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Wagner’s other ‘ring cycle’ and its problems.

IN NEW YORK, THE Metropolitan Opera’s controversial new production by Robert Lepage of Wagner’s Walküre, the second installment in his staging of the complete “Ring” cycle, features a celebrated cast, including Bryn Terfel, Jonas Kaufmann, and, as Brünnhilde, Deborah Voigt. The stars of the show, however, seem to be the two dozen multipurpose planks of  Carl Fillion’s ostentatious set. The Ring cycle is one of Wagner’s most famous works, and in the new production, the set not only plays a major part, it also reflects Wagner’s earlier personal life where the floor beneath his feet must have felt highly movable very often. Here is a 1905 commentary from our archives.

By William Ashton Ellis.

Fillion's set. Click to enlarge.

Fillion’s set. Click to enlarge.

NOW THAT THE PUBLICATION OF Richard Wagner’s letters to Mathilde Wesendonck has drawn renewed attention to the unhappiness of his own first marriage — an unhappiness of profounder origin than I am at present permitted to state — it is of peculiar interest to gain another side-light on the latter; a side-light which throws into still greater relief the truth of his remark, to his sister Clara, on the hopelessness of all attempts to “reason with Minna.”

The document I am about to produce made its first appearance in Germany so recently as last February, in the appendix to a voluminous collection of the letters of Peter Cornelius, nephew of the great painter, and well-known himself as poet-composer; it is a letter to Cornelius, though, from Richard Wagner, who has just consigned himself to melancholy solitude beside the Rhine, for composition of the music of his Meistersinger. But we must first go a little way back, to Richard’s second severance from Minna.     

After their first parting in August 1858, the causes whereof are fully set forth in a letter to his sister (see preface, R. Wagner to M. Wesendonck), husband and wife had come together again in the autumn of 1859, and dwelt in Paris, by no means in peace and harmony, yet with much exercise of patience on his side, until June, 1861. Here Otto Wesendonck himself had visited them in the spring, and that visit might have taught a lesson to any less stubbornly suspicious mind than Minna’s. Yet in the said June, just as the Wagners were making every arrangement to settle down in permanence at Carlsruhe, a swift catastrophe occurred, and by the middle of July we find them taking opposite paths, with no prospect of reunion—separated, in fact, by everything but human law.

Minna.

THE PRECISE NATURE OF that Paris catastrophe is not on record, but may be inferred from the deep gloom that overcasts all Wagner’s letters of those two dread months; from his veiled allusions to the “mysteriously sudden” death of the four-footed pet Frau Wesendonck once had given him—“With that little dog I buried much!”—and from Minna’s unequivocal hint to a female correspondent that it was “the Tristans” who had set her roaming once again. That inference I have drawn elsewhere, namely, that Minna’s wrath had been rekindled by discovery of a packet of Mathilde’s letters; but this fresh document converts it to a certainty. No matter how platonic, how demure the contents of those letters, their bare existence would suffice to enrage a woman of this type, whose every through was centred in her brainless self. Invective and invective, scene after scene—we can conjure them all up if we recall the words of Wagner’s letter to Mathilde of July 12th (his wife had left him on the 10th), “For my part I can think of no more settling down: this the upshot of a last hard, infinitely painful experience,” and of a fortnight later, “I do not write you, for fear of distressing you.”

By the irony of fate, Otto and Mathilde—who had never parted—were returning to the normal relations of man and wife about this very time; and less than four months after the words last cited, Richard Wagner sees that even the transcendent ideal which has sustained him in his troubles hitherto must be renounced. Of his own free will he writes Mathilde in December, resigning his last claim to soul-communion, whilst he seeks to turn the mournful stream of his reflections by taking up a “comic opera,” Die Meistersinger.

Mathilde.

