The Wagner Clan Page 8
What we can be fairly sure of is that the only regularly practising disciple of Schopenhauer in the Wagner household was Cosima. How much of her self-denial and masochistic embrace of suffering was inborn is a matter of conjecture. She can hardly have inherited those traits direct from her father and mother. At any rate she surely learned from her revered Thomas à Kempis, long before she came across Schopenhauer, about the admirable rewards to be expected from ‘conquering oneself’. To that inner conviction was added the emphasis on rigid control and correct deportment that she imbibed from her old governess Madame Patersi.
Wagner had much to thank Cosima for. She bore him three children, including his only son, and worshipped most of his work, egging him on even when he toiled gloomily over a chore like the Centennial March, a lucrative piece of hack-work commissioned to mark the hundredth anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence. She put up with his moods, managed to smile at his often coarse jokes and dealt cannily with bankers, lawyers and like threats to the Wagnerian way of life. Not least, she was the most gracious of hostesses although the company she encouraged at Wahnfried was not always to Wagner’s taste. Already in Munich, Peter Cornelius had complained that it was barely possible for Richard’s old friends, ex-revolutionaries and other ‘disreputables’, to get at him without going through Cosima first. That trend became still more marked in Bayreuth. The social ‘upper crust’ that assembled for the Ring, to Nietzsche’s disgust and in part to Wagner’s contempt, was a milieu in which Cosima felt completely at home.
The heart of the matter, though, was that while Wagner passionately over-embraced every aspect of life, despite his professed love of Schopenhauer and his occasional flirtations with suicide, Cosima did just the opposite. She saw that very well herself, noting in an early diary entry that Richard ‘relishes existence and lovely things, whereas I almost prefer to do without rather than enjoy’.3 Wagner poked fun at her, not always kindly. Less than a year after she had joined him for good, he observed that she wanted to bring her ‘renunciation regime’ to Tribschen too, and several times complained that she was ‘wearing [her] Catholic face’ again. But it was not just lovely things in general that Cosima felt to be dispensable. ‘If only we could curb passion,’ she wrote in May 1870, barely a year after Siegfried’s birth, ‘if only it could be banished from our lives! Its approach now grieves me, as though it were the death of love.’4 No single woman or combination of women had managed to satisfy Wagner’s sexual drive for long, and certainly Cosima was not cut out to be the first. Wagner felt frustrated. When Judith reappeared on the scene in 1876, she seemed to glow with the promise of all those things Cosima could not or would not adequately provide. A familiar drama, saved from banality only by the extraordinary cast.
A fortnight after the last 1876 Ring cycle, Wagner and Cosima took a three-month break in Italy that boosted them both, despite news of the festival deficit that reached them in Venice and a last, troubled, meeting with Nietzsche in Sorrento. They even found the time and inclination to pay a few calls in Rome on Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, whom neither had seen for years and who was still toiling over her twenty-four-volume magnum opus on church problems. The accompanying children hated the stuffy apartment that reeked of strong-smelling flowers and candle grease, but could not help giggling when forced to kneel before the princess for a farewell blessing. To their relief they were not invited back.
Henceforth Italy became Wagner’s salvation, or something close to that. When grey clouds gathered, Siegfried recalled years later, his father would shake his fists at them, call them ‘damned potato sacks’ and dream of fleeing to ‘the land where the lemons grow’. His early stays in Italy had been brief, apart from that spell in Venice in 1858–9 while he was working on Tristan. But the older he became, the worse his aches and pains and the greater the bother over Bayreuth, the more often he trekked south across the Alps and the longer he stayed away.
