Читать книгу Two Worlds of Music - Berta Geissmar - Страница 11

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It was a time of crisis for Germany, and for the world, yet new1930 tasks continued to arise. Siegfried Wagner had died on August 4, 1930, in the middle of the Bayreuth Festival Season. Toscanini conducted there for the first time that season—Tristan and Siegfried Wagner’s new production of the Paris version of Tannhäuser—and it was rumored that he asked Siegfried on his death bed for the privilege of conducting Parsifal the following season.

After the Great War Bayreuth had had difficult times. Siegfried, assisted by his wife, Winifred, had done his utmost to carry on his father’s legacy. Now the young widow was left alone to bring up her four small children, and to bear the responsibility for the future of the Festspielhügel.

Bayreuth for many reasons had always been a center of intrigue and jealousy, but it had also been a place of the highest artistic idealism and endeavor; the greatest artists had always been proud to serve there. After Siegfried Wagner’s death, however, Karl Muck, the last “knight” of Richard Wagner, ended his services at Bayreuth. Toscanini had promised to conduct in the summer of 1931, but there was still a great need for a man with authority and knowledge who could be put in entire charge of the musical arrangements in Siegfried’s place, and who would be a good conductor as well.

In December 1930, to his utter surprise, Furtwängler received a letter from Frau Wagner asking him whether Bayreuth might hope to have his services. It was no easy question for him to decide. Since his Mannheim days Furtwängler had been known as a great Wagner conductor; he had conducted Wagner’s works in many big Opera Houses, but he had not been to Bayreuth, which was, naturally, the dream of every conductor. On the other hand he needed rest badly, and so far had always managed to escape any summer commitments.

He took time to think it over. The offer was kept strictly secret, and finally a meeting in Berlin was arranged with Frau Wagner to discuss the matter fully. To avoid rumors they met at my home.

At first they talked about everything but the main purpose—but finally they got down to brass tacks, and Furtwängler agreed to go to Bayreuth. Frau Wagner actually burst into tears of relief.

For 1931 Furtwängler was to take over Tristan which Muck had1931 always conducted, and was to be the Musical Director of the Bayreuther Festspiele, with all musical questions subject to his authority.

This was no small addition to his work, and for me it was another new and fascinating task. One of Furtwängler’s main duties was the assembling of the Bayreuther Festspielorchester which was always chosen out of orchestras from all over Germany. There were special traditions among the players, and the old Bayreuthers knew all about every one of them. Many came year after year and considered it their greatest privilege to spend their summer holiday playing at Bayreuth. Professor Edgar Wollgandt was one of them. Normally the leader of the Gewandhaus Orchestra and Nikisch’s son-in-law, he could be found year after year at the first desk of the Festspielhaus.

The fact that Furtwängler, the great German conductor, had taken charge of Bayreuth resulted in an inundation of applications from orchestra players who wanted to join the Festspielorchester, and there was a waiting list for every section. For the first time members of the Berlin Philharmonic applied. They, of course, wanted to play opera under their own conductor. All sorts of young conductors and musicians asked for permission to attend the rehearsals. It fell mainly to me to deal with this correspondence and to report to Frau Wagner about it, in the inviolable tradition of Bayreuth.

During the Easter of 1931 Furtwängler had to go to Bayreuth for preliminary discussions with some of the collaborators and with Frau Wagner. He took me with him, and we spent a few days as guests at Wahnfried, the famous Wagner home. Guests of the Wagner family were in those days usually lodged in the Siegfried House, a low building tucked away in the garden, which had been Siegfried’s home while Cosima Wagner was still reigning. Frau Wagner had rearranged it for her guests, and it was the most comfortable place imaginable—there were even English novels in the sitting-room.

In Wahnfried itself, Frau Wagner, in spite of the splendor surrounding her, was the most charming and hospitable hostess. One evening Cosima’s daughters came to meet Furtwängler. Countessa Blandine Gravina, her second daughter by Hans von Bülow, lived for the most part in Florence; Frau Isolde Beidler, her third daughter, had died in 1919, and so it was only her eldest daughter, Frau Daniela Thode, and Frau Eva Chamberlain who came to spend the evening and inspect the new Musical Director. Imbued as they were with a religious devotion to Wagner’s and Cosima’s heritage, this meeting was of tremendous significance to them.