Midway in the text of this opera Wagner is overcome by the sense of his twofold loneliness, and writes from Paris, January 9th, 1862, to beg Cornelius (then aged thirty-seven) to come and join him at some quiet spot:

“I can manage no longer without a friendly soul about me, or a home of my own: —Friend, you must come to me for good!…. If you don’t care for Wiesbaden, for instance, we’ll talk about another place. Fortune is bound to smile on me again some day, when you shall share it; but I’m thinking you’ll have luck as well. If not, what matters? In any circumstances we are sure to get on well together.—So I hope that when summer commences we shall meet on the Rhine, where you’re a native, you know. Just think it out…. My wife seems to be making good progress and behaving quite rationally. When all’s said, though the poor woman stands so far from me in many ways, life’s hardships have so closely bound her fate with mine that I cannot possibly think of a supportable old age for myself without extending that wish to include my wife. So I must have her with us, also, after all: you will be of enormous benefit there. And so, you see, one hopes again!”

Cornelius—whose letters to Wagner are not accessible as yet—appears to have declined to hazard his independence, though we find him rushing from Vienna to Mayence at Wagner’s urgent invitation to attend the first reading of the Meistersinger text, early in February, at the house of Schott, its future publisher. Without the prospect of this friendly buffer, Wagner may well have hesitated to incur the risk of a renewal of domestic strife; but at last his longing for companionship obtains the upper hand, he makes the plunge, invites his wife to “think it over”—and learns to rue the consequences. Which brings us to our principal document:—

BIEBRICH (ON RHINE),

March 4th, 1862.

“MY GOOD CORNELIUS,

“I am most unhappy, and dying to tell my woes to somebody! But I can appeal to no feminine heart, as I should only give it more regret for its own helplessness, than comfort to myself. Indeed it is the hardest load to bear, to feel oneself so solitary in all one’s grief and anguish, to have to make the best of everything alone. Then it struck me as a dispensation of Heaven, that I had found yourself! You’ll understand me; to you I can commit a portion of my heartache.

“Dear friend, there’s no more doubt of it; it is impossible for me to live with my wife any more! You will scarcely credit all I say in those few words. My heart is bleeding, and yet I recognise that I must fight down all soft-heartedness by force, since firmness and frankness are the only rescue.

“You know how I was longing for a regulated home again, and how I fancied I could gain it only by reunion with my wife. Well, while I was sadly trying to instal myself in winter quarters here at Biebrich, my wife, appealed to by my want, suddenly makes up her mind to follow in your footsteps, in a sense; instead of answering me by letter, she appears in my chambers here herself, just as I had finished my provisional shake-down. My heart went out to her, and my great emotion and delight should easily have shown her how things stand with me. I reproached her for not having come with her parrot to stop, instead of merely running over for a week to help me furnish; and so we fell discussing a definitive abode at Wiesbaden. She was looking hale and hearty; which assured me how she invariably recovers when alone, left to her own likings as to company and mode of life, without interference through me. At once I began devising all kinds of common-sense arrangements and concessions to pave a lastingly endurable companionship, despite the diametric opposition of our tastes, our characters, and modes of viewing things. Certainly between us, and, confined to our own company through my fondness for seclusion, we are necessarily exposed to constant friction—all this was brought back to my feeling the very first day; still, my good will was such that I gladly resumed toward her that peculiarly affected mode of speech one uses to a child, and listened with apparent interest to things quite off my plane and often most distasteful to me. That dread peculiar to a conscience which will not palter with untruths I did my utmost to repress, and went to sleep the first night in the calm belief it would be possible henceforward. Next morning came a strange intervention of Fate, whose ocular demonstration really set me in amazement this time. Listen!

