The Wagner Clan Read online

  That first meeting between Chamberlain and Cosima came at a key moment for both of them. Five years after Wagner’s death, the festival was an artistic success and the circumspect von Gross was tending the still shaky business side. What Wahnfried lacked was an effective publicist for its regeneration ideology; an intellectual who combined devotion to the Master’s works, and to his widow, with a persuasive tongue and a fluent pen. Nietzsche had once been seen by Wagner as a suitable evangelist, as well as a likely tutor for his son, but the former pilgrim of Tribschen days had long since deserted the faith. A brilliant young philosopher, Heinrich von Stein, might have filled the gap and did, indeed, become Siegfried’s tutor at Wahnfried – but he died in 1887. Heinrich (Henry) Thode, a Dresden-born art historian of broad learning, seemed another possibility. In 1886 he had married Daniela, the eldest daughter of Cosima and von Bülow, who had for years sadly served as messenger between her divorced parents. But although Thode proved useful to Cosima on several occasions, he finally disappointed her as a Wahnfried propagandist and (still more) the luckless Daniela as a husband.

  That left Wahnfried with Wolzogen and his Bayreuther Blätter as the principal means of spreading the word. If the utmost devotion and diligence had been enough, Cosima could have rested easy. Born in Potsdam in 1848 and grandson of the great Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Wolzogen had been drawn so strongly as a young man both to religion and to Wagner that the two became for him indivisible. On his honeymoon in 1872, he visited Bayreuth and stood in silent homage before the huge hole in the ground which, at that stage, was all that could be seen of the festival theatre. Five years later when Wagner finally decided to go ahead with his long-mooted scheme to found a journal, it was Wolzogen who got the editor’s job. He lacked the intellect and literary style of a Stein, let alone of a Nietzsche, but even Cosima expressed awe at his utter dedication to Wahnfried’s cause. For the next six decades Wolzogen popped up in one family photo after another, his walrus moustache growing whiter, his gaze usually fixed beyond the camera as though towards some Wagnerian utopia just over the rainbow. Imperial Germany collapsed, the Weimar Republic came and went, the Nazis moved in, but Wolzogen ground on with his beloved Blätter from the first issue in 1878 to the last in 1938. All in all he wrote more than four hundred usually muddled and bombastic articles himself, and edited some twenty thousand pages of text, in which ultra-conservatism and racism went hand in hand with the worship of German art – especially, of course, Wagner’s.

  During its first five years, while the Master was still alive, the Blätter largely lacked political content. That was no surprise. Wagner had long since concluded that it was up to art, not politics, to transform society – a conviction bolstered by the lack of support he had received from ‘Berlin’, above all in the person of Bismarck. Besides, at the start only members of the Patrons’ Society received the journal and they looked to it mainly for monthly news about the Master and the future of the festival. It is not clear how often they read the Blätter’s accompanying pieces on philosophy and aesthetics, although they surely did mull over the perplexing ‘regeneration’ essays on art, religion, race and the Jews that were published there by Wagner himself. Cosima’s diaries show her husband felt the journal often fell short of his ideal and that he even toyed with shutting it down, although he never got round to doing so.

  After the Master’s death, the Blätter subtitled itself Deutsche Zeitschrift im Geiste Richard Wagners (German Journal in the Spirit of Richard Wagner) but it soon began to carry content its founder would have deplored. Backing was urged not just for Bernhard Foerster’s Paraguayan Neu Germania project that Wagner had spurned but also, indirectly at first, for the political right. Racism in general and antisemitism in particular featured ever more often although rabble-rousing prose, felt inappropriate to the ‘Bayreuth idea’, was usually avoided. Foerster himself contributed a dozen articles until his suicide in 1889; Ludwig Schemann, founder of the German Gobineau Society, produced forty-eight; Karl Grunsky, a Jew-hating musicologist who became an early favourite of the Nazis, wrote more than two hundred – many of them favourable reviews of other antisemitic material. Depressingly for Wahnfried, though, circulation was small. After briefly reaching a peak of more than 1,700 copies per issue during Wagner’s lifetime, it sank to around five hundred and stayed there. The Blätter’s influence was surely greater than that modest figure would seem to imply. The core of devoted subscribers came above all from the wealthy, educated bourgeoisie – academics, writers, lawyers and other professionals well placed to pass on the gospel to their peers. Even so, the journal’s ‘regeneration’ aim far outstripped its reach.4 Flanking support was badly needed from a ‘true believer’ with bestseller flair and Chamberlain, mirabile dictu, floated in to over-fill the bill.

