Appendix 5: Wagner - America Dreaming

Wagner begin dreaming of coming to America around 1850.  He wrote to his friend Ernest Kietz, “I am now thinking a good deal of America! Not because I might find what I am looking for there, but because the ground there is easier to plant…. I am planning to make a start soon on my great Nibelung trilogy.  But I shall perform it only on the banks of the Mississippi.”¹² (!) While at that point it was really just a pipe dream, he became much more serious about emigration later in his life, and was negotiating with various American supporters to raise the money for the relocation.  Cosima opposed the plan, but he persisted in working on it.  She wrote in her diary in 1880: “Again and again he keeps coming back to America, says it is the only place on the whole map which he can gaze upon with any pleasure: ‘What the Greeks were among the peoples of this earth, this continent is among its countries.’”¹³

Truly there were two purposes for the dream of America. First—once again, and for the last time—fleeing to leave his creditors in the lurch. But secondly, he was disappointed that Bayreuth hadn’t launched the revolution he intended. In 1880, he wrote to his principal American benefactor—a dentist named Newell Jenkins—asking him to raise the funds for emigration, and wrote that he may “regret not having transplanted the seed of my artistic ideas to a more fertile and more helpful soil in years long past.”¹⁴

He decided to finish Parsifal in Germany, and his death quickly followed in 1883, so the plan never came to fruition.  But I do think it points out this truth: Wagner’s reputation as a fanatic nationalist is really off he mark.  As William Weber writes in the Wagner Compendium, “[h]e never became a proponent of a politically unified Germany, especially under Prussian auspices.”¹⁵ He absolutely opposed the idea of a German empire-building—he hated militarism with vehemence—and became increasingly pacifistic as he aged.¹⁶ And, frankly, he really didn’t like Germany.  He thought the people backward, the place frigid, the politics wrong-headed.  In a letter to his last love, the French woman, Judith Gautier, in 1878, he wrote:

I like to see you defending your country so valiantly on every occasion…. I admire you even more for your patriotism, because it is something I lack completely, finding myself the only German amongst this stupid population which is called German.¹⁷

His so-called nationalism was entirely a cultural desire: for Germans to create a culture grounded in their language, their land, and their history that could take its place alongside other cultures equally, instead of being the weak cousin to the predominant Franco-Italian opera tradition.  Sure, he thought that Germany’s rich orchestral tradition was special (and indeed it was), and he wanted to build on that.  In that sense, he had particular pride.  But, as he notes, he had no pride in his country or countrymen.


End Note

12 Letters, 243. I think the Mississippi was a joke, however he was serious about doing it on the Rhine.

13 As quoted here by Alex Ross in “A Walking Tour of Wagner’s New York.” 

14 Letters, 899

15 Compendium, 155

16  I have already talked about the exception, the Franco-Prussian War, here. He did become an enthusiastic backer of the war, and it certainly brought out all his most repellent traits. But it was an exception to a life-long horror at militarism, and even in this one, he went back and forth between a schadenfreudic glee about the victory over their long-term tormentors, the French, with the horrors of the war, and all wars.

17 Letters, 880