her début in the historic opera-house on the hill. Zoltan Doeme, her
husband, also appeared. His Parsifal, too, is historic. Queen Cosima I
was a tall, gaunt woman with the familiar Liszt profile, her white hair
worn à la Liszt, her stride that of a grenadier. She ruled with an iron
hand, a hand not encased in a velvet glove like her father’s. A tyrant in
petticoats was the usual ascription. Not loved, indeed feared, she ran
the Baireuth machine with the shrewdness of a Tammany Hall politician.
Her contemporaries concur in that. A woman of brains, courage, audacity,
she recalled for me a second Margravine of Baireuth in her domineering
manner. She would tolerate no rivals. Conductor after conductor came and
went. When Lilli Lehmann toward the close of a glorious artistic career
sang, in 1896, then Gibraltar met Gibraltar. Lilli had been one of the
Rhine-Daughters in 1876. She knew her Wagner as well as Cosima. There was
warlike gossip then of which I got my fill. The ladies parted the best
of friends, of course. Olive Fremstad, a pupil of Lehmann, was one of
the Rhine-Daughters that year. Ellen Gulbranson was the Brünnhilde after
Lehmann. Alois Burgstaller made a clumsy début as Siegfried and Parsifal.
Mottl was the reigning favorite, Felix of Munich, the first man in whom
the inconsolable Cosima showed deep interest after the death of Richard.
Cosima, all said and done, was a daughter of Franz Liszt. The last time
I saw her was in 1901. With George Moore I stood on the esplanade facing
the Franconian valley, and during an entr’acte of the Ring we discussed
the mediocre conducting of Prince Siegfried Wagner and the fond, foolish
affection of his mother. She passed. This time she rode, but that rigid
spine, the proud pose of the head, the undimmed hawk-like eyes—I am the
widow of Wagner and the daughter of Liszt! they seemed thus to challenge
the gaze of the public—proved her still in possession of all her powers.
And she was then past sixty. Truly an extraordinary woman this, with
her name out of the Italian Renaissance, herself like some belated and
imperious apparition from the Renaissance.
Her forebears were just as remarkable. Liszt met her mother, the Countess
d’Agoult, in the brilliant whirl of his artistic successes at Paris.
Chopin had dedicated to her the first book of his Études. She was
beautiful, accomplished, though her intimates declare that hers was not
a truthful nature. She was born Marie Sophie de Flavigny, in 1805, at
Frankfort-on-Main, Germany. Her father was the Vicomte de Flavigny, a
French refugee, who had married the daughter of Simon Moritz Bethmann,
a rich banker, originally from Amsterdam and a Hebrew converted to
Lutheranism. Marie had literary ability, boasted of meeting Goethe once,
and in 1827 she married Count Charles d’Agoult of Paris. Social sedition
was in the air. The “Misunderstood Woman”—no new thing then, and still
with us—was the fashion. George Sand was changing her lovers with every
book she wrote, and the Countess d’Agoult began to yearn for fame and
adventures. Liszt appeared. He seems to have been the pursued one. They
eloped. In honor he could not desert the woman. They made Geneva their
home—temporarily, for both had the nomad heart and were doomed to pitch
their tents in many strange places. In her own right Marie had twenty
thousand francs yearly income. It cost Liszt exactly three hundred
thousand francs to keep up an establishment such as the lady had been
accustomed to; he earned this at the keyboard, a tidy amount for those
days. (There were pianistic money-kings before Paderewski.) And yet she
was not satisfied. Ever insatiable are artistic women.
Mme. d’Agoult bore him three children—Blandine, Cosima, and Daniel.
Blandine, the beauty of the family, married Emile Ollivier in 1857. She
died in 1862. Liszt greatly loved her. Ollivier was later Napoleon’s
war minister, and was fooled to the top of his bent by the Mephisto of
European politics, Count von Bismarck. He died a few years ago nearly a
centenarian, and busy to the last explaining that he was not to blame
for losing the tragic Franco-Prussian War. His hell was paved with good
intentions before he reached there. Cosima married Hans von Bülow, her
father’s “favorite pupil” (there were hundreds of them), in 1857. True
to family form, she ran off with Richard Wagner, and, to the despair of
her father, married that fickle gentleman. Her father’s discomfiture
was the result of Cosima’s defection from the Roman Catholic faith. She
renounced this faith and became of her husband’s religious persuasion,
_i. e._, nominally a Protestant, in reality a free-thinker. Daniel Liszt,
the hope of his father, died in December, 1859, at the age of twenty.
