Richard Wagner His Life and His Dramas
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Title: Richard Wagner His Life and His Dramas
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RICHARD WAGNER HIS LIFE AND HIS DRAMAS ***
[Transcriber's Note: Obvious printer errors have been corrected
without note.]
RICHARD WAGNER
HIS LIFE AND HIS DRAMAS
A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY OF THE MAN AND AN EXPLANATION OF HIS WORK
BY
W.J. HENDERSON
AUTHOR OF "THE STORY OF MUSIC," "PRELUDES AND STUDIES," "WHAT IS GOOD
MUSIC?" ETC.
[Illustration]
G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
_The Knickerbocker Press_
1902
Copyright, 1901
BY
W.J. HENDERSON
Set up, electrotyped, and printed, November, 1901
Reprinted February, 1902
_The Knickerbocker Press, New York_
[Illustration: Richard Wagner]
TO
ROBERT EDWIN BONNER
PREFACE
The purpose of this book is to supply Wagner lovers with a single
work which shall meet all their needs. The author has told the story
of Wagner's life, explained his artistic aims, given the history of
each of his great works, examined its literary sources, shown how
Wagner utilised them, surveyed the musical plan of each drama, and
set forth the meaning and purpose of its principal ideas. The work
is not intended to be critical, but is designed to be expository.
It aims to help the Wagner lover to a thorough knowledge and
understanding of the man and his works.
The author has consulted all the leading biographies, and for
guidance in the direction of absolute trustworthiness he is directly
indebted to Mme. Cosima Wagner, whose suggestions have been carefully
observed. He is also under a large, but not heavy, burden of
obligation to Mr. Henry Edward Krehbiel, musical critic of _The New
York Tribune_, who carefully read the manuscript of this work and
pointed out its errors. The value of Mr. Krehbiel's revision and
his hints cannot be over-estimated. Thanks are also due to Mr. Emil
Paur, conductor of the Philharmonic Society, of New York, for certain
inquiries made in Europe.
The records of first performances have been prepared with great care
and with no little labour. For the dates of those at most of the
European cities the author is indebted to an elaborate article by E.
Kastner, published in the _Allgemeine Musik. Zeitung_, of Berlin, for
July and August, 1896. The original casts have been secured, as far
as possible, from the programmes. For that of the "Flying Dutchman"
at Dresden--incorrectly given in many books on Wagner--the author
is indebted to Hofkapellmeister Ernst von Schuch, who obtained it
from the records of the Hoftheater. The name of the singer of the
Herald in the first cast of "Lohengrin," missing in all the published
histories, was supplied by Hermann Wolff, of Berlin, from the records
of Weimar. The casts of first performances in this country are not
quite complete, simply because the journalists of twenty-five years
ago did not realise their obligations to posterity. The casts were
not published in full. The records have disappeared. The theatres
in some cases--as in that of the Stadt--have long ago gone out of
existence and nothing can be done. As far as given the casts are, the
author believes, perfectly correct.
CONTENTS
PART I--THE LIFE OF WAGNER
CHAPTER PAGE
I--THE BOYHOOD OF A GENIUS 1
II--THE FIRST OPERAS 14
III--KÖNIGSBERG AND RIGA 27
IV--"THE END OF A MUSICIAN IN PARIS" 38
V--BEGINNING OF FAME AND HOSTILITY 50
VI--"LOHENGRIN" and "DIE MEISTERSINGER" 64
VII--"ART AND REVOLUTION" 73
VIII--PREACHING WHAT HE PRACTISED 85
IX--A STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND 96
X--A SECOND END IN PARIS 105
XI--A MONARCH TO THE RESCUE 117
XII--SOME IDEALS REALISED 127
XIII--FINIS CORONAT OPUS 136
XIV--THE LAST DRAMA 146
XV--THE CHARACTER OF THE MAN 154
PART II--THE ARTISTIC AIMS OF WAGNER
I--THE LYRIC DRAMA AS HE FOUND IT 167
II--THE REFORMS OF WAGNER 178
III--THE MUSICAL SYSTEM 189
IV--THE SYSTEM AS COMPLETED 200
PART III--THE GREAT MUSIC DRAMAS
INTRODUCTORY 213
RIENZI 221
DER FLIEGENDE HOLLÄNDER 234
TANNHÄUSER UND DER SÄNGERKRIEG AUF WARTBURG 250
LOHENGRIN 270
I--THE BOOK 272
II--THE MUSIC 283
TRISTAN UND ISOLDE 293
I--SOURCES OF THE STORY 294
II--WAGNER'S DRAMATIC POEM 300
III--THE MUSICAL EXPOSITION 315
DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG 328
DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN 355
I--THE SOURCES OF THE POEMS 364
II--THE STORY AS TOLD BY WAGNER 388
III--THE MUSIC OF THE TRILOGY 422
PARSIFAL 446
I--THE ORIGINAL LEGENDS 447
II--THE DRAMA OF WAGNER 461
III--THE MUSICAL PLAN 473
APPENDIX A--THE YOUTHFUL SYMPHONY 481
APPENDIX B--WAGNER AND THE BALLET 487
INDEX 491
PART I
THE LIFE OF WAGNER
RICHARD WAGNER
CHAPTER I
THE BOYHOOD OF A GENIUS
"O kindischer Held! O herrlicher Knabe."--SIEGFRIED
The ancestry of Richard Wagner has been traced as far as his
grandfather. This good man was Gottlob Friedrich Wagner, a custom
house official, whose life-work it was to see that nothing was
smuggled into Leipsic through the city gates. Gottlob Friedrich had
a son to whom was given the second name of his father. Friedrich
Wagner was a clerk of police. He had a considerable acquaintance
with languages, and spoke French so well that when the French army
under Napoleon occupied the city, he was appointed by Marshal Davoust
to organise the police. Wagner's father was born in 1770, and his
life was short. It is known that he had a taste for the theatre and
for verse. After the battles of October 18 and 19, 1813, at the
gates of Leipsic, when Napoleon's power was broken in Germany, the
accumulation of dead around the city caused an epidemic fever, and
among its victims was the police clerk Wagner. He passed away on
November 22, 1813, leaving among other children a male babe of six
months, destined to immortalise his name. This child was Wilhelm
Richard Wagner, born May 22, 1813, in "The House of the Red and White
Lion," No. 88 Hause Brühl.
Wagner's mother, whom his father married in 1798, was Johanna Rosina
Bertz, who died in 1848. Richard was the youngest of nine children,
the others being Albert, Carl Gustav, Johanna Rosalie, Carl Julius,
Luise Constanze, Clara Wilhelmine, Maria Theresia, and Wilhelmine
Ottilie. Of these Albert became an actor and singer of considerable
importance and finally stage manager in Berlin. He married Elise
Gollmann, a singer with a remarkably extensive voice, who is said
to have sung "Tancredi" and "The Queen of the Night" equally well.
She bore him a daughter, Johanna, who became one of the most eminent
sopranos of her time, and was the original Elizabeth in "Tannhäuser"
at the age of seventeen. Wagner's sister Johanna Rosalie was an
actress and Clara was a singer.
When the epidemic had carried off the police clerk, the widow was
in straitened circumstances. Her oldest son was only fourteen years
old and not competent to contribute to the support of the large
family. The governmental pension was small and she had no fortune of
her own. At this trying period Ludwig Geyer, an old friend of her
husband, asked her to be his wife, and although only nine months had
elapsed since Friedrich Wagner's death, she, like a sensible woman,
accepted the offer. Geyer was a man of talent and well fitted to be
the parental guide of the young Richard. He was an actor, a singer,
an author, and a portrait painter. As a singer he once appeared
in "Joseph in Egypt," when that opera was produced by Weber on his
assumption of the conductor's bâton at the Dresden opera. His gift
for portrait painting is said almost to have reached genius. He was
the writer of several comedies, and one of his plays, "The Slaughter
of the Innocents," is still well known in Germany. To celebrate the
sixtieth birthday of Richard Wagner his family at Bayreuth surprised
him with a performance of this play, and he was much touched by it,
for he always cherished a deep affection for his stepfather.
Owing to the employment of Geyer in a Dresden theatre, the whole
family removed to that city. Here the education of the future
composer began in earnest. The home influences were the example of
Geyer and the sweet, gentle affection of the mother, to whom her
children were the first of all considerations. The outside influence
was found in the Dresden Kreuzschule, where the boy was entered
under the name of Richard Geyer. This schooling, however, was not
begun till after the death of the stepfather. In the beginning Geyer
thought that Richard would make a good painter, but, the composer
tells us in his autobiographic sketch, "I showed a very poor talent
for drawing." Geyer died on September 30, 1821, still cherishing
the belief that there was some sort of promise in the boy. "Shortly
before his death," says the brief autobiography, "I had learnt to
play 'Ueb' immer Treu und Redlichkeit' and the then newly published
'Jungfernkranz' upon the pianoforte; the day before his death I was
bid to play him both these pieces in the adjoining room; I heard him
then with feeble voice say to my mother: 'Has he perchance a talent
for music?' On the early morrow, as he lay dead, my mother came into
the children's sleeping room and said to each of us some loving word.
To me she said: 'He hoped to make _something_ of thee.' I remember,
too, that for a long time I imagined that something indeed would come
of me."
Wagner was eight years old when his stepfather died, and in order
that the mother's cares might be lightened, he was sent for a year
to live with a brother of Geyer at Eisleben, where he attended a
private school. It was in December, 1822, that he began to go to the
Kreuzschule in Dresden. If ever there was a childhood in which the
future man was foreshadowed it was that of Wagner. His biographers
have with one accord set down the statement that the boy showed no
promise in his early years. Look at them and see for yourself. At the
Kreuzschule he conceived a profound love for the classicism of Homer,
and to the delight of his teacher, Herr Silig, translated the first
twelve books of the Odyssey out of school hours. He revelled in the
fascinations of mythology, and his fancy was so stimulated that when
commemorative verses on the death of one of the boys were asked for,
Wagner's, having been pruned of some extravagances, were crowned with
the halo of type.
Thereupon this child of eleven resolved to become a poet. He
projected vast tragedies on the plan of Apel's "Polyeidos" and "Die
Aetolier." He plunged into the deeps of Shakespeare and translated
a speech of Romeo into metrical German. Finally he began a grand
tragedy, which proved to be compounded of elements from "Hamlet" and
"King Lear." He laboured on this for two years. "The plan," he says,
"was gigantic in the extreme; two-and-forty human beings died in the
course of this piece, and I saw myself compelled in its working out
to call the greater number back as ghosts, since otherwise I should
have been short of characters for my last acts."
Huge poetic projects already throbbing in the young brain, music,
too, seized him for her own. He would not stay away from the piano,
and so the tutor who was guiding him through the mazes of Cornelius
Nepos engaged to teach him the technic of the instrument. But the
wayward Wagner would not practice. The moment that the tutor's back
was turned he began to strum the music of "Der Freischütz" by ear,
and he learned to perform the overture with "fearful fingering."
The teacher overheard him and said that nothing would come of his
piano studies. And so it proved, for Wagner never learned to play
the piano. Yet was there nothing in all this to show the bent of
the young mind? Was it not a childhood meet for him who was one day
to project tragedies before undreamed of on the lyric stage, and to
cut loose from all the traditions of operatic music? And was it not
a good omen when at last there fell across his childhood the shadow
of his artistic progenitor, Weber? "When Weber passed our house on
his way to the theatre," writes Wagner, "I used to watch him with
something akin to religious awe!" Indeed, Weber used to enter the
house to talk to the sweet Frau Geyer, who was well liked among
artists, and so perhaps the little Richard looked into the luminous
depths of the eyes of the composer of "Der Freischütz."
Weber became the idol of his boyhood, and no doubt the worship of
this real genius had some influence on the bent of Wagner's musical
thought. It is narrated of him that, when he was not permitted to
go to the theatre to hear "Der Freischütz," he used to stand in the
corner of a room at home and count the minutes, specifying just what
was going on at each particular instant and finally weeping, so that
his mother would yield and send him happy off to the performance.
However, in 1827 the family returned to Leipsic and that was the
end of young Richard's close observation of Weber. A still more
serious influence now entered into his life, for at the concerts
of the Leipsic Gewandhaus he first heard the works of Beethoven.
The overture to "Egmont" fired him with a desire to preface his own
drama with such a piece of music. So he borrowed a copy of Logier's
treatise on harmony and counterpoint and tried to learn its contents
in a week. This was the crucial test of his genius. If he had not
been born to be a composer, the difficulties which he encountered in
his solitary struggle with the science of music would have turned
him aside from the study forever. But it was not so. He says in his
autobiography: "Its difficulties both provoked and fascinated me;
I resolved to become a musician." And thus we find Wagner, whose
childhood has been pronounced insignificant, at the age of fifteen
already a dramatist and eager to be a composer. To be sure, he was
not a prodigy, but the future of the man was marked out plainly by
the child; and we shall see that from this time he moved steadily
toward the goal of his ambition.
The progress was not accomplished without a struggle. As he himself
tells us in his autobiography, his family now unearthed his great
tragedy, and he was severely admonished that in the future it would
be well for him to give less attention to Melpomene and more to his
text-books. But he was not to be turned aside from his purpose.
"Under such circumstances," he says, "I breathed no word of my secret
discovery of a calling for music; but nevertheless I composed,
in silence, a sonata, a quartet, and an aria. When I felt myself
sufficiently matured in my private musical studies, I ventured forth
at last with their announcement. Naturally, I now had many a hard
battle to wage, for my relatives could only consider my penchant
for music as a fleeting passion--all the more as it was unsupported
by any proofs of preliminary study, and especially by any already
won dexterity in handling a musical instrument." We laugh, perhaps,
at this awkward boy in his lumbering struggles, but there was
something large in it all. He aimed at the top, and from the outset,
pathetically enough, as it afterward proved, tried to hitch his
"waggon to a star."
The family so far humoured his new ambition as to engage a music
teacher for him, Gottlieb Müller, afterward organist at Altenburg.
But a sorry time this honest man had with his eccentric young pupil.
The boy was at this time head over ears in the romanticism of Ernst
Theodor Hoffmann, then recently dead and still in the height of his
fame in Germany. The astounding fecundity of this writer's invention
of marvellous incidents inflamed the boy's mind, and threw him into
a state of continual nervous excitement. He says himself that he
had day-dreams in which the keynote, third and dominant, seemed to
take form and to reveal to him their mighty meanings. But he would
not study systematically, and his family apparently had ground for
believing that music would soon be abandoned for some other fancy.
Instead of treading patiently the rocky path of counterpoint, the
impatient boy endeavoured at one leap to reach the top of the musical
mountain, and wrote overtures for orchestra. One of them was actually
performed in a theatre in Leipsic under the direction of Heinrich
Dorn. It was, as Wagner confessed, the culminating point of his
folly. The parts of the string instruments in score were written in
red ink, those of the wood in green, and those of the brass in black.
"Beethoven's Ninth Symphony," he says, "was a mere Pleyel sonata by
the side of this marvellously concocted overture." At every fourth
measure the tympani player had a note to be played forte, and when
the audience had recovered from its astonishment at this wonderful
effect, it burst into laughter.
But all these strivings were not in vain. As Adolphe Jullien notes
in his "Richard Wagner," the influence of the Hoffmann stories was
not lost; "for the 'Brothers of Serapion' contained an account of the
poetical tourney at Wartburg, and some germs of 'The Meistersinger'
are found in another story by Hoffmann, 'Master Martin, the Cooper of
Nuremberg.'" Dorn, the conductor, became interested in young Wagner,
and afterwards proved to be a valuable friend. The boy modestly and
sincerely thanked him for producing the overture, and Dorn replied
that he had at once perceived the boy's talent and that furthermore
the orchestration had not needed extensive revision. Wagner now
seemed to feel his own need of some sort of regular study, for he
matriculated at the University of Leipsic, chiefly in order that he
might attend the lectures on æsthetics and philosophy. Here again
his want of application made itself apparent, and he entered into
the dissipations of student life with avidity. But he soon wearied
of them and once more settled down to the study of music, this time
under Theodor Weinlig, who sat in the honoured seat of Bach as the
cantor of the Thomas School.
In less than half a year Weinlig had taught the boy to solve the
hardest problems of counterpoint, and said to him, "What you have
made your own by this dry study, we call self-dependence." At this
time, too, Wagner became acquainted with the music of Mozart and
its influence upon his mind was very healthful. He laboured to rid
himself of bombast and to attain a nobler simplicity. He wrote a
piano sonata in which he strove for a "natural, unforced style in
composition." This sonata was published by Breitkopf and Härtel, and
was, so far as the records show, Wagner's real Opus 1. It shows no
trace of inspiration, and can rank only as a conservatory exercise.
It was followed by a polonaise in D for four hands, Opus 2, and this
was also printed by Breitkopf and Härtel. It is nothing more than
school work, like its predecessor. The third work was a fantasia in
F sharp minor for piano. The restraining power of the teacher is
less apparent in this composition, which remains unpublished. In
his article on Wagner in Grove's "Dictionary of Music," Mr. Edward
Dannreuther quotes at some length from a personal conversation
with the composer, who described Weinlig's method of teaching. It
was a plain and practical method, in which example and precept
were judiciously combined. Wagner said to Mr. Dannreuther, "The
true lesson consisted in his patient and careful inspection of
what had been written." It was fortunate for Wagner that he had
such a mentor, and that he was in the beginning of his career as
a composer compelled to learn and practice the old forms in which
the fundamental laws of music found their perfect exemplification.
His readiness to depart from the straight and narrow path would
have led him into insuperable difficulties, and perhaps to hopeless
discouragement, had he not possessed so kind and trustworthy a guide.
Young Wagner now launched upon musical activities of no small
magnitude for one so youthful. In the year 1830 he made a pianoforte
transcription of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and in a letter dated
Oct. 6 he offered it to the Messrs. Schott, of Mayence. The offer
was not accepted. He also wrote to the Peters Bureau de Musique,
offering to make piano arrangements at less than the usual rates.
In 1831 he composed two overtures, one a "Concert Ouvertüre mit
Fuge" in C, and the other in D minor. This one is dated Sept. 26,
with emendations dated Nov. 4. It was performed at one of the
Gewandhaus concerts on Dec. 25, 1831. The _Allgemeine Musikalische
Zeitung_ said of it: "Much pleasure was given us by a new overture
by a composer still very young, Herr Richard Wagner. The piece was
thoroughly appreciated, and, indeed, the young man promises much: the
composition not only sounds well, but it has ideas and it is written
with care and skill, with an evident striving after the noblest."[1]
[Footnote 1: Quoted from "Wagner and his Works," by Henry T. Finck. 2
vols., New York, 1893.]
In 1832, when he was 19 years old, he wrote a symphony in C major.[2]
The biographers of Wagner have agreed to disagree about this
symphony, even the usually accurate Mr. Finck calling it a work in C
minor. It is, however, plainly enough in C major. The history of this
composition was peculiar. When he had finished it Wagner put it in
his trunk and started for Vienna, "for no other purpose than to get a
glimpse of this famed musical centre. What I heard and saw there was
not to my edification; wherever I went I heard 'Zampa' or Strauss's
potpourris on 'Zampa'--two things that were an abomination to me,
especially at that time." On the homeward journey he tarried a while
in Prague, where he made the acquaintance of Dionys Weber, director
of the Conservatory. This gentleman's pupils rehearsed the symphony.
The score was next submitted to the directors of the Gewandhaus
concerts at Leipsic.
[Footnote 2: See Appendix _A_.]
The managing director was Rochlitz, editor of the _Allgemeine
Musikalische Zeitung_, an authority on music, and he invited Wagner
to call on him. "When I presented myself, the stately old gentleman
raised his spectacles, saying, 'You are a young man indeed! I
expected an older and more experienced composer.'" The symphony was
tried, and on Jan. 10, 1833, it was produced at a Gewandhaus concert.
In the season of 1834-5 Wagner, who was in Leipsic, forced his score
on the attention of Mendelssohn, then the conductor of the Gewandhaus
concerts, in the hope of getting another performance. Mendelssohn put
the manuscript away, and, though he often saw Wagner, never spoke
of the work. Wagner was too modest to ask him about it, and so the
score was lost. In 1872 the orchestral parts were found in an old
trunk left by Wagner in Dresden in the course of the revolutionary
disturbances of 1849.
