JOHN F. RUNCIMAN

LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
1913

Portrait of Wagner

TO
HAROLD HODGE

INTRODUCTION

It is now one hundred years since Richard Wagner was born, thirty since he died. In every land he has his monument in one shape or another; his music-dramas can be heard all the world over; all the ancient controversies as to their merits or demerits have died down. The Bayreuth theatre, the outward and visible sign of his inner greatness, has risen to the point of its most splendid glory and lapsed into the limbo of tenth-rate things. Every one who really cares for the art of music, and especially the art of opera (of which art music is by far the most important factor), has had ample time and opportunity for making up his mind. It is, therefore, high time to simplify and to cease from elaborating. In this book will be found, I trust, no special pleading, no defence or extenuation, no preposterous eulogy on the one hand, and on the other no vampire work, but a plain and concise attempt to depict the mighty artist as he lived and to describe his artistic achievement as it is. We have all had time to consider and to sort out (so to say) the reams that have been written and printed about Wagner: the bulk of it has had to be thrown on the scrap-heap: what there was of value has, I hope, been utilised.

An author who plans a book on an artist or an artistic question must be wary, especially at the beginning of his adventure. To start away with a theory, whether new or old, and to yield to the seductive temptation to convince humanity of its truth—this is to lay a trap and to take the path that leads straight into it. Theories should be kept for scientific matters. A work proving that parallel straight lines never meet need not land the writer in self-contradictions; and another writer may prove that they must and do meet, and still avoid getting tangled amongst his own arguments. I even read a book once in which it was clearly shown that the earth was flat; and, granted a ludicrous premise, one could but admire the irrefragable logic with which the conclusion was reached. With regard to art, be your premises sound or grotesque, the result is the same—muddle. Logic, science, philosophy, applied to art, spell certain disaster. With mingled pain and amusement I have noted how more than one writer on music, setting out in triumphant high spirits to demonstrate this or that, has before his third chapter demonstrated just the contrary: I have never seen anything else occur.

Wagner wrote so much about himself and his art, and appeared so fully satisfied with his explanations of why he became just what he became and of why his art was just what it was, that naturally for nearly a generation his critics fell into one or other of two errors. Either they accepted his theorisings unreservedly or as unreservedly they rejected them. In the second case they had to face the difficulty of coining, shaping, a theory of their own; in either case shipwreck nearly always promptly ensued; and on the whole, if Wagner had to be theorised about, one would prefer to have it done by Wagner. He himself knew the tiny value of his theorisings about his art, for he declared that when he wrote Tristan and Isolda he found he had already left his theories far behind. This discovery might well have served as a warning both to Wagner and to the hosts of his commentators. Unluckily Wagner was far too fond of theorising, moralising and generally talking of himself and his works, and he reckoned he had a big propagandist work to do; so he went on scribbling to the end. As for the commentators, they neglected the warning and took Wagner's later doings as an example, with the result that the library shelves of Europe are stopped and blocked with as big a heap of rubbish as ever was provoked by great works of art since the world began to turn round. For Wagner there is an ample excuse: he honestly thought it necessary to spread his ideas abroad; his aims and intentions had been so misunderstood, and so stupidly, wickedly, recklessly misrepresented, that he did not believe his music-dramas would ever find acceptance until he had cleared the way by explaining himself. Little good came of it—in fact, the only good result was that some of his writings fell into the hands of Ludwig II of Bavaria, and thus led to the ending of his days of misery, and indirectly to Bayreuth. For the commentators no word of extenuation can be said. Those, perhaps, of the period 1867-77 were justified in pressing their master's claims on the public at large, for the support of the public at large had to be won, and the best way of winning it seemed to lie in advocating those claims, in season and out of season, through the agency of the newspaper-press; but the rest of the herd have proved themselves an unqualified nuisance and a hindrance to a right understanding of Wagner.

This herd I would not willingly join. In the following pages no general theory concerning Wagner will be found. I shall indulge in no theorisings whatever, but stick to the facts, facts which can now be ascertained with certainty. My endeavour will be to tell a plain, unvarnished tale of what Wagner did and of what he suffered, of the environment amidst which he grew up and laboured and struggled: with all that he said and wrote I shall deal as briefly as may be, regarding his endless loquacity of mouth and pen as of interest only when it throws real light on the artist. Least of all shall I waste the reader's patience on the morals that may be drawn from his musical works. The moral to be drawn from his prose works is simply that a man, even a stupendously great man, may write far too much; the moral to be drawn from his musical works every man may find out for himself: for myself, I have found none, any more than I could ever find a moral in a play of Æschylus or Sophocles or Shakespeare.

