Wagner the Man
Our image of Richard Wagner’s artistic personality is the product of literary tradition and, to a large extent, his own creation. For example, in his two novellas “An End in Paris” and “A Pilgrimage to Beethoven”, which he wrote in Paris in 1841 and 1842. Here he imagines his ideal alter ego “R”, a poor but righteous German artist who composes solely for the love of music and not to earn money. Until the end of his life, he would cultivate this image in numerous publications and condense it into that of the “master”.
However, there was also a Wagner who remained largely hidden from the public at the time and only became accessible to posterity through private testimonies. As early as 1835, Richard Wagner began to record his life in diary form. These notes formed the basis for his autobiography “My Life”, which he dictated to his future wife Cosima from 1864, as well as for the so-called “Brown Book” with his “Annals”. From 1869, Cosima recorded almost every day of the last fifteen years or so of their life together in her diaries, which were intended for her son Siegfried. However, he never gets to read them after his sister Eva takes possession of them. Initially, there were no plans to publish them. Some of the private correspondence was later burned at Wahnfried.
In the surviving notes, the reader encounters Wagner the man with all his preferences, weaknesses and fears. Social and personal constraints and influences become apparent and show the artist Richard Wagner as both a product and antagonist of his time.
The exhibition aims to make the man Richard Wagner recognizable behind the projections of myth, brand and image and to locate him in the world of his century. In this way, it becomes clear that Wagner’s genius is not so much the result of a higher divine inspiration, but is driven above all by Nietzsche’s “human, all-too-human”.
World on the Move
The industrialization of Germany in the 19th century is a phase of profound economic and social change that transforms the country from an agrarian state into one of Europe’s leading industrial nations.
The introduction of steam engines in mines and factories increased their productivity and was the driving force behind the industrial revolution. The development of the steam locomotive and the railroad network from the 1830s onwards accelerated transportation and mobility and facilitated the movement of goods and people within the country and beyond its borders. In addition to technological advances in steel production, chemistry and communications technology, it is above all the capital and investments of a new entrepreneurial class that drive industrial development forward.
Industrialization also fundamentally changes the traditional social structure. A massive migration of people from rural areas to the cities leads to rapid population growth and the emergence of a new class of often poorly paid wage laborers, the “proletariat”, most of whom live in precarious conditions. At the same time, a wealthy upper middle class of entrepreneurs and investors developed. This led to social tensions and the emergence of the labor movement and trade unions, which fought for better working conditions and social justice.
Critics of industrialization, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, describe the catastrophic living conditions and exploitation of the working class and denounce social inequality and the power of capitalism. Political movements such as socialism gain influence as a result.
Environmental pollution from industrial waste and the impact on public health also became increasingly visible. Artists and intellectuals such as Theodor Fontane regret the loss of traditional ways of life and the increasing alienation of people from nature.
Wagner on the Move
“The world owes me what I need” is one of Richard Wagner’s credos.
However, he despised the world of his time. He is, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, an “untimely man”. In Wagner’s view, the upheavals caused by industrialization, urbanization, bourgeois capitalism and not least the emancipation of the Jews are signs of the decline of a world in which “state and artistic barbarism”, “speculative and haggling spirit” prevail and man becomes part of the new machines.
His “artwork of the future”, on the other hand, is intended to be the blueprint for an “aesthetic world order” in which politics and religion are replaced by art and the artist is therefore also the ruler.
However, the cult of genius is countered by comparatively low pay and recognition for composers and musicians. The only exception is the cult of vocal and instrumental virtuosos. Like Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner also created a new artistic myth through skillful self-marketing and self-presentation.
Despite his constant debts, the “pump genius” lived large. Wagner only received a regular income as Dresden court conductor between 1842 and 1849, but his earnings were rarely sufficient for his lavish lifestyle. As a result, he was always dependent on patrons and sponsors. Only with the lifelong patronage of his royal patron and admirer Ludwig II of Bavaria were his finances on a solid footing.