With the composition of this symphony, Wagner's apprenticeship in
instrumental music may be said to have ended. His next venture was
across that magic border which separates the orchestra from the
stage. His period of juvenility was not quite ended, but he may be
said to have finished the preparatory stage of his career and to be
about to enter on the first years of serious struggle toward his real
goal. His boyhood was fairly indicative of his nature. Restless,
dissatisfied, eager to reach the topmost heights, and not suited with
the means at hand, we yet find him experimenting with the methods of
those who preceded him, analysing and assimilating the musical past,
and learning to conquer musical forms. In the juvenile symphony he
showed that he had honestly solved the problems of construction, that
he had mastered the formal materials of his art. The wise Schumann
said, "Mastery of form leads talent to ever increasing freedom."
At nineteen years of age, with the methods of Beethoven and Mozart
firmly fixed in his mind, the young Wagner had produced a symphonic
composition, which, while imitative in both themes and treatment,
showed astonishing musical vigour and an enterprising spirit. The boy
was on the verge of manhood, artistically as well as physically.
CHAPTER II
THE FIRST OPERAS
"You are a young man indeed!"--ROCHLITZ TO WAGNER
In the year 1832, while he was in Prague, Wagner began his career
as a composer of operas, and in his first attempt, as in all later
ones, wrote his own libretto. His friend Heinrich Laube[3] had
offered him a libretto on the subject of Kosciuszko, but he refused
it, saying that he was engaged wholly on instrumental music. But his
genius was for the stage, and his boyhood had been surrounded by the
immediate influences of the theatre. It is, therefore, not surprising
to find him at work on an opera. He says in his autobiography: "In
that city [Prague] I also composed an opera book of tragic contents,
'Die Hochzeit.' I know not whence I had come by the mediæval subject
matter:--a frantic lover climbs to the window of the sleeping-chamber
of his friend's bride, wherein she is awaiting the advent of the
bridegroom; the bride struggles with the madman and hurls him into
the courtyard below, where his mangled body gives up the ghost.
During the funeral ceremony the bride, uttering one cry, sinks
lifeless on the corpse. Returning to Leipsic, I set to work at once
on the composition of this opera's first number, which contained a
grand sextet that much pleased Weinlig. The text-book found no favour
with my sister; I destroyed its every trace."
[Footnote 3: Laube wrote in the _Journal du Monde Elégant_, of
Leipsic, after the private performance of the symphony, the first
public criticism of Wagner's work. It was favourable, and helped the
young composer to gain a public performance.]
We are indebted to the good Rosalie for her objections to this stupid
and unpoetic book. Wagner's memory in regard to this juvenile work
was not perfect. He presented an autograph of the numbers composed
to the Würzburg Musikverein. They are an introduction, a chorus,
and a septet, not a sextet as he said. This autograph copy is still
extant. Franz Muncker, in his "Life of Wagner," says that the young
librettist found his subject in Immermann's "Cardenio und Celinde"
(1826), and that he arranged the conclusion of his story after
that of the "Bride of Messina." The whole matter, however, may be
dismissed as unimportant.
Wagner now went to Würzburg, and at the age of twenty sought
employment as a musician through the influence of his brother Albert,
then engaged in the Würzburg Theatre as actor, singer, and stage
manager. Albert succeeded in securing for him a position as chorus
master at ten florins a month. As an evidence of his gratitude he
composed for Albert an aria of 142 measures to substitute for a
shorter one in Marschner's "Der Vampyr." A phototype reproduction of
this aria may be found in Wilhelm Tappert's "R. Wagner; Sein Leben
und Seine Werke." It has no especial interest except for collectors
of Wagneriana.
In the year 1833 the young composer set to work on another opera.
This was entitled "Die Feen," and although it was completed, its fate
was not unlike that of its predecessor. It came to nothing in the
composer's life, and though finished on Dec. 7, 1833, received its
first performance in Munich on Jan. 29, 1888. Perhaps the best short
account of this work that can be given is that of Wagner himself in
his "Communication to my Friends."[4] He says:
"On the model of one of Gozzi's fairy tales ['La donna serpente']
I wrote for myself an opera text in verse, 'Die Feen' [The
Fairies]; the then predominant romantic opera of Weber, and also
of Marschner--who about this time made his first appearance on the
scene, and that at my place of sojourn, Leipsic--determined me to
follow in their footsteps. What I turned out for myself was nothing
more than barely what I wanted, an opera text; this I set to music
according to the impressions made upon me by Weber, Beethoven, and
Marschner. However, what took my fancy in the tale of Gozzi was not
merely its adaptability for an opera text, but the fascination of
the 'stuff' itself. A fairy, who renounces immortality for the sake
of a human lover, can only become a mortal through the fulfilment of
certain hard conditions, the non-compliance wherewith on the part
of her earthly swain threatens her with the direst penalties; her
lover fails in the test, which consists in this, that however evil
and repulsive she may appear to him (in an obligatory metamorphosis)
he shall not reject her in his unbelief. In Gozzi's tale the fairy
is now changed into a snake; the remorseful lover frees her from
the spell by kissing the snake: thus he wins her for his wife. I
altered this dénouement by changing the fairy into a stone and then
releasing her from the spell by her lover's passionate song; while
the lover--instead of being allowed to carry the bride off to his own
country--is himself admitted by the Fairy King to the immortal bliss
of Fairyland, together with his fairy wife."
[Footnote 4: Published in the summer of 1851. It will be found in
Vol. I. of W. Ashton Ellis's translation of Wagner's Prose Works.
It is Wagner's most important paper in regard to his own artistic
development.]
This opera was offered to the director of the theatre at Leipsic,
whither Wagner returned early in 1834, and it is evident that a
production was promised, for Laube announced in his journal that
immediately after "Le Bal Masqué" by Auber there would be brought
forward the first opera of a young composer named Richard Wagner.
But when Auber's work had completed its run, the director announced
Bellini's "I Capuletti ed i Montecchi," and that was the end of
"Die Feen" till 1888. Some of the commentators have found the germs
of important features of Wagner's later works in this opera, but
there is really no evidence that any direct connection exists. It is
true that the story is mythical, but Wagner departed from the myth
in his next opera. It is, perhaps, more significant that already
the young writer showed some skill in the management of pictorial
stage effects. The music was wholly imitative of Beethoven, Weber,
and Marschner, with some minor borrowings from Mozart. Here and
there can be found musical ideas which recur in later works and
which are characteristic of Wagner. The score was constructed on
the Italian opera model and contains the regular series of arias,
scenas, cavatinas, etc. It has even a "mad scene." Furthermore it is
a strikingly melodious score, and very light in touch. But the work
has now only a historical interest, and its occasional performances
in Munich, about the time that the foreign pilgrims to Bayreuth are
in the land, are purely speculative enterprises.
Now came another change in the inner life of this budding genius. In
the performance of Bellini's opera, he heard for the first time the
great artist Wilhelmina Schroeder-Devrient, and the impression which
she made upon him was lasting. As late as 1872 he said, "Whenever
I conceived a character, I saw her." The imposing effect which her
dramatic sincerity and her consummate command of style enabled
her to make with the shallow music of Bellini caused Wagner to
become doubtful as to the right method of attaining success. He was
powerfully impressed with the importance of the dramatic element in
operatic performance. The Leipsic Theatre next produced Auber's "La
Muette de Portici," and again Wagner was astonished. Here he saw an
opera in which rapid action, fiery impulse, and the manifestations of
a revolutionary spirit achieved as strong an effect upon an audience
as had the potent acting and singing of Schroeder-Devrient.
The light, spontaneous melody of Bellini seemed to him to express
more directly the spirit of young life than the heavy music of the
Germans; the plan of Auber's work impressed him as well fitted for
combination with the style and character of the Italian music. A
union of the two, he thought, would lead toward a true embodiment
of the spirit of the time, and so reach swiftly the public heart.
The joy of life now became his battle cry. He steeped his soul in
the physical literature of the time. He read with avidity the works
of Wilhelm Heinse, "the apostle of the highest artistic and lowest
sensual pleasures, amongst all the authors of the last century the
one endowed with the warmest enthusiasm and finest comprehension
for music."[5] "I was then twenty-one years of age," wrote Wagner,
"inclined to take life and the world on their pleasant side.
'Ardinghello' (Heinse) and 'Das junge Europa' (Laube) tingled through
every limb, while Germany appeared in my eyes a very tiny portion of
the earth." Ludwig Börne, Carl Gutzgow, Gustav König, and last of
all, Heinrich Heine, became influences in his daily life and thought.
The utmost freedom in politics, morals, and literature, the most
passionate physical enjoyment of the fleeting moment, were taught by
these authors, to whom the reactionary movement in France against all
moral and artistic law seemed most attractive. Mysticism ceased to
charm Wagner, and he turned to revolutionary freedom in thought as
the highest possible good.
[Footnote 5: "Richard Wagner, a Sketch of his Life and Works," by
Franz Muncker. Bamberg, 1891.]
With these ideas seething in his mind in the summer of 1834, while
spending his holiday at Teplitz, he sketched the plot of his next
opera, "Das Liebesverbot [Prohibition of Love] or the Novice of
Palermo." In the fall he was obliged to accept a position as
conductor in a small operatic theatre in Magdeburg. There he found
in the ease with which public success was attained by trivial works
further encouragement for the revolt in his soul. He discharged his
duties as conductor with the greatest pleasure, and took much trouble
to give an impressive performance of Auber's "Lestocq." He had his
"Feen" overture played, and also an overture of his own to Apel's
drama, "Christopher Columbus." He made a New Year's piece out of the
andante of his symphony and some songs taken from a musical farce.
But meanwhile he worked assiduously at the score of his new opera,
with Auber as his model and Schroeder-Devrient as his hope.
The foundation of the story was taken from Shakespeare's "Measure
for Measure," but Wagner altered the plot so as to introduce the
revolutionary element which at that time played so conspicuous a
part in his fancies. In a "Communication to My Friends" Wagner
many years afterward thus described his opera: "It was Isabella
that inspired me; she who leaves her novitiate in the cloister to
plead with a hard-hearted Stateholder for mercy for her brother,
who in pursuance of a draconic edict has been condemned to death
for entering on a forbidden, yet Nature-hallowed, love-bond with
a maiden. Isabella's chaste soul urges on the stony judge such
cogent reasons for pardoning the offence, her agitation helps her
to paint these reasons in such entrancing warmth of colour that
the stern protector of morals is himself seized with passionate
love for the superb woman. This sudden, flaming passion proclaims
itself by his promising the pardon of the brother as the price of
the lovely sister's favours. Aghast at this proposal, Isabella takes
refuge in artifice to unmask the hypocrite and save her brother. The
Stateholder, whom she has vouchsafed a fictitious indulgence, still
thinks to withhold the stipulated pardon so as not to sacrifice his
stern judicial conscience to a passing lapse from virtue. Shakespeare
disentangles the resulting situation by means of the public return
of the Duke, who had hitherto observed events from under a disguise;
his decision is an earnest one, and grounded on the judge's maxim,
'measure for measure.' I, on the other hand, unloosed the knot
without the Prince's aid by means of a revolution. The scene of
action I transferred to the capital of Sicily, in order to bring in
the Southern heat of blood to help me with my scheme; I also made the
Stateholder, a Puritanical German, forbid a projected carnival; while
a madcap youngster, in love with Isabella, incites the populace to
mask and keep their weapons ready: 'Who will not dance at our behest,
your steel shall pierce him through the breast!' The Stateholder,
himself induced by Isabella to come disguised to their rendezvous,
is discovered, unmasked, and hooted; the brother in the nick of time
is freed by force from the executioner's hands; Isabella renounces
her novitiate and gives her hand to the young leader of the carnival.
In full procession the maskers go forth to meet their home-returning
Prince, assured that he will at least not govern them so crookedly as
had his deputy."
One has no difficulty in tracing in this arrangement of the story the
ideas that lay uppermost in Wagner's mind at the time. The heavy,
hypocritical governor was a hit at his own countrymen, and the free
life of the Sicilians was his embodiment of the sensuousness which he
had learned from his recent readings to admire. Auber's "Muette de
Portici" no doubt suggested the theatrical value of the revolution,
and as he himself says in his account of the writing and production
of this opera: "Recollections of the 'Sicilian Vespers' may have had
something to do with it; and when I think finally that the gentle
Sicilian Bellini may also be counted among the factors of this
composition, I positively have to laugh at the amazing quid-pro-quo
into which these extraordinary conceptions shaped themselves."[6]
[Footnote 6: Wagner wrote a long account of the conception,
composition, and production of this juvenile work. It may be found
in his collected prose writings, translated by W. Ashton Ellis. The
translation from which these words are taken is in "Art, Life, and
Theories of Richard Wagner," by E.L. Burlingame. In speaking of the
"Sicilian Vespers," Wagner refers to history, not to Verdi's opera,
which was not produced till 1855.]
The score of the opera was finished in the winter of 1835-36. The
composer, who was entitled to a benefit as conductor toward the
close of the season, naturally hoped to bring forward his work on
that occasion. Unfortunately the manager was in arrears of salary to
many of the company, and some of the principal artists gave notice
of their intended departure before the end of March. Wagner, who was
liked by all of them, succeeded in persuading them to stay a few
days longer and to endeavour hastily to prepare his opera. Ten days
were available for rehearsals. By dint of shouting, gesticulating,
and singing with the singers, Wagner persuaded himself and them into
thinking that the opera was in shape for production. There was a good
advance sale of seats, but the manager stepped in and claimed the
first performance of the work for himself, and so Wagner was perforce
content to wait for the second for his benefit.
The first performance on March 29, 1836, was, according to Wagner's
own account of it, absolutely incomprehensible. There were no
libretti, and the singers were so uncertain of both text and music
that no one could learn the story of the work from them. This was
probably well for Wagner in one way, for the censor had passed the
book on Wagner's assurance that the subject was from Shakespeare, and
as the audience did not know what it was all about, no unfavourable
comment was made on the licentious story. At the second performance,
owing to the apparent incomprehensibility of the work when first
heard, there were three persons in the auditorium, two of whom were
the composer's landlord and landlady. Before the curtain went up,
the husband of the prima donna, jealous of the tenor, set upon that
singer and beat him so that he had to be carried from the theatre.
The prima donna tried to interfere and she was also assaulted by her
husband. A general fight seemed imminent, and the manager went before
the curtain to tell the audience of three that "owing to various
adverse circumstances which had arisen the opera could not be given."
Wagner subsequently offered this opera to managers in Leipsic and
Berlin, but it was not accepted. Later in Paris he contemplated a
performance at the Théâtre de la Renaissance, and a translation of
the text was begun. But, as Wagner tells us, "Everything promised
well, when the Théâtre de la Renaissance became bankrupt! All
trouble, all hopes had therefore been in vain. I now gave up my
'Liebesverbot' entirely; I felt that I could not respect myself any
longer as its composer."
Mr. Finck recounts an interesting conversation he had with Heinrich
Vogl, the eminent Wagnerian tenor, in 1891. Vogl said that after
the success of "Die Feen" at Munich it was thought that "Das
Liebesverbot" might also be given, and a rehearsal was held. The
"ludicrous and undisguised imitation of Donizetti and other popular
composers of that time" caused general laughter,[7] but it was really
the licentious character of the libretto that brought about an
abandonment of the plan to perform the work. But the composer had not
yet found himself, and this was one of his attempts to reach success
as others had reached it, without any realisation of the vital fact
that he was not artistically constituted as they were.
[Footnote 7: Nevertheless there are passages which suggest the future
Wagner. Note this curious resemblance between a part of the chorus of
nuns in "Das Liebesverbot" and the so-called "feast of grace" theme
in "Tannhäuser."
[Music: LIEBESVERBOT.
Salve regina coeli! Salve!]
[Music: TANNHÄUSER.]]
The failure of the Magdeburg Theatre once more threw Wagner on his
own resources. He had borrowed money recklessly, hoping to pay it
from the proceeds of the performance of his opera. Poor Wagner! All
his life he was ahead of his income, and no amount of experience
could teach him to manage his finances. He went to Berlin to offer
the "Liebesverbot" to the opera, but without success, and then he
heard that there was an opening as musical director at the Königsberg
Theatre. To that city, therefore, he went in the hope of securing
the post. His Magdeburg friends, Frau Pollert, the prima donna, and
Wilhelmina Planer, the actress, had found employment there, and the
young composer was drawn after the second of these women by ties
soon to become closer. He wrote to his friend Dorn to ask his aid,
but it seems that the good Heinrich was unable to do anything for
him. Nevertheless the Königsberg post was given to him and he began
his duties in January, 1837, after nine months of idleness. Before
taking this position Wagner had done two things which must now be
recorded. He had written his first prose essay, and he had married.
The essay contained some unwise comments on the "Euryanthe" of Weber,
whom Wagner as a boy had venerated. He subsequently experienced a
second change of heart in regard to this composer. He had a change of
heart, too, in regard to his wife, also partly on artistic grounds.
Glasenapp says of this hasty and ill-fated union:
"The link was now forged that bound his future to a helpmate with
whom he had the smallest possible community of inner feeling. Beyond
doubt, he brought her that genuine affection which survived the
hardest trials it ever was put to; beyond doubt, the pretty, young,
and popular actress meant well by the ardent young conductor when she
joined her hand with his at a time of so little outward prospect;
beyond doubt she expected much from his abilities.... Any profounder
sense of the enormous artistic significance of her husband never
dawned upon her, either in this cloudy period or at a later date; and
though she made him loving sacrifices, she neither had the blissful
satisfaction of knowing to whom they were offered, nor of affording
the struggling artist a sympathetic ear in which to pour his deeper
woes. Wagner never forgot how she bore the trials of the next few
changeful years without a murmur; nevertheless, this precipitate
marriage of two natures so immiscible dragged after it an almost
endless chain of sorrows and internal conflicts."
CHAPTER III
KÖNIGSBERG AND RIGA
"To extricate myself from the petty commerce of the German
stage."--WAGNER
Minna Planer, as she was called, was the daughter of a spindle-maker,
and according to Praeger,[8] who knew her well, went on the stage
not because she was endowed with histrionic talent, but because it
was necessary for her to contribute to the support of her father's
family. Wagner had become engaged to her while at Magdeburg, and he
married her on Nov. 24, 1836, at Königsberg. He was twenty-three
years old and the wisdom of his marriage was what might have been
expected of a boy. From all the testimony it appears that the first
wife of Richard Wagner was a good, gentle, loving woman, devoted
to him in a mild, unimpassioned manner, and utterly incapable of
understanding him. At the outset of their married life, she was
almost as improvident as he, and the burden of debt which he had
accumulated at Magdeburg grew larger at Königsberg. Later at Riga
these two poor children lived in a house in the outskirts of a town
and had to take a cab whenever they went to the theatre!
[Footnote 8: "Wagner as I Knew Him," by Ferdinand Praeger, New York,
1892.]
In later years Minna learned the meaning of economy, and she
struggled bravely to make both ends meet, when there was nothing
but ends. But never did she perceive the genius of her husband, and
for that reason she was always impatient with his dreams of great
achievements, when money could have been earned by prosaic labour
at the expense of hazy aspirations. A woman of tender eye and sweet
speech, she commanded the sympathy of Wagner's friends, and it was
indeed a fatal misfortune for this gentle dove that she was mismated
with an eagle. Certainly she suffered much and bore with patience,
not only the privations of domestic life in straitened circumstances,
but also the waywardness and eccentricities of a mind beyond her
comprehension. Praeger says:
"As years rolled by and the genius of Wagner assumed more definite
shape and grew in strength, she was less able to comprehend the
might of his intellect. To have written the 'Novice of Palermo'
at twenty-three and to have been received so cordially was to her
unambitious heart the zenith of success. More than that she could
not understand, nor did she ever realise the extent of the wondrous
gifts of her husband. After twenty years of wedded life it was much
the same. We were sitting at lunch in the trimly kept Swiss châlet at
Zurich in the summer of 1856, waiting for the composer of the then
completed 'Rienzi,' 'Dutchman,' 'Tannhäuser' and 'Lohengrin' to come
down from his scoring of the 'Nibelungen,' when in full innocence she
asked me, 'Now, honestly, is Richard such a great genius?' On another
occasion, when he was bitterly animadverting on his treatment by the
public, she said, 'Well, Richard, why don't you write something for
the gallery?'"
That there was another side to the story is certain. From the
beginning, though tender and considerate of his wife when at her
side, and fully awake to her excellencies, Wagner was a victim of
those irregularities of temperament which seem inseparable from
genius, especially musical genius. He was inconstant as the wind,
a rover, a faithless husband. His misdoings amounted to more than
peccadilloes. He was guilty of many liaisons and the Sybaritic
character of his self-indulgences increased as the years went by.
