The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 by Rupert Hughes

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Surely, you would say, the creator of this masterwork must have had a
heart thrilled with mighty passion for womankind; surely he must have
lived a life of strange devotion.

But how often, how often we must warn ourselves against judging the
creator from his creations, the artist from his art. In his letter to
Liszt, announcing his intention to write this very opera, Wagner said:

"As I have never in life felt the real bliss of love, I must erect a
monument to the most beautiful of my dreams, in which, from beginning
to end that love shall be thoroughly satiated. I have in my head
'Tristan and Isolde,' the simplest, but fullest, musical conception.
With 'the black flag,' which waves at the end, I shall then cover
myself--to die."

The truth was that Wagner, as so many another creative genius, spent
his love chiefly upon the beings that he begot within his own heart.
Every genius is more or less a Pygmalion, and his own imagination is
the Aphrodite that gives life to the Galateas that he carves. I have
shown by this time that certain musicians have been most excellent
lovers, and there would be documents enough to prove Wagner another,
but we know it for a fact that his one great passion was for his art.
There is not recorded anywhere, I think, another such idolater of
ideals as Richard Wagner. To his theory of the perfect marriage of
music and poetry, he sacrificed everything,--his heart's blood, his
sensitiveness to criticisms, his extraordinary fondness for luxuries,
his sense of pride, and to these he added human sacrifice,--his wife,
his friends, and any one who stood in his way. He made himself a
pauper, and begged and borrowed every penny he could scrape from every
friend who could be hypnotised into supporting his creeds. As a result,
after years of humiliation such as few men ever did, or ever cared to,
endure, after a battle against the highest and the lowest intellects,
he attained a point of glory which hardly another artist in the world's
history ever reached. He reached such a pinnacle that critics were not
lacking who said that he often threatened to give Art a more important
place in the State than Religion.

Nothing but the most complete success, and nothing but the most
beneficial revolution could justify such a creed or such a life as
Wagner's. Both were eminently justified. He reaped a superb reward, but
he earned every mite of it. When his days of power and of glory came,
however, he spent them with another woman than the one who had gone
through all his struggles with him; had suffered all that he suffered,
without any aid from hope, without any belief in his personality or his
creeds, supported only on the courage and the dog-like fidelity of a
German _Hausfrau_ to her _Mann_.

Wagner was as plainly destined for war as any Richard the Third, born
with hair and teeth. For he was born in the midst of the Napoleonic
wars at Leipzig, in 1813, and the dead bodies on the battle-field were
so many that they raised a pestilence, which carried off Wagner's
father when the child was six months old; and also threatened the life
of his elder brother and of the babe himself. His life was one long
truceless war. He once said to Edouard Schure: "The only time I ever
went to sea, I barely escaped shipwreck. Should I go to America, I am
sure the Atlantic would receive me with a cyclone."

Wagner's first love was his mother. In fact, Praeger, his Boswell,
said: "I verily believe that he never loved any one else so deeply as
his _liebes Muetterchen_." She must have been a woman of winning
manners, for, though she had seven children, the oldest fourteen, she
got another husband before her first one was a year in his grave; the
second was an actor. Wagner was so fond of his mother that through his
life he never could see a Christmas tree alight without tears.

There were other loves that busied his heart. He was remarkably fond of
animals, particularly of dogs. He suffered keenly when his parrot Papo
died; he wrote his friend Uhlig: "Ah, if I could say to you what has
died for me in this devoted creature! It matters nothing to me whether
I am laughed at for this." His dog Peps died in his arms, and he wrote
Praeger: "I cried incessantly, and since then have felt bitter pain and
sorrow for the dear friend of the past thirteen years, who has walked
and worked with me." One of Wagner's last plans was to write a book to
be called "A History of My Dogs." Anecdotes galore there are of his
humanity to dogs and cats and other members of our larger family.

Wagner had also a famous passion for gorgeous colours; his music shows
this. He liked fine stuffs peculiarly, and even in his pauperdom wore
silk next to his skin. When fortune found him, he made a veritable
rainbow of himself with his dressing-gowns, and even with many-coloured
trousers. His stomach was not so fond of luxury, and he was not
addicted to wine or beer, and for long periods drank neither at all. He
injured his health by eating too fast, though this was not, as in
Haendel's case, from gluttony, but from absent-minded interest in his
work. Yet there is something strangely human and captivating in the
story that, when he was eight years old, he traded off a volume of
Schiller's poems for a cream puff.