Moving the whole family around posed grave logistical problems, solved mainly by Cosima, helped on and off by a governess and several servants including the ubiquitous Schnappauf. If anything the difficulties grew in Wagner’s very last years, from 1880 until his death in Venice on 13 February 1883, during which he spent more time in Italy than he did at home. Besides ensuring safe carriage for the Master with his books and scores, there were five children of varied age – and, indeed, paternity – to keep an eye on. The two eldest daughters, Daniela and Blandine, born to Cosima and von Bülow in 1860 and 1863 respectively, were in principle able to look after themselves. Not that this stopped Wagner from fretting when the girls were invited to dances by Italian hosts whose moral probity and financial resources might, he feared, be no better than his own. The third daughter Isolde, born in 1865 and attributed to von Bülow though tacitly assumed to have been sired by Wagner, was enterprising but headstrong and liable to land in scrapes. Eva and Siegfried, born in 1867 and 1869 respectively, were the ‘babies’ of the family, and Wagner was without any doubt their father. Whether despite or because of that, they gave precious little trouble to anyone – at least, not while young.
All the Wagner children loved Italy, but two of them were marked by it for life. One was Blandine, who was not only younger than Daniela but also prettier and more easy-going. Of the two girls Daniela, already aged eight when Cosima left von Bülow for good, may have suffered more from the ongoing tension and the final split in the family. Or perhaps she already had an inkling that fate was cutting out an unhappy future role for her, as a buffer and go-between for her divorced parents. Whatever the reason, she became so irritable and rebellious in Bayreuth that Cosima put her in a boarding school, a fate her more pliant sister suffered only briefly. And when it came to marrying, Blandine made an earlier and at first far happier match. During a family stay in Sicily in early 1882, she went to a ball where her looks and serenity attracted a local nobleman, count Biagio Gravina, who promptly asked for her hand. Blandine was eighteen and the count thirty-one but Wagner and Cosima could hardly complain that an age difference was an obstacle to marriage. So despite Wagner’s initial grumbles that the suitor, distinguished though he seemed to be, had no firm occupation, the two soon became engaged and wed in Bayreuth in August. Blandine bore her husband four children but the marriage ended tragically: beset by money troubles and subject to bouts of deep depression, the count took his life at the age of forty-seven. Blandine lived on in Italy until 1941 – keeping a mental and usually a geographical distance from the storms in Germany, and Bayreuth in particular.
The other Italy fanatic was Siegfried, of whom there will later be much more to say. Enough to note here that as a child, the future ‘Master of Bayreuth’ showed little enthusiasm for composition; indeed in a notebook he kept at the age of thirteen he sketched several music exercises, drew an unsavoury black hole next to them and wrote a less than elegant proposal for combining the two. At that stage it was the visual arts above all that Siegfried adored and it was Italy that gave the decisive impetus. In his memoirs he recalls how, on his very first visit at the age of seven, he trotted from church to church and palace to palace, awkwardly trying to reproduce what he saw with paper and pencil. By the time of that trip to Sicily that netted Blandine her husband, Siegfried was twelve and could draw well. In Palermo he became almost as familiar a figure as his father, sketching for hours in the streets and squares and exchanging comments in quite fluent Italian with passers-by. Already his big ambition was to become an architect. That stayed a dream, but time after time he returned to Italy to view the landscapes, buildings and paintings he loved. Ideally, he would have liked to settle there for good.
Unlike his son, Wagner was not deeply struck by the art-works he saw – or if he was, he rarely mustered other than banal remarks about them. Even the Sistine Chapel seems to have drawn from him only the comment that ‘This is as in my theatre, you realise it is no place for jokes.’5 Nor is it clear that Italy directly influenced Wagner’s work as much as he said it did. Althou
gh he stated in Mein Leben that seeing Titian’s Assunta (Assumption of the Virgin) inspired him to start composing Die Meistersinger, a private letter shows that he was already planning to get down to work on the piece before he clapped eyes on the painting. Likewise his claim that a vision in La Spezia in 1853 gave him the start of Rheingold seems to owe more to his imagination than his memory. It is hardly Wagner’s fault that posterity has so often overstated the significance of his 1880 trip to the Palazzo Rufolo in Ravello as an inspiration for Parsifal. He did indeed visit Rufolo’s splendid grounds, perched high above the Amalfi coast, and wrote in the visitor’s book that the (Act II) garden of the evil Klingsor had at last been found. But he had finished the text of Parsifal and had also completed the music in draft well before his Ravello trip. Even the claim that Rufolo’s neatly laid-out gardens served as a model for Parsifal’s 1882 stage design, with its suffocatingly weird and wonderful vegetation, seems unconvincing. But at least there is little doubt that the temple of the Grail Knights in Acts I and III was modelled on Siena Cathedral – the likeness is too clear to miss.
