Thus
far in my series on Wagner’s abnormal mind, I have argued there is a connection between various mental illnesses—particularly
on the bipolar spectrum—and creativity. But, in those same blog
posts, I also argued against reductionism, in that each brain is
utterly unique, and attempting to slot people into mental health
categories can conceal as much as it reveals. I think this is
particularly true of Wagner.
To
begin my psychological portrait of him, I wrote here about Wagner’s
formative years: his basic character traits and his difficult
childhood. To summarize those traits, I believe they fall into two
general categories: First, there was his extreme sensitivity, which
included his emotionality, i.e his strong reaction to visual stimuli
including hallucinations, nightmares, a variety of fears, intensely
strong reaction to animals suffering, and so forth. Second, there was his
headstrong nature, self-confidence and optimism as was revealed, for
example, in choosing to, secretly, forgo school and instead write the
“great” drama Leubald, and his subsequent decision to set
it to music, even though he had no musical training.
Given
the relative paucity of reliable accounts of his childhood, it isn’t
until late adolescence and early adulthood that another of his basic
character tendencies comes into clear focus: his cyclothymic nature,
that is his tendency to cycle—often quickly and strongly—between
feelings of ecstasy and enlightenment (hypomania) to feelings of rage
or depression. I have already written about this characteristic in
this general post on his personality, but I will just repeat one quote from
his friend, Edward Shure, to give you a sense of it:
His
high spirits overflowed into a joyous froth of acts of sheer
buffoonery and eccentric jokes, but the least contradiction provoked
unprecedented anger. Then he was like a caged lion, roaring like a
wild animal, pacing the room, his voice growing hoarse and the words
coming out like cries, his words striking at random. He then seemed
like an unleashed force of nature, a volcano erupting... Everything
about him was larger than life.”1
It
was the interaction of the these three broad characteristics—acute
sensitivity, optimistic tenacity and his cyclothymic nature— that
defined him for the rest of his life, and together created the well-spring
of his creative drive.
Wagner’s
Creative Drive
The
artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two
forces are at war within him—on the one hand, the common longing
for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a
ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override
every personal desire. There are hardly any exceptions to the rule
that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.2 Carl Jung
How
gladly would I, too, stretch out my limbs and let the wonderful world
outside leave its mark on me! But everyone has his own daemon, and
mine is a horribly powerful beast; it completely and utterly
subjugates me to it own end.3 Richard Wagner
Wagner’s
grand theme was always suffering, normally ending through
transforming and redeeming love and death. All his works are about
him, in the sense that the themes derive directly from his life: the man
against the world, the man in a love triangle, the man on a journey
to find his place in world, the man seeking love to redeem himself. That
was Wagner’s life, but by placing it within myth, he was attempted to
universalize his experience.
To
quote Carl Jung again on “the artist”:
As
a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as
an artist he is "man" in a higher sense— he is
"collective man"— one who carries and shapes the
unconscious, psychic forms of mankind. That is his office, and it is
sometimes so heavy a burden that he is fated to sacrifice happiness
and everything that makes life worth living.4
And,
indeed, Wagner felt deeply burdened by his artistic nature, and felt
he suffered greatly for it. While he knew he could be a complete
pain in the ass, he blamed the artist in himself, and felt his works redeemed his many flaws. Below in a letter to his friend Jakob Sulzer, he
makes this case:
There
is no doubt but that I cause many people pain in this way [through
putting his art above all else]; but it is equally certain that I cause
nobody such hellish torments as I inflect upon myself; it is the
artist in me who is almost entirely to blame for this; and so, if
there is anyone who can derive any pleasure from what I have created,
he really has nothing to complain about if I cause him distress,
since I certainly suffer more as a result than himself.5
Wagner
believed that the essence of his drive was the unsatisfied desire
of love. He put it simply as this in a letter to his sister Luise in
1852:
Art
for me is a substitute for a life of unsatisfied desire.... I pour
out into my art the violent need I feel for love, a need that life
cannot satisfy, and all I find in return is that people at best
mistake me for an energetic – opera reformer!6
When
he speaks of the “violent need I feel for love,” this wasn’t
some run-of-the-mill love he was talking about—he had no interest
in run-of-the-mill anything—but instead, it was an earth-shaking,
all-consuming love. Thus, there was never any chance he could get
it, and only in art could he create the world that his soul wanted.
