Richard Wagner
(b Leipzig, 22 May 1813; d Venice, 13 Feb 1883). Composer. One of the key figures in the history of opera, Wagner was largely responsible for altering its orientation in the 19th century. His programme of artistic reform, though not executed to the last detail, accelerated the trend towards organically conceived, through-composed structures, as well as influencing the development of the orchestra, of a new breed of singer, and of various aspects of theatrical practice.
1. The formative years: 1813–32.
It is both fitting and psychologically congruous that a question mark should hover over the identity of the father and mother of the composer whose works resonate so eloquently with themes of parental anxiety. Richard Wagner’s ‘official’ father was the police actuary Carl Friedrich Wagner, but the boy’s adoptive father, the actor-painter Ludwig Geyer, who took responsibility for the child on Carl Friedrich’s death in November 1813, may possibly have been the real father. Wagner himself was never sure, though any concern he may have had about Geyer’s supposed Jewish origins would have been misplaced: Geyer was of incontrovertibly Protestant stock. Recent research has further established that Wagner’s mother Johanna was not the illegitimate daughter of Prince Constantin of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, as previously believed, but his mistress (Gregor-Dellin 1985).
Wagner’s formal education began on 2 December 1822 at the Kreuzschule in Dresden, where his mother and stepfather had moved to enable Geyer to undertake engagements for the Hoftheater. On returning to Leipzig with his mother and sisters he entered the Nicolaischule on 21 January 1828, but school studies were less enthusiastically pursued than theatrical and musical interests, which resulted in a ‘vast tragic drama’ called Leubald and conscientious perusal of Logier’s composition treatise. Harmony lessons (initially in secret) with a local musician, Christian Gottlieb Müller (1828–31), were followed by enrolment at Leipzig University (23 February 1831) to study music and a short but intensive period of study with the Kantor of the Thomaskirche, Christian Theodor Weinlig (about six months from October 1831).
In his autobiographical writings Wagner later played down the significance of his musical education in order to cultivate the notion of the untutored genius. But its fruits were evident in a series of keyboard and orchestral works written by spring 1832 and particularly in the Beethovenian Symphony in C major which followed shortly after. A genuine passion for Beethoven, while confirmed by such works and the piano transcription of the Ninth Symphony made in 1830–31, was exaggerated in another typical piece of mythification: Wagner’s account of a supposedly momentous portrayal of Leonore by the soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient in Leipzig in 1829 is undermined by the unavailability of any evidence that the singer gave such a performance. Yet the fable (probably a semiconscious conflation of two separate events) attests to the young composer’s ambition to be proclaimed the rightful heir to the symphonic tradition embodied in Beethoven.
Wagner’s first attempt at an operatic project was a pastoral opera based on Goethe’s Die Laune des Verliebten (probably from early 1830); the work was aborted with only a scene for three female voices and a tenor aria written. His second project, Die Hochzeit, was conceived in October or November 1832, while he was visiting the estate of Count Pachta at Pravonin, near Prague. Based on a story from J. G. G. Büsching’s Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen, Die Hochzeit was a grisly tale of dark passions, treachery and murder. The libretto, according to Wagner’s autobiography, Mein Leben, was destroyed by him as a demonstration of confidence in the judgment of his sister Rosalie. Such music as was completed, between December 1832 and March 1833 – an introduction, chorus and septet – survives.
2. Early career: 1833–42.
Wagner’s first professional appointment, secured by his brother Albert, was as chorus master at the theatre in Würzburg. There he encountered repertory works by Marschner, Weber, Paer, Cherubini, Rossini and Auber, of which composers the first two influenced him most strongly in his musical setting of Die Feen (1833–4), a working by Wagner himself (he was to write all his own librettos) of Gozzi’s La donna serpente. Returning to Leipzig at the beginning of 1834 he came into contact with the charismatic radical Heinrich Laube (a family friend) and other members of the progressive literary and political movement Junges Deutschland. The writers associated with this uncoordinated grouping, including Karl Gutzkow, Ludolf Wienbarg, Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne, rejected not only the classicism of Goethe and Mozart but also what they regarded as the reactionary, socially irrelevant and sentimentally conceived romanticism of Weber and E. T. A. Hoffmann. They turned instead for inspiration to Italy and to the French Utopian Socialists, especially the Saint-Simonians, spurning Catholic mysticism and morality in favour of hedonism and sensuality. It was under these influences that Wagner wrote his essays Die deutsche Oper (1834) and Bellini (1837), celebrating the italianate capacity for bel canto expressiveness, as well as his next opera Das Liebesverbot (1834–6), relocating Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in a sun-soaked, pleasure-filled Mediterranean setting; the chief musical models adopted were, appropriately, Bellini and Auber.
