THE TWILIGHT OF COSIMA I

When Cosima I, Queen of Baireuth, does enter the eternal shadowland, her passing will not greatly intrigue the attention of a world whose ears buzz with the rumors of mightier happenings. She has been a dweller for years in the Twilights. (She was born December 25, 1837, at Bellagio, Italy, and not in 1840, as the musical annals have it.) She is the last of the famous dynasty founded by her husband, Richard Wagner, greatest of modern composers. No one, not even his admirers, dared pretend that Siegfried Wagner would ever succeed his father on the musical throne. A brief span Cosima entertained high hopes for her son’s future. He had been coached by Humperdinck and Richter. His operas were produced in European capitals, but to no avail. He could not fill the shadow of his sire, much less write a bar of music worth the whistling. Wotan had fathered a Parsifal, Jr., and Baireuth sympathized with Cosima’s disappointment. It was the second sorrow of a life crowded with happiness. In 1883 the man she adored as a god died on her bosom at Venice. That tragic event transformed her from a loving wife to the sternly ambitious woman who ruled the destinies of Baireuth for thirty years. In 1913 the third sorrow came to her in the unwelcome shape of copyright expiration. The music of Wagner was free to every country. Parsifal, the Rhinegold of Baireuth, already had been ravished by an American Alberich; nevertheless, from the shock of the legal decision which blotted Baireuth off the map of music Cosima never recovered. She was become a shadow of her former grandeur. She had outlived her majesty.

I first saw her in 1894. It was the summer when Lillian Nordica made her début in the historic opera-house on the hill. Zoltan Doeme, her husband, also appeared. His Parsifal, too, is historic. Queen Cosima I was a tall, gaunt woman with the familiar Liszt profile, her white hair worn à la Liszt, her stride that of a grenadier. She ruled with an iron hand, a hand not encased in a velvet glove like her father’s. A tyrant in petticoats was the usual ascription. Not loved, indeed feared, she ran the Baireuth machine with the shrewdness of a Tammany Hall politician. Her contemporaries concur in that. A woman of brains, courage, audacity, she recalled for me a second Margravine of Baireuth in her domineering manner. She would tolerate no rivals. Conductor after conductor came and went. When Lilli Lehmann toward the close of a glorious artistic career sang, in 1896, then Gibraltar met Gibraltar. Lilli had been one of the Rhine-Daughters in 1876. She knew her Wagner as well as Cosima. There was warlike gossip then of which I got my fill. The ladies parted the best of friends, of course. Olive Fremstad, a pupil of Lehmann, was one of the Rhine-Daughters that year. Ellen Gulbranson was the Brünnhilde after Lehmann. Alois Burgstaller made a clumsy début as Siegfried and Parsifal. Mottl was the reigning favorite, Felix of Munich, the first man in whom the inconsolable Cosima showed deep interest after the death of Richard. Cosima, all said and done, was a daughter of Franz Liszt. The last time I saw her was in 1901. With George Moore I stood on the esplanade facing the Franconian valley, and during an entr’acte of the Ring we discussed the mediocre conducting of Prince Siegfried Wagner and the fond, foolish affection of his mother. She passed. This time she rode, but that rigid spine, the proud pose of the head, the undimmed hawk-like eyes—I am the widow of Wagner and the daughter of Liszt! they seemed thus to challenge the gaze of the public—proved her still in possession of all her powers. And she was then past sixty. Truly an extraordinary woman this, with her name out of the Italian Renaissance, herself like some belated and imperious apparition from the Renaissance.

Her forebears were just as remarkable. Liszt met her mother, the Countess d’Agoult, in the brilliant whirl of his artistic successes at Paris. Chopin had dedicated to her the first book of his Études. She was beautiful, accomplished, though her intimates declare that hers was not a truthful nature. She was born Marie Sophie de Flavigny, in 1805, at Frankfort-on-Main, Germany. Her father was the Vicomte de Flavigny, a French refugee, who had married the daughter of Simon Moritz Bethmann, a rich banker, originally from Amsterdam and a Hebrew converted to Lutheranism. Marie had literary ability, boasted of meeting Goethe once, and in 1827 she married Count Charles d’Agoult of Paris. Social sedition was in the air. The “Misunderstood Woman”—no new thing then, and still with us—was the fashion. George Sand was changing her lovers with every book she wrote, and the Countess d’Agoult began to yearn for fame and adventures. Liszt appeared. He seems to have been the pursued one. They eloped. In honor he could not desert the woman. They made Geneva their home—temporarily, for both had the nomad heart and were doomed to pitch their tents in many strange places. In her own right Marie had twenty thousand francs yearly income. It cost Liszt exactly three hundred thousand francs to keep up an establishment such as the lady had been accustomed to; he earned this at the keyboard, a tidy amount for those days. (There were pianistic money-kings before Paderewski.) And yet she was not satisfied. Ever insatiable are artistic women.

