?«/ pfc. U-. ^^
m r ff'
IT;: W
»'i"l"%
^;%^%^-
% #.■
»: -l'. I
f. .1 $■ ^
'.^.^.,^.J'
#' -^^ 4»^^ :^' '^ # ^'
g^Sfea-^^J'^i^::^
BILLINGS HAL
(^^^^W %
■^' ^ f^'i
.4^ ,=.;«_# V ^^O^ •'^'
Mfiift
:?^9S45^^
|
Date Due |
|||
|
A i» ^. '^\ |
|||
|
nmDT^ li |
|||
|
%rr-7 . |
|||
|
K. \ ^ *^ |
i |
||
|
_/l,i?Y--.^'' |
|||
|
Library Bureau Cat. no, 1137 |
\^
Albert Frisih, Berlin V
Mathilde Wesendonck 1860
From a Painting by C. Dorner.
Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck
TRANSLATED, PREFACED, ETC.
By William Ashton Ellis
THIRD EDITION
New York : CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
153-157 Fifth Avenue A A A 19||
|0
a
14
All rights resaved.
^^^1i
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY ZÜRICH LETTERS . VENICE DIARY VENICE LETTERS . LUCERNE LETTERS PARIS LETTERS AFTERMATH . FROM HER TO HIM VALEDICTORY . INDEX .
PAGE
vii
I
29
83 115 171
295
333 367 376
Dein Verhältniss zu mir ist so heilig, sonderbar, dass ich erst recht bei dieser Gelegenheit fühlte : es kann nicht mit Worten ausgedrückt werden, Menschen könnens nicht sehen.
Goethe to Charlotte von Stein.
Ich gehe viel mit Richard JVagner um, tvelcher ein genialer und auch guter Mensch ist.
Gottfried Keller, Zürich, 1856.
INTRODUCTORY
{To Jiis sister, Clara Wolfram.)
"Geneva, 20th August 1858.
" My dear Kläre,
" I promised you something more detailed about the true causes of the serious step in vvhich you now see me engaged. I will teil you what is needful, that you may also be able to refute any other gossip ; toward which, however, I am most indifferent myself.
" What for six years past has supported, comforted, and strengthened me withal to stay by Minna's side despite the enormous differences of our character and disposition, is the love of that young gentlewoman vvho at first and for long approached me shyly, diffidently, hesitant and timid, but thereafter more and more decidedly and surely. As there never could be talk betvveen us of a union, our deep attachment took that wistful character which holds all base and vulgär thoughts aloof, and discerns its only source of gladness in the welfare of each other. Since the very commencement of our acquaintance she has feit the most unflagging and refined solicitude for me, and obtained from her husband in the most courageous fashion whatever mighf alleviate my life. For his part, in view of his wife's out- spokenness to him, it was only natural that he should fall into increasing jealousy ; but her grandeur has consisted in this, — that, ahvays keeping her husband informed about her
VlU INTRODUCTORY
heart, she gradually attuned him evcn to the füllest resigna- tion toward her. With what sacrifices and combats this could but be attended, may easily be judged : what made its achievement possible to her, could only be the depth and the sublimity of her attachment, remote from all self-seeking, which gave her power to shew herseif to her husband as of such stature that, if she ended by threatening her own death, he needs must abstain from her and prove his unshakeable love even by upholding her in her solicitude for me. In fine, it became a matter of retaining the mother of his children, and for their sake — who severed our two selves the most insuperably — he accepted his renunciant Position. Thus, whereas he was consumed with jealousy himself, she was able so to interest him in me again, that — as you are aware — he often-times assisted me ; and when it became at last a question of procuring me a little house with garden after my own wish, it was she who by dint of the most unheard-of battles won him round to buy for me the pretty premises beside his own. The most wonderful part of it, however, is that I absolutely never had a notion of these conflicts she was going through for me : for love of her, her husband had continually to shew himself friendly and unconstrained towards me ; not a black look was to enlighten me, not a hair of my head to be touched, — serene and cloudless should the sky envault me, soft and yielding be my every tread. This the unparalleled result of this purest, noblest woman's splendid love.
" And this love, which had still remained unuttered by a Word between us, was finally to cast aside its veil when I penned the poem of my Tristan just a year ago, and gave it to her. Then for the first time did she lose her self-control, and confess to me that she must die ! — Reflect, dear sister, what this love must have meant to me, after a life of toils and sufferings, of sacrifices and commotions, such
INTRODUCTORY ix
as mine ! — Yct \ve rccognised forthwith that any union between us could not bc so much as thought of, and were accordingly resigncd ; rcnouncing cvery sclfish wish, we suffercd, endured, but — loved each other ! —
" My vvife seemed to understand with shrcwd feminine instinct what here was procceding : certainly she often shewed some jcalousy, deriding and running down ; yet she tolerated our companionship, — which on its side never violated morals, but simply aimed at consciousness that we were in each other's prescnce. Conscqucntly I assumed Minna to be sensible enough to comprehend that there was strictly nothing here for her to fear, since an alliance was not to be dreamt of between us, and therefore that for- bearance was her best and most advisable resource. Well, I have had to learn that I had probably deceived mysclf in that respect ; chattcr reached my ears, and finally she so far lost her senscs as to intercept a letter from myself and — break it opcn. That letter, if she had been in anything like a Position to understand it, might rcally have afforded her the completest reassurance she could wish, for our resigna- tion formed its theme as well ; but she went by nothing save the endearing expressions, and lost her hcad. She came up to me raving, and thus compelled me calmly to explain to her precisely how things stood, that she had brought misfortune on herseif when she opened such a letter, and that if she did not know how to contain herseif, we two must part. On the last point we were both agrced, I tranquilly, she passionatcly. Next day, however, I feit sorry for her ; I went to her and said, ' IMinna, you are vcry ill ; get well first, and let us have another talk then.' We arranged the plan ot a [mcdical] eure, and she seemed to quiet down again. As the day of dcparture for the place of eure drew near, she insisted upon speaking to the VVesendonck first : I firmly forbade her to. Everything
X INTRODUCTORY
depended on my making Minna gradually acquainted with the character of my relations to that lady, and thus con- vincing her that there was nothing at all to be feared for the continuance of cur wedded life, vvherefore she simply ought to behave wisely, sensibly and nobly, abjure all foolish thoughts of vengeance and avoid any manner of fuss ; which she promised me at last. She could not hold her peace, hovvever ; she went across, behind my back, and — doubtless without realising it herseif — affronted the gentle soul most grossly. After she had told her, ' Were I an ordinary woman, I should take this letter to your husband ! ' there was nothing eise for the Wesendonck — who was conscious of having never kept a secret from her husband (which a woman like Minna, of course, can't comprehend ! ) — but to inform him at once of this scene and its cause. — Herevvith, then, had the delicacy and purity of our relations been invaded in a coarse and vulgär way, and many a thing must alter. Not for a long time could I succeed in making it clear to my lady-friend that the very highness and un- selfishness of such relations, as subsisted between us, made them forever impossible of explanation to a nature like my wifc's ; for I was silenced by her grave reproach that I had omitted this, whereas she had always had her husband for her confidant.
" Whoever can estimate what I since have suffered (it was the middle of April then), will also appreciate how I feel in the end, now that I have to realise that the most persistent efforts to preserve the relations disturbed have absolutely borne no fruit. I saw to Minna's welfare at the health-resort with every care ; to pacify her, at last I broke off all association with our neighbours pending her absence ; careful only for her health, I tried every possible means of bringing her to reason and recognition of what be- seemed her and her time of life : in vain ! She abides
INTRODUCTORY Xi
by the absurdcst fancies, declares herseif injured, and, scarcely tranquilliscd a little, the old fury soon bursts forth afresh. Since a month ago, when Minna returncd — while we werc having Company — it had to come to a dccision at last. The two women so close togethcr, was impossible any longer ; for neither could the Wesendonck forget, that, in reward for her supreme self-sacrifice and tenderest regards for me, she had been met on my side, through my wife, with such coarse and insulting treatment ; moreover, people had begun to speak about it. Eiiough : the most unheard- of scenes and tortures never ceascd for me, and out of consideration as well for the one as the other, I finally had to make up my mind to vacate the fair asylum that had been prepared for me with such tender affection.
'* Now I require rest myself, and the completest seclusion : for the grief I have to weary down is great. —
" Minna is incapable of comprehending what an unhappy wedlock ours has ever been ; she paints the past as some- thing other than it was, and if I have found relief, distraction and oblivion, in my art, she has brought herseif to think I never needed them. Enough : I have come to an issue on that head ; no longer can I tolerate this everlasting bickcring and whimsical distrust, if I'm to have any heart left to fulfil my life-task. Whoever has observed me closely, must have been surprised from of old at my patience, kindness, ay, my weakness ; and if I am now condemned by shallow judges, I have grown insensible to all that sort of thing. Never had Minna a finer opportunity of shewing herseif morc worthy to be wife of mine, than now, when it involved the preservation to me of the highest and dearest : it lay within her hand to prove if she truly loved me ; but she does not even understand what such true love is, and her rage transports her over all ! —
"Still, I exculpate her by her illncss ; not but that even
Xll INTRODUCTORY
this might perhaps have taken on another, milder character, had she herseif been othcrwise and milder. Further, the many adversities she has survived with me, and over which / have been lightly borne by my inner genius (which unfortunately I have never been able to communicate to her !), make me considerate tovvards her ; I should like to give her as little pain as possible, since, after all, I'm truly sorry for her ! Only, I feel unequal to enduring by her side henceforth ; neither could 1 help her in herseif by doing so : I should always be incomprehensible to her and an object of suspicion. Therefore — divided ! But, in kindliness and affection : I would not have her shamed ; merely, I could wish her to perceive in time, herseif, that it is better for us not to see each otber much again. For the present I afford her a prospect of my returning to her in Germany as soon as the amnesty arrives (which also was the reason why she was to take all our furniture and things with her) ; yet I mcan to bind myself to nothing, and let everything depend upon my future feeling. So please adhere to it, yourself, that the present is merely to be a passing Separation ; whatever you can do to make her calm and reasonable, I beg you not to leave undone ! For — as said — she really is unfortunate : she would have been happier with a lesser man ; and so take pity on her, with myself ! I shall thank you from my heai t for it, dear sister ! —
" I shall bide hcre in Geneva awhile tili I can go on to Italy, where I think of passing the winter — prcsumably in Venice ; already the solitude and the rcmoval from all torturing Company arc reviving me a little. It was a sheer impossibility of late, to think of work ; so soon as I find heart again to go on composing my Tristan, I shall regard myself as saved. Indced 'tis so that I must try to help myself: I want nothing of the world except that it may
INTRODUCTORY xin
leave me rcst for works that some day shall bclong to it ; thcrefore Ict it also judge me charitably ! —
" The substance of this letter, dear Kläre, you need not hesitateto use for explanations, whcrever needful ; in general, hovvever, I naturally should not like much discussion of vvhat has happened. Only the very fevvest will really understand what is the case : for that one needs close knovvlcdge of the persons here concerned.
" Now farewell, dear sister, and hearty thanks once more for your discreet enquiry, which I have answered, as you see, in confidence ! Treat Minna leniently, but let her also gradually come to know hovv she Stands with me !
" Your brother
"Richard W."
{To Doctor Anton Pnsinclli, Dresden})
"Venice, ist November 1858. " My dear faithful Friend,* * I approach you to-day on a deeply intimate subject. — My vvife will spend this winter in Dresden. In all probability she has already arrived ; pcrhaps she has even called on you by now. — I remcmber the kind cheering opinion on her State of hcalth you so touchingly sent me
* All these iutroductory letters, alike the two to the eider sister and those to the two intimate male friends, employ the second person Singular where I have rendered "you'' and "your." The present letter comes from a group of close on forty (out of an existing coUection of eighty) addressed to Dr. Pusinelli, published in the Bayreuther BläKc?- Spring 1902, i.e. four months bcfore Mathilde Wesendonck's sudden death, and therefore long prior to the pubiication of our main group. The letters to Clara Wolfram vvere first published in the Berlin Tägliche Rundschau within a month after that death, together with a fevv others to which I shall subsequently refer ; vvhilst that to Sulzer made its first appearance in Herr A. Steiner's Neujahrsblatt of the Zürich AUg. Musik- Gesellschaft January 1903. — W. A. E.
XIV INTRODUCTORY
last Summer, after my description of her Symptoms. Now I entrust to you the patient herseif; be her physician, her adviser, helper — if you can, alleviator if you cannot. The profound conviction that a change of air and scene, also a temporary removal from my undoubtedly somewhat agitating presence, must serve to give the invalid at least a Chance, combined with other things to make me fix upon a Separation from her for a period. Dresden will certainly be homelike to her on the whole, and woo her finally to greater calm. She will occupy a little parterre flat in the Rottdorf house, where we first dwelt at Dresden, but will first alight at Tichatscheck's. —
" Recently she has been at her brother-in-law's, who is a doctor himself. As I wanted ease of mind on her condition, I addressed myself to him, and now enclose his answer, which I received yesterday. You see how little consolation there is in his report ; 1 am deeply affected ! * —
" She will be able to afford you but little clear informa- tion as to the genesis of her condition. An organic ailment (perhaps seated in the lymphatic System— for her mother died of dropsy in the ehest) has probably been developing ever since and during our Dresden stay ; but the constantly increasing havoc of her nerves dates chiefly from the many severe and troublous episodes in our later life. In 1853 the over-excitation of her nerves, with sleeplessness, was already very strong ; a doctor treated her for gout, and employed
* The provincial brother-in-law must indeed have ' piled the agony ' regardless of all consequences to the husband"s own State of mind and health ; for, on the one hand we find this report almost plunging Wagner to the bottom of the Grand Canal (pp. 69-71 inf.), on the other we find it much discounted by the expert metropolitan physician, since the very next letter to Pusinelli (Nov. 18) exclaims : " I breathe again, at knowing my vvife to be under your treatment, in your guard. May Heaven bless you, if you can continue to give me relief such as you have already been able to indicate, You can scarcely believe vvhat good you do me, witli this care for the sufferer ! " — \V. A. E.
INTRODUCTORY XV
hot baths and douches, which drove her almost mad. Thcn she acquired a taste for laudanum, which had incautiously been ordered in small doses for her sleeplessness ; as she could detect no result, she pushed the doses up to several scores of drops, as she confcssed to me later. With her progressive irritability, morcover, frequcnt conflicts were not to be avoided between us ; and for that reason — I admit it to you openly — our life toi^ether had latterly become un- bearable.— But you will soon discover all about her physical condition for yourself. Be entirely candid with me, dear Anton, so that I may arrange myself in every way to back up your treatment as studiously as possible. My conduct and future relations to her will be governed by no other regard in the world, than the hcartfelt wish to contribute to her healing, her soothing and sparing ; whatsoever may serve towards that end, I shall rnake my most urgent concern. Should we succeed in preserving her life füll long to come, in utmost painlessness and comfort, my heartiest wish will have been fulfilled ; and I am prepared for any sacrifice, to attain that. — For the present I hear, to my relief, that she has somewhat quieted already — as was to be foreseen, — her appearance also is said to have improved, Let the poor woman, who moves my soul to deepest pity, be commended to your noble heart ; be to her as much as ever you can, and count upon my fervid thanks !
" Of myself, and my extremely retired life, you will hear a little through my wife ; I also will teil you somcthing of it next time I write you ; for which, as I instantly hope, you will very soon afford me and my gratitude occasion through friendly tidings of my wife ! Goodbye, best Friend ! Be saluted and blest by your
" Richard Wagner.
"Canale Grande, Palazzo Giustiniani, "Campiello Squellini 3228."
XVI INTRODUGTORY
{To Jakob Sidser, former chief-niagistrate of Zürich!)
"Venice, Dec, 3, 1858. " My dear honoured Friend,
" Can you believe that I would run away from you Hke that, without so much as looking back ? Whatever you may think of me, surely you at least have thus much good opinion of me, that I keep in inextinguishable fondness, and hold in an imperishable esteem, a figure that has left so deep and valuable a mark as yours upon my life ? Of latter years our paths had lain much asunder. . .
[etc., etc., See Life of Richard \Vag7ier iv, 133.]
" Whatever may have come to your ears as to the cause of my seemingly so sudden departure from Zürich, I must leave on one side ; yet [Alex.] Müller was initiated to some extent, I believe, and could have informed you ; though it is to be doubted, in any case, vvhether he was intelligent enough to inform you correctly. It was impossible for me then to take a formal, ceremonial leave of Zürich ; I had to put up with seeing my friends plunged into uncertainty about me for a time, whereas I myself must first gain time and quiet to turn back to them at last with needful ex- planations. You are the first to whom I now address myself in this sense too, and — in all likelihood you will also remain the only one ; for, taken strictly, my only care can be for your opinion.
" Probably it had not escaped you from hints of mine before, that the State into which my wife had fallen, particularly through the worsening of her very painful heart- trouble, was becoming so unsettling to myself as well, that a radical change in our dwelling arrangements would have to be thought of at last. lU-luck ordained that, owing to — what I can only call— a trivial misconccption of certain of my personal associations that were really far remote from Standing in any manner of relevancy to our conjugal
INTRODUCTORY XVll
relations, she bclieved hcrsclf actually wrongcd in thcse latter ; thereby, and particularly undcr thc influcncc of her physical affliction — which in such cases, as \ve know, reacts so strongly on the mind, — she lost all her usual discretion and forgot hcrself to the length of words in our immediate neighbourhood ; which must necessarily Icad to such un- settlement and disturbance of those neighbourly bearings themselves, that, in spite of my honestest endeavours to stave it off, the resolve was bound at last to ripen in m}-self — my very seif — to give up our residence at Zürich. VVhat I suffered through it all, between unreasonablencss on the one band and passionateness on the other, ought to absolve me of any share of blame for which I may have been answerable mysclf. W'hcn I formcd my decision, and resolutcly carried it out in the teeth of unusual obstacles, I had to give up much that had grown very dear to me ; among which I will merely name the swect country-place I long had desired, with its equipment. —
" But enough ! it had to be ; and the result is already proving that, just as I did the most straightforward thing, I also did the best. Amongst the motives for the change was the necessity of effecting a temporary Separation be- tween my wife and me. In constant, close, immediate contact, without a jot of external distraction, it was not ahvays possible for me to keep nothing but my regard for her ailing condition of body and mind in view, under every circumstance — with my own temper also inflammable : to my most pcnitent rcgrct, conflicts arose again and again, and finally with daily aggravation ; conflicts in the vehemence whereof I could not stay without a part myself. Even for her health's sake I must have thought about an altcra- tion ; so I now rejoice in the result. At Dresden, well tended, with pleasant old acquaintanccs and agreeable distraction by fit artistic entertainments, my wife already
b
XV 111 INTRODUCTORY
feels much better ; vvhich certainly is chiefly contributed-to by the fact that I can commune with her from a distance quite differently and more beneficially than was possible — with the best intentions — when close at band. Now I can pick time and mood for my communication, also for correction of her passionate charges — still constantly re- curring tili a short time back — , and in this way I have already brought matters so far that she has begun to grow thoroughly calm. Particularly in view of her most ailing State of health, which makes her quite irresponsible, I am heartily concerned to ease her hard and painful life and make it as endurable as possible.
" About myself and my probable future I will teil you some other day ; moreover — and especially about my future — there is next to nothing to be said at present. I am working and striving to finish my Tristan, but unfortunately have been repeatedly hindered by illness. A malady that is keeping m.e tied to my chair for the second wcek, now, is also to blame for my break in this letter, which you
will remark by itS date [a second date is not given; cf. p. 76 inf.\
" You must have been wondering why Venice, which made such a disagreeable impression on yourself when passing through it, should have seemed to me the very place to meet my present needs. I sought a spot where I could live entirely unnoticed, completely retired, and work without the least disturbance. Uninteresting little places could .never afford that. Here, on the contrary, I have everything I wish : a very quiet dwelling on the Grand Canal (of jourse with no noise of street traffic), where I pass the greater portion of my day ; then a promenade through the incomparable parts of Venice, ever new of effect, from S. Mark's square to the public garden, with an outlook across the lagunes to the sea ; an ever-lively populace, but altogcthcr foreign to me, always remaining objective, —
INTRODUCTORY XIX
this suffices and suits me exactly, in my prcsent State of mind. A quite dcfinitc change in my Situation must naturally take place next summer ; how and in what direction, however, I am unable as yct to say.
" Now I beg you to be satisfied with this morscl for to- day, also to give my best regards and heartiest greetings to your dear wife, the Herr son, and my friends Böhm and Hagenbuch — to Müller too — when }-ou see them. Should you be paying a call on the Wesendoncks, don't forget to give them news of me and convey my kindest greetings. If ^^ou care to write my wife for once — which certainly would much delight her — address to 9 Marienstrasse, Dresden . . . [pureiy business matters.] Prcserve a kind remem- brance of me, just as 1 shall ever hold yourself in grateful friendship !
" Goodbye and let me hear from you soon. " Your
"Richard Wagner."
"(Canal Grande, Palazzo Giustiniani, Campiello Squilini, 3228.)"
" Lucerne, 7th April 59. " Best thanks for your letter, dear Kläre, and don't be vexed if I write but little in reply. You would hardly believe the bulk my correspondence has gradually increased to, and how chary I often must be with words, not to be obliged to desist from work entirely ... [3 semences about a poor
rclation.]
