The Wagner Clan Read online

  None of that would matter if Wagner had been a mediocre composer. It is doubtful whether much of his prose would be read nowadays for intrinsic merit. But because Wagner’s music is, at its best, of rarely matched power and beauty, his writings have become by association an irresistible lucky dip into which just about anyone – be it sage or crank, pacifist or warmonger, vegetarian or meat-eater, semite or anti-semite – has been able to plunge a fist and pull out a prize. Zealots can find plenty of goodies there alone to back up their view of ‘The Master’ as a near-deity whose intellectual abilities matched his musical genius. Those who hold this opinion enjoy flanking support, thanks to the strenuous efforts of Cosima and her devoted circle to doctor the record after Wagner’s death and declare his life unimpeachable. Similar obfuscation, albeit less blatant, has gone on intermittently ever since. On the other hand Wagner’s many foes can easily assemble more than enough ‘evidence’ from his literary meanderings and chequered career to demonise him, even to make him seem personally responsible for Hitler. Innumerable books and articles have been launched from both implacable camps. Behind many of them you can hardly miss the sound of axes being ground.

  The six years Wagner spent at Tribschen (1866–72), when so many strands of his life came together, offer plenty of ammunition to fans and foes alike. It was, on the face of it, a period of almost unmatched joy and productivity. During it Wagner completed Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg) and recommenced work on the Ring after a twelve-year break. Cosima joined him for good in 1868 and, after her divorce from von Bülow, who seemed almost relieved to lose her to someone he too felt was the ‘better man’, the pair finally married in Lucerne in 1870. ‘What a lucky old donkey I am,’ Wagner burst out one evening at Tribschen – and up to a point, that is just what he was. Literally worshipped by a woman twenty-four years younger, surrounded by his adored children and favourite animals – including two dogs and two peacocks called Wotan and Fricka – he seemed to have come as close as he ever did to finding a real home. He did later own Wahnfried, whereas Tribschen was merely rented; but since the bill for the latter was footed by the sorely tried but still not wholly estranged King Ludwig, that particular distinction did not matter much to Wagner. And there were peaks of domestic bliss at Tribschen that seem never quite to have been scaled later.

  One of these was the famous birth of the Siegfried Idyll, which combines so many of those qualities such as charm, lightness and intimacy that the rest of Wagner’s music is widely but wrongly said to lack. Even those who can resist the Idyll itself can hardly deny the romance of its origin; how Wagner secretly composed the piece in 1870 as a birthday present for Cosima; how she failed to guess what was in the offing despite surreptitious rehearsals in and around the villa; how she awoke on Christmas morning (she was born on 24 December but celebrated on the twenty-fifth) to the strains of the premiere given by fifteen musicians crammed onto the staircase leading to her bedroom. Cosima wept. She often did that anyway, especially when listening to Wagner, but then whose eyes would have stayed dry on such a day? ‘Now let me die,’ she sighed to him after the work had been repeated twice more, albeit in less cramped conditions. ‘It would be easier to die for me than to live for me,’2 Wagner replied – an observation very likely true.

  Wagner was partly out to match (or rather surpass, since he despised mere equality) the birthday treat Cosima had secretly concocted for him seven months earlier. Overnight she had decorated Tribschen’s stairwell with hundreds of roses and in the early morning a forty-five-piece military band filed into the garden at her behest to play the Huldigungsmarsch (March of Homage), a far from idyllic piece Wagner had composed six years before for King Ludwig. But of course there was more behind the Idyll than a ritual move in an elevated game of tit-for-tat. Joy at the birth of his son, love for Cosima, a sense of peace in so ideal a place – all flowed into the piece and were reflected in the title Wagner gave it: ‘Tribschen Idyll with Fidi-Bird-song and Orange Sunrise presented as a symphonic birthday greeting to his Cosima by her Richard, 1870.’

