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Discovering Diverse Content Through
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noontide glory to the smallest person who comes within its range.
There was not one of his friends who did not sorrowfully recognise,
at some time or other, how much there was of clay in this idol to
which they all had made sacrifice after sacrifice. Turn by turn they
left him or were driven away from him, hopelessly disillusioned. Yet
none of them could escape the magnetic attraction of the man, even
after he had wounded and disappointed them. Bülow, as we have
seen, worked nobly for him and for Bayreuth after the cruel Munich
experiences. Nietzsche, after pouring out his sparkling malice upon
the man and the musician who had once been for him a very beacon
light of civilisation and culture, sings his praises in the end in a
passage that is full of a strange lyrism and a strange pathos. "As I
am speaking here of the recreations of my life, I feel I must express
a word or two of gratitude for that which has refreshed me by far
the most heartily and most profoundly. This, without the slightest
doubt, was my relationship with Richard Wagner. All my other
relationships with men I treat quite lightly; but I would not have the
days I spent at Tribschen—those days of confidence, of
cheerfulness, of sublime flashes, and of profound moments—blotted
from my life at any price. I know not what Wagner may have been
for others; but no cloud ever darkened our sky." And again: "I
suppose I know better than anyone the prodigious feats of which
Wagner was capable, the fifty worlds of strange ecstasies to which
no one else had wings to soar; and as I am alive to-day and strong
enough to turn even the most suspicious and most dangerous things
to my own advantage, and thus to grow stronger, I declare Wagner
to have been the greatest benefactor of my life. The bond which
unites us is the fact that we have suffered greater agony, even at
each other's hands, than most men are able to bear nowadays, and
this will always keep our names associated in the minds of men." "I
have loved Wagner," he says in another place; and in another he
speaks of "the hallowed hour when Richard Wagner gave up the
ghost in Venice."[285]
There is something titanic in the man who can inspire such hatred
and such love, and such love to overpower the hatred in the end.
Into whatever man's life he came, he rang through it for ever after
like a strain of great music. With his passionate need for feeling
himself always in the right it was hard for him to bow that proud and
obstinate head of his even when he must have felt, in his inmost
heart, that some at least of the blame of parting lay with him. But
when he did unbend, how graciously and nobly human he could be!
There is no finer letter in the whole of his correspondence than the
one he wrote to Liszt to beg his old friend and benefactor to end
their long estrangement by coming to him at Bayreuth in the hour of
his triumph, for the laying of the foundation stone of the new
theatre on his fifty-ninth birthday.

"MY GREAT AND DEAR FRIEND,—Cosima maintains that you would

not come even if I were to invite you. We should have to endure
that, as we have had to endure so many things! But I cannot
forbear to invite you. And what is it I cry to you when I say
'Come'? You came into my life as the greatest man whom I
could ever address as an intimate friend; you went apart from
me for long, perhaps because I had become less close to you
than you were to me. In place of you there came to me your
deepest new-born being, and completed my longing to know
you very close to me. So you live in full beauty before me and in
me, and we are one beyond the grave itself. You were the first
to ennoble me by your love; to a second, higher life am I now
wedded in her, and can accomplish what I should never have
been able to accomplish alone. Thus you could become
everything to me, while I could remain so little to you: how
immeasurably greater is my gain!
"If now I say to you 'Come,' I thereby say to you 'Come to
yourself'! For it is yourself that you will find. Blessings and love
to you, whatever decision you may come to!—Your old friend,

"RICHARD."[286]
The old egoistic note is there—it is he of course who has borne most
and suffered most and is prepared to be most forgiving—but his
heart must have been more than usually full when he wrote this. It
must have cost his proud soul many an inward struggle to bring
himself to take this first step towards a rapprochement.
But the stupendous power and the inexhaustible vitality of the man
are shown in nothing more clearly than in the sacrifices every one
made for him and the tyrannies they endured from him. Even those
who rebelled against him were none the less conscious of a unique
quality in him that made it inevitable that he should rule and others
obey. "He exercised," says his enemy Hanslick, "an incomprehensible
magic in order to make friends, and to retain them; friends who
sacrificed themselves for him, and, three times offended, came three
times back to him again. The more ingratitude they received from
Wagner, the more zealously they thought it their duty to work for
him. The hypnotic power that he everywhere exerted, not merely by
his music but by his personality, overbearing all opposition and
bending every one to his will, is enough to stamp him as one of the
most remarkable of phenomena, a marvel of energy and
endowment."[287]
A remark of Draeseke's to Weissheimer gives us another hint of the
same imperious fascination: "At present it is not exactly agreeable to
have relations with him. Later, however, in another thirty or forty
years, we [who knew him] shall be envied by all the world, for a
phenomenon like him is something so gigantic that after his death it
will become ever greater and greater, particularly as then the great
image of the man will no longer be disfigured by any unpleasant
traits [durch nichts Widerhaariges]."[288]
He was indeed, in the mixture of elements he contained, like nothing
else that has been seen on earth. His life itself is a romance. In
constant danger of shipwreck as he was, it seems to us now as if
some ironic but kindly Fate were deliberately putting him to every
kind of trial, but with the certain promise of haven at the end. The
most wonderful thing in all his career, to me, is not his rescue by
King Ludwig, not even the creation of Bayreuth, but his ceasing work
upon the second Act of Siegfried in 1857, and not resuming it till
1869. Here was a gigantic drama upon which he had been engaged
since 1848; no theatre in Europe, he knew, was fit to produce it,—
for that he would have to realise his dream of a theatre of his own.
