KING LUDWIG
In resuming Wagner's biography we may conveniently take it up after
the completion of _Tristan_ in August, 1859. I summarised the events
leading up to his beginning on the _Mastersingers_; but it is
necessary to go over some of the ground in a little more detail to
show in what a terrible plight Wagner had been landed when King Ludwig
II of Bavaria sent for him. He was bankrupt financially, in health and
in hope. Like the nose of his boyish hero, everything turned to dust
the moment he touched it. Concerts in Paris nearly brought utter
ruin--would have brought utter ruin had not a woman friend and admirer
come to the rescue. He gained no money by his concert tour until, as
he said, he got to St. Petersburg, and there the amount cannot have
been stupendous. He laboured with brain, heart and hand to give the
world masterpieces; the world responded by not responding at all--by
taking absolutely no notice. In Paris he made many valuable friends,
but they were useless to him for the realisation of his projects. They
might help him from moment to moment, and did help him to remain alive
and to avert calamities: a secure and peaceful living they could not
guarantee him: they could not assist him in getting his works
properly performed, or performed at all. I have already discussed the
mistaken policy, on his part, of writing so much about himself, and
the futility of his German friends taking up the pen on his behalf.
The friends meant well, and there was nothing else they could do; but
at the time their efforts resulted in nothing. He published the words
of the _Mastersingers_ and of the _Ring_, and the consequence was only
that a professor publicly implored him not to set such a monstrosity
as the second to music. It is hard to say who did him the greatest
amount of harm--his French friends, his German friends, or his enemies
on either side of wherever the frontier was in those far-off days.
Whatever was done for him, whatever he did for himself, whatever was
done against him, it seemed all one: he walked steadily on into the
thickest of grimy fogs. By romping over Europe like any itinerant
conductor of this day, he might earn an uncertain livelihood: as for
any prospect of getting on with his _Mastersingers_, his _Ring_ and a
score of other plans bubbling in his head, that was a receding
prospect indeed: every year, every month, made the prospect still more
remote. His music was either misunderstood or disliked: certainly the
man's writings and the writings of his friends resulted in _him_ being
disliked. When he settled in Vienna after the triumphs of his earlier
operas he speedily discovered this sad truth, but did not discover the
reason why. His life had been a long tragedy, and with this collapse
of his Vienna hopes he seemed to touch the lowest depths.
So he got away from Vienna, and one day had a visitor. This gentleman
said, in effect, that King Ludwig II had just ascended the throne, and
would be glad of a call. Instantly the grimy fog cleared away; all was
splendid sunshine: in that sunshine Richard was henceforth to bask and
the fruits of his genius were to ripen. He went to Munich, and there
were prompt results. In 1865 _Tristan_ was (at last) produced; he was
enabled to make a new start on the _Mastersingers_, which was
eventually produced in Munich in 1868. But in Munich, as elsewhere,
the inevitable occurred. Wagner suddenly became the "favourite," quite
as in mediæval times, of a not very popular king, one of a line noted
for mental and moral deficiency; and, without consulting any of the
powers that had ruled for a long time in Bavaria, in his mad
enthusiasm he set about "reforming" everything. Apparently he wanted
within twenty-four hours to set up a Saxon Utopia in the midst of a
people who hated the Saxons. He wanted to establish a new opera-house,
where perfect artists were to give perfect performances for audiences
that did not pretend to be perfect. As such performances could not
possibly pay, the audiences, besides putting down the price of
admittance, had, as taxpayers, to make good the deficits. King Ludwig
was supposed to do it; but where on earth was Ludwig's money to come
from if not out of the taxpayers' pockets? Then there was to be
founded a genuine school of music--an excellent scheme, but one,
again, which could not possibly be profitable, or for some time earn
enough to cover its expenses. Who was to pay?--of course King Ludwig:
that is, the taxpayers. And Wagner was not only known (with absolute
certainty) to wish to divert from the pockets of "placemen" funds they
had learnt to consider their perquisites, with a view of turning
Munich into a musical paradise on earth: it seemed to many that he was
gaining such an ascendancy over the feeble mind and will of the king
that shortly he would be dictator of the country. That view was not
well-founded: Wagner, dreamer though he was, had a strong practical
vein in his character: if he saw that one of his dreams could be
realised he realised it at the first opportunity; if he saw it could
not be realised he explained it in an article and left others to make
the first effort at realisation. The man who created Bayreuth was not
the man to imagine altogether vainly that he could, per favour of a
king, whom he must have known to be utterly weak, turn some millions
of citizens and villagers into an Utopian nation of art-lovers and so
on. But hatred surrounded him everywhere; the machinery of the state
came early to a standstill, and, finally, the king had to ask him to
withdraw for a longer or shorter while.