Liszt had legitimatized the birth of his children, had educated them, had
generously dowered his daughters, and all three were a source of sorrow
to him. The high light of comedy was not absent when the gallant Count
d’Agoult—we shan’t say “bereaved of his wife,” for who shall pretend to
analyze the mixed emotions of a man sorely wounded in his pride of race
and secretly overjoyed at being rid of a pernicious blue-stocking?—called
a family council, which, after due consideration, pronounced the verdict
that Monsieur François Liszt (they spelled it Litz in Paris) had behaved
like a “perfect gentleman” in a certain delicate indiscretion, thereby
absolving him from all blame in the matter. Recording angels on high must
have wept, and George Meredith lost a theme peculiarly fitted to his
ironic pen. But the injured husband calmly went to his club every day and
died in the odor of mundane sanctity.
As might have been foreseen, la d’Agoult quarrelled with her Liszt. They
parted bad friends. Under the pen-name of Daniel Stern she attacked
him in her souvenirs and novels. He forgave. A most irritating trait
in his character was his inability to hate his enemies. Of Heine alone
he spoke ill. When some one asked him if Heine’s name would be carved
on the portals of fame, Liszt replied: “Yes, in letters of mud”; which
is manifestly unjust. In 1860 Franz and Marie met for the last time,
and in Paris. He gently told her that the true title of her souvenirs
should have been Poses et Mensonges. She wept. He was quite right. She
was a detestable poseuse and a fibber. Tragic comedians, both. They
bored each other. Their union recalls Flaubert’s profound remark that
Emma Bovary found in adultery only the platitudes of marriage. Perhaps
other ladies had supervened in the cometary existence of Liszt. Like
Byron he was the sentimental hero of his day. A René of the pianoforte.
Read the recollections of Mme. Adam for a clue to the character of
Cosima’s mother. Liszt sensibly intrusted to the care of his own mother
the education of her three grandchildren. She was born at Krems, Lower
Austria, and a pious soul. Curious it is that the son of a Hungarian
magnate’s overseer should be by the force of circumstances and his own
genius allied with the aristocracy and high diplomacy in several lands
of his time, Liszt Ferencz, whose name translated into English would be
Frank Flour.
Unhappy with the intellectual but irascible von Bülow, Cosima was happy
with her Richard. If there were quarrels they were fought behind closed
doors. She was not beautiful like her sister Blandine, but she had more
brains. Anton Rubinstein loved her; Nietzsche’s last recorded writing
before his mental eclipse at Turin, 1889, was a passionate phrase meant
for her. He was closely allied with the Wagners at Triebschen, and had
corrected the proofs of Richard’s Autobiography, a garbled version of
which has been published with the blue pencil of Baireuth writ large
on every page. Some day all the secrets of that prison-house will be
divulged. Nietzsche surmised much, and many guesses have furnished
stuff for romantic commentators. Romance of the most lurid pattern has
enveloped the Liszt Wagner von Bülow d’Agoult group. And the greatest
influence in Wagner’s career was not Cosima but Mathilde Wesendonck, to
whom we owe the genesis of that lyric masterpiece among masterpieces,
Tristan and Isolde. For her spiritual collaboration with Wagner,
Mathilde was never forgiven by Cosima—after all, a real woman.
Liszt participated in the musical inauguration of Baireuth, in 1876;
the family dissension had been patched up in 1873; but he played second
fiddle to his son-in-law. His affectionate daughter saw to that; also
saw, in 1886, when her father had the bad taste to die during the
festival at Baireuth, that he was buried as quietly as possible, for an
imposing funeral might have disturbed the gate-money at the big barn on
the hill. Thrift, Cosima, thrift! At her husband’s death she declared
that her father no longer existed for her. Mention of his music was
snubbed at Wahnfried—in the back yard of which Wagner was buried like a
cat, as Philip Hale so blandly puts it. The awful part was to follow.
