The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  No wonder that, above and beyond offering insights into Schopenhauer and readings from the Ring, Wagner managed to dazzle the ladies at least as comprehensively as he did his financiers. Sometimes these were one and the same. Julie Ritter, a friend of Jessie Laussot, paid him an annual allowance for eight years. Countess Marie Muchanoff, a rich Polish admirer, gave him ten thousand francs to help him out of the red in Paris. Other grandes dames rewarded him for a piano trifle or a poetry reading with a thousand thalers here, a thousand roubles there. Wagner’s female fans rarely offered him loans rather than gifts, evidently judging the prospects of repayment more realistically than his male creditors did. Julie Schwabe, wealthy widow of a Manchester industrialist, did lend him money and tracked him down relentlessly for years until she got it back. But she was the exception.

  Finally, in 1864, Wagner’s luck seemed to run out. After he had spent most of his earnings from a Russian tour on lavish presents, and on having the walls of his latest ‘nest’ near Vienna lined in silk, his creditors got close to him at last, wings flapping, beaks snapping. He fled to a dismal hole in Stuttgart and, not for the first time, considered suicide. If Wagner had been the unhappiest of heroes in the corniest of pantomimes, this would have been the moment for a fairy godmother to waft onstage, wand fluttering, and grant his every wish. Such a miracle does not happen in real life, of course, except that in this case it preposterously did. Wagner was summoned to Munich in May by King Ludwig II, who had just ascended to the Bavarian throne at the age of eighteen and who had swooned over Lohengrin, above all, for years. Wagner’s debts were wiped out in a trice and he was urged to get on with composing – money, apparently, no object.

  Hard on the heels of the miracle, Cosima von Bülow-Liszt descended on Haus Pellet, a splendid villa by Lake Starnberg, south of Munich, which the king had put at Wagner’s disposal. Only cynics, surely, would see any unworthy connection between Cosima’s sudden appearance and her host’s dramatically improved circumstances, but it is clear that her arrival took Wagner aback. He had, indeed, invited his friend and colleague von Bülow to visit and bring his wife with him, but he had also written shortly before to Mathilde Maier begging her to come and be his ‘housekeeper’. When Cosima turned up on 29 June, a week ahead of her husband, Wagner had to write hastily to Mathilde (who had wisely treated the ‘housekeeper’ scheme coolly in any case) telling her not to come after all. It is virtually certain that during that week before von Bülow himself arrived, Richard and Cosima’s first child was conceived – a daughter appropriately named Isolde. When Liszt had talked about the future of his choosy but impecunious daughters, Cosima and Blandine, he had been inclined to shake his head sadly and complain that each sought a husband who combined the genius of Beethoven or Raphael with the wealth of a nabob. In 1864 Cosima seemed on the right track: she was netting Wagner and he was backed by the resources of a king.

  3

  Ugly Duckling and Swan King

  ‘All our peace in this miserable life is found in humbly enduring suffering rather than in being free from it,’ wrote the German mystic Thomas à Kempis in his De Imitatio Christi (Imitation of Christ). It was Cosima’s favourite passage in a book she first read as a girl, continued to read as an adult and urged her children to read. It goes on: ‘He who knows best how to suffer will enjoy the greater peace, because he is the conqueror of himself, the master of the world, a friend of Christ and an heir of heaven.’1

  Cosima learned very well how to suffer long before her life with Wagner began, though he gave her exceptional scope for further practice. Born on 24 December 1837 in a lakeside hotel in Como, Italy (not on Christmas Day in the more exclusive resort of Bellagio, as some starry-eyed biographers maintain), she was the second of three illegitimate children spun off, as it were, from the tumultuous liaison between the countess Marie d’Agoult and Franz Liszt. Her elder, prettier sister, Blandine-Rachel, died aged twenty-six, soon after giving birth to a son. Her younger brother Daniel, blessed with Liszt’s sea-green eyes and much of his irresistible charm, died at twenty of a lung ailment. Cosima, an ‘ugly duckling’ with a nose too long and a mouth too wide, dearly loved both of them – probably more than she loved anyone. ‘I am always seeking in my heart for these two beings who were so young, so rare, so truly sacred, so utterly my own,’ she wrote to a friend after Blandine’s death. ‘I feel nothing but emptiness.’2

