Wagner Remembered PB

This interesting little book is a collection of rather brief eyewitness accounts of people who actually met Wagner. It is entertaining, and endlessly fascinating. However, the veracity of many of these memories is questionable, so the reader has to be careful about accepting the text at face value. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in Richard Wagner, keeping the previous caution in mind. Literature about Wagner is not in short supply, and neither are analysis, critiques, and essays about his personality and behavior. It is refreshing to read first hand reports about him from a variety of viewpoints. On the other hand, many of these brief letters and diary entries were written many years or even decades after the fact. Some are obviously colored or altered by the eyewitness for various reasons. The childhood reminisces by Avenarius (Wagner's half-nephew) is a laughable prevarication, yet most writing about Wagner's childhood is based on it. Likewise, the account of Wagner's death by someone who was not there is also manufactured from whole cloth. I do have a few objections to the book's format. Each chapter merely has a year span as its title (1813-42, 1842-49, 1849-58, 1858-64, 1864-72, and 1872-83). There is no listing in the table of contents or chapter heading of the names in that chapter. Also, the date the reminisce was actually written is usually not listed. Likewise for the specific date the encounter supposedly occurred, even then only in an elliptical footnote.

If you want to know Wagner's personality, this is the book to read (and it might suprise you.) This is a chronological series of recollections from those who knew him. What will strike anyone who reads it is the disconnect between his current reputation, which is almost universally negative and one-dimensional (i.e. a liar, a cheat, a meglomanic, anti-semitic, facistic, ad nauseum) and his true multi-faceted personality. While all his human flaws are evident, so are his many wonderful characteristics: his extraordinary charisma and energy, amazing organizational abilities, sense of humor, acting and mimic ability and his general lust for life. The descriptions of his frenetic nature and tour de force monologues brought Robin Williams to my mind (and I think he should most definitely play him in a movie!) This book is one of the true gems in the Wagner literature.

Wagner would be 'the man' for opera buffs, but for the non operatic, including this reviewer, Richard Wagner is a footnote in the historical consciousness from whom we hear an occasional note, vaguely associate with some powerful music out of the late 1800s, and ever that disturbing sense of an anti-Semetic presence. Wagner Remembered brings such vague recollections to life by anthology of sixty something third person accounts about the composer written by friends and acquaintences close in time to some encounter with Wagner. There are included written impressions by such as Queen Victoria, King Ludwig of Bavaria, Nieztsche, the son Siegried, a memorable erudite rendition by Judith Gautier, all ranging from the mundane such as the furniture in the house or the cut of the clothes to complex analysis of the bombastic personality. Rather than haphazard compilation, it seems that Stewart Spencer gives to us a laborious effort of intense scholarship honed in multiple libraries and academic back alleys, and the result of this unusual format in biographical form is a suprisingly complete picture of the total package. Spencer is unable to include everything and seems intentionally to omit anything written by Wagner or the wives, treats (as noted) only superficially with the deeper relationships with Berlioz, Nietszche and Liszt, and deals only thinly with the operas. Also receiving superficial treatment are Wagner's anti-Semetic views, and while from this volume it is clear that he has them, it is unclear whether those views reflect merely the nationalism and isolation of those times, or whether Wagner and this admitted and advertised prejudice from a position of influence contribute in part to the conflagration that was to come. What does transpire in Wagner Remembered is something we all recognize, namely that our perfect expectation of mental genius is too frequently disappointed as we are presented simultaneously with a kind and thoughtful gentleman, but also an intellectual bully, philanderer on both his wives, and unrepentant deadbeat, who viewed his mental qualities as placing him above the ordinary milieu. Perhaps Wagner was correct in this view of himself. Certainly the quintessential experience of listening to a Wagner prelude creates to some extent the illusion or reality, take your pick, that the enormous talent does overshadow everything else. Credit Stewart Spencer with giving us an splendidly successful volume about a fascinating life.

Here is a fascinating collections of memoirs, letters, diary extracts and articles by people who spent time with Wagner.They show an extraordinary force of nature, a man of astonishing energy, by turns charming and unbearable, astonishingly quick both to rage and to forgive, and childish beyond belief. A famous example, given here, is the soiree where the guests - not Wagner's guests, by the way - briefly paid attention to another person in the room. Wagner solved the problem by screaming, literally, with rage; when the astonished company turned back to Wagner he carried on his "conversation", or monologue, as if nothing had happened. Other less well-known stories appear here, illustrating a similar outrageousness. The ugly and unpleasant antisemitism is also fully represented. Though the different excerpts all find this mercurial man in different moods, all accounts have one thing in common: the writers are all aware that they have just encountered something absolutely extraordinary. Not appearing is (I've forgotten the original source and the exact form of the quote, though it's cited in a well-known article on Wagner by Deems Taylor) Wagner's own observation on what people who put up with his demands, financial and emotional could expect: they were well recompensed because they would be able to tell stories about having known Wagner, for the rest of their lives. He was right, of course, as this book, among thousands of others, so richly proves. This is an excellent portrait and resource book, offering a more vivid and arguably truer picture of Wagner than any of the available biographies. (Wagner may be the historical figure of whom secondary sources are most unreliable. With Wagner it ALWAYS pays to read the original source and NEVER to trust the commentator, some of whom should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.) A fault is that we should have heard more from the musicians who knew Wagner: not the fellow composers, whose anecdotes are mostly well-known and appear here once again, but the orchestral players and others who played under him or worked with him at London, Dresden and of course Bayreuth: more especially on his rehearsing of the _Ring_ would have been most welcome. Among musicians Wagner is not only at his best as a human being, but also his most fascinating as a talker. His obiter dicta on his contemporaries, and even more on his great ancestors, are worth the price, but there could comfortably have been more. Still, a book which is both a fascinating read for the Wagner neophyte and a useful resource for the Wagner scholar: a great combination and an excellent book. Highly recommended. Cheers!Laon

A delightful book. It really is a must for anyone who is interested in Wagner. What emerges from Mr Spencer's skillful co-ordinating of personal recollections of Wagner is a fully rounded portrait of the composer, seen, as it were, through a kaleidoscope of time and chance. There are some charming vignettes of Wagner being entirely spontaneous, when for instance, he greets an old friend who has travelled far distances to be with him for a special occasion, and later, when he is hiding from importunate sightseers. Sometimes, of course, Wagner is less than pleasant, but when he is a musician among other musicians he emerges as a rather likeable man. When he is a famous figure holding his own among other famous figures one gets the impression of his need to dominate everyone and everything. I won't say anymore, I don't want to spoil it for you. It's a well constructed book, and none of the recollections are overlong. There is also a marvellous chronology of events that puts the time and place of each of these encounters within their historical framework. As I have said: A must!