Until then, he was constantly dependent on concert tours. However, his restlessness also repeatedly had private reasons, which led him to flee from oppressive predicaments. And the preparations for the Bayreuth Festival required intensive communication and mobility in order to bring the participants together and motivate sponsors.
For this purpose, he made use of the actually demonized, dehumanizing technical innovations such as the railroad, with which he travelled for the first time in London in 1839 and later also in his personal saloon car. For Wagner, language condensed into the dots and dashes of the Morse code alphabet was also transformed from a poetic medium into an important means of communication for telegraphy as early as the 1850s.
The World in Thoughts
The political upheavals following the Napoleonic Wars, the revolution of 1848 and finally the founding of the German Empire in 1871 by Otto von Bismarck and under the reign of Wilhelm I shaped the national consciousness. The reality of the powerlessly fragmented individual states of the “German Confederation” is contrasted with the longing for a national political identity. German nationalism becomes the driving political force. The German Reich, however, was hardly the realization of an enlightened political idea, but a national-chauvinistic authoritarian state under Prussian hegemony and with an increasing anti-Semitic background noise.
After the idealism of Weimar Classicism, Romanticism and later Realism were the defining cultural eras. Against enlightened rationalism and the onset of industrialization with its profound social changes, Romanticism fled into a cult of nature and emotion. Caspar David Friedrich painted landscapes as a mirror of human inner worlds, while Novalis, Tieck, Eichendorff and others created the literary image of a German soul growing out of the idealized Middle Ages. In contrast, realists and naturalists such as Adolph von Menzel and Theodor Fontane paint a detailed and often critical picture of social reality.
Based on the transcendental idealism and Enlightenment optimism of Immanuel Kant, the philosophy of Georg Friedrich Hegel became the focus of contemporary thought. He interpreted the world as an expression of the dialectically unfolding spirit. His followers were divided into politically right-wing and left-wing camps. Ludwig Feuerbach’s anthropocentric philosophy of religion emerged from left-wing Hegelianism, as did the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which described history as an economic class struggle between the proletariat and capital. Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of a world suffering from the power of the unconscious, dark drive of the all-dominant will and its overcoming through asceticism and renunciation had no less of an effect on Wagner than Friedrich Nietzsche and his revaluation of all values up to the proto-fascist “overman”.
The prospering natural sciences, progress in physics, chemistry and biology, also fundamentally changed the view of the world. The work of Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Friedrich Gauss and later Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution led to the conviction that history and society could be understood, structured – and cured – by the natural sciences.
Wagner in Thoughts
Richard Wagner perceives the world in which he lives with a sense of alienation. A concept that Karl Marx effectively established in the 19th century and which Richard Wagner also received, not least through his republican circle of friends around Heinrich Heine, Heinrich Laube and August Röckel in Paris and Dresden or Georg Herwegh in exile in Switzerland.
Richard Wagner, who took part in the revolution in Dresden in 1848/49 with his demands for the abolition of the nobility, the abolition of private property and the establishment of a just and open society, had much in common with Marx’s theory.
Unlike Marx, however, Richard Wagner sees the fundamental problem in politics itself and the emergence of the modern state, which is no longer of a “purely human nature” like the ancient polis, but is frozen in “political-legal formalism”.
In the spirit of Friedrich Schiller, who declares it to be an instance of counter-alienation, Richard Wagner places art in opposition to politics and derives the necessity of a “human revolution” from his critique of all religious, social and political institutions.
With the failure of the revolution, Richard Wagner’s hope of unleashing the creativity of the people and creating a self-regulating society without gods and state, in which free love and emancipative sensuality prevail, also comes to an end.
Out of resignation and as a result of reading Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner no longer saw his work as substitute politics, but as a substitute religion.
The radical left-wing Wagner of the 1840s also lost his faith in democratic parliamentarianism. Richard Wagner had no faith in political parties and feared that an incompetent electorate would only serve to preserve the hated German Reich, which was proclaimed under Prussian aegis in 1871.
The only constants in Richard Wagner’s thinking until the end of his life were his hatred of capital and the anti-Semitism that usually accompanied it.