  The empty feeling had, in fact, begun long before. She lost her brother and sister as a young woman, but as a child, she hardly knew her exotic, volatile parents. Liszt and the countess had begun their affair in 1833 and eloped two years later – Parisian society was shocked (or at least affected to be) but romantics everywhere were exhilarated. It was not every day that a French aristocrat’s wife, moreover one blessed with beauty and literary talent, deserted her husband and child to run off with a travelling pianist – albeit a bewitchingly good one – from some obscure spot in Hungary. But the ties between the two were already starting to loosen when Cosima was born. Her father pursued his international concert career, and other women, with still greater intensity, and her equally restless mother went back to Paris. There she worked as a political journalist and later wrote books, including a ‘kiss and tell’ novel based on life with Liszt and a three-volume history of the 1848 French revolution, whose liberal aims she applauded. The couple continued to see one another sporadically, but finally split amid angry scenes caused not least by Liszt’s fleeting involvement with the Irish-born dancer known as Lola Montez – an affair the countess found simply degrading.

  The children, meanwhile, were shuttled between nurses, boarding schools and long stays with Liszt’s mother Anna in Paris. Liszt, who paid the bills, forbade them to see their own mother, and when the two daughters broke the ban in 1850 he decided to put them under firmer control. In this course he was egged on by his latest mistress, Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, whom he had met in Kiev three years before while on a concert tour and who had since settled down with him in Weimar. With her dumpy figure, blackish teeth and liking for foul-smelling cigars, this Polish-born wife of a hugely rich Russian was easily the least glamorous of all Liszt’s known conquests. But she had quick intelligence and a sharp tongue of which even Wagner, who got to know her through Liszt, learned to beware. Irritated by her embarrassingly detailed questions about the exact meaning of the Ring, Wagner once told her that four weeks in her company would be the death of him. She laughed in his face.

  It was Carolyne who persuaded Liszt to give up touring, settle in Weimar where he had been a (largely absentee) Kapellmeister since 1842, and devote far more time to composition. How right she was. Liszt began to produce work of the kind Marie d’Agoult had always tried but usually failed to extract from him, and thanks to his influence Weimar became a key centre for new music, rather like Darmstadt after the Second World War, but less doctrinaire. Not that Carolyne herself was a liberal – on the contrary. Fiercely Catholic and a foe of revolution, she disapproved of Marie for her republican sympathies and was naturally jealous of her as Liszt’s former mistress and the mother of his children. Just as naturally, the daughters hated Carolyne from afar, all the more so since she sent her fearsome ex-governess, Madame Patersi de Fossombroni, from St Petersburg to Paris in 1850 to take them in hand for five interminable years. A fanatic for discipline and correct deportment, who is said to have crossed most of Europe in a railway carriage at the age of seventy-two without once leaning back in her seat, Madame Patersi and her similarly aged sister sought to create young ladies of whom Carolyne, Liszt and suitable suitors (in that order) would approve. That meant instilling into both girls reverence for the Catholic Church and, equally important, for that aristocratic, imperial France – given a new lease of life from 1852 under Napoleon III – that their mother had come to despise. It also meant ensuring that both of them learned just enough about most things, barring science, to be able to keep up an appropriate patter in the social circles into which they were carefully propelled.
Their mail was vetted by Madame Patersi and they had next to no friends their own age. Once in a while Blandine threw a scene to protest against this treatment. Cosima never did. She was too proud to show her elders what she really felt, and learned to dissemble skilfully in her letters, an art that stood her in good stead later. Besides – didn’t her beloved Thomas à Kempis advise that by conquering oneself, one mastered the world?

  Such was the domestic scene at the neat but claustrophobic apartment in the rue Casimir Périer, literally in the shadow of the church of St Eustache, when Liszt turned up on 10 October 1853 to visit the children he had last seen eight years before. He was accompanied by two composers whose work he was trying hard to promote: Hector Berlioz, who seems to have stayed quiet for much of the time, and Richard Wagner, who as usual did not. After supper Wagner treated the others to a reading of the last act of Götterdämmerung (then called Siegfrieds Tod – ‘Siegfried’s Death’), drawing tears of ecstasy from Cosima even though she could hardly follow the German words. Wagner hardly noticed her, simply reporting that both Liszt’s daughters seemed very shy. Marie Hohenlohe, the attractive teenaged daughter of Carolyne who had already caught Wagner’s fancy, was more observant. Years later in her memoirs Marie recalled ‘poor Cosima’s’ adolescent awkwardness – how tall and angular she had seemed and how the tears had run down her nose that evening. But that was not all.