After incredible vicissitudes he had completed two of the great
sections of the work and half of the third. The writing of the
remainder, and the production of it, one would have thought, would
have been sufficient for the further life energies of any man. To any
one else, the thought of dying with such a work unfinished would
have been an intolerable, maddening agony. It would have been to
him, had the possibility of such a happening ever seriously occurred
to him. But he knew it was impossible—impossible that he, Richard
Wagner, ill and poor and homeless and disappointed as he was,
should die before his time, before his whole work was done. He
gambled superbly with life, and he won. In those twelve hazardous
years he wrote two of the world's masterpieces in music. He played
for great stakes in city after city, losing ruinously time after time, but
in the end winning beyond his wildest dreams. He saw Tristan and
the Meistersingers produced; he dictated his memoirs. And then he
turns calmly again to the great work that had been so long put
aside, takes it up as if only a day, instead of twelve years, had gone
by since he locked it in his drawer, thinks himself back in a moment
into that world from which he had been so long banished, and, still
without haste, adds stone upon stone till the whole mighty building
is complete. What a man! one says in amazement. What belief in
himself, in his strength, in his destiny, in his ability to wait! And then,
after that, the toil of the creation of Bayreuth, and the bringing to
birth of the masterpiece, twenty-eight years after the vision of it had
first dawned upon the eager young spirit that had just completed
Lohengrin! Was there ever anything like it outside a fairy tale?
 WAGNER IN THE TRISTAN PERIOD.

He lived, indeed, to see himself victor everywhere, in possession of

everything for which he had struggled his whole feverish life
through. He completed, and saw upon the stage, every one of the
great works he had planned. He found the one woman in the world
who was fitted to share his throne with him when alive and to
govern his kingdom after his death with something of his own
overbearing, inconsiderate strength. He achieved the miracle of
building in a tiny Bavarian town a theatre to which, for more than a
generation after his death, musicians still flock from all the ends of
the earth. After all its dangers and its buffetings, the great ship at
last sailed into haven with every timber sound, and with what a
store of incomparable merchandise within!
 FOOTNOTES:

[44] See Mein Leben, pp. 19, 20. Later on he speaks of "the
importance the theatrical had assumed in his mind in comparison
with the ordinary bourgeois life" (Mein Leben, p. 25).
[45] Mein Leben, p. 65.
[46] "He had it temperament like a watch-spring, easily
compressed, but always flying back with redoubled energy," says
Pecht, who knew him during the time of his appalling misery in
Paris. Glasenapp, Das Leben Richard Wagners, i. 329.
[47] Briefe an Apel, p. 15.
[48] Briefe an Apel, p. 48.
[49] He is writing from Frankfort.
[50] Letter of January 21, 1836.
[51] He was twenty-one at this time, and evidently very like his
later self.
[52]Mein Leben, p. 105.
[53] See the account of his quarrel with Wagner in Daniel
Halévy's Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (English translation), p. 167.
[54] This was true of him even as a boy of seventeen. He cared,
he said, only for a companion who would accompany him on his
excursions, "and to whom I could pour out my inmost being to
my heart's content, without my caring what the effect might be
on him" (Mein Leben, p. 50).
[55]Mein Leben, p. 282.
[56]Mein Leben, p. 368.
[57] Mr. Ashton Ellis (Life of Wagner, v. 126 ff.) has pointed out
how many difficulties might have been avoided had Wagner taken
the advice of some of his friends and called upon Davison, the
critic of the Times. Wagner would have cleared Davison's mind of
many misconceptions that had become current as to the aims of
"Wagnerism" and his own attitude towards the older composers
and Mendelssohn. Wagner's temper and his dislike of critics made
him refuse. He refers to them en masse, in a letter to Otto
Wesendonck, as "blackguards," and again (to Liszt) as "this
blackguard crew of journalists." Mr. Henry Davison, in his
biography of his father, the former musical critic of the Times,
gives a reasonable enough explanation of the antipathy of the
London press to Wagner in 1855. Berlioz was giving concerts in
London at the same time. His music was as strange to English
ears as Wagner's; but he was much more gently handled by the
press. "The explanation," says Mr. Davison, "is not very difficult....
Berlioz had not written books in advertisement of his theories and
himself. He had not attacked cherished composers—far otherwise.
He had not studiously held aloof from the critics; on the contrary,
he had courted and conciliated them. In fine, with all the
peculiarities of an irritable, extraordinary, and self-conscious
mind, Berlioz was polished, courteous and fascinating. Wagner
was somewhat pedantic, harsh and uncouth" (Henry Davison,
From Mendelssohn to Wagner, p. 180).
