In due time Minna arrived in Zurich only to begin to combat her husband's artistic inclinations. He was eager to write "The Death of Siegfried." She urged him to abandon his unprofitable ideals, and to write for Paris the sort of opera that Paris would like. For Minna was ashamed of living on the charity of friends, and for that we cannot blame her. Nor can we even yet bring ourselves quite into agreement with Wagner in the belief that the world ought to take care of him while he was creating his immortal works. Yet there was something large and genial in the conception. The man felt the power that was in him, and he refused to stifle it in order that he might discharge the simple duties of a plain citizen and support himself and his family at the sacrifice of his future, and the future of his art.
It was to this struggle between himself and his own desires on the one hand and his wife and Liszt on the other that his inactivity in musical production for a long period was due. His whole mind was in a state of unrest. Yet the period of his exile proved in the end to be the most fruitful of his life, and in Zurich the name of Wagner was made immortal.
[CHAPTER VIII]
PREACHING WHAT HE PRACTISED
“Doch ich bin so allein.”—Siegfried
The first years of Wagner's residence at Zurich were occupied with the writing of works designed to propagate the reformatory ideas which he aimed at introducing into the composition and performance of opera. It has been noted that after the first performances of "Tannhäuser" he felt that the public would have to be educated up to his conception of art, and he now set to work to produce the necessary doctrinary essays. Through the kindness of Otto Wesendonck, a music-lover and admirer of his work, he was able to rent at a low price a pretty châlet overlooking the lake, and there he lived and laboured in retirement. He was too profoundly discouraged at first to undertake composition, and for five years he brought forth no music. The problem of how to live stared him in the face in all its frightful nakedness. He wrote to Liszt in the fall of 1849:
"How and whence shall I get enough to live? Is my finished work 'Lohengrin' worth nothing? Is the opera which I am longing to complete worth nothing? It is true that to the present generation and to publicity as it is these must appear as a useless luxury. But how about the few who love these works? Should not they be allowed to offer to the poor suffering creator—not a remuneration, but the bare possibility of continuing to create?... Tell me; advise me! Hitherto my wife and I have kept ourselves alive by the help of a friend here. By the end of this month of October our last florins will be gone, and a wide, beautiful world lies before me, in which I have nothing to eat, nothing to warm myself with. Think of what you can do for me, dear, princely friend. Let some one buy my 'Lohengrin,' skin and bones; let some one commission my 'Siegfried.'"
And so he went on, begging Liszt to save him and his wife from absolute want. He had not even an overcoat. The score of "Lohengrin" was eventually sold to Breitkopf and Härtel for a few hundred thalers, but the means of subsistence were provided for Wagner by Liszt and other friends. Yet even in this lamentable state of affairs he could not drive himself to compose. He could only write his literary works. In these he embodied what has come to be known as the Wagnerian theory of the music drama, the theory which finds its only full and satisfying illustration in the works of this master, though its elementary principals were recognised and obeyed by earlier writers. He says himself in "The Music of the Future," "My mental state resembled a struggle. I tried to express theoretically that which under the incongruity of my artistic aims as contrasted with the tendencies of public art, especially of the opera, I could not properly put forward by means of direct artistic production."
The principal works written by him in this state of mind were "Art and Revolution," 1849, "The Art-work of the Future," "Art and Climate," "Judaism in Music," 1850, "Recollections of Spontini," 1851, "On the Performance of 'Tannhäuser,'" and "Opera and Drama," 1852. Of these the last is the most important to the student of Wagner's theories, but at the time of publication it was the article on "Judaism in Music" which raised the largest disturbance. The criticisms of Meyerbeer contained in it have been used by Wagner's enemies down to the present day as evidence that he was an ungrateful man. The fact that these censures were wholly for Meyerbeer, the composer, should, however, be borne in mind; for in Wagner the artist always governed the man, and the timely aid given to him by Meyerbeer in the dark days in Paris was bound to take a place in his estimation second to the popular composer's palpable seeking after the applause of the inartistic masses.