The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  Unlike Blandine, Daniela had much of her father von Bülow’s short temper and sharp tongue. From whom she had inherited her odd eyes, one grey-blue and one brown, was anyone’s guess; likewise of mystery origin was the swarthy complexion that earned her Mohr (Moor) as a third nickname (after Lulu and Lusch). Her talents brought her little joy. A fine pianist, she tortured herself trying and naturally failing to match the brilliance of her maternal grandfather, Liszt. A skilled costume designer for the festival, she rarely seemed content with her work but took umbrage at criticism. Her sudden bursts of fury were terrible to behold – but then, thanks not least to her husband Henry Thode, she had much to be upset about. Like Chamberlain in his pursuit of Eva, Thode seems to have been fired not so much (if at all) by yearning for Daniela as by the ambition to marry into the Wagner clan. That aim achieved, he left his wife almost wholly unkissed and unem-braced, according to family gossip – at any rate Daniela, like Eva, had no children.

  Ironically it was Cosima who, by engaging the famous – not to say notorious – American dancer Isadora Duncan for Tannhäuser in 1904, contributed mightily to Daniela’s marital misery. The Hohe Frau had already shocked the prudes back in 1891 when she first produced the work with its opening Venusberg bacchanalia within the ‘sacred walls’ of the festival theatre. But clearly she felt the orgy as staged failed (as it usually does) to match the eroticism of Wagner’s music; hence her bold appeal for new choreography from the twenty-six-year-old Miss Duncan, whose sensuous writhing in often-scanty costume, defying most of the rules of classical ballet, had already set pulses racing in theatres across Europe. After taking over a mansion called Phillipsruh (Phillip’s Rest) on the outskirts of Bayreuth, and swapping all the chairs for couches, Cosima’s exotic new ‘catch’ set to work recreating the Venusberg offstage as well as on. That, at least, was the view of the locals who watched open-mouthed as all sorts of famous male visitors – seemingly unmindful of scandal – padded to the door by night and scuttled away at dawn. One of them was the ruling Prince (and later Czar) Ferdinand of Bulgaria, a Bayreuth festival regular for decades; another was a tenor of legendary skill and stamina – yet another was Henry Thode, whom Isadora first invited in after spying him under a tree gazing ecstatically at her lighted window.

  In her memoirs, Isadora scornfully rejects claims of orgies at Phillip-sruh and, in particular, swears that during his many nocturnal stays Thode never made love to her, preferring instead to read aloud from his new work-in-progress on St Francis of Assisi. She does, however, admit that he was seized with terror when, about to leave after one all-night literary session, he glimpsed Cosima stalking up to the mansion like an avenging angel.1 That early visit turned out to have nothing to do with Thode but of course his liaison, platonic or not, could not stay a secret for long, especially not from Daniela and the rest of the family. Isadora’s Bayreuth career was limited to that single, tempestuous summer and Daniela’s marriage took another lurch towards divorce. As for Thode, he wed a Danish violinist but lost the will to work when his villa on Lake Garda, along with his books, manuscripts and art treasures, was confiscated by the Italians after the outbreak of the First World War. The place fell into the hands of the flamboyant, ultra-nationalist writer Gabriele D’Annunzio (later much admired by several members of the Wagner clan, including Daniela), and Thode died a broken man in Copenhagen.

  While Cosima’s contribution to the collapse of Daniela’s marriage was unintentional, her efforts to drive a wedge between Isolde and her husband were calculated and implacable. The ensuing family tragedy for which, admittedly, Cosima was not solely responsible, will shortly be given a closer look. Suffice it to say here that Isolde, hitherto Cosima’s favourite daughter, finally became an ‘unperson’ whose existence could not be acknowledged in her mother’s presence. Even breathing the name of Isolde might, it was feared, give Cosima one of her attacks. The person firmest in insisting that ‘Mama’s’ welfare must not thus be put at risk was her ever-solicitous son, although in this case his action was not wholly altruistic. In principle Siegfried was riding high, as a festival producer/director popular with artists and public alike and as a composer whose very first opera Bärenhäuter had been an outstanding hit. He felt threatened all the same, and not only from the Isolde wing of the family, although to look at him you would hardly have thought so.