And in this self-created world, he dies in rapturous love, just like
his Brunnhilde, Elizabeth, Senta, and Isolde.
His
life was full of suffering — in love, in health, in continual
stress, in crushing disappointments — and his refuge was to
fantasize about death. As he wrote to Liszt in 1954,
[w]hen
I think back on the storms that have buffeted my heart and on its
convulsive efforts to cling to some hope of life — against my own
better judgement —, indeed, now that these storms have swelled so
often to the fury of a tempest, — I have yet found a sedative and
heartfelt yearning for death: total unconsciousness complete
annihilation, the end of all dreams – the only ultimate
redemption!7
His
creative process was generally this: in the depths of depression, he
would conceive of a piece, which brought him out of these depths
through inspiration. He would then rally to work on the piece, but
the composition process was extremely exhausting for him, so he would
then have to recuperate—sometimes for months—before continuing.
However, the result of his labors ultimately reinvigorated him.
For
example, when he conceived Tristan
and Isolde,
he wrote to Franz Liszt, “But since I have never in my life enjoyed
the true happiness of love, I intend to erect a further monument to
this most beautiful of dreams, a monument in which this love will be
properly sated from beginning to end: I have planned in my head a
Tristan and Isolde, the simplest, but most full-blooded musical
conception... I shall then cover myself over, in order — to die.”8
During
the composition of Tristan, he was “in the flow”, completely
engrossed. He wrote to his friend Eliza Willie in 1859, “Every
stroke of my pen has the significance of eternity for me...Tristan
will be beautiful! But it is eating into me. Who knows whether
there will be any part of me left.”9
But
then it was done, and he wrote to Mathilde Wesondonck, his muse for
the work:
The
proofs of the third act of Tristan suddenly arrive. You will, I know,
understand how I felt when my gaze fell upon this last completed work
of mine, a glance that brought renewed life and strength to me, a
sense of fulfillment and — of inspiration. Scarcely can a father
have felt such joy at the sight of his child! In a flood of tears —
why deny my weakness? — I heard a voice calling out: no! You
shall not end yet; you must complete what you have begun! He who has
just created such
a
work is still full to overflowing!10
Wagner
was right about this work; it is absolutely amazing and has turned
out to be one of the seminal works in Western music. Leonard
Bernstein called it “the central work of all music history, the
hub of the wheel.”11
He certainly isn’t alone in this appraisal; it is my favorite work
of music, for example. So Wagner, as usual, was absolutely right about himself and
his work. This wasn’t egoism, it was simply the truth.
As
much as he often said he yearned for death, there is no evidence he
ever actually attempted suicide. Instead, as he put it, “I still
have to overcome this wild and terrible instinct for survival which
continues to cloud my vision and to cast me into a chaos of
contradictions.”12
In the
book Just This Side of Madness by the poet Carol Beeman, the author proposes
that a strong creative
drive is just as strong as other other basic
drives: for food, for sex, for sleep, and that “the intensity of
the drive is directly related to the inheritance of affective
disorders, especially the mood disorders, cyclothymia, hypomania, and
bipolar or manic-depressive illness. The greater the affective
sensitivity of the person, the greater the drive to create.”13
She further postulates that “[t]he amount of creative output of the
individual artist or thinker is proportional to the control it is possible to maintain over his or her neurotic or psychotic
tendencies.”14
I found this book fascinating, mostly because she so closely tracked
Wagner’s feelings on the nature of his artistic drive,
mental illness and suffering.
Just
for one example, Beeman writes: “In the most real sense possible
the drive to create is both a unique asset and a burden to the
creative mind.”15
Wagner made the same point throughout his life. Here is one example
from one letter to his friend Theodor Uhlig that illustrates this:
I
have again been working very hard since you left: it finally affected
my health, but although I do want to get better finally, I simply do
not know how to go about it!... As long as I work, I can delude
myself – but as soon as I have to convalesce, I can not longer
delude myself, and immediately I feel – dreadfully miserable. My only
salvation is to keep on thinking of work, and my only pleasure, on
resuming that work, is to wear myself out! What a splendid life for
an artist to live! How gladly I’d throw it all away in return for a
single week of life!16
.