[58] The charge was indignantly repudiated by Davison when it
came to his ears. See the quotation from the Musical World of
May 12, 1855, in Ellis, v. 128 n. Davison replied to a letter of
Wagner's to a Berlin paper (after the London concerts were over)
in the Musical World of September 22, 1855. (See Mr. Henry
Davison's From Mendelssohn to Wagner, p. 175.) Wagner's
readiness to bring these unfounded charges must make us regard
with suspicion his unproved allegations against Meyerbeer and
others.
[59] November 12, 1846.
[60] Glasenapp, ii. 171.
[61] It would be interesting to know how Mr. Ellis, who was not
present at the supper, is able to decide that the account of a man
who was present is "exaggerated," but still has "a grain of truth in
it."
[62] How does Mr. Ellis know?
[63] Mein Leben, pp. 568, 569.
[64] See Mein Leben, pp. 627, 641, 656, 659, 662, &c.
[65] Mein Leben, p. 631.
[66] Mein Leben, p. 755.
[67] See the Fortnightly Review for July 1905.
[68] It is less generally known that while Cosima was still the wife
of Bülow she bore Wagner two daughters—Isolde, born in Munich
on April 10, 1865, and Eva, born at Tribschen on February 10,
1867.
[69] It was the third case of the kind, though the Madame
Laussot and Frau Wesendonck affairs apparently did not go so far.
[70] Wagner's candour about Minna contrasts strongly with the
concealments the worshipping Wagnerian biographers practise
with regard to the fact of his son Siegfried being born out of
wedlock. At the end of the first volume of the Glasenapp Life, for
example, is a genealogical table of the Wagner family from 1643.
It ends thus:—

WILHELM RICHARD WAGNER (1813-

83)
Married (first) 1836, Christine
Wilhelmine Planer (1814-66), secondly
Cosima Wagner [sic], née Liszt (born
1837)

Helferich Siegfried Richard Wagner,

born 6th June 1869.

It will be seen that the date of Wagner's marriage with Cosima,

which must have been perfectly well known to Glasenapp, is
deliberately omitted; nor is there any mention of the two
daughters Cosima bore Wagner while she was still von Bülow's
wife, or indeed of the fact that she had previously been married
to von Bülow.
[71] Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, p. 273.
[72] Ibid., p. 372. The italics are Mr. Ellis's own. He does not offer
any evidence in support of this charge. He merely remarks loftily
that "it is too long an argument to set forth here."
[73] Wagner writes thus to Otto Wesendonck on the 25th June
1861, seventeen days before the letter to Mathilde: "In this
anxious time [the Paris Tannhäuser fiasco had occurred three
months before, and his prospects were unusually black], when
any resolution is impossible for me, and I am incapable of any
mental effort, everything conspires to grieve me. The dear little
dog that you once gave me died the day before yesterday, quite
suddenly and in an almost inexplicable way. I had become so
used to the gentle animal, and the manner of its death,
everything, distressed me greatly." Briefe Richard Wagners an
Otto Wesendonck, pp. 99, 100.
[74] "Nach dem Vorfalle," which may mean either "after the
accident," or "after the occurrence."
[75] Mein Leben, pp. 765, 766.
[76] Mein Leben, p. 631.
[77] Mein Leben had not been given to the world at the time Mr.
Ellis wrote; but in the Richard Wagner und die Tierwelt of the
well-known Wahnfried partisan Hans von Wolzogen occurs this
passage: "but the little dog died suddenly in the confusion of
Paris, perhaps poisoned." (Quoted in Glasenapp, iii. 330.) These
last words are probably due either to a private reading of the
then unpublished Mein Leben, or to conversations in the Wagner
circle. Again there is no evidence: we are simply left with
Wagner's own words in Mein Leben and the two Wesendonck
letters.
[78] See, for instance, Mr. Ashton Ellis's Introduction to the
English edition of the letters to Mathilde Wesendonck.
[79] Especially when the wife does not believe the husband on
this point. As we shall shortly see, Minna had good reasons for
doubting the purely ideal attitude of Wagner towards other
women.
[80] Chamberlain actually tells us (Richard Wagner, Eng. trans.,
p. 65) that she was "personally unknown to Wagner." Glasenapp
ignores the whole episode.
[81] Mein Leben, p. 429.
[82] Mein Leben, p. 510.
[83] Mein Leben, p. 515.
[84] See Mein Leben, p. 530, and his letter to Minna of February
13, 1850.
[85] She was about twenty-two years of age.
[86] Mein Leben, p. 516.
[87] One is reminded of his calm recitals of how he almost
shouldered Otto Wesendonck and François Wille off their own
hearths.
[88] One gathers from other sources that she had also got an
inkling of the state of affairs in Bordeaux.
[89] Mein Leben, p. 519.
[90] Letter of March 17, 1850, to Minna.
[91] Mein Leben, p. 518.
[92] In the passage just quoted from Mein Leben he says he
returned "towards the end of April." This is demonstrably a slip of
the pen for either "the end of March" or "the beginning of April."
