Mathilde Wesendonck ou le rêve d'Isolde

by Judith Cabaud

Truly great compositions spring, like Athena from Zeus' skull, at the juncture of genius and passion. In Mathilde Wesendonck: Isolde's Dream, author Judith Cabaud calls on a host of heretofore undiscovered resources to tell the story of Mathilde Wesendonck, muse and paramour to Richard Wagner and, later, Johannes Brahms. Alma Mahler, eat your heart out. In or about August 1857, Richard Wagner's character changed. He abandoned Der Ring des Nibelungen, the Gesamtkunstwerk he'd begun work on nearly a decade earlier, tore through a short set of songs now known as the Wesendonck Lieder, and dove headlong into Tristan und Isolde, "eine Handlung" whose seminal influence would ricochet down the ensuing century of Western romantic music. Why the dramatic shift? Wagner had been struck by lightning twice. The first bolt was sighted across Europe; his name was Arthur Schopenhauer. The second was restricted to a insular social world centered at the estate of Otto Wesendonck, one of Wagner's patrons. Her name was Mathilde Wesendonck, and this is her story.

Genres: Biography

424 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Mark Golden]

"A biography is not a novel," Cabaud begins, before going on to insist that this novel is a true story, and attempting to make the case that it is reliable as biography because so much of it is drawn, verbatim, from the protagonists' own words, expressed in their own voices.

Of course, the challenge any author faces in trying to truthfully capture the complex and creatively fruitful relationship between Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck is the fact that only one side of the conversation that actually took place between them has been preserved: Wagner's letters and diary entries. Nearly all of Mathilde's half of their correspondence has been destroyed. (And let's put aside the complicating factor that, in Wagner, we have an always ego-centric personality and notoriously unreliable narrator of his own history. So even the one side of the conversation we do have to work from is devoid of any awareness of or sensitivity to anyone else's sensibilities and is factually suspect.)
Judith Cabaud overcomes this deficiency by using Mathilde Wesendonck's contemporaneously composed poetry and fantasies as the answering voice to Wagner, presenting it as though it could be read literally as Mathilde's direct response and the second side of the conversation. "As for Mathilde, she let us guess her reality through her poetry," Cabaud states.

But there is no guessing about it. Cabaud makes no distinction between either Wagner's or Mathilde's creative output/utterances and documentary evidence from letters or other contemporary sources. Each is treated as having equal weight and reliability. A snippet of a line from one of Mathilde's poems that suits Cabaud's sense of a biographical episode is used as if it were as relevant and objective as a reference to the date of Wagner's arrival in Zurich and the name of the hotel he stayed in. When a direct quotation from a Wagner letter won't do to make a point, put a few lines of Siegmund's in Wagner's mouth. There is not just a similarity between King Marke's interruption of the lovers in Act II of Tristan and the crisis which forced Wagner to leave Otto Wesendonck's estate in 1858. The episode did not just influence and inform how Wagner wrote that scene in the opera: the opera libretto can be read as a literal parallel of what actually happened at Asyl and to fill in any portion of her intended narrative that lacks documentary support.

Of course, the artist's life experiences do provide the raw material from which the artist crafts his work. What happened on the Wesendonck estate had a profound influence on the operas Wagner produced while resident there. But you do not need to be a strict formalist (insisting that a work of art be interpreted only in reference to itself, without taking into account any outside influence or context) to recognize that taking the artist's creative output as a reliable narrative of their biography is a highly questionable approach. And it is an approach Cabaud takes to an extreme.

Mathilde Wesendonck's poetry is as ecstatic and romantic as anything in Tristan or Die Walküre, the things Wagner was working on at the time. Cabaud artfully strings it, Wagner's creative output and his correspondence together into a coherent dialogue that tells a clear story. But is it an accurate picture of what actually transpired between them? Who knows. While it is perhaps a plausible conjecture, it is nothing more than that.

For Cabaud, the story of Richard and Mathilde is the story of Tristan and Isolde: a mutual and reciprocal passion of the highest order, made up in equal parts of the sexual and the spiritual. That is certainly the most widely held view of their relationship. (Cabaud is silent on the question of whether the relationship was ever actually consummated.)

