Читать книгу Being Wagner: The Triumph of the Will - Simon Callow - Страница 13

In 1813, when Wagner was born, the instability which is at the heart of his temperament and his work was the universal condition. Napoleon’s plans for world dominion were unravelling, but not quickly, and not without massive fallout. A year after their humiliating defeat in Russia in 1812, in October 1813 the French, fielding an army of young untried soldiers, fought a savage battle almost literally on Wagner’s doorstep, right in the centre of the city of Leipzig where he had been born, five months earlier, on 22 May, in a modest apartment over a pub in the Jewish district. Leipzig was the second city of the newly created kingdom of Saxony-Anhalt, one of the nearly forty sovereign states that constituted the hollow remnant of the Holy Roman Empire, itself the heir to the Western Roman Empire. Germany as such existed only as an idea. An increasingly potent idea, but an idea nonetheless. The Saxons were Napoleon’s allies, and along with the French they were brutally crushed in October 1813 by the brilliantly organised coalition of Prussian, Swedish, Austrian and Russian forces; during the battle – the biggest engagement in military history before the First World War – Napoleon’s armies were in and around the city, fighting and losing the heaviest pitched battle of the entire interminable war. Over the three days of the battle there were 100,000 losses, near enough: 45,000 French, 54,000 allies; just disposing of the corpses was a huge undertaking, and rotting bodies were still visible six months after the cessation of hostilities. The citizens were in a state of abject terror. The world seemed to be falling apart: and it was. Nothing would be the same again. Wagner claimed that his father, Carl Friedrich Wagner, a clerk in the police service, died during the hostilities as a result of the stress – that, and the nervous fever which had seized the city.

Richard, no stranger himself to nervous fever, of both the physical and the creative variety, was the ninth and last of the Wagners’ children. He was baptised in St Thomas’s church, the very church where Johann Sebastian Bach, in the previous century, had served as cantor for twenty-five years. This omen was not followed any time soon by evidence of musical gifts in the child; indeed, as a little boy Richard’s inclination and talent were all for the theatre, no doubt because his mother’s new husband, Ludwig Geyer, a family friend, was an actor. Wagner’s mother Johanna had remarried just nine months after her first husband’s death; young Richard was given his stepfather’s name and was accordingly known for his first fourteen years as Richard Geyer. Some fifty years later, Wagner came upon passionate letters from Geyer written to Johanna while her first husband was still alive; it was clear from them that she and Geyer were already lovers. So whose son was he? The police clerk’s, or the actor’s? Who was he? Like more than one of his characters, he could never be entirely sure, but it was Ludwig Geyer’s portrait he carried around with him to the day he died – not Carl Friedrich Wagner’s.

After the marriage, the newly-weds moved, with the children, to the Saxon capital, Dresden, where Geyer was a member of the royal theatre company. Little Richard’s new life was highly agreeable to him: Geyer, a deft and successful portrait painter as well as an actor, was a kind, funny step-father and the house was always aswarm with theatre people and musicians, among them Carl Maria von Weber. The great composer was music director of the Dresden opera, but also conductor of the theatre company, for whose productions he wrote incidental music. Wagner remembered him being in and out of the house all day long, hobbling around bandy-legged, his huge spectacles on the end of his large nose and wearing a long, grey, old-fashioned coat like something out of one of Wagner’s favourite E. T. A. Hoffmann stories. The boy was an insatiable reader, losing himself in the newly published fairy tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm; though showing no gift for performing music, he was obsessed by it, listening spellbound to the military brass bands which paraded up and down the streets, tootling out good old German folk tunes. Best of all, he had easy access to the theatre, where he could play as long as he liked in the props shop and the wardrobe department; he had no skills as a painter, Geyer noted, but his imagination knew no bounds, and his stepfather encouraged it.

And then, quite suddenly, Geyer was gone, when Richard was just eight, struck down at the age of forty-two. Arriving at the deathbed, the boy was sent to the room next door by his sobbing mother and told to play something: he had had some elementary lessons in the little country school he attended, and obliged with ‘Üb immer treu und Redlichkeit’, a sober transformation of Papageno’s playful ditty ‘Ein mädchen oder Weibchen’ from The Magic Flute, with pious words to match:

Use always fidelity and honesty

Up to your cold grave;

And stray not one inch

From the ways of the Lord

Hearing the lad play the sombre little piece, Geyer murmured, as he slipped away, ‘Is it possible the boy has some talent?’

