24. Gesamtkunstwerk

Großdeutschland

Wagner’s fortunes took a dramatic upturn in 1864, when King Ludwig II succeeded to the throne of Bavaria, when he exerted all his influence over the fragile king to conspire with Otto von Bismarck to realize his dreams of a new Reich. The Nazis declared that they were dedicated to continuing the process of creating a unified German nation state begun by Otto von Bismarck, a member of the super-rite of Freemasonry founded by Albert Pike and Giuseppe Mazzini, known as the Palladian Rite. The Third Reich, meaning Third Empire, alluded to the Nazis’ perception that Nazi Germany was the successor of the earlier Holy Roman Empire (800–1806), beginning with the crowning of Charlemagne in 800 and which was dissolved during the Napoleonic Wars in 1806, and the German Empire (1871–1918), which lasted from the unification of Germany in 1871 by Otto von Bismarck under Kaiser Wilhelm I until the abdication of his grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918 at the end of World War II. Although Bismarck had excluded Austria and the German Austrians from his creation of the Kleindeutschland state in 1871, integrating the German Austrians nevertheless remained a strong desire for many people of both Austria and Germany behind the Pan-German movement which influenced the racist fascism of Nazis.

Advocates of the Großdeutschland (“Greater Germany”) solution sought to unite all the German-speaking people in Europe, under the leadership of the German Austrians from the Austrian Empire. Pan-Germanism had been widespread among the revolutionaries of 1848, notably among Richard Wagner and the Brothers Grimm.[1] Writers such as Friedrich List (1789 – 1846) and Paul Anton Lagarde (1827 – 1891) argued for German hegemony in Central and Eastern Europe, with the Ostsiedlung, Germanic expansion into Slavic and Baltic lands. argued for the Zollverein, a pan-German customs union, from a nationalist standpoint. The anti-Semitism, opposition to Christianity, Social Darwinism of de Lagarde are said to epitomize the “Germanic ideology” that led to Nazism.[2] For the Pan-Germanists, these ambitions included a Drang nach Osten (“push eastward”), in which Germans would be eventually inclined to seek Lebensraum (“living space”) is concept of expansionism and Völkisch nationalism, which would become common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s.

As explained by Frank Turner, Wagner “realised that he could use his ideas and his capacity for self-advertisement to benefit from the unification of Germany then being carried out by the wars and diplomacy of Bismarck.”[3] Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Weber and Meyerbeer, Wagner is considered to have revolutionized opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (“Total-Art-Work”), by which he sought to synthesize the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama.  Wagner proclaimed in Art and Revolution, “When Art erst held her peace, State−wisdom and Philosophy began: when now both Statesman and Philosopher have breathed their last, let the Artist’s voice again be heard.” Wagner felt that the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus had been the finest (though still flawed) examples so far of total artistic synthesis, but that this synthesis had subsequently been corrupted by Euripides. As Turner explained:

Wagner’s own answer to the decadence of mid-century philistine art was a return to the Greeks and to a form of art that he thought would resemble that of Greek tragedy. Again he was anything but original, for such views had informed German literature from the time of Winckelmann and Goethe.[4]

To repair the rift and to replace the “Grand Opera,” Wagner called the Gesamtkunstwerk that would combine all of the arts. For Wagner, the Gesamtkunstwerk that would replace opera was what he called “Music Drama.” Part of the genius of Greek art, and especially drama, had been its appeal to myths. Myth for Wagner and many of his contemporaries held a very special power:

The incomparable thing about the mythos is that it is true for all time, and its content, how close soever its compression, is inexhaustible throughout the ages.[5]

 

Referring to Wagner’s nationalistic ambitions, “It is important to note in passing that in none of these ideas was Wagner original,” added Frank Turner. “What would give his ideas so much influence was both his artistic and his cultural-political victories from the mid-1860s onwards. These ideas would ride the crest of the nationalistic success of German unification after 1870 and the desire on the part of many educated Germans to create what they regarded as a distinctive German culture.”[6] According to Ernest Newman, Wagner’s ideas were nothing new, but originated with the Father Jahn.[7]  On May 1, 1848, Father Jahn, a mentor to Friedrich Fröbel and many other “Forty-Eighter,” was elected by the district of Naumburg to the German National Assembly, which included many of this disciples. Jahn is believed to have coined the term Volksthum (“Folkdom”), with his books Deutsches Volksthum (1810) and Merke zum deutschen Volksthum (1833). As Ernest Newman explains:

Jahn was an anti-Semite, he approved of the public burning of books not sufficiently “German” in tone. He yearned prophetically for a Führer who should heal Germany by “iron and fire,” a man whom the Folk would honour as a saviour, forgiving him all his sins. Germany was first of all to achieve internal unity, then take in the Danes, the Netherlanders and the Swiss; on the other side of Europe it had a “mission” to subdue and Christianise the Balts and Slavs, for the Germans shared with the ancient Greeks the distinction of being “humanity’s holy people”. Individual ideas and individual rights were all to be subject to the will of the State as the expression of “aggressive nationalism”: there was to be “One God, One Fatherland, One House, One Love.” No German should marry an unnaturalised alien.[8]

 

Jahn hoped from Prussia for “a revival, in due season, of the ancient German Reich,” with a Grossvolk who would accomplish a “New Order.” “Germany,” he continued:

 

if it is one with itself, if it develops, as a German commonwealth, its prodigious and as yet unexplored forces, can some day be the establisher of eternal peace in Europe, the guardian angel of humanity.[9]

In his Deutsche Kunst und deutsche Politik (“German Art and German Policy”), which appeared in 1868, Wagner wrote “‘German,’ ‘German,’ the bell tolls loudly over the cosmopolitan synagogue of the ‘present day’.”[10] In the 1860s, Wagner openly proclaimed that he was der huldvolle Genius (“the benevolent genius”) whose task was to serve his people. That is, the only German artist who had grasped what it was to be truly German.[11] This is clearly revealed in a passage included in his diary called The Brown Book and which was inspired after seeing a picture of Parson Riemann, a leading nationalistic figure in the Burschenschaft movement:

Then came the Burschenschaft. That’s when the Tugendbund was founded. All so fantastic that no human being could grasp it. But I have grasped it. Now it is me whom no one grasps. I am the most German being. I am the German spirit. Question the incomparable magic of my works—compare them with the rest and you can for the time being say no differently than that—it is German! But what is this German? It must be something wonderful, mustn’t it, for it is humanly finer than all else?—Oh heavens! It should have a soil, this German! I should be able to find my people! What a glorious people it ought to become. But to this people only could I belong.[12]

According to Hannu Salmi, in Imagined Germany: Richard Wagner’s National Utopia, Wagner saw the role of art in serving to bring about Weltrevolution (“World Revolution’), a concept already introduced by to the German-speaking world, by Heinrich Heine and Moses Hess, from whom it was adopted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.[13] In German Art and German Policy, Wagner stated: “Universal as the mission of the German Folk is seen to have been, since its entrance into history, equally universal are the German spirit’s aptitudes for Art.”[14] The idea of the universality of German culture which, as pointed out by Aira Kemiläinen, appears in the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Adam Müller, and Ernst Moritz Arndt. Wagner, however, claimed that Schopenhauer was the first thinker to understand the true import of this point.[15] Schopenhauer concluded that all art was related to the Wille (“will”), but that it was only music that tap into the world’s essence, namely, blind, impulsive will.[16 

Wagner had been a participant in the revolutions of 1848 and in the Dresden Revolution of 1849, as a consequence of which he was forced to live for many years in exile from Germany. During the two years after the failure of the Dresden Revolution, Wagner published four major theoretical statements of his conception of the role of art to advance his political programme: Art and Revolution (1849), The Art-Work of the Future (1849), Jewry in Music (1850), and Opera and Drama (1851). They involved a condemnation of contemporary art as decadent and bourgeois, blamed that decadence on the influence of Jews, which needed to be overcome by a new kind of art. Jewry in Music was an attack on Jewish composers, particularly Wagner’s contemporaries, and rivals, Felix Mendelssohn and his former friend Giacomo Meyerbeer, but expanded to accuse Jews of being a harmful and alien element in German culture, who corrupted morals and were, in fact, parasites incapable of creating truly “German” art. The root cause was the manipulation and control by the Jews of the money economy, particularly the Rothschilds. Wagner especially denounced the “monstrosities” as “Grand Opera,” which was infected with the influence of commercialism, Judaism, and French decadence, and of which Giacomo Meyerbeer was the most famous example.

Cosima

Wagner lived in exile in Zurich, on the run after his role in the 1849 revolution in Dresden. Wagner had been active among socialist German nationalists in Dresden, regularly receiving such guests as August Röckel and Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin had also played a leading role in the May Uprising in Dresden in 1849, helping to organize the defense of the barricades against Prussian troops with Wagner. Wagner was also influenced by the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Ludwig Feuerbach.[17] Wagner would spend the next twelve years in exile from Germany. Having had completed Lohengrin before the Dresden uprising, he now wrote desperately to his friend Franz Liszt to have it staged in his absence. Liszt conducted the premiere in Weimar in August 1850.

