MORE ABOUT RICHARD WAGNER
Time was when a fame-craving young man could earn a reputation for
originality by merely going to the market-place and loudly
proclaiming his disbelief in a deity. It would seem that modern
critics of Richard Wagner, busily engaged in placing the life of the
composer under their microscopes, are seeking the laurels of the
ambitious chap aforesaid.
Never has the music of Wagner been more popular than now; his name
on the opera billboards is bound to crowd a house. And never,
paradoxical as it may sound, has there been such a critical hue and
cry over his works and personality. The publication of his
autobiography has much to do with this renewal of interest. There is
some praise, much abuse, to be found in the newly published books on
the subject. European critics are building up little islands of
theory, coral-like, some with fantastic lagoons, others founded on
stern truth, and many doomed to be washed away over-night.
Nevertheless, the true Richard Wagner is beginning to emerge from
the haze of Nibelheim behind which he contrived to hide his real
self.
Wagner the gigantic comedian; Wagner the egotist; Wagner the victim
of a tragic love, Wagner tone-poet, mock philosopher, and a
wonderful apparition in the world of art till success overtook him;
then Wagner become bored, with no more worlds to conquer, deserted
by his best friends--whom he had alienated--without the solace of
the men he had most loved, the men who had helped him over the
thorny path of his life--Liszt, Nietzsche, Von Buelow, Otto
Wesendonk, and how many others, even King Ludwig II, whom he had
treated with characteristic ingratitude! No, Richard Wagner during
the sterile years, so called, from 1866 to 1883, was not a contented
man, despite his union with Cosima von Buelow-Liszt and the
foundation of a home and family at Baireuth.
I
However, there are exceptions. One is the book of Otto Bournot
entitled Ludwig Geyer, the Stepfather of Richard Wagner. I wrote
about it in 1913 for the _New York Times_. In this slender volume of
only seventy-two pages the author sifts all the evidence in the
Geyer-Wagner question, and he has delved into archives, into the
newspapers of Geyer's days, and has had access to hitherto untouched
material. It must be admitted that his conclusions are not to be
lightly denied. August Boettiger's Necrology has until recently been
the chief source of facts in the career of Geyer, but Wagner's
Autobiography--which in spots Bournot corrects--and the life of
Wagner by Mary Burrell, not to mention other books, have furnished
Bournot with new weapons.
The Geyers as far back as 1700 were simple pious folk, the first of
the family being a certain Benjamin Geyer, who about 1700 was a
trombone-player and organist. Indeed, the chief occupation of many
Geyers was in some way or other connected with the Evangelical
Church. Ludwig Heinrich Christian Geyer was a portraitist of no mean
merit, an actor of considerable power--his Franz Moor was a
favourite role with the public--a dramatist of fair ability (he
wrote a tragedy, among others, named The Slaughter of the
Innocents), and also a verse-maker. His acquaintance with Weber
stimulated his interest in music; Weber discovered his voice, and he
sang in opera. Truly a versatile man who displayed in miniature all
the qualities of Wagner. The latter was too young at the time of
Geyer's death, September, 1821, to have profited much by the
precepts of his stepfather, but his example certainly did prove
stimulating to the imagination of the budding poet and composer.
Geyer married Johanna Wagner-Bertz (Mary Burrell was the first to
give the correct spelling of her maiden name), the widow of the
police functionary Wagner (to whose memory Richard pays such cynical
homage in his obituary), August 14, 1814. She had about two hundred
and sixty-one thalern, and eight children. A ninth came later in the
person of Caecile, who afterward married a member of the Avenarius
family. Caecile, or Cicely, was a prime favourite with Richard.
* * * * *
Seven years passed, and again Frau Geyer found herself a widow, with
nine children and little money. How the family all tumbled up in the
world, owing much to the courage, wit, vivacity, and unshaken
will-power of their mother, may be found in the autobiography.