It was carnal rather than aesthetic considerations, according to Wagner, that persuaded him to accept a post as musical director of the travelling theatre company run by Heinrich Bethmann: he had fallen instantly in love with one of the leading ladies, Christine Wilhelmine (‘Minna’) Planer. However, during his term with Bethmann’s company (1834–6) he also gained valuable conducting experience and saw Das Liebesverbot on to the boards (29 March 1836) for what was to be the only performance in his lifetime.
Minna continued to pursue her theatrical career with engagements at the Königstadt Theater in Berlin and then in Königsberg. Negotiations for Wagner to secure the musical directorship of the opera in the latter city were protracted until 1 April 1837, but in the meantime he had sketched a prose scenario for a grand opera, Die hohe Braut, which he sent to Scribe in Paris in the hope that a libretto by him might inspire an Opéra commission. It was Wagner who eventually produced a libretto for Die hohe Braut (in Dresden in 1842); it was offered first to Karl Reissiger and then to Ferdinand Hiller, but was finally set by Jan Bed?ich Kittl. An already tempestuous relationship with Minna was sealed by their marriage on 24 November 1836. Within months she had abandoned him in favour of a merchant called Dietrich; the rift had been healed only in part when Wagner took up a new post as musical director of the theatre in Riga (the historic capital of Livonia), which was part of the Russian Empire although colonized by Germans. He made the journey alone, arriving on 21 August 1837, but subsequently shared his cramped apartment not only with Minna, but also with her sister Amalie (who had taken up an appointment as singer at the theatre) and a baby wolf. Conditions at the small theatre were similarly constricted and the management unimaginative, though Wagner’s enterprise and initiative did result in a series of subscription concerts.
In the summer of 1838 he turned his attention to a comic opera based on a tale from The Thousand and One Nights, calling it Männerlist grösser als Frauenlist, oder Die glückliche Bärenfamilie. He completed the libretto and began to set it in the manner of a Singspiel, but abandoned it in order to concentrate on a major project that had been simmering since he had read, the previous year, Bulwer-Lytton’s novel about the Roman demagogue Rienzi. The poem and some of the music of the five-act grand opera Rienzi had been written by August 1838. The Riga appointment turned out to be as precarious for Wagner as his marriage, and after a contractual wrangle he determined to try his luck in the home of grand opera, Paris.
The departure from Riga had to be clandestine; Wagner and his wife were heavily in debt and their passports had been impounded. Under cover of night, Wagner, Minna and their Newfoundland dog, Robber, clambered through a ditch marking the border, under the nose of armed Cossack guards. Then, reaching the Prussian port of Pillau (now Baltiysk), they were smuggled on board a small merchant vessel, the Thetis, bound for London. The dangerous, stormy crossing and the crew’s shouts echoing round the granite walls of a Norwegian fjord were later represented by Wagner as the creative inspiration for Der fliegende Holländer. If any ideas for text or music were jotted down at the time of the sea crossing (July–August 1839), the evidence has not survived. Crossing the channel from Gravesend to Boulogne, Wagner was received there by Meyerbeer, who listened to Wagner’s reading of the libretto of Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen and promised to provide letters of introduction to Duponchel and Habeneck, respectively the director and conductor of the Paris Opéra.
Wagner spent a dismal, penurious two-and-a-half years (September 1839 to April 1842) in Paris, a victim of the sharp social divisions of Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy which reserved wealth and privilege for a bourgeois élite. He was forced to earn his keep by making hack arrangements of operatic selections and by musical journalism in which he lambasted the mediocrities perpetrated by the Opéra. In March 1840 the Théâtre de la Renaissance accepted Das Liebesverbot, but the theatre was forced into bankruptcy two months later. There is no evidence to support Wagner’s suggestion (made subsequently in Mein Leben) that Meyerbeer, through whose agency the work had been accepted, was aware of the imminent bankruptcy. Nor, apparently, did Wagner so believe at the time: on 20 September 1840 he wrote to Apel, ‘Meyerbeer has remained untiringly loyal to my interests’. It is psychologically more plausible that Wagner’s shameless obsequiousness before an influential patron was later transmuted by frustration and jealousy into the venomous bitterness seen, for example, in Das Judentum in der Musik.
