Longer Views (15 page)

We know Wagner's mother died on January 9, 1848.

But Wagner recounts making the comparatively brief rail journey to the funeral, in time to view her remains and see her buried, as taking place in February. Doubtless he is a couple of weeks off. But the feel of the winter funeral is still there:

It was a bitingly cold morning when we lowered the casket into the grave in the churchyard; the frozen clumps of earth, which we scattered on the lid of the casket instead of the customary handfuls of loose soil, frightened me by their ferocious clatter. On the way back to the house of my brother-in-law Hermann Brockhaus, where the family got together for an hour, my sole companion . . . Heinrich Laube . . . expressed anxiety about my unusually exhausted appearance. Then he accompanied me to the railway station . . . On the short trip back to Dresden the realization of my complete loneliness came over me for the first time with full clarity, as I could not help recognizing that the death of my mother had severed all the natural ties with my family, whose members were all preoccupied with their own special affairs. So I went coldly and gloomily about the sole task that could warm and cheer me: the orchestration of my
Lohengrin
score . . .

This seems to be the sort of mistake that abounds in
Mein Leben
. Dates are off here and there. Sometimes Wagner misremembers names. Occasionally events are out of order. But save for those discretionary
omissions and a sense of occasion that are the prerogative of any autobiographer, I don't find examples of rank lies or outright prevarication. Indeed, Wagner expends considerable energy and narrative ingenuity to achieve the proper tone and feel for complexes of occurrences that even the most exhaustive memoirist would have had to abridge in order to remain readable.

In his account of the calamities in Dresden in the spring of 1849, Wagner describes his actions of early May—the decisive period—with dates and days of the week. Researchers have ascertained he was off as much as two days in some of the early events and a steady day off in his account of what occurred on May 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th. Biographers have since tried to document this period in Wagner's life day by day and, in some cases, hour by hour. The import of these times is easy enough to understand simply by the cataclysmic devastation they encompassed:

On Palm Sunday of spring 1849, Second Royal Kapellmeister Richard Wagner conducted a triumphant concert of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony
at the Dresden Royal Opera House, to a sold-out audience in a benefit performance for the orchestra's pension fund, recreating for the second time his triumphant Palm Sunday concert of 1846, when he first performed the same work for the skeptical Dresden public. In '46, through careful placement of articles on the difficult symphony in local papers, an imaginatively written program for the concert, and meticulous rehearsals for the orchestra (and an intelligent rearrangement of the usual orchestra placement into a form we are all familiar with today but which in 1846 was novel) and the chorus of three hundred, Wagner achieved a great success with what had been considered till then a difficult and inaccessible work, which had, when it had been conducted by First Kapellmeister Reissiger a few years before, left the Dresden audience bewildered and unenthusiastic.

By mid-May, some six weeks after this third Palm Sunday benefit performance of the
Ninth
, which, over three years (missing only 1848), Wagner had made into a Dresden tradition, thousands of men, many of them miners, were dead in the Dresden streets. The Dresden Opera House, where the concert had taken place, had been burned to the ground and was now a charred foundation. And Richard Wagner was in flight from Germany, under an assumed name (“Professor Werder”) and with a false passport, for Paris and finally Zurich.

Three of his friends, the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakúnin, the head of the Dresden Provisional Government, Otto Heubner, and the publisher of the radical newspaper,
Die Volksblätter
(which Wagner himself had edited for a while and written for extensively), August Röckel,
had already been arrested, to be sentenced to life imprisonment or death for treason.

Wagner had ridden with Bakúnin and Heubner to Freiberg. A newspaper editor from Rochlitz named Semming, with them in the coach, years later gave this account:

Conversation . . . was out of the question: before us, around us, behind us, was nothing but a crowd of armed men in great agitation. But all the din, all the shouting and rattling of arms, was drowned by the flaming talk of Wagner. Never have I seen a man so excited. . . . “War!” he kept shouting. This was all he had on his lips and his mind: he poured out such a flood of words that it is impossible for me now to remember it all. . . . The paroxysm lasted perhaps more than half an hour: and so overwhelmed was I by the storm of words of this man sitting next to me—shall I call him Wotan or Siegried?—that I could not address a single word to him. This scene remains with me as one of the most thrilling of my memories of those terrible, stormy days.