Mme. d’Agoult bore him three children—Blandine, Cosima, and Daniel. Blandine, the beauty of the family, married Emile Ollivier in 1857. She died in 1862. Liszt greatly loved her. Ollivier was later Napoleon’s war minister, and was fooled to the top of his bent by the Mephisto of European politics, Count von Bismarck. He died a few years ago nearly a centenarian, and busy to the last explaining that he was not to blame for losing the tragic Franco-Prussian War. His hell was paved with good intentions before he reached there. Cosima married Hans von Bülow, her father’s “favorite pupil” (there were hundreds of them), in 1857. True to family form, she ran off with Richard Wagner, and, to the despair of her father, married that fickle gentleman. Her father’s discomfiture was the result of Cosima’s defection from the Roman Catholic faith. She renounced this faith and became of her husband’s religious persuasion, i. e., nominally a Protestant, in reality a free-thinker. Daniel Liszt, the hope of his father, died in December, 1859, at the age of twenty. Liszt had legitimatized the birth of his children, had educated them, had generously dowered his daughters, and all three were a source of sorrow to him. The high light of comedy was not absent when the gallant Count d’Agoult—we shan’t say “bereaved of his wife,” for who shall pretend to analyze the mixed emotions of a man sorely wounded in his pride of race and secretly overjoyed at being rid of a pernicious blue-stocking?—called a family council, which, after due consideration, pronounced the verdict that Monsieur François Liszt (they spelled it Litz in Paris) had behaved like a “perfect gentleman” in a certain delicate indiscretion, thereby absolving him from all blame in the matter. Recording angels on high must have wept, and George Meredith lost a theme peculiarly fitted to his ironic pen. But the injured husband calmly went to his club every day and died in the odor of mundane sanctity.

As might have been foreseen, la d’Agoult quarrelled with her Liszt. They parted bad friends. Under the pen-name of Daniel Stern she attacked him in her souvenirs and novels. He forgave. A most irritating trait in his character was his inability to hate his enemies. Of Heine alone he spoke ill. When some one asked him if Heine’s name would be carved on the portals of fame, Liszt replied: “Yes, in letters of mud”; which is manifestly unjust. In 1860 Franz and Marie met for the last time, and in Paris. He gently told her that the true title of her souvenirs should have been Poses et Mensonges. She wept. He was quite right. She was a detestable poseuse and a fibber. Tragic comedians, both. They bored each other. Their union recalls Flaubert’s profound remark that Emma Bovary found in adultery only the platitudes of marriage. Perhaps other ladies had supervened in the cometary existence of Liszt. Like Byron he was the sentimental hero of his day. A René of the pianoforte. Read the recollections of Mme. Adam for a clue to the character of Cosima’s mother. Liszt sensibly intrusted to the care of his own mother the education of her three grandchildren. She was born at Krems, Lower Austria, and a pious soul. Curious it is that the son of a Hungarian magnate’s overseer should be by the force of circumstances and his own genius allied with the aristocracy and high diplomacy in several lands of his time, Liszt Ferencz, whose name translated into English would be Frank Flour.

Unhappy with the intellectual but irascible von Bülow, Cosima was happy with her Richard. If there were quarrels they were fought behind closed doors. She was not beautiful like her sister Blandine, but she had more brains. Anton Rubinstein loved her; Nietzsche’s last recorded writing before his mental eclipse at Turin, 1889, was a passionate phrase meant for her. He was closely allied with the Wagners at Triebschen, and had corrected the proofs of Richard’s Autobiography, a garbled version of which has been published with the blue pencil of Baireuth writ large on every page. Some day all the secrets of that prison-house will be divulged. Nietzsche surmised much, and many guesses have furnished stuff for romantic commentators. Romance of the most lurid pattern has enveloped the Liszt Wagner von Bülow d’Agoult group. And the greatest influence in Wagner’s career was not Cosima but Mathilde Wesendonck, to whom we owe the genesis of that lyric masterpiece among masterpieces, Tristan and Isolde. For her spiritual collaboration with Wagner, Mathilde was never forgiven by Cosima—after all, a real woman.

Liszt participated in the musical inauguration of Baireuth, in 1876; the family dissension had been patched up in 1873; but he played second fiddle to his son-in-law. His affectionate daughter saw to that; also saw, in 1886, when her father had the bad taste to die during the festival at Baireuth, that he was buried as quietly as possible, for an imposing funeral might have disturbed the gate-money at the big barn on the hill. Thrift, Cosima, thrift! At her husband’s death she declared that her father no longer existed for her. Mention of his music was snubbed at Wahnfried—in the back yard of which Wagner was buried like a cat, as Philip Hale so blandly puts it. The awful part was to follow. Liszt, instead of being interred at Weimar, or Budapest, lies under the shelter of a hideous tomb in Baireuth, devised by his grandson, Siegfried Wagner—who is also an architect. This, another of Cosima’s tactless doings. She estranged the old friends of her husband, with the exception of the faithful Hans Richter, who told me at London—in 1901, where he conducted the Ring in Covent Garden—that Cosima was as great as a woman as Wagner a composer; which was no doubt true; and she was also a meddlesome blunderer. She put Baireuth on the map of Cook’s Trippers. She botched artistically every performance she handled, but she made money; her banker-grandfather’s business ability she must have inherited. There is no doubt the tragedy of Germany added to her sorrows. With her will pass forever the once powerful Wagnerian dynasty.