My Life — Volume 1

by Richard Wagner

However that may have been, the bitterness I now experienced wrought a decisive effect upon my feelings. Not only did I relinquish all hope of a reconciliation with the theatre authorities by a splendid production of my Lohengrin, but I determined to turn my back for ever on the theatre, and to make no further attempt to meddle with its concerns. By this act I expressed not merely my utter indifference as to whether I kept my position as musical conductor or no, but my artistic ambitions also entirely cut me off from all possibility of ever cultivating modern theatrical conditions again.

I at once proceeded to execute my long-cherished plans for Siegfried’s Tod, which I had been half afraid of before. In this work I no longer gave a thought to the Dresden or any other court theatre in the world; my sole preoccupation was to produce something that should free me, once and for all, from this irrational subservience. As I could get nothing more from Röckel in this connection, I now corresponded exclusively with Eduard Devrient on matters connected with the theatre and dramatic art. When, on the completion of my poem, I read it to him, he listened with amazement, and at once realised the fact that such a production would be an absolute drug in the modern theatrical market, and he naturally could not agree to let it remain so. On the other hand, he tried so far to reconcile himself to my work as to try and make it less startling and more adapted for actual production. He proved the sincerity of his intentions by pointing out my error in asking too much of the public, and requiring it to supply from its own knowledge many things necessary for a right under-standing of my subject-matter, at which I had only hinted in brief and scattered suggestions. He showed me, for instance, that before Siegfried and Brunhilda are displayed in a position of bitter hostility towards each other, they ought first to have been presented in their true and calmer relationship. I had, in fact, opened the poem of SIEGFRIED’S TOD with those scenes which now form the first act of the GOTTERDAMMERUNG. The details of Siegfried’s relation to Brunhilda had been merely outlined to the listeners in a lyrico-episodical dialogue between the hero’s wife, whom he had left behind in solitude, and a crowd of Valkyries passing before her rock. To my great joy, Devrient’s hint on this point directed my thoughts to those scenes which I afterwards worked out in the prologue of this drama.

This and other matters of a similar nature brought me into intimate contact with Eduard Devrient, and made our intercourse much more lively and pleasant. He often invited a select circle of friends to attend dramatic readings at his house in which I gladly took part, for I found, to my surprise, that his gift for declamation, which quite forsook him on the stage, here stood out in strong relief. It was, moreover, a consolation to pour into a sympathetic ear my worries about my growing unpopularity with the director. Devrient seemed particularly anxious to prevent a definite breach; but of this there was little hope. With the approach of winter the court had returned to town, and once more frequented the theatre, and various signs of dissatisfaction in high quarters with my behaviour as conductor began to be manifested. On one occasion the Queen thought that I had conducted NORMA badly, and on another that I ‘had taken the time wrongly’ in ROBERT THE DEVIL. As Luettichau had to communicate these reprimands to me, it was natural that our intercourse at such times should hardly be of a nature to restore our mutual satisfaction with each other.

