NEARING THE END IN DRESDEN
IN THE middle of the short concert season of this winter he was summoned to Leipzig to lay his mother in earth. The old lady had passed away serenely on the 9th January. With her death, Richard felt that the last link between himself and the family was broken; each of the children had definitely gone his or her own way, and only by accident would his path cross theirs again in the future. In Leipzig he met Laube again; the pair talked despondently of the clouds that seemed to be descending upon Europe, in politics as in art.
A few weeks later, near the end of February, Paris was in revolution. The flames spread with lightning rapidity to Germany: in the middle of March there was a rising in Vienna, followed, on the 17th, by troubles in Berlin. It was only to be expected that the artists of the epoch would be infected with the general excitement, and share the general illusions as to the coming of Utopia. It was at this time that Spohr wrote his sextet, op. 140; when entering the work in the list of his compositions the seventy-year-old man added, “Written in March and April, at the time of the glorious revolution of the peoples for the liberty, unity, and grandeur of Germany.”1 The normally gentle Peter Cornelius, then a youth of twenty-four, helped to man the barricades in Berlin; he had been an ardent republican since the age of thirteen.2 The long-desired emancipation of the peoples seemed at last to be at hand. The finer spirits in art and letters had long been hoping for the coming of a society in which their dreams of an ideal world would be realised. Liszt, in his mystical youth, had plunged into Saint-Simonism; even the opera singer Nourrit had cherished the idea of a national theatre in which the humble and oppressed would be able to enter freely into the heritage of music that was supposed to be their natural right.3 The time seemed ripe for not only political emancipation but a spiritual catharsis. In the naïve political philosophy of that and every similar time, it was “the princes” who were primarily at fault, the rich who were answerable for all the economic woes of humanity: the virtuous “Folk” had only to be “freed,” and the millennium would arrive by the next post. Wagner was not by any means alone in his idealisation of that rather dubious entity “the Folk.” The poet Georg Herwegh, who had fled to Zürich to escape military service, had set the more progressive world of Germany on fire, in 1841, with his Gedichte eines Lebendigen (Poems of a Live Man); so extensive were the repercussions of these that even the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, was moved to discuss politics with their author in the following year and to attempt to convert him. “The Folk,” Herwegh wrote to the Countess d’Agoult in 1843, “alone can bring back vigour into our polished, blasé, civilised society; by it will art be fecundated and renewed” — an eminently Wagnerian sentiment.4 And again, “When I use the term man I mean always the human species, man eternal, humanity itself, to which belong the greater number of the attributes we have until now bestowed on an alien being, a certain Lord God”5 — an anticipation of the “truly human” that plays so large a part in Wagner’s writings of his post-Dresden period.
The storm-clouds had been gathering for years. “The philosophy of the schools,” said Herwegh in 1844, “is finished in Germany, and the philosophy of life has begun;” and again, “From Morocco to Berlin an electric battery runs; at the least contact the sparks will flash out.”6 In that same year the sufferings of the Silesian weavers, to which, in our day, Gerhart Hauptmann has given such fine dramatic expression in his play Die Weber, had stirred the conscience of all Germany.7 Wagner was only one of tens of thousands of earnest Germans who felt that the history of civilisation had arrived at a major crisis; the only difference between himself and the others was that he had had mournful practical experience of the impossibility of the pure artist shaping the world according to his heart’s desire in face of the power of the Courts and the notorious lethargy of the German spirit. In the early years of the century, Hölderlin, in his Hyperion, had lashed the Philistinism of his fellow-countrymen in a style that anticipated Nietzsche — “Barbarians from of old, now still worse barbarians by dint of their labours and their science, even of their religion, utterly incapable of any godlike sentiment.” At a slightly later date Platen, in a poem (Farewell to Germany) that was suppressed in every edition of his works, had said that “in all this base world there can be nothing baser than a German”; while still later Herwegh was to tell his countrymen that they were only lackeys and would never be anything else but lackeys. It took Wagner some time, and many a bitter disillusionment, to turn even against his idealised “Folk” — against the slowness of the plodding German mind of the period, the dullness of German sensibility, the bovine females who took their knitting to the theatre.8 In his Dresden days he still cherished agreeable illusions about the Folk: all his rage and contempt were reserved for the bureaucracy which, generalising from his own experience, he held to be the real obstacle to the Folk’s demonstrating its direct descent from the angels. It was against the Courts, rather than against the Kings, that he ultimately flung himself into the combat.
