The Wagner Clan Page 17
Clement and Siegfried quickly became close friends though not exclusive ones. Letters and diary entries by both, often written in a comical mix of misspelled English and German, reveal some friction, because each had other male fans. But after a summer both spent in Bayreuth, Clement, who was feeling nervous and restive, proposed that they take a trip together to the Far East free of charge on one of his father’s ships. Siegfried loved the idea and since he was now twenty-two Cosima could hardly say no, though her letters show she had great qualms. For the first time her adored son was travelling beyond even her long reach – who could tell what that might mean for Bayreuth’s future? Anyway, Siegfried joined Clement in London in early 1892 and – after a couple of breathtaking encounters with Oscar Wilde, who extolled all the French things usually deplored at Wahn-fried – the pair embarked on a voyage that was to last nearly six months. They turned out to be the only passengers aboard the far-from-luxurious merchant ship Wakefield, albeit joined during the trip by a growing number of pets including canaries, a monkey and a Chinese dog.
Of the 173 pages of memoirs that Siegfried produced in total three decades later, no fewer than 103 are devoted to that voyage with Clement Harris. Clearly, then, this was a crucial half-year for him, and his lively, often hilarious account of it makes for an easy read. We are told almost more than we might wish about eating pieces of cat and dog in Canton; we are left in no doubt about the joys of nude bathing on a deserted Malayan beach; and we learn how the two young travellers, lying in (Siegfried indicates) separate beds in a Philippines village, are serenaded by a lovely harpist from an adjoining room. There are occasional swipes at British colonialists, American tourists and Jews, but Siegfried directs his fiercest fire at his own countrymen: ‘atrocious, noisy, apelike’, a clear vindication of Darwin’s theory, he calls a group of Germans in a Singapore hotel. And everywhere, whether sweltering on his bunk in the Red Sea, visiting a Buddhist temple or watching the teeming throng in Hong Kong, he has his sketchbook to hand.
Despite all that, much – one is tempted to say most – about Siegfried stays hidden, not just in his memoirs but usually also in the more detailed notebooks he filled during the trip and that were published privately only after his death. Once or twice he lets deeper emotions show through; how his heart almost stops when he unexpectedly hears a Bach chorale wafting from a building half a world away from home; how his blood nearly freezes when he learns, on a trip to a Chinese jail, that a young murderess as beautiful as a Giotto madonna will be hacked to pieces for her crime. But for the most part he offers us no more than a snapshot travelogue and even implicitly admits as much. Of a visit to the Alhambra in Granada with Clement he reports that, precisely because the experience means so much to him, ‘I really cannot speak and write about it, as [I cannot] about all things inviolable.’12 What applies to his account of the voyage is also true of the remaining seventy pages of his memoirs. Siegfried has a knack of claiming that it ‘should not be necessary’ to say more just when more is exactly what we would love to know. Like the Cheshire Cat, he often lets us see his smile but rarely his substance.
So it is that we learn little of depth about Clement Harris. Obviously Siegfried owed the young Englishman a lot. Thanks to Clement, he came into direct contact with cultures he had only read and dreamed about, and it may be that under Clement’s influence he began to question the antisemitism he had imbibed from his parents. It is at least on record that the Harris family deplored remarks against Jews and that Clement gave short shrift to Adolf Stöcker (the antisemitic chaplain at the Imperial Court) when he happened to meet him in Bayreuth. Clement surely helped strengthen Siegfried’s regard for composers who did not bear the Bayreuth seal of approval; perhaps he was even behind his friend’s decision, abruptly taken in Hong Kong, to drop architecture and plump for a life in music after all. Typically, Siegfried himself gives no explanation for this momentous change of heart beyond insisting that it was not caused by pressure from his mother. For a time on board the Wakefield Clement and Siegfried were composing more or less simultaneously. While the former sketched themes for his Paradise Lost, the latter began to plan the structure of a symphonic poem of his own called Sehnsucht (Yearning), based on a poem of Friedrich Schiller. In 1895 the works had almost simultanenous premieres, Siegfried’s in London and Clement’s near Frankfurt.