There are plenty of authorities for the statements now to be made. We have the exhaustive Life by Glasenapp and W. Ashton Ellis; then there is Wagner's own work, My Life, lately translated into English; finally there are the Letters. Many of these are of no interest or value whatever, dealing only with details concerning scores and proof-sheets and petty money matters. Many, on the other hand, notably those to Uhlig, are invaluable to every one who wishes to understand Wagner. Extensive use is made of them in this book, though, as they are easily accessible, I have forborne to quote more than is absolutely necessary. My Life I think but little of, and have not relied greatly on it.

Wagner the reformer will receive no lengthy consideration. He did not "reform" the opera form—the opera form of Mozart and Weber needed no reforming—he simply developed it. He did reform operatic performances by insisting on precision and intelligence in place of slovenliness and stupidity, on enthusiasm for art in place of stolid indifference; and he did as much in the concert-room. I shall not theorize about these matters, but point out what he achieved by making a continuous appeal to indubitable, indisputable facts.

I am indebted to Messrs. H. Grevel & Co. for kind permission to print extracts from Mr. Shedlock's translation of Wagner's Letters, and to Messrs. Novello for similar permission regarding quotations from the libretti of the operas. Two words may be said about the quotations, both words and music, of the operas: in some cases, when I could neither find nor make an adequate translation of verses, I have stuck to the original German; with regard to the music, I have given as little as possible. Both musical and verbal citations are meant for reference—there is only one exception, the Sailors' Song from the opening of Tristan. Catalogues of Wagner's themes have for long been issued by several publishers; but they are of small assistance in helping one to understand Wagner.

J.F.R.

[CHAPTER I]	EARLY LIFE
[CHAPTER II]	EARLY BOYHOOD
[CHAPTER III]	EARLY LIFE (continued)
[CHAPTER IV]	JUVENILE WORKS
[CHAPTER V]	PARIS
[CHAPTER VI]	'RIENZI' AND 'THE FLYING DUTCHMAN'
[CHAPTER VII]	DRESDEN
[CHAPTER VIII]	'TANNHÄUSER'
[CHAPTER IX]	'LOHENGRIN'
[CHAPTER X]	EXILE
[CHAPTER XI]	'TRISTAN AND ISOLDA'
[CHAPTER XII]	'THE MASTERSINGERS OF NUREMBERG'
[CHAPTER XIII]	KING LUDWIG
[CHAPTER XIV]	'THE NIBELUNG'S RING' AND THE RHINEGOLD'
[CHAPTER XV]	'THE VALKYRIE'
[CHAPTER XVI]	'SIEGFRIED'
[CHAPTER XVII]	'THE DUSK OF THE GODS'
[CHAPTER XVIII]	'PARSIFAL'; THE END; THE MAN
[INDEX]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[PORTRAIT OF WAGNER]
(Photogravure)
[WAGNER'S BIRTHPLACE]:
The Sign of the Red And White Lion, on The Brühl, Leipzig
[THE WAGNER THEATRE]
at Bayreuth
[LISZT]
(From life and on stone by N. Hanhart)
[WAGNER]
(From the portrait by A.F. Pecht)
[KING LUDWIG OF BAVARIA]
[WAGNER IN 1877]
[PALAZZO VENDRAMIN CALERGI, VENICE],
where Wagner died, Feb. 13, 1883
[CARL TAUSIG]

CHAPTER I

EARLY LIFE

I

As the springtide of 1813 was melting into early summer the poet and musician of spring days and summer nights was born at the house of the Red and White Lion on the Brühl in old Leipzig. The precise date was May 22; and owing to many causes the 16th of August came round before, at the church of St. Thomas, the child was christened Wilhelm Richard Wagner. The events and circumstances of the period have furnished the imaginative with many striking portents with regard to the future mighty composer; and, to do the prophets full justice, after the event—long after the event—they have widely opened their mouths and uttered prophecies. Thus the name of the house, describing a beast such as never was on sea or land, distinctly warned a drowsy people that the monstrous dragon of Siegfried was about to take the road leading from Nowhere to Bayreuth. The spring foretold the songs in Tannhäuser and the Valkyrie; the summer, the nights in King Mark's Cornish castle-garden and amongst the fragrant lime-trees in the streets of ancient Nuremberg; the horrors of the war raging at the very gates of Leipzig and Napoleon's flight, the advent of the preacher who was to earn a long exile by advising the Saxon soldiers not to shoot their brethren. Events provided material for these and many another score of prognostications: only, fortunately, no one read events rightly at the time, and something fresh was left for the biographers to expend their ingenuity upon.

