For Simon Callow, biography, like acting, is about impersonation – appropriating the body and if possible the mind of someone else. In his life of Charles Laughton, Callow probed the sexual self-disgust of a man who felt himself to be a bloated gargoyle; he then devoted a series of fine volumes to the equally portly but more recklessly over-extended Orson Welles. Now, after trying out the role in a one-man show called Inside Wagner’s Head, he has decided to be Richard Wagner.
The cover of his new book shows Wagner scalped or trepanned. His skull, a cosmic dome, insecurely balanced on his dwarfish body, has its top sliced off so that Callow can wriggle inside, like Santa Claus squeezing down a chimney. The result, however, is not the psychological penetration the image promises. Callow describes Wagner’s mannerisms – the mad monologues he delivered with bulging eyes and bursts of fiendish laughter, the nervous frenzies caused by his raw, inflamed skin, the drooling endearments he lavished on his pet dogs – and pays careful attention to his wardrobe: velvet cloaks, floppy bohemian berets, and frou-frou undies confected in pink silk by a Viennese milliner. But the portrayal remains superficial, content with exaggerated mockery of the man’s quirks.
The emphasis throughout is on Wagner’s self-dramatising thespian foibles. “The theatre,” Callow believes, “was where he found himself”; not coincidentally, it’s also where Being Wagner began, with that solo performance commissioned by the Royal Opera in 2013. Given Callow’s collegial enjoyment of Wagner’s histrionics, he has fun with the backstage chaos occasioned by the impossible demands his operas made on musicians and technicians. During preparations for the first Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1876, Siegfried’s dragon malfunctioned, Brünnhilde’s horse ran away with her, the chief machinist quit after a hissy fit, and a violinist dropped dead. Such anecdotes are calculated to amuse, but Callow misses the crucial point of Wagner’s theatricality, which was his alarming capacity for metamorphosis. At those Ring rehearsals he acted all the parts, from gods to mermaids, a bear and a hopping toad. His genius was not for being himself; it lay in his capacity to become other creatures.
Preoccupied with Wagner’s misbehaviour, Callow reduces the operas to facetious synopses or relies on lengthy quotes from the libretti. His tone tends to be bluffly dismissive. He says that Wagner “knocked off” a begging letter to a patron, then three pages later adds that he “knocked off” a treatment for a play about Christ as a revolutionary; elsewhere we’re told that he “had a breeze” writing Die Meistersinger. A low point comes when Callow adopts the hucksterish idiom of advertising and calls Rienzi a “drop-dead, knock-down, mega-hit”.
Wagner’s music certainly fascinates and excites Callow, and he claims that in early adolescence he already understood the technicalities of the unresolved chord that begins Tristan und Isolde. But he excuses himself from analysing the enchantment. Instead he sings along, like those irritating operagoers who hum the tunes and gesticulate to help the conductor: he praises a “rum-ti-tum finale” in Rienzi, and transcribes an early overture as “dum dum, dum dum, dum dum, dum dum THWACK”, with the capitalised blow signalling a full stop banged out on a kettledrum.
Callow rattles off some adjectival arias of his own, as when he blathers about “the restless, unsettling, destructive, sublime, dynamic spirit of Richard Wagner”. Even more breathlessly, he says that Wagner saw man as “a turbulent, troubled, writhing, longing, betraying, creating, destroying, loving, loathing mess of instincts”. Could this logorrhoeal burbling be a contagious effect of Wagner’s endless melodies and their mutable motifs? Opera singers need elastic lungs as part of their technical kit; the equivalent in a writer is mere long-windedness. Wagner may have “talked, talked, TALKED”, as Callow noisily puts it, but he also composed silence: the shimmering air out of which the redeemer materialises in the prelude to Lohengrin, the underwater gloom where life almost inaudibly starts to throb in Das Rheingold.
Though Callow rightly deplores Wagner’s antisemitic bigotry, it’s a cheap shot to deploy a Third Reich slogan as his subtitle, given his awareness that Wagner, “loathing both militarism and imperialism”, would have “despised” the Nazis. In any case Callow seems unclear about what the will is, since he equates it with both heart and soul. By way of compensation, Wagner earns moral credit for tolerating an entourage of gay acolytes, and Callow is best when discussing the devious combine of masculine and feminine traits in the wily fellow’s character: managing his followers and helpers, he alternated between domination and seductive entreaty, and “provoked, almost flirtatiously, love and hate simultaneously”.
In conclusion, Callow denies Wagner classic status and excludes him from “the pantheon”, pronouncing anathema in a judgment so portentous that he gives it a paragraph of its own. “He cannot bring comfort,” Callow sternly declares. The remark betrays a weird incomprehension of great art. Is Stravinsky’s ritualised violence comforting, let alone the battering onslaught of political power that we hear in Shostakovich? Verdi’s Requiem fades out in metaphysical doubt and dread, and Puccini’s operas mostly conclude in acts of abrupt extermination. It’s muzak not music that aims to ease us through the day, and Wagner’s heady ecstasies have their consummation in individual death or global meltdown. If you want comfort you should buy a sofa, not a ticket to the opera.
• Being Wagner: the Triumph of the Will by Simon Callow is published by Harper Collins (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