Wagner's career shows a curious growth away from his early ideas. He
was at first an artistic disciple of Meyerbeer, and not only drew
operatic inspirations from him, but was saved from starving by
Meyerbeer's money and by his letters of introduction; later he came to
abhor Meyerbeer's operas, and to despise the man himself and his ways.
Wagner earned himself numberless powerful enemies by his fierce hatred
for the Jewish race, and by his ferocious attack in an article called
"Judaism in Music." Yet his first flirtation was with a Jewess, and it
was not his fault that he did not marry her. She lived in Leipzig, and
was a friend of his sister. She had the highly racial name of Leah
David, and was a personification of Jewish beauty, with her eyes and
hair of jet and her Oriental features. It has been remarked that all of
Wagner's heroes and heroines fall in love at first sight.

He began it. His first view of Leah plunged him into a frenzy. "Love
me, love my dog," was an easy task for Wagner, and he was glad of the
privilege of caressing Leah's poodle, and of mauling her piano. He
never could fondle a piano without making it howl. Now Leah had a
cousin, a Dutchman and a pianist. Wagner criticised his execution, and
was invited to do better. The man hardly lived who played the piano
worse than Wagner, and the result of the duel was a foregone defeat.
The last chapter of this romance may be quoted from Praeger:

"Wagner lost his temper. Stung in his tenderest feelings before the
Hebrew maiden, with the headlong impetuosity of an unthinking youth, he
replied in such violent, rude language, that a dead silence fell upon
the guests. Then Wagner rushed out of the room, sought his cap, took
leave of Iago, and vowed vengeance. He waited two days, upon which,
having received no communication, he returned to the scene of the
quarrel. To his indignation, he was refused admittance. The next
morning he received a note in the handwriting of the young Jewess. He
opened it feverishly. It was a death-blow. Fraulein Leah was shortly
going to be married to the hated young Dutchman, Herr Meyers, and
henceforth she and Richard were to be strangers. 'It was my first love
sorrow, and I thought I should never forget it, but after all,' said
Wagner, with his wonted audacity, 'I think I cared more for the dog
than for the Jewess.'"

Wagner entered the university at Leipzig and for a time went the pace of
student dissipations; he has described them in his "Lebenserinnerungen."
He took an early disgust, however, for these forms of amusement and was
thereafter a man, whose chief vices were working and dreaming.

One of his early creeds was free love; and though he gave up this
theory, his works as a whole are by no means an argument for
domesticity. In fact they are so devout a pleading for the superiority
of passion over all other inspirations, that it is astounding to hear
Wagnerians occasionally complain of modern Italian operas as
immoral--as if any librettos could be immoral in comparison with the
Nibelungen Cycle.

Wagner's first libretto, "The Wedding" (Die Hochzeit), horrified his
sister so, that he destroyed it at her request. His third, "Das
Liebesverbot," was based on Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure," with
the slight distinction that where Shakespeare's play is a preachment
for virtue, Wagner himself said that his libretto was "the bold
glorification of unchecked sensuality." Years afterward, admirers of
his put the work in rehearsal, but gave it up as too licentious. This
apostle of unrestrained amours found himself most prosaically married
and involved in the most commonplace struggle for daily bread, when he
was only twenty-three.

In 1833, at the age of twenty, Wagner had taken up music
professionally, and got a position as chorus-master. In 1834, he became
musical director at the theatre in Magdeburg. The company, made up
principally of young enthusiasts, who worked day and night, rehearsed
Wagner's opera, "Das Liebesverbot." The first night there was a crowded
house, but the troupe went all to pieces. The next night was to be
Wagner's benefit. Fifteen minutes before the curtain rose, he found the
audience consisted of his landlady, her husband, and one Polish Jew. A
free fight broke out behind the scenes; the prima donna's husband smote
the second tenor, her lover, and every one joined in; even that small
audience was dismissed. In this company _die erste Liebhaberin_ was
Wilhelmine Planer, one of twelve children of a poor spindle-maker. When
the Magdeburg company went to pieces, Wagner went to Leipzig and
offered the opera to a manager, whose daughter was the chief singer.
The manager said that he could not permit his daughter to appear in
such a work. Eventually, Wagner drifted to Koenigsberg, where he became
director of the theatre, and where Wilhelmine had found a position. The
two had become engaged in Magdeburg, and they were married at
Koenigsberg, on November 24, 1836.

