Curtis White
"Ah! If only I were dead!"
—Richard Wagner
For us, the stars are not merely the universe's profligate incinerators; for us, stars are also story-generators. Ancient people saw patterns in the stars and filled out the patterns with myth, myth that gave their lives human context rather than the disorienting feeling of being abandoned in space. We still have a need to create patterns of meaning, but we tend to do so not with stars but with people, famous people, celebrities rather than heroes. We arrange our "stars" like constellations, but the stories they reveal—in The National Enquirer, or on blog sites like Hollywood Life, or even in the "culture" sections of The New York Times and The Guardian—are more puzzling than revealing. "Dateline 2020: Kim Kardashian accuses Taylor Swift of lying about Kanye West!" Or, to take a blimp-sized example, what is it exactly that we want from our obsession with all things Trump-like, his presidency-by-scandal? His misadventures are as big and as wide as the Kathasaritsagara, the Hindu Ocean of Story, but what does any of that say about who we are? Where is the pearl in this laughable oyster?
Among the earliest of such modern succès de scandale is this strange story made up of some of the most luminous humans of the 19th century, the first public celebrities. This story is so strange that our first reaction to it is that it is false. How could these—the smartest, most sophisticated, most creative spirits in European history—how could they have behaved so childishly, with so little self-knowledge, so little kindness, and so much cruelty?
This story starts with the great German conductor Hans von Bulow. When he died in 1894, there was a celebration of his life in music. I suppose it was good to celebrate that part of his life, but the rest of it was another matter.
Von Bulow invented the modern idea of the conductor as virtuoso interpreter, as counterpart, even collaborator, to the artist/composer. He created the path that Mahler, Bruno Walter, Toscanini, and Solti would follow. Von Bulow was not a mechanical interpreter of the score. Like Mahler, he held in contempt those who believe that the notes on the page do all the work. Incapable of thinking independently or of simply paying attention to what was really to be found in the score, they festooned the music with stupidities because, well, it sounded okay, almost right, and who could tell? (Von Bulow: "Your tone sounds like roast-beef gravy running through a sewer.")
For von Bulow and those who would follow him, the conductor's job was to remove the film of accumulated error from the score in order to feel the vitality and energy and light of the composer's creation. The first beneficiary of this new kind of conductor was Beethoven (whom von Bulow called "the New Testament of Music"). The second was Richard Wagner. He and his contemporary Franz Liszt were among the very first musicians to have a "circle" of admirers, propagandists, and sycophants. For Wagner, that meant Wagnerians. First among this School of Wagner were the symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In our word, Wagner had groupies—royal groupies, artist groupies, philosopher groupies, and lots of regular groupie groupies, especially his coterie of women who seemed to find him irresistibly alluring. [1]
Beyond von Bulow's contribution to the history of orchestral music, he had a personal life in which, in odd ways, he played the part of the lazy and indifferent conductor that in a musical context he abhorred. He was not attentive to what he created in his relations with others and he must have paid a terrible price for it—if he noticed. Is it possible to be horribly disappointed in life, to suffer for one's bad choices, and be oblivious to the fact? Other people did suffer for von Bulow's emotional dilettantism. Whether he noticed or cared is an open question.
Hans von Bulow married the illegitimate daughter of the virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt. Her name was Cosima. Her mother was the Countess Marie d'Agoult with whom Liszt had two illegitimate children. Cosima's marriage to von Bulow was an unhappy one, in part because von Bulow was more dedicated to father Liszt than to wife Cosima. The point is that von Bulow was imprudent (to say the least) in marrying the bastard daughter of his musical idol. What could he have been thinking? He had little human interest in her, that much was obvious from the first. Was it simply that she brought him closer to the great man? Or did he think he was doing Liszt a favor?
Cosima, understandably, was bewildered and hurt by the whole thing. She resented this marriage arranged for the benefit of a father she despised. Meanwhile, old Liszt was off in his little private world where everything was what he said it was, and in which he could do what he chose to do, and receive applause and adulation for it. He was God of the Dandies. The idea that his daughter might have an objection to his self-interested shaping of the world never seemed to occur to him. I have to admit, though, that it is a very special person who can screw princesses, have children by them, and then hand off the daughters to admirers as if they were tokens of esteem.
In Cosima's case, she went along with the whole ridiculous thing because I think that she didn't have a clue that there were other options and maybe there weren't. It's also a possibility that Liszt asked von Bulow to take her off his hands because she was something that just didn't seem to have any other place. Dad was on the road with the piano, mom was a princess and couldn't be seen too often with her children-of-indiscretion. Earlier, Liszt had dropped Cosima in this school and that, this religious institution and that, out of sight as much as possible. You know. The usual callous thing to do back then. (In another notorious example, Lord Byron stuck his illegitimate daughter in a convent, refused her heartbroken mother (sister to Shelley's wife) permission to visit, and then let the poor thing essentially rot there, alone, until she died of TB.) Making matters even more difficult for Liszt was the fact that she couldn't have been the easiest girl to find a match for; she was tall and gaunt and had a large hooking nose because of which she was called "the Stork." So, perhaps von Bulow thought he was doing her a big favor.
