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Wagner Society in NSW Inc
Members may remember that the President, Roger Cruickshank, referred to a the launch of a new “Wagner Journal” in the UK, edited by Barry Millington, and the somewhat frivolous article (on 2 March 2007) reported as “Wagner's secret passion for frock opera” (SMH headline) and “Curtain lifts on Wagner's secret pink rhapsody” (The Age) and “Letter skirts dress code” (Sydney's free evening MX paper). The President noted: “It seems that Mr Millington and all the sub-editors involved enjoyed the punning opportunities this story gave rise to.” Well-known Wagner lecturer and regular contributor to our Newsletter, Peter Bassett, has addressed the articles –and the events that gave rise to and resulted from the frivolousness. He writes:
“Late 1873/early 1874 was a difficult time for Wagner in his relations with the king. There were doubts that a royal financial guarantee would be forthcoming (it didn't come until 25 January) and he was depressed and worried about paying for work on the festival theatre then under construction. He was also building his tomb in the garden of the unfinished Wahnfried and often expressed a wish to be in it already! Whether or not the letter to Chaillou was actually written in January or merely post-dated January, Wagner was in no state of mind (I would have thought) to be contemplating a life in drag.”
Joachim Kohler's recent biography of Wagner, The Last of the Titans (trans Steward Spencer, Yale University Press, 2004), devotes a number of pages throughout his work detailing what is known of Wagner's behaviour, including examining his “cross-dressing” predilections. What does Wagner himself say that stimulates biographers and critics, such as Kohler and Robert Gutman (with whom Kohler largely concurs), to find revealed a desire to “cross-dress” or, perhaps more precisely, to dress in garments conventionally worn by women, since the verb “cross-dress” already comes with significant baggage in Western culture. In his autobiography, Mein Leben , Wagner describes his reaction to growing up in a theatrical world: his father attended the theatre and his stepfather and most of his older siblings were actors and/or singers in Dresden and Leipzig and some other cities. So, it is not surprising that the child and adolescent (who only left this milieu when he made his first serious break with his family by becoming the repetiteur and Chorus Master in Wurzburg in 1833) was fascinated and perhaps bewildered by the theatrical world that spilled over into his home as part of his day-to-day reality. Wagner writes:
Kohler picks up another episode from Wagner's life, as recorded by Wagner in Mein Leben :
At this point in Wagner's life, it would be hard for anyone, including the pre-pubescent Wagner, to know how much eroticism is occurring in Wagner's psyche, the interesting feature is that the autobiographer, recollecting these early experiences (starting at the age of 52 in 1865, but taking a number of years to complete), had no qualms about analysing his state of mind and emotion in terms that we post-Freudians would recognise as arising from a suggestive borderland between innocence and sexual awareness. It is therefore not surprising that biographers and commentators have taken up Wagner's own hints and explored them in more detail. How far to take these hints from Wagner's childhood, and some later material, then becomes the question. Kohler takes the hints and evidence quite a long way into an account of Wagner's life that attempts to demonstrate how complex was the interaction between Wagner's sexual drive and his creativity: not an unusual exercise in these post-Freudian days of psychoanalytical biography. Even though Kohler does not dogmatically use psychoanalytic ideas (both Freudian and possibly either Kleinian or Anna Freudian childhood developmental theory and Jungian archetypes), he is inclined to use one of Freud's favourite tricks a little too freely. It is a fascinating exercise to read any text of Freud's with an eye to the way he uses language – and he is a wonderful writer. Freud regularly speculates on a piece of “evidence” from his practice or literature or history, draws a tentative conclusion, then begins to slide through gentle assertions and declarations to the point where the speculation has slyly become a “fact” because it now fits satisfactorily into the argument Freud is pursuing in the essay: beautifully circular. Kohler takes a similar line with, for example, the experiences Wagner reports as disturbing him greatly as a child: portraits coming to life, furniture becoming animate, ghosts manifesting around his bed, then elevates these distressing events that many children experience into a “trauma” that “must” drive Wagner's development as a person and artist. For example, Kohler analyses Johann August Apel's stories in his Gespensterbuch [ Ghost book of 1810] that includes Der Freischutz as they may have affected the young Wagner's imagination and his alleged root “trauma” of a sense of being untrue to his real identity. After acknowledging that “[I]t is difficult to find in Apel's ‘naïve ‘folktale' the potential for fear that it represented for Wagner”, Kohler then boldly asserts that ‘[t]ranslated into Wagner's private mythology, this [the story] must mean that, in order to deprive the hero of both his bride and is inheritance, his enemy persuades him to be untrue to himself' ( ibid ., p. 35). A little later, Kohler extends this “evidentiary” chain by noting that “When Wagner spoke of his fear of ghosts in the context of Der Freischutz , it must have been [the Wolf's Glen] scene, above all , that he had in mind, for his experience in the Thoma House in Leipzig, where dead objects had suddenly come to life, becomes a theatrical reality in the Wolf's Glen scene” ( ibid ., p. 37). The fact is that it is rather more Kohler's myth about Wagner's life and art that is being bolstered by the “evidence” from the Der Freischutz story. Given Wagner's looseness with the truth in Mein Leben , one has to wonder how much the impact of this seminal German opera was exaggerated in hindsight to establish the closest possible links with the venerated Weber and himself? Weber playing the John the Baptist to the coming German musical messiah? There is much to be gained from examining an artist's development to see how it influences the artistic works; it is another matter to assert as Kohler does, that these childhood experiences are “traumas” that “must” have manifested themselves in rigid patterns both in the artist's later life and the artist's works. Not content with identifying deterministic “traumas” in a Freudian or Kleinian way, Kohler draws on Jungian archetypes as controlling agents that shape all of Wagner's artistic output, almost as if he were taking dictation from creative daemons that override any conscious artistic