Before
I am able to address Carol Beeman's argument in terms of Wagner—and I think it
is spot on—I need to explore both Wagner's pathology and sensitivities
in greater detail.
Wagner’s
pathology
There
has been a lot of speculation on what exactly was the nature of
Wagner’s pathology—if he was indeed pathological—which existed from his own
day right up to the present. The book The Wagner Companion has a sub-chapter entitled “Psychological Literature on Wagner”
which explores the pathobiographcial literature. The writer of this
article notes that “to keep the present survey within reasonable bounds,” she included only authors who are “professional, psychiatrists and or
psychoanalysts.”17
It begins,
[a]s
far as it has been possible to ascertain, the psychological
literature on Wagner begins, spectacularly, in 1872 with the
publication of Richard Wagner: A Psychiatric Study, a pamphlet by the
aspiring psychiatrist Theodor Puschmann, who, out of hand, declared
the composer to be mentally ill. According to Puschmann’s
diagnosis, Wagner was suffering from what in his day were regarded as
three of the principal categories of psychiatric pathology, namely,
megalomania, persecution mania, and moral insanity.18
The
publication in 1877 of sixteen letters from Wagner to his seamstress
in the well-respected Vienna daily Neue Freie Press added much
fuel to the fire, as it became fairly clear through them that he
enjoyed women’s clothing and fine fabrics to a degree that many
people concluded was pathological. I will address this in detail in
my forthcoming “Wagner was Queer” post, but I bring it up here
just to say that most of the pronouncements of Wagner’s pathology
centered on sexuality for many decades. Sexologist Alfred Kind
wrote, with bemusement, in 1913:
Since
then [the publication of the Letters to a Seamstress] many
value judgements have been passed: sybaritic, homosexual, dermatitic
[!], fetishistic, transvestite, feminine streak. Much to the dismay
of the diagnosticians, none of these assessments is wholly true. The
way is therefore still open for new sub-fields of pathological
morality. A competition should be set up in time for the next
psychiatric congress: Wagner’s illness.19
[bracketed material in original]
Along
with having some sort of sexual pathology, most of the shrinks
concluded he was “a hysteric” too. The quotes above from Wagner give the accurate sense that he was indeed very dramatic—over the top—in virtually all his letters and, from all reports, in his normal life. He easily fits the criteria for histrionic personality, but most modern writers no longer focus on this disorder or sexual pathology. Instead, writers have focused on fitting him
into one of the other DSM categories. Thus there are works speculating
that he had ADHD, Borderline
Personality Disorder, Bi-Polar
Disorder,
and, of course, megalomania
(narcissistic personality disorder), and no doubt even more could be
deduced.
But the problem is that by fitting him into so many categories, it makes the whole idea rather useless. He truly can't be forced into a particular straight-jacket, particularly because none of these authors account for his tremendous competence and the essential sanity needed to have accomplished his great feats.
But the problem is that by fitting him into so many categories, it makes the whole idea rather useless. He truly can't be forced into a particular straight-jacket, particularly because none of these authors account for his tremendous competence and the essential sanity needed to have accomplished his great feats.
While
there has been a huge body of specialized literature on this subject, conversely, in all the major biographical writing about Wagner, there is a
remarkable tendency to shy away from directly addressing the issue of
his abnormal mind: that is, to what extent were his clearly abnormal
actions pathological?
There
is no doubt that Wagner was beset with both mental and physical
problems all his life. Clear evidence of this exists in his
letters and Cosima’s diaries, as well as through much of the other
first-hand sources. While biographers do write quite a lot about the
physical ailments—such as skin and digestive system
problems—that plagued him throughout his life, they rarely explore whether the ailments were part of a broader mental condition, even though
Wagner frequently wrote that he considered their source to be
psychological. What biographers do instead is write many dozens,
sometimes hundreds, of pages identifying what they all treat as
character flaws—his megalomania, his relationship history, his
prolifigant ways, his tempestuous temperament—but they never ask if
these stem from a mental illness. This is particularly odd in that
Wagner wrote letter after letter describing his mental problems and
the lengths that he went to try to “cure” himself.