The true dates are clearly established by letters to Minna and to
Liszt, and indeed by Wagner's own remarks, on the next page of
Mein Leben, that "towards the middle of April" he left Paris for
Montmorency.
[93] Mein Leben, pp. 519, 520.
[94] It may be argued that Wagner wrote two letters about this
time, that it was in the second of these that he told Minna of his
impending separation from her, and that this letter has been lost.
This theory, however, is put out of court by the passage last
quoted from Mein Leben. The "long and detailed letter" in which
he retraced their married life is clearly that of the 17th April. It is
significant that the letter of 17th April, as printed, terminates with
the utmost abruptness and bears no signature. Has the ending
been lost or suppressed?
[95] The letters to Minna were given to the world in two volumes
in 1908, without any editor's name, and without a preface or a
single explanatory note. It appears, however, from the publisher's
preliminary announcement, that the editing was done by Baron
Hans von Wolzogen.
[96] It is not improbable that he was deliberately trying to
minimise the importance of the matter.
[97] "Durch meine nächste Umgebung." In the English version of
the Wagner-Liszt letters this is rendered "by my immediate
surroundings." Apparently Minna is meant.
[98] Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, i. 48.
[99] It will be remembered that he proposed to divide between
Minna and himself the annuity of 3000 francs he was to receive
from Frau Ritter and Mrs. Taylor. We can hardly imagine Wagner
maintaining life on £60 per annum, even in Greece or Asia Minor;
and he could hardly expect that Mrs. Taylor would continue the
annuity after he had eloped with her married daughter.
[100] Letter of July 2, 1850, Briefwechsel, i. 49.
[101] Her father, by the way, was an English lawyer. But as he
had been in the grave for some time he could hardly be said, with
a strict regard for truth, to be interested in Wagner's music, and
to be advancing money on phantom assignments of the copyright
of unwritten works.
[102] The people in whose private affairs he was thus confidently
meddling were, on his own showing, "utter strangers," to him a
few weeks before this. It would be interesting to have Laussot's
opinion of him!
[103] According to his own account, which makes some demands
on our credulity, he simply "rang the bell and the door sprang
open: without meeting anyone I entered the open first floor,
passed from room to room," &c. Julius Kapp cynically suggests
that he must have been wearing the Tarnhelm.
[104] Mein Leben, p. 528.
[105] Letter of May 30, 1859: Richard an Minna Wagner, ii. 95.
[106] The Laussot story as told in Mein Leben is another instance
of the damage Wagner has done his own case by voluntarily
going into the witness box to give evidence on his own behalf.
The older biographers apparently know nothing of the Laussot
affair. There is not a word of it even in the latest Glasenapp
biography, though it is hard to believe that Glasenapp had never
heard of it. (His work as a whole, with its copiousness and its
general accuracy as to facts, suggests access to Mein Leben
before publication of the latter.) Reading his account of the Paris-
Zürich excursion of 1850, indeed, in the light of our present
knowledge, it is hard to resist the conclusion that he knows more
than he is telling.
It is interesting to recall the fact that Ferdinand Praeger, whose
Wagner as I Knew Him is anathema to the Wagnerians—and to
some extent rightly so—has a story that is evidently a muddled
version of the Laussot affair. "At Bordeaux," says Praeger, "an
episode occurred similar to one which happened later at Zürich
[Frau Wesendonck?], about which the press of the day made a
good deal of unnecessary commotion and ungenerous comment.
I mention the incident to show the man as he was. The
opposition have not spared his failings, and over the Zürich
incident were hypercritically censorious. The Bordeaux story I am
alluding to is, that the wife of a friend, Mrs. H——, having
followed Wagner to the south, called on him at his hotel, and
throwing herself at his feet, passionately told of her affection.
Wagner's action in the matter was to telegraph to the husband to
come and take his wife home. On telling me the story, Wagner
jocosely remarked that poor Beethoven, so full of love, never had
his affection returned, and lived and died, so it is said, a hermit"
(p. 196).
There is plainly an enormous admixture of fiction here; but
equally plainly the basis of the story is the Laussot episode. Had
there really been an affair of the kind narrated by Praeger, in
which Wagner had shone so brilliantly, we may be sure we should
have been told all about it in Mein Leben. It looks as if Wagner
had been indiscreetly confidential to Praeger, and had told the
story with embellishments, or that Praeger had heard it from
another source—perhaps someone in Minna's entourage—and the
story had been decorated and transformed in its transit from one
mouth to another. The novellettish touch about telegraphing for
the husband, however, is more likely to have come from the
Wagnerian side than from that of the "opposition." Whatever may
be the explanation, however, the fact remains that Praeger, whom
it has become the fashion to despise as a mere Munchausen, did
actually know of a "Bordeaux episode" of some sort; and that
though he had hold of the wrong end of the stick, that there was
a stick of some sort has now been proved by Wagner himself.
[107] From his childhood he was extremely susceptible to
women. His heart, he tells us, used to "beat wildly" at the touch
of the contents of his sisters' theatrical wardrobe (Mein Leben, p.