Bournot admits that Geyer and his wife may have carried to the grave
certain secrets. Richard Wagner until he was nine years old was
known as Richard Geyer, and on page thirteen of his book our author
prints the following significant sentence: "The possibility of
Wagner's descent from Geyer contains in itself nothing detrimental
to our judgment of the art-work of Baireuth."
II
In 1900 a twenty-page pamphlet bearing the title Richard Wagner in
Zurich was published in Leipsic. It was signed Hans Belart, and gave
for the first time to a much mystified world the story of Wagner's
passion for Mathilde Wesendonk, thus shattering beyond hope of
repair our cherished belief that Cosima von Buelow-Liszt had been
the lode-stone of Wagner's desire, that to her influence was due the
creation of Tristan and Isolde, its composer's high-water mark in
poetic, dramatic music. Now, Belart, not content with his
iconoclastic pamphlet, has just sent forth a fat book which he calls
Richard Wagner's Love-Tragedy with Mathilde Wesendonk.
We had thought that the last word in the matter had been said when
Baireuth (Queen Cosima I) allowed the publication of Wagner's
diaries and love-letters to Mathilde--though her complete
correspondence is as yet unpublished. But Belart is one of the
busiest among the German critical coral builders. He has dug into
musty newspapers and letters, and gives at the close of his work a
long list of authorities. Yet nothing startlingly new comes out of
his researches. We knew that Mathilde Wesendonk (or Wesendonck) was
the first love of Wagner, a genuine and noble passion, not his usual
self-seeking philandering. We also knew that Otto Wesendonk behaved
like a patient husband and a gentleman--any other man would have put
a bullet in the body of the thrice impertinent genius; knew, too,
that Tristan and Isolde was born of this romance. But there is a
mass of fresh details, petty backstairs gossip, all the
tittle-tattle beloved of such writers, that in company with Julius
Kapp's Wagner und die Frauen, makes Belart's new book a valuable one
for reference.
Kapp, who has written a life of Franz Liszt, goes Belart one better
in hinting that the infatuated couple transformed their idealism
into realism. Belart does not believe this; neither does Emil
Ludwig, the latest critical commentator on Wagner. But neither
critic gives the profoundest proof that the love of Richard and
Mathilde was an exalted, platonic one, _i. e._, the proof
psychologic. I firmly believe that if Mathilde Wesendonk had eloped
with Wagner in 1858, as he begged her to do, Tristan and Isolde
might not have been finished; at all events, the third act would not
have been what it now is. A mighty longing is better for the birth
of great art than facile happiness. For the first time in his
selfish unhappy life Wagner realised Goethe's words of wisdom:
"Renounce thou shalt; shalt renounce." It was a bitter sacrifice,
but out of its bitter sweetness came the honey and moonlight of
Tristan and Isolde. Wagner suffered, Mathilde suffered, Otto
Wesendonk suffered, and last, but not least, Minna Wagner, the poor
pawn in his married game, suffered to distraction. Let us begin with
a quotation on the last page but three of Belart's book: "Remarked
Otto Wesendonk to a friend: 'I have hunted Wagner from my
threshold....'"
This was in August, 1858. Wagner first met the Wesendonks about
1852, three years after he had fled to Zurich from Dresden because
of his participation in the uprising of 1849. (Wagner as amateur
revolutionist!) Thanks to the request of his wife Mathilde, Otto
Wesendonk furnished a little house on the hill near his splendid
villa for the Wagners. First christened "Fafner's Repose," Wagner
changed the title to the "Asyl," and for a time it was truly an
asylum for this perturbed spirit.
But he must needs fall deeply in love with his charming and
beautiful neighbour, a woman of intellectual and poetic gifts, and
to the chagrin of her husband and of Wagner's faithful wife. The
gossip in the neighbourhood was considerable, for the complete
frankness of the infatuated ones was not the least curious part of
the affair. Liszt knew of it, so did the Princess Layn-Wittgenstein.