" May I hope you understood me well enough, not to take offence at my begging you last autumn to avoid all agitating subjects with Minna? She had been writing me in grcater and greater heat and passion, so that I was bound to assume there was too much talk about the sore point
XX INTRODUCTORY
with her. Of course I might have told myself that it would be difficult, in fact impossible to avoid it, and there wasn't the smallest reproach in my plea to you ; yet I feit I could not do enough, all round, to ensure a calming influenae on her. A heart like hers, that will not come to rest at all, is a terrible affliction ; I was deeply sorry for her, and as I had grown more and more keenly alive to the impossibility of reasoning with her reason, I recognised that there was only one choice left — between treating her with considerate cajolery, always evading, simply tran- quillising, ignoring all her ebullitions, or — undisguisedly abandoning her to her misery. It Stands to reason that I chose the first course ; so far as anywise possible, in all my letters I have treated her according to this principle, now earnestly, now playfully, and the effect appears to be proving of gradual benefit to her. For money, ample money to live quite nicely on, I do not let her lack, and have just provided her again with enough to lead a life of really elegant comfort the summer through. Grant God that all this, combined with the summer eure at Schandau, may so materially improve her, as to make it possible for me to commit my home to her again this autumn without fear of fresh relapses to her old condition, which would deprive both me and her of any further hope ! —
" As for myself, this solitariness is doing me a power of good. True, I have often been unwell, but it has never oppresscd my spirit : within me is the fairest, deepest calm. What confcrs it on me, and makes its preservation possible, is the noblest, most touching experience of all my life : here everything is high, upraised above the common plane ; incredible sacrifice, but peace profound. I live henceforward to complete my works, — for that alone ; and for that — towards that, I am helped. — Intimation enough! —
" I expect to write my third act here ; my mood is
INTRODUCTORY xxi
excellent. — Farewel!, dear Kläre ; be thankcd for your sisterly love, and ever count on my reciprocation.
" Your brothcr "(Schweizerhof) " RICHARD."
In the eyes of a select fevv readers of this book the above will be sufficient preface, and they may prefer to pass direct to the profoundly interesting collection of letters itself. The generality, however, will probably demand additional enlightenment as to the actors in this unique tragedy. Let me therefore begin with the one whose principal scene may be said to occur in its first act : —
Minna Wagner — to give her füll baptismal name, Christiane Wilhelmine — was born at Oederan, a village between Freiberg and Chemnitz, about half-way from Dresden to Zwickau. Her father, Gotthelf Planer, is ahvays described as a " mechanikus," or mechanician — a term that covers various kinds of workmanship of skilful fingers, rather than of sinewy arms or educated brain ; Praeger says " working spindle-maker," — not inherently improbable. Of him and his wife (Johanne Christiane Meyer) we know nothing more, except that they had three daughters and a son, lived in Dresden most of their lives, and for many years (until their death ?) were supported entirely by Richard Wagner. The last we hear of them is on a visit to Zwickau in 1854 to meet Minna, apparently at the house of another married daughter. The first we hear, comes from that Oederan parish-register, where Minna's birth Stands entered as having occurred on the 5th of September 1809,* i.e. nearly four years before that of her future husband.
It was at Magdeburg that Richard and Minna first met, he aged 21 and just embarked on his first conductorship, she 25 and engaged as actress at the same town-theatre. That she was " pretty as a picture " then, and remained so for some years to
* It is only within the past two years that the exact date has been definitely established (by Herr Tappert), since the actual place of birth was theretofore unknown ; in vol. i of \.\\q Life of Richard Wagner the \ear is erroneously given as " 18 14," owing to tiie marriage certificate having been misleadingly filled up — after a manner not unusual with our own census papers.
XXll INTRODUCTORY
come, we hear on every band ; the quality of her professional talent, on the contrary, is difificult to ascertain, though Richard describes her in a letter of this period as " erste Liebhaberin," or ieading lady. Within six months of their acquaintance, i.e. early in 1835, they had begun to rank as an affianced couple in the eyes of their associates ; but it was not tili the end of that year that he made her a formal offer of marriage, as we are told, in a letter vowing himself to the devil should she refuse him. Minna, who appears to have left Magdeburg at the time in search of a more enthusiastic audience, returns at once to complete her professional, and commence her conjugal engagement ; and the pair get married in November 1836. That ceremony took place at Königsberg, where Richard was then waiting for the shoes of a conductor who betrayed no hurry to vacate them. Scarcely has he donned those shoes, when a Königsberg correspondent reports to Schumann's Neue Zeitschrift that " Herr Musikdirektor Wagner has already left us, it is said for family reasons ; " those discreetly- veiled family reasons being, in fact — that his wife had left him, and little more than six months after their wedding.
It was a bad beginning, whatever the cause ; but that cause has never been authenticated, since the master himself in later years was naturally loth to approach the subject. German marriage-laws inclining rather to the American, than the English code, we must not jump to the conclusion that Minna had done anything more serious than abandoning her husband, when we find him appealing to those laws for a divorce in June 1837 ; yet for his happiness during the next quarter of a Century, and even for her own — to go by her remarks on her silver-wedding * — we can but regret that he withdrew his legal plea and welcomed back the penitent in the foUowing autumn, so that the first anniversary of their wedding was spent together at Riga, after all, where he had meanwhile entered his third appointment as conductor. Not that Minna ever ran away again, or acted in any other fashion than that of a ' dutiful,' perhaps even an affectionate wife ; but, as we have just heard her husband say, decidedly " she would
* " The 24th ult. was the day of our so-called silver-wedding, which I passed very dismally (solo). If I coiild cross these 25 years out of my life, perhaps I might be merry again " (to a feminine friend in Berlin, Dec. 15, 1861 ; see Die Ccgemua?-t oi OcX.. 21, 1899).
INTRODUCTORY xxiir
have been happier with a lesser man." Whcther the 'Messer man " would have been happy, is quite another matter : for my own part I strongly doubt it, unless he had been an infinitely lesser, since the few letters that have been brandished by Minna's none too wise defenders positively set one's teeth on edge. I will reproduce one in an instant, as it is only fair that the poor sufferer should be given a hearing in person ; we must first take a bird"s-eye glance, however, at the course of the Wagners' married life down to the time of the great Zürich catastrophe.
From the first that life was her-relations-ridden, as bis had ahvays looked askance on what they deemed a mesalliance, — and rightly deemed; for, albeit several of his brothers and sisters began their life on the stage, the whole Wagner family, with its antecedents for two-hundred years, distinctly belonged to the class of ' in- tellectuals.' Consequently Richard was virtually cut off from his own flesh and blood for long to come, and tied to a stock with scant sympathy for higher aspirations ; consequences far worse for his wife's mental development, than for his own. Even on her return to his hearth in 1837 Minna brought with her her sister Amalie, to fiU a gap in the ranks of the Riga opcra- troupe, and Amalie dvvelt with the Wagner couple tili they left that place some two years later (when she married a lieutenant of the Russian Guards, and we lose sight of her *).
In Paris — whither the Wagners next removed, and where they remained for two years and a half, 1S39-42 — there was no ac- commodation for a sister-in-law, as Richard found it more than difficult to procure sufficient maintenance for his wife and seif. Is it no more than a coincidence, that those were the years tO' which he ahvays looked back with tender memory, despite the hardships they had jointly endured ? However that be, in this early Paris period Minna behaved as a loving wife should ; nor did she shrink from menial house-work to keep the home afoot. Yet her energies must have been confined to inside management, the washtub and kitchen ; for even 20 years later she confesses- that she "can make no headway with French," whilst her husband himself has to conduct every detail of a removal for the same
* Similarly, our only knowledge of the brother is that Minna had gener- ously assisted him before her marriage, and was plunged into the deepest grief by his death at the age of twenty-five, in Dresden, 1843.
XXIV INTRODUCTORY
specified cause. How was all the marketing and bargaining in- separable from a Paris menage to be carried on, then, if not by his unaided seif? Even a lady's-maid, when taken abroad, will generally have the wit to pick up enough of what she elegantly calls the 'lingo ' to make herseif intelligible for all useful purposes ; wherefore we have here another reason for not ranking Minna's intellectual capacity as quite up to the average. Nevertheless in this Planer-less period the pretty liule hand-toiling wife does seem to have been a comfort to her over-worked, half-starving husband.
With the acceptance of Rienzi for Dresden, its brilliant success there in October 1842, and Wagner's appointment as royal Kapellmeister a couple of months after, his wife was thrown once more among her old belongings, exposed to their banal influence ; and certainly in the last year or two of the 6| they stayed there, if not long before, we tind another relative enthroned in the house, namely Natalie, the youngest bearer of the Planer surname. Whether cause and effect may be linked here or no, the latter part of the Dresden period was embittered by perpetually recurrent domestic strife, goading Wagner on one occasion to the remark in presence of a young male friend, " Other people are lucky enough to have their enemies outside their house, but my bitterest foe I have at table" {Life ii, 373). This not- withstanding, he appears to have undertaken the entire support ■of Natalie, as well as of his wife and her parents, and immediately after his flight from Dresden (for a vague and trifling share in the insurrection of May 1849), behold him seeking to found a home for " my poor wife and her family " — so Planer-manacled is he !
For how lo7ig after Wagner's settlement in Zürich this extra mouth and tongue at table were imposed on him, I cannot definitely ascertain ; manifestly the wife's relative was viewed so much in the light of a standing dish or dispensation, that one hardly catches a glimpse of her in his correspondence — in itself no flattering sign. By three direct but colourless references in his letters to Uhlig, however, we can trace her as clinging like a limpet to his bare walls from September '49 to November '51 at least, though she must have relaxed her hold by October of the foUowing year (whether finally or not, I cannot say), since Wagner writes Uhlig November i, '52, " Please see that my wife's
INTRODUCTORY XXV
family receives three tickets for the thiid circle, next Tannhauser Performance; yours must go to the amphitheatre " ; and the nice distinction teils its tale. At any rate Minna must have soon after been robbed of her ally for good, if it was Natalie who married the doctor mentioned in the second of the letters printed above, and to whose new homc at Zwickau Minna paid her visit in 1S54.*
With his freeing from the Planer incubus Wagner had by no means been rescued from invasions of his domestic quiet. For Minna, entirely weaned from sympathy with her husband's inner seif by now, not unnaturally feit lonely, and began going out to the Zürich theatre and an occasional ball or two ; with the result that she picks up a little set of her own in the early part of 1852, and has to do some entertaining in return, — " tiresome visitors,'' her husband Complains, " new acquaintances have forced thcmselves upon me," and " Company that tortures me, and before which I withdraw to torture myself" (letters to Liszt and Uhlig). While the ' poor neglected wife ' thus was gadding about in her mild philistine way, leaving her husband " sitting lone on the couch, staring at the lamp" (leiter to Liszt Feb. '53), Providence brought him into the society of a lady with truer instinct for the needs of a genius' heart and mind, though, as we have seen in the first of the letters above, it was years before this pair of souls became consciously united. Nothing grosser than a union of souls did it ever come to, — that is piain on all the following pages ; whereas Minna had long ceased to be a wife in anything but name, since she and her husband now met at little more than meal-times.
For the moment I will skip those intervening years, undoubtedly of physical pain for Minna, and call herseif to the footlights in the interlude that succeeds the stormy ending of act i. After *' raising halloo " — to quote that choice expression which is all her Gegenwart champion finds fit to cite from any of her early letters to the Berlin lady — she evidently went to stay awhile,
* Here again we are in the dark, as the unsystematic von Hornstein, who did not make Wagners acquaintance tili 1853 ('^'^^- ^'^f \ has this to say : " How sniall was his household ! Himsclf, his wife and her unmarried sister — a simple, iinassuming person — the parrot and a dog." Buttlie whole question of Minnas relations awaits authoritative trcatment.
XXVI INTRODUCTORY
first with Richard's sister Clara Wolfram at Chemnitz {vid. sup. &• p. 33 /;?/!), then with her own married sister at Zwickau, and thence to Dresden — heralded by her husband's letters, not only to his old medical adviser and benefactor Dr. Pusinelli, but also to other of his own staunch friends who, he knew, would stand by and assist her. From Dresden she writes the unnamed Berlin lady as follows : —
"Dresden, the 29th December 1858.
" It is impossible for me to close this fatal year without sending you first my heartiest greetings. Please, do write nie soon, whether things are going well with you.
" Unfortunately I cannot teil you that about myself; I have been made wretched and ill by two abominations,* and shall recover very slowly, perhaps never at all. My poor heart still is thumping violently. I look so wretched that my acquaintances do not recognise me.
* At first one might suppose the "zwei Abscheulichkeiten" to be intended for Richard and Mathilde; but I do not hold Minna capable of describing her husband thus to a correspondent who, it appears, had once made a stay in his house. The first '' abomination " — especially, in view of that date " 1853 " in Richard's Ictter to Pusinelli, i.e. the year of removal to the nevv flat — is far more likely to be Einilie Heim, the singer mentioned in my footnote to p. 7 inf., wife of that " Papa Heim ' whose name crops up from time to time in the main collection of letters. It is one of the Zürich traditions, that Minna was furiously jealous of Frau Heim before she transferred that feeling to Frau Wesendonck ; also that the earlier jealousy was one of the causes of Wagners wish to quit his Zeltweg flat (p. 13 /«/.), since its back Windows looked straight on those of the Heims', and thus the two women were constantly brought face to angry face. The groundlessness of such jealousy is palpable, as Ignaz Heim himself became Wagner's generous financer at the very time when Minna's conduct had made it impossible for him to accept anything from Herr Otto, and we shall find the master writing him from Venice (p. 72 ?>(/".) ; whilst Herr Steiner, an inhabitant of Zürich who himself has carefully perused the documents, declares that in all the correspondence between Heim and Wagner (unpublished), extending over twenty years, there is " nowhere a shaddw of ruffling " {Ncujahi'sblatt 1902). — Tr.
INTRODUCTORY xwii
" I believe I wrote you that I had rented a small parterre here ; I only wanted to have the nccessary üf our effects sent from Zürich, which, however, 1 luckily did not afterwards necd, because good faithful Frau Tichatschek had so nicely fittcd up my little lodging, consisting of tuo tin}' rooms, with her own superfluit}", that nothing lacked ; she had even stocked thc little kitchen and store-room ; wood, coals, potatoes, eggs, flour, brcad, butter etc., none are wanting. This act of friendship was extrcmely welcome to me in various respects, as my brother-in-law [of Zwickau] had not been able to advance me the needful money after all. I am living very sparingly, and }'et left dry. My good man seems to run through very much himsclf at Venice, as always is thc case when he lives alone, so that nothing rcmains over for me. New Year I was to have had money sent me by him ; yesterday, however, he writes me that he w ill want it himself. A very nice thing, that ; yet I submit, and shall not exactly die of hunger so long as I have a roof and a warm room. Richard is often ill in Italy ; first he was threatened by a horrid nervous fever, which kept him twelve days in bed. Since nearly fivc weeks he has a large open wound on his leg, which has been discharging continually, so that he has feit acute pain with it. Walking is out of the question ; he is carried into and out of bed, and naturally cannot think of work.
" That fatcful Tristan, which I cannot bear for its origin, only seems able to be called into life with great interruptions and exertions. Let's see what happens between this and then. It seems to me as if with works like that therc can be no luck. Perhaps I am mistaken ; so we will sce what thc end brfngs, and whether this opera pleases pcople. I wish it from my heart ! Yet for various reasons I cannot bring mj'self to attend a first Performance.
"The [your?] communication of the little Guido's death
XXV 111 INTRODUCTORY
gave me quite a fright. May God hold every blow of Fate afar from this cold woman spoilt by happiness, but I believe that there is a Providence. I was alvvays thinking, if only our Lord God would suddenly check such sauciness through the ilhiess of a child — and now see ! O it gives me a shudder !
" Of course I cannot kecp a maid. I may not go to big parties, only to small family-gatherings ; on the othcr hand, by my doctor's advice I am to attend the theatre often, where I have no need to speak, vvhich tires me very much. It would not have been quite easy for me to carry out the theatre part if his Excellency Herr von Lüttichau, on vvhom I had to pay a call for politeness' sake, had not sent me a ticket next day for every performance, without my having had to waste a word on it. That was very obliging of him, and an exception but seldom made in anybody's favour. Altogcthcr, people here are taking me up very cordially and kindly, and as I am bound to believe, purely for my own sake this time. Yet as said, I must keep quiet, not to agitate m}'self, which brings on my old sleeplessness again.
" My eure here will last a long time still, consequently I shall never see my husband again, or at least not for a very long while. I require peace and quietness. . . . [Piease read footnote.*— Tr.] Sweet Christmastidc is at the door, People are buying an immense deal, in spite of the shocking high prices here. Only I shall pass the festival quite silently and without any presents, as also the New Year.
" Richard writes to me much and heartily ; I too, to
* The anonymous author of the strangely wry-brained article in Die Gegenzvart, whence the above is derived, here obviously tacks on a fragment from a letter of a füll vveek earlier ; it is so illuminating, however, particularly when tliis inference is borne in mind, that I have translated it as it Stands. — W. A. E.
INTRODUCTORY XX IX
him ; nevcrthclcss I wish my bcing with him long dcfcrrcd. I keep swallowing the thought, but down it will not stay.
" Apropos, in your ncxt leltcr do teil me oncc more the name of that gcntlcinan you mct, and who said : W'hat a pity the Wagner is going back to her husband ; she might have come to mc, as I'm a widowcr, and so on. You know that I should ncithcr go to him nor to anyone eise, — I might have had that bcfore if I likcd ; yet it intcrests me to know who it was that said that. Do satisfy
my CUriosity." [Here ends the reproduction of this Icttcr, or eombaiation of two letters, without winding-up or Signatare. — Tr.]
Writing to Lotte and Caroline, Schiller once spcaks of his profound interest on tinding, through study of the old Greek tragedians, that " human beings are so alike in every age, the same passions, same collisions of passions, same language of passion ; with all this infinite variety, yet this resemblance, this oneness of the same human form " ; and Caroline answers him, " As hfe goes on, it has become to me a second nature to feel my Söul at home with whatever things are beautiful and excellent, and to leave the common common, without deeming it bad, as may so easily happen to a heart that seeks for beauty." — After reading the effusion above, it is well to sip some such corrective, to remember that the voice of passion thrills to much the same chord whether high or low, and that ''the common" is not necessarily " the bad." For commonness is stamped on all this document, and one now may better reaHse what Wagner meant when he told Pusinelli (Nov. i8, 58) that "the great intcllectual divergence " between himself and his wife had been the source of their many painful differences. She has not even the sagacity to see that all the kindness showered upon her now in Dresden is by no means " purely for her own sake this time," but a very patent result of her husband's frequent messages to Jiis good friends to do their best to make her happy. " My doctor " is the doctor we have just seen Richard begging to assist her in every way ; he prescribes her the theatre as an agreeable diversion of her
XXX INTRODUCTORY
thoughts, and between him and Wagner's other old friend, the great tenor Tichatschek, the " exception but seldom made in anvbody's favour " is granted without her even having to ask for it. Tichatschek had been Wagner's own guest at the Asyl on the very eve of the disruption ; Wagner writes him at the end of September (as also to old Chorus-master Fischer a fortnight later) announcing his wife's arrival, and the Tichatscheks kindly offer her provisional shelter. Presumably it is they, who secure her a flat in the house of gentler memories, and behold ! — when she arrives to take possession, it Stands already furnished by a fairy band. Her own relations, so long recipients of her husband's charity, cannot advance her the money they had promised to ; yet she is so dense, or so vain at 49, as to imagine that his ancient Dresden friends are keeping the wolf from her door ' for the sake of her beautiful eyes,' as the French say ! Moreover she must have completely drifted from their good atmosphere not long hereafter, and returned to what her husband ten years since had called "the dregs of Dresden vulgarity " {Life iii, 9); for, in justification of his wish to draw her to himself in Paris, he teils Pusinelli next October (1859): " Your reports about my wife do not take me unavvares ; from her letters and her own confessions it is manifest to me, how difficult a Job it is with the poor soul. I also perceive, though, how much the success of your medical efforts is hindered by my wife's continuance in Company that can but be injurious in its effect upon her. That my wife has found yourself as doctor, was a great good-fortune for her ; the misfortune was, that this must be in Dresden. At any other place she would have been less exposed to all the influences I have hinted in brief." Poor Minna, incorrigible, I fear ; but weak and silly, not morally " bad."