The World Everyday
For large sections of the rural and small-town population, regular shooting festivals, fairs, church fairs and other local folk festivals were the central highlights of social life. For the aristocracy and upper middle classes, public or domestic balls and visits to restaurants, coffee houses, theaters and concerts dominate.
Social contrasts increase as a result of the emerging industrial proletariat. While the poor are often dependent on public welfare institutions and poverty often forces them to beg, the consumption of meat increases with the real wages of the middle income classes. The “bourgeois cuisine” also found its way into the less well-off sections of the population. Colonial goods, which are no longer only available to the upper classes, include sugar, coffee and cocoa, rice, pepper and raisins as well as better quality tobacco. However, there are usually considerable deficits in terms of a balanced, healthy diet in working-class households. In most cases, 50 to 80 percent of income has to be spent on food.
Industrial innovations also begin to rationalize everyday life. The invention of briquettes simplified heating, while the floor covering linoleum developed in England in 1863 made cleaning easier. From 1860, kerosene lamps replaced candles and tallow candles. The increasing mobility brought about by the railroad also made travel a bourgeois leisure activity. For the upper classes, extended spa trips to the large spas and bathing resorts were a popular vacation activity. However, by the middle of the century, the middle classes were also increasingly able to set off on short “summer retreats”.
Encouraged by the easing of restrictions, many clubs were formed in many places that were patriotically dedicated to the preservation of German cultural heritage. Gymnasts, marksmen and singers organized themselves into umbrella associations such as the German Shooting Association (1861), the German Singers’ Association (1862) and the German Gymnastics Association (1868). Their federal festivals with thousands of participants are demonstrations for the longed-for German nation state.
Wagner Everyday
“O sink down, night of love, give forgetfulness that I live; take me into your bosom, detach me from the world!” “When quoting Nacht der Liebe, R. says: This is Wahnfried,” Cosima noted in her diary in 1874.
Throughout his life, Richard Wagner searched for peace and quiet; disturbing sounds and noise caused him real phobias. Eternally restless and driven, he wished for a family, a home away from the big cities, closeness to nature and the primal. He experiences such moments in Wahnfried as well as in Switzerland and Italy. A passionate hiker from a young age, he discovered his love of the mountains in Switzerland and became an experienced and sometimes daring alpinist. He is in good physical condition and often surprises guests when he climbs trees at an advanced age or romps through the garden with children and dogs.
Wagner is in robust health, not least because for a long time a lack of financial resources forced him to follow a very frugal diet; lobster and oysters, which he greatly appreciates, are reserved for rare occasions. Nevertheless, he combats illnesses that do occur, such as a lifelong facial erysipelas and severe digestive problems, with a light diet and spa cures. Only the support of the Bavarian king allowed him to run a bourgeois household with employees and a corresponding table.
With financial security, Wagner’s daily routine also became reassuringly predictable. Morning cold-water showers and mealtimes are just as regulated as an afternoon walk, sometimes even a horse ride, but above all work. He followed Plato’s rule of “no day without drawing a line” until his death.
Despite the names of his homes, Richard Wagner was always driven by an inner restlessness in the “Asylum” in Zurich, the “Idyll” in Tribschen and the “Peace” in Wahnfried, which sometimes made everyday life seem like a performance.
Wagner’s Image
Around 100 different portraits of Richard Wagner were created during his lifetime. Only very few show the man, most present an idea and a “Richard Wagner” brand.
In Germany, after the failed revolution of 1849 and his flight into exile in Zurich, Wagner was initially only present in the media. The reproductions of his portrait characterize his “image”. His self-marketing, his “self-fashioning”, began with the portrait created by his friend Ernst Benedikt Kietz in Paris in 1842, which served as a wanted picture for the Saxon police in 1849.
Richard Wagner believed that a portrait should reflect both the natural physiognomy and the character of the sitter. His desire to be the master of his own image led to a strong aversion to painted portraits, which mostly reflected the artist’s interpretation and handwriting.