  It was not only the Wagners who found the Tribschen experience magical. Judith Gautier, a visiting French beauty whom Wagner seduced (or at least tried to) years later, told Cosima that ‘Now, at last, I comprehend that happiness of paradise so extolled by believers, the seeing of God face to face.’ The mistress of the house, Judith somewhat superfluously noted, ‘thought quite as I did’.3 Likewise Elisabeth Nietzsche, Friedrich’s sister who later devoted much of her life to falsifying his writings, recalls an enchanted walk by the lake under the full moon. Wagner wearing his famous velvet biretta and black cloak, Cosima in a pink cashmere gown, eloquently held forth with Nietzsche on the greatness of the Greeks, the promise of the Germans and the tragedy of human life until – bit by bit – they fell into a wistful silence. For the youthful philosopher, thirty-one years Wagner’s junior, Tribschen initially brought the revelation of joy (his unrequited love for Cosima notwithstanding) in a tortured, lonely life. Decades later and close to madness, he recalled his twenty-three visits – let’s say pilgrimages – to the spot, and confided that ‘at no price would I have my life deprived of those days at Tribschen – days of confidence, of sublime flashes of insight and of profound moments. I know not what Wagner may have been for others; but no cloud ever obscured our sky.’4

  The first part of that statement is no doubt true, the last is nonsense. Even during that much-prized Tribschen era, Nietzsche’s slowly growing differences with Wagner brought down on him Cosima’s censure: as she put it in her diary, he was mistakenly ‘trying to resist the overwhelming effect’ of the Master’s personality.5 Later, feeling used, betrayed and humiliated, Nietzsche launched attacks on Wagner that for bitterness and ferocity, not to mention stylistic skill, remain unsurpassed to this day despite huge and ever-growing competition. Yet he could refer to a cloudless sky in the above passage from Ecce Homo, written in 1888 but only published twenty years later. One explanation might be that his madness had set in rather earlier than generally thought. More likely, at this particular moment he simply blended out painful memories to ensure that happy ones stayed untainted. Selective recollection is certainly, to quote Nietzsche again, Menschlich, Allzumenschliches (Human, All-Too-Human). But whether such distortion is unconscious, as it may well have been in Nietzsche’s case, or deliberate, it bedevils the Wagner saga often, all-too-often. And, of course, it works both ways.

  Just how idyllic really was the Tribschen era? It was certainly a period when Richard and Cosima took their deception of King Ludwig, long blissfully unaware of their adultery, to new depths, with a barrage of lies and obsequiousness breathtaking even by Wagner’s abject standards. It was also just at this time that Wagner chose to reissue Das Judentum in der Musik (Jewishness in Music), an antisemitic tract he had published under a pseudonym two decades before. Now he worded it still more viciously (Cosima recorded her ‘great delight in its terseness and pithiness’6) and issued it under his own name. Similarly repulsive was Eine Kapitulation (A Capitulation), a jingoistic farce seemingly glorying in French humiliation in the war against Prussia, which he gleefully produced in late 1870, more or less simultaneously with the Siegfried Idyll. Wagner later argued that the piece was really meant to show that artistically the Germans were even more puerile than the French, and indeed his contempt for his own countrymen, Wagner fans excluded, at times seemed boundless. But whatever Wagner’s real intentions with Eine Kapitulation, there is no mistaking the joy with which he and particularly Cosima followed the progress of the Prussian onslaught. ‘Nine battles within a month, and all victorious,’ she exulted in her diary in September 1870. ‘What a christening present for Fidi.’7 In this and most other things, Cosima, with her French mother and Hungarian father, felt more intensely and chauvinistically German than most Germans. Hers was an example that other non-German members of the Wagner clan were disastrously to follow.

