The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  To that limited extent there is something to be said for the well-worn tale that Cosima became an inconsolable widow, far keener on preparing for the next world than on manoeuvring for power in this one. Her suffering was real enough but, as so often before, she won new strength from it. By autumn 1883 she was privately drawing up a detailed plan for the festival to the end of the decade, although she was not yet by any means in charge. Parsifal was to be given every year, Tristan und Isolde from 1885, Holländer from 1886, Lohengrin from 1887 and Tannhäuser from 1888. The bumper year 1889 would include Meistersinger and the first rerun of the Ring in Bayreuth since the festival theatre opened in 1876. Cosima sketched cast lists with comments on the singers and optimistically pencilled in her former husband Hans von Bülow to do much of the conducting. Much of this failed to happen on schedule, there was no festival at all either in 1885 or 1887 and von Bülow, not surprisingly, never fell in with Cosima’s scheme despite his undimmed love of Wagner’s music. But the scope of the plan shows that the emerging Mistress of Bayreuth was already thinking big.

  In 1884 Cosima went a step further. Before the final rehearsals, she had a screen erected at the side of the stage in the festival theatre and, like Beckmesser in Meistersinger, sat hidden behind it marking down what she felt was going wrong. With all the authority of an oracle relaying wisdom from the Master’s grave, she then handed on her ‘advice’ to the participants. Allegedly Cosima felt forced to step in because she was appalled by reports that, without the stamp of Wagner’s authority, the work on Parsifal was going to the dogs. In fact a detailed account of the preparations, drawn up by the technical director Fritz Brandt and sent to Cosima just before she intervened, reveal the sort of ups and downs common before any major opera staging. But the festival needed a firm hand in the long run and clearly Cosima decided she would be the one to supply it. When emissaries from the swelling ranks of the Wagner Societies tried to visit her to discuss Bayreuth’s future she refused to receive them. When proposals were made for a Wagner Foundation that would dilute if not erase the family’s role, she airily waved them aside – although the scheme resurfaced several times in modified form and was actually implemented nearly a century later.

  During the festival-free year of 1885 Cosima announced almost in passing that she was taking over the helm, and in 1886 she made her debut as a producer with Tristan und Isolde. It was, on the whole, an artistic success. Cosima understandably stuck closely to the staging supervised by the Master himself for the 1865 Munich premiere; the singing was much praised and the thirty-year-old conductor Felix Mottl, making the first of many appearances in the Bayreuth pit, held the thing together well enough. The work played to half-empty houses all the same, evidence of the shaky ground on which the festival still stood. With Wagner dead, it was far from plain that Bayreuth under the new aegis had anything better to offer than rival opera houses that were easier to reach, at least as well equipped, and staged the Master’s works ever more often. Even in the late 1890s seats were available at the last moment for many festival performances, unbelievable though that may seem nowadays to most pilgrims, who have to apply for about a decade on average before they are granted tickets.

  Undeterred by the many empty seats at Tristan, Cosima pressed on. In 1889 she presented a well-received and better-attended Meistersinger, also based on the Munich premiere, and two years later she scored a real breakthrough, staging Tannhäuser despite fierce opposition from Bayreuth diehards who felt the work with its opening Venusberg bacchanalia was too profane for the festival theatre. These were the just the kind of self-appointed allies Wagner had once called more of a menace than his foes. Cosima faced them down and won plaudits for her production, the first for which she had no model approved by her husband to work from, and hence the first that was truly her own. But the battle over Tannhäuser revealed a touchy issue that raises hackles to this day, especially within the Wagner family. Just which works should be performed in Bayreuth?

