The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  Amid the misery, there were nonetheless signs that Wagner and Cosima were becoming closer. At the end of a meeting with friends and family in 1861 she gave him a ‘timid, quizzical glance’ that stuck in his mind. A year later he remarkably offered to transport her across a square in a wheelbarrow – she, the strait-laced Cosima von Bülow. Even more remarkably she accepted, at which Wagner lost his nerve. Wagner relates both incidents in Mein Leben, perhaps giving them a significance they hardly had when they happened. But it is a fact that over the next year or so Wagner and Cosima saw one another four times, and that the last occasion was special; so special, in fact, that the key details of it were deleted for decades from all editions of Mein Leben available to the public. According to the full version, the two of them took a carriage ride in Berlin on 28 November 1863, while von Bülow was rehearsing a concert, and ‘in an urgent desire for truth between us [we] felt constrained to acknowledge our mutual unhappiness for which there was no need of words. With tears and sobs we sealed our vow to live for each other alone.’7

  Wagner did not by any means live for Cosima alone in the ensuing seven months, and seemingly did not intend to. At first he continued to enjoy female company in his silk-lined home near Vienna; later, after his flight and rescue by King Ludwig, he issued that invitation to Mathilde Maier, hastily revoked on Cosima’s arrival, to join him at his villa by Lake Starnberg. These facts used to lead some Wagnerians to conclude that the vow of eternal fidelity said to have been pledged in Berlin must in fact have been made later. But in an entry of her (long unpublished) diary dated 28 November 1869 Cosima, now separated from von Bülow for good and living with Wagner at Tribschen, makes the truth clear. ‘Six years ago today R. came through Berlin, and then it happened that we fell in love; at that time I thought I should never see him again, we wanted to die together. – R remembers it, and we drink to this day.’8

  So much happened to Wagner in Munich between his triumphant arrival and summary ejection that it almost comes as a shock to realise that he actually lived there for only nineteen months, though he made occasional visits later. That period from May 1864 to December 1865 includes the five months he spent at his villa by Lake Starnberg, often visiting King Ludwig at nearby Schloss Berg, before moving into the Bavarian capital itself. At first most things seemed to go nicely his way. Thanks to his urgent recommendation, Hans von Bülow was offered a job by the king and came to live with Cosima and the children in fashionable Luitpold Strasse in the town centre. Wagner held court in nearby Brienner Strasse in a rent-free residence equipped with all the things he loved, like silk and satin hangings and peacocks strutting in the garden. After supervising the daily chores at home, Cosima was easily able to slip round the corner and look after the Master’s needs, secretarial and otherwise. Wearing the latest gowns from Paris and exuding an air of ‘big city’ superiority, she soon began to glide from one society salon to another, extolling the greatness of Wagner’s work to those still sadly unconverted. In due course she also started on a long exchange of letters with the king, finding just the right blend of ecstasy and idolatry with which to make palatable her demands in what she took to be Wagner’s interest.

  Not that Cosima was the sole reason why Wagner wanted the von Bülows in Munich. ‘Were I to die today Hans Bülow would be the only man to whom I could entrust my works,’ he wrote to the king, one occasion on which he was surely telling Ludwig what he truly believed. ‘Bülow has all the attributes of a very great artist, and in addition abilities of a kind I myself do not possess. He lacks only one thing: imaginative productivity.’9 Hans was at first employed only as ‘Vorspieler [performer] des Königs’, a suitably vague title for a task that mainly involved drawing the king, with the help of piano examples, into the deeper mysteries of Wagner’s music. But it was not long before he was moved up several rungs to the post of ‘court conductor for special services’, just as Wagner had intended. Hence it was von Bülow who conducted the world premieres in Munich of both Tristan in 1865 and Die Meistersinger in 1868. These were probably the finest performances of any Wagner work given in the composer’s lifetime, the Bayreuth Ring of 1876 and Parsifal of 1882 not excluded. Munich had the cash and technical resources, and in von Bülow, who never worked in Bayreuth, it had the outstanding Wagner conductor of the time.

