The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  French soil still proved fertile for antisemitism, arguably more so, even after the birth of the insecure Third Republic in 1871. Monarchists sought for years to claw back their lost power, national humiliation over the defeat by Prussia ran deep, the economy was shaky and Jews as usual served as handy scapegoats, although there were even fewer of them than in Germany – about eighty thousand, or less than 0.2 per cent of the population. When finance scandals erupted in the 1880s and 1890s, notably over the collapse of a Catholic bank and of the Panama Canal Company, phantom Jewish conspirators were blamed – much as they had been in Germany for the 1873 stock-market crash. When it emerged in 1894 that military secrets had been betrayed to Germany it was an officer of Jewish descent, captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was arrested, convicted on trumped-up evidence and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island.

  Although Dreyfus was finally cleared, ‘L’affaire’ (so notorious that no more precise designation was needed) reverberated for decades in France and beyond. It helped persuade Theodor Herzl, who went to Paris to report on the Dreyfus trial, to found Zionism, on the grounds that antisemitism left Jews no course but to seek a homeland of their own. And it caused French nationalists like Charles Maurras, appalled by Dreyfus’s ‘treason’ and still more by his pardon, to found L’action française, a proto-fascist movement that later backed the Vichy government during the Nazi occupation of France. All in all, an unbiased observer at the turn of the century might well have concluded that the future of the Jews looked less secure in France than in Germany. That the opposite proved true was due to two main factors. Although often under threat, republicanism did survive in France and antisemitism, though present, rarely enjoyed even implicit governmental approval. Moreover, when it next came to a major war in Europe, Germany lost it and the Weimar Republic that emerged from the debris turned out to be all but stillborn. Conditions were ideal for extremists, notably Hitler, and Jews as usual were handy scapegoats.

  That is jumping on a lot, although Cosima lived to see much of it. Enough to stress here that her antisemitism was born in France, confirmed by her first marriage and intensified by her second. She shared all Wagner’s paranoia about Jewish conspiracy and almost none of his fondness for individual Jews. After his death she even turned that paranoia to advantage, emphasising the specialness of Bayreuth as a temple of pure art and true German-ness under unrelenting siege. As high priestess, Cosima preserved the Wagnerian faith as she saw it, greeted pilgrims, blessed true believers and excommunicated all those who fell short. Her acolytes were many, but her most effective evangelist by far came from a wholly unexpected source, and she came to love him as her son – perhaps even more.

  6

  The Spin Doctor

  The man was a voracious reader. His now unused library in a sturdy villa at Number 1 Wahnfriedstrasse, one of Bayreuth’s best addresses, is packed from floor to ceiling with more than twelve thousand volumes, many well thumbed. But from the evidence of the books alone you would find it hard to judge the owner’s nationality, let alone his occupation. Here are complete editions of Goethe and Luther, there the collected works of Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott along with shelf after shelf of Voltaire and Balzac, Hugo and Mérimée, Gautier and Maupassant – all in the original languages. A history of Sumerian art seems to have been consulted at least as often as the Tibetan Book of the Dead and a three-volume (German) survey of the Jews at the time of Christ.

  Who was he, this man of many letters? Theologian, historian, literary critic? Something of all those things and much besides: philologist, botanist, photographer – even, as a hobby, an astronomer. When his work was done for the day he would often climb to a domed observatory on the roof and sit for hours behind his telescope. Retreating to survey the heavens and, with luck, forget the earth was a habit he adopted as a child after constant bullying at school. In those days, he pathetically confessed, stars were his only friends – apart from Jesus Christ. A lonely, timid intellectual, then? In a way, yes. He hated crowds and admitted he would often pass several times before the door of a cafe trying to raise the courage to enter, then retreat hungry. Yet he was a keen mountain hiker, made a hazardous trip with his first wife through the Balkans on horseback and somehow found time for a string of mistresses.

