strained one will be evident when the story of his dealings with Peter
Cornelius is put beside the Liszt episode I have lately narrated. In
the mad Paris and Vienna time of the early 'sixties he had become
deeply attached to Cornelius; Liszt, the generous, kind Liszt, had
apparently passed out of his life. He writes to Cornelius from Paris
on 9th January 1862 in the strain that is now so familiar to us: he
is tired of his wanderings and his buffetings; he must settle in some
cosy nest if he is to go on with his work. But he needs a sympathetic
friend near him. "Heavens! how glad I should be to have the poor 'Doll'
(_Puppe_)[266] with me as well! In these matters my moral sense is
incurably naïf. I would see nothing at all in it if the maiden were
also to come to me, and were to be to me just what, with her pretty
little nature, she can be. But how to find the 'terminus socialis'
for this? Ach Himmel! It amuses me and it grieves me!" However, if
Seraphine could not come, Cornelius was to come alone; and they two
were henceforth to be inseparable.[267]
When Wagner is settled at Starnberg under the protection of King
Ludwig, Cornelius is again to come to live with him and be his love.
They are to live in the same house,--Cornelius can bring his piano,
and there is a box of cigars awaiting him--yet each is to maintain his
own independence. "Exactly two years ago I ardently expected you in
Biebrich: for a long time I had no news of you, and then I suddenly
learned from a third person that you had let Tausig take you off to
Geneva. You have never fully known how deeply this put me out of
humour. Nothing of that sort must happen this time; but we must be
open with each other, like men." He knew that Cornelius was working at
his opera the _Cid_, and doubted whether he could do this as well in
Wagner's proximity as apart from him.[268] Wagner will have it that
Cornelius can work at the _Cid_ and he at his _Meistersinger_ in their
common home; he is willing and anxious, indeed, to advise his friend
about his opera. "Either you accept my invitation immediately," he
concludes, "and settle yourself for your whole life in the same house
with me, or--you disdain me, and expressly abjure all desire to unite
yourself with me. In the latter case I abjure you also root and branch
(_ganz und vollständig_), and never admit you again in any way into my
life.... From this you can guess one thing,--how sorely I need _peace_.
And this makes it necessary for me to know definitely where I stand: my
present connection with you tortures me horribly. It must either become
complete, or be utterly severed!"[269]
Cornelius hesitated, as well he might, to give himself up body and
soul to this devouring flame of a man; he knew Wagner, and knew what
sacrifices a friendship of _his_ kind meant for the friend. Wagner
was very angry with him for not accepting the invitation at once. He
came to Vienna to liquidate his debts with the 15,000 gulden placed at
his disposal for that purpose by the King, and generally to put his
affairs in order. Asked by Seraphine Mauro the object of his visit to
the city, he curtly replied, "To quarrel with my friends." Heinrich
Porges and his brother had called upon Wagner, but Cornelius did not
go. "There were such scenes," he writes to his brother Carl on 15th
June, "and tears of rage and despair over my conduct: no answer to his
letter--my _Cid_ had 'miscarried,'--he could put everything in order,
go through it all cordially and calmly with me--at Starnberg, &c.,
&c., pianoforte ready--a box full of cigars--Peter as man and artist,
&c., &c." He saw Standhartner, who advised him, in case he did not
mean to accept Wagner's invitation, not to go near him just then, as
it would probably lead to a complete rupture. So Cornelius writes to
Wagner between one and three in the morning, telling him that he could
not settle in Munich now with anyone but his brother, but that when
he has finished the _Cid_ he will be willing to live there in merry
companionship with Carl and Wagner. No answer was vouchsafed to this
letter. "Standhartner speaks to him again in my interest. Heinrich
Porges writes him--'Reconciliation with Peter: otherwise--Egoist!'
Thereupon he writes at once to Porges: 'do not visit me to-day,' and
to Standhartner: 'do not come till to-morrow,' &c., &c., &c., and when
they come next day he is gone! So that one can truly say that he has
treated his best friends in Vienna like so many shoe-blacks.... He came
in May 1861. This is the upshot of these three years!"[270]
Cornelius writes at the same time to Reinhold Köhler on the 24th: "A
row with Wagner.... I was simply to be a Kurvenal. Wagner does not
understand that though I have many qualifications for that,--even to
a dog-like fidelity,--I have unfortunately just a little too much
_independence_ of character and talent to be this cipher behind his
unit." And on the same day to his sister Susanne: "Unfortunately we
have separated, perhaps for ever. He wrote me: Come to Starnberg--come
for ever--or I will have absolutely nothing more to do with you.--I
could not consent to that,--for the _Cid_ has haunted me all the time
since February, and is now coming to life,--_and if I were with Wagner
I should not write a note_.... I should be no more than a piece of
spiritual furniture for him, as it were, without influence on his
deeper life. I send you his letter. Tell me if any man ought to put
such an 'Or' to a friend: either everything, skin and hair,--or nothing
at all. I have never forced myself on Wagner. I rejoiced sincerely in
his friendship, and was truly devoted to him in word and deed. But to
share his life,--that entices me not."[271]
Wagner apparently got over his petulance, and still had hopes of
inducing Cornelius to come to Munich, where he could have a post either
at the Conservatoire or under the King. "But if he is really well
disposed towards me," Cornelius writes to his brother on 4th September
1864, "let him interest himself actively in the _Cid_. Everything
depends on that now. But salvation will not come to me _the_ way;
Wagner never for a moment thinks seriously of anyone but himself."[272]
That is the conclusion to which the study of Wagner's life and letters
so often lead us.
XVI
In _Mein Leben_ he half-humorously admits another little failing of
his--a passion for reading his own works to his friends.[273] With
the production of each new work he feels that here is something that
the whole world of thinking men must be hungry to see and hear; so
he either has it printed at his own expense--little as he can afford
such a luxury--or he calls his friends and acquaintances together and
remorselessly reads it to them. In 1851 he read the whole of _Opera
and Drama_ to his Zürich circle on twelve consecutive evenings! We
have seen him reading the _Meistersinger_ poem in Vienna.[274] As
soon as he has finished the poem of the _Ring_ (1853) he cannot rest
until he has "tried it on the dog"; so he "decides," he tells us, to
pay the Willes a visit and read it to the company there. He arrives
in the evening, begins at once on the _Rhinegold_, continues with the
_Valkyrie_ till after midnight, polishes off _Siegfried_ the next
morning, and finishes with the _Götterdämmerung_ at night. The ladies
"ventured no comment"; he attributes their silence to their having been
very deeply moved. But the effort had worked him up to such a pitch of
excitement that he could not sleep, and the next morning he left in
a hurry, to the mystification of the company. A few weeks afterwards
he reads the tetralogy on four successive evenings to a number of
people in the Hôtel Baur. He publishes the poem privately in February
1853,--twenty-three years before the performance of the whole work--so
anxious is this artist who despises our modern world, and shrinks from
appealing to it, to keep in the very centre of that world's eye.
