1843-1844.
[Sidenote: _A TOUCH OF HIS HUMOUR._]
However inclined the Dresden musical press may have been to be captious
and antagonistic towards Wagner, there were certain decided evidences of
gifts whose existence they could not deny, and which they were
reluctantly compelled to acknowledge, in spite of their openly
pronounced hostility. The rehearsing and conducting of “Rienzi” and the
“Dutchman” had established Wagner’s reputation as a conductor of unusual
ability. “But,” said his censorious critics, “that proves nothing, for
he worked with heart and soul to secure success, just because the operas
were his own. Wait until he is called upon to produce a classic; then we
shall see.” They had not to wait long. Within a month, Gluck’s “Armide”
and Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” were performed under his bâton. His reading
of both was original. He had, first, his individual conception of the
opera as an organic art work, and then very pronounced views as to the
manner in which each should be studied and performed. He spared not the
orchestra. This not unnaturally created among the less intelligent some
amount of irritation. Custom had sanctioned a certain slovenly
rendering, and they revolted at the revolutionary spirit of the new
conductor. But the openly expressed appreciation of the unquestioned
abilities of the conductor by the leading members of the orchestra, was
not without effect upon the malcontents. The friction did not last long;
a marked improvement was felt by all, and Wagner’s irrepressible animal
spirits and jocularity won over even the drudges. I have it from August
Roeckel, his colleague at the desk, that the intelligent members of the
orchestra idolized Wagner, and never wearied under his bâton.
Wagner was possessed of a keen sense of euphonic balance. The
predominance of one section of the orchestra over another, except where
specially required to produce certain effects, he would not tolerate, be
the defaulting instrument ever so difficult to control. On one occasion
the trombones were excessively noisy at a “Rienzi” rehearsal in the
overture, where they should accompany the violins _piano_. Their braying
aroused Wagner’s anger; however, with ready wit, instead of a reproof, a
joke, and turning good-humouredly to the culprits, he laughingly said,
“Gentlemen, if I mistake not, we are in Dresden, and not marching round
Jericho, where your ancestors, strong of lung, blew down the city
walls.” The humour of the admonition was not lost, and after a moment’s
general hilarity Wagner obtained the desired effect.
[Sidenote: _SPOHR’S KINDLY DEED._]
Wagner was a born disciplinarian. He held the orchestra completely in
the palm of his hand. The members were so many pawns which he moved at
will, responding to his slightest expressed wish. The rigid enforcement
of his will upon the players became talked of outside the doors of the
theatre. The critics could not understand why he should wish to change
the order of things, have a greater number and longer rehearsals than
any one else, and have the works performed in his heterodox way; and so,
they first ridiculed him, and then uncompromisingly attacked him,
attacks which, it is regrettable to add, lasted all the years he
remained in Dresden. But for all this, he was not to be deterred from
his purpose. He knew what he wanted, and meant to have it, and in this
Wagner has again and again acknowledged to me his indebtedness to August
Roeckel, who so ably seconded his chief. According to Wagner’s notions
the masterpieces of German musicians could never be properly understood
by the music-loving public, owing to their imperfect and faulty
rendering under conductors who were so many automaton time-beaters.
Great works of all descriptions were produced in a styleless manner, no
regard, indeed, but very little effort, being made to discover the
intention of the composer. All were rendered in the same pointless
manner. This was revolting to his sense of artistic probity, therefore
when he held the office of conductor he altered this almost dishonest
state of things, for it was dishonest not to seek to reproduce a
composer’s intention. Thus the works of all masters suffered. Therefore
Wagner made it a rule that whatever he conducted should be, when
possible, entirely committed to memory. His earnestness became
infectious, until players and singers became animated by one feeling.
They felt that he, at the desk, was as much a worker as any of them, and
the result was a performance hitherto unknown for perfection. It
happened, therefore, that when “Don Giovanni” was given, according to
his feelings and as he willed it, the critics fell upon him fiercely,
going so far even as to declare he did not understand Mozart, so
unexpectedly new did they find his conception. The contest waged hotly.
A large and important body of directors of art opinion selected the
phlegmatic Reissiger as their idol, and lauded him indiscriminately. It
is, to say the least, strange that there should have been found any one
to prefer a man of the diminutive talents of Reissiger to Richard
Wagner. The former was a pure mechanic, respectable in his way, but
completely overshadowed by the mighty genius of Wagner. This study of
conductors and conducting was a phase of his art to which Wagner devoted
much careful thought, embodying at a later period his views in a
pamphlet on the subject, which will be found invaluable by orchestral
conductors of every degree.
