My Life, Volume II

by Richard Wagner

  During the months of January and February (1857) I completed the first act of Siegfried, writing down the composition in full to take the place of the earlier rough pencil draft, and immediately set to work on the orchestration; but I probably carried out Vaillant's instructions with too much zeal. Pursued by the fear of a possible return of erysipelas, I sought to ward it off by a repeated and regular process of sweating once a week, wrapped up in towels, on the hydropathic system. By this means I certainly escaped the dreaded evil, but the effort exhausted me very much, and I longed for the return of the warm weather, when I should be relieved from the severities of this treatment.

  It was now that the tortures inflicted upon me by noisy and musical neighbours began to increase in intensity. Apart from the tinker, whom I hated with a deadly hatred, and with whom I had a terrible scene about once a week, the number of pianos in the house where I lived was augmented. The climax came with the arrival of a certain Herr Stockar, who played the flute in the room under mine every Sunday, whereupon I gave up all hope of composing any more. One day my friends the Wesendoncks, who had returned from wintering in Paris, unfolded to me a most welcome prospect of the fulfilment of my ardent wishes in regard to my future place of abode. Wesendonck had already had an idea of having a small house built for me on a site I was to select for myself. My own plans, elaborated with a deceptive skill, had been already submitted to an architect. But the acquisition of a suitable plot of land was and still remained a great difficulty. In my walks I had long had my eye on a little winter residence in the district of Enge, on the ridge of the hill that separates the Lake of Zurich from Sihlthal. It was called Lavater Cottage, as it had belonged to that famous phrenologist, and he had been in the habit of staying there regularly. I had enlisted the services of my friend Hagenbuch, the Cantonal Secretary, to use all his influence to secure me a few acres of land at this spot as cheaply as possible. But herein lay the great difficulty. The piece of land I required consisted of various lots attached to larger estates, and it turned out that in order to acquire my one plot it would have been necessary to buy out a large number of different owners. I put the difficulties of my case before Wesendonck, and gradually created in him a desire to purchase this wide tract of land, and lay out a fine site containing a large villa for his own family. The idea was that I should also have a plot there. However, the demands made upon my friend in regard to the preliminaries and to the building of his house, which was to be on a scale both generous and dignified, were too many, and he also thought the enclosure of two families within the same confines might lead in time to inconveniences on both sides. There happened to be an unpretentious little country house with a garden which I had admired, and which was only separated from his estate by a narrow carriage drive; and this Wesendonck decided to buy for me. I rejoiced beyond measure when I heard of his intention. The shock experienced by the over-cautious buyer was consequently all the greater when one day be discovered that the present owner, with whom he had negotiated in too timid a fashion, had just sold his piece of land to somebody else. Luckily it turned out that the buyer was a mental specialist, whose sole intention in making the purchase was to instal himself with his lunatic asylum by the side of my friend. This information awakened the most terrible anticipations in Wesendonck, and put the utmost strain upon his energy. He now gave instructions that this piece of land must be acquired at any price from the unfortunate specialist. Thus, after many vexatious vicissitudes, it came into the possession of my friend, who had to pay pretty heavily for it. He allowed me to come into possession at Easter of this year, charging me the same rent as I had paid for my lodging in the Zeltweg, that is to say, eight hundred francs a year.