“Since our last meeting in Venice[1] a prolonged stagnation had instinctively entered the correspondence between myself and my lady-friend W[esendonc]k. Everything is so perfectly understood between us, and ordered by the fullest resignation, that it is only in a good and friendly humour that I still communicate with her; particularly since the society of her most estimable husband has become so trying to me—quite apart from my personal considerations—that, renouncing any more enduring personal intercourse with both of them, I merely maintain a slight intercourse by letter, chiefly meant to ease her load of life a little: in times of such upset and trouble, as these last have been for me, I prefer to keep dead silence. So it happened that my lady-friend had heard nothing at all of my journey to Paris, and sent me a little Christmas-present to Vienna, which returned to her at Zurich after going long astray. After a while I did write from Paris, telling her also of my proposed migration to the Rhine; whereon she informed me of the miscarriage of her Christmas parcel, and asked me to acquaint her with my eventual address on the Rhine, that she might forward me the present there. This I accordingly did, from Mayence, but remained long without tidings. At last she tells me briefly she has been at Düsseldorf to bury her mother, and I convey to her my heartfelt sympathy forthwith. For this she thanks me at some length, as also for the Meistersinger [rough MS. Poem], and announces despatch of the belated Christmas gift.

“Now, that letter arrives here on the second, the little box on the third day of my wife’s stay with me, and both fall into the unhappy woman’s hands at once. Incapable of viewing my relations to that lady in aught save a revoltingly trivial light, she refuses to understand any of my explanations—given simply for the sake of reassuring her—but bursts into that common tone again which makes me lose all self-possession, in my turn: she reads my anger as an effect of that lady’s agitating hold upon me, and—the whole mad house of cards stands stark once more! It was enough to make me lose my sense: this woman on just the self-same spot as four years since; the same explosions, word for word, the self-same common tone!

“These ragings over, I composed myself again, tried to regard them as a last mad thunderstorm, still hope, and abjure no possibility. But then appeared the sad old sequel: mistrust, suspicion, misconstruction of my every word! And that in total solitude like this; pent up long winter evenings with a being who does not grasp one jot of my true nature, cannot so much as follow me if I take up a book, and has not occupation of her own. And then myself—demanding naught save quiet and a peaceful mood, yearning to get to my work, straining every nerve to cope with stress of circumstance and pinch of want, set quivering by every breath of gossip from without, and all the like. Finally, my wife’s heart-trouble growing more acute again! They were ten days of hell. And yet those ten atrocious days at least had one good side, a final warning; and I can but marvel that this solemn warning should have come, so wholly innocently, from my lady-friend herself!

“You may easily suppose the firm resolve that has matured in me! Remarkable to say, though my wife herself must also find my company a hell to her, it always comes hard to her to abide in moments of tranquillity by insights which she only seems to gain in passion; when I heard her suddenly commence again on house-hunting, I positively shuddered. Ah, that I should have let such misery become so old! My wife, however, will get over it, for I still shall leave her the appearance. To obtain an actual divorce from her, is a thing I could not dream of now; it is too late, and the cruelty of such an act revolts me. So I have decided on the following expedient. From next autumn on, my wife shall set up house in Dresden for herself, with all our goods and chattels save the few which I retain here, and reserve in it a room ‘for me.’ Under pretext—quite a valid one—of a tranquil nook for working in, I shall permanently keep a small apartment for myself, such as I occupy now, and visit my wife for a couple of weeks—perhaps—from time to time. That is the look we will give it, just for the sake of the look.

“But the luck it will need, even to carry this tolerably out! Strictly, it means keeping two establishments—for a man who can hardly keep one; for I won’t deny that my outward lot is verging on progressive downfall! I can’t be of any more good to myself, the gulf between me and the world of so-called art is growing ever broader. Friend, I no longer can converse with people! If I run against a conductor or theatre-director, or even a man like Raff, I have to cross myself forthwith, and seek refuge in some hole or corner where I may be left alone. What am I to do with the Schotts? To me it is exactly as if I were bound to play false to them all! My sole refuge is still the young Grand Duke of Baden: here at least is inborn nobleness of feeling, happily paired with a free and open mind. The man knows how things stand with me, and is of no other opinion than that I ought never to ask a farthing for my works; only he is not rich or powerful enough, though I am sure to have a little good news from him soon—my only little. Still, it’s a joy even to be able to speak with him as what I am. My wish would be for him to take possession of me bodily and provide for my life and works in naturalibus; any small pension I then would assign to my wife.

