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Too Close for Comfort: Henry James, Richard Wagner and The Sacred Fount

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2011

Emma Sutton
Emma Sutton
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews
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Abstract

In April 1880, one of the most intriguing lost opportunities in musical-literary history took place. Henry James and Richard Wagner were staying in Posilippo, near Naples. James was beginning a two-month visit to Italy, whilst Wagner was living in the Italian town with his family, working on essays including ‘Religion und Kunst’ (1880) and preparing the staging for Parsifal (1882). A mutual friend, Paul von Joukowsky, suggested to James that he and Wagner meet but the offer provoked an emphatic rejection from the American novelist. It would have taken place amid the heady bohemianism, homosexuality and obsessive aestheticism of Wagner's Italian circle of which Joukowsky was a part. No doubt their meeting would have been stilted and strained, suffused with various forms of social awkwardness, yet, as we shall see, James's explanation of his refusal has the overtones of a justification. Despite – or because of – the aborted meeting, James repeatedly returned to this unrealized encounter in his writing. He referred to the composer or his works in more than a dozen of his novels and short stories from the 1880s to the early twentieth century; these muted but resonant references suggest an informed and engaged response to Wagner and his works. It is as if, though these allusions, James re-imagined this event, composer and novelist encountering each other in numerous texts over a period of 20 years

Type
Articles
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , November 2009 , pp. 3 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 I retain James's spelling of the town and of (as it would now be) Zhukovski.

2 Despite alluding to the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi in ‘The Grand Canal’ (1892), James makes no mention of Wagner's death there. James, Henry, Italian Hours, ed. Auchard, John (Philadelphia/Harmondsworth: Pennsylvania State University Press/Penguin, 1995): 49,Google Scholar n.

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15 Blackall discusses the narrator's allusion to Ludwig in some detail in her monograph on The Sacred Fount (ibid.), emphasizing that Ludwig's identity as introspective Wagnerian and extravagant builder informs James's reference in the novel. I suggest in addition that James was fascinated by Ludwig's personal relationship with Wagner, and that the Posilippo episode had extensive repercussions in his fiction.

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24 Was James also recalling Keats's ‘Ode to Psyche’ (1820)? The poet's account of the lovers ‘couched side by side / In deepest grass’ follows the request that Psyche grant ‘pardon that thy secrets should be sung’. The Poems of John Keats, ed. Stillinger, Jack (London: Heinemann, 1978): 364–6; 364Google Scholar

25 James had met Zola in December 1875 in Paris in the company of Catulle Mendés, later editor of the Revue wagnérienne (1885–88), and was to become increasingly appreciative of Zola's work. (James gives an account of the meeting in Letters, vol. 2: 15.) L'oeuvre portrays a group of French Wagnerians, mainly painters, similar to the Parisian Wagnerians with whom Joukowsky was associated; it may have been based on the Marseilles Wagner Society, of which Zola was a member. Zola, Émile, The Masterpiece, trans. Walton, Thomas, rev. Pearson, Roger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

26 Finck, Henry T., Wagner and his Works: The Story of his Life with Critical Comments, 2 vols (London: H. Grevel, 1893), vol. 2: 464.Google Scholar The etymological association of ‘fanaticism’ and ‘fan’ is also pertinent to these negotiations of intimacy with admirers and friends.

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30 We might note, too, how frequently Thomas Mann associates Wagner with the debilitating effects of erotic desire and lack of (aesthetic) discipline: see, for example, ‘Tristan’ (1903), Tonio Kröger (1903) and ‘Der Tod in Venedig’ (1912).

31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Case of Wagner: ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ and ‘The Case of Wagner’, trans Kaufmann, Walter. (New York: Vintage, 1967): 166.Google Scholar David Huckvale makes the intriguing suggestion that Bram Stoker's character Dracula was influenced by stereotypes about ‘Wagnerian’ aesthetic effect as well as by the autocratic personalities of Wagner's father-in-law Franz Liszt and the ambivalently Wagnerian Henry Irving. Huckvale, David, ‘Wagner and Vampires’, Wagner 18/3 (Sep. 1997): 127–41Google Scholar.

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37 James, , Letters, vol. 2, 287.Google Scholar It is pertinent too that in Paris during the mid-1870s James was, to a certain extent, dependent on Joukowsky to facilitate his much-desired friendship with Turgenev, and that Turgenev himself was, at this date, under the apparently tyrannical domestic rule of the singer Pauline Viardot. Edel, , Henry James: A Life, 184.Google Scholar

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42 Humperdinck's Wagnerian career is an intriguing counterpart to that of Joukowsky: after years of passionate Wagnerism that included the preparation of reduced scores for performances by ‘Le petit Bayreuth’ , he met Wagner in March 1880, was present at Posilippo at the same time as Joukowsky, and spent much of 1881 and 1882 at Bayreuth copying the score of Parsifal and acting as Wagner's musical assistant. He did, of course, unlike Joukowsky, go on to have a distinguished and varied independent career as a composer. See Delage, Roger, ‘Chabrier and Wagner’, Wagner 17/3 (Sep. 1996): 115Google Scholar, and Sadie, Stanley, ed.,New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 20 vols (London: Macmillan, 1980), vol. 8: 789.Google Scholar

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44 See, for example, the work of Freedman, Jonathan, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), andGoogle ScholarGagnier, Regenia, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. (Aldershot: Scolar, 1987)Google Scholar on nineteenth-century aesthetics and commercialism.

45 For an introduction to Wagner's cultural influence during the nineteenth century, see Large, David C. and Weber, William, eds, Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1984).Google Scholar For a discussion of Wagnerism and commercialism in the fin de siécle see Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley, especially Chapter 4.

46 James, , Letters, vol. 4, 170Google Scholar (emphasis in original).

47 Did James also know that Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas had taken a villa at Posilippo in 1897, just after Wilde's release from prison and their reunion? See Ellmann, Richard, Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987/1997): 517–18Google Scholar.

48 Woolson's neice, Clare Benedict, who was intermittently her companion from 1879, was a keen Wagnerian who attended Bayreuth and published, in 1913, a eulogistic account of Wagner in The Divine Spark. Anne Dzamba Sessa, ‘At Wagner's Shrine: British and American Wagnerians’, in Large, and Weber, , Wagnerism, 253–55Google Scholar.

49 See Furness, Wagner and Literature; Martin, Wagner to ‘The Waste Land’; Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley; Sutton, “‘The Music Spoke for Us”’.