It is not possible to give the details of these secrets of Wagner's
life; but it must suffice to say that while Minna was unsuited to
him through her inability to understand him, she was more sinned
against than sinning. She was a faithful and devoted wife, patient
in adversity and modest in prosperity. It is impossible to say the
same of him as a husband. For twenty-five years they struggled along
together, and the history of their existence makes one sympathise
deeply with this sweet little woman. Enduring the most bitter
privations, she saw a husband, who could have earned a good living
by writing for the popular taste, deliberately refusing to do so
and following the promptings of what must have seemed to her the
wildest dreams. This same husband was also luxurious in habit, and
was always deeply in debt. The wolf was continually at the Wagner
door, even when the master had what to a less fastidious person would
have seemed abundance. Wagner, on the other hand, must have hungered
and thirsted for a companion who would understand his ideals and his
purposes, and be willing to wait with him for the triumph that was
sure to come. That these two ill-mated persons would separate was
almost inevitable. It may be briefly recorded at this point that they
did separate in August, 1861. Minna went to live in Dresden, where
she died on Jan. 25, 1866.
The grip of poverty in Königsberg seems to have strangled the voice
of Wagner's muse. He says in the Autobiography: "The year which
I spent in Königsberg was completely lost to my art by reason of
the pressure of petty cares. I wrote one solitary overture: 'Rule
Britannia.'" He wrote also about this time an overture entitled
"Polonia." The former is lost, but the Wagner family has the
manuscript of the latter. The state of the composer's mind, and the
actions to which it led are now best told in the "Communication to My
Friends":
"One strong desire then arose in me, and developed into an
all-consuming passion: to force my way out from the paltry
squalor of my situation. This desire, however, was busied
only in the second line with actual life; its front rank
made towards a brilliant course as artist. To extricate
myself from the petty commerce of the German stage, and
straightway try my luck in Paris: this, in a word, was the
goal I set before me. A romance by H. König, 'Die Hohe
Braut,' had fallen into my hands; everything which I read
had only an interest for me when viewed in the light of
its adaptability for an operatic subject: in my mood of
that time, the reading of this novel attracted me the more,
as it soon conjured up in my eyes the vision of a grand
opera in five acts for Paris. I drafted a complete sketch
and sent it direct to Scribe in Paris with the prayer that
he would work it up for the Grand Opéra there and get me
appointed for its composition. Naturally this project ended
in smoke."
The history of Wagner's first attempt to reach the goal of the opera
composer of his day, the stage of the Grand Opéra in Paris, is worthy
of particular note. He despatched the manuscript and a letter
for Scribe to his brother-in-law, Friedrich Brockhaus, to send to
Paris. Hearing nothing, he wrote again six months later, and sent
to Scribe a copy of the score of "Das Liebesverbot" as a specimen
of his work. Scribe answered this letter courteously and expressed
interest in Wagner and his music. The composer again sent him a copy
of the scenario of "Die Hohe Braut," but put it into the post without
any stamps and so never heard of it again, nor received an answer
from Scribe. These facts were recorded in an old note book in which
Wagner made first draughts of his letters. The letter giving this
information was addressed to one Lewald, a Leipsic journalist who had
lived in Paris, and, after reciting the facts, Wagner asked him to
find out whether Scribe had received the second letter and whether
he was still favourably inclined. If so, Wagner said, he had another
operatic plan in his mind, the book of "Rienzi," which was just
the thing for Paris. This letter was published in the _Frankfurter
Zeitung_, and will be found quoted in Mr. Finck's "Wagner." Nothing
came of this correspondence, and Wagner was fated not to enter
Paris till some time later, and then to find it a city of continual
disappointment.
In the spring the Königsberg Theatre failed and again Wagner was out
of employment. Like many other theatrical folk, the moment his salary
stopped he was in straits. So once more he called upon Dorn for
help. This critic had written of the "Rule Britannia" overture that
it was a medley of Bach, Beethoven, and Bellini, but he still had
faith in the genius of Wagner. So through his influence Wagner was
appointed director of music in the theatre at Riga, on the Russian
side of the Baltic, under Karl von Holtei as manager. Wagner's wife
and her sister, Theresa Planer, were also engaged for the comedy
performances. Riga was a more prosperous town than either Magdeburg
or Königsberg and at first Wagner, delighted with the higher salary,
set to work with evident pleasure. The material in the company was
good, and the composer was sufficiently interested in the singers
to write several airs for them. He also conducted ten orchestral
concerts, at which his overtures, "Rule Britannia" and "Columbus,"
were performed. He began to write a comic opera entitled "Die
Glückliche Bärenfamilie" ("The Happy Bear Family") for which he found
the material in a story in the "Arabian Nights." "I had only composed
two numbers for this," he says, "when I was disgusted to find that I
was again on the high road to music-making à la Adam. My spirit, my
deeper feelings, were wounded by this discovery, and I laid aside the
work in horror. The daily studying and conducting of Auber's, Adam's,
and Bellini's music contributed its share to a speedy undoing of my
frivolous delight in such an enterprise."
That inexpressible dissatisfaction with the extant state of the
theatre, which finally made Wagner the reformer of the lyric drama,
was already at work. The purely commercial spirit of the play-house
was rapidly becoming intolerably antagonistic to him. He held
himself aloof from the actors. He lived far away from the theatre.
He shut himself up within himself, and he began to cherish dreams
of breaking the sordid bondage of the German stage and reaching out
into a broader and more vigorous artistic atmosphere. He laboured
assiduously at Riga for good performances. The manager begged him not
to overwork the singers, but the singers liked his enthusiasm and
seconded his efforts. At this time, in his unsettled state of mind,
he worshipped Bellini, and exalted the Italian song above all other
forms of operatic music. He had "Norma" performed for his benefit on
Dec. 11, 1837. He wrote articles praising Bellini, and his enemies
delighted to quote these forty years later as evidence of Wagner's
inconsistency. This undeveloped youth of twenty-four was groping for
the path toward which his genius impelled him. That he could not find
it at once was not remarkable. He needed the discipline of a larger
experience and a closer contact with the great world. As yet he had
been but playing in the nursery. His first pointed lessons were about
to be received.
In the spring of 1839 his contract with Holtei expired. He could
not find employment. He even wrote to the director of the theatre
offering to return as assistant director or copyist, in fact, to do
anything except, as he ironically said, black boots or carry water.
Nothing came of all this, and debts began to press heavily on this
most improvident of men. He had a grand opera partly written. It was
made on the Meyerbeerian last, and that was fashionable in Paris.
Thither he determined to go. But when he endeavoured to leave Riga,
he could not get a passport because of his debts. So with his wife
and his dog, he stole away like a thief in the night. Minna went
across the border into Germany disguised as the wife of a lumberman.
Wagner himself was aided by a Königsberg friend, Abraham Möller, who
hid him in an empty sentry box till he could slip past the pickets
on the boundary line. This same Möller went with him to the port of
Pillau, where he, his wife, and his dog embarked on a sailing vessel
for London, thence to descend upon Paris.[9] Paris was to be assailed
with one opera completed and another half done. This second work was
"Rienzi." During the years of struggle at Magdeburg, Königsberg,
and Riga, while searching for material for a grand opera book, he
had read Bulwer's novel, "Rienzi," and the subject seemed to him to
be promising. The grandeur of the plan and the opportunities for
operatic effects fired his mind, and in the summer of 1838 he began
the libretto. At Riga, when he was holding himself aloof from the
surroundings of the theatre, he was at work composing the music, and
in the spring of 1839 the first two acts were finished. He had aimed
to make this an imposing work, too grand in plan for production at a
provincial German theatre. So it was with this uncompleted score that
he put to sea, a sea far vaster than he at the time imagined it to
be. For before leaving Riga he had fallen upon Heine's version of the
legend of the "Flying Dutchman," and this sea voyage was to make the
story vital in his mind and inspire him with the music for the first
work in which the Wagner of the immortal dramas was revealed. He says
in the autobiography:
"This voyage I never shall forget as long as I live; it lasted three
and a half weeks and was rich in mishaps. Thrice did we endure the
most violent of storms, and once the captain found himself compelled
to put into a Norwegian haven. The passage among the crags of Norway
made a wonderful impression on my fancy; the legends of the Flying
Dutchman, as I heard them from the seamen's mouths, were clothed for
me in a distinct and individual colour, borrowed from the adventures
of the ocean through which I was then passing."
[Footnote 9: Mr. Finck, who relates these facts, obtained them
from articles in the _Frankfurter Zeitung_ and from some of Dorn's
writings.]
But at length London was reached, and Wagner, Minna, and the great
Newfoundland dog were set down at a comfortless little hotel in Old
Compton Street, Soho, a dozen doors from Wardour Street, with the
purlieus of Seven Dials on one side of them and Oxford and Regent
Streets within a few minutes' walk.[10] His first experience in the
capital of Great Britain was the loss of his magnificent Newfoundland
dog, to which he was much attached. Fortunately the intelligent beast
found its master. Wagner was not far away from the house in which
Weber had lived when he was in London, and "to that shrine he made
his first pilgrimage." He visited the Naval Hospital at Greenwich and
was duly impressed by the sight of the shipping on the Thames. He
went over the hospital ship _Dreadnaught_, one of Nelson's old fleet,
and he visited Westminster Abbey, where he paid special attention to
the Poets' Corner. Standing before the statue of Shakespeare, he was
carried away into a long reverie on the manner in which this master
had triumphed by throwing aside all the rules of the old classic
writers, and Praeger sees in this one of the germs of Wagner's daring
reforms. The reverie ended when the patient Minna plucked him by
the sleeve and said, "Come, dear Richard, you have been standing
here for twenty minutes like one of these statues and not uttering a
word." And that was about the substance of Wagner's first experience
in London. He says in his autobiography that nothing interested him
so much as the city itself and the Houses of Parliament. He did not
visit a single theatre.
[Footnote 10: Praeger is the only authority for the incidents of
Wagner's first visit to London.]
He now set out for Paris by way of Boulogne, and at the latter
place he tarried four weeks, because the most influential man in
the operatic world of France, Giacomo Meyerbeer, was there enjoying
his summer rest. It was of vital importance to Wagner to make the
acquaintance of this great personage, and he did not think that the
expense of a month's stay was too much to pay for the advantage.
Meyerbeer, who was not averse to playing the dictator, received the
poor German kindly, and after reading the libretto of "Rienzi,"
praised it highly. He was also flattering in his commendation of the
two acts of the music which Wagner had finished. He was dubious as to
the future of this young man, who had nothing on which to live while
he lingered about the gates of the mighty in Paris, but he promised
to do what he could for him. He said that letters of introduction
were well enough in their way, but that persistence was the most
valuable lever to success. With this advice he gave Wagner letters to
Anténor Jolly, director of the Théâtre Renaissance, which produced
musical works as well as plays; to Léon Pillet, director of the Grand
Opéra; to Schlesinger, the publisher, and to Habeneck, the famous
conductor.
Armed with these letters, and with that naïve trust in the future
which deserted him only in his equally naïve periods of utter
despondency, Wagner set out for Paris, where he arrived in September,
1839. Only twenty-six years old, he had already produced two operas,
partly written a third, and conceived the germ of a fourth, which
was to make him famous. His experiences in Paris were to be of the
bitterest kind, but of the most vital importance to his future
career. He remained in the French capital till April 7, 1842, and
in the intervening time disclosed himself as an artist, although as
a man he nearly starved. Out of trials and tribulations are great
spirits moulded. It was necessary for Wagner to despair of pecuniary
success before he found the true path to immortal fame.
CHAPTER IV
"THE END OF A MUSICIAN IN PARIS"
"I, poor artist, swore eternal fidelity to my
fatherland."--WAGNER
On arriving in Paris Wagner took a furnished apartment in the Rue de
la Tonnelerie. This was in an unfrequented quarter, but the house
was said to have been occupied once by Molière. The apartment was
cheap, a matter of much moment to Wagner. The young man at once
started out with his letters from Meyerbeer. They not only secured
him an offer for the immediate performance of one of his operas,
but they also opened many doors to him and insured him a pleasant
welcome. It is quite true, as Jullien[11] notes, that he owed all he
ever accomplished in Paris to Meyerbeer and the men to whom he had
Meyerbeer's letters. In the beginning everything was most promising.
The director of the Renaissance agreed to accept "Das Liebesverbot,"
and Dumersan, a maker of vaudevilles, was set to work translating
it. Schlesinger, the publisher, induced Habeneck, the conductor of
the Conservatoire concerts, to promise to try a new overture, which
Wagner had just completed. This was the work afterward known as
"Eine Faust Ouvertüre." Wagner, delighted with his prospects, moved
to No. 25, Rue du Helder, in the "heart of elegant and artistic
Paris."
[Footnote 11: "Richard Wagner, His Life and Works," by Adolphe
Jullien; translated by Florence Percival Hall. 2 vols. Boston, the
J.B. Millet Co.]
But suddenly the horizon became overclouded. The Conservatory
orchestra did, indeed, try the overture, and Schlesinger inserted in
his paper, the _Gazette Musicale_, a paragraph saying, "An overture
by a young German composer of very remarkable talent, M. Wagner,
has just been rehearsed by the orchestra of the Conservatoire, and
has won unanimous applause. We hope to hear it immediately and we
will render an account of it." As a matter of fact, the Conservatory
orchestra had not been able to make head or tail of the overture,
and the Théâtre de la Renaissance, instead of producing the
"Liebesverbot," suddenly failed and the manager closed its doors.
Quite disheartened by these reverses Wagner laid aside the "Faust"
music, which he had intended to make the first movement of a "Faust"
symphony. In 1855, when he was living at Zurich, he altered this
familiar and admired overture to its present form.
Adolphe Jullien in his life of Wagner says that "If we have only an
overture instead of a complete score of 'Faust,' we are indebted for
this loss to the gold-laced musicians of the Conservatoire in 1840."
Jullien appears to have supposed that Wagner contemplated an opera,
but this is certainly an error. On Jan. 1, 1855, Franz Liszt wrote
to Wagner and told of the completion of his "Faust" symphony. In his
reply to this letter Wagner said:
"It is an absurd coincidence that just at this time I have been taken
with a desire to remodel my old 'Faust' overture. I have made an
entirely new score, have rewritten the instrumentation throughout,
have made many changes, and have given more expansion and importance
to the middle portion (second motive). I shall give it in a few days
at a concert here under the title of 'A Faust Overture.' The motto
will be:
'Der Gott, der mir im Busen wohnt,
Kann tief mein Innerstes erregen;
Der über allen meinen Kräften thront,
Er kann nach aussen nichts bewegen;
Und so ist mir das Dasein eine Last,
Der Tod erwünscht, das Leben mir verhasst!'[12]
But I shall not publish it in any case."
[Footnote 12:
The God that in my breast is owned
Can deeply stir the inner sources;
The God above my powers enthroned,
He cannot change external forces,
So, by the burden of my days oppressed,
Death is desired, and Life a thing unblest!
Goethe's "_Faust_," Act I, Scene 4.
Bayard Taylor's translation.]
In December of the same year, nevertheless, he wrote to Liszt
confessing that the fiasco of the work was "a purifying and wholesome
punishment" for having published it in spite of his better judgment.
Another failure of the unfortunate Paris period was in connection
with a grand entertainment which Parisians were organising in aid of
the Poles. The entertainment was to consist of the performance of an
opera, on the subject of the Duc de Guise, the libretto written by "a
noble amateur and set to music by the young Flotow." Wagner took the
score of his overture, "Polonia," to M. Duvinage, the director of the
orchestra, but this gentleman had no time to examine it. It may as
well be recorded here that this overture was lost for forty years,
and after passing through various hands came to rest in 1881 in the
possession of M. Pasdeloup, the famous Parisian conductor, from whom
Wagner recovered it. He had it played in that year to celebrate his
wife's birthday.
Wagner was now in dire distress. He had expended all his resources,
and he could not pay for the furniture of his apartment, which he
had bought on credit. Schlesinger came to his aid once more, and
took from him several articles for the _Gazette Musicale_. The
first of these, "On German Music," appeared on July 12 and 26,
1840. A translation of it will be found in Vol. VII. of W. Ashton
Ellis's edition of Wagner's prose works. Schlesinger had also at
this time bought the score of Donizetti's "La Favorita," and Wagner
was set to work making a piano arrangement of the music. Through
the help of M. Dumersan, who had begun the abandoned translation of
"Das Liebesverbot" into French, he obtained a commission to write
music to a vaudeville, entitled "La Déscente de la Courtille,"
which Dumersan and Dupeuty had written. Gasparini[13] says that
the bouffe singers of that time were incapable of singing anything
more difficult than the music of "La Belle Hélène" and they quickly
decided that the score "of the young German was quite impossible of
execution." Gasparini also notes that there was one chanson, "Allons
à la Courtille," which had "its hour of celebrity." M. Jullien is
probably right in saying that this song was not the work of Wagner,
and Mr. Edward Dannreuther in his excellent article in Grove's
"Dictionary of Music" says that it has not been traced. He next
endeavoured to earn a few francs by writing songs. He made a setting
of a translation of Heinrich Heine's "Two Grenadiers," but it was not
so good as that made by Schumann in the previous year, and singers
did not take to it kindly. He composed also at this time "L'Attente"
by Victor Hugo, "Mignonne" by Ronsard, and "Dors, mon enfant." Much
as we like these songs now, at the time of their composition Wagner
could not get them sung or published. "Mignonne" was printed in the
_Gazette Musicale_, and with two others was afterward reprinted in
Lewald's _Europa_. Wagner wrote the editor a letter begging that he
might be paid for them at once. They brought him in from $2 to $3.75
each.
[Footnote 13: R. Wagner, par A. de Gasparini, Paris, 1866.]
It was in the midst of these trials that Wagner wrote his famous
story entitled "A Pilgrimage to Beethoven," which attracted the
attention of Hector Berlioz. In a review of a concert organised by
the _Gazette Musicale_ the distinguished Frenchman spoke of the
articles in that paper, and said: "For a long time to come will be
read one by M. Wagner, entitled 'A Pilgrimage to Beethoven.'" As
M. Jullien says, "Little did Berlioz know how truly he spoke." In
the intervals of his labours at breadwinning Wagner worked at his
"Rienzi." But he sank deeper and deeper into the mire of poverty.
His few friends, Laube, Heine, and Schlesinger, could do little to
cheer him, though the last named furnished him with the means of
life. Berlioz, whom he had met, was not sympathetic to him, though he
always cherished a high regard for the Frenchman's talent.
Schlesinger again came to the rescue and decided to produce at one
of the _Gazette Musicale_ concerts a composition by Wagner. The
"Columbus" overture was accordingly thus performed on Feb. 4, 1841.
Schumann made a note of the performance in his paper, and Wagner,
encouraged by this remembrance of him in Germany, sent the score to
London to Jullien. But the manuscript, postage unpaid, came home
to its maker, and he was too poor to take it from the postman.
Accordingly that official put it back into his bag and walked off
with it. And that was the last that was seen of this overture.
Wagner's cup of misery seemed now to be brimming over. He abandoned
all hope of success in the volatile French capital. He fled from his
accustomed haunts, shunned the society of musicians, all mercenary
and insincere as they seemed, and sought that of scholars and
literary men, who at least had artistic ideals. He gave up all hope
of having "Rienzi" produced at the Grand Opéra, and turned his weary
eyes toward Dresden. There was an opera with an inspiring history; a
theatre with a long established routine; and a company which included
such artists as Tichatschek and Schroeder-Devrient.
Meyerbeer was master of the operatic world in Paris, and Wagner, who
found him amiable as a man, could not sympathise with the blatant
theatricalism of his "Les Huguenots" and "Robert le Diable." Halévy,
he felt, had suffered his pristine enthusiasm to fade before the easy
temptation of monetary success. Auber, whom he had once loved for his
"Muette," he now despised for his unblushing search after popular
approval. Only Berlioz pleased him, and he not fully. "He differs
by the whole breadth of heaven," he says in the autobiography,
"from his Parisian colleagues, for he makes no music for gold. But
he cannot write for the sake of purest art; he lacks all sense of
beauty. He stands completely isolated upon his own position; by his
side he has nothing but a troupe of devotees, who, shallow, and
without the smallest spark of judgment, greet in him the creator
of a brand new musical system and completely turn his head;--the
rest of the world avoids him as a madman." In Paris he met Liszt,
who was afterward his best friend, but at first was not pleasing to
him. He heard him play a fantasia on airs from "Robert le Diable"
at a concert in honour of Beethoven, and his sincere German heart
was outraged at such desecration. He felt that the virtuoso was
dependent on the public fancy and shallowness, and he compared his
own independence with this state in an article entitled "Du Métier de
Virtuose et de l'Indépendence des Compositeurs: Fantasie Esthétique
d'un Musicien," which he published in the _Gazette Musicale_ of Oct.
