Richard Wagner and the Art of the Avant-Garde, 1860-1910 1538179997, 9781538179994

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Richard Wagner and the Art of the Avant-Garde, 1860–1910

Richard Wagner and the Art of the Avant-Garde, 1860–1910

Donald A. Rosenthal

Rowman & Littlefield Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-1-5381-7999-4 (cloth : alk. Paper) ISBN 978-1-5381-8000-6 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents



Figures and Plates

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction Chapter   1

Tannhäuser in Paris

xiii 1

Chapter   2 An Allegorical Portrait of Richard Wagner with His Muse

13

Chapter   3

Brünnhilde and Parsifal as Seen by Odilon Redon

23

Chapter   4

“Wagnerian” Themes in Pre-Raphaelite Painting

39

Chapter   5

Aubrey Beardsley’s Drawings of Tristan und Isolde

57

Chapter   6

Art in the Wagner Memorial Album of 1884

75

Chapter   7

John Singer Sargent, Wagnerite

89

Chapter   8 Richard Wagner and the Artists of the Belgian Avant-Garde 103 Chapter   9

Constantin Meunier’s Bronze Valkyrie

Chapter 10 Wagnerian Architecture: The Wagnerhof in Rotterdam

v

139 153

vi  •  Contents

Index

165



177

About the Author

Figures and Plates

List of Figures Figure 2.1.  Henri Fantin-Latour, The Muse

14

Figure 2.2.  Henri Fantin-Latour, On the Death of Richard Wagner

16

Figure 2.3.  Elliot and Fry, London, Richard Wagner

21

Figure 3.1.  Odilon Redon, Brünnhilde on Horseback

27

Figure 3.2.  Odilon Redon, Brünnhilde

29

Figure 3.3.  Odilon Redon, Parsifal II

31

Figure 3.4.  Odilon Redon, Brünnhilde (Götterdämmerung)

32

Figure 4.1.  Simeon Solomon, The Death of Sir Galahad while Taking a Portion of the Holy Grail Administered by Joseph of Arimathea 47 Figure 4.2.  Aubrey Beardsley, Tannhäuser 53 Figure 5.1.  Aubrey Beardsley, How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink 62 Figure 5.2.  Aubrey Beardsley, A Répétition of “Tristan und Isolde”

65

Figure 5.3.  Aubrey Beardsley, Klavsky 67 Figure 5.4.  Aubrey Beardsley, The Wagnerites

68

Figure 5.5.  Aubrey Beardsley, Les Revenants de musique

70

vii

viii  •   Figures and Plates

Figure   6.1.  Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Lohengrin

78

Figure   6.2.  Franz von Lenbach, Franz Liszt

79

Figure   6.3.  Arnold Böcklin, Fafner as a Dragon Guarding the Nibelung Hoard

80

Figure   6.4.  Rogelio de Egusquiza, Amfortas

81

Figure   6.5.  Max Klinger, Ascent to the Grail Mountain

83

Figure   6.6.  John Singer Sargent, The Death of Tristan

85

Figure   7.1.  John Singer Sargent, Studies of Isolde and Brangäne

93

Figure   7.2.  John Singer Sargent, Studies of Two Opera Singers

97

Figure   7.3.  John Singer Sargent, Studies of Two Opera Singers

98

Figure   8.1.  Fernand Khnopff, Klingsor, costume study for a production of Parsifal 119 Figure   8.2.  Jean Delville, Parsifal

128

Figure   9.1.  Constantin Meunier, The Dock Hand

140

Figure   9.2.  Constantin Meunier, The Valkyrie

144

Figure   9.3.  The Valkyrie

145

Figure   9.4.  Meunier room, Fifth Exhibition, Vienna Secession, 1899

147

Figure 10.1.  View of the auditorium, Festspielhaus, Bayreuth

156

Figure 10.2.  Wagnerhof, general view, ca. 1905–1906

157

List of Plates Plate 1.1.  Anon., Scene from Tannhäuser Plate 1.2.  Henri Fantin-Latour, Scene from Tannhäuser Plate 2.1.  Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Luigi Cherubini and the Muse of Lyric Poetry Plate 3.1.  Odilon Redon, Parsifal Plate 3.2.  Odilon Redon, Brünnhilde on Horseback

Figures and Plates   •  ix

Plate   4.1.  W  illiam Holman Hunt, Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother, Slain in a Skirmish between the Colonna and the Orsini Factions Plate   4.2.  John Millais, Mariana in the Moated Grange Plate   4.3.  William Holman Hunt, Claudio and Isabella Plate   4.4.  William Morris, La Belle Iseult Plate   4.5.  D  ante Gabriel Rossetti, designer, William Morris & Co., Sir Tristram and la Belle Ysoude Drinking the Love Potion Plate   4.6.  Edward Burne-Jones, Laus Veneris Plate   4.7.  Simeon Solomon, A Design for a Motif from Parsifal Plate   5.1.  Aubrey Beardsley, Isolde Plate   7.1.  John Singer Sargent, A Dream of Lohengrin Plate   8.1.  James Ensor, At the Conservatory Plate   8.2.  James Ensor, The Entrance of Christ into Brussels Plate   8.3.  James Ensor, Amusements of the Valkyries Plate   8.4.  James Ensor, The Ride of the Valkyries Plate   8.5.  Fernand Khnopff, Secret/Reflections Plate   8.6.  Fernand Khnopff, Isolde Plate   8.7.  Jean Delville, Tristan and Isolde (Liebestod) Plate   8.8.  Jean Delville, Parsifal Plate   9.1.  Constantin Meunier, The Valkyrie Plate   9.2.  Constantin Meunier, Dead Hero Plate 10.1.  Wagnerhof, Rotterdam, general view from the Vijverlaan Plate 10.2.  Jan van Teeffelen, plan for a double villa Plate 10.3.  Walhalla Theater, Rotterdam

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of the following chapters appeared as articles in Wagneriana, a periodical published by the Boston Wagner Society. I wish to express my thanks to Jane Eaglen, president of the society, and to its board of directors for voting to grant permission for this revised publication. Dalia Geffen, president emerita of the society and editor of Wagneriana, and Susan Robertson, its designer, offered much helpful advice and support during the preparation of the project. In addition to the persons thanked in the individual chapters, Professor David Kleinberg-Levin and Grace Solomonoff have consistently given me encouragement during the evolution of this manuscript. Dr. Robert Knaus has also provided much thoughtful advice. The staff of the Harvard University Art Museums and the Harvard University Libraries offered much assistance for my research and provided new photography of works by Aubrey Beardsley, Constantin Meunier, and John Singer Sargent. At Rowman & Littlefield, Jaylene Perez, Charles Harmon, and Dominique McIndoe ably guided me through the publication process. Diane Kraut of DK Research provided valuable collaboration in obtaining permissions to publish and in preparing a master list of picture captions. Others who have offered information or advice include Dr. Susan M. Canning, Patrick Florizoone, Dr. Herwig Todts, Xavier Tricot, and Miriam Delville.

xi

Introduction

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) has had the greatest influence on the visual arts, especially painting, of any composer in the history of Western music. In the last years of his life and for about twenty years thereafter, Wagner’s operas caught the imagination of many of the most stylistically adventurous artists of Europe. Even those who had not been able to see performances of Wagner’s operas had heard his music in concert or were aware of his writings on a wide variety of subjects. Operas naturally provided subjects for the visual arts in contrast to the pure music (e.g., symphonies, concertos) of Beethoven or Brahms. Yet works by the leading opera composers of the previous century, Handel, Glück, and Mozart, though justly admired, had not caught the imagination of the leading painters and sculptors of their time. Ludwig Van Beethoven’s only opera, the powerfully dramatic Fidelio, had not been taken up as a subject by the most important artists of the Romantic period. Even in Wagner’s time, the operas of his great rival Giuseppe Verdi, though performed throughout Europe, were not depicted by leading artists to a large degree. Neither Verdi’s Les Vêpres Siciliennes nor Don Carlos, both written in French for the Paris Opera, attracted the same artistic attention there as the production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Certainly there had been occasional exceptions. In 1728–1729 the famous English artist William Hogarth produced a series of paintings following the story of The Beggar’s Opera, a popular ballad-opera arranged by John Gay. Colorful works like The Beggar’s Opera, Act III, Scene XI detailed the advenxiii

xiv  •  Introduction

tures of Macheath, Polly Peachum, and Gay’s other picturesque characters. Commissioned by the theater manager, the painting compositions were then circulated as engravings, reaching a wider audience. This unusual project perhaps reflected the taste of the English public for literary works. Artists’ interest in Wagner’s works derived from several factors. The most prominent artists first involved in depicting Wagner’s work were late survivors of the Romantic period of the first part of the nineteenth century as was Wagner himself. His medieval romances like Tannhäuser, and the fantastic plot of the Ring, appealed strongly to them. After 1880 a neo-Romantic taste evolved, turning away from the Realist and Impressionist scenes of everyday life that had dominated the third quarter of the century. In particular, Symbolists such as Jean Delville in Belgium and the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones in England rejected depicting the modern world in favor of escapist subjects of pure imagination. The greatest influence of Wagner, who had died in 1883, was felt during the last two decades of the century. Often the most important Wagnerian artworks were inspired by specific performances of the composer’s operas: Wagner’s production of Tannhäuser in Paris in 1861; the premieres of the four Ring operas (1876) and Parsifal (1882) at his theater in Bayreuth; and the international tour of the original Ring production that, among other cities, reached Amsterdam (1882) and Brussels (1883). In England, performances of Wagner’s operas, though beginning slightly later, were outstanding in quality and frequency. This is not a study of the history of Wagnerian images. The many German books on “Wagner in words and pictures” tend to mix fine art objects of painting and sculpture with advertising posters, stage sets, and decorated souvenir objects of all kinds. Also not all capable artists who dealt with Wagnerian themes, such as the Belgian painter Henry De Groux, will be discussed. The emphasis here is on artists who, from the viewpoint of the twenty-first century, either had highly individualistic styles or contributed in some way to what is understood today as the history of modern art. There is no Wagnerian style in art. Some of the artists under discussion are associated with movements such as Romanticism, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau. Others with uniquely personal, difficult to classify styles such as Max Klinger and James Ensor are often regarded as precursors of twentiethcentury artistic movements such as Surrealism or Expressionism. The artists themselves, however, mostly disliked being labeled as belonging to a particular school, preferring to think of themselves as independents. All tended to apply the same style they had been using for other works to their Wagnerian works as well. Thus for them Wagnerism was a category of subject matter that appealed to them for various reasons.

Introduction  •  xv

The term “avant-garde” is imprecise in meaning. Military in origin, it suggests a group working together, ahead of the rest of their colleagues, in a fight to advance art in some way. This meaning does not fit with the individualism of the artists under discussion yet it has been understood since the Romantic period as describing artists who reject existing stylistic norms by seeking new modes of expression. Some of the artists of the late nineteenth century who are most highly regarded today experimented with subjects from Wagner’s operas. Others did not. Thus Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, while together in Arles in 1888, read and discussed a translation of Wagner’s writings but did not venture into Wagnerian explorations of history and myth in their works. Many artists and intellectuals of the period were interested in relationships between the arts and sought to combine their effects in some way. The correspondances between the arts sensed by the poet Charles Baudelaire, and the Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art] advocated by Wagner had a high prestige at this period. Few artists or composers had the training to attempt producing a Gesamtkunstwerk themselves—even Wagner did not design the sets and costumes for his operas. We will discuss the effort of the painter James Ensor to produce a totalizing work in a ballet though hampered by his lack of formal training in music. Several elements in Wagner’s operas appealed to artists including the fantastic and escapist subjects of operas such as the Flying Dutchman, the Ring, and Parsifal. Wagner’s colossal ambition, most notably in the Ring, and his determination to carry a project through to completion, must have impressed artists such as Redon, Burne-Jones, Sargent, and Delville, all of whom at various times undertook large decorative projects. Several of these artists, such as Redon and Sargent, were also competent amateur musicians. Though harder to quantify, the grandeur of Wagner’s music, whether heard in opera, concert, or private performance, undoubtedly had its effect on them as well. Nearly all realized, however, that the effects of music could not be duplicated visually. Attempts to accomplish this had to wait for the advent of twentieth-century abstraction. These artists even when living in the same country did not work together yet we may discuss the same artist in different Wagnerian contexts. Thus we will be considering Henri Fantin-Latour’s response to Wagner’s failed Paris Tannhäuser production of 1861 (chapter 1); his allegorical portrait of Wagner and his observations of the composer at Bayreuth in 1876 (chapter 2); and his invited contribution to the Wagner memorial album in 1884 (chapter 6). Other artists whose works we will examine more than once are John Singer Sargent and Aubrey Beardsley.

xvi  •  Introduction

Wagner’s following among artists was international, yet it is striking that there were relatively few artists from the German-speaking countries who produced Wagner-themed artworks of significance. However, the young Viennese painter Hans Makart, whom Wagner knew, painted extensive decorative ensembles based on Wagner’s works during the composer’s lifetime executed in a colorful, neo-Baroque style, though he is little known today outside Austria and Germany. There were, though, two prominent German-speaking artists who contributed rather atypical works to the Wagner memorial album in 1884: Swiss Symbolist Arnold Böcklin and painter, sculptor, and printmaker Max Klinger. Both seem to have had conflicted feelings about Wagner and his work. Böcklin declined Wagner’s invitation to contribute designs to the production of Parsifal while Klinger, commissioned to produce a large sculpted memorial to the composer in Leipzig, never completed the project though previously he had produced a Beethoven monument and a collaborative book of sheet music with Johannes Brahms. The work of all these artists can tell us much about the relationship between the visual arts and music in Wagner’s time. The English critic Walter Pater famously proposed that “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music.” This reflects the view, widespread at the time, that music was the purest art form since it generally (except in opera or ballet) was not specifically tied to subject matter, working directly upon the hearer’s emotions. The Wagnerian artworks represent to some degree the ambitions of painters to go beyond the limitations of their art form. Redon considered himself a symphonic painter, a category he did not attempt to define. John Singer Sargent, whose style could not have been more different from Redon’s, was a good amateur musician and respected by professionals who knew him, and he sketched a variety of possible approaches to depicting the orchestral prelude and opening scene of Tristan und Isolde. James Ensor attempted to write music himself while French critics of the mid-1880s wrote, somewhat vaguely, of a Wagnerian painting style. At a slightly later date a few artists such as Jean Delville and Fernand Khnopff provided costume or stage designs for opera productions anticipating the later twentieth-century interest in such projects by Picasso, Chagall, and many others. Earlier versions of these chapters were written as essays for an audience thoroughly acquainted with Wagner’s librettos (unusually, all written by the composer himself) and with a good though not specialist knowledge of nineteenth-century art. Certainly a familiarity with Wagner’s operas is very helpful in appreciating these groups of works by well-known artists. The artworks display contrasting approaches to the operas. They range in size

Introduction  •  xvii

from substantial salon paintings like Fantin-Latour’s Scene from Tannhäuser to Sargent’s tiny pencil caricatures of a scene from Die Walküre. Most of these Wagnerian subjects are works on paper (drawings, watercolors, lithographs) with the important exception of British Pre-Raphaelite paintings that depict subjects parallel to, though not necessarily derived from, Wagner’s operas. Redon’s vague, ghostly pastel Parsifal is drastically different in style from Jean Delville’s obsessively detailed painting of the same subject. Such varied visual interpretations of Wagner’s work continue into our own time often in the form of opera productions, particularly in Germany, that Wagner himself hardly would have recognized: Lohengrin in an elementary school classroom, the Ring in a seedy American motel, and so on. The relation of Wagner’s music to these works of art is more complex. For the most part created well after Wagner wrote his operas, the artworks do not tell us much about Wagner’s intentions. Rather they are interpretations of the composer’s works through the contrasting personalities, interests, and milieus of several outstanding artists of the late nineteenth century. Wagnerian opera represented a vein of grandiose, often fantastic storytelling conveyed by powerfully original music that appealed to this diverse group of artists who, like Wagner, rejected aspects of modern industrial society in their works.

CHAPTER ONE

Tannhäuser in Paris

In September 1859 Richard Wagner arrived in Paris for a stay that, with brief interruptions, was to last nearly two years. Wagner’s goal was to obtain a production of one of his works in a Parisian opera house, and the score he had in mind was Tannhäuser. The opera had had its premiere in Dresden fourteen years earlier and had been succeeded by Wagner’s more experimental later scores, notably the still-unperformed Tristan und Isolde. Nevertheless, due to Wagner’s long political exile from Germany, Tannhäuser was the most recent of his operas he had seen performed on the stage. Wagner had a particular interest in this work, which he continued to revise almost until the end of his life. During an earlier long and unhappy sojourn in Paris (1839–1842), Wagner had attempted to place one of his operas, even offering to provide Rienzi in French for the Paris Opéra but to no avail. This time, returning as a prominent composer and theorist with many professional contacts, Wagner was determined to succeed. Through the intervention of influential friends, Wagner obtained a decree from Emperor Napoleon III himself ordering a full-scale production for March 1861 at the Opéra Impérial, as it was then called, the most influential opera house in Europe. After twenty years, Wagner was at last to achieve his ambition of a production at the Opéra. Wagner was, for once, impressed with the provisions made for his work. As he wrote in a letter published soon after the production, “Every acquisition desired by me was forthwith carried out, without the slightest counting of the cost; to the mise-en-scène a care was devoted such as I had never conceived before.”1 The costumes alone cost more than fifty thousand 1

2  •  Chapter One

francs, an extravagant sum for an opera scheduled for a limited number of performances. Though strongly advised to follow a house custom by adding a ballet in the second act (after the arrival of the guests in the Landgrave’s hall), Wagner declined, counter-proposing that the dance music be placed at the beginning of the opera in the Venusberg scene, a revision he had had in mind for some time. Despite the elaborate preparations, the production of Tannhäuser in Paris was a notorious fiasco. Even though the story has been told many times, the precise reasons for the opera’s failure remain somewhat unclear. One German musicologist at the time situated the debacle in a history of Parisian controversies over foreign operatic innovations from Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s La serva padrona in 1752 to Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Iphégenie en Aulide in 1774.2 Nevertheless, hostility to Wagner’s music does not seem to have been the cause of the problem: a series of concerts of his own music that Wagner conducted in Paris in January and February of 1860 had been generally well received by the public. Nor was anti-German sentiment an issue: the Franco-Prussian war lay a decade in the future, and several Germanborn composers (notably Wagner’s bête noire, Meyerbeer, and later Jacques Offenbach) had been wildly successful in the French capital. Wagner himself, in the same article, placed the blame squarely on disturbances caused by members of the aristocratic Jockey Club who, he wrote, were irate because they were unable to admire their favorite danseuses of the ballet corps due to the club members’ customary late arrival in the second act. Even so, while there were no doubt multiple causes, the most important may have been political: Napoleon III was a dictator and unpopular with both the republican Left and the monarchist Right (including the Jockey Club). The Tannhäuser production may have been too closely connected to the emperor’s patronage, and similar disturbances occurred at other theatrical performances of the period, again because they were seen as associated with the Napoleonic regime.3 A vast amount has been written about the influence Wagner exerted on composers in France as in other countries; on prominent aestheticians and writers (most importantly the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, one of Wagner’s strongest defenders); and even on philosophers, in particular Friedrich Nietzsche. Much less has been said about the immediate effect the Tannhäuser production of 1861 had on the leading visual artists in Paris. France was then the center of the European art world just as Germany and Austria were dominant in music. It was a moment of artistic change, when the painters later known as the Impressionists were at the beginning of their careers.

Tannhäuser in Paris   •  3

Much attention has been devoted to the possible influence of the Tannhäuser scandal on members of the emerging artistic avant-garde of the 1860s, notably painter Edouard Manet.4 But what of the reaction of the established leaders of the avant-garde to Wagner’s music? Such well-known literary figures as Baudelaire and the critic Champfleury came to Wagner’s aid; both quickly produced short books defending the composer. Can we identify a comparable response among the older members of the Parisian artistic avant-garde? Unquestionably the leading figure of this group was the painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), the most famous painter of the European avantgarde during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. A great colorist, Delacroix was considered the leader of the Romantic school and he had a profound effect on younger painters like Manet and the Impressionists. He made his reputation from the 1820s onward with large, often violent, politically engaged paintings of modern subjects like The Massacre at Chios and Liberty Leading the People. Delacroix was also interested in music: he was close to the composer Frédéric Chopin and painted a large double portrait of Chopin at the piano, watched by his mistress, the novelist George Sand. One work connected to Tannhäuser is a little-known finished painting in gouache (opaque watercolors) on vellum formerly attributed to Eugène Delacroix. Depicting a moment immediately after the ballet in the Venusberg scene, the painting shows Tannhäuser pleading with Venus for his freedom (Werner-Coninx-Stiftung, Zurich, plate 1.1). Numerous secondary figures, corresponding to the naiads, sirens, nymphs, tender couples, and bacchantes of Wagner’s scenario, are loosely indicated in the middle ground and background of Venus’s cave. The gouache bears a signature at the lower left, Eug. Delacroix f[ecit]. Though the attribution to Delacroix has not been challenged in print, specialists in the artist’s work have privately questioned the attribution,5 and this view has been adopted by the museum that owns the painting. The work is relatively large for a watercolor or gouache: 54 x 71.9 cm or about 21 1/4 x 28 1/4 inches. The first question to address concerning the Tannhäuser is whether Delacroix might have painted it. The Tannhäuser story would have appealed to Delacroix for its medievalism, an aspect of Romantic taste that he shared with Wagner. By the 1860s several French authors were comparing the painter and the composer. In 1860 soon after Wagner’s arrival in Paris, the critic Edmond Roche compared the impact of Wagner’s music in concert to that of Delacroix’s The Murder of the Bishop of Liège (1829; Louvre), which depicts an incident from Sir Walter Scott’s novel Quentin Durward and is one of the artist’s most violent paintings.6 Wagner and Delacroix were later

4  •  Chapter One

compared by the art critic Théodore Duret, best known as a defender of the Impressionists. Duret refers several times to the originality of the two artists and the hostility it provoked. Wagner is new, and he produces on certain ears accustomed to the forms of Beethoven and Rossini, the same impression of horror that [Delacroix’s] Barque of Dante and Women of Algiers produced on eyes that had rested until then on the paintings of the school of David.7

A later author who returned to this issue was Wagner’s erstwhile disciple, the philosopher Nietzsche, who in a rather overheated passage writes of his former mentor and the Romantics, I specially mention Delacroix, the nearest related to Wagner . . . great discoverers in the realm of the sublime, also of the loathsome and dreadful, still greater discoverers in effect, in display, in the art of the show-shop; all of them talented far beyond their genius, out and out virtuosi, with mysterious accesses to all that seduces, allures, constrains, and upsets; born enemies of logic and the straight line, hankering after the strange, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, and the self-contradictory.8

In his late literary fragments Nietzsche returns to the subject several times, describing both Wagner and Delacroix as, in his view, examples of sickness or neurosis.9 Like Baudelaire before him, Nietzsche senses a Romantic striving for heroic excess in the works of both the painter and the composer. Delacroix very frequently painted literary or theatrical subjects. In addition to Shakespeare, he also favored modern authors including Goethe, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott. He painted many figures from classical mythology including a large Venus reclining on one elbow for the ceiling of the Salon de la Paix of the old Hôtel de Ville, Paris (1849–1853; destroyed 1871).10 On the other hand, Delacroix, though a regular opera-goer, does not seem to have painted any subjects drawn from operatic librettos. Nor did he explore the medieval Germanic mythology that was being rediscovered in the nineteenth century and was to serve as the basis for Wagner’s Ring operas. In the Zurich gouache the strong, reddish tonalities, seminude Venus with exposed breasts, and crouching leopard in the center all have analogies in Delacroix’s work. Some oddities in the drawing as in the figure of Tannhäuser, who is in shadow and appears smaller than Venus (though also further away), might be compared to expressive distortions in other paintings and drawings by Delacroix.