  Nothing illustrates Chamberlain’s special talents and his value to Wahnfried better than the turbulent ‘Praeger affair’. Ferdinand Praeger was a German musician and writer who had settled in England and who had often met Wagner during his London stay in the winter of 1854–5, and on other occasions. The two of them had even trotted off together to the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand to see a Christmas pantomime pot-pourri of Mother Goose, Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella that Wagner called ‘in every respect excellently mounted and played’ – praise he rarely bestowed on performances of weightier fare, including his own. Armed with much personal anecdote, Praeger completed a lively but in part inaccurate book called Wagner As I Knew Him shortly before he died in 1891. It was published in English and German the following year and at once sent the Wahnfried circle into fits of fury. Praeger had not just failed to pass over the Master’s less majestic foibles, such as his ‘childish, petty fits of anger’ and his dyspepsia-generating habit of gobbling his food. Far worse, the author noted that Wagner had mistreated Minna and that he had played a highly active role in the 1849 revolution, both accusations that ran directly counter to the revised, official, Wahnfried version of the Master’s life.

  Chamberlain launched two attacks on Praeger’s book, the second of which proved deadly, in Germany at least. In a first article issued in July 1893, he drew attention to discrepancies between the English and German editions and noted that some of the letters allegedly by Wagner that Praeger had quoted were not written in the composer’s usual style. By dwelling on details Chamberlain managed to cast doubt on the book as a whole, a familiar critical device of which he was a master. Still, he had no proof. Accordingly he made one of his rare visits to England and, thanks to help from influential members of his family, managed to worm his way into the country home of Lord Dysart, a Wagnerian who possessed most of the Master’s original letters to Praeger. Working mainly overnight, when the rest of the household was asleep, Chamberlain made copies of Wagner’s texts, bore them away in triumph and published a second article in early 1894 documenting where Praeger’s version differed from the originals.

  Chamberlain had long since made his peace with Wolzogen, who had refused his first essay on the Ring well over a decade before, and both the Praeger articles were first published in the Blätter. But unlike most of the journal’s pieces they reached a broad public, partly because Chamberlain could write persuasively without pomposity, partly because he turned out to be an effective string-puller. For all his seeming diffidence he made useful contacts easily and kept them – in Geneva, Paris, Dresden and later Vienna. Even in the England he deplored he initially worked closely on the Praeger affair with William Ashton Ellis, a writer with much influence among Wagnerians despite his cumbersome translations (still, sad to say, widely used) of the Master’s already opaque prose. In France he drummed up backing from the small but fervent band of the faithful he had nurtured through the Patrons’ Society. In Germany it was not just ultra-nationalist and anti-semitic circles that rallied to his support. Even balanced journals like the Hamburger Nachrichten carried commentaries praising Chamberlain for his energy in uncovering the ‘real facts’ and the persuasive way he had ar
gued his case.

  As a result of the hullabaloo Praeger’s book was swiftly withdrawn from the German market, to the special delight of Cosima who felt handsomely confirmed in her immediate belief that Chamberlain was a godsend. Sadly for the Bayreuthians, though, the book survived and thrived in England. The juicy scandal over it, with Lord Dysart hitting back at Chamberlain’s ‘underhand’ tactics, served to spark interest among people whose eyes might otherwise have glazed at the mention of Wagner. Most critics and readers alike concluded that however correct Chamberlain might be on this point or that, much in Praeger’s account about the Master’s excesses in life and love ‘rang true’. British Wagnerites fumed, of course. Typical was the reaction of the writer George Ainslie Hight who, after confessing he had never read the book, charged that ‘more than any other single work’ it had been responsible for disseminating false views about Wagner. ‘Sensuality, that is in the morbidly sexual sense of the term, was no part of Wagner’s character,’ opined Hight with the blinkers of the true disciple.5

