Wagner's Anti-Semitism, Part 9: The Wrap-up

Before I leave the subject matter of Wagner's anti-Semitism with a sort-of conclusion, I want to give two Jewish fans of Wagner the floor. First up is a brilliant bit from Larry David. It is a 3-minute clip from the episode “Trick or Treat,” combining an initial confrontation with a fellow Jew over Wagner’s music with the denouement, his revenge against the man.

 

The second is Stephen Fry’s one-hour documentary “Wagner and Me,” in which his life-long passion for Wagner’s music is juxtaposed with the fact that he is Jewish. Is there a contradiction there? That’s the topic. Fry is a sweetheart and his joy stemming from his love of Wagner’s music is palpable.

Okay, now for my summation. I am so delighted that from today forward I will no longer have to expend much energy on the topic of Wagner’s anti-Semitism. From now on, if someone asks, “But wasn’t he a Nazi?” I will say, “No, of course not. He was long dead when the Nazis came to power and he didn’t share their political ideology in any case. But his family was certainly intertwined with Hitler, and that has really screwed up his reputation. Go to this link where I give the full background.” 

Or if someone rails on about what a horrible person he was because of his anti-Semitism, I will say, “But historical perspective is absolutely necessary. First, you need to put his views in the context of the hundreds of years of vicious anti-Semitism for which Christians are responsible. Second, you need to put it in the perspective of 19^th century Western Civilization. Come on, we still had slavery in America at the time, and we were actively expelling Indians from their land. Let’s not even talk about how gays were treated! Wagner was a saint compared to the folks who were doing those things. Go to this link for more thoughts on this matter.” 

If someone says, “but I read he wanted to burn Jews,” I will sigh and say, “He made a nasty joke to his wife in private and she wrote it down; I know if Leslie wrote down every black humor joke I made, my reputation would be no better than Wagner’s. This post gives you the full story.”

And, if someone asks why he was anti-Semitic, I will say, “For a large variety of reasons, much of it from sheer paranoia—read this—but much of it having a rationality from his perspective, as I describe in these posts. His perspective was bizarre—he was a visionary fanatic—but given his beliefs, his anti-Semitism was inevitable. Personally, it is not the fact of his anti-Semitism per se that bothers me given his world-view and the historical context; it is the fact that he could be a mean and vengeful guy.” 

Finally, if someone says, “I heard the music itself is anti-Semitic,” I will respond: “Not to my ears, or the vast majority of people who love Wagner. The fact is, there are no Jews portrayed in his works, so any anti-Semitism would have to be in some way coded. It certainly isn’t obvious, if it is there. But if you are interested, you can read about it here, as it is the raging debate in Wagnerian academic circles.”

I guess the last point really needs a little more emphasis, because it is at the heart of the reason that I am able to ignore Wagner's anti-Semitism: it's not in the music. According to some, people who don’t perceive the anti-Semitism in the works have buried their heads in the sand. What can I say? I find his music dramas to be enormously compassionate, and they bring forth in me the deepest empathy for humankind.  Everyone agrees that if there is anti-Semitism in the works, it isn't on the surface. So why search for it??  What good will that possibly do?  I would rather just take the stories at face value, and see the beauty and splendor in the works. Thus, if my head is stuck in the sand, that is exactly where it should be.

---

End Notes

^{1. From Season 2, Episode 3.  If you have never seen the episode, it is worth the $2 to rent it here.}

Wagner's Abnormal Mind - Part 1

Wagner was very far from normal. (I’ve already outlined that here to a large degree.) Virtually everyone who met him—friend and foe—noted how unusual he was in a wide variety of ways. Many of his contemporaries felt he suffered from this or that mental illness, and the literature on what pathology he may or may not have suffered from is quite extensive. Clearly, as well, he was an incredibly gifted man. He was also well-aware of his difference from everyone else, and made frequent reference to it. Wagner, who was beset by both mental and stress-related physical problems his entire life, believed—and I will argue he is generally correct on this— that his stark differences from seemingly everyone else were both pathological and the source of his genius. Yet, whether stemming from or just coexisting with that pathology, he was extraordinary productive. His creative drive overrode whatever pathology stood in his path, as well as the multiple physical ailments that plagued him, and he succeeded in creating an incredible body of work, overcoming massive practical impediments along the way.