At the commencement of 1848 he had found himself, probably out of sheer exhaustion, a trifle more reconciled, if only passively, to conditions at the Dresden theatre. He had many a cause for irritation, it is true, not the least among them being his niece Johanna, who was by this time taking advantage of her popularity in the town to play the prima donna, and, as far as she could, to turn the repertory into channels of which he did not approve.9 But he had schooled himself by this time into a comprehensive indifference towards the Dresden theatre and the people with whom his duties there brought him into contact: and during the early months of the year he could forget them all in the company of his Lohengrin, the scoring of which he finished by the end of March, 1848. The conclusion of this task coincided with the full coming of the crisis in German public affairs; and he could now turn his always superabundant energy into the business of politics, for which, as for everything else, he felt he had particular qualifications and a special mission from the Deity.
Only one event of this period had any significance for him as an artist — the real beginning of his friendship with Liszt. On his way from Vienna to Weimar, where he was now settling down for good as Court Kapellmeister, Liszt took in Dresden en route, and astonished Wagner by suddenly appearing in his room. Finding himself once more in Dresden in November, 1857, in the same room in the same Hôtel de Saxe, he wrote to Wagner recalling their talks there nine years earlier — “How could I fail to think of you always with love and fervent devotion, especially in this town, in this room, where we first drew nearer to each other, and your genius flashed its light on me?”10 They spent an evening at Schumann’s house, where they all made music together; an argument broke out with regard to Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, that led to their host — unable, no doubt, to bear up against the combined assault of Liszt and Wagner — retiring to his room in a temper. After this meeting, Wagner was so sure of Liszt’s affection that it was not long before he began to look hopefully in his direction for assistance in his financial troubles.
He spent part of April and May in the drawing up of a comprehensive Plan for the Organisation of a German National Theatre for the Kingdom of Saxony.11 The turn-over of public opinion, as shown by certain electoral results in Saxony, pointed to the probability of the election of an extreme Radical Chamber, composed mostly of men who were resolved on cutting down the Civil List. Rumour had it that one of the institutions the funds of which were to be curtailed or withdrawn was the theatre, which was looked upon by these noble purists as a mere place of entertainment for the frivolous. Wagner took the sensible view that since the theatre was certain to continue to exist in some form or other, to deprive it of State countenance and State direction would be to deliver it over, bound hand and foot, to the very influences that were held to have made for its degradation. He thought it his duty, therefore, to point out that the nation ought to continue to contribute the same amount as that hitherto furnished by the King through the Civil List, but that the institution should cease to be a Court Theatre and become a National Theatre. He drafted, with his usual thoroughness, a complete scheme for the working of a theatre on these lines.
In Germany, he pointed out, the theatre was mostly an appanage of, and financially dependent on, the Court, with an Intendant possessing no real qualifications for his task, and responsible to the King or Grand Duke alone. Hence at once the degradation of the theatre as an artistic institution and its failure to play its due part in influencing the moral life of the community. It should everywhere cease to be Royal and become National. There should be a national union of dramatists and composers, whose informed opinion should decide which works should be given; and the “immoral trade of theatre reporter” should be done away with. Workers for the theatre should receive an adequate return for their labour. Detailed plans are drawn up for the constitution and the routine of the proposed governing body.
As the State can have only one National Theatre, the locale of this must obviously be the capital, Dresden. One other city in the Saxon kingdom — Leipzig — maintains a theatre out of its own purse. But it suffers from all the evils natural to a theatre that is dependent for its very existence on its box office takings, a system which subjects the impresario to a constant temptation to sacrifice the ideal to the real. As Leipzig, however, cannot reasonably be asked both to support its own theatre and to contribute to the upkeep of the National Theatre, the Leipzig theatre shall also become a secondary National Theatre, with a subvention from the State, and regulated by the same organisation as that in Dresden. The smaller Saxon towns have never been able to support theatres of their own; they have been dependent upon touring companies, working under concessions from the government. No more of these concessions should be granted, and those in existence should be allowed to run out or be withdrawn as soon as is practicable. These theatres have brought about a deplorable degeneration in public taste: a better theatrical fare can be provided by the central institution.
