A Previously Unpublished Chapter of Wagner’s Autobiography, Recently Discovered by Yours Truly

I’m Richard Wagner! I’m the greatest writer and composer who ever lived! And I speak to you now, from beyond the grave, my voice brought to you through the magic of blogging, to tell you about some of my experiences in the city of Venice, or as we call it auf Deutsch, VENEDIG. (The natives call it ‘Venezia’. Ah, the glories of Babel! And what a city for it! So many tourists, from so many places, most Venetians need to be able to buy and sell in English, French, Spanish, and German as well. And Venetian is a far cry from Italian!)

I remember so well time spent in Venice back in the summer of 1858. I had been staying near Zurich, with my great friends the Wesendoncks, until...well, things there went a bit south. I was supposed to be hard at work writing my great ‘RING’ cycle; but two powerful forces had joined strength to push me from that difficult path, first one of my rare moments of practical lucidity, in which I despaired that I could either finish the RING or manage to get it produced; and secondly, the considerable charms of Frau Wesendonck. It was with she as muse that I turned from writing, in the RING, the sum total of our time and our world, and turned instead to building a monument to love in all its glory—that blissful love which I in my misery have never been fortunate enough to know. TRISTAN AND ISOLDE—a poem of love in its purest passion, that sexual love from which all other loves must derive. My impossible love for Mathilde inspired this impossible work, which they later considered ‘unperformable’ and ‘unplayable’ in Vienna.

Mathilde knew about it; she fed it, nourished it, pushed me onwards; but she insisted upon misunderstanding me, when I spoke to her about the proper relations between the sexes, and thus we had that argument about Gretchen in Goethe’s FAUST. And I scribbled that regrettable response for her to read the next morning; and alas! my wife intercepted it, as should never have been. In the unpleasant altercations that necessarily followed, they all continued their refusal to understand me; and thus my flight to Venice, accompanied only by young Karl Ritter. A sweet knave, and devoted to me; but it was clear from the beginning that he would never amount to much, so thank goodness his mother was wealthy. (And shared his taste in music!)

We stayed in rooms at the Palazzo Giustinian in Venice, on the Grand Canal. I had no wife, no hope of any great love; no homeland, no money, no friends; only a useless catamite for company, and now I was working on my fourth unperformable, unfinishable drama (with a further three foreseen from afar). It’s a wonder I went on breathing.

Our rooms were lovely, giving on to the Grand Canal, but the incessant noise of those gondolieri! They call Venice ‘La Serenissima’, the Most Serene Republic, and indeed parts of it are more quiet than any place I know—no cry of birds, no sound of wind, no human voices, only the ebb and flow of water in the small canals, and sometimes the quiet lapping against stone steps. But the Grand Canal—that’s a different kind of song. There the gondoliers are forever passing back and forth, and ever singing that strange local music of the gondolieri, something like the mournful cry of a tall bird standing in a swamp, one foot firmly fixed fast in the muck, thus rendering its wings useless.

Little wonder, then, that this sound found its way into my TRISTAN; as the third act begins, and the hero lies wounded, abandoned, desparate, friendless, penniless, in faraway Kareol, he hears in the shepherd’s piping on the hill, in the English horn solo, an echo of the ‘alte Weise’—his song of love and death. MY song of love and death. The sound of Venice.

It is the loveliest place there is, truly. Everyone who comes here feels the pull of love; the perfect place for a romantic getaway: the land of Casanova, of carnival, of quiet, slow journeys up and down the canals, with a pretty young thing in the back of the boat with you. Goethe knew it, wrote about it in his salacious ‘Venetian epigrams.’ You see it, everywhere, the ubiquitous public displays of affection; you smell it in the perfumed air of the lagoon, you know it from the hazy light rippling off the water. To be in Venice is to be in love.

But it is also the land of death. Elsewhere one is never so conscious of our proximity to the other side. On land, back home in Saxony and Bavaria, there is life everywhere you turn: the air is full of birds, the land is covered in vegetation, the fields and forests are filled with beasts, the waters are full of fish. But in Venice (in the city itself, not the outer lagoon) the water is only death. It’s always there, never obtrusive, patiently waiting; it touches everything, connects everything, it is the ethereal which surrounds and embraces and protects and ultimately receives us. The city itself is no city but a great vessel; it emerged from the sea and to the sea will it one day return, as this our life is rounded with a sleep.

Our lives come closest to death in love. Through love do we create new life, balanced in the end with our own death; in the act of love we momentarily forget this life, to reconnect with that infinite from which we came and to which we must return. Thus love, like the canals of Venice, connects us all through the ages in this great floating city of humanity. Thus it is to Venice that I came to write my song of love and death.

It became a fearsome thing; I knew as I created it that only inadequate performances could save us, that really good ones would drive men mad. The first to go was my good, poor Schnorr, my Tristan in Munich, the only one capable of really SINGING my difficult drama. (His wife could sing it, too...but she, too, went mad. He died too soon, leaving Malvina alive to torture me for decades.)