In the next several posts, I will be exploring all the above. I will be laying out pieces of the puzzle of his brain and, in my last post in the series, assembling all of them to try to create a coherent story. I should note that I have no particular expertise in the field. But I do feel I have a solid lay understanding of the area, as I have spent years studying the brain and mental illnesses and have a lot of practical experience with people who suffer from a wide variety of mental challenges, disorders, differences or illnesses...whatever you want to call it.

I am going to save the issue of the connection between his particular genius and “madness” for the next several posts. In this one, I just want to give an overview of my understanding of the issues, and my assumptions and understanding about the brain, mental illness and creativity, before tackling his specific case. But everything I touch on here will come back in his unique story, so pay attention!

I would like to start by (re)emphasizing my belief that a discussion of anyone’s mind must be put in the context of modern neuroscience’s understanding of the brain; to wit, our free will, if it exists at all, is severely limited. I wrote about the issue of free will here, and if you didn’t read it before, I suggest that as the starting point for this section. But for a quick review, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, who does not believe we have any free will, puts it this way: “Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control.” David Dennett opposes this view in general but agrees that free will doesn’t exist to any appreciable degree if we are not “wired right,” that is have retardation, brain damage, or mental illness.

The Brain

First, we all have unique brains. One of the key findings of modern neurology is the plasticity of the brain. In a nutshell, the brain’s experience alters its structure, therefore each of us has a very singular brain. An interesting article about the human mind from Salon summarizes this point:

Because each life path is uniquely personal, our individual patterns of neuronal connections are likewise uniquely constructed. Far more complex than a fingerprint, the intricate pattern of synapses makes every brain one of a kind, distinguishing even between identical twins, who share the same DNA code. The 1,000,000,000,000,000 or so neuronal connections that compose each brain’s structure form its unique signature, unprecedented and unrepeatable.

These structural changes can be minimal or, in the case of intensive study and work, much more significant:

Some alterations amount to no more than heightened sensitivity of the connections between neurons. A more significant form of adaptation is the formation of new synapses, which supports longer-term knowledge and skill development. The most radical structural change entails rewiring large sections of the cortex. Although we are used to thinking about learning along the timeline of minutes or hours, wholesale brain rewiring can occur over the course of many years. We see manifestations of significant neurological “remodeling” in the neural organizations of professional violinists and taxi drivers. Such remodeling might even include brain enlargement.

I am pretty sure that Wagner “rewired” his brain to be a finely tuned emotional machine. I can’t prove this contention, of course, but one study of professional musicians gives a clue to what I am proposing. These musicians, in contrast to the control group, were shown to have an increased ability to process emotion in sound. The study’s author said: “In essence, musicians more economically and more quickly focus their neural resources on the important -- in this case emotional -- aspect of sound. That their brains respond more quickly and accurately then the brains of non-musicians is something we'd expect to translate into the perception of emotion in other settings.”¹

Mental Abnormality and Mental Illness

While we are all unique, there are certainly patterns of behavior that people have labeled as “normal or “abnormal.” This whole issue is rather fraught, as more often than not the “abnormal” has been viewed as pathological. However, sometimes things that were once considered pathological have been relabeled as okie-dokie. In my lifetime, for example, my lesbianism went from being considered a mental disorder that was criminalized behavior to being seen as mentally healthy and quite legal!

Obviously, just because something is abnormal doesn’t mean it is a necessarily a pathology; instead, it could be just a part of normal human variation. That said, in the US, the principal direction is clear: more and more behaviors are being identified as pathological. In a speech in 1939, Carl Jung noted with disgust that “we cannot stand abnormal people any more so there are apparently very many more crazy people”²

The blogger Steven Novella sums up the debate within the psychology profession of the issue of so-called “abnormalities”:

The question is essentially how we should think about symptoms of mood, thought, and behavior. At one extreme we night consider all aspects of human mentality as being part of the normal spectrum, with differences being just that – differences. Those who follow the position of Thomas Szasz consider labels on mental differences to be largely politically and culturally motivated forms of repression.

At the other end is the obsessive partitioning of every nuance of human behavior into one or another abnormal category – the medicalization of all human problems. This may be connected to an overly reductionist approach to psychology, seeing all behavior in terms of neurotransmitters and brain function and giving insufficient attention to higher order situational and cultural factors.