Notwithstanding all this, it still seemed possible to prevent matters from coming to a crisis, though everything continued in a state of agitating uncertainty and fermentation. At all events the forces of reaction, which were holding themselves in readiness on every side, were not yet sufficiently certain that the hour of their triumph had come as not to consider it advisable for the present, at least, to avoid all provocation. Consequently our management did not meddle with the musicians of the royal orchestra, who, in obedience to the spirit of the times, had formed a union for debate and the protection of their artistic and civic interests. In this matter one of our youngest musicians, Theodor Uhlig, had been particularly active. He was a young man, still in his early twenties, and was a violinist in the orchestra. His face was strikingly mild, intelligent and noble, and he was conspicuous among his fellows on account of his great seriousness and his quiet but unusually firm character. He had particularly attracted my notice on several occasions by his quick insight and extensive knowledge of music. As I recognised in him a spirit keenly alert in every direction, and unusually eager for culture, it was not long before I chose him as my companion in my regular walks—a habit I still continued to cultivate—and on which Roeckel had hitherto accompanied me. He induced me to come to a meeting of this union of the orchestral company, in order that I might form an opinion about it, and encourage and support so praiseworthy a movement. On this occasion I communicated to its members the contents of my memorandum to the director, which had been rejected a year before, and in which I had made suggestions for reforms in the band, and I also explained further intentions and plans arising therefrom. At the same time I was obliged to confess that I had lost all hope of carrying out any projects of the kind through the general management, and must therefore recommend them to take the initiative vigorously into their own hands. They acclaimed the idea with enthusiastic approval. Although, as I have said before, Luettichau left these musicians unmolested in their more or less democratic union, yet he took care to be informed through spies of what took place at their highly treasonable gatherings. His chief instrument was a bugler named Lewy, who, much to the disgust of all his comrades in the orchestra, was in particularly high favour with the director. He consequently received precise, or rather exaggerated, accounts of my appearance there, and thought it was now high time to let me once more feel the weight of his authority. I was officially summoned to his presence, and had to listen to a long and wrathful tirade which he had been bottling up for some time about several matters. I also learned that he knew all about the plan of theatre reform which I had laid before the ministry. This knowledge he betrayed in a popular Dresden phrase, which until then I had never heard; he knew very well, he said, that in a memorandum respecting the theatre I had ‘made him look ridiculous’ (ihm an den Laden gelegt). In answer to this I did not refrain from telling him how I intended to act in retaliation, and when he threatened to report me to the King and demand my dismissal, I calmly replied that he might do as he pleased, as I was well assured that I could rely on his Majesty’s justice to hear, not only his charges, but also my defence. Moreover, I added, this was the only befitting manner for me to discuss with the King the many points on which I had to complain, not only in my own interests, but also in those of the theatre and of art. This was not pleasant hearing for Lüttichau, and he asked how it was possible for him to try and co-operate with me, when I for my part had openly declared (to use his own expression) that all labour was wasted upon him (Hopfen und Malz verloren seien). We had at last to part with mutual shruggings of the shoulder. My conduct seemed to trouble my former patron, and he therefore enlisted the tact and moderation of Eduard Devrient in his service, and asked him to use his influence with me to facilitate some further arrangement between us. But, in spite of all his zeal, Devrient had to admit with a smile, after we had discussed his message, that nothing much could be done; and as I persisted in my refusal to meet the director again in consultation respecting the service of the theatre, he had at last to recognise that his own wisdom would have to help him out of the difficulty.

Throughout the whole period during which I was fated to fill the post of conductor at Dresden, the effects of this dislike on the part of the court and the director continued to make themselves felt in everything. The orchestral concerts, which had been organised by me in the previous winter, were this year placed under Reissiger’s control, and at once sank to the usual level of ordinary concerts. Public interest quickly waned, and the undertaking could only with difficulty be kept alive. In opera I was unable to carry out the proposed revival of the Fliegender Holländer, for which I had found in Mitterwurzer’s maturer talent an admirable and promising exponent. My niece Johanna, whom I had destined for the part of Senta, did not like the role, because it offered little opportunity for splendid costumes. She preferred ZAMPA and FAVORITA, partly to please her new protector, my erstwhile RIENZI enthusiast, Tichatschck, partly for the sake of THREE BRILLIANT COSTUMES which the management had to furnish for each of these parts. In fact, these two ringleaders of the Dresden opera of that day had formed an alliance of rebellion against my vigorous rule in the matter of operatic repertoire. Their opposition, to my great discomfiture, was crowned by success when they secured the production of this FAVORITA of Donizetti’s, the arrangement of which I had once been obliged to undertake for Schlesinger in Paris. I had at first emphatically refused to have anything to do with this opera, although its principal part suited my niece’s voice admirably, even in her father’s judgment. But now that they knew of my feud with the director, and of my voluntary loss of influence, and finally of my evident disgrace, they thought the opportunity ripe for compelling me to conduct this tiresome work myself, as it happened to be my turn.