A school is to be founded in the capital in which everyone who intends to take up a musical or theatrical career can receive adequate instruction in every branch of the art he will have to practise, and at the same time a sound general culture. Promising students can begin their actual stage career in the smaller towns, and from there be drafted gradually into the two central theatres. The small local theatres will be permitted, on the one hand, to produce only works of real artistic value, and on the other hand only such works as are within the range of their modest resources: in this way a fight can be made against “that utter ruin of taste and manners resulting from the production of operas and pieces, calculated originally for the colossal dimensions of the largest Paris theatres, with the most horrible mutilations and the most deficient personnel, and on the most unsuitable stages.”
In towns with so few inhabitants as Dresden and Leipzig it is inevitable that the public that patronises the theatre shall sooner or later have seen this or that play or opera as often as it wants to for the time being; and the result is that to attract an audience each night of the week there has to be an incessant change of bill. This means a large repertory, inadequate rehearsals, and mediocre productions. The theatre should be open not more than five nights a week, instead of seven as at present. Bad performances not only disgust the public but ruin the taste and the morale of the performers. The conventional reply to this, says Wagner, will probably be that in a town like Dresden there are many people, particularly visitors, who would not know what to do with themselves on evenings when the theatre was closed. But that reply is the severest condemnation imaginable of the current view of the theatre. If it is true that people only go to the theatre to escape from boredom and from themselves, that is an admission that the theatre has been allowed to lose sight of its lofty mission. The fault can only be corrected by making the theatre less common. As for the feared loss of income, the returns from five good houses a week would be larger than from seven middling houses.
The official church music in Dresden is equally in need of reformation. The music of the Catholic church has everywhere been allowed, in the course of generations, to drift away from its old severity of ideal. Under the influence of the Italians it has become operatic, being written and performed, in great part, for the vain display of vocal virtuosi. Since the Royal Kapelle is used for the church service, this results in the absurdity that an orchestra of fifty accompanies a choir of twenty-four or twenty-six. The orchestra should be abolished in the church: the music should either be a cappella or accompanied only by the organ. In a country that is predominantly Protestant while the Court is Catholic, there must necessarily be a difficulty in providing a full and adequate Catholic personnel for the choir; Protestant singers should therefore be admitted, as well as a certain number of female voices. There should be a school for the proper training of the chorus singer: “the State neither can nor ought to tolerate his being turned into a slave for the purpose of its higher pleasure, which is what he has been and is, his time being so fully occupied with these duties that no other means of livelihood is open to him, yet his wages barely sufficing for the commonest necessities of life; while only in exceptional circumstances can the care of him when he is infirm be recommended to the King’s grace.”12
By a more rational redistribution of material and duties the orchestra of the opera would not only be more efficient but would cost less, for at present there is a good deal of wasted effort. The orchestra should not be expected to perform in the entr’actes of the spoken play. The men despise the trivial stuff they have to perform on these occasions, and resent the manifest indifference of the audience, with the result that they become mechanical and cynical. The public acquires such a contempt for this kind of music that when really worthy incidental music is put before it, as in the case of Goethe’s Egmont with the music of Beethoven, it hardly troubles to listen. Out of the five nights a week to be devoted to performances in the theatre, only two, or three at the most, should be allotted to opera if the best results are to be obtained from the men.
Instead of an orchestra composed of a limited number of full “Kammermusiker” plus a number of inferior “Accessists,” the latter receiving only half the salary of the weakest regular member of the band,13 and consequently being recruited from a very inferior class of musicians, the National Theatre should have an orchestra of good material throughout, the payment offered, and the conditions of service, being such as will attract first-rate men. The orchestra should be allowed to give regular concerts of its own each winter, up to the number of twelve, the proceeds to be devoted to ameliorating its deplorable economic lot; this would relieve the Civil List of the onus of the care for members in distress.
The Leipzig Conservatoire should be transplanted to Dresden, and made into a National School for the kingdom of Saxony.
There should be a Union of the composers of the country, who, along with representatives from the players, should elect the Kapellmeister for the Opera, determine the repertory, select new works for performance, and so on, functioning through a properly constituted managing council. The King will remain the national head of the national institution, but the person in control will be a responsible Minister of State, not a mere Court placeman with no qualifications whatever for his task; while the purely artistic conduct of the theatre shall be entrusted to an artist — i.e. the Kapellmeister.