This is the plain truth of an affair concerning which there has been
an immense amount of lying on both sides. The scandals about the
personal relations of the king and Wagner I leave to the vampires; as
for the gentry who will have it that Wagner was "persecuted" out of
Munich by Jews, Christians, journalists and bank-managers, I leave
them to anybody who likes to take them up. That Wagner had to quit
Munich was a sad thing in his life--a very sorrow's crown of sorrow;
and it was a bad thing for German music. It put back the clock many
years. But, sad though it was for Wagner, in the long run it proved
good for him. He would have composed little more in such a city--a
city so misgoverned and misguided as Munich: his days would have been
filled with bitterness, his nerves would have been quickly shattered
by intrigues. He was now amply provided for; a villa--the celebrated
"Triebschen"--was taken for him on the shores of Lucerne, and here he
settled and remained for some years. Here he finished the _Ring_ and
planned Bayreuth.
Another thing which contributed to his unpopularity was his relations
with his own and another man's wife. Hans von Bülow, his pupil, had
married Liszt's daughter Cosima: that lady became infatuated with
Wagner, and Wagner with her, and they virtually eloped together.
Minna's cause was eagerly taken up by musicians, operatic people
generally, and journalists, though none of them cared a rap about
Minna. The most scandalous stories were circulated, and Wagner came to
be thought not only a charlatan cadger living on the State funds, but
one who used those funds to satisfy his carnal and other appetites.
His silk dressing-gowns, his gorgeous apartments, his sybarite
feastings, were the common talk of the newspapers: while he was
slaving, as the saying goes, twenty-six hours out of twenty-four, the
common fancy was taught to picture him as taking his ease in
unheard-of luxury.
These matters have nearly all been indirectly dealt with already, and
as we come to review the situation, this is what we find. Minna was an
impossible wife for such a man: she never could understand why he
could not have remained quietly at his post in Dresden, indifferent to
good or bad opera representations, and unambitious concerning the
proper artistic production of his own works. When calamity followed
calamity, to her all the trouble seemed due to Richard's
pig-headedness; and she would at once have grown cheerful and
good-natured had he burned his finished and unfinished scores and
written "something popular." She was, I say, impossible. Cosima, for
her part, found Bülow impossible. A splendid character in many ways,
he was as wayward and quarrelsome a man as has lived. So Richard and
Minna drifted apart, and Bülow and Cosima drifted apart, and in the
end Richard and Cosima drifted together. The censures that still are
passed at times on their conduct are hypocritical and grotesque. The
people who pass them are usually people who think that the Ten
Commandments were made only to be observed by the poorer classes, or
by other people, not themselves, and are willing enough to excuse
offences against the marriage laws when they are committed by folks of
exalted social position. The whole truth about the Richard-Cosima
affair will evidently never be known; no one has told; three of the
four concerned have passed away; and those writers to-day who pretend
to know most are precisely those whom I suspect of knowing least.
The charge of living in luxurious surroundings is well enough
founded--Wagner undoubtedly did love them: he said so himself. What
did the luxury amount to? A few carpets, chairs, a silk dressing-gown,
and sufficient to eat and drink! He certainly worked hard enough for
them and had a right to them. It is odd to think that most of those
who brought these charges against him themselves grasped at as much
luxury as they could get: had King Ludwig spent his money on _them_
there would have been no objections raised, and doubtless they would
have given us _Rings_ and _Mastersingers_. This must be the judgment
of every sane person.
However, Wagner settled peacefully at Triebschen, and remained there
until the Bayreuth idea took solid and visible shape. He completed the
_Mastersingers_ and _Siegfried_, and made progress with the _Dusk of
the Gods_. When Minna died in 1868 he immediately married Cosima. The
idea of what ultimately became Bayreuth took shape. Bayreuth was first
thought of for a very prosaic reason. The town theatre at that time
possessed the largest stage in Germany, and in many respects was far
ahead of every other German theatre, and this drew the attention of
Wagner and his friends to the spot. Various causes combined to make
the idea of giving the first performances of the _Ring_ in this
theatre an utter impracticability, and Wagner reverted to his old pet
idea of building a theatre for himself. An eminent architect,
Gottfried Semper, cheerfully helped at planning a building which
should unite the utmost artistic usefulness with the smallest possible
expense. The house is long out-of-date, but in the 'seventies it
seemed a marvel. The seats were so arranged that every one commanded,
theoretically, the same view of the stage; the stage was fitted with
the most modern machinery, lights and so on. The orchestra was sunk,
so that the movements of the conductor and his fiddlers should not
distract the attention of the audience; the auditorium was darkened,
so that everything happening on the stage could be seen with the
greatest possible clearness. When the good burghers of a decaying
mediæval town found what was going to happen to them they rejoiced,
for they foresaw invasions of millions of aliens who would not hurt
them but would pay out handsomely, and renew the days of the town's
prosperity. Sites were granted free of cost, both for Wagner's own
house--Villa Wahnfried--and the Festival Theatre. When the foundation
of the latter was laid, brass bands and processions took an important
part in the proceedings.