Once Geyer was dead – the second father Wagner had lost – little thought was given to his dying question: her youngest son’s musical abilities was low on the widow’s list of priorities. The decent sum of money Geyer had left her soon ran out; Johanna took in lodgers, including, for a time, the distinguished composer and violinist Louis Spohr, so music was always in the air. In a household filled with musically gifted children, only Richard had shown no aptitude for performing it, as his mother helpfully informed Weber, in Richard’s presence. In fact, apparently unnoticed by Johanna, he was utterly consumed by music. The sound of a brass band tuning up put him, he said, into a state of mystic excitement; the striking of fifths on the violins seemed to him like a greeting from the spirit world. Later he developed a crush on a young man who played the overture to Weber’s new opera Der Freischütz on the piano. Whenever the hapless youth came to the house, Richard begged him to play it over and over and over again. At twelve, he finally persuaded his mother to let him have piano lessons, which he continued with only up to the point where he was able to bash out the Freischütz overture for himself. From then on he bashed out every score he could get his hands on; his skill at the piano never improved to the end of his days. All his performances – and he was a compulsive performer – were a triumph of feeling over technique and mind over fingers; the same effort of will and imagination somehow, fifty years later, enabled him to play and sing through the entire Ring cycle, evidently to overwhelming effect.

For a year after Geyer’s death, to save money, young Richard had been shunted aimlessly around his relatives, from Eisleben to Leipzig and back again; en route he picked up the art of acrobatics, a skill he proudly displayed to the end of his life, manifesting startling flexibility in his late sixties. Back in Dresden at last, he was sent to the city’s famous old grammar school, the Nicolaischule. Johanna was determined that he should be properly educated, desperate above all else that he should never become an actor. Three out of her nine children had done so, with some success, but to her the theatre was beneath contempt, barely an art at all, certainly not to be compared with the poetry or the painting she so admired. Severe – Wagner said he could never once remember her having embraced him – and strongly pious, she was given to leading impromptu family prayer sessions from her bed, dispensing moral precepts to each of her children in turn. She was determined to make a serious young man out of Richard.

All in vain. He was a terrible student, lazy and wilful, refusing to study anything that failed to engage his imagination, which left exactly two subjects: history and literature – ancient Greek history and literature to be precise, with a bit of Shakespeare thrown in. His forte was recitation. At twelve, he made a big success speaking Hector’s farewell from the Iliad, followed by ‘To be or not to be’ – in German, of course, both of them: languages, he said, were too much like hard work. Nevertheless, even in translation, Greek plays, Greek myths, and Greek history grabbed him by the throat from an early age. He wrote copiously himself, great poetic screeds, blood-spattered epics: it was the gruesome, he said, that aroused his keenest interest, invading his dreams, and giving him, night after night, shattering nightmares from which he would wake shrieking; understandably his brothers and sisters refused to sleep in the same room with him. He seems to have been, to put it mildly, a bit of a problem child. There may have been some anxiety – some uncertainty – in the air. There was very likely a sense in the household that Richard was Geyer’s son. Nor did he fit in at school: a histrionic, hyperactive, oversensitive little chap with a nasty habit of bursting into tears every five minutes, but nonetheless he somehow managed to corral some of his school fellows into giving a performance (heavily abridged, one can only assume) of his favourite opera, Weber’s Der Freischütz. In the opera a young man with ambitions to succeed the Head Forester and marry his daughter is outshot by a rival; frustrated, he turns to his saturnine colleague Kaspar, who gives him a magic bullet, promising to give him more if he will come with him to the Wolf’s Ravine, which is where they go at the end of the second act.

In that famous scene, which terrified its first audiences and positively obsessed the young Wagner, the central characters, the hero Max and his darkly brooding friend Kaspar, repair at midnight to the fearsome ravine, deep in the woods. The clearing they are heading for is a vertiginously deep woodland glen, planted with pines and surrounded by high mountains, out of which a waterfall roars. The full moon shines wanly; in the foreground is a withered tree struck by lightning and decayed inside; it seems to glow with an unearthly lustre. On the gnarled branch of another tree sits a huge owl with fiery, circling eyes; on another perch crows and wood birds. Kaspar, in thrall to the devil, is laying out a circle of black boulders in the middle of which is a skull; a few paces away are a pair of torn-off eagle’s wings, a casting ladle, and a bullet mould:

Moonmilk fell on weeds!

