Toward the end of his life Wagner frequently entertained the fantasy of moving himself, his family, and his whole artistic enterprise to America. The principal motive was financial. Continually harassed and depressed by the debts incurred through the Bayreuth festival of 1876, which of course had entailed the construction of an entire custom-designed theater, Wagner imagined that the New World of infinite enterprise and commerce might easily take up the reins of patronage that had slackened in the hands of Ludwig II, and which Bismarck and the Kaiser had disdained to take over in the name of the German nation. “Despair over Germany” is a recurrent refrain of Wagner’s from 1877 onward. The emigration fantasy also had an ideological side, fueled by the composer’s notions of cultural and racial “regeneration,” vaguely articulated in various essays written in conjunction with his final music drama, Parsifal. Hardy, right-thinking, hardworking German émigrés, unspoiled by modern urban European society, would be the right audience for his valedictory message of cultural salvation.
The intended agent for these plans was Wagner’s one American acquaintance, Dr. Newell Sill Jenkins (1840-1919), a dentist from Bangor, Maine, who had set up practice in Dresden in the late 1860s. On Friday, September 21, 1877, a few days after Wagner began to sketch out some of the music for Parsifal, Cosima recorded in her diary: “The American dentist Mr. Jenkins arrives from Dresden at my request, to attend to R., and the very agreeable man starts his operation immediately during the afternoon.” On Saturday, “Another operation, R. bears it patiently, says that yesterday, while it was going on, he was composing! Departure of Mr. Jenkins, who utterly declines to accept any money from R.” Under the current, post-festival economic circumstances, this recommended him very highly. And this, as Jenkins notes, “was the beginning of a friendship which lasted until Wagner’s death.”
Apart from Parsifal (and two occasional songs for the children at Wahnfried), Wagner’s last completed work was a Grand Festival March for the Opening of the Centennial Commemorative of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, commissioned for the 1876 celebrations in Philadelphia by the “Women’s Centennial Committee” and the leading American conductor of the day, Theodore Thomas.1 Wagner was less than inspired by his work, admitting that he could muster no mental image while composing it besides the $5,000 he had stipulated as a fee, along with the European publication rights.2 The dedication to his American friend (“Es lebe Amerika!”) entered by Wagner in a copy of Joseph Rubinstein’s piano arrangement of the march, alludes, as Jenkins notes in the memoir that follows, “partly to a hope we both entertained that he might sometime visit America.”3 Jenkins tactfully suppressed the Master’s more grandiose visions by gently dispelling them on several occasions.
During an extended sojourn in Naples in the winter and spring months of 1880, Wagner seriously considered a permanent emigration, beginning with a trip of some months’ duration as early as the following September. At the beginning of February he was suffering from rashes, inflammation of the eyes, and general irritability. “He wants to move to America (Minnesota),” Cosima writes, “and there, for a subscription of one million dollars, build a drama school and a house.” (The project of a school for Wagnerian music and drama in Bayreuth had recently occupied him for some time, to no avail, echoing earlier such plans for Munich under Ludwig’s patronage.) “He would dedicate Parsifal to them [the Americans] and stage it there, for he can no longer tolerate the situation here in Germany…. Again and again he keeps coming back to America, says it is the only place on the map he can contemplate with any pleasure: ‘What the Greeks were among the peoples of this earth, this continent is among its countries.’”4 A week later he spelled out his plan in a letter to Jenkins, back in Dresden. An association of interested citizens would put up a million dollars, half of which would allow Wagner and his family “to settle in a climatically favorable part of the Union” (Minnesota?) while the remaining $500,000 “would be employed as capital, to be placed on deposit in a state bank at 5 percent. America would thereby have purchased me from Europe forever.”5 To King Ludwig, at the end of March, he confides another financial motive: by emigrating to America he would be able, he claims, to buy back the performing rights to his works currently assigned to European agents—including, notably, the Bavarian king. Meanwhile, Wagner’s million-dollar scenario did not include funds for reestablishing the Wagner festival and its theater on American soil, which apparently also depended on the supposedly limitless enthusiasm of Americans for transplanting the Wagnerian music drama to the New World.