An incident of this year, 1843, his first at Dresden, to which Wagner
referred with pleasure, was the performance of the “Dutchman” at Cassel
by Spohr. It was done entirely on its merits, without any solicitation
from Wagner, the pleasure being intensified by reason of the ripe age of
the conductor and his well-known reverence for the orthodox. Spohr was
sixty-nine, and Richard Wagner thirty. Wagner felt and expressed himself
as deeply touched at the interest a musician of such opposite tendencies
should take in his work, particularly, too, on receiving later a letter
from Spohr expressing the delight he experienced on making the
acquaintance of a young artist who showed in all he did such earnestness
and striving after truth. When Wagner related this to me, wondering at
the curious contradiction in Spohr’s character, I remarked that the
solution seemed to lie in the gentle, almost effeminate nature of Spohr,
which found its completion in the robust, manly vigour of Wagner’s own
conceptions.
How Spohr could have been attracted by Wagner, and repulsed by the “last
period” of Beethoven, is a contradiction difficult to account for; but
that it existed is beyond doubt, for the last time he was in London,
about 1850-51, I put the question direct to him whether it was true, as
asserted, that he had stigmatized the third period of Beethoven as
“barbarous music,” to which he promptly and emphatically replied, “Yes,
I do think it barbarous music.” After the performance at Cassel, Wagner
endeavoured to get the “Dutchman” accepted elsewhere, but signally
failed; from Munich, where a quarter of a century later he was to be the
ruling spirit, came the discouraging response that “it was not German
enough,” though the composer thought this its distinguishing merit.
[Sidenote: _HIS PECULIAR DRESS._]
The acrimoniously bitter attacks that were made upon Wagner, during his
first year at Dresden, increased in poignancy, as he showed himself
uncontrolled by custom’s laws. He affected a careless, defiant attitude
towards all criticism, whereas he was abnormally sensitive to
journalistic opinion. He could scoff, play the cynic, treat his opponent
with derisive scorn, but it was all simulated; the iron entered into his
soul, and he chafed and grew irritable under it. It was as though he
suffered a bodily castigation. He brooded over the attacks, and there
can be no doubt that they caused him moments of acute pain. It is true
that in combat he could parry and thrust with as much vigour as his
opponents; that the sting of his reproof was as torturing as any he
suffered; perhaps even that his assaults were more annihilating than
the occasion demanded; yet with it all, though he emerged from the
contest victorious, he suffered deeply, acutely. There can be no doubt
that the genesis of this hostile criticism was directed more against the
man than his art work, and that wounded personality played an important
part in it. Richard Wagner was seen to be a man of artistic taste, with
proclivities which were exhibited in his domestic surroundings, novel,
perhaps, to the somewhat heavy Dresdenites. First, Wagner’s attire was
different from that of the ordinary individual. He persisted in wearing
in the house a velvet dressing-gown and a biretta, truly an uncommon
head-gear. His apartments were asserted to be upholstered luxuriously.
And in these things the art critics (?) saw a target for ridicule and
sarcasm. Now that his apartments were furnished in a costly manner is
absolutely untrue. Wagner had a keen appreciation of the beautiful, and
loved tasty decoration, but it was secured at the minimum of cost. The
thrifty Minna contrived and invented, to gratify Wagner’s fancies, at an
outlay which does credit to German thrift. And yet there were found
Dresden journals that went so far as to discuss his mode of living,
attributing all the apparent extravagance to gratification of an
over-rated self-esteem, the appeasing of an inordinate vanity.
A year of vexation! a year of consolidation was 1844! From Wagner I have
often heard it: “My failures were the stepping-stones to success”; and
this year, when the hot blood of ambition coursed violently through his
youthful veins, when he aimed as high as the heavens, and met with
failures everywhere, when directors of German opera houses returned his
scores “unopened” or pronounced them unripe and lacking in melody,
truly, it was an epoch of bitter disappointment. Attacked relentlessly
by journalistic hacks, imbued with the bitter feeling that he was the
rejected of his countrymen; that for him there was not a glimmer of hope
of success on the German stage, and yet convinced of his own exceptional
gifts, and the living truth of the mission he was destined to
accomplish, he, broken down in spirit, angered with the world, and
fractious with himself, retired from all intercourse with his
fellow-men, shunned society as the plague, appeared at the Dresden
theatre only when absolutely necessary, and went into seclusion,
accessible to none except August Roeckel. Of this gloomy period, and the
devotion of his friend, Wagner has left it on record. “I left the world,
retired from public life, and lived in the closest communion with one
intimate companion only, one friend, who was so full of sympathy for me,
so wholly engrossed in my artistic development, that he ignored his own
unquestioned talents, artistic instinct, and inventive powers, and cast
to the winds his own chances of worldly success. This companion of my
gloom was Roeckel.” In referring to his friend’s self-abnegation, Wagner
evidently alludes to Roeckel’s opera, “Farinelli,” which the composer
had withdrawn from the Dresden repertoire through excess of modesty,
over-awed, as he was, by his conception of Richard Wagner’s genius.
