Part two of the Wagner/Liszt letters. A lot longer than the first. These include three such letters - the first oldly enough not to Liszt. It follows the aftermath of the Dresden Uprising and Wagner's escape. Sadly the file size exceeds that of our host and so we are forced to use YouTube. If the adverts become too annoying, we apologize. We assure you we have not monetized. Later, we will make all of these available as audio files - if there is interest. Transcript below.
Wagner and Liszt. Flight, eighteen forty nine.
In the spring of eighteen forty nine, Richard Wagner was Royal Kapellmeister to the King of Saxony, and one of the most prominent musicians in Dresden. He was also, increasingly, a revolutionary. He had written inflammatory articles, and fallen in with radicals such as the editor August Roeckel and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.
In May, when the King dissolved parliament and rejected a new constitution, Dresden rose. For several days there was fighting in the streets. Wagner was in the thick of it, writing, organising, and keeping watch from a church tower. The old baroque opera house beside the Zwinger went up in flames. Then Saxon and Prussian troops arrived, and the rising was crushed.
Wagner got out of the city as it fell. By the thirteenth of May he was in Weimar, with Franz Liszt, where he watched Liszt rehearse his Tannhauser. Years later he would write that on the very day his danger became certain, he heard his own music conducted by Liszt, and recognised in him a second self.
On the sixteenth of May, the Dresden police issued a warrant for his arrest. Liszt had no doubt that his friend must leave Germany at once. Wagner hid for a few days on a farm outside Weimar, then made his way to Jena, where Liszt saw him for the last time. There, two professors took charge of him. One was Oskar Wolff, a professor of literature. The other, a Professor Widmann, gave Wagner his own passport. It had been issued in Tuebingen, and it was out of date.
So Wagner crossed Germany by mail coach, as Professor Widmann. At the gates of Lindau, on the shore of Lake Constance, the passengers were asked for their papers. Wagner, by his own account, had his head full of the Swabian dialect of the man he was pretending to be. The passport was taken away, and returned the next morning. On the twenty eighth of May he crossed the lake by steamer to Rorschach, and stood on Swiss soil.
The first letter was written the next day, from Zurich. It is not to Liszt, but to Professor Wolff in Jena, and much of it is about Liszt.
The first letter. To Professor Wolff.
Zurich, May, eighteen forty nine.
Dearest friend,
It was impossible for me to write to you from Rorschach, where I arrived only yesterday, and to return your passport. Half an hour after the arrival of the steamer the express coach started for Zurich; and I felt bound to take advantage of it, as I had made up my mind to cut this journey as short as possible by avoiding unnecessary delay. Unfortunately I got on but slowly. From Coburg I could not start for Lichtenfels till early on Saturday, but fortunately I got through everywhere without notice, at Lindau only, where I arrived at midnight, they asked for my passport at the gate. The next morning I received it back without difficulty, but unfortunately it had on it a visa for Switzerland, adorned with which I am compelled to return it to Doctor Widmann. I hope that his political experience will understand this addition to his passport.
Luckily then I am in Switzerland. To your counsel and your active aid, dear friends, I owe my safety. The four days' journey in a frightful heat had, however, brought my blood to such a state of excitement, that I found it impossible to go on without risking a stroke of apoplexy. Moreover, I hope to employ my stay at Zurich in obtaining a passport for France. One of my early friends has been residing here for a long time; today I expect him back from a pleasure trip, and I hope he will do what is necessary to save me the long detour by Geneva.
To my wife I write at length, and my request to you to communicate this news to my friends is therefore for the present limited to our Liszt. Greet my preserver and sovereign liege many thousand times, and assure him of my firm resolution to do all that is in my power to please him. The journey has freshened and roused my artistic courage, and I have quite made up my mind as to what I have to accomplish in Paris. I do not think much of fate, but I feel that my late adventures have thrown me into a path where I must do the most important and significant things which my nature can produce. Even four weeks ago I had no idea of that which now I recognise to be my highest task; my deep-rooted friendship for Liszt supplies me with strength from within and without to perform that task; it is to be our common work. More of this soon!
Liszt will shortly receive a parcel of scores, and so on, from my wife; let him open it. The score of Lohengrin I want him to try at some leisure; it is my last and ripest work. As yet I have not shown it to any artist, and therefore have not been able to learn from any one what impression it produces. How curious I am to hear Liszt about it! As soon as he has finished looking through it, I want him to forward it at once to Paris, along with the other scores and books of words. Perhaps some acquaintance going to Paris will take them. The copy of the score of the Flying Dutchman is meant for the Weimar theatre; this and the book of words let Liszt therefore take from the parcel and keep back.
That wonderful man must also look after my poor wife. I am particularly anxious to get her out of Saxony, and especially out of that damned Dresden. Therefore I have hit upon the idea of finding for her and her family a modest but cheerful refuge somewhere in the Weimar territory, perhaps on one of the grand-ducal estates, where, with the remainder of what is saved of our goods and chattels, she might prepare a new home for herself, and perhaps for me also, in the future. May my friend succeed in this!
