Auteur : Jos Hermans
The following story gives an idea of the self-confidence with which Wagner tackled his subjects, the same kind of self-confidence by which he dared to invest 20 years of his life in The Ring while spending most of that time in uncertainty as to whether the work would ever be performed at all, a work, by the way, intended for a yet-to-be-built theater of which he did not know whether it would ever be realized.
In September 1857 he wrote to his publisher Breitkopf & Härtel: “I am about to begin the musical composition of Tristan und Isolde – this will be the title of my new work- the libretto of which I have already finished. Among other things, I have taken this subject to heart because it presents almost no difficulties for the scenery and the chorus. Practically the only demanding task will be to find a good pair of singers for the main parts, which means that I shall possibly easily get a good first performance and the chance of distributing it to the theatres very quickly, unimpeded by any obstacles”.
That the work would subsequently meet with rejection because it was considered virtually unperformable was something he could not have suspected at the time. Wagner was in precarious financial straits when, on January 4, 1858, he made the following proposal to Härtel: “I propose a fee for the score of Tristan of six hundred Louis d’or, or twelve thousand francs. I must insist however, that it be paid to me in full, and in cash, by the time the score is finished. I suggest that each time I deliver the full score of one of the three acts, I receive a third of the total fee, i.e., four thousand francs. For the production of the score we still have to decide the following. The score will be engraved, and the engraving is to begin immediately after I have sent in the manuscript. This can be arranged so that when I’ve finished the manuscript, the engraving will be finished shortly thereafter”
The publisher made a counter-proposal which Wagner reluctantly accepted, giving him only 1/3 of the requested sum. All this is sufficiently well known, but did you know that as a result of this agreement Wagner cultivated such discipline in himself that the composition of Tristan could stand comparison with an assembly line in a modern factory? While he was working on the composition of the second act, he was correcting the proofs of the first act. Ditto for the second and third acts. Even more so, he wrote to Härtel: “Please be so good as to inform me exactly how much of my manuscript the engraver gets through daily or weekly; I’ll then adapt accordingly and keep in step with him, though I’ll always try to give him a bit extra as well”
Once his manuscript was at the printer's he could no longer change anything. Wagner was acting like a kind of Orpheus, who was not allowed to look back. He must have been aware of the consequences of this exploit because he writes in Mein Leben: “The process of correcting the proofs of the second act, while I was simultaneously in the throes of composing the ecstasies of the third arct, had the strangest, even uncanny, effect on me; for it was just in those first scenes of this act [i.e.,the third] that I realized with complete clarity that I had written the most audacious and original work of my life.”
NOTE :
600 Louis d'or would be worth approximately 100,000 euros today. I am relying on data provided by Stewart Spencer for this estimate.