Richard Wagner, Composer of Operas

by John F. Runciman

CHAPTER XVIII

'PARSIFAL'; THE END; THE MAN

I

After Wagner had completed the Ring, a work which, in regard to its gigantic size and proportions, stands without a parallel in music, he was an exhausted and beaten man. Outwardly he was a highly prosperous musician—more successful from some points of view than Mendelssohn or Meyerbeer: at least he had, without means, achieved a greater triumph than they, starting with their fathers' thousands or millions, had dreamed of. No Mendelssohn, no Meyerbeer, no Rossini, would have dreamed of gaining a king, even the king of a minor bankrupt state, as his lackey—and his generous paymaster. After the first Bayreuth festival a Rossini would have retired as swiftly as such a person could with his percentage of the gross profits, leaving the guarantors to straighten the little matter of the deficit; Meyerbeer had too much of cold cunning in him to have gone on such an adventure at all; Mendelssohn would have paid up everything and shaken the dust of his Bayreuth off his feet for ever and a six-days week longer. I take these three because they are three of the most successful financial composers the world has seen; minor prophets of their order might be added. That is what they would have done: made a little money they did not need and retired from a hard conflict. Wagner was more successful than they. He never accumulated the thousands of marks or ducats or francs that they did: he did not want them, but in proportion to his needs he accumulated more; he was richer than they were, as Diogenes in his tub was richer than Alexander. Wagner's tub, it may be remarked, was a preciously comfortable one, and he made no pretence about it being anything else. He was a successful man of business; in spirit he was broken, exhausted, defeated.

Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, Venice

That is the first point to be considered; the next is a corollary. This man of dashed, broken hopes still needed the driving force of either human passions, griefs or sorrows, or of great human ideals, before he could compose ten notes. It is no desire of mine to scoff at the Schopenhauerian, Feuerbachian notions working in Wagner's brain when he planned the Ring, and wrote its finest music; in art—as in business, if it comes to that—one judges by results and results only. But we can see that it was these ridiculous ideas, as perhaps I have already pointed out, that were the postilion's whip to Wagner's Pegasus. Of some men it can be said that no one knows anything of the postilion's whip: of every artist concerning whom a fair tail of facts is available and consultable we find a very distinct whip. We may laugh at the idea of the "stories" to which Beethoven worked: who would laugh at the Fifth Symphony would not even be laughed at. And I have not the slightest hesitation in affirming that when Wagner set to work on Parsifal his most eager and greedy desire was to show the world that he desired nothing. Knowing Bayreuth a failure, fancying his whole life a failure, from a particular point of view, one idea seized hold on him—- the idea that those who did not like his music were in a pitiable condition, and compassion exhorted him to rescue them, to redeem them. He meant to heap coals of fire upon a generation that refused to recognise him as a prophet. He did it—with a double vengeance: he made the detractors come to his knees and he made a fortune out of them—them alone. For Bayreuth never became a profitable investment for Jewish money until the one great Christian drama of modern times was produced there.

Parsifal, in one form or another, had long fermented in Wagner's brain. At first it was—incongruous though the thing may seem—either Jesus of Nazareth or Wieland the Smith; then Parzival grew out of the Siegfried idea; and at length, stimulated by the attentions and help of poor Ludwig, he settled on Parsifal. These are matters not of opinion, but of historical fact. Ludwig, when not masquerading in woman's clothing, or ordering it from Paris, or appearing at private performances in one opera or another, suffered from great attacks of religion; and, unhappily for the art of music, what appealed to his diseased brain from one side appealed to Wagner's tired brain from the other side. Ludwig asked him to complete Parsifal and he did so. I doubt whether without the royal request he ever would have done so. But in doing so he, as Americans say, "struck lucky." Throughout Western Europe you have only to bawl the word "religion" and your fortune is made; in America it is the same; on the two continents innumerable fortunes have been made by bawling the word "religion." So Wagner's conviction, Ludwig's desire, and advertisement possibilities, all coincided; and thenceforth Bayreuth flourished—financially, if not artistically or morally.

I shall devote little attention to Parsifal. The plot would disgrace Wagner's memory if we did not know it to be the work of his tired-out old age. The central idea is that of Renunciation; and I will give the reader a skeleton, but a fair skeleton, of the plot, and ask him, Who renounces anything? who gains anything by renouncing? or loses anything by not renouncing? and, above all, what is any one called on to renounce?