This mania for reading to his friends increased as he grew older; in
the last years at Bayreuth he would read not only his own works, but
anything he was interested in at the moment. But at Wahnfried he had
a carefully selected audience of worshippers, who indulged him to the
full in his little vanities and weaknesses. The _Erinnerungen_ of Hans
von Wolzogen and the sixth volume of Glasenapp are full of his _obiter
dicta_ on these occasions. Like the bulk of the philosophising in his
prose works, they do not strike us as showing any particular insight
into the problems he is handling; but he dearly loved the sound of
his own voice. In 1879 he makes everyone listen night after night to
a reading of the thirty-years-old _Opera and Drama_; while to his
little daughters he reads, on successive evenings, the _Pilgrimage to
Beethoven_ and _The End of a Musician in Paris_.[275] Only the most
devoted admirers could have stood this kind of thing night after night;
did any one of them dare to rebel, he no doubt met with the same fate
as the audacious and irreverent Kellermann.[276]
His nature was all extremes; he either loved intensely or hated
furiously, was either delirious with happiness, or in the darkest
depths of woe. His chequered life, so full of dazzling fortunes and
incredible misfortunes, of dramatic changes from intoxicating hope
to blind despair, had bred in him the conviction that he was born
under a peculiarly powerful and maleficent star. "Each man has his
dæmon," he said to Edouard Schuré one day in 1865, when he was still
crushed by the news of the tragic death of his great singer Schnorr
von Carolsfeld, "and mine is a frightful monster. When he is hovering
about me a catastrophe is in the air. The only time I have been on the
sea I was very nearly shipwrecked; and if I were to go to America, I
am certain that the Atlantic would greet me with a cyclone."[277] He
himself was either all cyclone or all zephyr: intermediate weathers
were impossible for him. In 1865 he spent the happiest days of his life
rehearsing _Tristan_ in Munich. "He would listen with closed eyes to
the artists singing to Bülow's pianoforte accompaniment. If a difficult
passage went particularly well, he would spring up, embrace or kiss the
singer warmly, or out of pure joy stand on his head on the sofa, creep
under the piano, jump up on to it, run into the garden and scramble
joyously up a tree, or make caricatures, or recite, with improvised
disfigurements, a poem that had been dedicated to him."[278]
Edouard Schuré also saw something of him in those _Tristan_ days. To
him too Wagner exhibited both poles of his temperament. "To look at him
was to see turn by turn in the same visage the front face of Faust and
the profile of Mephistopheles.... His manner was no less surprising
then his physiognomy. It varied between absolute reserve, absolute
coldness, and complete familiarity and _sans-gêne_.... When he showed
himself he broke out as a whole, like a torrent bursting its dikes.
One stood dazzled before that exuberant and protean nature, ardent,
personal, excessive in everything, yet marvellously equilibrated by
the predominance of a devouring intellect. The frankness and extreme
audacity with which he showed his nature, the qualities and defects of
which were exhibited without concealment, acted on some people like a
charm, while others were repelled by it.... His gaiety flowed over in
a joyous foam of facetious fancies and extravagant pleasantries; but
the least contradiction provoked him to incredible anger. Then he would
leap like a tiger, roar like a stag. He paced the room like a caged
lion, his voice became hoarse and the words came out like screams; his
speech slashed about at random. He seemed at these times like some
elemental force unchained, like a volcano in eruption. Everything in
him was gigantic, excessive."[279]
Liszt describes him thus to the Princess Wittgenstein in 1853: "Wagner
has sometimes in his voice a sort of shriek of a young eagle. When he
saw me he wept, laughed and ranted for joy for at least a quarter of an
hour.... A great and overwhelming nature, a sort of Vesuvius, which,
when it is in eruption, scatters sheaves of fire and at the same time
bunches of rose and elder.... It is his habit to look down on people
from the heights, even on those who are eager to show themselves
submissive to him. He decidedly has the style and the ways of a ruler,
and he has no consideration for anyone, or at least only the most
obvious. He makes a complete exception, however, in my case."[280]
Turn where we will we find the same testimony. "He talked incredibly
much and rapidly," says Hanslick.... "He talked continuously, and
always of himself, of his works, his reforms, his plans. If he happened
to mention the name of another composer, it was certain to be in a tone
of disdain."[281] And again: "He was egoism personified, restlessly
energetic for himself, unsympathetic towards and regardless of
others."[282]
He apparently could not even accommodate himself to such small
courtesies of life as a sympathetic interest in other men's music. We
have seen how chilled Cornelius was by his attitude towards the _Cid_.
Weissheimer tells us that Bülow once played a composition of his own
to Wagner, and was much hurt by the older man's reception of it. He
said to Weissheimer afterwards: "It is really astonishing how little
interest he takes in other people; I shall never play him anything of
my own again."[283]
Weissheimer tells us of an experience of his own of the same kind.
"Once when I began to play my opera to Bülow alone at his wish (without
Wagner), the servant came immediately to say that we were to stop
our music, as the Meister wanted to sleep! It was then eleven in the
morning! Bülow banged the lid of the piano down, and sprang up in
agitation with the words, "It is a high honour for me to live with the
great Master,--but it is often beyond bearing."[284]
So he goes through life, luxuriant, petulant, egoistic, improvident,
extreme in everything, roaring, shrieking, weeping, laughing, never
doubting himself, never doubting that whoever opposed him, or did not
do all for him that he expected, was a monster of iniquity--_Wagner
contra mundum_, he always right, the world always wrong. He ended his
stormy course with hardly a single friend of the old type; followers
he had in the last days, parasites he had in plenty; but no friends
whose names rang through Europe as the old names had done. One by one
he had used them all for his own purposes, one by one he had lost them
by his unreasonableness and his egoism. Even where they maintained
the semblance of friendship with him, as Liszt did, the old bloom had
vanished, the old fire had died out. Yet it is impossible not to be
thrilled by this life, by the superb vitality that radiates from that
little body at every stage of its career, by the dazzling light that
emanates from him and gives a noontide glory to the smallest person who
comes within its range. There was not one of his friends who did not
sorrowfully recognise, at some time or other, how much there was of
clay in this idol to which they all had made sacrifice after sacrifice.
Turn by turn they left him or were driven away from him, hopelessly
disillusioned. Yet none of them could escape the magnetic attraction
of the man, even after he had wounded and disappointed them. Bülow, as
we have seen, worked nobly for him and for Bayreuth after the cruel
Munich experiences. Nietzsche, after pouring out his sparkling malice
upon the man and the musician who had once been for him a very beacon
light of civilisation and culture, sings his praises in the end in a
passage that is full of a strange lyrism and a strange pathos. "As I
am speaking here of the recreations of my life, I feel I must express
a word or two of gratitude for that which has refreshed me by far the
most heartily and most profoundly. This, without the slightest doubt,
was my relationship with Richard Wagner. All my other relationships
with men I treat quite lightly; but I would not have the days I spent
at Tribschen--those days of confidence, of cheerfulness, of sublime
flashes, and of profound moments--blotted from my life at any price.
I know not what Wagner may have been for others; but no cloud ever
darkened _our_ sky." And again: "I suppose I know better than anyone
the prodigious feats of which Wagner was capable, the fifty worlds of
strange ecstasies to which no one else had wings to soar; and as I am
alive to-day and strong enough to turn even the most suspicious and
most dangerous things to my own advantage, and thus to grow stronger,
I declare Wagner to have been the greatest benefactor of my life. The
bond which unites us is the fact that we have suffered greater agony,
even at each other's hands, than most men are able to bear nowadays,
and this will always keep our names associated in the minds of men."
"I have loved Wagner," he says in another place; and in another he
speaks of "the hallowed hour when Richard Wagner gave up the ghost in
Venice."[285]
There is something titanic in the man who can inspire such hatred and
such love, and such love to overpower the hatred in the end. Into
whatever man's life he came, he rang through it for ever after like a
strain of great music. With his passionate need for feeling himself
always in the right it was hard for him to bow that proud and obstinate
head of his even when he must have felt, in his inmost heart, that some
at least of the blame of parting lay with him. But when he did unbend,
how graciously and nobly human he could be! There is no finer letter in
the whole of his correspondence than the one he wrote to Liszt to beg
his old friend and benefactor to end their long estrangement by coming
to him at Bayreuth in the hour of his triumph, for the laying of the
foundation stone of the new theatre on his fifty-ninth birthday.
"MY GREAT AND DEAR FRIEND,--Cosima maintains that you would not come
even if I were to invite you. We should have to endure that, as we
have had to endure so many things! But I cannot forbear to invite you.
