End of the Trail

For two generations, Wagner scholars (including famed Biographer Ernest Newman) tried in vain to get a look at the largest collection of Wagneriana outside the Wagner shrine at Bayreuth--the "Burrell Collection." Last week, more than 60 years after Englishwoman Mary Burrell began the job of assembling it, the best of her collection was published: Letters of Richard Wagner (Macmillan; $10.50). For Wagner scholars, it was the end of a long, long trail.

Wealthy and devoted Mary Burrell considered Wagner's early biographers little better than "scribblers" who had merely "touched up" the great composer's autobiographical fragments. Even while Wagner was alive, she set out to track down every relative, friend and acquaintance, gather material for a biography "that would tell all." Before she was through she owned 840 items, mostly letters, and the printer's copy of the first edition of Wagner's My Life, which Wagner himself had suppressed. She made a start at writing, but died, in 1898, before she reached the point in Wagner's life where her material might have shed fresh light. Thereupon, Mary Burrell's collection was locked away. Finally, thanks to Philadelphia's Mary Louise Curtis Bok (Mrs. Efrem Zimbalist), who bought the collection in 1931, and to John N. Burk, scholarly program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who spent years collating and editing it, the Letters of Richard Wagner went to press.

Obligation. The letters deal largely with the period of Wagner's tempestuous first marriage (to Actress Minna Planer), when he composed The Flying Dutchman, Tannaehuser, Lohengrin and Tristan und Isolde, and they hardly reveal a new Richard Wagner. Rather, they amplify the old one--the "Archegotist" who called on his friends to pick up the checks and often gave them his scorn in return, the German genius who believed the world owed him both a living and its unbounded love, and offered it great operas in return.

Wagner considered himself "no artisan to earn my daily bread; it must be offered to me . . .so that I may remain an artist. Who is to do this? Only those who love me." Those who loved him--the most famed was Franz Liszt--had often to be reminded of their obligation. Sample: "I have locked myself up in a country house to put the last touches on the Hollaender; the town won't see me again until he flies. Meanwhile, there is urgent business for you. Look at this pawn ticket . . ."

In one letter to wife Minna, demanding separation after 14 years of bickering marriage, he further uncloaks his character. ". . . You cling to the peacefulness and permanence of existing conditions--I must break them to satisfy my inner being; you are capable of sacrificing everything ... to 'have a respected position in the community,' which I despise . . . You think only of the past, with nostalgia and yearning--I give that up and think only of the future . . . You cling to people, I to causes; you to certain human beings, I to humanity . . ."

Articulation. As Editor Burk sees it, there were four times in self-centered Richard Wagner's life when he "really lost his head over a woman." His love for Minna was violent, "but because it had no basis in artistic sympathy could not last." He was drawn to two others but "the circumstance .. . tore them apart." (The precise circumstance: they were both married.) But such circumstances did not stop Wagner from running off with the wife of his friend Hans von Buelow, who conducted the first performance of Tristan. Cosima von Buelow, illegitimate daughter of Wagner's old friend and benefactor Franz Liszt, became Richard Wagner's second wife, died in 1930 at 92.

Always articulate about himself, Wagner describes in one letter his method of composition: "Before starting to write a verse, or even to outline a scene, I must first feel intoxicated by the musical aroma of my subject, all the tones, all the characteristic motives are in my head, so that when the verses are finished and the scenes ordered, the opera proper is also finished for me and the musical treatment in detail is rather a calm and considered afterwork which the moment of real creation has preceded."

He could "create my music only to my texts" because "both text and music in an unprecedented sense are based ... on the German language and the German spirit." Until the day in 1883 when he slumped over his desk in Venice, stricken with a fatal heart attack, he believed in himself as "the most German of the Germans."

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