Richard Wagner His Life and His Dramas / A Biographical Study of the Man and an Explanation of His Work

by W. J. Henderson

How faithfully Liszt fulfilled the trust imposed upon him may be seen from one of his letters to Wagner in the course of the preparations for the opera's production.

"Your 'Lohengrin' will be given under exceptional conditions, which are most favourable to its success. The management for this occasion spends about 2,000 thalers, a thing that has not been done in Weimar within the memory of man. The press will not be forgotten, and suitable and seriously conceived articles will appear successively in several papers. All the personnel will be put on its mettle. The number of violins will be slightly increased (from 16 to 18) and a bass clarinet has been purchased. Nothing essential will be wanting in the musical material or design. I undertake all the rehearsals with pianoforte, chorus, strings and orchestra. Genast will follow your indications for the mise-en-scène with zeal and energy. It is understood that we shall not cut a note, not an iota, of your work, and that we shall give it in its absolute beauty, as far as is in our power."

The date chosen for the production was Aug. 28, the birthday of Goethe, when a large number of visitors would be in Weimar to attend the unveiling of a monument to Herder. Wagner was anxious to be present at the performance, but the risk of arrest, if he set foot on German soil, prevented him from going. Liszt was profoundly moved by the work, but he was not satisfied with the performance nor the reception by the public. The singers did not know how to deliver Wagner's music, and the general public found this, the most popular of all Wagner's creations, quite beyond its comprehension. The performance lasted five hours, owing to the singers' treating all the arioso passages as recitatives, and Wagner accordingly wrote to Liszt explaining how this music should be sung. The whole series of letters on the manner of performing "Lohengrin" is full of instruction as to Wagner's dramatic ideas and the proper method of singing his music. Liszt and Genast, the stage manager, however, saw no way out of the difficulty except by making cuts, and these were accordingly made, but under protest from the composer, who authorised only one in the latter part of Lohengrin's narrative.

The production of the most popular of all operas now before the public was accomplished in the absence of its composer. Indeed, it was not until May 15, 1861, in Vienna, that poor Wagner heard this beautiful and touching work. While it was in course of preparation at Weimar he was labouring at Zurich, as we have seen, and was fighting ill-health, too. His low spirits brought on an attack of dyspepsia, and with this came another lifelong enemy, erysipelas. The cheerfulness and devotion of the unhappy Minna helped him through this trying period, and he further solaced himself by long walks into the forest, accompanied by his dog Peps. He declaimed aloud against the density of the public and the machine-made music of some of his contemporaries, and when Peps answered his master's voice with a lively bark, Wagner would pat his head and say, "Thou hast more sense, Peps, than some of these contrapuntists." Liszt continued to push the fortunes of "Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin" at Weimar, and although it was three years before the latter was performed elsewhere, it became the fashion to visit Weimar to hear it.

Wagner closed the literary work of this period by writing the "Communication to My Friends," which, with the autobiography, forms the most satisfactory material for the study of his early career. This communication is rather a story of his artistic development than of the incidents of his life, but it is a fascinating piece of self-examination, and throws more light than anything else upon the motives which led to the composition of the most famous of Wagner's dramas.

It was at this time that he entered upon the task of writing his long-cherished "Death of Siegfried," which he had shaped into a drama in three acts and a prologue in the autumn of 1848. It was in June, 1849, that he wrote to Liszt that he would have the drama completed in half a year. In the spring of 1851 Liszt learned that there was to be a prefatory drama called "Young Siegfried," and on June 29 Wagner wrote to him that the poem was finished. On Nov. 20 of the same year Wagner wrote a long letter, in which he set forth the development of the entire plan. He had found that his story was too long and complex to tell in two dramas, and that he would have to make three, with a prologue.

Thus he had finally developed the plan of what was to be his most imposing, if not his greatest, work, a work rivalling in the immensity of its conception and its dramatic seriousness the ancient trilogies of the Greeks. It was altogether fitting that this magnum opus should have acquired its full and definite shape in his mind at a time when his invention was refreshed by abstinence from musical production, and when the appetite for composition was springing up anew. Early in 1853 the poem in its new form was completed, and on Feb. 11 he sent a copy to Liszt. The latter wrote: "You are truly a wonderful man, and your 'Nibelung' poem is surely the most incredible thing which you have ever done." In a letter written in 1871, to Arrigo Boïto, the famous Italian composer and librettist, he said: "During a sleepless night at an inn at Spezzia the music to 'Das Rheingold' occurred to me. Straightway I turned homeward and set to work." He finished the full score of "Das Rheingold" in May, 1854, and in the following month he began that of "Die Walküre." The score of this work was finished in 1856, and part of "Siegfried" was written in the next year.

The sleepless night at the Spezzia inn occurred in the course of a journey into Italy made in 1853. It was a journey made in the vain hope of cheering the drooping spirits of Wagner, who was always fond of travel. His life in Zurich had its pleasant side. He had made friends, some of whom, notably Wille, a former journalist of Hamburg, and his wife, a clever novelist, understood and adored him. But he suffered from dyspepsia, insomnia, and erysipelas, the latter returning with wearing persistency; and he writhed under the restraints of an exile which for artistic reasons he could not but desire to terminate. In some of the cities of Germany his works were performed without understanding and in a way to make him shiver with anguish, yet he was helpless. On all sides he was critically assailed for faults that were not his, and would instantly have disappeared if his operas had been properly interpreted. In Berlin, where he might have reaped at least a decent pecuniary profit from performances, jealousy, intrigue, and Philistinism prevented his works from reaching the stage.

And the demon poverty pursued him to the verge of madness. He suffered from the agonising fear that at length he would be forced to abandon all the splendid imaginations that were burning within him and divert his whole life into the sordid channels of bread-and-butter drudgery. He cried to Liszt and other friends to save him. For this he has been called a beggar; but if we obey Charles Reade's injunction, "Put yourself in his place," the thing wears a different aspect. Wagner was profoundly convinced of the greatness that was within him, and it maddened him to think that he might have to stifle it. He wrote to Liszt: "I am in a miserable condition, and have great difficulty in persuading myself that it must go on like this, and that it would not really be more moral to put an end to this disgraceful kind of life."