It is true, of course, that lucrative American tours were becoming a common undertaking for European artists amid the rapid industrial expansion of the American economy in the decades after the Civil War, and above all with the ubiquitous growth of the railway. Still, a touring virtuoso or conductor is one thing and a translated Bayreuth festival quite another. Except for that large savings account “at 5 percent” with always more where that came from, Wagner’s dreams of a new start in the United States were vague and undefined. To him it was all tabula rasa, a place where he might yet be received as a great cultural savior and thus show up the ungrateful Germans back home. After hearing on one occasion from Jenkins “some very interesting things about the Negroes” (“whom R. can hardly visualize taking part in public affairs; he feels that what has made them significant is their touching submission to a cruel fate”), he also discussed the character of the émigrés: “Yes the emigrants,” Wagner opined, “those are the good ones, just as the earlier wanderers were the heroes; the ones who stayed home were the Philistines.”6
After the summer of 1880 Wagner’s dreams of the American El Dorado quickly began to fade, in part with the evident decline in his health. A series of dental appointments with Jenkins at his Dresden practice in September 1881 were limited to friendly conversation on local topics (and somewhat more taxing dental procedures than before), with no more talk about moving. In the meantime he had also relinquished as impractical the idea of a six-month American cross-country concert tour to raise funds for the original festival in Bayreuth and to help secure performing rights for his works, above all Parsifal, at home. The thought of consecrating some distant, foreign stage became still less attractive once King Ludwig came forward with resources for Bayreuth, forgoing his own claims on the score and putting the personnel of the Munich court theater at the disposal of the festival. No doubt in the end Dr. Jenkins was better pleased to be left with his assorted Wagnerian mementoes, as described in his Reminiscences, rather than the burden of assisting in the transplantation of the Wagner festival to the American Great Plains.
A graduate of the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery (class of 1863), Newell Jenkins realized the potential for exporting the latest developments in American dentistry to the European continent, a project he continued while resident in Germany. He experimented with various materials for fillings (tin and gold mixtures, glass) and pioneered the use of porcelain enamel crowns. By the 1880s his patients included the King of Saxony and the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg, and later Mark Twain, who offered to promote his products in the United States. Jenkins remained resident in Europe through the period of the First World War, moving to Paris after retiring from his Dresden dental practice in 1909. Around that time he patented Kolynos toothpaste, a product that earned him and his heirs considerable sums, and he continued to publish extensively in journals of dentistry.7 His memoirs, Reminiscences of Newell Sill Jenkins, were privately printed in 1924, five years after his death at Le Havre, France. What follows here is the complete text of chapter nine.8
NEWELL SILL JENKINS
Reminiscences, 1875-1883
(1924)
In the middle of the seventies I made my first acquaintance with Richard Wagner. Frau Cosima Wagner came first to me as a patient, with her children. I was much impressed by this remarkable woman. She was the embodiment of physical and mental energy. Her tall form, her strong features, her quick resolves, as firm as they were intelligent, her disdain of obstacles standing between her and her purpose, and the tact and resource with which she overcame them, revealed her at first sight as a woman of extraordinary character. My first impression was confirmed by further acquaintance.
In 1877 Frau Cosima asked me to go to Bayreuth to treat her husband. The previous year had witnessed the first representation at Bayreuth of the “Nibelungen Ring” and the world was still ringing with echoes of this great musical and national event. Wagner was unable to come to me and greatly needed certain treatment, to relieve sufferings intolerable to a man of his temperament, and accordingly, although I was myself tired and overwrought, I determined to go; and this was the beginning of a friendship which lasted until Wagner’s death.