Meanwhile, Cosima went a little nuts.
But von Bulow's greatest musical devotion wasn't to Liszt. After hearing Liszt conduct Wagner's Lohengrin in its world premier, von Bulow became a Wagnerian. He was devoted to Wagner and visited him with Cosima about the time Wagner was finishing Tristan und Isolde. One day while von Bulow was in rehearsal, Wagner and Cosima took a carriage ride and, just as if they were characters in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, did certain inappropriate little things with their fingers and lips.
But Cosima's husband wasn't the only advocate of Wagner's music. Father Liszt had also long regarded Wagner as the greatest composer in Europe. In fact, Liszt had saved Wagner from jail or worse by smuggling him out of Germany in his private carriage after the Dresden Revolution of 1849. According to legend, Wagner had fallen way out of favor with the authorities because he had burned down his own opera hall during the revolt (not good enough for him), and then paid for the production of hand grenades for the revolutionaries. Did he throw one? I don't know, but how does a person go to the trouble and expense of buying custom-made hand grenades and not throw one?
Wagner repaid all of Liszt's generosities by badmouthing and ignoring him with the connivance of Cosima, who loathed her father, the celestial Années de Pelerinage be damned. Cosima didn't care at all about how pretty Dad's music was, he was a shit, and she was going to get even with him for the sin of bringing her miserable self into the world. And now Wagner repaid von Bulow's kindness and support by, as Shakespeare would say, tupping his wife. "Hey, von Bulow, nice wife! Did she tell you? She blew me in the back of the carriage while we were taxied around the old town inner circle. Sweet! Now, when will you do Tristan in Munich?"
Wagner and his private secretary Cosima, followed by her husband Hans von Bulow, with the score of Tristan und Isolde under his arm.
Believe it or not, the plot gets thicker. When Wagner and Cosima set up household in Tribschen (the house and property were gifts of barmy King Leopold of Bavaria), they befriended a young philologist, Friedrich Nietzsche. The philosopher, too, came under the powerful spell of the composer and was even, for a few years, a one-man propaganda machine for Wagner's ideas about opera, drama, Jews, and the "victory of German culture."[2] Given the perverse nature of all these relationships, it was perhaps inevitable that Nietzsche fall in love with Cosima. Because of course he did.
But, once again, Wagner repaid devotion with betrayal: during one of Nietzsche's first illnesses, Wagner sent him to his own doctor and then spread a rumor that the doctor's diagnosis confirmed that Nietzsche's problem was that he was—as we might put it now, equally ungenerously—a closet queer. (Gay bashing was SOP for Wagner. As he said when his wayward disciple Karl Ritter fell out of favor, "An onanist! That says it all!") When Nietzsche heard of this betrayal, he was furious. It was then he began writing intensely hostile diatribes against the Master (The Case of Wagner). At the end of Nietzsche's life, his friend Franz Overbeck made an emergency trip to Turin in order to put Nietzsche in an asylum. Overbeck found him seated in a corner, singing the Gondola Song, claiming to have just come from his own funeral, and reading the final proofs of Nietzsche Contra Wagner. [3]
But the last laugh was Cosima's. She had revenge against all of these famous men. She put horns on the head of von Bulow, as noted, then she had revenge on her father. When old Liszt was dying and the world wanted to come to his side to express their thanks for his art, Cosima put the poor man in a locked room and allowed no visitors. Liszt died choking on isolation, as if Cosima had hired furniture movers to haul him out into the vacuum of space. Thus was her own childhood abandonment revenged.
For Nietzsche she had only contempt. She found him unctuous, servile, and inferior, someone good only for laughing about behind his back. She and Wagner thought of him as a useful rube (it was to Nietzsche that Wagner assigned the chore of purchasing him silken underwear or women's frillies while he was in town). Their nickname for the loyal if myopic disciple of Wagnerism was "Anselmus," after a character in der Goldene Topf who stumbles through life as a bumbling dreamer before finding his true vocation as an assistant scribe in a library. Cosima also goaded Wagner into conviction about Nietzsche's sexual "inversion."
As for Nietzsche's musical compositions and piano playing, they chortled about him as if he were the village idiot. They indulged his efforts to play and compose for the piano condescendingly, as if he were a pet chicken that had learned to peck out "Chopsticks." Wagner observed to the ardent philosopher that, "You play too well for a professor," tongue firmly in cheek. Von Bulow listened to Nietzsche play one of his own compositions and said to the sad crust of a man, "This may be something, but it is not music."
