My Life, Richard Wagner [little readers .txt] 📗

family circle very pleasantly. She was the musical one among my brothers and sisters, and I enjoyed her society very much. It was also a relief to me when her presence acted as a damper upon the various household scenes brought on by Minna, who, as a result of the steady development of her heart trouble, grew more and more suspicious, vehement and obstinate.

In October I expected a visit from Liszt, who proposed to make a fairly long stay at Zurich, accompanied by various people of note. I could not wait so long, however, before beginning the composition of Siegfried, and I began to sketch the overture on the 22nd of September.

A tinker had established himself opposite our house, and stunned my ears all day long with his incessant hammering. In my disgust at never being able to find a detached house protected from every kind of noise, I was on the point of deciding to give up composing altogether until the time when this indispensable condition should be fulfilled. But it was precisely my rage over the tinker that, in a moment of agitation, gave me the theme for Siegfried's furious outburst against the bungling Mime. I played over the childishly quarrelsome Polter theme in G minor to my sister, furiously singing the words at the same time, which made us all laugh so much that I decided to make one more effort. This resulted in my writing down a good part of the first scene by the time Liszt arrived on 13th October.

Liszt came by himself, and my house at once became a musical centre. He had finished his Faust and Dante Symphonies since I had seen him, and it was nothing short of marvellous to hear him play them to me on the piano from the score. As I felt sure that Liszt must be convinced of the great impression his compositions made on me, I felt no scruples in persuading him to alter the mistaken ending of the Dante Symphony. If anything had convinced me of the man's masterly and poetical powers of conception, it was the original ending of the Faust Symphony, in which the delicate fragrance of a last reminiscence of Gretchen overpowers everything, without arresting the attention by a violent disturbance. The ending of the Dante Symphony seemed to me to be quite on the same lines, for the delicately introduced Magnificat in the same way only gives a hint of a soft, shimmering Paradise. I was the more startled to hear this beautiful suggestion suddenly interrupted in an alarming way by a pompous, plagal cadence which, as I was told, was supposed to represent Domenico.

'No!' I exclaimed loudly, 'not that! Away with it! No majestic Deity! Leave us the fine soft shimmer.'

'You are right,' said Liszt. 'I said so too; it was the Princess who persuaded me differently. But it shall be as you wish.'

All well and good--but all the greater was my distress to learn later that not only had this ending of the Dante Symphony been preserved, but even the delicate ending of the Faust Symphony, which had appealed to me so particularly, had been changed, in a manner better calculated to produce an effect, by the introduction of a chorus. And this was exactly typical of my relations to Liszt and to his friend Caroline Wittgenstein!

This woman, with her daughter Marie, was soon to arrive on a visit too, and the necessary preparations were made for her reception. But before these ladies arrived, a most painful incident occurred between Liszt and Karl Ritter at my house. Ritter's looks alone, and still more, a certain abrupt contradictoriness in his way of speaking, seemed to put Liszt into a state in which he was easily irritated. One evening Liszt was speaking in an impressive tone of the merits of the Jesuits, and Ritter's inopportune smiles appeared to offend him. At table the conversation turned on the Emperor of the French, Louis Napoleon, whose merits Liszt rather summarily insisted that we should acknowledge, whereas we were, on the whole, anything but enthusiastic about the general state of affairs in France. When Liszt, in an attempt to make clear the important influence of France on European culture, mentioned as an instance the French Academie, Karl again indulged in his fatal smile. This exasperated Liszt beyond all bounds, and in his reply he included some such phrase as this: 'If we are not prepared to admit this, what do we prove ourselves to be? Baboons!' I laughed, but again Karl only smiled--this time, with deadly embarrassment. I discovered afterwards through Bulow that in some youthful squabble he had had the word 'Baboon-face' hurled at him. It soon became impossible to hide the fact that Ritter felt himself grossly insulted by 'the doctor,' as he called him, and he left my house foaming with rage, not to set foot in it again for years. After a few days I received a letter in which he demanded, first, a complete apology from Liszt, as soon as he came to see me again, and if this were unobtainable, Liszt's exclusion from my house. It distressed me greatly to receive, soon after this, a letter from Ritter's mother, whom I respected very much, reproaching me for my unjust treatment of her son in not having obtained satisfaction for an insult offered him in my house. For a long time my relations with this family, intimate as they had been, were painfully strained, as I found it impossible to make them see the incident in the right light. When Liszt, after a time, heard of it, he regretted the disturbance too, and with praise-worthy magnanimity made the first advance towards a reconciliation by paying Ritter a friendly visit. There was nothing said about the incident, and Ritter's return visit was made, not to Liszt, but to the Princess, who had arrived in the meantime. After this Liszt decided that he could do nothing further; Ritter, therefore, withdrew from our society from this time forward, and changed his winter quarters from Zurich to Lausanne, where he settled permanently.