  Wagner’s conduct can be, and often is, cast in a mo
re favourable light. It is at least arguable that King Ludwig mainly had his own naivety to blame for trusting his ‘heavenly friend’ for so long, and for continuing to back him (much to posterity’s benefit) even when it was clear the trust was misplaced. Besides, it is widely claimed that geniuses have a higher calling that justifies any amount of subterfuge – or at least makes those who draw attention to it seem petty if not contemptible. Above all great love is said to set its own rules or, as Cosima more eloquently wrote, it ‘works on us like a Plutonian eruption, it bursts through everything, throws all strata into confusion, raises mountains, and there it is – utmost transformation and utmost law’.8 Even those who consider themselves less than ‘perfect Wagnerites’ usually praise Cosima for striking courage and self-sacrifice, risking everything the world of convention had to offer to go to the man she adored. By so doing, she gave him vital stability, a family and fostered his creativity. ‘Richard is working,’ she joyfully noted time after time in her diary. Wasn’t this relationship at least pretty close to a love that, as Wagner put it, emerges ‘only once in five thousand years’?9

  Yes and no. By mid-1864, when Wagner and Cosima are first known to have slept together (‘consummated their union’ as it is often more delicately put), and four years before they finally settled in at Tribschen, he had already composed the bulk of his work, including more than half the Ring, part of Die Meistersinger and the whole of Tristan und Isolde. It is tempting to speculate that the tension produced by Wagner’s long and unhappy first marriage to Minna Planer, and by his relatively brief infatuation for Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a rich German businessman in Zurich, may have spurred him to creativity at least as much as life with Cosima ever did. Tempting – but hardly fruitful. At least Cosima’s omnipresence did not stop him completing his unfinished works and composing the whole of Parsifal, often claimed to be his finest piece. Besides, the love that happens ‘only once in five thousand years’ was itself far from tension-free.

  Take that flowery account of Siegfried’s birth in Cosima’s diary. Isn’t it strange that Wagner should have written it there? He did have a lovely diary of his own in brown leather decorated with malachite stones, given him by Cosima years before. One explanation could be that Wagner felt so totally at one with her on that splendid June morning that her thoughts and feelings – and hence her diary – became his own, as it were. No doubt he also wanted to spare her the effort of writing so soon after giving birth. That seems plausible, except that Wagner had written another long entry in Cosima’s diary a few days before, without at first telling her what he was up to, and it was anything but considerate. Instead he bitterly complained because Cosima, still married to von Bülow and apparently embarrassed with her elder children in the house, refused to move into an apartment on the ground floor with a bedroom next to his. Such treatment, Wagner charged as he returned the volume to his pregnant mistress, tormented him ‘like the fear of death.’10 Cosima was not just remorseful. As the very next entry (in her own hand) makes clear, she felt that barely seven months after moving in with Wagner she had been given the ‘coup de grâce’.11

  This was no isolated storm. Like a spoiled brat, Wagner could never bear to be away from the centre of attention, sometimes emitting a piercing scream simply to shut up guests who had the effrontery to chat among themselves. But when Cosima was distracted for an hour or two, say minding the children or doing embroidery, his tantrums could become especially vindictive. Even before the Tribschen era, he particularly resented Cosima’s continuing contacts with her father – that same Franz Liszt who had proved such a staunch friend to Wagner when he was down and nearly out, as he so often was. And later in Bayreuth a ‘distracting’ letter from Liszt sparked such a bitter outburst from Wagner that Cosima in distress abandoned her beloved diary for twelve days. How could she put up with such treatment? The truth is she enjoyed it. ‘I am glad of my suffering,’ she wrote, ‘and fold my hands in grateful prayer.’12

  The Tribschen idyll with its peaks of physical joy and its ‘sublime flashes of insight’ was no sham. That birthday music for Cosima unforgettably sums up the best of it. But as so often with Wagner, it was also a time shot through with peculiarly intense envy, prejudice and cruelty. Both extremes belong to the true picture of a life that, to cite Charles de Gaulle’s forbidding words between the two world wars about Germany, was like ‘a sublime but glaucous sea where the fisherman’s net hauls up monsters and treasures’.13 No wonder Wagner’s descendants staggered under the weight of so glorious but poisoned a legacy.

  2

  Revolution and Reverse

  At the start of 1848, revolution sparked by poverty, famine and unrealised democratic ideals began to sweep through Europe – unstoppably, it seemed at first. In February Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels issued their Communist Manifesto, not an immediate cause of the uprisings, it is true, but very much a sign of the times. The same month King Louis-Philippe of France, threatened by street battles in Paris and fearing for his head, hastily abdicated after eighteen years of rule and fled to England. A republic was promptly declared – the second in France since the bloody revolution begun in 1789, bringing about a reign of terror, the execution of Louis XVI and the end of the monarchy for more than two decades.