How about the wicked husband, though, who " wanted all the money for himself"? — In the first place, he was ill himself, in a foreign land without a single friend ; no one there to provide him with coals and potatoes, or medical advice and physic gratis ; no one to cheer him up with a free pass for entertainments. He was occupying a vast room in a palace, no doubt, but probably at very little more rent, as times then went in Italy, than she was charged for her small flat ; and he had lately had to — pawn his watch. For, where was the money to come from ? Minna
INTRODUCTORY XXXI
herseif had killed the goose with thc golden eggs, and very little profit trickled from the theatres ; since most of them had paid a miserably small lump suni down, some time before, for the performing-rights of all bis marketable wares. In the second place, as I suspect to have been usual with her, Minna was only telling half the truth when she cited her husband's letter of " yesterday " ; and as this really is an enlightening instance, I will furnish detailed proofs of my assertion : —
That "yesterday" gives her whole case away since 1903, when the records of the Hanover court-theatre, down to forty years ago, were published by Dr. Georg Fischer. On the 22nd of December 185 8 Wagner writes a long business letter to the Director of this theatre, to the effect that, as they have already procured the score of Rienzi for Performance, he expects the "fee of 50 Friedrichsd'or " to be paid at once, and begs that the treasurer be instructed " to address 20 Friedrichsd'or [;!^i7] of the sum destined for me to my wife, Madame Minna Wagner, No. 9, Marienstrasse, Dresden ; the rest, however, to myself at Venice " ; whilst a fortnight later he is made acquainted by an official telegram with the money's despatch. Now, we happen to have a very close idea how long it then took letters to travel from Venice to the middle of Germany, since Wagner acknow- ledges on the yth of January 1859 the "receipt to-day " of a letter Liszt had posted at Weimar on the ist, and on the 22nd of February a letter Liszt had posted on the ijth; therefore five to six days was the length to Weimar, and it would be much the same with Dresden. Consequently the letter Minna received "yesterday," i.e. the 28th of December 1858, would be posted by her husband on the 22nd or 23rd — the day of, or day after, his letter to the Flanover director — -and must indisputably have conveyed the intimation that he had ordered the said 20 Friedrichsd'or to be despatched to her direct. Even if she hsd small faith in its coming, she had no right to suppress the fact of its promise when complaining that some other amount — perhaps a contribution from his former benefactress, elderly Frau Ritter of Dresden — could not be set aside for her. And now we will turn to Wagner's letter of Jan. 19, 59, to Mathilde (pp. 101-2) : " Karl Ritter returned on New Year's day, and now comes to see me at 8 every evening again. He has reported to me that
xxxil INTRODUCTORY
he found niy wife looking somewhat better. She seems to be doing tolerably, on the whole, and I take care that nothing lacks to her ease." So Karl — and he was always generous — had visited Minna on her husband's behalf only a few days before that letter of sour complaint !
Nor — to shake off this sordid business once for all — do we find the peevish wife " left dry " in the interval between January and next April, when we heard Wagner teil his sister that he had just sent Minna "enough to lead a life of really elegant comfort the summer through." For that interval we now have data in Dr. Wilhelm Altmann's most valuable Synopsis, Richard Wogner's Briefe nach Zeitfolge und Inhalt, published only this year (1905). Here, among other things, Messrs. Breitkopf and Härtel supply particulars of never-printed letters from the master to their firm, extending over many years. Under date Jan. 31, '59, he asks them to send a Mannheim theatre-fee to his wife direct, on March lyth to make her an advance on others (her receipt whereof he afterwards acknowledges). That fully disposes of every innuendo that she was left to shift for herseif, even when he was so hard put to it to find the wherewithal. Neither did he omit to send her whatever eise conceivably might interest her : during the same period the Härteis' archives demonstrate that he ordered them to forward her in November '58 the vocal score of his revision of Gluck's Iphigenia in Aulis, and ten days later the poem of his Tristan, — his only publications that winter. He ministered to her in every possible way, and a woman who, despite all that, could send off such a letter to a friend (of both ?), must long before have grown most difficult to live with.
I have deferred the question of jealousy, as in the present instance that was pardonable to some extent, though with a different kind of wife there might never have been occasion for its cause. But if confirmation were needed for the dictum that the jealous person is the selfish person, this letter would furnish it down to the ground. Year after year had . Richard treated Minna to every conceivable ' eure ' for her disease — far offener and more sedulously than he had troubled to attend to his own 111- health — and coldbloodedly she can now recite her husband's bodily sufferings without a word of pity ! Surely he is right when he informs his sister that Minna " does not even under-
INTRODUCTORY XXXiii
stand what true love is." A woman who had ever owned a spark of love would at least have hinted sorrow that this painful wound of his was left to allen hands to drcss. Contrast her expressions with his to Pusinelli, and say which member of this ill-matched pair not only had the tiner brain, but far the better heart. Physically, indeed, there wasn't niuch to choose between the hearts ; as \ve shall see later on (p. 190), even nine years back he had been warned against the danger to his, and it nearly carried him off ten months from this (p. 183). But Minna had learnt to make capital of hers, and it is the best capital in the world to trade on if you want your own way. Listen to what dear old Fischer hears this autumn (Oct. 58): " It's all very well for you, to exhort me to conie to rest at last. Lord, how I love rest, in other people ! Seriously though, my poor wife is a grcat sufferer ; she has a complaint of the heart, and one must have experienced what that means ! No rest to he thought of there, either for the invalid or anyone around." The story of years is Condensed in that one phrase, yet we soon shall see that Wagner manfully niade up his mind — and clearly through the Wesendoncks' persuasion — to Shoulder his cross once again. After another year of it, he falls seriously ill himself; and alike by Minna's bulletin to her Berlin friend (p. 254;^;), and Mathilde's courageous offer to come and tend him (p. 257), we may judge how utterly unsympathetic a nurse Frau Minna made. Only by prodding it into our memory that she really was an invalid herseif, can we divest our mind of the conclusion that " the common " in this case came perilously nigh being " the bad."
Another excuse must also be remembered. Wagner has already called her unzurechnungsfähig — " not accountable for her actions " ; four years after the Zürich catastrophe he writes sister Clara again (June '62) " Arrived home, I found a letter from Minna, which made me most terribly concerned about her ; for this letter really gave me the impression as if it had come from a maniac. She must be terribly excited again." Of course the heart alone would not do that, for its physical distress would prevent any wielding of the pen tili the attack was over and reaction had set in : it must be the effect of a ' stimulant ' of some kind. And there we have every Symptom of what nowadays is morphinomania, but then was induced by the far more harmful
c
xxxiv INTRODUCTORY
parent-drug, crude laudanum, — in which the effect of its solvent proof-spirit should not be forgotten.* Dr. Pusinelli was cautioned about it November '58, whilst Liszt had been told in the previous July, " My anxiety about my wife has been terrible ; for two whole months I actually had to be prepared every day for the news of her death. Her condition has become so much worse chiefly through the insensate use of opium — allegedly for sleeplessness ! " That vermeintlich (allegedly) teils us all ; the drug habit had become a Virtual intoxicatien, with all its shocking consequences : consideration for truth is discarded, the wildest fancies spring unbidden to the victim's brain, any innate vulgarity grows rampant, a molehill is converted to a mountain. Thus must it have been for some time past at Zürich, and thus it certainly goes on in Paris. Early in 1861 — when he seems no longer to have had a private sitting-room, poor man — Wagner writes Mathilde : " The odds are so against my profiting by any better-cultivated intercourse, that I willingly resign on every band, and just accept whatever whim or hazard brings into the house " (p. 262 /?//".). Immediately preceding this obvious allusion to Minna's mistrust comes a refer- ence to Mme Ollivier, Liszt's eider daughter, "... I'm thinking, how it is that we so seldom see each other," and the reasons for the dots in that passage we are bound to respect ; bat on the one band we find the most odious insinuations anent the seifsame lady in Minna's letter of March 1860 to her Berlin friend (see Die Gege/iwart), on the other, Liszt writes Princess Witt- genstein in May 1861, " Pour revenir ä Wagner, je vous dirai qu' Ollivier a ecrit une lettre fort se'vere ä Mme Wagner, qui, ä ce qu'il parait, a fait des cancans tres de'plaisants sur Elandine. II est difificile que les relations se renouent apres cela.t Pour nia part, je ne m'en melerai point, l'experience m'ayant trop enseigne sur l'inutilite des replätrages ! " At times the poor drug-victim must have behaved as a she-devil in the house, then ; outside it too.
* It may be needtul to inform the layman that even drops of lavender- water, or eau-de-cologne oa lumps of sugar, have been taken by the weaker sex with dire effect ; whilst in one of the worst cases I have Seen of feminine addiction to stimulants, when every other was cut off, recourse was had to sal volatile.
t Together with his wife, Emile Ollivier, future premier of France, accompanies Wagner on a journey two months later, — after Minna's departure ; see p. 278 infra.
INTRODUCTORY XXXV
Not for a moment would I deny that Minna had amiable qualities, once displayed to her husband, now chiefly to her Company ; though when Challemel-Lacour terms her " la meilleure des femmes d'artiste " (quoted by Herr Tappert), either he must have had a lordly contempt for "artists," or those of his acquaint- ance must have been singularly unfortunate in wedlock — as Berhoz was indeed, his second time. Of notable acts to her credit, we do know of her attempt in 1854 to gain her husband's amnesty by personal Intervention at the Saxon Court, and her visit to his friend Roeckel in prison ; of her renewed efforts in 1859 and 1862, the latter whereof proved successful * ; also of an open letter, written at her husband's request Jan. 9, 1866, in which she gave the lie to " Munich and Vienna rumours " by declaring that " until now I have received a sustentation from my absent husband Richard Wagner, which secures nie an existence free from care." That disavowal was published in the newspapers only just in time, for she died a fortnight later (Jan. 25) — alone in the night with an open window, as if she had been gasping for breath, after the excitement of a tea-party she had given at her rooms that afternoon. Poor soul, one cannot but feel deeply sorry for her ; but it is an act of gross injustice to her husband's memory, to represent her as a martyr to anything but her own constitutional unfitness, and I am convinced that her loudest-mouthed Champions would never have endured a whole week by her side in the last half of her life, to say nothing of her husband's score of years. His own epitaph upon her is still the best ; writing to Clara a year after, he says : " Your [year-old] account of Minna's death has quite moved me to horror afresh ; there was a calamity about the unhappy one, and nothing of it could be changed. In her fate lies something so disconsolate, that in my eyes it throws a shadovv over all existence."
It is because that shadow looms so threatening in the back-
* August Roeckel's uife obtained her husband's release from his .13-year imprisonment at about the same time, not by any personal influence, but simply since the Saxon Ministry insisted on a personal apology, and were driven at last to accept it by proxy. The more important half of Wagners amnesty, viz. permission to enter any part of Germany except his native land, was procured for him in 1860 by the Princess of Prussia, subsequently Kaiserin Augusta.
xxxvi INTRODUCTORY
ground of the present group of letters, though her name occurs so seldom in them, that I have devoted to unhappy Minna a disproportionate share of this attempt at introduction, and shall even have to bring her in again. Without knowing something very definite of the poor earthen pot that cracked itself against the nobler vessels with which it swam awhile adown the stream, one cannot understand the natura of the dents it left on them. And nobler the other three were, far nobler, two of silver, one of gold.
Of Otto Wesendonck, the first of the two silver vessels, we know little more than is conveyed by these letters themselves and those others addressed by the vessel of gold to him. He was a Rhinelander, we are told, born March 16, 181 5, therefore dose on two years younger than his friend, and nearly fourteen older than his gentle wife— not a great discrepancy in age when the man is the senior. Partner in a large New York firm connected with the silk-trade, his knowledge of the world would naturally be extensive ; but, until thrown into Wagner's society, he does not appear to have devoted much thought to art, saving as applied to luxury. For good pictures to hang in his house, a fine house wherein to hang them, his taste was pronounced ; to judge by page 287 of the present book, however, he had not cultivated any great relish for reading, apart from the newspapers ; whereas- his conversation seems to have betrayed a marked tendency ta ar-'ument, on ' politics ' or other trifling matters (pp. 131, iSS'^^ 2,1g) But it is as a knightly figure that he will ever abide in the memory of all who met him (he died November 1896), and surely truer knightliness than he displayed m a singularly difficult conjuncture can nowhere have been found, outside Kmg Arthur's court Undoubtedly 'twas /le who was the greatest sufferer for several years,-by no means Minna,-years of perpetual heart- burning bravely borne. Not a line of his do we possess or are likely to, though Wagner once thanks him (1855) for a "long letter which I have accepted as the outpouring of the heart of a friend"; but in the autumn of 1856, a year before the time of areatest trial, Wagner says to him, " If ever I am to play a role üi the history of art, truly you should likewise occupy no scanty place therein,"— and those words stand true to-day.
INTRODUCTORY xxxvii
The precise nature of those "coiiflicts" on Otto's private hearth, to which Wagner alludes in the first long paragraph of his narration to bis sister, \ve shall never know ; it would be unjust to all concerncd, however, to imagine that they passed beyond the hounds of dignity ; also we must make due allowance alike for the certainty that Wagner speaks of them at secondhand, and for his intense agitation at the moment of writing. Whatever form they took, and however long they had endured, their issue is -sutificient warranty that Otto kneiv that his trust in his friend was not abused ; and even though some coolness between the two men would be very natural after the repeated " scenes " which Minna's turbulence had caused, we find Otto writing Richard on a subject nearest to a father's heart, the death of a beloved child, barely two months after the Asyl was closed (see Letters to Otto, and p. 109 inf.). That in itself is ample refutation of the avid slanderers who not long since painted Wagner's voluntary forsaking of his haven as a humiliation inflicted by a wrathful husband. But the refutation is strengthened by the frequent interchange of Visits in the following spring and summer ; still more by Wagner's expression of October '59 : " Children, that we are three, is my and your greatest triumph ! " (p. 194). Here a triple renuncia- tion, of a kind too sacred for the vulgär mind to grasp, was still in force ; a renunciation which alone can explain those cryptic
words on page 69, " Nay, he will not betray thee, — , not —
he ! " — the application whereof to Otto is so manifest when we remember that Wagner had but just received his tender tidings of bereavement.
One more point, before we pass to the other vessel of silver. Down to the time when Wagner knew at last the secret of Mathilde's heart, he may have guessed that her friendly interest in him was part-occasion of her husband's largesses, but the wildest Imagination could never have dreamt that Otto's generosity was not dictated by his own free will * ; for Jakob Sulzer also, no wife to influence him, had long ago combined with Wesendonck for the artist's assistance. From the moment that his eyes were opened, though,
* In a " Gedenkblatt," or "Souvenir" contributed to the Alh^. Musik- Zeitung of Feb. 14, 1896 (nine montlis before her husband's death), Frau Wesendonck pointedly observes that " money-matters were never discussed ' between herseif and Wagner.
xxxviu INTRODUCTORY
Wagner seeks help in every other quarter ; and even a year there- after, when the ideal trefoil spreads its leaves in peace, it needs some pressure on Herr Otto's part, to induce his friend to accept of his munificence again (p. 167«). One may wish that no further acceptance had been necessary, but the eternal money- trouble was the Achilles-heel in Wagner's lot, and for that his laggard fellow-countrymen must be mainly held responsible ; neither has a golden vessel ever yet been known without its portion of alloy.
Mathilde, the chief vessel of silver, was born at Elberfeld the 23rd of December 1828, her parents Karl Luckemeyer and Johanna his wife (nee Stein). We hear of a brother and a younger sister, but know nothing more about her family, except that her father was a man of civic Standing — a Kgl. Kommerzienrath, or member of the royal Board of Commerce — and that they soon removed to Düsseldorf, a very important commercial city on the lower Rhine. Mathilde at first received her education there, thereafter at Dunkirk; but as she teils us herself, she was a "blank page" when she first met Wagner (1852). On the igth of May 1848 she married Otto, and their first son Paul was born at Düsseldorf November 1849 (died four months old). They spent the following year in " America," presumably New York, and by the middle of 1851 we find them settled in grand style in the Hotel Baur au Lac at Zürich, where Myrrha, whose name will often recur, was born the 7th of that August. This hotel became their head-quarters for another six years, and here were also born their sons Guido, Sept. 13, 1855, ^"d Karl on the iSth of April 1857 ; — they had no further issue until June 16, 1862, their last child, Hans (died 1882). Probably when they first arrived at Zürich, a great silk centre, they had no Intention of making it a permanent home ; certainly they spent a good portion of each year away, and almost a whole twelvemonth in Paris from early 1856 to early 1857 save for a brief flight back and forth again. Not tili 1855 did they begin to build their stately villa in the rural suburb Enge, the famous "Green Hill," which they occupied from August 22, 1857, down to 1872 ; when they removed first to Dresden, and in 1882 to Berlin, with a country-seat " Traunblick " on the shores of the Traunsee, Salzkammergut (1878 onward). It was at Traunblick
INTRODUCTORY xxxix
that Mailiilde Wesendonck died, the 3 ist of August 1902, after but eight hours' illness ; apparently, therefore, from a seizure of the heart, as Minna and Richard Wagner before her.
A fair idea of Frau Wesendonck's mental capacity is scarcely to be gathered either from her "Gedenkblatt" on Wagner in the Allgeiiieine Musik-Zeitung* written when age was creeping on, or from the fourteen letters that terminate the present book ; for which reason I have prefaced those letters by tvvo little so-called children's- tales from a collection lately re-issued, these bearing too close a relation to the life-romance not to be "doubly welcome in the absence of any of the former of earlier date than June 1861. The curious will find at the British Museum, as I am informed by a friend, her five-act drania " Gudrun," Zürich 1868, a volume of her " Gedichte, Volksweisen, Legenden und Sagen," Leipzig 1874, and her dramatic poem " Odysseus," Dresden 1878. Beyond these, I can speak of a five-act tragedy " Edith oder die Schlacht bei Hastings," Stuttgart 1872, a " Baldur-Mythos " after the younger Edda, 1875, " Kalypso, ein Vorspiel" (without date), and a four-act " Alkestis, nach dem Griechischen frei bearbeitet," 1898, — for possession of all which I have to thank her heirs. Dr. Golther (editor of the German Originals of these letters) further mentions "Natur-Mythen," Zürich 1865, and a drama "Friedrich der Grosse," Berlin 187 1. Quite a respectable list, and of works of no mean merit ; the main point for us, hovvever, is that not one of them was written before Frau Wesendonck's attachment to Wagner — whose phraseology may be detected here and there — or published tili correspondence with him had practically ceased. These works have little prospect of survival, but those which sprang from the depth of her heart, the Fünf Gedichte (pp. 16-17 ^"f-) ^ri<^ the poems sent to him with one of her later letters (pp. 351-54), are bound to live as long as his own name. —
Her Personality ? No one admitted to the honour of Frau Wesendonck's society during the last twenty years of her life — and here I can speak from personal experience, however slight — could for a moment believe her to have ever been the heroine
* Ot" Feb. 14, 1896, already referred to. As most of the facts in that article have already been used in my vol. iv ot the Life, I do not think its reproduction needful here, more particularly as the chronology is ratlier taulty at times.
xl INTRODUCTORY
of what the baser sort imply when they speak of a ' Tristan-and- Isolde romance.' This placid, sweet Madonna, the perfect emblem of a pearl, not opal, her eyes still dreaming of Nirvana,— no ! emphatically no ! she could not have once been swayed by carnal passion. And these letters, in l:)ulk and in detail, most flatly con- tradict that implication : nay, more,— they prove the justice of my old contention, not mine alone, that the 2nd act of Wagner's drama excludes all possibility of Ms Tristan, his Isolde being victims to a coarse desire. In these letters all is pure and spiritual, a Dante and.a Beatrice; so must it have been in their intercourse. For my own Impression of their recipient— whom I first met in that sad year at Bayreuth when the master was no more — it was that of the silver moon reflecting a sun that has set long since. Not a word ever feil from her lips on such a love as is revealed here ; but every accent of her voice, the gathering moisture in her eye, speit worship, and from her it was, I earliest learnt a truth which added years have simply verified : that in Richard Wagner we have more than a great,— a profoundly good man.
Richard Wagner :—
" The message from X greatiy moved and affected me,* and in more than one respect. My art has ever fared quite well with women's hearts ; and that apparently arises from the fact that, amid all the prevailing vulgarity, it still is much more difficult for women to let their souls turn utterly to leather, than it has proved for our civilised men-folk with such ample success. Women indeed are the music of life ; they take up everything with opener mind and less reserve, to beautify it through their fellovv-feeling " (To Uhlig, Dec. 1849).
" What set your letter in its ugliest light, was its Coming rs enclosure to a letter of E.'s, which 1 happened to read
* From other sources vve learn that this " X " in the authorised edition of the Letters to Uhlig Stands for Mme Laussot, the "Bordeaux lady " of page xlviii, a relative of Wagner's benefactors the Ritter family. The " E." in the next extract was a daughter of Frau Ritter's, and Wagner seems to have met none but the sons as yet.— Tr.
INTRODUCTORY xli
first of the two. Ask E. what I iiiean by that, and in two words she'll make it piain to you ; for — belicvc me — this girl is milcs ahcad of you, — and why ? By birth, bccause she is a female. Shc was born a human being, — \'ou, and all men no\vada\'s, are born philistines ; but pain- fuliN' and slowly do \ve wrctched crcaturcs reach at last to turning human. Oniy the ladies, those vvho have stayed cntirely what they are at birth, can teach us ; and were it not for them, we men should go irreclaimably to ground with our papcr pellets. Do you suppose that the passage in m>' Ictlcr, where — sincc you took it so for granted — I answcred that Paris was doing me a world of good, I was perfcctly delighted with it, and so on, — do you suppose that E. would have taken that at its face value ? I can hardh' believe it, and presume she would have understood the irony a little better than the Royal Chamber-musician did " (To Uhlig, from Bordeaux, March 1850).
"Just one thing more, — it used to crop up in our old debaies : — never shall we be what we might and should be, tili — \Vo)nan is zvoken. — Ah, see what sonsfs I'm singine you, poor fellow ! Believe me, I am not blithe myself, that I can merely sing" (To August Roeckel, political prisoner, Aug. 1851).