  Back in his days of exile in Switzerland, remember, Wagner had dreamed of a temporary structure built on the lines of a Greek theatre where his (so far non-existent) Ring would be given before a non-paying audience. He had to make compromises, but broadly speaking in Bayreuth he got the kind of building he was after and in 1876 the Ring was performed there. According to the original scheme that would have been that. But Wagner went on to compose Parsifal, the only work he conceived with a full knowledge of the festival theatre’s acoustics, and without doubt the one that sounds best there. Since he prepared the Bayreuth premiere in 1882 and was looking forward to a repeat in 1883, there could hardly be any argument about continuing to present Parsifal in the festival theatre after his death. Indeed, it was argued then and later that the Master insisted that his ‘Stage-Consecrating Festival Play’ should be put on only in Bayreuth and nowhere else. That is not quite true. In this as in so many things Wagner contradicted himself. In 1881 he agreed that a company proposed by Angelo Neumann to go on tour with Wagner’s works (and that did, in fact, later present the Ring throughout much of Europe and Russia) might eventually include Parsifal in its repertoire. He even repeated this view to Neumann a year later.9 So Wagner not only agreed that a Jew (Levi) should conduct Parsifal at Bayreuth; he did not rule out the idea that a Jewish impresario might stage the work elsewhere.

  The Ring and Parsifal manifestly belonged to a Bayreuth repertoire but what else did – if anything? Hardliners baulked at Tannhäuser; more open-minded Wagnerians felt the festival should include, as draft statutes for the still-born Foundation put it, the ‘stylistically pure presentation’ of musical works by other German masters – a proposal Cosima termed ‘a joke’. In an 1880 letter, Wagner himself stated that once Parsifal had been staged, he aimed to present all his earlier works – one per year in chronological order – in ‘exemplary performances’ in Bayreuth. This, he stressed, would constitute his ‘artistic legacy’.10 Moreover, at one time, at least, the Master did not believe that a (mainly) Wagner festival should only look back; quite the contrary. In an introduction to the Ring text published in 1863, long before his Bayreuth era, Wagner proposed that such a festival be held every two or three years in the context of a prize-giving for a new ‘musical-dramatic’ work. The prize itself would be no more but no less than a well-prepared performance at the festival of the new piece. In this way, Wagner argued, his own works would gain from repetition under ideal circumstances and new ones also worthy of ‘the German spirit’ would steadily emerge.11

  It is impossible to judge whether Wagner would really have done all that had he lived longer. But his proposals, even his self-contradictions, show he was far more open about the festival he founded than the many – above all his widow – who claimed to speak in his name once he was gone. It was Cosima who drew up the Bayreuth menu, basically unchanged to this day, offering huge dishes of Wagner and nothing but Wagner – later spiced with a few helpings of Beethoven’s ‘Choral’ Symphony. It is easy to see why she acted as she did. So long as Bayreuth concentrated on the Wagner canon alone (excluding the earliest works – Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi) it stayed manifestly special. For devotees the Master’s spirit there was never far away: his widow and children were constantly visible. Poky hotel rooms and unpalatable fare seemed sacrifices worth making to belong for a while to the big Bayreuth family. Indeed, the truest of the pilgrims like Friedrich Eckstein, a friend of Bruckner, spurned the relative comfort of train or carriage and plodded to Bayreuth with staff and knapsack. Throw in works by other composers, though, and the festival stood to lose the exclusiveness that was its main competitive advantage. Cosima knew that. As one of her descendants put it in private, she was ‘an astute old bird’ who saw the value of a well-defined brand and who was ‘great at PR’.

  That refreshingly disrepectful judgement is no doubt true as far as it goes, but it hardly gets to the heart of Cosima’s achievement or of its limitations. She faced a dangerously tricky balancing act. On the one hand, she did not wan
t to dissuade houses elsewhere from performing Wagner; indeed, the more they did so the more much-needed royalty income would flow to the debt-plagued family the Master had left behind. On the other, she needed to prevent the emergence of any real rival to Bayreuth. Parsifal was a special case. By using its ‘sacred’ character and ‘the Master’s wish’ as arguments, the work was to be reserved for Bayreuth, thus forcing anyone who wanted to see it to go there. That alone ensured a steady stream of Wagnerians to the Green Hill, but it also attracted a lot of the unconverted who simply wanted to know what the fuss was about. As a result, Parsifal was better attended from the outset than other Bayreuth offerings.