Tannhäuser in Paris   •  5

Nevertheless, the hothouse eroticism of the cave, though appropriate to the Venusberg scene, seems closer to the style of later nineteenth-century painters who were influenced by Delacroix, such as Gustave Moreau. The horror vacui of the lower half of the picture, with a background filled with indistinct figures and decorative objects, does not resemble the most characteristic style of Delacroix’s late works in which a few large figures often are seen before an expansive landscape (as in Fantin-Latour’s version of the scene, discussed below). Assuming the work has a Parisian origin, it must relate to the 1861 production since Tannhäuser did not appear again at the Opéra until 1895. The picture is not mentioned, however, in Ernest Chesneau’s excellent catalog of Delacroix’s paintings and drawings published in 1885. If it is by Delacroix, the Tannhäuser would be a very late work yet it was not in the auction sale of the contents of the artist’s studio after his death. The gouache was first reported in a private collection in Basel and was sold at auction in 1971.11 With so many differences of style and subject, it is possible the artist was not attempting to imitate Delacroix, and the signature may have been added by someone else with a view to selling the work.12 What evidence do we have relating to Delacroix’s attitudes toward music (and Wagner)? As he grew older, Delacroix, though still a vanguard painter, became more conservative both politically and musically. The painter’s famous Journal is filled with comments on the importance of form and structure in music, for example, “Mozart is superior to all others in the way he carries his form through to its conclusion” (April 21, 1853).13 At the opera, Delacroix could still enjoy the works of the long-retired Gioachino Rossini but intensely disliked Giuseppe Verdi’s more recent Nabucco and Il Trovatore. At this period Delacroix, like most Parisians, had no direct experience of Wagner’s music. During an excursion to Baden where he enjoyed a performance of liturgical music, Delacroix writes of Wagner and his music, which had been praised to him by society hostess Countess Marie Kalergi, This Wagner wants to be an innovator; he thinks that he has reached the truth; he suppresses a great many of the conventions of music, believing that conventions are not founded on necessary laws. He is a democrat; he also writes books about the happiness of humanity, books that are absurd, according to Mme Kalergi herself (September 27, 1855).14

Delacroix based this stern judgment at most on a secondhand knowledge of Wagner’s writings, perhaps including Art and Revolution (1849). Given this attitude, Delacroix’s decision to complete a large, detailed gouache of

6  •  Chapter One

a Tannhäuser around 1861 would be unexpected. At that period the artist, in poor health, was conserving his energy to complete a major decorative commission for a chapel in the church of Saint-Sulpice, Paris. He moved to a studio close to his work at the church, rarely went out socially, and made no entries in the Journal between January and April 1861, the period of the Tannhäuser production. Though we do not know whether Delacroix attended the performances at the Opéra, he could have been familiar with the scenario for the revised Venusberg scene. Wagner had published the libretto in a French prose translation in Quatre poèmes d’opéras (January 1861), and the book also included a lengthy “Lettre sur la musique,” usually known today as “Music of the Future,” in which he laid out his most recent theoretical concerns. The letter was addressed to Frédéric Villot, curator of paintings at the Louvre and a friend of both Wagner and Delacroix. Delacroix certainly must have been aware of the scandal of the Opéra performances and of Charles Baudelaire’s book Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris (1861), which touches on the political issues associated with the production and mentions Delacroix several times. Baudelaire had been Delacroix’s leading critical supporter for many years. Baudelaire’s theory of the correspondances among the arts of music, painting, and poetry, outlined in the book, would have appealed strongly to Delacroix. With a large social circle in Paris, Delacroix, when not at work, could have continued to receive friends like Baudelaire in his fine new studio and garden near Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It is therefore probable that Delacroix was aware of the response to the Tannhäuser scandal and the strong support for Wagner of Baudelaire, Frédéric Villot, and other influential friends. These contacts, however, do not in themselves prove that Delacroix essayed a painting relating to Tannhäuser or to Wagner. As in the case of Delacroix, the influence of the Tannhäuser production on Edouard Manet can only be inferred indirectly. Manet did not paint scenes from this or other operas. Therese Dolan has devoted considerable attention to Manet’s radical painting Music in the Tuilleries (1863; National Gallery, London, currently on loan to Hugh Lane / City Gallery, Dublin). The picture shows the Parisian literary and artistic elite socializing outdoors. Since a number of Wagner’s defenders, including Baudelaire and Champfleury, are depicted, Dolan infers Manet’s sympathy for or interest in Wagner’s music. Tannhäuser had been written in two separate periods corresponding to the Dresden premiere in 1845 and the 1861 production. This music, in Wagner’s newer style and already in evidence in his still-unperformed Tristan und Isolde, proved much more difficult for the public to understand. Dolan com-

Tannhäuser in Paris   •  7

pares these contrasting musical styles with the painting method of Manet’s Music in the Tuilleries in which relatively straightforward painted passages appear close to much more loosely painted areas. By the bold juxtaposition of broadly brushed areas of paint next to descriptive figuration, such as is found in the very center of the painting, Manet deliberately enacted a similar aesthetic tension. . . . The formal innovations introduced by both [Wagner and Manet] would influence the modernist movement in the arts.15

However, this subjective analogy would have occurred to few admirers of either Manet or Wagner in 1862. Fantin-Latour’s Scene from Tannhäuser is another pictorial version of Tannhäuser from this period and one that had a much greater public visibility. Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904), a young painter at the time, had been strongly influenced by Delacroix. Though not a household name today, Fantin is still well known in France mainly for one aspect of his work, his group portraits of avant-garde artists and intellectuals (of whom he had an insider’s knowledge) executed in a nearly photographic realist style. Fantin himself set far more store in his imaginative subjects, painted with a loose and colorful technique, and one of these was the large Scene from “Tannhäuser” (plate 1.2) that he exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1864, a popular exhibition that attracted thousands of visitors. Fantin, an avid music-lover, had purchased a ticket for the fourth Opéra performance of Tannhäuser, which was cancelled by Wagner. He could have had access to the published libretto or full score of the opera, however, and he chose the same scene as in the Zurich gouache, that on the Venusberg, for his painting. The choice was certainly no accident since the Venusberg scene and its ballet had been the principal focus of controversy during the Paris performances of 1861. Fantin first approached the subject in 1862 in one of his earliest efforts in lithography, a medium that was later to become his preferred means of expression. The monochrome scene, printed in only a few copies, already has most of the compositional elements of the 1864 painting in place though reversed from left to right—a common strategy in transferring compositions between prints and paintings. A reclining Venus looks up at an evasive Tannhäuser while dancing bacchantes fill the rest of the foreground. The oil painting shown in 1864, approximately 51 inches wide, would have been considered substantial for a theatrical subject picture. As in the lithograph, Fantin used considerable artistic license in interpreting Wagner’s

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libretto. In contrast to the Zurich gouache, the scene is set outside the mouth of the cave rather than inside and before an expansive landscape. Although depicting the ballet scene, Fantin reduces Wagner’s naiads, sirens, nymphs, tender couples, and bacchantes to a few dancers and a musician, now placed in the middle register. Venus rests her head on Tannhäuser’s lap, rather than the reverse as in Wagner’s scenario. This was considered a more appropriate depiction of sex roles. In other respects, however, Fantin closely follows the French libretto: the two principal figures are placed in the left foreground, and the background includes the bluish lake specified by Wagner. Wearing a black costume that is closer to the Venetian Renaissance than medieval Germany, Tannhäuser stares out intently, oblivious to both the dancers and Venus. The free brushwork and intense colors are indebted to old master painters, particularly the Venetians and Rubens, and to Delacroix. Though Fantin painted few imaginary subjects because he found them commercially unviable, he sold this one fairly quickly, and today it is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.16 Almost the only other surviving picture by Fantin in this colorful, fanciful style is a canvas of identical size called the Display of Enchantments (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts). When it was rejected by the jury for the Salon of 1863, Fantin showed the picture in the notorious Salon des Réfusés of that year along with the scandalous works of Edouard Manet and James McNeill Whistler. The picture shows a young woman in vaguely oriental dress arriving in a harbor where kneeling women greet her and offer gifts. Given Fantin’s Wagnerian interests, it has been suggested the picture shows Isolde arriving in Cornwall as the bride of King Marke from the not-yet-produced Tristan und Isolde.17 The relaxed atmosphere and orientalizing costumes make this unlikely, however. The precise subject, if there is one, is closer to a biblical theme much beloved by the Venetian old masters such as The Departure of the Queen of Sheba after Visiting King Solomon. Fantin showed one other painting at the Salon of 1864, a much larger group portrait titled Homage to Delacroix (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Of the two pictures, this was the one that received nearly all the critical attention, an imbalance that largely has continued to this day. Though painted in radically different styles, these two pictures by Fantin, taken together, comprise a homage to Delacroix and perhaps to Wagner as well. The center of the Homage is occupied by a framed portrait of the recently deceased Romantic master surrounded by formally dressed members of the contemporary artistic and literary avant-garde. The controversial painters Whistler and Manet stand flanking the portrait while seated at the right are two prominent art critics, Champfleury and Baudelaire, both of whom, as already noted, had published

Tannhäuser in Paris   •  9

short books defending Wagner. Seated on the left is Fantin himself, shown working in his shirtsleeves and holding his palette. These three seated foreground figures are connected not only to Delacroix but to Wagner, whose Tannhäuser Fantin celebrates elsewhere in the exhibition in a style strongly influenced by Delacroix. The Romantic master, represented by his posthumous portrait, is here acknowledged as the source of subsequent avant-garde painting and criticism. In later years other French avant-garde artists, particularly Pierre-Auguste Renoir (see chapter 2) and Paul Cézanne, undoubtedly recalling the 1861 controversy, were to paint scenes relating more distantly to Tannhäuser. Fantin himself much later in his career after a visit to Bayreuth in 1876 was to paint scenes from other operas by Wagner including Das Rheingold and Lohengrin, but Scene from Tannhäuser remains his most ambitious Wagnerian painting.

Cézanne and Tannhäuser According to some accounts, Paul Cézanne, like the other artists of his circle, was fond of Wagner’s music. References to Wagner in Cézanne’s extensive correspondence are few and brief, however, and date from his youth.18 Cézanne’s recent biographer Alex Danchev reports that the painter’s favorite composer in his old age was Carl Maria von Weber in transcriptions from such operas as Der Freischütz and Oberon. A dinner guest was surprised to find that the elderly artist could sing, from memory, selections from popular mid-century opéra comique (e.g., Boieldieu’s La dame blanche and Hérold’s Le Pré des Clercs) and grand opera (e.g., Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable).19 Cézanne’s musical tastes evidently were formed before Wagner’s music became fashionable in Paris. Cézanne’s only surviving work relating to Wagner is his early Overture to Tannhäuser, his third attempt at this subject (c. 1869; Hermitage Museum). This is a bourgeois, domestic, music-making scene of a type also depicted by Whistler, Manet, and Edgar Degas and later by James Ensor and Fernand Khnopff (Listening to Schumann). There is nothing in the painting that specifically refers to Wagner’s opera. Cézanne, who may have seen Fantin’s picture in the Salon of 1864, in any case certainly knew about the 1861 controversy because he first arrived in Paris to study painting in April 1861, only a month after the debacle at the Opéra. His picture, of which he destroyed several versions dating to 1866 if not earlier, may be a commentary upon it. The music is enjoyed without disturbance by two women, a pianist and a listener, in a heavily decorated bourgeois interior. The rigidly geometric organization of the picture contributes to a sense of

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stability. Perhaps Cézanne intended to suggest a contrast between Tannhäuser’s restless, conflicted life and the comforts of a settled, middle-class existence. Some writers have attempted the difficult task of finding a formal parallel between Wagner’s operas and Cézanne’s paintings, and the names of the two masters were linked by the novelist and critic Joris-Karl Huysmans as early as 1888.20 There have been other, more recent attempts to find formal connections between the Wagner scenario for the Venusburg scene and some of Cézanne’s early bacchanale pictures though this remains speculative.21

Notes   1.  “Richard Wagner über die Aufführung seines ‘Tannhäuser’ in Paris,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung [Leipzig], Beilage zu no. 80 (April 7, 1861): 811–13; Richard Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis (New York: Broude Bros., 1966), 3:352.  2. Eduard Schelle, Der Tannhäuser in Paris und der dritte musikalische Krieg: Eine historische Parallele (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1861).   3.  Georges Servières, Tannhäuser à l’Opéra en 1861, 2nd ed. (Paris: Fischbacher, 1895), 120.  4. See Therese Dolan, Manet, Wagner, and the Musical Culture of Their Time (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013).   5.  Therese Dolan in a message to the author, December 2022.   6.  “Donné le 25 Janvier 1860, au Théâtre Impérial Italien,” La Presse théâtrale et musicale (January 29, 1860): 1–2.   7.  Théodore Duret, “Richard Wagner aux concerts populaires,” La Tribune (December 26, 1869), republished in Duret, Critique d’avant-garde (Paris: Charpentier, 1885), 287–95.  8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. H. Zimmern (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 219.   9.  Ingrid Schulze, “III. Tannhäuser in der französischen Kunst der Spatromantik und des Impressionismus,” in Tannhäuser in der Kunst, ed. H. Weigel, W. Klante, and I. Schulze (Bucha bei Jena, Quartus, 1999), 170. 10. Ernest Chesneau, L’Oeuvre complet de Eugène Delacroix (Paris: Charavay frères, 1885), no. 1144. 11.  Lucerne, Galerie Fischer, sale no. 208, June 21–22, 1971, lot 878. 12.  For an older photograph of the work, see H. Barth, D. Mack, and E. Voss, eds., Wagner: A Documentary Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), ill. color plate 128. 13.  Eugène Delacroix, The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, trans. Walter Pach (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 296. 14. Delacroix, Journal, 492. 15. Dolan, Manet, Wagner, 217.

Tannhäuser in Paris   •  11

16. Larry Curry, “Henri Fantin-Latour’s Tannhäuser on Venusberg,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art Bulletin 16, no. 1 (1964): 3–19. 17.  Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, “Guide,” 1977, fig. 70. 18.  Alex Danchev, ed., The Letters of Paul Cézanne (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013), letters 35 and 42. 19.  Alex Danchev, Cézanne: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 2012), 27. 20.  Joris-Karl Huysmans, “Trois peintres: Cézanne, Tissot, Wagner,” La Cravache, August 1888. 21.  Mary Tompkins Lewis, Cézanne’s Early Imagery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), attempts to relate the Venusberg scene, as described in Wagner’s libretto, to various pastorales by Cézanne. See also Norman Turner, “Cézanne, Wagner, Modulation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 353–64.

CHAPTER TWO

An Allegorical Portrait of Richard Wagner with His Muse

A fine black-and-white lithograph titled The Muse and placed at the beginning of a biography of Richard Wagner published in Paris in 1886 depicts a highly unusual scene (figure 2.1). The composer, shown in profile, sits writing at a desk while looking upward as if seeking inspiration. Behind him stands a seminude young woman who holds a palm frond in her right hand. A fire burns at the left, as if on an altar, before a dark background of vegetation. Though the standing figure puts her left hand reassuringly around Wagner’s shoulder, the two figures do not look directly at each other. Despite the realism of the way Wagner is depicted, his muse here is not his wife Cosima. The idea that the formidable Cosima could appear as a gently inspiring muse may seem odd; nevertheless, Wagner himself saw her in this way. In 1874 she was depicted in this guise in a relief carving by Robert Krausse placed over the front door of Wahnfried, Wagner’s house in Bayreuth. In a lengthy letter to his patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Wagner includes an interpretation of the iconography of the frieze. It is a monumental representation of the “Art-Work of the Future.” The central section is taken up by Germanic myth; since we wanted the figures to have characteristic features, we gave this one the head of the late Ludwig Schnorr; Wotan’s ravens can be seen flying toward him on either side, while he relates the tidings that he has received to two female figures, one of whom represents classical tragedy in the likeness of [Wilhemine] Schroeder-Devrient [a soprano who inspired Wagner], the other being music, with the head and figure of

13

Figure 2.1.  The Muse. Source: Henri Fantin-Latour, The Muse, lithograph. From Adolphe Jullien, Richard Wagner, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: J. Rouam, 1886), f Typ 815.86.4695, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

An Allegorical Portrait of Richard Wagner with His Muse   •  15

Cosima; a small boy, armed like Siegfried and with the head of my son, holds her by the hand and looks up at his mother, music, with high-spirited delight.1

While the features of Schroeder-Devrient may be recognizable in the Wahnfried relief, those of Cosima and Siegfried are too generalized to be identifiable. The 1886 lithograph was one of fourteen commissioned for the biography from the painter and lithographer Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904). The original lithographs were bound directly into a lavish volume, Adolphe Jullien’s Richard Wagner, sa vie et ses oeuvres, along with reproductions of many other works by various artists. An expanded English translation in two volumes was then published in Boston in 1892. This was the first biography of Wagner in any language with extensive visual documentation, and it is indicative of the strong interest in Wagner’s work among French writers and artists in the mid-1880s. For this project all examples of Fantin’s lithographs seem to have been placed in the French volumes except for seven or eight sets of trial proofs for Fantin and four sets printed on special papers for Jullien. The images are a little smaller than most of Fantin’s other Wagnerian lithographs in order to fit the dimensions of Jullien’s book. Two of the other images for the book, the frontispiece and the print at the end, also have allegorical themes but do not represent Wagner. The other eleven lithographs depict scenes from Wagner’s operas, one for each work from Rienzi to Parsifal. Though the lithographs for Jullien were Fantin’s largest Wagnerian project, he had been interested in such themes for twenty-five years. Fantin, an avid concertgoer, first heard transcriptions of Wagner’s music in the late 1850s. For the Paris production of Tannhäuser in 1861, a notorious failure (see chapter 1), Fantin had a ticket to the fourth performance, which Wagner canceled. By the following year Fantin nevertheless produced Scene from Tannhäuser, his first lithograph, based on the controversial Venusberg scene. He then revised and expanded this into a large painting, shown at the Paris Salon of 1864. After a long hiatus during which he concentrated on portraiture and still-life painting, Fantin unexpectedly obtained tickets to the fourth and final performances of the premiere of the Ring at the Bayeuth Festival in 1876. These were the first operas by Wagner that Fantin saw. Fantin was enchanted with everything he encountered at the Bayreuth Festival: the music, the story (though he did not understand German), the performances, and even the sets and costumes, which some German critics found old-fashioned. Returning to Paris, Fantin in 1877 painted a small, brilliantly colored picture of the sleep of Brünnhilde at the conclusion of Die Walküre (Musée Fabre,

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Montpellier). His greatest effort, however, was in lithography: he was to produce dozens of lithographs on Wagnerian subjects between 1876 and the early 1890s. The avant-garde Revue wagnérienne, to which Fantin contributed an Evocation of Erda, his third plate on the subject, in 1886 published an incomplete catalog of Fantin’s Wagnerian lithographs and eighteen were listed, not including allegorical subjects or the group for Jullien. By the time of Wagner’s death, Fantin was probably the leading European artist in the field of Wagnerian subjects. Fantin was one of a small number of prominent artists from Germany and other countries who in 1883 were invited to contribute to a memorial album to be published in Munich. After sketching a number of variations, Fantin provided a lithograph, On the Death of Richard Wagner, showing a winged female figure holding a palm frond (figure 2.2). With her other hand the figure scatters petals on a slab bearing Wagner’s name and resembling his actual tomb behind his home in Bayreuth.2 Fantin’s picture was the only allegorical subject depicted in the album. The iconography of female figures mourning at the monument of a dead composer is not unusual; Fantin himself had used this motif in memorial prints and paintings for Robert Schumann and Hector Berlioz. Typically the composer was not depicted though he might be presented symbolically. A monumental example is Auguste Clésinger’s marble sculpture of a mourning

Figure 2.2.   On the Death of Richard Wagner. Source: Henri FantinLatour, On the Death of Richard Wagner, lithograph, from CentralLeitung des Allgemeinen RichardWagner-Vereines, Baÿreuther Festblaetter in Wort und Bild (Munich: AutotypeCompany, 1884), 46, Harvard University Library.

An Allegorical Portrait of Richard Wagner with His Muse   •  17

muse of music atop the tomb of Frédéric Chopin in Paris. Chopin himself is represented in profile in a portrait medallion on the base of the sculpture. In The Muse, the depiction of Wagner is portrait-like: though his hair is not white, the composer is shown as an older man, with hollowed cheeks and lines drawn at the mouth. The muse, on the other hand, is an idealized, nude young woman with beautiful, if generalized, features. Though this combination is unusual in the essentially realistic art of the nineteenth century, the subject of artist and muse has a long history. Beginning in ancient Greek times, authors were shown accompanied by the appropriate member of the nine muses of Mount Helicon, the patrons of all the arts. The best-preserved examples are in durable media such as mosaics dating from late-antique Roman villas. Usually a poet (e.g., Homer, Hesiod) is shown seated with his muse, a female figure in classical garb, standing next to or behind him. The two figures do not look at each other. In regard to book illustration (the genre of Fantin’s lithograph), the format of ancient books in rolls was not favorable to such elaborate depictions but allegorical author-portraits of this kind seem to have been introduced soon after the adoption of the codex, or modern book, in the first century AD. Comparable depictions of composers appear only during the Romantic period of the early nineteenth century when the notion of genius was first applied to musicians. One of the few examples by a major artist is Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s painting Luigi Cherubini and the Muse of Lyric Poetry (1836–1842, Musée d’Orsay, Paris; see plate 2.1). The Florentine-born Cherubini (1760– 1842) is represented today in the international operatic repertory only by his somber tragedy Médée (1797). During and after the French Revolution, however, Cherubini’s rescue operas had a great influence throughout Europe, most notably on Fidelio, Ludwig van Beethoven’s only opera. Cherubini was also, coincidentally, one of the few living composers Wagner regarded favorably. During Wagner’s first long stay in Paris (1839–1842), Cherubini was no longer writing for the operatic stage but was still active as director of the prestigious Paris Conservatoire. Atypically for works by Ingres, Cherubini’s portrait is in rather poor condition. The figure of the muse is a late addition, perhaps at the time of the composer’s death, and though designed by Ingres, it may have been painted by one of his students. The head and neck of the muse are obscured by a heavy craquelure, the result of faulty paint application, and the head of the composer, on a separate piece of canvas, has been moved, probably to make room for the muse’s arm. The picture nevertheless shows the contrast between the realism of the composer’s depiction and the hazy idealization of the muse (now somewhat obscured by damage) also seen later in Fantin-Latour’s lithograph. The physical and psychological separation between the figures is consistent with the long tradition of images of

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artists and their muses. Edward Lucie-Smith, who notes the connection of Ingres’s painting to Fantin, points out that Cherubini was exhibited in Paris at the Ingres memorial exhibition of 1867.3 This was, however, nearly twenty years before Fantin’s picture of Richard Wagner and his muse. The Ingres picture was on public view in Paris continuously from 1842 in the Musée de Luxembourg and from 1874 in the Louvre where Fantin, a frequent visitor, easily could have seen it. Fantin’s composition for The Muse seems to have evolved gradually from the artist’s earlier works. The 1886 lithograph, no. 62 in Germain Hédiard’s 1892 catalog of Fantin’s lithographs, was preceded by two compositionally related works. In the lithographs The Musician (1877; Hédiard no. 13) and The Poet and the Muse (1883; Hédiard no. 45), a generic, bearded artist in Renaissance garb is seated and working at a desk before a seminude muse. In the first print the musician looks up directly at the muse, who puts her hand on his shoulder. In the second composition the two figures look in different directions and barely seem aware of each other. With these works as preparation, Fantin moved surely in adopting his definitive Wagnerian composition. While executing On the Death of Richard Wagner in 1883–1884, Fantin made numerous sketches before arriving at the final composition. By contrast, only one study is known for The Muse: a loosely drawn but relatively complete charcoal sketch in the Louvre.4 Very close to the lithograph of The Muse and drawn in reverse from left to right, the sketch seems to return to the idea of The Musician though the figures are closer together. There is one small but significant difference between the sketch and the lithograph: in the sketch, Wagner turns his head slightly toward the muse and appears to look up at her. In the lithograph, on the other hand, he looks straight forward and upward as if unaware of the muse’s presence. Thus he appears to seek inspiration rather than supernatural aid. Despite a massive German bibliography of books on Wagner’s life and works in pictures, Fantin-Latour’s lithograph is rarely mentioned probably because it is seen as a subject picture (an allegory) rather than a portrait. Solveig Weber included the print among the portraits in her dissertation on Wagner iconography though she did not know the source of the image and was unsure of its authorship.5 What is the origin of the portrait elements in Fantin’s picture of Wagner? It is well known that Wagner did not like to pose in artists’ studios and got along badly with painters, in particular with famous artists who were used to having their own way. Given his celebrity, there are surprisingly few original depictions of Wagner in the media of oil painting and portrait busts. In a letter of December 10, 1871, to Cosima, Wagner complains of the prominent Munich portraitist Franz von Lenbach, “I was