Clinically speaking, if a pattern of behavior is harmful to the individual or to others in society, it is generally considered pathological. The more severe the harm to the self or others, the more the person is perceived to be mentally ill. But what if the reason the person is harming themselves—i.e. the person has developed a mental disorder or a drug dependency, for example—is because of a reaction to long-term persecution for their “abnormal” behavior? Who is the person with the real mental illness, the persecutor or the persecuted? Returning to the issue of the historical labeling of homosexuality (and other “queer”³ thoughts and behavior) as a pathology, I believe that there was—and is—a pathology related to the issue. However, it wasn’t queer people who had the mental illness (except as so driven by their persecution.) Instead, to my mind, it was the people who wanted to persecute those who were different who had the true mental illness, as they had a pathological fear or hatred of the “other” (often codified in religious dogma).

I am not arguing that mental illnesses that develop from persecution aren’t real, of course. Many queer people did and do, in fact, have mental problems stemming directly from the societal taboo on their behavior or thoughts. While the relatively broader acceptance of queer behavior has helped to lessen this problem, the taboo still remains fierce in many parts of the country, particularly for those people who cross gender boundaries. The flip side is that those intolerant behaviors that should be seen as pathological are not labeled as such due to a societal cultural paradigm accepting this behavior—such as persecution of those who are different than the general population—as normal and part of “human nature.”

The etiology of mental illness is, of course, complex and well beyond the scope of this blog. But, I do want to highlight one of the important precursors to its development: stress. To be persecuted or to be poor or to have a dysfunctional family environment brings on stress. There is large body of evidence that this can both can trigger the initial onset of mental illness as well as be a factor in the continuation of the illness and relapses into severe episodes. Read here for evidence on the relationship of mental illness and stress.  As well, it is linked to all sorts of physical problems as well, from long-term problems such as heart disease to an increased susceptibility to the common cold.⁴ This is particularly true for chronic stress.

Creativity and Mental Illness

There has long been an academic debate whether “madness” and creativity are linked. The debate is getting tantalizingly close to consensus with both long-term studies and neurological science finding clear links between several mental conditions and creativity, including depression and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, ADHD and autism.  For a good overview of the topic with many references to the scientific research, see here. 

The fact that they are linked doesn’t mean, of course, that the majority of creative people have mental problems.⁵ But what has been repeatedly proven is that the numbers of highly successful creative folks who have had mental problems far exceed any control group.  This is the finding that has fueled the neurological and biochemical search.

One of the scientists who is unconvinced that there is a casual connection between creativity and mental illness is Johns Hopkins researcher Albert Rothenberg.⁶ In Creativity and Madness, he argues that madness and creativity are functionality incompatible: “Although creative people may be psychotic at various periods of their lives, or even at various times during a day or week, they cannot be psychotic at the time they are engaged in the creative process, or it will not be successful.”⁷ He then acknowledges that creative thinking “involves a great deal of mental and emotional strain,” which could lead to mental problems.⁸ 

The problem is that he is arguing against no one. Researchers who believe that creativity and mental illness are often linked are not arguing that people create during psychotic episodes, but that mental illnesses can emotionally inform those artists about the human condition through their own suffering or, for that matter, euphoria.  The idea is that they then channel into their emotional revelations into their art during periods of relative or complete sanity.

Rothenberg did show through his research that there is one universal factor for creative success: extraordinarily high motivation, that is, a strong creative drive.⁹ The poet Carol Ann Beeman argues in her compelling book Just This Side of Madness that it is this drive itself which is can tip over to mental illness unless it is able to be satisfied:

The drive to create is explored through an increased affectivity and sensitivity to emotional stimulation into a total, unique, and individual expression of his or her experience of life. The artist just like the rest of us becomes burdened with the affective build-up associated with any biological or psychological drive state. Creative self-expression is the only constructive means through which artist can reduce the tensions inherent in the drive state to any effective degree. Without a suitable outlet to ensure the constructive channeling of the emotional content collected from his or her reactions of the world, the artist will inevitably break-down.¹⁰

However, the strains of the “constructive” act of artistic creation itself can lead breakdown. For instance, Leonard Woolf reports about his wife Virginia: “It was mental and physical strain which endangered her mental stability....Thus the connection between her madness and her writing was close and complicated, and it is significant that, whenever she finished a book, she was in a state of mental exhaustion and for weeks in danger of a breakdown.”¹¹

While the link between creativity and “madness” has been all but proven, the main thing to reemphasize is that the act of creation generally requires sanity and detailed control, certainly for works that require skilled craft such as creative writing, composing, etc. (I mean, there could be exceptions: Jackson Pollack’s work looks nuts to me, and I can imagine it could have been done in a psychotic state without any problem.) As Salvador Dali said, “There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know that I am mad.”