  By sheer force of character and a talent for self-dramatisation hardly less than the Master’s, Cosima achieved much; imperiously nodding approval of a production or artist when this seemed in Bayreuth’s interest, giving the thumbs down when she scented danger to its supremacy. But she did not always get her way. As already noted, she vainly tried to stop Munich building its Bayreuth imitation, the Prinzregententheater. More importantly, she petitioned the Reichstag in 1901 to extend copyright protection from thirty years to fifty, a step that would have ensured Wahnfried handsome royalty income beyond 1913, the thirtieth anniversary of Wagner’s death (and the hundredth of his birth). For Parsifal she wanted even more: a permanent ban on performances outside Bayreuth. Cosima failed on both these counts too, providing her with a further cause for disgust with democracy in general and ‘Berlin’ in particular. Not that dictatorship proved more reliable. Adolf Hitler later solemnly promised at Wagner’s graveside that Parsifal would be ‘given back to Bayreuth’ – but it never was. In any case Parsifal had been staged beyond the reach even of Cosima’s long arm well before the thirty-year copyright expired, notably in New York from 1903 – an act denounced by the Wagner faithful as ‘the rape of the Grail’. Cosima fumed and artists who took part in the New York ‘treachery’ were banned from the Green Hill. Otherwise she was powerless. The United States had not signed the Berne convention on international copyright protection, so no law had been broken – other than a ‘moral’ one drawn up in Bayreuth.

  On the artistic side, Cosima generally secured outstanding singers, although she pettily drove some of the best away again – for example Lilli Lehmann, a soprano of Jewish descent who was, among many other things, a legendary Brünnhilde, and Anton van Rooy, one of the finest Wotans ever but outlawed from Bayreuth as one of the New York ‘traitors’. She attracted some good conductors but not quite the best (although she kept on Levi who was unsurpassed in Parsifal). Hans Richter was one of her favourites, despite the fact that his erratic handling of the Ring in 1876 had driven the Master to despair. Still, Richter was almost a family heirloom, having played the trumpet in that unforgettable premiere of the Siegfried Idyll on the staircase to Cosima’s bedroom at Tribschen. The dynamic young Richard Strauss appeared for just one season, conducting Tannhäuser in 1894 a few weeks before he married Pauline de Ahna, a soprano with a sweet voice and a sharp tongue. The match displeased Cosima, who would have loved to have won Strauss for Bayreuth as a conducting son-in-law, although she thought little of him as a composer. For that and other reasons Strauss vanished from the Bayreuth scene for nearly forty years, finally popping up with abominable timing as a replacement for Arturo Toscanini, who dropped out when Hitler came to power in 1933.

  From 1896 the able but initially reluctant Siegfried began regular service in the Bayreuth pit and from 1901 the punctilious Karl Muck took over Parsifal, becoming well-nigh as indispensable a ‘guardian of the Grail’ (particularly in his own opinion) as Levi had long been. Missing from the list were two of the greatest all-round conductors of the age: Hans von Bülow and Gustav Mahler. The former shunned the chance to appear at his ex-wife’s court and died in Cairo in 1894; the latter was a Jew, and for Cosima Levi was already one Jew too many. She even plotted behind the scenes in a vain bid to stop Mahler winning the directorship in 1897 of the Vienna Court Opera, the most influential post in European music. After failing, she switched tack and sent him fawning letters extolling her son’s operas, the first of which – Der Bärenhäuter (The Man in a Bear’s Skin) – Mahler did indeed present in Vienna. But she never invited him to conduct in Bayreuth.

  As for Cosima’s stagings, the journalist Moritz Wirth snapped after seeing her Ring that if she had applied for a job as producer in any house but Bayreuth she would have been shown the door after fifteen minutes. That seems too tough by half. Cosima could think big and organise as well as anyone, as the massive spectacle of her Tannhaüser planned down to the tiniest detail well shows. But the stylised action and singing she endorsed, in presumed accord with Wagner’s wishes, too often drained away the passion on which he of all people had insisted. Not surprisingly she had no time for the radical ideas of a new generation of stage designers, sticking instead to naturalistic sets and monotonous lighting.