Liszt had been married to Countess Marie d’Agoult (1805 – 1876), a friend of Mazzini, who had left her husband for Liszt. Marie d’Agoult half-sister, Auguste Bussmann, was the second wife of Clemens Brentano, a close friend of Achim von Arnim, whose wife Bettina had an affair with Franz Liszt.[18] Marie was the daughter of Alexandre Victor François de Flavigny (1770 – 1819), French nobleman, and Maria Elisabeth Bethmann, from an old family of German Jewish bankers converted to the Protestant Christianity. Bethmann Bank, founded by Marie’s grandfather Johann Philipp Bethmann (1715 – 1793) and his brother Simon Moritz Bethmann (1721 – 1782), developed into one of Frankfurt’s leading Christian-owned banks, on a scale comparable only to its younger rival, the House of Rothschild.[19] Marie’s grandmother, Katharina Margarete Schaaf (1741 – 1822) gained her husband Johann Philipp was on familiar terms with the mother of Goethe and, even after she was widowed, maintained a respected salon where she received Madame de Staël in 1808.[20] Marie recalled in her memoirs, writing under the pseudonym Daniel Stern, about having met the German poet Goethe, and that when he caressed her hair that she felt blessed by his “magnetic hand.”[21]

From 1835 to 1839, Marie lived with Liszt, and became close to Liszt’s circle of friends, including Frédéric Chopin, who dedicated his 12 Études, Op. 25 to her. In 1841, Liszt was admitted to the Masonic lodge Zur Einigkeit, in Frankfurt am Main and Zur Eintracht in Berlin in 1842.[22] Liszt’s “Die Lorelei,” one of his very first pieces, based on text by Heinrich Heine, was also dedicated to her. Marie was close friends with Chopin’s lover, Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil (1805 – 1876), who, writing under the pen name of George Sand, was one of the most popular writers in Europe in her lifetime. Marie became the leader of her own salon, where the ideas that culminated in the Revolution of 1848 were discussed by the outstanding writers, thinkers, and musicians of the day. She maintained a correspondence with Mazzini, whose letters were sometimes read aloud in her salon. In 1850, under the name Daniel Stern, she published The History of the Revolution of 1848. During the Second Empire, meeting at Marie’s salon were Émile Ollivier, Jules Grévy, Carnot, Émile Littré and the economist Dupont-White met. Karl Marx visited her salon in 1844.[23]

Ollivier (1825 – 1913) married Marie’s daughter Blandine Rachel. Ollivier was the son of Démosthène Ollivier, Republican deputy for Bouches-du-Rhône, who hosted Mazzini, then his son, during his childhood.[24] With the establishment of the Second Republic, the Minister of the Interior, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, member of the Carbonari and friend of his father, appointed him 1848 commissioner of the provisional government in the departments of Bouches-du-Rhône and Var, when he was only twenty-two years of age. He was transferred to Haute-Marne under Eugène Cavaignac (1802 – 1857), then dismissed in 1849 after the victory of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in the presidential elections, before seizing power as Napoleon III in 1952.[25]

Probably it was Marie Kalergis (1822 – 1874) a noblewoman and salonnière who brought Liszt into close contact with Napoleon III, as she was good friends with General Cavaignac. She studied music with Chopin, who praised her musical abilities. From 1847 she lived in Paris, where guests at her salons included Liszt and Wagner, who addressed his “Jewishness in Music” to her, despite the fact that her paternal grandmother was Jewish. Also attending were Heinrich Heine who dedicated his poem “The White Elephant” to her and Chopin.[26]

Wagner was also associated with revolutionary circles through his friendship with Malwida von Meysenbug (1816 – 1903) and Hans von Bülow (1830 – 1894). Bülow, who was perhaps the most prominent of Liszt’s early students, fell in love with and eventually married Liszt’s daughter Cosima, who later left him for Wagner. Von Meysenbug was born at Kassel, Hesse. Her father Carl Rivalier descended from a family of French Huguenots, and received the title of Baron of Meysenbug from William I of Hesse-Kassel (1787 – 1867), the nephew of Prince Charles. Because of her support for the Revolutions of 1848, Malwida grew estranged from her family who supported the royal family.

In 1850, Malwida moved to Hamburg and enrolled in the Hamburger Hoschule für das weibliche Geschlecht (“Hamburg University for the Female Gender”) founded by Johannes Ronge and Johanna and Karl Fröbel, the nephew of Friedrich Fröbel. Teachers included the Freireligiöse preacher Georg Weigelt and Anton Rée (1815 – 1891), the director of the Israelite Free School, founded in 1815 with funding Baruch Abraham Goldschmidt and led for a time by Eduard Kley of the Hamburg Temple. Until 1840, Kley shared the priesthood with Gotthold Salomon (1784 – 1862), who took part in the Hamburg Temple Disputes. Salomon was also a member of the Frankfurt Judenlodge and the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. Following on the work of Moses Mendelssohn, Salomon was the first Jew to translate the complete Old Testament into High German in 1837, under the title Deutsche Volks- und Schulbibel für Israeliten (“German People’s and School Bible for Israelites”). In 1844, Salomon opened the New Hamburg Temple with Gabriel Riesser. Rée was elected to the Hamburg Constituent Assembly in 1848, alongside Riesser, with whom he worked closely, and was one of the most important advocates of Jewish emancipation.