18, 1840.
On Nov. 19 of the same year the score of "Rienzi" was completed, and
on Dec. 4 he sent it to Von Lüttichau, the director of the opera at
Dresden, accompanied by two letters, one to the director himself and
the other to Friedrich August II, King of Saxony. Neither of these
letters seems to have effected anything, and Wagner then applied to
Meyerbeer, who on returning to Paris in the summer of 1840 had found
his young friend in dire distress. Meyerbeer wrote to the intendant,
Von Lüttichau. "Herr Richard Wagner of Leipsic," he said, "is a young
composer who has not only a thorough musical education, but who
possesses much imagination, as well as general literary culture,
and whose predicament certainly merits in every way sympathy in his
native land." Three months after the writing of this letter Wagner
received word that his opera had been accepted at Dresden, but it
was sixteen months later when it was produced. Although he knew
that in Fischer, the chorusmaster, Reissiger, the conductor, and
Tichatschek, the tenor, who saw golden opportunities in the title
rôle, he had friends at court, yet he suffered intense anxiety during
the period between the acceptance and the production of the work.
The correspondence with Fischer and Heine well shows the extent of
this.[14]
[Footnote 14: R. Wagner: Letters to Uhlig, Fischer, and Heine.
London, 1890.]
Meanwhile Meyerbeer, wishing to do something to give immediate help
to the unfortunate young man, placed him in communication with Léon
Pillet, the director of the Grand Opéra. "I had already," says Wagner
in the autobiography, "provided myself for this emergency with an
outline plot. The 'Flying Dutchman,' whose acquaintance I had made
upon the ocean, had never ceased to fascinate my phantasy; I had also
made the acquaintance of H. Heine's remarkable version of this legend
in a number of his 'Salon'; and it was especially his treatment of
the redemption of this Ahasuerus of the seas--borrowed from a Dutch
play under the same title--that placed within my hands all the
material for turning the legend into an opera subject." Wagner rushed
to Pillet with this sketch for the book of the "Flying Dutchman," and
the suggestion that a French text-book be prepared for him to set to
music.
Pillet accepted the sketch and there was much talk about the choice
of a person to make a suitable French arrangement. Suddenly Meyerbeer
left Paris again, and no sooner was his back turned than Pillet told
the young German that he liked "Le Vaisseau-Fantôme" so well that
he would be glad to sell it to a composer to whom he had long ago
promised a libretto. Wagner naturally declined to accede to such a
proposition and asked for the return of his manuscript. But Pillet
was unwilling to part with it. Wagner left the manuscript in his
hands, hoping that Meyerbeer would return and straighten out the
affair. Pursued by creditors and harassed by want, he now left Paris
and went to reside in the suburb of Meudon. Here he heard by chance
that his sketches for "Der Fliegende Holländer" had been placed in
the hands of M. Paul Foucher for arrangement, and that he was in a
fair way to be cheated out of his book. So in the end he accepted
$100 for it, and was thankful to get that.
"Le Vaisseau-Fantôme," libretto by Foucher and Revoil, music by
Pierre Louis Phillipe Dietsch, chorusmaster and afterward conductor
at the opera, was produced Nov. 9, 1842. It was a distinguished
failure and was speedily consigned to oblivion. Meanwhile Wagner,
who was not forbidden by the terms of his agreement with Pillet to
write a German book of his own after his sketches, sat down to pen
the text of "Der Fliegende Holländer," which still lives. In seven
weeks he had written the whole work except the overture, and then his
$100 were gone, and he had to revert to hack work to earn bread. He
returned to Paris and lived most humbly at No. 10 Rue Jacob, where
he made piano scores of Halévy's "Guitarréro" and "La Reine de
Chypre."
It was at this time, too, in the beginning of the year 1841, that he
wrote his pathetic sketch, "The End of a Musician in Paris," in which
he delineated his own hopes and disappointments, and made the poor
man die with the words, "I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven."
When the score of the "Dutchman" was completed, he hastened to send
it to his fatherland, but from Munich and Leipsic came the answer
that it was not suitable to Germany. "Fool that I was!" he says;
"I had fancied it was fitted for Germany alone, since it is struck
on chords that can only vibrate in the German breast." Once more
he turned for help to the musical dictator, Meyerbeer, who was in
Berlin. He sent the new work to him with a request that he get it
taken up by the opera in that city. The opera was accepted speedily,
but there was no prospect of immediate production. Nor did Wagner see
any prospects of any kind, except starvation, in Paris.
All through the winter of 1841-42 he hoarded his money in the hope
of going to Germany for the production of his "Rienzi." In the same
winter began the voluminous correspondence with his Dresden friends,
Wilhelm Fischer and Ferdinand Heine. The former was addressed
ceremoniously in the first letters as a new acquaintance. The latter
was an old friend of the Wagner family. In his letters to these
two men the poet-composer poured out the tortured anxiety of his
soul over the promised production of "Rienzi." He gave invaluable
suggestions as to the cast and the performance. He besought first one
and then the other of the friends to let him know how and when the
work would at length be given. He wrote to the artists, Tichatschek
and Schroeder-Devrient. They paid no attention to him. Who was he,
this unknown young composer, to trouble the darlings of the public?
He grovelled before them and they spurned him. Reissiger's "Adèle de
Foix" must be given before "Rienzi," for Reissiger was the conductor
at Dresden. Then came Halévy's "Guitarréro," which Wagner knew well
indeed. And finally when "Rienzi" seemed likely to get a hearing,
Mme. Schroeder-Devrient decided that she needed a revival of Gluck's
"Armida." Poor Wagner! He wrote of Schroeder-Devrient to Heine:
"I believe I have already written her a dozen letters:
that she has not sent me a single word in reply does not
surprise me very much, because I know how some people
detest letter-writing; but that she has never sent me
indirectly a word or a hint disquiets me greatly. Great
Heavens! so very much depends upon her; it would be
truly humane on her part if she would only send me this
message--perhaps by her chambermaid--'Calm yourself! I am
interested in your cause!'"
At length patience became impossible. He was eager to be on the spot
and to exert his personal influence. Furthermore he wished his wife
to take the baths at Teplitz. So on April 7, 1842, he was able to
turn his face from Paris, the scene of so much achievement, so much
disappointment, and move toward his native land. "For the first
time," he says at the end of the autobiographic sketch, "I saw the
Rhine. With hot tears in my eyes, I, poor artist, swore eternal
fidelity to my German fatherland." But a little later the poor
artist's name was on every tongue, in every print; and the great
Wagner war broke over Germany. For genius always arouses opposition,
and there are few who can follow the seven league strides of a
creative mind.
CHAPTER V
BEGINNING OF FAME AND HOSTILITY
"Before the world of modern art I now could hope no more
for life."--WAGNER
The excursion to Teplitz in the early summer of 1842 for his wife's
health was of great importance in the development of Richard Wagner,
for it was there and then that he completed the outline of the book
of "Tannhäuser." When he had finished "Der Fliegende Holländer," he
searched for a new subject. That he had not yet discovered in what
direction his genius called him is demonstrated by the fact that he
was attracted by the story of the conquest of Apulia and Sicily by
Manfred, the son of the Emperor Friedrich II. He made a plan for a
book to be called "Die Sarazener." In this Mme. Schroeder-Devrient
was to have the rôle of a half-sister of Manfred, a prophetess, who
led the Saracens to victory and secured Manfred's coronation. The
plot was shown to Mme. Schroeder-Devrient some years later, but it
did not please her, and the work was dropped. And now there fell
into Wagner's hands a version of the "Tannhäuser" legend, and his
mind went flying back to Hoffmann's "Sängerkrieg," which he had
read in his youth. He started to run down the different versions of
the story, and in so doing came upon the legends of "Parzival" and
"Lohengrin." But it was the "Tannhäuser" legend which first absorbed
him, and at once he began the plan which he completed at Teplitz.
The general rehearsals for "Rienzi" began in Dresden in July, for
in spite of the anxiety of Wagner and his lack of information, the
preparations for the production of his work had been going on very
well. The summer past, the rehearsals were again pushed forward, and
the composer found valuable allies in Tichatschek, who was enamoured
of the title rôle, and Fischer, who saw the power and splendour of
the glowing score. For though "Rienzi" is a work entirely opposed
to the true Wagnerian methods and style, it is one of the greatest
creations of the real French school, to which it strictly belongs.
So on Oct. 20, 1842, the first of the Wagnerian works which still
hold the stage, was produced at the Dresden opera and Wagner awoke
the next morning to find himself famous. The performance was an
almost startling success. Singers, orchestra, public, and critics
were alike amazed and overwhelmed by the enormous breadth of style,
mastery of technic, and maturity of methods shown in the work.
Although the performance occupied six hours, the enthusiasm of the
audience was not abated. The next morning Wagner went to the theatre
to indicate the cuts which should be made in the over-long work,
and was met with a storm of protests by the singers. Tichatschek
declared that he would not spare a measure. "It is heavenly!" he
exclaimed. A second and a third performance were given with growing
receipts. At the third Reissiger resigned the conductor's bâton to
the young composer, and the public went wild with approval. All the
wretchedness of Paris was gone and forgotten. The star of genius was
in the ascendant; the Rhine had been Wagner's Rubicon.
In subsequent performances the work was divided into two parts, the
first and second acts being given on one evening, and the other three
on another. It was five years, however, before the opera travelled
as far as the stage of the opera at Berlin. Thence it went out into
all the world. But it was the end of what may be called Wagner's
first artistic period. The work was planned and executed on the
conventional lines of the Meyerbeerian grand opera, and the music
was a compound of French and Italian styles, with here and there a
burst of the real Wagner of the future. The artistic convictions
which were to develop into a complete theory of the music drama
in the mind of Wagner had come to him in the composition of the
"Flying Dutchman," and this work became the starting point of what is
commonly called his second period, in which he produced it, together
with "Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin."
The winter at Dresden passed happily, for the young composer was
enjoying the first fruits of success. Heinrich Laube, the old friend
of Wagner and editor of the _Journal for the Polite World_, asked the
composer to furnish material for an autobiographic sketch, and this
Wagner wrote. This sketch will be found in the first volume of the
collected prose writings of the master. It ends with the start from
Paris for Dresden. The music of "Rienzi" began to be heard on the
concert stage, and the name of Wagner, to be noised about as that of
a man of high promise. It would have been extremely easy for him to
achieve pecuniary success by writing more works on the popular lines
of "Rienzi," but it was not in the man to sacrifice his artistic
conscience to public favour. Already the ideas which were to make
him famous in time, but which were first to throw musical Europe
into a ferment of dispute, had taken firm possession of his mind. In
March, 1843, August Roeckel, second music director at Dresden, and a
lifelong friend of Wagner, wrote to Ferdinand Praeger in London:
"Henceforth I drop myself into a well, because I am going
to speak of the man whose greatness overshadows that of all
other men I have ever met, either in France or England--our
friend Richard Wagner. I say advisedly, our friend, for
he knows you from my description as well as I do. You
cannot imagine how the daily intercourse with him develops
my admiration for his genius. His earnestness in art is
religious; he looks upon the drama as a pulpit from which
the people should be taught, and his views on a combination
of the different arts for that purpose open up an exciting
theory, as new as it is ideal."
This theory of a combination in one organic whole, of all the arts
tributary to the drama, each part to be as important, as essential as
the other, was the theory which Wagner now began to practice, which
he first attempted to illustrate in his "Flying Dutchman," and which
he subsequently preached in his principal prose writings. It was the
theory which met with active and obstinate opposition from those who
either would not or could not climb to Wagner's artistic altitude,
and who preferred to see in the opera nothing but a field for the
display of pretty vocal pieces and voices trained to sing them.
Wagner's theory made the music and the singing subordinate to the
dramatic design, transformed them from ultimate objects into means
of expression; and this was to his contemporaries a revolutionary
idea for which they were not prepared.
"Der Fliegende Holländer" was produced at the Dresden opera on
January 2, 1843, with Mme. Schroeder-Devrient as Senta, and Wagner
in the conductor's chair. The work proved to be a disappointment to
the public, which had looked for another "Rienzi" with glittering
processions, splendid scenery, and groupings, and imposing action
coupled with brilliant music. The simple story and action of the
"Dutchman," interpreted largely by music of a purely emotional
character, was too serious for the Dresden audience, and at that
period for audiences elsewhere. To us of the present day this work
is the essence of simplicity, and much of its music seems trivially
light. But to the Germans of 1843 it was a most sombre tragedy.
"My friends," Wagner says, "were dismayed at the result; they seemed
anxious to obliterate this impression on them and the public by an
enthusiastic resumption of 'Rienzi.' I was myself in sufficiently ill
humour to remain silent and leave the 'Flying Dutchman' undefended."
The critics of the day were nonplussed by the total departure from
the recognised conventions of the contemporaneous stage, and they
talked a deal of nonsense about the lack of melody in the work, a
sort of nonsense which some old-fashioned persons have not done
talking even yet. But we must remember that this new work was an
artistic revelation; and the general public never likes these.
It desires only to be amused in the theatre, and only after much
struggling yields to the power of genius, and renders homage to true
works of art. Wagner himself realised that the general public could
not be looked to for support in his radical departure from the easy
path of tuneful dalliance, in which it was accustomed to travel. In
his "Communication to My Friends" he says:
"From Berlin, where I was entirely unknown, I received from
two utter strangers, who had been attracted towards me by
the impression which 'The Flying Dutchman' had produced
upon them, the first complete satisfaction which I had been
permitted to enjoy, with the invitation to continue in the
particular direction I had marked out. From this moment I
lost more and more from sight the veritable public. The
opinion of a few intelligent men took the place in my mind
of the opinion of the masses, which can never be wholly
apprehended, although it had been the object of my labour
in my first attempts, when my eyes were not yet open to the
light."
On May 22 the opera was given at Riga, and on June 5 at Cassel under
direction of the famous composer, violinist, and conductor, Ludwig
Spohr. The poem had been submitted to him and he had spoken of it
as a little masterpiece. He had sent for the music, and at once
decided to produce the work. It seems strange that Spohr, a composer
of tendencies so different from Wagner's and so old a man (he was
sixty-nine), should have been one of the first to perceive the power
of the new genius. But in a letter to his friend Lüders he wrote:
"This work, though it comes near the boundary of the new
romantic school _à la_ Berlioz, and is giving me unheard-of
trouble with its immense difficulties, yet interests me in
the highest degree since it is obviously the product of
pure inspiration, and does not, like so much of our modern
operatic music, betray in every bar the striving to make a
sensation or to please. There is much creative imagination
in it, its invention is thoroughly noble, and it is well
written for the voices, while the orchestral part, though
enormously difficult, and somewhat overladen, is rich in
new effects and will certainly, in our large theatre, be
perfectly clear and intelligible."[15]
[Footnote 15: Spohr quotes this letter in his "Autobiography."]
The completeness of the popular failure of the "Flying Dutchman"
may be estimated from the fact that after the first performances in
Dresden it disappeared from the _répertoire_ of that opera for twenty
years. It was produced in Berlin in 1844, and it was ten years after
that when it was heard again anywhere. Wagner himself did not realise
either the fulness or the significance of the failure of this work.
He had only begun to experiment with his reformatory ideas, and that
the public was not ready to accept them with acclaim could not have
amazed him, though it doubtless brought him from the rosy heights
of sanguinity down to the shadier levels of dull fact. To awaken
from a hopeful dream, however illusive, is painful; and Wagner was
momentarily shocked and hurt. But as he had not yet grasped all the
details of his own theories, so he failed to perceive the utterness
of the public inability to comprehend his dawning purposes. It was
not till after the production of his "Tannhäuser," which some of his
most ardent admirers still regard as poetically his noblest tragedy,
that he realised the solitariness of his genius, the shallowness of a
public trained up to be lightly pleased.
Meanwhile he was appointed to a very important professional post.
The deaths of Kapellmeister Morlacchi in 1841 and "Musik-director"
Rastrelli in 1842 had made two vacancies in the Dresden Theatre.
Wagner was one of those who applied for the secondary position at
a salary of 1200 thalers (about $900) a year. Von Lüttichau, the
Intendant (manager), excited by the success of "Rienzi," thought
he had found a rare jewel, and supported Wagner, with the result
that the composer was appointed Hofkapellmeister at 1500 thalers
(about $1125). The position of Hofkapellmeister also carried with
it life incumbency, and a pension on retirement. On January 10,
1843, he conducted Weber's "Euryanthe," this being the customary
public "trial" representation. He then made an unsuccessful trip
to Berlin to try to push his "Rienzi." Before the close of the
month his appointment was formally made, and his first duty was to
assist Hector Berlioz, who arrived in Dresden on February 1, in the
rehearsals for his concerts.[16]
[Footnote 16: In his letters from Germany Berlioz wrote of Wagner
thus: "As for the young Kapellmeister, Richard Wagner, who lived for
a long while in Paris without succeeding in making himself known
otherwise than as the author of some articles published in the
_Gazette Musicale_, he exercised his authority for the first time
in helping me in my rehearsals, which he did with zeal and a very
good will. The ceremony of his presentation to the orchestra and
taking the oath took place the day after my arrival, and I found
him in all the intoxication of a very natural joy. After having
undergone in France a thousand privations and all the trials to which
obscurity is exposed, Richard Wagner, on coming back to Saxony, his
native country, had the daring to undertake and the happiness to
achieve the composition of the text and music of an opera in five
acts ('Rienzi'). This work had a brilliant success in Dresden. It
was soon followed by 'The Flying Dutchman,' an opera in three acts,
of which also he wrote both text and music. Whatever opinion one
may hold of these works, it must be acknowledged that men capable
of accomplishing this double literary and musical task twice with
success are not common, and that M. Wagner has given enough proof
of his capacity to excite interest and to rivet the attention of
the world upon himself. This was very well understood by the King
of Saxony; and the day that he gave his first kapellmeister Richard
Wagner for a colleague, thus assuring the latter's subsistence, all
friends of art must have said to His Majesty what Jean Bart answered
Louis XIV. when he made him a commander of a squadron: 'Sire, you
have done well.'"]
He served seven years as conductor at Dresden and in that time
rehearsed and conducted works by Weber, Spohr, Spontini, Mendelssohn,
Mozart, Beethoven, Marschner, Gluck, and others, gaining an immense
amount of valuable experience. The arrangement of Gluck's "Iphigenie
in Aulis," which he made for the performance of February 22, 1847, is
published and approved by critical authorities.
Concerts were given by the court orchestra, and in these he conducted
the leading orchestral works, making a special study of the
Beethoven symphonies. To this labour he applied all the results of
his early studies of Beethoven, and his own ideas about conducting,
together with some thoughts formed in listening to the Conservatoire
concerts in Paris. The results of these studies and experiences he
subsequently embodied in a book called "Ueber das Dirigen." (On
Conducting). Among his other duties a certain amount of attention
had to be given to the music of the Hofkirche. The choir consisted
of fourteen men and twelve boys, and there was a full orchestra of
fifty, including trumpets and trombones. Wagner said to Mr. Edward
Dannreuther, "The echoes and reverberations in the building were
deafening. I wanted to relieve the hard-working members of the
orchestra and female voices, and introduce true Catholic church music
_a cappella_. As a specimen I prepared Palestrina's 'Stabat Mater,'
and suggested other pieces, but my efforts failed." Wagner was as
true an artist in the matter of church music as he was in that of the
stage, and he returned with joy to the glorious treasure-house of
Roman art; but he found his public just as unfit for that as for his
new dispensations in the drama.
Wagner was made conductor of the Liedertafel, a chorus of men
organised in 1839, and also of the Saengerfest of 1843. It took place
in July of that year and the composer wrote for it "Das Liebesmahl
der Apostel," a biblical scene. The story of this celebration of
the Lord's Supper by the Apostles was this: The disciples being
assembled for the feast, the Apostles arrive with the information
that the penalty of death has been prescribed for teaching the
Christian faith. Alarm fills every breast and the assembly prays
to the Father to send them the Holy Spirit. Heavenly voices sound
from above, telling the supplicants that their prayer has been
granted. Then follows a convulsion of nature, caused by the descent
of the Spirit, and the Apostles and Disciples go forth to preach
the Gospel. A chorus of forty men represented the Disciples, and
the heavenly voices were consigned to an invisible choir singing in
the dome of the building. This bit of stage management, repeated in
"Parsifal," was the only feature of the work that attracted special
attention.[17] The correspondent of the Paris _Gazette Musicale_,
Schlesinger's paper, wrote, "This last work, the conception of which
is most daring, has produced an extraordinary effect, and one which
it is impossible to describe. The King after the concert was over
summoned the young author to him, and testified his satisfaction in
the most affectionate terms." But the _Gazette Musicale's_ Dresden
correspondent trusted much to the effect of distance in magnifying
the size of a popular demonstration. Wagner himself thought well
of this work, and lamented in a letter to Liszt in 1852 that choral
societies did not perform it. But the truth is that the most
noticeable qualities of the composition are purely theatrical,
showing that Wagner's genius was entirely for the stage and not for
the concert platform.