An Allegorical Portrait of Richard Wagner with His Muse   •  19

with him today in his sumptuous studio from 1 o’clock until 4 . . . I was then subjected to 2 hours’ harassment, and made to sit first in one place and then in another, first like this and then like that.”6 Though Lenbach later became something of a court painter at Wahnfried, he had mixed feelings about Wagner, referring privately to the composer as “His Holiness” or “Kasperl [a clown puppet] from Bayreuth.” Wagner in turn, according to Cosima, sometimes found the “Prince of Painters” “antipathetic.”7 In 1880, Wagner’s improbable proposal to the famous Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin that he paint the sets for Parsifal reportedly resulted in the following exchange. Wagner: So you don’t seem to understand much about music? Böcklin: More, I hope, than you understand about painting, dear Master.8

Perhaps the most celebrated artist among those for whom Wagner posed, the French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, caught up with the composer in Palermo in 1882 barely a year before Wagner’s death. Wagner was in a good mood having just finished the full score of Parsifal, and he allowed a half-hour sitting for his portrait (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). It is doubtful that Wagner had heard of Renoir, though Cosima was aware that the painter belonged to the Impressionist school. Predictably Wagner was not enthusiastic about the result, comparing his pale image alternatively to that of a Protestant pastor or, more imaginatively, to “the embryo of a monkfish [ange] swallowed by an epicure who thinks it’s an oyster.”9 Renoir for his part seems to have been exasperated by the many provocative comments on social and artistic issues that Wagner made during the session. He put the painting aside, possibly unfinished, and did not exhibit it until after the composer’s death. In contrast to his reluctance to sit for portraits in painting or sculpture, Wagner was very interested in photographic portraits. He posed for dozens of such images in the leading studios of Munich, Paris, Brussels, and London. Previously unknown photographic portraits of Wagner have been discovered in recent years.10 Often he wore his favorite Reformation attire including a fur- or silk-trimmed jacket and a Rembrandtesque, soft velvet cap. This costume emphasized both his persona as an artist and his identification with the German Renaissance, the period of his beloved Meistersinger. Usually shown in partial profile, Wagner adopted expressions that exuded purposeful confidence. Wagner was able to exert more control over his idealized public image with photographers than with painters. Franz von Lenbach eventually painted many pictures of Wagner, mainly on commissions from Cosima. Despite the

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posing sessions mentioned by Wagner, however, most, if not all of the Lenbach portraits ultimately derive from photographs.11 Though a distinguished portrait painter, Fantin-Latour, unlike his friend Renoir, never had the rather mixed blessing of a posing session with Wagner. Nevertheless, he did observe Wagner on several occasions and has left written descriptions of the composer. During the inaugural Bayreuth Festival of 1876, Fantin saw Wagner several times and reported on his appearance in letters to his friends. From Bayreuth he wrote enthusiastically to the critic Edmond Maître, How pleased I am to be here! I saw Wagner from rather close up. He seems aged [vieilli], his hair nearly all white. He is quite small. An old scholar or diplomat. Madame [Cosima Wagner] closely resembles [her father, Franz] Liszt, whom one sees everywhere, always surrounded by women . . . [Wagner] seems tired, as if exhausted.12

Fantin’s correspondence with the German-born painter Otto Scholderer, published only in 2011, contains a similar description: “I saw Wagner from very close up last night. We slipped into the wings, where he was saying farewell to his entourage . . . I am sending you a very accurate portrait of him; he seems exhausted; I am afraid for him. One would say that this glory will be the end of him!”13 We know, however, from Scholderer’s reply that the portrait of Wagner was not a sketch by Fantin but a commercially available photograph. Fantin’s comment that Wagner looked aged is ambiguous; it could mean that the composer seemed old or that he looked older than he had when Fantin had seen him on some previous occasion. If the latter, the most likely occasion would have been during the concerts of his own music that Wagner conducted in Paris in January and February 1860. There is no evidence that Fantin sketched Wagner’s appearance during these brief observations. It therefore seems most probable that Fantin, like Lenbach and other artists, based his posthumous portrait of Wagner on a photograph. Many of Wagner’s photographic portraits, like the one illustrated here (and also in Jullien’s 1886 book; figure 2.3), show the composer in full profile. Other photographs show him seated at a desk in three-quarter profile, his hand in his jacket. Nevertheless, an exhaustive catalog of these portrait photographs14 does not include any in the precise pose chosen by Fantin. Perhaps future research will reveal that a photograph was one of the sources for the allegorical portrait that remains unique in Fantin-Latour’s large lithographic output.

Figure 2.3.   Richard Wagner. Source: Elliot and Fry, London, Richard Wagner, photograph, 1877. Adolphe Jullien, Richard Wagner, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: J. Rouam, 1886) 241, f Typ 815 86 4695, Houghton Library, Harvard University

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Notes  1. Richard Wagner, Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. S. Spencer and B. Millington (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988), 842.  2. Baÿreuther Festblaetter in Wort und Bild (Munich: Verlag des Autotype Company, 1884), 46.  3. Edward Lucie-Smith, Henri Fantin-Latour (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), 153.  4. Lucie-Smith, Henri Fantin-Latour, pl. 106.  5. Solveig Weber, Das Bild Richard Wagners (New York: Schott, 1993), vol. 1, p. 245; vol. 2, fig. 274.  6. Wagner, Selected Letters, 786.   7.  Walter Hansen, Richard Wagner: sein Leben in Bildern (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2007), 124.  8. Timothée Picard, ed., Dictionnaire encyclopédique Wagner (Arles: Actes Sud, 2010) , 1583 (my translation).  9. Cosima Wagner, Diaries, ed. M. Gregor-Dellin and Dieter Mack (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), trans. Geoffrey Skelton, vol. 2, 873 (January 15, 1882). 10.  G. Föttinger, Wagnerspectrum 1 (2011): 143f. 11. Weber, Das Bild Richard Wagners, vol. 2. 12.  Adolphe Jullien, Fantin-Latour, sa vie et ses amitiés (Paris: L. Laveur, 1909), 116, 119 (my translation). 13.  Correspondance entre Henri Fantin-Latour et Otto Scholderer (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2011), 253 (my translation). 14.  Martin Geck, Die Bildnisse Richard Wagners (Munich: Prestel, 1970).

CHAPTER THREE

Brünnhilde and Parsifal as Seen by Odilon Redon

In the decades following Richard Wagner’s death in 1883, one of the leading European visual artists most interested in Wagnerian subjects was the French painter and lithographer Odilon Redon (1840–1916). Though he was an exact contemporary of such Impressionist painters as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Redon had a career that began to develop only around 1880, much later than theirs. Redon is often classed with the Symbolist painters of the 1880s, the most famous of whom is Paul Gauguin, an acquaintance of Redon. Symbolism was in many ways a kind of neo-Romanticism that looked back for inspiration to the artists of the first half of the nineteenth century. This is perhaps the connection between Wagner’s operas and Redon: though we often emphasize Wagner’s uniqueness, he belonged to the Romantic movement as much as older artists like the composers Carl Maria von Weber and Hector Berlioz or the painter Eugène Delacroix. Like them, Wagner set his works in an idealized or mythical past. It is difficult to imagine him composing an opera on a contemporary subject: Wagner has no Traviata. Odilon Redon originally came to prominence through his sets of blackand-white lithographs noted in particular for the strangeness of their subjects such as a giant floating eyeball or a smiling spider. These lithographs often were inspired by, though only loosely related to, such celebrated works of the Romantic period as Francisco Goya’s grotesque etchings (the Caprichos and Disparates) and Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of horror. The images sometimes had no obvious interpretation, and Redon declined to provide any. Active early in his career as an art critic as well as an artist, Redon in a newspaper review 23

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in his native Bordeaux of the Paris Salon of 18681 voiced his disapproval of naturalistic art styles such as Realism (Gustave Courbet) and Impressionism (Eduard Manet and Claude Monet). Redon felt that these artists, in their focus on accurate depictions of everyday reality, were turning away from the true source of art: the imagination, which the poet Charles Baudelaire had called “the queen of the faculties.” In the review Redon demonstrates a tendency to generalize about art rather than concentrating on one specific work after another like most other salon reviewers. Though the subjects of Redon’s later works became less opaque and highly charged, they remained unusual choices for an avant-garde painter in the era of Impressionism because they were themes from Classical mythology (e.g., the chariot of Apollo and the winged horse Pegasus) or traditional religious subjects (e.g., the Madonna) treated in an untraditional manner. It is not surprising that Redon, especially in the later phase of his career, was attracted to Wagner’s world of remote Northern mythology that, like most of Redon’s subjects, had little to do with the realities of nineteenth-century urban life. The dreamlike quality of Redon’s early work continues in his Wagnerian subjects, particularly in his depictions of Parsifal. Redon was a competent amateur violinist and, as he wrote in his journal To Myself, “a faithful listener to concerts” who considered himself a “symphonist painter.”2 On the other hand, he had little opportunity during his early career to familiarize himself with Wagner’s operas. Redon missed Wagner’s lavish 1861 Paris production of Tannhaüser (see chapter 1) nor did he attend an 1869 production of Rienzi that, as Wagner had predicted, became a popular success. After the disastrous Franco-Prussian War and siege of Paris in 1870–1871, nationalist hostility in effect banned German opera, even in translation, from Parisian stages for two decades. As late as 1887, a production of Lohengrin at the Eden-Théâtre had to be canceled after one performance. The principal mode of gaining familiarity with Wagner’s operas in France (and indeed in much of the rest of Europe) was through piano transcriptions played at home, with which Redon was familiar (he was friendly with the Wagnerian-influenced composer Ernest Chausson and the Catalan piano virtuoso Ricardo Viñes) or through occasional concert performances of orchestral excerpts. We know that Redon attended the Concerts Lamoureux in Paris, where he heard music by Wagner.3 A reluctant traveler, Redon in correspondence later mused about a visit to the Bayreuth Festival, Before leaving Paris I heard Tannhaüser with great emotion. That gives me the desire to go to Bayreuth one day; that would suggest crowds of ideas to me. What a new art, for the eyes as well! Yes, Wagner, with his cycles and

Brünnhilde and Parsifal as Seen by Odilon Redon   •  25

the whole world that he evokes, the ink that has spilled about him, was really somebody. We must not yet really judge all that. His writings make me think.4

In the end, however, Redon never made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth. Rather than regarding Wagner’s works as the culmination of modern art, Redon preferred to use them as a source of reflection and inspiration for his own work. Since Redon did not date his works, little was known about their evolution until the recent publication of his livre de raison, or listing of authentic works.5 A few earlier painters had kept such books or lists, though true to his less-organized persona as a writer, Redon left a livre that consists of several lists of works, payment records, and so on arranged according to a variety of criteria. Three notebooks record sales of works; “noirs,” or drawings, as well as pastels and oil paintings; and prints with a general chronology (Paris, Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet). From the lists we learn that he began to treat some Wagnerian subjects in 1884, the year following Wagner’s death, and continued to do so until at least 1905, when he began to stop recording the production and sale of his works. Redon’s opinions of specific composers, as on other subjects, can be difficult to pin down. His musical tastes seem to have been wide-ranging; his friends claimed he was interested in the music of Bach, Beethoven, and César Franck, among others. In his journal, however, with its discussions of many painters, Redon devotes sections to only two composers: Robert Schumann and Hector Berlioz, exemplars of pure instrumental composition since their operas were little known. (He executed a Symbolist Homage to Robert Schumann in pastel.) Redon acknowledges the greatness of the two composers without trying to define it. He is more interested in his view of their contrasting personalities: Schumann as generous and accepting, Berlioz (Redon’s primary subject) as ambitious, angry, and disappointed.6 Redon’s only mention of Wagner in To Myself was written in 1882, the year the composer presented Parsifal. It comes in a discussion of the lithographs of Henri Fantin-Latour, probably the best-known contemporary interpreter of Wagnerian themes. After critiquing the older painter’s emphasis on “worldly” external detail and his handling of color and composition, Redon continues, Laborious and careful research led this artist to attempt the interpretation of music through painting, forgetting that no color can render the musical world which is uniquely and deeply internal and without any support from real nature. Not having succeeded, he doubtless takes revenge in discharging his sorrows through lithography in pale, soft sketches on the poems of the musician,

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Wagner. But whether he draws out of the “libretti” of Brahms, Schumann, or Berlioz, it is always the expression of a vague German sentimentality that is not new for us and that needs to be given with less emphasis.7

In discussing Fantin’s art, Redon inverts a criticism of Wagner that was common in France in the 1850s and 1860s that Wagner was trying (perhaps through his early use of the Leitmotif) to imitate the effects of realist painting in his works (“the Courbet of music”). Redon’s attitude toward Fantin must have been ambivalent since the older painter appears to have taught him the technique of transfer lithography, which was the basis of Redon’s early success. In his writings, Redon repeatedly speaks with approval of the suggestive, indeterminate, or ambiguous nature of music as a model for visual artists. His belief in the esthetic superiority of the art of music due to its abstract or intuitive nature was widespread among visual artists and theorists of the time, including Walter Pater.8 In most of his own Wagnerian works, Redon avoids the dramatic scenes often favored by Fantin-Latour, preferring static images (with the important exception of Brünnhilde’s immolation) that capture the spiritual quality or essence of the character he is depicting. Many commentators on Redon’s work have noted his use of Wagnerian subjects. In recent years a number of art-historical studies have been devoted to his Wagnerian images, mainly the lithographs, and in the broader context of artists’ interest in Wagner in the late nineteenth century.9 There is no study discussing all of Redon’s Wagnerian pictures, which include four lithographs, a charcoal drawing, and two pastel paintings. Additional works by Redon on Wagnerian themes once existed but are now lost. The Wagnerian subjects make up only a small part of Redon’s oeuvre and cannot be considered in isolation from his work as a whole. Nevertheless, the surviving Wagnerian works are consistent in subject matter. Over a period of more than twenty years, only Brünnhilde and Parsifal are depicted. These subjects were drawn from Wagner’s most recently produced works: the Ring operas, premiered in their complete form at Bayreuth in 1876, and Parsifal of 1882. Redon’s career followed an unusual pattern: initially he was better known in literary than artistic circles.10 Among his critical champions were leading members of the literary avant-garde including the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. In Huysmans’s influential, anti-naturalistic novel A rebours (Against the Grain, 1884) dealing with an eccentric art collector and aesthete, Redon and the painter Gustave Moreau are the only living artists given favorable mention. With Mallarmé, the unofficial arbiter of the literary avant-garde, Redon planned to produce a lavish artist’s book of the poet’s works though Mallarmé’s death prevented its completion.

Brünnhilde and Parsifal as Seen by Odilon Redon   •  27

At this time Richard Wagner’s influence in France was exerted less through his music than his writings, especially his popularization of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the synthesis or union of the arts in one work.11 Both Huysmans and Mallarmé contributed articles on Wagner to the important literary journal Revue wagnérienne, founded in 1885. Redon first recorded a Wagnerian subject in his livre de raison in 1884. It was A Warrior: For Wagner. This drawing, probably in charcoal, was undoubtedly a response to the composer’s death in the preceding year. The work is lost. The first surviving Wagnerian subject picture listed in the livre de raison is Brünnhilde on Horseback, a charcoal drawing made in 1885 that was sold at auction in 1971 (figure 3.1).12 The background of literary interest in Wagner may have provided an impetus for Redon’s turn to Wagnerian subjects: in 1885 he contributed to the Revue wagnérienne, probably by invitation, a second treatment of Brünnhilde, this time in lithography. Redon’s first two Brünnhilde images, though nearly contemporary, are handled quite differently. The charcoal drawing is relatively large for a work on paper: more than

Figure 3.1.  Brünnhilde on Horseback. Source: Odilon Redon, Brünnhilde on Horseback, charcoal, c. 1885. Sale, Kornfeld und Klipstein, Bern, 10–12 June 1971, no. 1088.

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twenty inches in height. Brünnhilde, her face in nearly full profile facing right, crouches atop her rearing horse, Grane. She wears a light shift that covers most of her torso while leaving the breasts exposed. She raises her right forearm, and in her hand is a small object she prepares to throw. This surely depicts Brünnhilde at the conclusion of Götterdämmerung throwing the ring into the Rhine, which is shown as a small and rather placid stream at the right. Such a gesture would be clearer to the viewer than showing the heroine wearing the ring as she rides into the fire. The mountainous landscape behind the figure at the left is undefined. Most unusually, the image shows a second, more sketchy Brünnhilde seated behind the first. She carries a large, ornate, circular shield behind her on the left but otherwise her face and costume are not detailed. Her right arm is raised and her forearm and hand thrown far back, as if to hurl something forcefully. Grane also has a curious feature in possessing vestigial wings, suggesting that the artist might originally have thought of depicting the winged horse Pegasus. In contrast to these unresolved elements, the horse’s head and mane, and the grasses in the foreground, are treated in detail. One might describe the sketchy Brünnhilde figure as a pentimento (an image drawn before an artist’s second thought or revision). While pentimenti are usually covered over, however, Redon has intentionally left the entire figure visible. He apparently regarded the drawing as finished, and it is probably the work on this subject that he exhibited at the forward-looking Salon des XX in Brussels in 1890. The indeterminate aspect of the composition, if anything, enhances a modern quality that has appealed to artists: the distinguished British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986) at one time owned the Brünnhilde. The critic Teodor de Wyzewa wrote about Redon in the Revue wagnérienne in June 1885, a few months before the artist’s contribution to the journal. Wyzewa included Redon among the few practitioners of “Wagnerian painting,” an imprecise term referring to artists who worked by suggestion rather than description.13 Around the same time Léo Rouanet defended Redon’s art against the accusation that it was too literary, citing Wagner’s advocacy of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and Charles Morice and other literary critics linked the names of Wagner and Redon in their often diffuse theories of Symbolism, sometimes to the painter’s dismay.14 Redon’s lithographic Brünnhilde of 1885 (figure 3.2) is a small work, proportioned to fit the dimensions of the Wagnerian journal. The subject’s face is in full profile, this time to the left, though her body, as in the earlier work, largely faces toward the viewer. Encased somewhat awkwardly in heavy armor with a helmet and large shield, she stands before sketchy mountainous lands as in the charcoal drawing. She is shown here as she appears in Die

Figure 3.2.  Brünnhilde. Source: Odilon Redon, Brünnhilde, lithograph, Revue wagnérienne, 1885, TS 40.40, Harvard Theater Collection. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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Walküre, still fully active as Wotan’s warrior daughter. Redon did not see the opera until the 1890s—perhaps in Paris in 1893 and certainly in London in October 1895.15 Nevertheless, he was already familiar with it to some extent if only through the libretto. Brünnhilde’s youthful, small, sensitive features and down-turned mouth seem to contrast with her formidable armor, suggesting a certain vulnerability. Redon’s earliest surviving depictions of Parsifal date from 1891. He had not seen Wagner’s opera, which at this time was performed only in Bayreuth; nevertheless, Redon must have had some familiarity with Wagner’s version of the Parsifal legend. The piano and full scores of the opera had been published, and the plot and interpretation of Wagner’s work had been discussed in a detailed article by the critic Edouard Schuré in the Revue wagnérienne in 188516 as well as in later articles. The subject interested other artists of the period: the young Belgian Symbolist Jean Delville, for example, produced at least two works related to the last act of Parsifal: a charcoal drawing of Parsifal as an androgynous, disembodied face in a state of ecstatic vision (1890; private collection); and a strange painting in which the hero peers from behind a curtain at the distant Monsalvat (1894; Brussels, Musées Royaux; see chapter 6). By this time Redon was nevertheless the best-known artist working on Wagnerian subjects. Redon was thinking about the meaning of the Parsifal story by the summer of 1891 albeit in somewhat negative terms. Writing to a friend, Redon stated that despite what moralists may say, older men (Redon was then fifty-one) regret the unfulfilled desires of their youth. Referring no doubt to the hero’s encounter with the Flower Maidens and Kundry, Redon affirmed, “Renunciation, Parsifal to the contrary, leaves a malaise.”17 Redon began a lithograph showing Parsifal frontally at bust length, which we may call Parsifal I. A line from a crack in the lithographic stone at the level of the figure’s forehead caused Redon to reject the print after a few proofs were printed, and only three are known today.18 Not wishing to waste the stone, Redon inverted it and depicted an aged druidess, the crack being hidden in the costume of the druidess. While not a Wagnerian subject, the Druidess suggests Redon’s casual attitude toward the interchangeability of male and female figures, which can sometimes be difficult to tell apart in his work. Redon’s final version, Parsifal II, mentioned in the livre de raison as completed by October 1891, has the same composition as the rejected plate yet the two images differ considerably (figure 3.3). Judging from reproductions, the left side of the face in Parsifal I is in deep shadow. The dark eyes, which seem to glance to the viewer’s right, and the slightly asymmetrical mouth give the figure an alert, active look. In the final version, Parsifal’s broad face is smooth and more evenly lighted, producing a decidedly youthful appear-

Brünnhilde and Parsifal as Seen by Odilon Redon   •  31

ance. His large eyes look forward yet are not focused, giving the figure a detached, dreamy quality that heightens the impression of his innocence. The decoration of his helmet and costume as well as the detail of the architectural setting behind him have been much reduced, placing all emphasis on the face. Although he already holds the sacred spear that he wrested from Klingsor, Parsifal hardly conveys the impression of a man of action. As in Jean Delville’s contemporaneous drawing, the figure has an androgynous quality, and it makes an interesting contrast to the similarly costumed but more forceful-looking Brünnhilde in Redon’s earlier lithograph. Symbolist authors posited Parsifal’s androgyny as an aspect of his sexual purity and spirituality. While Redon maintained a certain distance from the Symbolist and spiritualist currents of the time, he certainly was aware of this interpretation of the hero’s personality, which has some support in statements made by Wagner himself.19 Redon attempts to convey Parsifal’s spiritual essence rather than the events of the story. In this he is faithful to Wagner’s opera, which relies more on the presentation of the characters’ thoughts and emotions than on scenes of action.