21).
[108] Autobiographische Skizze, in G.S., i. 10.
[109] In the first edition (1852) there came after this a passage
in which Wagner more than hints at sexual escapades in his
youth. He deleted the passage from the second edition (1872), as
also the following words after "moral bigotry of our social
system"; namely,—"as what people call unfortunately to-be-
tolerated vice." See Mr. Ellis's translation of the Prose Works, i.
396.
[110] Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde, in G.S., iv. 253.
[111] Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde, in G.S., iv. 256.
[112] Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde, in G.S., iv. 256.
[113] Mein Leben, p. 109.
[114] Mein Leben, p. 110.
[115] He had been so certain in advance of the liveliness of the
party that he had warned the landlord of possible damage to his
furniture, for which he would be compensated.
[116] Mein Leben, p. 117.
[117] See Mein Leben, p. 117 ff.
[118] This letter is not included in the published volume of
Wagner's correspondence with Minna, which commences with
1842. I quote it from Julius Kapp's Richard Wagner und die
Frauen: eine erotische Biographie (1912), p. 34. Kapp has had
access to a large number of still unpublished Wagner letters.
[119] Mein Leben, p. 138.
[120] The bitterness of the later years seems to have affected
Wagner's memory of the earlier ones. In Mein Leben his thesis is
that Minna was kind enough to him, but without love, and
perhaps without the capacity for loving. That was not his opinion
at the time, however. "Minna was here," he writes to Apel on 6th
June 1835 from Leipzig, "and stayed three days for my sake, in
the most dreadful weather, and without knowing a single other
person, and without going anywhere, simply to be with me.... It
is remarkable what influence I have acquired over the girl. You
should read her letters; they burn with fire, and we both know
that fire is not native to her" (Richard Wagner an Theodor Apel,
p. 48).
[121] Richard Wagner an Theodor Apel, p. 62.
[122] Mein Leben, p. 146.
[123] Mein Leben, pp. 154, 155. At this point he digresses to give
us the story of Minna's early life. From the age of ten she had
had to help to maintain the family, her father having sustained
misfortunes in business. She was a most charming girl, "and at an
early age attracted the attention of men." At sixteen she was
seduced; her child, Natalie, was always supposed during her life-
time to be her younger sister. Minna went on the stage. She had
no particular talent for acting, and saw in the theatre only a
means of livelihood. According to Wagner she was "devoid of
levity or coquetry," but used her powers of charm to make friends
and obtain security of tenure in the theatre.
[124] Mein Leben, p. 157.
[125] He had soon accustomed himself, he says, not to talk of his
ideal cravings before her. Uncertain of them himself as he was, he
passed over this side of his life with a laugh and a joke. With the
better part of him thus sealed up from her, it is no wonder they
ultimately drifted apart.
[126] Mein Leben, pp. 157, 158.
[127] Cornelius, Ausgewählte Briefe, i. 698.
[128] Mein Leben, p. 158.
[129] He pleads guilty more than once to an offensive manner of
speech when he was angry. We can dimly imagine what he was
like in moments such as these. Hornstein, Nietzsche, and others
had experience of it. Nietzsche's account of his scene with
Wagner has become classical. See Daniel Halévy's Life of Friedrich
Nietzsche, Eng. trans., p. 167.
[130] Mein Leben, p. 166.
[131] It must be remembered, however, that we have only his
account of all this. It is just possible that the accounts of the
other actors in the episode might have given it a slightly different
colour here and there.
[132] Printed for the first time in Julius Kapp's Richard Wagner
und die Frauen, p. 143.
[133] Minna's letters of 28th October and 17th November 1840,
in Richard Wagner an Theodor Apel, pp. 80-87.
[134] See Mein Leben, pp. 212, 213, 232. His feeling towards her
seems to have hardened during their later residence in Dresden.
In the first sketch of the Flying Dutchman he gave the name of
Minna to the redeeming heroine; and as late as 1845 he could
speak warmly of her to Hanslick. When the latter praised Minna's
good looks, Wagner said, "Ah, you can scarcely recognise her
now. You should have seen her a few years ago. The poor woman
has gone through much trouble and privation with me. In Paris
we had a wretched time, and without Meyerbeer's help we might
have starved" (Hanslick, Aus meinem Leben, i. 65, 66).
[135] Liszt also urged him to do this.
[136] He had apparently forgotten his promise (Mein Leben, p.
177) never to mention the affair to her again; and when he said
in Mein Leben, "I can pride myself on having kept this resolution
to the letter," he had evidently forgotten this epistle of May 18,
1859.
[137] See p. 68.
[138] Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner, ii. 92.
[139] See pp. 55, 56. He protests that she has been misinformed;
the object of his "second journey to Bordeaux" was not to
"abduct a young wife from her husband." So far as it goes, that
statement is correct. The object of his second journey, apparently,
was merely to pacify Eugène Laussot. But he does not seem to
have told Minna as much of his relations with Jessie Laussot as he
has told the world in Mein Leben.
