Richard Wagner was the most politically incorrect composer in history, a man whom one critic described as “standing for all that is unpleasant in human character.”
He was a megalomaniac who constantly welched on financial obligations, a twice-married man who carried on with the wives of benefactors and collaborators and was one of the worst anti-Semites of the 19th Century.
“I am not like other people,” the Leipzig-born composer said. “I must have brilliance, beauty and light. The world owes me what I need.”
Many great composers have displayed personality quirks that raised eyebrows: Mozart enjoyed coarse language; Beethoven’s temper tantrums were legendary; and Tchaikovsky’s profound lack of confidence carried over to his conducting–while leading an orchestra, he’d constantly grab his neck with his left hand, fearing his head was about to fall off.
Wagner’s lengthy operas long have been a source of humor. George Bernard Shaw said the music “is not as bad as it sounds” and composer Claude Debussy said “Wagner has his moments–but his bad half-hours.”
But the German composer’s behavior and religious views were off the charts of civil society. He was, in many ways, a monster.
When a fire destroyed the Vienna Burgtheater in 1881, killing hundreds of people, including 400 Jews, Wagner’s second wife, Cosima, said her husband made a “hearty joke” of the calamity. He observed that “all Jews should be burned up” at a performance of “Nathan the Wise,” a play by the Jewish writer Gottfried Ephraim Lessing.
Wagner tried, without success, to persuade Jewish conductor Hermann Levi to be baptized before conducting the world premiere of his opera “Parsifal” in 1882. After the final dress rehearsal, Cosima wrote in her diary: “He (Wagner) remarked privately that if he were playing in the orchestra he wouldn’t like to be directed by a Jew.”
Ernest Newman, perhaps Wagner’s best-known biographer, wrote: “Wagner lost no opportunity, year in and year out, of fretting the life out of his Jewish friends and collaborators about their Judaism.”
More than a half-century after his death in 1883 at the age of 69, Wagner was the unofficial court composer of the Third Reich. Adolf Hitler said, “Whoever wants to understand National Socialistic Germany must know Wagner.”
The strains of Wagner were played during the Nazis’ book-burning ceremonies and when concentration camp prisoners were about to be put to death. Nazi Germany’s main defense fortification along the French beaches at Normandy was called the “Siegfried Line,” after the mythic hero in Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung.”
Not until the early 1990s would the Israel Philharmonic, whose founding musicians included survivors of the Holocaust, play any Wagner. During both world wars, his works were not performed at the Metropolitan Opera.
In his book “The Germans,” historian Gordon Craig says two factors may have triggered Wagner’s anti-Semitism: Jewish financiers and impresarios who failed to support him at the start of his career; and Jewish competitors such as the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, whose operas in the 1840s were far more successful than Wagner’s early efforts.
The 28-year-old Wagner angrily wrote in 1841: “The Paris Grand Opera will die at any moment. It awaits the salvation of the German Messiah from Meyerbeer.”
Yet Wagner had the gall to ask Meyerbeer for a letter of recommendation to the general manager of Dresden Court Theatre, a request that his rival graciously honored. He praised Wagner’s originality, asking that the young German have the chance to see “his fine talent more generally recognized.” Meyerbeer even helped arrange the 1842 premiere in Dresden of “Rienzi,” Wagner’s first major opera.
Craig writes: “A strong element of fear affected Wagner’s thinking that the Jews, who survived centuries of oppression, might outlast German individuality and culture.”
Amazingly, despite his outbursts and his reference to Jews as “former cannibals,” Wagner retained a number of Jewish friends throughout his career, such as opera director Angelo Neumann and pianist Josef Rubinstein.
Levi, who nearly walked out on Wagner after the composer’s suggestion of baptism, not only stayed on to conduct “Parsifal” but also served as a pallbearer at Wagner’s funeral a year later.
Over the years, Jewish conductors such as Bruno Walter, Erich Leinsdorf, Leonard Bernstein and Georg Solti have been among Wagner’s greatest interpreters.
In some of his more levelheaded moments, Wagner was tolerant of the Jews. Cosima noted in her diary in 1878 that her husband said, “If I wrote about the Jews again, I would say there is nothing to be held against them, only they came to us Germans too soon; we were not stable enough to absorb this element.”
But in that same year, when Wagner learned that Jewish banker Gerson Bleichroder had been allowed to give a dinner for delegates to the Congress of Berlin, he called it “a shame for Germany.”
Critics have argued that some of the less appetizing characters in Wagner’s operas, Mime in “Siegfried,” Beckmesser in “Die Meistersinger” and Klingsor in “Parsifal” are gross characterizations of Jews, outsiders whom the composer sought to mock.
Anti-Semitism was not Wagner’s only wart. He constantly embarrassed his financial supporters, most notably King Ludwig II of Bavaria, and his love life would have given late-20th Century tabloids enough material for an entire edition.
He often cheated on his first wife, Minna, most notably with Mathilde Wesendonk, the wife of a silk merchant, and one of Wagner’s financial backers (Wagner’s love of the good life put him in economic straits for most of his career).
While Otto Wesendonk provided the money, Wagner and Mathilde carried on during the mid-1850s. Eventually, the Wesendonks faded out of Wagner’s life but not before he had composed the beautfiul “Wesendonk Songs,” which foreshadow the groundbreaking love music of “Tristan und Isolde.”
Wagner’s most spectacular love affair began developing in 1864 with Cosima von Bulow, the wife of conductor Hans von Bulow and the daughter of composer Franz Liszt.
As von Bulow worked feverishly at rehearsals for the world premiere of “Tristan,” Wagner and Cosima were becoming an item. All of Europe seemed to know what was going on except von Bulow. When Cosima had a daughter in 1865 (named Isolde), the conductor simply accepted her as part of his family.
After Minna Wagner, who had long been sick, died in 1866, Wagner’s relationship with Cosima von Bulow shifted to a higher gear. The two began living together at an estate on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. In 1867 she had their second daughter, Eva.
Finally, when Wagner and Cosima had a third child (Siegfried, in 1869), Hans von Bulow threw in the towel. The von Bulows’ divorce became final in 1870, and Cosima and Wagner were married that August.
There was one more arrow in Cupid’s quiver for Wagner. When he was in his 60s he met Judith Gautier-Mendes, more than 30 years his junior and the daughter of French poet Theophile Gautier. They began an affair during the opening of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre in 1876 and exchanged secret, intimate letters over the next few years.
Despite behavior that would seem to guarantee the making of more enemies than friends, Wagner found supporters in both his personal and professional life.
He was so charismatic that even the people whose lives he poisoned maintained special feelings for him, including Hans von Bulow.
After Wagner’s death on Feb. 13, 1883, Von Bulow’s second wife recorded her spouse’s reaction: “The news had so shattering an effect on my husband that the atmosphere here has been one . . . of the profoundest melancholy. Even I had no notion of how passionate was the love he still felt in his innermost heart for Wagner despite everything.”
Von Bulow was among the first of more than a century of music lovers who would face the challenge of bridging what Gordon Craig calls “the gulf between the tremendous music and the mean-spirited man.”