What Italy did for Wagner above all, apart from regularly lifting his spirits and warming his creaking limbs, was give him an unmatched stage on which to perform the high drama of being himself. That goes especially for Venice. Wagner was far from the first to be seduced by the glorious unreality of La Serenissima, with its black, bobbing gondolas and slowly sinking palaces. But seduced he was, so much so that it is hard to avoid the thought that he may have selected the city as the ideal backdrop for his final exit. When he left Bayreuth for Venice in September 1882, he said farewell to his beloved dogs with special intensity, as though he would never see them again. Nor did he. Five months later his heart ruptured and he slumped dead across his desk in one of the eighteen rooms the family had hired in the Palazzo Vendramin, a superb pile overlooking the Canal Grande.
Then the legends began, as they usually do when illustrious people die. According to one famous story, based on remarks reported to have been made much later by Isolde, Wagner expired after a furious row with Cosima over an impending visit by that will o’the wisp flower maiden, Carrie Pringle. That claim can be neither proved nor disproved, but Cosima’s diary shows that Wagner’s temper and his heart pains had been getting worse for many months, even without Miss Pringle as an excuse. It is also often claimed that Cosima remained prostrate over the body for more than twenty-four hours, although the rather precise account given to Liszt a week later by Paul von Joukowsky, the Bayreuth stage designer who was present, suggests that is a mite exaggerated. Minor details, no doubt, but ones that help make up a false mosaic. As for King Ludwig, legend has it that when he heard of Wagner’s death he let out a scream and stamped so heavily that he broke a floorboard. But the note made of Ludwig’s reaction by the court secretary, Ludwig von Bürkel, gives a rather different impression. ‘Oh! I’m sorry, but then again not really,’ the king is reported to have said. ‘There was something about the man I didn’t really like.’6 Is such a reaction credible? We know at least that Wagner was deeply hurt because Ludwig had failed to attend Parsifal in 1882, pleading ill health. Perhaps by the end the king had swum wholly free of the Master, and had his mind fixed more on his castles.
‘A scoundrel and a charmer he must have been such as one rarely meets,’ wrote Virgil Thomson, an American composer and one of the most rewarding of critics, about Wagner. ‘Perfidious in friendship, ungrateful in love, irresponsible in politics, utterly without principle in his professional life. His wit was incisive and cruel; his polemical writing was aimed usually below the belt.’ Quite so. At this point Thomson might have been expected to argue that, despite all those personal flaws, it is Wagner’s art that really counts, that twentieth-century music is hardly imaginable without it, and so on. Instead, he pays tribute to the composer’s ‘sheer guts’ and confesses that, fine though the music often is, he would most have liked ‘to have known the superb and fantastic Wagner himself’.7 That is a refreshing point of view. At least it takes account of the man’s diabolical attraction, even to those who had most cause to shun him.
Because Cosima was later well-nigh worshipped at Bayreuth and lived on for nearly half a century, it is easy to forget how vulnerable she really was in those first years as a widow – and with her the family and the festival itself. Her first and biggest hurdle was that Wagner had made no will, perhaps because he had usually had only debts to bequeath, perhaps because despite all his talk of death he really thought himself immortal. Whatever the reason, Cosima was left out on a limb with a still partly dependent family and, for all her nimbus, a lot of critics. Amazingly, there is not a shred of evidence that Wagner thought she might take over the festival once he had gone. Sometimes he groaned that he could see no one able to step into his shoes, sometimes he mentioned his son as a possible successor. But Siegfried was only thirteen when his father died and besides, he was far keener on the visual arts than on music.