I remembered Frau Thode from my first Heidelberg term when, as wife of the art historian, Professor Henry Thode, she upheld the Wahnfried etiquette in a style that would have been fitting at Court. Outwardly there was little of her mother in her. She was slight and dark and her features were those of her father, Hans von Bülow. Her deep parti-colored eyes had a fanatical expression, and fanatical she was in many ways. She had had many years of close intimacy with her mother, and so possessed a minute and exact knowledge of Wagner’s intentions up to the smallest details of his works; after the death of her brother, Siegfried, she was considered the last living source of the direct Wagner tradition. Never did she refer to him other than as “der Meister”; her devotion to his cause and memory was fervent.

Frau Thode was impressive in many ways; never did one forget that one was in the presence of a great lady. Like her mother, Cosima, she had regal manners, and sometimes even seemed to over-emphasize the outward forms of life, which occasionally led her to overrate matters of secondary importance. For instance, though Frau Thode was a great admirer of Furtwängler’s Wagner interpretation, she was greatly perturbed by his manner of conducting. The orchestra pit in Bayreuth was covered, and the conductor could not be seen by the audience. Furtwängler, though invisible, was conspicuous in other respects; the stamping with which he unconsciously accompanied his conducting could be heard very distinctly. Shortly after he had begun his first season in Bayreuth, Frau Thode actually suggested the possibility of putting a mat under the feet of the wild man to muffle the noise, as his behavior seemed to her incompatible with the noble tradition of the Festspielhaus!

In other ways, however, she was a remarkable woman whose deep and wide knowledge enabled her to write and edit many letters and documents connected with the Wagner family. In 1931 when Toscanini conducted Parsifal and Tannhäuser, Frau Thode designed the Tannhäuser costumes after the beautiful illustrations of the minnesingers, Wolfram von Eschenbach among others, in the Manessesche Liederhandschrift, the famous manuscript of twelfth to fourteenth century love songs in the Heidelberg University Library. Frau Thode also acted as producer, sitting on the stage with her notes throughout the rehearsals, thus serving the cause of Wagner, and of Toscanini, whom she worshipped.

With the advent of Hitler, and the resignation of Toscanini, she retired more and more from the official life in Bayreuth, where she kept, however, a modest pied à terre.

It was in 1938 that I heard of her for the last time. I was shown a letter that she had written to an old and intimate friend of hers, which reveals what she was, at the end of her life, full of dignity and resignation, living in her memories which nobody could take from her and without bitterness.

Her sister, Frau Eva Chamberlain, was born in 1867, the daughter of Cosima von Bülow by Richard Wagner. She was the widow of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose book, The Foundations of the 19th Century, has had such a fatal influence through Hitler. Frau Chamberlain was tall and stately and imposing; her distinguished face bore the features of both Cosima and Richard Wagner. Her reputation was that of a clever woman but she was rarely communicative, and on that evening when she came to meet Furtwängler, though obviously interested, she remained slightly aloof and condescending. After the death of her husband she continued to live in the old Chamberlain house, next door to Wahnfried—and yet, how far away. The wall over which she could look into her parental home and garden was in a way symbolic—it was an insurmountable wall between herself and the young generation.

Cosima’s daughters have actually never bowed to the Nazi régime, which for them meant a new régime at Bayreuth in many respects—not only politically. While their brother Siegfried lived, they had more or less belonged to the reigning generation; now they had to yield to the younger one, which went its own way, and could not always religiously adhere to the letter of the old laws.

It was this deep chasm between the two generations in the Wagner family that I felt acutely on that strange evening; and a strange evening it was, spent in the unique atmosphere of Wahnfried, with the two old ladies, symbols of past splendor and greatness: Winifred, the young, energetic trustee and heir to it all, the mother of the coming generation, and Furtwängler, the fervent Wagner adherent, filled with holy determination to do his best and live up to his new task.

Finally everything was well in hand for the summer. Frau Wagner had offered Furtwängler a romantic and secluded abode, an old farmhouse near a mill. The proprietors, the Feustel family, connected with Wahnfried for many years, were willing to move out for the summer and let Furtwängler have the house with its old-fashioned garden. A horse was put at his disposal—he was an enthusiastic rider then—and this horse was for him one of Bayreuth’s greatest attractions.

I was to accompany him to Bayreuth and was put up in a lovely house on the Festspielhügel belonging to the former Festspielhausdirektor, Herr Schuler. Frau Schuler, an old friend of Cosima’s, was my warm friend from the first.

The 1931 spring tour with the Berlin Philharmonic and other engagements had to be limited, as Furtwängler had to be in Bayreuth at the beginning of June.