  Our installation in this house, which occupied me heart and soul at the beginning of the spring, was not achieved without many a disappointment. The cottage, which had only been designed for use in summer, had to be made habitable for the winter by putting in heating apparatus and various other necessaries. It is true, that most of the essentials in this respect were carried out by the proprietor; but no end of difficulties remained to be solved. There was not a single thing upon which my wife and I did not constantly differ, and my position as an ordinary middle-class man without a brass farthing of my own made matters no easier. With regard to my finances, however, events took place from time to time which were well calculated to inspire a sanguine temperament with trustful confidence in the future. In spite of the bad performances of my operas, Tannhauser brought me unexpectedly good royalties from Berlin. From Vienna, too, I obtained the wherewithal to give me breathing-space in a most curious way. I was still excluded from the Royal Opera, and I had been assured that so long as there was an imperial court, I was not to dream of a performance of my seditious works in Vienna. This strange state of affairs inspired my old director, Hoffmann of Riga, now director of the Josephstadt Theatre, to venture on the production of Tannhauser with a special opera company, in a summer theatre built by himself on the Lerchenfeld outside the boundary of Vienna. He offered me for every performance which I would license a royalty of a hundred francs. When Liszt, whom I informed of the matter, thought this offer was suspicious, I wrote and told him that I proposed to follow Mirabeau's example with regard to it. Mirabeau, when he failed to be elected by his peers to the assembly of Notables, addressed himself to the electors of Marseilles in the capacity of a linen-draper. This pleased Liszt; and, indeed, I now made my way, by means of the summer theatre on the Lerchenfeld, into the capital of the Austrian empire. Of the performance itself the most wonderful accounts reached me. Sulzer, who on one of his journeys had passed through Vienna and had witnessed a performance, had complained principally of the darkness of the house, which did not allow him to read a single word of the libretto, also of its having rained hard right into the middle of the audience. Another story was told me some years later by the son-in-law of Mme. Herold, the widow of the composer of that name. He had been in Vienna at that period on his wedding tour, and had heard this Lerchenfeld performance. The young man assured me that, in spite of all superficial deficiencies, the production there had given him genuine pleasure, and had been more deeply impressive than the performance in the Berlin Court Theatre, which he had seen afterwards, and found immeasurably inferior. The energy of my old Riga Theatre director in Vienna brought me in two thousand francs for twenty performances of Tannhauser. After such a curious experience, offering clear proof of my popularity, I may perhaps be excused for having felt confident about the future, and having relied on incalculable results from my works, even with regard to actual gain.

  While I was thus occupied in arranging the little country house for which I had longed so much, and working on the orchestration of the first act of Siegfried, I plunged anew into the philosophy of Schopenhauer and into Scott's novels, to which I was drawn with a particular affection. I also busied myself with elucidating my impressions of Liszt's compositions. For this purpose I adopted the form of a letter to Marie Wittgenstein, which was published in Brendel's musical journal.

  When we moved to what I intended to be my permanent refuge for life, I again set myself to consider the means of obtaining a basis for the supply of the necessities of that life. Once again I took up the threads of my negotiations with Hartel about the Nibelungen, but I was obliged to put them down as unfruitful, and little calculated to end in any success for this work. I complained of this to Liszt, and openly told him how glad I should be if he would bring this to the ears of the Grand Duke of Weimar (who, from what my friend told me, wished himself still to be regarded as the patron of my Nibelungen enterprise), so that he might realise the difficulties I was encountering in the matter. I added that if one could not expect a common bookseller to assume the responsibility of such an extraordinary undertaking, one might well hope that the Prince, whose idea was to make it a point of honour, should take a share, and a serious share, in the necessary preliminaries, among which the development of the work itself must very properly be included. My meani
ng was, that the Grand Duke should take the place of Hartel, should purchase the work from me, and pay by instalments as the score neared completion; he would thus become the owner, and, later on, could if he liked cover his expenses through a publisher. Liszt understood me very well, but could not refrain from dissuading me from taking up such an attitude towards his Royal Highness.

  My whole attention was now directed to the young Grand Duchess of Baden. Several years had passed since Eduard Devrient had been transferred to Karlsruhe by the Grand Duke to be manager of the court theatre there. Since my departure from Dresden I had always kept in touch with Devrient, though our meetings were rare. Moreover, he had written the most enthusiastic letters in appreciation of my pamphlets, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft and Oper und Drama. He maintained that the Karlsruhe Theatre was so poorly equipped, that he thought he could not well entertain the idea of a performance of my operas in that house. All these conditions were suddenly changed when the Grand Duke married, and the Crown Princess's young daughter, who had been turned into a champion of mine by my old friend Alwine Frommann, thus secured a position of independence in Karlsruhe, and was eager in her demand for the performance of my works. My operas were now being produced there also, and Devrient in his turn had the pleasure of informing me of the great interest shown in them by the young Princess, who even frequently attended the rehearsals. This made a very agreeable impression upon me. On my own initiative I expressed my gratitude in an address which I directed to the Grand Duchess herself, enclosing 'Wotan's Abschied' from the finale of the Walkure as a souvenir for her album.