From an artistic standpoint, the argument that Cosima and/or her offspring should run the festival thus looked pretty thin. Nor did the family have a financial hold. The festival theatre had been built on land donated by the town of Bayreuth, Wagner fans had raised much of the cash for construction (albeit less than the Master had hoped for) and King Ludwig had stepped in with a loan when the enterprise faced catastrophe. With Wagner gone, many patrons and friends of Bayreuth who had put up funds felt entitled to a big say in the festival’s future – if there was to be one. The most orthodox of them actually rejected Cosima on two main grounds: she was not thought pure enough to be Bayreuth’s high priestess (although her adultery had been, as it were, ‘in the Master’s cause’); and she was not considered German enough – she who revered German culture über alles, who literally had nightmares about losing the German language and who had ticked off Nietzsche for a lack of true German style. As late as 1896, when Cosima produced a festival Ring that Siegfried conducted, such critics were still lamenting a dangerous ‘internationalism’ at Bayreuth allegedly promoted by Cosima’s Gallic spirit. The ‘older, better Wagnerians’, railed the singer and composer Martin Plüddemann, were moved to ‘hostility and loathing by the lifestyle and goings-on at the thoroughly un-German court of Princess Cosima’.8
Despite these obstacles Cosima quickly won the upper hand, ran the festival for some twenty years and hovered in the background as a grey-black eminence for over twenty more – further evidence, if it is needed, of that often ruthless will she had shown from childhood. But she would never have seized power so soon after Wagner died, nor kept it so long, without the backing of one particularly devoted ally. He advised her on every vital step, legal and financial, built up the Wagners’ fortune, protected them from scandal, pulled innumerable strings to help the festival run smoothly and, so it seems, never personally took so much as a sou for his trouble. This paragon, who deserves (but has never been given) a book to himself, was Adolf Wilhelm Benedikt von Gross. The name of his initial boss in Bayreuth, the banker Friedrich von Feustel, is better known, mainly because it was Feustel who early on helped arrange the offer to Wagner of a site for the proposed festival theatre. But it was von Gross who forged the closer personal links with Richard and especially Cosima the moment they arrived from Tribschen in 1872. At first the Wagners stayed at the Hotel Fantaisie, a cosy nest next to a splendid park outside Bayreuth, and every evening after work von Gross would ride out on horseback to visit them – partly on banking business but soon as a friend. Although Feustel indirectly benefited from these contacts, his relations with his brilliant and ambitious employee, then aged twenty-seven, were far from tension-free. In contrast to his boss, von Gross had a real love of music that quickly helped him gain favoured entry to the Wagner circle. Besides, he had long been courting Feustel’s adored daughter Marie whom the father evidently hoped would make a more splendid match. The marriage went ahead all the same shortly after the Wagners came to town.
When Wagner died, von Gross and his wife sped
at once to Venice and for weeks were the only people, apart from family, with whom Cosima would speak. In a way von Gross almost was family since Wagner, planning ahead that far at least, had appointed him the children’s future guardian. He quickly extracted the go-ahead for the 1883 festival from Cosima and, crucially, had a document drawn up that amounted to a retroactive will naming Cosima and Siegfried as Wagner’s heirs. As a means of bolstering Cosima’s position and securing a clear line of succession for the Wagner dynasty, this prompt action was something of a masterstroke. It presented others keen to muscle in on the festival with a fait accompli and, at least for a few decades, headed off a family power struggle. It is not plain whether Cosima herself first proposed this solution at the expense of her daughters – Eva, after all, was certainly fathered by Wagner and Isolde was assumed to have been so – or whether her omnipresent adviser took the initiative. What evidence there is suggests the latter. In the immediate aftermath of Wagner’s death Cosima did partly lose her bearings and later became briefly but seriously ill. It thus fell to von Gross to nudge her to the prompt action that kept foes and rivals at bay.