An immense amount of "snooping" was indulged in by interested lady
friends of Minna Wagner. She has her apologists, and, judging from
the letters she wrote at the time and afterward--several printed for
the first time by Kapp and Belart--she took a lively hand in the
general proceedings. Evidently she was tired of her good man's
behaviour, and when he solemnly assured her that it was the
master-passion of his life she didn't believe him. Naturally not. He
had cried "wolf" too often; besides, Minna, like a practical person,
viewed the possibility of a rupture with Otto Wesendonk as a
distinct misfortune. Otto had not only advanced much money to
Richard, but he paid twelve thousand francs for the scores of
Rheingold and Walkuere and for the complete performing rights.
Afterward he sent both to King Ludwig II as a gift--but I doubt if
he ever got a penny from his tenants for rent. He also defrayed the
expenses of the Wagner concert at Zurich, a little item of nine
thousand francs. Scandal and calumny invaded his home, the fair fame
of his wife was threatened. No wonder the finale, long deferred, was
stormy, even operatic.
The lady was much younger than her husband; she was born at the
close of 1828, therefore Wagner's junior by fifteen years. She was a
Luckemeyer, her mother a Stein; a cultured, sweet-natured woman, it
is more than doubtful if she could have endured Wagner as a husband.
She did a wise thing in resisting his prayers. Not only was her
husband a bar to such a proceeding, but her children would have
always prevented her thinking of a legal separation. All sorts of
plans were in the air. When, in 1857, the American panic seriously
threatened the prosperity of Otto Wesendonk, who had heavy business
interests in New York, gossip averred that Frau Wesendonk would ask
for a divorce; but the air cleared and matters resumed their old
aspect. Minna Wagner's health, always poor, became worse. It was a
case of exasperated nerves made worse by drugs. She daily made
scenes at home and threatened to tell what she knew. That she knew
much is evident from her correspondence with Frau Wilk. She said
that Wagner had two hearts, but while he delighted in intellectual
and emotional friendship with such a superior soul as Mathilde, he
nevertheless would not forego the domestic comforts provided by
Minna. Like many another genius, Wagner was bourgeois. Those
intolerable dogs, the parrot, the coffee-drinking, the soft beds and
solicitude about his underclothing, all were truly German;
human-all-too-human.
In September, 1857, the newly married Von Buelows paid the Wagners a
visit, and as the guest-chamber of the cottage was occupied they
took up temporary quarters at an inn, "The Raven" (Wotan's ravens!)
Cosima, young, impressionable, turned her face to the wall and wept
when Wagner played and sang for his friends the first and second
acts of Siegfried. Even then she felt the "pull" of his magnetism,
of his genius, and doubtless regretted having married the fussy,
irritable Von Buelow--who had gone down in the social scale in
wedding a girl of dubious descent. (In Paris Liszt for many years
was only a strolling gipsy piano-player to whom the Countess
d'Agoult had "condescended.")
Mathilde Wesendonk entertained the Von Buelows, who went away pleased
with their reception, above all deeply impressed by the exiled
Wagner. They so reported to Liszt, and Von Buelow did more; as the
scion of an old aristocratic family, he made many attempts to
secure an amnesty for Wagner, as well as making propaganda for his
music. Which favours Wagner, who was the very genius of ingratitude,
repaid later.
In one point Herr Ludwig is absolutely correct: the composer was
supported by his friends from 1849 to the year when King Ludwig
intervened. The starvation talk was a part of the Wagner legend,
even the Paris days were greatly exaggerated as to their black
poverty. Wagner was always a spendthrift.
From November, 1857, to May, 1858, Wagner set to music the five
poems of Mathilde, veritable sketches for Tristan. Early in
September, 1857, the relations between Minna and Mathilde had become
strained. Wagner accused his wife of abusing Mathilde in a vulgar
manner; worse remained; he had sent a letter by the gardener to Frau
Wesendonk and the jealous wife intercepted it, broke the seal, read
the contents. To Wagner, this was the blackest of crimes; yet can
you blame her? To be sure, she had no conception of her husband's
genius. For her Rienzi was his only work. Had it not succeeded? So
had Tannhaeuser and Lohengrin, also The Flying Dutchman, but Rienzi
was her darling. How often she begged him to write another opera of
the same Wagnerian calibre he has not failed to tell us. Otto
Wesendonk's wife she firmly believed was leading him into a
quagmire. What theatre could ever produce The Ring? One thing,
however, Minna did not do, as most writers on the subject say she
did: she did not show the fatal letter to Wesendonk at the time, but
only to Wagner. Later she made its meanings clear to the injured
husband, which no doubt provoked the explosive phrase quoted above.