“But whatever way this outward question of existence may resolve itself, how favourably soever, it hardly will allay the point that really gnaws my vitals. I’ve such an awful amount of regret in me, it is so horrible to think that anyone is suffering through me, that it costs me an untold exertion to bring myself to reason. My own eyes have taught me that my wife has better health away from me, in any circumstances, than beside me; further, I plainly recognise that the feeling of true love for me does not exist in her at all, that she knows no injury but what is done to her, and he heart is quite incapable of e’er forgiving it; yet—for the only world we know is that within us—I figure to myself it may be otherwise, deep sorrow, yearning of the heart may make her suffer—and my heart bleeds. Since the day before yesterday, when I said goodbye at Frankfort to the unhappy but still wrathfully resentful woman, it has kept on gnawing at me; and nothing but the certainty that by softness I should only prolong the agony on both sides, can bring me—resignation in the end. Ah, God! and then the tears well up in me, and I cry aloud for a woman’s kind soul to take me gently to itself!! But that I have shut off from me; and so, I fancy, all the troubles of my wife are venged!

“Alack!—

“Do tell me how you have been faring[2]…. Your visit [a month ago] was like a fairy-tale: with you the good angel departed, as with you it came…. I haven’t been cheerful since, though I have taken a liking to Weissheimer; his seriousness and zeal attract me, and I do not think him without gifts. He often comes out to me…. Of course I haven’t got to work yet: it is incredible how one’s life is stolen from one…. Within me and around me all is waste, still March! A huge disgust has taken me; if I don’t get to work soon, there’s an end of me. Heavens, for just one year of peace and but a little comfort!—

“Now piece together what you can from these mumblings of a man dead-beat. Keep of good cheer, remember me kindly, and think of another fairy-tale ere long.

“Adieu, friend; all’s so drear!

“Your

“RICHARD.”

LUCKILY THAT WAS THE last attempt at reconcilement of two such hopelessly disparate beings, though Wagner did make his promised visit de convenance to his wife’s abode the following November. Yet why had he endured this purgatory for a quarter of a century; why had he dropped that petition for divorce which he lodged scarce seven months after marriage? Ten years before this last catastrophe, he describes the world as a place “where the Strong brims full the sacrifice demanded of it by the Weak”; and that is the only answer. But what an addle-pate the woman was! The tiniest grain of mother-wit might have shown her that this was the psychologic moment for displaying herself in the most attractive light: one word of human sympathy would have brought her husband to her feet for good and all. An impenetrable barrier had been raised between him and her fancied rival—on a very different plane—as the merest glance at the correspondence with Mathilde Wesendonck about this date reveals to us at once; was Minna so childishly blind that she could not see it too? Empty heart, empty head.

Richard.

But Minna had not come to Biebrich with the remotest thought of making up for past dissensions by a kindly self-effacement. With a recollection of prae-nuptial plaudits, she had come to play the “leading lady,” and perhaps her effort at light comedy is the most dismal incident in all this scene. In the document we have just perused it is merely hinted: “who cannot so much as follow me if I take up a book”; but we happen to have another testimony. Wendelin Weissheimer, the young man mentioned towards our letter’s close, published a book of Erlebnisse mit Richard Wagner, &c., in 1898, and this is what he tells us of Minna’s surprise visit to her husband’s barely-furnished retreat:—

“It was entertaining to see how he pulled himself together, and did his best to play the loving husband and attentive host. He sent for cold viands from the hotel, brewed tea himself, and boiled us half-a-dozen eggs; for I, also, was to share their meal and stop for the recital of the Meistersinger poem, which his wife did not know as yet. Then he slipped into one of his famous velvet dressing-coats, put on a cap to match, and the reading commenced. The first act passed without mishap, though Frau Minna interjected questions here and there which forced him to superfluous explanations. Ere beginning the second, he gave her a description of the mise-en-scène: ‘To the right Hans Sachs’s cobbler-stall, to the left the house of Pogner, with a crooked alley leading to the background’—‘And here sits the public,’ put in Minna, while a pellet of bread, which she had been kneading, rolled over Wagner’s manuscript,—the recital was at end. An awkward pause ensued; I deemed it time to start on my return to Mayence, but Wagner insisted on my stopping. Laying hold of me, he said with emphasis, ‘For God’s sake, only stop this evening!’ I stayed, did all I could to bring about a better feeling, and succeeded more easily than I had ventured to home” (by turning the subject, of course).