In May 1840 Wagner sent Eugène Scribe a copy of his sketch for Der fliegende Holländer, and in letters of 3 May and 4 June he mentioned it to Meyerbeer, in the hope that he might use his influence to have the work put on at the Opéra. Meyerbeer introduced him to the new director of the Opéra, Léon Pillet, who bought the story for 500F, supposedly to have it made into an opera by one of the composers under contract to him. In fact, the two librettists given the sketch, Paul Foucher and Bénédict-Henry Révoil, did not, as generally stated, base their work Le vaisseau fantôme primarily on it but on a variety of sources including Captain Marryat’s The Phantom Ship and Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate. Wagner meanwhile proceeded to elaborate his scenario into a work of his own and initially he worked on the Holländer in tandem with Rienzi, which was completed in November 1840.
At this time Wagner was threatened with imprisonment for debt, but the available evidence strongly suggests that the threat was never executed. Partly through Meyerbeer’s influence, Rienzi was accepted by the Dresden Hoftheater. Preparations were under way by April 1842, when Wagner, deeply disillusioned with Paris, began to make his way back to the fatherland.
3. Kapellmeister in Dresden: 1843–9.
The première of Rienzi on 20 October 1842 was an immense success, catching as the work did the rebellious spirit of the times. The darker, introspective quality of the Holländer, which followed at the Hoftheater on 2 January 1843, was found less appealing. Nevertheless, Wagner was an obvious candidate for the post of Kapellmeister at the King of Saxony’s court in Dresden, which had become vacant. The prospect of financial security finally outweighed any doubts he had about accepting a liveried post in the royal service. Contrary to what he had been led to believe, Wagner’s status was that of second Kapellmeister, subordinate to that of Reissiger, who since his appointment as Kapellmeister in 1828 had elevated the reputation of the opera house to the highest level, but who by the 1840s was content to rest on his laurels while a younger colleague undertook the more onerous duties.
Those duties included conducting operatic, instrumental and orchestral performances and composing pieces for special court occasions. Among the latter works are numbered Das Liebesmahl der Apostel (1843), a biblical scene for male voices and orchestra; Der Tag erscheint (1843), a chorus for the unveiling of a monument to the king; Gruss seiner Treuen an Friedrich August den Geliebten (1844), another choral tribute to the king; and An Webers Grabe (1844), a chorus for the ceremony accompanying the reburial of Weber’s remains in his home town (the campaign to effect which Wagner had vigorously supported).
Wagner had begun work on his next major project, Tannhäuser, in the summer of 1842, when a detailed prose draft was worked out at Aussig (now Ústí nad Labem) in the Bohemian mountains. It was versified by the spring of the following year and the composition occupied Wagner between July 1843 and April 1845. The first performance took place at the Hoftheater on 19 October 1845. Wagner then spent three months analysing the conditions under which court music was produced at Dresden. His proposals, including a series of winter orchestral concerts, were eminently reasonable, but after a year’s delay he was informed that they had been rejected.
Wagner’s library in Dresden embraced a broad range of literature, both ancient and modern, from Calderón to Xenophon and Molière to Gibbon. It also contained versions of Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, editions of the Parzival and Lohengrin epics, and a number of volumes on the medieval cobbler-poet Hans Sachs. The subjects of Lohengrin and each of the music dramas to follow the Ring are thus likely to have been germinating in his mind during these years. A first prose draft was actually made for Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at Marienbad (now Mariánske Lánsk?) in 1845.
An event of major importance for Wagner was his organization in 1846 of a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (then still considered an unapproachable work) for the traditional Palm Sunday concert in the old opera house. Against considerable opposition from the administration he secured a notable financial and artistic success. The existence of sketches dating from 1846–7 for at least two symphonies bears witness to the inspirational effect the preparations for the Ninth had on Wagner himself.
During these years too he was working on the composition of Lohengrin, as well as studying Aeschylus (Oresteia), Aristophanes and other Greek authors in translation. In February 1847 he conducted his own arrangement of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide. His meagre salary (1500 talers per annum) was not enough to cover essential outgoings, but Minna managed the household efficiently and enjoyed the status of Kapellmeister’s wife. They remained involuntarily childless (probably as a result of an earlier miscarriage) but in general the marriage was at its most stable at this period.