Uhui!

moans a chorus of Invisible Spirits,

Spiders web is dewed with blood!

Uhui!

Ere the evening falls again –

Uhui!

Will the gentle bride be slain!

Uhui!

E’re the next descent of night,

Will the sacrifice be done!

Uhui! Uhui!

In the distance, the clock strikes twelve. Kaspar completes the circle of stones, pulls his hunting knife out and plunges it into the skull. Then, raising the knife with the skull impaled on it, he turns round three times and calls out:

Samiel! Samiel! Appear!

By the wizard’s cranium,

Samiel, Samiel, appear!

Samiel appears. Kaspar, who has already sold his soul to this woodland devil, tries to do a deal with it: Samiel can have Max instead of him. The Spirit agrees; Max, knowing nothing of this, arrives and together – in spite of a scary warning from his mother’s ghost, which suddenly looms up – he and Kaspar cast seven magic bullets, six of which will find their mark, the seventh will go wherever Samiel decrees. Finally, at the very last moment, and thanks to the intervention of an ancient hermit, the seventh bullet, instead of killing Max, finds its way into Kaspar’s heart. Max is redeemed, and is free to marry his beloved Agathe.

Despite the redemptive ending this is gruesome stuff, all right, and strangely disturbing. The old story stirs up memories of a pagan German past, of nomadic warriors who come from the dark and terrible forest, where, in the grip of demonic powers, they commune with spirits. Weber tapped into all of that, creating German Romantic opera at a stroke, and scaring the pants off his audiences, not least sixteen-year-old Richard Wagner; its atmosphere, and its music, entered into his soul.

Meanwhile his flagrant neglect of his schoolwork finally forced a crisis, which he precipitated by disclosing to his family that he had written a play, Leubald and Adelaïde, loosely based, he said, on Hamlet, King Lear, Richard III and Macbeth, with a few bits of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen thrown in for good measure. It was essentially Hamlet, he said, with the interesting difference that the hero, visited by the ghost of his murdered father, is driven to acts of homicidal revenge and goes mad – really mad, unlike Hamlet: in a frenzy, he stabs his girlfriend to death then, in a final blood-drenched tableau, he kills himself. The total roll call of the dead by the end of the play is forty-two. Or so Wagner said. In fact, as the recently rediscovered text reveals, it was no more than twelve, which tells us that Wagner was not averse to sending up his youthful self.

Whether it was twelve corpses or forty-two, the family were horrified to think what dark and desperate thoughts, how much violence and death, were swirling around inside the sixteen-year-old’s brain. Not least disturbing among the play’s catalogue of murders, rape and incestuous love – Adelaide is Leubald’s half-sister – is the prominence given to the Hamlet-like murder of Leubald’s father by his own brother; he then swiftly marries the widow, which might have seemed rather close to home for Johanna Wagner. All through the outraged tirades which rained down on his head, Wagner was laughing inwardly, he said, because they didn’t know what he knew: that his work could only be rightly judged when set to music, music which he himself would write – was indeed about to start composing immediately. The fact that he had no idea how to go about such a thing was a minor obstacle. Under his own steam, he found a fee-paying music lending library and took out Johann Bernhard Logier’s elementary compositional handbook, Method of Thorough-bass. He kept it so long, studying it so intently, that the fees accumulated alarmingly; the words ‘borrow’ and ‘own’ were always interchangeable in Wagner’s mind. This particular music lending library was, as it happens, run by the implacable Friedrich Wieck, whose daughter Clara was before very long about to defy him by marrying Robert Schumann; Wagner failed to deflect him, and so, at the age of sixteen, he found himself being pursued for debt, an experience with which he would become all too familiar. His family was eventually called on to bail him out; that too was a pattern that became wearyingly familiar.

His family’s dismay at having to pay was matched by their horror at discovering the nature of Richard’s musical ambitions: to be an aspiring performer is one thing – at least there is a chance of earning a living. But to want to be a composer is quite another thing, a recipe for penury. He was not to be gainsaid: the willpower that was to drive his life forward was already fully formed: he was going to be a composer. Faced with the inevitable, the family procured him lessons in harmony (which bored him) and in violin (which tortured them), but neither the boredom nor the torture lasted very long: no sooner were both begun than they were abandoned. He went his own way; for him it was the only way possible. What really mattered to him was cultivating his imagination. He immersed himself in the writing of that phenomenal figure Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann – critic, composer, storyteller, journalist, embodiment and avatar of everything that was dark and fantastical in German Romanticism. Above all for the young Wagner, Hoffmann was the creator of the misunderstood musical genius Johannes Kreisler, rejected by society but certain of his own greatness; for Kreisler music is nothing less than a form of possession:

Unable to utter a word, Kreisler seated himself at the grand piano and struck the first chords of the duet as if dazed and confused by some strange intoxication … in the greatest agitation of mind, with an ardour which, in performance, was certain to enrapture anyone to whom Heaven had granted an even passable ear … soon both voices rose on the waves of the song like shimmering swans, now aspiring to rise aloft, to the radiant, golden clouds with the beat of rushing wings, now to sink dying in a sweet amorous embrace in the roaring currents of chords, until deep sighs heralded the proximity of death, and with a wild cry of pain the last Addio welled like a fount of blood from the wounded breast.

Young Wagner gobbled up these stories, as well as devouring Hoffmann’s intensely imagined analyses of Beethoven’s music – less critical appreciation than Dionysiac trance.

Beethoven’s instrumental music unveils before us the realm of the mighty and the immeasurable. Here shining rays of light shoot through the darkness of night and we become aware of giant shadows swaying back and forth, moving ever closer around us and destroying us but not the pain of infinite yearning, in which every desire, leaping up in sounds of exultation, sinks back and disappears. Only in this pain, in which love, hope and joy are consumed without being destroyed, which threatens to burst our hearts with a full-chorused cry of all the passions, do we live on as ecstatic visionaries

– which could easily be a description of Wagner’s own mature music. Intoxicated with all this, the seventeen-year-old plunged in at the deep end, applying himself to the monumental task of making a piano transcription of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – a work written, in the view of most contemporary musicians, when the composer was already half mad. That was in itself enough to recommend it to Wagner. Weber had remarked on hearing the first performance of the Seventh Symphony that Beethoven was ‘ripe for the madhouse’; and the Ninth went further. It was the nineteenth century’s Rite of Spring, considered unplayable, incoherent, crude, the ne plus ultra of all that was fantastic and incomprehensible. To Wagner it became, in his own words, ‘the mystical goal of all the strange thoughts and desires’ he had concerning music; the opening sustained fifths, he said, seemed to him to be the spiritual keynote of his own life. Its darkness, its mystery, its implication of profound chaos, found an answering echo in his teenage soul, and never ceased to connect to him at the deepest level. He returned to this music again and again throughout his life; it was played at the opening of the first Bayreuth Festival and has been played at every opening since. It was, he felt, what music should be. What his music should be, though he had no idea how that might come to pass. The adolescent Wagner was almost morbidly susceptible to impressions; they overwhelmed his mind and his imagination, entering him like viruses, stirring up an inner furor, stoking his heightened sense of being, setting him on fire, mentally and physically. Encountering the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven was the overwhelming experience of his young manhood.

The next massive hit his system took, he said, was seeing the soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient in Fidelio, in the Leipzig theatre. Schröder-Devrient, then just twenty-eight, was the Maria Callas of her day: vocally unreliable, but expressively thrilling, every note, every word, every gesture deeply imbued with meaning. He despised the operatic performers he had seen up to that point: staring straight out at the audience, rooted to the spot, playing to the gallery, straining for stratospheric top notes. The vehicles in which they performed were equally beneath contempt; to the young Wagner, opera was a cartoon medium. But this was different. Every note, every word, every gesture meant something. The combination of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient and Beethoven convinced him that opera was the greatest form of human communication available. Forty years later he claimed that no event in his life produced so profound an impression upon him as seeing Schröder-Devrient on stage; he spoke about ‘the almost satanic ardour’ which the intensely human art of this incomparable actress (as he called her: actress, not singer) poured into his veins.

As it happens, it seems that Wagner could not have seen Shröder-Devrient sing Leonora. But to spur himself on, he linked his two gods together. Schröder-Devrient in whatever it was she sang knocked him sideways: the thought of Schröder-Devrient in Beethoven was tantamount to ecstasy. Having imagined it, it became real for him. That was the combination he sought in his work, for the rest of his life: sublime performance allied to supreme imagination.