WHAT POSSIBLE HOPE COULD there be of any dwelling in concord with a woman who even at fifty-two could not repress her natural irreverence? A cab should have been ordered at once, to convey her to the nearest station—railway or police. Or would it have been wiser for Wagner to go out himself, and leave her to deploy her skittishness on Wendelin? On the whole, however, a certificate of suicidal lunacy might best have met the case.

Now see how generously Wagner omits from his next letter to Mathilde all mention of this tragi-comedy, though she herself had been the unsuspecting cause of its dénouement. Not until a week after writing Cornelius, can he trust himself even to thank Frau Wesendonck for the Christmas-gift which had run such strange adventures (a cushion her little girl had helped to work): “I could no write before to-day; I had to wait for good humour.” Not one word does he breathe of Minna, though her name must have hung on the tip of his pen when he arrived at the sentence: “I’ve read the poem several times aloud; lastly at the Grand Duke’s in Carlsruhe [March 7th], when they listened very well.” But what a commentary on Minna’s tantrums is the very opening of this letter of March 12th: “I wrote you from Paris lately, that you should hear little of my life henceforward, but solely of my handiwork, because the first could never have a meaning more. But how when I cannot get to work, when life takes all my energy? Even to-day I can tell you nothing further, than, I hope to start work at last to-morrow.” There is a refinement in this reticence which floods with light those words of last July, after the previous domestic catastrophe: “I do not write you, for fear of distressing you.”

For all that, there is a tangible connection between the letter of March 12th to Mathilde and our principal document, since it contains a sympathetic sketch of good Cornelius’ flying visit for the earliest recital of the Meistersinger, followed by a request: “Do write him, child; he loves you too.” And that tempts me to set off the picture of the Wagner interior with Cornelius’ own description of its counterpart; for the younger man indulges in another “fairy” expedition very soon. On his way from Vienna to the lake of Geneva, in search of two months’ quiet for the composition of his Cid, Cornelius makes a halt at Zurich, whence he writes to Dr. Standhartner,[3] May 5th, 1862:—

I’m still full of my impressions of the Villa Wesendonck, which yesterday I saw. I didn’t want to continue my journey without gaining an idea of Wagner’s former Asyl.”[4] Cornelius goes on to relate how he had fallen into conversation with a native: “Then I asked about the house Richard Wagner had occupied, and the man became quite warm. Just fancy—it was the wood-carver who had modelled that baton which Frau Wesendonck got made for Wagner after Semper’s drawing! So the first person I spoke to at Zurich was an enthusiastic worshipper of Wagner.

“The second was Wesendonck, whom I visited forthwith. Dear Heaven!—how much I understand since yesterday, and what a good thing it is, friend, friends, that I have made this fool’s journey! Take a plunge into life, said Nicolai to me, and how right he was! Beholding, learning life, what oxygen, what air it brings the mind!….[5] At Wesendonck’s I swam in stupefaction blent of ecstasy and strange affright. How shall I describe it to you? It is summed up in that saying of Diogenes, which kept re-echoing in me: ‘Alexander, get from between me and the sun!’ A ghazal might be strung on that refrain. When a rival of Adonis, in guise of a white-cravatted janitor, rather floated than advanced to me—whom I should as soon have taken for Count Persigny as for the footman of Herr Wesendonck—‘Alexander, from between me and the sun.’—When that sun-god of a lackey had wiped the dust from my miserable boots, at the unanimous request of all my outer and my inner man, and a study—no, not glimmered—glowered at me with its chairs and tables, pictures, bookshelves, easel, clock and all utensils, such as it would need a Boz or Dumas to depict—‘Alexander, from between me and the sun.’ When the monarch-citizen himself evolves before me, who creates his life as Wagner his operas, and talks of America and Italy as I of my landlord’s apartments—‘Alexander, from between me and the sun.’ When his limes and poplars murmur in the park, all laid out by himself; when, inviting to a cup of tea, he leads me up his marble staircase with its four hermae chiselled at his nod in Rome for ‘next to nothing’—Socrates, the god-like young Augustus and the rest—and the needles of Australian shrubs embrace my chin en passant like green parricides—‘Alexander, from between me and the sun.’ Then at a supper in the third heaven (for one must rank his cellar as the first)—where the butter is served up with ice—he pours me out real Chinese tea in real Japanese cups on real Tungoo napkins—and gives me suddenly my first correct idea of Raphael through the wonders of his giant red portfolio…. Yes, just as my uncle told him on the staircase of his house in Rome, ‘And were you the archangel Raphael himself, I must be going now,’ though he bore me on the wings of his wealth to every height and depth of all creation, I still say ‘Alexander, from between be and the sun!’….

