Although the hard-fought production of Tannhäuser in Paris in 1861 was a notorious fiasco,1 Wagner’s presence in Paris at this fertile moment in French cultural history captured the attention of several notable literary figures, above all Charles Baudelaire, whose essay “Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris” (Révue européenne, 1 April 1861) proved to be the cornerstone of an illustrious Wagnerian legacy among French poets of the pioneering generation of modernism. The Symbolist movement, led by Stéphane Mallarmé, is often traced back to Baudelaire’s essay.2 Of the same generation as Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine was the poet, playwright, and novelist Catulle Mendès (1841-1909), initially the most devoted of the French literary Wagnerians. In the year of the Paris Tannhäuser, then twenty-year-old Mendès founded the literary journal La revue fantaisiste, which published works by Baudelaire as well as Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, who would accompany Mendès on his pilgrimage to Wagner’s Swiss retreat at Tribschen near Lucerne in 1869. As editor of Le Parnasse contemporain (1866-76) Villiers de L’Isle-Adam oversaw the formation of a Parnassian movement, subsequently overshadowed by the more radical avant-gardism of the Symbolists.3 The Parnassians represented a modern strain of neoclassical formalism and shared with Symbolists, Decadents, and other aestheticist movements toward the end of the century an underlying philosophy of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake), explaining their shared fascination with the phenomenon of Wagner and his theories of a “total work of art.”
In 1866 Mendès married the daughter of Théophile Gautier, Judith, who also stopped at Tribschen with her husband in the summer of 1869. The fact that Mendès’s short memoir of the visit, published as an introduction to his 1886 monograph on Wagner’s oeuvre, suppresses any mention of her name may have to do with the fact of their separation not long afterward (she later married the novelist Pierre Loti); this gesture of discretion might also reflect the husband’s awareness that Judith had gone on to conduct a brief affair with the aging composer, with whom she remained on friendly terms to the end of his life. The outbreak of hostilities between France and Germany the following summer (1870) interrupted the budding friendship of the Mendès couple with Wagner, and as Catulle suggests in his memoir of Tribschen, it would take some years for the wound of Wagner’s vitriolic anti-French chauvinism to heal. The novel Mendès published in 1880, Le roi vièrge (The virgin king), parodies the psychological dependency of the Bavarian king Ludwig II (here styled as King Frederick of Thuringia) on a private aesthetic cult of Wagnerian mythology. Despite the initial fallout from the Franco-Prussian War, both he and Judith continued to spread the gospel of Wagnerism in France, Judith in several personal memoirs as well as a full-length study, Richard Wagner et son oeuvre poétique depuis Rienzi jusqu’à Parisfal (Paris, 1882) and Catulle in contributions to the Revue wagnérienne (which were reprinted in Richard Wagner, his 1886 monograph from which the following text has been taken).4 His later work as a librettist for post-Wagnerian French composers such as Chabrier, Massenet, and the young Debussy can be seen as a continuation of his early devotion to the Wagnerian idea and its propagation in France.
CATULLE MENDÈS
Personal Recollections: At Tribschen
(Paris, 1886)
It should not be without interest if I were to give some details on the most curious and rather unfamiliar personality of the man of genius who is now no more. It was above all at Lucerne that I had the opportunity of intimate visits with him. Already in Paris, if I remember correctly, I had occasion to see him at his quarters in the Rue d’Aumale with regard to the Revue fantaisiste.5 But that would have been shortly before the first performance of Tannhäuser at the Opéra, and at that point he had been driven to the utmost degree of nervous exasperation by a thousand annoyances and misérabilités (as he used to put it). He was like an angry cat, his back up and his claws out. It was not a well-chosen moment to establish relations with him, besides which my very young age then was an obstacle to any real familiarity. But some years later a somewhat less irritable if not exactly calm Richard Wagner (for calm he never was!) was living in peaceful solitude more favorable to creative productivity near Lucerne, at Tribschen,6 with the woman who was to become his wife. When the train pulled up at the station my heart was beating rapidly, and I believe I can say that my traveling companion, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, was no less moved. For all that, we were no strangers to Wagner; and given that he knew how we were fighting passionately toward the triumph of his ideas and his oeuvre, we had reason to hope for a cordial reception and, before long, a sense of mutual sympathy. No sooner had we stepped off the train than we saw a large straw hat; under it a pale face looked very quickly to the right and the left, as if in search of something.