When the school was forced to close in 1852, Malwida fled to England where she met Carbonari like Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Lajos Kossuth and other Forty-Eighters. The young Carl Schurz—who would go on to become a general in the American Civil War and associated with Lincoln assassination conspirator Simon Wolf—and his friend Gottfried Kinkel, an associate of Ledru-Rollin and Mazzini, also became acquainted with her there. She also met and maintained contact with Thomas Carlyle. In 1862, Malwida went to Italy with Olga Herzen, the daughter of Mazzini’s friend, the “father of Russian socialism,” Alexander Herzen. After she moved to Paris in 1860, she met Wagner for the first time and also corresponded with Arthur Schopenhauer.[27]

Malwida was also present at the disastrous performance of Tannhäuser in Paris, first performed on March 13, 1861 at the Salle Le Peletier of the Paris Opéra. What is now known as the “Paris version” of the opera was requested by Emperor Napoleon III at the suggestion of Princess Pauline von Metternich, wife of the Austrian ambassador to France, Richard von Metternich (1829 – 1895), the eldest surviving son of Illuminatus Prince Metternich. The conform with the traditions of the house, Wagner added a ballet, but in the form of a bacchanale, to conform with the sensual world of Venus’ realm. Performances erupted in whistling and catcalls, until on the third performance on March 24, the uproar caused several interruptions. As a consequence, Wagner withdrew the opera, marking the end to his hopes of establishing himself in Paris.[28]

Mad King Ludwig

Wagner’s appointment to Munich in 1864 had opened up to him for the first time the real possibility of realizing his ideas of the “artwork of the future.” In his first official administrative function, Franz Seraph von Pfistermeister (1820 – 1912), the court secretary and State Council of the Kingdom of Bavaria, was ordered by Ludwig II to find Wagner and bring him to Munich.[29] Ludwig II settled his considerable debts, and proposed to stage Tristan, Die Meistersinger, the Ring, and the other operas Wagner planned. While composing the opera Siegfried, the third part of the Ring of the Nibelung, Wagner interrupted work on it and between 1857 and 1864 wrote Tristan und Isolde and his only mature comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (“The Mastersingers of Nuremberg”). At the king’s request, Wagner also began to dictate his autobiography, Mein Leben. The premiere of Tristan und Isolde at the National Theatre Munich in 1865, the first Wagner opera premiere in almost fifteen years, was conducted by Hans von Bülow, whose wife, Cosima, had given birth that year to Wagner’s child, a daughter named Isolde. Cosima was 24 years younger than Wagner, and the illegitimate daughter of Liszt and Marie d’Agoult.

In 1865, however, as the assets of the Bavarian State Treasury were almost exhausted through Ludwig’s extravagant support of Wagner, he gained the enmity of number of politicians, including Pfistermeister and Prime Minister, Baron Karl Ludwig von der Pfordten (1811 – 1880), pressured the king of break off his friendship with Wagner. On 5th February the King refused to receive him. Wagner was banished from immediate contact with Ludwig II at the end of the year. However, the conflict between Wagner and the king did not last long.[30]

In February 1865, Wagner was drawn into a plot conceived by Maximilian Karl, 6th Prince of Thurn and Taxis (1802 – 1871), Head of the Princely House of Thurn and Taxis and head of the Thurn-und-Taxis-Post, who led the Black Brunswickers against French domination in Germany. Maximilian Karl was the fourth child of Karl Alexander, 5th Prince of Thurn and Taxis and his wife Duchess Therese of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, sister of Queen Louise of Prussia, the wife of the wife of King Frederick William III. Maximilian Karl wanted to found a puppet kingdom for his eldest son Maximilian Anton, Hereditary Prince of Thurn and Taxis (1831 – 1867), consisting of Rhineland-Westphalia and approximately half of Belgium.[31] Maximilian Anton was married to Duchess Helene in Bavaria, a granddaughter of Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria. Duchess Helene’s father, Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria, was introduced to Wagner through his cousin of Ludwig II and became his patron.[32] Duchess Helene’s sister, Duchess Sophie Charlotte in Bavaria, had been for a time engaged to Ludwig II. Maximilian Anton’s brother was Prince Paul of Thurn and Taxis (1843 – 1879), Ludwig II’s homosexual lover.[33]