Soldiers had climbed on the back of the coach, and the vehicle was loaded down. The coachman complained that the carriage had very delicate springs and was likely to break under the weight; he begged people to dismount, and at one point even broke out sobbing. Bakúnin thought this viciously funny. (“The tears of the philistine,” he whispered to Wagner, “are the nectar of the gods,” and continued by telling how, earlier, when he'd had to order trees along the Maximilians-Allee in Dresden cut down, so as not to provide shelter for the Prussian invaders, the people who lived on the street had complained volubly of the fate of their “bee-yoo-ti-ful trees.”) But finally Wagner and Heubner dismounted and continued together on foot, while Bakúnin stayed in the coach. While they were walking, some messengers from a group of soldiers the two men spotted on a hill extended an invitation to Heubner to come to Chemnitz and set up his provisional government there. (Wagner was on his way to Chemnitz because his wife had already gone there to be with brother-in-law Brockhaus, and Wagner was going to rejoin her.) When they reached Heubner's Freiberg home, Wagner ate with Bakúnin, Heubner, and Heubner's family, and rested there a while. The exhausted Bakúnin went to sleep sitting on the living room couch, his huge, bearded head falling on Wagner's shoulder.

As Wagner recounts in
Mein Leben
, it was only a mix-up, due to a delayed mailcoach from Freiberg to Chemnitz, on May 9th, that prevented Wagner from ending up again in the same carriage with Heubner and the Russian, who had already ridden on to Chemnitz; when
they announced themselves come to set up the provisional government, they were arrested at their inn.

The invitation from the soldiers to establish the new government there had been a lure and trap set by the opposition officers.

In the course of Wagner's flight, on May 10th, he stopped to attend a rehearsal of
Tannhäuser
his friend Liszt was conducting in Weimar. From there, on the 14th, he wrote to his wife Minna of revolution:

[P]eople of our sort are not destined for this terrible task. We are revolutionaries only in order to
build
on fresh soil; it is
re-creation
that attracts us, not
destruction
, which is why we are not the people whom fate requires. These will arise from the very lowest dregs of society; we and our hearts can have nothing in common with them. You see?
Thus do I bid farewell to revolution
. . . .

I think it's to Wagner's credit that, while he did send the above to Minna, he neither quotes it in
Mein Leben
nor does he express any similar sentiment there. By 1865 he was willing to take responsibility for what he had done—at least for what of it he was willing to admit to. But despite any personal regrets he had at the time, by the 19th of May a Wanted notice appeared in the
Dresdner Anzeiger:

Warrant
. The Royal Kapellmeister Richard Wagner, of this place, being somewhat more closely described below, is wanted for questioning on account of his material participation in the rebellious activities that took place in this city, but has not so far been found . . . Wagner is 37 or 38 years old [Actually he was three days shy of 36], of medium height, has brown hair and a high forehead.

. . . And an unpublished personal description (quoted in his biography by Martin Gregor-Dellin) goes on: “Eyebrows: brown. Eyes: gray-blue. Nose and mouth: well proportioned. Chin: rounded. Wears glasses. Special characteristics:
movements and speech abrupt and rapid
. Clothing: overcoat of dark green buckskin, trousers of dark cloth, velvet waistcoat, silk cravat, ordinary felt hat and boots.”

But Wagner was now more or less safe in Zurich, where he began writing what turned out to be nearly 700 pages in his collected works:
Art and Revolution, The Artwork of the Future
, the notorious anti-Semitic article “Jewry in Music,” and
Opera and Drama
, a theoretical outpouring which was apparently necessary before he could move onward with the music of the
Ring
. There is a great deal of social observation in all of these works, much of it very modern. All of it has been commented on, at length.

But we must examine the Dresden events and what led up to them if we really are to learn of Wagner's politics. We must also examine them because in the year that preceded them and, arguably, during the Dresden Uprising itself, the ideas that shaped the
Ring
were fired, forged, and annealed.