Liszt, instead of being interred at Weimar, or Budapest, lies under
the shelter of a hideous tomb in Baireuth, devised by his grandson,
Siegfried Wagner—who is also an architect. This, another of Cosima’s
tactless doings. She estranged the old friends of her husband, with the
exception of the faithful Hans Richter, who told me at London—in 1901,
where he conducted the Ring in Covent Garden—that Cosima was as great as
a woman as Wagner a composer; which was no doubt true; and she was also a
meddlesome blunderer. She put Baireuth on the map of Cook’s Trippers. She
botched artistically every performance she handled, but she made money;
her banker-grandfather’s business ability she must have inherited. There
is no doubt the tragedy of Germany added to her sorrows. With her will
pass forever the once powerful Wagnerian dynasty.
IDLE SPECULATIONS
If it had been hinted a half century ago that in the veins of Richard
Wagner there flowed Semitic blood, laughter would have ensued. The race
that Wagner reviled in speech and pamphlet—though he never disdained
its generosity—the hated Jew, daring to claim kinship with him might
have set in motion the spleen of the German master. Wagner’s hatred of
the chosen race is historical. “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” is not the
only expression of this contempt and dislike on the part of the man who
was born in a Ghetto at Leipzig. Benefits forgotten, he seldom missed a
chance to gibe at Meyerbeer or Mendelssohn or to flout some Hebrew banker
who was imprudent enough to advance him funds. The Wagnerian pedigree has
been subjected to critical microscopes. Bournot, who was patronized by
Baireuth, wrote concerning Ludwig Geyer, the true father of the composer,
that his family had been Lutheran since 1700. Which proves nothing; race,
not nationality, nor yet religion, counts. Geyer, from whom Richard
inherited his versatile aptitudes, was markedly Jewish in features and
temperament. So was Wagner. Of the putative father, a Police Magistrate,
we know little. In his autobiography Wagner avoids the subject.
But Wagner’s mother, born Johanna Bertz, reveals in her portraits marked
characteristics of the Jewish race. There is mystery concerning her
origin; even the name of Bertz was only discovered a few years ago.
Bertz, too, like Geyer, is a Jewish name. There is in the polemical
writings of Richard an almost insane hatred of the Jew; and, ironic
circumstance, in his music there are the sensuous glow and glitter of
the Oriental. It is certainly unlike any music made by a German, with
its vibratile rhythms, its dramatic characterization and magnificent
decorative frame. “Was Wagner German at all?” demands Nietzsche. “We
have some reasons for asking this. It is difficult to discern in him any
German trait whatsoever. Being a great learner, he has learned to imitate
much that is German. His character itself is in opposition to what has
hitherto been regarded as German—not to speak of the German musician. His
father was a stage player named Geyer. A Geyer is almost an Adler—Geyer
and Adler are both names of Jewish families [Vulture and Eagle, in
English]. What has hitherto been put into circulation as the ‘Life’ of
Wagner is a fable. I confess my distrust of every point which solely
rests on the testimony of Wagner himself. He had not pride for any truth
about himself; nobody was less proud. He remained, like Victor Hugo, true
to himself in biographical matters—he remained a stage player.”
Thus Nietzsche, who knew whereof he spoke, as he was the secretary of
the composer at Triebschen when Richard dictated his autobiography; not
an official secretary, but a dear friend and confidant. But Nietzsche
must be taken with reservations in the Wagner case. He alternately
adored and abused his idol. Another of his favorite contentions was
that Schopenhauer ruined Wagner’s art. The truth is that in Wagner the
artist was stronger than Wagner the philosopher. The reflective man
was usually overcome by the man poetic. Witness Tristan and Isolde,
composed, as Richard confessed, in direct opposition, nay, defiance, of
his life’s theories. Wagner began with Feuerbach and ended a victim to
the fascinating black magic of Schopenhauer. But now we know, thanks to
James Sully’s magisterial work Pessimism, that pessimism and optimism are
a question of personal temperament. Wagner succumbed at the last to the
Buddhistic quietism of the Schopenhauerian theories, though his elastic,
optimistic nature rebelled at the yoke. In the Ring the pessimism
never crowds out the vital dramatic power. In Parsifal the vigorous
affirmations of the earlier Wagner are absent. He said Nay to the life
that had exhausted him, and, bathed in a mystic atmosphere, his soul
found consolation in the mere contemplation of Roman Catholic symbolism.