For the first time I had occasion to rejoice that I was so unmusical, for it might well have been that, had I been a musical enthusiast, he would have been as bored by my society as he appeared to be by many whom I have seen trying to express to him their admiration. As it was, he accepted me as a novelty and took to me at once. Upon this occasion, and upon other visits which I made him, he was with me as much as possible. We had long walks together, conversing upon all things human and divine, barring music, except that I told him something of the plaintive character of the music of the American negroes under slavery, a quality inherent also in the music of the Russian serfs; but we could not decide if this were due to temperament or circumstance.
To my great delight, I found that he had an extraordinary sense of humour and that he was very fond of amusing anecdotes, telling them in a dry manner which added much to their piquancy. We have sat up until late in the night upon more than one occasion exchanging stories, he finding the American jest especially racy; and, indeed, he had a wide interest in everything American, for he was in theory a redoubtable republican, as shown by his participation in the revolution of’48 and in his subsequent indifference to the blandishments of royalties.
One evening Frau Cosima was speaking of the previous summer, when Bayreuth was visited by so many royal and princely personages and all the world beside, and she told how the Emperor of Brazil, upon his arrival, sent to ask Wagner and Liszt to call upon him. They were both absent but Frau Cosima sent a verbal reply, saying: “I know positively that my father will go, but I also know as certainly that my husband will not.”
Once at dinner Wagner asked me about Brigham Young, who had recently died, and wished to know the secret of his power. I told him of the worldly position of the people among whom the Mormons made their converts, how ignorant and poor many of them were, and instanced the Cornwall miners, many of whom were converted and found Utah, which their strong hands made to blossom like the rose, an earthly paradise compared to their former dismal home. Like the followers of Mahomet, they gained not only the assurance of heaven, but such blessings in this life as they were capable of appreciating.
After a little time, Wagner looked at me with a twinkle in his eye which I knew to presage a jest, and began to speak gravely of his intention to establish a new religion as soon as he finished “Parsifal,” which he was then composing. After the first moment, he especially regarded another guest, a nephew by marriage and a professor of mathematics at Kiel, whom I had already suspected of being devoid of imagination, and began to explain the details of the new enterprise.
It was to be founded upon a materialistic view of Heaven, like that of Mahomet, but there were to be also different grades of heavenly bliss and the services were to be magnificently choral, for musical art should be the means of worship and the passport to Heaven should be by tickets bought for hard cash from the priests. These tickets, however, should have something of the form of Papal indulgences and thus secure abundant income to the church. They should be also like railroad tickets, which would not carry the holder beyond the place for which they were bought, so that the pious soul should aspire through sacrifice of gold in this life to attain to the highest heaven in the world to come and not be satisfied with a third-class ticket, which would merely give him admittance to standing room, as in a theatre. Then he went on more and more fantastically and slyly, noting the amazement of the good professor, who might well have thought the Meister mad, until Frau Cosima and I could no longer restrain our merriment and it began to dawn upon the other auditor that it was but an extravagant jest.
This side of Wagner’s character, revealed only in the “Meistersinger” among all his works, may have been the source of the many surprising stories which were related of him. I have myself observed that the awestricken reverence with which some of his worshippers approached him seemed to him fit subject for raillery, and indeed it was sometimes so exaggerated that the temptation to turn it into ridicule must have been irresistible. I remember a reception at Wahnfried one evening in the days of the first public performance of “Parsifal.” I had obtained an invitation for a minor American composer, who was, except upon the subject of music, a very sensible fellow. He came early and I presented him to Frau Cosima, who was receiving, Wagner himself coming in only late upon such occasions. My friend was tremulous with excitement. He said to me that this was the most important experience of his life, he was about to see the two greatest men in the world, Wagner and Liszt.
When he did see and was presented to the Meister, he was too agitated to speak and was so much moved that I took early occasion to shunt him into a corner, where he could slowly recover. The next day I found that the poor man was suffering from a deep disappointment. Being familiar with pictures which represented only Wagner’s massive head, he had expected to find a man of commanding stature and was greatly distressed to find him somewhat less than average height. But I consoled him by reminding him of Napoleon’s diminutive stature, as I knew the Corsican was another of his heroes.