Thanks, cordial thanks, to you for the great kindness you have shown to me! My memorials of it are so numerous that I cannot put my hand in my pocket without being reminded of the thoughtfulness and sympathy of friend Wolff. May my future be your reward!
Cordial greetings to Doctor Widmann, as whose double I have acted for four days; I return him to himself in his integrity, which I hope will not a little conduce to his perfect well-being. Best thanks to him!
And thanks, thanks also, to your dear wife and mother! The blessings of one saved are with them. Farewell, dear friend!
You will soon hear more from your
Richard Wagner.
Wagner did not stay long in Zurich. With a proper Swiss passport, he went on to Paris, as Liszt had urged him to, to try his fortune at the Opera. Liszt's secretary, Belloni, was there to guide him. But Paris crushed him. Within a week he was writing to Liszt that he felt like a calf bleating for its stall, that his money was running out, and that he had heard nothing from his wife, Minna, who had stayed behind in Dresden.
Then he made a request. He asked Liszt to approach the Grand Duchess of Weimar, and perhaps the Duke of Coburg and the Princess of Prussia, for a small yearly salary of three hundred thalers, in return for his operas, so that he could live quietly and work.
The next day a letter came at last from Minna. It was full of the things being said about him in Dresden. And Wagner sat down, in a village outside Paris, and wrote to Liszt again. He had remembered, rather late, that he was asking royalty to support a man who had just tried to overthrow it.
The second letter. To Liszt.
Rueil, June nineteenth, eighteen forty nine.
Dear friend,
Excuse me for applying to you again so soon. At last I received a letter from my wife, and many pangs of conscience were again roused by it. More than all, it lies heavy on my heart today that I have asked you to intercede with several royal personages for a salary for me. I had forgotten, to say nothing of my immediate past, that my sufficiently public participation in the Dresden rising has placed me towards those royal personages in a position which must make them think of me as one opposed to them on principle, and this perhaps will make it appear strange that now, when the collapse of that rising has reduced me to poverty, I turn for help to them of all others. My position is all the more painful because I can take no steps to free myself from the suspicion of such sentiments without incurring the worse suspicion of meanness and cowardice. You personally I may assure that the feeling manifested by my undisguised sympathy with the Dresden rising was very far from the ridiculously fanatical notion that every prince is an object of active hatred. If I concurred in this strange fanaticism, I should naturally have had scruples in approaching the Grand Duchess at Weimar with perfect openness. Before you, I trust, I need not defend myself; you know the bitter source of my discontent, which sprang from the condition of my beloved art, which I nourished with passion, and which finally I transferred to every other field, the connection of which with the ground of my deep dissatisfaction I had to acknowledge. From this feeling came the violent longing which finds its expression in the words, There must be a change; thus it cannot remain. That now, taught by the experience of my participation in that rising, I could never again mix myself up with a political catastrophe, I need not say; every reasonable person must know it. What rejoices me, and what I may safely affirm, is that in all my aims I have once more become entirely an artist. But this I cannot possibly tell the princes at the moment when I am about to claim their assistance. What would they think of me! A general and public declaration also would bring me nothing but disgrace. It would have to appear as an apology, and an apology in the only correct sense time and my life alone can tender, not a public declaration, which in the present threatening circumstances and in my helplessness must needs appear cowardly and low.
I am sure you will agree with my view of the matter, and I surmise that already you have found yourself in a very awkward position towards the Grand Duchess on my account. My wife, who still thinks it necessary to live on amongst the dregs of Dresden vulgarity, tells me a thousand unpleasant things which in the eyes of miserable creatures make me appear much more compromised by the revolution than I really am. This feeling towards me is probably spread far and wide, and therefore may have affected the Weimar court. I can well imagine that you think it at present inadvisable to raise your voice for me at a court which, with a natural prejudice, at first sight recognises in me only the political revolutionary, and forgets the artistic revolutionary whom at bottom it has learnt to love.
How far you will think it good to comply with my application of yesterday in such circumstances you will best decide for yourself. Is it possible that our princes nowadays should be magnanimous enough to exercise a beautiful, old privilege, unmoved by the currents of the time and without weighing conditions? Think this over; perhaps you have more confidence than I.
My wife suffers, and is embittered; for her I hope everything from time. I asked you yesterday to inquire of her as to the pecuniary aid she may need; I ask you today not to do so. Not now. If you will do me a kindness, send me a little money, so that I can get away, anywhere, perhaps after all to Zurich, to my old friend Mueller. I should like to be at rest, so as to write the scenario for Paris; I don't feel up to much just now. What should I do in London? I am good for nothing, except perhaps writing operas, and that I cannot do in London.
Best greetings to any one who will accept them from me; there will not be many. Farewell, dear, much-troubled friend. Could I but make you returns!
Your most faithful
Richard Wagner.
Liszt replied that of the two letters, he agreed rather more with the second. It would not be very diplomatic, he wrote, to knock at battered doors. Later, once Wagner had made his name, protectors would be easy to find. For now he should stay focused on Paris, and leave aside political commonplaces, socialist talk, and personal hatreds. And he sent three hundred francs, through Belloni, for the journey to Zurich.
