Author : Jos Hermans
"I am organized differently, have irritable nerves, beauty, shine and light I must have! The world owes me what I need! I cannot live on a miserable organist's position, like your master Bach! - Is it an outrageous demand, then, that the little luxury I may suffer should come to me? I, who give pleasure to the world and to thousands!" (Richard Wagner, Letter to Eliza Wille)
(RICHARD WAGNER, as quoted by Eliza Wille in “Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner”, 1887)
With a few exceptions, all German composers and writers in the mid-19th century were in a state of chronic lack of money. Borrowing from friends was not the exception but rather the rule. The difference between Richard Wagner and all these other indigent colleagues was that he was never shy about taking on debts that fit rather into the framework of a life of luxury and was never keen on actually repaying his debts. Wagner felt that the world owed him. The wealthy people he circled like a vulture later assured themselves of their place in cultural history.
One must never forget that Wagner never borrowed for his own benefit but that his debts were always in the service of his artistic projects. In all of this, it should be clear that if he had not put himself so recklessly into debt and had been much less willing to live at the expense of others he would not have realized even a quarter of his schemes and would have died as penniless as an Albert Lortzing.
All this is well known and has been used before to turn Wagner into a monster. But sometimes it is also appropriate to descend into the plights of mid-19th century social life and take a look at the status of the artist. Take, for example, the blessed year of 1852. At that time Wagner was in exile in Zurich working on the Ring while his very first four operas (Rienzi, Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin) were beginning to run like clockwork in Germany. That Wagner would not have had success during his lifetime is a myth! Both large and small cities were participating: Leipzig, Frankfurt, Wiesbaden,Würzburg, Breslau, Düsseldorf, Rudolstadt, Hamburg. Special trains were even being thrown in here and there. The greatest demand was for Tannhäuser but with orchestras rarely exceeding 40 members, those performances will hardly have been able to meet Wagner's high standards of quality.
Whoever now thinks that Wagner gained from this is mistaken. Apart from the opera houses themselves, it was rather the soloists who benefited: Tichatschek, the first heldentenor, received £40 per performance of Tannhäuser, while Wagner had to cede the performance rights of his score to the opera houses for barely £7 to £17, and not for just one performance but for eternity! The figures are taken from Ernest Newman and do not mean much to me in absolute terms but it is the comparison that matters here.
If composers in those days had been treated more fairly and had obtained a substantial royalty per performance Wagner would have earned enough from his first 4 operas so that he wouldn't have had to bother his friends with loans and he would have been able to buy himself, as early as 1852, the little house and garden he dreamed of -as his letters from that time testify -in order to work quietly on the Ring. Or as Wagner biographer Ernest Newman puts it: “There is something peculiarly revolting about a social system that legally made it almost impossible for a composer like Wagner to be anything but a mendicant and then sneered at him for borrowing.”
That same year, Wagner, together with Franz Liszt, tries to sell his Tannhäuser to the Court Opera of Berlin. He proposes a one-time fee of 1,000 Thaler (by my reckoning this would amount to some 22,500 Euros today, not an exorbitant sum, after all!) but intendant Botho von Hülsen has no ears for it and suggests a 10% royalty. Berlin was one of the larger opera houses in Germany and could easily afford a one-time fee and pay a royalty on top of that. But because Wagner, concerned about the quality of the planned performances, tries to go over the heads of Berlin's conductors by demanding that Liszt should conduct the performance, the deal ultimately falls through and Wagner gets his score sent back. Wagner even showed a willingness during the negotiation to drop his fee as long as the artistic quality of the performance was assured. That was his concern! Hülsen, however, would have been better off accepting Wagner's proposal because, as is so often the case with Wagner's business proposals, this one too would eventually prove to be a gold mine. By 1892, 300 performances of Tannhäuser had already been given in Berlin.
There are often disparaging comments about romantic opera of the nineteenth century and its creators but show me the contemporary artist who possesses the nerve, the boldness, the self-confidence, the perseverance and the integrity of this man, Richard Wagner. The deeper you dig into Wagner's biography, the greater his artistic-social realization becomes. And likewise, the more ridiculous his critics become.