Otello but, as I stood in the queue to buy tickets, a Wagner buff who treated us to an impromptu lecture on Lohengrin, in the manner of one of Michael Heath’s great bores, confirmed my impression of this odd cult. No, Wagner was not for me.
It just shows how wrong you can be.
Everybody recalls their conversion to the Master — and a conversion it is: a completely new way of hearing, feeling, living. Mine occurred one afternoon in September 1987, when, on account of some mad impulse, I bought Furtwängler’s recording of Tristan und Isolde. It was a tribute of sorts to Bernard Levin, the columnist I most admired. Levin rarely let a month pass without telling his readers what a great man Wagner was, and, as his writing had opened other doors for me, it was time to walk through another. I approached the music with some trepidation, as, I was to learn, one should. Yet within five minutes, the world looked a different place. That famous prelude, on which music critics have poured millions of words, set me on a course that changed my life.
Two decades on, I may at last call myself a true Wagnerian, having just completed a century of operas. But I cannot claim to understand the work that started it all. In his excellent book on the composer, Michael Tanner says that Tristan, ‘eternally seductive and eternally elusive’, marks the defeat of criticism. Here, as nowhere else, the listener is released from the moorings of time and space. For Thomas Mann the opera was ‘a perfumed fog’. The Viennese novelist, Robert Musil, found Wagner’s music to be ‘a thickly brewed, hot, benumbing drug’. Sir Simon Rattle, who conducted Tristan for the first time in 2001, said it was ‘like floating in amniotic fluid’.
Wagner is not my favourite composer. Schubert is, and always will be. Nor is he, in my judgment, the greatest composer. That must be Beethoven. Wagner, who was not a modest man, bent the knee to Ludwig. We may find perfection in the great operas of Mozart, or the oratorios of Bach. But ‘heilige Richard’ is the one who casts the deepest spell because he reveals aspects of the human personality that we try hardest to suppress. Debussy had good cause to call him ‘old Klingsor’. He is a magician.
A year after that exposure to Tristan I caught my first Wagner opera on stage, Götterdämmerung at the Met, and felt as though I had been granted the keys to an exotic kingdom. Bryan Magee puts it beautifully in Wagner and Philosophy: ‘Some people are made to feel by it [Wagner’s music] that they are in touch with the depths of their personalities for the first time. The feeling is of a wholeness yet unboundedness — hence its frequent comparison with mystical or religious experiences.’
Magee captures, as well as words can, the essence of this addiction. Wagner’s music ‘fulfils in art our most heartfelt wishes, which can never be fulfilled in life’. This may be an admission of defeat. Why can’t Wagnerians feel in life what they find in this dangerous art? Are we deficient? It is certainly true that Wagner appeals most to solitary types, and those with a highly developed sense of melancholy. Or does melancholy lie at the root of all great art, which is, after all, about consolation?
Solitary or not, how these works speak to us! I shall select one memory from my century. In April 2002 Daniel Barenboim conducted two cycles of the ten mature operas at the Deutsche Staatsoper in Berlin. At the end of the first act of Götterdämmerung, when two hours and five minutes had passed in the twinkling of an eye, I stood on the cobbles outside the theatre, swaying to and fro, oblivious to the real world. What was ‘reality’, when this magician could summon into being a world of the imagination that was so much more intoxicating? Wagner had gone beyond Einstein. He had dissolved time!
That night, over dinner with the great bass, Sir John Tomlinson, supreme Wagnerian and good friend, we spoke at length about this hypnotic process. ‘After singing Wagner,’ he said, ‘all other music seems tame. It isn’t tame, of course. It’s just that one has been taken in by the magic of Wagner. With a good performance of a Wagner opera you are transported. You have no sense of time or place.’ So performers feel it, too.
Perhaps we need a poet to distil the magic. In 1989, the year after I caught that Götterdämmerung in New York, James Merrill attended a production of the Ring at the Met, and wrote a marvellous poem, ‘The Ring Cycle’. ‘Next to Verdi,’ he wrote,
Whose riddles I could whistle but not solve,
Wagner had been significance itself,
Great golden lengths of it, stitched with motifs,
A music in whose folds the mind, at twelve,
Came to its senses.
Not when I was 12! No matter. The poem continues:
E-flat denotes the Rhine,
Where everything began. The world’s life.
Mine.
‘Significance itself’. ‘Great golden lengths’. ‘Where everything began’. All Wagnerians will recognise that epiphany. After 100 operas the young man who resisted his music for so long is, as Magee writes of standing before the Master, in awe of his own experience. Merrill spoke for so many: life can begin afresh with Wagner. So I must away to Klingsor’s magic garden, Siegfried’s enchanted forest and Brünnhilde’s rock of fire, to lose myself in that perfumed fog. Once more, for the first time.
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