“Frau Wesendonck, alas! is ill. She is expecting [six weeks hence] and a cough has developed—not without some anxiety, to judge by the account. This lady, of whom I saw a beautiful portrait in oils, must, in fact, be a dear angel of goodness! She regretted not being able to see me—but I had been received with so much friendship, and Herr Wesendonck behaved with such complete absence of side, that I ventured to leave my Geneva address and beg for kind news of the health of the lady of the house. Herr Wesendonck read me a letter from Wagner, which unfortunately doesn’t confirm the good conclusions we had drawn from his silence. He says, ‘Wherever I try to drive a nail to tighten up my life, it will not hold! And the doctor tells me, You absolutely must not work at present—it is destroying you out and out!’ Write to him as often as you can—insist upon [your niece] Seraphine writing also; I will write to him myself either to-day or directly I get to Geneva! It’s urgent.

“Imagine it! Wagner wrote to Wesendonck about that journey of mine—and just as it I had undertaken it at my own expense!… Of course I demolished that illusion by the simple truth.”

IT IS GENERALLY THESE little touches that tell the most, and the last simple reference shows the full veracity of Wagner’s old remark, that Mathilde kept no secrets from her husband; for that letter was addressed to her, as we have seen already. But the whole reception given to Cornelius, himself a perfect stranger, is striking evidence of the light in which Otto Wesendonck regarded Wagner. On this side of the picture, at least, there was no animosity.

A graceful little epilogue.—Cornelius writes to Standhartner some five weeks after: “Wesendonck has had the great kindness, not only to give me news of his wife’s better health, but at the same time to make me the most delicate present. He has sent me, in quite admirable drawings, six sheets of them, those Psyche pictures of Raphael’s the photographs of which so much impressed me. That is a gift which makes one proud, in place of shaming one.” So Cornelius steals a couple of days from his Cid to frame his thanks in verse—we may be sure with no refrain of “Alexander, get from between me and the sun!


William Ashton Ellis was one of the most important Victorian musicologists and an expert in the life and idea of Richard Wagner. His translations of Wagner’s Religion and Art, Art and Politics, Opera and Drama, and other works, are considered classics. This article appeared in N.S. No. CCCCLXIII [July 1905] of The Fortnightly Review. It has been manually transcribed for this New Series online, with very minor redactions added to track subsequent web usage. Please cite The Fortnightly Review and fortnightlyreview.co.uk. See our copyright page for details.


[1] When Wagner paid a three-day visit to the Wesendoncks, leaving Vienna November 7th and returning the 13th. Those three days clearly told him all; see letters 124-125, R. Wagner to M. Wesendonck.

[2] The few sentences which I omit here, and lower, are of no general interest; mere references to mutual friends.

[3] A Vienna intimate of Wagner’s also.—See R. Wagner to M. Wesendonck.

[4] The cottage adjoining Wesendonck’s palace. Cornelius calls it “langjährigem Asyl,” but we know that Wagner dwelt there less than sixteen months.

[5] Some omission by the German editor.

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