Quote of the Day (Mark Twain, on Richard Wagner)

“I have seen and greatly enjoyed the first act of everything Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; after two acts I have gone away physically exhausted.”—Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain

Did Twain say, as he is so often quoted, that Richard Wagner’s music is “better than it sounds”? 

It sure sounds like something he’d express—and when in doubt about a quote that surprises and delights with its plain-spoken directness, there’s a tendency to attribute it to him, just as, whenever there’s a quote that’s surprising and paradoxical, people will, more often than not, believe it originated with either Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw.

It turns out that Twain didn’t say or write this. In his autobiography, he quoted this as coming from the younger humorist Edgar Wilson, a.k.a. Bill Nye (1850-1896). Over the years, people became confused and attributed it to Twain himself, probably because the Man in the White Suit cited it approvingly in his memoir.

No matter what he might have thought about the sounds created by the composer, however, Twain freely admitted to fascination with the stagecraft of the German's overwhelming musical theater works: “One of the most engaging spectacles in the world is a Wagner opera force marching on to the stage, with its music braying and its banners flying.”

I don’t know if Twain was in the audience, but he undoubtedly would have had a similar reaction on this date in 1886, 21 years after its premiere in Munich and three years after the composer’s death, when Tristan und Isolde made its American debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. The two leads had worked with the composer himself, so they were as well-grounded in the material as you could get.

Wagner had feared that he was creating an opera that would drive people mad, and indeed the first Tristan in Germany had died from delirium only days after the premiere.

  

If New Yorkers were driven mad, however, it was with delight. A critic for the Musical Courier observed that when the performance concluded, “middle-aged women in their enthusiasm stood up in their chairs and screamed their delight for what seemed like hours.”

  

The darker side of that latent hysteria was evoked in this Woody Allen one-liner: “Every time I listen to Wagner, I get the urge to invade Poland.”

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.)