  Did Hans already realise that Cosima and Wagner were having an affair? Even allowing for his long-standing ignorance of his wife’s feelings, it is hard to believe he did not sense something was in the wind. During the summer of 1864, he suffered ailments including temporary paralysis and bad migraines, perhaps signs of a mental and emotional conflict he found it impossible to resolve. At any rate Liszt knew what was going on, because Cosima soon told him. He was not amused, still less so since he happened to be entering a particularly pious phase. Three years before, Princess Carolyne had failed in her long battle to win the Pope’s sanction for a divorce from her Russian husband. She and Liszt had therefore abandoned their plan to marry and now lived apart in Rome, where he was preparing to take the four minor Catholic orders and she was starting to write a survey of church problems that finally ran to twenty-four volumes. Liszt had never felt less in a mood to condone anything that might lead to the break-up of his daughter’s marriage; but on reflection he concluded that the affair was a temporary infatuation, a condition on which he rightly regarded himself something of an expert. He even strongly urged von Bülow to go ahead and take the king’s offer of a Munich job, advice he would hardly have given had he foreseen the consequences. When he did realise that more than a passing fling was involved he took tougher action to try to save the marriage, extracting Cosima from Wagner’s immediate proximity for weeks at a time. The ruse did not work. Wagner wrote bitter letters to his distant mistress expressing contempt for her father’s ‘sanctimoniousness’, and as soon as Cosima returned to Munich the affair was resumed, if anything more passionately. Probably Liszt would have had no better success if he had tried to put his foot down earlier. For Cosima, her father was not the most credible source of counsel on the inviolability of holy matrimony.

  Most of that suited Wagner very well, but trouble was brewing and his relationship with the king was at the heart of it. In part this was due to jealousy at court and worry in the government because Ludwig seemed so much in thrall to a mere composer, and a non-Bavarian at that. But there were other reasons too, less obvious nowadays because the real Ludwig has tended to recede behind popular legend. Variously called the ‘mad king,’ the ‘swan king’ and the ‘dream king’ – though not (so far) the ‘gay king’, despite his homosexuality – Ludwig is widely thought to have been a political simpleton who nearly bankrupted Bavaria with his profligate backing of Wagner and his passion for building fairy-tale castles. Add in his doomed engagement to his cousin, the lovely Princess Sophie, and his mysterious death by drowning in Lake Starnberg, and it is easy to see why he has been deemed ideal material for films and a hit musical. Despite the sturdy efforts of scholars to set the record straight, the Ludwig caricature is in danger of replacing historical fact as firmly as Shakespeare’s Richard III has done.

  It is surely true, however, that Ludwig was not the ideal leader for the strained political situation into which he was unexpectedly catapulted by the early death of his father Maximilian II. When Prussia, propelled by the far-sighted and ruthless Bismarck, declared war on Austria in 1866, Bavaria backed the latter and was trounced along with it. In 1870, Bavaria reluctantly joined the war against France and saw Prussia emerge from it a year later as the strongest single German state by far, one able to compel the creation of a united nation. It even fell to Bavaria to invite King Wilhelm of Prussia, Ludwig’s uncle, to accept the crown of the newborn German Reich. None of that was glorious. Ludwig hated militarism and quickly became bored by campaigns. But he realised very well early on that Bismarck was picking off Prussia’s rivals one by one, and tried to stop him by supporting Austria. When that failed he did what he could to preserve Bavaria’s indep
endence in the Prussian-dominated German empire that was becoming inevitable, as he saw all too clearly. In that he was largely successful – admittedly helped by the realism of Bismarck, who found Ludwig intelligent and did not want a permanently humiliated Bavaria on Prussia’s doorstep.

  Ideally Ludwig would have liked to let politics simply go hang and to concentrate on ‘art’ in its broadest sense. He shared the fascination of his professorial father for mythology and the passion of his grandfather, Ludwig I, for building. What he did not share was his grandfather’s particular weakness for women. Ludwig I had been forced to abdicate in 1848 after a stormy affair with Lola Montez, that very same adventuress who had helped bring the final split between Liszt and Marie d’Agoult a few years before. Instead of succumbing to a Lola, so the Munich wags had it, Ludwig II had fallen for a ‘Lolus’ – alias Richard Wagner. That was not necessarily meant to suggest that the two were lovers, though the longer the king failed to marry the more tongues wagged. But it certainly implied that Ludwig II, like Ludwig I, was letting a rank outsider have too much money and influence on affairs of state.