The insurrectionary outbreaks in Paris in February 1848 and in Vienna the following month were greeted with zealous approbation by the ranks of middle-class German liberals, indignant at the indifference of their princely rulers to social deprivation among the working classes and motivated by fear of their own proletarianization. In Dresden barricades were erected and the king was presented with demands for democratic reform. Wagner’s plan for the organization of a German national theatre, which proposed that the director of such an institution be elected, that a drama school be set up, the court orchestra expanded and its administration put under self-management, was a reflection of such democratic principles, and consequently rejected. It is mistaken to see such a proposal – or, indeed, Wagner’s involvement in the revolution generally – simply as opportunist. He naturally wished to see the role of the opera house enhanced in a reconstructed society, but such a desire sprang from the conviction that art was the highest and potentially most fruitful form of human endeavour.
He threw in his lot with the insurrectionists when in June 1848 he delivered a speech to the Vaterlandsverein, the leading republican grouping, on the subject of the relation of republican aspirations to the monarchy. The evils of money and speculation were denounced as barriers to the emancipation of the human race, and the downfall of the aristocracy was predicted. The notion that the Saxon king should remain at the head of the new republic, as ‘the first and truest republican of all’, was not an idiosyncratic one, but in tune with the limited demands of the bourgeois liberals for constitutional government.
Wagner remained for the time being at his post, and began to set down a prose résumé of what was to become Der Ring des Nibelungen: Der Nibelungen-Mythus: als Entwurf zu einem Drama (October 1848). A prose draft of Siegfrieds Tod (later to become Götterdämmerung) was made the same month, followed (not preceded, as previously supposed) by the essay Die Wibelungen: Weltgeschichte aus der Sage (probably written in about mid-February 1849). Other projects of the period included Friedrich I (in five acts, possibly an opera), Jesus von Nazareth (probably also intended as a five-act opera, though only a prose draft was completed), Achilleus (probably a three-act opera) and Wieland der Schmied (a heroic opera in three acts; prose draft). Wieland and, in particular, Jesus von Nazareth espouse the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Ludwig Feuerbach: ownership of property as the root of evil, supremacy of love over the law, and a new religion of humanity.
Wagner’s assistant conductor, August Röckel, was no less of a firebrand, and the weekly republican journal he edited, the Volksblätter, contained various inflammatory tirades by Wagner and others. Through Röckel, Wagner came to know Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist, who in turn was acquainted personally with Marx and Engels. The fact that no works of Marx were contained in Wagner’s library at Dresden provides no proof that Wagner was unfamiliar with his ideas: radical theories would have circulated freely in a major city such as Dresden.
Wagner’s active role in the Dresden insurrection obliged him to flee for his life when the Prussian troops began to gain control in May 1849. He was sheltered by Liszt at Weimar before making his way on a false passport, via Paris, to Switzerland. A warrant had been issued for his arrest.
4. Zürich essays.
Even after the savage crushing of the 1848–9 uprisings, Wagner continued to believe that both social and artistic reform were imminent. In the first years of his exile in Zürich – he was not to enter Germany again until 1860 – he formulated a set of aesthetic theories intended to establish opera in a radically recast form as at once the instrument and the product of a reconstructed society. In the first of this series of Zürich essays, Die Kunst und die Revolution (1849), written under the influence of Proudhon and Feuerbach, Wagner outlined the debasement of art since the era of the glorious, all-embracing Greek drama. Only when art was liberated from the sphere of capitalist speculation and profit-making would it be able to express the spirit of emancipated humanity. The vehicle envisaged to effect this transformation process, namely the ‘art-work of the future’, was elaborated, along with the concept of the reunification of the arts into a comprehensive Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’) on the ancient Greek model, in two further essays, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849) and Oper und Drama (1850–51).
In the former, Wagner argued that the elements of dance, music and poetry, harmonized so perfectly in Greek drama, were deprived of their expressive potential when divorced from one another. In the ‘art-work of the future’ they would be reunited both with each other (in the ‘actor of the future’, at once dancer, musician and poet) and with the arts of architecture, sculpture and painting. Allowance was even made for the occasional use of the spoken word. Theatres would need to be redesigned according to aesthetic criteria rather than those of social hierarchy. Landscape painters would be required to execute the sets. Above all, the new work of art was to be created, in response to a communal need, by a fellowship of artists, representative of das Volk (‘the People’).
The philosophical basis of Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft is multi-faceted. The völkisch ideology, which urged a return to a remote primordial world where peasants of pure Germanic blood lived as a true community, had evolved with the rise of national consciousness in the 18th century. Notions such as that of the Volk’s creative endeavours arising spontaneously out of sheer necessity – a process of historical inevitability – owe much to Feuerbach and to such revolutionary thinkers as Marx. Nor was the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk new: writers such as Lessing, Novalis, Tieck, Schelling and Hoffmann had previously advocated, either in theory or in practice, some sort of reunification of the arts, while the idea of the regeneration of art in accordance with classical ideals can be identified with Winckelmann, Wieland, Lessing, Goethe and Schiller.