Figure 3.3.   Parsifal II. Source: Odilon Redon, Parsifal II, lithograph, 1891: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of W.G. Russell Allen, 60.698, photo © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Redon’s last Wagnerian lithograph, Brünnhilde (Götterdämmerung), appeared in 1894 at a time when Redon was particularly interested in Wagner and his operas (figure 3.4). In his livre de raison Redon listed an oil painting of Tannhäuser for 1894, around the time he saw this opera for the first time, but that painting is lost. Though the pose in the Brünnhilde is similar to that

Figure 3.4.   Brünnhilde (Götterdämmerung). Source: Odilon Redon, Brünnhilde (Götterdämmerung), lithograph, 1894, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 22.104.3

Brünnhilde and Parsifal as Seen by Odilon Redon   •  33

in the earlier lithographic image, the draftsmanship is completely different. In contrast to the broad treatment of the earlier Brünnhilde and Parsifal II, Redon here uses a delicate linear style particularly in the outline of the face and the long, flowing hair. While the cap-like treatment of the head and the topknot somewhat recall the earlier Brünnhilde’s helmet, the figure otherwise wears a loose-fitting dress instead of armor. Standing before faintly sketched tree trunks, Brünnhilde has only a flowering branch at left as her attribute. Her face, with its down-turned mouth, nevertheless shows the same determination as the earlier figure: perhaps she is plotting her revenge for Siegfried’s supposed betrayal. Redon dated his emergence as an artist to the mid-1870s when he gave up trying to achieve perfect drawing in an academic style. Nevertheless, as this lithograph shows, he could draw very subtly when he wished to do so. Some critics have seen the influence of English Pre-Raphaelite art here or, in particular, the drawing style of the brilliant English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898).20 Beardsley, unlike Redon, was a true Wagner fanatic who saw every Wagnerian operatic performance he could attend in London or Paris. Many of Beardsley’s designs on Wagnerian themes were published in British journals, and Redon also could have seen them in exhibitions during his trips to visit collectors in London. Beardsley’s drawings, though, have an erotic and satirical emphasis that is foreign to Redon’s seriousness. After 1900 Redon virtually ceased making lithographs or charcoal drawings, concentrating instead on brilliantly colorful works in pastels or oil. He even attempted large decorative paintings: these were commissioned for specific locations and had to be executed on-site while all of Redon’s earlier works had been completed in his Paris apartment. Estimates of the dates of Redon’s late works vary widely because as noted around 1905 he stopped recording the completion and sale of his works in the livre de raison. Even the recorded works are difficult to identify, however, due to repetition of titles or subjects. Redon’s move to color opened many new formal possibilities, and some of the late works are in a loose technique that approaches abstraction. He continued, however, to produce works on the same subjects as before. Redon was relatively casual about the subject matter of his works, an attitude often regarded today as modern. There is some evidence that Redon himself was unsure of the subjects of some of his works. In a list of 321 drawings in the livre de raison, Redon says of the next-to-last item, “320 Drawing. Is this a Parsifal, a bard, a barbarous and mystic knight? Head covered and viewed from the front.” Since Redon is usually specific about the medium used, this does not seem to be a work we know of. The discussion of the work

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near the end of the list may mean not that it is recent but merely that the artist postponed discussing this ambiguous subject until the end. A large pastel and charcoal titled Parsifal retains some of the strangeness of Redon’s earliest lithographs (see plate 3.1). The work was long owned by members of Redon’s family, who provided the identification of the subject. The work has recently occupied a central place in the Redon room of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. It is relatively restrained in color, in keeping with the somber tone of Wagner’s opera: the figure wears a black robe and cowl over which a gold-colored cloak is fastened by a strap across the chest. His face is young and bearded with large eyes, a dreamy expression, and tonsure-like hair. He stands before a landscape of high mountains and a gold-and-pink sky. Redon does not include a Parsifal in the chronological list of his later works though there are various references to “Ohannès,” that is, Saint John the Baptist in the desert. A listing for “Saint John” might indicate another traditional subject, that is, Saint John the Evangelist on the island of Patmos writing his Gospel. However, the usual iconographic attributes of these saints (an animal-skin cloak or an open book) are not present here. On the other hand, the figure does not hold a spear as in the earlier Parsifal lithographs. The monk- or pilgrim-like attire of the young figure in the pastel fits with the general meaning of the Parsifal story. In Wagner’s scenario an older Parsifal returns to Monsalvat dressed in armor, which he removes, but this detail is often omitted in productions. A hard-to-read outcropping at the upper right in the image may represent the knights’ castle. The loose handling of the pigments suggests that this is a late work, and specialists have proposed various dates from 1890 onward, an unusual disparity for a picture by a wellknown modern artist. The museum dates the Parsifal on stylistic grounds to 1912, a very late stage of Redon’s career. The work could have been done in two phases: an early drawing in charcoal (the black robe), whether of Parsifal or some other subject, later reworked in pastel colors, a procedure Redon is known to have followed in other cases. The strong emotions expressed in the opera are notably absent in this representation as in Redon’s lithographs of this subject. Redon again seeks to capture the character’s spirituality now not as androgyny but through the weary inwardness of Parsifal’s lowered gaze. The latest, and perhaps the most unusual, of Redon’s Wagnerian subjects is a pastel Brünnhilde on Horseback, now in a private collection in New York (see plate 3.2). At twenty-nine inches in width, it is the largest of Redon’s surviving Wagnerian pictures. The heroine, as in the charcoal drawing of 1885, is again shown on her rearing horse and in near profile to the right. Her right arm is held far back to hurl the ring into the Rhine. But if the composition is similar, the handling is radically different with large blocks

Brünnhilde and Parsifal as Seen by Odilon Redon   •  35

of brilliant, undefined color, extremely loose drawing, and flat, conceptual modeling especially in the body of the horse, which is mostly blue in color. A large central core of orange indicates Siegfried’s burning pyre while the green-and-blue area at the right is associated with the Rhine. Grane’s rearing pose is explained by a water snake that crawls beneath his hooves where Redon also signed the work. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the work is the depiction of Brünnhilde in the nude. The idea of a nude Brünnhilde was certainly unusual if not unique up to this time. It probably did not derive from any of the medieval epics Wagner consulted during his preparations for the Ring. Nor was Redon particularly known as an artist who depicted the nude. Although painting from a nude model was long the core of the academic art curriculum, Redon had relatively little formal training. In 1904 Redon, then aged sixty-four, hired his first nude model. In the following years he became more interested in painting subjects calling for the female nude, and this Brünnhilde probably dates from this period. As in the earlier charcoal drawing, a detailed pentimento above and to the left of Brünnhilde is clearly visible under strong lighting. Yellow flames burst from the roof of a square castle tower representing Valhalla. Before it, sketched in an orange-red similar to Brünnhilde’s hair, stands at least one armored figure with right arm raised, echoing Brünnhilde’s gesture. This is perhaps the Valkyrie Waltraute who unsuccessfully urged Brünnhilde to give up the ring. Did Redon treat any Wagnerian subjects other than Brünnhilde and Parsifal? A lost painting of Tannhäuser has already been mentioned. At least one critic reports an undocumented drawing of Isolde though it is not now possible to locate this work.21 A large retrospective exhibition of Redon’s work at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 2011 included a little-known oil painting from a private collection depicting two figures in a boat at sea. Beginning in the late 1890s, Redon recorded more than a dozen works with the word Barque in the title. Redon seems to have recorded the Paris picture in May 1907 as “858 Boat (gray sail) four figures. Good small painting.” The boats in these pictures carry one or two passengers, usually women, but this scene is atypical in that it depicts two males. A large figure in a brilliant red cloak and hood sits upright at the tiller while a young figure in shirtsleeves leans wearily against his shoulder. In the front of the vessel, near the sail, are two ghostly forms, probably sailors. The curator of the Paris exhibition suggests that the picture depicts a scene from Tristan und Isolde.22 The action is not shown on the stage but is described in a monologue by Kurwenal. When the wounded Tristan on awakening asks how he came from Cornwall to Brittany, the loyal Kurwenal replies,

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No horse hither you rode: a vessel bore you across. But on my shoulders down to the ship you had to ride: they are broad, they carried you to the shore. Now you are at home once more; your own the land, your native land.23

In the painting the ship sails under a brilliant sky before high cliffs that might be found in a number of places along the coast of Britain or of Brittany, an area where Redon regularly vacationed. The choice of a scene not actually shown on the stage suggests that if this is indeed the subject, Redon was working from Wagner’s printed libretto. Although Redon claimed to have lost his early interest in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, he continued to produce pictures based on Richard Wagner’s operas in the late period of his career. Redon’s principal Wagnerian subjects, Parsifal and Brünnhilde, exemplify different aspects of psychological and moral life. For Redon, Parsifal, though a warrior, represents interiority and contemplation; and as we know, Parsifal survives to be eventually recognized as king at Monsalvat. Brünnhilde’s engagement, in contrast, is exteriorized and uncompromising, resulting in her death. Redon’s pictures of these subjects demonstrate the strong interest Wagner’s operas continued to arouse in some of the leading visual artists of the late nineteenth century.

Notes   1.  Odilon Redon, review of Paris Salon of 1868 in La Gironde (May 19, June 9, July 1, and August 2, 1868). See Odilon Redon, Critiques d’art, ed. Robert Coustet (Bordeaux: W. Blake, 1987), 43–66.   2.  Odilon Redon, To Myself, trans. M. Jacob and J. L. Wasserman (New York: George Braziller, 1986), 19. The original French edition, Odilon Redon, A soi-même (Paris: José Corti, 1923), was published after the artist’s death. Though the title was Redon’s own, he did not finalize the contents and order of the work.   3.  Odilon Redon, Lettres d’Odilon Redon, 1878–1916 (Paris: Van Oest, 1923), 23.   4. Redon, Lettres, 25, 27 (my translation).   5.  Rodolphe Rapetti, ed., Odilon Redon: Prince de rêve, 1840–1916 (Grand Palais, Paris, 2011). The catalog of this major exhibition includes a transcription, “Le ‘Livre de raison’ d’Odilon Redon,” in CD-ROM format. A massive catalogue raisonné of Redon’s paintings and drawings, published before the livre de raison became avail-

Brünnhilde and Parsifal as Seen by Odilon Redon   •  37

able, is arranged not in the usual chronological order but by subject matter. See Alec Wildenstein et al., Odilon Redon: Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint et dessiné (Paris: Wildenstein Institute, 1992–1998). A catalog of Redon’s lithographs and etchings had already been published in the artist’s lifetime in André Mellerio, Odilon Redon (Paris: Secrétariat, 1913).   6.  Redon, To Myself, 117–19.   7. Redon, To Myself, 130.   8.  Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” Fortnightly Review, October 1877.   9.  Michael Tymkiw, “Pictorially Transcribing Music: The Wagner Lithographs of Henri Fantin-Latour and Odilon Redon,” in Martha Ward and Ann Leonard, eds., Looking and Listening in 19th Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 51–59; and Rachel Sloan, “The Condition of Music: Wagnerism and Printmaking in France and Britain,” Art History 32, no. 3 (June 2009): 545–77. See also Astrid Sebb, “Peinture Wagnérienne: Phasen und Aspekte der Wagner-Rezeption in der französischen bildenden Kunst zwischen 1861 und 1914” (dissertation, University of Düsseldorf, 1999). 10.  Recently this aspect of Redon’s career has been exhaustively analyzed in Dario Gamboni, The Brush and the Pen: Odilon Redon and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 11.  Wagner’s influence on Symbolist literature and art, particularly in France, is discussed in Grange Wooley, Richard Wagner et le symbolisme français (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1931); and Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Die Symbolisten und Richard Wagner (1991). 12. Bern, Kornfeld und Klipstein, Moderne Kunst, sale, June 10–12, 1971, no. 1088, ill. Tafel 16. 13.  Teodor de Wyzewa, “Peinture wagnérienne: Le Salon de 1885,” Revue wagnérienne 1, no. 5 (June 8, 1885): 155; and Teodor de Wyzewa, “Notes sur la peinture wagnérienne et la Salon de 1886,” Revue wagnérienne 2, no. 4 (May 8, 1886): 113. 14.  Léo Rouanet, “La 8e Exposition des impressionistes,” [Perpignan] Le Passant (June 5, 1886): 199–202; and Charles Morice, La Littérature de tout à l’heure (Paris: Perrin, 1889), 281. 15.  Redon, Lettres, 26. 16.  Edouard Schuré, “Parsifal,” Revue wagnérienne 1, no. 10 (November 8, 1885): 270–81. The journal subsequently published other articles on this opera including one by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, later the husband of Wagner’s daughter Eva, as well as a sonnet by the poet Paul Verlaine. 17.  Redon, To Myself, 14. 18. See Tymkiw, “Pictorially Transcribing Music,” fig. 49; and Suzanne Folds McCullagh and Inge Christine Swenson, “A New ‘Parsifal’ by Odilon Redon,” Print Collector’s Newsletter 7, no. 4 (September–October 1976): 108. 19. Jean-Jacques Nattier, Wagner androgyne (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1990), 195–96, quoting Cosima Wagner, Tagebücher (June 27, 1880).

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20. On the possible mutual influences of Beardsley’s and Redon’s Wagnerian subjects, see Sloan, “Condition of Music,” 565–67. 21.  Suzy Levy, Odilon Redon: Lettres inédites (Paris: Corti, 1987), 162, mentions a drawing of this subject in the collection of Redon’s patron Andries Bonger in Almen, The Netherlands. The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, which now houses most of this collection, has no record of a work of this kind (Lucinda Timmermans, personal communication, May 1, 2014). 22.  Paris, Grand Palais, 2011, cat. 116 (text by Rodolphe Rapetti). 23.  The Opera Libretto Library (New York: Avenel, 1980), 338.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Wagnerian” Themes in Pre-Raphaelite Painting

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was an English avant-garde art movement that first rose to prominence in 1848–1849 during a year of revolution in Europe. In that year, Wagner had to flee Dresden after his involvement in an uprising there. The leading Pre-Raphaelite painters, William Holman Hunt (b. 1827), John Millais (b. 1829), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (b. 1828), were some fifteen years younger than Wagner and had limited contact with the composer and his music. Nevertheless, there are numerous points of similarity between his works and theirs in the choice of subject matter. Critics rightly emphasize the modernism of both Wagner and the painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (or PRB, as they were known). Yet all came out of the Romantic movement that dominated all the arts during much of the first half of the nineteenth century throughout Europe. Romantic art and music often conveyed violent emotions and extreme situations. Historicizing subjects frequently were chosen; themes from Greek and Roman antiquity, often treated in the eighteenth century, increasingly were replaced by those from more modern eras, in particular the medieval and Renaissance periods. This late Romantic medievalism is particularly evident in Wagner’s choice of subjects for his operas: nearly all are set in the Middle Ages or in vaguely medieval mythological settings. Wagner’s most modern hero, the cobbler-poet Hans Sachs of Die Meistersinger, was born in 1494; for Wagner, contemporary operatic subjects were not an attraction. While none of the PRB’s pictures (except for some late works in the 1890s) derive directly from Wagner’s operas, there is a considerable parallel development of themes between the English artistic group and the composer. 39

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Though the leading PRB artists are not household names in the United States like the members of the French Impressionists, they were, and remain, extremely popular in Britain. Nearly every year brings another large monograph or exhibition catalog devoted to the group generally or to its individual members.1 The PRB exerted varying levels of influence on a wide variety of British artists, and it can be difficult to decide which ones to include in the group. Their activity was of long duration, occupying the second half of the nineteenth century and three generations of artists who trained with or were influenced by each other. Nevertheless, themes that could be called Wagnerian take up a limited yet significant portion of their work. We will focus on works by six leading members of the group, acknowledging that a complete catalog of PRB-related paintings and drawings on these themes is beyond the scope of this chapter. While a comparison of PRB works with Wagner’s operas reveals a substantial overlap of subjects, the treatment of these themes may vary significantly. Depictions of Tristan and Isolde, Tannhäuser, and the story of the Holy Grail as well as versions of the story of Siegfried all make their appearance. Regular performances of Wagner’s operas in London began only after 1875 when the first generation of PRB artists were already well established in their careers. Nor could the PRB artists make the pilgrimage to Bayreuth, like later artists who engaged with Wagnerian subjects such as Henri Fantin-Latour, John Singer Sargent, and Fernand Khnopff. Like Wagner, the PRB turned to modern editions of medieval poems, histories, and legends. Though their sources were different from those used by the German master, they used some of the same stories but with differences in emphases and details. Tales like that of Tristan and Isolde and of the Holy Grail had an international resonance, appearing in the literature of many countries. Several of these artists were also professional poets or novelists, and some were close to prominent English literary figures of the time.2 Conjunctions of subject between Wagner and the PRB are particularly evident in the earliest part of Wagner’s career when he based his opera librettos on well-known literary works rather than creating the stories himself. These include Die Feen, after Carlo Gozzi’s play La donna serpente; Das Liebesverbot, derived from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure; and Rienzi, based on the popular novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi: The Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835). One of the few sources used by both the PRB and Wagner, BulwerLytton’s novel is based on a historical figure, Cola di Rienzo, or Rienzi, who in the fourteenth century led a popular revolt against aristocratic factions in Rome. Though he took power under the ancient title of the people’s tribune, Rienzi began to show dictatorial tendencies and was eventually overthrown. Wagner first read the novel in translation in 1837, and it was reissued shortly before the beginning of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

“Wagnerian” Themes in Pre-Raphaelite Painting   •  41

In writing Rienzi, Wagner envisioned a grand opera in the French manner with many crowd scenes and spectacular effects. He unsuccessfully proposed the work to the Paris Opera. With a recommendation from the influential Parisian composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, he was able to present its premiere at the Dresden Opera in 1843. The work was an overwhelming public success— much more so than the composer’s nearly contemporary Flying Dutchman. Though Wagner later excluded Rienzi from the canon of works to be produced in his theater at Bayreuth, it was performed elsewhere with Wagner’s permission. The enormous scale of the opera, Wagner’s longest, has led to infrequent productions in more recent times though it is still performed occasionally. The three leading Pre-Raphaelites, Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti, displayed their works in the Royal Academy and other exhibitions of 1849. They advocated collaboration and signed their works with the then-mysterious acronym “PRB.” Hunt, who was to remain the most faithful to the original goals and methods of the group, demonstrated its radical approach in a painting he submitted: Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother, Slain in a Skirmish between the Colonna and the Orsini Factions (plate 4.1). As a painter and limited to depicting one dramatic moment as opposed to the more expansive story conveyed in Wagner’s opera, Hunt chooses the backstory that is the origin of Rienzi’s revolutionary leadership. Wagner does not include this moment in his work, which begins with Rienzi in full rebellion. However, in act 1 Rienzi relates the story in full to the sympathetic knight Adriano, a member of the Colonna faction. The technique of Hunt’s picture may not seem unusual to viewers today, but it differed sharply from the rules of art as taught at the Royal Academy of Arts, where all the PRB painters had recently studied. The picture is brightly and evenly lighted throughout with little attempt to depict shadows or gradations of tones through superimposed paint glazes. Colors are bright and local, and the paint surface is so finished that hardly any individual strokes are visible. The PRB stressed the importance of truth to nature in their work, and in their first paintings this led to an obsessive attention to detail. The vegetation at the left and lower right, for example, has a degree of detail that, at the time, would not normally have been lavished on subordinate areas of a picture. The medieval costumes are also depicted as accurately as possible. The Royal Academy taught that a subject picture should have a primary figural group to which the rest of the composition is subordinated. While the Pietà-like group of Rienzi and his dead brother clearly is the most important element, visual interest is distributed relatively evenly across the entire scene. The medieval townscape and the landscape background, which typically would recede in layers, are here blocked by the backs of the mounted soldiers, and there is no attempt at atmospheric perspective effects.

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In keeping with their ideals of collaboration, Hunt’s fellow PRB members posed for the heads of Rienzi (Rossetti) and Adriano (Millais), here shown at the scene of the crime at the left. Hunt carefully distinguishes between the clothing and facial types of the aristocratic Adriano and the middle-class Rienzi. Rienzi’s pose, though appropriate to the situation, is highly dramatic, a common aspect of the PRB’s early pictures, while Adriano’s pose of sympathy could be regarded as somewhat stiff and awkward. Since the PRB admired the early fifteenth-century Italian and Flemish painters who preceded the sophisticated Raphael, the stiffness may have been an intentional homage to those painters whose simplicity and directness the PRB sought to emulate. Though initial critical reaction was mixed, Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti soon were to become famous and especially for their fanatical attention to detail. A large picture executed in this technique might take a year to complete. All of these artists depicted literary subjects: Shakespeare’s familiar dramas were favorite themes, with important PRB paintings based on scenes from Hamlet; The Two Gentlemen of Verona; The Tempest; and Measure for Measure. The latter play was a source for both John Millais’s picture Mariana in the Moated Grange (1850–1851; plate 4.2) as well as Wagner’s Das Liebesverbot. Wagner had moved the story from Shakespeare’s Vienna to Palermo, Sicily, contrasting a repressed German governor with a lively and open Italian population. This opera, only occasionally performed today,3 was Wagner’s first to be produced, receiving one performance in Magdeburg in 1836. Though later dismissing the opera as “a sin of my youth,” Wagner thought enough of it to give the manuscript of the score as a gift to his patron, Ludwig II of Bavaria. Hunt also created a work, Claudio and Isabella (1850–53; plate 4.3), that was drawn from Shakespeare’s play. Together with the corrupt governor (called Friedrich by Wagner), Mariana, Claudio, and Isabella constitute the principal characters of Das Liebesverbot. In the Millais painting, Mariana stretches wearily as she works on her embroidery. She has been jilted by her fiancé for financial reasons. Shakespeare alludes only briefly to Mariana’s lonely life in a remote farmhouse: “There, at the moated grange resides this dejected Mariana” (Measure for Measure, III, i). Millais’s picture follows a later source, Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Mariana” (1830), which elaborates on this part of Shakespeare’s story. Details such as autumn leaves and a mouse on the floor suggest her household’s decline. In Wagner’s revision of the story, Mariana is the governor’s abandoned wife and has entered a convent. Claudio, under sentence of death for violating a “ban on love,” is visited in prison by his sister Isabella, a novice in the same convent. Isabella, who has been offered the chance to save her brother

“Wagnerian” Themes in Pre-Raphaelite Painting   •  43

by yielding her virginity to the hypocrite Friedrich, expresses her reluctance to do so, and as depicted by Hunt, Claudio angrily turns away from her. As in the case of Hunt’s and Wagner’s Rienzi, works in different media derive from the same literary source though here, in Wagner’s case, the story has been substantially revised. Opera was less important as a source for the subjects of the PRB’s paintings; however, of the PRB, Millais was a regular operagoer.4 During the early 1850s he painted a series of pictures based on well-known operas of the day. In 1852 he exhibited the popular, pathos-laden A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge. The painting derived from Meyerbeer’s tragic grand opera Les Huguenots (1836), which Millais had seen at Covent Garden. In 1852–1853 he painted The Proscribed Royalist, 1651, showing a Puritan woman visiting the hiding place of her royalist lover, the story having been taken from Vincenzo Bellini’s I puritani (1834). And in 1855 Millais completed a picture derived from Gaetano Donizetti’s comic opera La fille du régiment (1840).5 Donizetti, Bellini, and Meyerbeer were all composers whom Wagner had emulated to some extent in his early operas Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi. Beginning in the late 1850s, Millais created designs for small wood engravings to serve as illustrations in popular magazines and books. In 1857 he returned to the subject of Mariana. In his earlier work, Mariana’s stretching pose emphasized the sensuality of her body in a manner unusual for Victorian painting. In the wood engraving, Mariana, in a bare alcove, doubles over in grief, burying her face in her hands, her body hidden in her voluminous clothing. In 1860 Millais attempted the subject of Tannhäuser as a wood engraving that was published in 1861.6 The hero is shown stalwartly resisting the entreaties of a group of seminude maidens as he prepares to leave the Venusberg. Perhaps coincidentally, 1860 was the year in which Wagner, in Paris, was preparing the lavish production of his revised Tannhäuser, which had its unsuccessful premiere there early in the following year. Wide coverage was given to this production of the opera, excerpts of which Wagner had performed in concert in London in 1855. The PRB artists also depicted religious and historical subjects as well as scenes of contemporary life though the latter category was less emphasized in their later work. Beginning in the mid-1850s, medievalism became another important aspect of their interests. At the time, medieval miniature paintings were beginning to be collected and published, and medieval literary texts were increasingly available for study. As a formal group, the PRB lasted only a few years. Hunt concentrated increasingly on hyper-realistic Christian subjects, traveling regularly to the Holy Land to obtain authentic backgrounds and

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models. Millais, faced with having to support a family, gradually transitioned to a more rapid, accessible technique especially in portraits of members of the upper classes. It was Dante Gabriel Rossetti who was to become the most influential member of the group as it moved into its next phase. At this time Rossetti painted small watercolors packed with color and detail and usually based on themes from medieval legends. In 1856 he was commissioned to paint a series of ten murals for a large room (now the library) of the Oxford Union Society, the famous debating forum that has trained many British political leaders. He was joined by other PRB artists and by two young Oxford students, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, who had little prior training in art though both were to become key figures in a later evolution of Pre-Raphaelitism. Rossetti drew his subjects from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (c. 1470), a late-medieval English collection of legends about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which was attracting renewed interest. Unfortunately, none of the participants had any experience in fresco painting, and the murals began to deteriorate soon after their completion. Malory’s book, derived from French sources, contains variations on much of the material Wagner found in medieval German literature. One important shared story was that of Tristan and Isolde, which takes up the middle third of Malory’s thousand-page epic. In 1857 William Morris painted La Belle Iseult (plate 4.4)—sometimes interpreted alternatively as a Guinevere—around the same time that Wagner, in Switzerland, was working on Tristan und Isolde. Malory’s book includes both the Tristan-Isolde story and the parallel romance of Queen Guinevere with Sir Lancelot. Disagreement about the subject began early on. The artist’s widow, Jane Morris, who owned the painting and had posed for it, sent it to his memorial exhibition in 1897 as Guinevere. Here Isolde, putting on her belt, thinks of Tristan, who has been banished from King Mark’s court. Behind her, on an unmade bed, sleeps a small dog, a symbol of fidelity. (In Malory, Tristan had given Isolde a dog as a keepsake.) The dense pattern of detail throughout the room is characteristic of the Pre-Raphaelite style of the period and prefigures Morris’s later concentration on the decorative arts. William Morris was unsure of his abilities as a painter, and this canvas is believed to be his only completed oil painting. Nevertheless, the multitalented Morris was to become a key member of the Pre-Raphaelites. As a poet, publisher, and translator, he commissioned many book illustrations from his friend Burne-Jones and other members of the group. And as founder of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., the most important British decorative-arts firm of the nineteenth century, Morris brought advanced design to such media as stained glass, metalwork, wallpaper, and furniture.