  Although the Praeger affair caused a special stir in Wagnerian circles and even beyond, it was only one bitter skirmish in the campaign of revisionism and distortion being run from the Wahnfried headquarters. The key aim, as Cosima and her loyal troops saw it, was to ‘cleanse’ Wagner’s life of all elements that might be ‘misunderstood’ and therefore harm the ‘regeneration’ faith being proclaimed from the ‘fortress on the hill’. This was a huge task although the Master himself had made a firm start on it with his (naturally) biased autobiography. Still, in Cosima’s view even the latter’s manuscript needed a spot of cleansing and she had stretches of it (including the one mentioned in chapter three detailing the start of her affair with Wagner) cut or revamped before the first publication in 1911.

  Impossible though it was to get rid of all correspondence that in her view could compromise Wagner or herself, Cosima did her dogged best. All the letters she had received from Nietzsche went into her incinerator. So did those to Wagner from Peter Cornelius, one of the Master’s more forthright comrades in arms, several from von Bülow and all those from Mathilde Wesendonck that Cosima could lay her hands on. She had, in fact, begun a drive many years earlier to bring as much evidence as possible of the Wagner–Mathilde link under her control. Back in the early days of her affair with Wagner in Munich, Cosima had written to demand from Mathilde the return of the Master’s literary manuscripts that she still possessed (quite a lot of them, many with fond dedication), on the grounds that King Ludwig wanted them for publication. Mathilde had sent a reply as prompt as it was piquant direct to a dumbfounded and, for once, embarrassed Wagner. She was sure he knew of the request, she wrote, and was glad to learn he was well and surrounded by those dear to him. Touché.

  Cosima’s example in destroying or suppressing material was followed by other members of the family. Eva, for instance, later burned most of Wagner’s letters to her mother and blacked out or pasted over parts of his early diary known as the ‘Brown Book’. But in Wahnfried’s orgy of obfuscation it was Chamberlain who emerged as the leading spin doctor. Not for him mere suppression of evidence, although he did plenty of that too; the past had to be creatively reshaped to meet the perceived needs of the present. He cut his teeth with that favourable gloss on Liszt and the Wagners that had first impressed Cosima; he produced a stream of articles arguing fluently but implausibly that the festival was being carried on exactly as its founder would have wished; and he wrote a book claiming, still more implausibly, that the Master’s music dramas all stemmed from an unchanged philosophy of life.

  Chamberlain’s biggest contribution to the creation of a new, squeaky-clean Wagner came in 1895 when he published his ‘short’ biography of the composer6 – a mere 526 pages compared with the six-volume colossus later laboriously erected by Carl Friedrich Glasenapp, the Master’s official biographer.7 Even Cosima admitted that Glasenapp’s opus was tough going and praised Chamberlain for devising something ‘appropriate’ with more popular appeal. This he did by producing what he called in the introduction a ‘sketch’ unsullied by an excess of facts that would cloud the ‘real’ Wagner and his spiritual world. In practice this meant tricky questions like the Master’s paternity were largely ignored; that his role as a political (as opposed to an artistic) revolutionary was denied and that his excesses, monetary and otherwise, were portrayed as the inventions of a hostile press. According to the author, Cosima’s adultery (not, of course, specified as such) had been inspired by a ‘higher calling’, Minna had played only a very modest role in Wagner’s life and Mathilde Wesendonck next to none. As usual, Chamberlain’s near-chatty style made for a smooth read and the book sold well – but another work, far greater in scope, was already welling up in him and it was to make his name far beyond Germany.