  Above all, he became much the most influential propagandist for the racist, ultra-nationalist clique centred on Wahnfried after Wagner’s death. The Kaiser and Hitler were among those who revered him. After his second marriage, this time to the Master’s youngest daughter Eva in 1908, he held sway for years over the whole Wagner clan, to a greater degree than the domineering but aged and ailing Cosima, let alone the even-tempered Siegfried. Time was when a Bayreuth road proudly bore his name and that erstwhile residence of his sported a stone memorial plaque. But the road has been re-christened and the plaque removed. The ground floor of the villa now houses a museum devoted to Jean Paul, a once hugely popular novelist who lived in Bayreuth in the early nineteenth century. The upper floors, including the library and the now empty observatory, are in principle off limits. Curious visitors who nonetheless win entry may spot that dismantled plaque, evidently thought too shameful to show but too precious to pulverise, propped up in a corner. It is doubtful whether the name on it will ring a bell with them, or if it does it may be the wrong one, bringing a vague association with an ill-starred former British prime minister. For how many people nowadays know much, if anything, about Bayreuth’s once-adopted son – the erudite but wildly misguided Houston Stewart Chamberlain?1

  He was the youngest of a British admiral’s three sons, born on 9 September 1855 in Southsea, a genteel adjunct to the naval dockyard city of Portsmouth on the south coast of England. With four of his uncles also in the armed forces, it seemed quite likely that young Houston would one day take the same road. One of his brothers, Harry, at first did so, following his father into the navy; the other, Basil, eventually became a professor of Japanese and philology at Tokyo University but seemed to stay fond of Britain from afar. Houston, by contrast, came to despise almost everything about the land of his birth; its military might, its empire, its commercialism and what he saw as its crass superficiality. The best thing that could happen to the British, Houston believed in later life, would be defeat by the Germans with their deeper and truer culture. When the opposite happened in 1918 his world fell apart.

  One might put Houston’s bitterness down to an unhappy, uprooted childhood; but his brothers, only a few years older, suffered much the same early strains and yet emerged, if not exactly smiling, at least more balanced. When the boys’ mother died months after giving birth to Houston, the often-absent admiral put his offspring in the care of his own wealthy, widowed mother, Anne Chamberlain, who, supposedly for reasons of her health, lived in Versailles. This formidable old lady brought the boys up to believe that ‘British is best’ (climate excepted), but all three of them initially attended the local lycée and spoke French more fluently than English. Harry and Basil took to this schizophrenia better than Houston, who tended to be sickly and hated games. Worried that his youngest son in particular was losing contact with ‘the old country’, the admiral had Houston hauled back across the Channel at the age of eleven for further education. He meant well but the result was disastrous. At his first English school the child suffered physical and mental torment he never forgot; at his second he was simply lonely and homesick, although strictly speaking he had no real home to yearn for. When his health worsened, probably for psychological reasons, doctors diagnosed a breathing ailment and proposed treatment at a foreign spa. Accordingly, the youth was withdrawn from school and went abroad in 1870 accompanied by his devoted aunt Harriet, a near-substitute for his long-dead mother. He never returned to England again for long.

  For much of the next decade or so Chamberlain drifted through agreeably clement continental spots like Montreux, Cannes and Florence, mainly at the expense of relatives worried that serious work might break his delicate health for good – a concern
he seems to have done his best to foster. Torn between passion for the arts and an unexpected brilliance in natural science, Chamberlain finally enrolled at Geneva University, easily won a bachelor’s degree in 1881 and began work for a doctorate in plant chemistry. His course finally seemed more or less clear – but not for long. He abruptly shelved further study and to the amazement of his friends joined a brokerage partnership in Paris. With France still reeling after post-war reparation payments to Germany and stock markets shaky throughout Europe, Chamberlain could hardly have chosen a worse time to go into business. The partnership foundered and it was thanks only to an injection of funds by the long-suffering aunt Harriet that Chamberlain was narrowly saved from ruin. Back in Switzerland he had a nervous breakdown. Unable to read for more than a few minutes at a time without getting a splitting headache, his future looked bleak indeed.