[Footnote 17: In reality the most striking feature of this work is
the complete silence of the orchestra till the descent of the Holy
Ghost. The composition, however, is weak.]
Spontini, the aged composer of "La Vestale," visited Dresden when
his work was produced under Wagner's direction, and was treated
by the young conductor with great veneration in spite of his
troublesome demands for adherence to his old manner of performing
the work. Wagner also entered heart and soul into a project which
the Liedertafel had long cherished, namely, to carry the remains of
Weber from London to Germany and inter them in the family vault at
Dresden. The Liedertafel had raised some money by concerts, and now
after Wagner had overcome the opposition of both the King and the
Intendant, an operatic performance was given for the aid of the plan.
The receipts, added to the funds already secured and augmented by
the proceeds of a benefit given in Berlin by Meyerbeer, enabled the
Liedertafel to send Weber's oldest son to London for the remains.
He returned in December, and on the fourteenth of that month the
ceremony of reinterment took place. The funeral music was arranged
by Wagner from two passages in "Euryanthe," and he delivered the
funeral oration, which was pronounced a masterly effort. It may be
read in his collected prose writings. Taken all in all, the work of
Wagner outside of the field of operatic composition was important
while he was in Dresden. He certainly amazed the Germans themselves
by his puissant revelations of the possibilities of the Beethoven
symphonies, and his interpretations of the works of other composers
were so striking and so far out of the conventional ruts into which
the easy-going kapellmeisters of the country had fallen that a
coterie of bitter opponents to him arose. Among them he was known
as Wagner, the iconoclast, and this deceptive appellation, applied
to him because he was not satisfied with indolent mediocrity and
slothful error, clung to him for many years, an empty formula which
its users could not justify.
It was at this time that, smarting under the failure of his public
to understand him, and half inclined to return to the easy path of
popular success indicated by the triumph of "Rienzi," he showed
to Mme. Schroeder-Devrient the sketch of "Manfred." She, however,
was not pleased with the story and dissuaded him from attempting
to develop it. That his own artistic conscience was at work, too,
is shown by the words written by him in the "Communication to My
Friends."
"Through the happy change in the aspect of my outward
lot; through the hopes I cherished of its even still more
favourable development in the future; and finally through
my personal, and in a sense, intoxicating contact with a
new and well-inclined surrounding, a passion for enjoyment
had sprung up within me, that led my inner nature, formed
among the struggles and impressions of a painful past,
astray from its own peculiar path. A general instinct that
urges every man to take life as he finds it now pointed
me, in my particular relations as artist, to a path which,
on the other hand, must soon and bitterly disgust me.
This instinct could only have been appeased in life on
condition of my seeking as artist to wrest myself renown
and pleasure by a complete subordination of my true nature
to the demands of the public taste in art. I should have
had to submit myself to the mode, and to speculation on its
weaknesses; and here, on this point at least, my feeling
showed me clearly that, with an actual entry on that path,
I must inevitably be engulfed in my own loathing. Thus the
pleasures of life presented themselves to my feeling in
the shape alone of what our modern world can offer to the
senses; and this again appeared attainable by me as artist
solely along the direction which I had already learnt to
recognise as the exploitation of our public art-morass. In
actual life I was at like time confronted--in the person
of a woman for whom I had a sincere admiration--with the
phenomenon that a longing akin to my own could only imagine
itself contented with the paltriest return of trivial love;
a delusion so completely threadbare that it could never
really mask its nature from the inner need.
"If at last I turned impatiently away and owed the strength
of my repugnance to the independence already developed in
my nature both as artist and as man, so did that double
revolt of man and artist inevitably take on the form of a
yearning for appeasement in a higher, nobler element; an
element which, in its contrast to the only pleasures that
the material present reads in modern life and modern art,
could but appear to me in the guise of a pure, chaste,
virginal, unseizable and unapproachable ideal of love. What
in fine could this love-yearning, the noblest thing my
heart could feel, what other could it be than a longing for
release from the present, for absorption into an element of
endless love, a love denied to earth, and reachable through
the gates of death alone? And what again at bottom could
such a longing be but the yearning of love; aye, of a real
love, seeded in the soil of fullest sentience--yet a love
that could never come to fruitage on the loathsome soil
of modern sentience? The above is an exact account of the
mood in which I was when the unlaid ghost of 'Tannhäuser'
returned again and urged me to complete his poem."
In these sentences one can easily find the mind of the Wagner who
wrote "Tristan und Isolde," and this statement of the mood of
the time explains why "Tannhäuser" stands more closely related
to "Tristan" than any other of the master's works. Urged now
by his artistic soul and dissuaded by the intuition of Mme.
Schroeder-Devrient from yielding to a dangerous impulse, he turned
once more to "Tannhäuser" and completed the work in April, 1844.
"With this work I penned my death warrant," he says; "before the
world of modern art I now could hope no more for life. This I felt;
but as yet I knew it not with full distinctness:--that knowledge I
was not to gain till later."
Every work that Wagner wrote was, at least in so far as it was
related to his own life, epoch-making; and the birth of "Tannhäuser"
marks a departure so wide that it must receive special consideration.
The great Wagner war began with the production of this drama, and
in it the composer's opponents first discovered those "unmusical"
traits which they celebrated for half a century, till the applause
of the civilised world drowned out their noise. The hint at the
dissatisfaction of the man with the "paltriest return of trivial
love" shows us that the inability of the good Minna to enter into the
lofty aspirations of her husband and her inevitable sympathy with the
false impulses urging toward swift pecuniary success had already set
at work in the mind of Wagner those dangerous longings which were
eventually to lead to their separation.
CHAPTER VI
"LOHENGRIN" AND "DIE MEISTERSINGER"
"How curious I am to hear Liszt about it."--WAGNER
When "Tannhäuser" had been completed Wagner went to Marienbad to
spend the summer. While there he made the first drafts of his
"Meistersinger" and "Lohengrin." He says: "As with the Athenians a
merry satyr-play followed the tragedy, so, during that excursion, I
suddenly conceived the idea of a comic play which might follow my
minstrel's contest in the Wartburg as a significant satyr-play. This
was the Mastersingers of Nuremberg with Hans Sachs at their head.
Scarcely had I finished the sketch of this plot when the plan of
'Lohengrin' began to engage my attention, and left me no rest until
I had worked it out in detail." Returning to Dresden he devoted
himself to the preparations for the production of "Tannhäuser."
For, in spite of the failure of "Der Fliegende Holländer," the
Intendant had not wholly lost faith in the young man. August
Roeckel, who was now always at Wagner's side, urged so eloquently
the need of new scenery for this drama that painters were brought
from Paris. The best singers available were placed at Wagner's
disposal, and they vied with one another in studying this, to them,
almost incomprehensible work. Tichatschek had to have the music of
"Tannhäuser" lowered for him. Johanna Wagner, the daughter of the
composer's brother Albert, was specially engaged for Elizabeth, and
Schroeder-Devrient took Venus, while Mitterwurzer was the Wolfram.
Wagner wrote an explanation of his poem, and placed it at the head
of the libretto, which was sold at the door. On Oct. 19, 1845, the
work was performed for the first time. The opening scene went for
nothing. Schroeder-Devrient, who did not like the music of Venus,
sang it badly, and the audience lost the entire significance of the
episode. The ensuing scene went well and the popular septet at the
end of the act gained the composer a recall. The march in the second
act pleased, but the contest in the hall of song dragged listlessly.
The evening star song was liked, but then came the true Wagner, the
Wagner of the uncompromising music drama. The return of Tannhäuser
and his despairing narrative were wholly lost on the audience. The
public was unable to understand the aims of a man who, having a
heroic tenor on the stage in a grand situation, would not write a
pealing aria for him, but persisted in making him tell a story in a
long declamatory recitative. The master's intent to put the dramatic
situation before them was not discerned. All that was seen was
that he would not write a pretty song when he might have done so.
"Tannhäuser" reached its fourth performance on Nov. 2. The following
day Wagner wrote to his friend Carl Galliard in Berlin, sending him a
copy of the score:
"I have gained a big action with my 'Tannhäuser.' Let me
give you a very short account of a few of the facts. Owing
to the hoarseness of some of the singers, the second
performance was played a week after the first; this was
very bad, for in the long interval ignorance and erroneous
and absurd views, fostered by my enemies, who exerted
themselves vigorously, had full scope for swaggering
about; and when the moment of the second performance at
length arrived, my opera was on the point of failing; the
house was not well filled; opposition! prejudice! Luckily,
however, all the singers were as enthusiastic as ever;
intelligence made a way for itself, and the third act,
somewhat shortened, was especially successful; after the
singers had been called out, there was a tumultuous cry
for me. I have now formed a nucleus among the public; at
the third performance there was a well-filled house and an
enthusiastic reception of the work. After every act the
singers and the author were tumultuously applauded; in the
third act at the words, 'Heinrich, du bist erlöst,' the
house resounded with an outbreak of enthusiasm. Yesterday
at length the fourth performance took place before a house
crammed to suffocation; after every act the singers were
called out, and after them on each occasion the author;
after the second act there was a regular tumult. Whenever
I show myself people greet me enthusiastically. My dear
Galliard, this is indeed a rare success, and under the
circumstances one for which I scarcely hoped."
But in a short time Wagner realised that all the applause was for
the popular numbers in his work, and for the stage pictures and
ensembles. The drama as a whole had missed fire. The public did not
know what Wagner designed. The ethical meaning of his play was hidden
from the people. Its artistic purport was undiscerned. The public
still went to the theatre to see the pretty pictures and hear the
pretty tunes. Of the conception of an opera as the highest form of
poetic drama they were as ignorant as they had ever been. A few years
later Wagner, in recalling this, wrote in the "Communication to My
Friends":
"The public had shown me plainly by its enthusiastic
reception of 'Rienzi' and by the colder treatment of
the 'Dutchman,' what I must offer it to win approval.
Its expectations I disappointed utterly. Confused and
dissatisfied it left the first performance of 'Tannhäuser.'
I was overwhelmed by a feeling of complete isolation.
The few friends who heartily sympathised with me were
themselves so depressed by my painful position that the
perception of this sympathetic ill-humour was the only
friendly sign about me."
From this time it is possible to trace two features in the career
of Wagner. The first was a ceaseless effort to spread by polemical
writings the meaning of his doctrines, and the second was a somewhat
reckless determination to abide by them, come what might. Wagner has
been charged with grave neglect of the practical affairs of life.
He was interminably in debt. He borrowed money right and left, and
seemed to entertain an idea that the world ought to support such a
genius as he while he was pursuing his vast projects. This was not
exactly the vein of Wagner's thought, though his reckless methods of
expression might easily justify the belief that it was. The man was
aflame with the fire of his own genius. He knew what it was in him to
produce, and he rebelled bitterly against the constant pressure of
his daily needs to turn him aside, to force him to write pot-boilers
and abandon his vast conceptions. That a man with such an artistic
conscience as Wagner's could not compromise we can easily understand;
and the struggle of the ensuing years began with the decision to
bring the public to him, and not to descend to the flowery level on
which it reposed.
Criticism of Wagner's writings at this time was of the most
discouraging sort. In Dresden, for instance, the leading commentator
was one Schladebach. This gentleman was, perhaps, a perfectly honest
critic, but he was incompetent to discern the importance of a
departure from the beaten path. He constituted himself the champion
of classicism, for which poor conventionality is so often and so
easily mistaken. When a number of famous masters have laid down the
plan of opera, it is extremely confusing to a poor critic to have a
stranger appear and propose a wholly different method of treating
the form. Schladebach was incapable of understanding the theories
and aims of Wagner; so he praised whatever was good according to
the old models, and condemned what departed from them. He was the
correspondent of the leading papers of many German cities, and
consequently the belief was spread abroad that, while this man Wagner
had some talent, he was unpractical and hopelessly eccentric. The
managers paid no attention to him, in many cases they did not even
look at the scores which he sent them.
Robert Schumann, who went to live in Dresden in the fall of 1844,
wrote to Dorn in 1846, "I wish you could see 'Tannhäuser'; it
contains deeper, more original, and altogether an hundredfold
better things than his previous operas--at the same time a good
deal that is musically trivial. On the whole, Wagner may become of
great importance and significance to the stage, and I am sure he
is possessed of the needful courage." Unfortunately the pressure
of the general opinion of the time proved to be too strong even
for Schumann, and a few years later he wrote that Wagner was "not
a good musician." Spohr, who produced "Tannhäuser" in 1853, wrote,
"The opera contains much that is new and beautiful, also several
ugly attacks on one's ears." In another place he complains of
the "absence of definite rhythm and the frequent lack of rounded
periods." In none of the contemporaneous criticism, except that
written by Wagner's intimates, can one find anything to show that the
writers had discerned the artistic purpose of the composer. It is not
strange that he felt that he stood alone.
Nor is it, on the whole, strange that he was misunderstood. As
for the critics, they had formed their standards of opera on the
masterpieces of Meyerbeer, Spontini, and Rossini. Even in Mozart they
were unable to find justification for Wagner's ideas, for it was his
novelty in form that confused them. The public had long placed opera
in the category of "amusements." It went to the opera house to hear
arias, duos, quartets, sung by great singers, while the story, told
chiefly in recitatives, was regarded merely as an excuse for the
presentation of certain poetic points of emotion to be set to music.
When Wagner came, demanding that the music should be only one means
of expression of the whole emotional content of a consistent drama,
and that it should not be simply a string of pretty tunes, we can
easily understand that he was far beyond the public of his day, and
we can picture to ourselves the unhappy Intendant, asking him why
it was necessary to be so distressing, and why Tannhäuser could not
marry Elizabeth.
In the year 1847 Wagner's musical activity was confined almost
wholly to work upon his "Lohengrin." He lived in retirement as
much as possible, and gave himself up to the realisation of those
artistic projects with which he felt that his entire surroundings
were unsympathetic. In the winter of 1845 he had conceived and
noted the principal themes. In the fall of 1846 he lived in a villa
at Grosgraufen, near Pilnitz, and there he began the music. In the
summer of 1847 he secluded himself wholly, and on August 28 he
finished the introduction, which for more than half a century has
thrilled hearers all over the world. The scoring of the entire opera
was completed in the early spring. While Wagner must have realised
the artistic value of this new work, he must also have seen how
much further he had removed himself from the possibility of public
comprehension than he had in his "Tannhäuser." He even doubted the
practicability of opera as an art form. The Intendant of the Dresden
opera did not feel any sympathy with the composer's experimental
mood, and only the finale of the third act of "Lohengrin," performed
on September 22, 1848, at the anniversary celebration of the
orchestra, was heard in Dresden.
Meanwhile although "Tannhäuser" had been refused a hearing at Berlin,
preparations had been made for the production of "Rienzi," and the
birthday of the King of Prussia, Oct. 5, 1847, had been chosen as the
date for the performance. Wagner went to Berlin to superintend the
rehearsals. There he found that anti-Wagnerism was in full bloom.
The newspapers began the attack before the work was made known, and
every possible rumour that envy and jealousy could invent found
ready acceptance. The fate of "Rienzi" was sealed in advance. The
manager of the opera discovered that the text of the work breathed a
revolutionary spirit quite out of keeping with the temper of a royal
fête, and accordingly the production was postponed till Oct. 26. On
that evening "Rienzi" was given, but the King was not present, the
court did not attend, and Meyerbeer, who was the general director
of music, was suddenly called out of town. There was an audience of
good size and the applause was of a liberal character; but there was
no hope of permanent success in Berlin without the smiles of royalty
and the favourable comment of the press. So Wagner saw his dreams
of pecuniary aid from this early work fade away, and leave him to
struggle with the constantly growing problem of how to live.
The eventful year 1848 was now at hand, a year which was big with
incidents in the personal and artistic life of Wagner. It was in
this year that the political troubles which harassed the kingdom of
Saxony, and Germany in general, made themselves felt in the opera
house and afterward in the career of the composer. The work of the
opera house was affected by the general unrest. Nothing serious was
undertaken. The list of the season was made up chiefly of works
of the calibre of Flotow's "Martha," then in the height of its
popularity. The orchestra gave three subscription concerts, and at
one of these Wagner conducted Bach's eight-part motet, "Singt dem
Herrn ein neues Lied." In March he finished the instrumentation
of "Lohengrin" and then his mind began to busy itself with a new
subject. The first which attracted him was "Jesus of Nazareth." The
impulse which led him to the contemplation of this subject was so
plainly identical with that which afterward led to the creation of
"Parsifal" that it is worth while to note how far he went in its
embodiment. He collected a large quantity of material for this
projected work, and published it afterward in a volume of a hundred
pages.[18]
[Footnote 18: "Jesus von Nazareth, von R. Wagner." Leipsic, 1887.
Translation in 8th Vol. of Mr. Ellis's edition of the prose works.]
At this period, too, he seriously contemplated the employment of the
story of Barbarossa, or Friedrich Rothbart, as material for a lyric
drama. His study of this subject was of inestimable value to him in
shaping clearly in his mind the conviction that a mythical subject
was more suitable than one historical for the purpose of musical
treatment. He discovered that he could not give to the splendid
personality of Barbarossa the necessary historical background without
overloading his opera with a host of minor details too inflexible
for musical treatment. On the other hand to endeavour to sacrifice
historical accuracy to dramatic requirements would materially
change the true character of his subject. He became convinced that
only a mythical subject, in which elementary world-thoughts and
emotions were typified, would admit of free musical treatment. His
serious study of this whole matter resulted in an essay entitled,
"Die Wibelungen.--Weltgeschichte aus der Sage" ("The Wibelungs:
world-history from the Saga"). The essay treats of the history of the
world according to tradition, showing the agreement of history and
mythology in certain elementary facts. It was written in 1848 and was
published at Leipsic in 1850. It will be found in Vol. VII. of Mr.
Ellis's translation of the prose works.
CHAPTER VII
"ART AND REVOLUTION"
"Behold Mercury, and his docile handmaid, Modern
Art!"--WAGNER
The period of Wagner's life which we have now reached was one of much
complication and of important results. With the decision to abandon
the subject of Barbarossa he made another, namely that the story
of the Nibelungen Lied and its original material as found in the
Volsunga Saga would provide excellent material for a music drama. His
conception was first formulated in an article entitled "The Nibelung
Myth as Sketch for a Drama" (Ellis's translation, Vol. VII.). This
was followed by the first form of the text of the drama, "Siegfried's
Tod," a translation of which will be found in Mr. Ellis's eighth
volume. Wagner's first thought was to tell the entire story of the
death of Siegfried and the causes leading to it in one opera, but he
was not long in discovering that this was impossible. In June, 1849,
he wrote to Franz Liszt, with whom he had begun a correspondence[19]
in 1841 (though it did not become continuous till 1845) in these
words: "Meanwhile I shall employ my time in setting to music my
latest German drama, 'The Death of Siegfried.' Within half a year
I shall send you the opera completed." In 1851 in a long letter to
Liszt he explained how he had found it impossible to condense the
whole story into one drama, and afterward even into two, and thus how
the work had stretched itself into four separate dramas.
[Footnote 19: "Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt," edited by Francis
Hueffer, 2 vols., London, 1888.]
At the time of the writing of the original form of the book Wagner
also conceived some of the germs of the music, and in this, too,
lay the seed of a new and wonderful development of his genius.
His "Lohengrin" marked a wide departure from the style of his
"Tannhäuser," but in the dramas based on the Siegfried legend he
went much further. He felt in the beginning that he would be forced
to do so, and in the fall of 1850 he wrote to Liszt: "Between the
musical execution of my 'Lohengrin' and that of my 'Siegfried' there
lies for me a stormy, but I feel convinced, a fruitful world."
The correspondence between Wagner and Liszt had grown into warmth
when the latter undertook the preparation of "Tannhäuser" for
production at Weimar, where he was the ruling power in music. No
one who desires to be intimately acquainted with the life of Wagner
should omit reading this correspondence, which throws more light on
the artistic and personal character of the two men than anything
else in existence. It is highly creditable to Liszt that he early
recognised the full force of the genius of Wagner and bowed to him as
a superior. On the other hand Wagner, who was hopelessly improvident
and always in the depths of monetary difficulties, came to lean on
Liszt as a friend in all needs.
