by A. N. Wilson
When she was seventeen, Cosima and her elder sister were sent by her father to live with a protégé of the Abbé Liszt’s, Hans von Bülow, and his mother. Hans taught the girls music and helped to improve their bad German. Why did it make her shudder when his horrible moist hands touched hers on the keyboard? She did not fear sex. From an early age she had known her need of it, and from the instant she met Hans she had known his inability to provide what her soul and her loins hungered after.
Poor Hans! He was destined to become one of the most successful conductors of his generation, but when she was a lodger in his mother’s house she saw only an impoverished and painfully nervous young man, in awe of her father certainly, but in love, not with her but with the music of Richard Wagner. She loved him for the dangers he had passed. It made her laugh to apply the Desdemona line to her feelings for Hans, since he had none of the heroism of the Moor. Once, when he was perhaps only twenty-five, he had conducted the Overture to Tannhäuser at the Stern Conservatory where he was a teacher. The public had hissed, so disturbing did they find it.
Waiting at home for his return, his mother had said that she would go to bed at the usual time. The servants had also turned in. Poor Hans had been so overwhelmed by the hostile response of the audience to what they conceived of as dangerous modern innovations that he had passed out. He had lain unconscious in his dressing room for a long time, and when he returned to his mother’s house he had found but one lamp burning in the drawing room and the pale, intense, beaky figure of Cosima sitting up to wait for him.
Yet the love letters he wrote were not to her but to her father. ‘For me Cosima Liszt transcends all other women not only because she bears your name but because she is in so many ways the exact mirror of your personality.’ Poor Hans spoke true. Hans the Apollonian had fallen in love with a Dionysian. Had he not seen his hero, the Abbé Liszt, selfishly pursue music, women, women, falling back from time to time on the no less delicious raptures of penitence and religious ecstasy? This was what he fell in love with in Cosima and this he married.
She was glad to be loved. After the chaos of childhood and the many years when she felt no certainty of either parent’s affection, Hans’s spaniel devotion was very reassuring. Getting married had been his idea; all his idea? She could never remember. The only misgiving she could ever recollect was that she knew all passion was absent from those areas which she knew mattered most. Even before her first ecstasy, which occurred a few months after she married him and was self-stimulated, she had known that he would never send her into the dizzying realms of Venusberg, either by what they did in the bedroom or anywhere else. Some audience would always be hissing while in vain he conducted an opera to whose inner meaning and raison d’être he was totally deaf.
She’d met Richard Wagner when she was a child and he had evoked, as did so many grown-ups, feelings of angry jealousy, since it was obvious that Liszt cared more for the German composer than he did for his own children. When she married Hans the Wagner idolatry also got in the way. Hans did seem, quite literally, to worship Wagner. The spaniel eyes he had cast at her when she first came as a lodger to his mother’s house were as nothing to the adulation he bestowed upon his hero. Taught by Liszt, Hans saw Wagner as a new comet in the sky, a new chapter in the history of music. Cosima was to see this, but only by tortuous paths did she come to the Heavenly City, winding up the purgatorial slopes and twisted paths of envy and jealousy and rage – envy not least of her sister Blandine, who seemed to be the one on whom Wagner had the crush.
Did any of it, this early emotionally confused pain of her marriage to Hans, flicker in and out of the old skull on the sofa in Bayreuth as she muttered to that polite American journalist? I went in several times during that fortnight. By morning light the head was silhouetted against the garden windows; one saw the nose, the wisps of hair, and beyond it trees and sky; in the afternoon light her face was radiated with the golden rays of the sun, setting behind the Hofgarten.
Tannhäuser is the dream of separation between two visions – the world seen when we are in lust and the world otherwise. It is not a celebration of sex, as such, it is an acknowledgement of its importance and of the genius human beings have for placing it in compartments. Hence the pivotal importance for nineteenth-century respectability of the brothel. Hence, perhaps, H’s obsession with the Viennese prostitutes of his youth and the many raving references to syphilis in Mein Kampf, where venereal disease and racial impurity are sometimes intermingled as metaphors of social harm. With the advance of syphilis, so the book maintains, came the decline of German culture and the rise of cubism.
