Scan 5
Musical Courier 1906-09-26: Vol 53 Iss 1383, 1906
16 lines. Read by computer on 23 September 2026. Printed page 6. See the scan on archive.org.
1old Rath or Town Hall, in a mixture of South German and Italian Renaissance, with busts of many of the reputable Greek and Roman democrats in niches, and maxims sculptured out to show the budding Swiss demos what the old-timers said. Half of the hair of poor Themistocles is washed away, however, and Miltiades' whole nose is wasted, and no wonder, for the building was finished in 1694, just when Henry of Navarre was made King of France (no, I am a hundred years late; that was 1594)—when Voltaire was born and before Frederick the Great was born and before Benjamin Franklin was born and before there were any United States. The old woman who was scrubbing the old floor took me up the old and worn steps to the chambers where the 270 delegates of the Canton of Zürich meet and to the other where the seven members of the Cantonal Government sit, a miniature in each Canton of the seven sitting at Bern. The first hall was the one in which, in 1859, the peace was signed that incorporated Piedmont and Lombardy in one government, being the foundation on which the present united Italy is built. Napoleon III secured Savoy—Italian—through the treaty, and Austria got Venice, but Bismarck later on took this from Austria and gave it to Italy. How they do play with these people in the trading of whole countries!
3On going down stairs I asked: "Will you please tell me where the house is in which Richard Wagner lived?" The old woman had never heard the name, but as a postman was leaving the building I did not press her, but made for him and asked my question. He had never heard of Wagner. I said: "Compositeur, compositeur, musiker," mixing the languages, as they do in Switzerland, and he then took me to the curb, and pointing down the street, said: "Holzman, the music store there; you will find out probably," and I did, for Mr. Holzman—I think it was he—gave me the address of the Escher house and also the Wesendonck villa.
5The Track.
7Now then, for first hand information, if I could get it, and abandoning all impressions of past reading on this particular epoch of the "Master," as he was universally called and is now always and reverently called at Bayreuth, I began with the first step, and that naturally was the Escher house. Sure enough, from this first floor of the Escher house out into the court, into adjoining houses, into houses in the vicinity which he and Minna Planer-Wagner frequented, into Wein Stuben, over hills, down dales, out into the Enge where the Wesendonck estate lies, and there into the little Zum Sternen located in an out of the way, uphill corner, among old ladies of high repute, old lawyers who made out papers, old hosts of old inns, old musicians, pensioned, but who played under Wagner's direction, and old friends of both the Wagners and the Wesendoncks I delved and mined and cross-examined and treated and dialected until I finally, particularly through three old people of fine character and standing, whose names I shall religiously suppress, I found a true narrative of the man Richard Wagner and the artist, and what these two in one were doing here and around about from 1849 until, in 1856, the amnesty permitted him to go back to Germany. All the witnesses I examined agree in saying that with a few immaterial exceptions of no moment whatsoever, the Glasenapp biography covers the Zürich sojourn truthfully from the point of view of the hero-worshipper. If one decides upon representing or making Richard Wagner a god or a demi-god, he is not very apt to keep him down here on earth making steps that can be tracked. The fault with so many biographers consists in their insistence upon an apotheosis of their object, and, indeed, if they were not interested in the subject they would not have the inclination, the preliminary knowledge of the subject or the feeling of defense, in many instances, to become the biographers. A man calling himself a good Christian would never voluntarily become the biographer of Thomas Paine, and a good Christian would not read the biography, and he would also deny that a good Christian could write the usual panegyrical biographies of Thomas Paine—or any one of his type. I merely instance Paine to make the point. The story of Napoleon Bonaparte written, as a commission from the Government of Great Britain, by Walter Scott, tarnished his name forever. It is one of those biographical sketches, so rarely seen, damaging to the subject, and the ministry hired Scott and paid him because of his great literary prominence, through the sketch, to demolish Napoleon, and he tried to do it; but no one, not even in England, would read Scott's Napoleon, because it is on the reverse what so many biographies are on the obverse, with this difference, that the world does not know how the biographer is interested generally. In the Scott case it became public, and the biography and Scott were both damned forever.
9Wagner's biographers start out at once with the proposition that he is not only the most profound musician that ever lived and a poet of a high order, but that he was also a tremendous critic, literary authority, philosopher and Welt improver. Beginning with such a premise, the real man Wagner goes overboard, and in his place appears an infallible nature, a deified human being, a superman, and all that leads, as a necessity, to a decidedly false conclusion; and any one who dares to separate this superman from his work and look at him as one would view Goethe (who, by the way, also lived here for a while) or Byron or Dante or Poe or Beethoven or Shakespeare or Raphael or any man who did something, must be anathemized—according to many of our Wagnerphiles.
11It makes no particular difference to the vast world, with its flux of activities, whether Mr. Wagner was a goody-goody man or a libertine, but there is a certain philosophical question that, when put, insists upon a reply, and to those who put it and to those who wish the reply this personality of Mr. Wagner is necessarily and even insistently of deep interest, and it is: "Can a man be a great character as an artist and a vile character as a man?" (I do not mean to cast any reflections upon Mr. Wagner in asking that question for the philosophy in it.) I am not here to answer the question, and I am not engaged in polemics; I am merely a reporter of The Musical Courier, hunting the facts regarding one R. Wagner who lived in this town once upon a time, for a time, and this reportorial duty has no relation with the Meistersinger "Vorspiel," with the orchestration of the "Huldigungs Marsch," with the dialogue between the Old Gentleman and Mime in the second act of the "Siegfried," or with the use of the chord of the ninth and its reiterated application by the said R. Wagner. With all these matters I have no affairs on this particular occasion, nor can I consistently admit that a proper mirror of a man's life can be expected from biographers who do not look upon their subject as a man.
13The Man Wagner.
15When Wagner came to this town and while he resided here he was not the Richard Wagner we know now musically nor the Richard Wagner of the biographers; he was a composer, some of whose works had been produced and were continued as repertory works in isolated cases; he had been an opera conductor, and he had given out to close friends his vast scheme of music and drama alliance and explained the ethical tendencies of his compositions and illustrated in skeleton sketches his remarkable creations. He was poor; he had the standing of the usual struggling musician, but as he was far above and beyond the usual musician and composer in his mental accomplishments, as he was a literary magazine filled to the roof with profound knowledge, as he was an adept in philosophy, the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy, as he was a practical psychologist, as he was a splendid financier and shrewd business man and poet and critic and art connoisseur—in fact, the
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