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Richard Wagner was ‘about as detestable as it is possible for a man to be’. And as for Cosima Wagner…

Never thinking for a moment that I would ever use my Sue Ryder Loyalty Card, what did I discover there a few weeks ago but the first volume of Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, published by Collins 36 years ago, and covering the fairly short period between 1869 and 1877. The 1200 odd pages make it not so much a coffee-table book, more a coffee table. What could it tell me about R (as Cosima inscribed him) that I didn’t already know, or could guess? Well, as it turned out, a great deal – and with the second volume covering the period from 1878 until his death in Venice in 1883 (another 1200 pages, and available in all good bookshops), it looks like my summer will comprise just one book and a hernia.

Back in the summer of 2011 I made a rather limp attempt to grasp the essence of Richard Wagner in Tricky Dicky, and was reminded by the evergreen Malty in the Comments that The Ring Cycle was ‘the greatest music drama ever written’, a statement I would struggle to take issue with. What I do struggle with is not all the ‘nazi stuff’ (who cares what music Adolf liked?), nor the appalling behaviour of both these monsters, nor even the rabid anti-semitism that they wallowed in daily, bad as it undoubtedly was – no, what I am unable to square is how Wagner, as Bernard Levin expressed in The Times of 1978 ‘….was surely unique in the breadth of the gap between his measure as an artist and as a man, in which latter capacity he was about as detestable as it is possible for a man to be’. Levin goes on to suggest that we listen to the marvellous Quintet from Act 3 of Die Meistersinger. Can we ‘hear the darkness that runs through its creator’s story?’

That amazing eighty year old recording is close to the dream-team that the old monster might have imagined in his reveries: Elizabeth Schumann, the soprano of the age, sings Eva; the Dane Lauritz Melchoir, the pre-eminent Wagner tenor for thirty years sings Walther, and the central part of Sachs is taken by the great Austro-Hungarian Bass-Baritone Friedrich Schorr, who sang the role over 150 times. The orchestra is the LSO, the conductor John Barbirolli. Wagner heaven.

Of the ‘detestable’ character there is no sign whatever – in fact Meistersinger stands alone in the canon, not just as a comedy, but as perhaps the ultimate expression in music and words of the soundness and goodness of normal human life, and as such it has always presented a problem to the whole-hearted anti-Wagnerians (and there is an army) who simply cannot deny the beauty of workmanship and texture, and the seemingly inexhaustible variety of invention and device; to quote another commentator, there seems to be an ‘almost Haydn-ish ease of composition’.  The opera was first performed in 1868, and by this time Wagner had spent almost 20 years trying to reshape the very pith of opera into something closer to his own ideal of a ‘music drama’, a fusion of poetry, music and (realistic) dramatic elements. This ‘unification’, this gesamtkunstwerk, and the introduction of leitmotifs (essentially, musical motifs, themes, ideas, that can be used to identify people, places etc, as the ‘music drama’ moves forward), was brought to its apogee in the operas that make up the fifteen hour Ring tetralogy, beginning with Das Rheingold.

I should say at this point that I am no fan of ‘newness’ in the staging of Wagner. I have a very clear idea of how these dramas should look as they unfold, and I find myself alongside the great John Culshaw when he suggested that if a producer elects

to portray the first act of Die Walkure as taking place in a modern railroad station, then so far as I am concerned he has already departed so remotely from Wagner’s intentions that he might just as well have Sieglinde played by a boy soprano who is having a homosexual affair with Hunding until he is eventually seduced by his twin transvestite brother Siegmund.

 If, however, you are lucky enough to find yourself in a good seat at Bayreuth, and you know that the producer is not a madman, you are waiting in almost pitch darkness for the conductor (hidden under the cowl of the stage, along with the orchestra) to signal the start of 150 minutes of unbroken drama in four acts. Then, out of the very depths of that darkness, comes the long, ominous, elemental double-bass E flat, the first sound of Das Rheingold, and what the composer remarked, speaking to Franz Liszt, should sound ‘like the beginning of the world’. Played here by the Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Sir Georg Solti, it also suggests depth and, as we move forward water – we are actually in the water, the water of the Rhine of course. Is this magical realism?

A clue to the obsessive, driven nature of this tiny (5’5″) bundle of energy, is a quote from his diary in the period leading up to the composition of Das Rheingold. He had spent the night in a fever of sleeplessness, and forced himself to take a walk in a pine-forest, hoping to find sleep on his return:

it did not come; but I fell into a kind of somnolent state, in which I suddenly felt as though I were sinking in swiftly flowing water. The rushing sound formed itself in my brain into a musical sound, the chord of E-flat major, which continued re-echoed in broken forms; these broken forms seemed to be melodic passages of increasing motion, yet the pure triad of E-flat major never changed, but seemed by its continuance to impart infinite significance to the element in which I was sinking. I awoke in a sudden terror from my doze, feeling as though the waves were rushing high above my head. I at once recognised that the orchestral overture to the Rheingold, which must have long lain latent within me, had at last been revealed to me.

At about five hours, the next part of the tetralogy Die Walkure is roughly twice as long as Rheingold. In a way, the listener needs to prepare for it, perhaps by taking the day off before heading to the theatre – the sight of grey-suited business types falling asleep in the second act is quite common. But notwithstanding any of this, Walkure remains by far the most popular element of the Ring Cycle – probably because it contains a number of ‘hits’: the Magic Fire music at the end of the opera; Wotan’s moving farewell to his daughter; the so-called Ride of the Valkyries at the start of Act 3 – and, in Act 2, Wotan’s lengthy monologue, an acting and singing examination that tests the very best. But perhaps the most transcendentally beautiful moment comes in Act 1, with Siegmund’s aria ‘Wintersturme’, a paean to his growing love for his twin sister Sieglinde. With adultery and incest just across the glade, one might imagine more disturbing sounds, but no – what we get is the innocent beauty of arguably the finest love music Wagner ever wrote, sung here by the great Canadian tenor (now retired) Ben Heppner, recording the piece in Dresden with the Staatskapelle.

So, ‘Richard & Cosima at Home’, the invitation that nobody in their right mind would want to receive. She, daughter of another mountebank, Franz Liszt, married the conductor Hans von Bulow and, almost immediately, began an affair with Wagner that, whilst she was still married to von Bulow, produced two children and the seed of a third. He, pleading his adoration of her from the outset, can be found writing a lecherous letter to another lover a few days later, this mistress being the daughter of a Viennese pork butcher (‘I hope your pink drawers are ready, too’). I will only get the measure of this appalling couple when I have swallowed ‘Act 2’ of Cosima’s Diaries, and digested the horrors. The genius of Richard is almost beyond dispute. For Cosima there seems to be no such salvation, save the fact that her life up until the moment she met Wagner appears, in retrospect, to be a leading up to that fateful meeting and the 14 year union that followed; and the 47 years that she lived after Wagner’s death, were simply devoted to keeping the flame of his genius alive. In short, she devoted her life to R, and for that she earns a modicum of grudging respect from this writer.