And what is it I cry to you when I say 'Come'? You came into my life
as the greatest man whom I could ever address as an intimate friend;
you went apart from me for long, perhaps because I had become less
close to you than you were to me. In place of you there came to me
your deepest new-born being, and completed my longing to know you very
close to me. So you live in full beauty before me and in me, and we
are one beyond the grave itself. You were the first to ennoble me by
your love; to a second, higher life am I now wedded in _her_, and can
accomplish what I should never have been able to accomplish alone.
Thus you could become everything to me, while I could remain so little
to you: how immeasurably greater is my gain!
"If now I say to you 'Come,' I thereby say to you 'Come to yourself'!
For it is yourself that you will find. Blessings and love to you,
whatever decision you may come to!--Your old friend,
"RICHARD."[286]
The old egoistic note is there--it is he of course who has borne most
and suffered most and is prepared to be most forgiving--but his heart
must have been more than usually full when he wrote this. It must have
cost his proud soul many an inward struggle to bring himself to take
this first step towards a _rapprochement_.
But the stupendous power and the inexhaustible vitality of the man
are shown in nothing more clearly than in the sacrifices every one
made for him and the tyrannies they endured from him. Even those who
rebelled against him were none the less conscious of a unique quality
in him that made it inevitable that he should rule and others obey.
"He exercised," says his enemy Hanslick, "an incomprehensible magic
in order to make friends, and to retain them; friends who sacrificed
themselves for him, and, three times offended, came three times back
to him again. The more ingratitude they received from Wagner, the more
zealously they thought it their duty to work for him. The hypnotic
power that he everywhere exerted, not merely by his music but by his
personality, overbearing all opposition and bending every one to
his will, is enough to stamp him as one of the most remarkable of
phenomena, a marvel of energy and endowment."[287]
A remark of Draeseke's to Weissheimer gives us another hint of the same
imperious fascination: "At present it is not exactly agreeable to have
relations with him. Later, however, in another thirty or forty years,
we [who knew him] shall be envied by all the world, for a phenomenon
like him is something so gigantic that after his death it will become
ever greater and greater, particularly as then the great image of the
man will no longer be disfigured by any unpleasant traits [_durch
nichts Widerhaariges_]."[288]
He was indeed, in the mixture of elements he contained, like nothing
else that has been seen on earth. His life itself is a romance. In
constant danger of shipwreck as he was, it seems to us now as if some
ironic but kindly Fate were deliberately putting him to every kind
of trial, but with the certain promise of haven at the end. The most
wonderful thing in all his career, to me, is not his rescue by King
Ludwig, not even the creation of Bayreuth, but his ceasing work upon
the second Act of _Siegfried_ in 1857, and not resuming it till 1869.
Here was a gigantic drama upon which he had been engaged since 1848; no
theatre in Europe, he knew, was fit to produce it,--for that he would
have to realise his dream of a theatre of his own. After incredible
vicissitudes he had completed two of the great sections of the work and
half of the third. The writing of the remainder, and the production of
it, one would have thought, would have been sufficient for the further
life energies of any man. To any one else, the thought of dying with
such a work unfinished would have been an intolerable, maddening agony.
It would have been to him, had the possibility of such a happening ever
seriously occurred to him. But he knew it was impossible--impossible
that he, Richard Wagner, ill and poor and homeless and disappointed as
he was, should die before his time, before his whole work was done.
He gambled superbly with life, and he won. In those twelve hazardous
years he wrote two of the world's masterpieces in music. He played for
great stakes in city after city, losing ruinously time after time,
but in the end winning beyond his wildest dreams. He saw _Tristan_
and the _Meistersingers_ produced; he dictated his memoirs. And then
he turns calmly again to the great work that had been so long put
aside, takes it up as if only a day, instead of twelve years, had gone
by since he locked it in his drawer, thinks himself back in a moment
into that world from which he had been so long banished, and, still
without haste, adds stone upon stone till the whole mighty building is
complete. What a man! one says in amazement. What belief in himself, in
his strength, in his destiny, in his ability to wait! And then, after
that, the toil of the creation of Bayreuth, and the bringing to birth
of the masterpiece, twenty-eight years after the vision of it had first
dawned upon the eager young spirit that had just completed _Lohengrin_!
Was there ever anything like it outside a fairy tale?
[Illustration: WAGNER IN THE _TRISTAN_ PERIOD.]
He lived, indeed, to see himself victor everywhere, in possession of
everything for which he had struggled his whole feverish life through.
He completed, and saw upon the stage, every one of the great works
he had planned. He found the one woman in the world who was fitted
to share his throne with him when alive and to govern his kingdom
after his death with something of his own overbearing, inconsiderate
strength. He achieved the miracle of building in a tiny Bavarian town a
theatre to which, for more than a generation after his death, musicians
still flock from all the ends of the earth. After all its dangers and
its buffetings, the great ship at last sailed into haven with every
timber sound, and with what a store of incomparable merchandise within!
FOOTNOTES:
[44] See _Mein Leben_, pp. 19, 20. Later on he speaks of "the
importance the theatrical had assumed in his mind in comparison with
the ordinary bourgeois life" (_Mein Leben_, p. 25).
[45] _Mein Leben_, p. 65.
[46] "He had it temperament like a watch-spring, easily compressed, but
always flying back with redoubled energy," says Pecht, who knew him
during the time of his appalling misery in Paris. Glasenapp, _Das Leben
Richard Wagners_, i. 329.
[47] _Briefe an Apel_, p. 15.
[48] _Briefe an Apel_, p. 48.
[49] He is writing from Frankfort.
[50] Letter of January 21, 1836.
[51] He was twenty-one at this time, and evidently very like his later
self.
[52] _Mein Leben_, p. 105.
[53] See the account of his quarrel with Wagner in Daniel Halévy's
_Life of Friedrich Nietzsche_ (English translation), p. 167.
[54] This was true of him even as a boy of seventeen. He cared, he
said, only for a companion who would accompany him on his excursions,
"and to whom I could pour out my inmost being to my heart's content,
without my caring what the effect might be on him" (_Mein Leben_, p.
50).
[55] _Mein Leben_, p. 282.
[56] _Mein Leben_, p. 368.
[57] Mr. Ashton Ellis (_Life of Wagner_, v. 126 ff.) has pointed out
how many difficulties might have been avoided had Wagner taken the
advice of some of his friends and called upon Davison, the critic
of the _Times_. Wagner would have cleared Davison's mind of many
misconceptions that had become current as to the aims of "Wagnerism"
and his own attitude towards the older composers and Mendelssohn.
Wagner's temper and his dislike of critics made him refuse. He refers
to them _en masse_, in a letter to Otto Wesendonck, as "blackguards,"
and again (to Liszt) as "this blackguard crew of journalists." Mr.
Henry Davison, in his biography of his father, the former musical
critic of the _Times_, gives a reasonable enough explanation of the
antipathy of the London press to Wagner in 1855. Berlioz was giving
concerts in London at the same time. His music was as strange to
English ears as Wagner's; but he was much more gently handled by the
press. "The explanation," says Mr. Davison, "is not very difficult....
Berlioz had not written books in advertisement of his theories and
himself. He had not attacked cherished composers--far otherwise. He
had not studiously held aloof from the critics; on the contrary, he
had courted and conciliated them. In fine, with all the peculiarities
of an irritable, extraordinary, and self-conscious mind, Berlioz was
polished, courteous and fascinating. Wagner was somewhat pedantic,
harsh and uncouth" (Henry Davison, _From Mendelssohn to Wagner_, p.
180).
[58] The charge was indignantly repudiated by Davison when it came
to his ears. See the quotation from the _Musical World_ of May 12,
1855, in Ellis, v. 128 _n._ Davison replied to a letter of Wagner's
to a Berlin paper (after the London concerts were over) in the
_Musical World_ of September 22, 1855. (See Mr. Henry Davison's _From
Mendelssohn to Wagner_, p. 175.) Wagner's readiness to bring these
unfounded charges must make us regard with suspicion his unproved
allegations against Meyerbeer and others.