[Sidenote: _HE PRODUCES “ARMIDE.”_]
This tribute to the constancy and humble workship of August Roeckel is
not a whit too much. Roeckel idolized Wagner. The two men were the
complement of each other; whilst the vivacious imagination of Wagner
inspired admiration in Roeckel, the latter’s placid, closely-reasoned
logic soothed the excitable poet-musician. All Roeckel’s letters to me
of this period--and he was an excellent correspondent--might be summed
up in the word “Wagner.” The minutest incidents of work and details of
their conversations are related. This poor Roeckel suffered thirteen
years imprisonment, from May, 1849, when his friend Wagner escaped. At
the termination of his confinement, the two friends met with a warmth of
affection difficult to describe. Seeing, then, the intimacy of the men
during this year of retirement, it is the letters of August Roeckel
which will supply the faithfullest record of Wagner’s life and work.
He tells me that Wagner spoke of himself as “one crying in the desert.”
But few sympathized with him, his breaking away from the “Rienzi” period
being frowned upon, but that through all disappointment Wagner’s
inexhaustible animal spirits never left him. The following letter is
dated March, 1844:--
Wagner has returned from Berlin, very morose in temper; the “Flying
Dutchman” did not touch the scoffing Berliners, who certainly have
less poetical feeling than most Germans; they only saw in
Schroeder-Devrient a star, and in the touching drama an opera like
other operas; yet they pose as profound art critics. Bah! they are
simply stupid!
Since then we have had “Hans Heiling” and “Vampyr.” Wagner thinks
much of Marschner’s natural gifts, but finds that his general
intelligence is not on a level with his musical gifts, and that
this is often painfully evident in his recourse to commonplace
padding.... I wish you could have witnessed the work of the old
Gluck “Armide,” most tenderly cared for by Wagner. I doubt that it
ever was rendered with such reverence,--nay, not even in Paris. We
have also had what Wagner considers the masterwork of Mendelssohn,
“Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with which he also took considerable
pains, although fully aware of the composer’s unfriendly feeling
towards himself.
Later I find the following:--
You cannot conceive what a system of espionage has grown up about
Wagner, how keenly all his actions are criticised. He deemed it
advisable to rearrange the seating of the band (I send you a plan);
but oh! the hubbub it has produced is dreadful. “What! change that
which satisfied Morlacchi and Reissiger?” They charge Wagner with
want of reverence for tradition and with taking delight in
upsetting the established order of things.
In the middle of the year it seems the “Faust” overture was performed;
the reception was disheartening. It was another disappointment, and
showed Wagner how little the public was in sympathy with his art ideal.
Although performed twice, it produced no effect.
[Sidenote: _SPONTINI AND “LA VESTALE.”_]
This is not to be wondered at [writes Roeckel]; for in the judgment
of some here it compares favourably with the grandest efforts of
Beethoven. Such a work ought to be heard several times before its
beauties can be fully perceived.
Wagner day by day becomes to me the beacon-light of the future; his
depth of thought, his daring philosophical investigations, his
unrestrained criticism, startle one out of the every-day optimism
of the Dresden surroundings. The only ready ear besides myself is
Semper, who, however, agrees with Wagner’s outbursts only so far as
they are applicable to his own art, architecture, as in music he is
but a dilettante. Much of Wagner’s earnestness in his demands for
improvement in art matters is attributed by the opposition to
self-glorification. At the head of it stands Reissiger, who can not
and will not accept the success of “Rienzi” as _bona fide_. He is
forever hinting at some nefarious means, and cannot understand why
his own operas should fail with the same public, unless, indeed,
he stupidly adds, it is because he neglected to surround himself
with a “life-guard of claqueurs”; but he was a true German, and
against such malpractices. You can imagine how such things annoy
Wagner; and although he eventually laughs, it is not until they
have left a scar somewhere. For myself, I wonder how he can mind
such stuff. I keep it always from him, but nevertheless it always
seems to reach him; and Minna is not capable of withholding either
praise or blame from him, although I have tried hard to prove to
her that it affects her husband deeply, whose health is none of the
strongest. Another annoyance is the Leipzic clique, with
Mendelssohn at the head, or, to put the matter into the right
light, as the ruling spirit. He gives the watchword to the clique,
and then sneaks out of sight, as if he lived in regions too refined
and sublime to bother himself about terrestrial affairs. But the
worst sore is that coming from our intendant. He has not the shadow
of an idea upon music; takes all his initiative from current
phrases learnt by heart; he is the veriest type of a courtier, and
hates nothing so much as “revolutionary” suggestions from a
subordinate, for as such he rates the conductors, nor has he a
glimpse of discernment as to their relative merits, and finding
Reissiger always ready to bow to his aristocratic acumen, he
evidently thinks him the more gifted. The matter is not made better
by the bitter tone of the press, which, arrogating to itself the
office of defenders of true art, smites heavily the “iconoclast
Wagner.” Schladebach leads them, and unfortunately, his prominent
position inspires courage in scribblers.