  The 20th April was now drawing near, the day on which I was to leave my lodging in the Zeltweg (which had already been let), although I could not occupy the cottage, where the arrangements were not yet complete. The bad weather had given us colds in the course of our frequent visits to the little house, in which masons and carpenters had made themselves at home. In the worst of tempers we spent a week in the inn, and I began to wonder whether it was worth while occupying this new piece of land at all, for I had a sudden foreboding that it would be my fate to wander further afield. Eventually we moved in at the end of April, in spite of everything. It was cold and damp, the new heating apparatus did not provide any warmth, and we were both ill, and could hardly leave our beds. Then came a good omen: the first letter that reached me was one of reconciliation and love from Frau Julie Ritter, in which she told me that the quarrel, brought about by her son's conduct, was at last ended. Beautiful spring weather now set in; on Good Friday I awoke to find the sun shining brightly for the first time in this house: the little garden was radiant with green, the birds sang, and at last I could sit on the roof and enjoy the long-yearned-for peace with its message of promise. Full of this sentiment, I suddenly remembered that the day was Good Friday, and I called to mind the significance this omen had already once assumed for me when I was reading Wolfram's Parsifal. Since the sojourn in Marienbad, where I had conceived the Meistersinger and Lohengrin, I had never occupied myself again with that poem; now its noble possibilities struck me with overwhelming force, and out of my thoughts about Good Friday I rapidly conceived a whole drama, of which I made a rough sketch with a few dashes of the pen, dividing the whole into three acts.

  In the midst of arranging the house, a never-ending task, at which I set to work with all my might, I felt an inner compulsion to work: I took up Siegfried again, and began to compose the second act. I had not made up my mind what name to give to my new place of refuge. As the introductory part of this act turned out very well, thanks to my favourable frame of mind, I burst out laughing at the thought that I ought to call my new home 'Fafner's Ruhe,' to correspond with the first piece of work done in it. It was not destined to be so, however. The property continued to be called simply 'Asyl,' and I have designated it under this title in the chart of dates to my works.

  The miscarriage of my prospects of support for the Nibelungen from the Grand Duke of Weimar fostered in me a continued depression of spirits; for I saw before me a burden of which I knew not how to rid myself. At the same time a romantic message was conveyed to me: a man who rejoiced in the name of Ferreiro introduced himself to me as the Brazilian consul in Leipzig, and told me that the Emperor of Brazil was greatly attracted by my music. The man was an adept in meeting my doubts about this strange phenomenon in the letters which he wrote; the Emperor loved everything German, and wanted me very much to come to him in Rio Janeiro, so that I might conduct my operas in person. As only Italian was sung in that country, it would be necessary to translate my libretto, which the Emperor regarded as a very easy matter, and actually an improvement to the libretto itself. Strange to say, these proposals exercised a very agreeable influence on me. I felt I could easily produce a passionate musical poem which would turn out quite excellent in Italian, and I turned my thoughts once more, with an ever-reviving preference, towards Tristan und Isolde. In order in some way to test the intensity of that generous affection for my works protested by the Emperor of Brazil, I promptly sent to Senor Ferreiro the expensively bound volumes containing the pianoforte versions of my three earlier operas, and for a long time I indulged in the hope of some very handsome return from their gracious and splendid reception in Rio Janeiro. But of these pianoforte versions, and the Emperor of Brazil and his consul Ferreiro, I never heard a single syllable again as long as I lived. Semper, it is true, involved himself in an architectonic entanglement with this tropical country: a competition was invited for the building of a new opera house in Rio; Semper had announced that he would take part in it, and completed some splendid plans which afforded us great entertainment, and appeared to be of special interest, among others, to Dr. Wille, who thought that it must be a new problem for an architect to sketch an opera house for a black public. I have not learned whether the results of Semper's negotiations with Brazil were much more satisfactory than mine; at all events, I know that he did not build the theatre.

  A violent cold threw me for a few days into a state of high fever; when I recovered from it, my birthday had come. As I was sitting once more in the evening on my roof, I was surprised at hearing one of the songs of the Three Rhine Maidens, from the finale of Rheingold, which floated to my ears from the near distance across the gardens. Frau Pollert, whose troubles with her husband had once stood in the way of a second performance in Magdeburg of my Liebesverbot (in itself a very difficult production), had again appeared last winter as a singer, and also as the mother of two daughters, in the theatrical firmament of Zurich. As she still had a fine voice, and was full of goodwill towards me, I allowed her to practise the last act of Walkure for herself, and the Rhine Maidens scenes from the Rheingold with her two daughters, and frequently in the course of the winter we had managed to give short performances of this music for our friends. On the evening of my birthday the song of my devoted lady friends surprised me in a very touching way, and I suddenly experienced a strange revulsion of feeling, which made me disinclined to continue the composition of the Nibelungen, and all the more anxious to take up Tristan again. I determined to yield to this desire, which I had long nourished in secret, and to set to work at once on this new task, which I had wished to regard only as a short interruption to the great one. However, in order to prove to myself that I was not being scared away from the older work by any feeling of aversion, I determined, at all events, to complete the composition of the second act of Siegfried, which had only just been begun. This I did with a right good will, and gradually the music of Tristan dawned more and more clearly on my mind.