[140] No one would guess, for example, from Mein Leben how
much money had been put at his disposal and how much
consideration had been shown him by Napoleon III and others
during the Paris Tannhäuser period.
[141] November 9, 1851; Briefe, i. 88.
[142] Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner, i. 302.
[143] Kapp, Richard Wagner und die Frauen, p. 65.
[144] Letter to Hermann Brockhaus of February 2, 1851, in
Familienbriefe, p. 165.
[145] Minna objected energetically to the time he spent in writing
prose instead of music. Between August 1847, when he finished
Lohengrin, and the autumn of 1853 he seems to have written no
music at all, though he was occupied with the text of the Ring.
[146] See, for example, Weingartner's tragic-comic account of his
experiences, in his Akkorde.
[147] It is quoted in Kapp's Richard Wagner und die Frauen, p.
90, but without date or name of addressee. It is simply given as
"addressed to a lady friend."
[148] Wagner, however, conducted some concerts at Zürich for a
fee.
[149] Richard Wagner an Eliza Wille, p. 123.
[150] Mein Leben, p. 731.
[151] "I left Baden to fill up my time with a little trip to Zürich,
where I again tried to get a few days' rest in the Wesendoncks'
house. The idea of helping me did not occur to my friends,
though I told them frankly of the position I was in." Mein Leben,
p. 857.
[152] "Whereupon," he characteristically remarks, "I could not
resist sending him a reply pointing out the wrongness of this."
Mein Leben, p. 865.
[153] Mein Leben, pp. 866, 867.
[154] Richard Wagner an Eliza Wille, pp. 74, 75.
[155] Familienbriefe, pp. 189, 190. He recurs to the same idea in
a letter to his sister Cäcile Avernarius of 30th December 1852:
Familienbriefe, p. 194. See also the letter to Uhlig of December
1849, and other passages.
[156] "Und weil er so sei, wie er ihm erschiene." Mr. Ashton Ellis
(Wagner's Prose Works, i. 341) translates this, "and because he
was whate'er she deemed him," reading, perhaps rightly, "ihr" for
"ihm."
[157] Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde, in G.S., iv. 295.
[158] Ibid., p. 266.
[159] Familienbriefe, p. 279.
[160] Familienbriefe, pp. 217, 218. See also Wagner's letter to
Mathilde in his diary of August 21, 1858: "What you have been
and are to me these six years now."
[161] Robert von Hornstein, Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner, in
the Neue Freie Presse for 23rd and 24th September 1904 (written
in 1884; Hornstein died in 1890). I have been unable to procure a
copy of the article. My quotation is from Mr. Ashton Ellis's preface
to his translation of the Wesendonck correspondence, p. lv.
Hornstein adds, "he [Wagner] would turn sulky, hasty, perverse,
never coarse. With one little word he might have thrust a poniard
in the woman [Minna]; he never breathed it."
[162] Earlier in the month a child had been born to Mathilde.
Hornstein tells us that at the christening he stood by Wagner's
side. "He was very moody; all at once he muttered to himself, 'It
is like attending one's own execution.'" Ellis, p. lviii.
[163] Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonck, pp. 44, 45.
[164] I do not know that Mr. Ashton Ellis is justified in assuming
that "Wagner at last made his bosom friend [Liszt] a confidant
and counsellor," on the basis of the letter to Liszt of [5?]
November 1857 which he quotes: "Now take my hand, and take
my kiss; a kiss such as you gave me a year ago, when you
accompanied me home one night—you remember, after I had told
my doleful tale to both of you. However much it may lose its
impression on me,—what you were to me that night, the
wondrous sympathy that lay in what you told me as we walked,—
this heavenliness in your nature will follow with me, as my most
splendid memory, to each future existence." (Op. cit., lvii.) What
Mr. Ellis translates as "told my doleful tale to you both," is in the
German "nachdem ich Euch bei Dir meine traurige Geschichte von
Bordeaux erzählt" ("after I had told you both my mournful
Bordeaux story"). Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, ii.
181. Wagner's confidence and Liszt's sympathy were apparently
as much in connection with the Laussot affair as with the other.
But the words "von Bordeaux" were suppressed in the first edition
of the letters.
[165] In Mein Leben Wagner tells the story of the purchase of the
"Asyl" somewhat differently. There is not a word there of
Wesendonck having been persuaded by his wife into buying the
property for Wagner, or of the trouble in the Wesendonck
household over him. See Mein Leben, p. 645.
The passage I have just quoted from Wagner's letter to his sister
Clara has been suppressed in the German edition of the
Familienbriefe (p. 218). Mr. Ashton Ellis, in his English version
(Family Letters of Richard Wagner, p. 215), opines that
Glasenapp, the German editor of the Familienbriefe, omitted the
passage in compliance "with Wahnfried wishes." It is one more
evidence of the utter untrustworthiness of the Wahnfried coterie.
The letter was originally published in the Deutsche Rundschau in
1902. A complete English version of it will be found in the
opening of Mr. Ellis' translation of the Wagner-Wesendonck
correspondence. The German of the passage quoted above is
given in Kapp's Richard Wagner und die Frauen, pp. 116, 117.