The Plan, as was always the case when Wagner was dealing with the practical side of music or the theatre, was the quintessence of common sense. After his experience in connection with his previous Plan for the reorganisation of the Kapelle, and in view of his strained relations with the Intendant at this time, he no doubt thought it useless to approach Lüttichau in the matter, especially as the political events of the moment seemed to herald a change in the relations of the Court to the business of the Kingdom. He wrote to Oberländer, the Minister of the Interior, on the 16th May, 1848, asking for the favour of an hour in which to read his Plan, and hoping that the Minister of Education, von der Pfordten, might also be present, as he was not sure to which department a matter of this kind really belonged. Pfordten, who, by the way, was to come into sharp conflict with Wagner in the hectic Munich days of the ’sixties, did not prove particularly responsive. Oberländer was more receptive and sympathetic, but could hold out no hope of success, the Ministers of the moment not being personae gratae with the King. He advised Wagner to try to work through the Chamber of Deputies. The attempt to do so brought him into close contact with a number of democratic politicians, for whose wits and culture he soon conceived a fitting contempt. They were wholly preoccupied with the facile formulae and the oratorical platitudes that do duty for political and economic thinking in times of national stress; and, as is the quaint way of their kind, they were either frankly indifferent to questions of high art, or held the complacent theory that the last person to be entrusted with the control of a national artistic institution is a practical artist. Wagner’s scheme consequently came to nothing; and as Lüttichau got wind of it, heard that Wagner had deliberately ignored him in a matter that vitally concerned his office, and no doubt learned from the Report itself that Wagner was audaciously proposing to take the control of the theatre out of the hands of aristocratic “Court placemen” like himself, the relations of the pair during these weeks of political tension became more strained than ever. Wagner, for his part, could no longer cherish any illusions as to the possibility of a reform of the theatre through Court officials. The only hope now was in revolution.
Thus for the second time the Dresden authorities threw away their chance at once of retaining the good will of the most gifted composer and most practical musical organiser of the day, and of gradually raising the Dresden Opera to the front rank among contemporary institutions. And Wagner being what he was, he now turned his back on music and plunged into political agitation not merely for music’s sake but for political agitation’s sake. His remark that he “became a revolutionary for love of the theatre” is in part true, but only in part. For this extraordinary man, music was never quite enough, just as poetry was never quite enough for Goethe or painting for Leonardo. It is no paradox to say that it was really Wagner’s peculiar constitution as a musician that made him, at more than one period of his life, abandon music for other activities. From the world’s point of view, it has always seemed a pity that he should have spent so much time, his whole life long, in writing so many prose works and letters, and meddling so much with politics, and confidently dogmatising in a dozen intellectual spheres in which he was only an amateur, instead of turning his back resolutely on all this and concentrating on his real work. Had he done that, it has often been said, he might have dowered us with another half-dozen operatic masterpieces. But that view of the matter, which would be reasonable enough in the case of any other composer, leaves out of consideration the one vital factor in the problem — Richard Wagner himself.
He could never write music, as so many composers do, for mere music-writing’s sake — the equivalent of talking for mere talking’s sake. In one of the rare direct glimpses he affords us into his psychology as an artist, he says that he finds it impossible to embark automatically upon a new work as soon as the one in hand has been finished. Each new work, he held, should represent a new phase in its creator’s inner life, a new extension of experience, a new conquest of material and of technique, a new crystallisation not only of aesthetic but of spiritual wisdom and power. Planning his works on the scale he did, to cover so vast an area of thought and emotion, this point of view was inevitable: for art-works of this ultimate stature and complexity of organisation the long preliminary period of unconscious gestation is far more important than any amount of conscious reflection. The subjects of virtually all his works, down to Parsifal, were settled upon, more or less definitely, at quite an early stage of his career: but for the working-out of them he had to wait almost passively for the right psychological moment in each case. Thus there is really no mystery, in the last resort, in this extraordinarily musical mind refraining altogether from the writing of music for a period of something like six years — from August, 1847, when Lohengrin was completed, to about October, 1853, when he began work upon the music to the Rheingold. Busoni has aptly spoken of the almost “animal instinct” that led Mozart and Schubert to do the right thing again and again in their music without reflection. This “animal instinct” Wagner had in the highest degree, though in him it took another form — that of unconsciously holding aloof from the specifically musical part of each new work until a new experience of life and the slow self-gestation of the poetic subject within him had brought about the needful new enrichment of his musical powers. It was not that he needed a “libretto” to set his musical faculty working, and that when he had settled upon the text he proceeded doggedly to “set it to music.” His musical imagination kept playing incessantly upon the subject through every stage of its progress, from the first thrill at meeting with it, through the various prose sketches for it, down to the final casting of it in poetic form. But for the complete release of the musical imagination at its highest pressure, and for the organization of these innumerable moods into living forms, a sound instinct always bade him wait until the operations of his subconsciousness rose of themselves to the conscious surface of his mind and clamoured imperiously for outward realisation in line and colour.