Nevertheless, hold firmly in your mind that Richard Wagner the artist was
greater than Wagner the vegetarian, the anti-vivisectionist, Socialist,
revolutionist, Jew-hater, and foe of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, also
greater than Wagner the philosopher and poet-dramatist. He was first
and last the musician. For that reason he did not say the last word in
the music-drama. It is a mistaken partisanship that attaches to his
every utterance profound significance. We should gladly exchange his
collected prose writings for another Tristan. He dearly loved a paradox.
A versatile man, he wore many masks. Not that we doubt his sincerity,
but that his emotional nature, his craving for excitement, his agitated
life often led him to speak and write in misleading terms. He seldom put
his best foot foremost when he took up the pen. And the Jews he reviled
always proved his best friends.
We have often wondered where Wagner’s religion, metaphysics, his working
theory of life, would have led him had he lasted a few years longer. That
in his extraordinary brain there had been dimly floating the outlines of
a greater work than Parsifal we learn from his correspondence with Franz
Liszt. He died with the projected Trilogy incomplete. Tristan and Isolde,
Parsifal and the Penitent (Die Büsser) were to have composed this Trilogy
of the Will-to-Live, Compassion and Renunciation. That negation of the
Will-to-Live, so despised by Nietzsche, had gripped him after he became
acquainted with Schopenhauer’s theories in 1854. He eagerly absorbed
this Neo-Buddhism and at the time of his death he was fully prepared
to accept its final word, its bonze-like impassivity of the will. In
Parsifal he sought to transpose to tone its hopelessly fatalistic spirit,
its implacable hatred of life in the flesh. That the world has lost a
gigantic experiment may be true, but that it has lost the best of Wagner
we doubt. In Parsifal his thematic invention is seldom at high-water
mark, notwithstanding his mastery of technical material, his marvellous
moulding of spiritual stuff. Parsifal is an abstraction, while Kundry is
a “howling hermaphrodite,” as Hanslick tastefully called the poor hunted
hind and harlot. It is with Wagner’s power of characterization that we
might concern ourselves, as the composer had drifted into a philosophical
nihilism—that intellectual quietism which is a treacherous pitfall for
the thinker who strays across the borderline of Asiatic religions. The
Christianity in Parsifal seems like the last expiring glimmer of its
values. He deftly drew upon the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church, yet
in the essential Christianity of the result we place no faith.
He went to the Buddhistic roots of Christianity, perhaps for
philosophical reasons. However, Nietzsche’s attack on Wagner’s supposed
religious predilections is wide of the mark; no one was less likely to
indulge in sacerdotal sentimentalism than the musician. The fact is that
all was grist that came to his theatrical mill. Despite his mysticism
he never lost view of the box-office. After the rude knocks of his early
career he, like Balzac, realized that money is the Archimedes-lever that
lifts the modern world. Money is the leading motive of the Human Comedy,
and money it is that is the ruling idea of the Ring. The speculation is
attractive. He changed the title of his Trilogy from The Victors (Die
Sieger) to The Penitents. First considered in 1856, the name was altered
a quarter of a century later. In the interval Oriental philosophy had
supervened with its accustomed effect.
It was a critic of acuity who said of Tristan and Isolde that “the
thrills relieve each other in squads.” Wagner touched the top-notch of
his torrid imaginings in this apotheosis of lyric ecstasy. Nothing has
been written comparable with its intensity; its double, it is safe to
predict, will never be composed. He declared that when he wrote the
music he could not have made it otherwise. It is full-blown in its
imperfections, glaring excellences, noble turgidity, lack of frugality,
economy of thematic resources, dazzling prodigality, soggy prolixity,
riotous tonal debaucheries and almost superhuman enchantments. What
boots it to gird against a demoniacal art that thrills and makes mock
of theories concerning the divine in music? We are no longer on the
windblown heights with Beethoven, nor do we worship as in the vast
Cathedral of Bach. The Schopenhauerian philosophy hurled at us in the
pessimistic dualism of the low episode avails not to stem the turbulent
current of fashion. Tristan and Isolde is the very deification of
carnalism. Call it what pretty titles you may, wreathe the theme with
poetic garlands, yet the stark fact stares at you: The man’s desire for
the woman and the woman’s desire for the desire of the man, to put the
case in Biblical phraseology. The love potion does but unloosen their
tongues; both were mute lovers before Brangaene juggled with the fatal
brew. Wagner was the greatest poet of passion—odious, misused term—in
the history of the Seven Arts. And he had a more potent instrument than
words at his command, an orchestra that wooes and thunders, that achieves
in the surging undertow the very soul of love. A mighty master, but a
dangerous guide is this same Richard Wagner.