  Despite appearances, though, Ludwig was by no means in Wagner’s pocket. It is true that the two of them exchanged hundreds of letters couched in embarrassingly purple prose – ‘O my glorious, my heavenly friend’ is a fairly typical introductory flourish – but on ploughing through the full texts it is hard not to feel present at an elaborate charade. Each said what the other wanted to hear, and neither quite meant it. Ludwig was also amazingly naive for a long period about the real relationship between Wagner and Cosima, and by issuing a public letter at their outrageous instigation to ‘defend the honour’ of von Bülow he made himself look stupid. But in other respects he was more hard-headed than is usually claimed.

  When Wagner started to talk about politics, Ludwig is said to have looked up to the ceiling and whistled, not just because he was bored but as a signal that his interlocutor was exceeding his brief. Wagner’s demand that a politician he favoured be made prime minister was answered by Ludwig with several pages of flowery nothingness, followed by a sharp rebuff. Likewise Wagner’s effort via an anonymous newspaper article to force the dismissal of ministers he hated ended in ignominy. The king told his ‘beloved friend’ to leave town. He acted sadly, under great pressure from his cabinet and family, and he had sporadic contact with Wagner for years to come – but act he did. Not least, Ludwig rejected Wagner’s (and Cosima’s) intense antisemitism, holding that he found ‘nothing more objectionable, nothing more distasteful’ than hatred of Jews, because ‘we are all basically brothers’.10 Wagner responded with an agitated letter claiming the king was only able to adopt such an attitude because ‘these people never touch upon his royal sphere’. The truth was, he went on, that the Jewish race was ‘the born enemy of pure humanity and all that is noble in man: it is certain that we Germans especially will be destroyed by them.’11 Ludwig did not bother to reply.

  In foreign affairs Wagner vainly advised Ludwig to keep Bavaria independent in the strife between Prussia and Austria. But once Prussia had won and began to look still more like the land of the future, Wagner changed his tune. He reckoned that Bismarck, whom he had initially detested, could be useful to him if Ludwig’s support were to wane. In this he was mistaken. Bismarck had no intention of bending to any demands, especially not those of an interfering musician, that might fray the delicate ties with Bavaria. When the two finally met briefly in Berlin in 1871, Bismarck handled the talk so skilfully that the question of money for the planned but as yet unfinanced Bayreuth festival was not even raised. Wagner’s irritation became greater as the years passed and Bismarck still proved no material use to him. Particularly galling was that Bismarck turned out to be no more antisemitic than Ludwig; indeed Gerson Bleichröder, a Jew, was his private banker and one of his closest counsellors.

  As for Ludwig’s alleged extravagance, his non-recoverable spending on Wagner was hefty but not astronomical and it all came from the civil list (the sums annually made available to the crown by law). Including all payments such as salary, rents and gifts, the total going to Wagner over nearly twenty years amounted to almost 563,000 marks. On top of that, interest-bearing loans of more than 300,000 marks were made at Ludwig’s behest to save the Bayreuth festival. These credits were gradually repaid in full by the Wagner family from royalty income. All in all, the financial needs of the Master cut a biggish swathe through Ludwig’s own funds, and it is easy to see why long-serving government officials and courtiers seethed at the good fortune of what they held to be a busybody interloper. But the sums involved did not even begin to break the back of the Bavarian exchequer. The more than thirty-one million marks Ludwig spent building his weird and wonderful castles at Herrenchiemsee, Linderhof and Neuschwanstein came closer to doing so; but since that sum has in the meantime been recovered many times over through tourist income, it is arguable that Ludwig in his ‘madness’ really did rather well for Bavaria’s future.

  Besides, the king’s support for Wagner was far from selfless, whatever the unctious tone of his ‘I am yours for ever’ letters may seem to suggest. In return for services rendered, or at least promised, he received the copyright to the Ring (which, typically, Wagner had disposed of twice before), as well as a cluster of precious manuscripts including the autograph full scores of Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi along with autograph copies of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. Unfortunately nearly all these treasures later came into the unsafe hands of Adolf Hitler and seem to have been destroyed along with him in the real-life Götterdämmerung of Berlin in 1945. But it was not simply possession of original manuscripts that interested Ludwig. He longed to be able to sigh and thrill to new works and, above all, he urgently wanted Wagner to complete the Ring. He arguably wanted that more than Wagner himself did.