He wrote her a passionate letter – of course he did! – telling her briefly (he says) that he now knew what he had to do with the rest of his life, and that if in the future she ever chanced to hear his name praised in the world of art, she must remember that she had, that evening, made him what he then swore it was his destiny to become. The great singer had revealed his mission to him. But what to do about it? He knew perfectly well that he was utterly incapable at that moment of producing anything worthy of her. Nor did he know how to go about learning to. He despised the bourgeois world around him; above all he despised the education system, which had rejected him and everything that interested him. What did it have to do with the dark beauty he lived with in his imagination? He dismissed it with contempt.

He was by now more or less semi-detached from his family. He had been chucked out of one school and walked out of another. He gave himself over to what he called the dissipations of raw manhood, the student life of his day. He wasn’t a student, as it happens, but he plunged in regardless. If he had had access to drugs, he would certainly have funnelled them into his system; as it was he drank, he fornicated, he debauched, he partied in the taverns and the whorehouses. He hung out with dangerous, crazy people; he talked, talked, TALKED, about the subject of subjects: himself – and of course, art, inseparable notions in his mind. He was Rimbaud; he was Kurt Cobain; he was James Dean. His companions in debauchery turned out to be rather disappointing: he poured out his confidences, his dreams, his desires, his analyses of the world’s ills without caring what effect they would have. His excitement in expressing his ideas was the only reward he received; when he turned to his listeners, expecting them to confide in him as he had done in them, it appeared that they had nothing to say. They just liked horsing around. In the midst of all the ragging and the rowdyism, surrounded by so-called friends, he found himself, he said, quite alone. But these adolescent activities were not just indulgences: they formed a protective hedge – a ring of magic fire, he might just as well have said – around what he called his ‘inner life’. Instinctively he knew that this inner life had to grow to its natural strength in its own good time. Even at that early age, running in parallel to the recklessness, the debauchery, the over-exuberance, was a beady instinct for protecting his gift, his genius, and what fed it, even though at this stage it was, even to him, totally invisible.

Having been thrown out of school, he embarked on private tuition, paid for by his mother. He tried learning Classical Greek but gave up almost as soon as he started. Johanna’s patience, and her money, were not limitless: she told him he had to find a job. His publisher brother-in-law offered him work as a proof-reader on a new edition of Karl Friedrich Becker’s monumental World History; reading this was, Wagner said, his first real experience of education. For the first time he got a sense of the broad sweep of human history – just at the moment, as it happens, that it was passing through one of its periodic crises. Louis XVIII, the last of the Bourbons, fell in 1830; he was replaced by the so-called bourgeois king, Louis-Philippe, which provoked a wave of democratic solidarity across Europe, in particular across the thirty-nine member states of the fragile German Confederation. Kings, grand dukes, electors all felt the ground trembling under their feet. Saxony felt especially vulnerable. The reactionary King Anton shrewdly invited his liberal nephew, Friedrich Augustus, to become co-regent; a constitution was established.

At eighteen, restless, volatile Wagner sided with change. He quickly knocked off a Grand Overture to celebrate the new order; in it he graphically depicted the darkness of oppression giving way to the joyful new dispensation, the latter represented by a theme unambiguously marked Friedrich und Freiheit – Friedrich and Freedom – which blazed forth in triumph at the end. It was not performed.

Meanwhile, despite the new liberal constitution, the revolutionary aspirations of the student body in Leipzig rumbled on; there was unrest, swiftly quelled by the arrest of a number of students. Wagner, still working in his brother-in-law’s publishing house, attached himself to them, fell in with their protest marches, sang along with them as they bawled out the great student anthem ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’:

Down with sadness, down with gloom,

Down with all who hate us;

Down with those who criticise,

Look with envy in their eyes,

Scoff, mock and berate us.

He joined their angry demands for the release of the arrested students, and was with them when they descended on the house of the magistrate who had ordered the arrest. Finding that the place had already been lightly trashed, they plunged in and finished the job off. Wagner was among the most uninhibited of the rioters, intoxicated, as he put it, by the students’ unreasoning fury: he smashed and pillaged with the best of them, drawn into the vortex – his words – ‘like a madman’. The frenzy only grew; he and his fellows moved across the town, slashing and burning. They weren’t drunk; this was a self-generating rampage. All the latent violence that was in Wagner found an outlet. The formless resentments that had been germinating through his childhood and youth – his fatherlessness, his mother’s narrow outlook, his hatred of authority, his frustration at having no proper channel for the expression of his artistic dreams and fantasies – erupted in rampant destruction as he threw his lot in with the student rioters.