Note on the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM)

Before I continue with this line of argument, I just want to interject that the whole concept of disorders as we understand them—the DSM being the standard reference for classification of mental disorders—is suspect, and there is now a large push-back to the symptom-based view of mental illness that it is not grounded in science. The recent release of the DMV-V has crystallized this debate. The new edition, though greatly criticized for some of its tweaks, doesn’t really change much from DSM-IV. The National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) has publicly criticized its approach, not because of a radical break with the past, but because it hasn’t done so, which they believe in the modern era is essential. The organization's central argument is that the new techniques of brain science—still in their infancy— are the best way forward, and the DSM way of categorizing is, essentially, without scientific underpinning and therefore a dead-end. The director of the NIMH, in this open letter writes:

The weakness [of the DSM] is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment.

He goes on to indicate his bottom-line: “But it is critical to realize that we cannot succeed if we use DSM categories as the ‘gold standard.’The diagnostic system has to be based on the emerging research data, not on the current symptom-based categories.”

Since all brains are completely unique, that too argues against any sort of reductionist model in which people suffering from a variety of mental—and often physical—symptoms can easily be slotted into this or that disorder. That said, it is hard to even discuss the subject without referring to the dominant model—the DSM—that exists in our culture now. I am hoping to avoid reductionism, as I absolutely believe that is impossible with Wagner, but I will of necessity refer to DSM disorders when I turn to Wagner.

Creativity and the Bipolar Disorder Spectrum

The strongest evidence showing a link to creativity consists of disorders on the bipolar spectrum. These disorders are characterized by cyclical mood changes between manic and depressive states. The changes can be extremely rapid or a person can be stuck in a “manic” or “depressive” episode for long periods. Sometimes both symptoms co-exist. On the mild end of the spectrum, it is called Cylothymia disorder, with the less-severe manic episodes termed hypomania. There are various subtypes, but the most severe is Bipolar I and the relatively more moderate is Bipolar II.

Kay Redfield Jamison, the author of Touched with Fire writes about creativity and bipolar or depressive disorders in her book: “Mania is characterized by an exalted or irritable mood, more and faster speech, rapid thought, brisker physical and mental activity levels, quickened and more finely tuned senses, suspiciousness, a marked tendency to seek out other people and impulsiveness.”¹² As for the depressive cycle, it “affects not only mood but the nature and content of thought as well. Thinking processes almost always slow down, and decisiveness is replaced with indecision and rumination. The ability to concentrate is usually greatly impaired and willful action and thought become difficult if not impossible.”¹³

The paradox of the disease is that many people who have it like aspects of it, and don't want to lose those parts of the disease. In this small study of people diagnosed with bipolar illness most viewed it “as a gift.”  The actor Stephen Fry, who has been diagnosed with the disorder, created a film to explore this conundrum.¹⁴  (Watch it here.)  He asked everyone he interviewed who had been diagnosed with the disorder if they would push a button to make it disappear. Only one would have done so. The three folks pictured below—Fry, Richard Dreyfuss and Carrie Fisher—all said that they preferred to “keep” their disease.  

At the time of the film, Fry had never even treated the disorder because he actually liked his manic self, believed it was essential for his creativity, and didn’t want that to go away.  However, the depression that accompanies the disorder has led him to make repeated suicide attempts (and according to this article about a recent suicide attempt, he seems to be treating the syndrome now).

There are a number of explanations and theories from neuroscience and psychiatric literature exploring this connection between bipolar and creativity. I can only provide a small smattering of them, and I am leaving out the scientific grounding as it would require many more pages. However, please follow the links below in the footnotes to get started on the biochemical and neuroscientific literature.¹⁵

The most obvious connection is that during the hypomanic state the artist has both the drive, stamina and confidence to express their emotional insights, often gained at the depressive trough. In this article by the psychiatrist Neel Burton, he highlights a study by Jamison of artists diagnosed on the bipolar spectrum, in which the majority self-reported that the hypomanic state led to “‘increases in enthusiasm, energy, self-confidence, speed of mental association, fluency of thoughts and elevated mood, and a strong sense of well-being.’ Participants also reported a noticeably decreased need for sleep and feelings of elation, excitement, and anticipation.” That such feelings and thoughts would potentially aid the creative process seems clear.

An article on the subject in Wired puts it this way: “The extravagant high descends into a profound low. While this volatility is horribly painful, it can also enable creativity, since the exuberant ideas of the manic period are refined during the depression.”