  Ludwig raised the question of ending the Ring at that very first meeting in 1864, when Wagner had arrived post-haste in Munich from his Stuttgart hideaway, dazed by the somersault in his fortunes. The king later repeatedly referred to ‘our Nibelungs’ and wrote that ‘we want to make of this wonderful work a gift to the German nation and show both it and other nations what “German Art” is really capable of’.12 In other words, Ludwig was far from unambitious although he despised the glory of the battlefield and the might of the new Reich. He aimed to become the undisputed King of German Art and Wagner was going to help him do it, firstly by finishing his ‘greatest’ work. In principle Wagner had similar ambitions, although in his revolutionary phase he had hardly reckoned that a king would make it possible for him to realise them. He too wanted to reveal what German Art could do and he had long viewed a completed Ring as the main showpiece. But he had dropped the project in mid-spate seven years before and in the meantime his style and view of life had changed, as Tristan well shows. Might it not have been better had he quietly let the thing slip altogether and moved on to other work – unbound by a concept in which he no longer fully believed?

  For many, perhaps most, Wagnerians the question is at best absurd, at worst heretical. What, no completed Siegfried, no Götterdämmerung – and perhaps no Bayreuth either, since the festival theatre there was built in the first place for the Ring? Unthinkable! On the other hand Rheingold and Die Walküre fit rather well together – the latter largely complementing with a heart-rendingly human tale the forbidding saga of the former with its gods, giants and dwarfs. Ending the ‘cycle’ with Wotan’s farewell to his sleeping daughter Brünnhilde on her fire-encircled rock would have left questions unanswered, but what fun Wagnerians would have had arguing ever since over what probably happened next. Besides, it would have avoided the muddled ending of Götterdämmerung and the stylistic break that Wagner could not wholly conceal, despite his immense ingenuity, when he resumed composing Siegfried. It would also, admittedly, have deprived audiences of the most unintentionally hilarious scene in all opera: the one in which Siegfried pulls off the breastplate of the sleeping Brünnhilde (his aunt, according to the Rin
g’s tangled genealogy) and cries ‘Das ist kein Mann’ (That is no man).

  Speculation aside, it is plain that even with the backing and prodding of Ludwig from mid-1864, Wagner was not burning to get the Ring on the road again. ‘I keep hesitating as to what I should start on first,’ he wrote to a friend in September. ‘In the end I expect I shall put everything aside and complete the Nibelungs: if I tell the King this I shall be even better off.’13 He did tell the king exactly that a fortnight later, combining the glad news with a request for ‘suitable accommodation’ and more funds – which he promptly received. Wagner then took up again those parts of Siegfried on which he had already worked years before, making a fair copy of Act I and scoring Act II. But he did not actually get down to composing new material – Act III – until 1869, when he had long since left Munich and had settled in with Cosima for that ‘Tribschen Idyll’ described in the first chapter.

  There were initially several good reasons for Wagner to delay. They included the accident-prone preparations for the premiere of Tristan on 10 June 1865 and the birth of his daughter Isolde on 10 April – the date of Tristan’s first orchestral rehearsal, conducted by the child’s putative father, von Bülow. But hitherto Wagner had never allowed anything or anyone to distract him when he was in the throes of creation. Nor was he keen, as one might have expected, on Ludwig’s scheme, foreshadowing Bayreuth, to build a festival theatre in Munich as a worthy home for the completed Ring. ‘How I hate this planned theatre,’ he wrote in September 1865, ‘indeed how childish the King seems for insisting on this project so passionately.’14 Wagner had indeed long felt a special theatre to be essential to the planned tetralogy but he wanted a simple one, probably of wood, not the imposing pile Ludwig had in mind. Irritatingly he now found himself being widely accused, wrongly for once, of making extravagant demands for which the king alone was responsible. Still worse, he felt he was being put under unwelcome pressure. What if the theatre were finished before the Ring itself was?