Liszt and Wagner chose to carry the chaos of their emotional and sexual burdens upon the carriage top and in the light of open day. True, the actual secrets of what each man did, or liked doing, might have remained a secret, though even in Wagner’s lifetime his fondness for dressing up in silken female underwear was hinted at by the gossips. Neither man really needed the Tannhäuser dichotomy of the virtuous domestic hearth held in Hegelian balance by the Venusberg brothel or the kept woman behind lace curtains. They carried their chaos about, making everyone pay. When Liszt had abandoned the Comtesse Marie d’Agoult in Paris, he openly took up with the Princesse Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein in Weimar. Wagner, cut to the quick by Minna’s infidelities in their early married life, lost no time in making his own arrangements, and his life was punctuated by love affairs and a few grandes passions. Of these undoubtedly the most extreme, and the most artistically fruitful, was his unconsummated adoration of his neighbour in Zurich, Mathilde von Wesendonck.
The young bride Cosima used to weep at the mention of his name, Wagner’s. By then she had stopped pretending, even in her head, that she found Hans’s approaches anything but repellent, but if she were to hear him speak with adoration, it was of her she wished him to be the worshipper, not of this short, rather common, exuberant German genius.
But then, in those days she was always bursting into tears. Nothing now, as she lay half a corpse, remained of the passions, either of the anger she felt with poor Hans or the hopeless passions conjured by her imagination to escape the prison house of marriage. Whatever had happened to Karl Ritter, one of Hans’s friends? Yet for one summer she and Karl had been so in love that they had rowed out into the lake at Geneva and earnestly committed themselves to a suicide pact.
At the time of these tempests Wagner was having troubles of his own. His wife Minna, who had lived through so many of his adventures, found the obsession with Mathilde intolerable and they were now living apart. She had come to be more and more conservative since the failed revolutions and she hated her husband’s ‘progressive’ views on everything, and his desire to write ‘modern’ music that audiences hissed at. Why not a few pleasant tunes that audiences enjoyed? The Mathilde obsession was being turned by Wagner into the first great piece of modernist music, Tristan und Isolde. He came and went between Switzerland and a very cold palazzo in Venice where, much of the time alone, he worked on that noble masterpiece.
Out of so much chaos … Wesendonck eventually found the situation between himself and his wife so unbearable that, while continuing to pay Wagner’s bills, he in effect sent him away from Switzerland. Minna, who had periodic attempts to meet Wagner and repair their marriage – episodes he regarded as unmitigated hell … Cosima, trapped in the misery of her marriage to Hans and Wagner needing Hans as the musical interpreter of Tristan. Here were emotional circles of which Goethe himself could have spun another Elective Affinities.
It was to Hans that Wagner entrusted the task of making a piano score of Tristan, even as he composed it; and it was Hans who first played it through to Cosima.
And now she was fading. Her soul was possessed by music. So was her body. The intake of difficult breath and its exhalation heaved to the music of Tristan, to the ultimate yearning expression that love could find its fulfilment only in … Hans playing the ‘Liebestod’… Hans conducting the first rehearsals of Tristan … love …
death … So many deaths around that fateful time when her soul and body became the possession of Richard Wagner. Her sister Blandine … her brother Daniel, aged twenty. Lying in the falling shadows of Wahnfried, the ninety-year-old shell, so soon approaching its shuddering separation from the soul, smiled across something which felt like a river of mist at her brother’s kind young face. Her face, apple-pink but wrinkled: it was soon to become young again. She would feast on the apples of Freia and know eternal youth. Time was already in confusion.
Someone (it was the author of these words) and another (it was Winnie) was lifting the old lady under the armpits. Ever practical in her kindness, Winnie said, ‘They become so uncomfortable if you do not move them.’
Was there a sob in the background? Is it Fidi sobbing? Is it a baby sobbing for its mother, or is it the universal cry of pain which the universe hurls back at the unjust gods?
She is being lifted, lifted.
