RICHARD WAGNER. The last of the Titans. By Joachim Kohler. Translated from the German by Stewart Spencer. 688pp. Yale University Press. £29.95 (US $40). 0 300 10422 7
If, on one hand, you ever wanted to know what a swine Richard Wagner was, this is the book to tell you. It does so at length, in reliable detail, calmly, without prurience, perfectly backed with documentation, and in a translation whose only fault is in giving no Translator's Notes for in-house German references. Joachim Kohler sustains his story with new ideas, revises other interpretations and modestly deconstructs Cosima nee Liszt's creation of "Richard Wagner Enterprises Inc".
(This she developed so far as to keep Parsifal exclusive to Bayreuth, prompting George Bernard Shaw to remark in 1889 that it "would almost reconcile me to the custom of suttee"!) Her tirelessly engineered public image of Wagner as a Titan -a Prometheus? an Atlas? -is countered by Kohler's picture of him as his own successive operatic heroes: Tannhauser, Lohengrin, the Dutchman, Tristan, Walther, Wotan, even Parsifal's Saviour.
If, on the other hand, you ever wanted to know how it was that the same Richard Wagner created some of the most ravishing and marvellous music ever composed, how he achieved in his gigantic compositions, note by note, bar by bar, some of the biggest single projects of the imagination ever achieved by any human being in any field of endeavour, then you will not quite find the answer here. The book's limitations in this respect are not exceptional, being second nature to most studies of composers, particularly now that music study is to music as Classical Studies are to Latin. I had three particular doubts as I read Kohler's interpretation of the life and works, and the first has to do with the swinishness.
It's all here: how often Wagner sponged off others, how many women succumbed to his psoriatic charms, what creditors he swindled, where he fled and why, what he said about Jews, how he used everybody, what friends and supporters (from the great Liszt to the sad Ludwig II) he bad-mouthed and in one way or another betrayed. Of course, how he could attract so many absolutely impassioned admirers is far less easy to understand than how he came to quarrel with most of them, including Nietzsche, whose part in the story (like Schopenhauer's, Hegel's and Feuerbach's) is usefully outlined in Kohler's Richard Wagner. But if charisma is puzzling when one doesn't feel it oneself even in the case of contemporaries (Clinton, say), how much more puzzling for this long dead, repulsive little man, Wagner.
Although the book chronicles the outrageous demands Wagner made on everybody he came into contact with, it could have made clearer and more vivid the outrageous demands he made on himself. Hard though he pressed everybody, he pressed himself harder. He allowed nothing to get in the way. Despite a certain impressionistic manner in Kohler's writing -one often needs to search for details of where or when something happened -he describes this hard life well, not least as it is (mis)represented in Wagner's fascinating, peerless auto- biography, My Life. But readers will not find it easy to grasp fully the immensity, in quantity as well as quality, of what Wagner produced, what inhuman effort it required. Do not groan as you read of yet another flight of creditors or misused women: rather, imagine a man over-coming all vexations (financial, physical, emotional) so as to be able to work out those opening chords of Lohengrin or the melody of the Wesendonck Songs. Do not snigger at his multicoloured silk furnishings or self- pampering clothes: something helped him escape into that inner world where he alone could produce those miraculous harmonies as Wotan puts his daughter Brunnhilde to sleep or as Alberich goads his son Hagen, and I for one don't care what it was.
And the sheer energy of the man! To flick through the pages of Tristan or Gotter-dammerung, trying to envisage the effort involved in just writing out their orchestral scores (more than 800 pages for Die Meistersinger alone), is to leave one breathless with wonder. If the opera stories have left various cruxes -why does Wotan have one eye (Bradley's "How old is Hamlet")? Why such-and-such a theme here? Why does Siegfried's love potion feel more contrived than Tristan's? -that is hardly surprising. Just imagine all the preliminary study, the writing of libretti, the gestation periods (with minimal swerving from first intentions), the voluminous theoretical writings (more than any other major composer's), all the living hand to mouth, the travelling, planning, rehearsing, conducting, staging and, not least, fund-raising.
The demands Wagner made on himself were extraordinary. In my opinion, here is the apologia for his impossible behaviour, not the music's consoling beauty. He demanded everything from everybody, but everybody included himself. Here, too, might even be found the seed for Wagner's flourishing, complicated anti Semitism, for I can quite believe that, as well as disliking Mendelssohn's lisp, family privilege and coolness, he simply could not stand the easy solutions Mendelssohn so often took in his music. When a man is trying to pull off a work like Lohengrin, he might well be repelled by Elijah.