Even Gustav Mahler felt Cosima's wrath, in spite of the fact that at the end of the century he was Wagner's greatest interpreter. She refused to allow the Jew to perform on the podium at Bayreuth, even though season after season Mahler brought Wagner's operas to the stage in the musical capital of the world, Vienna, and, in his last years, in New York. Mahler was all too aware of the reason for this slight. It wasn't the first time that his Jewishness had been held against him, but he always maintained a dignified and patient silence while she acted on every vile thought.
But her greatest revenge was against Wagner himself. Wagner was a philanderer, and Cosima made him pay a heavy price for his extra-marital pleasures. In fact, his last affair with the actress Carrie Pringle created such a violent quarrel that it precipitated Wagner's death: a few hours after this scene, he was found dead of a heart attack.
After his death, Cosima clutched icy fingers around the Wagner legend. She tolerated no deviance from her doctrinal instructions regarding the Master's work. Cosima censored those aspects of Wagner's life—his contempt for Christianity, his love for the pagan Greeks, etc.—that were inconvenient to the fascistic Wagner Legend that she was piecing together. In her telling, Wagner was a Christian mystic, and an advocate for German nationalism and anti-Semitism. The most extreme and noxious example of her censorship was the bonfire she made of all of Nietzsche's letters to Wagner.
Forty years later, Wagner's lovingly constructed opera house in the sleepy town of Bayreuth, out in the boonies of Northern Bavaria, became a Nazi vacation resort. Hitler spent his happiest moments there, flirting with Wagner's daughter, while Himmler and S.S. dignitaries snored through Parsifal.
Wagner's reputation never recovered from Cosima's distortions, which is far from saying that he was an innocent. He was a charming rascal, a self-serving cad, and an anti-Semite when it served his purposes. But, ironically, he also wrote music that in its best moments expressed a spiritual love that is still compelling. Through his invention of liebestod (love/death) in Tristan und Isolde, he discovered for the West what Buddhism had long ago understood in the East: the co-dependency of love and death (or enlightenment and suffering); the understanding that love/death was not something happening "out there" among the things of the world but in the mind; and the conviction that this mind was not my mind, or your mind, but the mind's Mind.[4] We may think of him as an unworthy vessel, but a vessel he was, a soiled angel of "crazy wisdom."
Whatever the case, if we were able to ask Wagner about what was most important in his life, I think we'd hear something surprising. Wagner was often a hypocrite, but, as Samuel Johnson put it, "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures." What Wagner would remember was how happy it made him to turn his private rooms into damask bowers brocaded and draped in the finest silks and velvets. What Wagner would remember were the silk pajamas and women's softest fineries that he wore inside his bower. What he'd remember was the feel of those dainty things against his skin, against his inner thigh. What he most loved was the plush consolation he'd feel in this bower while writing music for Tristan and his gauzy love Isolde. That was the joy that rooted in his solar plexus and soared out into the Milky Way, the River of Heaven, dispersing as smoky sfumato.
While Wagner was no hypocrite in these pleasures, still, he was mistaken. He licked the honey of his life from a razor's edge.
In all this, some people will see a magic/tragic vortex of mad energies, genius, and immortal works of art and philosophy. Wagner's life and his art together produced the kind of mythic story that the Greeks would once have translated into legends written in the night sky as constellations. "See there? That's the tip of Mahler's baton. And those three stars? Cosima's nose." But it is a delusion to think that these patterns are eternal. They are merely the irredeemable burning away of that energy that we call human passion. Wagner's mighty passions were only dukkha, suffering, and suffering burns both brilliant and foul as methane. Our assumption is that the Wagner legend is part of art history, and that his works are "timeless." But that is wrong. Nothing is timeless. Everything happens and then is gone. Just like the dying stars.
That is their beauty.
[1] Baudelaire appears to have been similarly charmed. He wrote fan mail to Wagner including this orgasmic passage: "I experienced a sensation of a rather bizarre nature, which was the pride and the joy of understanding, of letting myself be penetrated and invaded—a really sensual delight that resembles that of rising in the air or tossing upon the sea.”
[2] See especially his essay "David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer" from Nietzsche's first book Untimely Meditations. Nietzsche argues that the true German nation should be united under "one style," Wagner's style, as he makes clear in the volume's last essay, "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.”
[3] In Nietzsche's last sad dementia, the ravenous spirochetes of syphilis having nibbled away one too many cerebral nerve root, he was heard to ask about his "wife, Cosima Wagner." His last letter was to Cosima: "Ariadne, I love you. Dionysus."
There is, out in that great blasphemous reflection of all things us-like, YouTube, an eerie and heartbreaking kinetograph of the twilight Nietzsche in various states of addled repose. In one scene, a woman (his wicked sister Elizabeth?) sits at his side reading a book. In another, a large bug seems to climb up his arm. It's here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alHu-nGqDHY
[4] This way of thinking was not entirely unfamiliar at the time, thanks to the work of the German Idealists Fichte and Schelling.
Sources:
Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan: the Saga of Germany's Most Illustrious and Infamous Family (2009)
Joachim Kohler, Richard Wagner: the Last of the Titans (2001)