THE MASTER BUILDER
Thus far this season we have heard the Third Symphony of Brahms three
times, and once the Symphony in D, the second. These various performances
were respectively given at concerts by the Symphony Society, the
Philharmonic Society, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Nor were they
unusual happenings. The symphonic works of Brahms are perennial favorites
in New York. There is a sufficing reason. Brahms is a transitional bridge
between the mighty Beethoven and the modern men. He is the last of the
classicists, though not precisely the first of the romantics. Schumann
was that, not Berlioz. But Brahms is more romantic than is commonly
realized. It always will be a mystery to the present generation why he
was called a pedant, a dry-as-dust composer. He has his dull moments,
when philosopher-like he contemplates the umbilicus of the universe.
He is not dramatic when drama is not demanded by his theme, and he is
occasionally drab in orchestral color, though never brilliant in the
meretricious sense. He is on the side of the angels. He stands for what
is sound, lofty, beautiful as opposed to shallow operatic trivialities
and melodramatic effects.
It was unfortunate that almost at the outset of his career Edouard
Hanslick, erudite, witty, malignant, should have posed Brahms as an
antithetical man of straw to Richard Wagner. Doubtless it was a tempting
contrast to make: Brahms, the serious symphonist, a reverent follower
in the broad pathway of Bach and Beethoven; and Wagner, creator of the
music-drama, of marvellous stage pictures—romantic, erotic Wagner. Yet
what a fallacy is there. Brahms, as his songs, symphonies, piano, and
violin music prove, was a poetic, a romantic, musician. He could not
paint as boldly as Berlioz, but he always had something vital to say,
while Berlioz, despite his grandiloquent rhetoric, like Victor Hugo,
displayed more manner than matter. As for Wagner—well, he, too, absorbed
as much of Bach and Beethoven as he could assimilate for his particular
usage, and was quite as learned as Brahms. Von Bülow had set the pace for
Dr. Hanslick and that detractor of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner, indeed of
all the New Music—whenever he saw a head pop up on the horizon he hit
it, like the game of Aunt Sally—recognized his opportunity and promptly
pitted Brahms against Wagner, with the result that for a long period the
musical world labored under the mistaken notion that Brahms was a rusty,
musty old pedagogue, with bewhiskered counterpoint and a plentiful lack
of melodic invention. And he was just the reverse.
He died over two decades ago and his vogue has waxed with the years.
When we consider the list of his achievements we are amazed at the
slow, patient, yet fertile and versatile qualities of the man. “Their
impatience,” wrote John Henry, Cardinal Newman, in condemning the major
defect of heresiarchs. Brahms was ever patient. Patience might serve
as his epitaph. His was a genius that grew from accretions. His first
opus was far from the later Brahms, notwithstanding its potential
powers. It was but the acorn which became the great oak of the four
symphonies, the piano and the violin concertos, the songs, chamber
music, choral compositions, the Songs of Destiny and the Requiem. This
massed work is the sum total of a high ideal; stern, unyielding, betimes
frostily inhuman, yet logical and consistent. The philosophic bent of
his intellect extorts our admiration. For a half century he pursued
the beautiful in its most difficult and elusive form, followed it when
the fashions of the season mocked at such undeviating devotion, when
musical structure was called old-fashioned, sober thought voted down
as dull, when the theatre had invaded the tonal realm and menaced it
in its very stronghold, the symphony. After all, there is something to
be said in favor of the skeleton, whether concealed by human flesh or
embodied in religious dogma or encased within the formal walls of musical
compositions. Things must have structure to interest mankind; even
the prudish oyster has a shell. Otherwise the amorphous shreds of the
floating jellyfish or the primeval amœbæ would become our ideal. Brahms
was homo sapiens. He stood on his hind legs, as did our common forebears,
with “probably arboreal habits.” And he wrought the noblest music since
Beethoven.