Here
is just a short excerpt from one such letter—this one during a period
of getting a “water cure”—to his friend Ernst Keitz in 1852:
When
our friend Lindemann [his doctor] looks for the present main source
of my illness in the cerebral nerves, he thereby proves to me
again how correctly he diagnoses my condition.... My illness then is
of transcendental nature, and all other medical measures can have no
decisive effect if I’m not cured up there. From my brain the
affection spread to my entire nervous system and manifested itself in
complete exhaustion.... That I cannot get well again, in the sense
that you imagine it, is as clear as day: I’m mentally ill—and
mental illness is incurable.... It is for me no longer a question of
recovering, but only of making the period of my existence bearable,
and I can do this only through artistic creation, since this is the
only illusion that is effective with me. I therefore desire from our
Lindemann not cure, but merely palliatives to make my
existence as artist possible as long as this existence can be maintained at all.20
I
am not sure why major biographers haven’t taken the topic up.
Historically, his ailments were written about to shame him, or to shame his
memory, and to argue against his work, not to exculpate him. It's possible that biographers thought that pursuing the topic would just add unnecessary abuse
on him, since historically to be “mentally ill” was not something
that softened criticism, but increased it. Or perhaps they felt it
was outside their expertise and couldn’t do the topic justice.
(Hell, that’s not stopping me!) But, perhaps, they just couldn’t
believe someone with a mental illness could do what he did. If
he was in fact loaded with some combination of pathological conditions, how could
he possibly have been so remarkably competent, such a disciplined
worker, effective manager, fund-raiser, world-class promoter, and so
incredibly creative? He set goals higher, visions grandeur, than any
other composer in history. And he succeeded in virtually all his
life’s plans, against huge odds, and tremendous opposition. How
could that jibe with major mental illness? Or, at least, that is
what I imagine his biographers think.
I believe that it is a massive failure of the major biographical literature to not fully explore this area, and these biographers' portraits end up being as one-sided as those who just write about him as if he were only pathological. Neither side gives an adequate synthesis of the material that exists about the man.
I believe that it is a massive failure of the major biographical literature to not fully explore this area, and these biographers' portraits end up being as one-sided as those who just write about him as if he were only pathological. Neither side gives an adequate synthesis of the material that exists about the man.
It seems to me there are two reasons that
it should be of major inquiry and importance in his biography.
First, what exactly is the relationship between his mental
abnormality and his creativity? He and his works were so different
from any other musicians, and he was so different from most any other
person, this has got to be a story worth exploring and telling. Here
Wagner gives a tremendous amount of testimony within his letters, and
modern neuroscience can add much to the picture.
The
other reason it seems important to me is by way of explanation and,
yes, some sympathetic understanding of his actions that seemed so
utterly outside the norm. At this historical point in time, most
writers spend a whole lot of space judging Wagner, identifying
character flaw after flaw; very few spend much time trying to really
understand the man. But what if he really wasn’t in control of his
actions and they were, in fact, from in-born traits or
pathology? Most mental health professionals subscribe to the “mental
illness is not a character flaw” line, so if he was a victim of a
pathological condition, doesn’t that let Wagner off the hook in full
or part?
Before
I give my answer to these questions, I have a couple more puzzle
pieces to add in future posts.
1 Spencer, Stewart,
Wagner Remembered, 181
2 Jung, Carl,
Modern Man and the Search for Soul, 173
3 Millington
and Spencer, Selected Letters of Wagner, page 564, June 22, 63
letter to Malwilda Von Meysenbug; what exactly he meant by daemon
can’t really be determined in that there were both good and bad
daemons in the Greek; I think he saw it like his view of creative
drive in general: having both good and bad aspects.
4 Jung,
The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, Vol. 15, page 101
5 Millington and Spencer, op. cit. 339
6 Ibid,
273
7 Ibid,
323
8 Ibid,
323-324
9 Ibid,
448
10 Ibid,
478
11 as
quoted in Smith, There’s a Place For Us, 245
12 Millington and Spencer, op. cit., 312
13 Beeman,
Just This Side of Madness, 193
14 Ibid,
82
15 Ibid,
83
16 Millington, op. cit., 228
17 in Müller
and Wapnewski eds., Wagner Handbook, Vetter, “Wagner in the History of
Psychology,” 124
18 Ibid,
page 125
19 Ibid, Müller, 127
20 Burk,
John ed. The Letters of Richard Wagner, Burrell Collection, Sept
7, 1852, 191-192; I will talk about what palliatives he used in the final article in this series.
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