An incident of this year, 1843, his first at Dresden, to which Wagner referred with pleasure, was the performance of the “Dutchman” at Cassel by Spohr. It was done entirely on its merits, without any solicitation from Wagner, the pleasure being intensified by reason of the ripe age of the conductor and his well-known reverence for the orthodox. Spohr was sixty-nine, and Richard Wagner thirty. Wagner felt and expressed himself as deeply touched at the interest a musician of such opposite tendencies should take in his work, particularly, too, on receiving later a letter from Spohr expressing the delight he experienced on making the acquaintance of a young artist who showed in all he did such earnestness and striving after truth. When Wagner related this to me, wondering at the curious contradiction in Spohr’s character, I remarked that the solution seemed to lie in the gentle, almost effeminate nature of Spohr, which found its completion in the robust, manly vigour of Wagner’s own conceptions.
How Spohr could have been attracted by Wagner, and repulsed by the “last period” of Beethoven, is a contradiction difficult to account for; but that it existed is beyond doubt, for the last time he was in London, about 1850-51, I put the question direct to him whether it was true, as asserted, that he had stigmatized the third period of Beethoven as “barbarous music,” to which he promptly and emphatically replied, “Yes, I do think it barbarous music.” After the performance at Cassel, Wagner endeavoured to get the “Dutchman” accepted elsewhere, but signally failed; from Munich, where a quarter of a century later he was to be the ruling spirit, came the discouraging response that “it was not German enough,” though the composer thought this its distinguishing merit.
HIS PECULIAR DRESS.
The acrimoniously bitter attacks that were made upon Wagner, during his first year at Dresden, increased in poignancy, as he showed himself uncontrolled by custom’s laws. He affected a careless, defiant attitude towards all criticism, whereas he was abnormally sensitive to journalistic opinion. He could scoff, play the cynic, treat his opponent with derisive scorn, but it was all simulated; the iron entered into his soul, and he chafed and grew irritable under it. It was as though he suffered a bodily castigation. He brooded over the attacks, and there can be no doubt that they caused him moments of acute pain. It is true that in combat he could parry and thrust with as much vigour as his opponents; that the sting of his reproof was as torturing as any he suffered; perhaps even that his assaults were more annihilating than the occasion demanded; yet with it all, though he emerged from the contest victorious, he suffered deeply, acutely. There can be no doubt that the genesis of this hostile criticism was directed more against the man than his art work, and that wounded personality played an important part in it. Richard Wagner was seen to be a man of artistic taste, with proclivities which were exhibited in his domestic surroundings, novel, perhaps, to the somewhat heavy Dresdenites. First, Wagner’s attire was different from that of the ordinary individual. He persisted in wearing in the house a velvet dressing-gown and a biretta, truly an uncommon head-gear. His apartments were asserted to be upholstered luxuriously. And in these things the art critics (?) saw a target for ridicule and sarcasm. Now that his apartments were furnished in a costly manner is absolutely untrue. Wagner had a keen appreciation of the beautiful, and loved tasty decoration, but it was secured at the minimum of cost. The thrifty Minna contrived and invented, to gratify Wagner’s fancies, at an outlay which does credit to German thrift. And yet there were found Dresden journals that went so far as to discuss his mode of living, attributing all the apparent extravagance to gratification of an over-rated self-esteem, the appeasing of an inordinate vanity.
A year of vexation! a year of consolidation was 1844! From Wagner I have often heard it: “My failures were the stepping-stones to success”; and this year, when the hot blood of ambition coursed violently through his youthful veins, when he aimed as high as the heavens, and met with failures everywhere, when directors of German opera houses returned his scores “unopened” or pronounced them unripe and lacking in melody, truly, it was an epoch of bitter disappointment. Attacked relentlessly by journalistic hacks, imbued with the bitter feeling that he was the rejected of his countrymen; that for him there was not a glimmer of hope of success on the German stage, and yet convinced of his own exceptional gifts, and the living truth of the mission he was destined to accomplish, he, broken down in spirit, angered with the world, and fractious with himself, retired from all intercourse with his fellow-men, shunned society as the plague, appeared at the Dresden theatre only when absolutely necessary, and went into seclusion, accessible to none except August Roeckel. Of this gloomy period, and the devotion of his friend, Wagner has left it on record. “I left the world, retired from public life, and lived in the closest communion with one intimate companion only, one friend, who was so full of sympathy for me, so wholly engrossed in my artistic development, that he ignored his own unquestioned talents, artistic instinct, and inventive powers, and cast to the winds his own chances of worldly success. This companion of my gloom was Roeckel.” In referring to his friend’s self-abnegation, Wagner evidently alludes to Roeckel’s opera, “Farinelli,” which the composer had withdrawn from the Dresden repertoire through excess of modesty, over-awed, as he was, by his conception of Richard Wagner’s genius.
HE PRODUCES “ARMIDE.”
This tribute to the constancy and humble workship of August Roeckel is not a whit too much. Roeckel idolized Wagner. The two men were the complement of each other; whilst the vivacious imagination of Wagner inspired admiration in Roeckel, the latter’s placid, closely-reasoned logic soothed the excitable poet-musician. All Roeckel’s letters to me of this period—and he was an excellent correspondent—might be summed up in the word “Wagner.” The minutest incidents of work and details of their conversations are related. This poor Roeckel suffered thirteen years imprisonment, from May, 1849, when his friend Wagner escaped. At the termination of his confinement, the two friends met with a warmth of affection difficult to describe. Seeing, then, the intimacy of the men during this year of retirement, it is the letters of August Roeckel which will supply the faithfullest record of Wagner’s life and work.
He tells me that Wagner spoke of himself as “one crying in the desert.” But few sympathized with him, his breaking away from the “Rienzi” period being frowned upon, but that through all disappointment Wagner’s inexhaustible animal spirits never left him. The following letter is dated March, 1844:—
Wagner has returned from Berlin, very morose in temper; the “Flying Dutchman” did not touch the scoffing Berliners, who certainly have less poetical feeling than most Germans; they only saw in Schroeder-Devrient a star, and in the touching drama an opera like other operas; yet they pose as profound art critics. Bah! they are simply stupid!
Since then we have had “Hans Heiling” and “Vampyr.” Wagner thinks much of Marschner’s natural gifts, but finds that his general intelligence is not on a level with his musical gifts, and that this is often painfully evident in his recourse to commonplace padding.... I wish you could have witnessed the work of the old Gluck “Armide,” most tenderly cared for by Wagner. I doubt that it ever was rendered with such reverence,—nay, not even in Paris. We have also had what Wagner considers the masterwork of Mendelssohn, “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with which he also took considerable pains, although fully aware of the composer’s unfriendly feeling towards himself.