From the very start the enterprise was looked on as a commercial one.
Wagner's house was built, but work at the theatre had soon to be
stopped for want of money. Numerous Wagner societies were started to
raise it; concerts innumerable were given with the same object; the
composer himself laboured incessantly; and eventually it was possible
to resume building. But the very means, or some of the means, adopted
to raise money aroused fierce antagonism amongst the musicians who
did not believe in Wagner, or had been attacked by him and his
disciples, and put into their hands a weapon of counter-attack.
"Begging" was a term freely employed; and a thousand newspapers were
found willing--nay, anxious--to insinuate or to state boldly that the
money was badly needed to enable the composer to live on a sumptuous
scale. When, in the summer of 1876, the first cycle of the _Ring_ was
given, no artistic undertaking could have made a worse start. People
did not know what they were asked to see and to hear; they did know
that all these scandalous rumours had been flying about for years,
that the "entertainment" was not ordinary opera, that the opening of
Bayreuth was to mark the beginning of a millennium--a new moral,
religious, political and goodness knows what sort of era. Bayreuth
from the first had attracted a very disagreeable set of persons, men
whom fathers would not allow to speak to their daughters--or to their
sons. Wagner himself had invited ridicule by claiming that his theatre
was not to be a mere opera-house, but, as he told Sir Charles Hallé,
the centre of the intellectual and artistic world. "A noble ambition!"
scornfully replied the pianist. In a word, nothing was done to
conciliate; everything was done to create resentment and opposition.
King Ludwig's unpopularity must not be forgotten. Not Bavarians only,
but all the German-speaking peoples, knew Bavarian national finances
to be in a deplorable, desperate condition, and it seemed to them
scandalous that State funds should be used--as, rightly or wrongly,
was thought--for Ludwig's own gross, unspeakable pleasures. While the
Germans were thus alienated, Wagner immediately after 1871 had stirred
up the wrath of the French by speaking of the German army as the
"world-conquerors"; he had angered the English musicians by the many
remarks concerning them uttered by or attributed to him after his
exploits with the Philharmonic society. He had written against the
Jews, and though their finest musicians were with him, the bulk were
against him.
That the performances were in many respects admirable, indeed without
any precedent, we are bound to believe. The artists, great and little,
had toiled for months to attain perfection. Most of the orchestra,
headed by Wilhelmj, had slaved without payment that there might be no
deficiencies in their department. The stage machinery, crude though it
seems to us nowadays when we read of it, was on all sides reckoned
marvellous. Interminable rehearsals had been held, Wagner supervising
them all. In the end, even the anti-Wagnerites who went to curse,
admitted that unheard-of results had been achieved: they would not
give in about the music, which remained, in their crass ears, "without
form or melody"; and we may therefore the more readily accept their
testimony as to Wagner's supremacy as a musical director. The late Mr.
Joseph Bennett's reports--and he was till his last breath a violent
anti-Wagnerite--are typical: they may be read in the files of the
_Daily Telegraph_, and are well worth reading. But, alas! when those
heartless people called accountants came to add up their mysterious
sums and to put figures on the credit side and on the debit side, they
proved incontestably that an appalling deficit was the most obvious
result of the whole proceedings; and if Wagner had any doubts, the
steady inflowing tide of bills to be met must have finally convinced
him. To pay the deficit, dresses and scenery had to be sold; and for a
time, at any rate, it was clear the theatre could not open again.
Wagner, in his old age, had to commence once again giving concerts, in
London amongst other places, to raise funds. Ludwig had done much, and
dared go no further. A huge subscription was arranged, and a large
amount of money had been collected, when help came from somewhere,
whereupon the subscriptions were returned. The detractors and
slanderers who had shouted that all the money asked for in the name of
Bayreuth was really destined to pay for Wagner's and King Ludwig's own
private amusements received, if a vulgar phrase is allowable, a
violent blow in their noisy mouths. Wagner paid no further heed to
them, but went on working out his plans. The old dream referred to in
his letters to Uhlig had been realised; he had his ideal theatre, he
had given ideal performances, and he reckoned he had given the Germans
an art. And now let us see what that art was.