Already, in his last Dresden years, the Ring was shaping itself in the depths of his subconsciousness; but he knew instinctively that the time for dealing with it as a whole was not yet. Yet his stupendous physical and mental energy, to which there is hardly a parallel in the artistic, scientific, or political world of the nineteenth century, made quietism impossible for him; he had to be fructifying even in his fallow seasons. If he was not writing music he had to find some other outlet for his high-voltage dynamism, that was allied with so illimitable and unshakeable a belief in himself. In his earliest years he managed to work off this excess of energy in the practical routine of the theatre; we have seen him more than once incurring resentment there not only by his passion for perfection but by his lust for pedagogy and leadership; and to have had to give all this up in Paris, to have been compelled to realise that he was nobody in that rich swirl of cosmopolitan life, to have been from first to last the provincial under-dog, impotent to impose his will upon others, must have been the bitterest of all the pills he had to swallow there. His kingdom there was a very tiny one, with only an Anders, a Kietz, a Pecht for his subjects. It was no doubt this constant sense of subjection and frustration that accounted for the surliness that unsympathetic observers noted in him at the time. On his appointment as Kapellmeister in Dresden the young zealot at once made the pace so hot for everyone in the theatre that, as we have seen, he raised a camp of enemies for himself. German Kapellmeisters and composers had hitherto been content to serve. Wagner was bent on governing; but the time had not yet come when a mere musician could dictate his own terms to Intendants and impresarios. He was part of a Court establishment, and not only a servant but a liveried servant: in the after years he would sometimes amuse his guests by coming down arrayed in his old Dresden uniform, bending his back and rubbing his hands in the style that Reissiger, no doubt, used to adopt in the presence of his official superiors.
There are no universal geniuses in art: the thing is a contradiction in terms. But there are geniuses whose energy is too colossal to permit of their confining themselves to any one form of intellectual activity. Goethe was not satisfied to be a poet: he had to be a politician as well, an administrator, a theatre producer, a critic and aesthetician, a speculator in purely scientific territories such as those of botany, geology, and the theory of colour. The result was, as Brandes has pointed out, that, for all his greatness, he achieved hardly a single perfect work of art on the large scale.14 Wagner’s was really the more remarkable artistic mind of the two; no matter in how many directions he might waste the surplusage of his vast energies, he gave to each of the completed works of his maturity the finish, the organic unity, that one expects of an artist who has never thought of anything else but his art. But when, as was so often the case, the creative impulse was lying dormant in him, wisely biding its appointed time, some other outlet had to be found for his inexhaustible intellectual and physical energy, some other means of gratifying his considerable self-esteem, some other channel through which he could exercise his lust for shaping men and things to his own end. In the whole course of his life he never seems to have doubted himself. He was as certain that he could solve the knottiest problems of art, of science, of economics, of politics, or run a kingdom, or guide a strayed civilisation to the new Jerusalem, as that he could write better music than any of his contemporaries. We shall see, at a later stage, the trouble he made for himself in Munich by his obstinate belief in his God-given mission for politics.
Could the Dresden authorities have been as wise at the time as it is easy for us to be now, they would have seen to it that his energy was canalised for the benefit of the music of the town, instead of being dammed in the quarter in which it could have been the most useful and driven into channels where it was bound to be a danger to himself and others. For the overruling impulse of his being, apart from his artistic creation, was to plan, to organise, to pontify, to govern. It was this impulse that led him finally, to the lasting benefit of the world, to call Bayreuth out of the void — the fighting spirit that made him, once he had become disillusioned about King Ludwig, refuse to exist in a theatrical world in which he could not be absolute master. Even the task of founding and running Bayreuth — a colossal task for any man, but most of all for an elderly man whose health was already undermined — was not sufficient to absorb all his energy, as is shown by the lengthy list of his prose works during the last ten years or so of his life; but at any rate we can congratulate ourselves on the fact that the greatest and most continuous outward effort of his whole career was directed to a purely artistic, not a political end. Dresden would have had reason to congratulate itself later if in 1847 and 1848 it had only had the wisdom to turn the overplus of Wagner’s energy, which at the moment he did not need for the creation of a new work of art, into the business of the reorganisation and regeneration of the local theatre.
