Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

These are surely very flimsy foundations on which to erect a theory that Wagner was a Jew. It is, of course, not impossible: nothing is impossible in this world. One of the rumours afloat is that Wagner himself, in private, spoke of Geyer as being his father. Again proof or disproof is impossible; though Mrs. Burrell gives a facsimile of a letter from Wagner of the 23rd October 1872 (sending Feustel a certificate of baptism), in which he goes out of his way to call himself "Polizei-Amts-Actuarius-Sohn" (Police-actuary's son).

Another branch of the argument is that Wagner was typically Jewish in appearance. I question whether that theory would ever have gained currency except for the back-stairs gossip with regard to his supposed paternity. It has long been a puzzle to the present writer to discover what there is particularly Jewish in Wagner's face. It is true that his nose was large and to some extent aquiline; but it is certainly not the nose that we are accustomed to regard as typically Jewish. The portraits of Geyer that we possess do not show a physiognomy that anybody would call peculiarly Hebraic. On the other hand, Wagner's mother had a nose not only very prominent and curved like Wagner's, but suggesting a Jewish origin far more than either his or Geyer's. For the rest there is nothing whatever in Wagner's face that could lead anyone to think he was a Jew. Let us take Sir Charles Stanford's own test. He remarks that "no one who had known Brahms, especially in his later years, when the Jewish type, if it exists in the blood, is most accentuated, could fail to see that in face, in complexion, in hair and in gait he was a pure Teuton, without a trace of Eastern relationship or characteristics." Let us admit, for the sake of argument, that it is in a man's later years that Jewish characteristics in the blood show themselves most markedly in the face. Now Wagner, so far from looking more Jewish in his maturity and old age, looked decidedly less Jewish. In some of the later full-faced portraits, indeed, the face bears an extraordinary resemblance to that of Mr. Asquith. Some people would call it a very English face. And what of the other members of the Wagner family? We have portraits of his uncle Adolf (1774-1835) and his brother Albert (the latter was born fourteen years before Wagner, and long before Geyer comes into the story). But these faces are unmistakably of the same general cast as Wagner's: that of Albert, indeed, is almost exactly the face of Wagner, but without the genius. The bust of Adolf Wagner shows a nose, forehead, and other features very like those of Richard. The chin is not so pronounced, but the two faces are incontestably of the same type. According to Frau Rose, the daughter of Carl Friedrich Wagner's friend, Gustav Zocher, Wagner's father "was small and slightly crooked, but had a fine face." "I have often thought," says Mrs. Burrell, to whom Frau Rose made this communication, "in looking at Wagner, that he had a narrow escape of deformity; he was not in the least deformed, yet the immense head was poised on the shoulders at the angle peculiar to hunchbacks." The mother also was tiny and eccentric, with "an electric disposition." No judge and jury would say on this evidence that there was any reason whatever to doubt the German paternity of Wagner and assume the Jewish.

There are one or two facts, however, that must be taken into consideration on the other side. Why should Geyer, a struggling artist, be so willing to assume the burden of the widow Wagner and her seven young children? A man of the highest character and the warmest heart he certainly was: are these sufficient explanation of his chivalrous conduct? We have letters of his to Frau Wagner during the weeks that immediately followed the husband's death. The tone of them is warm, but friendly and sympathetic rather than loving. He generally addresses her simply as "Friend," or "Dear Friend." His goodness of heart is shown by such remarks as that à propos of the recovery of the little Albert from illness: "I have indeed felt sincerely with you in your terrible experience, for if Albert were my own son he could not be nearer to my heart." There is not a line in the letters that shows any more affection for Richard than for Albert; the latter, indeed, is mentioned the more frequently. Yet some suspicion clusters round a fact that cannot be discovered from the ordinary biographies of Wagner. The date of the marriage of Johanna Wagner and Geyer is not generally known; it cannot be found, for example, in Glasenapp's big official life of Wagner; while in other biographies the date is variously given as from one month to two or three years after Carl Friedrich's death. The marriage is now known to have taken place in August 1814—on the 14th according to Otto Bournot, on the 28th according to Mrs. Burrell;[411] and a daughter, Cäcilie, was born to them on the 26th February 1815,—i.e. six months later. This fact must necessarily count somewhat in our estimate of the nature of the earlier relations between Geyer and Frau Wagner.