Besides this, my chief occupation at the royal theatre during this period consisted in conducting Flotow’s opera MARTHA, which, although it failed to attract the public, was nevertheless produced with excessive frequency, owing to its convenient cast. On reviewing the results of my labours in Dresden—where I had now been nearly seven years—I could not help feeling humiliated when I considered the powerful and energetic impetus I knew I had given in many directions to the court theatre, and I found myself obliged to confess that, were I now to leave Dresden, not, the smallest trace of my influence would remain behind. From various signs I also gathered that, if ever it should come to a trial before the King between the director and myself, even if his Majesty were in my favour, yet out of consideration for the courtier the verdict would go against me.

Nevertheless, on Palm Sunday of the new year, 1849, I received ample amends. In order to ensure liberal receipts, our orchestra had again decided to produce Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Every one did his utmost to make this one of our finest performances, and the public took up the matter with real enthusiasm. Michael Bakunin, unknown to the police, had been present at the public rehearsal. At its close he walked unhesitatingly up to me in the orchestra, and said in a loud voice, that if all the music that had ever been written were lost in the expected world-wide conflagration, we must pledge ourselves to rescue this symphony, even at the peril of our lives. Not many weeks after this performance it really seemed as though this world-wide conflagration would actually be kindled in the streets of Dresden, and that Bakunin, with whom I had meanwhile become more closely associated through strange and unusual circumstances, would undertake the office of chief stoker.

It was long before this date that I first made the acquaintance of this most remarkable man. For years I had come across his name in the newspapers, and always under extraordinary circumstances. He turned up in Paris at a Polish gathering, but although he was a Russian, he declared that it mattered little whether a man were a Russian or a Pole, so long as he wanted to be a free man, and that this was all that mattered. I heard afterwards, through George Herwegh, that he had renounced all his sources of income as a member of an influential Russian family, and that one day, when his entire fortune consisted of two francs, he had given them away to a beggar on the boulevard, because it was irksome to him to be bound by this possession to take any thought for the morrow. I was informed of his presence in Dresden one day by Röckel, after the latter had become a rampant republican. He had taken the Russian into his house, and invited me to come and make his acquaintance. Bakunin was at that time being persecuted by the Austrian government for his share in the events which took place in Prague in the summer of 1848, and because he was a member of the Slav Congress which had preceded them. He had consequently sought refuge in our city, as he did not wish to settle too far from the Bohemian frontier. The extraordinary sensation he had created in Prague arose from the fact that, when the Czechs sought the protection of Russia against the dreaded Germanising policy of Austria, he conjured them to defend themselves with fire and sword against those very Russians, and indeed against any other people who lived under the rule of a despotism like that of the Tsars. This superficial acquaintance with Balumin’s aims had sufficed to change the purely national prejudices of the Germans against him into sympathy. When I met him, therefore, under the humble shelter of Röckel’s roof, I was immediately struck by his singular and altogether imposing personality. He was in the full bloom of manhood, anywhere between thirty and forty years of age. Everything about him was colossal, and he was full of a primitive exuberance and strength. I never gathered that he set much store by my acquaintance. Indeed, he did not seem to care for merely intellectual men; what he demanded was men of reckless energy. As I afterwards perceived, theory in this case had more weight with him than purely personal sentiment; and he talked much and expatiated freely on the matter. His general mode of discussion was the Socratic method, and he seemed quite at his ease when, stretched on his host’s hard sofa, he could argue discursively with a crowd of all sorts of men on the problems of revolution. On these occasions he invariably got the best of the argument. It was impossible to triumph against his opinions, stated as they were with the utmost conviction, and overstepping in every direction even the extremest bounds of radicalism. So communicative was he, that on the very first evening of our meeting he gave me full details about the various stages of his development, he was a Russian officer of high birth, but smarting under the yoke of the narrowest martial tyranny, he had been led by a study of Rousseau’s writings to escape to Germany under pretence of taking furlough. In Berlin he had flung himself into the study of philosophy with all the zest of a barbarian newly awakened to civilisation. Hegel’s philosophy was the one which was the rage at that moment, and he soon became such an expert in it, that he had been able to hurl that master’s most famous disciples from the saddle of their own philosophy, in a thesis couched in terms of the strictest Hegelian dialectic. After he had got philosophy off his chest, as he expressed it, he proceeded to Switzerland, where he preached communism, and thence wandered over France and Germany back to the borderland of the Slav world, from which quarter he looked for the regeneration of humanity, because the Slavs had been less enervated by civilisation. His hopes in this respect were centred in the more strongly pronounced Slav type characteristic of the Russian peasant class. In the natural detestation of the Russian serf for his cruel oppressor the nobleman, he believed he could trace a substratum of simple-minded brotherly love, and that instinct which leads animals to hate the men who hunt them. In support of this idea he cited the childish, almost demoniac delight of the Russian people in fire, a quality on which Rostopschin calculated in his strategic burning of Moscow. He argued that all that was necessary to set in motion a world-wide movement was to convince the Russian peasant, in whom the natural goodness of oppressed human nature had preserved its most childlike characteristics, that it was perfectly right and well pleasing to God for them to burn their lords’ castles, with everything in and about them. The least that could result from such a movement would be the destruction of all those things which, rightly considered, must appear, even to Europe’s most philosophical thinkers, the real source of all the misery of the modern world. To set these destructive forces in action appeared to him the only object worthy of a sensible man’s activity. (Even while he was preaching these horrible doctrines, Bakunin, noticing that my eyes troubled me, shielded them with his outstretched hand from the naked light for a full hour, in spite of my protestations.) This annihilation of all civilisation was the goal upon which his heart was set. Meanwhile it amused him to utilise every lever of political agitation he could lay hands on for the advancement of this aim, and in so doing he often found cause for ironical merriment. In his retreat he received people belonging to every shade of revolutionary thought. Nearest to him stood those of Slav nationality, because these, he thought, would be the most convenient and effective weapons he could use in the uprooting of Russian despotism. In spite of their republic and their socialism a la Proudhon, he thought nothing of the French, and as for the Germans, he never mentioned them to me. Democracy, republicanism, and anything else of the kind he regarded as unworthy of serious consideration.