Maximilian Karl had already contacted the government in Berlin to ensure Prussia’s non-intervention, and now sought a similar guarantee from Bavaria. Councillor of State Georg Klindworth (1798 – 1882) from Brussels and Baron Franz Josef von Gruben (1829 – 1888) from Augsburg, on behalf of the Maximilian Karl, presented Wagner with the offer of almost unlimited bank credit, on condition that he lend his assistance to the dismissal of Pfistermeister. Klindworth’s illegitimate daughter Agnes Street-Klindworth was a lover of Franz Liszt. In 1827, Klindworth went to Brunswick, where he entered the service of Duke Charles II of Brunswick (1804 – 1873), the son of Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1771 – 1815), the “Black Duke,” and Princess Augusta of Great Britain, a granddaughter of George II of England and a first cousin of Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel. Frederick William’s father was Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, a favorite nephew of Frederick the Great and nephew of Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick. Charles William Ferdinand was also brother of Duchess Anna Amalia, the mother of Karl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and a friend of Israel Jacobson, founder of the Hamburg Temple, and who met with Moses Mendelssohn.[34]

In September 1830, Charles II of Brunswick was overthrown and fled to England. Klindworth then went to Paris and joined in 1832 for several years the service of King Louis Philippe I—the son of Illuminatus Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, Philippe Égalité—in whose secret cabinet, he played a leading role. In the 1840s, Klindworth served as an agent to Illuminatus Prince Metternich and Lord Palmerston, and other European princes and politicians. At time he was also a double agent for several clients.[35]

Süddeutsche Presse

Wagner’s Report to His Majesty King Ludwig II of Bavaria upon a German School to be founded in Munich (1865), outlines the plan for a fundamentally new education for singers and musicians. Wagner’s suggestions were subsequently implemented to a large extent. The former Royal Conservatory was closed and reopened in 1867 under the direction of Hans von Bülow as the Münchner Atelier für Musik (“Munich Studio for Music”). Until 1874, the school was financed by private funds from King Ludwig II. In the same memorandum, Wagner had also proposed the creation of a weekly journal to be devoted to furthering the ultimate aim of the school: the redemption of “German” culture through Wagnerian music drama. But the music journal had been only a part of the larger scheme Wagner outlined in 1865. As he wrote to Lorenz von Düfflipp (1886 – 1886), Ludwig II’s Cabinet Secretary, “there was to have been established a great political paper which our aims in connection with the founding of a genuinely German musical and dramatic style were to be set forth and treated as intimately bound up with the higher interests of the nation.”[36] The program met with the approval of the Ludwig II, his Ministers, Wagner and Cosima, and it was decided to replace the Government paper, the Bayerische Zeitung, by a new journal with the title of the Süddeutsche Presse.

As editor, Wagner appointed his friend, Julius Fröbel, the son of Friedrich Fröbel.[37] Julius was also a friend of Alexander von Humboldt, whose friend and benefactor was Moses Mendelssohn’s eldest son Joseph. Wagner’s German Art and German Policy was immediately published in the Süddeutsche Presse on Fröbel’s appointment as editor in 1868.[38]

Cosima assured Ludwig II that the program had “made a great sensation. I believe that in the foundation of this paper resides the possibility of a renaissance of the German spirit, and so I hail it with sincerely uplifted joy.” “You know, my valued friend”, Wagner himself wrote to Fröbel, “Our chief task must be to rescue this so vigorous and capable Folk from the neglected condition into which education by priests and bureaucrats has brought it.”[39] Wagner quoted Konstantin Frantz (1817 – 1891), his latest mentor and one of the precursors of European federalism, that the French influence the wholly “materialistic” culture must be destroyed in order to save civilization, “and this precisely is the mission of Germany, because of all Continental countries Germany alone possesses the needful capacity and strength to bring about a nobler culture against which French civilisation will no longer have any power.”[40] To Wagner, the re-birth of the “German spirit” will not only “ennoble the public spiritual life of the German Folk” but “found a new and truly German civilization, extending its benefits even beyond our own frontiers.” That, he believed, has been “the universal mission of the German Folk since its entry into history.”[41]

Austro-Prussian War

Writing about Wagner’s dream before World War I, Houston Stewart Chamberlain claimed that what Wagner wanted most of all, and “to which he devoted his life, was single, strong Germany, in contradistinction to the impotent confederation’ of little states and squabbling peoples. In this dream the glory of Wagner’s united “German fatherland was, not that it should rule the world, but that it should ennoble and redeem the world.” through the superiority of German art.[42] According to David Ian Hall, “Wagner was an undisputed national and international celebrity, and a symbol of Otto von Bismarck’s triumphant new Germany.”[43] For Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, explains Hall, “Wagner was an exemplar of Germanness, and his works were testaments of German cultural superiority, which fed their fanatical ideas on Aryan concepts of race, a return to hereditary soil, and an aggressive German imperialism.”[44]

To lend support of Bismarck’s dream of German unification, Wagner put at his disposal his unique relationship with Ludwig II. According to Berita Paillard’s and Emile Haraszti, referring the some six hundred letters kept in the Bavarian National Archives:

These pages prove still more conclusively, if there was any need of doing so, the cynical selfishness of Wagner: to get what he wanted, he did not hesitate before any obstacle. They unmask the true face of the politician, sharp and artful, pulling the strings behind the scenes; they show his great influence in the administration of Bavarian affairs; and they give us a clear picture of that wreck of a young king, hypnotized and finally betrayed by his evil genius… All this is hidden behind honeyed gratitude, drenched in unparalleled servility. In these letters we find the solution of many of the problems that have remained largely enigmatic up to the present. Above all, they reveal the mysteries of the crucible of German unity.[45]

Historians have tended to ignore the fact that Bismarck secretly contacted Wagner in June 1866, attempting to recruit his support in persuading Bavaria to side with Prussia in the impending war. Wagner remained silent about the event, not mentioning it in his correspondence with Ludwig II, or his closest friends. Wagner’s old friend François Wille (1811 – 1896) who knew Bismarck personally, acted as mediator. At Bismarck’s request, Wille asked Wagner to intercede with Ludwig II and ask him to adopt a positive in favor of Prussian policy, and mediate between Austria and Prussia. Wagner at first declined, but changed his mind following the outcome of the Austro-Prussian War, fought in 1866 between the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia, and which resulted in the abolition of the German Confederation and its partial replacement by the unification of all of the northern German states in the North German Confederation that excluded Austria and the other southern German states, a Kleindeutsches Reich.

The decision that caused Wagner’s reversal was when, on June 23, 1866, prior to the end of the war, the Landtag expressed support for his former rival, the pro-Austrian Prime Minister, Baron Pfordten, which he saw as a vote against the Ludwig II and the German Confederation. Wagner therefore appealed to Ludwig II to side with Prussia against Austria:

Germany is something. She is powerful; Germany feels the life force within her. What is German and what is the German spirit—that is what we wish to show to the world, and we wish to fill, the dessicated arteries of the poor, unbelieving Teutonic world with new life.

Let then, from Munich, the flags of the noble Germanic genius fly over Germany, all united as I envisioned it-flags that my glorious Siegfried will wave and flaunt throughout the country! The acts of French insolence and menace touch the honor of Germany; the entire people desire a reply. We stand before a highly popular war… Now or never… The greatest armed force… Forward, forward!... The Bavarian and the Prussian scales must now be hooked together in the balance. You will thus become the Führer of South Germany and of Austria. You ought to do it; it must be. And at once! This is my testament.[46]

Helping Wagner to intercede with the Ludwig II was his homosexual lover, Prince Paul of Thurn and Taxis. Wagner succeeded in finally convincing Ludwig II to support Bismarck’s trustee in Bavaria, Chlodwig, Prince of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst (1819 – 1901). Chlodwig’s brother, Prinz Konstantin zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst (1828 – 1896), was married to Marie zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst. Marie zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst’s childhood was shaped by her parents falling out and her mother’s flight to Germany to join her lover Franz Liszt in 1848. Richard Wagner and Hector Berlioz, among others, frequented the Altenburg in Weimar, where her mother had taken up residence. Marie had a special friendship with the German dramatist Friedrich Hebbel (1813 – 1863), whose circle of friends included Amalie Schoppe, Fanny Tarnow, Adelbert von Chamisso and Rosa Maria Assing, whose brother was Karl August Varnhagen, husband of the salonnière Rahel Varnhagen.

Kaisermarsch

The significance of Wagner’s role in these events has been assessed in Berita Paillard’s and Emile Haraszti’s article “Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner in the Franco-German War of 1870” as being of major significance.[47] The authors’ primary source was a report published by Cornelien Abrányi, a student of Chopin, Friedrich Wilhelm Kalkbrenner, and Fromental Halévy, and also a close friend of Franz Liszt. According to Abrányi, Liszt had been acting as an international agent, conveying information from Germany to France, as his son-in-law, Emile Ollivier, was then Minister of Justice in the Second Empire and was also from 1870 Prime Minister of France. Listzt’s contact Napoleon III and Cavaignac, Marie Kalergis, regarded not only the French emperor, but also Bismarck was a genius.[48] Although Kalergis at first served as liaison agent between Liszt and the Emperor, later information passed through diplomatic channels, at times the French Legation at Weimar, at other times the Austrian Embassy, thanks to the invitations of Princess Pauline von Metternich, wife of the ambassador, Richard von Metternich.