The theatre soon followed the example of that at Magdeburg and went
into bankruptcy. During the honeymoon year, Wagner had composed only
one work, an overture, based on "Rule Britannia." At that time "The Old
Oaken Bucket" had not been written. He then drifted to Riga, where he
became music-director and his wife a singer. Now his relentless
ambition seized him and he determined to consecrate the rest of his
life to glory. His wife found herself consecrated to poverty and the
fanatic ideals of a husband, to whom starvation was only a detail in
the scheme of his life,--a scheme and a life for which she had neither
inclination nor understanding.

Wilhelmine, or Minna, as she was called, is described as pretty by some
and as of a "pleasing appearance," by others. The painter Pecht called
her very pretty, but blamed her for a sober, unimaginative soul.
Richard Pohl calls her a prosaic domestic woman, who never understood
her husband, and who might have been an impediment to his far-reaching
ideas, if Richard Wagner could have been impeded in his career by
anything. Wagner himself seems to have been genuinely fond of her,
though never, perhaps, deeply in love with her. He called her an
"excellent housewife," who lovingly and faithfully shared much sorrow
and little joy with him.

The young couple lived at Riga in an expensive suburb, whence it was
said they could reach the theatre only by means of a cab, though
Glasenapp denies this story. Minna brought to her husband not a penny
of dowry, and he brought to her a number of debts, and a hopeless lack
of economy. The first year he tried to get an advance of salary, and
offered to do anything, "except bootblacking and water-carrying, which
latter my chest could not endure at present." Then he decided that fame
and fortune awaited him, as they usually do, just over the horizon. The
only trouble with the horizon, as with to-morrow and the
will-o'-the-wisp, is that it is always just ahead.

When the Wagners applied for a passport, to leave Riga, they did so in
the face of certain suits for debt. They were told that they could have
the passport as soon as they showed receipts for their bills. That was
too ridiculous a condition to consider, so Minna disguised as a peasant
woman, and a friendly lumberman took her across the border as his wife.
The friends of Wagner took up a purse for him, and by elaborate
manoeuvres got him across the Russian border in disguise. He reached
the seaport of Pillau, found his wife and his dog there, and set sail
in a small boat.

Thus he embarked for the future, "with a wife, an opera and a half, a
small purse, and a terribly large and terribly voracious Newfoundland
dog." The composer, his wife, and the dog were all three outrageously
seasick. They arrived finally after violent storms in London, where the
chief event was the loss of the dog. When he came back, the three
decided that Paris offered a better chance, so thither they went.
Meyerbeer befriended them with letters of introduction and much
encouragement, on the receipt of which the cautious couple diluted
their few remaining pence in champagne.

Wagner began to write songs, which he offered to sell for prices
ranging from $2.50 to $4.00; he asked the publisher obligingly to grant
him the latter sum, "as life in Paris is enormously expensive"!

Wagner was so poor that about the only thing he could afford to keep
was a diary. Here he wrote down alternate accounts of his abject
poverty and of his abnormal hopes. In Villon's time, the wolves used to
come into the streets of Paris at night. They were not all dead by
1840, it would seem, for one of them made his home on Wagner's
door-step. He wrote in his diary that he had invited a sick and
starving German workman to breakfast, and his wife informed him that
there was to be no breakfast, as the last pennies were gone.

In one of his moments of desperation, he brought himself to the depth
of asking Minna to pawn some of her jewelry. She told him that she had
long ago pawned it all. She faced their distress like a heroine. Wagner
used to weep when he told of her self-denial, and the cheerfulness with
which she, the pretty actress of former days, cooked what meals there
were to cook, and scrubbed what clothes there were to scrub. For
diversion, when they had no money for theatres and the opera, the
genius and his wife and the dog could always take a walk on the
boulevard.

Wagner could not play any instrument, not even a piano, and so he tried
for a position in the chorus of a cheap theatre; but his voice was not
found good enough for even that. His long sea voyage had given him an
idea for an opera, "The Flying Dutchman." He was driven to sell his
libretto for a hundred dollars to another composer.