It is possible that through the influence of Liszt Wagner might
have gained wide recognition throughout Germany much sooner than he
did, but his own sympathy with the revolutionary ideas of the time
led him into direct conflict with authority in Saxony and drove him
into exile. The story of Wagner's connection with the revolutionary
movements of 1848 and 1849 has had several versions, and it has been
the subject of acrid dispute between Wagner's devotees and those who
are only candid friends. The story of the Saxon uprising need not
be repeated here in detail. Suffice it to say that the impetus of
the French revolution of 1848 moved the people of Saxony to demand
of their king a constitution, a free press, trial by jury, national
armies, and representation. The king refused to accede to the
demands. A second time through a deputation Leipsic people demanded
what they regarded as their rights and threatened to attack Dresden,
if these were not conceded. The king adopted conciliatory measures,
which served to allay the excitement for a time, but the people soon
saw that under the surface oppression was gaining headway.
Wagner and his friend and assistant, August Roeckel, the latter an
enthusiastic republican, became members of a society known as the
"Fatherland Union," an organisation devoted to the furtherance of
reform measures, but not in favour of direct disloyalty to the king.
Before this society on June 16 Wagner read a paper entitled "What is
the Relation of our Efforts to the Monarchy?" Wagner had previously
drawn up for the government a plan for the reorganisation of the
Dresden Theatre. In that paper he proposed that the changes in the
existing arrangements be made so that the theatre would be brought
into closer relations with the higher artistic life of the people.
It was at this period, too, that he wrote "Art and Revolution," in
which he still further demonstrated that he saw a connection between
political and artistic reform, or rather that he believed the latter
impossible under the restrictions of extant governmental control. He
aimed at a sort of republican representation in art, a plan by which
the literary and artistic elements of the community might have voices
in the direction of the theatre. He saw no way of bringing this about
except by a change in the nature of the government.
Therefore in this paper read before the Vaterlandsverein he demanded
general suffrage, abolition of the standing army and the aristocracy,
and the conversion of Saxony into a republic. His loyalty to the
king was shown by his proposal that he should himself proclaim
the republic and remain in office at its head. This speech was
published and it caused a good deal of unfavourable comment. Yet it
was not taken very seriously, for Wagner was warned that a Court
Conductor should not indulge in such talk; he wrote a long letter of
extenuation to Lüttichau, the Intendant; asked for a brief leave of
absence, and obtained it. And that would have been the end of the
matter in all probability, had not open insurrection broken out.
It was in regard to the acts of Wagner in the days of turmoil in May,
1849, that the acrid dispute before mentioned raged in 1892. This
dispute was caused chiefly by the statements of Ferdinand Praeger
in "Wagner as I Knew Him." Among other things Praeger said, "During
the first few of his eleven years of exile his talk was incessantly
about the outbreak, and the active aid he rendered at the time,
and of his services to the cause by speech and by pen prior to the
1849 May days; and yet in after life, in his talk with me, who held
documentary evidence, under his own hand, of his participation, he
in petulant tones sought either to minimise the part he played or
to explain it away altogether. This change of front I first noticed
about 1864 at Munich." With this as his text Praeger set out to show
that Wagner was a red-handed revolutionary, and that he fought on the
barricades in the streets of Dresden.
It was my fortune to read these assertions of Praeger's before they
were published. The manuscript of his book was placed in my hands by
his publishers in 1892 to be prepared for the press. The author was
dead and no changes could be made in his work. It seemed to me at
the time that Praeger had written incautiously of this whole matter,
and that at any rate he might fairly have represented Wagner as
desirous in after years to bury the memories of an unwise exhibition
of his republican tendencies. But of Praeger's honesty I never had a
doubt, nor had I any reason to suppose that he was not well informed
(through his intimate friendship with Roeckel) of Wagner's actions
in the May days of 1849. Pohl, Glasenapp, and Tappert had said but
little in regard to the matter, and, as I was not editing, but merely
supervising the printing of the book, it would not have been open to
me to write so much as a foot-note of warning to the reader to take
Praeger's statements with a grain of salt, even if I had been fully
informed of the real facts in the case.
But Wagner was not without a champion. Mr. W. Ashton Ellis, editor of
"The Meister," and translator of the prose works, published in 1892 a
complete answer to Praeger under the title of "1849: a Vindication."
In this he showed that Praeger had formed a theory as to Wagner's
part in the revolution and had wrested the facts to make them appear
as evidence. He also proved that some of the acts attributed to
Wagner were those of a young journeyman baker of the same name. The
real facts of the case, as I have sifted them from the conflicting
testimony, appear to be these:
Wagner's mind was filled with a conviction that freedom and the
honesty of art went hand in hand. His reformatory ideas embraced not
only the stage, but its relations to governmental control, through
which its artistic character must be touched and guided. The stage
could never be brought to represent the spirit of the people till
the government was. All around him he saw the relics of feudalism,
and the innate hostility of these to that freedom of art and public
to which he looked forward made him a republican at heart. His paper
read before the Fatherland Union was, as we have seen, a plea for
free government and representation by the people, but it was filled
with a spirit of loyalty to the reigning king.
When the revolutionary movement took shape Wagner, as Mr. Ellis
notes, did not hesitate between the dictates of his conscience
and the preservation of court favour. He became, as he afterward
confessed in a letter to Liszt, openly active in the movement. But
the stories of his firing a musket from the barricades and setting
fire to public buildings are pure fabrications. Praeger's narrative
of his revolutionary activity is misleading, and Mr. Ellis's pamphlet
has quite demolished it. Wagner assisted in getting men and stores
into Dresden, and he probably carried a musket while engaged in this
work. At the Town Hall he publicly embraced one of the revolutionary
leaders after the latter had made a speech. On May 1, 1849, the king
dissolved the Saxon diet, and the people went to arms. The insurgents
were victorious in the beginning, but Prussian troops arrived 36
hours later, and the revolutionaries were put to flight. Wagner
escaped from Dresden and hurried to Weimar, where he took refuge
under the wing of Liszt, then actively preparing "Tannhäuser" for
performance.
Mr. Praeger says: "Future biographers can no longer ignobly treat
the patriotism of Wagner by striving to whitewash or gloss over the
part he played during these sad days." It is the hope of the present
biographer that he will not be accused of any attempt to conceal
the truth in regard to this matter, especially as he has not been
able to discover in it anything discreditable to Wagner. His action
was injudicious, it was impulsive, it was shortsighted; but it was
honest. If in after years Wagner saw that the regeneration of the
theatre might be accomplished without the overthrow of extant forms
of government, and if at the same time he wished ardently to return
to his native land, it was not at all surprising that he expressed
sorrow for his actions. It was quite natural indeed that in April,
1856, he wrote to Liszt:
"In regard to that riot and its sequels, I am willing
to confess that I now consider myself to have been in
the wrong at that time, and carried away by my passions,
although I am conscious of not having committed any crime
that would properly come before the courts, so that it
would be difficult for me to confess to any such."
Disheartened as Wagner was at the inartistic conditions surrounding
the theatre at Dresden, it was not astonishing that he rejoiced in
the excuse for flight, and that he hastened to Weimar with a jubilant
spirit. That Liszt was glad to receive him thus unexpectedly goes
without saying. It was this meeting which perfected the understanding
between these two remarkable men, and which cemented indissolubly
the friendship hitherto dependent on their letters for its support.
They came to know one another intimately, and from that time onward
Liszt was the main prop of Wagner. As Mr. Finck well summarises it in
his life of Wagner: "A few letters had passed between the two, and
they had met several times, but it was not until this occasion that
their hearts were really opened towards each other, and the beginning
was made of a friendship unequalled in cordiality and importance in
the history of art, and without the existence of which the world
would in all probability have never seen the better half of Wagner's
music dramas. It was Liszt who helped him with funds when he would
otherwise have been compelled to stop composing and earn his bread
like the commonest day labourer; Liszt who sustained him with his
approval when all the critical world was against him; Liszt who
brought out his operas when all other conductors ignored them; Liszt
who wrote letters, private and journalistic, about his friend's works
and aims, besides three long and enthusiastic essays on 'Tannhäuser,'
'Lohengrin,' and the 'Dutchman,' which were printed in German and
French, and with the Weimar performances of these operas, gave the
first impulse to 'the Wagner movement.'"
Of the greatest importance to Wagner was Liszt's understanding of his
artistic aims. Wagner said that when he saw Liszt conduct a rehearsal
of "Tannhäuser," he recognised a second self in the achievement.
Discouraged as he had been on leaving Dresden, his spirits now rose
again, and he would undoubtedly have settled down in Weimar to pursue
his artistic labours under the protection of Liszt, had not news come
that he was wanted by the police. A warrant was issued for him as a
politically dangerous person and his description was published. As
soon as this news was received, Wagner, acting on Liszt's advice,
fled.
So hasty was his departure that, as we learn from a letter of Liszt
to Carl Reinecke, he left Weimar on the very day of a performance of
"Tannhäuser," which he, therefore, did not witness. This was in the
latter part of May. He went directly to Zurich, where he remained a
few days and obtained a passport for France. He wrote from Zurich to
a Weimar friend, O.L.B. Wolff, that Liszt would soon receive a bundle
of scores from Minna, his wife.
"The score of my 'Lohengrin,'" he wrote, "I beg him to
examine leisurely. It is my latest, ripest work. No artist
has seen it yet, and of none have I therefore been able to
ascertain what impression it may produce. Now I am anxious
to hear what Liszt has to say about it."
From this same letter we learn that Minna had been left in the city
from which Wagner had fled. He says:
"That wonderful man must also look after my poor wife. I
am particularly anxious to get her out of Saxony, and
especially out of that d----d Dresden."
It is necessary only to say that while Liszt at first had doubts
of the public success of "Lohengrin," owing to what he called its
"superideal character," he immediately recognised its artistic
greatness, and was the first to bring it before the public.
In Zurich Wagner contemplated the stern necessity of doing something
toward the support of himself and wife, and he saw in the production
of an opera in Paris his only hope. Accordingly he set out for the
French capital. Liszt had already written to Belloni, an influential
person in the musical circles of Paris:
"In the first place, we want to create a success for a
grand, heroic, enchanting musical work, the score of which
was completed a year ago. Perhaps this could be done in
London. Chorley, for instance, might be very helpful to
him in this undertaking. If Wagner next winter could go to
Paris backed up by this success, the doors of the Opéra
would stand open to him, no matter with what he might
knock."
Wagner had a consultation with Belloni in Paris, and was convinced
that nothing could be done with his extant works. He decided that he
must spend a year and a half in the preparation of a new work, and
for that purpose he must live in seclusion with his wife. He tells
Liszt in a long letter that he has decided on Zurich, and begs Liszt
to make arrangements for an income for him from his works so that he
can live to write more. He says that he is fit for nothing but to
write operas; he must create some genuine art work or perish. He has
arranged to send from Zurich to Belloni a sketch of a work for Paris,
and Belloni is to get a French version made. Meanwhile Wagner will be
working on the "Death of Siegfried." And so, after this brief and
futile visit to Paris in June, 1849, we find him back at Zurich early
in July. And now it became his fixed idea to get his wife out of
Dresden and settled down in some sort of a home in Zurich. But he had
no means. Once more, then, he appealed to the unfailing friend Liszt.
He tells the great pianist that he has no further resources, and says:
"You, therefore, I implore by all that is dear to you to
raise and collect as much as you possibly can, and send it,
not to me, but to my wife, so that she may have enough to
get away and join me with the assurance of being able to
live with me free from care for some time at least. Dearest
friend, you care for my welfare, my soul, my art. Once
more restore to me my art! I do not cling to a home, but I
cling to this poor, good, faithful woman, to whom as yet I
have caused nothing but grief, who is of a careful, serious
disposition, without enthusiasm, and who feels herself
chained forever to such a reckless devil as myself."
These words go far toward revealing the true nature of the relations
of Wagner and Minna. They also do credit to his justice, but at the
same time show how completely unsettled he was at this period. Liszt
hastened to reply in a letter beginning: "In answer to your letter I
have remitted one hundred thalers to your wife at Dresden. This sum
has been handed to me by an admirer of 'Tannhäuser,' whom you do not
know and who has especially asked me not to name him to you."[20]
[Footnote 20: In his residence at Zurich, Wagner was also pecuniarily
aided by Wilhelm Baumgartner, a music teacher, Jacob Sulzer, a local
office holder, Mme. Laussot, and Frau Julie Ritter, whose son Carl
was associated with Wagner's musical activities in the Swiss city.
Frau Ritter placed a permanent fund to Wagner's credit. Others who
aided him will be incidentally mentioned.]
In due time Minna arrived in Zurich only to begin to combat her
husband's artistic inclinations. He was eager to write "The Death
of Siegfried." She urged him to abandon his unprofitable ideals,
and to write for Paris the sort of opera that Paris would like. For
Minna was ashamed of living on the charity of friends, and for that
we cannot blame her. Nor can we even yet bring ourselves quite into
agreement with Wagner in the belief that the world ought to take
care of him while he was creating his immortal works. Yet there was
something large and genial in the conception. The man felt the power
that was in him, and he refused to stifle it in order that he might
discharge the simple duties of a plain citizen and support himself
and his family at the sacrifice of his future, and the future of his
art.
It was to this struggle between himself and his own desires on the
one hand and his wife and Liszt on the other that his inactivity in
musical production for a long period was due. His whole mind was in a
state of unrest. Yet the period of his exile proved in the end to be
the most fruitful of his life, and in Zurich the name of Wagner was
made immortal.
CHAPTER VIII
PREACHING WHAT HE PRACTISED
"Doch ich bin so allein."--SIEGFRIED
The first years of Wagner's residence at Zurich were occupied with
the writing of works designed to propagate the reformatory ideas
which he aimed at introducing into the composition and performance
of opera. It has been noted that after the first performances of
"Tannhäuser" he felt that the public would have to be educated up
to his conception of art, and he now set to work to produce the
necessary doctrinary essays. Through the kindness of Otto Wesendonck,
a music-lover and admirer of his work, he was able to rent at a low
price a pretty châlet overlooking the lake, and there he lived and
laboured in retirement. He was too profoundly discouraged at first
to undertake composition, and for five years he brought forth no
music. The problem of how to live stared him in the face in all its
frightful nakedness. He wrote to Liszt in the fall of 1849:
"How and whence shall I get enough to live? Is my finished
work 'Lohengrin' worth nothing? Is the opera which I am
longing to complete worth nothing? It is true that to the
present generation and to publicity as it is these must
appear as a useless luxury. But how about the few who love
these works? Should not they be allowed to offer to the
poor suffering creator--not a remuneration, but the bare
possibility of continuing to create?... Tell me; advise me!
Hitherto my wife and I have kept ourselves alive by the
help of a friend here. By the end of this month of October
our last florins will be gone, and a wide, beautiful world
lies before me, in which I have nothing to eat, nothing to
warm myself with. Think of what you can do for me, dear,
princely friend. Let some one buy my 'Lohengrin,' skin and
bones; let some one commission my 'Siegfried.'"
And so he went on, begging Liszt to save him and his wife from
absolute want. He had not even an overcoat. The score of "Lohengrin"
was eventually sold to Breitkopf and Härtel for a few hundred
thalers, but the means of subsistence were provided for Wagner by
Liszt and other friends. Yet even in this lamentable state of affairs
he could not drive himself to compose. He could only write his
literary works. In these he embodied what has come to be known as the
Wagnerian theory of the music drama, the theory which finds its only
full and satisfying illustration in the works of this master, though
its elementary principals were recognised and obeyed by earlier
writers. He says himself in "The Music of the Future," "My mental
state resembled a struggle. I tried to express theoretically that
which under the incongruity of my artistic aims as contrasted with
the tendencies of public art, especially of the opera, I could not
properly put forward by means of direct artistic production."
The principal works written by him in this state of mind were "Art
and Revolution," 1849, "The Art-work of the Future," "Art and
Climate," "Judaism in Music," 1850, "Recollections of Spontini,"
1851, "On the Performance of 'Tannhäuser,'" and "Opera and Drama,"
1852. Of these the last is the most important to the student of
Wagner's theories, but at the time of publication it was the article
on "Judaism in Music" which raised the largest disturbance. The
criticisms of Meyerbeer contained in it have been used by Wagner's
enemies down to the present day as evidence that he was an ungrateful
man. The fact that these censures were wholly for Meyerbeer, the
composer, should, however, be borne in mind; for in Wagner the artist
always governed the man, and the timely aid given to him by Meyerbeer
in the dark days in Paris was bound to take a place in his estimation
second to the popular composer's palpable seeking after the applause
of the inartistic masses.
The article on "Judaism in Music" was printed in Brendel's _Neue
Zeitschrift für Musik_ for Sept. 3 and 6, 1850. Eleven masters at
the Leipsic conservatory, where Brendel lectured on the history of
music, wrote to him asking him to resign or reveal the name of the
author. He refused to do either, thereby leaving the eleven irate
masters in a ludicrous position. But the hostility of the press to
Wagner was aroused by the article, for his authorship was speedily
suspected. In 1869 he issued a revised and enlarged edition of this
article and then a host of replies appeared. None of them, however,
dealt candidly with the artistic questions. Most of them rested with
accusing Wagner of assailing rival composers because they were Jews.
The chief points made in Wagner's article were that the Jews were not
an artistic people, that they could not be so because they were not
sincere, because they had no nation, no home, no language, but lived
to please the people of the country in which they chanced to be and
whose language they spoke. Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer were quoted as
examples.
In "Opera and Drama" Wagner set forth the principles which, according
to him, should govern the creation of art work for the stage. These
principles we shall have opportunity to examine in detail when we
come to the study of the Wagnerian theories. Let it suffice here to
quote Muncker's admirable summary of the essay:
"Systematically he examined in what manner all the arts, plastic,
mimic, phonetic and oral, had in the antique tragedy combined to
the highest mutual purposes, and how thereafter, released from this
close and lifelike union, the single arts had in their individual
development either stagnated or degenerated. He refused to
acknowledge the objections that only the mild atmosphere of Greece
had been able to ripen the artistic power of intuition and formation,
out of which the Attic tragedy had grown. Only the historical man,
the man independent of nature, has awakened art to life; and only he,
noble and strong, who through the highest power of love has attained
true liberty, can newly create the vanished dramatic work of art,
just as he alone, his life and death, is its subject; for this reason
there can be only one principal consideration for art, and that
is the true nature of the human race. Strictly Wagner weighed the
unsuccessful attempts of the last century externally to combine the
sister arts (without any of them giving up their egotistic purposes)
in the oratorio and particularly in the opera, the trysting place of
their most selfish endeavours. He contrasted with these inorganic
species the loving union of the single arts in the work of art of
the future, in the true drama, that, like the Attic tragedy, employed
the same artistic means, only on a greater scale and with a higher
technical perfection, in the same manner and for the same purposes.
Like the Attic tragedy, it is to be represented by the people, or
rather the totality of different artists is to represent it for the
people; just, however, as the single arts can here for the first
time freely and naturally unfold their innermost nature, so the
individuality of the single artist can, just in that community with
the whole, significantly develop itself."
In this essay he ruthlessly exposed the musical shallowness of
Rossini and Meyerbeer. He saw at the time that his criticism of the
latter would expose him to the charge of ingratitude, but the artist
in him prevailed, and he spoke his mind freely. It should be added
that he praised certain passages in Meyerbeer's works, especially the
great duet in the fourth act of "Les Huguenots."
In the early years of his exile he undertook once more the task of
writing an opera for Paris. He went so far as to make a prose sketch
of a libretto entitled "Wieland the Smith." In after years he offered
the book to Liszt, saying that it reminded him of a period of pain.
The labour of writing this work was distasteful to him, and he began
it only at the earnest solicitation of his wife and Liszt. The
sketch, which is an elaborated scenario, is included in Mr. Ellis's
translation of the prose works.
The only musical work which Wagner did in the early years at
Zurich was the conducting of some orchestral concerts, and the
superintending of performances at the city theatre. It was at this
time that Wagner's acquaintance with the afterward famous pianist
and conductor, Hans von Bülow, began. Von Bülow had abandoned the
career planned for him by his father and gone to Zurich literally to
throw himself at the feet of Wagner. The master secured him the post
of assistant conductor at the opera, where he supported his protégé
against the intriguing of the singers and the orchestra. After six
months of experience there Von Bülow was sent with a letter of
introduction from Wagner to Liszt, whose pupil he became, and whose
daughter Cosima he married. Little did either he or Wagner think at
the time that he would be conductor of Wagner's greatest works, and
that his wife would become the second spouse of the famous composer.
