Being Wagner: The Story of the Most Provocative Composer Who Ever Lived

by Simon Callow Narrated by Simon Callow

Overview

Simon Callow, the celebrated author of Orson Welles, delivers a dazzling, swift, and accessible biography of the musical titan Richard Wagner and his profoundly problematic legacy--a fresh take for seasoned acolytes and the perfect introduction for new fans.

Richard Wagner's music dramas have never been more popular or more divisive. His ten masterpieces, created against the backdrop of a continent in severe political and cultural upheaval, constitute an unmatched body of work. A man who spent most of his life in abject poverty, inspiring both critical derision and hysterical hero-worship, Wagner was a walking contradiction: belligerent, flirtatious, disciplined, capricious, demanding, visionary, and poisonously anti-Semitic. Acclaimed biographer Simon Callow evokes the intellectual and artistic climate in which Wagner lived and takes us through his most iconic works, from his pivotal successes in The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin, to the musical paradigm shift contained in Tristan and Isolde, to the apogee of his achievements in The Ring of the Nibelung and Parsifal, which debuted at Bayreuth shortly before his death. Being Wagner brings to life this towering figure, creator of the most sublime and most controversial body of work ever known.

Editorial Reviews

APRIL 2018 - AudioFile

Director, actor, and writer Simon Callow, who has toured with his one-man show on Charles Dickens, offers his own study of composer Richard Wagner. The narration is a fascinating and effervescent tour de force that has the energy of a stage performance rather than a studio recording. The performance, which is part analytical biography, is approachable and irresistible. Germany’s political and social upheaval in Wagner’s time creates the setting for sketching a most disagreeable and loathsome man who was also an undisputed musical genius, with at least 10 musical masterpieces to his credit. Listeners may want to augment their experience by interspersing or following their listening with some Wagnerian music to complete the enlightened portrait. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

From the Publisher

International Praise for Simon Callow's Being Wagner

"Would Callow be able to tell me, in layman's language, what it is about Tristan that makes it so powerful? The answer, I am happy to say, is yes. The perfect introduction for those, like me, who may not be obsessives but who sense that something profound is going on, and would like to know more. . . . A delightful little book." —Craig Brown, The Mail on Sunday (London)

"A sparkly written, witty, learned, and absorbing account, Callow brings The Master vividly to life." —The Times (London)

"Intelligent, fluent, and buoyant." —The Daily Telegraph (London)

APRIL 2018 - AudioFile

Director, actor, and writer Simon Callow, who has toured with his one-man show on Charles Dickens, offers his own study of composer Richard Wagner. The narration is a fascinating and effervescent tour de force that has the energy of a stage performance rather than a studio recording. The performance, which is part analytical biography, is approachable and irresistible. Germany’s political and social upheaval in Wagner’s time creates the setting for sketching a most disagreeable and loathsome man who was also an undisputed musical genius, with at least 10 musical masterpieces to his credit. Listeners may want to augment their experience by interspersing or following their listening with some Wagnerian music to complete the enlightened portrait. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2017-11-12
A brief life of the composer who "got under people's skin."Actor, writer, and musician Callow (Orson Welles: One-Man Band, 2016, etc.) takes a break from his ongoing, multivolume biography of Welles to pen this compact and witty biography of the idiosyncratic German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883). Its genesis began in 2012 when Callow performed his one-man show, Inside Wagner's Head, for the composer's bicentenary. He now "aims to give a sense of what it was like to be near that demanding, tempestuous, haughty, playful, prodigiously productive figure." The "lazy and willful" young Wagner was a "bit of a problem child" and a terrible student. A talented musician, at 17 he took on the "monumental task of making a piano transcription of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony." He would conduct the piece some 17 years later. At 28, he had written four operas, but he had no prospects nor money. He finally got some of his work produced, and he was appointed Royal Conductor in Dresden. Wagner felt The Flying Dutchman ("nobody understood it") was his first piece of "real music" that he had written from his "unconscious mind." Tannhäuser and Lohengrin "were the end of a road," and he set out to write the artwork "of the future." In 1850 he wrote a pamphlet, Judaism in Music. Callow argues that it shows him moving from his "casual anti-Semitism typical of the time into a fixed intellectual position…Germanness," which made him Hitler's favorite composer. He became more involved in a revolutionary politics and read Schopenhauer as he began work on Tristan and Isolde and The Ring of the Nibelung, which was performed in 1876, along with Parsifal in 1882, in the theater Wagner had built in Bayreuth, Germany."Dangerous and dynamic," Callow's Wagner is a "musical genius," but he "cannot bring comfort. Which is why people fight over him." An infectiously readable biography.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169210392
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	02/06/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

VORSPIEL
 
On 26 August 1876, as the last notes of the first performance of The Twilight of the Gods died away in the newly built Festspielhaus, in the tiny Bavarian town of Bayreuth, 2,000 people sat shaken, inspired, enchanted – or appalled. Among them were the musical aristocracy of Europe: Liszt, Saint- Saëns, Tchaikovsky, Anton Rubinstein, Grieg and Bruckner, along with a good sprinkling of the actual aristocracy of Europe, two emperors, three kings, a handful of princes, two grand dukes. All of them, or almost all of them, were swept along on a cataclysm of emotion to equal anything that happened on stage that evening.
 