[59] November 12, 1846.
[60] Glasenapp, ii. 171.
[61] It would be interesting to know how Mr. Ellis, who was _not_
present at the supper, is able to decide that the account of a man who
_was_ present is "exaggerated," but still has "a grain of truth in it."
[62] How does Mr. Ellis know?
[63] _Mein Leben_, pp. 568, 569.
[64] See _Mein Leben_, pp. 627, 641, 656, 659, 662, &c.
[65] _Mein Leben_, p. 631.
[66] _Mein Leben_, p. 755.
[67] See the _Fortnightly Review_ for July 1905.
[68] It is less generally known that while Cosima was still the wife of
Bülow she bore Wagner two daughters--Isolde, born in Munich on April
10, 1865, and Eva, born at Tribschen on February 10, 1867.
[69] It was the third case of the kind, though the Madame Laussot and
Frau Wesendonck affairs apparently did not go so far.
[70] Wagner's candour about Minna contrasts strongly with the
concealments the worshipping Wagnerian biographers practise with regard
to the fact of his son Siegfried being born out of wedlock. At the
end of the first volume of the Glasenapp _Life_, for example, is a
genealogical table of the Wagner family from 1643. It ends thus:--
WILHELM RICHARD WAGNER (1813-83)
Married (first) 1836, Christine Wilhelmine Planer (1814-66), secondly
Cosima Wagner [_sic_], née Liszt (born 1837)
Helferich Siegfried Richard Wagner, born 6th June 1869.
It will be seen that the date of Wagner's marriage with Cosima, which
must have been perfectly well known to Glasenapp, is deliberately
omitted; nor is there any mention of the two daughters Cosima bore
Wagner while she was still von Bülow's wife, or indeed of the fact that
she had previously been married to von Bülow.
[71] _Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck_, p. 273.
[72] _Ibid._, p. 372. The italics are Mr. Ellis's own. He does not
offer any evidence in support of this charge. He merely remarks loftily
that "it is too long an argument to set forth here."
[73] Wagner writes thus to Otto Wesendonck on the 25th June 1861,
seventeen days before the letter to Mathilde: "In this anxious time
[the Paris _Tannhäuser_ fiasco had occurred three months before, and
his prospects were unusually black], when any resolution is impossible
for me, and I am incapable of any mental effort, everything conspires
to grieve me. The dear little dog that you once gave me died the day
before yesterday, quite suddenly and in an almost inexplicable way. I
had become so used to the gentle animal, and the manner of its death,
everything, distressed me greatly." _Briefe Richard Wagners an Otto
Wesendonck_, pp. 99, 100.
[74] "Nach dem Vorfalle," which may mean either "after the accident,"
or "after the occurrence."
[75] _Mein Leben_, pp. 765, 766.
[76] _Mein Leben_, p. 631.
[77] _Mein Leben_ had not been given to the world at the time Mr.
Ellis wrote; but in the _Richard Wagner und die Tierwelt_ of the
well-known Wahnfried partisan Hans von Wolzogen occurs this passage:
"but the little dog died suddenly in the confusion of Paris, _perhaps
poisoned_." (Quoted in Glasenapp, iii. 330.) These last words are
probably due either to a private reading of the then unpublished _Mein
Leben_, or to conversations in the Wagner circle. Again there is no
evidence: we are simply left with Wagner's own words in _Mein Leben_
and the two Wesendonck letters.
[78] See, for instance, Mr. Ashton Ellis's Introduction to the English
edition of the letters to Mathilde Wesendonck.
[79] Especially when the wife does not believe the husband on this
point. As we shall shortly see, Minna had good reasons for doubting the
purely ideal attitude of Wagner towards other women.
[80] Chamberlain actually tells us (_Richard Wagner_, Eng. trans., p.
65) that she was "personally unknown to Wagner." Glasenapp ignores the
whole episode.
[81] _Mein Leben_, p. 429.
[82] _Mein Leben_, p. 510.
[83] _Mein Leben_, p. 515.
[84] See _Mein Leben_, p. 530, and his letter to Minna of February 13,
1850.
[85] She was about twenty-two years of age.
[86] _Mein Leben_, p. 516.
[87] One is reminded of his calm recitals of how he almost shouldered
Otto Wesendonck and François Wille off their own hearths.
[88] One gathers from other sources that she had also got an inkling of
the state of affairs in Bordeaux.
[89] _Mein Leben_, p. 519.
[90] Letter of March 17, 1850, to Minna.
[91] _Mein Leben_, p. 518.
[92] In the passage just quoted from _Mein Leben_ he says he returned
"towards the end of April." This is demonstrably a slip of the pen for
either "the end of March" or "the beginning of April." The true dates
are clearly established by letters to Minna and to Liszt, and indeed by
Wagner's own remarks, on the next page of _Mein Leben_, that "towards
the middle of April" he left Paris for Montmorency.
[93] _Mein Leben_, pp. 519, 520.
[94] It may be argued that Wagner wrote _two_ letters about this
time, that it was in the _second_ of these that he told Minna of his
impending separation from her, and that this letter has been lost.
This theory, however, is put out of court by the passage last quoted
from _Mein Leben_. The "long and detailed letter" in which he retraced
their married life is clearly that of the 17th April. It is significant
that the letter of 17th April, as printed, terminates with the utmost
abruptness and bears no signature. Has the ending been lost or
suppressed?
[95] The letters to Minna were given to the world in two volumes in
1908, without any editor's name, and without a preface or a single
explanatory note. It appears, however, from the publisher's preliminary
announcement, that the editing was done by Baron Hans von Wolzogen.
[96] It is not improbable that he was deliberately trying to minimise
the importance of the matter.
[97] "Durch meine nächste Umgebung." In the English version of the
Wagner-Liszt letters this is rendered "by my immediate surroundings."
Apparently Minna is meant.
[98] _Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt_, i. 48.
[99] It will be remembered that he proposed to divide between Minna and
himself the annuity of 3000 francs he was to receive from Frau Ritter
and Mrs. Taylor. We can hardly imagine Wagner maintaining life on £60
per annum, even in Greece or Asia Minor; and he could hardly expect
that Mrs. Taylor would continue the annuity after he had eloped with
her married daughter.
[100] Letter of July 2, 1850, _Briefwechsel_, i. 49.
[101] Her father, by the way, _was_ an English lawyer. But as he
had been in the grave for some time he could hardly be said, with a
strict regard for truth, to be interested in Wagner's music, and to be
advancing money on phantom assignments of the copyright of unwritten
works.
[102] The people in whose private affairs he was thus confidently
meddling were, on his own showing, "utter strangers," to him a few
weeks before this. It would be interesting to have Laussot's opinion of
_him_!
[103] According to his own account, which makes some demands on our
credulity, he simply "rang the bell and the door sprang open: without
meeting anyone I entered the open first floor, passed from room to
room," &c. Julius Kapp cynically suggests that he must have been
wearing the Tarnhelm.
[104] _Mein Leben_, p. 528.
[105] Letter of May 30, 1859: _Richard an Minna Wagner_, ii. 95.
[106] The Laussot story as told in _Mein Leben_ is another instance of
the damage Wagner has done his own case by voluntarily going into the
witness box to give evidence on his own behalf. The older biographers
apparently know nothing of the Laussot affair. There is not a word of
it even in the latest Glasenapp biography, though it is hard to believe
that Glasenapp had never heard of it. (His work as a whole, with its
copiousness and its general accuracy as to facts, suggests access to
_Mein Leben_ before publication of the latter.) Reading his account of
the Paris-Zürich excursion of 1850, indeed, in the light of our present
knowledge, it is hard to resist the conclusion that he knows more than
he is telling.