“Wagnerian” Themes in Pre-Raphaelite Painting   •  45

Politically oriented toward socialism, Morris believed that fine design should be available to a large segment of the population and not only to the wealthy few. In this he was in line with a social consciousness that was characteristic of most of the PRB painters. Scholars have noted similarities between the social and artistic goals of William Morris and those of Richard Wagner,7 both of whom thought of accessing a new, wider audience for their art and both becoming politically disillusioned as they grew older. The parallels between their works were noticed in their time. When the Wagners were in London for a concert series in 1877, Cosima Wagner asked to meet Morris “because he treated the same subjects that her husband had treated in his music.”8 The democratic amphitheater seating of Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth is perhaps the most important remnant of his early goal of social inclusiveness. In later years Morris professed to have little interest in Wagner’s music and in opera in general. Nevertheless, he apparently did feel some rivalry with Wagner in regard to their literary works. Wagner had written and published his libretto for the Ring operas in the early 1850s before much of the music had been composed. These texts became available in English translation beginning in 1872, and Morris in all likelihood was familiar with them. Wagner had adopted a short, forceful, compressed verse form with heavy use of alliteration. In his Sigurd the Volsung, first published in late 1876, the year of the Ring’s official premiere, Morris chose a longer, more relaxed poetic line with less alliteration; he regarded this as closer to the forms of the Icelandic sagas that he was then translating. He may have seen this as a response to the literary choices Wagner made when dealing with the same material.9 For Morris and the other PRB artists, the medieval past represented a time when society was more integrated and people had a greater possibility of doing meaningful work or expressing themselves creatively in contrast to the dehumanized factory culture of the nineteenth century’s Industrial Revolution. Wagner had a similarly idealized view, particularly of the past of the German nation. In Tannhäuser he portrays Landgrave Hermann’s medieval court at Eisenach as seriously supportive of the arts, particularly music. And in Die Meistersinger (1868) he depicts the entire population of Renaissance Nuremberg as being proud of their master singers, who for the most part are ordinary citizens. Both operas revolve around song contests. Such communal unity contrasted with the political disorganization of Germany in Wagner’s time (the country became politically unified only in 1871). One of the Morris firm’s first commissions was for a set of thirteen stainedglass panels on the story of Tristan and Isolde ordered by a merchant from Bradford, England. The work of designing the panels was divided between several artists belonging or close to the PRB including Burne-Jones, Morris, and Ford Madox Brown. In 1862–1863 Rossetti created designs for two of

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the glass panels, one of which is Sir Tristram and la Belle Ysoude Drinking the Love Potion (plate 4.5). The window, about two feet square, has a lengthy inscription at the bottom: “How, as they sailed towards Cornwall, they saw on a day the flasket wherein was the love-filtre which the Queen of Ireland was sending by the hand of Dame Brangwaine for Isoude to drink with King Mark, and how Tristram drank it with her, both unwitting and how they loved each other ever after.” Following Malory’s version, this famous scene shows that the drinking of the love potion is merely an accident rather than, as in Wagner’s nearly contemporary opera, the result of Isolde’s attempt to poison Tristan and herself. The color scheme chosen is subdued especially in the costumes of Isolde and the crowned Cupid at the right. Isolde’s cabin is closed off and filled with a variety of decorative objects including plates and flasks or jugs. In 1867 Rossetti returned to this theme in an elaborate watercolor, a medium that was a Pre-Raphaelite specialty. While for the most part retaining the earlier composition, Rossetti expanded the scene by opening up the back of the cabin to reveal the ship’s deck, bridge, and sails. More color is used: dark green in Isolde’s costume, light green for Tristan, and reds in the chair cushions and Cupid’s wings. Even more decorative detail is shown, mainly in the furniture and the tablecloth. A quarter-century later, Aubrey Beardsley was to reduce the same scene to a near-abstract sweep of curving Art Nouveau lines, eliminating the clutter of medievalizing details (see chapter 5).10 It is not certain whether Rossetti knew of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde while working on this picture. The premiere of the opera in Munich did not take place until 1865 though the full score had already been published in 1860. Elizabeth Prettejohn has suggested that Rossetti could have known of Wagner’s opera through his friendship with the German-born, Londonbased music critic Francis (Franz) Hueffer.11 Later married to a daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown, Hueffer published several books about Wagner.12 In 1871 he arranged for the publication of a German edition of Rossetti’s Poems. An artist who entered the Pre-Raphaelite circle in the late 1850s was a young Londoner named Simeon Solomon. Considered something of a prodigy especially for his ability in drawing, Solomon was admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts at the age of fifteen. By 1858 he had met Rossetti and Burne-Jones, whose works clearly influenced his own style. His choice of subjects was individual yet it complemented those of the PRB group: social problems caused by poverty; contemporary Jewish ceremonial life; and Old Testament themes.

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Solomon’s stylistic debts, especially to Rossetti, are evident in an early drawing of 1857–1859, The Death of Sir Galahad while Taking a Portion of the Holy Grail Administered by Joseph of Arimathea (figure 4.1). The work is an early example of Solomon’s interest in depicting religious rituals, mostly Jewish, but extending to rites of the Greek Orthodox and Coptic Christian Churches. The drawing is executed in a stiff and linear style with relatively little shading and closer to the PRB drawing style of a decade earlier than to some of Solomon’s contemporary and later drawings. The story of the Grail is treated quite differently in Arthurian legend than in Wagner’s Parsifal. Having located the Grail, the dying Galahad is offered a eucharistic wafer and given a kiss of peace by the richly robed Joseph. Both figures are haloed, and these circular forms are echoed at the top by three roundels. At the left appears Galahad, alone, and at the right are two embracing couples: La Belle Isonde [sic] with Sir Tristram, and Sir Lancelot with Queen Guinevere. Solomon contrasts Galahad’s purity, which enabled him, unlike Lancelot, to succeed in finding the Grail, with the adulterous behavior of the two couples. On the other hand, there is a curious parallelism between the heads of Joseph and Galahad and the nearby group of Lancelot and Queen Guinevere who, like Galahad, wears a crown or coronet. No doubt Solomon again intends to contrast the chaste Galahad scene with the eroticism of the Lancelot and Guinevere group. However, this also might

Figure 4.1.  The Death of Sir Galahad while Taking a Portion of the Holy Grail Administered by Joseph of Arimathea. Source: Simeon Solomon, The Death of Sir Galahad while Taking a Portion of the Holy Grail Administered by Joseph of Arimathea, ink over pencil, c. 1857–1859, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, 1922P19, photo by Birmingham Museums Trust

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suggest that the adolescent Solomon already felt the homoerotic inclinations that were to get him into difficulties later. During the 1860s, 1870s, and later the leading figures of the original PreRaphaelite Brotherhood continued to move further apart stylistically. Rossetti abandoned his small, tightly composed watercolors of medieval subjects for a new style. Beginning in 1859 with Bocca Baciata (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston),13 he now produced sensuous half-length studies of female figures, reduced in details, richly colored, and relatively free in brushwork. His models in these works were clearly the Venetian painters of the High Renaissance, especially Titian, rather than the art of the fifteenth century. The most influential English artist of this period was probably the younger Edward Burne-Jones. Despite his rather informal artistic training with Rossetti, Burne-Jones developed a style of large, multifigure decorative paintings often conceived in pairs or series. These often presented dreamlike scenes far removed from modern life with subjects that were of the artist’s invention and that could be hard to interpret. He also was associated with another tendency in British art and literature of the period, that of Aestheticism, or art for art’s sake. In this movement the emphasis was on beauty rather than on subject matter, moral lessons, or social criticism in art. The tendency’s best-known advocates were the painter James McNeill Whistler and the writers Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. By the 1890s the French and Belgian Symbolist painters also regarded Burne-Jones as a precursor who shared their preference for dreams and reflection rather than realism. He was in regular contact especially with the Belgian Symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff, a frequent visitor to London. The two exchanged signed drawings, each of an enigmatic female head. Throughout his career Burne-Jones produced works on themes also treated by Wagner. In the early 1860s, like Rossetti, he had been producing watercolors of medieval or legendary subjects. He participated in Morris’s stained-glass project, contributing four designs of the story of Sir Tristram as told in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. One was Madness of Sir Tristram. In Malory, Tristram is driven to madness by mistakenly believing Iseult has fallen in love with another knight, Sir Kay. Burne-Jones later developed the composition into a watercolor as Rossetti had done with his love potion scene.14 In 1871–1872 he essayed Tristram and Iseult in oils (private collection) after Malory. At nearly three meters in width, it was too large for his studio at the time. Having drawn a frieze of figures in the manner of the early Italian Renaissance and begun an underpainting in brown and ochre monochrome, he left the composition uncompleted.15

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In 1883 Burne-Jones again collaborated with his friend William Morris, a great expert on Norse mythology, to design a series of stained-glass windows on Norse themes for Vinland, a mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. Among the designs, now in Birmingham, UK, is a nearly life-size black chalk drawing titled Odin (that is, Wotan).16 The old god is shown seated, wearing a wanderer’s cloak and a pulled-down hat as in Wagner’s Siegfried. He holds his spear, and his two ravens perch on his left shoulder. The similarity of details between Wagner’s and Burne-Jones’s treatment suggests that they are working from the same, or very similar, source materials. Burne-Jones was more interested in music than was Rossetti though he was ambivalent about Wagner’s works. In her Memorials of Edward BurneJones, his widow stated that the painter was familiar with Wagner’s Ring operas and the Nibelungen legends on which they were based. In 1884 when Burne-Jones attended a concert performance of Parsifal at the Royal Albert Hall in London, he wrote that he approved of Wagner’s music for the Hall of the Grail, finding it appropriate to the subject, versions of which he had painted several times.17 One Burne-Jones painting of the period with a recognizable subject is the large Laus Veneris [Praise of Venus] of 1873–1878 (plate 4.6), a scene derived from the story of Tannhäuser. John Christian has discussed the many possible literary sources for this legend that could have been known to BurneJones.18 One was Ludwig Tieck’s poem The Trusty Eckart (Tannhäuser’s shield bearer), which was translated in German Romance (1827) by Thomas Carlyle, an author much read by Burne-Jones in his Oxford days. A more recent source for Laus Veneris was a poem of the same title by Algernon Swinburne, who was close to the Pre-Raphaelite painters and strongly interested in Wagnerian themes. Burne-Jones produced a watercolor version of the composition (private collection) in 1861 around the time Swinburne was working on his poem. It is not clear whether Burne-Jones was familiar with Wagner’s Tannhäuser. As already noted, 1861 was the year of the disastrous production at the Paris Opera that inspired paintings on the Venusberg theme by Henri FantinLatour, among others. Swinburne was in contact with the Parisian poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, who in 1862 sent Swinburne a copy of his book defending Wagner and Tannhäuser. Later in 1877, while Burne-Jones was still working on the painting, he had three portrait sittings with Cosima Wagner during her London visit though the painter did not meet Richard Wagner. Burne-Jones was dissatisfied with the likenesses, and the portrait was never completed. In her diary, Cosima commented on the refinement of the works

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she saw in Burne-Jones’s studio but this did not result in any further contact of the Wagners with the painter.19 Laus Veneris is striking for its complex composition and strong colors particularly the orange of Venus’s costume. The scene is set not in a grotto but in an ornate room. The picture is oriented horizontally with little sense of recession in depth. Five knights on horseback look wistfully through the window, perhaps wishing, like Tannhäuser, to be admitted. Even this distant group, however, could be read as a framed picture hanging on the wall. Four attendants discreetly hold musical instruments and read from musical manuscripts on a stand, praising Venus. The densely patterned tapestries on the wall depict Venus twice—once nude and once clothed—with a naked cupid as they are drawn forward on a chariot by Venus’s votaries. Occupying the right side of the picture, Venus sits in profile with a golden crown on her knees. Slumped back in her chair, Venus could be viewed as listening intently to music. A second picture of nearly equal size, Le chant d’amour (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), was first exhibited with Laus Veneris in 1878. This outdoor scene shows a young knight in armor who sits listening, as if in a trance, to music played by a female organist. As with Rossetti’s contemporary works, Burne-Jones’s artistic reference here is to the Venetian Renaissance, particularly to the mysterious pastorals of Giorgione. The two pictures, which belonged to the same person, could have been intended as pendants, with contrasting outdoor and indoor settings, depicting the power of music. An alternative reading of Laus Veneris is possible, however. Despite the many signs of her high status, Venus, like many figures in Burne-Jones’s paintings, has a rather dejected appearance. She looks down, her right arm thrown over her head. In Hellenistic Greek art, this pose signified exhaustion or sexual satiety. A rose has fallen to the floor from her languid left hand. Although the subject is relatively familiar, Burne-Jones’s treatment is unusual: Venus’s dejection—if indeed that was what Burne-Jones depicted— is left unexplained. She might be thinking of her abandonment by her lover Tannhäuser. Here as elsewhere, Burne-Jones is more interested in surface pattern than in either narrative or psychological analysis. One artist whose career did not flourish in the 1870s was Simeon Solomon. Arrested in a sexual scandal in 1873, Solomon lost his access to respectable households and their patronage. Despite strong support from his family and the open-mindedness of some of the bohemian Pre-Raphaelites, Solomon eventually became an alcoholic and, at times, homeless. Too poor to continue to buy oil paints and canvas, Solomon concentrated on drawings and watercolors, which had always been an important part of his

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production. Despite these bleak personal circumstances, Solomon retained good technical control and remained active as an artist until his death more than thirty years later. In Solomon’s later work, his figures grow increasingly androgynous so that at times it is difficult to determine their gender. He did a number of drawings in a horizontal format depicting pairs of heads. A good example is A Design for a Motif from Parsifal of 1894 (plate 4.7). Here, nearly forty years after his Death of Sir Galahad (figure 4.1), Solomon uses a sophisticated drawing style. In this case his scene from the Grail story certainly relates to Wagner’s opera. Though Parsifal was performed only in Bayreuth at that time, the music could be heard in London in concerts such as the one Burne-Jones attended in 1884, and the vocal and full scores of the opera had been published as early as 1882 and 1883. Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, who published the drawing, commented on the difficulty of identifying the subject despite the inscription at the bottom.20 Most likely the naïve young Parsifal appears at the left; to the right is the more experienced and determined Kundry. Or is this a picture depicting two aspects of Kundry or showing her at different ages? The identification is complicated by the fact that Kundry wears in her headdress a sheaf of swan feathers though this attribute would more likely be associated with Parsifal, who kills a swan at the beginning of the opera. Blue, the tonality chosen by Solomon, was a color associated with spirituality by Symbolist artists of the 1890s throughout Europe. The motif mentioned in the inscription could be musical rather than visual though this is not specified. The drawing does not seem to have a narrative function; instead it represents some private meaning that Parsifal had for the reclusive and reverie-prone artist. An artist of the 1890s whose name is often associated with the PreRaphaelites is the draftsman Aubrey Beardsley. All of the leading original members of the PRB were still active at this time except Rossetti, who had died in 1882; the second-generation Pre-Raphaelite Burne-Jones was nearly forty years Beardsley’s senior. Beardsley, who considered Burne-Jones the greatest artist of Europe, took some of his own drawings to show to the older man. Burne-Jones was very enthusiastic and encouraged Beardsley to pursue an artist’s vocation. The short-lived Beardsley was to have an active career lasting little more than five years (1891–1896). During this time he became a public celebrity largely because of his personal eccentricities and scandalous drawings for Oscar Wilde’s play Salome and other works. During the first year he was heavily under Burne-Jones’s influence, and it is only for this period that Beardsley’s work may be considered part of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. After that Beardsley began to develop a completely different

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style combining abstract simplifications that anticipated Art Nouveau with a strong dose of eroticism, much to Burne-Jones’s irritation (see chapter 5). Nevertheless, Beardsley retained the taste of the original PRB members for early Renaissance Italian art throughout his life.21 Like all of the other artists discussed, Beardsley depicted a wide range of literary and mythological subjects though in a highly idiosyncratic manner. Among these artists, only Beardsley could be called a fanatical Wagnerite. Whenever possible he attended the frequent and well-staged performances of Wagner’s operas available in London at the time. During his period of working in Burne-Jones’s manner, he produced a scene of an imaginary council of the gods from Götterdämmerung and another of Siegfried with the dragon, from act 2 of Siegfried. The latter image in particular is cluttered with detail and mannered drawing making it difficult to read. The evolution of Beardsley’s style is demonstrated by two depictions of the same scene from Tannhäuser made about five years apart and so at opposite ends of his career. Beardsley was particularly interested in this opera, perhaps identifying with its outsider hero. He even planned to write The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser: A Romantic Novel, his own version of the story, to be illustrated with his drawings. Beardsley never took this Gesamtkunstwerk further than the Venusberg sequence at the beginning of the story. On this occasion his drawings were demure enough but the text was frankly pornographic and could not be published in unexpurgated form until long after Beardsley’s death. In an 1891 pen-and-ink drawing titled Tannhäuser (figure 4.2), Beardsley depicts a scene that according to the critic Emma Sutton shows the hero on his unsuccessful journey to visit the pope, who denies Tannhäuser a requested absolution for his sins.22 The hero, emaciated and garbed in tattered clothing, stretches his arms toward a goal that is hidden behind a stand of tree trunks. The image is full of linear detail and is compressed by decorative upper and lower borders and a title. One aspect of the image that derives directly from Burne-Jones is the prominence of the thick, spiky brambles that block Tannhäuser’s way. These recall Burne-Jones’s most famous series of pictures, The Story of Briar Rose, a definitive version of which was exhibited in a London gallery in 1890. This series is a set of large decorative paintings telling a version of the familiar story of Sleeping Beauty (Faringdon Trust, Buscot Park, Oxfordshire). In the first painting, titled The Briar Wood, a young knight in armor comes upon five knights deep in an enchanted sleep and entangled in a heavy thicket of briars. The large branches, arching upward, are a prominent feature of the composition, and Beardsley has retained this element in his drawing of the

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struggling Tannhäuser. Beardsley’s picture is even closer to Burne-Jones’s large painting titled Love and the Pilgrim, a two-figure horizontal composition (Tate Gallery, London). One figure in a dark, monk-like costume at the left is pulled from a particularly dense thicket of briars by the winged figure of Love at the right. Though the picture was not exhibited until 1897, by which time Beardsley’s active career had ended, Burne-Jones had worked on it intermittently for twenty years and Beardsley could easily have seen it in his studio. In a second version of Tannhäuser from 1896, Beardsley retains the same general composition while treating the details in a totally different manner. Instead of exhibiting detailed drawing, Tannhäuser’s figure shows

Figure 4.2.  Tannhäuser. Source: Aubrey Beardsley, Tannhäuser, 1891, black ink with grey wash heightened with white, Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1943.3.1456, courtesy National Gallery of Art

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the reserved white of the paper. Though the brambles continue to block Tannhäuser’s way, the decorative borders are gone, opening up the picture. The screen of trees, composed of thousands of black dots, now opens to reveal the goal toward which the hero stretches his elegant hands. It is a breastshaped mountain—according to Sutton the Venusberg to which Tannhäuser returns in some versions of the story though not in Wagner’s opera.23 Sutton sees Beardsley’s biographical identification of his personal situation with Tannhäuser’s struggle between sensual and spiritual yearnings. The artist, late in his short life, converted to Roman Catholicism. Dying of tuberculosis, he proposed to his publisher that he place The Return of Tannhäuser to the Venusberg on the last page of A Book of Fifty Drawings of Aubrey Beardsley (1897).24 In this brief survey of a half-century of works by the Pre-Raphaelites and their close followers, it has not been possible to include every English artist influenced by this circle or to list every one of their Wagnerian or nearWagnerian subjects. Nevertheless, Wagner and the Pre-Raphaelite painters, though working from different source materials, shared a similar goal in the works under discussion: a desire, derived from early-nineteenth-century Romanticism, to escape from the modern industrial world into history and legend, a tendency that remained powerful in both opera and painting until the end of the century.

Notes 1.  Illustrated monographs and exhibition catalogues on the Pre-Raphaelite painters include Aurélie Petiot, The Pre-Raphaelites (New York: Abbeville, 2019); Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Tim Barringer, ed., Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). The PRB influence in the decorative arts is discussed in Martin Ellis, Victoria Osborne, and Tim Barringer, eds., Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement (New York: American Federation of Arts, 2018), exh. cat. 2.  The mutual interest of Wagner and the PRB painters in medieval subjects and the Grail legend is discussed in David Huckvale, “The Holy Grail: Avalon,” Wagner 15, no. 3 (September 1994): 105–14. For Wagner’s cultural influence generally, see David C. Large and William Weber, eds., Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Wagner’s influence in England is discussed in Anne Dzamba Sessa, Richard Wagner and the English (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1979).

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  3.  In recent years new productions of Das Liebesverbot have been mounted at the Glimmerglass Opera, Cooperstown, New York, and the Teatro Real, Madrid. The latter version is preserved on a DVD.  4. Malcolm Warner, “Notes on Millais’ Use of Subjects from the Opera, 1851–4,” Pre-Raphaelite Review 2, no. 2 (May 1979): 73–76.   5.  The pictures after Meyerbeer, Bellini, and Donizetti are illustrated in color in Jason Rosenfield, John Everett Millais (London: Phaidon, 2012), pls. 30, 31, and 42.  6. Rosenfield, John Everett Millais, pls. 59 and 60.   7.  Carl E. Schorske, “The Quest for the Grail: Wagner and Morris,” in Kurt H. Wolff and Barrington Moore Jr, eds., The Critical Spirit: Essays in Honor of Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 216–32.  8. Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 273–74.   9.  Jane Ennis, “William Morris’s ‘Sigurd the Volsung’: A Response to Wagner,” Wagner 18, no. 3 (September 1997): 111–26. 10.  See www.rossettiarchive.org for a reproduction of the Rossetti watercolor Sir Tristram and La Belle Yseult Drinking the Love Potion. For Beardsley’s version of the scene see chapter 5. 11.  Julian Treuherz, Elizabeth Prettejohn, and Edwin Becker, eds., Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 131–36. 12.  Francis Hueffer, Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future: History and Aesthetics (London: Chapman and Hall, 1874). 13.  For a discussion of a watercolor version of this work closer in date to Tristan und Isolde, see Donald Rosenthal, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti: La Bionda del Balcone,” in Susan Dodge Peters, ed., Memorial Art Gallery: An Introduction to the Collection (Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 1988), 124–25. 14.  Christopher Wood, Burne-Jones: The Life and Works of Sir Edward  BurneJones (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1998), 31, 35. 15. Leslie Parris, ed., The Pre-Raphaelites (London: Tate Britain, 1984), exh. cat., no. 164, 213. 16.  John Christian and Stephen Wildman, eds., Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), exh. cat., no. 138, 289. 17. Wood, Burne-Jones, 95. 18.  Christian and Wildman, Edward Burne-Jones, no. 63. 19. The interactions and correspondence between Burne-Jones and Cosima Wagner are documented in Barry Millington, “Edward Burne-Jones, George Eliot and Richard Wagner: A Collision of Like-Minded Souls,” Wagner Journal 10, no. 1 (2016): 26–44.

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20.  Entry by Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond in Richard Wagner: Visions d’artistes, D’Auguste Renoir à Anselm Kiefer, ed. Paul Lang (Geneva: Musées d’Art et d’Histoire, 2005), exhibition catalog, no. 37, 152–53. 21. On Beardsley’s extensive knowledge of early Italian art, see Gail S. Weinberg, “Aubrey Beardsley: The Last Pre-Raphaelite,” in Susan P. Casteras and Alicia Craig Faxon, eds., Pre-Raphaelite Art in Its European Context (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), 210–33. 22.  Emma Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 28ff. 23. Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley, 31. 24. Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley, 196.