With all the criticism that has fallen on
Mein Leben's
account of Dresden, I can find only three places where Wagner has inarguably omitted pertinent facts.

His most eyebrow-raising abridgement is this: Wagner and Röckel ordered a large number of hand grenades from a brass founder, Karl Oehme, and on May 4th (so Oehme claimed at Röckel's trial for treason) Wagner placed an order for them to be filled with gunpowder.

This is
not
mentioned in
Mein Leben
.

Whether the grenades were used in the Dresden fighting at all is not, in fact, known. One theory is that the men placed the order for their friend Bakúnin and that the grenades ultimately went to Prague, where Bakúnin also had his finger in the fighting. While such an interpretation may be bending over backwards to exonerate Wagner, what I think we can be sure of is that, even if he ordered them, whether subsequently they went off in the streets of Dresden or in the streets of Prague, he did not throw them. And if, by some chance, during the fighting he did, while it pertains to whether, at the time, he did or did not commit a criminal act during the fighting that warranted his imprisonment, in terms of what we are interested in today—the political ideas behind his involvement in the uprising as they were to be expressed in his later work, particularly the
Ring
—, it only makes the extremity of his beliefs that much more intense (and Wagner was nothing if not intense). But it does not change their basic nature.

Wagner's second suppression in
Mein Leben
is not so cataclysmic.

Days after the
second
Palm Sunday concert, on April 8th, 1847, Wagner and his wife, the former actress Minna Planer, with Minna's illegitimate daughter from an adolescent liaison, Natalie (who was raised all her life to believe she was Minna's younger sister), a parrot, and a dog, moved into their new quarters in the second floor apartments of Dresden's beautiful Palais Marcolini, upstairs from a sculptor named Hänel. The palace's spacious French-style gardens were at their disposal, where Wagner would sometimes go out to sit on the Triton in one of the dried-up fountains, orchestrating. The rent was low. The only drawback to the location, Wagner writes, was its inordinate distance from the
theater, where he had to go to rehearse the orchestra and conduct performances.

“. . . I often found the cabfare,” Wagner remarks in
Mein Leben
, “a serious problem.”

Just after Wagner returned from his mother's funeral in Leipzig, the news of Louis Philippe's flight and the proclamation of a Republic in France (February 24, 1848) reached Dresden. February gave way to March, and with it came Germany's March Revolution. King Friedrich August was besieged with petitions to recreate Germany's government structure in a more liberal form, on the French model, while he stubbornly withstood all such demands. “On the evening of one of these really anxious days,” writes Wagner, “when the very air seemed heavy and full of thunderclouds, we gave our third big concert, which was attended, like the first two, by the King and his court.” The program was Mendelssohn's
A-minor Symphony
(Mendelssohn had died that past November while Wagner was in Berlin and the choice was commemorative) and Beethoven's
Fifth
. Just before the concert, Wagner wondered out loud if two such pieces, both in minor keys, might not seem too grim to the audience. His first-chair violinist and concertmaster, Lipinski, quipped to him, however, that after the two opening bars (it was already a performance warhorse), no one ever heard the rest of the
Fifth Symphony
anyway.

Minutes later, Wagner ascended the podium.

As the eighth note of the Fifth rang through the house, someone from the balcony shouted down, “Long live the king!” and the rest of the audience (bourgeois, paying) seemed to hear the remainder of the rich and sprightly music as a paean to, and an expression of, the unified German spirit—breaking into spontaneous and vociferous applause at every stirring passage! What did the thirty-four-year-old conductor actually think of the audience's response, so clear in the house behind him—other than that he was off the hook of having to please them with two major works in minor keys? Was he amused at their simple-minded chauvinism? Was he repelled by the anti-republican sentiments their response was clearly based on? Was he annoyed at the interruptions? Did his own spirits, at the same time (politically? aestheticically?), soar along with theirs? Was he pleased with his own powers, in such a charged field, to move his hearers so? In
Mein Leben
he is, of course, writing
for
Ludwig. I think we can read his silence on the topic, there—as well as the fact that the incident stayed vividly enough in his memory for him to recount it at all—as a sign that his feelings, as he conducted that evening, probably contained elements of all, and were more complex than any, of these.