A New York Times article on the same subject suggests, “One idea is that since there is a genetic basis for affective disorders, the same gene may also produce artists. Geneticists suggest that because the way a manic depressive episode arouses brain activity -- triggering extreme swings of emotion -- the brain may become more adaptive to synthesizing incongruous thoughts. That process -- of reorganizing disparate emotions into a new order -- may be the essence of creativity.” 

Burton cautions in his article: “Thus, whilst there can be little doubt that bipolar disorder and creative genius are associated, evidence of causation and of the direction of causation is still lacking.”  Thus, he postulated that it was possible that the creative drive and the acts of artist expression itself that could trigger the disorder in some individuals and not the other way around as is generally imagined.

---

End Notes

1  See here.

2  As quoted in Beeman, Just This Side of Madness, page 32. It is easy to track this trend through the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Each edition has led to an ever greater numbers of identified disorders; some of this is just refining and distinguishing but some of it is, in fact, pathologizing that which was not seen as pathological in the past. The DSM-I, from 1952, listed 106; the DSM-III, from 1980, listed 265, and the current DSM-IV has 297. The chair of the DSM-5 task force, David Kupfer, announced that the total number of disorders in DSM-5 would not increase, but subtypes were added!

3  I understand that some people aren’t comfortable with the use of the word “queer” to define the gamut of folks who are gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual and otherwise outside the norm of heterosexual and gender conformity. Oh well, get used to it. It’s a great term and so darned economical for writing!

4  See for instance this or this.

5  Though in the case of famous poets it is close to a majority, as a number of studies have shown the incidence of psychopathology to be around 50% for them; musicians and prose writers tend to follow with about 35-30% rates. See page 62 of Jamison, Touched by Fire and the whole of chapter 3.

6  Rothenburg, Creativity and Madness; this book came out in 1990, which in the world of brain science is in the relative dark ages.  I don't know if he has moderated his position with the changing evidence.

7  Ibid, 36 (emphasis in the original)

8  Ibid, 161

9  Ibid, 9
10  Beeman, Just This Side of Madness, 73

11  Ibid, 141

12  Jamison, Touched with Fire, 27. Jamison is both a professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins (though a trained psychologist) and has suffered from the disease herself since early adulthood.

13   Ibid, 21

14   Fry obviously likes to tackle conundrums, in that he did the previously-linked documentary exploring his love for Wagner in the context of his Jewish heritage, too.

15  For some of the scientific underpinnings of the links between creativity and madness, see here and here on dopamine and the mesolimbic and mesocortical pathways; see here where you can either read or watch a Glenn Wilson lecture covering creativity and psychoticism, schizotype, apophenia; see here for the connection of a lower latent inhibition (LI) threshold to creativity and mental illness.

Wagner's Abnormal Mind - Part 2: His Formative Years

Before focusing on Wagner’s mind, I need to give enough biographical details to make his mental development intelligible.  I will do this in two parts. The first part will take us to the point he decided to become a composer, drawing the portrait from his own autobiography as well as a variety of secondary sources.¹ The second part will be focused less on biography per se, but more on his emotional development in adulthood, with his own letters providing the road map, supplemented with necessary biographical information. This will be a rapid tour, highlighting those things I think important to understanding his mind, but please see both my bibliography here and the footnote below if you want a want a more extensive biography.

Wagner was born in May of 1913 into a large family of nine children; he was the second to last child in the family.²  His birthplace was Leipzig³ in the Saxony region, which was soon to be the location of one of Napoleon's greatest defeats: the Battle of Leipzig, in which about 100,000 were killed. In the aftermath of this battle, his father, Carl, caught typhus and died. While he would obviously have no memory of this time, it can’t be great for a baby’s development to have lived through the chaos of the war, along with the ensuing loss of his father and his income, plunging the family into economic woe. 

An actor, painter and playwright named Ludwig Geyer soon rescued the family by marrying his mother, Joanna, and the family moved to Dresden. For his formative years, then, Geyer was seen by Wagner as his father, and he was given his last name. (He changed it himself at 14 for reasons I will go into below.)

Geyer, in fact, may have been his true father. It is impossible to say this definitively, but there is evidence on both sides, with more on the Geyer side of the equation. Very much is made of this issue, probably way too much. It certainly wasn’t a preoccupation of his youth, and there is no documentation that Wagner even thought about the issue until fairly late in his adulthood. Most biographers jump to all sorts of fanciful conclusions. For instance, many say Wagner was “tormented” by this question, but that is a fairly strong word for virtually no evidence of this—and significant contrary evidence—beyond opera analysis.⁴

For those who want to play the “who was Wagner’s father” game, some of the evidence is visual. Take a look:

His brother Albert (14 years his senior)

Step-father Geyer

Wagner at 29 as drawn by his friend Ernst Kietz

Mother Johanna

Son Siegfried

Wagner in his 50s

I came to no conclusions from the pictures.  Albert (whom we know was Carl's son) looks like Richard, but the younger Wagner has similarities to Geyer.  His son, Siegfried looks more like Geyer than Wagner does. Evidence: inconclusive. Moving on...

