Richard Wagner. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Riga, summer 1839. Richard Wagner is twenty-six. He has just lost his post as director at the city theatre, and he has a wife, Minna, a Newfoundland dog named Robber, and so many debts that his creditors have had his passport seized: from tsarist Russia, without papers, there is no way out. Wagner does what he will do all his life when faced with an obstacle: he goes around it, illegally. With the help of a friend, the three of them, wife and dog included, cross the Russo-Prussian border by night, a ditch watched over by armed Cossacks, running in the dark. Then, from a Prussian port, they stow away on a merchant ship, the Thetis, bound for London: seven crew, no passenger cabins, a dog hoisted aboard on a rope.
The voyage, which was meant to take eight days, took more than twenty. Three storms, a forced stop in a Norwegian fjord, a crew convinced that the stowaways brought bad luck. And here the biography hands over one of its most novelistic pages, which for once is documented by the man himself in abundant detail. In Mein Leben Wagner recounts how the echo of the sailors’ calls in the fjord, bouncing off the granite walls, and the terror of the storms settled into him, and how from that voyage was born The Flying Dutchman, the opera of the ghost ship condemned to wander the seas. Every Wagnerian memoir must be handled with tongs, because the author was the most brilliant falsifier of himself in the nineteenth century; but the route, the dates and the Thetis are real, and the Dutchman arrived right on schedule three years later.
The flight from Riga was not an episode: it was the model. Wagner spent his life running, from the creditors of Magdeburg, from those of Paris, where real poverty awaited him, from the Saxon police after the uprisings of 1849, from the creditors of Vienna in 1864, saved at the last minute by the King of Bavaria. The relationship between his debts and his music is one of the great moral themes in the history of art: a man who considered luxury a creative necessity, silk and perfumes working conditions, and other people’s money an advance owed by the future. The future, it must be said, paid up: Bayreuth exists, and the creditors are all dead. But the question the Wagner case poses, with no comfortable answer, remains: how much genius does it take to justify such a bill handed to one’s neighbour? Melos’s answer is that nothing is justified: it is only success, and that is different. Music does not settle debts. At most it makes them interesting; and that night of running through the ditch, with the dog and the wife, remains the greatest opera scene Wagner ever lived instead of wrote.