Only once, at the end of their trip together, does Siegfried briefly drop his emotional guard. The Wakefield has reached the decidely unromantic stopover of Port Said and Siegfried, keen to get back to Bayreuth for festival rehearsals, has decided to join a faster boat. ‘My dear Clement accompanied me on board where we said goodbye,’ he writes in a notebook entry not reproduced in his memoirs, ‘superficially in as English a way as possible because lots of people were milling around us, but in our hearts with that affection and intimacy with which we had learned to love one another.’13 Five years later Clement was killed. Siegfried made no recorded comment on the loss, but then silence (his music apart!) was his refuge if faced with the deepest emotion. When three decades later he composed his second and last symphonic poem entitled Glück (Happiness), he evidently dedicated it in private to the dead friend whose picture never left his desk. For all his other emotional entanglements, male and female, much suggests that in Clement Harris Siegfried found and lost the love of his life.
Natural reticence was not, of course, the only reason for Siegfried’s discretion. As ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, homosexuality could bring personal and social disaster even to those simply accused of it, let alone sentenced in court. If Siegfried had had any doubt about the risks involved, he lost them at the latest when he came to London to give the premiere of Sehnsucht on 6 June 1895 in Queen’s Hall. Twelve days earlier, after a second trial for sodomy during which his private letters were read out in evidence, Oscar Wilde had been sent to jail for two years’ hard labour. The judge called the case the worst he had ever tried and regretted that in his view the sentence, the maximum the law allowed, was ‘totally inadequate’. There is no record of how Siegfried reacted to the trial, but it is inconceivable that he was unaware of it and the events leading up to it. Deserted by most of his friends and family, unable even to rent rooms, the scintillating Oscar, who had been the toast of London and who had dazzled Siegfried just three years before, plunged into a black hole.14
The Master’s son naturally took care to cover his tracks, thus helping his family – expert erasers of unwelcome facts in any case – to keep the topic for the most part safely sealed. Blackmailers who got wind of Siegfried’s sexual escapades are said to have been bought off by the ever-faithful Adolf von Gross, although written evidence of this is unsurprisingly lacking. Only once did a really serious threat loom in the person of Maximilian Harden, feared and fearless editor of the weekly Die Zukunft (The Future), who had already caused a national storm with his charges of homosexuality in circles close to the Kaiser. Harden despised the Wagners and his indirect reference to Siegfried’s sexual orientation in an article in 1914 suggested he was planning a campaign to bring down family and festival lock, stock and barrel. He might even have succeeded. The Wagners were already reeling under the impact of another scandal that had burst into the open after simmering behind the scenes for years. This one focused not so much on Siegfried, though he was deeply involved, as on his sister Isolde and her ambitious, errant husband.
Mention Franz Beidler nowadays and even keen Wagnerians may be hard put to place him. Didn’t a Swiss conductor of that name lead a few performances in Bayreuth early in the last century, and wasn’t his son in some way linked with plans to restart the festival on a new footing after the Second World War? Indeed, but there is more to the tale than that. Twice over, the Beidlers came close to playing a key, perhaps decisive, role in Bayreuth. That they failed was due partly to their own bad judgement as well as bad luck; but they were also out-manoeuvred from the start by Wahnfried incumbents ready to use every weapon, including lies and deceit, to defend th
eir patch.15