On the whole the weight of external evidence is against the theory that Geyer was Wagner's father: the facial resemblances between Richard, his brother Albert, his sister Ottilie (born 14th March 1811), and his uncle Adolf, and Frau Rose's testimony as to the size and appearance of the police actuary, Carl Friedrich, make it more than probable that the last was the composer's father. But the explicit statements of Nietzsche and Mottl cannot be disregarded. The question of their veracity, however, could very easily be settled. There must be more than a dozen of the early copies of Mein Leben in existence. Mrs. Burrell, who seems to have spent a life-time and a fortune in accumulating Wagner letters and documents,[412] actually managed to buy a copy of this privately printed edition. One gathers that she knew Wagner and Cosima, and had evidently small liking for the latter. She appears to have been horrified by the picture Wagner gives of himself and his friends, and at the many evasions, suppressions and distortions of the truth in the work. "This unmentionable book," she calls it in one place. She doubts whether Wagner wrote it, and hints that it has really been pieced together—presumably by Cosima: "To the well-informed and candid mind the book cannot fail to give the impression of being written up after conversations; the exact words are not remembered, and the writer unconsciously imparts another stamp to the language; it is not the German of a German," which is an obvious side-blow at the Franco-Hungarian-Jewish Cosima. "The easily proved inaccuracies are legion...." "The unmistakable purpose of the book is to ruin the reputation of everyone connected with Wagner.... I maintain that Wagner consented under pressure to the book being put together, that he yielded to the temptation of allowing everyone else's character to be blackened in order to make his own great fault [apparently his conduct towards von Bülow] pale before the iniquities, real or invented, of others.... The poet who wrote the pure and impassioned poems of which Senta and Elsa are the heroines could never have conceived so flat and prosaic a plan of revenge upon everyone that had ever annoyed or thwarted him, yes, and worse still, upon many who had benefited and befriended him." She concludes that "Richard Wagner is not responsible for the book."

These remarks are interesting as showing the disgust felt by one who knew something of Wagner at the many basenesses perpetrated in Mein Leben—a disgust that thousands of readers have felt since the publication of the book. There may be something in Mrs. Burrell's theory as to how the work was put together; but Wagner undoubtedly assumed full responsibility for it, as is shown by the letter of his to the printer, Bonfantini, Basel (1st July 1870), of which Mrs. Burrell gives a facsimile: he is having fifteen copies printed "dans le seul but d'éviter la perte possible du seul manuscrit, et de les remettre entre les mains d'amis fidèles et [conscientieux?] qui les doivent garder pour un avenir lointain" ("with the object simply of guarding against the possible loss of the sole manuscript, and of placing the copies in the hands of faithful and [conscientious?] friends, who should keep them for a distant future"). But Mrs. Burrell is generally right in her facts, and there may be something more than mere conjecture in her hint that the book, so far as its actual composition is concerned, is Cosima's work at least as much as Wagner's. This would account, among other things, for the tone of enmity or contempt towards almost everyone who had come into his life before herself. But the point with which we are most closely concerned here is not how Mein Leben came to be written, but what it contains on the first page. The copies that Nietzsche and Mottl saw belonged to the same imprint as Mrs. Burrell's copy. This last must still be in existence somewhere. If the possessor would allow an inspection of it, it could be settled once for all whether the first page opens with the words "I am the son of Ludwig Geyer," or "My father, Friedrich Wagner...." If Mottl was speaking the truth, there is an end of the matter—except that our last remaining shred of respect for the editorial probity of Wahnfried will be gone. If Mottl was deceiving himself and others, we can only fall back on a balance of the evidence I have tried to marshal in the preceding pages.

A touch of unconscious humour has been given to the situation by a recent book of Otto Bournot, Ludwig Heinrich Christian [strange name this for a Jew!] Geyer, der Stiefvater Richard Wagners. Bournot has delved with Teutonic thoroughness into the records of the Geyer family, has traced it back to 1700, in which year one Benjamin Geyer was a "town musician" in Eisleben, and has established the piquant facts that all the Geyers were of the evangelical faith, that most of them were Protestant church organists, and that all of them married maidens of unimpeachable German extraction. It makes one smile to find how many of these alleged Jews had "Christian" as one of their forenames, as Wagner's putative father had. Even, therefore, if it should be proved at some time or other that Geyer was Richard Wagner's real father, this can only bring with it the admission that the amount of Jewish blood in the composer's veins must have been negligibly small. At the worst he was much more of a German than, say, a semi-Dutchman like Beethoven; much more German than the present English royal family is English; and Bournot is therefore justified in holding that in the last resort the question of Wagner's paternity cannot affect the "national" quality of the work of Bayreuth.

FOOTNOTES:

[411] Mrs. Burrell tells us that the Saxon law forbade a woman to marry again until ten months after the death of her husband. This apparently means "in the tenth month" for only nine full months had elapsed between 22nd November 1813 and the 28th August 1814.

[412] She compiled a biography of him covering the years 1813-1834, which was published in sumptuous form in 1898, after her death. Only one hundred copies were printed, or rather engraved. The book may be seen in the British Museum.