These exploits were viewed indulgently by the city: it was just the young gentlemen letting off steam, people felt. But when the workers started rioting, there was universal outrage. Indeed, Wagner drily noted, the student body offered itself as temporary policemen, in which capacity, drunk and disorderly themselves, they imposed the rule of law, stopping travellers and inspecting their visas. How Wagner longed to be one of these lords of misrule. Soon enough, despite lacking the slightest qualifications, Wagner became an undergraduate of the University of Leipzig, not on the academic course, but as a student of music – just in time to realise his supreme aspiration: membership of the Saxonia fencing club. The moment he enrolled, he challenged as many people as he could to duels. None of these challenges materialised, which is just as well, since he knew nothing whatever about fencing. Instead he took up gambling, to which he soon became addicted. The more he lost, the more he gambled. Pale, sunken-eyed and haggard, like something out of Balzac or Dostoevsky, he lived only to gamble; finally, he stole his mother’s savings and bet them, convinced that with a high enough stake he could make a large sum of money. Miraculously, this is what happened, and he returned his mother’s savings to her, considerably richer. When he told her what he had done, she fainted. He experienced a moment of celestial benison: ‘I felt as if God and His angels were standing by my side and whispering words of warning and consolation in my ears.’

From his earliest years, Wagner saw everything in his life as happening sub specie aeternitatis; destiny was always pulling the strings. Thus redeemed by divine intervention, he hurled himself into creative activity: his purpose was nothing less than to turn the world of music upside down. Among the first fruits of his inspiration was an overture in B-flat major. To ensure that it made its full revolutionary impact, he used different colours for the various instruments, drawing attention to the mystic meaning of his orchestration: strings were red, brass was black. If he had been able to get hold of any green ink, he said, he would have used that for the winds. Astonishingly, the young Leipzig conductor Heinrich Dorn agreed to programme the piece. During rehearsals Wagner was forced to acknowledge to himself that the technicolor scoring made no appreciable difference to the playing, and anxiously noted that the big effect he had planned, whereby after every four bar phrase there would be a loud thwack on the kettledrum, simply did not work. The conductor, however, insisted it would be splendid. At the concert, the audience were enchanted by this wonderfully predictable effect. He heard them calculating its return; dum dum, dum dum, dum dum, dum dum THWACK, they would chant along with the music; seeing how unerringly accurate their calculations were, he suffered, he said, ten thousand torments, almost passing out with misery. The audience was delighted; it could have gone on forever as far as they were concerned. And then quite suddenly, the overture came to a halt, Wagner having disdained to provide it with anything as bourgeois an ending. A silence ensued. There were no exclamations of disapproval from the audience, no hissing, no comments, not even laughter: all he saw on their faces was intense astonishment at a peculiar occurrence, which impressed them, as it did him, like a horrible nightmare. He was then obliged to take his sister Ottilie, the only member of the family who had come to the concert, back home, through the puzzled crowd. The strange look the usher gave him on the way out haunted him ever afterwards, he said, and for a considerable time he avoided the stalls of the Leipzig theatre.

This event hastened his realisation that without skill, craft, or technique he would never write anything remotely worthy of Schröder-Devrient. The idea of actually attending the classes he’d enrolled in at the university was, of course, beneath consideration. Instead, he made his way to Bach’s old church (where he had, after all, been baptised) and sought out the cantor, Theodor Weinlig, and asked him to take him on. Weinlig agreed – on one condition: that he would give up composing for six months. Wagner accepted the condition: for half a year he wrote nothing but fugues, day in and day out; he and Weinlig would engage in counterpoint duels. Under this highly practical tutelage, he finally began to get a feel, he said, for melody and vocal line. Once the six months were up, his self-denying ordinance was over, and music poured out of him: symphonies, overtures, marches, arias, sonatas – all entirely faceless. His Opus 1 was, in fact, a piano sonata; it is almost comically lacking in personality. For some years, Wagner would set his own highly original musical identity to one side; he would learn by imitating other people. Not a hint of experiment, nothing to mark his work out as his. That was how he taught himself, as he told the very young Hugo Wolf at the end of his life: by imitating other composers, often those whose music he despised. ‘You can’t be original straightaway,’ he told Wolf.

In his first three operas, he systematically impersonated Marschner, Meyerbeer and, of all people, Donizetti. This is quite extraordinary. Because, like it or loathe it, Wagner’s music is unmistakeably his. To eliminate all traces of personality from it must have taken a considerable effort of will.