* * * * *
The youthful Karl Tausig, bearing credentials from Liszt, appeared
on the scene in May, 1858, and the entire household was soon in an
uproar. Luckily, Wagner had persuaded Minna to take a cold-water
cure at a sanatorium some distance from Zurich, so he could handle
the wild-eyed Tausig, whose volcanic piano performances at the age
of sixteen made the mature composer both wonder and admire. Tausig
smoked black cigars, a trait he imitated from Liszt, and almost
lived on coffee. Here is a curious criticism of him made by Cosima
Von Buelow, who, it must be remembered, was both the daughter and
wife of famous pianists. She said: "Tausig has no touch, no
individuality; he is a caricature of Liszt." This, in the light of
Tausig's subsequent artistic career, sounds almost comical; it also
shows the intensely one-sided temperament of a remarkable woman, who
banished from her life both von Buelow and her father, Franz Liszt,
when Wagner entered into her dreams. The fortitude she displayed
after her Richard's death in 1883 was not tempered by any human
feeling toward her father. His telegrams were unanswered. She
denied herself to him. She became a Bruennhilde frozen into a symbol
of intolerable grief.
Of her personal fascination the sister of Nietzsche, Elizabeth
Foerster-Nietzsche, told me, when I last saw her at Weimar. Von
Buelow succumbed to this charm; Rubinstein also (query: perhaps that
is the reason he so savagely abused Wagner in his Conversations on
Music?), and, if gossip doesn't lie, Nietzsche was another victim.
On September 17, 1858, after a general row, Wagner left his home on
the green hill, his "Asyl," for ever. Why? Plenty of conjectures, no
definite statements. He makes a great show of frankness in his
diaries, in his autobiography; but they were obviously "edited" by
Baireuth. Tristan and Isolde remains as evidence that a mighty
emotion had transfigured the nature of a genius, and instead of an
erotic anecdote the world of art is richer in the possession of a
moving drama of desire and woe and tragedy. At the Berlin premiere
of Tristan the old Kaiser Wilhelm remarked: "How Wagner must have
loved when he wrote the work;" which is sound psychology.
III
The two books discussed are constructive in nature; not so the book
by Emil Ludwig, Wagner, or the Disenchanted, which is frankly
destructive. Since The Wagner Case by Nietzsche--and not Nietzsche
at his best--there has not been written a book so overflowing with
hatred for Wagner, the man as well as the musician. Ludwig is the
author of poems, plays, and a study of Bismarck, the latter a
noteworthy achievement. He is thorough in his attacks, though he
does not measure up to Ernest Newman in his analysis of Wagner's
poetry, libretti, and philosophy. The English critic's studies
remain the best of its kind, because it is written without
parti-pris.
Ludwig slashes a la Nietzsche, though he cannot boast that poet's
diamantine style. He accuses Wagner of being paroxysmal, erotic--a
painter of moods; he couldn't build a Greek temple like
Beethoven--weak as a poet, inconclusive as a musician. For Tristan
and Die Meistersinger he has words of hearty praise. The Ludwig book
stirred up a nest of hornets, and one lawsuit resulted. A newspaper
critic presumed to criticise, and the sensitive poet, who calls
Wagner every bad name in the Schimpf Lexicon, invoked the aid of the
law. We know only too well, thanks to that ill-tasting but
engrossing autobiography, that Wagner was a monster of ingratitude.
Hasn't Nietzsche, against his own natural feeling, proclaimed the
futility of gratitude? Perhaps he learned this lesson from his hard
experience with Wagner. We also know that Wagner wanted to run the
universe, but after a brief note from Ludwig II he left Munich
rather than face the angry burghers.