Oper und Drama is an immense discourse on the aesthetics of drama-through-music (see Music drama). A new form of verse-setting (Versmelodie) is outlined, in which the melody will grow organically out of the verse. It will use Stabreim (an old German verse form using alliteration) and a system of presentiments and reminiscences, functioning as melodische Momente (‘melodic impulses’; see Leitmotif). Only rarely will one voice serve as harmonic support for another; choruses and other ensembles will be eliminated. Wagner’s claim that the new ideas and techniques had ‘already matured’ within him before the theory was formulated is something of an exaggeration, as is suggested by his willingness to adapt the theoretical principles in the light of practical experience. Their formulation did, however, enable him to grapple with the central issue: how to reconcile his own fundamentally literary and dramatic inspirations with the Classical symphonic tradition.
Two other important essays of the period should be mentioned. Das Judentum in der Musik argues that the superficial, meretricious values of contemporary art are embodied, above all, in Jewish musicians. The rootlessness of Jews in Germany and their historical role as usurers and entrepreneurs has condemned them, in Wagner’s view, to cultural sterility. The uncompromisingly anti-semitic tone of the essay was, in part, provoked by repeated allegations that Wagner was indebted artistically, as well as financially, to Meyerbeer. The preoccupations and prejudices of Das Judentum also place it in an anti-Jewish tradition, perpetuated by writers often of otherwise impeccably liberal and humanitarian credentials, going back via Luther to the Middle Ages. Even the idea that Jews should, as part of the process of assimilation, undergo a programme of re-education was not novel, though the refinement (stated elsewhere) that that programme should largely consist of the Wagnerian music drama was original.
In 1851 Wagner wrote an extensive preface to accompany the projected publication of the librettos of the Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. This autobiographical essay, called Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde, is of interest for the insights it offers into Wagner’s own view of his life and works to that date.
5. Composer in exile: 1849–63.
In Zürich Wagner made the acquaintance of a number of cultured individuals, some of whom provided pecuniary as well as intellectual sustenance. A pair of female admirers, Julie Ritter, a widow from Dresden, and Jessie Laussot (née Taylor), an Englishwoman married to a Bordeaux wine merchant, jointly offered him an annual allowance of 3000F (equivalent to 800 talers, or approximately half his Dresden salary), for an indefinite period. Such benefactors showed the kind of disinterested generosity and confidence in his artistic endeavours that he found lacking in his wife, Minna, whose constant reproaches he found increasingly hard to bear. A love affair between Wagner and Jessie (who, according to him, was also unhappily married) briefly blossomed. When, after the intervention of Jessie’s mother and death threats from her husband, it ended, one source of financial support dried up. But an unexpected legacy then enabled Julie Ritter to confer the full amount herself, which she continued to do from 1851 to 1859.
Lohengrin received its world première at Weimar under Liszt, with the composer necessarily absent. A drastic water cure at nearby Albisbrunn failed to relieve the dual complaints of erysipelas (a skin disease) and severe constipation, and further depression resulted from the failure of the revolution to materialize in France, or elsewhere in Europe. Several of Wagner’s letters of the period speak of a loveless, cheerless existence; more than once he contemplated suicide.
By February 1853 he was able to recite the completed text of the Ring to an invited audience at the Hotel Baur au Lac in Zürich; 50 copies of the poem were printed at his own expense. Financial assistance from Otto Wesendonck, a retired silk merchant to whom Wagner had been introduced early in 1852, allowed him to present and conduct three concerts of excerpts from his works (May 1853) and to make a trip to Italy. Wagner’s account (in Mein Leben) of the dream-inspired onrush of inspiration for Das Rheingold while he lay half-asleep in a hotel room in La Spezia has been dismissed as a further example of mythification (see Deathridge, in Deathridge and Dahlhaus 1984), though it has been argued (see Darcy 1989–90) that the documentary evidence neither supports nor contradicts Wagner’s account. The story bears witness, in any case, to the perceived importance of the new artistic phase being entered, and it was indeed in the succeeding months that the music of the Ring began to take shape.
