From November, 1857, to May, 1858, Wagner set to music the five poems of Mathilde, veritable sketches for Tristan. Early in September, 1857, the relations between Minna and Mathilde had become strained. Wagner accused his wife of abusing Mathilde in a vulgar manner; worse remained; he had sent a letter by the gardener to Frau Wesendonk and the jealous wife intercepted it, broke the seal, read the contents. To Wagner, this was the blackest of crimes; yet can you blame her? To be sure, she had no conception of her husband's genius. For her Rienzi was his only work. Had it not succeeded? So had Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, also The Flying Dutchman, but Rienzi was her darling. How often she begged him to write another opera of the same Wagnerian calibre he has not failed to tell us. Otto Wesendonk's wife she firmly believed was leading him into a quagmire. What theatre could ever produce The Ring? One thing, however, Minna did not do, as most writers on the subject say she did: she did not show the fatal letter to Wesendonk at the time, but only to Wagner. Later she made its meanings clear to the injured husband, which no doubt provoked the explosive phrase quoted above.
The youthful Karl Tausig, bearing credentials from Liszt, appeared on the scene in May, 1858, and the entire household was soon in an uproar. Luckily, Wagner had persuaded Minna to take a cold-water cure at a sanatorium some distance from Zurich, so he could handle the wild-eyed Tausig, whose volcanic piano performances at the age of sixteen made the mature composer both wonder and admire. Tausig smoked black cigars, a trait he imitated from Liszt, and almost lived on coffee. Here is a curious criticism of him made by Cosima Von Bülow, who, it must be remembered, was both the daughter and wife of famous pianists. She said: "Tausig has no touch, no individuality; he is a caricature of Liszt." This, in the light of Tausig's subsequent artistic career, sounds almost comical; it also shows the intensely one-sided temperament of a remarkable woman, who banished from her life both von Bülow and her father, Franz Liszt, when Wagner entered into her dreams. The fortitude she displayed after her Richard's death in 1883 was not tempered by any human feeling toward her father. His telegrams were unanswered. She denied herself to him. She became a Brünnhilde frozen into a symbol of intolerable grief.
Of her personal fascination the sister of Nietzsche, Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, told me, when I last saw her at Weimar. Von Bülow succumbed to this charm; Rubinstein also (query: perhaps that is the reason he so savagely abused Wagner in his Conversations on Music?), and, if gossip doesn't lie, Nietzsche was another victim.
On September 17, 1858, after a general row, Wagner left his home on the green hill, his "Asyl," for ever. Why? Plenty of conjectures, no definite statements. He makes a great show of frankness in his diaries, in his autobiography; but they were obviously "edited" by Baireuth. Tristan and Isolde remains as evidence that a mighty emotion had transfigured the nature of a genius, and instead of an erotic anecdote the world of art is richer in the possession of a moving drama of desire and woe and tragedy. At the Berlin premiere of Tristan the old Kaiser Wilhelm remarked: "How Wagner must have loved when he wrote the work;" which is sound psychology.
III
The two books discussed are constructive in nature; not so the book by Emil Ludwig, Wagner, or the Disenchanted, which is frankly destructive. Since The Wagner Case by Nietzsche—and not Nietzsche at his best—there has not been written a book so overflowing with hatred for Wagner, the man as well as the musician. Ludwig is the author of poems, plays, and a study of Bismarck, the latter a noteworthy achievement. He is thorough in his attacks, though he does not measure up to Ernest Newman in his analysis of Wagner's poetry, libretti, and philosophy. The English critic's studies remain the best of its kind, because it is written without parti-pris.
Ludwig slashes à la Nietzsche, though he cannot boast that poet's diamantine style. He accuses Wagner of being paroxysmal, erotic—a painter of moods; he couldn't build a Greek temple like Beethoven—weak as a poet, inconclusive as a musician. For Tristan and Die Meistersinger he has words of hearty praise. The Ludwig book stirred up a nest of hornets, and one lawsuit resulted. A newspaper critic presumed to criticise, and the sensitive poet, who calls Wagner every bad name in the Schimpf Lexicon, invoked the aid of the law. We know only too well, thanks to that ill-tasting but engrossing autobiography, that Wagner was a monster of ingratitude. Hasn't Nietzsche, against his own natural feeling, proclaimed the futility of gratitude? Perhaps he learned this lesson from his hard experience with Wagner. We also know that Wagner wanted to run the universe, but after a brief note from Ludwig II he left Munich rather than face the angry burghers.
He attempted to coerce Bismarck, but there he ran up against a wall of granite. Bismarck was a Beethoven lover, and he abhorred, as did Von Beust, revolutionists. Thereat Wagner wrote sarcastic things about the uselessness and vanity of statesmen. He didn't treat Ludwig II right when he announced from Venice that he wasn't in sufficient health and spirits to grant the King's request for a performance of the prelude to Lohengrin in a darkened theatre with one listener, Ludwig II. (By the way, Ludwig II never sat through a performance alone of Parsifal. Once and once only, years before the completion of the work, he heard a performance of the prelude in Munich given for his sole benefit.) Wagner's gruff letter wounded the sensitive idealist. In 1866, a few weeks after the death of Minna Wagner-Planer, Cosima von Bülow-Liszt followed Wagner to Switzerland. Probably the hostile attitude of Liszt in the affair was largely inspired by the fact that when Richard and Cosima married, the latter abjured Catholicism and became a Protestant. Liszt, a religious man (despite his pyrotechnical virtuosity in the luxurious region of sentiment), never could reconcile himself to this defection on the part of a beloved child.