  With the 1848 insurrection victorious in Paris, demonstrations erupted in March in Vienna, capital of the Habsburg (Austrian) empire, forcing the flight of Clemens von Metternich, the power behind the throne for nearly forty years, and later the abdication of Emperor Ferdinand himself. For a time the far-flung but loosely integrated empire itself seemed about to fall apart. Meanwhile regimes in the patchwork of states that made up Italy and Germany lost their nerve with startling speed, promising all sorts of democratic reforms to keep the mobs at bay. More or less at the geographical centre of this turmoil, though not at first directly involved in the violence swirling around it, was Dresden, capital of Saxony. And at the core of Dresden’s musical life was the energetic but chronically impecunious Richard Wagner, since 1843 Hofkapellmeister (court conductor) to King Friedrich August II, a post that brought more than local prestige.

  Surely such an establishment figure, with his regular duties, smart livery and ex-actress wife who adored being called ‘Frau Hofkapellmeisterin’, would be firmly committed to the status quo. Not so. Bursting with frustration and increasingly anarchic visions, Wagner backed the drive for sweeping reform at home and greeted the outbreak of street fighting in Vienna with a signed poem published in the Austrian press. None of that lost him his job. His monumental opera Rienzi, der letzte der Tribunen (Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes), set in ancient Rome and packed with insurrection, death and destruction, was indeed removed by the management from the programme of the Royal Court Opera – hardly a drastic rebuke in the circumstances. But in September Wagner was still very much active in His Majesty’s service, conducting a concert including excerpts from his latest work Lohengrin to mark the three-hundredth birthday of the Court Orchestra (forerunner of the superb Dresden Staatskapelle, still going strong today despite everything war and dictatorship has flung at its home city). Wagner’s friends marvelled at his ability to bounce back; his foes seethed at his knack, as it seemed to them, of getting away with murder. Whatever you called it, the truth was that this phenomenal court employee had already packed far more scandal and sheer adventure into his thirty-five years than most men do into a lifetime.

  Twelve years before, Wagner had made his public debut as an opera composer with Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love), an over-long but witty piece based on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, which lampoons sham morality in general and puritanism in particular. It still deserves a staging but rarely gets one anywhere; it is never produced at the Bayreuth festival, where its lightish relief would be a boon. It was not Wagner’s first completed opera – that was the easily forgettable Die Feen (The Fairies) – but it was the first to get a hearing, albeit a brief one. The premiere in Magdeburg where Wagner regularly conducted was a fiasc
o, and a second performance was scrapped after onstage fist fights broke out before the curtain rose. The company then went bankrupt. It was during his involvement with the Magdeburg troupe that Wagner wooed and won – perhaps one should rather say wore down – Christine Wilhelmine ‘Minna’ Planer, a fetching, blue-eyed actress four years older than himself with an illegitimate daughter named Natalie whom she passed off as her sister. They were wed in 1836 in Königsberg, a marriage that was rocky from the first but somehow survived poverty, sickness and a stream of affairs, not to mention a basic difference of outlook, until Minna’s death thirty years later.

  Not quite all the extra-marital adventures were Wagner’s. Six months after the wedding Minna, battered and bewildered by her husband’s lightning switches of mood from towering rage to tearful remorse, ran off with a merchant. She finally rejoined Wagner in the Baltic town of Riga (then in the Russian empire) where he had become music director. But when his contract was not renewed and his passport impounded because he failed to pay his debts, Wagner decided in 1839 to flee west with Minna and a huge hound called Robber to seek his fortune in Paris, at that time the capital of the opera world. According to Natalie, Minna was so injured in a cart accident during the perilous trip that she was unable to have another child. That may or may not be accurate. Natalie was not present in Riga and only rejoined the household in Paris, so her report made decades later is second-hand. But both Wagner and Natalie in their separate accounts do agree that there was an accident – and it is a fact that Minna henceforth stayed childless.