Richard Wagner came of a German lower middle-class stock. There is not amongst his ancestry a single man distinguished in letters or any art. His uncle Adolph, of whom some Bayreuth gentlemen make much, would not be remembered had he not been Wagner's uncle. Only by patient research has it been discovered that one or more of his forebears could so much as play the organ. His father was an amateur theatrical enthusiast, and he too would have been utterly forgotten had he not been Wagner's father. His stepfather—though this seems hardly to the point—was an actor and portrait-painter; and his one claim to remembrance is that he was Wagner's stepfather. So, however scientifically minded we may be, however strongly disposed to account for the sudden appearance of a stupendous genius by the cheap and easy method of pointing to some distinguished ancestor and talking pompously of the laws of heredity, in Wagner's case we are baffled and beaten. He came like a thunderbolt out of a blue sky. We must be content with the fact that he came. His father and grandfather were state or municipal officials both; and bearing in mind Wagner's frank detestation of officialdom, the scientist can scarcely draw much comfort from that.

The grandfather, Gottlob Friedrich Wagner, was born in 1736, only a few years later than Haydn. In 1769 he married the daughter of a charity-school master or caretaker; and in 1770, the year of Beethoven's birth, his first child, christened Carl Friedrich Wilhelm, was born. Four years later Adolph arrived. Gottlob was a douanier, an exciseman, at the Rannstadt gate of Leipzig, and passed his days, I dare say, as honestly as an exciseman can, in examining incoming travellers to see that they did not bring with them so much as an egg that had not paid duty. He died in 1795. Meantime, Carl Friedrich had received a thoroughly sound education, and he became deputy-registrar to the Leipzig town court. In 1789 he married Johanna Rosina Pätz (whose name, it seems, is susceptible of many spellings).

The scientific mind may after all find consolation in the all-illuminating truth that Friedrich and all his children were more or less passionately addicted to the theatre and attracted by it. It was Friedrich's one hobby; and though Friedrich's brother Adolph had a horror of it, the feeling was not aroused by it as an artistic institution, but as an agency for the intellectual, moral and worldly ruin of young men and women. In his leisure Friedrich arranged dramatic performances and took part in them, and, as amateurs go, he appears to have been highly successful. Histrionic persons were constant guests at his house on the Brühl—amongst them notably one, Ludwig Geyer, who became a fast friend of the family and played an important rôle, off the stage, with regard to that family soon after Richard's birth. Friedrich, during his later years, cannot have had much spare time for amateur theatricals or any other amusement. Napoleon was fighting his last desperate fights against the combined forces of reactionary Europe; all the powers of feudalism had combined to crush an emperor who had no royal blood in his veins; he raged over Germany like an infuriated beast with a genius for military tactics, scattering armies which dispersed only to join together and face him again. While Richard was in his cradle the whole of Saxony was filled with the squalor and misery and loathsome terrors of war. Leipzig was occupied by the French; Marshal Davoust was left there as commandant, with power of life and death, and all the other privileges of a military governor; and in the deputy-registrar of the law-court he found the man for the post of provisional chief of the police "of public safety." Who kept the public safe from the police I am unable to say. Fighting was going on perpetually in the neighbourhood; the dead and dying lay scattered in all directions; the stench bred epidemics more murderous than all Napoleon's cannon. Friedrich must have found his hands full day and night. Richard was baptized on August 16; the following day Napoleon won a victory which cost him dear; the 18th, being Sunday, was observed as such by a soldiery in need of a rest; on the 19th Napoleon was a beaten man, and ran to save his skin past the windows of the house of the Red and White Lion on the Brühl. Richard's mother had been trembling for her own safety and that of her children and husband; but when, as she herself afterwards told, she saw the dreaded conqueror bolt in haste without his hat, she breathed again. Whether she and the family were any better off under the deliverers is a question that does not concern us here: the point is that she thought she was. It was all one to Richard, who, aged three months, slept peacefully on.