  In fact, Chamberlain was at last on the way to finding his real métier. Throughout his years roaming Europe one emotion above all had proved strong and growing – a love of all things German. It had seized him on that very first trip with aunt Harriet that took them to the German spa of Bad Ems in the summer of 1870, just at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. In principle he abhorred the armed services, no doubt fearing his father might yet force him into a military career. But in Bad Ems he was stirred by the bands and uniforms and spent hours watching soldiers leave for the front. That same year, when it was clear he would not soon be returning to England, Chamberlain was put in the hands of a Prussian tutor who fired his interest in Germany’s language and culture. By 1874, when he went to winter on the French Riviera and there met Anna Horst, a Prussian woman ten years his senior, he had become a fervent Germanophile. Indeed it may have been Anna’s nationality as much as anything more personal that first attracted him. His family opposed the liaison but Chamberlain persisted and in 1878 the two were married.

  Anna has had a ‘bad press’ – on the rare occasions, that is, when she has been noticed at all. The daughter of a public prosecutor in Breslau, she was shy, rather plain and was often sniffed at by her husband’s friends as ‘second-rate’ or ‘the governess type’. Chamberlain managed to concoct his four-hundred-page memoirs, written a decade after he divorced Anna to marry Eva Wagner, without once mentioning her by name, although they had lived together for the best part of thirty years. Yet she shared many of his interests, especially botany, cleared up his affairs in Paris after his abortive sally into finance there, repeatedly nursed him through his mysterious illnesses and set up the several homes where he found the relative tranquillity to write his most (in)famous works. Her own little-known memoirs are neither sweeping in scope nor a model of style, but they wholly lack rancour – even over the divorce, in which Chamberlain (as other documents show) displayed a mean spirit and a tight fist.

  What Anna did not share was her husband’s passion for Wagner; or rather, while she was stirred by the music she shunned the quasi-religious dogma laid down from Wahnfried. So did Chamberlain at first. In later years he came to see his gradual transformation from mere Wagnerian to ‘Bayreuthian’ (a word he coined to identify one of the true faithful) as a Parsifal-like pilgrimage from simpleton to saviour. The very beginning of the odyssey seemed to him in retrospect to have been ordained by a higher power. Shortly after that stay in Bad Ems at the start of his continental travels, he had moved on with aunt Harriet to Switzerland and taken a boat trip on the Vierwaldstätter Lake. Those around him pointed to the elegant villa Tribschen on a headland and chattered about the wild composer and his mistress who lived there ‘in sin’. Chamberlain could not recall ever having heard of Wagner before, but the name stuck in his mind along with the splendid view and the intriguing gossip. The date was August 1870, just before his fifteenth birthday, and the very month in which Richard and Cosima finally married in nearby Lucerne.

  Step by step Chamberlain began to move closer to the Wahnfried sanctum although it was nearly four decades before he joined the family. Still in Switzerland, he was pumped full of fascinating fact and fiction about Wagner by (ironically) a Jew from Vienna. He missed the Ring at the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 but caught up with it in Munich two years later, just after his marriage to Anna. Impressed by the sound and spectacle, he promptly joined the Allgemeine Bayreuther Patronatsverein (Bayreuth Patrons’ Society) and submitted an essay to its house journal, Bayreuther Blätter. The piece was rejected by the editor, Baron Hans Paul von Wolzogen, a Prussian aristocrat, who went on to maintain in an article of his own that only Germans could really get to the bottom of Wagner. And indeed Chamberlain still held a view anathema to Wahnfried; that the world of art was one thing, the more precise realm of ideas quite another. He even (cogently) argued that, if put to the test, the Ring could be held to justify wholly opposite philosophies of life and death. No wonder the ultra-orthodox Wolzogen felt impelled to make a ‘Germans are deeper’ response, although he had to phrase it carefully to avoid offending wealthy foreigners who might help boost Bayreuth’s flagging finances.