" Exactly as Ahasuerus, the Holländer yearns for death as end of all his sorrows ; but the Hollander may gain this redemption — denied to the eternal ]z\\ — through a icouian who shall sacrifice herseif for love of him. Thus it is the yearning for death that spurs him on to seek this woman ; but this woman no longer is Od3'sseus' housekeeping Penelope, wooed in days of old : no, she is the archetj-pe of womanhood, though non-extant as yct, the longed for, dreamt of, infinitely womanly woman, — let me out with it in one word : the Woman of the Future" (Communication, autumn 1851).
xlll INTRODUCTCRY
These passages, and many, niany like them, have lain open to the world for years, alike in German and in English ; it is amazing that their sense should have been grasped so seldom, and the coarsest imputations cast on Wagner's moral character by all sorts and conditions of writers, down to the last bumptious tyro who fancies he can wield a pen. Somewhere, of course, there must reside an explanation : it resides in this, that fifty years ago the " Woman of the Future " was considered a fantastic myth, at any rate in Germany ; whereas she has become to-day the Woman of the Present, whilst the Woman of the Fast is so extinct that her very history runs risk of being clean forgotten. Unfortunately Wagner, whose whole mission it was to " make revolution wherever I go," lived far in advance of his age — which was mentally and morally incapable of understanding him in almost anything— and still he has to pay the penalty. " Out of themselves they blow them across to me, those clouds ; how much longer must I scatter them, to shew them that I'm, after all, a good pure man ? " (p. io6 inf.). Those clouds are still blown, and I cannot too emphatically insist that, upon ail reliable evidence, Wagner was a clean-living, clean-thinking man ; in fact, it is the very cleanness of his thoughts that has baffled so many a plumber, — where he speaks of " the senses," for instance, " they " only think of one.
Writing of the Paris 'sixties (when Minna scented vice in every petticoat), Malwida von Meysenbug, a pure-minded spinster who shared her friend Wagner's belief in the future of Woman, has placed this on record : " In face of practical life he had that awkwardness of genius which is so touching, since it coincides with a profound naivety of ideas about the relations of ordinary life which can be misunderstood alone by mediocrity and malice " {Memoiren einer Idealistin III. 267). In his first edition of the Communication he was naive enough, indeed, to include the following passage concerning his Liebesverbot period, i.e. the year or so before he feil in love with Minna : " Woman had begun to dawn on my horizon. The shy reserve towards the female sex inculcated on us all — that ground of all the vices of the modern male generation, and no less of the stunting of the female — my temperament had only been able to break it through by lits and Starts, in isolated utterances of a pert impetuosity : a hasty con-
INTRODUCTORY xlül
science-stinging snatch had had to servc as most unsatisfying Substitute for tlie instinctively desired bliss. That desirc, which nowhere could still itself in life, found an ideal food in the reading of Heinse's Ardinghello, as also the works of Heine and other members of the ' Young-German ' school of literature. The effect of these inipressions shewed itself on my outward life in the only way in which Nature can utter hersclf under the pressure of the moral bigotry of our Society, namely as — vvhat folk call, unfortunately to-be-tolerated — vice" {Frose Works I. 294 & 396). The next edition, issued twenty years later (1872), expunged for good the last clause and the second sentence; for which reason, when translating the work in 1892, I relegated them to an appendix ; whence — oddly enough — they have not yet been unearthed by " mediocrity and malice." But is it not piain, on the face of them, that these are the words of a man disgusted with the wild oats which he, like myriads of others, had sown for a brief period of his early life ? And does not their expunging connote that bis traducers were a force to be reckoned with, people who even in 1872 would fail to comprehend his protest against that " shy reserve towards the feniale sex " which still prevailed in Germany and turned that sex into domestic animals or puppets ? The Woman of the Future was only just beginning to be born, and rational liberty of comradeship was not yet tolerated.* —
To get back, or on — I almost forget which — to the time when Wagner first met the two Wesendoncks, namely February 1852:—
With a wholly unsympathetic wife by his side — a wife con- stitutionally disqualified to understand her husband's wish for more inspiring Company, — Richard Wagner has arrivcd at a climacteric in his artist-life. His operas Rienzi, the Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin already are on the boards, though the last-named he has never hcard himself; he has just rounded off his most important theoretic period, Opera and Drama and the Conimunica-
* To obviate any misconstruction of ihis deprecation of " Die uns Allen anerzogene schüchterne Zurücklialtung gegen das weibliche Geschlecht,'' I adduce von Hornstein (see p. xlv) : " Once he happened to make a risqu6 joke in the presence of his wife and sister-in-Iaw» and inimediately bhished like a girl. That blush became him well.'* How many men past forty have retained the faculty of bliishing?
XllV
INTRODUCTORY
tion to 7ny Friends appearing logether this seifsame winter ; the füll plan of Der Ring des Nibelungen has ripened in his brain, whilst its last two members He versified on paper (subject to revision). Now he is simply waiting for the Spring, his favourite Creative season, to attack the Walküre and Rheingold poems in earnest ; but his health has ebbed to a wretched State— undoubtedly due to the eye-strain of so much literary work — and a fallow season is essential. To tide the Interregnum over, he conducts subscrip- tion-concerts at Zürich (his place of refuge) with an inadequate orchestra and a tiny fee : at a rehearsal of his Tamihäuser overture, for one of these, he delights Mathilde Wesendonck, to whom and her husband he has been introduced at the house of a friend some few nights previously. His remarks to Uhlig (a young Dresden friend) in a letter of a day or two afterwards are eloquent of an instantaneous Impression : " The feminine element remains the only one that can help me to illusions, off and on ; for I can form no more about the males " ; and a month later, four days after the concert-performance itself : " Don't call me vain if I confess to you that the extraordinary effects, which I am spreading around me, restore me now and then to a pleasur- able sense of existence ; ever and again it is the ' eternal womanly ' that fills me with sweet illusions and warm thrills of joy-in-life. The glistening moisture of a woman's eye often saturates me with fresh hope again" (see Life iii, 272 et seq.).
I have just said that the mutual Impression seems to have been instantaneous, but hasten to add that for a long time, a very long time, it was quite subconscious on both sides. In certain precipitate quarters — evidently acquainted with nothing but French extracts which lately appeared in a Paris review — capital has already been made of Wagner's Diary entry of August 21, 1858 : " Yesterday I wrote to my sister Kläre. ... I indicated to her what thou hast been and art to me these six years since " (p. n inf.) ; but my readers have only to turn back to the said letter itself, — "at first, and for long, shy, diffident, hesitant and timid." A profound effect had been produced on Mathilde's mind by her first personal experience of that rarity on earth, a genius, and no doubt the effect was strengthened by a woman's quick grasp of the Situation in Wagner's cheerless home : admiration and commisera- tion would thus go band in band, with the result that Otto was
INTRODUCTORY xlv
at once pcrsuaded to exercise the duty of the rieh and takc upon himself, in some degree, the role of a kind Providence. That Otto did so from the very first, is proved by Wagner's earliest pubUshed letter to him, namely of July 1852, and still more strongly by a much later one, of February 1857: " You know how I told you 5 years ago of this greatest wish of mine,* and dcfined it as the longing for a cosy, quiet country-house with garden. It seemed a thing that ought to be attainable, and you offered me a band thereto yourself." And so we shall find that, until a little later than the letter of 1857 just-cited, alike those to Otto and the tiny billets to bis wife betray no feeling, certainly no consciously reciprocated feeling, other than that of a friendship which has ripened into camaraderie : brothers and sisters might address each other thus. Yet, in bis passion for proselytising, Wagner soon undertook to form the beautiful young matron's untrained mind. There lay the unsuspected danger; with centuries of chains bchind it, the feminine mind had not yet learnt to loose itself from the emotional heart ; the "wakening of Woman " might prove to be a thought too soon.
From Frau Wesendonck's brief reminiscences, above referred to, there is really very little to be gleaned as regards this process ; from her (later ?) friend Frau Wille's absolutely nothing. The gossip gathered half a Century thereafter from toothless survivors of their entourage, at second to fifih band, is not worth the paper vvasted on its priniing. For this nebulous period we are therefore restricted to Wagner's private letters to contemporaries, and the testimony of the only one of bis male associates whose recollec- tions have as yet bccn made public, to wit, von Hornstein.-)-
* Namely, " untroubled rest to carry out my artistic drafts '' ; yet unless tiie above refers to a conversation, the " five " should be reduced to less than four if we may judge by that fragment ol' a second letter in the Otto collection dated "June 11, 1853,'' which seems to be an answer to Herr Ottos inquiry as to Wagner's needs.
+ " Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner : Auszüge aus dem unge- druckten Naclilasse des Komponisten Robert P^eiherrn von Hornstein," feuilleton of the Neue freie Fresse Sept. 23-2.^, 1904. An editorial footnote teils us that Baron Hornstein was born 1833, and died 1890 (long before modern gossip on these relations had started), also that a collection of his songs lias now reached its twelfth edition ; whilst allusion is made to his "interesting reminiscences of Schopenhauer"
xlvi INTRODUCTORY
Trom these, combined, I will endeavour to ' reconstitute ' the puzzling past : —
1852. — Jan. 30: " With her natural strong need of love, a woman niust love something " (to Liszt, just before this acquaint- ance). Then —
March 25 : " Yesterday I received a letter from Hamburg, from
a lady of aristOCratic birth [Malwida von Meysenbug, a total stranger] who
thanks me for my essays, saying they have been her salvation ; she declares herseif a thorough revolutionary, — Thus it is ever the ladies that have their hearts in the right place in my regard, -whereas I am almost compelled to give men up as lost already " (to Uhlig). — May 3: "The Holländer' s impression on my public was most unusual, deep and earnest. Naturally, the ladies wäre to the fore again " (to U.) ; 29th, " With all the ladies I have won a mighty feather in my cap " (to L.); and 3ist, "Julie [nöe Ritter] is in the COUntry with US here ; K[ummer, her husband] is
at the baths. — Julie seems to have taken a great fancy to me ; at any rate she implicitly foUows my word " (to U.)- — July 15, " There are splendid women here in the Oberland, but only to the eye ; they're eaten up with raging vulgarity " (to U.). — Sept. 12: " My personal affairs are shaping fairly pleasantly \Tannh. fees coming in], but alas ! I'm much alone ; I lack all satisfying Company " (to Roeckel) ; 27th, "If I could only come to an agreeable rest : yesterday a young woman [perhaps a fortune-teiier?] told me what would eure me ; she was very bold, and was right ! Good Lord, what a silly fool I am, to be such a squeamish beast ! But that's the way I'm built ! " (to U.). — Nov. 9, " I am living an inexpressibly good-for-nothing life ! Of actual enjoyment of life I know sheer nothing : for me the ' taste of life, of love ' is simply a matter of the Imagination, not of experience. . . . If I could visit you at Weimar, perhaps I might hope to recover, . . . perhaps a word of love might sound from here or there — but here ? ? Here I must perish in the very briefest space, and everything will come
published by the same Journal in 1883. Making allowance for an obvious inaccuracy here and there, v. Hornstein's vindication of Wagner is the more valuable as it was written in 1884 and he confesses to having ceased to be on friendly terms about tvve:nty years previously. Unfor- tunately the " Auszüge," or excerpts, give no dates, though these are «asy to furnish on other internal evidence.
INTRODUCTORY xlvii
too laie — too laie. 'Tis so ! " (to Liszt).— N.B., Theodor Uhlig, ^\■ag^er's favourite disciple, died in Dresden this Christmas. — 1853 : the year the two faniiUes first became more intimate : — IMay 30 {re the famous three Zürich concerts, consisting of extracts from the Holländer, Tannhäuscr and Lohe?igrin) : " Indeed it was a festival for the Httle world around me ; the ladies were all in my favour " Üo Liszt). — June 8: "I might say I am living fairly pleasantly now [in the ncw Hat] if — I were anybody eise ! It is not only that I am bound to feel the dishonourableness of the World in general more acutely than many another does ; but even as regards my own personal life I'm bound to admit to myself more candidly each day that it is only in the last few years [cf. Jan. 1854] l've grown aware — too late ! — that I strictly have not lived (7/ all yet ! . . . My art is becoming more and more the lay of the blinded yearning nightingale, and this art would suddenly lose all its reason if I could but clasp the actuality of life. Ay, just where Life stops, there does Art begin ; from youth up we stumble into art sans knowing how, and only when we have forged through art to its very end, do we discover to our lamentation that 'tis just this life we lack. . . . O yes, there's one thing might console me : — not only am I wondered at, but also loved ; where criticism ceases, love Steps in, and a number of hearts has it drawn near me. Yet that sort of love cannot but still remain far off me ; it enters my life most indirectly, and — the way this life of mine has shaped — it is only as into dimmest distance I can look into that realm of love. Could I become a proper egoist, things would be easier ; but as it is, it can't be helped, and — like yourself — only through resignation can I at least main- tain myself in the truth of my nature " (to Roeckel in prison). — Dec. 29: "When composing [Rheingold^ I generally undertake too much, and drive my wife to justifiable wrath by keeping dinner waiting ; so that it is in the sweetest of humours I enter the second half of the day, with which I don't at all know what to do: solitary walks in the mist; sundry evenings at Wesendonck's. It is there I still obtain my only Stimulation ; the graceful lady stays loyal and attached to me, though there also remains much in this Society that can but torture me " (to elderly Frau Ritter of Dresden). — One might place the commencement of the reading- lessons somewhere about here, with a good deal of pianoforte
xlviii INTRODUCTORY
demonstration, as we know, includitig fragments from the growing
Rheingold.
1854.— Jan. 25-26 (the famous homily to Roeckel) : " Whatever a man cannot love, stays beyond him, and he beyond it ; here the philosopher may flatter himself he comprehends, but not the truthful human being. Well, in its füllest reality, love is only possible between the sexes : only as man and wonian can we human beings love most really, whereas all other kinds of love are but derived from this . . . [a'icl so on, for pages] . . . ' I ' and the World, means nothing more than ' I ' alone ; to ' me ' the world becomes a füll reality but when it has become a ' thou ' ; and it becomes that only in the apparition of the loved individual. . . . Enough ! I venture to send you these confessions of faith without fear of rousing trouble for you, in your solitude, through a sharing of my views. Not only you, but I myself— as all of us— live at present in con- ditions and relations which point to none but Surrogates or makeshifts ; for you, no less than for myself, truest, realest life can only be a thing of thought, of wish. I had become 36 years old ere I guessed the actual drift of my artistic Impulse * ; so long
* Wagner became "36" on the 22nd of May 1849, so that— unless jj^g .,5" be a misprinted g— the said epoch vvould fall within bis first year of exile ; which confronts us with the never yet unriddled " Bordeaux episode" of March 1850. Ferdinand Praeger, who invariably embroiders what he does not invent, teils the story thus : " Feeling naught congenial to him in Paris, he left again for Zürich, via Bordeaux and Geneva [such a shon cut]. At Bordeaux an episode occurred similar [?] to one which happened later at Zürich, 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 [it was not so much as known to any but a private circle before this wretched book of P.'s]. The Bordeaux story 1 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 herseif at his feet pa'^sionately told of her affection. Wagner's action in the matter was to tele^raph to the husband to come and take his wife home. On telling me the story, Wagner jocosely remarked that poor Beethoven, so füll of love, never had his affection returned, and lived and died, so it is said, a hermit " {Wagner as I kncw him pp. 196-7)- And that was published by a respectable London and New York firm durmg the lifetime of both the ladies mentioned, a few months alter its authors
INTRODUCTORY xlix
hat! Art found credence with nie as the end, and Life the means. But the discovery, it is truc, had come too lata, and none but tragical experiences could respond to my new instmct of life. Moreover, a wider glance into the world shews Love itself impossible now. . . . Not one of us will see the Promised Land ; we all shall perish in the wilderness ... in the happiest event we must he- come niartyrs. . . Now I can do nothing eise than go on existing as artist : all the rest — since I can embrace Life, Love, no more — either disgusts nie, or interests me solely insofar as it bears upon Art. 'Tis an agonising life, to be sure ; still, 'tis the only life possible." — ^Vhat does that reveal to us,* but a man distraught
own decease ! Seeing that Frau Wesendonck was openly named loo pages after, in course of further insolences regarding " the Zürich incident " ; seeing also that a German edition was promised for speedy appearance (also a French, but the German publisher's withdrawai knocked that on the head) — the reader will not be astonished at my warning that lady at once about the slander. That there was somcthing in the " Bordeaux story," quite unconnected with herseif, is proved by her reply (see facsimile), but Praeger's version is so little to be credited that he does not even believe it himself: the " English " edition says " At Bordeaux an episode occurred '' etc., implying that "the husband " was telegraphcd-for from thcre ; the German edition, professedly " trans- lated " by himself, says in the usual Praeger fashion, " At Bordeaux he visited a married couple .... and when he resumed his journey, she followed him and found him at a hotel en route. . . . but Wagner telegraphed to the husband to come and fetch his wife back." After that, one cannot trust a single word of the details ; but the very possession of the Story, in any shape, points either to a still graver breach of confidence than is self-admitted (namely to garbled divnlgence of Wagners closely guarded Memoirs), or to something far more likely in this instance, an unbosoming by the "solitary, heroic Minna ' — with whom the tattler made great friends during his fortnight at the Asyl in summer 1857 (of course he persistently dates it "1856"). The latter supposition, coupled with P.'s soup-brewing tendencies, would account for the im- possible Suggestion (Engl, ed.) that the Bordeaux lady was Emilie Heim, — who with her husband first came to Zürich in 1852. Whatever the right or the wrong of the story may some day prove to be, there is not the smallest probability of Richard Wagners having betrayed it to so garrulous an acquaintance, and never in this world "jocoselj'," — see " tragical experiences " above.
* There is tio directer personal allusion in the letter. Incidentally it should be remarked that, apart from all despondence caused by a Leipzig Lohcugrin fiasco, the acuteness of the present psychologic
d
1 INTRODUCTORY
with love, driven almost to despair by its apparent hopelessness ? Resignation has yet to come, though only just below the offing, as \ve shall descry in an instant ; consciousfiess of being loved in return is niany, many a league away.
April 9, '54 : " Ah dearest, dearest, onlyest Franz ! Give me a heart, a mind, a feminine soul, in vvhich I might wliolly merge myself, that would embrace the whole of me, — how Uttle should I ask of this world ! , . . But I'm wool-gathering again ! Send me to the right-about, as I deserve ; — nobody will ever make anything of me but a fantastic idiot ! " (to Liszt). — June : " Seek me no copyist ; Mad. Wesendonck has presented me with a gold pen — of indestructible writing-power [cf. page 152 ////".] — which is turning me into a caligraphic pedant again. These scores will be my most consummate masterpiece of penmanship : one can't escape one's destiny " (to L.) ; his saving gift of humour, so often Coming to the rescue, has stood him in good stead once more. But that gift will not forever stay his tears, as is shewn by the following reminiscence of von Hornstein's, who first met him at the zenith of the Zürich festival in '53, and now runs over from Lausanne for a wild-goose concert chase at Sion {Life iv, 365-70) and its sequel at Karl Ritter's bridal home near Chillon : " Several times was AVagner overcome by yearning for the talented and beautiful Frau Wesendonck, for whom he had conceived a passionate regard ; the refined lady accepted the artist's homage without compromising herseif in the smallest degree. Once we surprised him, sitting in the garden, with tears in his eyes. Apart from such attacks of weakness, he was cheerful, amiable, füll of intellectual talk." Later in July, Wagner invites Liszt to Zürich, " Come, if you can, in the second half of August ; the Wesen- doncks will be back by then, I think " (as Liszt was unable to come, he cannot have met them tili autumn 'so).
Then the Walküre music is taken seriously in hand, some of it under the eyes of von Hornstein, who has come to Zürich for a while and teils us, evidently of September : " In the presence of Ritter, Wesendoncks, Heim and myself, he sang and played the whole first act. Frau Heim, a capital singer, supported him ;
crisis itself accounts for the strangely inconsequential ' explaaation ' of the Ring-poem contained in this,. the favourite epistle of the modern axe-grinder : W'agner himself is hardly to be recognised here.
INTRODUCTORY li
it was a rare premifere. — For himself, he did not sing at all badly; with little voice he managed much ; just an ordinary sort of voice, but the higher notes rang better. His piano-playing was about the same ; without being a proficient, he could bring out every- thing. — That evening he was very happy." — On the sketch of the prelude to that first act of Die Walküre Wagner's pencil traced
" G^ s . . M ," deciphered later by Frau Wesendonck
as " Gesegnet sei Mathilde "— " Blessed be Mathilde ! " Even though the initials may date from this period, however, it is impossible for the sketch itself to have been made away tili long thereafter ; at first he needed it until completion of the füll score, and then he left it in London for Klindworth to make the pfte Version (1S55 onward, see no. 213 of JV.-L. Corr.).
Meantime this same month of September 1854 brought his first acquaintance with the works of Schopenhauer, without which he might have been unable to endure the strain of so hopeless a passion ; for his thoughts had often been attuned to suicide of late. Schopenhauer taught him very soon a nobler way — of resigtied renunciation ; and it is in that mood that his Tristan / dawns on him before " this mournful year " goes out. Mid- December to Liszt : "As I never in my life have quaffed the actual delight of love, I mean some day to raise a monument to this most beauteous of all dreams, wherein that love shall glut itself right royally for once. In my head I've planned a Tristan and Isolde, the simplest but fullest-blooded musical conception ; with the black flag that floats at its end I then shall shroud myself — to die." Certainly Tristan is deferred for nearly three years, three years of ripening and refining, as the J^ing des Nibelungen blocks the way ; but, the JValkiire composition-draft completed (Dec. 27), for a fortnight he suddenly takes up and finishes a subject just as symptomatic of his present State, — he revises his Faust overture of fifteen years ago, " the solitary Faust."