  ‘Frau Wagner was tireless as a producer,’ wrote the conductor Felix Weingartner, who as a young protégé of Levi often saw Cosima at work. ‘She combined a clear, flexible mind with a compelling way of arguing that made it hard to resist her.’ But he added ‘that Frau Wagner came to believe she had a kind of divine mission was less tragic than that no one had the courage to point out … that even a highly gifted person taking over a new and unusual task makes pardonable, understandable and natural mistakes.’12 Weingartner did in fact contradict Cosima several times to her face and attacked Bayreuth’s dogmatism in print, drawing charges from the faithful that he resented not being invited to conduct on the Green Hill. More likely Weingartner’s version – that he loathed the servility around Cosima and was not prepared to make her Bayreuth the focal point of his career – is the right one. In his memoirs he recalls one particularly ghastly evening at Wahnfried when Levi was treated by the Wagner family with faint but constant contempt ‘ill-concealed beneath the smiling mask of friendship’. Far from showing offence, the victim simply bowed and scraped. After leaving, Weingartner furiously asked his mentor how he could put up with such degrading treatment. Levi looked at him sadly and replied, ‘It’s easy enough for you in that house – Aryan that you are.’13

  ‘Servile’ would not correctly describe the least dispensable of the Wahnfried inner circle, namely von Gross. ‘Devoted’ fits better, although it was not always easy for outsiders to tell the difference. It was von Gross, for instance, who argued for festival-free years to help consolidate Bayreuth’s finances, and for postponement until 1891 of the huge expense bound to be involved in a Tannhäuser production. Cosima objected on both counts but she finally backed down, well aware of her adviser’s worth. In a letter, she once told the parable of the drowning man and the four bystanders. One of the four wondered what to do, another called for help, another went to fetch a boat but the fourth hurled himself into the water and pulled the victim to the shore. The festival had been the drowning man, Cosima said, and von Gross the rescuer.

  It is misleading to see von Gross, as some have, as a philistine constantly putting business before culture. His many surviving letters to Bayreuth stalwarts like Richter and Levi, as well as to well-wishers like the composer Engelbert Humperdinck (Siegfried’s music tutor) and the French conductor Charles Lamoureux, show how much he had the festival’s artistic success at heart. It was he who drew the soprano Rosa Sucher to Bayreuth, initially at his own expense, where she became a much-feted Isolde. But it was as financial adviser and canny negotiator that von Gross showed his greatest worth; not least when King Ludwig died in 1886 and the Bavarian government sought to withdraw from Bayreuth the rights to the Ring and Parsifal that the monarch had ceded to it. In a confrontation with von Gross in Munich, the minister involved argued that as Ludwig had been declared mad his waiver of the rights was invalid. Gross retorted that in this case the minister’s appointment by Ludwig must have been invalid too. The day was saved. Von Gross continued to guard the interests of family and festival so closely, and to invest royalty income so wisely, tha
t the final tranche of Ludwig’s loans to the Master could be paid back in 1906. By the time copyright protection ran out in 1913, royalty income earned on Wagner’s works at home and abroad in the three decades since his death amounted to over six million marks and the wealth of the Wagner family itself totalled around seven million. That was above all von Gross’s doing. If any charge can fairly be levelled at him, it is that he kept too many threads in his hands for too long and failed to prepare Siegfried adequately for his role as the next Master of Bayreuth.

  The Cosima/von Gross tandem thus drew artistic and business success from near ruin but, for the faithful, Bayreuth was far more than music and money. It was, as Cosima put it, ‘our mighty fortress on the hill’ – the heart of a crusade aimed at achieving that ‘regeneration’ of mankind Wagner had dreamed of. Just what this brave new regenerated world would involve was no longer clear, if indeed it ever had been; but evidently German-ness, above all the work of the Master, was to be at the heart of it. One thing was certain. Jews would play a role only on sufferance, at best none at all.

  5

  The Plastic Demon

  Was it just coincidence? In 1869 Wagner issued a more sharply worded version of his antisemitic pamphlet Das Judentum in der Musik, and in the same year most German Jews were finally granted the emancipation for which they had long struggled. Historic event though it surely was, the act of emancipation slipped into being by stealth. Under a one-paragraph law that came into force in the North German Confederation, the Prussian-dominated alliance of states north of the River Main, the civil and political rights of all subjects were declared wholly ‘independent of religious affiliation’.