The last chance there might normally have been of his keeping his head in this atmosphere of political excitement was destroyed for him by the parlous state of his finances. Unless a miracle happened, and soon, he was ruined; and the only hope for a miracle lay in the birth of a new theatre in a new world of German culture.
We have seen him, in October, 1846, endeavouring to get a loan of 1,000 or 1,200 thalers from Schletter to help him to discharge his growing debt to Meser. In June, 1848, he had to swallow his pride and approach Breitkopf & Härtel once more. To liquidate his debt to them he offers them the score of Lohengrin, which opera, he says, is to be produced in Dresden in the coming winter. He then reminds them of his unlucky publishing venture on his own account. This would have been fully justified, he says, had the capital been his own; for the sales have more than covered the interest, and that at a time when his works have been given hardly anywhere but in Dresden, so that with the spread of them to the rest of Germany he can reasonably count on an improvement in this respect. But situated as he is he can no longer carry the huge load of the capital indebtedness. Owing to his already having become a political suspect, various creditors had called in their loans; he wants to settle down again to creative work, but cannot win the necessary peace of mind. Breitkopf & Härtel have already informed him, he reminds them with a touch of irony, that they would have no objection to publishing his works if he did not expect payment for them. Very well; will they now become the proprietors of Rienzi, the Flying Dutchman, and Tannhäuser by paying Meser the capital sum still outstanding, he himself receiving nothing? “If I thus renounce, once for all, the profit from my works, this sacrifice seems a small one to me in comparison with the so ardently desired regulation of my external affairs.”
The Leipzig firm threw away this chance of acquiring an ultimately most valuable property for very little. He has himself admitted, they say in their reply, that his works have as yet not been taken up by the German theatres in general. They are polite enough not to question the rightness of his belief that some day the operas will be very successful. At the same time, as business men, they feel bound to point out to him that experience shows that an opera rarely conquers a big public for itself a long time after its first production. The thing is not impossible, of course; this belated fame, they assure him soothingly, has been the lot of some of the greatest musical works. But there is a technical difficulty in the way of their taking over the three operas from Meser. That gentleman has already sent out specimen copies to the trade; this process cannot be repeated, so that Breitkopf & Härtel would simply have to rely, for sales, upon such orders as might come along from intending purchasers, and, in the terms of the case, not many of these can be hoped for. Wagner’s operas present great difficulties for the smaller German stages; and there is no demand anywhere for vocal scores until after a work has been heard in the theatre. Moreover, owing to the fact that Meser has no music-engraving plant of his own, he has necessarily had to pay more for the production of the works than Breitkopf & Härtel, with their own workmen and machines, would have had to pay in the first place. Finally, the times are bad for art: “many of the theatres are closed, everyone is taken up with politics, no one has the necessary peace of mind to think about art.” They will not even ask him to go into details as regards his new opera Lohengrin, “for we take the most mournful view of the future, especially with regard to works that call for elaborate staging, and which will consequently present even greater difficulties to the German theatres in the coming time than has hitherto been the case.”15
Wagner’s situation was now indeed desperate. Within a couple of days of receiving Breitkopf & Härtel’s letter the distracted man turns to Liszt, in Weimar, for help: his creditors are pressing him, he says, and the times are so difficult that no one will take over his liability to Meser. Will Liszt do so — the sum required is 5,000 thalers — and so become his publisher? “Do you know what this would mean for me? I should become a human being again, one to whom existence is possible — an artist who will never again in all his life ask for a groschen, but will simply turn joyously to work. Dear Liszt, with this money you would buy me out of slavery!” But Liszt, who had abandoned his virtuoso career, and had already parted with perhaps most of the fortune he had made as a pianist, could for the moment do nothing.