  Two things above all caused Chamberlain to change his mind. One was his first visit to Bayreuth with Anna in 1882. They attended six performances of Parsifal and Houston, at any rate, was bowled over. He spotted Wagner in the distance but was too shy to approach him and (despite repeated claims to the contrary ever since) there is no evidence that they ever met or corresponded. Nonetheless, after Parsifal Chamberlain began to talk about Bayreuth as the only source of true culture and agreed there really was a link between music drama, philosophy and religion after all. During his ill-fated spell juggling finance in Paris, he even became representative there of the Patrons’ Society and won new recruits for Wagnerism – quite a feat little more than a decade after the French humiliation in the war with Prussia. In Bayreuth Chamberlain had found a cause and, although he did not yet know it, a future home.

  The second revelation on the long road to Wahnfried came not in Bayreuth but in Dresden, stamping ground of that younger, revolutionary Wagner whom most conservative followers of the Master were now doing their best to forget. Chamberlain had moved to the Saxon capital after his post-Paris breakdown and there, nursed by Anna and still backed by family funds, he recovered enough to read widely and to write articles – including his first ones in German. One such article, about the tricky relationship between Wagner and his father-in-law Liszt, caught Cosima’s eye and won her gratitude. Liszt had died in Bayreuth in 1886 at the age of seventy-four amid charges from his fans that Cosima had paid more attention to running the festival than to tending her father, who had expired in a house just across the street from Wahnfried after contracting pneumonia. The charges were far from groundless. Cosima’s treatment of Liszt had latterly become increasingly cold, if not callous, as though she were belatedly paying him back for her unhappy childhood. But Chamberlain claimed that the Master, and by implication Cosima, had always given Liszt the honour he was due, both as a composer and as one of the firmest backers of the festival from the start. No wonder the Mistress of Bayreuth asked to meet the author of this accolade when she visited Dresden in 1888. They hit it off right away – the intense but soft-spoken Englishman and the widow of French-Hungarian birth, both self-exiled in Wagner-land. Chamberlain thought he found in Cosima the embodiment of all that he had come to revere in the Master and she believed him to be ‘an aristocrat through and through in the finest sense of the word’.2 Later she claimed Chamberlain had English courage and tenacity that, combined with German spirit, could guarantee society what she regarded as a civilised future.

  There was more to this relationship than deep, largely misplaced, admiration. Naturally Cosima was always on the lookout for ‘suitable young men’ for her unmarried daughters, and when she thought she had found one she used all her guile to try to haul him in. Her letters to the up-and-coming Richard Strauss, for example, were notably affectionate until he, scenting her net closing around him, bolted for (relative) freedom and married the shrewish Pauline de Ahna. But from the first Cos
ima’s contacts with Chamberlain were on another level, as though she saw in him not so much a potential match for a daughter as a soulmate for herself. Marriage was, of course, out of the question, not just because Chamberlain had a wife already (not an insuperable obstacle) nor because Cosima was eighteen years his senior. More to the point, by remaining simply Wagner’s widow Cosima retained a mystique she would largely have lost by becoming someone else’s wife. Still, every year she and Chamberlain solemnly recalled the day they first met and scores of their surviving letters to one another (many were destroyed) are intimate in tone. With her eyesight failing Cosima had to dictate her correspondence, including billets doux, to her daughter/secretary Eva, who in turn read her Chamberlain’s responses, which were always handwritten although most of his other letters were typed. Evidently Eva began to identify with the sentiments her mother expressed and to feel herself the main object of the eloquent replies. At any rate, over the years she slipped out of her role as a mere go-between and began to correspond with Chamberlain directly and often. That helped bring them closer and they finally married, but it is hard to avoid feeling that, for Chamberlain, the daughter remained to the end something of a proxy for the mother. Cosima seems to have thought so too. ‘Greet Houston for me,’ she told Eva years after the wedding. ‘I don’t even need to see him. We are always together.’3