Wagner was a sickly toddler, and later recounted that his mother had told him that she “almost wanted me dead owing to my seemingly hopeless condition.” He rallied to health and became “a bundle of energy, ” generally wild, incorrigible and extremely sensitive, crying or screaming or otherwise emoting regularly. Geyer called him “the Cossack,” given his penchant for resisting authority and following his own drummer.⁵ According to Cosima, Richard said of his childhood, "I grew up in the wildest of anarchy; it had to be, for then as later no known method ever fitted me, but how much should I have been spared if I had been accustomed to obeying! To my sister I was just a wild and forsaken being who never conformed.” (Cosima's diary, July 5, 1871)

He had a very vivid imagination and was full of fears. For instance, while he loved to look at fruit or flowers, he refused to touch them. (One biographer suggested this was because Geyer had yelled at him for touching those things while painting still-life canvases.) He had fears of reflections, such as those on the stone beer bottles as they “seemed to him to be ‘grimacing devils’, taunting and mocking him with their ‘constantly changing shapes.’” He even had a fear of bells, as he looked into what he referred to as their “jaws.”

Beyond fears, as a child he developed deep aversion and horror when seeing people and, particularly, animals, in pain. This aversion remained intense throughout his life, and the depth of his feelings in this area were frequently recounted by friends as well as oft-mentioned in in his letters.

Because he was such a difficult child, he was often shunted off to live with others. At the age of seven, his first “exile” occurred, when he was sent to live with a pastor for more than a year, ostensibly to help with his education, but primarily due to his unruly nature.  His stepfather, in the meantime, had his own problems. According to the author Joachim Köhler, in Wagner: The Last of the Titans, Geyer “started to withdraw from his friends and seemed to sink into deep despondency. Whereas they had earlier been struck by the ‘dual aspects of his character’, causing him to veer between high spirits and melancholy, he was now in a permanent state of depression.” He contracted tuberculosis and died when Wagner was eight.

Wagner had been summoned from the pastor’s house when it was clear that Geyer was dying, but was returned to the pastor the very next day. Soon he was shunted to Geyer’s brother for ten months, and then to his paternal uncle, Adolf Wagner. At this house there were portraits on the wall which he hallucinated were alive, and he had nightly nightmares about them. In fact he was generally terrified “of inanimate objects coming to life.” According to Köhler, “[e]ven ordinary pieces of furniture could induce a sense of terror in him when he was alone in a room and fixed his attention on them. In his panic-stricken fear that they might suddenly come to life, he would invariably scream for help.”

Adolf couldn’t handle the terrified child, so he returned him to his mother. Thus, his two-year exile ended at age nine. Back at Dresden, though, Wagner’s nightmares continued. He said of them:

Until late in my boyhood no night passed without my awakening with a frightful scream from some dream about ghosts, which would end only when a human voice bade me to be quiet. Severe scoldings or even corporal punishment would then seem to be redeeming kindness. None of my brothers and sisters wanted to sleep near me; they tried to bed me down as far from the others as possible, not stopping to think that by doing so my nocturnal calls to be saved from the ghost would become even louder and more enduring, until they finally accustomed themselves to this nightly calamity. 

To the end of the days, he hated solitude—except when composing—which his biographer Newman suggests was because “solitude brought up out of the subconscious depths of him all sorts of lurking fears.”

In should be noted that his family was highly theatrical, with most of his siblings making their living through the acting or singing arts. Wagner was, therefore, a “theater brat”—he knew it as well as anything in life. Of the theater, he wrote that the world “would serve as a lever to lift me out of a monotonous everyday reality into that fascinating demoniacal realm. Everything connected with the theater had for me the charm of mystery, an attraction amounting to intoxication.” 