1855. — It would seem to have been Mathilde's expressed desire to hear this work, that prompted the Faust revision ; for she in- forms US that he had wished to dedicate its publication to her, but recoiled with horror at the thought of its gloomy motto (after Goethe) : " Impossible — he cried — to pin that fearful motto to your breast ' " Whether those were his actual words or not, he simply prcsented her with " the score " (rough draft ?), pre-
\\[ INTRODUCTORY
sumably without the motto, and wrote upon it, " R. W. Zürich 17 Jan. 1855 zum Andenken S. 1. F.," i.e. "In remembrance of
bis dear Friend." *
The next piece of evidence we have in this year is a letter to Roeckel of February the 5th : " With my own Hfe-experiences I had arrived at the exact point where it needed nothing but Schopenhauer's philosophy, to determine my whole course. Through abihty to accept bis very, very serious truths without reservation I most positively conformed to my innermost bent, and albeit he has set me on a somewhat different tack from before, yet this veering was the only one to answer to my deeply suffering sense of the world's essence. . . . With a truly reverential feeling, then, do I send you this work that has strengthened me to endurance, and given me power of renunciation, at a very decisive catastrophe of my inner hfe"; whilst the meaning of that " catastrophe "—i.e. crisis and an inner one, mark you-is distinctly outUned in a previous passage of this letter: " At last I have finished composi- tion of the JVa/küre—amid great inner sufferings whereof no one knovvs anything, and least of all my good wife » (she had visited the prisoner some three months back).-Then from London, to Roeckel again, next April or May : " Long had I found it hard to keep an optimistic footing, in face of the perpetual evidence of my own eyes, and friend Seh. simply helped by bis enormous impetus to rid me of the last Judaic heresy, and, with great grief indeed, but the consolation of having cast off the last wilful illusion, to make myself as free as ever man can be. . . . In summer I shall return to my dear Switzerland, which I think of never quitting more. Retirement, beautiful Nature and-work : 'tis the only dement for me to live in, and I shall not let myself be torn from it again." That is the reverse of the reflection of a declared, still more of an accepted lover.-In September, and on
* Dr Golther-evidently going by Frau Wesendonck's Gedefikblait, where she had cited the inscription as " Der lieben Frau "-interprets the initials as "Seiner lieben Frau"; but that possessive pronoun makes a vast difference, and I therefore believe that. the "F" should be read as " Freundin " i.e. " Lady-friend." In Lotte's letters to Schiller we constantly find this abbreviation "U.", or "1. Fr.," Standing for a male " dear friend."— The revised Faust overture was first performed Jan. 23, 1855, at Zürich.
INTRODUCTORY llli
the day of Guido's birth, it is followed hy an invitation to Liszt to bring Princess Wittgenstein and her daughter to Zürich at Christmas : '' One can pass the winier very spaciously and com- fortably, for very Utile, at the Hotel Baur au lac where you stayed before [1S53]. . . . The Wesendoncks are living there, and you might set u[) quite a famous — half Joint — household ; which would much divert nie."
Richard and Minna had passed a few weeks at SeeHsberg on tlie lake of Lucerne just previously ; von Hornstein went to stay there too, and this is what he teils us : — "He [they ?] occupied two small rooms, in which one could not have placed even an upright piano, even had there been one to procure. There was a grand in the public conversation-room ; but that was never empty, and Wagner never set his foot inside. . . . On our walk, as we came to a part dropping sheer to the lake, he begged me to let him go first, as he had what is called sympathetic dizziness and feit nervous for the man in front [cf. p. 167 ////]. On our return it was exactly time to go to supper. Then for the first time I saw his wife, vvho gave me the Impression of a very kind, good- natured woman ; we soon became great friends. She always had a high opinion of me * ; moreover, Ritter [?] and I ahvays took her part, — which could not be said of everyone in Zürich. The three of us sat down to the general table-d'hote : Frau Wagner, who sat opposite her husband and myself, stood [!] very well with all the Company, and chatted briskly with her female neigh- bours ; Wagner held aloof from the whole Company, which was taken very ill of him. They were mostly ladies from Zürich and Basle, few gentlemen ; a fairly home-baked gathering — Immediately after table, Wagner retired with us to his room ; his wife brewed him a grog, which he used to drink every evening then. He would often change his diet. . . We parted rather late that night, against his usual custom. — At Seelisberg he rose early, and worked tili dinner at a desk-siand near the balcony, from which one looked down on the lake, with
* To judge by Hornstein's literary style, one can quite believe it ; to make any coherent sense of his six-word gasps, I have been compelied to reduce the rank of their full-stops, from time to time. Needless to say, his paragraphs are equally jerky ; they are represented by the dashes introduced above.
liv INTRODUCTORY
the Mythensteine opposite. — I posted myself on this balcony to study Schopenhauer, and in those few weeks at Seelisberg I got the principles of Schopenhauer's philosophy by heart [wouid that it had also been his style !]. As I took a daily walk of several hours with Wagner, and passed the evenings with him, my penetration into that philosophy was much assisted by the fact that Schopen- hauer formed our chief topic of conversation. — Wagner had a pencil-sketch of the ' Rheingold ' in front of him [it was Walküre act ü], and was fair-copying the score. For this he used a platinum pen which a Russian lady had presented to him [poor Frau Wesendonck]. He wrote most distinctly, almost beautifully. VVhen I asked if the copying did not weary him, he replied : It was no mere transcribing, but thus he went over the work again and altered in detail. — At the dinner-table things passed exactly as the night before ; the Swiss had a kind of awe of Wagner, and got out of his way. Directly after table Wagner withdrew to his room, to read and rest ; Frau Wagner and I remained with the Company, and entertained ourselves quite well with the excellent philistines, who were very nice to us and appreciated our affability ; Frau Wagner, in particular, did all she could to furnish a corrective of her husband. Later, I retired to my room in the side building, which looked upon the Uri-Rothstock. Towards evening I fetched Wagner for a walk. — Thus our life repeated itself with great regularity ; it was fine weather almost all the time, so that this day's plan was little altered.— I learned to love and admire Wagner. At Seelisberg he did not turn one of his disagreeable sides outward. He was füll of wit, and often enchantingly adorable. Even with his wife he had not the smallest rencontre, which fre- quently occurred at Zürich later." — Had Minna but encoiiraged her husband to go his harmless way, as he let her go hers, no " rencontre " need there ever have been, — clearly he was steering away from the rocks toward which her non-company temper lashed him back; and of this "later" we have von Hornstein's testimony again, though he specifies no definite period : "He was charming when he went for walks with Ritter and myself alone. Clever apergus fiew through the air ; he lavished upon us his rieh störe of experiences. Many a golden saying leapt to aar, original views of men, relations, art and politics, to light ; his whole goodness of heart, of which he possessed a large dose.
INTRODUCTOPy Iv
mounted to thc surface. His love ot' jnimals had something toucliing. When his pity was aroused, he found himsclf disarmed. He long had ceased to love his wife, and was consumed with passion for another ; yct he would turn sulky, hasty, perverse, never coarse. With one little word he might have thrust a poniard in the wonian [cf. p. xxii] : he never breathed it." —
1856. — In January of this year the \\'esendoncks were still at Zürich (cf. a lettcr of Gottfried Keller's), but they must have left for Paris, or possibly the Riviera, quite early in the year ; nor did they return, save for a brief spell or two in autumn, tili about commencement of the following Spring, — practically a twelvemonth's absence.
In the nieantime \\'agner has finished scoring Die Walküre, middle of March, and repeated attacks of illness have com- pelled him to take a long rest at a place of so-called 'eure.' In May he sketches that scenario for Die Sieger to be found in vol. VIII. of the Prose Work'-, with Ananda and Prakriti (alias Sawitri) as hero and heroine (pp. 54-56 inf^j. This is highly significant, especially as it appears from his letter to Roeckel of August 23rd that the Buddhesque variant of Brynhild's farewell words in Götterdämmerung has been drafted soon thereafter, whilst "The chief thing I desire is health, to be able to execute all the sketches of which I am füll. Unfortunately I'm fuller than I need ; for, beyond the Nibelungen pieces, I have still a Tristan und Isolde in my head (Love as fearful agony), and a latest subject of all, 'die Sieger' (supreme Redemption — a Buddhist legend), which so compass me about that only with great pertinacity can I drive them back in favour of the Nibelungen." Love as '''' furchtbare Qual" — that is his own experience, like Tristan's in act iii, and he has just described it on another page of this letter as the " devastating " dement in his Ring^ — so at variance with the earlier termination ! further : " Can you con- ceive a luoral action otherwise than as an act of retmnciation 1 And what eise is highest holiness, i.e. füllest redemption, than the conversion of this principlo into the basis of cur every deed ? — But even with these simple questions I'm faring too far afield, no doubt, and becoming more abstract than is good for me ; wherefore I will merely add something about my concrete per- sonality. — I am nothing but Artist, — and that's my blessing and
Ivi INTRODUCTORY
my curse ; otherwise I would fain become an anchorite, and have my life mapped out for me in the simplest of niodes. As it is, fool that I am, I run about in search of rest, i.e. that complex lest to be supplied by an untroubled life of ease sufificient to enable me to — do nothing but work, be nothing but artist."
We shall find that paradox running as a thread of scarlet through this volume, the cause of all its hero's seeming incon- sistencies. But the interesting point at present, is that Ottds sympathy had also been claimed a fortnight previously alike for the Tristan and Die Sieger projects, whilst we can plainly detect a week hence that Mathilde has taken such alarm at the Grand Duke's offer of a IVei/fiar sanctuary as to induce her husband to forestall it {Leiters to Otto). Wagner himself had wisely endeavoured to secure a rural house, whose whereabouts we must leave the Zürichers to trace, but which clearly was not near the Wesendoncks' then half-built villa (p, lo in/.): Mathilde, listening to the dictates of her heart, not her reason, holds out to the renunciant that fateful apple of the Asyl. Of that there can be no doubt, since Wagner's letter to Otto of September lo bears all the marks of a response to a spontaneous offer : " To be sure of enjoying total quiet and retirement in the imrnediate neighbourhood of a family so kind and dear to me as yours, of ahvays finding harbourage and sympathy for joy and sorrow in these most intimate - relations, would be a happiness }io other could replace ! " Nothing
could be more positive proof, that on September the 4th Otto himself had written : If I can succeed in buying it, will you oblige me by accepting tenancy of the little property adjoining mine ? And Wagner follows up our last Quotation with a serious monition : "But can I cast this whole bürden of my existence upon you, and after repeated experiences of the great difificulty of my Position, ought I not to recognise that the load would grow too heavy for you?" Here we can see that the temptation to accept relief is becoming too strong to be resisted, but it is mani- fest that Wagner believes himself strong enough to resist any other temptation which may flow from that acceptance. Another thing manifest, is that neither Richard nor Minna can as yet have had
. the least suspicion of Mathilde's secret love of him.
/ In that letter of Sept. lo to Otto one passage, given us merely
in oblique narration, refers to Wagner's " anxious waiting for
INTRODUCTORY Ivii
\Vesendonck's return." Soon thereafter the friends must have met once more, followed by the little dispute bctween the two wives anent the merits of Kienzi (p. 12 inf.); a mere passing tiff, how- ever, for it is the present owner of the future Asyl who frustrates the " harbourage " proposal, by declining to be bought out. — In mid-October Liszt witli Princess Carolyne and her daughter arrive, for about six weeks at the Hotel Baur, and it is clear from messages sent to and fro immediately hereafter that they make the Wesendoncks' acquaintance. More than that, — Wagner at last niakes his bosom-friend a confidant and counsellor, for \ve read in a letter of November '57 : " Now take my band, and take my kiss ; a kiss such as you gave me a year ago, when you accom- panied me home one night — you remember, after I had told my doleful tale to both of you. However much may lose its impression on me, — what you were to me that night, the wondrous sympathy that lay in what you told me as \ve walked, — this heavenliness in your nature will foUow with me, as my most splendid memory, to each future existence " (note (71 jedes Dasein hin ; the English edition fogs it into "everywhere " !). —
To wind up his visit, Liszt makes a little concert expedition with ^^'agner alone, and the latter, on his return to Zürich, writes friend Otto (back in Paris with his wife by now) Nov. 30 : " Last Thursday I returned to my domestic quiet (?) " — the note of interrogation being explicable by the letter's close — " The great kind-heartedness of the princess has attuned me to a greater gentleness and control of my so very irritable temper ; so that I am rcturning to my solitude as from a school, with the feeling of having learnt something. And how much should I not have to learn yet, to conform a little to the claims I make upon myself, and shew myself worthy to myself of what I hold for good and noble in ihis life of woe and weakness ? Never has it become clearer to me than now, what lenience the very best of us requires, and how, above all others, he must exercise the greatest goodness, not to become the greatest wretch ! " If it was not a good man who wrote these lines, there never was one ; and as they seem to point to 'rencontres' with Minna whereof Otto himself had been witness, it is fairly piain that jealousy of Otto's wife cannot have been the exciting cause as yet.
1857. — February the 8th Liszt is informed of Otto's purchase
Iviii INTRODUCTORY
of the little property on the grass-clad moraine ridge * '.hat runs up to a commanding prospect, Kilchberg (p. loo) between the Sihl Valley and the lake of Zürich, and of his offer of a tenancy thereof for life. Here it should be remarked that in the very next breath Wagner speaks of the necessity of " securing niy Hvelihood in an independefit fashion," namely by a sale to Härteis of the Fing; composition of the third member whereof, the Siegfried, he had commenced last September. His ambition for independence was not to be wholly fulfiUed, since Härteis would not come to terms; but its sincerity is past all cavil, whilst nothing could be more beautiful than the expression of his thanks to Otto, ending with the words : "Could I depict to you the wonderful deep calm that fills my soul to-day !" {Leiters to O.) —
April i8, as we have seen, Karl Wesendonck is born, and Hornstein shall be called into our witness-box for the last time : " At the christening of a child of Frau Wesendonck's I stood at Wagner's side ; we were in the background. He .vas very moody ; all at once he muttered to himself, ' It is like attending one's own execution.' That utterance did not suggest an intimate relation ; moreover we were all convmced that the connection never broke through certain bounds." Vulgarly as it is put, this corroborative evidence is vital, and it is confirmed by the entire absence in ail contemporary correspondence of any belief in such "relations" — whatever the prurient know-alls of half a Century later may fable to the contrary. —
At the end of April the Wagners move into the Asyl, on which Wesendonck's own architect has meanwhile been hard at work. May 8 Wagner wrues Liszt: "I have a trying time behind me, but it now seems Clearing to quite an agreeable State. Ten days ago we moved into the little country-seat you know of, beside the Wesendoncks' villa, which I owe to the truly great sympathy of this friendly family. I had to go through many a trouble first, though : the fitting of the little house, which ccrtainly has turned out very neat and to my mind, required much time; so that we were compelled to move out before there was any possibility of moving in. Then my wife feil ill, to boot, so that I had to
* Herr Steiner teils us that the ridge (not the little house) is locally called the "Gabler." After the Wesendoncks left the Green Hill, the ne.vt proprietors were goths enough to puU the "Asyl* down.
INTRODUCTORY lix
Shoulder the whole removal out myself, and alonc. W'c wcnt to the hotel for ten days, and finally moved-in in terrible wcather and cold ; so that really nothing but the thought of a definitive migration could have kept my spirits up. 15ut it's all got over now, all set and stowed for permanence just as we want it, everything in its proper place. My workroom is furnished with the pedantry and elegant ease well known to you ; the writing-table Stands at the big window with the splendid view of lake and Alps ; quiet and tranquillity Surround me. A pretty garden, alrcady very well cukivated, offers me room for little walks and sittings-down, and to my wife the pleasantest of occupation and diversion from her crotchets about me ; in particular, a good-sized kitchen-garden absorbs her tenderest care. Quite a nice soil for my retreat is won, you see, and when I reflect how much I have been longing after such a thing for long, and how hard it was even to get a prospect of it, I feel compelled to look on this good Wesendonck as one of my greatest benefactors. Next July, too, the Wesendoncks hope to be able to take possession themselves, and their neighbourship promises me all that is friendly and pleasant. — So, something achieved ! — and I hope very soon to be able also to resume my long-discontinued work."
Work is resumed a fortnight later ; for act i of the Siegfried ' composition-sketch ' bears as final dato "20. Januar 1857," act ii the dates "22. Mai 1857 — 30. Juli 1S57." The real trouble, however, is only about to commence, and that with the Wesendoncks' own definite removal from their Zürich hotel to their new villa (August 22). Not one of Wagner's brief notes before that date suggests the faintest shadow of a passion shewn,* and we may dismiss F. Praeger's Observation " During my stay I saw Minna's
* At first I feit inclined to place the letter concerning "die Liebe" and "die Muse " (now numbered by me "49") in May 1857 owing to a verbal kinship with no. 28, where a " visit of the Muse" is also referred to ; but we find a similar reference even so late as the Venice diary of December 1858: "Da klopfte Koboldchen ; es zeigte sich mir als holde Muse" (p. 80 inf), whereas the Muse of letter 28 as yet bears no "endearing" epithet. A still more convincing reason for assignment of letter "49" to its present Position, is the fact that Minna plainly quotes it to her Berlin friend in July '59: "Möchte diesmal seine Muse ... in der Ferne,' — thus practically identifying it with the letter she had intercepted in April 1858 Cp ix sup.).
Ix INTRODUCTORY
jealousy of another," and his connection thereof with what he grossly misterms " a public scandal," as on a par with his usual unreliabih'ty. Certainly he was one of the series of guests who enjoyed Wagner's hospitality for periods ranging from three days to three weeks in this summer ; but he had left before the neighbours settled in, and Frau Wesendonck herseif informed me years ago that she had no recollection of ever meeting him. Whatever gossip the magpie picked up, must have fihered through a very dubious Channel afterivards : " Minna had been in correspondence with me " — he teils US, of a later epoch indeed, but his chronology is always negligible — "Of her letters I publish nothing."
At the end of July the Rhig des Nibelungen is laid aside for years, no business person wanting it, and Tristati taken up instead. Authority has it, that Parzival himself originally was meant to meet with Tristan in act iii, but the first was sundered from the second in the early Asyl days and made the subject of a separate scenario (cf. p. 94) — for further particulars of which we still must wait. What is documentarily established, is that Wagner wrote Frau Ritter as to Tristan July 4, " The poem is slumbering in me yet, and I .shall summon it to life ere long " ; also that "20. August 1857" is the date upon the Tristan prose-draft found among Frau Wesendonck's effects and soon to be presented to the world elsewhere.
A fortnight later, the Asyl guest-chamber is occupied by very memorable visitors ; after a week in neighbouring apartments, Hans von Bülow brings his bride there — married in Berlin two days before that draft was signed. Sept. 4, Hans writes to Richard Pohl : " How I regret not having found you here still ; we might have passed magnificent days, as yesterday for instance. Wagner was in splendid vein, and what a glance at the score of ' young Siegfried ' revealed me is colossal. What a giant of a man ! . . . Wagner has promised to read us a new poem, at which he is working this instant." — Then Wagner himself, to Frau Ritter again : "The visit of the young Bülow couple was my most delightful episode of this summer. They stayed in our cottage three weeks ; seldom have I feit so agreeably stimulated, as by this intimate visit. Of a morning they had to keep quiet, as I was writing my Tristan then, a fresh act of which I read them out each week. The rest of the day we almost always made music, whcn Frau Wesendonck would come loyally across, and thus we had our most grateful little audience
IN7RODUCTORY 1x1
close at band." Could anything he more draniatic, ilian this daily gathering under the Tristan poet's roof of the only three women who ever had or wcre to have a share in bis buman destiny ?
Tbe last act of Tristan und Isolde — do not forget that third act — is read to tbis " most grateful audience" tbe iStb of September 1S57. Wagner's diary of a twtlvcnionth bence completes tbe history of tbat day (p. 42 //-//), and this is what Hans von Bülow teils a correspondent on tbe next : " I can imagine notbing that could confer on nie so great a boon, such spiritual refresbment, as the being witb this glorious, unique man, whom one must reverence as a god. In presence of this great, good man I thaw from all life's misere, and ascend." If in these Tristan days a bappy bridegroom can use such terms about anotber man, is it at all astonisbing that Mathilde also sbould have thawed at last, con- fessed her pure and gentle love? O yes, tbis testimony of von Bülow's is worth a bundred times von Hornstein's : did tbe wonder- ful epistles in our volume leave the faintest shadow of a doubt— \i+iich empbatically they do not—\\. would be dispelled at once by that immediate evidence of one who bad seen the reflex of chaste radiance on bis bero's face.
And now I beg you to take up that phrase, again, of tsvo montbs hence to Liszt, — " will follow me to euch existenceP Indeed it is the key to all tbe mystery : this love held no fulfilment in the present life, but a sacred promise for the next. We have seen how deeply Wagner had been steeped in Indian lore, how bis Sieger was an ideal of tbe most unstained renunciation. In the Venice diary we shall see how he arrives "witb greatest certainty, at proving in Love a possibility of attaining to exaltation above the instinct of the individual will " (p. 76). One other link alone is needed, a link supplied by bis demonstrable familiarity witb Goethe's letters to Mathilde's prototype, Frau Charlotte von Stein, where we find tbe idea of such renunciant love embodied in these lines : —
" Sag, was will das Schicksal uns bereiten ? Sag, wie band es uns so rein genau ? Ach, du warst in abgelebten Zeiten Meine Schwester oder meine Frau " — -
and even still more appositely in pro.se: " If I come upon this
Ixii INTRODUCTORY
earth again, I will pray the gods to let me love but once ; and were you not so averse to this world, I would beg you for com- panion of that life of mine."