Every objection raised by those who had the slightest wish to reconstruct what had been demolished, he met with overwhelming criticism. I well remember on one occasion that a Pole, startled by his theories, maintained that there must be an organised state to guarantee the individual in the possession of the fields he had cultivated. ‘What!’ he answered; ‘would you carefully fence in your field to provide a livelihood for the police again!’ This shut the mouth of the terrified Pole. He comforted himself by saying that the creators of the new order of things would arise of themselves, but that our sole business in the meantime was to find the power to destroy. Was any one of us so mad as to fancy that he would survive the desired destruction? We ought to imagine the whole of Europe with St. Petersburg, Paris, and London transformed into a vast rubbish-heap. How could we expect the kindlers of such a fire to retain any consciousness after so vast a devastation? He used to puzzle any who professed their readiness for self-sacrifice by telling them it was not the so-called tyrants who were so obnoxious, but the smug Philistines. As a type of these he pointed to a Protestant parson, and declared that he would not believe he had really reached the full stature of a man until he saw him commit his own parsonage, with his wife and child, to the flames.

I was all the more perplexed for a while, in the face of such dreadful ideas, by the fact that Bakunin in other respects proved a really amiable and tender-hearted man. He was fully alive to my own anxiety and despair with regard to the risk I ran of forever destroying my ideals and hopes for the future of art. It is true, he declined to receive any further instruction concerning these artistic schemes, and would not even look at my work on the Nibelungen saga. I had just then been inspired by a study of the Gospels to conceive the plan of a tragedy for the ideal stage of the future, entitled Jesus of Nazareth. Bakunin begged me to spare him any details; and when I sought to win him over to my project by a few verbal hints, he wished me luck, but insisted that I must at all costs make Jesus appear as a weak character. As for the music of the piece, he advised me, amid all the variations, to use only one set of phrases, namely: for the tenor, ‘Off with His head!’; for the soprano, ‘Hang Him!’; and for the basso continuo, ‘Fire! fire!’ And yet I felt more sympathetically drawn towards this prodigy of a man when I one day induced him to hear me play and sing the first scenes of my Fliegender Holländer. After listening with more attention than most people gave, he exclaimed, during a momentary pause, ‘That is stupendously fine!’ and wanted to hear more.