Despite its irrelevance for any serious consideration of Wagner, Die Feen is a plausible starting-point for a composer whose preoccupations were later to be with the supernatural, with the centrality of love as leading towards some mode of redemption, and with the expression of his dramatic themes in a German musical idiom. His next opera, Das Liebesverbot (‘The Ban on Love’), based loosely on Measure for Measure, can only be seen as an act of fairly gross infidelity to his muse. True, there are some passages that give a foretaste of Wagner’s later works more strongly than anything in Die Feen, and the tumescent motif which appears in the Overture, and in the scene between Friedrich (the Angelo figure) and Isabella, is strikingly characteristic. But the whole ambience of the work, its celebration of uninhibited hedonism, is utterly remote from anything that one thinks of as Wagnerian. In fact Wagner was going through a rebellious period, in which ‘German’ signified for him what it vulgarly does for many people – heaviness, soul-searching, and in musical terms a lack of interest in sustained singable melody. He was infatuated with the music of Bellini, the supreme bel canto composer, and a love-worthy object. But although Wagner never lost his affection for Bellini’s work. he soon came to realise that he was not destined for that path – or rather, that for all its appeal it wouldn’t serve his purposes. And in fact he was only able to use Bellini by misunderstanding him. He even went so far as to write an alternative aria for Oroveso, to be inserted in Norma, Bellini’s masterpiece. Listening to that aria one is amazed that Wagner thought he had captured the flavour of Bellini.
In Das Liebesverbot, which is once more an enjoyable opera, though again somewhat overlong, it is possible to feel that the young Wagner was putting up a misguided battle with his destiny. It manifests, if not with consummate skill, at least with gusto, many of the things which he was to spend the rest of his life fighting against with single-minded dedication. The theme of the ban on love itself he revisited in one work after another, but in his mature output the various ways in which the ban is brought into operation are seen as deep elements of human nature, as the concept of love itself becomes something of increasingly daunting complexity. But in Das Liebesverbot the figure of Friedrich, who imposes the ban, is a one-dimensional caricature, and a hypocrite to boot. He merely provides what suspense there is in the plot, while Wagner is mainly keen to express a mood of carnival and enthusiastic youthful rebelliousness. No comparison with the Shakespeare play would have any point: Shakespeare produced a deep, and in my view deeply flawed, work. Wagner produced something which doesn’t reach a level where serious criticism is appropriate. He was, as it were, shopping around. His first opera was an attempt in the German mode, reflecting what Wagner took to be his concerns; his second was one of those trips across the Alps which Goethe seems to have made obligatory for Germans at some stage of their career.
With almost too handy comprehensiveness, Wagner’s next effort, Rienzi, the last of what have been widely and rightly agreed to be his juvenilia, was an emulation of grand French opera. Though it is artistically the least satisfactory of these three works, it provides more interesting food for thought than do the first two. Wagner tried to produce a grand historical tragedy, basing it on the novel by Bulwer Lytton. On its own terms – or rather those of Meyerbeer, who had set the fashion for this kind of oversized period drama, with its compulsory ballets, spectacular scenery and vast cataclysms – it is successful to a degree that makes one fear for Wagner’s integrity at this stage. Perhaps it is fairer to say that since he still lacked an artistic identity, there was nothing to be single-minded about. And yet the beginning of the Overture, the first piece of Wagner’s music to have retained its place in the repertoire, is original, moving and unmistakable. It starts with a long-held trumpet note, evocative both of majesty and suspense, and then moves into the first great arch-Wagnerian melody, richly scored for strings. That melody, which provides Rienzi with the material for his Prayer at the beginning of Act V, has a nobility which almost everything else in the work betrays, including most of the rest of the Overture, a blowsy piece which, once it moves into its allegro stride, skirts vulgarity with a Verdian brio, though it is much more heavily scored than anything by the Italian master.
This theme, which can’t be called a motif, since it is too fully-formed and monolithic to be plastic enough for that purpose, clearly indicates the hero’s greatness of soul. But in the work itself Rienzi has to become a figure who has been forced to sink to the level of the intriguers around him, so that there is a disjunction between his portrayal in the opening section of the Overture and everything that comes later, apart from the recapitulatory prayer. The only way that Wagner can resolve the action is through a suitably apocalyptic conflagration, as the Capitol is ignited by the angry crowd and Rienzi is immolated along with his visions. Once more, if one were so inclined – many commentators are – one could trace connections between elements in Rienzi and the later works, including, very obviously, the conflagration at the end of the Ring. But such comparisons are more likely to subtract from the sublimity of Götterdämmerung than to add to the stature of Rienzi. That Wagner was fascinated by certain types, and by what might happen to them, is clear enough. But it is merely confused to think that later versions are nothing more than the earlier ones with sophisticated and far greater music to lend them glamour and plausibility. In the case of many of the greatest artists who can, in a sensible way, be said to have subjects, they show what those subjects are going to be from their earliest works. But what makes them great is their capacity for working with certain terms and endlessly exploring and deepening them, until the connections with what they started out from are better disregarded. Otherwise we get nothing more than an example of the ‘fallacy of origins’, by which the developed form of something is alleged to be no more than its elementary form cosmeticised.
Unfortunately this tendency is especially pronounced with Wagner’s critics, and all the more so since it was attending a performance of Rienzi in Linz which set Hitler, so he often claimed, his goal of absolute power. It may have done, though if he fancied himself as a reincarnation of Rienzi he must have paid scant attention to the action. Perhaps this is one thing for which Hitler can be forgiven, since Rienzi is written in an idiom which discourages concentration. With its spectacle and its elaborate diversions, it was the ideal work for those who went to the opera for ‘effects without causes’ – Wagner’s cruel and famous characterisation of Meyerbeer’s operas, which also applies in large part to Rienzi. In fact one wishes that the opening weren’t so arresting; it raises expectations and suggests a degree of seriousness which are willingly granted. But when they aren’t fulfilled, what may happen is that instead of spending five hours being disappointed, one takes the actuality of the work at a higher value than it deserves, lapsing again into the mistake of thinking there are such things as serious subjects, as opposed to serious treatments of them.
All of Wagner’s three early operas are on a virtually unprecedented scale, at any rate in the history of German opera. He indulged himself in them, letting an impressively far-ranging imagination have its head, at the same time that he was developing his capacity for thinking in long time-scales. Their organisation is rudimentary, but they must have given him confidence in his ability not to let things simply get out of hand. Prentice-work though they are, and worth only occasional airings, they would have established him as a composer of unusual ambitions. But the work which, even if Wagner had never written another, would have remained permanently among the great operas, was his next and most evidently concise drama, and the one in which, at one bound, he found himself – by no means all of himself, but what he did find was wholly genuine and strikingly deep. There may be no other example of a composer so suddenly moving from competence in various idioms of his day to commanding mastery which was partly rooted in tradition, but equally impressive for its necessary departures from it.
The famous opening of Der fliegende Holländer has the hallmarks of all Wagner’s openings from now on: it compels attention,