It would not do to follow Wagner's artistic progress in this place;
that is an epic in itself. Finally, however, he managed to get his
"Rienzi" written and accepted in Dresden. He scraped up money enough to
go back to his Fatherland, and to take his wife to the baths at
Teplitz, her health having broken under the strain of poverty. It is at
this period that he closed an autobiographic sketch, with these words:
"In Paris I had no prospects for years to come, so in the spring of
1842 I left there. For the first time, with tears in my eyes, I saw the
Rhine; poor artist that I was, I swore eternal allegiance to my German
Fatherland."

But his German Fatherland seems to have sworn everything except
allegiance at him. From this moment he emerged into fame, or rather
into notoriety; he thrust his head through the curtain of obscurity, as
if he were a negro at a country fair, and with remarkable enthusiasm
the whole critical fraternity proceeded to hurl every conceivable
missile at him. It was well for him that his skull was hard.

"Rienzi" made an immediate success. But he was in his thirtieth year
before even this unwelcome success was achieved. It is typical of the
indomitable greatness of the man that even thus late in life, and after
all his trials, he could put away from him success of such a sort, and
turn back into the wilderness of exile and ignominy for years, until he
could find the milk and honey land of art, which only his own
magnificent fanaticism and the unsurpassed friendship of one man,
Liszt, inspired him with the hope of reaching.

To the woman, Minna Planer, who had cooked his meals, washed his
clothes, and darned his socks, this refusal of prosperity was a final
blow of disenchantment. She had understood him little enough before,
but now she lost track of him altogether. Her feelings were those of
Psyche, when she found that her lover was a god with wings and a mania
for flight. So far as concerned the further marriage of their minds, he
now disappeared for her into the blue empyrean; when she sought to
embrace his soul, she clasped thin air.

As for Wagner's heroism for his art, has there ever been anything like
it? Some of his operas he did not see performed for years and years. He
saw hardly the hope of winning his crusade this side the grave of
martyrdom. That he believed in presentiments will be understood in his
powerful feeling throughout the composition of "Tannhauser," that
sudden death would prevent his finishing it. The world knows the value
of these presentiments. Mendelssohn, too, in his letters tells of
receiving on one occasion a letter which he feared to open, so strong
was his feeling that it contained disastrous news. When at length he
found courage to rip the envelope, the news was of the best. If, by
chance, either of these presentiments had proved true, who would have
been satisfied with the explanation of mere coincidence? The value,
however, of Wagner's presentiment lies in the fact that, in spite of
his despairful misgivings, he persevered in his ideals, and, if there
has been never so great a triumph granted a musician, it is perhaps
largely because no other musician so relentlessly worshipped his
artistic ideals or sacrificed to them with such Druidic ruthlessness.

Carl Maria von Weber paid great heed to his wife's artistic advice, and
called her his "gallery." But there are wives and wives, and however
deeply our humanity may sympathise with poor Minna Planer, our love for
evolution can only rejoice that she was not permitted to tie her
husband down to the narrow-souled ideals of the good-hearted, stupid
little housewife she was. Wagner understood her far better than she
understood him. He sympathised with her even in her resistance to his
career. To the last it made him indignant to hear her spoken of
slightingly.

Wagner's appeals for money to his friends, who supported him in his
moneyless art, are constantly mingled with tender allusions to Minna.
When he would borrow Liszt's last penny, he usually wanted a large part
of it for Minna. I do not find him convicted of ever using rough
language to her. She was not so patient. Wagner's friend, Roeckel,
wrote to Praeger in reference to the agony Wagner suffered from the
gibes of criticism:

"I keep it always from him; Minna is not capable of withholding either
praise or blame from him, although I have tried hard to prove to her
that it deeply affects her husband, whose health is none of the
strongest."

When he was implicated in the revolution of 1849, and was forced to
flee for his life, he escaped in the disguise of a coachman, and
finally, with Liszt's ever-ready aid, reached Zurich. As soon as he
found himself there, he borrowed further money from Liszt, to send for
Minna, who had remained behind and "suffered a thousand disagreeable
things."

Wagner had been supporting her parents, and he borrowed sixty-two
thalers more to help them. When Minna did not come immediately, Wagner
wrote an anxious letter of inquiry to a friend.