" Happy Ananda ! Happy Sawitri ! " — Wagner cries (p. 56) — and what fiUed von Bülow's hero with such exaltation that the younger man feit ready to fall down and worship him, was the sense of a very real, but spiritual victory : " And no one then shall lose, when we — are vidors'" (p. 28).
Let me intrude no further, but reserve tili the close whatever eise may still be requisite to say.
W. A. E. — February 1905
(slightly amended July 1905).
ILLUSTRATIONS
Mathilde Wesendonck, after an oil-painting by C. Dürner . Frontispiecc
Facsimile oi" a letter from Mathilde Wesendonck . . . facing p. i
Photograph of the "Green Hill" and "Asyl" . . . n n ^3
Facsimile of a theme for " Parzival " . . . . . ,, „ ::3
Facsimile of concert-close and programme, prelude to Tristan
tmd Isolde . . . . . . . . ,, ,, 198
Photograph of Richard Wagner, Brüssels 1860 ... i, ,, -33
Facsimile of Sachs' Cobbler-song, Meistersinger \>o&vc\ . , ,< ,, -91
Medallion-portrait of Mathilde Wesendonck .... ,. ,. 333
FACSIMILE OF A LETTER FROM MATHILDE WESENDONCK
(See page xlix.)
#//^
■rty.
^•';^ J (^ . /r^/.
<^i-*'*— ♦
^fOcc/fJY ^-/^^^^ '^/^^^ 4^/fj>r^ ^ ^/ä^
r'^t4^ ^
,^ /C^r^ 'f^^/'/f^
V/^-
/.,
^^J?
^
Jl/f^^^t^ ^if^^C
^^[ ^^►«-e---
■V5 ^v<s»^.r<::i'. ^ AT. ,
-^^N*^ •■■
-K^~
--^w «-.r V
■■^>f-^'vi'!k ^
.s^ ^
>
X
\ /^^ '^^^■^^ '^'^ /^e^^ 4/y^-^^
^
s
:;^,55A^ ^/kA,^
/7
ZÜRICH
1852 ro AUGUST 185s
«9 «o aft
^9 ^9 ^9
1.
Herr and Madame Wesendonck are most kindly re- quested to join us on Sunday at dinner-time.
R.s.r.p.
Familie Wagner.
2.
Busy in the kitchen, my wife advises you to take thc carriage, which you would probably have made use of even had the weather been fine ; further, that it will be cx- traordinarily warm in our abode.
All which is to signify that we have no Intention to give you up yet.
3.
Many thanks for the kind invitation, which I unfortu- nately shall be unable to obey. Fare you well !
4.
Esteemed Lady ! God will guard you henceforth from my rudenesses ; for you certainly perceive by now that it was no idle whim of mine when I often dreaded accepting your kind invitations lest my nasty temper might torture m,y good friends as much as it torments myself If in the future, also, I become more abstinent in this regard— and ought I not to cnd by being so, after experiences like those of yesterday? — rest assured that it is simply to earn your pardon through presenting myself to you in a better light.
3
4 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
I hope to hear from your husband to-morrow at Basle
that at least your precious health has suffered no ulterior
härm through my unruly tongue.* With this heartfelt wish
your kind indulgence is besought by
Richard Wagner. Zürich, March 17, 1853.
5.
[Easter 1853.] Faircst good-day !
My poor wife has bccome quite ill ; consequently I acccpt to-morrow's invitation for myself alone.
Presumably you are not at home to-day ; otherwise I should have inquired toward evening.
At my house everything is dull and dismal, despite the growing "gaiety " of the apartments.
I hope things are going right well with you, and that you
are keeping Easter-day [March 27] with joy.
Many kind regards to all !
Your
R. W.
6.
Friday morning.
The Herweghs have invitcd thcmselves for this evening.
If you think it would help you to recover from the
cxertions of your last invitations, it would much delight us
if you consented to take part in our entcrtainment.
Kindest regards.
R. VV.
7.
Here's syrup, for ycsterday's ice.f [May 29, I853-]
* A clue to the above may be found in Letter 95. — Tr, t Accompanying a few bars of a polka, whereon Stands the date. [Cf. Life of R. IVagjicr, iv. 132. — Tr.]
ZÜRICH LETTERS 5
8.
Esteemed !
You gave me pcrmission to inquirc to-day whcthcr
you vvould be able to come to us again this evening. In
case of a favourable ansvver, I vvould suggest your passing
a couplc of quiet hours with us tili lO o'clock : I vvould
invite nobody eise, not to spoil this sacrcd evening in
any way.
Hoping Ibr a kind consent,
Your Richard Wagner. June I, 1853.
9.
[To Herr O^^o.]
Your disposals are excellent, best friend : I thank
you for them from my heart.
To enter my fresh indebtedness in a manner vvorthy to
arouse your confidence, I am paying an old debt to-day : *
please give your vvife the accompanying sonata, my first
composition since the completion of Lohengrin (six years
back !).
You soon shall hear from me again : but first send us
news hovv you're faring yourselves.
Your
Richard Wagner. Zürich, June 20, 1853.
10.
The best of good-mornings ! Getting on prctty well. — Sincerest thanks for all kind-
* As IS to be g.Tthered from a fragment dated June 11, published in the Letters to O. Wesendonrk, Herr Otto had just advanced a sum of money. The "composition" is tliat afterwards issued as "Album Sonata'' (see Life, iv. 131 and 4.48). — Tr.
6 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
ness ! — I propose going proudly on foot to the rehearsal. If it must be, however, I accept the carriage for % to 2. You would follow soon after.
I meant to send the accompanying yesterday !
Auf Wiedersehen !
11,
The best of good-mornings !
Just skim a littleof this book [A.Schmid'sbiographyof Gluck, 1852],
It is badly writtcn, and one is compelled to skip all where the author thinks anywise needful to trot out an opinion of his own ; yet the facts, particularly from Gluck's Paris period, are highly interesting ; moreover, this passionate, yet entirely self-centred Gluck, vvith his calm vanity, large savings, and embroidered court-dress, has something quite amusing and refreshing about him in his old age. — Only, make a big skip at the beginning.
12.
Homer was stealing out of my library.
Whither ? I asked.
He replied : To congratulate Otto Wesendonck on his
birthday.
I answered : Do't for me, as well !
Richard W. March 16, 1854.
13.
With the present weather-outlook and west winds, will
you be travelling ?
Merely a question.*
Your
R. W.
* A Joint excursion to Glarus, Stachelberg, and the Muotta-Thal had been arranged. [Footnotes unsigned are the German editor's. — Tr.]
ZÜRICH LETTERS 7
14.
Is it necessary to rcmark that my qucstioa of yesterday,
touching a trip to-day, requires no ansvver ?
R. W.
15.
As Herr and Madame Wescndonck seem to havc abandoned that footiiig of intimacy whereon they would drop in on us of an evening uninvited, I suppose vve must ceremoniously inquire whether they perhaps could deign to take US unawares to-day, or — in case certain Professors have been given this day for imparting their learning to the gentleman and lady — whether \ve might expect a similar surprise to-morrow ?
16.
My Lady ! Frau Heim cannot sing before Tuesday* — so for to- morrow (if show you must have) a simple piano-evening.
I shall see you soon !
Your
R. W.
17.
What should I do to cheer you up — poor invalid ? I gave the programme [Philh.] with the translations to Eschenburg [professor of Engiisii at Zürich] : but how shall that profit
* At the Zürich Subscription Concert of Tuesday, January 23, 1855, when Frau Heim sang soiigs by Schubert, and Wagner conducted Mozarts Zaubcrflöte overture, Beethoven's C minor symphony, and his own revised Faust overture ? — Tr.
8 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
you ? Otto must at oncc procure you " Indian Legends edited by Adolf Holtzmann, Stuttgart." I brought them to London with me : their reading has been my only pleasure here. All are beautifiil : but — Sawitii is divine, and if you wish to find out my religion, read Usinar. How shamed Stands our whole Culture by these purest revelations of noblest humanity in the ancient East ! —
At present I'm reading a canto of Dante every morning ere I set to vvork : I'm still stuck deep in Hell ; its Horrors accompany my prosecution of the second act of Walküre. Fricka has just gone off, and Wodan must novv give vent to his terrible vvoe.
Beyond this second act I shall in no case get here ; I can work but very slowly, and each day brings some fresh upset to contend with. —
My London experiences are determining me to vvithdraw from public music-making altogether, for some years to come : this concert-conducting must have an end. So don't let our Zürich gentry put themselves to any expense on my account ! I now need total inner equilibrium, to com- plete my big work ; for which, as a grotesque chimera, I fear this eternal outrageous contact with the inadequate and insufficient might easily put me out of sorts.
— To enliven yourself, just reckon up how many fugues ought to appear in my London oratorio, whether ***** should vvear white or black kid-gloves, and if the Magdalene should carry a bouquet or fan. When you have settled thcse important points, we'U go into it farther.
To-day is my fourth concert : the A major symphony (which at any rate will not go anything like so well as at Zürich), and with it a numbcr of lovely things I never dreamt of having to conduct again in my life. However, I'm fortified for it all by the certainty that this — will have been the last time. —
ZÜRICH LETTERS 9
Best wishes to Otto, whom I hcartils' thank for his last kind letter : if it really amuses him, I'U write him once more. Is Marie [sistcr of Fr.ui Wk] not Coming to you soon ? —
To-morro\v, after thc conccrt, I shall write my wifc : shc won't have any mighty ncws to givc you, though.
Kind lovc to Myrrha too [the vvesendoncks' litiiegiri]! Farewcll, and — kcep your spirits up ! London, April 30, 1855.
18.
[July 8, 1855.]
I fear my good old faithful friend — my Peps — will pass away from me to-day. It is impossible for me to leave the poor thing's side in its last hours. You won't be cross with US, if we beg you to dine without ourselves to-day? In any case vve shall not leave [for Seelisberg] tili Wednesday : so that we can still make up for what we miss to-day.
You surely will not laugh if I am weeping?
Your
R. \V.
Sunday morning.
19.
[September 1855 ?]
I am not well, and presumably shall have to keep my wife's birthday [Sept. 5] a prisoner to the house. Cordial thanks for your kindness !
20.
Take notice : —
Wednesday : Othello Ira Aldridge.* Tickets should be booked in good time.
(The top of the morning !)
R. W.
* "The African Roscius '' (1805-66).
lO WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
21.
If the Familie Wesendonck will give Heinrich of the Hotel
Baur that errand, they can obtain my wife from the theatre
too ; otherwise they must put up with my single seif.
By the way, I, too, know English.
R. W.
22.
Dear Friend,
My wife has just told me a happy thought of hers, which leads me to address you quite a big petition.
It is a matter of making one more effort to obtain a life- lease of the Bodmer property at Seefeld, near Zürich. Were it to succeed, I should be relieved of all cares about an estate of my own, and for a mere rent I should arrive at the same enjoyment I am seeking. This place is let at present as a Summer residence to a family by the name of Trümpier ; so that the Bodmers would have to be persuaded to give these ancient tenants friendly notice and let me have the place for life, or perhaps for a term of ten years.
So far as we know, it is rather a habit than a requirement of the Trümpiers, to occupy the Bodmer place, and if the Bodmers themselves were glad to let us have it, I have no doubt they would find no difficulty in inducing the Trümpiers to stand back. Therefore it is merely a question of winning the Bodmers to my wish in earnest ; and my wife, whom I have commissioned to make overtures to Frau Bodmer, desires the help of a third person who should teil that lady all the ingratiating things which neither she nor 1 can say : and to act as that third person, honoured friend, my wife considers nobody more fitted than yourself. So the heartfelt prayer goes up to you, to write Frau Bodmer and try to win her to my part. For that — my wife thinks— it might bc advisable if you laid stress on my great want and need of
ZÜRICH LETTERS l 1
such a quict country home as her estatc affords ; perhaps also — so thinks my wife — if you pricked the lady's pridc a little, and pointcd out to her the honour it mi^ht conccivably bring her, to have her premises supply me with a fostering haven for my future art-creations. —
What do you say to it ? Will you undcrtakc it ?—
On my approaching return to Zürich I should very much like to See this affair, which cxercises me so urgently now, brought so far forward that I might take a swift dccision.*
Need I say how much it would please me to be able to bid good-day to you as well [as Otto] at Bcrne ?
Many hearty greetings from
Mornex, August ii, 1856. 23.
Your Richard Wagner.
[September (?) 1S56.] Most faithfui of all Protcctresses of the Arts ! My sister [Clara Wolfram] is obliged to keep her bed : if you are not a victim to the same necessity, I beg you to dis- pose of the vacant cover, or eise to save it (something of a consideration in these hard times, with the silk-crop failure !). In the former event I would propose (without dictating) Boohm. — t
Your R. W.
* It cameto nothing, for Wagner writes Herr Otto three vveeks later : " Here you have the B.'s letter back ; please give your dear wife my best thanks again for lier attempt at intervention. — Once more I feel much and deeply liumbled," etc. — Tr.
t Wilhelm Baumgartner. Frau Wesendonck adds a note concerning " a beautiful poem " delivered by Gottfried Keller at the Schweiz. Musikfest, 1867, in memory of B.'s then recent dcath. She further explains that she had vvarmly defended Rheingold and Walküre against Minna's admoni- tion to returu to the style of Rienzi.
12 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
The house is about my ears, through your spcaking disrespectfully of Rienzi yesterday !—
24.
[Autumn 1856?]
Would it entcrtain you, perhaps, to see what my Weimar Councillor has brewed about my poem ?
Various hints which I had given him are strewn with marvellous fidelity amid his own gallimathias ; which makes the thing fairly amusing*
Much satisfaction is vvished you by Your much dissatisfied
R. W.
25.
0 happy swallow, wouldst be mating,
Thyself thou build'st thy brood a nest ; In quest of quiet for creating,
1 cannot build my house of rest !
The peaceful home of stone and pine — What swallow'll build that nest of minc?
26.
All in Order. Will you be Coming over for the last act of the Walküre ? I — hope so. —
[Maj 8, 1857, evidently referring to a matter of some two vionths previüusly, Wagner teils Liszt of a private rendering
* Liszt, August I, 1856: "Franz Müller will visit you at Mornex the middle of this month, and bring you his work on the Nibelungen." Wagner finished his Mornex 'eure' Aug. 17, met Otto at Berne on the i8th, and returned to Zürich next day ; where he not only found his sister Clara, but also that his " Weimar Regierungsrath and red-hot en- thusiast had arrived, bringing novelties foretold by Liszt." Clearly. then, cur no. 24 refers to an ensuing MS. revision, for Müllers i?/;/^-book was not published until six years later.— Tr.
ZÜRICH LETTEP5
1
" thc big last scenc trom ' Lnc i ; .;/ /> . -'< :•' " "'u Poliert
Bribmhilde. himsclf as Wrt.^^^. ..'■,■ 77 Ki-^n-r ns ac-
„/umist : " We did it th ^ i'^'
■itweg flat, from ivhich lu moved out ine inidate oj Apnl ;
p. Iviii sup. — 7>.]
Herewith ihe music-journal * and a Ictter ilgenstein's, which please return to me when rc.iü.
I am to give you my wife's best wishes.
R W
.8.
11
May 21, 57-
1 have naught to say to the futher of my country : if he to presume to call upon me in my swallow's-nest, I ': shew him the door. His colours are white and grecn ; lor Baur.f —
rhe Muse is beginning to visit me : docs it betoken the
,ty of your visit? The first thing I found was a
which I didn't at all know what to do with. tili of
,en the words from the last scene of Siegfried came
toyhead. A good omen. Yestcrday I also iit on the
cncement of act- 2--as Fafner's Rest: which has an
,t of humour'in it. But you shall hear all about it,
swallow comes to insuect her edificc to-morrow
RicH. Wagner.
!y the Ar//c Zeitschrift oi April lo, 1857, containine Wagners ranz LiszVs Symfhonic Poems, which onv med a
VVnsdaughter'(February 15. 1857). The L. .vould
• r to the birth of liltle Karl. April 18.— Tr.
King John of Saxony at his Hötel du LiC. Baur had le correct colour for decorations.
.J'
ZÜRICH LETTERS 13
of " thc big last scene from ' Die Walküre ' " with Frau Poliert as BrüniiJiilde, hiviself as Wotau, and T/t. Kirc/itrer as ac- coiiipaiiist : " We did it t/iree tinics in v/y j'oojns," i.e. t/ie Zettweg ßat, from tvJiich he nioved out t/ie niiddle of April ; see p. Iviii sup. — Tr?^
27.
Herewith the music-journal * and a Ictter of Princess VVittgenstein's, which please return to me when read.
I am to give you my wife's best wishes.
R. VV.
28.
May 21, 57.
I have naught to say to the father of my country : if he were to presume to call upon me in my swallow's-nest, I should shew him the door. His colours are white and grecn ; this for Baur.f —
The Muse is beginning to visit me : docs it betoken the certainty of your visit ? The first thing I found was a melody which I didn't at all know what to do with, tili of a sudden the words from the last scene of Siegfried came into my head. A good omen. Yesterday I also lit on the commencement of act 2 — as Fafner's Rest : which has an Clement of humour in it. But you shall hear all about it, if the swallow comes to inspect her edifice to-morrow
[his birthday].
RiCH. Wagner.
* Probably X\\&Neue Zeitschrift o[ April 10, 1857, containingWagner's artide Ün Franz LiszVs Symphonie Poems, which original!)* iormed a letter to Pss Wn's daughter (February 15, 1857). The last clause vvould seem to refer to the birth of little Karl, April 18. — Tr.
t E.xpecting King John of Saxony at his Hotel du Lac, Baur had inciuired as to the correct colour lor decorations.
14 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
29.
[Early July 1857.]
It seems to me as though we had forgotten to send you a proper invitation for Sunday evening [i2th]: permit US to remedy the Omission herewith ! As you are aware, it is a feast in honour of Sulzer. I am also to inform you that tea will be served at 7 o'clock.
We hope to see you appear quite punctually with Herr Kutter* whom we likewise beg you most cordially to invite on cur behalf.
For your personal gratification I may also teil you that of late I have been unable to work again at night ; Calderon, however, is committed to rest. — Devrient sends you his kindest regards. For the rest, the vvorld is still standing, Fafner alive, and everything as it was.
30.
[Mid-August 1857 ?]
There you make acquaintance with a very amiable person [Robert Franz?]. Good-morning !
S^TJie poeni of " Tristati und Isolde'' was completed and its last act given to Frau W esendonck on tJie 1 8/// of September 1857; a mejnorable day — cf. p. 42 Inf. In all likelilwod the next letter refers to a recital thereof, such as we know the Herweghs etc. to have been present at. — Tr?\
31.
To the
highly-esteemed Familie
Wesendonck (Myrrha, Guido, Karl etc.) I don't want to leave it to Fortune whether you turn
* Of the firm of Kutter & Luckemeyer, New York. [Luckemeyer, il will be remembered, was Frau Mathilde's maiden name. — Tr.]
ZÜRICH LETTERS 15
up this evening, but to ensurc that good fortune by begging it of you. I am expecting Scmper and Herwegh. So — early, please !
R. W. Lazarus.
32.
October i, 1857,* [To Ottii Wcsendonck?[
Thus, dear friend, you also receive your first
[nominal?] rent from me. In time I hope to get the
length of offering you the actual equivalent : perhaps it's
not so far off now ; then you shall say —
" Hei, unser Held Tristan, wie der Zins zahlen kann!!" —
And so for to-day, as for ever, my heartiest thanks again for all the goodness and kindness you have shewn me !
Your Richard Wagner.
33.
[October 1857.]
" Die Morold schlug, die Wunde, sie heilt' ich, dass er gesunde,"
and so on
has come off capitally tc-day — I must play it to you by and by !
* Also the date of commencement of the ' composition-draft ' of act i., Tristan. — Tr.
l6 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
34.
[December 1857.]
The great outburst duet between Trista.n and Isolde has turned out beautiful beyond all measure. — In the first flush of joy thereat.
35.
[Dec. 1857.]
S^riie following is a incinorandum by Frau IVesendonck herseif ^ found in c.'Vipcxny of the said two additio}ial closes to " Schmerzen," the last ivhereof is the same as that now in use. The difference between the ist and 2nd versions of "Träume" consists in addition of the sixteen introdicctoiy bars, the first Version Jiaving conivienced luith onr bar 17. — 7>.]
On the 30//^ of NoiJeuiber 1857 Riehard Wagner wrote the m 71 sie to the sang :
" In der Kindheit frühen Tagen " [= " Der Engel "].
December 4, 1S57, the first sketch for :
" Sag', welch' wunderbare Träum-e ? "
December 5, 1857, the second version of Träume." December 17, 1857, "Schmerzen"; witJi a second, some-
wJiat lengthened dose. This was soon folloiued by a third
dose, bejieath wJiicJi stood the words :
" It must become finer and finer!
" After a beautiful, refreshing night, my first waking thought was this amended postlude : we'll see whether it plcases Frau Calderon, if I let it sound up to her to-day." — *
* "Träume" was also scored lor a small orchestra, and, conducting eighteen picked Zürich bandsrren, Wagner performed it beneath Frau Wesendonck's window, as a birthday greeting, Dec. 23, '57 : possibly he played or sang "Schmerzen" on the same occa^ion. — Tr.
