ends too. It sounds not only as if Wagner is making a declaration of having found his real self as a composer, but is also showing how he relates to the most admired figures and works in the tradition from which he emerges. For the raging first pages are in D minor, the demonic key of Mozart and Beethoven. Don Giovanni opens in it, and equally cataclysmically. No other operatic overture before Holländer begins so arrestingly, and with music that is part of the fabric of the main action. And Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a talismanic work for Wagner, and one which he had made a piano arrangement of when he was seventeen, has given nineteenth-century music its definitive D minor statement. Though Beethoven begins almost inaudibly, while Wagner’s Overture rages, they are both elemental, and both use the same material and some of the same devices. Wagner, as always, has his roots in the physical, even though his ultimate intentions are metaphysical; Beethoven evokes a primeval chaos which has no truck with physicality. It would be pointless to press the similarities, but if they were not conscious, that is all the more striking. At any rate, the demands Wagner is going to make on us are clear, and they are immense.
But it is not the Overture that I want to dwell on, rather the drama it portends: for, quite apart from the elemental sweep of Holländer, it is a simple, but certainly a serious treatment of a subject which is at the top of Wagner’s agenda throughout the whole oeuvre, and so, besides its intrinsic compellingness, it is a valuable way into his world, as the three works which precede it are not.
The story is familiar. The Flying Dutchman, whose story Wagner took from Heine, but without the irony – Wagner is the least ironic of artists, at least within his individual works: the ironies exist in their relationship to one another – is, in crude outline, the prototype of the Wagnerian protagonist: someone who has done something so terrible that he has to spend the rest of his existence looking for salvation, or redemption, which comes only through the agency of another human being, even when, as in Wagner’s first three and last dramas, there is a certain amount of theological background (usually vague and non-specific). Though it is characteristic of Wagner’s central figures that they have committed a crime – in the Dutchman’s case, an oath that he would round the Cape at any cost, for which Satan doomed him to eternal voyaging; in Tannhäuser’s that of sojourning with Venus; in Wotan’s that of making a bargain which he has no intention of keeping – it seems that really Wagner was a Schopenhauerian from the start. He only read Schopenhauer in 1854, instantly becoming a disciple.
Schopenhauer claims that living itself is the original sin. That Wagner always held a position which amounts to that comes out in the fact that the ‘redeemers’ in his works long to redeem just as much as the sinners long to be redeemed. Hence it is entirely appropriate, and could well have been a planned effect, unquestionably casting light back over a lifetime’s work, that the final words of Parsifal, intoned by the chorus, are ‘Erlösung dem Erlöser’ (‘Redemption to the redeemer’). Taken by themselves, or just in the context of Parsifal, they are a riddle. But it may not be too difficult to solve it if one surveys the series of characters, often though not always female, who do the redeeming. In Der fliegende Holländer Senta needs the Dutchman quite as badly as he needs her. Her life is without a genuine purpose, it only has a visionary one until he appears on the scene. The various ways in which the sinner/redeemer relationship is worked through is among the great fascinating topics for meditating on Wagner’s works – and one that, in the notoriously vast ‘literature’ on them, is weirdly neglected.
So the Dutchman himself, given a teasing chance every seven years of setting foot on land to find a woman who will sacrifice herself for him, begins the Duet with Senta, which is the heart of the work, with an unaccompanied solo which is more groan than song, and more interiorised recitative than melody. But it does move, gradually, into song, quietly punctuated by the orchestra, as he feels the faintest stirrings of hope, exhaustion hardly daring to give place to a new attempt at salvation. Then, to tense tremolandi from the strings, he moves into a statement of what he feels, which is expressed by a slowly rising melodic line and then a declamatory mode which hovers between song and enhanced speech. The words:
Die düstre Glut, die hier ich fühle brennen,
Sollt’ ich Unseliger die Liebe nennen?
Ach nein! Die Sehnsucht ist es nach dem Heil,
Würd’ es durch solchen Engel mir zuteil!
(The sombre glow that I feel burning here,
Should I, wretched one, call it love?
Ah no! It is the longing for salvation,
might it come to me through such an angel!)
In his justly famous essay ‘Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner’, Thomas Mann quotes these lines and rightly comments, ‘never before had such complex thoughts, such convoluted emotions been sung or put into singable form’. And he adds, ‘What a penetrating insight into the complex depths of an emotion!’ (Thomas Mann Pro and Contra Wagner, p. 97). But in his account of what it is that the Dutchman is discovering himself to be feeling, Mann seems to me to go astray. For he takes it that the Dutchman is in love with Senta, whereas it is a case of his mis-identifying, and then correctly re-identifying, a feeling. Just as Wagner is, according to Nietzsche’s sneer, always thinking about redemption, so he is always meditating on love. And since the soaring last melody to be heard in the Ring, often taken to be its final ‘message’, has routinely been miscalled ‘Redemption through Love’ by the commentators – an error which Wagner himself corrected, via Cosima – it is easy to conclude that his preoccupation is, if not always, then very often with how love might redeem.
But that is to assume that Wagner has a fixed idea of what love and redemption are, and is concerned with the mechanism by which the former effects the latter. Whereas his works constitute, along with a great deal else, a sustained investigation, often amounting to downright critique, of what love may be, and of what it is we seek when we seek redemption. He inherited an extremely well-worn vocabulary, which embodies the conflicting valuations of two millennia of Western civilisation; and thus he found himself in a profound predicament. Either, because his views were so radical and disruptive, he could coin a new vocabulary, but one which we wouldn’t understand, or would rapidly assimilate to the old one. Or he could use the familiar terms, with all their ambiguities and conflicting forces, and see how they could be put to new but indispensable work, thanks partly to the dramas in which they are saliently employed, and partly to the effects of the music, itself an integral part of the drama.
At no point in his life, so far as I am aware, did he put his problem and his mission in such bald terms, though he might (could) have done. For he was a slow developer, and what he achieved was an ever-increasing complexity of thought and feeling on these matters. That was something he was certainly aware of; and his endless retrospectives, autobiographical writings, reinterpretations of his life and art, are to be judged in large part not as being historically accurate – their failings in that respect have been at least sufficiently castigated – but as attempts to make sense of the process of making sense itself. His is a curious case, possibly a unique one, of an extraordinarily articulate artist who simultaneously mistrusted his own fluency. Hence his compulsive need to go on talking and writing. He viewed his works with a mixture of proud possessiveness and bemusement. And in some cases he not only gave conflicting accounts of what they meant, but remained dissatisfied with the works themselves. Tannhäuser, which he rightly felt to be unsatisfactory but too good to write off – it was also highly popular with his contemporaries – was something that, a few weeks before his death, he told Cosima ‘he still owed the world’.
But more often than revisions after the deed, he went in for, or found himself involved in, lengthy gestations. It has often been noted that halfway through his life Wagner had drawn up the agenda for his artistic productivity for the second half, as well as planning several major works which he never executed, and would not have done, though he sometimes wrote the complete text. Evidently he could not have considered someone else as a librettist. He sometimes said of his works that he had written the text and now all that remained to be done was to set it to music, and commentators with less perceptiveness than they need have taken it that the music was being composed in his