The German Genius

lay with the German form, the genre of his three best-known early operas— Der fliegende Holländer ( The Flying Dutchman ; 1841), Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1848). Joachim Köhler says The Flying Dutchman was Wagner’s “French Revolution” though no one noticed it at the time.
    There then followed, not a crisis exactly, but a period of reflection. By this stage, Wagner had been married twice, at first to a beautiful actress who had no idea what kind of genius her husband was and wanted only for him to be conventionally successful. His second marriage, to Cosima, an illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt, was considerably happier. Much less beautiful, she devoted her life to him. 3
    His early politics had led him into friendship with Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist, and to Wagner’s presence on the barricades in the Dresden uprising of 1849. In 1843, following Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman , both of which were well received, he accepted the position of Kapellmeister in Dresden, where Bakunin was living. Wagner was just twenty-nine and in his autobiography says he found the anarchist “a truly likeable and sensitive person.” Bakunin of course knew Marx, though he could be anti-Semitic. 4 Wagner and Bakunin formed part of the leadership of the uprising in Dresden. As a result of the failed revolution, Wagner was forced into exile in Switzerland, a wanted man in Germany.
    During his first years in Switzerland, he composed scarcely any music but produced instead a number of prose writings that made his name more widely known. Two of them are still much read: Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft ( The Work of Art of the Future ; 1849) and Oper und Drama (1850–51). These are both important works of theory; and with his theory of the “complete embrace” of art in place, he set about trying out his ideas, which were to lead to music very different from anything composed before. 5
    In the first place, he produced the libretti of the four operas that comprise Der Ring des Nibelungen : Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (usually translated as “The Twilight of the Gods”). At the same time, he wrote the music for the first two. Then came a long break. After Act II of Siegfried he gave up on The Ring and, for twelve years, never went back to it. He wasn’t idle: he composed Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg . Only then did he go back to The Ring , finishing Siegfried and writing the music for Götterdämmerung . Only one opera followed the Ring—Parsifal , which premiered in 1882, the year before his death.
    His personal situation was rather more dramatic than this sounds. When he composed Rheingold , Valkyrie, and Tristan , Wagner was already in his fifties, but he had little prospect of the works ever being performed. Moreover, he was in debt in Vienna and, to avoid imprisonment, he was forced to flee and so was “on the run” for the second time. 6 At this point, the Wagner story, if it doesn’t have a fairy-tale ending, has at least a fairy-tale middle. Ludwig II, the king of Bavaria, was an eighteen-year-old passionate soul who felt as strongly about Wagner’s music as Wagner did himself. Out of the blue he offered the composer funds to stage his operas and, using the same funds, Wagner built his own opera house and launched the Bayreuth Festivals, which continue to this day.
    Before Schopenhauer, the thinker who had the greatest influence on Wagner was Ludwig Feuerbach (see Chapter 11). In his autobiography, Wagner says he “discovered” Feuerbach while living in Dresden and that he was “the sole adequate philosopher of the modern age.” In particular, and as the poet Georg Herwegh was the first to note, he was influenced by Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums ( The Essence of Christianity ), which, it will be remembered, argued that nothing exists except man and nature, that therefore “higher beings” are merely a reflection of our own anxieties and ambitions (Wagner dedicated one of his own books, The Work of Art of the Future , to Feuerbach). 7 The aspect of Feuerbach’s argument that appealed to Wagner was his idea that the reason religious belief has been almost universal is that it “meets basic human needs” and is not really interested in, say, biology or physics. 8 Religion has to be looked at not for what it reveals about heaven or fundamental aspects of reality, but for what it reveals about ourselves . 9 These ideas were