At the end of July, the situation having become intolerable, Wagner asked Pusinelli to come to his rescue by buying Meser out. As he saw it, it was a rational business deal that would some day pay handsomely whoever might undertake it. But Pusinelli shrank from the further large sacrifice it would involve. In a letter to Wagner’s attorney, Fleck, which has lately been published for the first time, he points out that he would have to pay Meser at least 3,000 thalers, and as Wagner already owes him capital and accumulated interest amounting to between 5,600 and 5,800 thalers, he would be involved to the extent of some 9,000 thalers, and moreover, “compared to the other creditors, be at a most conspicuous and unfair advantage.” He could not raise so large a sum except at a high rate of interest, or alternatively by the sale of securities at a loss, or by using his wife’s means. “My friendship for W——, my great regard for his talent, my enthusiasm for his art, must not mislead me into any further unwarranted steps. I have proved that I am ready to make sacrifices, great sacrifices, but my conscience forbids my going any further, and I have decided quite firmly not to enter into the purchase proposal under any circumstances. In fact, I claim the same rights as Wagner’s other creditors. Although I may lose much, very much, by doing so, I shall have to content myself with the conviction that I have been enthusiastic over an ideal and that I am paying dearly for an enthusiasm, a lofty enthusiasm; I shall regret only this one thing, and on this account I shall not think any less of Wagner than hitherto, but it would be senseless to make any further sacrifices, it would be unfair to my family, to the property entrusted to me. Actually, Wagner’s published works already belong to me.16 He promised them to me as surety for the loans I made him. He neglected making over this guarantee to me — I was too considerate to demand it. Now I shall renounce these claims in Wagner’s favour, so that he may dispose of his property — his works — as he likes, to his advantage.”17
Pusinelli could hardly have done any more: it was generous of him to have done so much. Fearing, no doubt, that his resolution might weaken if Wagner were allowed to exercise his familiar blandishments on him in person, he wrote to him to ask him not to approach him directly on the matter. This brought a characteristic reply from Wagner, in another letter recently published, by Mr. Elbert Lenrow, for the first time from the Pusinelli papers. Though he recognises the friendship Pusinelli has shown him, and admits the obligation he is under with regard to him, he cannot refrain from expressing a certain irritation. “Many and bitter were the thoughts which this [i.e. the request not to write to Pusinelli personally] roused in my mind. Perhaps you might — speaking frankly! — not comprehend what I perceive in this wish to have me keep away. In this I don’t see any change in your feelings towards me in particular, but rather a fresh confirmation of my views regarding the ruinous effects of money and its attendant vile worries upon the human mind: we are not guided by any purely humane sentiment, but the more we perceive anything godlike in us, the greater our inclination becomes to yield this up to another baser — but unfortunately, prevailing — principle: we prefer to give way to it consciously, perceiving its superior force. It is to be hoped that last evening you did not expect a visit from me, in consequence of your request.”18 The expression is not ideally lucid, but one gathers that Wagner was annoyed at Pusinelli’s refusal, even though he recognised that Pusinelli acted as he had done because of “the ruinous effects of money and its attendant vile worries upon the human mind”; the “purely humane,” the “godlike” thing to have done, apparently, was for Pusinelli to bleed himself and his family to the bone for Richard’s benefit. One detects in this letter the first hints of the later exacting spirit and rancorous mood of Wagner towards those who had helped him, or, in his opinion, ought to have helped him on demand. As the years went on, his needs became more and more pressing, while at the same time his sensibilities both as borrower and as hypothetical repayer became progressively blunted. The key to the mentality and the events that were now and then to come so near to wrecking his life in the future is to be found, not, as the more romantic biographers have supposed,19 in his escapades with women, which were for the most part of the ordinary male kind, but in the cumulative story of his debts. As he himself said, in a passage to which reference has already been made in the foregoing pages, he ceased, in time, to believe in the reality of them and of finance in general, so monstrously disproportionate were his desires and his liabilities to his income, past, present, or, as it seemed, future. According to Pecht, when Wagner fled from Dresden in 1849 he owed 20,000 thalers. From all that we know, the figure is not incredible. It is easy to understand how a man with a debt of anything approaching that amount, and a salary of only 1,500 thalers, would come to regard it all as so fantastic that it had the minimum of relation to reality; and when even that small income ceased, as it did when he fled from Dresden, it became an imperative necessity, if he were to go on living and working, that he should complacently declare not only a financial but a moral moratorium.
This is virtually what we find him doing in the years following 1849, which present us with the spectacle of a Wagner differing in several respects from the Wagner of the first half of his life. And in 1848 and 1849 he drifted into revolution not merely “from love of the theatre” but from lack of thalers. Even while he was endeavouring to bring some sort of order into his finances with the aid of Breitkopf & Härtel, of Liszt, and of Pusinelli, and in each case failing, he was already up to the waist in the revolutionary activities of the epoch. The story of his complete plunge into them, which brought him near drowning, must be reserved for another volume.