So Wagner went back to Switzerland, to his old friend Alexander Mueller. But Dresden would not leave him alone. Rumours were reaching him about what he had done during the rising. And one charge in particular cut him to the bone: that he had been ungrateful to the King of Saxony, the man who had made him Royal Kapellmeister six years before.
The third letter. To Liszt.
Zurich, July ninth, eighteen forty nine.
Dear friend,
Thanks to your intercession, I have been able to fly to the friendly place from which I write to you today. I should trouble you unnecessarily were I to tell you all that latterly has passed through my heart; perhaps you will guess it. Belloni has taken care of me with the greatest kindness and consideration; there are, however, things in which no friend in the world can be of assistance. One thing more by way of explanation: during my journey through Switzerland and on my arrival in Paris, I met with some Saxon refugees in a position which induced me to assist them in your name. I shall not be tempted again.
I hope to find some rest and collectedness for the completion of my intended Paris work in the intimate intercourse with a dear friend who is also a friend of yours, Alexander Mueller. About Rienzi and the plans which you have commended to us regarding that opera, Belloni will give you details in so far as the purely practical part of the matter is concerned. He thinks it impossible, especially at first, to place it at the Grand Opera. I, as an artist and man, have not the heart for the reconstruction of that, to my taste, superannuated work, which, in consequence of its immoderate dimensions, I have had to remodel more than once. I have no longer the heart for it, and desire from all my soul soon to do something new instead. Besides, the erection of an operatic theatre in Paris is imminent where only foreign works are to be produced; that would be the place for Rienzi, especially if some one else would occupy himself with it. I want you to decide about this as soon as you have heard our reasons. I have settled everything with Gustave Vaez as regards the external part of our common enterprise. The work, which I shall now take in hand at once, will, I hope, soon open to him and to you my inner view of the matter. Heaven grant that in this also we may understand each other, or at least come to an understanding. Only from the one deep conviction which is the essence of my mental being can I draw inspiration and courage for my art, for only through this conviction can I love it; if this conviction were to separate me from my friends, I should bid farewell to art, and probably turn clodhopper.
By all accounts I am in fine repute with you! The other day, I hear, I was accused, together with another person, of having set fire to the old Dresden opera house. All right. My dear wife lives in the midst of this slough of civic excellence and magnanimity. One thing grieves me deeply; it wounds me to the very bone: I mean the reproach frequently made to me that I have been ungrateful to the King of Saxony. I am wholly made of sentiment, and could never understand, in the face of such a reproach, why I felt no pangs of conscience at this supposed ingratitude. I have at last asked myself whether the King of Saxony has committed a punishable wrong by conferring upon me undeserved favours, in which case I should certainly have owed him gratitude for his infringement of justice. Fortunately my consciousness acquits him of any such guilt. The payment of fifteen hundred thalers for my conducting, at his intendant's command, a certain number of bad operas every year, was indeed excessive; but this was to me no reason for gratitude, but rather for dissatisfaction with my appointment. That he paid me nothing for the best I could do does not oblige me to gratitude; that when he had an opportunity of helping me thoroughly he could not or dared not help me, but calmly discussed my dismissal with his intendant, quieted me as to the dependence of my position on any act of grace. Finally, I am conscious that, even if there had been cause for any particular gratitude towards the King of Saxony, I have not knowingly done anything ungrateful towards him; proof of this I should be able to furnish. Pardon, dear friend, this unpleasant deviation; unfortunately I am not yet again in that stage of creating which shuts out anything but the present and the future from my cognisance. My spirit still writhes too violently under the impression of a past which, alas, continues wholly to occupy my present. I am still bent on justification, and that I wish to address to no one but you.
As soon as I have anything ready I shall send it to you. For the present I must urgently ask you to forward me here at once the scores and other literary tools which my wife has sent to you. I want to get into some kind of swing again so that the bell may ring. Be good enough to give the parcel to a carrier to be forwarded here by express conveyance, care of Alexander Mueller, Zurich.
Mueller greets you most cordially. He will write to you soon to inform you of the success of Herr Eck, the instrument maker, whose company is doing very well.
Dear Liszt, do not cease to be my friend; have patience with me, and take me as I am. A thousand compliments to the Princess, and thank her in my name for the kind memory she has preserved of me; she may find it difficult to remain my friend.
Be healthy and happy, and let me soon hear some of your works, even as I promise you on my part. Farewell, and take my cordial thanks for your constancy and friendship.
Your
Richard Wagner.
By the autumn, with money Liszt had helped to raise, Minna joined him in Zurich, bringing what she could save of their household, including his grand piano. Zurich would be his home for the best part of nine years. There he wrote Art and Revolution and The Artwork of the Future, and began the work that would become The Ring.
The Paris opera never happened. Instead, the following spring, Wagner sent Liszt a short and urgent request: perform my Lohengrin. Liszt did, at Weimar, on the twenty eighth of August, eighteen fifty. Its composer was not there to hear it. He would not be allowed back into Saxony until eighteen sixty two.