It is interesting to recall the fact that Ferdinand Praeger, whose
_Wagner as I Knew Him_ is anathema to the Wagnerians--and to some
extent rightly so--has a story that is evidently a muddled version of
the Laussot affair. "At Bordeaux," says Praeger, "an episode occurred
similar to one which happened later at Zürich [Frau Wesendonck?], about
which the press of the day made a good deal of unnecessary commotion
and ungenerous comment. I mention the incident to show the man as he
was. The opposition have not spared his failings, and over the Zürich
incident were hypercritically censorious. The Bordeaux story I am
alluding to is, that the wife of a friend, Mrs. H----, having followed
Wagner to the south, called on him at his hotel, and throwing herself
at his feet, passionately told of her affection. Wagner's action in the
matter was to telegraph to the husband to come and take his wife home.
On telling me the story, Wagner jocosely remarked that poor Beethoven,
so full of love, never had his affection returned, and lived and died,
so it is said, a hermit" (p. 196).
There is plainly an enormous admixture of fiction here; but equally
plainly the basis of the story is the Laussot episode. Had there really
been an affair of the kind narrated by Praeger, in which Wagner had
shone so brilliantly, we may be sure we should have been told all
about it in _Mein Leben_. It looks as if Wagner had been indiscreetly
confidential to Praeger, and had told the story with embellishments,
or that Praeger had heard it from another source--perhaps someone in
Minna's _entourage_--and the story had been decorated and transformed
in its transit from one mouth to another. The novellettish touch about
telegraphing for the husband, however, is more likely to have come from
the Wagnerian side than from that of the "opposition." Whatever may be
the explanation, however, the fact remains that Praeger, whom it has
become the fashion to despise as a mere Munchausen, did actually know
of a "Bordeaux episode" of some sort; and that though he had hold of
the wrong end of the stick, that there _was_ a stick of some sort has
now been proved by Wagner himself.
[107] From his childhood he was extremely susceptible to women. His
heart, he tells us, used to "beat wildly" at the touch of the contents
of his sisters' theatrical wardrobe (_Mein Leben_, p. 21).
[108] _Autobiographische Skizze_, in _G.S._, i. 10.
[109] In the first edition (1852) there came after this a passage
in which Wagner more than hints at sexual escapades in his youth.
He deleted the passage from the second edition (1872), as also
the following words after "moral bigotry of our social system";
namely,--"as what people call unfortunately to-be-tolerated vice." See
Mr. Ellis's translation of the _Prose Works_, i. 396.
[110] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 253.
[111] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 256.
[112] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 256.
[113] _Mein Leben_, p. 109.
[114] _Mein Leben_, p. 110.
[115] He had been so certain in advance of the liveliness of the party
that he had warned the landlord of possible damage to his furniture,
for which he would be compensated.
[116] _Mein Leben_, p. 117.
[117] See _Mein Leben_, p. 117 ff.
[118] This letter is not included in the published volume of Wagner's
correspondence with Minna, which commences with 1842. I quote it
from Julius Kapp's _Richard Wagner und die Frauen: eine erotische
Biographie_ (1912), p. 34. Kapp has had access to a large number of
still unpublished Wagner letters.
[119] _Mein Leben_, p. 138.
[120] The bitterness of the later years seems to have affected Wagner's
memory of the earlier ones. In _Mein Leben_ his thesis is that Minna
was kind enough to him, but without love, and perhaps without the
capacity for loving. That was not his opinion at the time, however.
"Minna was here," he writes to Apel on 6th June 1835 from Leipzig,
"and stayed three days for my sake, in the most dreadful weather, and
without knowing a single other person, and without going anywhere,
simply to be with me.... It is remarkable what influence I have
acquired over the girl. You should read her letters; they burn with
fire, and we both know that fire is not native to her" (_Richard Wagner
an Theodor Apel_, p. 48).
[121] _Richard Wagner an Theodor Apel_, p. 62.
[122] _Mein Leben_, p. 146.
[123] _Mein Leben_, pp. 154, 155. At this point he digresses to give
us the story of Minna's early life. From the age of ten she had had to
help to maintain the family, her father having sustained misfortunes in
business. She was a most charming girl, "and at an early age attracted
the attention of men." At sixteen she was seduced; her child, Natalie,
was always supposed during her life-time to be her younger sister.
Minna went on the stage. She had no particular talent for acting, and
saw in the theatre only a means of livelihood. According to Wagner she
was "devoid of levity or coquetry," but used her powers of charm to
make friends and obtain security of tenure in the theatre.
[124] _Mein Leben_, p. 157.
[125] He had soon accustomed himself, he says, not to talk of his ideal
cravings before her. Uncertain of them himself as he was, he passed
over this side of his life with a laugh and a joke. With the better
part of him thus sealed up from her, it is no wonder they ultimately
drifted apart.
[126] _Mein Leben_, pp. 157, 158.
[127] Cornelius, _Ausgewählte Briefe_, i. 698.
[128] _Mein Leben_, p. 158.
[129] He pleads guilty more than once to an offensive manner of speech
when he was angry. We can dimly imagine what he was like in moments
such as these. Hornstein, Nietzsche, and others had experience of it.
Nietzsche's account of _his_ scene with Wagner has become classical.
See Daniel Halévy's _Life of Friedrich Nietzsche_, Eng. trans., p. 167.
[130] _Mein Leben_, p. 166.
[131] It must be remembered, however, that we have only his account of
all this. It is just possible that the accounts of the other actors in
the episode might have given it a slightly different colour here and
there.
[132] Printed for the first time in Julius Kapp's _Richard Wagner und
die Frauen_, p. 143.
[133] Minna's letters of 28th October and 17th November 1840, in
_Richard Wagner an Theodor Apel_, pp. 80-87.
[134] See _Mein Leben_, pp. 212, 213, 232. His feeling towards her
seems to have hardened during their later residence in Dresden. In the
first sketch of the _Flying Dutchman_ he gave the name of Minna to the
redeeming heroine; and as late as 1845 he could speak warmly of her
to Hanslick. When the latter praised Minna's good looks, Wagner said,
"Ah, you can scarcely recognise her now. You should have seen her a few
years ago. The poor woman has gone through much trouble and privation
with me. In Paris we had a wretched time, and without Meyerbeer's help
we might have starved" (Hanslick, _Aus meinem Leben_, i. 65, 66).
[135] Liszt also urged him to do this.
[136] He had apparently forgotten his promise (_Mein Leben_, p. 177)
never to mention the affair to her again; and when he said in _Mein
Leben_, "I can pride myself on having kept this resolution to the
letter," he had evidently forgotten this epistle of May 18, 1859.
[137] See p. 68.
[138] _Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner_, ii. 92.
[139] See pp. 55, 56. He protests that she has been misinformed; the
object of his "second journey to Bordeaux" was not to "abduct a young
wife from her husband." So far as it goes, that statement is correct.
The object of his _second_ journey, apparently, was merely to pacify
Eugène Laussot. But he does not seem to have told Minna as much of his
relations with Jessie Laussot as he has told the world in _Mein Leben_.
[140] No one would guess, for example, from _Mein Leben_ how much money
had been put at his disposal and how much consideration had been shown
him by Napoleon III and others during the Paris _Tannhäuser_ period.
[141] November 9, 1851; _Briefe_, i. 88.
[142] _Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner_, i. 302.
[143] Kapp, _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 65.
[144] Letter to Hermann Brockhaus of February 2, 1851, in
_Familienbriefe_, p. 165.
[145] Minna objected energetically to the time he spent in writing
prose instead of music. Between August 1847, when he finished
_Lohengrin_, and the autumn of 1853 he seems to have written no music
at all, though he was occupied with the text of the _Ring_.
[146] See, for example, Weingartner's tragic-comic account of his
experiences, in his _Akkorde_.
[147] It is quoted in Kapp's _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 90,
but without date or name of addressee. It is simply given as "addressed
to a lady friend."
[148] Wagner, however, conducted some concerts at Zürich for a fee.
[149] _Richard Wagner an Eliza Wille_, p. 123.