But is it reliable? There are other ways to read the history. Chris Walton (writing in Volume 1, Issue 2 of The Wagner Journal - July 2007) argues that in building the "received history" that is commonly accepted as fact, Mathilde Wesendonck "underwent a mythologising process that left her only slightly more than a disembodied, de-voiced muse of the composer, with no identity except what his [Wagner's] words and music deigned to give her." Much of her own creative output (upon which Cabaud so heavily relies) does share with Wagner's a common obsession with fatal and fateful love, death and Schopenhauerian questions of existence. Walton even goes so far as to argue that Mathilde Wesendonck deserves more credit than the "received history" gives her as someone whose intellectual and creative efforts influenced Wagner, just as much as his did hers. (Walton does not argue that this was a relationship of artistic or intellectual equals. No one could.)
But Walton purposefully eschews the trap Cabaud so freely enters into of accepting either artist's creative output as a reliable narrative of their biographies.

Taking a more traditional and scholarly approach to biography, Walton makes a very credible case that the sexual passion in the Mathilde-Richard relationship was entirely one-sided. Mathilde knew she was attractive to men, enjoyed the power of her feminine allure, and was maybe even a bit of a flirt. But while her interest in Wagner as a soulmate was intense, he argues that interest was only in an intellectual and artistic coupling, not a physical one. Frustrated sexual passion was to be found exclusively on Wagner's side (the surviving documentary side) of what actually transpired between them.

Cabaud's own presentation of Mathilde Wesendonck's later history is in fact consistent with this reading. Following the loss of any sustained or even platonically intimate relationship with Wagner, she sought to replace it with a similar relationship with Brahms. These efforts were spectacularly unsuccessful. Nothing she wrote in the hopes that Brahms would set it to music matched the quality of the poems Wagner had set as the Wesendonck lieder; some of it was absurdly bombastic and pretentious. But her efforts to find a replacement soulmate with whom she could continue to engage as mutual muses were utterly devoid of any passion beyond the artistic work she hoped to share.

To the book's credit, it is indeed a pleasure to have so much of Wagner's own words (including segments excised by Cosima when his diaries and letters were published) and of Mathilde's poetry and fairy tales to read. There is a good deal of source material from both principals that was new to me, and fascinating.

Footnotes are sparse. Even more lacking is any obvious logic or consistency as to what drove the author's judgment on whether a reference required a footnote, when a multitude of others in the adjacent text did not.

But even if we are to approach Mathilde Wesendonck, Isolde's Dream as fiction (albeit, based on actual people and events), I am afraid it is still found wanting. The prose is rather of the Harlequin Romance sort. Upon first meeting, "Richard and Mathilde could not help exchanging glances ... but this time she was forced to lower her eyes before the artist's eloquent gaze. The act of drinking brought a strain of Wagner's music to mind ..." (Incidentally, beyond the insipid nature of the prose, the two specific examples of the Wagnerian score that Cabaud chooses to accompany this encounter were still years in Wagner's future.)

And worse: when reporting on the reception of his music at a concert (in a letter to Theodor Uhlig in March of 1852) Wagner did actually write: "The women were particularly overwhelmed; it made such a strong impression on them that crying and sobbing could be heard." To this, Cabaud feels compelled to add: "Notwithstanding the plurals 'women' and 'tears,' Wagner was undoubtedly referring to a single person." Even if you accept this as a factually accurate (although no evidence is provided to support it), Cabaud seems so taken with the idea that any reference to women by Wagner can be appropriated as a direct and unique reference to Mathilde, she repeats it at least two more times in the pages that follow.

And then there are the occasional statements that are as odd as they are gratuitous. After 125 pages of presenting Wagner as the embodiment of Tristan and Siegmund, combined and on steroids, with letter and diary entries in language that is over the top, even by the most excessive standards of romanticism, Cabaud states that Wagner, "though not naturally inclined to romanticism," was melancholy in Venice. Not inclined to romanticism?

The book improves greatly in its second half, reading more as straight biography, with only intermittently inserted questionable reads on the documentary (literary) evidence and paroxysms of florid prose. ("In this otherworldly spot she picked up bits and pieces of inspiration like a bouquet of alpine flowers, making her painful metaphors of the past an abstraction and enjoying the delights Parnassus.")
In sum, the book might have been improved if the author had decided on a single genre - fiction or biography - and focused on that. The evidence suggests she has it in her to be a decent biographer, if she only would resist her inferior, novelistic impulses.

And when your subject is Mathilde Wesendonck, the hole left in the book by Cabaud's treatment of the period of her most intimate and intense relationship with Wagner, is a glaring deficiency