The introduction of a new conductor at Bayreuth was always a great occasion—but Furtwängler’s first appearance there was particularly sensational and most dramatic. He had just begun to appreciate flying, and a young airman with a private plane offered to fly him to Bayreuth. They had engine trouble and had to make a forced landing half-way. The machine turned over—and Furtwängler, always athletic, coolly prepared for the crash by doing a handspring. Only thus did he save his life. Bruised and still half dazed from the shock, he arrived in Bayreuth by car shortly after he was to begin rehearsing at 9 a.m. The beginning of the rehearsals at Bayreuth was almost a state ceremony. The musicians sat in their places full of expectancy, the musikalische Assistenz, as all the young coaches and volunteers were called, sat in attendance, thrilled, with their scores in their hands. The Wagner family, especially the older generation, appeared with all the solemn dignity they gave to the cause of the “Meister.”

But something happened on this occasion, which had never happened before at Bayreuth: the principal figure, the new Musical Director, was not punctually on the spot. This was a crime, in comparison to which the fact that he had nearly lost his life on his way to Bayreuth was insignificant.

The press, of course, recorded the incident of Furtwängler’s entry to Bayreuth at full length. Soon I was accused of arranging press stunts for Furtwängler, to the detriment of others. It was unfair, I was told, and I was advised not to do it again. I pointed out diffidently that the public was, of course, more interested in incidents connected with Furtwängler than with the ordinary run of folk, but it was of no avail. I was in for trouble, and trouble of this kind never ceased for me that summer.

That first season without Siegfried Wagner was difficult for everyone, who missed his friendly, welcoming smile at the Festspielhügel. Naturally the new management headed by the young widow had at first to find its way between the necessary innovations and the jealously guarded old tradition.

The first clash of the season was with Lauritz Melchior, the Tristan of Furtwängler’s first performance in Bayreuth, who declared that he would leave immediately and would never return; the management was apparently his source of irritation. He finally consented to fulfill his contract for that summer, but since then the world’s greatest Wagnerian tenor has never set foot in Bayreuth.

There was also a Toscanini incident which was reported and distorted all over the world. The Festspiel Direktion had arranged a memorial concert for Siegfried Wagner on the anniversary of his death, August 4, 1931. This was a novelty in Bayreuth, concerts had never been held in the Festspielhaus. The conductors of that year, Elmendorff, Furtwängler, and Toscanini were to participate. At the general rehearsal in the morning Toscanini furiously broke his baton and stalked off the platform leaving a nonplussed orchestra and audience behind. The maestro, because of the limited time available, had expected to rehearse undisturbed, and was upset to find the house full—the management had granted admittance to relatives of members of the staff, singers, orchestra, and chorus. Toscanini, greatly upset, left the rehearsal, and told Furtwängler, who rushed after him, that he would leave Bayreuth at once and would not conduct the memorial concert in the evening. He made straight for his car and left the Festspielhügel.

Furtwängler, as Musical Director, conducted the rehearsal to the end and meanwhile sent me to inform Frau Wagner of Toscanini’s intention. She declared, “I don’t think that Toscanini will do this to me, he would never desert me on such an occasion.” Nonetheless she immediately sent me and her nephew, Gil Gravina, who spoke Italian fluently and often acted as the maestro’s interpreter, to Wahnfried, where Toscanini was staying as her guest at the Siegfried House. The servants told me that he had just left for Marienbad with his chauffeur and his adored little dog. All his passionate love for pre-Hitler Bayreuth had not sufficed to alter his decision; he left the widow of Siegfried Wagner on the anniversary of her husband’s death. For Toscanini no compromise was ever possible once he had made up his mind. And so, although his personal relations with the Wagner family were not interrupted by this incident, the 1931 season was actually his last on the Festspielhügel. For this, however, there were several other reasons yet to come—last but not least, Adolf Hitler.

Furtwängler himself never felt quite at ease during this, his first Bayreuth Season. He had his own definite ideas about how the legacy of Richard Wagner should be upheld, and the difference of opinion reached such a state that he wanted to resign even before his first performance. He wrote a long letter to Frau Wagner—a letter revealing how earnestly and seriously he took all his responsibilities—explaining his ideas, and that he felt they were incompatible with the way Bayreuth was now conducted. The incident was patched up, but it was the beginning of later conflicts which finally led to his resignation from Bayreuth before the next season, and which he explained in an article published in June 1932 in the Vossische Zeitung: “Um die Zukunft von Bayreuth” (“The Future of Bayreuth”).

Yet for the international world he became more and more the acknowledged Wagnerian conductor and besides his work in Germany and Austria, he regularly conducted the Wagner Festivals in Paris and Wagner operas at Covent Garden—until this activity, like so many others, was rendered impossible by Hitler.