CHAPTER FIVE

Aubrey Beardsley’s Drawings of Tristan und Isolde

During the 1880s and 1890s, the growing fame of Richard Wagner’s music dramas prompted a number of leading visual artists across Europe to interpret these works. These artists varied in their knowledge of Wagner’s operas though some were genuine enthusiasts. In the work of many prominent artists, the tendency to depict realistic, everyday subjects, characteristic of avant-garde art from 1850 to 1880, began to be replaced by a return to imaginary or literary subjects. The remote, legendary, and highly dramatic content of Wagner’s operas made them ideal subjects for visual interpretation though artists realized that the qualities of Wagner’s music could not be directly reproduced in other media. This interest in Wagner’s operas at a time when they still were relatively new and controversial resulted in some outstanding works in visual media until the years after 1900 when a growing trend toward abstraction as well as new currents in music began to make literary subjects, including Wagner’s operas, unfashionable in the avant-garde of the visual arts for many decades to come.1 One of the most exceptional artists working on material of this kind was the English draftsman Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898). Although according to the traditional hierarchies of academic art accepted throughout Europe painting and sculpture were considered vastly superior to drawing, Beardsley was quickly recognized as the most original young artist in England. Lacking an academic education in art, Beardsley felt free to ignore many timehonored expectations. He died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five but like some other artists with life-threatening illnesses was extremely prolific 57

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until his health gave out. In a career lasting little more than five years, he produced over five hundred finished drawings not including preliminary sketches.2 Most of these were designed for reproduction in illustrated books or journals. The artist’s Wagnerian pictures, though relatively few in number, had an outsize importance within his work. Beardsley also harbored literary ambitions and, as we shall see, virtually all of his efforts in this area were directed toward works inspired by or reacting against Wagner. Beardsley belonged to the first generation of artists who were too young to have seen Wagner’s own productions of his operas. Some influential older artists working on Wagnerian themes, such as Henri Fantin-Latour, saw or may have seen one of Wagner’s productions. Although Wagner was not completely satisfied with these presentations, they nevertheless gave an idea of his dramatic intentions beyond what could be gleaned from studying the scores of the operas. Beardsley was fortunate, however, to live in London during the early 1890s when most of Wagner’s operas were performed, often with excellent casts and musical direction. With an early background in music and acting in plays before he decided to become an artist, Beardsley retained an interest in all aspects of theatrical opera production, and this is most evident in his pictures relating to Tristan und Isolde. Beardsley made over twenty Wagnerian drawings for books or magazines. Most of these are equally divided among three of his favorite operas: Tannhäuser; the Ring operas, particularly Das Rheingold; and Tristan und Isolde. Though he illustrated plays by many authors, Beardsley did not treat subjects from operas by any other composer. Beardsley’s work has been analyzed in detail by art historians and, more recently, by literary critics.3 Some critics have played a Freudian game of finding sexual symbolism in every straight line or curve of Beardsley’s designs. Though such observations are sometimes illuminating, they are not subject to proof or disproof. In addition, Beardsley was a celebrity as the most famous, or notorious, young artist of the decadence of the 1890s in England, and he has been the subject of a number of full-length biographies. Rather than trying to recapitulate this material, we will concentrate on the Wagnerian subjects and where they fit into Beardsley’s life and work. Most of Beardsley’s Wagnerian drawings were published during his brief lifetime, and these works have not escaped the scholarly attention devoted to Beardsley’s art. He also planned full-scale projects (to be discussed below) for both Tannhäuser and Das Rheingold though because of ill health he was unable to complete the first project or to advance very far with the second. The Tannhäuser project, involving both text and illustrations, was published and analyzed after Beardsley’s death4 while several studies have been devoted to

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his drawings for Das Rheingold and the Ring.5 A book has even been devoted to Beardsley’s Wagnerism mainly in the context of the decadence or neuroticism that some perceived in Wagner’s music (the view already expressed in the 1880s by Wagner’s former disciple, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche) and in Beardsley’s art.6 On the other hand, Beardsley’s drawings of Tristan und Isolde have not been studied as a group. This is not surprising. Unlike the drawings for the other two operas, which were completed in relatively short periods and meant to be published together, the Tristan drawings were scattered throughout Beardsley’s career and there is no evidence that he intended to present them as a group. All were published at different times and in diverse journals and books. Nevertheless, Beardsley was careful to title some drawings as relating to Tristan und Isolde even when initially they seem to have no obvious connection to that opera. Discussing them together may throw some light on Beardsley’s attitude toward Wagner’s celebrated work and toward opera in general. We will focus on the drawings rather than the printed illustrations since they are closer to Beardsley’s intentions. We may only speculate about the reasons for Beardsley’s devotion to the three Wagner operas. He may have identified with Tannhäuser, an outsider like himself, an artist whose work was rejected by many of his contemporaries as indecent. In Das Rheingold Beardsley seems to have been most intrigued by the trickster god, Loge, another outsider: surrounded by flames, he spectacularly upstages Wotan in two of Beardsley’s drawings. As for Tristan und Isolde, Beardsley, despite a reputation in some quarters for frivolity, was devoted to this most serious of Wagnerian operas. He probably was attracted by the beauty of the music—he owned a vocal score of the opera, for which he drew a title page with two floral decorations (Princeton University Library). Among other items of Wagneriana in Beardsley’s library were a French translation of some of the librettos, including Tristan, and four volumes of English translations of Wagner’s prose works and of the composer’s biography by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner’s son-in-law. Gleeson White, former editor of The Studio, which had published some of Beardsley’s work, reminiscing about the artist’s attendance at a London performance of Tristan, described Beardsley’s “transparent hands clutching the rail in front, and thrilling with the emotion of the music. . . . No instrument in the orchestra vibrated more instantly in accord with the changes of the music, from love-passion to despair.”7 If we speculated again, we might see Beardsley’s identification with a story of love that cannot be fully realized in the world, finding consummation only in death, as an analogy to his personal situation as an invalid.

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Beardsley titled his two large Wagnerian projects The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser: A Romantic Novel; and The Comedy of the Rheingold. In each case he planned to supply both the illustrations and the text, creating a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk for which he would provide the story and its (visual rather than musical) accompaniment. Beardsley may also have intended to participate in the design of the books, like Wagner in some of his theatrical settings, though this is not certain. Projects of this nature by prominent artists are rare though not unknown: Beardsley was aware of William Blake’s books of poetry, illustrated with Blake’s hand-colored engravings. Beardsley’s texts were to be drastic revisions or interpretations of the librettos of Wagner’s two operas. As an artist Beardsley had a reputation for favoring sexually charged subjects. While his designs for the partly completed Venus and Tannhäuser were relatively demure, this was not the case with the text. As summarized by Colette Colligan, Beardsley had “published a highly metaphorical work of obscenity . . . which includes stylized descriptions of masturbation, bestiality, coprophilia and pederasty.”8 Clearly Beardsley envisions activities on the Venusberg that never would have occurred to Wagner. Though there are many sources for the Tannhäuser story, Beardsley makes specific references to Wagner and his operas. Colligan’s catalogue of sexual practices probably does not represent Beardsley’s fantasies much less the ailing artist’s sexual life, if any. The intention of the rather oblique text may be partly satirical and so in keeping with Beardsley’s dominant mode for his drawings sometimes caricature people he admired, even close friends. Throughout his career Beardsley also showed a desire to épater le bourgeois, to shock his Victorian readership. His physical disability left him feeling an outsider, and he did not share the widespread national mood of imperial triumphalism and self-satisfaction. The story was published in installments (as Under the Hill) in 1896 in the Savoy magazine, of which Beardsley was art editor. Needless to say, the text was heavily expurgated. Though Beardsley depicts readily identifiable scenes from Wagner in his drawings of Tannhäuser and in particular of the Rheingold story, this is much less true of the images he relates to Tristan und Isolde. Musicologists generally agree that this is Wagner’s most advanced opera and has had the greatest influence on music history. Even the opera’s most fervent admirers would admit, however, that it does not have the same variety of picturesque settings, characters, and actions as Das Rheingold with the gods, dwarves, Rhinemaidens, and so on depicted by Beardsley. Much of the action in Tristan takes place in the main characters’ minds. Beardsley’s first large commission as a professional artist was for illustrations to a new edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. There was

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a revival of interest in the book in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the publisher J. M. Dent planned to issue a new edition complete with archaic spellings and Gothic type. Between 1892 and 1894 Beardsley produced more than three hundred drawings for this enormous volume, ranging from double-page compositions to small vignettes and decorative elements. There is a substantial overlap between the legends used by Malory and Wagner: Malory includes a long, incident-filled account of the story of Tristan and Isolde as well as the tale of Sir Percival, the only knight pure enough to find the Holy Grail; the analogies to the story of Parsifal are evident. These stories were in widespread circulation throughout medieval Europe. While Wagner’s main source for Tristan und Isolde was Gottfried von Strassburg’s epic Tristan (c. 1215), Malory (as he freely admits) adapted his tales from French sources. Of a half-dozen full-page illustrations of the Tristan story by Beardsley for the Malory book, only two relate to Wagner’s telling of the story. The first scene is described in Tristan und Isolde but not enacted on stage: before the action of the opera begins, Isolde nursed the wounded Tristan in her native Ireland. Malory’s version of this incident differs considerably from Wagner’s in that Isolde is not aware that Tristan had killed her betrothed, and Beardsley in this case follows Malory. In How La Belle Isoud Nursed Sir Tristram (Harvard University Art Museum), a kneeling Isolde is shown looking up anxiously at the bedridden, semiconscious Tristan.9 The sword mentioned in Wagner is not present, and Isolde shows empathy rather than hostile intentions toward Tristan. The reverse side of this drawing contains a rare pencil sketch in which Beardsley tentatively blocks out the forms of the composition with near-abstract looseness. Malory’s telling of the story of the love potion also differs considerably from Wagner’s. In Malory the scene takes place in a ship’s cabin below decks and is a lighthearted affair (for Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s treatment of this scene, see chapter 4, plate 4.5). Tristan and Isolde find the cup prepared by Brangäne and help themselves to it, thinking it is ordinary wine; Isolde again has no intention of killing Tristan. In How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink (figure 5.1), on the other hand, Beardsley follows the scenario of Wagner’s opera, which he first saw at the Drury Lane Theater in the summer of 1892. The scene takes place in a curtained-off area on the ship’s deck and, as in Wagner, Tristan toasts Isolde with the cup both believe to be poisoned. Such independence in illustrating even well-known texts like Malory’s was characteristic of Beardsley throughout his career.

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Figure 5.1.  How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink. Source: Aubrey Beardsley, How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, bequest of Scofield Thayer, photo: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1986.681

The image is one of the earliest in Beardsley’s advanced, modern style and it reveals the many influences he had absorbed. The tall, thin figures recall the enervated personages of English Pre-Raphaelite painting, particularly those of Sir Edward Burne-Jones. The riotous floral and vegetal motifs of the wide border, perhaps symbols of erotic attraction, emulate with more

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energy the designs of William Morris and the arts and crafts movement. Isolde’s Medusa-like hair is familiar in depictions by Beardsley and others of the femme fatale, that ubiquitous figure of the 1890s, an era of a heightened war between the sexes. But the dominant mode is that of Japanese prints, which Beardsley enthusiastically collected. This is evident in the flattened figures, defined by outlines; Isolde’s spectacular mantle; and the tall curtains, resembling Japanese screens, each pane decorated with an enormous clematis flower. The flowers hovering above the figures’ heads symbolize romantic passion though this seems contradicted by the sinister scene enacted below. In the opening between the curtains, separating the figures, we can make out a ship’s railing and stylized waves, again in the Japanese manner. On the other hand, the central placement of the figures and the receding boards of the ship’s deck that still give some sense of depth through traditional perspective are Western conventions that Beardsley later was often to ignore. Tristan and Isolde display the androgyny characteristic of many of Beardsley’s figures: wrapped in voluminous clothing, they resemble each other at least as much as Siegmund resembles Sieglinde in Die Walküre. The only demonstration of emotion is by Isolde: taller than Tristan, with one shoulder raised, her hands hidden, she leans back as if recoiling from him and from the supposedly poisoned cup.10 Beardsley’s drawing does not tell us anything about Wagner’s intentions when he wrote Tristan und Isolde in the 1850s. Like all good later interpretations, it embodies attitudes of the artist’s own time toward Wagner’s work. Beardsley must have been fond of the composition since he repeated it three years later, this time titled Tristan und Isolde, in a smaller, simplified version published in the Savoy.11 From a technical viewpoint, How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink is characteristic of Beardsley’s best work. His first drawing for the Morte d’Arthur project, The Achieving of the Sangreal (by Sir Percival), was done in a traditional technique using pen and watercolor washes to create shading and a greater illusion of depth.12 Such drawings had to be reproduced in books by photogravure, and the publisher, Dent, wished to use less-expensive line blocks. In this procedure the artist uses only black and white, without shading, relying on line to define figures and objects. The drawing is photographed and transferred to a zinc plate covered with light-sensitive gelatin. The plate is printed after a process resembling that of traditional etching.13 Beardsley quickly adapted to the new technique, which fitted well with his aesthetic: unlike many other master draftsmen, he was generally satisfied with the quality of the reproductions of his designs even though they were not always faithful to the originals.

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Turning to Beardsley’s other drawings relating to Tristan und Isolde, it may be beneficial to discuss them not, as usual, in the chronological order of their composition but in an iconographic or subject-matter order as they relate to the stages of a production of Tristan, or indeed of any opera. Beardsley’s background would have predisposed him to an interest in the practicalities of a musical theater production. He and his sister had performed music publicly as children, and Aubrey acted in amateur theatricals both during and after his school days. His sister, with whom he lived for much of his life, became a professional actress, and though a stage career was not feasible for Beardsley, his involvement with the theater as a spectator continued. The Tristan drawings demonstrate that Beardsley was thinking about this opera throughout his career from some of his earliest works to the latest. The only work in color among all of Beardsley’s Wagnerian pictures is Isolde, first completed as a drawing with watercolor (plate 5.1) then published in the Studio in 1895 as a color lithograph. Though we think of Beardsley as an artist working only in black and white, he often, working only for himself, added colors to his drawings when they were returned to him after transfer to the line block. He was not averse to issuing works in color when commissions arose: in 1894 he published three posters in color lithography, all considerably larger than his drawings and advertising theatrical productions or new books. Isolde is the only one of Beardsley’s surviving drawings for lithographs that is not specifically an advertisement. Isolde has similarities to posters: the figure is pushed to the left side with the right side largely empty except for lettering. In this case it shows only the title in a green that matches parts of Isolde’s hat, necklace, and elaborate bracelet. This work, then, might be regarded as an advertisement for the opera though no particular production is specified. Advertising is one of the first steps in an opera production, sometimes preceding rehearsals, in order to generate advance ticket sales. Beardsley had no problem doing work of this kind since, as he wrote, “advertisement is an absolute necessity of modern life, and if it can be made beautiful as well as obvious, so much the better.”14 Beardsley here depicts Isolde in a hybrid of medieval and modern dress, a production concept familiar in our own time though not in the 1890s. (He had already, however, shown biblical-era figures in modern dress in some of his drawings for Oscar Wilde’s play Salome.) Isolde’s elaborate hat is nearly identical to that worn by one of two women in his Black Coffee, a contemporary café scene not unlike those by Edgar Degas.15 Just as Beardsley often made fun of his contemporaries, his Isolde was subjected to satirical treatment: a watercolor by John Wallace shows the heroine not drinking but smoking a cigarette while a dog leaps up at a string of sausages falling from her wrist (University of Delaware Library, Lasner Collection).

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Isolde leans forward with determination to drink the poisoned cup. Tristan, however, is absent, and the lack of décor in the picture gives it an almost abstract flatness. The curtain behind Isolde is a deep red, indicative of fiery passions. Though the lithograph differs considerably from Beardsley’s drawing with its loose brushwork, the artist most likely approved the lithograph before publication. At this period he was living in London and could discuss this face-to-face with the publisher or the lithographer. Later, living in a coastal resort in hopes of restoring his health, he had to deal with such matters by correspondence. In regard to a small lithograph advertising a set of books, Beardsley asked to see color proofs and set out in detail the colors he wished to be used.16 The design and brilliant colors of the Isolde have analogies to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous lithographic advertising posters of the 1890s, which Beardsley easily could have seen on his regular trips to Paris. In Beardsley’s work, Wagner’s tragic heroine curiously shares the visual world of Jane Avril, La Goulue, and the other denizens of Lautrec’s Montmartre. Characteristically, Beardsley did not explain why he chose to depict Isolde in this way. Beardsley depicts another aspect of opera production, rehearsal, in A Répétition of “Tristan und Isolde” (figure 5.2 ). This was published in December 1896 in the final issue of the Savoy. Though dealing with one of the earliest stages of an opera production, it is actually the last published image of Beard-

Figure 5.2.  A Répétition of ‘Tristan und Isolde.” Source: Aubrey Beardsley, A Répétition of “Tristan und Isolde,” Indian ink, 1896, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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sley’s Tristan. “t is in his late style, first seen in some of the illustrations for The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, published in the same journal earlier that year. Instead of the open spaces and spare, sweeping lines of How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink, the entire surface here is covered with a dense web of lines with white appearing only in the reserved open spaces of the upper bodies, hands, and feet of the figures. The background is filled with a mass of black dots making it difficult to identify the location of the scene, which might be outdoors at night. Mixing several languages in the title, Beardsley uses the French word for “rehearsal.” The longhaired figure with a raised hand is the rehearsal coach though he wears the formal tails usually associated with an orchestra conductor. Given the work being rehearsed, the two young women might be the singers playing the roles of Isolde (on the left) and Brangäne. Leaning close together, they wear elaborate modern dresses, possibly opera costumes, showing considerable décolletage. Like many compositions by Beardsley, this one relates to one of his other works, in this case a wash drawing of 1895 titled Frontispiece to Chopin’s “Nocturnes,” referencing another group of musical works that he admired. That scene, like some of Beardsley’s other depictions of music making, unaccountably takes place outdoors in an open field. The conductor or coach in that work leans sharply toward the two women, who are dressed more demurely and maintain a greater distance from each other. The rehearsal scene from the Savoy has some of the strangeness of Beardsley’s other Tristan illustrations. Suggestions about the identity of the male figure (Tristan?) or the relationship between the two women remain in the realm of speculation. The standing figure leans against an ornate pillar entwined with flowers; this might be the column of a harp,17 an instrument Wagner used to great effect in works such as Die Meistersinger though a piano would be a more usual rehearsal instrument. Although the women watch him closely, he looks away as if conducting unseen musicians. A rehearsal is a fairly mundane event, often taking place in nondescript surroundings, yet Beardsley again gives the scene a mysterious, unexplained quality. This brings to mind Kenneth Clark’s view of Beardsley: “He was essentially a visionary and an ideal artist.”18 Beardsley was not given to realistic reportage of everyday scenes, and the indeterminate, dreamlike quality of much of Tristan’s plot and music would have been exceptionally appealing to him. In regard to the action of the opera itself, we have seen that Beardsley inserted the love potion scene from Tristan und Isolde into his early illustrations for Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Another important type of depiction of an opera production, in Beardsley’s time and today, is in publicity portraits of the stars or lead players. Beardsley essays this genre in his image

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of Hungarian soprano Katharina Klavsky in an early work of 1892 (figure 5.3). Beardsley sought a portrait-like depiction of Klavsky—judging from contemporary photographs of the singer in newspapers and magazines— though modified to his own svelte beauty ideals. He depicts Klavsky in the role of Isolde, which he had seen her portray at the Drury Lane Theater in the summer opera season of 1892. Her Tristan was the German tenor Max Alvary, and Gustav Mahler conducted. All of these artists had reached adulthood during Wagner’s lifetime and presumably had some idea of Wagner’s musical and dramatic intentions; Mahler had even heard Wagner conduct Tannhäuser. Though Beardsley was more enthusiastic about Klavsky, he also drew a profile portrait of Alvary in vaguely medieval costume.19 The tenor had performed both Tristan and Tannhäuser in London that year, however, and a role is not specified. The Klavsky image is tall and narrow in format suggesting the influence on Beardsley at this stage of his career of Japanese prints, especially the category of kakemono, or pillar prints, which had been known in France and England for some time.20 Isolde’s long strands of hair and sweeping cloak anticipate her appearance in the slightly later How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink. Her back to us, with one shoulder raised, she leans on a ship’s railing and looks ahead toward a mountainous shoreline. This is probably the Isolde of act 1 looking toward the approaching Cornwall of King Marke as she broods on Tristan’s supposed indifference. Alternatively it could represent her sea voyage from Figure 5.3.  Klavsky. Source: Aubrey Beardsley, Klavsky, Cornwall to Brittany and the dying Tristan ink and watercolor, 1892, though this action is not depicted in the opAubrey Beardsley Collection, era. Klavsky’s name (perhaps in its Germanic Manuscripts Division, pronunciation) appears above while the title Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, of her role is written below amid stylized Princeton University Library Japanese waves and weeds.

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Modern criticism in the arts pays considerable attention to the reception of an artwork—that is, how it is perceived by critics and its audience at the time of its introduction and later. This perception may or may not correspond to the artist’s own view of his work. The remaining two Tristan subjects by Beardsley may both be described as reception pictures. The most famous of all Beardsley’s Wagnerian images, a drawing largely in black and white ink titled The Wagnerites (figure 5.4), published in The Yellow Book in 1894, does not show any dramatic action at all; instead it focuses only on the audience. As such it is highly unusual among nineteenth-century depictions of theatrical performances. Though small (about eight inches by six inches), The Wagnerites has been the subject of a surprising number of different interpretations. In an ornate, darkened theater an audience in the orchestra stalls faces the stage. Whatever may be happening there is not visible to us; however, a theatrical program discarded on the floor at the lower right informs us that the evening’s program is Tristan und Isolde. There has been much speculation about the attitude of the audience toward the performance. With one exception, the orchestra stalls, the most expensive seats in the theater, are filled entirely with women. Most have elaborate coiffures and wear off-the-shoulder dresses, their upper bodies highlighted by the reserved areas of white paper in a largely black ink drawing. Their faces, seen mostly in profile, are particularly difficult to read. The standard interpretation of the picture, proposed by Kenneth Clark,

Figure 5.4.  The Wagnerites. Source: Aubrey Beardsley, The Wagnerites, pen and white ink, 1894, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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Brian Reade, and others, is that Beardsley’s intention, as so often, is satirical.21 The women’s expressions may be seen as hard and oversophisticated, even decadent; as such, they make an ironic contrast with Wagner’s idealistic tale of romantic love that is being presented on the stage. This is not the only possible interpretation, however. Literary critic Emma Sutton discusses the widespread conservative opinion in England and elsewhere that Wagner’s music was decadent.22 If so, then having a sensual, decadent audience would be entirely appropriate. Beardsley’s view of the scene therefore could be considered objective, or at least nonjudgmental, rather than satirical. Beardsley himself, it will be recalled, was regarded by many, perhaps unfairly, as a prominent decadent largely due to the notoriety of his illustrations for Wilde’s Salome and to his emaciated yet fastidious appearance. On the other hand, French critic Xavier Lacavalerie, in an extended discussion of this image, finds in it no evidence of decadence.23 Instead he sees the audience members as concentrating intensely on Wagner’s music drama; the principal effect of Tristan und Isolde takes place within their minds, as Wagner intended. In this interpretation, Beardsley’s attitude toward the audience in The Wagnerites is sympathetic and approving. The lone male figure in the orchestra stalls, balding and timid-looking, probably would have been understood at the time as a caricature of a Jew. Again Beardsley’s attitude is by no means clear. He is known to have been friendly with a number of Jews from London’s artistic community such as the young satirist and caricaturist Max Beerbohm. During the last two years of his life, Beardsley was heavily under the influence of Marc-André Raffalovich, a Jewish emigré poet and Roman Catholic convert who helped steer Beardsley’s conversion to Catholicism. Is the male figure a reference, satirical or not, to Wagner’s well-known anti-Semitism? The subject is never mentioned in Beardsley’s extensive correspondence. In his notorious essay Judaism in Music (1850), Wagner had written that Jews were not a suitable subject for representation in the visual arts. Perhaps here, as in The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, Beardsley is showing signs of rebelliousness against Wagner, a revered authority figure. He does not hesitate to depict a Jewish subject who moreover has a central place at a performance of Wagner’s opera.24 Beardsley again deals with audience response to Tristan und Isolde in a little-known drawing of circa 1892, now in a private collection (figure 5.5). The work is titled Les revenants de musique [The Ghosts of Music]; it is one of a number of works to which Beardsley gave French titles, perhaps influenced by his simultaneous involvement with Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. The drawing is tall and narrow and surrounded by a triple-lined border as in his nearly contemporaneous portrait of Katharina Klavsky. As in that picture, the

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bottom of the composition is filled with motifs from nature, in this case sketchy tree limbs. It was one of Beardsley’s group of four drawings reproduced as line-block illustrations in the Studio in April 1893. At the left a thin young man with long hair is seated in profile on a chair evidently before a curtain and on an empty stage. He is slumped as if exhausted, looking downward, his right hand open and limply supported by the chair. His costume is unusual: a jacket buttoned up to the neck, baggy trousers, and pointed shoes. The costume resembles that traditionally worn by Pierrot, the French version of a hapless character of the commedia dell’arte. Beardsley used the Pierrot figure elsewhere and seems to have identified with it; thus the subject shown here takes on the aspect of a self-portrait.25 Facing the young man are three somewhat smaller figures, the ghosts of the title. A standing young man and woman look at him though he does not seem to notice them. Sutton plausibly suggests Figure 5.5.  Les Revenants de muthat these are Tristan and Isolde, recog- sique. Source: Aubrey Beardsley, nizable by their unruly hair also seen in Les Revenants de musique, Indian How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink ink and wash, c. 1892. Private Coland in Klavsky. A robed female figure lection/Bridgeman Images seen from the back below them may represent Brangäne.26 The young man, then, has just seen and heard Tristan und Isolde, the work that, according to the account of his friend Gleeson White, had such an intense effect on Beardsley in the theater. Beardsley also would have known Burne-Jones’s large painting Le chant d’amour ([The Song of Love]; 1868–1877; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), based in part on a French folk song, in which a young knight in armor sits at the left, spellbound and drained of energy, as he listens to a musician.27 In Beardsley’s image the young man’s musical experience is based not on listening but on recollection. In an age before recordings and electronic media when one could experience works fully only through infrequent, live performances,

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a devoted Wagnerian might well replay an opera in his imagination. The drawing may suggest the enervating, decadent effect some critics of the time thought Wagner’s music had on its audiences. Beardsley did not attempt to imitate the effects of music or a leitmotif in any of the Tristan und Isolde images: the visual arts and music were not directly comparable, at least before the advent of abstract art in the twentieth century. Nor for the most part did he seek to emulate the intense emotions of the opera except perhaps in the strange watercolor Isolde. His other groups of Wagnerian drawings had consistent styles: decorous for Tannhäuser, lively and picturesque for Das Rheingold. On the other hand, the Tristan drawings, made throughout his career, show the rapid evolution of his technique: from the linearism of How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink to the horror vacui of the late A Répétition of “Tristan und Isolde.” Beginning in Beardsley’s lifetime, a few critics have suggested the possible stylistic influence on the British artist of the French painter and lithographer Odilon Redon28 (see chapter 3) though the influence could have been mutual. The extent of Beardsley’s knowledge of Redon’s work is uncertain though members of his immediate circle certainly were familiar with it. Arthur Symons, later Beardsley’s editor at the Savoy and his biographer, had published an article on Redon as early as 1890.29 Rachel Sloan has proposed that Redon’s influence was specifically on Beardsley’s Wagnerian works.30 If so, then in the Tristan drawings this might be evident in the quality of arrested motion in some of the compositions, notably How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink and Isolde. Although Beardsley drew caricatures of such composers as Carl Maria von Weber and Felix Mendelssohn and a portrait of the still-active Giuseppe Verdi, he never depicted Wagner. Without work and short of money, Beardsley contemplated selling his extensive library but he excluded a few books: religious texts and the volumes of Wagner’s prose works. A photograph taken late in Beardsley’s life shows the artist in the hotel room in Menton, France, where he died.31 Wearing a suit, he is seated facing a wall of photographs of Italian Renaissance figural compositions including many religious and mythological subjects by Andrea Mantegna. Arranged on the top of a bookcase, in the manner of an altar, are photographs of Beardsley’s sister— and Richard Wagner. Aubrey Beardsley remained faithful to the Master of Bayreuth to the end.