It was he. Intimidated as we were, we observed him without daring to approach.
He was small, thin, and tightly wrapped in a frock coat with maroon brocade. His whole slender but certainly quite robust body seemed a bundle of energy, while the tension of waiting had apparently produced the almost convulsive trembling of a woman suffering from “nerves.” Still, his face retained a magnificent expression of hauteur as well as serenity. His mouth—the lips very thin and pale, almost invisible—was twisted into a bitter smile; beneath the hat, somewhat cast back, his large, pure, well-formed brow surrounded by very fine hair, already graying and thinning, exhibited a stable, peaceful character due, I suppose, to the influence of some immense idea. In the ingenuous transparency of his eyes—eyes like those of a young child or a virgin—there was all the beautiful candor of an unspoiled dream.
As soon as he saw us Richard Wagner trembled from head to toe like the high string of a violin suddenly struck pizzicato; he threw his hat into the air with wild cries of welcome: almost dancing for joy he leapt upon us, grabbing us by the arm and the neck. Quite moved—nearly knocked down, for that matter—we were swept up in a torrent of words and gestures, suddenly finding ourselves in the carriage that was to take us to the home of the master. For many years I felt compelled to suppress the memories of several weeks spent entirely in that hospitable domicile, thanks to that odious brochure; but I have explained why I now feel I have the right to revive them.7
The next morning, after a hurried breakfast, we left our hotel, the object of much curiosity on account of our visit to Richard Wagner. I recall even now a rather amusing incident from that moment. Each time we descended the staircase together with the young woman whom we had the honor of accompanying on this trip, the servants came running, lining the hall and bowing low to the ground. The owner himself escorted us to our carriage with an air of deep respect, once even insisting on kissing our hands quite vehemently. What on earth could have earned us such signs of respect? Consider that we were lodged quite simply in three small rooms on the fifth floor of the Hôtel du Lac, and that our attire was only moderately sumptuous, at best. Yet in town as well we were met with salutes, whispered exchanges, groups of bared heads. Better still, as we took the boat across the lake to Tribschen, other boats full of English visitors followed us as far as the promontory on which the Wagner villa was situated, where the English waited until evening with incredible patience. All this obsequious attention finally began rather to annoy us, and we said straight out to the hotel owner that we only wanted to be treated like the ordinary tourists we really were. Adopting a knowing air, that wise gentleman turned to me, saying: “Sir, we will do whatever is required by your Majesty, and if that means respecting your incognito, we shall certainly do that.” My majesty? You can imagine how we were ready to explode with laughter. The fact was, our arrival in Lucerne coincided with an announcement in the papers regarding the imminent arrival of the King of Bavaria, so that I had been taken for King Ludwig and Villiers de Lisle-Adam for the Prince Taxis.8 As for our other young traveling companion, it was firmly believed that she was none other than Mme. Patti, come to Lucerne to study an operatic role with Richard Wagner, and it was in hope of hearing her sing that the English group had spent the day waiting in their boat next to the promontory of Tribschen.9 It required infinite pains to disabuse the good people at the hotel and to convince them not to render us any further royal honors.
At Wagner’s house the days passed in the most charming fashion. Hardly would we enter the garden than our arrival was greeted by the barking of an enormous black dog, accompanied by children’s laughter from the steps, while at the window the poet-musician would shake his black velvet beret in a signal of welcome.10 On more than one occasion our morning visit caught him in that odd costume that legend has often since attributed to him: dressing gown and slippers of gold satin, brocaded with pearl-colored flowers (for he had a passionate love of luminous fabrics, spreading out like flames or spilling out in splendid waves).11 Velvets and silks were in abundance in the salon and in his study, freely dispersed in swelling heaps or torrential trains in no particular relation to the furnishings—simply for the sake of their beauty and to enchant the poet with their glorious warmth.