* * * * *
We have had a very interesting event here. Spontini came to conduct
his “Vestal.” It was done twice. He is a composer who has said what
he had to say in his own manner. He commands respect, is full of
dignity and amiability. Wagner had trained the orchestra well; his
respectful bearing to the veteran composer incited them to exert
themselves heart and soul. The result was a very satisfactory
rendering. But after the second performance, a peremptory order
came from Luttichorn, that the “Vestal” was not to be repeated, and
Wagner was to convey the decision to Spontini. Wagner prayed me to
accompany him; first, because he does not speak French so fluently
as I do; and secondly, since Spontini had shown himself very
friendly towards me, and it was hoped my presence might calm the
composer’s expected anger, for Spontini is known for his
irritability on such occasions. We went. The time was most
opportune, for as a new dignity had just been conferred upon him by
the Pope, his vanity was so flattered that he listened with
unruffled temper to what was, for him, unpleasant news.
DECEMBER, 1844.
Perhaps the event of the year was the removal of the remains of Weber
from London to Dresden. An earnest committee had been working some time
towards this end; concerts and operatic performances had been given in
Germany and subscription lists opened to provide the necessary funds.
Wagner was truly enthusiastic in the matter, but August Roeckel merits
equal tribute. It was arranged that the deceased musician’s eldest son,
Max von Weber, should come to London to carry out the necessary
arrangements. He came in June, 1844, and was the guest of Edward
Roeckel. We met daily. Max von Weber was a bright, intelligent man.
Enthusiastic for the cause, I accompanied him everywhere, soliciting
subscriptions from compatriots in this country and interviewing the
authorities to facilitate the removal.
August Roeckel writes:--
[Sidenote: _AT THE GRAVE OF WEBER._]
All Dresden was in excitement; the event produced a profound
sensation. The body was received by us all. We had been rehearsing
for some time a funeral march arranged by Wagner from themes in
“Euryanthe.” The loving care bestowed by Wagner on the rehearsals
touched every one. It was clear that his whole heart was in the
work. His own opinion is that he never succeeded in anything as in
this. The soft, appealing tones of the wood-wind were wonderfully
pathetic, and when the march was performed in the open air,
accompanying the body, not a member of the cortège or bystander but
was moved. And then the scene at the grave! Schulz delivered an
oration, and Richard Wagner too. Wagner had composed and written
his out. Think of the care! He wished to avoid being led away at
the sight of the mourners’ grief, and the great concourse which was
sure to be present, and so he learned his speech by heart. The
impression produced upon me was such a one as I never before
experienced. Deep sympathy reigned everywhere; all the musicians
adored Weber; and the towns-people, members of whom had known that
lovable man personally, did honour to Germany’s great son, for
national sentiment played an important part in the matter. You know
that in ordinary conversation, the strong accent of the Leipzic
dialect is the common speech of Richard Wagner, but when delivering
his oration, his utterance was pure German, his measured periods
were declaimed in slow, clear, ringing tones, showing unmistakable
evidence of histrionic power. As an effort of will it was
remarkable, and surprised all his intimate friends.
This curious and interesting feature of dropping the somewhat harsh
Leipzic accent and delivering himself in the purest German remained with
Wagner to the last. On all what might be termed state occasions, when
addressing an assembly his speech was clear, measured, and dignified;
not a trace of his Leipzic accent was observable. It should be explained
that the Leipzic accent is a sort of sing-song, almost whining
utterance, with as strongly marked a pronunciation compared to pure
German as that of a broad Somerset dialect to pure English.