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Notes   1.  There is still no monographic treatment of Wagner’s influence on the visual arts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Good color reproductions of paintings on Wagnerian subjects are included in Musées d’Art et d’Histoire, Richard Wagner: Visions d’artistes, d’Auguste Renoir à Anselm Kiefer (exhibition catalog, Geneva, 2005). See also Emma Sutton, “Wagner in the Visual Arts,” in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, Nicholas Vazsonyi, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 682–90. Many general studies deal with the relationship between art and music in the early modern period. See James H. Rubin and Olivia Mattis, eds., Rival Sisters: Art and Music at the Birth of Modernism, 1815–1915 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014).   2.  A nearly complete if difficult to use compendium of illustrations of Beardsley’s works is Brian Reade, Aubrey Beardsley (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1987). A more recent study is Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).  3. Ian Fletcher, Aubrey Beardsley (Boston: Twayne, 1987), attempts a pictureby-picture analysis.  4. Aubrey Beardsley, The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser; or, “Under the Hill”. . . A Romantic Novel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974).   5.  Victor Chan, “Aubrey Beardsley’s Frontispiece to The Comedy of the Rheingold,” Arts Magazine 57 (January 1983): 88–96; and Janet Jempson, “Aubrey Beardsley and the Ring,” Wagner 17 (May 1996): 65–77.  6. Emma Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).   7.  Gleeson White, “Aubrey Beardsley: In Memoriam,” Studio 13 (May 1898): 260.  8. Colette Colligan, The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley: Sexuality and Eroticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 157.  9. Reade, Aubrey Beardsley, fig. 100. 10.  These observations have been made by various authors. See Chris Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley, Dandy of the Grotesque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 83. 11.  Savoy 7 (November 1896). Illustrated in The Later Work of Aubrey Beardsley (New York: Dover, 1967), pl. 129. 12. Reade, Aubrey Beardsley, fig. 33. 13. Reade, Aubrey Beardsley, 16. 14.  Cited in David Colvin, Aubrey Beardsley: A Slave to Beauty (London: Orion, 1998), 56. 15. Reade, Aubrey Beardsley, fig. 393. 16. Aubrey Beardsley, The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, ed. Henry Maas et al. (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970), 194. The lithograph is reproduced in color in Colvin, Aubrey Beardsley, 82.

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17. Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley, 172. 18.  Kenneth Clark, The Best of Aubrey Beardsley (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 31. 19. Reade, Aubrey Beardsley, fig. 29. 20.  Linda Gertner Zatlin, Beardsley, Japonisme, and the Perversion of the Victorian Ideal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 81ff. 21. Clark, The Best of Aubrey Beardsley, 122, cat. 39; and Reade, Aubrey Beardsley, 347, cat. 364. 22. Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley, 100. 23.  Xavier Lacavalerie, “Beardsley, Aubrey Vincent (1872–1898),” in Dictionnaire encyclopédique Wagner, ed. Timothée Picard (Arles: Actes Sud, 2010), 217. 24.  Milly Heyd, Aubrey Beardsley: Symbol, Mask and Self-Irony (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 175 and 188n13. 25. Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley, 62. 26. Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley, 63. 27. On the Burne-Jones painting, see Tim Barringer, “Burne-Jones’s Le Chant d’amour and the Condition of Music,” in Rubin and Mattis, Rival Sisters, 249–71. 28.  M. H. Spielmann, “Original Lithography: The Revival on the Continent,” Magazine of Art 20 (January 1897): 150. 29.  Arthur Symons, “A French Blake: Odilon Redon,” Art Review (July 1890): 207. 30. Rachel Sloan, “The Condition of Music: Wagnerism and Printmaking in France and Britain,” Art History 32, no. 3 (June 2009): 545–77. 31.  Illustrated in Colvin, Aubrey Beardsley, 106.

CHAPTER SIX

Art in the Wagner Memorial Album of 1884

Following the death of Richard Wagner in February 1883, a lavish memorial album was published in Munich in early 1884 through the Baÿreuther Festblaetter, a journal of the Richard Wagner Society.1 The volume included twenty-nine articles and twenty-three reproductions of works of art as well as many decorative elements. It was put together relatively quickly (it included an announcement for the Bayreuth Festival of July 1884) though some of the articles had been published previously. One-third of the album was devoted to essays on Wagner and his works in languages other than German: French, English, Italian, and Spanish, demonstrating the composer’s international influence. The black-and-white reproductions of artworks in the autotype process of photographic printing were mainly of drawings of scenes from Wagner’s operas from Rienzi to Parsifal by artists from many countries. The album had a board of five editors headed by Karl Freiherr von Ostini, and responsibility for selecting the artistic contributions was given to Joseph Ritter von Schmaedel. The clique of Wagnerian admirers gathered around Cosima Wagner in Bayreuth was notoriously conservative. The editors’ choice of art to illustrate the memorial album largely reflected the equally conservative artistic tastes of their subject, Richard Wagner, if occasionally moving into more adventurous territory.

Wagner’s Views on Art Though the most prominent composer of his time, Richard Wagner had little knowledge of, or interest in, contemporary painting, sculpture, and 75

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architecture. Wagner’s prose writings, filling eight volumes in translation, have little to say about the visual arts. Wagner spent many winters in Italy and he died in Venice yet he rarely mentions historical Italian art other than some pro forma references to Raphael. At most Wagner thought of art as playing a supporting role in his music dramas as part of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. (He contributed significantly, however, to the architectural design of the interior of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth.) When Pierre-Auguste Renoir sought out Wagner in Palermo in 1882 to paint his portrait, the composer probably had never heard of the Impressionist artist and was unenthusiastic about the resulting painting (see chapter 2). On one occasion Wagner did approach an internationally prominent artist: the Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin. In 1880 the painter visited Wagner in Posillipo, outside Naples, but the meeting was not a success. Wagner suggested to Böcklin that he might design the stage sets for a forthcoming production of Parsifal. The painter declined, though in 1884 he would provide a sketch for the Wagner memorial album. Regarding portraits of Wagner, the composer, despite his fame, was wary of posing for likenesses in painting or sculpture. Wagner, who had a great interest in disseminating his image, preferred photographic portraits, in which he could exert greater control over his pose and costume. Nevertheless, besides the painting by Renoir, he was the subject of portraits by a few other well-known artists of the time such as the Munich painter Franz von Lenbach. The images of Wagner reproduced in the memorial album, however, like the portraits by Lenbach, largely derive from photographs, echoing the composer’s preferences. The only portrait in a noble medium from Wagner’s maturity is a sculptural sketch of the composer’s head in terra-cotta by Lorenz Gedon; however, this project was left unfinished following the deaths of both Wagner and Gedon in 1883. In 1867 Wagner published an article in which, in a rare discussion of the visual arts, he acknowledged “the noble beginnings of a development of the German art spirit” earlier in the century exemplified by the works of the Munich fresco painter Peter Cornelius (1784–1867). Cornelius was a long-lived representative of the Nazarine school, which developed among German artists in Rome during the period 1810–1820. The Nazarine artists favored a linear, rather dry painting style based on their interpretation of artists of the Italian Renaissance, particularly Raphael and his school. Imagining a French spectator of the German scene in the arts and sciences, Wagner asserted that what was in earnest in the work of Cornelius “has now become a flippant pretext which flings its heels for mere effect. . . . But as far as Effect is concerned, our Frenchman knows that none can beat his friends at home.”2

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This is one of Wagner’s few observations on the artistic scene in Paris, then the center of the art world, where he lived for extended periods from 1839 to 1842 and 1859 to 1861. In private, Wagner’s estimation of contemporary German painters was even less generous. Cosima Wagner, in her Diaries, records the following conversation in 1878. On this occasion we were exchanging impressions of German painting (Schnorr, Kaulbach, Cornelius), and remarking how soon these great impressions faded into nothing (though R[ichard] still likes some things by Cornelius . . .). We agree that, if there had been anything genuine in this artistic movement (of Schnorr’s in Dresden at that time), Tannhäuser, for example, ought to have been hailed by it as a fulfillment of all its desires.3

Although Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, another Nazarine painter, lived until 1872, Wagner referred to their joint residence in Dresden more than thirty years earlier when Schnorr had been a professor at the art academy and director of the celebrated Gemäldegalerie. Tannhäuser had initially enjoyed only a modest success in Dresden. Like other prominent individuals, Wagner tended to evaluate the efforts of others solely on the basis of their effect on his own career. While most of the works reproduced in the 1884 album were recent, some dated from long before the year of publication. Thus Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s sketches of Lohengrin (figure 6.1) and Der fliegende Holländer dated from 1860 and 1863. These were late works by Schnorr whose style, which might have been considered avant-garde in 1815, was certainly very conservative by 1860. Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s art, like that of some of the other German artists to be discussed, is not strongly represented in American museums yet it has been extensively documented and collected in Germany. Schnorr’s linearism, clarity, and preference for mythological or historical subjects are evident in the designs reproduced in the Wagner album. Beginning before the Dresden period, for the royal palace in the Munich Residenz, Schnorr had painted for King Ludwig I—grandfather of Wagner’s patron Ludwig II—a series of frescoes based on the Nibelungenlied, also one of the principal sources for Wagner’s Ring operas.4 In addition, Schnorr was the father of tenor Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Wagner’s first Tristan in the premiere of Tristan und Isolde in 1865. The two operas depicted by Schnorr are among Wagner’s early works, composed in the 1840s, though as late as 1863 none of Wagner’s more-recent operas had been given a public production. These images have been somewhat neglected in comparison with the Nibelungenlied cycle in the literature

Figure 6.1.  Lohengrin. Source: Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Lohengrin, drawing, 1860. Central-Leitung des Allgemeinen Richard-Wagner-Vereins, Baÿreuther Festblaetter in Wort und Bild (Munich: Autotype Company, 1884)13, Harvard University Library

Art in the Wagner Memorial Album of 1884   •  79

on Schnorr. The painter’s affinity for literary (e.g., biblical or mythological) themes is evident in his choice of Lohengrin; he even includes a block of text from Wagner’s libretto as Lohengrin addresses the swan.

Artists in the Memorial Album The criteria for the inclusion of artwork in the memorial album were varied: scenes from each of Wagner’s operas were to be depicted, and an attempt was made to include artists from as many countries as there were languages among the authors in the book. Many of the illustrations were by academic artists from Munich who are not well remembered today either in Germany or internationally. Some though by no means all of the better-known artists whose work was included were acquainted with or at least had met Wagner. The prominent Munich artist Franz von Lenbach contributed a forceful pastel portrait dated 1881 of the composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt, Wagner’s ardent supporter, father-in-law, and next-door neighbor in Bayreuth (figure 6.2). This is the only image in the album that does not refer directly to Wagner (though it accompanies a discussion of Liszt’s early productions of Wagner’s operas in Weimar). Lenbach’s relationship with Wagner was rather uneasy despite the fact that he was considered the official portraitist of the Wagner family. Lenbach had become friendly with Cosima Wagner in the 1860s and through her met

Figure 6.2.  Franz Liszt. Source: Franz von Lenbach, Franz Liszt, pastel, 1881, 11. Central-Leitung des Allgemeinen Richard-WagnerVereins, Baÿreuther Festblaetter in Wort und Bild (Munich: Autotype Company, 1884), Harvard University Library

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most of the Wagner circle. As early as New Year 1872, Lenbach sent a portrait of Liszt to the Wagners at Tribschen, Switzerland. The 1881 pastel is probably a portrait of Liszt now in the Wagner Archive, Bayreuth, which suggests that the work remained in the Wagner family. After a tumultuous youth, Liszt had taken holy orders, and his sober costume in the pastel perhaps reflects his status as an abbé. In a slightly smaller head-and-shoulders version of the pastel (Lenbachhaus, Munich) the pose is identical though Liszt appears older and looks upward.5 The alert, momentary facial expression in both pastels suggests that the portrait may be derived from a photograph. Lenbach also completed an oil portrait of Liszt in partial profile though it is less striking than the pastel. Arnold Böcklin, who as already noted had met the composer in Italy in 1880, provided one of the more unusual images in the album, showing the dragon Fafner, from Siegfried, as a giant coiled reptile (figure 6.3). A modern art historian finds an element of “disguised parody” in this odd image, perhaps reflecting Böcklin’s ambivalence toward both Wagner’s personality and his music.6 This did not, however, prevent the editors from using the image. The motif also was adapted for the decoration of the album cover, initialed with the monogram RS (probably the Munich painter and illustrator Rudolf Seitz) and dated 1884. Though Böcklin’s work is thoroughly documented, Fafner is known only from its autotype reproduction in the album.

Figure 6.3.  Fafner as a Dragon Guarding the Nibelung Hoard. Source: Arnold Böcklin, Fafner as a Dragon Guarding the Nibelung Hoard, drawing, 25. CentralLeitung des Allgemeinen Richard-Wagner-Vereins, Baÿreuther Festblaetter in Wort und Bild (Munich: Autotype Company, 1884), Harvard University Library

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One of the few visual artists who was on friendly terms with Wagner was the Spanish genre painter and portraitist Rogelio de Egusquiza (1845–1915). Long resident in Paris, Egusquiza first saw the Ring operas in Munich in 1879. Greatly impressed, he then traveled to Bayreuth, where Wagner and his family received the young artist hospitably. Years later Egusquiza provided an extended account indicating “the impression produced by the first visit he made to Wagner, whose work was to radically change the painter’s artistic production and even his life.”7 Wagner’s dinner conversation, as recorded by Egusquiza, at times seems rather mercurial, with abrupt changes of tone. As he was to do later with Böcklin, Wagner asked if Egusquiza was interested in designing sets and costumes, presumably for Parsifal. The painter modestly declined. Egusquiza was an honored guest at the premiere of Parsifal in 1882, attending four performances. Subsequently he painted numerous Wagnerian subjects for the rest of his career. In 1884 he produced a highly realistic drawing of an ailing Amfortas wrapped in the voluminous white robes of his order for use in the memorial album (figure 6.4). Both the style and the choice of subject recall a Spanish tradition going back at least as far as Zurbarán and Velázquez of depicting the suffering Christ as an ordinary human being. In Paris at the Symbolist-oriented Salon de la Rose+Croix in 1896, Egusquiza exhibited a series of five etchings on Parsifal including an Amfortas. The etching largely repeats the composition of the drawing with the addition of a shadowy landscape background. All of the etchings except the Amfortas

Figure 6.4.  Amfortas. Source: Rogelio de Egusquiza, Amfortas, drawing, 1884, 51. Central-Leitung des Allgemeinen RichardWagner-Vereins, Baÿreuther Festblaetter in Wort und Bild Munich: Autotype Company, 1884), Harvard University Library

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feature dramatic spotlighting from above, perhaps symbolizing divine intervention. Egusquiza advocated using such lighting rather than footlights in operatic productions, publishing an article on this subject in the Wagnerian Baÿreuther Blätter in 1885.8 He also produced a large painting (Prado, Madrid), in which Amfortas, with shorter hair and a voluminous beard, leans to the left though his face, in profile, does not convey the anguish seen in Egusquiza’s drawing.9 Artists not personally acquainted with Wagner also took part in the project. One contributor who has a reputation as an avant-garde artist was the young Max Klinger (1857–1920), probably best known today as a printmaker. The Klinger work is a sketch titled Ascent to the Grail Mountain (figure 6.5), a grandiose landscape with a distant castle but no figures. The picture does not have much in common stylistically with Klinger’s fantastic print series such as A Glove (1881) that anticipate twentieth-century Surrealism. It does have analogies, however, to several extensive mountain landscapes in Klinger’s etching series Intermezzi (Munich, 1881). With rare exceptions, such as an etching of a nude Venus for the frontispiece of the thirteenth edition of Eduard Grisebach’s Der neue Tannhäuser (1885),10 Klinger did not continue to create Wagner-related imagery. Instead he later collaborated with Wagner’s musical archrival Johannes Brahms on a large Brahms-fantasie album in which lithographic images by Klinger were associated with sheet music by Brahms. In 1903–1904, however, the city of Leipzig commissioned Klinger to produce a sculptural monument to Richard Wagner who was, like Klinger, a native son. Although Klinger had previously sculpted a large monument to Beethoven (1900, Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig; a reduced marble version is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), both artist and patrons had difficulties with the Wagner commission. Klinger created a reduced plaster model of a figure to stand atop a three-meter marble base decorated with scenes from Parsifal and Siegfried. The plaster depicted Wagner wrapped in a cloak and looking forward.11 Using photographs supplied by Cosima and Siegfried Wagner, Klinger made an overlife-size marble portrait bust of the composer (destroyed) and also produced a version of the pediment reliefs,12 but due in part to technical problems in obtaining a large block of marble, the project remained incomplete at the artist’s death in 1920. As Hellmuth Christian Wolff tersely remarks, “Klinger was no admirer of Wagner, which no doubt also had an impeding effect.”13 Of the included artists, the one whose work was best known for its Wagnerian themes was the French painter Henri Fantin-Latour. Early on Fantin-Latour had gone to Wagner’s defense in a lithograph and painting derived from the controversial Paris production of Tannhäuser in 1861 (see

Figure 6.5.   Ascent to the Grail Mountain. Source: Max Klinger, Ascent to the Grail Mountain, drawing, 1884, 27. Central-Leitung des Allgemeinen Richard-WagnerVereins, Baÿreuther Festblaetter in Wort und Bild (Munich: Autotype Company, 1884), Harvard University Library

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plate 1.2). After obtaining a ticket for the opening of the Bayreuth theater with the Ring operas in 1876, Fantin-Latour became a convinced Wagnerian. He saw but did not meet Wagner during the Bayreuth production, and this experience may have contributed to his allegorical portrait of the composer published in 1886.14 Fantin-Latour subsequently produced dozens of lithographs and paintings based on Wagner’s operas. For the 1884 album he contributed an allegorical drawing, On the Death of Richard Wagner, showing a winged female figure (perhaps that of Glory) scattering flowers on Wagner’s tomb (figure 2.2). By October 1883 Fantin-Latour had already made a preparatory sketch in black chalk (Musée de peinture et de sculpture, Grenoble) that showed the composition in near final form; only the lettering on the tomb is not yet depicted.15 Fantin-Latour used traditional funerary allegory (the mourning figure), having also depicted mourning female figures in prints memorializing the composers Robert Schumann and Hector Berlioz, among others. At the same time Fantin-Latour added realistic elements: the monument closely resembles Wagner’s actual tomb behind his home, Wahnfried, in Bayreuth. This was one of the few artworks that was given a full-page reproduction in the album. Fantin-Latour’s status as a member of the artistic avant-garde was somewhat debatable. He was undoubtedly the painter of choice for group and individual portraits of the Impressionists as well as other leading Parisian modernist painters, poets, and composers. Fantin-Latour himself was ambivalent about being included in this group, however, while another independent but more unconventional artist, Odilon Redon (who had learned the technique of transfer lithography from Fantin-Latour), regarded Fantin-Latour’s Wagnerian lithographs as merely late Romantic and sentimental in style. Thus the choice of Fantin-Latour for prominent inclusion in the Wagner memorial album did not indicate an embrace of modernist art by the editors. A surprising choice among the artists in the album was the Anglo-American painter John Singer Sargent, only twenty-eight years old at the time and not yet well known in Germany. One guesses that von Schmaedel, the editor for artistic content, had advisers to help choose which artists would represent various countries within the album. In Paris, Sargent, an avid concertgoer, was friendly with the Wagner-influenced composer Emmanuel Chabrier. He also knew the young critic Judith Gautier, a strong supporter of Wagner’s music and a romantic interest of the composer’s last years. Gautier, a familiar figure in Bayreuth, may have suggested that Sargent be a contributor to the album. The editors associated artists’ works with essays by writers from the same countries, and Sargent’s sketch was published with a piece by an American author, Elizabeth E. Evans.

