Wagner, Liszt and Fred

From "I am Dynamite "

Wagner adored fame and he adored clothes. He well understood the value of the image as vehicle for ideas. Today, greeting the phi~ lologist whose discipline was the understanding and continuity of the antique, he was dressed in his “Renaissance painter outfit”: black velvet jacket, knee breeches, silk stockings, buckled shoes, sky-bluc cravat and Rembrandt beret. His welcome was warm, and genuine, as he led Nietzsche through the dazzling succession of rooms furnished in the opulent taste that the composer shared with his royal patron King Ludwig. 

Many visitors commented that they found Tribschen too pink and over-endowed with cupids, but such an interior was something quite new and intoxicating to Nietzsche, whose life had been spent in self-denying, Protestant rooms. Tribschen’s walls were covered in red and gold damask, or in cordovan leather, or in a special shade of violet velvet that had been carefully chosen to set off to best advantage the dazzling white marble busts of Wagner and King Ludwig. There was a carpet made of breast feathers of flamingos bordered with peacocks’ feathers. Exalted high on a plinth stood a ridiculously fragile, elaborately curlicued beaker of ruby Bohemian glass presented to Wagner by the King. Mementoes of glory were hung like hunting trophies on the walls: fading laurel wreaths, autographed programs, paintings of a muscle-bound, golden-haired Siegfried getting the better of the dragon, of breastplated Valkyries storming the skies like thunderclouds.

King Ludwig, who was paying the bills, had given Wagner carte blanche to settle wherever his imagination might be free of all practical considerations as he concentrated solely on Finishing the Ring cycle, which was the King’s passion. Wagner had settled on this spectacularly picturesque site that took full advantage of Kant’s principle of the sublime; “a function of the extreme tension experienced by the mind in apprehending immensity and boundlessness, transcend~ ing every standard of sense and which rouses a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror which, accomplished through a transcendent scale of reference, a greatness comparable to itself alone . . . its effect is to throw the mind back upon itself-and thus we soon perceive that the sublime is not to be looked for in the things of nature but in our own ideas.”

WAGNER’s DOMESTIC SITUATION was in a muddle when Nietzsche paid his visit. His birthday was looming the following weekend and King Ludwig wanted to be with him on that significant day but Wagner was torn between spending the day with the King or with his mistress Cosima. Though she and Wagner had been together long enough for her to bear him two daughters and she was now pregnant by him for the third time, Cosima had only very recently left her husband to come to live with Wagner at Tribschen. Wagner was concealing her from the King for various reasons. The King was an ardent Roman Catholic who disapproved of adulterous relationships. He was a pale creature who adored Wagner more than anyone on earth. It was obviously never a physical relationship in any way beyond each of them falling to their knees to sob hot tears in tribute to each other, but it was a highly romantic one, at least on Ludwig’s side. 

Ludwig was jealous and possessive; he saw no reason why he should not be first-and-only to the genius he elevated to a sort of fetishistic idolatry while supporting him financially to a degree beyond reason. 

While Wagner was the better conductor, Liszt was the infinitely better pianist, effectively inventing the profession of international concert performer. He was worshipped as a demigod of the keyboard from Paris to Constantinople and most points between. Heinrich Heine coined the term Lisztomania for the mass hysteria he engendered. Women swooned and swayed like cornfields in his presence. They stole his cigar ends from ashtrays and kept them as holy relics. They sneaked the Howers that adorned his concert platforms. Though there can never be any doubt of Wagner’s vigorous heterosexuality (much to both his wives’ fury there was practically a new young mistress for every opera) he would break into tears as he knelt to kiss Liszt’s hand. In terms of sentiment and sentimentality, Wagner conformed to the conventions of an age of male-to-male hero worship and unashamed emotion. 

Cosima was not Liszt’s favorite daughter. A gawky duckling of powerful personality, she was a long-faced belle laide, the physical image of her father. She shared his astonishing charisma, his height, his distinctive Roman nose and his etiolated looks which, handsome on a man, lent her a goddess-like unapproachability that was irresistible to certain intellectual men of sort stature.