What galls people even more than Wagner’s idealism is that he was a practical idealist. He succeeded in making real what his contemporaries regarded as ludicrous pipe-dreams. But many of them were in the interests not only of great art, with which his only connection was passionate devotion, but in the interests of those who were performing it. He had a lifelong concern with the welfare of the musicians with whom he performed, and who idolised him. He drew up detailed and carefully worked-out plans for the betterment of the Dresden orchestra, and did a great deal to put the careers of the musicians in Zurich, when he was exiled there, on a secure financial footing. He believed, from extensive experience, that they were unlikely otherwise to give of their best, but there is no reason to think that that was his only or primary motive; unless one is determined to see him as ‘an absolute shit’ and ‘a very bad hat indeed’, to invoke two of W. H. Auden’s judgements on his character.
Wagner’s preparedness to be as hard on other people, in the fulfilment of what he saw as his mission, as he invariably was on himself, is undeniable. And it is easy to slide from that to his ‘using’ people. The prize example here is King Ludwig II, and it is worth looking at his relationship with Wagner in a bit of detail because it is so common to regard the King as the pathetic but rich host, Wagner as the impoverished but triumphant parasite. In the most famous single episode of his life, Wagner, in 1864, was in hiding from his creditors, at the end of his financial and all other tethers, when the eighteen-year-old Crown Prince came to the Bavarian throne, and as his first act sent his cabinet secretary in search of the composer whom he had idolised since early adolescence. Having finally run Wagner to ground, the secretary Pfistermeister conveyed his royal master’s greetings, Wagner went off to Munich the next day, and Ludwig promised to settle all his debts, set him up in the comfort he needed for completing the Ring, and ensure its production. A Platonic honeymoon ensued, but was short-lived. The populace of Munich was scandalised by Wagner’s behaviour, he made enemies in the cabinet by attempting to influence Ludwig’s political opinions, and later on he lied to him about whether he was having an affair with Cosima, the wife of Hans von Bülow, the conductor who was tirelessly preparing the first performance of Tristan und Isolde. Their relationship continued until Wagner’s death, but Ludwig was, for all his passion for Wagner’s art (more its scenic than its musical aspects), sadly disillusioned with its creator, whom he once included in a denunciation of ‘the theatre rabble’.
It is, in many respects, a painful story. But the truth is that Ludwig, in his lonely misery, found his chief consolation in watching Wagner’s dramas. He wanted them finished and performed for himself alone – his preferred way of seeing them was in a theatre in which he constituted the sole audience. He was one of the first of the breed of people who have found Wagner’s dramas superior to life, and in straightforward competition with it, and was unusual among them only in that he had the means at his disposal to build himself a Venus Grotto, a Hunding’s Hut (both in the grounds of his pleasure palace Lindenhof), and to spend a large part of the time which should have been occupied in affairs of state pretending to be Lohengrin. There is no single piece of evidence that he wanted ‘to save Wagner for the world’, as he put it on hearing of Wagner’s death, to which his immediate reaction was, ‘Oh! I’m sorry, but then again not really. Only recently he caused me trouble over Parsifal.’ And as for the expense which Wagner caused him – and it does seem very unlikely that without Ludwig’s aid Wagner’s later works could have been written – the decorations for Ludwig’s bedroom in Herrenchiemsee, his recreation of Versailles, cost considerably more than all the money and gifts in kind that he gave Wagner over nineteen years; and his wedding coach, never used, three times as much as he gave Wagner. The treatment he received from the composer was compounded of genuine gratitude, warm affection and concern at the start, and exploitation in the service of his art.
Admittedly Wagner wrote in a letter to Liszt: ‘If I am obliged to plunge once more into the waves of an artist’s imagination in order to find satisfaction in an imaginary world, I must at least help out my imagination and find means of encouraging my imaginative faculties. So I cannot live like a dog, I cannot sleep on straw and drink common gin: mine is an intensely irritable, acute and hugely voracious, yet uncommonly tender and delicate sensuality which, one way or another, must be flattered if I am to accomplish the cruelly difficult task of creating in my mind a non-existent world.’ That does strike me as candid. If, on the basis of it, hostile judgement of Wagner is in place, he would even so not be worse than many people who escape the criticism that is heaped on him because he told the truth and was incessantly in the limelight; quite apart from the reputation he has earned from producing his works under the conditions, some of the time, which he tells Liszt he craves. Quite a lot of the time he managed to create them despite poverty and discomfort, but I don’t see that he should have had to endure more of that than he did. All told, I’m inclined to feel that Wagner’s capacity for making writers on him, many of them securely established in academic jobs, reveal their priggish and disapproving lack of imagination is his most vexing feature.
However, on to Wagner and sex. After some youthful gallivanting of a commonplace kind, he married a woman who was in no respect suitable for him, and their life together was unhappy for the most part. Very shortly after the marriage his wife Minna ran away with another man, twice. Her sexual history had begun distressingly, with a seduction which led to the birth of a daughter, Nathalie, whom Minna always passed off as her sister, and thanks to Wagner’s loyalty, the secret was not discovered during her lifetime. Minna was a great admirer of Wagner’s worst work, Rienzi, and was unable to understand why he felt the need to write operas vastly different from it, which were less successful at the box office and led to lengthy periods of near-destitution. That they didn’t give up the effort to live together until decades of misery had passed is a mystery. Under the circumstances, Wagner’s intermittent passions – he always needed a muse – are in no wise surprising. And what was certainly the grand passion of his life, for Mathilde Wesendonck, though it caused all the parties concerned great pain, was hardly anyone’s fault. Its connections with Tristan – was Wagner in love with Mathilde because he was writing Tristan, was it the other way round, or a mixture of the two? – can never be sorted out, if only for the reason that this is one of those matters in which there is no such thing as the truth.
His second marriage was as mutually fulfilling as his first was frustrating. Cosima, illegitimate daughter of Liszt, had married early in her first attempt at self-sacrifice to a man of genius, Hans von Bülow. Unfortunately he was tormented by not being genius enough, and their marriage was, in its way, as unhappy as Wagner’s first. Since for Cosima, a woman of extraordinary gifts, it was inconceivable that she should not play the part of a George Eliot heroine to someone who needed her, it was inevitable that frequent contact with Wagner should lead to passion. As so often in such situations, the idea was that in concealing their relationship from Bülow they would spare his feelings, though of course that is never possible. Cosima’s guilt over the deception pervades her diaries, written after everything was in the open. She and Wagner would have been fools to refuse to enter into what became one of the most famously productive partnerships in history, Cosima giving him every kind of support, except financial, during the last eighteen years of his life when he was bearing crushing burdens of responsibility, creative and otherwise, and his health was in decline. Wagner had one last fling, with Judith Gauthier, in the period of the first Bayreuth Festival, an affair of which the remarkable Cosima was aware and which she sanctioned, knowing that it would not survive for long.
So if Wagner had ‘a passion for other men’s wives’, as the familiar account goes, that