[150] _Mein Leben_, p. 731.
[151] "I left Baden to fill up my time with a little trip to Zürich,
where I again tried to get a few days' rest in the Wesendoncks' house.
The idea of helping me did not occur to my friends, though I told them
frankly of the position I was in." _Mein Leben_, p. 857.
[152] "Whereupon," he characteristically remarks, "I could not resist
sending him a reply pointing out the wrongness of this." _Mein Leben_,
p. 865.
[153] _Mein Leben_, pp. 866, 867.
[154] _Richard Wagner an Eliza Wille_, pp. 74, 75.
[155] _Familienbriefe_, pp. 189, 190. He recurs to the same idea
in a letter to his sister Cäcile Avernarius of 30th December 1852:
_Familienbriefe_, p. 194. See also the letter to Uhlig of December
1849, and other passages.
[156] "Und weil er so sei, wie er ihm erschiene." Mr. Ashton Ellis
(_Wagner's Prose Works_, i. 341) translates this, "and because he was
whate'er _she_ deemed him," reading, perhaps rightly, "ihr" for "ihm."
[157] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 295.
[158] _Ibid._, p. 266.
[159] _Familienbriefe_, p. 279.
[160] _Familienbriefe_, pp. 217, 218. See also Wagner's letter to
Mathilde in his diary of August 21, 1858: "What you have been and are
to me these six years now."
[161] Robert von Hornstein, _Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner_, in the
_Neue Freie Presse_ for 23rd and 24th September 1904 (written in 1884;
Hornstein died in 1890). I have been unable to procure a copy of
the article. My quotation is from Mr. Ashton Ellis's preface to his
translation of the Wesendonck correspondence, p. lv. Hornstein adds,
"he [Wagner] would turn sulky, hasty, perverse, never coarse. With one
little word he might have thrust a poniard in the woman [Minna]; he
never breathed it."
[162] Earlier in the month a child had been born to Mathilde. Hornstein
tells us that at the christening he stood by Wagner's side. "He was
very moody; all at once he muttered to himself, 'It is like attending
one's own execution.'" Ellis, p. lviii.
[163] _Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonck_, pp. 44, 45.
[164] I do not know that Mr. Ashton Ellis is justified in assuming
that "Wagner at last made his bosom friend [Liszt] a confidant and
counsellor," on the basis of the letter to Liszt of [5?] November 1857
which he quotes: "Now take my hand, and take my kiss; a kiss such as
you gave me a year ago, when you accompanied me home one night--you
remember, after I had told my doleful tale to both of you. However much
it may lose its impression on me,--what you were to me that night, the
wondrous sympathy that lay in what you told me as we walked,--this
heavenliness in your nature will follow with me, as my most splendid
memory, to each future existence." (_Op. cit._, lvii.) What Mr. Ellis
translates as "told my doleful tale to you both," is in the German
"nachdem ich Euch bei Dir meine traurige Geschichte von Bordeaux
erzählt" ("after I had told you both my mournful Bordeaux story").
_Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt_, ii. 181. Wagner's confidence
and Liszt's sympathy were apparently as much in connection with the
Laussot affair as with the other. But the words "von Bordeaux" were
suppressed in the first edition of the letters.
[165] In _Mein Leben_ Wagner tells the story of the purchase of the
"Asyl" somewhat differently. There is not a word there of Wesendonck
having been persuaded by his wife into buying the property for Wagner,
or of the trouble in the Wesendonck household over him. See _Mein
Leben_, p. 645.
The passage I have just quoted from Wagner's letter to his sister Clara
has been suppressed in the German edition of the _Familienbriefe_ (p.
218). Mr. Ashton Ellis, in his English version (_Family Letters of
Richard Wagner_, p. 215), opines that Glasenapp, the German editor of
the _Familienbriefe_, omitted the passage in compliance "with Wahnfried
wishes." It is one more evidence of the utter untrustworthiness of the
Wahnfried coterie. The letter was originally published in the _Deutsche
Rundschau_ in 1902. A complete English version of it will be found
in the opening of Mr. Ellis' translation of the Wagner-Wesendonck
correspondence. The German of the passage quoted above is given in
Kapp's _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, pp. 116, 117.
[166] I am well aware that he filled his letters with moanings about
his "renunciation" and "resignation." But the words were little more
than resounding literary counters for him, helping him to some of the
best of his epistolary effects.
[167] _Mein Leben_, p. 654.
[168] _Mein Leben_, p. 667. In his Venice diary of September 18, 1858
(after his flight from the Asyl) he reminds her how she has placed her
arm round him and declared that she loved him. See also under 12th
October. On 1 January 1859 he speaks with ardent recollection of her
caresses. On 1 November 1858 he tells her how sweet it would be "to die
in her arms." If we are to die in the arms of all the women with whom
our relations have been "merely friendly" we shall all of us need more
lives than a cat.
[169] _Mein Leben_, pp. 658, 659.
[170] _Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonck_, p. 45. In the same
winter he set to music the "Five Poems" of Mathilde.
[171] Kapp, _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 119.
[172] _Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt_, ii. 184. This letter
was omitted from the first issue of the Wagner-Liszt correspondence,
and consequently will not be found in the English edition.
[173] Also published for the first time in the expanded edition (1910).
[174] _Ibid._, ii. 186.
[175] _Ibid._, ii. 188. This passage was suppressed in the previous
editions of the Wagner-Liszt letters.
[176] Letter of 24 (?) January 1858, ii. 188 ff. That matters at Zürich
had been on the verge of a crisis we may guess from a sentence in a
previous letter (18-20 (?) January); in which Wagner speaks of it being
necessary for him to go away in order to "give some appeasement to the
sufferings of the good-natured man [Otto Wesendonck]," and that this
being done he will return in a few weeks. All this, again, and more,
was suppressed in the first issue of the correspondence. Truly the way
of Wahnfried passeth understanding.
[177] Kapp, _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 123.
[178] I have ventured, here and elsewhere, to improve upon Minna's
rather illiterate system of punctuation.
[179] "Mit seiner vortrefflichen Suade."
[180] Kapp, pp. 124, 125. Mr. Ellis wrongly conjectures the intercepted
note to be the one quoted as No. 36 in the German edition of the
Wagner-Wesendonck correspondence (No. 49 in the English edition).
[181] See the quotation on p. 86.
[182] In Mr. Ellis's translation of the letter (preface to the
English edition of the Wagner-Wesendonck correspondence, p. ix.),
this sentence is followed by "get well first, and let us have another
talk then." I cannot find this sentence in the German edition of the
_Familienbriefe_, p. 219.
[183] _Familienbriefe_, pp. 218 ff.
[184] Kapp, _op. cit._, p. 102. The remainder of the letter shows
that while Frau Herwegh had a good opinion of Minna, she was not
blindly prejudiced in her favour; and she was quite conscious that
intellectually Minna was unfitted to keep pace with her husband's
development. Her testimony to the excellency of Minna's heart and the
hardness of her lot with Wagner is therefore all the more valuable.
Wagner, it is hardly necessary to say, did not like Frau Herwegh.
[185] With all his sense of the intellectual and other divergencies
between them, Wagner was not as a rule anxious to sever his life from
Minna. He admits more than once that she was an excellent housewife,
and specially expert in ministering to his comforts. After every
dispute we find him setting up house with her again.
[186] Kapp, p. 127.
[187] See, for example, his letter of 1st November 1858 to the Dresden
physician and friend Anton Pusinelli, to whose care he had entrusted
Minna. _Bayreuther Blätter_, 1902, p. 98. "By periodical separations I
have attained what I instinctively contemplate--namely, to place myself
in a position to be able always to exert only a pacifying, conciliating
influence upon her spirit. In view of the sad state of her health, this
had been my only design during the time we lately lived together; but
with a character as irritable as mine the agitation and excitement of
the moment were too much for me now and then, as in general I too needs
must truly suffer greatly during these eternal, useless and senseless
vexations. Here, however, at a distance, I can choose the hour and the
mood when I am fully master of myself, and have to achieve faithfully
only my purpose, my duty." Letter of 18th November to Pusinelli;
_ibid._, p. 100.