  ‘I do not feel like a tragic figure,’ Siegfried states at the end of his skimpy but indirectly revealing memoirs written in 1922. ‘I rejoice every day that I had the good fortune to have a father such as mine; I rejoice to have had such a mother and grandfather. I love my sisters who give their brother nothing but love and kindness … I am happy that I am not quite without talent and have inherited a liberal dose of humour from my parents. Dear reader, do you think that anyone who has so much to be grateful for can be a pitiable, tragic figure? I certainly don’t.’2

  Similar buoyant declarations pop up so often in Siegfried’s slim volume that even the least wary of ‘dear readers’ may feel the author ‘doth protest too much’. They may also wonder why someone who calls his life so blissful allows bleak topics like illegitimacy and child murder to dominate his operas, often with witches and similar agents of evil woven into the tale. Of course composers can and often do write sad music when their lives seem outwardly joyful and vice versa, but in Siegfried’s case the contrast looks especially crass. Was the sunny public image, maintained through thick and thin, simply show?

  Not altogether. Siegfried surely did inherit a lot of humour although, despite his dutiful reference to ‘my parents’, precious little of it can have flowed his way from his austere mother. His private letters are full of wit, puns and gentle irony, often directed against himself. Much the same is true of the way he ran the festival, even if there was calculation as well as personal inclination behind his relaxed approach. He would often arrive beaming for rehearsals dressed in plus-fours and yellow stockings, as though just dropping by on his way to the racecourse, then stand about chatting cheerfully until everyone was at ease. Siegfried, in other words, in no way belonged to the ‘terror works best’ school, either as producer or conductor. Once the real business began he was tireless and exacting. But even then his frequent jokes would bolster a discouraged singer or disarm an enraged maestro – and when he could not avoid enforcing discipline among his ‘children’, as he tended to call the cast, he used a light touch not a bludgeon. ‘Performers planning pleasure tours to Nuremberg’, he chalked up on a blackboard in the festival theatre after a bout of absenteeism, ‘are requested to inform the festival director, not because the aforesaid wishes to join in the trips but because he would like to know if he may dare to schedule a rehearsal.’ For good measure, Siegfried noted that in his view further rehearsals were indeed needed because ‘unfortunately we can still not pride ourselves on having scaled the highest peak of perfection’.3

  What a contrast to the ‘fortress on the hill’ ethos of the Cosima era. Indeed, for hard-line Wagnerians the laid-back style of the new boss, Master’s son or not, seemed close to sacrilege; but then Siegfried despised nothing more than hardliners, in music or anything else. Sometimes he railed against supposed allies who were ‘more papal than the Pope’, but usually he kept his blood pressure down by seeing the funny side of things. He smirked to learn of the woman who chanted ‘War das sein Horn?’ (Was that his horn?) from Götterdämmerung every time her husband blew his nose; and he wryly reflected that, in view of the unpleasing bulk of some Wagnerian singers, it might be best to ban opera glasses. For all his love of his father’s work, Siegfried was only too happy when he could escape to hear some Donizetti, Verdi – even Bizet, a composer shunned at Wahnfried at least since the hated Nietzsche wrote Der Fall Wagner, in which he praised the sharp-etched tragedy of Carmen at the expense of the Master’s ‘fogbound’ music dramas. More shocking still, on one occasion during a boring supper given in his honour in Nuremberg Siegfried slipped away to a nearby nightclub featuring a jazz band – the last wo
rd in decadence for the old Wagnerian guard. Worst of all, he actually enjoyed it.

