Brünnhilde was not conjured up in a glass of common gin
Like many journalists, I can write anywhere and under any conditions. I honestly believe I could do an article in the middle of the street provided there was somebody to fend off the traffic. Certainly I could manage on the rim of Alfred Gilbert’s delightful Eros fountain in Piccadilly Circus. More impressive, to my mind, is Mozart’s ability to write bits of a violin concerto while playing a game of billiards. He wrote all five of his admirable exercises in this genre during a single summer, aged 19. While his opponent clicked off a long cannon he had time to jot down an entire cadenza. Rossini was, if anything, even more hard-boiled. I believe he composed his admirable aria ‘Di tanti palpiti’ in Tancredi during the time it took a saucepan of rice to boil. But then, he needed only 13 days to complete the entire orchestrated score of The Barber of Seville, still constantly performed nearly two centuries later. He was obviously a fast worker. How I love these prodigiously fertile and expeditious people.
All the same I have nothing against more fastidious operators, who need all kinds of special conditions before inspiration can be made to flow. No one could have been more prolific and speedy than Edgar Wallace. But he had to be wearing a silk dressing-gown, and his long white cigarette-holder, containing a Balkan Sobranie, had to be jutting out of his mouth at exactly the right angle to his chin (precisely the same as Roosevelt’s) before the characters would begin to stir in his mind. Another silk dressing-gown man was Noël Coward, and the garment had to come from Charvet, too. I have heard that Handel had to put on court dress before sitting down to compose. Did this apply only to compositions especially commissioned by the Court, like the Water Music or the Royal Fireworks Music, ordered to enliven the fête in Green Park which celebrated the signature of the Peace of Aix-la-Chappelle in 1748, or did it include all those organ concerti, oratorios and operas? I looked up Winton Dean’s admirable entry on Handel in Grove but did not find the answer. On the other hand, there was the portrait of Handel by Thomas Hudson (now in the National Portrait Gallery) sitting in court dress, with a two-inch-broad edging of gold braid to his satin coat, silk stockings and shoes with gold buckles. A score is propped up in front of him on the table, but he is not composing — his writing hand grasps the gold knob of his magnificent court cane. Handel was not courtly, however. Dr Burney said he was ‘impetuous, rough and peremptory in his manner’ and his ‘general look was heavy and sour, but when he did smile, it was his sire the sun, bursting out of a thick cloud’. He made jokes, too. When a famous violinist at last reached the end of a long and tedious cadenza, he exclaimed, ‘You are welcome home, Mr Dubourg!’ in a voice ‘loud enough to be heard in the most remote parts of the theatre’. And when one of his friends remarked on the low quality of the music they were hearing in Vauxhall Gardens, Handel replied, ‘You are right, Sir, it is very poor stuff. I thought so myself when I wrote it.’ However, the main man who really needed to dress up before he could compose (especially The Ring) was Richard Wagner. And not just dress up, but surround himself with luxury. He did the furnishing and interior decorating. In May 1863, his new house near Vienna had a bedroom ‘plain purple with green velvet borders and gold trim, and purple bed curtains’, an adjoining dressing-room ‘in pale green with dark red flowers’ and a music salon with ‘brown woollen curtains with Persian pattern, sofa ditto, garnet plush for armchairs’. The study was ‘plain purple’ with ‘corners decorated with garnet velvet borders and gold trim’. The dining-room was ‘dark brown with small rosebuds’. In addition there was a tea-room ‘plain green with violet velvet borders and gold trim in the corners’. (I quote from Wagner’s written instructions.) The rooms were heavily perfumed with expensive scents, and in the midst of them sat the Great Man in his satin trousers. His dress designer Berthe Goldweg, the leading couturière in Vienna, said his ‘main reason’ for liking satin was that ‘he needed an inordinate amount of warmth if he was to feel well. All his clothes which I made for him had to be heavily padded with cotton wool, for he was always complaining of the cold.’ His walking dress was described as follows: ‘Snow-white pantaloons, sky-blue tail coat with huge gold buttons, cuffs, an immensely tall top hat with a narrow brim, a walking stick as high as himself, with a huge gold knob, and very bright sulphur-yellow kid gloves.’ However, it was indoors that his sartorial splendour was seen at its most notable. Rudoph Sabor, in his entertaining work The Real Wagner, prints one of his orders to Frau Goldweg. This included four dressing-gowns, one ‘pink with starched insets, one ditto blue, one ditto green, and one quilted Dressing Gown, dark green’. He needed four ‘jackets’, as follows: ‘One pink, one very pale yellow, one light grey and one dark green, as the Quilted Dressing Gown’. He demanded six pairs of boots, ‘white, pink, blue, yellow, grey, green’. There followed instructions for ‘covers’ and cushions. Of ribbons, Goldweg has to supply ‘as many and as beautiful as possible, and also approximately ten yards of the white embroidered ribbon’. Wagner added: ‘Supply a large quantity, say 20 to 30 yards, of the lovely heavy pink satin material.’ Frau Goldweg was not the only woman who saw to Wagner’s sartorial needs. There was also Judith Gautier, with whom he was in love while composing Parsifal. He wrote to her asking her to send him from Paris silks, satins and the finest scent. He called his chaise-longue, on which he lay while thinking out themes and bits of orchestration before dashing to the vast piano to try them out, after her: it was ‘Judith’, and spreading himself out on it was the next best thing to embracing her in person. So he asked her to send him ‘an exceptionally beautiful cover for it’. I often think of Wagner wriggling about on his decorative, perfume-soaked sofa, while I listen to bits of Parsifal, that noble — or ignoble — paean to the merits of chastity and the renunciation of material pleasures. But then, whenever I listen to Wagner, it always ends with a laugh.
It can’t have been exactly a laughing matter to Wagner’s friends, however, especially those he relied on to supply him with money to finance his luxurious tastes. In one of his endless begging letters to poor Franz Liszt, he refers to his need ‘to renounce reality’ when composing, and how he can best do this by surrounding himself with luxury even when unable to pay for it. He must, he says, ‘give vent to [my] passionate, fantastical and sensual extravagances ... to inspire in me the requisite mood of artistic sensuality’. He wrote: ‘I cannot live like a dog. I cannot sleep on straw and drink common gin. Mine is an intensely irritable, acute and hugely voracious, yet uncommon delicate and tender sensuality which must be flattered if I am to accomplish the cruelly difficult task of creating in my mind a non-existent world.’ The letter goes on as usual: ‘I must have money! Listen, Franz, you must help me now!’ Somehow Wagner got the money. Somehow the music was written. I listened last week to the whole of Die Walküre, with the splendid Eva Marton singing Brünnhilde, and thought, no common gin there, eh?
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