[188] He reminds us of Mr. Shaw's Prossy in _Candida_, who was only a
beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.
[189] She has just given a distressing account of her sufferings from
her heart disease.
[190] Kapp, pp. 129, 130.
[191] Kapp (p. 134) wrongly gives the date as 1850.
[192] Kapp, pp. 134, 135.
[193] Mr. Ashton Ellis, reading "liegt deutlich vor mir," instead of
"vor dir," translates this "lies plain before _me_."
[194] See his letter of 19th August 1858, _Richard Wagner an Minna
Wagner_, i. 296.
[195] _Ibid._, i. 299.
[196] The warrant for his arrest for his supposed complicity in the
Dresden rising of 1849 was still in force.
[197] Italics mine.
[198] He had just had the Dresden physician's distressing report on
Minna's health. In addition to her heart trouble and the nervous
ravages made by laudanum, she was now said to be developing dropsy of
the chest.
[199] Compare his letter to Pusinelli of 18th November 1858, quoted on
p. 97.
[200] Otto Wesendonck provided the funds, giving Wagner 24,000 francs
for the rights of the still unfinished _Ring_.
[201] _Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner_, ii. 139 ff.; _Bayreuther
Blätter_, 1902, p. 101.
[202] According to Kapp (p. 159), Wagner's relations with her were the
subject of much comment in Paris at that time, and were the reason
for the Princess Wittgenstein--Liszt's companion--breaking off all
intercourse with him and refusing to visit him in Paris in 1860. "An
anxious silence upon this affair," Kapp remarks, "has been maintained
in the Wagnerian literature, which was the easier inasmuch as all the
passages relating to it in Wagner's letters have been suppressed before
publication. Later publications will bring to light much interesting
material."
[203] Except for a few days, they never lived together again. They kept
up their correspondence, however.
[204] _Mein Leben_, p. 779.
[205] _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 157.
[206] He seems to have taken it rather ill of his friends that
they should have been prosperous and happy while he was poor and
disappointed and up to his eyes in difficulties of all kinds. See his
account of the visit in _Mein Leben_, pp. 787, 788.
[207] Mathilde's character, like that of Wagner, has probably been
slightly idealised for us by time. She had probably been less agreeable
to the bourgeoise Minna than to her genius of a husband.
[208] _Mein Leben_, p. 798.
[209] Owing to his having ceased to correspond with the Wesendoncks,
his changes of address were unknown to them. The box contained a
present that Mathilde had sent him the preceding Christmas; after
many journeyings it had been returned to her through the post. Having
learned his Biebrich address, she sent it to him there. See his letter
to Minna of 12th June 1862.
[210] _Mein Leben_, p. 806. See, however, his letter to Pusinelli of
1st July 1862, in _Bayreuther Blätter_, 1902, p. 103.
[211] _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 182. In a letter to his
sister Clara of 11th July 1862, Wagner denies that the idea of a
divorce proceeded from him, "obvious as it is, and excusable as it
might be for me to indulge the wish to utilise my remaining years for
the benefit of my work, by the side of someone sympathetic to me"
(_Familienbriefe_, pp. 247, 248), which last remark probably refers
to Mathilde Maier. In this letter he makes it clear that a reunion
with Minna is out of the question. His idea was that she should have
a small establishment of her own in Dresden, where he can visit her
occasionally. In a letter to Minna of two days earlier he makes out
that being unusually distressed as to her health--which was steadily
worsening--he had sent Pusinelli to report upon her, but the physician
had broached the question of divorce of his own accord (_Richard Wagner
an Minna Wagner_, ii. 290). "Your believing that you were to understand
the opinion he gave you of his own account as if I too entertained the
idea of a divorce from you has greatly distressed me. Never has that
entered _my_ head, and it never will." Whether or not it had entered
his head at that time, it certainly entered it later. In less than
two years he had to fly from his Vienna creditors to Mariafeld, near
Zürich. He was at the very end of his resources, and was apparently
a ruined man had not King Ludwig come to his rescue. Discussing his
prospects with his hostess, Frau Wille, "we touched, among other
things, on the necessity of obtaining a divorce from my wife, in order
that I might contract a rich marriage. As everything seemed to me
expedient, and nothing inexpedient, I actually wrote to my sister Luise
Brockhaus, asking her whether she could not, in a sensible talk with
Minna, induce her to be satisfied with her settled yearly allowance,
and abandon her claim to my person" (_Mein Leben_, p. 866). This letter
is not to be found in the _Familienbriefe_. It would be interesting to
know whether it is one of the letters that Glasenapp speaks of as being
"lost beyond recall," or has simply been suppressed.
Minna was of course a hopeless wreck by this time. She died in Dresden
on the 25th January 1866. The last of Wagner's published letters to her
is dated 8th November 1863.
[212] Kapp, _op. cit._, p. 187. See Wagner's own account in _Mein
Leben_, p. 828.
[213] _Mein Leben_, p. 828. Later on he said that his relations
with Friederike had involved her in serious trouble. Friederike had
apparently already been the mistress of von Guiata, the manager of the
Frankfort theatre.
[214] Peter Cornelius, _Ausgewählte Briefe_, in _Literarische Werke_,
i. 683.
[215] "Keep that in mind," he continues, "and your own griefs will
seem less to you. They simply add to mine." _Richard Wagner an Minna
Wagner_, ii. 310, 311.
[216] _Mein Leben_, p. 848. What was the subject of these reproaches it
is impossible to say, as Minna's letters to him have not been published.
[217] It is a little difficult to know what he means by a resolution
made "in the previous year." He corresponded with her a good deal in
1862, and we have a few of his letters to her of 1863. In one of these,
dated 8th November 1863, he tells her that there is a possibility of
his conducting a concert in Dresden on the 25th, and asks her if she
can put him up. This letter is not included in the German edition. It
was published in Adolf Kohut's _Der Meister von Bayreuth_ (1905), and a
translation of it will be found in Mr. Ellis's English version of the
letters to Minna, p. 787.
[218] _Mein Leben_, pp. 848, 849.
[219] See his letter to Frau Wesendonck of 3rd August 1863.
[220] _Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck_, p. 318.
[221] Kapp, _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 194.
[222] "Eine heftige Liebe." Mr. Ashton Ellis renders this "a sudden
love."
[223] _Mein Leben_, p. 777.
[224] _Mein Leben_, p. 816. This was in the summer of 1862, just a year
before the Marie episode.
[225] _Mein Leben_, pp. 858, 859.
[226] King Ludwig gave him 15,000 gulden with which to pay his debts in
Vienna. Röckl, _Ludwig II und Richard Wagner_, Erster Teil, p. 33.
[227] _Mein Leben_, p. 861.
[228] _Mein Leben_, p. 863.
[229] In a letter to Peter Cornelius of the end of March 1864,
addressed from Frau Wille's house at Mariafeld, he says that that lady,
Frau Wesendonck and Frau von Bissing "love him equally: only Frau von
Bissing was lately so very jealous (I had a suspicion of it!), that her
behaviour towards me is only now, through that discovery, intelligible
to me." Peter Cornelius, _Ausgewählte Briefe_, in _Literarische Werke_,
i. 762.
[230] See his letter of 14th April 1865 to Dr. Gille, in _Hans von
Bülow: Briefe_, iv. 24.
[231] Kapp, _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 222.
[232] He behaved afterwards with the greatest nobility to Wagner,
raising by his concerts £2000 for the Bayreuth venture, though his
presence at the Festival was of course impossible.
[233] Letter of 23rd September 1863: _Richard Wagner an Mathilde
Wesendonck_, p. 355.