Beidler, born in 1872, was no mean conductor, but his career would almost certainly not have prospered so well at the start, or failed so abjectly later, if he had not first won entry to the ranks of Bayreuth’s ‘royal family’. At any rate his professional fame soared after he wooed and won the loveliest of the Wahnfried daughters, the proud and impetuous Isolde, who was seven years his senior. Cosima was not happy with the match, no doubt feeling that Isolde of all her daughters deserved a paragon with the fire of a Tristan and the status of a King Mark. But she did not prevent it and probably could not have done so (although she had managed to thwart a budding romance of Isolde’s years before). So the two were married in December 1900 and went to live in an idyllic manor house near Bayreuth where, ten months later, their son Franz Wilhelm was born – an event of which the Hohe Frau really did approve, at least at the time. Isolde, she gushed to a friend, was an incomparably beautiful and caring mother, just like a being from paradise. Even Beidler came in for belated praise. After poring over the score of Tristan und Isolde with her new son-in-law, Cosima concluded that he was a better musician than she had thought, ‘excellent’ in fact.16
For all that, Beidler did not slot into place at Wahnfried. His blunt talk, his disinclination to bow and scrape, were among the traits that had first endeared him to the similarly direct Isolde, but they did not go down well with others at Cosima’s court. For the inner circle, family and acolytes, the burly newcomer with the thick Swiss accent was and remained an interloper, unwilling even to master the art of kissing the hand of the Hohe Frau with adequate reverence. Nor did his success on the podium as far afield as Moscow and St Petersburg win him friends at home. Quite the opposite. Thanks to Cosima, he conducted a Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1904, well enough by most accounts, and two performances of Parsifal in 1906. But when he tried to insist on being given a third Parsifal, the Hohe Frau flew into a rage that probably contributed to her heart attack late the same year and her subsequent withdrawal from the festival leadership. In a letter of truly Wagnerian intensity, she told Beidler that he was not a really fine conductor – let alone a good husband – and that to become one his whole nature would need to be reborn. Unless and until that happened, Cosima thundered, ‘we are divorced.’ If asked, she would urgently advise Beidler’s ‘pitiable wife’ to separate from him.17
Clearly there was more behind this fury than a family member’s desire, in principle laudable, to conduct the Bühnenweihfestspiel more often. The truth is that by 1906 at the latest, Beidler was emerging as a rival to Cosima’s adored son, and in his bumptious way he was making that plain. Like Siegfried in 1876, he had begun his Bayreuth career with the toughest possible assignment, the Ring, and now he seemed to be laying special claim to the Master’s ‘holiest’ work. That alone did not mean Beidler could displace Siegfried as heir apparent to the festival, but it presaged a likely power struggle once Cosima died or stepped down. Looking still further ahead, Isolde and her husband already seemed to hold a trump card – namely their son – in any future battle for the Bayreuth succession. Blandine and Daniela were ‘only’ von Bülow’s daughters, not Wagner’s, and anyway Daniela was childless. Eva was surely sired by Wagner but she was baptised von Bülow, was still unmarried and was getting too old to produce an heir. Siegfried was still a bachelor and even those unaware of his sexual habits had begun to assume that he would remain so. That left little Franz Wilhelm Beidler, born on 16 October 1901, sound in mind and limb and already with an evident ear for music, as the Master’s only grandson.
The boy’s status depended, however, on the assumption that Isolde, born in Munich on 10 April 1865, really was Wagner’s daughter; that she had been conceived at the Master’s villa by Lake Starnberg in the summer of 1864, most probably during the week or so when Cosima was present without ‘poor Hans’, her husband. Wagner had no doubt that he was Isolde’s father. Evidently Cosima had none either, referring to Isolde on at least one occasion as her ‘first child of love’. Still, legally speaking Isolde was a von Bülow and on the advice of von Gross, keen as ever to ensure a clear line of succession at Wahnfried, she had accepted her share of the estate von Bülow left on his death in 1894. In other words Isolde’s true paternity was an open secret that most insiders, including for a time Isolde herself, found it convenient to deny or ignore. Sometimes, though, even the best-trained disciples became a mite confused. When he produced his sycophantic two-thousand-page biography of Cosima in 1928, Richard Graf Du Moulin Eckart referred to Isolde as ‘v. Bülow’ in the index to the first volume and as ‘geb. Wagner’ (born Wagner) in that to the second. By this time, though, Cosima was in little state to care.