  ‘Dark passion and boundless vanity pulsated through her veins,’ Marie recorded, ‘and now and then the Parisienne’s inborn mockery played wantonly on her thin lips.’3 Perhaps part of that picture was embellished with hindsight. But suppressed passion, vanity and mockery were always important parts of Cosima’s make-up, and of her icy attraction.

  After nearly four years the paths of Cosima and Wagner crossed again, but the second meeting proved hardly more propitious than the first. Cosima, now aged nineteen, had just married Hans von Bülow, an ex-pupil of her father and eight years her elder, and he could think of no better way to spend a memorable honeymoon than in the company of Wagner, whom he venerated as much as he did Liszt. So the newly-weds travelled in September 1857 to Zurich to find the lovesick composer trapped between his anguished wife Minna and the adored but already ‘taken’ Mathilde Wesendonck. Cosima thought little of either woman, and hardly any more of Wagner, however affecting his music. The uncouth ways and Saxon accent of the ageing ex-revolutionary outraged her Patersi-induced sense of etiquette, and she reacted with a coldness still manifest when the von Bülows visited Zurich again a year later. Indeed, so upset was Hans by his wife’s standoffish attitude during this trip that he wrote to Wagner afterwards to make excuses for her. The honoured Master should get to know Cosima better, von Bülow advised, and then he would realise how lovable she really was.

  If anyone urgently needed to know Cosima better it was von Bülow himself. He must have been surprised, and no doubt gratified, when Cosima abandoned her reserve for a few brief moments at the end of the stay, threw herself weeping at Wagner’s feet and kissed his hands. Wagner himself seems to have been nonplussed (he omitted details of the scene from Mein Leben) but then he had much else on his mind at the time. The atmosphere in and around the Wagner household during that summer of 1858 was even more doom-laden than usual. Minna made one jealous scene after another. Mathilde saw Wagner often but stayed tied to her husband. Wagner had the passion and desolation of Tristan und Isolde welling up in him and felt cornered. He was about to make another bolt for ‘freedom’ and everyone knew it, including Cosima. But even that did not seem fully to explain her uncharacteristic outburst.

  By this time Wagner had certainly noticed how intensely Cosima responded to his work. After her first Zurich visit he had even sent her a letter, to which she seems not to have replied, apologising with awkward humour for his bad manners. But that gesture was probably meant to ensure that he did not indirectly estrange von Bülow, a fine musician and willing tool whom Wagner (rightly) felt could prove useful to him. Cosima simply does not seem to have struck him as particularly desirable: too prim and proper, too uptight. However much he adored having women at his feet, he seems to have been frankly surprised and a mite embarrassed to find Cosima there.

  Wagner’s eyes were unexpectedly opened soon afterwards when he fled from Zurich to Venice accompanied only by his disciple Karl Ritter, son of his benefactress Julie Ritter. The young man had an extraordinary tale to tell – one, moreover, that seems to have percolated through to von Bülow only twelve years later. Ritter claimed that during a recent trip, he and Cosima had poured out their hearts to one another and she had asked him to help her drown in Lake Geneva. She only dropped the idea when Ritter said he would kill himself too. The story naturally enthralled Wagner, hard at work on Tristan and yearning hopelessly for Mathilde. Even so, when he recorded it in his Venice diary he still seemed to be keeping his emotional distance from Cosima, simply expressing surprise at her conduct and intense curiosity about her ‘further development’. Did the incident in fact take place as Ritter claimed and/or as Wagner recorded it? It hardly seems to fit the picture of the haughty stoic who would sooner die than lose her self-possession. Or does it? Perhaps it was precisely because her feelings were so firmly suppressed for most of the time that their rare eruptions proved so fierce. Anyway, in a letter to a confidante in 1864 (only published in full more than a century later), Wagner not only referred to this abortive suicide attempt but claimed there were more. Cosima, he wrote, had later made repeated, and conscious, attempts to contract various fatal illnesses.4 And he had no doubt about the cause of her desperation. It was her marriage to von Bülow.