The French naively expected Austria-Hungary to remain neutral and for anti-Prussian sentiments in Southern Germany, led by Bavaria, even though Liszt had warned them of Wagner’s influence over Ludwig II. According to Abrányi, Liszt related to him:

The Prussian diplomats were quite well aware of the enormous influence of Richard Wagner on the young and unstable king, who idolized him: they knew how to use him to attain their ends. There was no need to exert much pressure on Wagner to get him to accomplish the task that the Prussians expected of him.[49]

Taking place from July 19, 1870, to January 28, 1871, the Franco-German War was caused primarily by France’s aim of reasserting its dominant position in continental Europe, following the decisive Prussian victory over Austria in Austro-Prussian War of 1866. According to a number of historians, Bismarck deliberately provoked the French into declaring war on Prussia in order to induce four independent southern German states—Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt—to join the North German Confederation.[50] As Liszt further reported, a day after Napoleon III declared war on Prussia, Ludwig II signed the Prussian alliance and the general mobilization order. These two decrees were decisive. Napoleon III’s armies could not withstand the combined German forces, and Austria-Hungary chose to withdraw into neutrality.[51] The war incited nationalistic fervor in Germany, inspiring volunteers to join the army, including Wagner’s friend, Friedrich Nietzsche, who was soon hospitalized, after having caught dysentery and diphtheria at the front. Wagner himself considered participating, but as Salmi noted, was “content to engage in propaganda.”[52]

Following Germany’s victory, Prussian King Wilhelm I was proclaimed Emperor of a unified Germany at Versailles on January 18, 1871. Wagner, was exuberant: “Wonderful progress is being made in establishing the new Reich!”[53] Wagner decided to compose a patriotic march, the Kaisermarsch, to be performed in the presence of the Kaiser in Berlin, an idea that had originated from the Jewish publisher Max Abraham (1831 – 1900).[54] A well-known Wagner sympathizer, Friedrich Stade (1844 – 1928), reviewed the score for the journal Musikalisches Wochenblatt, and praised the work, writing, “Whereas, in Wagner’s creations for the stage, we perceive the workings of the German spirit indirectly; in the Kaisermarsch, Wagner provides with us a vision of that German spirit, of the German character itself; a vision imbued on the one hand with strength and energy, on the other with gentleness and introspection.”[55]

Berlin’s largest newspaper, the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, reported the Kaisermarsch had been anticipated in Berlin “with excitement.”[56] The paper emerged from the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung, founded in 1837 and published by Heinrich Brockhaus (1804 – 1874), whose older brother Friedrich married Richard Wagner’s sister Luise Konstanze, while his younger brother Hermann married another sister, Ottilie Wilhelmine Wagner. The newspaper was at times directly financed from the Foreign Office by Reptilienfonds, black money hidden usually used to exert political influence or to pay bribes. The term Reptilienfonds arose as a result of the Prussian annexations in 1866, when Bismarck used funds from the confiscated private assets of King George V of Haover (1819 – 1878) and Frederick William, Elector of Hesse (1802 – 1875), the last Prince-elector of Hesse-Kassel, after the war against Austria to buy positive press. Bismarck also wanted to obtain the support of the Ludwig II of Bavaria for the war against France and the establishment of a German empire under Prussian control.[57]

The Kaisermarsch was officially premiered on May 5, 1871, at the Berlin Opera House, conducted by Wagner in the presence of the Kaiser and his wife. Although Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of SPD and close associate of Marx and Engels, was member of the founding editorial board in 1861, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung became soon a conservative flagship of the German press, Bismarck’s Hauspostille.[58] The program included parts of Lohengrin, Wotan’s farewell from The Valkyrie, Beethoven’s Symphony in C Minor, and the Kaisermarsch, performed at the beginning and again as a finale, with the audience joining in. The applause, according to the paper, was “stormy.”[59]


[1] “Slik ble vi germanersvermere – magasinet.” Dagbladet (May 7, 2009). Retrieved from http://www.dagbladet.no/2009/05/07/magasinet/litteratur/historie/5961478/

[2] Forging an Empire: Bismarckian Germany (1866-1890). “Paul de Lagarde on Liberalism, Education, and the Jews: German Writings (1886).” German History in Documents and Images. Retrieved from https://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_dcument.cfm?document_id=1774; Facism. “Intellectual origins.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism/Intellectual-origins

[3] Frank M. Turner. European Intellectual History: From Rousseau to Nietzsche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 196.

[4] Ibid., p. 199.

[5] Ibid., p. 200.

[6] Ibid., p. 197.

[7] Carl Euler. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Sein Leben und Wirken (1881), p. 368, This and the following citations are from Jahn’s Deutsches Volksthum (1810). Cited in The Life of Richard Wagner. Volume Four: 1866 – 1883 (New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 1961).

[8] Ibid.

[9] Cited in Ernest Newman. The Life of Richard Wagner.

[10] Richard Wagner. German Art and German Policy, PW IV, p. 55; cited in Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 59.

[11] Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 55.

[12] Richard Wagner. The Diary of Richard Wagner 1865–1882. The Brown Book. Presented and annotated by Joachim Bergfeld. Translated by George Byrd (Cambridge 1980).

[13] Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 59.