He attempted to coerce Bismarck, but there he ran up against a wall
of granite. Bismarck was a Beethoven lover, and he abhorred, as did
Von Beust, revolutionists. Thereat Wagner wrote sarcastic things
about the uselessness and vanity of statesmen. He didn't treat
Ludwig II right when he announced from Venice that he wasn't in
sufficient health and spirits to grant the King's request for a
performance of the prelude to Lohengrin in a darkened theatre with
one listener, Ludwig II. (By the way, Ludwig II never sat through a
performance alone of Parsifal. Once and once only, years before the
completion of the work, he heard a performance of the prelude in
Munich given for his sole benefit.) Wagner's gruff letter wounded
the sensitive idealist. In 1866, a few weeks after the death of
Minna Wagner-Planer, Cosima von Buelow-Liszt followed Wagner to
Switzerland. Probably the hostile attitude of Liszt in the affair
was largely inspired by the fact that when Richard and Cosima
married, the latter abjured Catholicism and became a Protestant.
Liszt, a religious man (despite his pyrotechnical virtuosity in the
luxurious region of sentiment), never could reconcile himself to
this defection on the part of a beloved child.
It angered Nietzsche to discover in Wagner a leaning toward
mysticism, toward religion: witness the mock-duck mysticism and
burlesque of religious ritual in Parsifal. After Feuerbach came
Arthur Schopenhauer in the intellectual life of Wagner. This was in
1854. His friend Wille lent him the book. Immediately he started to
"Schopenhauerise" the Ring, thereby making a hopeless muddle of
situation and character. The enormous vitality of Wagner's
temperament expressed itself in essentially optimistic terms. He was
not a pessimist, and he hopelessly misunderstood his new master.
Wotan must needs become a Schopenhauerian; and Siegfried, a
pessimist at the close.
Nietzsche was right; Schopenhauer proved a powerful poison for
Wagner. And Schopenhauer himself laughed at Wagner's music; he
remained true to Rossini and Mozart and advised Wagner, through a
friend, to stick to the theatre and hang his music on a nail in the
wall; but when his library was overhauled several marginalia were
discovered, one which he contemptuously wrote on a verse of
Wagner's: "Ear! Ear! Where are your ears, musician?"
Wagner, when Liszt adjured him to turn to religion as a consolation,
replied: "I believe only in mankind." Ludwig compares this
declaration with some of the latter opinions concerning
Christianity, of which Wagner has said many evil things. Wagner's
life was a series of concessions to the inevitable. He modified his
art theories as he grew older, and with fame and riches his
character deteriorated.
He couldn't stand success--he, the bravest man of his day; the
undaunted fighter for an idea crooked the knee to caste, became an
amateur mystic and announced his intention of returning to absolute
music, of writing a symphony strict in form--which, for his
reputation, he luckily did not attempt. He was a colossal actor
and the best self-advertiser the world has yet known since Nero.
But I can't understand Herr Ludwig when he asserts that from 1866
to 1883 the composer did nothing but compose two marches, finish
Siegfried and Goetterdaemmerung. Rather a large order, considering the
labours of the man as practical opera conductor, prose writer,
poet-dramatist, and composer. And then, too, the gigantic scheme of
Baireuth was realised in 1876.
Comparatively barren would be a fairer phrase. After Tristan and
Isolde, what could any man compose? A work which its creator
rightfully said was a miracle he couldn't understand. After the
anecdotage of Wagner's career is forgotten, after Baireuth has
become owl-haunted, Tristan and Isolde will be listened to by men
and women who love or have loved.
It isn't pleasant to read a book like Ludwig's, truthful as it may
be in parts. Nor should he call our attention to the posthumous
venom of the composer as expressed in his hateful remarks concerning
Otto Wesendonk. There Wagner was his own Mime, his own Alberich, not
the knightly hero who would not woo the fair Irish maid till magic
did melt his will. Richard Wagner was once Tristan.