The year 1850 was made a memorable one in Wagner's life by the first
performance of "Lohengrin," which had slept in silence for three
years. In the "Communication to My Friends" Wagner wrote of the
movement toward the production thus:
"At the end of my latest stay in Paris, as I lay ill and
wretched, gazing brooding into space, my eye fell on the
score of my already almost quite forgotten 'Lohengrin.'
It filled me with a sudden grief to think that these
notes should never ring from off the death-wan paper. Two
words I wrote to Liszt. His answer was none other than an
announcement of preparations the most sumptuous--for the
modest means of Weimar--for 'Lohengrin's' production."
Even at this distance the words of that letter of April 21, 1850, are
pathetic:
"DEAR FRIEND: I have just been looking through the
score of my 'Lohengrin.' I very seldom read my own works.
An immense desire has sprung up in me to have this work
performed. I address this wish to your heart: Perform my
'Lohengrin'! You are the only one to whom I could address
this prayer; to none but you should I entrust the creation
of this opera; to you I give it with perfect and joyous
confidence."
How faithfully Liszt fulfilled the trust imposed upon him may be seen
from one of his letters to Wagner in the course of the preparations
for the opera's production.
"Your 'Lohengrin' will be given under exceptional
conditions, which are most favourable to its success. The
management for this occasion spends about 2,000 thalers, a
thing that has not been done in Weimar within the memory
of man. The press will not be forgotten, and suitable and
seriously conceived articles will appear successively
in several papers. All the personnel will be put on its
mettle. The number of violins will be slightly increased
(from 16 to 18) and a bass clarinet has been purchased.
Nothing essential will be wanting in the musical material
or design. I undertake all the rehearsals with pianoforte,
chorus, strings and orchestra. Genast will follow your
indications for the mise-en-scène with zeal and energy. It
is understood that we shall not cut a note, not an iota,
of your work, and that we shall give it in its absolute
beauty, as far as is in our power."
The date chosen for the production was Aug. 28, the birthday of
Goethe, when a large number of visitors would be in Weimar to attend
the unveiling of a monument to Herder. Wagner was anxious to be
present at the performance, but the risk of arrest, if he set foot
on German soil, prevented him from going. Liszt was profoundly
moved by the work, but he was not satisfied with the performance
nor the reception by the public. The singers did not know how to
deliver Wagner's music, and the general public found this, the most
popular of all Wagner's creations, quite beyond its comprehension.
The performance lasted five hours, owing to the singers' treating
all the arioso passages as recitatives, and Wagner accordingly
wrote to Liszt explaining how this music should be sung. The whole
series of letters on the manner of performing "Lohengrin" is full of
instruction as to Wagner's dramatic ideas and the proper method of
singing his music. Liszt and Genast, the stage manager, however, saw
no way out of the difficulty except by making cuts, and these were
accordingly made, but under protest from the composer, who authorised
only one in the latter part of Lohengrin's narrative.
The production of the most popular of all operas now before the
public was accomplished in the absence of its composer. Indeed, it
was not until May 15, 1861, in Vienna, that poor Wagner heard this
beautiful and touching work. While it was in course of preparation
at Weimar he was labouring at Zurich, as we have seen, and was
fighting ill-health, too. His low spirits brought on an attack of
dyspepsia, and with this came another lifelong enemy, erysipelas. The
cheerfulness and devotion of the unhappy Minna helped him through
this trying period, and he further solaced himself by long walks into
the forest, accompanied by his dog Peps. He declaimed aloud against
the density of the public and the machine-made music of some of
his contemporaries, and when Peps answered his master's voice with
a lively bark, Wagner would pat his head and say, "Thou hast more
sense, Peps, than some of these contrapuntists." Liszt continued
to push the fortunes of "Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin" at Weimar,
and although it was three years before the latter was performed
elsewhere, it became the fashion to visit Weimar to hear it.
Wagner closed the literary work of this period by writing the
"Communication to My Friends," which, with the autobiography, forms
the most satisfactory material for the study of his early career.
This communication is rather a story of his artistic development
than of the incidents of his life, but it is a fascinating piece of
self-examination, and throws more light than anything else upon the
motives which led to the composition of the most famous of Wagner's
dramas.
It was at this time that he entered upon the task of writing his
long-cherished "Death of Siegfried," which he had shaped into a drama
in three acts and a prologue in the autumn of 1848. It was in June,
1849, that he wrote to Liszt that he would have the drama completed
in half a year. In the spring of 1851 Liszt learned that there was to
be a prefatory drama called "Young Siegfried," and on June 29 Wagner
wrote to him that the poem was finished. On Nov. 20 of the same year
Wagner wrote a long letter, in which he set forth the development of
the entire plan. He had found that his story was too long and complex
to tell in two dramas, and that he would have to make three, with a
prologue.
Thus he had finally developed the plan of what was to be his most
imposing, if not his greatest, work, a work rivalling in the
immensity of its conception and its dramatic seriousness the ancient
trilogies of the Greeks. It was altogether fitting that this _magnum
opus_ should have acquired its full and definite shape in his mind at
a time when his invention was refreshed by abstinence from musical
production, and when the appetite for composition was springing up
anew. Early in 1853 the poem in its new form was completed, and
on Feb. 11 he sent a copy to Liszt. The latter wrote: "You are
truly a wonderful man, and your 'Nibelung' poem is surely the most
incredible thing which you have ever done." In a letter written in
1871, to Arrigo Boïto, the famous Italian composer and librettist,
he said: "During a sleepless night at an inn at Spezzia the music to
'Das Rheingold' occurred to me. Straightway I turned homeward and
set to work." He finished the full score of "Das Rheingold" in May,
1854, and in the following month he began that of "Die Walküre." The
score of this work was finished in 1856, and part of "Siegfried" was
written in the next year.
The sleepless night at the Spezzia inn occurred in the course of a
journey into Italy made in 1853. It was a journey made in the vain
hope of cheering the drooping spirits of Wagner, who was always
fond of travel. His life in Zurich had its pleasant side. He had
made friends, some of whom, notably Wille, a former journalist of
Hamburg, and his wife, a clever novelist, understood and adored
him. But he suffered from dyspepsia, insomnia, and erysipelas, the
latter returning with wearing persistency; and he writhed under the
restraints of an exile which for artistic reasons he could not but
desire to terminate. In some of the cities of Germany his works were
performed without understanding and in a way to make him shiver with
anguish, yet he was helpless. On all sides he was critically assailed
for faults that were not his, and would instantly have disappeared if
his operas had been properly interpreted. In Berlin, where he might
have reaped at least a decent pecuniary profit from performances,
jealousy, intrigue, and Philistinism prevented his works from
reaching the stage.
And the demon poverty pursued him to the verge of madness. He
suffered from the agonising fear that at length he would be
forced to abandon all the splendid imaginations that were burning
within him and divert his whole life into the sordid channels of
bread-and-butter drudgery. He cried to Liszt and other friends to
save him. For this he has been called a beggar; but if we obey
Charles Reade's injunction, "Put yourself in his place," the thing
wears a different aspect. Wagner was profoundly convinced of the
greatness that was within him, and it maddened him to think that he
might have to stifle it. He wrote to Liszt: "I am in a miserable
condition, and have great difficulty in persuading myself that it
must go on like this, and that it would not really be more moral to
put an end to this disgraceful kind of life."
In these circumstances, it was perhaps the best thing that could
have happened to him that in that sleepless night at Spezzia he was
haunted by the thought that the music of "Rheingold" must be written,
and went home to chain himself again to the pathetic task of heaping
one silent score upon another. The time came when he did not believe
that he would live to finish the mighty tetralogy which is now the
glory of the lyric stage. But even in the face of despair he could
not repress the impulses within him, and back to Zurich he went, and
the wonderful measures of the prologue of the "Nibelung" drama sprang
into being. Even as he had out of despair forged the links of his
first success, "Rienzi," so again the fires of anguish lit the forges
of the "Schwarzalben" and the "Wonniges Kind."
CHAPTER IX
A STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
"This red republican of music is to preside over the Old
Philharmonic of London, the most classical, orthodox, and
exclusive society on this globe."--Letter of Ferdinand
Praeger to the New York _Musical Gazette_.
The musical activities of this period were about to be interrupted
by a voyage so strange that we can hardly conceive it as possible.
That Richard Wagner, the reformer, should go to England to conduct
the then most stagnant musical organisation in the world, the London
Philharmonic, before the most conservative musical public on earth,
seems little short of humorous. Yet this thing actually happened. And
the musicians of the London orchestra, to their credit, recognised
the greatness of their new conductor and played as they had never
played before. But this is anticipating. In Zurich he was already
known as a conductor before he had set foot on Swiss soil. So it is
natural that the musical authorities of the place should have sought
his services as soon as he was settled. We have already noted that
he conducted some concerts and supervised the operatic performances
at the theatre where Von Bülow and Carl Ritter conducted. But the
good Swiss were not satisfied with this. They desired the excitement
of the production of one of Wagner's works under his own direction.
Accordingly, in May, 1852, "The Flying Dutchman" was given, but
because the singers treated the work as an old-fashioned opera, it
did not make a deep impression. Nevertheless, in February, 1855,
"Tannhäuser" was produced in Zurich. It was at this period, too,
that Wagner took up the old "Faust" overture and revised it, making
changes which drew expressions of delight from Liszt.
At this time the warfare of two musical societies in London was to
have an unexpected influence on the movements of Wagner. The London
Philharmonic Society had suffered a split, caused by dissensions
which need not be discussed here, and a New Philharmonic had been
formed. The insurgent forces proceeded to formulate a plan of
campaign which threatened disaster to the older army. As a master
stroke, they secured as conductor no less a personage than Hector
Berlioz, the famous French composer. It now became necessary for the
older body to deal a counterblow. But where to turn for a conductor
whose name would excite public interest in such a manner as that
of Berlioz they knew not. In the midst of their confusion arose
Ferdinand Praeger, the London friend and admirer of Wagner, of whom
he had first heard through August Roeckel. Praeger knew that there
would be opposition to Wagner, but he knew, too, that the name of the
composer of the music of the future would arouse public curiosity
and that audiences could be got for his concerts. And audiences were
what the staid and languishing Old Philharmonic most needed. On the
other hand, there was something to be done in London in the way of
correcting false impressions of Wagner's works. As Liszt wrote to him
on learning that he was to make the visit:
"The London Philharmonic comes in very aptly, and I am
delighted. As lately as six months ago people used to
shake their heads, and some of them even hissed, at the
performance of the 'Tannhäuser' overture, conducted by
Costa. Klindworth and Remeny were almost the only ones who
had the courage to applaud and to beard the Philistines who
had made their nests of old in the Philharmonic. Well, it
will now assume a different tone, and you will revivify old
England with the Old Philharmonic."
Liszt as usual wrote in an encouraging strain, but it is likely that
he really believed that Wagner would profit by some personal contact
with the public. For the history of this incident we must turn to
the pages of Praeger, who acted as Wagner's private agent in making
the engagement, and who first suggested it to Prosper Sainton, the
eminent violinist and a director of the Philharmonic. It was an
ill-advised visit, but it was made by Wagner chiefly because he hoped
through this introduction to the English public to bring out his
operas in London. On Jan. 21, 1855, he wrote to Fischer in Dresden:
"At the end of February I go for two months to London, to
conduct the concerts of the Philharmonic Society, for which
they expressly sent one of their directors here to persuade
me. As a rule, that kind of thing does not suit me; and
as I am not to get much pay for it, I would scarcely have
consented, had I not therein seen a chance of next year
bringing together in London--under the protection of the
Court--a first-rate German opera company, with which I
could give my operas, and at last my 'Lohengrin.'"
Mr. Anderson, conductor of the Queen's private band, and an acting
director of the Philharmonic, was sent to Zurich to negotiate with
Wagner. Some correspondence had already taken place, and the composer
had demanded conditions which were waived after conversation with
Mr. Anderson. The question of terms was speedily disposed of, the
irresponsible Wagner saying that he was too busy to think about them.
After Mr. Anderson had returned to London Wagner wrote to Praeger and
suggested giving a concert of his own works, but this alarmed the
conservative Philharmonic people, and a compromise was effected by
the promise of the performance of selections. It was arranged that
the composer should stay at Praeger's house, 31 Milton Street, till a
quiet and secluded lodging, where he could go on with the scoring of
the trilogy, could be found for him. He arrived in London on Sunday,
March 5, 1855. The lodging was found at 22 Portland Terrace, Regent's
Park. Much of the work of scoring the "Nibelung" dramas was done at
this place.
The first meeting between Wagner and Mr. Anderson in London was not
encouraging. The Philharmonic director suggested the performance of a
prize symphony by Lachner, whereupon Wagner rose excitedly from his
chair and exclaimed: "Have I, therefore, left my quiet seclusion in
Switzerland to cross the sea to conduct a prize symphony by Lachner?
No, never! If that be a condition of the bargain I at once reject it,
and will return."[21]
[Footnote 21: Praeger, "Wagner as I Knew Him," p. 231.]
The matter was smoothed over, but it was only one of several similar
outbreaks on the part of the impatient artist. Fortunately, as
Praeger notes, Wagner had a keen sense of humour, and when there was
a ludicrous aspect in the scenes of misunderstanding it sufficed to
put him in a pleasant mood once more.
Wagner made only one visit of ceremony in London, and that was a
call on Sir Michael Costa. He flatly refused to call on the musical
critics of the London papers, and Praeger says that this was to his
injury. This state of affairs is not easy to understand in the United
States, where visits to critics are looked upon with suspicion, and
are discouraged by the critics themselves. Praeger records that Mr.
Davison, the editor of _The Musical World_, then an influential
paper, declared that as long as he held the sceptre of musical
criticism, Wagner should not acquire any hold in London. In these
circumstances it is not at all astonishing that the new conductor
received not a little censure. It is only right to mention, however,
that some of the London papers viewed his work without prejudice and
praised what appeared to them to be its excellences. That Wagner was
an uncommonly fine conductor cannot be doubted, and the musicians of
the Philharmonic, as soon as they had recovered from the surprise
caused by Wagner's spirited and truthful readings of the works under
rehearsal and his emphatic insistence on the correct treatment of
every passage, together with vigour of style, applauded him and
obeyed him with delight.
The first concert took place on March 12. The programme, like that
of all the other concerts, was absurdly long, and this was one of
the things against which Wagner vainly fought. The list comprised a
symphony by Haydn, an operatic trio, a Spohr violin concerto, the
Weber aria, "Ocean, thou mighty monster," Mendelssohn's "Fingal's
Cave," overture, Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony, a duet by Marschner,
and the overture to "Die Zauberflöte." Wagner amazed the Londoners
by giving readings of the orchestral works instead of permitting the
orchestra to glide through them in the conventional slovenly way.
He even restored the true tempi in the "Eroica," in which London
conductors had been playing the first movement slowly and the funeral
march quickly. He astonished the great body of Mendelssohnians, which
infested London then as it has ever since, by reading the overture
with beautiful colour and intelligence. Several of the papers abused
him roundly, but _The Morning Post_ discovered in him the ideal
conductor.
At the second concert on March 26, Wagner conducted the overture to
"Der Freischütz," Beethoven's ninth symphony, and the prelude to
"Lohengrin." The Weber overture had to be repeated, which goes to
show that the audience was not insensible to Wagner's enthusiastic
sympathy with the music of his great predecessor. The dates of the
other concerts conducted by Wagner were April 16 and 30, May 14 and
28, and June 11 and 25. In addition to the Beethoven symphonies
already mentioned he directed the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and
eighth; also the "Leonora" overture, No. 3, and the violin concerto,
Mozart's symphonies in B flat and C, Mendelssohn's Scotch and Italian
symphonies, Spohr's C minor symphony, Cipriani Potter's symphony
in G minor, and some minor works. The overture to "Tannhäuser" was
produced at the fifth concert, and was received with acclamations
by the audience and derision by the critics. It was repeated at the
seventh concert by royal command. The Queen and the Prince Consort
attended this concert and had Wagner before them in the salon. There
the Prince Consort suggested the desirability of translating some of
Wagner's operas into Italian that they might be presented in London,
and the Queen said, "I am most happy to make your acquaintance. Your
composition has charmed me."
Wagner left London the day after his last concert, and he was
heartily glad to shake the dust of the British capital off his feet.
Musical criticism in London was stilted, timorous, afraid of new
thoughts, unable to grasp any departure from the conventionalities
with which it was acquainted, and desperately opposed to musical
progress along lines not laid down by Mendelssohn and Handel. It was
to be expected that the commentors would oppose the entire Wagner
system, but the vituperative strain in the criticisms suggests the
probability that the writers felt and writhed under the power of the
man. It must be understood that similar criticism was written in
Germany, and that the "music of the future," as it was derisively
called, was not peacefully permitted to become the music of the
day. The younger generation of opera-goers cannot realise the state
of mind into which their forerunners were thrown when they were
asked to accept the opera as a play, and not as a mere string of
pretty vocal pieces, loosely connected by the pretence of a plot. In
London, where the opera was the amusement of fashionable society,
the music of Wagner was bound at first to meet with opposition. For
fashionable society always has been and still is opposed to all that
is dignified, serious, or uplifting in life or art.
Aside from some scoring of the Nibelung dramas, Wagner did little
productive work in the uncongenial atmosphere of London. Praeger
introduced to him Karl Klindworth, who was engaged to make piano
scores of the first dramas of the trilogy. This was, perhaps, the
most serious musical achievement of the London visit. It should be
said, however, that the friends whom Wagner found in London were the
nucleus of a substantial support for him in that capital, and when
the movement to build the Bayreuth Theatre took shape, the English
Wagnerites were among the sturdiest upholders of the plan.
Wagner went home to Zurich by way of Paris, and soon after his
arrival took his wife for a short visit to Seelisberg, near the Alps.
Just before starting his dog Peps died, and the letter in which he
communicates this fact to Praeger is so full of warm feeling that it
is a revelation of the richness of the heart of this singular and
erratic being. He said in part:
"The day of our departure for Seelisberg was already fixed,
where, as I wrote to you, I was going with my wife, my dog
and bird.[22] Suddenly dangerous symptoms showed themselves
in Peps, in consequence of which we put off our journey
for two days so as to nurse the poor dying dog. Up to the
last moment Peps showed me a love so touching as to be
almost heartrending; kept his eyes fixed on me and though
I chanced to move but a few steps from him, continued to
follow me with his eyes. He died in my arms on the night
of the ninth or tenth of this month, passing away without
a sound, quietly and peacefully. On the morrow, midday,
we buried him in the garden beside the house. I cried
incessantly, and since then have felt bitter pain and
sorrow for the dear friend of the past thirteen years who
ever worked and walked with me. It has clearly taught me
that the world exists only in our hearts and conception."
[Footnote 22: A parrot which he had humorously taught to say
frequently: "Richard Wagner, you are a great man."]
At this period he received an offer to visit America. He mentions it
in one of his letters to Praeger and also in other correspondence,
especially that with Liszt. He had been told while in London that he
would receive this invitation, and he wrote to Liszt: "While here I
chew a beggar's crust, I hear from Boston that 'Wagner nights' are
given there. Everyone persuades me to come over; they are occupying
themselves with me with increasing interest; I might make much money
there by concert performances, etc. 'Make much money!' Heavens! I
don't want to make money if I can go the way shown me by my longing."
Indeed Wagner thought of money only as the means which would enable
him to carry out his plans for the production of the Nibelung dramas.
He was sorely tempted for a time by the possibility of earning enough
in the United States to do as he pleased, but he finally wrote to
Liszt, with more than usual penetration, that he was not the kind of
man to be successful with a money-making speculation, and that he had
decided not to be turned aside from his artistic purposes. And thus
ended the attempt to induce Wagner to visit a country, which in its
state at that time would have been quite as uncongenial to him as
London.
CHAPTER X
A SECOND END IN PARIS
"People treat this unfortunate Wagner as a scamp, an
impostor, an idiot."--HECTOR BERLIOZ
The composer now set to work right gladly on his "Walküre." He was
eager to finish it and begin the writing of what was still called
"Jung Siegfried." For a time he was impeded by the illness of his
wife and afterwards his own, but on October 3, 1855, he was able to
send to Liszt the first two acts of "Die Walküre." Liszt and his
beloved Countess Wittgenstein went over them together and both wrote
to Wagner of the marvellous effect which this music made upon them.