[234] He never had any objection to accepting money from Jews, nor to
calling on their assistance in the production of his operas. The first
performance of _Parsifal_ was conducted by Hermann Levi.
[235] "If the assumption be correct that a flesh diet is indispensable
in Northern climates, what is to prevent us from carrying out a
rationally conducted emigration into such countries of the globe as,
by reason of their luxuriant fertility, are capable of sustaining the
present population of the whole world,--as has been asserted of the
South American peninsula itself?... The unions we have in mind would
have to devote their activities and their care--perhaps not without
success--to emigration; and according to the latest experiences it
seems not impossible that these northern lands, in which a flesh food
is said to be absolutely indispensable, will soon be wholly abandoned
to hunters of boars and big game...." _Religion und Kunst_, in _G.S._,
x. 243.
[236] See _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 279, and
the letter to Roeckel of 23rd August 1856; also a general discussion of
the subject in Henri Lichtenberger's _Wagner, Poète et Penseur_, pp.
109-16.
[237] See, for example, the very prejudiced and rather foolish book of
Emil Ludwig, _Wagner, oder die Entzauberten_ (1913).
[238] Afterwards in book form as the _Briefe Richard Wagners an eine
Putzmacherin_. Vienna, 1906.
[239] We must always remember that his extremely sensitive and
irritable skin made coarse fabrics intolerable to him.
[240] _Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt_, ii. pp. 4, 5.
[241] "Das Überschwängliche meiner Natur." In the English version
of the Correspondence this is rendered "the transcendent part of my
nature."
[242] "Bedenklich"--rendered in Hueffer's version "dangerous."
[243] _Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt_, ii. 10.
[244] _Ausgewählte Briefe_, i. 748, 749.
[245] He had just returned from the meeting with Frau von Bissing, at
which she had undertaken to provide for him.
[246] _Mein Leben_, p. 862.
[247] The _Putzmacherin_ letters extend into the Lucerne period of
1886-7.
[248] Röckl, _Ludwig II und Richard Wagner_, Erster Theil, p. 151.
[249] The relations between Wagner and the King's ministers were
already embittered at this time, and the King granted the loan against
their wish. The Court Treasurer objecting to sending the money by a
servant, Cosima had to call for it personally. He gave her the whole
of the sum in silver coins, which she had to carry away in sacks, his
object being to render the transport of it as public as possible, and
so arouse popular feeling against the composer. The loan was repaid to
the Munich Treasury by Wagner's heirs. See Röckl, _op. cit._, p. 197.
[250] See Ludwig Nohl, _Neues Skizzenbuch_, p. 146.
[251] Röckl, _op. cit._, pp. 245, 246.
[252] Weissheimer, _Erlebnisse mit Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt und
vielen anderen Zeitgenossen_, 3rd ed., 1898, pp. 229, 230.
[253] Glasenapp, _Das Leben Richard Wagners_, vi. 154, 155.
[254] _Mein Leben_, p. 811.
[255] "Wagner has not the strength to make those around him free
and great," he writes in his diary. "Wagner is not loyal; he is, on
the contrary, suspicious and haughty." See Daniel Halévy, _Life of
Friedrich Nietzsche_ (Eng. trans.), p. 130.
[256] Glasenapp, vi. 165.
[257] _Briefwechsel_, ii. 216, 217. This and several other passages in
the letter were suppressed in the first edition of the correspondence.
The Countess d'Agoult--the mother of Liszt's daughter Cosima--was
visiting Wagner at the same time as Cosima and Hans. Apparently there
had been some gossip as to Wagner's behaviour with her; and in this
letter he indignantly protests against Liszt's "suspicions."
[258] _Briefwechsel_, ii. 222. The passage relating to the Countess
d'Agoult was at first suppressed.
[259] _Briefwechsel_, ii. 294. The first part of the sentence, as
far as "fell to my lot," was suppressed in the first edition of the
letters, as well as the succeeding sentences,--"The love of a tender
woman has made me happy: she can throw herself into a sea of sorrows
and torments in order to say to me 'I love you,'" &c. &c. This was the
lady with whom his relations were "merely friendly." The first edition
of the Wagner-Liszt correspondence was systematically manipulated so as
to keep from the reader all knowledge of the Wesendonck affair.
[260] The English version (p. 687) makes nonsense of this passage.
[261] _Mein Leben_, p. 674.
[262] Letter of 20th October 1859 (Paris), in _Briefwechsel_, ii. 275.
[263] Letter of 23rd November 1859, in _Briefwechsel_, ii. 276, 277.
[264] Glasenapp, vi. 139.
[265] See the poem _Siegfried-Idyl_, in the _G.S._, xii. 372.
[266] Seraphine Mauro. See p. 106.
[267] Cornelius, _Ausgewählte Briefe_, i. 640 ff.
[268] The gentle and honourable Cornelius--whom it obviously pains
to have to say a word in disparagement of Wagner--knew that his only
chance of developing his artistic nature along its own lines was
to avoid coming too much under the influence of the much stronger
personality of the older man; he should, he says, "hatch only Wagnerian
eggs."
[269] Letter of 31st May 1854, in Peter Cornelius' _Ausgewählte
Briefe_, i. 767.
[270] _Ausgewählte Briefe_, i. 770, 771.
[271] _Ibid._, i. 774.
[272] _Ausgewählte Briefe_, i. 784. At a later time Cornelius did yield
to Wagner's solicitations and take up his abode for a time in Munich.
[273] All testimonies agree as to the extraordinary expressiveness and
dramatic vivacity of his reading--as indeed of his conversation also.
See Cornelius, _Ausgewählte Briefe_, i. 623, Weissheimer, _Erlebnisse_,
pp. 89, 90, and Liszt's letter to the Princess Wittgenstein, in
_Briefe_, iv. 145. His tumultuous conversation used to give King Ludwig
a headache.
[274] He writes thus to Cornelius from Paris, at the end of January
1862: "Listen! On Wednesday evening, the 5th February, I am to read the
_Meistersinger_ at Schott's house, in Mainz. You have no idea what it
is, what it means for me, and what it will be to my friends! You must
be there that evening! Get Standhartner at once to give you, on my
account, the necessary money for the journey [from Vienna]. In Mainz I
will reimburse you this, and whatever may be necessary for the return
journey." See the letter in Cornelius' _Ausgewählte Briefe_, i. 643.
[275] Glasenapp, vi. 161.
[276] See p. 129.
[277] Edouard Schuré, _Souvenirs sur Richard Wagner_, p. 76.
[278] Röckl, _op. cit._, p. 133.
[279] Schuré, _op. cit._, pp. 54, 57.
[280] Liszt, _Briefe_, iv. 140, 145.
[281] Hanslick, _Aus meinem Leben_, ii. 11.
[282] _Ibid._, p. 12.
[283] Weissheimer, _Erlebnisse_, p. 128.
[284] Weissheimer, _Erlebnisse_, p. 392.
[285] _Ecce Homo_ (Eng. trans.), pp. 41, 44, 122, 97.
[286] Liszt's reply of the 22nd runs thus:
"DEAR AND NOBLE FRIEND,--I am too deeply moved by your letter to be
able to thank you in words. But from the depths of my heart I hope
that every shadow of a circumstance that could hold me fettered may
disappear, and that soon we may see each other again. Then shall you
see in perfect clearness how inseparable is my soul from you both,
and how intimately I live again in that 'second' and higher life of
yours in which you are able to accomplish what you could never have
accomplished alone. Herein is heaven's pardon for me: God's blessing
on you both, and all my love."
These are the first letters that appear in the correspondence between
the two since 7th July 1861. _Briefwechsel_, ii. 307-8. The two letters
are given in a slightly different form in Liszt's _Briefe_, vi. 350.
[287] _Aus meinem Leben_, ii. 12.
[288] Weissheimer, _Erlebnisse_, p. 391.