  Chamberlain once vowed that ‘if it was of any use to Bayreuth, I would without hesitation let myself be roasted on a slow fire.’8 Fortunately he made the pledge to the good-humoured Siegfried, not to Cosima, who might just have taken him up on it. But despite his undoubted devotion to Wahnfried, Chamberlain kept astonishingly much on his mind beyond Wagner. In 1889, only a year after that first meeting with Cosima, he and Anna abandoned Dresden and set up house in Vienna. In his memoirs Chamberlain says he made the move not just because the Habsburg capital was blessed with much culture (true) and better weather (arguable), but also because it was the home of Julius Wiesner, a professor of botany whose work had intrigued him while he was studying in Geneva. The latter argument is not as spurious as it may seem. Chamberlain was now well into his thirties and uncomfortably aware, as his letters show, that he was still much dependent on the largesse of relatives and one or two rich admirers. He thus seems to have reluctantly concluded that it was time to make another stab at qualifying himself and earning a living. Accordingly he enrolled at Vienna University and took up work again for a doctorate, probing what caused the movement of sap in plants. He failed to finish his studies, typically casting his net ever wider so that what began as a limited investigation became a quasi-philosophical hunt for the essence of life itself; but doctorate or not, the city with its sweet-sour charm would not let him go. Chamberlain finally stayed there for all of two decades, usually in the closest touch with Bayreuth and often visiting the festival, but gradually winning an intellectual independence all but unknown in Wahnfried’s inner circle.

  It is easy to see why Chamberlain loved Vienna. His spacious apartment was only a few minutes walk from the wide, tree-lined Ringstrasse, encircling much of the city centre and built by special command of Emperor Franz Joseph a few decades before to match the boulevards of Paris. The Court Opera, the grandest building on the Ring, offered fine performances that reached stellar heights after the fiercely uncompromising Gustav Mahler became director in 1897. Theatres, museums and libraries equalled any in the German-speaking world and the ubiquitous coffee houses offered an ideal combination of club and second home for rich and poor alike. Besides, as Chamberlain gleefully noted to a French friend, the city abounded in pretty women of easy morals. Despite his long-standing ailments and intense intellectual pursuits (not to mention his marriage), Chamberlain had found time to philander even before his arrival in Vienna. Once there he became involved in new affairs, including a lengthy one with an actress called Lili Petri whom some of his friends thought he might one day marry. But in the end it was the attraction of belonging to the Wagner clan that Chamberlain found irresistible.

  What Chamberlain most loathed about Vienna is plain too: its Jews. Hitherto his antisemitic comments had been intermittent and, despite the influence of Bayreuth, usually marked more by disdain than hatred. In Dresden he had actually claimed to feel real sympathy for Jews after hearing brutish charges made against them there at a tub-thumping rally. But he soon began to change his tune in fast-growing Vienna, focus of the social and political unrest seething throughout the multinational empire. Jews were more visible there than in most German cities, thanks to the often poverty-stricken
Ostjuden with their distinctive dress and habits who (to the embarrassment of many already-established brethren) streamed in from the east to find work. Moreover, although they made up less than a tenth of the population of greater Vienna, Jews already accounted for nearly a third of the students at the university and, in some faculties like medicine, almost a half. They were prominent in music even before Mahler took over at the Opera and highly active in the press and publishing. To the hypersensitive, intellectual newcomer from Dresden, the Jewish influence that had seemed an irritation started to loom as a threat.

  At first Chamberlain’s growing hostility was directed largely at Jews, not at other groups from all over the empire that helped people Vienna. He even said he was elated to live amid such a colourful mix of Magyars, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes and the rest. But that feeling gradually changed too. During his long trip on horseback with Anna through the Balkans in 1891, Chamberlain began to be obsessed with race – comparing what he regarded as degenerate Slavs with pure, fair-haired Serbs. He also joined the Neuer Wagner-Verein (New Wagner Society), a group that had broken away from Vienna’s main Wagner association and which, unlike the parent body, flirted with nationalist politics – even with proto-fascists like Georg von Schönerer, leader of the (Austrian) empire’s pan-Germans. Chamberlain despised Schönerer and had become involved with the ‘new’ society mainly because the old one had increasingly criticised Cosima’s imperious rule in Bayreuth. But the more he came into contact with nationalist circles and observed the Jews and Slavs around him, the more he began to see history in terms of racial conflict – with the Germans the highest strain, but gravely endangered. When his Munich publisher Hugo Bruckmann, delighted with the success of Richard Wagner, urged him to turn his hand to a new work of greater scope, Chamberlain was only too happy to commit his analysis to paper – at length.