In his autobiography, Wagner spoke highly of his mother, but it is clear through his actions—and later letters—that he was also critical of her and generally preferred distance from her. The highly sensitive child who grew up to be a very sensual man lived as a youth in a home, as he put it, in which “there was little tenderness...particularly as expressed in caresses.” In a letter to his younger sister Cäcilie when he was 29 he said, “our good mama is utter hell for everyone around her...[still] I always enjoy seeing her once in a while: she has many charming qualities.”  What is clearly true is that he never enjoyed the parental love he craved. He told his first wife Minna that “on the whole...[I had] a miserable youth.” The one bright spot of his youth was his older sister, Rosalie, who filled the role of early supporter, protector, inspiration and muse.

By adolescence, though relatively small,⁶ Wagner was physically fit and quite athletic. He had a life-long ability and interest in acrobatics, having learned to walk a tightrope at age ten, and retained the love of such feats—and an ability to preform them—for the rest of his life. For instance, to greet—and impress—a female visitor at age 60, he scurried up a tree. Throughout his life, he enjoyed walking, includes long hikes and mountaineering. These outings helped to calm his nerves, and put him in the peacefulness of nature, which he found tremendously regenerative. He never liked the noise and hustle and bustle of cities and longed always for quiet and solitude.

As a student, he showed no follow-through for subjects he considered dull, such as mathematics. But he was an avid reader to the point of obsession with those things he found fascinating, such as the classics, particularly Greek culture and mythology.

Wagner's living arrangements became somewhat random in his early adolescence: sometimes with his family, who had moved to Prague where the breadwinner, Rosalie, had a well-paying acting job; sometimes with a Dresden family; sometimes with his Uncle Adolf, in Leipzig. By his early teens, he was quite independent. He would set off on journeys by foot of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of miles to move from place to place, occasionally with a lift from a passing coach. Such a walking trip took him to his Uncle’s house in Leipzig as a 14 year-old. This trip was a turning point towards the more cerebral, as he bonded with his Uncle, who conversed with him about ancient Greece and other wide-ranging literary and philosophical issues. It was at this time he first read Shakespeare and Goethe’s works. He learned from his uncle that he inherited a number of books from his father, and was ecstatic with acquiring the library. From this point on, Wagner viewed his uncle as the father-figure that he had been long missing. It was to please his uncle—who always hated Geyer— that he took back the name of Wagner.

His mother and the two other younger siblings, Ottilie and Cäcilie, had moved to Leipzig at this point, so Richard did live with them, but he spent hours walking and talking with his mentor, Adolph. He hated the school at Leipzig with a passion and decided to teach himself whatever he wanted to know, with the help of Adolph’s fine library and astute mind.

The 14-year-old thus ceased going to school—unbeknownst to his family— and instead hid up in the attic to write a Shakespearean-inspired blood-soaked tragedy, full of the stuff of his nightmares: ghosts, murder, rape and insanity. It’s name was Leubald. It was the kind of thing that would have gotten a school-kid in our day and age sent straight to a psychologist for evaluation and on a watch-list of some kind. When his labors were discovered, everybody was indeed quite upset, mostly that he was wasting his time on this, but his uncle reacted to the content with “shock and astonishment.” (To my mind, Wagner was trying to take control of his ghostly fears through artistic means, purging his subconscious fears, and replacing them with his creation.)

Wagner realized two things from this ordeal: First, since he thought his play was wonderful, he felt both misunderstood and alone, and he decided that the only real problem with the play was that it needed music to make it emotionally intelligible. Second, he concluded he needed to learn music to complete his great work. And so he went to the library and checked out a book to begin his musical education as his aim was now set: to become a great composer of dramatic works.

This is quintessential Wagner: highly optimistic and supremely self-confident, undeterred by criticism, systematically taking the steps necessary to achieve his dream, nay, his destiny.

---

End notes:

1 I drew this portrait from these sources: Wagner, My Life; Millington, Wagner; Köhler, The Last of the Titans; Newman, The Life of Wagner, Volume 1; Millington & Spencer, eds., Selected Letters of Wagner. I am not going to use too many footnotes in this post as I am on the road and don’t have the time. If you want specfic references for anything I assert, I am happy to give them to you. Just write.

2 He was the last child of Carl Wagner, at least that’s the story. His younger sister Cäcilie was the the child of Ludwig Geyer.

3 Leipzig was the town in which Bach served as Kapplemeister for 27 years at St. Thomas Church. Wagner was baptized in that same church, something he later saw as some sort of sign of his destiny.