Some two decades earlier, she had cared intensely. It is not clear whether Cosima wrote her ‘divorce’ letter wholly independently or with Siegfried’s collusion, but the aim was plain enough; to defend her son’s position by driving Beidler out of both the festival theatre and the family. She only half succeeded. Beidler never again conducted in Bayreuth and his later career, in Manchester among other places, proved a flop. But true to type, Isolde stuck to her man. In 1909 she and Beidler wrote to Cosima admitting errors and begging forgiveness but the letter never arrived. Seemingly Siegfried intercepted it. At the very least, he knew of its contents and warned the authors never to try to make such an approach again as it might lead ‘Mama’ to suffer a relapse. By this time, though, the Beidlers and to some extent Siegfried himself faced a challenge from yet another source – the newly wedded Chamberlains.
Houston and Eva had long been hugely influential at Wahnfried in their separate roles; he (albeit often in absentia) as publicist, racist guru and friend of the Kaiser, she as the conduit through which virtually all correspondence to and from Cosima passed. But once together, living in or close to Wahnfried and with direct access to every scrap of inside information, they became all but dominant. Eva remained her mother’s secretary and close confidante – so close, in fact, that Cosima put all the diaries detailing her life with Wagner into her daughter’s care. Hosts of friends and foes would have loved to scour the intimate contents of these twenty-one handwritten volumes, but Eva made sure that next to no one got the chance. She did the job so well that the revelations of the Hohe Frau only became generally available to scholars and the public in the 1970s.
While Eva took charge of the diaries, her husband at Cosima’s behest prepared the Master’s unfinished autobiography Mein Leben for its first issue to the general public. Decades earlier Wagner had sent copies of a private printing to King Ludwig and a few friends but Cosima had managed to claw back most of this material after his death. Now the work was to be made generally available in a ‘suitable’ form – with seventeen passages deleted or rewritten mainly on the grounds that they reflected poorly on people still living, including Cosima, or on the Master himself. Given the wholesale distortions in Chamberlain’s own Wagner biography written a few years earlier, it is something of a surprise that Mein Leben did not suffer a still more thorough editorial mangling before it reached the market in 1911. Daniela, for one, later said she wished additional embarrassing passages of the original had been chopped. Intact and unsullied editions of Wagner’s original text finally did emerge – but only from 1963 onwards.
Apart from his work on Mein Leben, Chamberlain was active as never before – writing a book about Goethe, planning a sequel to Die Grundlagen and using his influence to make the Bayreuther Blätter still more nationalist and antisemitic in tone. Bit by bit he was abandoning the view, held by Wagner in his later years, that it was in the first place up to art, not politics, to change society. Foreign-policy setbacks, the rising power of organised labour and the ‘muckraking’ by Maximilian Harden involving the Kaiser’s friends – all this helped persuade Chamberlain that Germany faced threats too urgent to be countered by ‘regeneration through art’ alone. In advocating a firmer political stand against what looked like a far-flung conspiracy to deny the country its rightful ‘place in the sun’, Cham
berlain reflected and intensified the feelings of a growing number of Germans. As usual, Jews (among them the Jewish-born Protestant convert, Harden) were widely blamed for the misère. All too few of the grumblers acknowledged that it was not least Germany’s own bungling diplomacy since Bismarck’s departure, worsened by the Kaiser’s hamfisted intervention, that had brought the country more foes than allies.
Far from all of those who trekked to Bayreuth for the festivals were dyed-in-the wool nationalists, but the hardening of the mood in the years before the First World War was unmistakable. Ever more publications appeared linking the festival to ‘true German-ness’ and carrying Chamberlain’s thesis about Aryans as makers and saviours of civilisation to still more absurd extremes. It was in this context that a new drive was launched to try to keep performances of Parsifal legally restricted to the Bayreuth stage alone. But despite much lobbying and a petition that won eighteen thousand signatures, parliament failed to act – yet another sign to most of the backers that politics was subject to sinister influences behind the scenes. To such people Chamberlain was a hero and at Wahnfried he had no real rival. His old enemy Thode was disgraced; Wolzogen was intellectually outclassed and Siegfried was on the whole a benefactor who had helped haul Chamberlain back to Bayreuth after the tiff with Cosima over the Grundlagen. Siegfried was admittedly in a strong position as son and heir so long as his private life stayed strictly private; but he got on with his manifold artistic work and left the ideology to Chamberlain, just as he left money matters to von Gross.