Hurricane

By Christopher Porterfield

RICHARD AND COSIMA WAGNER:

BIOGRAPHY OF A MARRIAGE

by Geoffrey Skelton; Houghton Mifflin; 319 pages; $14.95

She was 26, an illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt, wife of Pianist and Conductor Hans von Buelow, a quick, intense, yearningly serious votary of high German romanticism. He was 51, notorious throughout Europe as a musical and political revolutionary, separated from his wife of 29 years, his life a "perpetual hurricane" of controversies, conniving and debts, a questing genius who had gone through women as if trying out musical themes, searching for the one who would sing to his soul. In Cosima von Buelow, Richard Wagner found at last his "profoundly noble feminine spirit." It was a match made in Valhalla.

But their marriage of true minds was not without impediments, as Geoffrey Skelton details in this engrossing narrative. For one thing, Cosima's husband happened to be a close friend and zealous exponent of Wagner's. For another, Wagner's professional hopes rested on his new patron, 19-year-old King Ludwig of Bavaria, and the composer was not eager to test the idealistic youth's attitude toward unconventional liaisons. So for four years he and the Buelows lived in a free-floating menage `a trois. Cosima bore him a daughter during this period. Wagner continued to promote Buelow's career. And poor Buelow vacillated between submission and outrage, at one point taking up pistol practice in preparation for a duel until he was dissuaded by a fellow Wagnerite: "You cannot exchange shots with the master!"

In 1868 Cosima finally lived openly with her lover, and nearly two years later the way was cleared for them to marry. For the next 14 years, until Wagner died of a heart attack in 1883, they were scarcely out of each other's sight. Cosima bore him two more children and created a domestic refuge, while also serving as his amanuensis, companion and "dear indispensability." His followers quickly found that they could no longer gain access without the consent of "the Delphic oracle," as they dubbed her. Even the young Nietzsche was willing to run shopping errands and help trim the Christmas tree in order to pass muster.

For Wagner, love meant complete subjugation to his will. The formidable Cosima was able to comply because she rated his work--the first productions of Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger, the completion of the Ring cycle and Parsifal, the construction of the festival theater at Bayreuth--almost as highly as he did. "There stands he who has called forth these wonders," she marveled in her diary. In return Wagner was generous and, by his standards, faithful. In one of the elaborate celebrations that became traditional, Wagner assembled a 45-piece orchestra in the hall of their house so it could awaken her on her birthday with the strains of his Parsifal Prelude. "Then," she recorded, "R. comes to my bed, jokes gaily, undresses and gets into bed, breakfasts again with me, and talks and talks." Wagner was then 65.

Such devotion was a bulwark for both of them against an ungrateful world. Old Liszt swooped down occasionally to inflame Cosima's feelings of guilt. Nietzsche betrayed the cause with attacks on Wagnerian aesthetics. King Ludwig offered ardent support one moment and retreated into incipient madness the next; reports reached the Wagners that he went in and out of his palaces only by the windows and once ordered dinner for twelve, then sat down alone after bowing to the empty seats. Weary and overextended, Wagner toyed with emigrating to the U.S. on the condition that the American faithful would "place at my disposal the sum of one million dollars."

Skelton, the British translator of Cosima Wagner's Diaries, recounts all this with grace and a perhaps too benign indulgence. Since his story leaves off before Cosima's long widowhood (she died in 1930, at 93), he does not have to confront her in the decades when she reigned implacably over Bayreuth. He cites ample evidence of Wagner's more monstrous traits, which Cosima shared or abetted: egomania, antiSemitism, a devouring exploitativeness. Yet Skelton seems to take his tone from a remark of Cosima's, when the abandoned Buelow told her he forgave her. "What is needed," said Cosima, "is not forgiveness, but understanding." --By Christopher Porterfield

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