‘Riccardo’ Wagner: the mascot of Venice
The beauty and mystery of the city jolted Wagner's thinking, finds R J Stove
7 August 2009

Richard Wagner, photographed in 1860

Wagner and Venice
By John W Barker
University of Rochester Press, £35

Of the making of Wagner books there is no end. "What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?" Clearly, yes. Wagnerology long ago became a field where not even the most workaholic student could keep up with more than a fraction of the specialist literature.

Besides, Wagner's own eccentricities are fully matched by those of numerous Wagner disciples, a fact emphasised by Wagner expert Bryan Magee (himself as conspicuously sane a historian as ever breathed). "His [Wagner's] work," Magee writes, "seems to have a special appeal for the emotionally isolated or repressed: Nietzsche; Proust living alone in his cork-lined room; Albert Schweitzer, who turned his back on the western world to live out his life in Africa; Bernard Shaw, undersexed and unable to relate to others except through ideas." And these figures represent, of course, Wagnerism's intellectual elite.

Less talented commentators on Wagner have a distressing tendency towards mental derangement. If one may adapt Clive James's observation on film-makers: "Not everyone who writes about Wagner is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy writes about Wagner. It is just one of the things that crazy people want to do, like starting a law suit or sending long, unsolicited letters to people in the public eye ... at least the nutter letter can be written on a low budget."

The resultant problem of plethoric Wagneriana is obvious. How can the mere common reader be expected to distinguish the wheat from the chaff?

Perhaps the best method of doing so, when the umpteenth new Wagner book appears, is to examine its author's résumé. If this gives evidence that he has a life outside Wagner, he could be well worth reading. Best of all is if he has wide musical interests.

John W Barker cannot be faulted in this respect: emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he has published much on medieval politics and has reviewed numerous CDs of Renaissance and Baroque music for the Cincinnati-based American Record Guide.

Wagner stayed in Venice on five occasions altogether, and he died there in 1883. (His 1876 visit overlapped that of Ruskin, but the two men never met.)

In evaluating Wagner's Venetian years, Barker has hit upon an area that even now remains under-explored, no doubt because Italian musicology in general is something of an academic Cinderella.

The relevant sources have lain in Italian libraries for more than a century; but Barker is often the first writer, and almost always the first writer in English, to draw on them. As a consequence, myths which chronicler after chronicler have blithely and lazily repeated crumble to dust at Barker's archival touch.

Particularly worthwhile in this regard is Barker's deployment of contemporary coverage from Venice's two main newspapers: La Venezia (morning) and La Gazzetta di Venezia (afternoon). He has also made thorough use of books by two early Wagnerians: Giuseppe Norlenghi and Marco Panizzardi, both figures so obscure as to have eluded all but the most maniacally comprehensive of previous biographers.

Italy had almost as great an impact on Wagner's thinking as it did on Nietzsche's, even if he showed much greater caginess than Nietzsche about acknowledging it.

Wagner always extolled Italian vocal methods, expecting a mastery of these from the singers whom he directed.

Venice's own beauty and mystery jolted Wagner into genuine reportage, so different from the turbid philosophising that elsewhere dominated his prose. Late in life he casually admitted to Saint-Saëns - first a devotee, afterwards a passionate opponent - that when he re-read his early theoretical writings: "I find I no longer understand them."

At first Wagner's Venetian residence had severely practical reasons. Harassed by Saxony's government, after the abortive Dresden uprising into which he had thrown himself with characteristically rampageous enthusiasm, he needed a bolt-hole beyond the writ of the policeman, the debt collector, or the jealous husband (this last category having made life awkward in Zürich).

Yet La Serenissima grew on him, as it grows eventually on everyone. While he only stayed there a year before returning to Paris in 1859 - there to superintend Tannhäuser's French premiere - he retained fond memories of existence among the canals. So when, in 1882 after Parsifal's completion, angina pectoris forced the 69-year-old Wagner to a comparatively tranquil refuge, there could only be one choice: Venice it was.

"Riccardo Wagner" (for thus journalists italicised his name) became something of a local mascot, in a city all too conscious that creative musical prestige had largely abandoned it since Vivaldi and Albinoni had disappeared from the scene more than a century earlier.

The city's brass band, conducted by one Jacopo Calascione, played Wagner extracts repeatedly in public. If this strikes modern readers as degrading, it should not. Brass band and piano arrangements were among the extremely few means of bringing music to the masses in a pre-gramophone age, and Wagner's stylistic amplitude scarcely lent itself to pianistic transcription. Wagner happily gave Calascione advice, and accepted the latter's homage, even if no doubt superior results emerged when Wagner could be persuaded to wield a baton himself, as he did on an unforgettable occasion in Venice with a proper orchestra. One of this orchestra's members assured Norenghi that under Wagner's direction, "we were working miracles ... we achieved twice what even we believed possible for us, as if against our will".

Meanwhile Wagner had another staunch admirer in Viennese-born impresario Angelo Neumann, of whom he wrote to Bavaria's Ludwig II: "Strangely energetic and extremely devoted to me, in a way which - oddly enough! - I find even today is true of the Jews whom I know." Wagner's wife, Cosima, distrusted him (she had even less time for Jews as Jews than her husband did). Still, Neumann's musical credentials were indisputably solid - he had once sung the small yet crucial role of the Herald in Lohengrin - and after the Ring cycle's Bayreuth world premiere in 1876, he set up the Wandering Wagner Theatre to make the cycle better known.

Berlin, London, Leipzig, Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp, Strasbourg, Basle, Rome, Bologna, Trieste: all these cities, and others, witnessed Neumann-supervised Ring performances, either complete or in the form of concert-hall extracts.

Wagner so liked Neumann that he even toyed with giving him the performing rights to Parsifal, stagings of which he had forbidden outside Bayreuth. At one Neumann brainwave, however, Wagner bridled: there would be no Ring production in Venice itself "as long as I live". Undaunted, Neumann's ensemble mounted such a production within three months of Wagner's death.

All this - and far more, such as the mysterious (and probably unwarranted) rumours of Wagner's belated affair with a soprano who had been one of Parsifal's Flower Maidens - Barker describes with lucid gusto.

He might have been better served by his proofreaders, though. Wagner gave no concerts in "1960", nor were Ruggiero Leoncavallo's dates 1860-1941 (they were 1857-1919).

These, nevertheless, are venial flaws compared with Barker's overall attainment, which demonstrates that there remains abundant room for a new Wagner study when it is as refreshing as this one.




R J Stove lives in Melbourne and is the author of A Student's Guide to Music History (ISI Books, Wilmington, Delaware, 2007)