What Richard Wagner required of his Viennese dress designer
PAUL JOHNSON
President Bush and the Chinese dictator dressed up in fancy silk tunics to do business this week. And why not? Wearing a different outfit tends to make the mind more flexible. Churchill liked to don his quasi-nautical uniform as an Elder Brother of Trinity House to impress foreign potentates. De Gaulle was mystified; still more by Churchill's explanation of its significance (le SiliS le frere aine de la Saint Trinite'). Old Nikita Khrushchev, I recall, liked dressing up and once suggested that all participants at a summit should adopt the style of clowns in a circus, an image that delighted my friend Vicky, the cartoonist.
Various people think they perform their functions better when dressed up: archbishops, for instance, traffic wardens, royals. The more august French authors, the kind who belong to the Academie, put on a skullcap before picking up their pen, even though it is now a word-processor. I know one English writer who likes to put on a magic jacket, like a conjuror, before he gets on with his play/novel. And was there not a prolific author, specialising in romantic novels (among other genres), who had to dress up as a flapper before tackling his current tale, while retaining his foul pipe and Osbert Lancaster moustache? Deep waters here, eh, Watson?
The man — genius, I should say — who formed the closest connection between art and costume was Richard Wagner. He had, he told his father-in-law, Liszt, 'an uncommonly tender and delicate sensuality which must be flattered if I am to accomplish the cruelly difficult task of creating in my mind a non-existent world'. One reason he involved his sponsors in such ruinous expenditure was that he decorated his habitations in silks and satins of astonishing luxury, which he commissioned in elaborate detail from the top Viennese dress designer, Bertha Goldwag. His letter to Fraulein Goldwag of 1 February 1867 includes sketches and a mesmerising description of the housecoats he wanted her to make for him so that he could finish the Ring. One was in pink satin (I need 12 yards'), 'quilted with eiderdown and sewn in squares'. It was to be 'lined with a lightweight white satin', and the width of the coat at the bottom had to be 'six lengths, i.e. very wide' so that he could swish it about. He wanted 'a puffed ruche all the way round' and 'the trimming or flounce must be particularly opulent and beautifully worked .. . a foot in width [with] three or four beautiful bows' near the waist. The sleeves were to have 'puffed trimmings, opulent' and there had to be 'a wide sash, ten feet long'. This fantastic garment he wanted duplicated in blue, and he enclosed samples of the exact colours he required. The whole was completed, once put on, by profuse spraying of costly scents and unguents, in the rooms as well as on the person, so that faint whiffs of his prodigality are still to be detected in his apartments — in the Palazzo Vendramini in Venice, for example.
This attention to detail in the composition of a costume is akin to his orchestration, where he often doubles up the instruments but writes a separate line for each to produce the exact sound he wants. Thus he uses eight horns, each independently scored, to produce the sound of the Rhine at the opening of Rheingold. When the gods first view the new Valhalla, Wagner uses a group of 13 brass instruments, including a bass trumpet, two tenor and two brass tubas, a contrabass tuba and a contrabass trombone, each carefully scored to produce, in combination, the precise sonority to invest the theatrical scenery with the sound he required to set the imagination aflame. And it must be said that these two effects are among the grandest in all orchestral music. If Wagner needed to dress up like a Renaissance fop to score them, then he was quite right to spend the money. As he said to Liszt, 'I have stopped asking the price of anything.'
What would Wagner have done with Christian Dior, that sartorial perfectionist? He employed the finest seamstresses in the world in his atelier, and designed one evening dress with 40 tiny cloth-covered buttons on the back, each of which had to be eased into a minute, exquisitely sewn buttonhole to make the shape of the bodice and flow of the garment over the hips perfect. As it happened, the first time the lady wore it her maid was away, a dinner party was assembling and her husband gave up after struggling with the buttons for half an hour. Among the guests, however, was the greatest designer of them all, Cristabal Balenciaga, and the lady had the nerve to ask him to step upstairs and button her into his rival's gown. The saturnine Basque flashed a wintry smile and got down to work, muttering and grumbling. 'Forty buttons! Thirty would be more than enough. C'est la folie fitrieuse! But Dior has never seen a buttonhole in his life. I have — since the age of three-and-a-half. It is hard work, Madame. But then [finishing] what is work if it produces beauty? The effect is magnificent! Maybe 40 buttons were needed after all! I salute him!' (As Dior, the younger man, was always careful to call Balenciaga Maitre, the Basque could afford to be generous.) He ended his observations thus: 'We are all madmen, who live for clothes.'
Well, Nancy Mitford was as sane as they come (except when picking men to fall in love with) but she saw each new book she wrote in terms of the number of Paris couturier outfits it would buy her. But what are we to make of the grandee I heard about, from a family famed for its historic past of military splendour, who kept up with the traditions, at least sartorially? At his office one morning he was suddenly told that his house was on fire. He rushed out to his car in a frenzy, drove furiously and pulled up in front of the smoking ruin with screeching brakes. The head fireman reassured him, 'It's all right, guvnor. Your wife is OK. So are the children. The servants are all right.' 'Yes, yes, yes, my man, I dare say they are. What I want to know is—have they saved my uniforms?'
However, I suspect that almost all of us care about clothes, especially those we work in, more than we will admit. The only man I know who was genuinely indifferent was the late Lord Longford, and even he was prepared to take a little trouble attiring himself as a Knight of the Garter. So don't let's criticise Fergie for getting her secretary to blow-dry her armpits. A society lady tells me, 'It's well known that deodorant, if left wet, tends to rot the delicate material of a tight-fitting evening dress.'
So what Fergie required her secretary to do made practical sense. Let's hope this dressing in Chinese silks makes sense too, and tolls another bell for bin Laden, no mean dresser-up himself.
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