Surely, there can be nothing tenderer than his allusion to her in
another letter to Liszt:

"As soon as I have my wife I shall go to work again joyfully. Restore
me to my art! You shall see that I am attached to no home, but I cling
to this poor, good, faithful woman, for whom I have provided little but
grief, who is serious, solicitous, and without expectation, and who
nevertheless feels eternally chained to this unruly devil that I am.
Restore her to me! Thus will you do me all the good that you could ever
wish me; and see, for this I shall be grateful to you! yes,
grateful!... See that she is made happy and can soon return to me!
which, alas! in our sweet nineteenth-century language, means, send her
as much money as you possibly can! Yes, that is the kind of a man I am!
I can beg, I could steal, to make my wife happy, if only for a short
time. You dear, good Liszt! do see what you can do! Help me! Help me,
dear Liszt!"

At last she came, and he wrote Heine a letter of rejoicing. But once
with him, she began again her opposition to his high-flying theories.
She wanted him to write a popular French opera for Paris. She was
humiliated at his borrowing for his self-support, and could not see
much glory in his creed: "He who helps me only helps my art through me,
and the sacred cause for which I am fighting." He seemed more than
afraid of her opinion, and wrote to Uhlig:

"She is really somewhat hectoring in this matter, and I shall no doubt
have a hard tussle with her practical sense if I tell her bluntly that
I do not wish to write an opera for Paris. True, she would shake her
head and accept that decision, too, were it not so closely related to
our means of subsistence; there lies the critical knot, which it will
be painful to cut. Already my wife is ashamed of our presence in
Zurich, and thinks we ought to make everybody believe that we are in
Paris."

At last, she nagged him into her theory, although he fairly loathed
writing a pot-boiler, and considered it the purest dishonesty. He went
to Paris, but returned, having been able to accomplish nothing. On his
return, he wrote in his "A Communication to My Friends," that a new
hope sprung up within him. His friend Liszt was then directing the
opera at Weimar.

"At the close of my last Paris sojourn, when I was ill, unhappy, and in
despair, my eye fell on the score of my 'Lohengrin,' which I had almost
forgotten. A pitiful feeling overcame me that these tones would never
resound from the deathly pale paper; two words I wrote to Liszt, the
answer to which was nothing else than the information that, as far as
the resources of the Weimar Opera permitted, the most elaborate
preparations were being made for the production of 'Lohengrin.'"

It was in "Lohengrin" that he first put in play his theory of the
marriage of poetry and music, his idea being their complete devotion,
with poetry as the master of the situation. He believed in independent
melodies no more than in strong-minded wives. He lived this artistic
theory in his own domestic relations, and it was not his fault that
Minna, his melody, found it impossible to live in the light upper air
of his poetry. He was so discouraged, however, by this time, by finding
no encouragement at home, and a frenzy of hostility from the
critics,--a frenzy almost incredible at this late day, in spite of the
monumental evidences of it,--that for six years, after the completion
of "Lohengrin," he wrote no music at all.

He felt that he must first prepare the soil of battle with the critics
in their own element--ink-slinging. On this fact Mr. Finck comments as
follows:

"Five years,--nay, six years, six of the best years of his life,
immediately following the completion of 'Lohengrin,'--the greatest
dramatic composer the world has ever seen did not write a note! Do you
realise what that means? It means that the world lost two or three
immortal operas, which he might have, and probably would have, written
in these six years had not an unsympathetic world forced him into the
role of an aggressive reformer and revolutionist."

He received some money, and more fame, and still more enemies as a
result of his powerful literary tilts against Philistinism. Then he
took up the Nibelungen idea, planning to devote three years to the
work; "little dreaming that it would keep him with interruptions for
the next twenty-three years." For the accomplishment of this vast
monument he asked only a humble place to work. He wrote Uhlig:

"I want a small house, with meadow and a little garden! To work with
zest and joy,--but not for the present generation.... Rest! rest! rest!
Country! country! a cow, a goat, etc. Then--health--happiness--hope!
Else, everything lost. I care no more."

He found all in Zuerich, where he and his wife rowed about the lake, and
accumulated friends. He found special sympathy in the friendship of
Frau Elise Wille, a novelist. Perhaps she was more than a friend, for
one of his letters to her is superscribed "Precious."

But all the while he suffered much from erysipelas and dyspepsia, and
was occasionally moved with violent despair to the edge of suicide, for
he was exiled from his Fatherland, and he was an outlaw from the world
of music, which he longed to enlarge and beautify. He compared himself
to Beethoven:

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