  Balance, irony, tolerance; those are not the first qualities one tends to associate with the name Wagner, let alone an excess of personal modesty. But when Siegfried notes that he is ‘not quite without talent’ he is being too coy by half, a trait his critics exploited during his lifetime and still more later. Even, for now, leaving aside his compositions – operas, songs and instrumental works – Siegfried’s gifts were wide-ranging. Thanks to his photographic memory, as well as a fine sense of colour and design that he bequeathed to his son Wieland, he might have become an architect and until his early twenties that was his main aim. At least those qualities stood him in good stead as a producer; not, it is true, a revolutionary one (which would surely have upset ‘Mama’), but a steady, pragmatic innovator whose impact on Bayreuth stagings over decades, culminating in a legendary Tannhäuser in 1930, is often underestimated. When Siegfried claimed that his favourite role in the theatre was to direct the lighting apparatus, he was, as so often, half joking. But it is true that by developing the use of light and shade to match the ebb and flow of his father’s music, he implicitly adopted the Adolphe Appia approach that Cosima had shunned (and Chamberlain had long advocated). In this respect at least Siegfried helped pave the way for Wieland’s productions, hailed and reviled as ‘revolutionary’, when the festival reopened after the Second World War.

  Views differ sharply about Siegfried’s conducting. ‘Miserable,’ snapped Richard Strauss – the finest composer-conductor of the day, alongside Mahler – after hearing the Bayreuth Ring in 1896. That judgement seems plausible on the face of it. Siegfried was only twenty-seven and he was making his festival debut (a single act of Lohengrin apart two years before) in the most taxing of all operatic marathons. He was also wielding the baton with his left hand, an oddity some players found confusing and which he later ‘corrected’. But then Strauss had recently fallen out with Siegfried – for reasons unclear, although still-embryonic rivalry may have played a role – and he was fed up with Bayreuth in general: a ‘pigsty to end all pigsties’, he called it in a letter to Pauline, his fiancée.4 Other critics were usually friendlier about Siegfried’s skill on the podium but they were rarely ecstatic, at least not in Germany. When the young maestro appeared at London’s Queen’s Hall, though, George Bernard Shaw – no less – compared him favourably with Richter and Mottl and declared himself ‘touched, charmed, more than satisfied’.5 What aural evidence there is, about a dozen pieces Siegfried recorded in his last years, tends to support the view Shaw had expressed decades earlier. That goes in particular for the deft, lucid interpretation of the Siegfried Idyll played by the London Symphony Orchestra in 1927, which is worlds away from the sentimental approach one might have feared from the dedicatee. On the whole the swift tempi and the clarity of the inner parts (insofar as the dim recordings allow one to hear them) match reports of the Master’s own conducting, which Siegfried witnessed as a boy on at least three occasions.6

  A far from ‘pitiable, tragic’ figure, then, but for one crucial element that Siegfried naturally does not mention directly; his dread that his bisexuality might be exposed, ruining him and disgracing the family. That Siegfried did not abhor women, nor they him, is plain enough. While married, he fathered four children and long before that he may well (the evidence is mixed) have sired a son in a brief affair with a Bayreuth pastor’s wife that was quickly hushed up. His letters also reveal regular but fleeting allusions to a liaison with a Romanian-born singer, Marguerite de Nuovina, that lasted for years. Siegfried seems first to have met her in Paris where she was performing at the Opéra-Comique; they spent holidays together in Italy and on one trip to the French capital he gave her address as his own. When she came to Hamburg in 1905 for the premiere of his fourth opera, Bruder Lustig (Brother Merry), Cosima took tea with her and judged her a ‘fine, charming’ woman’ who ‘loves Siegfried tenderly’ and who ‘pleases me uncommonly well’.7 Praise indeed from ‘Mama’, who no doubt felt it was high time her son produced an heir and who even seems to have considered Isadora Duncan as a possible match until Thode butted in. But Marguerite finally faded out of the picture. Did she realise she had male rivals for Siegfried’s affection?

  Even in pre-Freudian days (just), it needed no great insight to see that the young Siegfried might well have trouble establishing his male identity – as an ultra-sensitive only son who for years had next to no contact with lads his own age, with a dominant mother and four doting sisters so protective that, in early photos, they seem almost to engulf the forlorn little brother in their midst. Just six months after Siegfried’s birth, his father warned that the boy would later have to be sent away ‘to meet other people, to get to know adversity, have fun, and misbehave himself; otherwise he will become a dreamer, maybe an idiot, the sort of thing we see in the King of Bavaria’.8 Leaving aside that shabby jibe about his greatest benefactor, Wagner’s paternal instinct was no doubt correct, but he left most of the children’s care to Cosima and died when his son was barely an adolescent. Aged thirteen, Siegfried suddenly became the only man in the family – far from an idiot but surely a dreamer, and idolised nearly to death. When he finally got away from home for a longish spell in 1889 it was at his mother’s behest and then only to stay with more family – Henry and Daniela Thode, who at that time lived in Frankfurt.