For myself, I found a way out of the endless spiral of that English Horn solo, that ‘alte Weise’ of love and death—music, they later said, which began the destruction of tonality—when I happened with Ritter one day to step into the church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, in San Polo. An amazing church, really, one of the finest in all Venice, and there are many to choose from! I noticed, as I entered from the left transept, a chapel with a grave and monument to Claudio Monteverdi, one of the earliest composers to work in this form of ‘opera’—long before it degenerated into ‘opera’ the way it is generally practiced today. I didn’t know these operas by Monteverdi while I lived, but had I known them I would have approved, because he wrote dramas, not operas. Passing a little farther into the church, I happened upon a grave and memorial to Francesco Foscari, the early Doge of this city who died of grief upon the death of his exiled son Jacopo. This history was well known, in my day, because Lord Byron (who stayed here in Venice across the Grand Canal from my Giustinian) immortalized him in a poem, “The Two Foscari”, which an Italian contemporary of mine—the one born the same year as me, and who did such strange things to Shakespeare—turned into one of the dreariest ‘operas’ in the tradition which degenerated out of Monteverdi’s really strong start, his I due Foscari. The less said about that, the better.

But it was the painting above the central altar—Titian’s ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN—which hit me like a thunderbolt. I saw the painting; tears flooded my eyes, I felt my heart racing, I gasped for breath. I grabbed Karl’s arm—“There! That’s it!” I shouted. “That’s the face of my Isolde, in her final transfiguration!” As she soars upwards, assumed heavenwards, into the highest rapture of ecstasy, the gold pouring down from the heavenly Father. Perhaps Titian’s noblest work, and certainly the one which took me from the English Horn solo at the top of Act Three to the long-sought resolution at the end of Act Three. And I knew, when I gazed upon Titian’s vast, intricate, busy yet carefully balanced canvas, how I would write my MASTERSINGERS OF NÜRNBERG. A comedy, yes, a spoof on the singing competition of TANNHÄUSER, and on the Forging Song of SIEGFRIED; but a comedy with a great heart, a celebration of all that is divine in the spirit of man. And so, with TRISTAN finished, it was back to Switzerland to work on MEISTERSINGER (mostly in our charming house in Tribschen).

But it was not farewell to Venice. My final farewell to Venice, as it happened, was my final farewell to this earth. A fitting end, I think. It was February of 1883; we had been spending more and more time in Italy, since the 1876 opening of the Festival, first in search of scenic inspiration for my final, consecratory, drama, the grail-story of PARSIFAL; but after that simply because it’s warmer in the land of the sun, and I felt my tired old body deserved a little heat and light after so many northern years of rain and cold. We were staying at the time in Palazzo Vendramin, now the grand casino of Venice, near where the newfangled ‘train’ deposits its passengers.

All I remember is, it was a rainy, nasty, cold, wet February, and Cosima and I had been having another one of our rows; in this case it was because of the visit, the day before, of the young English singer Carrie Pringle, one of my lovely Blumenmädchen from the summer before, the first performances of PARSIFAL the long-awaited grail opera. Of course Fräulein Pringle was young and delightful, am I to blame for that? She and I had gone over some of the Rheintöchter music from the RING, their final cry of “Truth and trust can be found only in the deeps; False and cowardly is all that reigns on high!” The last music I heard, still ringing in my ears even now. Nothing I ever wrote was more true or more beautiful...and so early on! Strange, how I knew it, even then.

But since I did grow passionate, Cosima assumed there was more to our tête-à-tête than might be proper, and I had to explain calmly that no harm was meant or done, and that she should go easy on an old man. The next morning I was sitting down to continue work on my essay, “On the Feminine in the Human,” in which I intended to prove, finally to prove, that women might also be considered human beings; and it was then that my old trouble began again. I knew it at once, and called for the servant; he called Cosima, and she came, and in my Isolde’s all-forgiving, all-knowing, all-consuming embrace this Tristan’s light was put out for good. But whether the sound of the ‘alte Weise’ continued or no, I am not here to tell you.

I will tell you, I’m not so keen on some of what’s happened since I’ve been away. This German writer, young Thomas Mann, has memorialized me in his DEATH IN VENICE, as a ridiculous old fop lusting after a Polish youth, choosing to die of cholera rather than risk separation from one with whom he was never and could never be united. A lot of claptrap, I say...I was never on the Lido, where Mann’s story is set, I never felt the slightest twinge of lust for such youths—despite my admiration for Goethe, here is one place I was never able to follow him—and I never traveled alone, as Mann’s ‘Aschenbach’ does in his old age; I always pull after me an entourage of at least ten useless people, many of whom—Ritter, Joukowsky, even that sad king, who once threatened to abdicate his throne and come to Tribschen to live with Cosima and I—did more than enough lusting after the ragazzi. How do they find me?

Some young fool, I notice, has been seeking me recently, turning up in all sorts of places where they remember me. I wonder—will he find me, too?

(EDITOR'S NOTE: that young fool took all sorts of pictures, but for some reason I'm having trouble getting them uploaded. Sorry...technical difficulties...hopefully we'll be able to edit them in...)