Upon one of my visits, the brother of the famous pianist Rubinstein was at Wahnfried, engaged in arranging the “Nibelungen Ring” for the piano. He was an interesting man, in a way. I believe he met with a tragic fate before the work was finished and that it finally appeared in the name of Klindworth. During the visit it happened that the family would be obliged to go out somewhere now and then, something which Frau Cosima always regretted, because, she said, she was unwilling to leave her husband even for a few hours, since all the time she could expect to be with him was so precious to her. Upon these occasions I remained with the Meister, for I did not dance and disliked general society, and these evenings were among the most delightful I have ever known. I found Wagner, like all the truly distinguished men I have met, a most human character with a very wide range of interests and sympathies. To talk with an American, who knew nothing of music, was probably to him a rare experience. In any event, he kept me up, even after the family had returned, talking familiarly upon many topics and always impressing me with his great mental endowments. In October 1877, after the adaptation of the “Ring” to the piano was published, he sent me a splendidly bound copy with his autograph and a Widmung in his own handwriting on the flyleaf of the first volume.
Ich sage nichts vom Zahn der Zeit,
Die Zeit des Zahnes naht heran,
Ist dann Herr Jenkins nicht mehr weit,
Trotz’ ich die Zeit mit Ihrem Zahn.9
He was unwilling to speak English, of which he had only a literary knowledge, and was accustomed to say: “I speak English, but only in the dialect of North Wales.” One day he asked me the origin of my name, saying that it should have a meaning, as German names generally did. Then I told him there was once a great king in Wales, of whom the English “King Cole” was but a degenerate copy. This king, whose name was Jen, was a model of all a monarch should be, pious, learned, just, generous and, above all, jovial. In his court were assembled all the great artists of his time and they were more honoured than princes. His happy subjects basked in the light of his jolly countenance and lived so happily under his gentle and prosperous reign, that, when at last he died childless, they decided that no successor should bear that beloved name. Only when later a man appeared who in his person and character reminded them of their lamented monarch, they called him “of the kin of Jen,” and so originated the name of Jen-kins.
The next morning he gave me a copy of Alfred Forman’s alliterative English translation of the “Ring,” which the author had sent to the Meister and with which we had all amused ourselves the previous evening. It bore (I quote from memory, for the book is now inaccessibly packed away) written in Wagner’s hand, the following inscription: “Translated in the dialect of North Wales, in the time of King Jen, forefather of my noble friend, Jenkins.”
There are many legends which seem to have an equally stable foundation.
I have various other mementoes of the great Meister which you children will prize. Among them is a copy of Joseph Rubinstein’s arrangement for the piano of the great Festive March composed by Wagner for the opening of the celebration in America of the hundredth anniversary of the United States’ Declaration of Independence. The flyleaf of the book bears these words:
Mein lieber Herr Jenkins!
In Umtausch unserer Hoffnungen rufe ich mit dieser
freundschaftlicher Widmung Ihnen zu. Es lebe Amerika!10
Ihr, Richard Wagner.
This refers partly to a hope we both entertained that he might sometime visit America and partly his sympathy with my belief that Europe would eventually become republican and not Cossack. Of this composition he told me a characteristic anecdote. Der Festfeierfrauenverein (Woman’s Committee of the Celebration) had asked him to compose a march for the occasion, offering him a handsome honorarium. He had consented but, burdened with other duties, had neglected this work. At last, rather late, he began to occupy himself with it and, as he worked and thought what a century of republican government in America meant to the world, the importance of the occasion grew upon him and he finished it in a state of exalted enthusiasm. He cabled to America that the work was ready but received no reply. After a time he thought that perhaps it might be too late for its purpose and was sorely disappointed. Being in Berlin one day, he therefore took the score to the American legation, but, as the Minister was absent, he was obliged to explain the situation to a secretary.