4 A bunch of writers tie this question to the issue of his anti-Semitism. That is, they think he may have thought that Geyer was both his true father and Jewish (which he wasn’t), and so that is what tormented him. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Wagner thought or worried about Geyer being Jewish. It’s a complete fabrication.  He did entertain the idea that Geyer might have been his father, but he came to the conclusion that Carl Wagner was, according to Cosima's diaries. In any case, he showed no torment over the subject to Cosima or in his letters.  The opera analysis “evidence” is that Siegfried was tormented by wanting to know who his real parents were. Beyond that, there is no one in his works with this sort of father issue. This is pretty skimpy evidence for being “tormented.”

5 They were called Cossacks from the Turkish “kazak” meaning “free man,” referring to those “who anyone could not find his appropriate place in society and went into the steppes, where he acknowledged no authority.” 

6 How tall Wagner was is variously reported from about 5’ to 5’6”. The latter is the only one with evidence, as a surviving passport lists him at that height. The reason many thought of him as particularly small is because his head was much larger than a normal person of the same size, highlighting the contrast.

His abnormal mind, Part 3: Wonderfully Megalomanic

“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.” G.B. Shaw

Lance Armstrong

Tiger Woods

Bill Clinton

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Hunter S. Thompson

Steven Jobs

James Cameron

Pete Rose

Richard Wagner

What do these names have in common?

• They were all incredibly hard workers.
• They were all self-made men (in the case of Woods and Rose, with a father pushing them, but they did the work).
• They were tops in their fields.
• They devoted obsessional time and energy to their craft.
• They were far more energetic than the average person.
• Within their work, they were all famous for being very jerky sometimes.
• Most of them broke rules of convention or of law.
• They all had messy personal lives, most with multiple relationships (some with multiple marriages, others with multiple affairs in and out of marriage).
• They were all innovators, doing things in new ways or to new degrees.
• They all thought they were better than everybody else doing something similar.
• They had faith in themselves, they hustled, they delivered. They were driven, and they knew they were special in relationship to their peers.
• They are my favorite fanatically-driven people.

I admire them all.  And I loathe many things about all of them.

I have always felt that for every character trait, there is a good and bad side to it. When you fall in love with someone, you see only the good side. Two years later you are trying to learn to live with the bad side. To bring it home, my partner Leslie really loved my spirit, my drive, my competence, my self-confidence. She soon learned of their flip companions: my tempestuous and judgmental nature, my impatience, my competitiveness. I try to keep the bad sides of these traits at bay, but I have failed many times in my life. But my good wouldn’t exist without my bad, and vice versa; they are two sides of the same coin. (I’m so sorry, Leslie! You deserve my good side, but don't deserve its evil twin.)

Similarly, megalomania has two sides. For the most successful narcissists, the bad side is their arrogance and lack of empathy, but the flip side is that they are visionaries, with rock-solid confidence in their abilities and the drive to make it so. They wouldn’t have done what they did without these traits that are completely entwined. As the saying goes, you gotta take the bad with the good.

But to call any of the men above megalomaniacs creates a problem.

Wikipedia says it as "a psychopathological disorder characterized by delusional fantasies of power, relevance, or omnipotence. 'Megalomania is characterized by an inflated sense of self-esteem and overestimation by persons of their powers and beliefs'. Historically it was used as an old name for narcissistic personality disorder prior to the latter's first use by Heinz Kohut in 1968, and is used these days as a non-clinical equivalent." [my emphasis added]

The DSM IV definition begins: "A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts." [my emphasis added]

This is the problem: the men listed above really had no delusions, their sense of self-esteem wasn’t inflated, they didn’t overestimate their abilities. They were special. These people actually have a lot of self-knowledge and a realistic self-appraisal. They all have been known to be jerky and arrogant, but they are not in a la-la land of delusion.

Because of the fact that some narcissists are very successful, there is now a movement to try to differentiate those types from the delusional types in leadership literature. John Maccoby calls them Productive Narcissists or Roy Lubit calls them Constructive Narcissists. The negative characteristics remain though; they are still self-centered jerks. Just successful ones.

I like this woman’s cheeky, but true, summary of this issue in her blog post entitled, "the importance of vision: what we can learn from total narcissists (even though they suck)."  (ed note - I just realized the woman who wrote this is Justine Musk - ex-wife of Elon, certainly a world-class meglomanic - so she really knows what she is talking about.)

She has gotten Wagner—and all those other guys—exactly right, in my book.

There isn’t a way in the world that Wagner would have accomplished what he did without being a narcissist, megalomaniac, or whatever you want to call it. It was certainly a trait of Wagner's, tiresome to many, but crucial to his art. So, I embrace it in his case, and in the case of all my favorite narcissists listed above. I just would not want to be in a relationship with any of them.