This Day in Classical Music History (‘Tristan & Isolde’ Reflects Real-Life Wagner Drama)

June 10, 1865—The Munich premiere of Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Isolde) should have placed Richard Wagner on the high, comfortable plateau he had needed so desperately throughout his career.

His creative acolyte, conductor Hans von Bulow, had battled recalcitrant musicians in the orchestra throughout rehearsals, but had now brought off the composer’s vision in brilliant fashion; after several postponements, the public had nevertheless greeted his three-act music drama with storms of applause; and, most of all, he now had a patron—King Ludwig II of Bavaria—who not only had taken care of his debts but had financed this really expensive opera.

But Wagner, being Wagner, had already incurred the proverbial wrath of the gods. It wasn’t only that he continued to spend other people’s money recklessly, that he told any and all about “the incomparable magic of my works,” or even that he tried to influence Ludwig’s politics.

No. Like the Arthurian tale he’d adapted, Wagner had embarked on a heedless love affair with von Bulow’s wife Cosima—not the first time he’d taken advantage of the wife of an admirer. Only this time the relationship produced a baby, as well as such a scandal that, by year’s end, he’d be forced into exile again.

I was first exposed to the work of Wagner for a music humanities course in college. As the various tenors and sopranos battled each other in ear-shattering duets, I came to agree with the assessment of Mark Twain in his Autobiography (or, rather, the assessment he passed along by humorist Edgar Wilson “Bill” Nye): “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.”

Wagner’s personality, most assuredly, was not better than his music. Harold C. Schonberg’s The Lives of the Great Composers, after the obligatory noises about the composer’s genius, offered this devastating conclusion:

“As a human being he was frightening. Amoral, hedonistic, selfish, virulently racist, arrogant, filled with gospels of the superman (the superman naturally being Wagner) and the superiority of the German race, he stands for all that is unpleasant in human character.”

In creating Tristan from 1857 to 1859, Wagner proposed to change the rules of the musical drama with an opera that used the orchestra, in startling new ways, to suggest unresolved chords and recurrent leitmotifs. He was already changing the rules of civilized social order by having an affair with poet-writer Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of Otto Wesendonck, a wealthy silk trader. The relationship broke up his marriage and alienated Wesendonck, a benefactor.

As bad as that was, the scandal involving Cosima, the daughter of Wagner’s great friend Franz Liszt, was worse. It was so blatant that even Ludwig told the composer he needed to leave for awhile, until everything blew over. (Ludwig being Ludwig, he subsidized the exile of Wanger and Cosima in Switzerland for the next few years.)

In 1983, public television aired a miniseries on Wagner, starring Richard Burton (in one of his last roles) as the composer and Vanessa Redgrave as Cosima von Bulow Wagner. I have not yet had a chance to watch this, but I can’t imagine better casting than these two stars. Only they could begin to comprehend the scandal and controversy that followed in the wake of the composer and his wife.

(Incidentally, the image accompanying this post shows one of the original Munich performances of Tristan, with Ludwig Schnorr von Carelsfeld and wife Malvina in the title roles. Good thing the photographer took this shot, because, in another instance of the turbulence surrounding this production, the gifted Ludwig died after only the fourth performance, at age 29, of rheumatic fever.)

This Day in Classical Music History (Lothario Liszt Starts Recital Craze)

June 9, 1840—Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt laid the groundwork for taking the Continent by storm in his advertisement for a new concert form he would try this night at London’s Hanover Rooms: the solo piano recital.

For the last several years, Liszt had soaked up literary as well as musical influences in an attempt to reshape the creative culture of his time. As a result, when he first tried to describe how he wanted to affect audiences, he chose a different metaphor in a letter to the Princess Belgiojoso of Italy:

“These tiresome musical soliloquies (I do not know what other name to give these inventions of mine) with which I contrive to gratify the Romans, and which I am quite capable of importing to Paris, so unbounded does my impudence become!”

It took another few years for Liszt to adopt a suggestion by music publisher Frederick Beale that they use the term “recital” instead. People reacted quizzically at first, but were soon won over by the skill and intensity with which the virtuoso Liszt played.

Very much included in his fan group were women. Woody Allen once joked that he didn’t believe in reincarnation, but if it existed he’d like to come back as Warren Beatty’s fingertips. He might have done better as Liszt’s—he’d have perhaps just as many women, but all sorts of musical performances and compositions to his credit, too.

In fact, the latter were part and parcel of the package that attracted women. “Before Liszt, pianists kept their hands close to the keyboard, playing from wrist and finger rather than arm or shoulder,” explained longtime New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg in The Lives of the Great Composers. “But not after Liszt. He established once and for all the genre of the bravura pianist, the pianist who would haughtily come out, cow the audience, lift hands high, and assault the instrument.”

Alfred Brendel, no mean pianist himself, explained that as part of his act, Liszt would plunge into the audience between recitals to mingle with the audience. This, I suggest, was an opportunity for him to press the flesh—literally.

If Liszt were paying attention from the stage, he probably already had a good idea who would warm to him. He would negligently whip off his silk handkerchiefs and velvet gloves. This would send the females in the audience into such fits that they’d fight each other over these accessories. They probably would have thrown their undergarments at him, too, the way they did a century and a quarter later with the “Welsh Elvis,” Tom Jones--only, given the size of undergarments in the early Victorian period, it probably would have taken a fortnight to accomplish that feat.

Liszt stopped playing for money after 1847, spending nearly the last four decades of his life composing instead, for the most part. More bizarrely, he ended up taking Holy Orders and was known as Abbe Liszt in his last quarter-century.

Liszt’s life contains so much eccentricity, contradiction, passion, and incident that it has proven irresistible to Hollywood. Predictably, Tinseltown has never known to let well enough alone and has resorted to fictionalizing it.

I can still recall as a child watching a late-afternoon weekday movie series featuring Song Without End (1960), starring Dirk Bogarde as the Romantic idol. The Liszt lover in that biopic, Princess Carolyne Wittgenstein, was not an especially attractive woman. That, of course, would have been a complete non-starter at the box office, so Capucine had to be cast in the role.

But that was nothing compared with what Ken Russell did to the virtuoso’s career in Lisztomania. I never thought that anything could equal the over-the-top direction of his screen adaptation of Tommy, but reading about what he did with Liszt, I may have to revise that opinion.

Imagine this, faithful reader: Ringo Starr, as the pope. Wearing cowboy boots.

I’m not going to write any more on this topic because, after that last line, you won’t be able to remember anything I say, anyway.