After the deliverance Friedrich's work became even heavier than before. The town through its length and breadth was shattered and dilapidated; whole families were homeless and packed like rabbits in hutches; the slaughtered dead, men and beasts, could not be buried quick enough; black death stalked abroad in the guise of what was called hospital typhus—an epidemic fever of some kind. After the French flight, I take it, provisional chief-policeman Wagner had returned to his deputy-registrarship; but his toils were none the lighter for that. He exhausted himself; the appalling fever attacked him and he had no strength to resist it; and he died on November 22, exactly six months after the birth of Richard. Wagner's ill-luck, his wicked fairy, struck her first blow while his age had to be reckoned in months; she went on striking, and never ceased to strike, until he was beginning to grow a little weary and his age was reckoned in decades of years, and in terms of masterpieces accomplished and insults and ill-usage by no means patiently borne. It must have seemed hard to his widowed mother, after the uncertainties and horrors of the last years, that when at last a period of happy peace seemed about to dawn, uncertainties and griefs and worries of a fresh sort should come upon her.

Whether Frau Wagner ever actually drew any pension from the good burghers of Leipzig or the greedy state officials of Saxony seems, when all is said, very uncertain. In such times of stress and struggle great crown officers, laudably anxious about their own interests and the interests of their families, are apt to be rather careless, not to say callous, about the smaller fry. However, pension or no pension, with the aid of relatives and friends the Wagners pulled through. Chief and best amongst the friends was Ludwig Geyer.

A few words must be said about him. Born in 1780, he was ten years Carl Friedrich's junior. An actor who had taken up painting, or a painter who had taken up acting, in both arts he had won at any rate a local reputation. We know what was thought of his histrionic gifts from more or less competent contemporaries; but what to think of his paintings I do not know, for two reasons: I do not trust my own judgment in such a matter, and if I did, I have never seen any of Geyer's work. Of this, however, I am very sure: he cannot have been a good painter unless nature had worked a miracle in sending a good painter to Germany in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. German artists of the period must be classified not as sheep and goats, but as bad goats and worse goats. But if he was not a fine painter he was what is better, or, at any rate, more useful to the rest of human kind, a fine character: a noble, generous, self-sacrificing man. In haste on hearing of Carl Friedrich's death he came from Dresden to attend to the burying of the dead and the nourishing of the living. The details of this first period of Richard's ill-fortune do not amount to a great deal and are unimportant, since our subject is Richard, and his mother, brother and sisters only so far as their lives and characters influenced Richard. Albert, the eldest of the children, was now fourteen years old; he was at the Royal school in Meissen, and there he remained. Rosalie went to dwell with a friend of Geyer's, a lady who lived at Dresden. Louise was adopted by a Frau Hartwig, also at Dresden. Richard in his cradle remained with his mother and the younger members of the tribe in Leipzig.

Wagner's Birthplace

And so presently life began to move on as before, while the dead man slept in his grave. But immediately fresh troubles came. Albert fell dangerously ill and was threatened with a total breakdown of his health; Richard was an ailing infant; and a change in the arrangements of the theatrical company which provided Geyer with a portion of his income compelled him to remain in Dresden continuously. This proved really a stroke of good fortune. Glasenapp, basing his calculations on I know not what authorities or documents, computes that his earnings as an actor at this time came to £156 a year, and there seems every reason to think he was at least fairly well paid for his portraits. It was not enough to be shared between two families, or, we had better say, to be devoted to the up-keep of two homes. He determined rapidly on a bold stroke. That he was in love with Frau Wagner is more than any one can declare with confidence; but she was an amiable, bright woman, a good mother and thrifty housekeeper; and it is likely enough that she had inspired a deep affection in a singularly loving man. After the recovery of Albert the widow had gone for a change to Dresden; and there Geyer resolved to marry her—and resolved quickly; for Carl Friedrich died in November 1813, and early in 1814 the marriage took place. Soon after, the new Frau Geyer returned to Leipzig; then the whole family migrated to Dresden, where Richard was to pass from babyhood into boyhood and spend the first fourteen years of his life.