  To some extent external motives, which seemed to me both attractive and advantageous to the execution of my task, acted as incentives to make me set to work on Tristan. These motives became fully defined when Eduard Devrient came on a visit to me at the beginning of July and stayed with me for three days. He told me of the good reception accorded to my despatch by the Grand Duchess of Baden, and I gathered that he had been commissioned to come to an understanding with me about some enterprise or
other; I informed him that I had decided to interrupt my work on the Nibelungen by composing an opera, which was bound by its contents and requirements to put me once more into relation with the theatres, however inferior they might be. I should do myself an injustice if I said that this external motive alone inspired the conception of Tristan, and made me determine to have it produced. Nevertheless, I must confess that a perceptible change had come over the frame of mind in which, several years ago, I had contemplated the completion of the greater work. At the same time I had come fresh from my writings upon art, in which I had attempted to explain the reasons for the decay of our public art, and especially of the theatre, by seeking to establish some connection between these reasons and the prevailing condition of culture. It would have been impossible for me at that time to have devoted myself to a work which compelled me to study its immediate production at one of our existing theatres. It was only an utter disregard of these theatres, as I have taken occasion to observe before, that could determine me to take up my artistic work again. With regard to the Nibelungen dramas, I was compelled to adhere without flinching to the one essential stipulation that it could only be produced under quite exceptional conditions, such as those I afterwards described in the preface to the printed edition of the poem. Nevertheless, the successful popularisation of my earlier operas had so far influenced my frame of mind that, as I approached the completion of more than half of my great work, I felt I could look forward with growing confidence to the possibility that this too might be produced. Up to this point Liszt had been the only person to nourish the secret hope of my heart, as he was confident that the Grand Duke of Weimar would do something for me, but to judge from my latest experience these prospects amounted to nothing, while I had grounds for hoping that a new work of similar design to Tannhauser or Lohengrin would be taken up everywhere with considerable alacrity. The manner in which I finally executed the plan of Tristan shows clearly how little I was thinking of our operatic theatres and the scope of their capabilities. Nevertheless, I had still to fight a continuous battle for the necessaries of life, and I succeeded in deceiving myself so far as to persuade myself that in interrupting the composition of the Nibelungen and taking up Tristan, I was acting in the practical spirit of a man who carefully weighs the issues at stake. Devrient was much pleased to hear that I was undertaking a work that could be regarded as practical. He asked me at which theatre I contemplated producing my new work. I answered that naturally I could only have in view a theatre in which it would be possible for me to superintend the task of production in person. My idea was that this would either be in Brazil or, as I was excluded from the territory of the German Confederation, in one of the towns lying near the German frontiers, which I presumed would be able to place an operatic company at my disposal. The place I had in my mind was Strasburg, but Devrient had many practical reasons for being wholly opposed to such an undertaking; he was of opinion that a performance in Karlsruhe could be arranged more easily and would meet with greater success. My only objection to this was, that in that town I should be debarred from taking a personal share in the study and production of my work. Devrient, however, thought that, as far as this was concerned, I might feel justified in entertaining some hope, as the Grand Duke of Baden was so well disposed towards me, and took an active interest in my work. I was highly delighted to learn this. Devrient also spoke with great sympathy of the young tenor Schnorr, who, besides possessing admirable gifts, was keenly attracted by my operas. I was now in the best of tempers, and acted the host to Devrient for all I was worth. One morning I played and sang to him the whole of the Rheingold, which seemed to give him great pleasure. Half seriously, and half in joke, I told him that I had written the character of Mime especially for him, and that if, when the work was ready, it was not too late, he might have the pleasure of taking the part. As Devrient was with me, he had, of course, to do his share of reciting. I invited all the friends in our circle, including Semper and Herwegh, and Devrient read us the Mark Antony scenes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. So happy was his interpretation of the part, that even Herwegh, who had approached the recitation from its outset in a spirit of ridicule, freely acknowledged the success of the practised actor's skilful manipulation. Devrient wrote a letter from my house to the Grand Duke of Baden, telling him his impressions about me and what he had found me like. Soon after his departure I received an autograph letter from the Grand Duke, couched in very amiable terms, in which he first thanked me most profusely for the souvenir I had presented to his wife for her album, and at the same time declared his intention of championing my cause, and, above all, of securing my return to Germany.