BIOGRAPHY: FERGUS JOHNSTONreviews Cosima Wagner: The Lady of BayreuthBy Oliver Hilmes, translated by Stewart Spencer Yale University Press, 366pp. £25
‘YOU KNOW VERY well how much I know the influence that you have exerted on W[agner] – you know even more how much I despise that influence . . . Whenever Liszt’s daughter attempts to meddle in matters relating to German culture and even religion, I am implacable.” Thus spake Nietzsche to Cosima Wagner, in a letter to her that he drafted in 1888.
Cosima Wagner was the daughter of the pianist and composer Franz Liszt and his lover Marie d’Agoult. Her extraordinary life is here described by Oliver Hilmes in a new biography originally written in German, and translated into English by Stewart Spencer.
Brought up in 19th-century Paris by a strict French governess, with Thomas à Kempis's De Imitatione Christusas her moral guide, Cosima went on to have an extramarital affair with Richard Wagner while she was married to the conductor Hans von Bülow, who was Wagner's friend and worshipper. We read that while "Bülow was . . . otherwise engaged . . . preparing for the world premiere of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, ruining his already frail health in the service of his rival . . . Wagner and Cosima were fussing over their first child".
She bore Wagner three children before finally divorcing von Bülow and marrying Wagner, devoting the rest of her life to him and his ideas, and after his death developing a Wagnerian religion that was to propagate the Master’s ideas on art through the medium of the Bayreuth festival.
Referring to the Wagner cult, Hilmes writes that "the networkers of the Bayreuth circle saw Bayreuth not as an innovative theatre workshop but as a kind of substitute religion that humankind needed to embrace if it was to be saved" and, later, that "Bayreuth's hallowed temple to Wagner's music was a meeting place for a reactionary social elite that demanded special status for Parsifal[Wagner's final opera] while in reality wanting to abolish parliamentary democracy". Parsifalitself is described as "a holy relic that could be taken from its tabernacle on only a few days a year, when it was placed before its congregation to be worshipped".
Cosima was virulently anti-Semitic, probably more so than Wagner, and while it is hard to say for certain whether she was behind the 1869 republication of his dreadful 1850 pamphlet Das Judenthum in der Musik, the author notes that its republication occurred within months of the couple's living together; he later analyses her prejudice thus: "She reviled the Jews and everything Jewish because she herself lacked the ability to see herself as a fully integrated person. She was never at peace with herself but felt weak and inferior and found in the Jews a group that in her own estimation was beneath even her."
As an example of her manipulativeness and her anti-Semitism, Hilmes quotes her reply to Hermann Levi, the (Jewish) conductor of many Parsifalperformances, when, weary of her anti-Jewish jibes, he attempted to resign from the festival: "The qualities in you that offend me are part of your line, whereas all your good and admirable qualities are your own and cannot, therefore, be praised sufficiently highly. With me the opposite is the case: I inherited my good qualities (assuming there is anything good about me), whereas the bad qualities, which I do not need to enumerate, are entirely my own." Hilmes describes it as a diplomatic masterpiece.
It was Cosima who raised Wagner worship to the level of a German national religion, and she did this through the careful cultivation and manipulation of people in power. Early in the festival’s history one observer noted that “it was precisely those people who until then had been thoroughly unmusical who now declared that they finally knew what music was”. By the 1900s it had become the place for people in power to be and to be seen to be. This, however, was not what Wagner had intended; such audiences consisted of the type of establishment figures Wagner had previously despised, the top of the pyramid instead of the bottom.
Cosima herself became managed in her old age by Eva, her second daughter by Wagner: “Eva shadowed Cosima, deciding who should be admitted to her mother’s presence, who should accompany her on her daily walks, and what information she should be given.” Eva’s control over Cosima was total, to the extent that it was 10 years after the event before Cosima learned of the death in 1919 of Isolde, her first, and disinherited, daughter by Wagner. The reason for the delay: Eva considered Cosima’s health too frail to let her know.
Hilmes’s writing itself is gripping, although the too-frequent post-digressionary use of the phrase “But let us return to . . .” wears thin after a while. I loved the passage describing son and heir Siegfried Wagner’s compositional dilemma: “Mahler . . . had forced open the door to the 20th century, leaving Schoenberg . . . to slip through. Siegfried, meanwhile, peered anxiously through the keyhole, and, failing to understand what he saw, withdrew . . .” The translation by Stephen Spencer is idiomatic, but do they really say “sexing it up” in German? And what, I wonder, in the original German, is the marvellous phrase “biliously base calumniators”?
Fergus Johnston is a composer and a member of Aosdána