As the applause grew and grew, and before singers or conductor or designer or choreographer had appeared in front of the curtain to acknowledge it, a diminutive, stooping figure, familiar not just to the faithful but to the cultured world at large, the subject of a dozen photoshoots, two dozen portraits and a thousand cartoons, made his way somewhat lopsidedly to the front of the stage; his disproportionately huge head with its madly bulging eyes was topped by a floppy velvet cap set at a rakish angle. This man, this tiny man, sixty-three years old, but looking, Tchaikovsky thought, ancient and frail, was the hero of the hour, the sole architect of the vast four-day, fifteen-hour epic, every one of whose thousands and thousands of words and thousands and thousands of notes he had created, unleashing onto the vast stage gods and dwarves, dragons and songbirds, women warriors on horseback and maidens disporting themselves in the Rhine, digging deeply and unsettlingly into the subconscious, discharging in his audience emotions that were oceanic and engulfing – this man was the architect of all that; the architect, indeed, in all but name, of the very theatre in which the heaving, roaring audience sat. There he stood before them, the self-proclaimed Musician of the Future. He held a hand up, and in the ensuing silence, in the marked Saxon accent which he never made the slightest attempt to lose, he said: ‘Now you’ve seen what I want to achieve in Art. And you’ve seen what my artists, what we, can achieve. If you want the same thing, we shall have an Art.’
 
That was the way he spoke.
 
By we, he meant, of course, the German people. The first, the most important thing he had to say, was that the great work he had brought into existence was, above all else, German.
 
At a celebratory banquet the following night, after an interminable and obscure speech by a Reichstag deputy, the Hungarian politician Count Albert Apponyi leaped to his feet unannounced and said:
 
Brünnhilde – the new national art – lay asleep on a rock, surrounded by a great fire. The god Wotan had lit this fire, so that only the victorious and fi nest hero, a hero who knew no fear, would win her as his bride. Around the rock were mountains of ash and clinker – the cross-breeding of our own music with non-German elements. Along came a hero, the like of whom had never been seen before, Richard Wagner, who forged a weapon from the fragments of the sword of his fathers – the classical German masters – and with this sword he penetrated the fire, and with his kiss he awoke the sleeping Brünnhilde. ‘Hail to you, victorious light!’ she cried and with her we join our voices: ‘Three cheers to our master, Richard Wagner! Hip hip! Hip hip! Hip hip!’
 
So that was it: Wagner was the hero of the newly unified German Reich, which had come into being just five years earlier, and his music was its music. Many people, including many Germans, felt very uncomfortable about this new Germany, and The Ring of the Nibelung seemed to embody, in its grandiosity, its self-celebrating Teutonic tub-thumping, its primitivism, everything that worried them about it. Wagner himself, after a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with the masters of the new establishment, was already somewhat unenamored of their policies: to his immeasurable disgust, one of Reichskanzler Bismarck’s first acts had been to give the vote to Jews. Wagner also, more surprisingly, loathed the new climate of militarism and imperialism. He withdrew back into the kingdom of art where he would always be absolute monarch, where his will would always prevail, where he could explore the depths and the heights of human experience – by which he meant, of course, his own experience.
 
None of this – Wagner’s creation of a new national art, his acclaim as the greatest German artist of his times, the creation of his custom-built theatre – could possibly have been predicted at any point in the composer’s life up to that point. It was, to be sure, exactly what he set out to do, almost to the letter. But there was nothing inevitable about it whatever. The massive solidity of his achievement grew out of and existed in the face of profound instability, both internal and external, an instability which characterizes every stage and every phase of his life and which indeed is at the very heart of his music. At every turn of the way, his vision, and he was nothing if not visionary, was in danger of being sabotaged, either by circumstances, or by other people, or – more often than not – by himself.
 
We know all this because he told us. We know everything about this extraordinary man, everything, that is, except the most important thing: how he created his music. Because even he, the great motor-mouth, the obsessive self-analyst, was unable to explain that. But everything else, we know. Not just because of the memoirs, the reviews, the police records, the biographies, but because, in a way unusual in a musician – almost unknown, in fact – he was driven to communicate verbally, to explain himself in conversation, in letters, in speeches, in diaries, in pamphlets, in books. He wrote about art, music, theatre, history, politics, race, language, anthropology, myth, philosophy. Above all he wrote about himself. All this self-centeredness was not simple egomania, though it was that too. It was how he engaged with his creativity.
 
Before he could compose a note he needed to articulate his position, to formulate his philosophy, to put himself in relation to the work and to the world – to dramatize himself as an artist, one might say. And for those who were susceptible, this torrent of words and this vision of himself was bewitching – positively hypnotic. For others (including some of his closest associates) it was unnerving, dangerous, overwhelming, almost life-threatening. His production of himself was inextinguishable. Many people tried to stop him, to suppress him, to silence him. Nothing but death could stem the flow. Where did it all come from? What was going on inside Wagner’s head?

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