intentions on Wagner's part. One of Kohler's driving archetypes is engendered by Wagner's positive interactions with his favourite sister, Rosalie, who becomes, in Kohler's mythology, the “angel” Similarly, his mother and stepfather form a demonic couple representing all that is ambiguous, ambivalent, unloving, retributive in Wagner's life: “Just as, in the world of Wagner's imagination, his mother Johanna and his stepfather Geyer came to embody the demonic in all its archetypal appallingness, so Rosalie represented that aspect of divine love that brings redemption through self-sacrifice. He discovered his own identity between these two extremes, forever unable to decide which side he belonged to” ( ibid ., p. 31). Surely one does not really need to invoke archetypes to underline how important disparate and conflicting role models can be to a child? The difficult thing with this hermeneutic (interpretative) approach taken by analytical and philosophical practices, such as Freudian psychoanalysis, is its inherent circularity. Once the propositions are accepted (by the proposer at least), then the conclusions follow automatically and are virtually impossible to falsify (in a standard scientific way) because one has to step outside the terms of the analysis, but that is to betray the alleged value of the system, as therapy for example. However, for the purposes of gaining insight into the unique creative processes of an artist, such an approach can be useful as a paradigm that may throw into relief unsuspected connections or thought-provoking patterns. Kohler's approach, while tending towards the straitjacket, does make one reconsider how powerful childhood experiences can persist into adulthood and both provide grist for the creative mill and shape the very kind of mill that does the grinding. If one takes Kohler's biography as a paradigm for considering Wagner and his works, it has much value and interest. It certainly prompted me to reconsider many aspects of Wagner's works. One of the most suggestive sections of Kohler's analysis focusses on the musical aspects of Wagner's childhood. Kohler proposes that, because Wagner was already predisposed to experiencing the world as an eerie, scary place, with ghosts and animated furniture for example, he was totally overwhelmed by Die Freischutz that deals with the horrors of the nighttime world, especially if one has also been primed by ghost stories and legends. But Kohler points out how it could be that Weber's music for the Wolf Glen scene, full of eerie fifths, uncertain harmonies and strange melodies “tuned” not only Wagner's musical ear, but also his musical psyche to a particular sound world that manifested itself unmistakeably for the first time in Der fliegende Hollander with its abundant use of open fifths and strange, clashing harmonies, not to mention ghosts! To return finally to the “cross-dressing”, Kohler acknowledges that Wagner's erysipelas was a major chronic distress to Wagner and follows Gutman in both acknowledging the value of silks and satins in dealing with the discomfort of the skin condition, but also wondering at the degree to which Wagner employed this “medical” use of fabrics. Gutman puts it quite baldly: “ His needs for silks, satins, furs, and perfumes had reached the fetishistic. A strange compulsion forced him to pull on ludicrous travesty. That his skin was extremely sensitive may explain his silk chokers and underwear but hardly those quilted, shirred, bowed, laced, flowered, fringed, and furred gowns he dragged through his private rooms” ( Richard Wagner The Man, His Mind and His Music , Penguin Books, 1971, p. 554). In some of the reactions to the proposition that Wagner may have enjoyed dressing in satin and silk undergarments, specially made for him or borrowed from his wives' wardrobes, there is a hint of idealising puritanism, as if it would be unthinkable for someone of Wagner's magisterial stature to behave so. (One perhaps only needs to remember the Monty Python sketch of a magistrate at the bench wearing only pink nickers under his robes.) On the other hand, some intimate that such behaviour is not surprising for a person such as Wagner with his extreme egotism, emotional immaturity, self-indulgence and need to compensate for personal and social disadvantages, even though he is also a great artist (the latter sometimes only grudgingly conceded). Both Gutman and Kohler draw attention to the subterfuges and stratagems that Wagner employed to acquire fabrics, clothes and scents to satisfy hi desires and to the excuses and rationalisations he used to explain his behaviour and tastes when allegedly caught in flagrante delicti . Kohler proposes the following scenario:
It was, course, only in his 'beautiful closet' that he wore the silk creations that he had designed for himself - there was invariably one such room in each of the houses he inhabited from the time of his roseate dream in Paris . When his Viennese seamstress Bertha Goldwag was asked whether she had ever seen him wearing silk suits, she emphatically denied it: 'Never. Neither I myself nor anyone else. I can tell you that for certain'. But Bertha knew at first hand the inner sanctum in which Wagner tried on these costumes, as she had furnished the entire apartment for him ( ibid ., p. 455). It would be hard to recall any recent biography of an artist or even political figure that has not uncovered some peccadillo or sexual behaviour that some people might classify as “fetishistic” or “aberrant” or “deviant”. It is, however, perhaps one of Freud's greatest achievements to remind us unequivocally of our “polymorphous perversity” – that is, capacity for any kind of sexual activity. One could argue that Wagner's willingness to “cross-dress”, or to explore his feminine side, if one prefers a more contemporary concept, helped him create some of the opera world's most convincing and powerfully dramatic females characters. The circumstantial evidence adduced by Gutman and Kohler appears to support strongly their contention about Wagner's tastes; what is less justifiable on the evidence is the implicit tone of censoriousness they adopt in discussing the evidence – Gutman more so than Kohler. For both authors, Wagner's tastes are part of a larger “problem” with the artist: his personal ethical and moral standards in some cases. Most of us would find Wagner's flights from debts, his womanising and his lying to his patron, Ludwig II, and to his wives deplorable ethical practices. I suspect few of us would put the desire to dress in certain fabrics and clothes worthy of moral or ethical condemnation. These days, one hopes, it is possible to be more honest and open about such desires without attracting the raised eyebrow or the snide aside. The Editor would be delighted to receive any comment or discussion on this matter. [Editor June 2007]
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