Wagner’s speech was not always clear, for often the thoughts were too rapid for the tongue; but, in his tempestuous manner, he tried to make plain the history of the work and that he was so proud of the honour of composing the March for this occasion, that he was quite willing to renounce the fee which had been promised him, if only the March could quite certainly be accepted and performed. He showed the secretary the motto, taken from Goethe, which prefaced the score.
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben
Der täglich sie erobern muss.11
Whereupon the secretary burst out: “Sir, do you mean to say that the American people intend to rob you!”
Poor Wagner gave up his explanation as hopeless, but upon returning home to Bayreuth found a communication from the Committee which was in every way satisfactory, as it provided that the March should be accepted and performed and, moreover, the fee he was so willing to renounce was paid by cable.
After Wagner’s death another memento was given to your mother by Frau Cosima, with a letter dated June 20, 1888. She wrote: “I put also some engravings, French ones, which have now got so rare that they are no more to be bought and from which I would be very glad if Mrs. Jenkins would accept them from me. Perhaps the fact that they have been for many years in Wahnfried’s library will be able to size their worth…. Mr. Latour belongs to the impressionists in France, and his great picture of the Wagnerians in Paris made a great noise there.”12
We knew the value, actual and sentimental, of these engravings, for they had been presented to Wagner by the artist upon the first representation of the “Ring” at Bayreuth and I had often seen and admired them hanging in the great library.
We did not like to accept them, thinking they ought to remain in the Wagner family, but Frau Cosima was so persistent that it was impossible to refuse. You will all remember how they have hung in our library for a quarter of a century.
I was always greatly impressed by Frau Wagner’s devotion to her husband. She cared for him with motherly tenderness and wifely tact. She stood between him and every annoyance. There were innumerable practical questions constantly demanding attention, visits from the mayor or some committee, or from aspiring artists, or from builders and architects, and with all of them she made every way smooth and sent them off contented, without a thought of troubling the Meister himself. All the while he would be in his study, working undisturbed, singing from time to time, or darting to the piano and striking the keys again and again, and then falling into silence while rapidly writing his score. He seemed to work with great concentration of thought, but when he had finished he was as light-hearted as a child. His wife was so familiar with his needs that she always chose just the right moment and exactly the right tone and the best form of words to present to him any question upon which his decision was necessary, with the result that everything seemed easily accomplished with the least possible friction or disturbance.
In 1878 I received from Wagner a remarkable letter. At that time he had become discouraged at not having the assurance of being able to carry out his plans for perpetuating his temple of art at Bayreuth and fancied he might be able to find the support he longed for by going with his works to settle permanently in America, and that I could help him to realize such a plan. It was, of course, wildly impractical, but it was a delicate matter to convince him that it would be unwise. We went to Constantinople by way of Naples expressly to talk with him and Frau Cosima and found they were so full of illusions as to the conditions in America that arguments against this plan had no force. During the next year, however, it was possible, through the aid of a few of the great Meister’s friends and enemies in America, to make it plain that the place for his great triumph was in his own country and among his own people, and I rejoiced that that end was attained without a cloud resting upon our friendship.
Your mother and I were invited to attend the first performance of “Parsifal” on July 26, 1882. It was, even to me, a very great event. By nature I have a love of poetry, as well as for colour and meaning in painting, but my profession has been so absorbing that, despite all my advantages, I have been unable to cultivate the fine arts to the extent of my limited capacity. But music has always been a sealed book to me. I had often said that I would rather have written any one of the world’s great poems than all the music of all time. You children will remember what a trial I have been to you at the opera, because the music which you enjoyed so much became to me, after the first half hour, only unmeaning and almost unendurable noise. But the performance of “Parsifal” was not opera; it was a mystical musical drama, composed by a great genius and performed by famous artists inspired by religious enthusiasm. At this first representation there were present musical celebrities from all the world, as well as an immense number of Wagner’s devoted disciples. The whole town had an aspect of solemnity, which was as impressive as it was genuine, for everyone felt himself participating in a great historical event; but the audience in the theatre was in the mood of a congregation in a cathedral engaged in celebrating High Mass upon some famous national occasion. Although the audience had been requested not to applaud, there was, after the first act, a spontaneous outburst of delight, but it was instantly suppressed when the Meister, leaning over from his box, entreated the audience not to disturb the illusion. I can recall nothing of the close, I do not remember if we applauded or not, for even like those who had the ability to understand the music, I was overwhelmed with the sublime effect of this magnificent drama.