The midday meal was always served at precisely two o’clock, and prior to that conversation would be struck up in the large, light salon where four large windows let in the air of the hills and the moist countryside. Sometimes we would be sitting at this point, but never him! No, I cannot recall seeing him seated even once, except at the piano or at table. Coming and going through the large room, moving this chair or that, searching his pockets for a misplaced snuffbox or his eyeglasses (sometimes they had become hung up on the pendants of the chandeliers, but never in any case on his nose), grasping the velvet beret that hung down over his left eye like a black cockscomb, rubbing it between his clenched fists, then thrusting into his waistcoat only to take it out again and replace it on his head—all the while talking, talking, talking! Often he spoke of Paris. He had not yet become so unfair toward our country. He loved this city where he had suffered and hoped; with the warmth and anxiety of an exile he asked after the neighborhoods where he had lived, which might have been much changed under the recent construction projects. I saw his eyes well up with tears when he recalled a house at the corner of this or that street which he now learned had been demolished.12 Then, too, he would let fly with great outbursts: sublime metaphors, puns, barbarities—an incessant stream of observations, flowing in fits and starts, alternately proud, tender, violent, or comical. Now smiling ear to ear, now turning emotional to the point of tears, now working himself up into a prophetic frenzy, all sorts of topics found their way into his extraordinary flights of improvisation: the dramas he still dreamed of writing, Parsifal, the King of Bavaria (“not a méchant garcon,” he told us),13 the tricks played on him by Jewish music directors, the subscribers who hissed at Tannhäuser, Mme. de Metternich,14 Rossini (the most “voluptuously” endowed of musicians), a reply he had in mind to send to the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, the theater he would build one day on a hill outside of a town and to which people would come from all over the world, Sebastian Bach, Monsieur Auber who had been very kind to him,15 his idea for a comedy titled Luther’s Wedding.16 And then dozens of anecdotes: stories of his political involvements in Dresden, the happy dreams and escapades of his childhood, looking out from the last row of the orchestra stalls to see the great Weber conducting, Mme. Schröder-Devrient (the dearest, most significant memory of all, “that admirable, dear, dear woman!” he added with a sigh), the death of Schnorr, creator of the role of Tristan.17 And when he uttered the name “Tristan!” it was with a tremendous exaltation of his whole being directed toward a febrile eternity of love-in-death, suggesting the conception of a frenetic void! We, however, who were overwhelmed and dazed by all this, laughed and cried along with him, sharing his ecstasies, seeing his visions; we felt like a cloud of dust stirred up by a storm, but also illuminated by his imperious discourse, frightful and delightful at once.
1. See the reviews of this production in Part IV of this volume, “Wagner in Paris.”
2. On this legacy, see Steven Huebner’s introduction to the excerpts from the Revue wagnérienne in Part IV.
3. Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1838-89) was later more closely affiliated with the Symbolists than Mendès. His prose works explore spiritualist, uncanny, and “fantastic” motifs; an overtly Wagnerian symbolist drama, Axël, written in 1886 during the brief run of the Revue wagnérienne, evokes Mallarmé’s ideal of a psychological “theater of the mind” as well as a Wagnerian love-death for Axël and his beloved ideal, Sara.
4. Catulle Mendès, Richard Wagner (Paris, 1886), 5-17. In addition to the memoirs of Tribschen, Mendès includes in the monograph an “epistle to the King of Thuringia” (alluding to his fictionalized account of King Ludwig II of Bavaria in the 1880 novel Le roi vièrge), an essay on the “Wagnerian theory” of musical drama (reprinted from the Revue wagnérienne), individual essays on each of Wagner’s operas from Der fliegende Holländer on, and a dialogue between “an old Wagnerian and a young Prix-de-Rome fellow,” also reprinted from the Revue.
5. Wagner and his wife, Minna, took lodgings at 3 rue d’Aumale in October 1860. The Revue fantaisiste was founded by Mendès in 1861 with the help of Théophile Gautier.