The last act was finished in April, 1856, and was also despatched to
Liszt. In October of this year Liszt, the Countess Wittgenstein, and
her daughter went to Zurich to visit Wagner. Of course the score of
"Die Walküre" occupied their attention, and Liszt, Wagner, and the
wife of Kapellmeister Heim gave a rehearsal of the work at the Hotel
Bauer before a number of personal friends. The rehearsal moved the
hearers greatly and, as Mr. Finck notes, they "would have been no
doubt greatly surprised had any one foretold that twenty years would
elapse before this drama would have its first adequate performance."
Together, too, Liszt and Wagner gave an orchestral concert at St.
Gall, on November 3, 1856, when Wagner conducted the "Eroica"
symphony and Liszt his "Orphée" and "Les Préludes." But perhaps the
greatest concert of the Zurich series was that given by Wagner in
May, 1853, when he assembled an orchestra of 72 men from different
parts of Germany, and gave selections from "Lohengrin" as they were
never given before and have probably not often been given since. Of
his visit Liszt wrote in several of his numerous letters. He said to
his friend Dr. Adolf Stern, of Dresden, where the name of Wagner was
certainly familiar:
"In spite of my illness I am spending glorious days with
Wagner, and am satiating myself with his 'Nibelungen'
world, of which our business musicians and chaff-threshing
critics have as yet no suspicion. It is to be hoped that
this tremendous work may succeed in being performed in the
year 1859, and I, on my side, will not neglect anything to
forward this performance as soon as possible--a performance
which certainly implies many difficulties and exertions.
Wagner requires for this purpose a special theatre built
for himself, and a not ordinary acting and orchestral
staff. It goes without saying that the work can only appear
before the world under his own conducting; and if, as is
much to be wished, this should take place in Germany, his
pardon must be obtained before everything."
These remarks of Liszt admirably sum up the situation in regard to
the "Nibelung" dramas. It was long after the date named when they
saw the light of publicity, and in the meantime many events of
significance were to take place. Not the least of these was to be the
temporary abandonment of the beloved Siegfried subject for another
work. This was the great "Tristan und Isolde," which many of Wagner's
admirers regard as his most inspired creation. This work, like the
"Flying Dutchman," the first in which the real Wagner was disclosed,
was the fruit of discouragement. Although, through the liberality of
Liszt and a few others, including the devoted Mathilde Wesendonck
(who is still--August, 1900--living in Berlin), the Wagners were able
to live in comfort, and Minna could afford to make Richard a present
of silk dressing-gowns and even silk trousers for house wear on his
return from London, the composer saw no way to convince the world
that he was not a mere bundle of eccentricities, but a master with
living embodiments of the true theory of the lyric drama. He was sore
at heart, weary of writing a majestic four-night drama which might
never see the light of the stage.
In 1854, while he was at work on "Die Walküre," the stories of
"Tristan" and "Parsifal" had come to his attention, and the plan of
the former work was sketched. In the winter of 1854-55 he wrote to
Liszt: "As I have never in life felt the real bliss of love, I must
erect a monument to the most beautiful of all my dreams, in which,
from beginning to end, that love shall be thoroughly satiated. I have
in my head 'Tristan und Isolde,' the simplest, but most full-blooded
musical conception. With the black flag which floats at the end
of it I shall cover myself to die." In the midst of a letter of
January, 1855, Liszt interrupted the discussion of other matters to
exclaim: "Stop! One thing I forgot to write to you: Your 'Tristan'
is a splendid idea. It may become a glorious work. Do not abandon
it." In the summer of 1856 Wagner wrote again: "I have again two
splendid subjects which I must execute. 'Tristan und Isolde' you
know, and after that the 'Victory,' the most sacred, the most perfect
salvation."
This "Victory"[23] was a Buddhistic subject, which Wagner had in mind
for a short time, but which he abandoned for the superior attractions
of "Parsifal." The leading theme, that of the renunciation of sexual
love by the hero, and the assent to it by the heroine, who had at
first passionately loved the unmoved hero, bore a close resemblance
to the personal purity of Parsifal and to the negation of the desire
to live, pictured in "Tristan" as the highest issue of real love.
These thoughts appealed to Wagner, whose mind at this time was deeply
under the influence of the philosophy of Schopenhauer. The Buddhistic
quietism which prevailed in Schopenhauer's philosophy seemed to
offer a solution to the life-problems confronting Wagner, and it was
natural that he should seek to embody the emotional essence of this
philosophy in his music dramas. In 1854 he sent a copy of the poem of
the Nibelung dramas to Schopenhauer as a mark of his esteem.
[Footnote 23: A sketch of this drama, under the title of "The
Victors," was found among Wagner's papers, dated May 16, 1856. The
hero, Ananda, an absolutely pure man, renounces sexual love. He is
passionately beloved by Prakriti, the beautiful daughter of King
Tchandala. The heroine, after vainly suffering the torments of
unrequited passion, renounces love, and is received into the order of
Buddha by Ananda. The idea of salvation through negation is found in
Wagner's "Tristan" and again in his "Parsifal."]
With all these thoughts active in his mind, the poem of Gottfried
von Strassburg on "Tristan und Isolde" offered him an opportunity
to embody his ideas in what he called the "simplest and most
full-blooded musical conception." He was eager to begin a work which
might possibly be produced, and all at once came the needed final
incentive. Dom Pedro, the Emperor of Brazil, had become interested in
the Wagner movement, and he sent an agent to the composer to ask him
if he would write an opera for the Italian company in Rio Janeiro. He
might name his own terms, provided he would promise to go to Brazil
and conduct the work. Wagner was at first touched by this munificent
offer, but he soon saw the hopelessness of trying to get Italian
opera singers to perform such a music drama as he was about to write.
But the Emperor's offer shaped his resolution, and in the latter
part of June, 1857, he wrote to Liszt: "I have determined finally
to give up my headstrong design of completing the 'Nibelungen.'
I have led my young Siegfried to a beautiful forest solitude and
there have left him under a linden tree, and taken leave of him with
heartfelt tears." And later, in the same letter, he told Liszt that
he had decided to write "Tristan und Isolde" and have it performed at
Strassburg with Niemann and Mme. Meyer.
On the last day of 1857 the first act of "Tristan" was finished.
Wagner now made a trip to Paris, on money borrowed from Liszt, in
the hope of being able to arrange a performance of "Rienzi," but
nothing came of the journey, except that a waiter in the house in
which he lived stole a large part of the advance royalties which
Breitkopf and Härtel had paid him on the completion of the first
act of the new work. He returned to Zurich and there Liszt sent to
him Carl Tausig, the pianist, who became one of his firmest friends
and supporters, and who subsequently made the piano arrangement of
"Die Meistersinger." Tausig, with all his genius, was only a boy
of seventeen at this time, and he could not satisfy the craving of
Wagner for sympathetic intellectual companionship. Unfortunately the
composer had in previous years sought this in the society of Mrs.
Wesendonck, before mentioned, and aroused the jealousy of poor Minna.
This jealousy led in 1856 to an open outbreak, for Wagner wrote to
Praeger, who was on his way back to London after a visit to the
composer, "The devil is loose. I shall leave Zurich at once and come
to you in Paris." But a little later he wrote that the matter had
been smoothed over. This, however, was one of the evidences that this
unhappily assorted union was slowly nearing its dissolution.
In June, 1858, Wagner sketched the second act of "Tristan und
Isolde," and then a desire for quiet and the luxurious atmosphere of
Italy took possession of him. Venice, not having any German alliance,
and there being consequently no danger of his arrest there, seemed to
be the desired place, and thither he went. He wrote the music of the
second act of the opera in Venice. Then came news that a projected
production of "Rienzi" in Munich had been abandoned, and that a
new Intendant, who had no artistic feeling, had gone to reign in
Weimar and make Liszt powerless. On the heels of these misfortunes
came an attempt of the Saxon government to drive him out of Venice.
Disheartened, embarrassed, and in debt, he went to Switzerland and
secluded himself on the shores of the Lake of Lucerne. There in the
summer of 1859 he completed, after four months' work, the third
act of "Tristan." The completed score was placed in the hands of
Breitkopf and Härtel, and then Wagner set to work to find an opening
for its production. Various difficulties arose. In some places where
he could have had singers he dared not set foot. In other places he
could get no competent performers.
Wagner's final departure from Zurich was undoubtedly due to the
action of Mr. Wesendonck. The nature of the attachment between Mrs.
Wesendonck and the composer could no longer be concealed. Wagner
had dedicated to her a sonata and the prelude to "Die Walküre." He
had set words of hers to music. She was his friend, his confidante.
According to M. Belart, in whose "Richard Wagner in Zurich,"
published in Leipsic in 1900, this whole matter was discussed, Wagner
left Zurich finally and suddenly on Aug. 17, 1859. Mr. Wesendonck,
when questioned about the matter in after years, said flatly that
he compelled Wagner to go. He went to Jacob Sulzer, previously
mentioned, borrowed some money, and started for Geneva. Minna Wagner
went to Dresden. This was the beginning of the end between them.
There is some discrepancy in the dates. There is no doubt that Wagner
went to Lucerne when he returned from Venice, but he must have gone
again to Zurich in the course of the summer. At any rate when he went
to Geneva, he was en route for Paris, and the Wesendonck entanglement
was at an end. In 1865 Wagner wrote to the injured husband:
"The incident that separated me from you about six years
ago should be evaded; it has upset me and my life enough
that you recognise me no longer, and that I esteem myself
less and less. All this suffering should have earned your
forgiveness, and it would have been beautiful, noble,
to have forgiven me; but it is useless to demand the
impossible, and I was in the wrong."
It was in September, 1859, that Wagner arrived in the French capital.
He settled in the Rue Newton, near the Arc de Triomphe, and there
he and Minna, who had rejoined him, received their friends every
Wednesday. Among the frequenters of their home were Émile Ollivier,
the French statesman and husband of Liszt's daughter Blandine;
Frédéric Villot, keeper of the imperial museums; Edmond Roche,
afterward the translator of "Tannhäuser"; Hector Berlioz, Carvalho,
director of the Théâtre Lyrique; Gustave Doré, Jules Ferry, Charles
Baudelaire, and A. de Gasparini, afterward one of the biographers of
Wagner.
Later, when the composer had taken a new residence at No. 3, Rue
d'Aumale, there was added to this number Cosima, a younger daughter
of Liszt, married two years previously to Hans von Bülow. By
arrangement with M. Carvalho, Wagner gave three concerts in the
Théâtre des Italiens on Jan. 25, and Feb. 1 and 8, 1860. The overture
to "Tannhäuser" and the prelude to "Tristan und Isolde" were given at
these entertainments. These concerts were pecuniarily disastrous, and
so also were two given in Brussels in March. Both press and public
were nonplussed by Wagner's music, and it remained for Hector Berlioz
to lead, by an article published in the _Gazette Musicale_, in the
subsequent general attack. Meanwhile Wagner was striving to induce
M. Carvalho to produce "Tannhäuser" at the Théâtre Lyrique, when
suddenly an unexpected power intervened.
According to Wagner's account given to Praeger, the Emperor Napoleon
III., in conversation with the Princess Metternich, asked her if she
had heard the latest opera of Prince Poniatowski. She answered that
she had, and that she did not care for such music. "But is it not
good?" asked the Emperor. "No," she responded. "But where is better
music to be got, then?" "Why, your Majesty, you have at the present
moment the greatest composer that ever lived in your capital." "Who
is he?" "Richard Wagner." "Then why do they not give his operas?"
"Because he is in earnest, and would require all kinds of concessions
and much money." "Very well; he shall have carte blanche." The
Emperor accordingly gave orders that "Tannhäuser" should be mounted
at the Grand Opéra. This stroke of fortune came like lightning out of
a clear sky, yet Wagner was not altogether blind to the difficulties
in the way of a satisfactory performance.
With the scenic preparations, which now began, he was delighted, for
the resources and skill of the leading opera house of Europe were at
his disposal. But the lack of singers trained in the theory of the
lyric drama hampered him. He stipulated that Albert Niemann should
be engaged for the title rôle, and that he should have time to learn
the French text. He asked for Faure to create the rôle of Wolfram
for the Parisians, but that new and rising star demanded too large a
salary, and Morelli was engaged for the part. With this singer, and
Mme. Tedesco, the Venus, Wagner had no end of trouble, as they were
Italians and utterly without comprehension of his ideas. Marie Saxe,
who had a lovely voice, was wooden in her acting, and Wagner had to
drive her to movement and life. Edmond Roche's translation of the
text proved to be too rough for use, and finally Charles Nuitter,
who translated Bellini's "Roméo et Juliette" for the Opéra, was
employed to finish the work.
In his anxiety to make himself and his purposes known to the
Parisians Wagner published four of his dramatic poems, prefaced by
a letter on music,[24] in which he endeavoured to set forth his
ideas. M. Adolphe Jullien says of this letter: "As Wagner had in
1860 already written 'Tristan und Isolde,' and as that poem figured
in his book, he instinctively carried the history of his life and of
the development of his ideas beyond the point of 'Tristan,' without
reflecting that he was thereby exceeding his aim, it being simply a
question of preparing people to hear 'Tannhäuser.'" There is no doubt
that this letter did much to confuse those Frenchmen who read it and
to deepen the spirit of opposition to Wagner's reformatory theories.
[Footnote 24: "The Music of the Future," W. Ashton Ellis's
translation of Wagner's Prose Works, Vol. III.]
But despite all these things the production of "Tannhäuser" might
have come to a successful issue but for one difficulty. The
gentlemen of the Jockey Club, who were among the most important of
the subscribers to the Opéra, and who, of course, did not at any
time desire to take the entertainment seriously, were in the habit
of arriving after their dinners in time for the ballet. In the
original version of "Tannhäuser" there was no attempt at a ballet,
and Alphonse Royer, the director of the Grand Opéra, besought Wagner
to introduce one in the hall of song, in the second act. This the
composer peremptorily refused to do, because it would interfere
with the dramatic integrity of the scene. He would consent only to
a rearrangement of the first scene, where, in the revels in the
Venusberg, a ballet with some significance might be introduced. He
therefore rewrote this scene, cutting out the stirring finale of
the overture and raising the curtain on the second appearance of
the bacchanalian music, which was now extended and elaborated so
that a pantomimic ballet might be danced. He also elaborated the
scene between Tannhäuser and Venus, after this ballet, according to
his later conceptions of music drama. The music of this new scene
was written in the style of "Tristan und Isolde," and, at every
performance of the Parisian version of "Tannhäuser," obstinately
refuses to amalgamate in style with the rest of the score. This whole
new scene was beyond the comprehension of the Parisian public of
1861, but might have been tolerated had it not been a direct affront
to the subscribers. A further element of danger lay in the fact that
the conductor was no other than Dietsch, the musician who had failed
with "The Phantom Ship" after Wagner had sold that text to Léon
Pillet.
The first performance took place on Wednesday, March 13, 1861.
After the first act the gentlemen of the Jockey Club went out and
bought all the hunting whistles they could get, and as soon as the
second act began they set up a din which gradually drowned out
the performance except in the forte passages. In the third act
pandemonium reigned, and the thrilling narrative of Tannhäuser
was unheard in the chorus of yells from the auditorium. Wagner's
friends applauded, and the Emperor on several occasions led the
favourable demonstrations, but Wagner was taught that in Paris the
coryphée ranked above high art. Before the second performance,
March 18, Royer succeeded in inducing Wagner to cut out some of the
most familiar parts of the work, a portion of the Venus scene, the
plaintive melody of the shepherd's pipe, the hunting horns and the
appearance of the dogs at the end of the first act, and other similar
things, all now known to every lover of Wagner's work. The gentlemen
of the Jockey Club again drowned the latter half of the opera with
their whistles, despite the plain protest of a large part of the
audience led by the Emperor. The third performance was given on a
Sunday in order that the subscribers might not be present. That the
general public was interested in the opera is proved by the receipts:
First performance, 7,491 francs; second, 8,415; third, 10,764.
Wagner now refused to allow the performances to continue, and as he
had borne much of their expense he left Paris burdened with debts.
But the shrieks of the Jockey Club whistles had resounded across the
Rhine and stirred up a Teutonic indignation, which was eventually
to be of much benefit to him. The French public was not unjust to
Wagner; he knew that and testified to it; but, as Charles Baudelaire
exclaimed in his pamphlet on the episode, "'Tannhäuser' was not even
heard."
CHAPTER XI
A MONARCH TO THE RESCUE
"My King, thou rarest shield of this my
living."--WAGNER
Wagner went from Paris to Vienna, where he hoped that a production
of "Tristan und Isolde" might be arranged. The manager of the opera
house, when he learned that the composer was about to visit the city,
prepared a special performance of "Lohengrin." This took place on May
15, 1861, and for the first time Wagner himself heard the work which
has touched the hearts of so many thousands of his fellow-creatures.
At the end of each act the audience forced him to acknowledge its
applause, and at the conclusion of the performance he was called
before the curtain three times and compelled to make a brief speech.
Many times afterward did he refer to the intoxication of that
wondrous May night. Think of it! Thirteen years after it was written,
and eleven years after its first performance, the writer of the most
popular opera in the world heard it for the first time. And even then
this master, who had already written "Rienzi," "The Flying Dutchman,"
"Tannhäuser," "Lohengrin," "Das Rheingold," "Die Walküre," part of
"Siegfried," and "Tristan und Isolde," was a wanderer on the face of
the earth, an outcast, and could not make a living from his music.
His early works were now beginning to find their way to the stage,
but the royalties paid in the German theatres were too small and
the performances too infrequent to bring him in a satisfactory
income. His first effort, therefore, was to get "Tristan und
Isolde" produced, and to his great joy the manager of the Vienna
opera accepted the score. Preparations were at once made for the
production. But, alas! that was still far away. The rehearsals began
in the fall, but the tenor, Ander, was taken sick, and the whole
winter was lost. When the work was resumed, it dragged along at a
snail's pace, and finally, after fifty-four rehearsals, the drama
was abandoned as impossible. Ander, the Tristan, told Dr. Hanslick
that as fast as he learned one act he forgot another. Wagner, on the
contrary, asserted in after years that all the singers went through
the whole work with him at the piano. However, it is not difficult
to conceive that the artists of that day may have found "Tristan und
Isolde" impracticable, seeing that the work never was really _sung_
until within the last half-dozen years, when the greatest vocal
artists of the world appeared in it.
While the Viennese were floundering, Wagner found it necessary to do
something toward earning money, and so he undertook a concert tour.
In Carlsruhe, Prague, and Weimar negotiations for the production of
Tristan fell through, but in the last-named place Wagner was royally
received in the summer by Liszt and the other musicians. The general
amnesty which had been granted some years before to the rebels of
1848 made it possible for him to go openly to Germany, except the
kingdom of Saxony, and even that was soon opened to him. He planned
a tour, and reluctantly prepared to produce excerpts from his own
works, as the only means of advertising them. He confesses that dire
necessity forced him to this step so inconsistent with his theories,
and his enemies did not hesitate to taunt him with the inconsistency.
He was alone in his travels, for the winter of 1861 in Paris had
been the last straw on the back of the patient Minna. She could no
longer endure her life with this "monster of genius," who would
not be a faithful husband, who wrote works ridiculed by the world,
and could not earn bread and butter. She left him and went back to
Leipsic to live with her relatives. She and her husband never came
together again, though they occasionally referred to one another with
tolerance in their letters to third persons. Minna died in 1866.
The concert tour began in the winter of 1862, and Wagner travelled
in Germany and even into Russia. In the latter country alone did
his entertainments bring him in any substantial pecuniary returns.
He was in Moscow when he learned that the rehearsals of "Tristan
und Isolde" had been abandoned at Vienna. He had become indifferent
on the subject. He was almost convinced that he ought to give up
his attempt to be a composer. Mr. Finck notes that at one time he
seriously thought of going to India as a tutor in an English family.
Let it be borne in mind that in 1863, while he was still wandering
about, giving these concerts, he was fifty years old, and that, with
a surging consciousness within him that he had created immortal
works, he was stared at by people wherever he went as a freak and a
madman, and was caricatured and ridiculed by almost the whole press
of Europe. And all this because he had dared to say that an opera
was a poetic drama, and should be so written, so performed, and so
received by the public.
Yet in these years of hardship, sorrow, and discouragement he wrote
the text of his most humorous work. He took up and completed the
book of "Die Meistersinger," of which he had made a sketch in 1845,
just after the production of "Tannhäuser." This work was done in the
course of a temporary residence in Paris in the winter of 1861-62.
The text was published, or rather printed for circulation among his
friends, in 1862. The version now known to all music lovers shows
many changes. The copyright of the drama was sold to Messrs. Schott,
of Mainz, and acco
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