[166] I am well aware that he filled his letters with moanings
about his "renunciation" and "resignation." But the words were
little more than resounding literary counters for him, helping him
to some of the best of his epistolary effects.
[167] Mein Leben, p. 654.
[168] Mein Leben, p. 667. In his Venice diary of September 18,
1858 (after his flight from the Asyl) he reminds her how she has
placed her arm round him and declared that she loved him. See
also under 12th October. On 1 January 1859 he speaks with
ardent recollection of her caresses. On 1 November 1858 he tells
her how sweet it would be "to die in her arms." If we are to die in
the arms of all the women with whom our relations have been
"merely friendly" we shall all of us need more lives than a cat.
[169] Mein Leben, pp. 658, 659.
[170] Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonck, p. 45. In the
same winter he set to music the "Five Poems" of Mathilde.
[171] Kapp, Richard Wagner und die Frauen, p. 119.
[172] Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, ii. 184. This letter
was omitted from the first issue of the Wagner-Liszt
correspondence, and consequently will not be found in the
English edition.
[173] Also published for the first time in the expanded edition
(1910).
[174] Ibid., ii. 186.
[175] Ibid., ii. 188. This passage was suppressed in the previous
editions of the Wagner-Liszt letters.
[176] Letter of 24 (?) January 1858, ii. 188 ff. That matters at
Zürich had been on the verge of a crisis we may guess from a
sentence in a previous letter (18-20 (?) January); in which
Wagner speaks of it being necessary for him to go away in order
to "give some appeasement to the sufferings of the good-natured
man [Otto Wesendonck]," and that this being done he will return
in a few weeks. All this, again, and more, was suppressed in the
first issue of the correspondence. Truly the way of Wahnfried
passeth understanding.
[177] Kapp, Richard Wagner und die Frauen, p. 123.
[178] I have ventured, here and elsewhere, to improve upon
Minna's rather illiterate system of punctuation.
[179] "Mit seiner vortrefflichen Suade."
[180] Kapp, pp. 124, 125. Mr. Ellis wrongly conjectures the
intercepted note to be the one quoted as No. 36 in the German
edition of the Wagner-Wesendonck correspondence (No. 49 in the
English edition).
[181] See the quotation on p. 86.
[182] In Mr. Ellis's translation of the letter (preface to the English
edition of the Wagner-Wesendonck correspondence, p. ix.), this
sentence is followed by "get well first, and let us have another
talk then." I cannot find this sentence in the German edition of
the Familienbriefe, p. 219.
[183] Familienbriefe, pp. 218 ff.
[184] Kapp, op. cit., p. 102. The remainder of the letter shows
that while Frau Herwegh had a good opinion of Minna, she was
not blindly prejudiced in her favour; and she was quite conscious
that intellectually Minna was unfitted to keep pace with her
husband's development. Her testimony to the excellency of
Minna's heart and the hardness of her lot with Wagner is
therefore all the more valuable. Wagner, it is hardly necessary to
say, did not like Frau Herwegh.
[185] With all his sense of the intellectual and other divergencies
between them, Wagner was not as a rule anxious to sever his life
from Minna. He admits more than once that she was an excellent
housewife, and specially expert in ministering to his comforts.
After every dispute we find him setting up house with her again.
[186] Kapp, p. 127.
[187] See, for example, his letter of 1st November 1858 to the
Dresden physician and friend Anton Pusinelli, to whose care he
had entrusted Minna. Bayreuther Blätter, 1902, p. 98. "By
periodical separations I have attained what I instinctively
contemplate—namely, to place myself in a position to be able
always to exert only a pacifying, conciliating influence upon her
spirit. In view of the sad state of her health, this had been my
only design during the time we lately lived together; but with a
character as irritable as mine the agitation and excitement of the
moment were too much for me now and then, as in general I too
needs must truly suffer greatly during these eternal, useless and
senseless vexations. Here, however, at a distance, I can choose
the hour and the mood when I am fully master of myself, and
have to achieve faithfully only my purpose, my duty." Letter of
18th November to Pusinelli; ibid., p. 100.
[188] He reminds us of Mr. Shaw's Prossy in Candida, who was
only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.
[189] She has just given a distressing account of her sufferings
from her heart disease.
[190] Kapp, pp. 129, 130.
[191] Kapp (p. 134) wrongly gives the date as 1850.
[192] Kapp, pp. 134, 135.
[193] Mr. Ashton Ellis, reading "liegt deutlich vor mir," instead of
"vor dir," translates this "lies plain before me."
[194] See his letter of 19th August 1858, Richard Wagner an
Minna Wagner, i. 296.
[195] Ibid., i. 299.
[196] The warrant for his arrest for his supposed complicity in the
Dresden rising of 1849 was still in force.
[197] Italics mine.
[198] He had just had the Dresden physician's distressing report
on Minna's health. In addition to her heart trouble and the
nervous ravages made by laudanum, she was now said to be
developing dropsy of the chest.
[199] Compare his letter to Pusinelli of 18th November 1858,
quoted on p. 97.