1 SA, II, 292.
2 See CPC, I, 50, 94 ff., etc.
3 See LSAS, II, 131.
4 HAPD, p. 19.
5 Ibid., p. 23.
6 Ibid., p. 100.
7 See also Heine’s passionate poem, Die schlesischen Weber:
Im düstern Auge keine Träne,
Sie sitzen am Webstuhl und fletschen die Zähne;
“Deutschland, wir weben dein Leichentuch,
Wir weben hinein den dreifachen Fluch —
Wir weben, wir weben!”
etc.
8 See his outburst to Judith Gautier, in GWH, p. 21.
9 In a letter to her of the 3rd June, 1857, when he was hoping his niece would be the first Brynhilde in the Ring, the fretted idealist spoke frankly but sensibly and kindly of the old differences between them in Dresden. “I thought you would follow the same path as myself, the path along which I was fleeing, with ever-increasing repugnance, from the false, to refresh myself only with the true. Briefly, you were to be my singer, my representative; and one night, when I had been particularly pleased with you as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, I felt a really passionate inclination towards this — hope. Your heart was good and willing, but as yet you could not comprehend me: while I was sketching my Brynhilde I had to conduct La Favorita for you, and see you and Tichatschek fling yourselves into Zampa. Believe me, what estranged me irresistibly from you was not poisonous innuendo but simply the tragic feeling, she is going to be just like the others!”
He explains that at that time he had also turned against her father for a similar reason. Albert had in earlier days shown talent as a singer, but had given up all his ideals, for himself and for Johanna, merely in order to go with the crowd and make money. “As a father he may have acted for the best; but from him also I had hoped too much not to watch him now, with bitter grief, from a distance.” JKJ, p. 74 ff.
10 RWLZ, II, 179.
11 Reprinted in RWGS, Vol. II. When he was preparing it for publication in the Collected Edition of his writings he wrongly dated it 1849.
12 I have already said that opera was a sweated industry in the Germany of those days. One sometimes wonders how the rank and file of the theatre managed to keep body and soul together, even with living as cheap, relatively, as it was then. At Leipzig, in the 1820’s, the Concertmeister received 400 thalers per annum, the leaders of each section of the orchestra 200 thalers, the remainder only 150 thalers. They were paid 8 groschen (a shilling) for small rehearsals, and 16 groschen for costume rehearsals. They were engaged for 110 operas and 110 plays a year, plus 50 rehearsals, so that they could not have found much time for other occupations. In the 1830’s the Leipzig orchestra cost in all only 6,000 thalers a year, including extra rehearsals. The chorus was paid from 4 thalers 4 groschen to 10 thalers 10 groschen per month. See SHJ, pp. 22, 90, etc. For figures relating to the Gewandhaus Orchestra at that period see DGG, pp. 66–77.
13 Sometimes, after as many as fifteen years’ service, an Accessist would be receiving a salary of only 150 thalers!
14 “The masterpieces are relatively few … because, with the exception of a short period, Goethe never applied himself unreservedly to his true vocation — to the writing of poetry. He allowed business to sap him of his strength. For ten long years, and these the very best for a poet, from his twenty-seventh to his thirty-seventh, he gives up poetic activity entirely and dedicates himself to the wearisome affairs of statecraft in Weimar. During all this time he writes practically nothing but poetry for set occasions. Hence the lack of unity in his more pretentious works. He let them lie too long; they are as a rule heterogeneously or poorly constructed. He constantly took them up anew and revised them, or he worked new pieces into them, or he continued them after he had half-forgotten the original plan.
“Götz von Berlichingen exists in three different forms, not counting detached scenes. Iphigenie was revised five times. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre lay so long that it was finally completed after a plan that differed entirely from the original one; two versions exist. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre was elaborated according to no plan whatsoever: it is a mere compilation. And finally we come to his main work, Faust, which was outlined and laid aside and then taken up again and then laid aside again and taken up again, so that its composition extends over a period of sixty years. It is consequently difficult to say how many Fausts there are in Faust; one there certainly is not. The entire work contains a series of geological strata, and these strata lie at times as they do when a great mass of material tumbles over — in one confused and conglomerate pile.” Georg Brandes, Wolfgang Goethe, I, xix, xx.
15 RWBV, I, 14, 16.
16 Wagner had overlooked this trifling fact when he asked Breitkopf & Härtel and Liszt to set him free by buying out Meser.
17 RWAP, pp. 27, 28.
18 RWAP, p. 28.
19 See, for instance, JKWF, Introduction and final chapter.