  Cosima planned that Siegfried should take music lessons several times a week from Engelbert Humperdinck, a composer and Bayreuth disciple who lived not far from Frankfurt in Mainz. She repeatedly claimed to all and sundry that her son was free to study architecture later if he really wanted to; but she naturally hoped that under Humperdinck’s influence he might yet change tack and opt to join her in running the festival, eventually taking it over. He had, after all, also been named Helferich (little helper), meaning that in his parents’ view he would do all he could to further the Master’s work, an implication of which Siegfried was all too aware. Cosima’s hopes were handsomely fulfilled, as the lessons went splendidly. Siegfried began to compose seriously, subsequently learned conducting technique from Felix Mottl and abandoned his dream of becoming an architect. To Cosima’s delight, he also won a wider circle of influential Frankfurt friends, including the banker and music patron Edward Speyer (later a key backer of the London Promenade Concerts) and a wealthy young English musician called Clement Harris. ‘Mama’ would, however, have been perturbed to learn that her son, in the course of the colourful entertainment offered at the Speyer house, sometimes dressed up and performed as a prima ballerina.9 And she almost certainly never realised, despite many hints, just how much the young Englishman really came to mean to Siegfried.

  Born in Wimbledon in 1871 into a family of ship-owners, Clement Hugh Gilbert Harris was a man of many talents; artistic (he painted probably the finest portrait of the young Siegfried), literary and above all musical. At seventeen he became one of the favoured few accepted for piano lessons in Frankfurt by the legendary Clara Schumann and at twenty-four his symphonic poem Paradise Lost was premiered to critical acclaim before an audience that included the Prince of Wales and the King of Belgium. In Germany his titled admirers included Alexander Friedrich, Landgrave of Hesse, who joined him in piano duets and took him on a tour of the Middle East. In the London of the late 1880s and early 1890s he was a protégé of Oscar Wilde, then at the height of his fame, to whom he performed Wagner transcriptions and talked about ‘the most marvellous of all things; painting, music, love’.10

  Wilde was one of those who referred to the rare aura of the young pianist, confessing indeed that he was sometimes scared by the intensity of his playing. Some even claim that from boyhood on, Harris had hypnotic powers above and beyond his riveting skill at the keyboard. Whatever the truth of that, his gifts, good looks and connections seemed to cut him out for an outstanding career. His aim, he confided to his diary, was to further ‘the regeneration of English music’ and after his early success as a composer he briefly
seemed well set to achieve that; rather more so, in fact, than his older compatriot Edward Elgar, who was still struggling for recognition. But in April 1897, three months before his twenty-sixth birthday, Harris was killed – apparently shot while fighting for Greek independence against the Turks in the mountain battle of Pente Pigadia. The exact circumstances of his death remain unclear to this day.

  When Harris first met Siegfried at one of the Speyers’ soirées he was just a highly promising music student of eighteen, but he fascinated his new acquaintance right away. Although two years younger than Siegfried, he seemed far more worldly-wise. The broad-minded, international outlook of his family had rubbed off on Clement early on, just as it had on his elder brother Walter, a journalist, author and adventurer who spent much of his life in his beloved Morocco. This openness extended to music too, arousing mixed feelings in Siegfried. Along with his love of Wagnerian music drama, Clement favoured the work of Robert Schumann (and not just because he was studying with the composer’s widow) as well as that of Brahms. To true Bayreuthians, admiration for the – in their view – vastly inferior Schumann and Brahms came close to heresy; indeed the doctrinaire Thode had already squabbled over the issue with Speyer and his soprano wife Antonia, one of the finest interpreters of both composers’ songs. In principle the Master’s son, of all people, should have been shocked by Clement’s sad lack of discrimination, and no doubt he tried to be; but then he too had long felt tempted by siren sounds shunned by hardline Bayreuth. Even as a child, Cosima reported in her diary, he had sung ‘a kind of Turkish music’ in his sleep.11