The hands under her armpits feel her body. She feels the hands of Richard. Why is it so unlike the sensation when Hans touches her? Why is there such deep, deep excitement as the Master takes her in his arms? He was whispering to her. He was telling her his dreams. How many hundreds of his dreams was he to tell her and would she transcribe in her diaries? They were at the opera together … Tannhäuser … Paris … ‘Comment a-tu osé avoir le courage et le mérite de venir ici seule?’
They are in a box. She longs more than anything for him to possess her, there and then. She wants his hands, his tongue, his lips, his sex. She feels herself melting. Venusberg is now the centre of the universe, and all else has become a dream. Hans at the piano, her unhappy little affair with Karl Ritter, her baby … They are as ‘in the background’ as servants along a corridor, whose existence you acknowledge but who have absolutely no inner reality for you as you lie in bed drifting off into a deeper reality.
Long before the first wonderful union had occurred, and she had made love to the Master, Venusberg had come alive, its dry places had filled with hidden springs. That day he quite boldly, in front of everyone, in front of Hans, picked her up and put her in a wheelbarrow. They were staying at an hotel in Biebrich called the Beaver’s Nest. His hands under her arms and then, as he carried her into the barrow, his hands beneath her buttocks, were so placed that one or two fingers, sticking up above the others, felt the ever-willing territories of Venusberg.
Not long after that, came another moment – in a carriage, riding alone the pair of them through the streets of Berlin.
‘I think she said something,’ said Winnie.
‘Oh, Mutti, Mutti, oh darling Mutti…’ This was Eva leaning over her, but the girlish sobs in the background were Fidi’s.
Cosima thought, ‘The wheelbarrow had become for me a celestial wain, in which he bears me on and on towards our spiritual home.’
‘Eva, let me near … oh my God, is she going – oh, Mutti, Mutti!’
‘Fidi, darling.’ It is Winnie, being comforting.
Now they are all kneeling beside the bed. They have managed to heave the body from the sofa to the bed. The old bones feel as brittle as biscuits. It is a wonder they can carry her without her cracking.
‘She looks very comfortable.’
No one would know. No one could know what the union meant to them. There was no point in trying to find a word, which would either be some piece of smut, such as her father guiltily read, one of those novels from Paris that he concealed beneath his priestly soutane; or it would be an unsuccessful piece of ‘poetry’. Music alone could convey … Oh, must they shout and mutter and pray through the music?
‘I think she’s more comfortable.’
‘Mutti, dear, we love you.’
‘Hallowed be thy name, thy Kingdom come.’
I am coming, my Master. Our celestial wain is carrying me and once again I feel that heaving music, that ecstatic pleasure. With a great shudder, she shot from the room and out into the gloaming, the dusk took her. She swooped – the movement both was, and was not, of her own volition – towards Richard. The shudder was the greatest orgasm to which she had ever surrendered. She found his face, his smile. In the sardonic smile which sometimes on earth was cruel, she found only a benign indifference. He both welcomed and repelled her. She realized to her dismay, and panic, that she was not permitted to reach him: that, although she was coming to him, he was in some different condition from her own. She recollected quite distinctly at that moment their readings aloud together after dinner at Wahnfried – and the month they read the Purgatorio in which there was a long ascent and many encounters, before the pilgrim came fully into the presence of the Beloved.
* * *
‘Twenty minutes’ – Toscanini was convulsed with laughter. I record this fact not because I rate my talents as a comic anecdotalist but to show how different he was from any of the other great conductors whom I met at Bayreuth – all, that is, with the exception of Fidi, who had a highly developed sense of the absurd. Even Fidi, however, had not laughed at the twenty-minute Parsifal that had been shown at the local cinema, the Electric Palace. Cosima, in words her children helped her to frame and dictate, had written in the most grief-stricken tones to the city fathers. It would have been beneath her dignity to write to the manager of the cinema. One might have thought it was beneath her dignity to recognize the existence of motion pictures, let alone of a cinema in the divine Bayreuth. I remember the manager, a jolly cinematomane called Herr Tischler, reading out the Cosima epistle – ‘The grief felt by all good people … This sacred drama, uniquely and for ever associated with the town of Bayreuth … desecration … the truncation little short of blasphemy’ – to the projectionist, Herr Bäcker, and the box office clerk, Fräulein Horn, with a mixture of incredulity and amusement. I of course had been the pianist aged about eighteen.