Even though he was initially shocked by the realistic authenticity of his first photographic portrait, which he had made in Paris in 1860, he regularly visited the numerous photographic studios that emerged in order to have up-to-date pictures made of himself. Technical developments and the invention of the small calling card format reduced costs and led to an explosion in the distribution of these photographs, which were also collected and promoted the growing cult of personality. Richard Wagner’s most important role model in this respect was his friend and later father-in-law Franz Liszt.
Wagner the man is rarely recognizable in these pictures. Unposed snapshots were not yet possible due to long exposure times. Snapshots also ran counter to Wagner’s desire for self-dramatization. Thus the very rare depictions that come closest to Wagner the man, showing him at work or wearing glasses, are still quick oil or pencil sketches.
Wagner’s Dreams
No other personality in history is known to have had as many dreams as Richard Wagner. In her diaries between 1869 and 1883, his wife Cosima wrote down exactly 421 dreams, often described in great detail. Richard Wagner dreamed like every human being. Remnants of everyday life, wishes, fears and memories are woven into realistic and surreal images, which above all reflect the restlessness, anxiety and uncertainty of his life.
There are abstruse and fantastical dreams such as that of Franz Liszt, who looked like the Emperor of Brazil and had introduced him to the Pope in the form of Anton Bruckner. And when Wagner wants to kiss the hand of his Holiness, the latter kisses his – and grabs a bottle of cognac.
Cowardice dreams”, as Richard Wagner calls them, are frequent. He fears a retort and flees, he dreams of a path that becomes narrower and narrower, or he is ambushed, receives support but leaves the helper in the lurch, who tracks him down and gouges out his eyes.
It is not surprising that money worries are a frequently recurring theme in his dreams, although – for once – it is not exclusively about himself. Wagner’s feelings of guilt towards his first wife Minna become clear time and again when he worries whether he is doing enough to provide for her financially. However, he did not actually have to reproach himself in this respect.
Feelings of guilt and the need for harmony are also at issue when he dreams of the actually hated Giacomo Meyerbeer, “whom he saw again in a theater and who said to him: ‘Yes, I know, the long nose’, as if R. had made fun of his nose, whereupon R. virtually apologized, and the audience applauded the reconciliation.”
Death is also a frequent motif. For example, he dreams of “birds with their eyes missing in their sockets” or “a donkey tied up in a pond, sinking deeper and deeper until it floats there dead”.
Less common, however, are the dreams of the rebellious, world-changing artist and genius. Once he dreams “of a tooth that he ripped out and which became a flaming sword.”
For the most part, however, his dreams are dominated by fears of loss, which repeatedly revolve around Cosima and his family. His children are taken away from him everywhere, Cosima leaves, he “running after the train, calling out … convulsively: To Ansbach.” She leaves him, gives herself up to a “dreadful Polish count” or has herself executed at the request of her father Franz Liszt in order to atone for her adultery and marriage to him.
Wagner’s Death
“My watch…”.
Memories of Richard Wagner’s last words differ. The profane, referring to the pocket watch that had fallen to the ground, and symbolic, pointing to time and finiteness, with which the curtain closes on the earthly drama of Richard Wagner’s life on February 13, 1883, around 3:30 in the afternoon in the Venetian Palazzo Vendramin-Calergis following a heart attack, is passed down through the monumental biography of Carl Friedrich Glasenapp and is thus authorized by his descendants.
Wagner’s death did not come as a complete surprise. He had been suffering from heart attacks for over ten years. In the last weeks of his life, he repeatedly sings the song “Harlequin, you must die”, quotes Shakespeare: “I am like Othello, my day’s work is done” or the death scene from Don Giovanni.
Unlike when he wrote to Franz Liszt in 1853, for example, that he “would like to perish in the fire of Valhalla”, Richard Wagner did not die in a grand production, but as “a man like all men” (Parsifal).
His arrangements in the event of his death were limited to the construction of a tomb in the garden of the Wahnfried house for his wife Cosima and himself. Surprisingly, however, Richard Wagner did not leave a will regulating his estate and, above all, the future of the festival.
Perhaps he is also convinced that he is no longer the director of his life and certainly not of his afterlife, but that, as he states on February 28, 1879, “Richardtum has completely merged into Cosmatum [sic!]”