ZÜRICH LETTERS 17
February 22, 1858, "Sausendes, brausendes Rad der Zeit" [= "Stehe still"].
May I, 1858, "Im Treibhause." —
All fivc songs siibsequently came out at Schott* s Sotis, Mainz [1862], by tlie masters own Instructions. — Before tkeir publication, " Träume " and " im Treibhause " were named by liim sei/ " Studien zu Tristan und Isolde."
36.
[December 1857?]
Here is another winter-flower for the Christmas-trce, füll of sweet honey, without the smallcst bane.
37.
Hochbeglückt,
Schmerzentrückt,
frei und rein
ewig Dein —
was sie sich klagten
und versagten, Tristan und Isolde, in keuscher Töne Golde, ihr Weinen und ihr Küssen leg' ich zu Deinen Füssen, dass sie den Engel loben, der mich so hoch erhoben !
Am Sylvester, 1857,*
R. W.
38.
I have not had the best of slcep, and was just hesitating
* New Year's Eve, 1857, together vvith the composition-dralt of the first act of Tristan, completed that day. Bare prose must serve for a rendering : " Thrice happy, out of reach of pain, free and purely ever thine — Tristan and Isolde, what they bevvaiied and forwent, their tears and kisses, in music's chaste gold I lay at thy feet, that they may praise the angel who has lifted me so high ! " — Tr.
2
1.8 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
whether I should come to-day, in spite of Vischer and ice. Now, however, I think of looking in for half an hour.
I have mach on my heart — yet everything, again, is but the one thing without which poorest I should have no footing more upon this earth. That one thing !
A thousand greetings.
38a.
Thanks ! Slept well — go it must ! — And the one thing !— *
Sincerest greeting !
\Frcin Jan. i6 to Feb. 2, 1858, Wagner was in Paris, ^uhence he sent at hast one letter that has not been preserved {see p. 68 in f.). PerJiaps the following note refers to a small com^nission execiited thei'e. — 7"/-.]
39.
Here is the lamp-shade. May it shed a rose-beam on the snow !
I have had quite a passable night. And how was VVahlheim t off for sleep ?
Best greetings 1
40.
[February 1858.]
I already have Soden too,^ — unbound, and soon at disposal.
* Ranging this and the preceding note here, I take the "go it must" to refer to the 'orchestral sketches ' of Tristan i, — commenced Nov. 5, 1857, completed January 13, 1858, — since the Härteis vvere to commence engraving the vvork at once, and Wagner in fact began sending them his fair-copy of the score in February. — Tr.
t "Home of Choice " ; perhaps from Goethe's Werther, Dr, Golther suggests. — Tr.
\ Count J. von Soden's translation of Lope de Vega's dramas.
ZÜRICH 1-£1TERS I9
I knew the whole catalogue before, through Schulthcss.* Perhaps thc volume vvith Kaiser Otto at Florence would also be worth reading.
Be\ond these, Richard's translations seem to me not uninteresting, as far as the matter goes.f
We might also think of Cervantes' tales — I possessed them once myself.
For the rest, l can still hclp out awhile with my own Provision ; I'm — reading little.
Best thanks for Iphigenie [hisownrevision of Gluck's?].
Herewith a present from Strassburg ;t no päte de foie gras, though, our God be praised !
Shall we see each other this afternoon, perhaps ?
41.
After a wonderful night, blest with almost ten hours of Goethian sleep,§ I wish you serenely happy Good-day, send {schicke) you Schack, || and promise to read aloud quite beautifully this evening, if Herr Otto has nothing against it.
* Zürich bookseller.
t C. Richard, Lope de Vega's Romaiitic Poems, 1824-8.
\ A Strassburg playbill, dated January 15, 1858: —
Aujourd'hui, Le Foii par Amour, par MM. Bourgeois et A. Dennery.
Le spectacle commencera
par Ouvertüre de Tattnhäuser, Musique de K. Wagner.
\_En rollte tor Paris, Wagner had stumbled on this Performance and become the recipient of an impromptu ovation. — Tr ]
§ In Goethe's letters to Charlotte von Stein allusions to sleep abound : once he writes, "I have only two gods, Thyself and Sleep;" still more to the point, on two different occasions he says, "I slept 10 hours last night." This in corroboration of my remark, p. Ixi, on Wagners mani- fest familiarity vvith those letters. — Tr.
ji Count A. F. von Schack's Gescliichie der dramatischen Literatur in Spanien. [Wagner subsequently became ne.xt-door neighbour at Municli to Schack and Ins famous picture-gallery ; in the 'eighties he was still recommeiiding this " History of Spanish Dramatic Literature " to his friends. — Tr.]
20 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
42.
So that one may not fall into the pHght again, of having to teil good stories badly, I deposit in the Wesendonck house
the aCCOmpanying exemplar [Grimms" Deutsche Sagen, 1816, No. 72] ;
für black on white is a glorious thing.
You see, you won't be rid of me in a hurry ! l'm burrowing so into your house, that, even if you burned it down, a very well-known voice would cry to you from out the salvage : ♦' *Twas time that we got out ! "
43.
l'm sending to the bookbinder, and should like to get [Lope de Vega's] " Star [of Seville] " etc. bound at the same time. Do you still require it first?
44.
Telegram.
Lucerne, 8.55 [A.M.] Zürich, 31 March 58 ; 9.10. To Herr Otto Wesendonck, Zürich.
The trusty Kapellmeister unfortunately cannot conduct the concert to-day. Saint Gotthart has taken toll, and given him in exchange a violently orthodox catarrh. The concert shall still be conducted, though, if the bands- xnen only keep in good tune.*
Your
Richard Wagner.
* Wesendonck must have been as much puzzled as ourselves by the "soll aber doch noch dirigirt werden, die Musiker mögen nur immer noch gut einstimmen." The printed programme of this famous Villa concert (detached movements from Beethoven's symphonies) bears the date March 31, 1858, and no contemporary speaks of its postponement ; wherefore it is probable that, when telegraphing, Wagner meant to get Heim to take his place, but on reaching Zürich (2.30 p.m. — cf. p. 122) he feit bettei, and
ZÜRICH LETTERS 21
45.
Madame Mathilde Wesendonck.
[Easter Sunday, April 4, 1858.] Best thanks for the splendid flowers ! The old plant, well looked after, is as magnificent as ever ; so I still shall keep it. — A good thing I finished the act yesterday and sent it off.* I should have been unable to work to-day ; the catarrh has increased, and I am not free from a touch of fever. Othervvise things go well — and brightly ; how go they in the neighbour-land ? —
46.
Madame Wesendonck.
Best thanks ! — I am still a little feverish and very limp, but think of tasting a mouthful of the lovely air to-day. Kindest wishes ! R. W,
47.
Tc the entire Familie
Wesendonck. Children, am I not to get a glimpse of you to-day? I'm feeling better than yesterday.
R. W.
48.
[April 1858.]
I'm doing tolerably. How does the zealous lady-pupil of de Sanctis ? t
conducted that evening himself — tliereby " increasing his catarrh'' (see no. 45). As he held a rehearsal on tlie 27th, he cannot have been absent more than three days ; so that the allusion to "der heihge Gotthart" Sounds like some private joke — a pun on "catarrh"? — Tr,
* The German edition conjectures May 1857 as the data of this letter, connecting it vvith Siegfried i ; but iater research shews that no Siegfried niusic was ever " sent oft" to Härtel's, whereas the final pages of act i of Tristan were, füll score, on the 3rd of April 1858. — Tr.
t Francesco de Sanctis (1818-83), an Italian Scholar, then professor at the Zürich Polytechnic.
22 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
Thanks for the Cervantes meanwhile. It will tune me gradually for work again. The second act is beckoning me.* Shall we see one another to-day ?
49.
^ : [April 1858?]
And my dear Muse still stays afar ? In silence I awaited her Visit; with pleadings I vvould not disquiet her. For the Muse, like Love, beatifies but freely ; woe to the fool, woe to the loveless, who fain would cörtstrain what will not yield itself of its free will. They cannot be constrained ; is it not so? Not so? How could Love be Muse withal, did itlet itsqlf be forced?
And my dear Muse stays far from me? —
50.
[Mid-April 1858?]
That letter — how mournful it has made me ! The demon moves from out one heart into the other. How subjugate it ? O we poor creatures ! We are not our own. Demon, change to god !
That letter has made me mournful. Yesterday I wrote to our friend.f She will bc sure to come in, before long.
50a.
\The following unused sketcJi for '' Parzival" was found by Dr. Golther in the savie envelope as letter 50, which woidd
* My arraiigement of this little group of notes — which seem to have followed each other pretty closely, and during their writer's temporary confinement to the house by illness, — of course is purely tentative ; but I novv should guess tlie next of them, viz. no. 49. to have been the very one " intercepted" by Minna (see pages ix and lix). thus accounting for com- position of act ii Tristan not being actually commenced tili May 4. — Tr.
t Frau Wille? Cf. p. 51, inf. also p. x sup. — Tr.
ZÜRICH LETTERS
23
thus appear to Jiavc been ansivcrcd crc long by tJie poein "'Im Treibhaus" set tu inusic May i. — Ti\\
Parzival.
Dear errant child ! See, I was just about to write this down, when I found thy lovely, noble verses.
51.
[April or May 1858?]
I have just been reading [Calderon's] holy " Ferdinand " and found it very beautiful and touching. Perhaps it was my frame of mind. Were death foretold me surely for this year, I should embrace it as the most fortunate and conse- crate of all my lifo. Only the uncertainty, how long remains for US to live, makes us frail and prone to sin ; that certainty^ however, would hallow mc completely. — How were it to be gained, that certainty so ardently I ycarn for ? —
52.
[May 22, 1858?]
Ah, the lovely pillow ! Too dainty, though !
Tired and heavy as often is my head, I should never
24 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
dare to lay it on it, not even in sickness ; — at most, in death l
Then I may couch my head for once as easily as if I
had a right to ! Then you shall spread the pillovv under
me. — There you have my testament !
R. W.
53.
[Late May or early June 1858.]
Madame Mathilde Wesendonck. Here is my little musical home-goblin [Tausig] ; may he find a kind welcome !
54.
[July2(?) 1858.]
What a wondrous birth of cur child of sorrows ! * Had we to live, then, after all ? From whom could it be asked, that he should forsake his children ? —
God stand by us, poor creatures !
Or are we too rieh ?
Must we help ourselves unaided ? —
55.
[July6(?) i858.]t
Tuesday morning.
Surely thou didst not expect me to leave thy mar- vellously beautiful letter unanswered ? Or was I to forgo the privilege of replying to the noblest word ? And how could I reply to thee, bat in a manner worthy of thee ? —
The stupendous conflicts we have passed, how could they end but with the victory over every wish and longing ?
In the most fervent moments of approximation, did we not know that this was our goal ? —
* With the Sketches for act ü Tristan, completed July i. [Füll score begun July 5.]
t The original is missing. [Here for the first time " Du " appears in- stead of " Sie," apart from the verses of No. 37 and the lines under the " Parzival " theme. — Tr.]
ZÜRICH LETTERS 25
Assuredly ! Only because its difficulty was so untold, was it only to be reachcd aftcr the hardest of combats ; but have we not foui^ht out all our battles now? What others could there still remain ahead ? — Of a truth, I feel it deep vvithin : they are at end ! —
When a month gonc by I told thy husband my resolve to break off personal commune with you ["£«<:*"— piurai] I had — given thee up, albeit I was not yet altogether whole in that. For I merely feit that nothing save a total severance, or — a total union, could secure our love against the terrible collisions to which we had seen it exposed in these latter times. Thus the sense of the necessity of our parting was haunted by the possibility — present to the mind, if not to the will — of Union. In that still lay a racking suspense which neither of us could bear. I approached thee, and clear as day it stood before us, that that other possibility involved a crime which could not be so much as thought of
But hereby the necessity of our renunciation of itself acquired another character : the strain resolved into a gentlc reconcilcment. The last taint of egoism vanished from my heart ; and now my decision to revisit you {Eu:h) was the triumph of purest humanity over the last stirring of selfish desire. I wished naught any longer but to reconcile, assuage, console — cheer up ; and thus procure myself withal the only happiness that still can come to me. —
So deeply and terribly as in these last few months, have I never been affccted in my lifo. All earlier impressions were void of meaning 'gainst these last. Shocks such as I endured in that catastrophe were bound to plough deep furrows in me ; and if aught could add to the great serious- ness of my reflections, it was my wife's condition. For two whole months I was threatened each day with the possible news of her sudden dcath ; for the doctor had feit obliged to warn me of that possibility. Everything round mc
2Ö WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
breathed the scent of death ; all my prospects and retrospects became Images of death, and life — as such — lost its last Iure for me. Admonished to the utmost sparing of the un- happy soul, nevertheless I had to make up my mind to raze our last hearth and home, so lately founded, and at last to teil her so, to her deepest dismay. — :
With what feelings dost thou think in this sweet summertide I viewed this charming Asyl,* the sole and perfect counterpart of my whilom aims and wishes, when I wandered through the tiny garden of a morning, watched the flowers springing into bloom, and liMened to the white- throat that had built her nest within the rosebush ? And what this tearing loose from my last anchor meant for me, that teil thyself, who knovv'st my inmost thought as none !
If 1 havefled from the world once before, dost dream I could return into it now ? Now, when each nerve of me has grown so sensitive and tender with the lengthier weaning from all contact with it ? Even my recent interview with the Grand Duke of Weimar [mid-June] shewed me plainer than ever that I can thrive in nothing but most absolute independence, so that I earnestly had to decline every possible kind of Obligation to be entered, evcn towards this really not unamiable prince. I cannot — cannot face towards the World again ; to settle down in a big city, is inconceiv- able to me. And if not that — how could I think again of founding a new refuge, a new hearth, aftcr having to break up this, scarce tasted, which friendship and the noblest love had founded for me in this charming paradise? No, no ! — To go forth hence, for me is tantamount to — going under !
With wounds like these in my heart, I can try to found me no new home a^ain ! —
* " Refuge," or " Haven of Rest " — the name he had given his little house. — Tr.
ZÜRICH LETTERS 27
My child, there's only one salvation for me 1 can think of ; and that can only arise from the innermost, depth of the heart, not from any sort of outer dispensation. Its name is Rest ! A truce to yearning ! Allaying of every desire ! Worth\', noble overcoming ! Life! for others, for others — in relief to oursclves ! — ::lc
Thou know'st the whole solemn resolve of my soul now ; it relates to all my views of life, to my whole future, to all that Stands anigh me, — and so to thee, too, who art dearest to me ! Upon the ruins of this world of longing, let me — bless thee ! —
See, never in my life, in any manncr of rclation, have I ever been importunate, but ahvays of an almost exaggerated sensibility ; so for the first time will I seem to be impor- tunate, and implorc thee to be profoundly tranquil as regards me. I shall not often visit you {Euch), for in future you must only see me when I'm sure of shewing you a calm and checrful countenance. — Of old, maybe, I have sought thy house in suffering and longing : thither, whence I wanted solace, have I brought unrest and suffering. That shall be no more. Wherefore if thou dost not see me for a length of time, then — pray for me in silence ! — For, then be sure that I am suffering ! But when I come, be sure I'm bringing to your house a gracious gift of my bemg, a boon such as lent perhaps to me alone to shed, who have endured so much and willingly. —
Probably, nay, certainly, the time is at band — I conjecture the beginning of next winter — when I shall depart from Zürich altogether for a spell ; my amnesty, expected soon [invain!], will reopen to me Germany, whither I shall peri- odically return for the only thing I could not make good to myself here. Then I often shall not see you for long. But then to return again to the Refugc so endeared to me, to recover from worry and unavoidable vexation, to
28 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONGK
breathe pure air, and gain new zest for the old work for which Natura has chosen me, — this, if you grant it me, will ever be the point of mellow light that buoys me up there, the sweet relief that becks me here.
And— wouldst thou then have shewn my life no highest benefaction ? Should I not owe to thee the only thing that yet can seem worth thanks to me upon this earth ? And ought not I to seek to requite what thou has won for me with suffering and sacrifices so indicible ? —
My child, these last months have perceptibly blanched the hair on my temples ; there is a voice in me that cries with yearning after rest, — that rest which long, long years ago I made my Flying Dutchman yearn for. It was the yearning after "home," — not after the seductive joys of love : only a grandly faithful woman could gain for him that homeland. Let us vow ourselves to this fair death, which stills and buries all our hankerings and cravings ! Let us fade away, with peacefully transfigured gaze, and the holy smile of beautiful self-victory ! — And — no one then shall lose, when we are Victors !
Farewell, my dear hallowed angel !
56.
[August 1858?]
It must be so ! *
57.
[August, 17, 1858.]
Farewell ! Farewell, dear love !
I'm leaving tranquilly. Where'er I be, I shall be wholly thine now. Try to keep the Asyl for me auf Wiedersehen ! Auf Wiedersehen ! Dear soul of my soul, farewell — auf Wiedersehen ! —
* English in the original. This clearly refers to bis irrevocable ile- cision to break up his home at once. — Tr.
DIARY
AUGUST iSsS—/ANUARV 1859
YEN ICE
{Wiih orte entry, April 1859, Lucerne)
AO «g 6»
^9 ^9 ^9
DI ARY
Since my flight from the Asyl 17. August 1858
Gen EVA.
August 21.
The last night in the Asyl I went to bed at II o'clock : I was to start at 5 next morning. Before I closed my eyes, it flashed through my soul how I had ahvays sent myself to slcep here by the thought that on this very spot I once should die : thus should I lic vvhen thou approachedst me for the last, last time, clasp'dst my head in thine arms, in open view of all, and vvith one final kiss receiv'dst my spirit ! That dcath was my fondest conception, and it had framed itself entirely to the locality of my sleeping-room : the door toward the staircase was closed, thou enter'dst through the curtains of the study ; thus didst thou wind thine arm around me ; thus, gazing up to thee, I passed away. — And now? Even that possibility of dying had bcen snatched from me ! Cold, as if hunted, I was quitting this house, in which 1 had been shut with a d?emon I no longer could ban save by flight. — Where —
wherc shall I die, thcn ? Thus I feil asleep. —
Out of troubied dreams I was wakened by a wondrous rustling : as I woke I plainly feit a kiss upon my brow : — a shrill sigh succeeded. 'Twas all so lifelike, that up I sprang, and pccrcd around me. All still. I Struck a light :
31
32 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
it was just before i, at end of the ghosts' watch. Had a spirit stood guard by me in that drear hour? Wert thou awake or sleeping, near that time? — How fared it with thee ? — Never an eye could I close thereafter. For long I vainly tossed in bed, tili at last I rose, completely dressed myself, shut the last trunk to, and, now pacing up and down, now stretched füll length on the divan, uneasily waited for daylight. This time it appeared later than 1 had been accustomed-to on sleepless nights in the summer past ; shame-flushed the sun crept up behind the mountain. — Then I gazed across once more and long. — O Heaven, not a tear came to me, but it seemed as if every hair on my temples were turning grey ! — I had taken leave ; now everything was cold and set within me. — I went downstairs. There my wife was waiting for me ; she offered me tea, 'Twas an awful, lamentable hour. — She accompanied me. We paced down the garden. It was a magnificent morning : I never turned my head. — At the last farewell my wife broke out in tears and lamentations ; for the first time my eyes stayed dry. Once again I exhorted her to gentle- ness and nobleness and quest of Christian comfort ; once more the old revengcful vehemence flared up in her. She is incorrigible, — I could not help telling myself, — yet I cannot venge myself on the unhappy woman ; herseif she must work out her own sentence. — So I was in terrible, sad and deadly earnest ; but — weep I could not. — So I set forth. And lo ! — I won't deny it : it was well with me, I breathed free. — I was faring into solitude : there I am at home ; in that solitude where I may love thee with every breath
I draw !
Hcre I haven't spoken to a soul as yet, save servants. Even Karl Ritter I have written not to call upon me. It does me so much good, not to have to spcak. — Thy diary *"
* See pages 50 and 56, infra. — Tr.
VENICE DIARY 2>3
I read ere going to my fii'st slccp sincc my dcparturc. Thy diary ! Those fair dcep imprints of thy bcing ! — I slept well.
Next day I moved into a lodging,* which I havc hired by thc vveek. Hcre I am quict and undisturbcd, collect my thoughts, and wait tili thc hcat is past, to Ict me go to Itah'. I kcep the house the whole day long. —
Yestcrday I wrote to my sister Kläre, t whose acquaint- ance thou madest two years ago : shc wanted brotherly explanation from mc, as my wife had written and announced herseif. I indicated to her what thou hast becn and art to me these six years since ; what a heaven thou hadst prepared for me, and with what strifes and sacrifices thou hadst stood b\' me ; and how that wonder-work of thy high, noble love had then so rudely and so clumsily been mauled. I know she'll understand me — shc has the heart of an enthusiast in a somewhat unkempt shell — and I was bound to shed a little light on that side ; but how my soul and bosom hea\-cd as I ventured to delineate thy lofty, noble purity with tender touch ! — Of a surety, we shall forget and forgive all, all, and nothing but elation will remain ; the conscious- ness that here a miracle has happened, the likc whcreof Dame Nature weaves but once in centuries, pcrhaps never so nobly before. Away with grief! VVe are the happiest ; with whom would we exchange? —
August 23. 5 in the morning.