Not only my own modest residence, but the whole of Zurich seemed full of life when Princess Caroline and her daughter took up their abode at the Hotel Baur for a time. The curious spell of excitement which this lady immediately threw over every one she succeeded in drawing into her circle amounted, in the case of my good sister Clara (who was still with us at the time), almost to intoxication. It was as if Zurich had suddenly become a metropolis. Carriages drove hither and thither, footmen ushered one in and out, dinners and suppers poured in upon us, and we found ourselves suddenly surrounded by an increasing number of interesting people, whose existence at Zurich we had never even suspected, though they now undoubtedly cropped up everywhere. A musician named Winterberger, who felt it incumbent on him on certain occasions to behave eccentrically, had been brought there by Liszt; Kirchner, the Schumann enthusiast from Winterthur, was practically always there, attracted by the new life, and he too did not fail to play the wag. But it was principally the professors of Zurich University whom Princess Caroline coaxed out of their hole-and-corner Zurich habits. She would have them, one at a time, for herself, and again serve them up en masse for us. If I looked in for a moment from my regular midday walk, the lady would be dining alone, now with Semper, now with Professor Kochly, then with Moleschott, and so on. Even my very peculiar friend Sulzer was drawn in, and, as he could not deny, in a manner intoxicated. But a really refreshing sense of freedom and spontaneity pervaded everything, and the unceremonious evenings at my house in particular were really remarkably free and easy. On these occasions the Princess, with Polish patriarchal friendliness, would help the mistress of the house in serving. Once, after we had had some music, I had to give the substance of my two newly conceived poems, Tristan und Isolde and Die Sieger, to a group which, half sitting, half lying before me, was certainly not without charm.

The crown of our festivities was, however, Liszt's birthday, on the 22nd October, which the Princess celebrated with due pomp at her own house. Every one who was some one at Zurich was there. A poem by Hoffmann von Fallersleben was telegraphed from Weimar, and at the Princess's request was solemnly read aloud by Herwegh in a strangely altered voice. I then gave a performance, with Frau Heim, of the first act, and a scene from the second, of the Walkure, Liszt accompanying. I was able to obtain a favourable idea of the effect of our performance by the wish expressed by Dr. Wille to hear these things badly done, so that he could form a correct judgment, as he feared he might be seduced by the excellence of our execution. Besides these, Liszt's Symphonic Poems were played on two grand pianos. At the feast, a dispute arose about Heinrich Heine, with respect to whom Liszt made all sorts of insidious remarks. Frau Wesendonck responded by asking if he did not think Heine's name as a poet would, nevertheless, be inscribed in the temple of immortality.

'Yes, but in mud,' answered Liszt quickly, creating, as may be conceived, a great sensation.

Unfortunately, our circle was soon to suffer a great loss by Liszt's illness--a skin eruption--which confined him to his bed for a considerable period. As soon as he was a little better, we quickly went to the piano again to try over by ourselves my two finished scores of Rheingold and the Walkure. Princess Marie listened carefully, and was even able to make intelligent suggestions in connection with a few difficult passages in the poem.

Princess Caroline, too, seemed to set extraordinary store on being quite clear as to the actual intrigue concerning the fate of the gods in my Nibelungen. She took me in hand one day, quite like one of the Zurich professors, en particulier, to clear up this point to her satisfaction. I must confess it was irrefutably brought home to me that she was anxious to understand the most delicate and mysterious features of the intrigue, though in rather too precise and matter-of-fact a spirit. In the end I felt as though I had explained a French society play to her. Her high spirits in all such things were as marked as the curious amiability of her nature in other respects; for when I one day explained to her, in illustration of the first of these two qualities, that four weeks of uninterrupted companionship with her would have been the death of me, she laughed heartily. I had reason for sadness in the changes which I realised had taken place in her daughter Marie; in the three years since I had first seen her she had faded to an extraordinary extent. If I then called her a 'child,' I could not now properly describe her as a 'young woman.' Some disastrous experience seemed to have made her prematurely old. It was only when she was excited, especially in the evening when she was with friends, that the attractive and radiant side of her nature asserted itself to a marked extent. I remember one fine evening at Herwegh's, when Liszt was moved to the same state of enthusiasm by a grand-piano abominably out of tune, as by the disgusting cigars to which at that time he was more passionately devoted than to the finer brands. We were all compelled to exchange our belief in magic for a belief in actual witchcraft as we listened to his wonderful phantasies on this pianoforte. To my great horror, Liszt still gave evidence on more than one occasion of an irritability which was thoroughly bad-