Throughout all my acquaintance with Wagner I had been more and more impressed by his intellectual greatness. He was a man apart from all others in mind and purpose. I came to understand the passionate devotion he received from his true disciples, to whom any faults he may have had seemed of no account in a genius so lofty and with aims so noble and I rejoice to possess for myself a flawless memory of this remarkable man.
On the thirteenth of February, 1883, Wagner suddenly died at Venice. On the morning of that day his son, Siegfried, who had been under my treatment, wrote me a letter, enclosing some small article, and he sealed it five times, using his father’s seal. This is probably the last time it was ever used. Four of these seals I have given as souvenirs to friends, but one has been still preserved.
1. Also known as the “American Centennial March.” In the original: Großer Festmarsch zur Eröffnung der hundertjährigen Gedenkfeier der Unabhängigheit der Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika. See John Deathridge, Martin Geck, Egon Voss, Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis: Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke Richard Wagners und ihrer Quellen (Mainz and New York, 1986), no. 110.
2. Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New York, 1978), entry of 14 February 1876 (henceforth CWD).
3. The Russian-Jewish pianist Joseph Rubinstein was one of a group of musical assistants and copyists in Bayreuth sometimes referred to as the “Nibelung Chancellory.” Rubinstein often performed works from the Classical and Romantic canon for Richard and Cosima in the salon at Wahnfried. Jenkins incorrectly identifies Joseph Rubinstein as the brother of Anton and/or Nikolai Rubinstein (who were brothers) in his Reminiscences. He is correct, however, in alluding to Joseph Rubinstein’s suicide a year after Wagner’s death.
4. CWD, 1 February 1880.
5. Cited in Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century, trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (New York, 1983), 482. The full text of this letter can be found in Curt von Westernhagen, Wagner: A Biography, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge, 1978), 551-52.
6. CWD, 24 January 1879.
7. Jenkins’s grandson, also Newell (1915-96), became a notable advocate of lesser-known Baroque and Classical musical repertoire from the 1950s through the 1970s in the United States and abroad as founder and director of the “Clarion Concerts,” thanks in part to the proceeds of his grandfather’s toothpaste patent. Details of the elder Jenkins’s professional contributions are given by John M. Hyson Jr., DDS, MS, MA, and Scott D. Swank, DDS, in “Dr. Newell Sill Jenkins: Progenitor of Cosmetic Dentistry,” Journal of the California Dental Association 31/8 (August 2003): 626-29.
8. Newell Sill Jenkins, Reminiscences of Newell Sill Jenkins (Princeton, 1924), 191-204.
9. Wagner’s dedication to Jenkins is built around punning allusions to his dental profession. In Jenkins’s own translation: “I speak not of the tooth of time, / The tooth’s own time is drawing nigh. / Is Jenkins then within this clime? / Time and its tooth I will defy.”
10. The dedication reads: “My dear Mr. Jenkins! In exchange of our mutual hopes I address to you this friendly dedication. Long live America! — yours, Richard Wagner.”
11. “He alone earns his freedom, and his life, who daily must re-conquer them” (Goethe, Faust, Part 2, Act 5, II. 11575-76). These famous lines of Faust refer to his symbolic land-reclamation project near the end of Part 2, embodying the theme of constant moral striving at the heart of Goethe’s philosophical dramatic epic.
12. The engraving of Fantin-Latour’s 1885 painting Autour du piano is reproduced as Figure 2 in “The Revue wagnérienne,” in Part IV of this volume.