In September 1854 Wagner reckoned his debts at 10000F – by this time he was supporting not only Minna and her illegitimate daughter Natalie but also Minna’s parents. Wesendonck agreed to settle most of these in exchange for the receipts from future performances of Wagner’s works. Appeals for clemency made on his behalf to the new king of Saxony, Johann, were rejected, no doubt on the advice of the Dresden police, whose agents still had him under surveillance. Several of his acquaintances were regarded as dangerous political refugees, not least Georg Herwegh. Ironically, it was Herwegh who in September or October 1854 introduced him to the quietist, renunciatory philosophy that was to influence his future outlook on life: that of Arthur Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer’s influence was twofold: his Buddhist- inspired philosophy, advocating the denial of the will, and the quest for the state of nirvana (cessation of individual existence), was profoundly to affect the ideological orientation – and even the locution – of each of Wagner’s remaining dramatic works. Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, which elevated music above the other arts, made a similarly forceful impact. But Wagner’s abandonment of the concept of the egalitarian coexistence of the arts should be seen not so much as a wholesale volte face from Oper und Drama principles as a shift of emphasis from the realization of those principles in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre.
An invitation from the Philharmonic Society to conduct a series of eight concerts in London resulted in a four-month stay in England in 1855. A hostile press campaign, uncongenial weather and the philistinism of the English combined to make the visit an unhappy one. On returning to Zürich he completed his severely disrupted work on Walküre (1856) and made a short prose sketch for an opera on a Buddhist subject: Die Sieger. The latter project was never completed, but its themes – passion and chastity, renunciation and redemption – later found a place in Parsifal.
Otto Wesendonck put at Wagner’s disposal a small house adjacent to the villa he was having built in the Enge suburb of Zürich. Wagner and Minna moved in at the end of April 1857 and Wesendonck and his wife Mathilde to their own home in August. A love affair developed between Wagner and Mathilde, though their love – celebrated and idealized in Tristan und Isolde – was probably never consummated. To begin work on Tristan (20 August 1857) Wagner abandoned Siegfried, returning to sustained work on it only in 1869. An eruption of marital strife necessitated Wagner’s move out of the Asyl (as, following Mathilde’s suggestion, he had called the little house). In the company of Karl Ritter he travelled to Venice; the second act of Tristan was completed there (in draft) on 1 July 1858 and the third act in Lucerne on 16 July 1859.
Preparing another offensive against Paris, Wagner conducted, at the beginning of 1860 in the Théâtre Italien, three concerts of excerpts from his works. Through the intervention of Princess Pauline Metternich Tannhäuser was eventually staged at the Opéra on 13 March 1861; a politically inspired demonstration, combined with Wagner’s refusal to supply the customary second-act ballet, caused a débâcle and the production was withdrawn after three severely disrupted performances. A partial amnesty (Saxony remained barred until the following March) allowed Wagner to return to Germany on 12 August 1860.
In February 1862 he took lodgings in Biebrich, near Mainz, and set to work on the composition of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, for which he had made two further prose drafts (elaborating that of 1845) the previous November. Surrounded as he now was by female admirers, he yet baulked, on compassionate grounds, at putting a decisive end to his irreparably broken marriage. Instead he installed Minna, with a not ungenerous allowance, in Dresden; they last met in November 1862 and Minna died in January 1866. In May 1863 he rented the upper floor of a house in Penzing, near Vienna, furnishing it in luxurious style, heedless of the consequences. His generosity to friends was equally unstinting and by March the following year he was obliged to leave Vienna under threat of arrest for debt.
6. Munich and Bayreuth: 1864–77.
A plea for pecuniary assistance published by Wagner along with the Ring poems in 1863 was answered in spectacular fashion when a new monarch ascended the throne of Bavaria in March 1864. The 18-year-old Ludwig II discharged Wagner’s immediate debts, awarded him an annual stipend of 4000 gulden (comparable to that of a ministerial councillor) and continued his support for many years, making possible the first Bayreuth festivals of 1876 and 1882.
A plea to Mathilde Maier to join him in the Villa Pellet, his new home overlooking Lake Starnberg, was less successful. But by now Wagner was on intimate terms with Cosima von Bülow, unsuitably married to the conductor Hans von Bülow, and their union was consummated some time between the arrival at Starnberg of Cosima (with two daughters and nurserymaid) on 29 June 1864 and that of Hans on 7 July. The child that resulted, Isolde, was born on 10 April 1865.
In October 1864 a more spacious house at 21 Briennerstrasse in Munich was made available to Wagner by Ludwig; it was decked out extravagantly, as was Wagner him