[14] Richard Wagner. German Art and German Policy, PW IV, p. 63; cited in Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 56.

[15] Aira Kemiläinen. “Auffassungen über die Sendung des deutschen Volkes um die Wende des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts” (1956); cited in Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 56.

[16] Bryan Magee. Aspects of Wagner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 77–78.

[17] Barry Millington. The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner’s Life and Music (Revised ed.). (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1992), pp. 140–4.

[18] Nigel Cawthorne. The Mammoth Book of Sex Scandals (Little, Brown Book Group, 2012).

[19] Wolfgang Klötzer (ed.). Frankfurter Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Erster Band A-L. Verlag Waldemar Kramer, 1994), p. 62.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Daniel Stern (Marie d’Agoult). Mes souvenirs (Bibliothèque contemporaine, 1880), p. 71.

[22] William R. Denslow. 10,000 Famous Freemasons (1959). Cited in “Franz Liszt.” Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon. Retrieved from https://freemasonry.bcy.ca/biography/liszt_f/liszt_f.html

[23] “Marx Karl.” Paris Revolutionaire (December 19, 2010). Retrieved from https://www.parisrevolutionnaire.com/spip.php?article458

[24] “Émile Ollivier.” Encyclopædia Universalis. Retrieved from https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.universalis.fr%2Fencyclopedie%2Femile-ollivier%2F

[25] Jacqueline Piatier. “L’homme du ‘cœur léger’ se défend pour la seconde fois à la barre de l'histoire.” Le Monde (January 28, 1961). Retrieved from https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lemonde.fr%2Farchives%2Farticle%2F1961%2F01%2F28%2Fl-homme-du-c-ur-leger-se-defend-pour-la-seconde-fois-a-la-barre-de-l-histoire_2260875_1819218.html

[26] Maria Kalergis. Listy do Adama Potockiego (“Letters to Adam Potocki”), ed. by Halina Kenarowa, translated from the French by Halina Kenarowa and Róża Drojecka (Warsaw, 1986).

[27] Birgit Mikus. “Untangling the Heroic from the Sacrifice: Malwida von Meysenbug’s Attempt to Appropriate a Common Femal Topos in and for her Political Novel Phädra (1885).” In Andreas Schlüter, Carolin Hauck, Monika Mommertz, Thomas Seedorf (eds.). Tracing the Heroic Through Gender (Baden-Baden: Ergon Verlag, 2018), p. 26.

[28] Barry Millington. The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner’s Life and Music (Revised ed.). (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1992), p. 281

[29] Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 93.

[30] Ibid., p. 104.

[31] Ibid., p. 105.

[32] Aloys Dreyer. Herzog Maximilian in Bayern, der erlauchte Freund und Förderer des Zitherspiels und der Gebirgspoesie (Munich: Lindauer, 1909).

[33] A. Nolder Gay. Some of My Best Friends: Essays in Gay History and Biography (1990), p.116.

[34] Jacob Rader Marcus. Israel Jacobson: The Founder of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Hebrew Union College Press, 1972), p. 17.

[35] Alfred Stern. “Georg Klindworth: A secret political agent of the 19 Century.” Historical Quarterly (Tübingen: JCB Mohr, 1931), p. 430-458.

[36] Newman. The Life of Richard Wagner.

[37] Euler. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Sein Leben und Wirken, p. 368; Cited in Newman. The Life of Richard Wagner.

[38] Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 105.

[39] Newman. The Life of Richard Wagner.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Richard Wagner, trans. G. Ainslie Hight (London, 1897), pp. 123–30; cited in  Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany's Rebirth after the First War,” p. 165.

[43] Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany's Rebirth after the First War,” p. 158.

[44] Ibid., p. 158.

[45] Berita Paillard & Emile Haraszti’s article. “Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner in the Franco-German War of 1870.” The Musical Quarterly, 35 (1949), pp. 401–402.

[46] Ibid., pp. 404

[47] Ibid.

[48] Ibid., p. 392.

[49] Ibid.,  p. 387.

[50] Agetha Ramm. Germany, 1789–1919: a political history (London: Methuen, 1967), pp. 308–313.

[51] Paillard, Haraszti & Wager. “Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner in the Franco-German War of 1870,”  p. 387.

[52] Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 146.

[53] Wagner to Alwine Frommann February 1, 1871; cited in Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 149.

[54] Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 150.

[55] Musikalisches Wochenblatt (April 21, 1871); cited in Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 151.

[56] Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (May 7, 1871); cited in Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 152.

[57] Heinrich Wuttke. Die deutschen Zeitschriften und die Entstehung der öffentlichen Meinung (Hamburg 1866).

[58] Gordon A. Craig. German History 1866–1945. Translated from English by Karl Heinz Siber. 2nd Edition. (Munich: Beck, 1999), p. 87.

[59] Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (May 7, 1871); cited in Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 152.

Zionism