6. Mendès spells the name Triebchen.
7. Mendès’s explanation as to why he feels entitled now to ignore “that odious brochure” (an allusion to Wagner’s famously offensive satirical “operetta” text, Eine Kapitulation, discussed at length in my essay in Part I of this volume) is contained in the avant-propos to his book. (As the son of a banker of Portuguese-Jewish descent, Mendès might equally well have taken offense at the 1869 republication of “Judaism in Music” in brochure form.) In the avant-propos he quotes some lines he had published in 1880 lamenting the anti-French satire in Wagner’s libretto, then appends some further text written in 1883, soon after Wagner’s death: “Once the tomb is closed, we have the right, even the duty to choose among our memories. Yes, we cannot help but remember that the incomparable poet-musician was also the wretch who saw fit to insult our national defeat as well as our national glories. For my part, I no longer think of how I had to scorn and hate him. I see him again as I once knew him, before those terrible times, in the days of unrestricted enthusiasm” (vi-vii).
8. Prince Paul Maximilian Lamoral von Thurn und Taxis (1843-79), of the Bavarian noble family Thurn und Taxis, was an adjutant to the young Ludwig II.
9. As mentioned in the introduction, the discreetly unnamed “other” traveling companion was the author’s wife (and daughter of Théophile Gautier), Judith Gautier-Mendès (1845-1917), with whom Wagner became smitten and conducted a transient affair in later years. The internationally celebrated soprano Adelina Patti (1843-1919) was at the height of her fame in the 1860s.
10. The dog was Wagner’s Newfoundland, Russ (acquired in memory of Robber, the Newfoundland he and Minna Wagner had lost in Paris after the dog had accompanied them in all the trials and privations of their voyage to Paris in 1839). The children, at this point, were Hans von Bülow’s daughters Daniela and Blandine, as well as the two fathered by Wagner out of wedlock, Isolde and Eva. Wagner’s one son, Siegfried, had been born in early June, just a month before this visit.
11. Wagner’s fondness for delicate silks, satins, and furs to wear about the house, a fetish that sometimes bordered on transvestism, became notorious with the (obviously unauthorized) publication ofBriefe Richard Wagners an eine Putzmacherin, his correspondence with a high-class Viennese seamstress, Bertha Goldwag. The serialized publication of the letters was the brainchild of the anti-Wagnerian Viennese satirist Daniel Spitzer and appeared in the Neue freie Presse in 1877.
12. Wagner had spent his longest time in Paris in 1839-42, visited it again periodically between 1849 and 1850, and during the Tannhäuser “campaign” of 1860-61 signed a three-year lease for an apartment at 16 rue Newton, near the Étoile, only to discover that it was about to fall victim to the grand construction schemes of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. The large-scale urban renewal program of Haussmann began in 1852, but the bulk of the new construction (and removal of older quarters) took place in the 1860s and after.
13. Mendès quotes Wagner’s French here—méchant garçon (bad boy). It is unclear whether Wagner is defending Ludwig against imputations of homosexuality, already familiar by this time, or just joking in a more general way.
14. Pauline von Metternich (1836-1921), wife of the Habsburg ambassador to Paris, Prince Richard Metternich, had notably intervened on Wagner’s behalf to obtain an imperial decree for the performance of Tannhäuser in Paris in 1861.
15. D.-F.-E. Auber (1782-1871), composer of the grand opera La muette de Portici and Fra Diavolo, among dozens of other opéras comiques. Wagner wrote an obituary essay on the composer, “Reminiscences of Auber,” in 1871.
16. Wagner had drafted some plans for a comedy on the subject of “Luther’s wedding” the previous summer at Tribschen, possibly intended as either a prose play or a libretto.
17. On the impact of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient on the young Wagner, see the first document in this section. Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1836-65) was the son of the painter Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and became a devoted interpreter of Wagnerian heroes, including the first Tristan, until his death a few weeks after the premiere of that opera on June 10, 1865.