  Wagner might fairly have pinned some of the blame on Cosima’s largely loveless childhood too, but it is true that her husband was about the last man likely to help her find emotional fulfilment. Born in 1830 into a noble but impoverished family and rocked in his youth by his parents’ divorce, von Bülow concealed a deep-seated emotional insecurity behind irascibility and sarcasm. Already in a letter to Liszt in 1856 asking for Cosima’s hand, he seems to have had more than an inkling that he was embarking on a doomed enterprise. ‘I swear to you’, he wrote, ‘that however much I feel bound to her by my love, I should never hesitate to sacrifice myself to her happiness and release her, were she to realise that she had made a mistake in regard to me.’5 Cosima soon realised it all too well but – as usual – she gave few outward signs. Fearful that Hans would react cuttingly on learning she was pregnant with their first child, she could only pluck up enough courage to whisper the news in his ear when he was asleep. The child, Daniela Senta – known as Lulu – was born in 1860. Three years later a second daughter arrived, Blandine Elisabeth. According to Cosima, Hans greeted the birth with sullen silence.

  So why did they marry? In von Bülow’s case the answer seems clear. In taking the daughter he felt he was nearing the father, his mentor. ‘For me Cosima Liszt transcends all other women,’ he confided to his future father-in-law, ‘not only because she bears your name, but also because she so resembles you, because she is in so many ways the exact mirror of your personality.’6 Cosima’s motives were less straightforward. She was surely tired of being shunted around, and marriage offered a way out. The most recent indignity was that Princess Carolyne, concluding in 1855 that Cosima and Blandine were still too close to their mother in Paris, had seen to it that the girls were whisked off willy-nilly to Berlin, to live with Franziska von Bülow and her son Hans, who would give them piano lessons. Barely six weeks after her arrival, Cosima waited up late for Hans after a concert at which he had been hissed. She showed every sympathy and Hans, unused to such treatment from anyone, let alone from a Liszt daughter, was deeply grateful. They became secretly engaged.

  Marriage was more than a bolt-hole for Cosima, all the same. In his twenties, Hans was already a remarkable musician and Cosima aimed to make him a great one. As a pianist of uncommon stamina and virtuosity, he had no rival in Berlin and few in Europe. All that stood in the way of still greater success wa
s his insistence on spicing his programmes with modern works his audiences found indigestible. He had, for instance, given the first public performance of Liszt’s B minor sonata, a work that in its tonal ambiguity and structural daring was as innovative as anything by Wagner – and much more concise. As a conductor he was only gradually making his mark but he promised to become truly outstanding, as Liszt and especially Wagner well realised. But all that was not enough for Cosima, just as Liszt’s keyboard wizardry alone had not been enough either for Marie d’Agoult or Carolyne. She, like them, wanted to be the muse to a creative genius, and Hans yearned to fill the bill. He mulled over composing an opera based on the Merlin legend, and Cosima helped ensure he got a libretto. Then he was commissioned to produce the piano reduction of an entirely different opera, and as he pored over the astounding manuscript he felt all his own creativity draining away. The work was Tristan und Isolde.

  So it was that Wagner unintentionally began to destroy von Bülow’s urge to compose – some years before he seduced his wife, or was seduced by her. It is hard to say whether ‘poor Hans’ would have produced anything to win a firm place in the repertory even without Wagner’s despotic influence. The few piano and orchestral pieces he did complete do not suggest that he would. In any case the blow delivered by Tristan in 1859 was followed by a still more crippling one in the summer of 1862. While visiting Wagner at Biebrich on the Rhine with Cosima, von Bülow perused the as yet unfinished score of Die Meistersinger and lost heart altogether. Compared with that masterpiece, he reflected, his own work was ‘Lappaliendreck’ – trifling filth. For a while he felt suicidal – just like his wife, for whom 1862 was another dreadful year. Her sick and wasted brother Daniel had expired in Berlin in her arms three years earlier, and now her sister Blandine, weakened by a difficult birth, succumbed in France. By September, when Blandine died, Cosima was pregnant with her second child, but the knowledge brought her no joy. Quite the opposite – she knew what Hans would think about it.