In a dream I saw thee on the tcrrace, dressed as a man, with a travelling-cap upon thy hcad. Thou peer'dst toward the direction in which I had departed ; but I drcw ncar from thc contrary : thus thy gaze was evcr turncd from
* Tliird floor of tlie "Maison James Fazy,'' subsequently Hotel de Russie, Corner of the Quai du Leman and Rue du Montblanc. — Tr. t The letter reproduced in the preface to the prescnt volume.
3
34 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
me, and I sought in vain to signal my approach, until I softly cried : Mathilde ! then louder and still louder, tili my bedroom echoed with the sound, and my own crics awakened me. — Then, when I had relapsed a little into slumber, I dreamed I was reading letters of thine, wherein thou con- fess'dst to me a youthful love-affair ; thou hadst renounced thy lover, yet kept'st singing his praises, so that I appeared in the light of a mere would-be consoler, — which somewhat galled me. I would not let that dream proceed, and arose to write these lines. — The vvhole day I had had vehement longing, and a grievous impatience of life had mastered me oncc more. —
August 24.
Yesterday I feit utterly wretched : Why go on living ; why live ? Is it cowardice — or courage ? Why that immeasurable happiness, to be so boundlessly unhappy ? — — The night brought sound sleep. — To-day has gone better. — I have had a beautiful portfolio made here, expressly to lock away thy keepsakes and letters : it will hold a great ■quantity, and what once gets in, will not be given out again to naughty children. Therefore take good care what thou send'st me in future : not a jot thereof wilt thou have back — until after my death ; unless thou wouldst fain commit it to the grave with me. — To-morrow I go direct to Venice. I am dying to get there, where I think of settling calmly ■down, tho' the journey in itself is most distasteful to me. — It is a week to-day since I saw thy terrace for the last time ! —
Venice, the ßrd of September.
Yesterday I wrote thee and our lady friend,* so long had I been withheld by the journey and my accommoda- tion here. Now the diary shall be kept right methodically. —
Frau Wille ; the letters are not preserved.
VENICE DIARY 35
My route lay over the Simplon ; the mountains, particu- larly the long valley of Wallis [Vahiis], weighcd me down. One lovely hour I spcnt on the garden-terrace of the Isola bella ; a wondrous sunny morning ; I knevv this spot,* and dismisscd the gardener at once, to be alone there. A beauti- ful sense of calm and uplifting came ovcr me — so beautiful, that it could not last. Yet what raised me up, what was with and in myself, that lasted : the happiness of bcing lovcd by thee !
At Milan merely a night's halt ; on August 29 arrived in Venice after noon. On the way down the Grand Canal to the Piazetta, melancholy impressions and graveness of mood ; grandeur, beauty and decay, in close array : yet comfort in the reflection that hcre no modernity flourished, and in con- sequence no bustling trivnality. S. Mark's Square of magical effect. A wholly distant, outlived world, it admirably fits the wish for solitude : nothing to strike one as directly real life ; everything objective, like a work of art. I will remain here, — and accordingly I shall. — Next day, after long debate, apartments taken on the Grand Canal in a mighty palace wherc I am quite alone for the present ; wide, lofty Spaces, wherein I can wander at will. Since the question of Abode is so important to me, as the housing for my labour- mechanism, I'm dcvoting all possible care to arranging it after my wish. I wrote for the Erard at once ; it ought to sound wonderful in my vast, high palace-salon. The peculiarly intense stillness of the Canal suits me splendidly. Xot tili 5 in the afternoon do I leave my abode, to dine ; then promenade towards the public garden ; brief halt in the Square of S. Mark, which gives a thoroughly theatrical Suggestion through its absolute uniqueness and its sea of utter strangers void of all concern to me, merely distracting
' See letter to Otto of July '52.— Tr.
36 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
one's fancy, Toward 9 return home in a gondola ; find the lamp lit, and read a little tili bedtime. —
Thus will my life flow outwardly on, and thus would I have it. Unfortunately, my stay hcre is already known ; but I have given Orders, once for all, to admit nobody. — This solitude, possible wellnigh here alone to me — and so agreeably possible — caresses myself and my hopes. — Eh ! I hope, for thy sake to get well ! To save thee to me, means to save me to my art. With it — to live for thy consolement ; that is my mission, that fits with my nature, my fate, my will, — my love. Thus am I thine; thus, too, shalt thou get well through me ! Here will the Tristan be completed — a defiance to all the raging of the world. And with that, an I may, shall I return to see thee, comfort thee, to make thee happy ; there looms my fairest, my most sacred wish. So be it ! Sir Tristan, Lady Isolde ! help me, help my angel ! Here shall your wounds cease bleeding, here shall they heal and close. From here shall the world once learn the sublime and noble stress of highest love, the plaints of agonising joy. And august as a god, serene and hale, shalt thou then bchold me back, thy lowly friend !
September 5.
This night I have been sleepless, long my vigil ; my sweet child does not teil me how it fares with her ? — Marvellously beautifui, the Canal by night ; bright stars, last quarter of the moon. A gondola glides by ; from the distance the chant of gondolicrs calling to each other. This last is extraordinarily beautifui, sublime : Tasso's stanzas are rccited to it no more, they say, but the melodies are in any case of hoary eld, as old as Venice ; certainly older than Tasso's stanzas, which must simply have been fitted to them after. Thus the everlasting has preserved itself
VENICE DIARY 37
in the melody, whereas thc stanzas wcre but taken there- into as a passing phenomenon, at last to be cngulfed.* These profoundh' melancholy ditties, sung with füll ringing voice, bornc across the water from afar, and dying into still remoter distance, have sublimely moved me. Glorious ! —
September 6.
Ycsterday I saw Ristori as Maria Stuart. I had Seen her first a few days since as Medea, in which she pleased me much, nay — made a fairly deep impression on me. Uncommon virtuosity, and in the play of emotions a certainty of gesture never known to me before in such perfection ; but what I missed from the first — and as for that, is necessarily foreign to Medea — I plainly recognised novv as the chief defect in her art, since it is imperatively demanded of Maria Stuart. Here ideality, enthusiasm, deep, rapturous warmth, are needed. It was humiliating, how painfully the artist feil short here ; and with no little pride I feit the height and the significance of German art, whcn I remembered how enkindlingly, ay, transportingly I had seen this very task fulfilled by many a German actress ; t whereas the Ristori, with her abrupt leaps from sophisticated prose to almost animally plastic passion, shewed that she had not cven rcmotcly guessed the nature of her task, to say nothing of being born to it. It w^as truly dcplorable and exasperating. This strain of ideality in German art, howevcr, is that which makes my music possible, and by means thereof my poetry. How distant, on the other hand, are these French-Italian evolutions from all I can evcr conceive ; and yet the ideal dement casts
* Cf. Prose Works, vol. v. 73-4 (the Beethoven essay). t Minna herseif had played the part at Riga in 1S39 as " guest," and therefore presumably before her maniage also.— 'fr.
38 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
an unconscious spell over Italians and French themselves, vvhcn it comes upon them from without, so that I cannot let it merely rank as a sort of specifically German onesided- ness of character. I myself have experienced this in the effect on individuals of my Performances. — In what, then, consists the difference between the ideahty I mean and that realistic comedy of passion ? Glance through the scene in the third act of Maria Stuart, in the garden where she welcomes freedom, and imagine that Ristori left out the greater part here, nay, almost all that did not lead up to a point of hatred against Elisabeth, and thus afford an opening for development of her rapid changes of impassioned byplay. — Yet, that will not make it quite clear to thee, but thou'lt know what I mean in an instant, if I rcmind thee of our love
September 7.
To-day I had a note from Frau Wille ; it was the first tidings I had had of thee. Thy mind is made up, she says, calmly and resolutely to go through with the renuncia- tion : parents, children — duties. —
Oh but how foreign it sounded to me, in my solemn cheerfulness ! —
Thinking of thee, never have parents, children, duties, come into my mind : I simply knew that thou lov'dst me, and that everything sublime must be unhappy in the world. From this height it startles me to see a written catalogue of what makes us unhappy. Then of a sudden I see thee in thy gorgeous house, see all tJiat, hear all those to whom we must ever remain unintelligible ; those who, strangers, yet are — near us, all anxiety to keep the Near afar from US ; and anger takes me at the thought : To t/wse, who know naught of thee, comprehend naught of thee, but want everything from thee, thou'rt to sacrifice all I — I cannot, will
VENICE DIARY 39
not sce or hcar it, if I'm to fmish worthily my carthly work ! Onh' from thc inmost depth can I c^jain thc strcngth ; but — evcn'thing from witlioul, that would usurp my resolutions, stirs bitterness up in me. —
Thou hopc.st to sec me for a fcw hours in Romc this wintcr ? I fear — I cannot see thcc ! To sce thce, — and thcn depart from thee for the delcctation of another, — can I do that now already ? Surely not ! —
And no letters, wouldst thou ? —
I have writtcn thee,* and sincerely hope not to be rejectcd with that letter ; — ay, I am sure of thinc answer ! —
Away with these foolish thoughts ! — I hope. —
Sept. 8.
" O blinde Augen !
Blöde Herzen ! " {Tristan i.— Tr.]
Sept. 10.
Yesterday I was downright ill, with fever. In the evening, too, I received another letter from Frau Wille : — enclosed was my note to thee — sent back unopened !— Nay, tJiat should not have been ! — Not that ! — To-day I have nothing for the diary as yct ; no thoughts,— merely fcelings. Those must first come to clearness. —
That thou art recruiting thy health, and feeling strong, is my consolation. I have yet another, that almost looks like a revenge : — Some day thou'lt read this rejected letter also — and realise what an appalling injustice has been done mc v.ith its rejection ! — But much the samc has occurred to me quite often bcfore. —
See entry under date September 3. — Tr.
40 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
Sept, 1 1.
Ha ! — a direct address from thee ! Three words — nothing more !
Yet mere go-betweens, vvere they the most intelligent and sympathetic, can make up for nothing. Hovv hard it is for two to understand each other fuUy, how necessary, even for that communion, that they should be in a happily like mood, such as nothing but the füllest feeling of the loved one's actual presence can rcally bring to pass ; but a third person Stands ever apart. Who could efface himself and his particular Standpoint so entirely, as only to be a Channel for two others? That Frau Wille, purely for her own part, cannot prevail on herseif to convey to thee letters from me, I can but deem intelligible : of course there can be no regard paid to thcir contents there, no consideration how quieting, therefore how needful such Communications are ; — enough, they're letters, and she feels, perhaps must feel, compunction in delivering them. As for that, whatever can the " lady friend " advise in general, save what her attitude toward all concerned makes possible to her, and possible in the best and noblest sense? — But — she also acted according to thy wish ! What ! — a case of conscience between us two?
Enough for to-day ! — Peace ! Peace ! —
Septernber 13.
I feit so sad, that I meant to confide nothing even to the diary : then thy letter came to-day — the letter to Frau Wille. — That thou lov'st me, I knew füll well, and thou art good as ever, profound and wise ; so I had to smile almost to rejoice at my late vexation, since thou prepar'st me here so excellent a satisfaction. I understand thee — even where I think thee a shade in the wrong, — for everything is a wrong to me, that savours of defence against im-
VENICE DIARY 41
portunacy. By that tcrrible dcparturc from Zürich I should have thoui^ht I had given final proof tliat I can — witlidravv ; consequcntly I have a right to rcsent any doubt of my resis^native nicety as an unmerited and deep affront. — Yet to what purpose i/^a/ now ? — My bcautiful exaltation has becn cast down ; it nceds an cffort, to mount again : for- give mc if I still am tottcring ! — I'll be cheerful again — so far as I can ; to Frau Wille, too, I'll write ere long ; but even with letters to her I'll be moderate. God ! every Single thing is so hard, and yet the highest can only be attained through moderation. — Yes ! 'tis well, and all will turn out well. Our love Stands high above all obstacles, and every hindrance makcs us richer, more spiritual, nobler, and ever more intent upon the substance and essence of our love, ever more indifferent toward the inessential. Yes, good, pure darling ! we shall triumph, — we are already in the midst of victory. —
September 16.
Behold me well and cheerful. Thy Ictter rejoices me \-et. How apt, how sweet and bcautiful, is ever}'thing that Springs from thee ! — Our personal fate seems to me almost a matter of indifference now, everything within is so pure, so altogether fitted to our nature alike and necessity. With that harmonious feeling I wish to return to my work, and am waiting for the piano. The Tristan will cost much still ; but once it is quite ended, meseems a vastly important period of my life will have then been rounded off, and I shall look with new senses, calmly, clearly and with deep con- sciousness into the world, and through the world up to thee. For that it also is, I now feel so much drawn to work. —
Meanwhile I have all manner of dreadful and tedious correspondence, that takes away my time ; j^et ever thou quicken'st me in midst thereof, and Venice gloriousl}- assists
42 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
thee to cheer me up. For the first time I breathe this pure, delicious, ever even air ; the magic of the place enfolds me in a tender melancholy charm, which never ceases to exert its beneficial power. Of an evening, when I take a gondola trip to the Lido, it vibrates round me like one of those mellow long-drawn fiddle-notes I love so, and to which I once compared thee. Judge thence how I feel, in the moonbeams there on the sea ! —
September i8.
A year gone by to-day I finished the poem of Tristan and brought thee its last act, thou led'st me to the chair before the sofa, placedst thy arm around me and saidst : " I no more have a wish ! " —
On this day, at this hour, was I born anew. — To then was my before-Hfe : from then began my after-life : in that wondrous instant alone did I Hve. Thou know'st how I spent it ? In no tumult of intoxication ; but solemnly, profoundly penetrated by a soothing warmth, free as if looking on eternity. — I had been painfully, but more and more definitely detaching myself from the world ; all had turned to negation in me, to warding off. Painful was even my artistry ; for it was a longing, an unstilled longing, to find for that negation, that warding off — the positive, affirmative, self-wedding-to-me. That instant gave it me, with so infallible a certitude that a hallov\^ed standstill came o'er me. A gracious woman, shy and diffident, had taken heart to cast herseif into a sea of griefs and sorrows, to shape for me that precious instant when she Said : I love thee ! — Thus didst thou vow thyself to death, to give me life ; thus did I receive thy life, thence- forvvard from the world to part with thee, to sufifcr with thee, die with thee. — At once the spell of longing was dissolved ! — And this one thing thou knowest too, that
VENICE DIARY 43
nc'er since have I bccn at variancc with myself. Pcrjilexity and panf:j might comc to us ; even thyself mii^ht'st be svvept by an eddy of passion : — but I — thou know'st! — rcmained ever thc same ; never, by never so awful a moment, could my love to thcc be icft of its fragrance, wcre it but of one minutcst film. All bittcrness had vanishcd from me ; I might mistake, fcel paincd or torturcd, but ever it stayed clear as day to me that thy love was my highest possession, and without it my existence must be a contradiction of itself.—
Thanks to thee, thou gracious, loving angel ! —
September 23.
The drinking-vessel [see p. 88] and cup have arrived ; once again the first friendly token from without. VVhat am I sa\-ing ? " von Aussen " ? How can anything come from without to me, that comes from thee? And yet, — it comes from out the distance ; from that distance where my nearest now is. A thousand thanks, thou dear inventive souI ! Thus mute, how plainly can we teil each other what is so inexpressiblc ! —
September 26.
I can't even get to my diary now, such an odious mass of business letters I have to attend to. How foolish I am, though ! This constant vulgär care for life, — and at bottom so deep a disgust with it ; a life I always have to dress up artificially, not to see it constantly before me in its natural offensiveness ! If people only knew what lies between me and a final possibility of rest for work ! — Yet ril hold on, since I must; I do not belong to myself, and my griefs and troubles are the means to an end that scoffs at all these sufferings. Tut, tut! — no shirking ! —
44 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
September 29.
The waning moon now rises late : at its füll it fur- nished me fine comfort through agreeable sensations which I needed. x'\fter sunset I regularly took a gondola to meet it, toward the Lido, for the battle twixt day and night was always an entrancing vision in this limpid sky : to the right, amid the dusk-rose aether, gleamed kindly bright the evening star ; the inoon in füll splendour cast its flashing net towards me in the sea. Then when I turned my back upon it for the journey home, my gaze — athwart toward where thou dwellest, and whence thou look'dst towards the moon — would meet the comet, stern and brilliant with its tail of waxing light, close above my affinity the VVagoner. For me it had no terrors, just as nothing can inspire me any more with fear, because I absolutely have no hope, no future more ; rather, I could but smile quite earnestly at pepple's awe of such a visitant, and chose it with a certain insolent pride for my star. I could see nothing in it but the unaccustomed, dazzling, marvellous. Am I such a comet myself ? Have I brought misfortune ? — Was it viy fault ? — I could not lose it from my ken again. Silent and at peace I reached the gaily-lighted, ever-lively Piazzetta. Then down we go the melancholy grave Canal : to left and right stand lordly palaces : without a sound : only the gentle gliding of the gondola, the plashing of the oar, broad shadovvs from the moon. At my dumb palace steps I disembark : wide halls and spaces, now inhabited by me alone. The lamp is burning ; I pick up a book, read little, ponder much. All's still. — Music there, on the canal ! An illuminated gondola with singers and musicians : more and still more boats with listeners follow in its wake : the flotilla spans the breadth of the canal, gliding all but moveless past. Fine voices, passable Instruments, render songs. All is ear. — Then, scarcely perceptibly it curves round the bend.
VENICE DIARY 45
and vanishes still more impcrccptibly. For loni:^ I still can hear the tones, ennobled and transfii^urcd by thc midnii^ht stillness, tones that as art could hardly captivate me, but had here become part of nature. At last all ceases : the last tone as if dissolves into the moonlic^ht, which softly goes on shining as a visual rcmaindcr of thc sound-world. —
Now the moon has vvancd. —
I have not been well these last few da)'s : I have had to givc up my evening cruisc. Nothing remains but my loneliness, and m}' futurelcss existence ! —
On the table before me lies a little picture. It is the Portrait of my father,* which I no longer could shew thee when it arrived ; a noble, gentle, sufferingly pcnsive face that intinitely moves me. It has become very dear to me. — Whoever enters, would probably suspect at first the picture of a lady-love. Nay ! Of her I have no picture, but her soul I carry in my hcart ; there let him peep u ho can ! — Good-night ! —
September 30.
To-day I have gone through much. I heard of my beloved's care for me, and quitc a beautiful letter lay by.f I have answered as well as I could, sadly and gladly, just as I feit! —
Once morc I have experienced a thorough horror of youthful marriages ; + except with persons of absolutel\- no
* Siirely this must be meant for "stepfather " ; see the letter of Jan. 5, 1870 to Otto, also the portrait of Geyer on page 34 of Mr. H. S. Chamberlain's Richard Wagna'. — Tr.
t See letter of same date to Frau Wille, printed belovv.
\ Comparing this sentence with the said letter to Frau Wille, I take tiie preceding dots to represent some allusion to Karl Ritter, whose marriage, contracted four years previously, had by no means proved a happy one. — Tr.
46 WAGNER TO MATHILDE WESENDONCK
importance, I have not yet encountered one the radical mistake whereof has not shewn forth in time. What misery then ! Soul, character, parts — all must warp, unless excep- tional, and then of course most sorrovvful new relations supervene. Thus all around me is quite doleful ; what has any manner of significance, helpless and suffering : and only the insignificant can thoroughly enjoy existence. Yet what recks Nature of it all? She goes her blind way, intent on nothing but the race : i.e. to live anew and anew, com- mence ever again ; spread, spread — utmost spread ; the in- dividual, on whom she loads all burdens of existence, is naught to her but a grain of sand in this spread of the species ; a grain she can replace at any moment, if she only gives an extra twist to the race, a thousand- and a million- fold ! Oh, I can't stand hearing anyone appeal to Nature : with finer minds 'tis finely meant, but for that very ri^ason something eise is meant thereby ; for Nature is heartless and devoid of feeling, and every egoist, ay, every monster, can appeal to her example with more cause and warranty than the man of feeling. — What, then, is such a marriage, which we contract for life in giddy youth at the first stir of the sexual Impulse ? And how seldom are parents made prudent by their own experience ; when they themselves at last have steered out of misery and into ease, they forget all about it, and heedlessly allow their children to plunge along the seifsame track ! — Yet it is just like everything in Nature : for the individual she holds misery, death and despair, in readiness, and leaves him to lift himself above them by his highest effort of resignation : — she cannot prevent that succeeding, but looks on in amazement, and says perhaps : " Is that what I really willed ? " —
I'm not quite well yet, but have great hopes of to-night if it brings me calm sleep. Thou wilt not grudge me that ? — Good-night ! —
VENICE DIARY 47
October i.
The othcr da}', in the stiect, my eye chanced to Hght on a poulterer's stall ; unconsciously I was looking at the heaped-up wares, all neatly and appetisingly drcssed, whcii, as a man at one side was busy plucking a fowl, another thrust his hand into a cage, dragged out a live hen, and tore off its head. The bird's horrible shriek, its pitiful clucking while being overcome, sent a shudder through my soul. — Often as I had experienced the impression beforc, I haven't got rid of it since. — It is ghastly, the bottomless ab}-ss of inhumanest misery on which our existence, for the most part bent on pleasure, is really poised ! This has always been so manifest to me, and with increasing sensibility has become so stamped upon my mind, that I recognise the rightful cause of all my sorrows