[200] Otto Wesendonck provided the funds, giving Wagner
24,000 francs for the rights of the still unfinished Ring.
[201] Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner, ii. 139 ff.; Bayreuther
Blätter, 1902, p. 101.
[202] According to Kapp (p. 159), Wagner's relations with her
were the subject of much comment in Paris at that time, and
were the reason for the Princess Wittgenstein—Liszt's companion
—breaking off all intercourse with him and refusing to visit him in
Paris in 1860. "An anxious silence upon this affair," Kapp remarks,
"has been maintained in the Wagnerian literature, which was the
easier inasmuch as all the passages relating to it in Wagner's
letters have been suppressed before publication. Later
publications will bring to light much interesting material."
[203] Except for a few days, they never lived together again.
They kept up their correspondence, however.
[204] Mein Leben, p. 779.
[205] Richard Wagner und die Frauen, p. 157.
[206] He seems to have taken it rather ill of his friends that they
should have been prosperous and happy while he was poor and
disappointed and up to his eyes in difficulties of all kinds. See his
account of the visit in Mein Leben, pp. 787, 788.
[207] Mathilde's character, like that of Wagner, has probably been
slightly idealised for us by time. She had probably been less
agreeable to the bourgeoise Minna than to her genius of a
husband.
[208] Mein Leben, p. 798.
[209] Owing to his having ceased to correspond with the
Wesendoncks, his changes of address were unknown to them.
The box contained a present that Mathilde had sent him the
preceding Christmas; after many journeyings it had been returned
to her through the post. Having learned his Biebrich address, she
sent it to him there. See his letter to Minna of 12th June 1862.
[210] Mein Leben, p. 806. See, however, his letter to Pusinelli of
1st July 1862, in Bayreuther Blätter, 1902, p. 103.
[211] Richard Wagner und die Frauen, p. 182. In a letter to his
sister Clara of 11th July 1862, Wagner denies that the idea of a
divorce proceeded from him, "obvious as it is, and excusable as it
might be for me to indulge the wish to utilise my remaining years
for the benefit of my work, by the side of someone sympathetic
to me" (Familienbriefe, pp. 247, 248), which last remark probably
refers to Mathilde Maier. In this letter he makes it clear that a
reunion with Minna is out of the question. His idea was that she
should have a small establishment of her own in Dresden, where
he can visit her occasionally. In a letter to Minna of two days
earlier he makes out that being unusually distressed as to her
health—which was steadily worsening—he had sent Pusinelli to
report upon her, but the physician had broached the question of
divorce of his own accord (Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner, ii.
290). "Your believing that you were to understand the opinion he
gave you of his own account as if I too entertained the idea of a
divorce from you has greatly distressed me. Never has that
entered my head, and it never will." Whether or not it had
entered his head at that time, it certainly entered it later. In less
than two years he had to fly from his Vienna creditors to
Mariafeld, near Zürich. He was at the very end of his resources,
and was apparently a ruined man had not King Ludwig come to
his rescue. Discussing his prospects with his hostess, Frau Wille,
"we touched, among other things, on the necessity of obtaining a
divorce from my wife, in order that I might contract a rich
marriage. As everything seemed to me expedient, and nothing
inexpedient, I actually wrote to my sister Luise Brockhaus, asking
her whether she could not, in a sensible talk with Minna, induce
her to be satisfied with her settled yearly allowance, and abandon
her claim to my person" (Mein Leben, p. 866). This letter is not to
be found in the Familienbriefe. It would be interesting to know
whether it is one of the letters that Glasenapp speaks of as being
"lost beyond recall," or has simply been suppressed.
Minna was of course a hopeless wreck by this time. She died in
Dresden on the 25th January 1866. The last of Wagner's
published letters to her is dated 8th November 1863.
[212] Kapp, op. cit., p. 187. See Wagner's own account in Mein
Leben, p. 828.
[213] Mein Leben, p. 828. Later on he said that his relations with
Friederike had involved her in serious trouble. Friederike had
apparently already been the mistress of von Guiata, the manager
of the Frankfort theatre.
[214] Peter Cornelius, Ausgewählte Briefe, in Literarische Werke,
i. 683.
[215] "Keep that in mind," he continues, "and your own griefs will
seem less to you. They simply add to mine." Richard Wagner an
Minna Wagner, ii. 310, 311.
[216] Mein Leben, p. 848. What was the subject of these
reproaches it is impossible to say, as Minna's letters to him have
not been published.
[217] It is a little difficult to know what he means by a resolution
made "in the previous year." He corresponded with her a good
deal in 1862, and we have a few of his letters to her of 1863. In
one of these, dated 8th November 1863, he tells her that there is
a possibility of his conducting a concert in Dresden on the 25th,
and asks her if she can put him up. This letter is not included in
the German edition. It was published in Adolf Kohut's Der Meister
von Bayreuth (1905), and a translation of it will be found in Mr.
Ellis's English version of the letters to Minna, p. 787.
[218] Mein Leben, pp. 848, 849.
[219] See his letter to Frau Wesendonck of 3rd August 1863.
[220] Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, p. 318.
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