SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
The opera public
The opera public would probably be very astonished to learn that in Siegfried they applaud a revolutionary work, expressly directed by Wagner against this detested Capital, whose downfall would have been so dear to him. And he never doubted that he was expressing grief in all these pages of shining joy.
Wagner went to Zurich after a stay in Paris, where he felt «so much distrust for the artistic world and horror for the restraint that he was forced to put upon himself» that he was seized with a nervous malady which nearly killed him. He returned to work at Der Junge Siegfried, and he says it brought him great joy.
«But I am unhappy in not being able to apply myself to anything but music. I know I am feeding on an illusion, and that reality is the only thing worth having. My health is not good, and my nerves are in a state of increasing weakness. My life, lived entirely in the imagination and without sufficient action, tires me so, that I can only work with frequent breaks and long intervals of rest; otherwise I pay the penalty with long and painful suffering…. I am very lonely. I often wish for death.
«While I work I forget my troubles; but the moment I rest they come flocking about me, and I am very miserable. What a splendid life is an artist’s! Look at it! How willingly would I part with it for a week of real life.
«I can’t understand how a really happy man could think of serving art. If we enjoyed life, we should have no need of art. When the present has nothing more to offer us we cry out our needs by means of art. To have my youth again and my health, to enjoy nature, to have a wife who would love me devotedly, and fine children–for this I would give up all my art. Now I have said it–give me what is left.»
Thus the poem of the Tetralogy was written with doubts, as he said, as to whether he should abandon art and all belonging to it and become a healthy, normal man–a son of nature. He began to compose the music of the poem while in a state of suffering, which every day became more acute.
«My nights are often sleepless; I get out of bed, wretched and exhausted, with the thought of a long day before me, which will not bring me a single joy. The society of others tortures me, and I avoid it only to torture myself. Everything I do fills me with disgust. It can’t go on for ever. I can’t stand such a life any longer. I will kill myself rather than live like this…. I don’t believe in anything, and I have only one desire–to sleep so soundly that human misery will exist no more for me. I ought to be able to get such a sleep somehow; it should not be really difficult.»
For distraction he went to Italy; Turin, Genoa, Spezia, and Nice. But there, in a strange world, his loneliness seemed so frightful that he became very depressed, and made all haste back to Zurich. It was there he wrote the happy music of Das Rheingold. He began the score of Die Walküre at a time when his normal condition was one of suffering. Then he discovered Schopenhauer, whose philosophy only helped to confirm and crystallise his instinctive pessimism. In the spring of 1855 he went to London to give concerts; but he was ill there, and this fresh contact with the world only served to annoy him further. He had some difficulty in again taking up Die Walküre; but he finished it at last in spite of frequent attacks of facial erysipelas, for which he afterwards had to undergo a hydropathic cure at Geneva. He began the score of Siegfried towards the end of 1856, while the thought of Tristan was stirring within him. In Tristan he wished to depict love as «a dreadful anguish»; and this idea obsessed him so completely that he could not finish Siegfried. He seemed to be consumed by a burning fever; and, abandoning Siegfried in the middle of the second act, he threw himself madly into Tristan. «I want to gratify my desire for love,» he says, «until it is completely satiated; and in the folds of the black flag that floats over its consummation I wish to wrap myself and die.»[109] Siegfried was not finished until 5 February, 1871, at the end of the Franco-Prussian war–that is fourteen years later, after several interruptions.
Such is, in a few words, the history of this heroic idyll. It is perhaps as well to remind the public now and then that the hours of distraction they enjoy by means of art may represent years of suffering for the artist.
[Footnote 109: The quotations from Wagner are taken from his letters to Roeckel, Uhlig, and Liszt, between 1851 and 1856.]
this was: The Opera Public
go to next chapter: the amusing account Tolstoy gave