‘I had prepared myself for the possibility that some truncation would have occurred,’ I said, ‘in adapting the drama for the screen. But only when Herr Tischler played it through did I…’ Once more I laughed. Toscanini laughed – not because either of us had anything but the deepest reverence for the Master, and for Parsifal in particular, but because it was funny that the Edison Film Company – ages since, in the year I was born – had managed to make a film of this five-hour story and reduce it to twenty minutes.
‘I wonder how short they’d manage to make the Ring cycle?’ He spoke quite fluent German but with the strongest of Italian accents. Indeed, apart from making few grammatical errors and remembering his word order, something foreigners seldom do, he spoke the words themselves as if they were Italian, often adding vowel sounds at the end which did not exist in our language: Parsifal-uh. With his curly moustaches, dark, humorous eyes and swept-back black hair greying at the temples, he was the very embodiment of a dashing Lothario and I think Friedelind, twelve or thirteen when we were having this lunch together at the Golden Anchor, was already in love with him. But I do not think anything ever passed between them. Later she’d say he was her second father.
There were others round the spotless thick white tablecloth – Frida Leider was there, I remember, a great friend of Toscanini’s. She was singing Kundry that year in Parsifal and she made Toscanini laugh with jokes about Furtwängler, his rival conductor.
It is hard to convey to you how grand the conductors were in those days. That season there were three – Muck, Furtwängler and Toscanini. In order to get these characters to come to Bayreuth, Fidi and Winnie had to write extravagant contracts. Furtwängler insisted not only upon his own private chauffeur and car to convey him from the bachelor house to the Festival Theatre but also a horse-drawn carriage with equipage as back-up for the days when the car was temperamental. He himself was temperamental always and the servants, not only in Wahnfried but also at the hotels and restaurants in the town and in the theatre restaurant, all regarded him with loathing.
Karl Muck was similarly capable of creating a fuss about trivia and only that morning, the morning we were having lunch at the Golden Anchor
, Fidi had been driven half mad by a row invented by Muck because he believed Furtwängler and Toscanini were given better dressing rooms, more attentive valets – I forget the trifling nature of the complaint.
As well as having to contend with Furtwängler, there was also his formidable secretary, Berta Giessmar, who went through his contracts and negotiated on his behalf, an iron-grey-headed bespectacled person who terrified Fidi.
Toscanini was ‘difficult’ with the orchestra. (After their first rehearsal with him they christened him Toscanono.) But in person and as a domestic guest he was popular with the staff. He enjoyed his food, did not complain or send dishes back to the cook, as Giessmar so often did on Furtwängler’s behalf. He was above all charming with the children. In the past year they had got so out of hand, and Winnie and Fidi had become so busy, that they had been dispatched to boarding schools in England. They’d only lately come home for the holidays as the Festival began. They brought with them all noise, chaos and life. We’d been working flat out in the weeks before the Festival but it was only when they all returned that I noticed (however short-tempered both parents could be with their offspring) how much happier Fidi and Winnie both were. Furtwängler would behave as if the children were an offensive smell it was heroic to ignore. Toscanini made friends with them, especially with Friedelind, and during any free time he would take them, or any member of the household who was willing, on picnics to the Eremitage, drives to the pretty Franconian villages round about, or to meals at the dear old Golden Anchor. ‘Come on,’ he’d said that day, ‘Frau Wagner is being a good wife at the theatre, Herr Wagner is working like a Trojan – the house is full of people – come and join us for lunch at the hotel.’
After some joke about the Giessmar, I remember Frida Leider leaning forward and saying – directly to Toscanini and across the heads, as it were, of us Germans – ‘What will we do if these people have any more success?’ A little silence fell on the table. It was clear enough what her question meant. The formidable Giessmar was Jewish. Frida wasn’t Jewish, but her husband, Rudolf Deman (leader of the orchestra at the Berlin State Opera), was. ‘You know what Frau Wagner said when Siegfried got me to do Kundry? “The synagogue is filling up.” That’s the way people speak now –’