Art in the Wagner Memorial Album of 1884   •  85

Sargent’s reputation today is of a talented if relatively conservative artist. His pen-and-wash study titled The Death of Tristan (figure 6.6) nevertheless is stylistically the most modern piece in the album. Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, in their massive catalog of Sargent’s complete paintings, date the work to 1886, and they assume it was commissioned by London’s Art Journal before Sargent’s visit that year to Bayreuth, where he saw several operas including Tristan und Isolde.16 The work was then published in November 1886 to accompany an article by Charles Dowdeswell describing that production. However, the work’s publication in the Wagner memorial album means that The Death of Tristan dates from 1883–1884 if not earlier. Sargent seems to have settled on depicting a scene from Tristan und Isolde either by assignment or by choice. Initially he considered a scene from the first act of the opera showing Isolde, Brangäne, and a messenger. A sheet in brown ink, from a fragile sketchbook in the collection of the Harvard University Art Museum, depicts the shipboard scene while a related sketch on the preceding page is on the verso of a sheet of figure studies for Sargent’s

Figure 6.6.   The Death of Tristan. Source: John Singer Sargent, The Death of Tristan, ink and wash, 1883–1884, 55. Central-Leitung des Allgemeinen Richard-WagnerVereins, Baÿreuther Festblaetter in Wort und Bild (Munich: Autotype Company, 1884), Harvard University Library

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painting The Spanish Singer circa 1879. Brangäne stands protectively next to the seated Isolde, who turns and listens with her head lowered, and although it is a rapid sketch, it conveys Isolde’s tension effectively. The standing figure of Kurwenal at the right is drawn several times; in each case the figure leans backward as he delivers his unwelcome message. The figures of Isolde and Brangäne are also sketched in different poses in drawings on other sheets. Sargent eventually opted for a more dramatic scene from the conclusion of the opera. In The Death of Tristan the details of the story are clearly presented: Tristan’s empty bed on the battlements; the ship in the harbor; and the hero’s death in Isolde’s arms. Nevertheless, the aggressively sketchy handling differs from that seen in any other work in the album. In academic art, such free handling was reserved for preliminary studies rather than for the final product. Though a prolific artist, Sargent does not seem to have published or exhibited any other works on Wagnerian themes. His sketchbooks at Harvard contain other studies that may be of figures from Wagnerian operas, possibly including Die Walküre, but the compositions were not developed further (see chapter 7). He continued his attendance at Wagnerian operas, however, particularly after his move from Paris to London, and in 1890 he produced a monotype showing a panoramic view of the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, New York, during a performance of Lohengrin17 (see plate 7.1). In the years after 1884, an increasing number of performances of Wagner’s operas led to an explosion of visual images of these works. Paintings, book illustrations, and advertising images of all kinds appeared in profusion, differing widely in function, style, and aesthetic quality. The weakness of much academic art based on Wagner did not escape the notice of some of the composer’s admirers. Visiting the Paris Salons, art critic Karl Ludwig Thieme was sarcastic about recent Wagnerian paintings by Gaston Bussière and Georges Antoine Rochegrosse, among others.18 Much of this largely illustrative art has been reproduced mainly in studies in Germany where books on Richard Wagner in words and pictures have become a minor publishing genre.19 The Wagner memorial album nevertheless remains the most ambitious group effort by artists of Wagner’s time to capture the composer’s operas in visual form.

Notes 1.  Central-Leitung des Allgemeinen Richard-Wagner-Vereines, Baÿreuther Festblaetter in Wort und Bild (Munich: Verlag des Autotype Company, 1884, 1886). Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations in chapter 6 have been taken from this text. 2.  Richard Wagner, “Deutsche Kunst und Deutsche Politik,” trans. in William Ashton Ellis, ed., Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (New York: Broude Brothers, 1966), 4:54–55.

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 3. Cosima Wagner, Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, vol. 2, 1983), 189.  4. Inken Nowald, Die Nibelungenfresken von Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld im Königsbau der Münchner Residenz, 1827–1867 (Kiel, Germany: Schriften der Kunsthalle zu Kiel, 1978), vol. 3.  5. Lenbachhaus, Munich, Franz von Lenbach, 1836–1904, exh. cat. (1986), 300, no. 136.  6. Hans Holenweg, Arnold Böcklin: Die Zeichnungen, catalogue raisonné (Basel, Switzerland: F. Reinhardt and Hirmer, 1998), 220, no. 417.   7.  Aureliano de Beruete y Moret, Rogelio de Egusquiza: Pintor y Grabador (Madrid: Blass y Cia., 1918), 14; see also Javier Barón Thaidigsmann, “Los grabados de Parsifal de Rogelio de Egusquiza,” in Santander, Museo de Bellas Artes de Santander, Rogelio de Egusquiza, 1845–1915, exh. cat. (1995), 69–75.   8.  Rogelio de Egusquiza, “Über die Beleuchtung der Bühne,” Bayreuther Blätter, June 1885, 185.   9.  Beruete y Moret, Rogelio de Egusquiza, plate 11. 10. Illustrated in Heinrich Weigel, Wolfram Klante, and Ingrid Schulze, Tannhäuser in der Kunst (Bucha bei Jena, Germany: Quartus, 1999), 209. 11. Julius Vogel, Max Klinger und seine Vaterstadt Leipzig (Leipzig, Germany: Deichertsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1923), 57–62 and pl. 11. 12.  Illustrated in color in Max Klinger: Plastische Meisterwerke (Leipzig, Germany: E. A. Seemann, 1998). 13.  Hellmuth Christian Wolff, “Max Klingers Verhältnis zur Musik,” in Roemerund-Pelisaeus-Museum, Hildesheim, Max Klinger: Wege zum Gesamtkunstwerk (1984), 87. 14.  See chapter 2. 15. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Fantin-Latour, exh. cat. (1980), 297, no. 120. 16. Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: The Complete Paintings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 5:141, no. 876. 17. Ormond and Kilmurray, illustrated in fig. 73 (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco). 18.  Karl Ludwig Thieme, Richard Wagner im Dienste französischer Maler: Eine kritische Studie (Leipzig, Germany: C. Wild [1895]). 19.  A partial list includes Erich W. Engel, Richard Wagners Leben und Werke im Bilde (Leipzig, Germany: Siegel, 1922); Julius Kapp, Richard Wagner: Sein Leben sein Werk seine Welt in 260 Bildern (Berlin, Germany: Max Hesse, 1933); Robert Bory, Richard Wagner: Sein Leben und sein Werk in Bildern (Frauenfeld, Germany: Huber, 1938); Hans Meyer, Richard Wagner, mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg, Germany: Rowalht, 1994); and Jordi Mota and María Infiesta, Das Werk Richard Wagners im Spiegel der Kunst (Tübingen, Germany: Grabert, 1995).

CHAPTER SEVEN

John Singer Sargent, Wagnerite

The Anglo-American painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) became famous as the leading portraitist of his time to the wealthy elite and aristocracy, showing their portraits at the Paris Salon and the Royal Academy’s exhibitions in London. Sargent also valued his landscapes and genre scenes, often in watercolor, the product of his many journeys to the Mediterranean countries and beyond, and he frequently exhibited these works in prestigious commercial galleries. In the early stages of his career from 1880 to 1890, however, Sargent essayed a variety of genres, adopting an experimental attitude to subject matter as he sought to find his artistic niche. Although Sargent’s reputation declined after his death, since the 1980s there has been a major revival of interest in his work. Books and exhibitions on all the major aspects of his career have appeared, and a massive nine-volume catalog has been devoted to his complete paintings.1 One little-known aspect of Sargent’s early career that has not been examined in detail is his strong interest in depicting Richard Wagner’s operas. Sargent’s Wagnerian works are all done in graphic media rather than as paintings, and they occupy a limited place in the artist’s prolific, fifty-year career. Nevertheless, they are evidence of Sargent’s documented, lifelong involvement with music generally and with Wagner’s operas in particular. In London where Sargent lived from 1886, the term Wagnerite was applied, slightly ironically, to fanatical enthusiasts of Wagner’s operas. Thus in Aubrey Beardsley’s famous drawing The Wagnerites (figure 5.4), a somewhat over-sophisticated audience focuses intently on a performance of Tristan 89

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und Isolde. An examination of Sargent’s life and works suggests that he, too, belonged in the category of the Wagnerites. Born in Florence to expatriate American parents, Sargent spent a peripatetic youth in a variety of European countries. Though he had little formal education, Sargent read widely, especially in literature, and spoke several languages fluently. He also became an excellent amateur musician, easily able to sight-read scores at the piano. Deciding to study painting, Sargent moved to Paris in 1874 and entered the atelier of the fashionable portraitist Carolus-Duran, who had a good reputation as a teacher. Adopting Paris as his home for the next dozen years, Sargent made many contacts among the city’s intellectual and artistic elite, and this almost certainly led to his first explorations of Wagnerian themes. Though Sargent traveled widely, there is no evidence that he had seen any of Wagner’s operas before his first known depictions of Wagnerian themes in the early 1880s. During Sargent’s residence in Paris (1874–1886), Wagner’s operas were virtually banned from Parisian stages due to lingering resentment following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 and perhaps also to Wagner’s undiplomatic writings about the French defeat. Other German-born operatic composers, though, had been highly successful in Paris, and most of their works were written in French, but the Wagner operas staged there in the decade before the war (Tannhäuser; Rienzi) had also been presented in that language. Sargent’s first securely datable Wagnerian work is an ink-and-wash drawing, The Death of Tristan (figure 6.6), faithfully depicting a scene from act 3 of Tristan und Isolde. The drawing, now in a private collection, was published in the ambitious memorial album for Wagner issued in Munich by the Bayreuth Wagner-Verein in 1884.2 How did Sargent, young and not yet well known particularly for subject pictures (that is, scenes from history or literature), obtain what must have been a prestigious commission to collaborate on the Wagner memorial album? The freely sketched style of the drawing is unlike that of any other artwork in the album. In Paris Sargent knew two critics, Louis de Fourcaud and Judith Gautier, who contributed articles to the album, and it is likely that one of them recommended Sargent for inclusion. Both critics had written sympathetically about Sargent’s exhibited works, and the artist had painted Fourcaud’s portrait. More is known about Sargent’s contacts with Gautier. Of the artist’s wide circle of acquaintances, she had by far the closest connection with Richard Wagner. A prolific novelist and critic, Gautier was considered the leading expert in France on Wagner’s works and had published a book on the librettos of the German master’s operas.3 Later she was to devote another book

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to an account of her visits to Richard and Cosima Wagner in Tribschen, Switzerland, in 1869 and 1870.4 Gautier had stopped in Lucerne on her way to and from the unauthorized (by Wagner) premieres of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in Munich. Wagner’s letters to Gautier have survived and have been published5 unlike his letters to an earlier romantic interest, Mathilde Wesendonck, which eventually were requisitioned from Wesendonck and burned by Cosima Wagner. Particularly following her attendance at the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876, Wagner’s letters to Gautier, more than thirty years his junior, took a decidedly romantic turn even by the effusive standards of nineteenth-century letter-writing. One example will suffice. Dear soul, sweet friend! I love you still! . . . For me you were full of gentle fire, soothing, intoxicating! Oh, how I should love to embrace you again, dear sweet one! . . . I pity you your life. But everything is to be pitied. And I above all should be pitied if I followed your advice to forget you.6

One wonders how this escaped the notice of the usually eagle-eyed Cosima (with whom Gautier also corresponded). Though unhappily married, Gautier maintained a prudent distance from Wagner but made occasional visits to Bayreuth. The last was for the premiere of Parsifal less than a year before Wagner’s death. It is probable that Gautier knew the members of Wagner’s entourage who were responsible for putting together his memorial album. It is not clear when Gautier first met Sargent, about whose work she had written at the time of the 1882 Paris Salon. At some point Gautier bought a summer home at Saint-Enogat on the coast of Brittany, and judging by letters from Cosima and Richard Wagner, she was installed there by 1877.7 Mabel de Courcy Duncan, a friend who knew Gautier many years later, thought that Sargent “visited Judith quite often when she first bought her villa at Saint-Enogat.”8 In any event, during the summer of 1883 Sargent, who was working on a portrait at a nearby estate, often visited Gautier at her villa. It was probably at this time that he made no fewer than seven portraits of Gautier in various media, the largest an oil painting showing her standing indoors by candlelight (Detroit Institute of Arts). This may be the greatest number of portraits Sargent made of anyone. By the fall of 1883 Sargent may have been exploring subjects relating to Tristan und Isolde either as alternatives for the Munich album or for some other purpose. His loosely handled drawing The Death of Tristan, published the following summer, effectively conveys the intensity of the scene yet it is a rare depiction of sexual passion by an artist who was reserved, if not

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repressed. He may also at this time have been working on sketches––now in the Harvard University Art Museums––of scenes from act 1 of Tristan or from other Wagnerian operas, most of which have never been published.9 These drawings are in fragile sketchbooks Sargent kept for his own use, and after his death his sister donated them to Harvard. One compositional sketch in pen and brown ink for the act 1 shipboard scene shows Isolde and Brangäne in different poses; another shows them with the messenger Kurwenal. While in this case the group of Isolde and Brangäne, with part of the ship’s deck, is shown only once, Sargent experimented with the figure of the messenger, drawing it no fewer than three times. Sargent may have depicted a number of additional subjects from act 1 of Tristan und Isolde that are now lost. Page 5, verso, in the same sketchbook bears this inscription (my reading): Scène I 1—lever du rideau [Voilier] du haut bord[?]—le Bateau marche—   une galère— Sc—2—Scène 2—(Photogr.) la tente ouverte par Brangaine—Tristan au fond   du navire. [Scene I 1—the curtain rises. [Sailing ship] seen from above [?]—the Ship  moves—a galley— Sc—2—Scene 2—(Photogr.) the tent opened by Brangäne—Tristan at the   stern of the ship.]

The reference to photography is odd, and in the opinion of Sargent specialist Elaine Kilmurray, the inscription is not in the artist’s hand.10 In that case, the inscription most likely lists scenes from act 1 that were drawn by Sargent but cannot now be located. The inscription first mentions the opening of the opera. Using four different words to refer to the ship (“voilier,” “bateau,”  “galère,” and “navire”), it describes the vessel as depicted under sail. Sargent here may have been considering a scene showing the ship from a distance to evoke the famous orchestral prelude to the opera. The inscription then refers to Brangäne opening Isolde’s tent, or cabin. This subject is the only one from the list depicted in this sketchbook. The volume is missing five pages, however, and the other Tristan drawings could have been on pages that have been removed. One compositional drawing in the album, extending over two pages, is Studies of Isolde and Brangäne (figure 7.1). This drawing and the other compositional sketch, Isolde, Brangäne and a Messenger, are atypical for this sketchbook, which otherwise consists largely of Sargent’s more characteristic

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Figure 7.1.  Studies of Isolde and Brangäne. Source: John Singer Sargent, Studies of Isolde and Brangäne, brown ink and wash, 1880–1885. Harvard Art Museums/ Fogg Museum, gift of Mrs. Frances Ormond, photo: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1937.7.21.18

rapid studies of the attitudes of individual figures executed in either pencil or pen. At the far left is a figure of Isolde with a barely visible Brangäne, rendered in pen and wash, an unusually elaborate technique in the context of this sketchbook. Isolde is seated on a couch, her head turned to the right; Brangäne, her back to her mistress, stands peering to the left through the tent curtains she has parted. Next come two similar sketches in pen, and the upper one, framed with a border, shows Brangäne peering out to the right. These drawings are partly covered by the wash of the image at the far left, indicating that the wash drawing was executed later. The sketches at the right of the page again show the seated Isolde with three iterations of the standing Brangäne. Isolde is now in the attitude in which she also is shown in Isolde, Brangäne and a Messenger: leaning forward, with her right hand to her forehead. Dating the drawings precisely is difficult. They may belong to the same time period as The Death of Tristan (1883–1884; figure 6.6) and could have been alternative ideas for the memorial album though that project allowed room for only one work per artist. On the other hand, The Death of Tristan was republished in 1886 to accompany an article in London’s Art Journal on a production of the opera at that year’s Bayreuth Festival, which Sargent attended.11 The circumstances of this commission also are unknown. An illustration by an anonymous artist in the Art Journal article shows a scene of Isolde observing Tristan on the ship’s deck. This also appears to be one of the

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subjects mentioned in the sketchbook inscription, that of Tristan standing in the stern of the ship. It is not known why this image was supplied by another artist rather than by Sargent. The dating also is complicated by the subject matter of the other drawings in the sketchbook. The right-hand page of Studies of Isolde and Brangäne (Harvard Art Museums 1937.7.21.17) is on the verso of a drawing of a Spanish dancer. During the period 1880–1882, following a trip to Spain, Sargent was engaged in producing El Jaleo, an enormous genre painting of a flamenco dance performance (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) that Sargent exhibited with great success at the Salon of 1882. Probably at the same time he painted a related smaller picture, The Spanish Dance, set outdoors at night (Hispanic Society of America, New York). The study on the recto of the sketchbook page is for a figure in The Spanish Dance. That image dates no later than 1880–1882 or to the Spanish journey itself (late 1879). Other drawings in the same sketchbook relate to Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, an ambitious picture of children outdoors that Sargent showed at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1886. However, since Sargent could have returned at any time to an older sketchbook to use the blank pages, the dates of these drawings are not definitive for the sketches relating to Tristan. El Jaleo demonstrates Sargent’s interest in stage performances of all kinds as also evident in his depictions of subjects from Wagner’s operas. At the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 Sargent made several life-size oil sketches of Javanese women dancers in costume. He also made an effort to paint the portraits of many of the leading tragic actors of his time, including Ellen Terry, Edwin Booth, and Eleonora Duse though not showing them in action on the stage. In the most important work of this kind, the full-length Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1889; Tate Gallery, London), the actress, in a spectacular pseudo-medieval robe, places a crown upon her own head, her face displaying mixed emotions. This scene, however, does not occur in Shakespeare’s play. Sargent had previously sketched, and rejected, the scene in which Lady Macbeth emerges from her castle to welcome King Duncan. Sargent’s disinclination to depict dramatic scenes may have contributed to his decision not to execute any of his Wagnerian sketches as oil paintings. Although Sargent may not have seen Tristan until his visit to Bayreuth in 1886, his drawings already demonstrate a thorough familiarity with the opera that could have been gained through study of the published score and libretto or through piano transcriptions. Even for artists who frequently depicted subjects from Wagner’s operas, precise information on their attendance at performances of his music is usually scanty. As we’ve seen, Aubrey Beardsley was a fanatical admirer of Wagner’s music and some record

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survives of the specific performances that he saw in London. In the case of Sargent, information can be gleaned from his large correspondence and from the reminiscences of those who knew him. His pictures also yield clues: in the late 1870s Sargent painted two oil sketches of rehearsals by conductor Jules Pasdeloup at the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris (Chicago Art Institute [loan] and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). In this popular concert series, clearly attended by Sargent, Pasdeloup made an effort to include orchestral transcriptions of Wagner’s music in most of the programs since the operas were not being staged in Paris during this period. Before his definitive move to London, Sargent frequently visited friends in England. In May 1886 he wrote to the poet Alma Strettell about conductor Hans Richter’s concerts in London, “Richter’s plans are now known. The ‘Grand Wagner Night’ is on from June 7th and June 10th, same programme, 2nd act of Tristan and almost entire 3rd act of Siegfried with Malten, Gudehus, Henschel etc.”12 The previous year at Farnham House, a country house in Surrey, the American painter and illustrator Edwin Austin Abbey had written, referring to piano transcriptions, “We have music until the house won’t stand it. Sargent is going elaborately through Wagner’s trilogy, recitatives and all.”13 In the era before recordings, most musical entertainments were selfgenerated. Sargent reportedly could play the piano scores of Tristan; Die Walküre; and Parsifal in full. At Farnham House, Sargent and Strettell were known as the “maniac” and “co-maniac” for their marathon performances of piano duets.14 Other Wagnerians in their circle included Strettell’s brotherin-law Joseph Comyns Carr, a gallery director and theatrical impresario who organized the first production of Parsifal in England. Sargent had written to Strettell, “I shall see you I suppose at Carr’s little play for which he has given me a ticket on Wednesday and I will rejoice for are we not two Comaniacs, and is not Wagner our straitjacket? He is.”15 Despite this amateur musical activity, Sargent included relatively few professional musicians in his large social circle. In the latter part of his career, however, when he switched from portraits in oils to drawings in charcoal, Sargent depicted the composers Gabriel Fauré, Ethel Smyth, and Charles Loeffler. The American Wagnerian soprano Susan Strong, who made her debut at the Royal Opera in 1895 as Sieglinde in Die Walküre, was portrayed by Sargent a decade later though in formal attire rather than onstage in costume. During Sargent’s visit to Bayreuth in 1886, the festival program included Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. A friend, Lucia Millet, wrote to her family on July 25, 1886, “Mr. Sargent is going to Germany for the Parsefel (I think it is spelled like that) on Saturday.” On August 9 she added, “Mr. Sargent is

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at Bayreuth wild over the music he is hearing.”16 Sargent’s Death of Tristan drawing is close to the scene in the Bayreuth production of the opera as described in the Art Journal article, but as already noted, the drawing had been published two years earlier. The Bayreuth production, however, may not have been the first Sargent had seen of Tristan und Isolde. Recently Marc Simpson has published evidence that Sargent may have seen a production of the opera by the Royal Italian Opera at Covent Garden in July 1884 during a visit to London. On May 25 he had written from Paris to the American novelist Henry James, “It will be pleasant getting to London. . . . It will be a great treat to hear Wagner operas. I believe Schuster has secured a seat for me for several nights.”17 The London performances in any event would have come too late to influence Sargent’s Death of Tristan, which was published in Bayreuth within the same month. Later reports underline Sargent’s continuing interest in Wagner’s operas. Julie H. Heyneman, a writer and a student of Sargent, recalled for Sargent’s biographer Evan Charteris an evening in London in July 1890 when several amateurs “worked through the whole of Tristan, taking all the parts” with Sargent as the pianist.18 Charles Loeffler, who first met Sargent after a concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra around 1891, wrote to Charteris about Sargent’s sensitivity to the music of the contemporary composers Fauré and Edouard Lalo. Loeffler recalled that Sargent “knew Wagner’s scores more intimately than many musicians and in bygone years played through the better part of them with complete comprehension, deep interest and genuine love for all the beauties in them.”19 Another group of Sargent’s Wagnerian drawings at Harvard are four caricatures on sheets of the same size in one mounting showing alternative views of a stage production. The subject evidently is Brünnhilde disputing with Wotan from act 3 of Die Walküre. While caricature survives today mainly in the form of political cartoons, it had a much wider range of subjects in the nineteenth century. Popular humor journals such as Le Charivari and Punch frequently published caricatures of scenes from operas by Wagner, Verdi, and Berlioz or of the composers themselves, an indication of the more central role opera played in popular culture at that time than it does today. The genre was particularly well developed in Paris, where Sargent lived for a dozen years prior to the probable date of the drawings. Wagner’s Ring operas had their official premieres at Bayreuth in 1876 perhaps only a decade before the period of Sargent’s drawings, which means they were contemporary and still controversial. Like other well-known artists, Sargent occasionally made caricature drawings, and he even produced a rare caricature in oils depicting art critic

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Figure 7.2.   Caricature: Brünnhilde and Wotan 2. Source: John Singer Sargent, Studies of Two Opera Singers (recto and verso), graphite, 1937.8.105. Harvard Art Museums/ Fogg Museum, gift of Mrs. Frances Ormond. Photo: President and Fellows of Harvard College

Joseph Comyns Carr and a woman friend in a rowboat.20 In his caricatures Sargent exaggerates aspects of the subjects’ costumes, expressions, and gestures for comic effect. The first Wagnerian caricature shows a protesting Brünnhilde near the front of a summarily rendered stage with Wotan as a distant and sketchy figure at the right. Next are two rapid drawings that are slightly more detailed with an enlarged figure of Brünnhilde. One of these, partly damaged, has not previously been reproduced (figure 7.2). In the fourth drawing (figure 7.3) Wotan is now downstage in front of and larger than Brünnhilde. The costumes are more fully worked out, particularly that of Wotan, whose winged helmet, tunic, and cape are clearly visible. With his back to Brünnhilde, he raises his arm dismissively, ordering her to her mountaintop. Both appear to be singing at full volume. Sargent’s multiple, alternate versions of the same scene correspond to the procedure he used in sketching Studies of Isolde and Brangäne. As with the Tristan studies, this group raises the question of when, or whether, Sargent had seen Die Walküre before drawing the sketches and what their intended purpose may have been. He was already familiar with the music in 1885, according to the artist Edwin Austin Abbey’s report of Sargent “going elaborately through Wagner’s trilogy” on the piano. Scattered references in Sargent’s correspondence indicate his attendance at performances of Wagnerian operas. In 1890 Sargent spent much of the year working in New

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Figure 7.3.   Caricature: Brünnhilde and Wotan 3. Source: John Singer Sargent, Studies of Two Opera Singers (recto and verso), Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, gift of Mrs. Frances Ormond, 1937.8.105. Photo: President and Fellows of Harvard College

York. While there he saw an unauthorized production of Parsifal in Brooklyn, and at the Metropolitan Opera he attended the entire Ring and, as discussed below, a performance of Lohengrin.21 In later years Sargent continued to attend performances of Wagnerian operas. In London in June 1898 he wrote that he was planning to see Das Rheingold. Two weeks later he added that he was going to the “second Wagner cycle,”22 probably a reference to another complete Ring series. Thus he had several opportunities over the years to see Die Walküre, but it is not possible to determine that the caricatures, which are not part of a sketchbook, were conclusively related to any of these productions. During 1890 Sargent produced a monotype titled A Dream of Lohengrin showing a panoramic view of the stage of the Metropolitan Opera during a performance (plate 7.1). As with The Death of Tristan, this work grew out of Sargent’s personal relationship with a member of his circle. Sargent was friendly with the successful American comic actor Joseph Jefferson, an amateur printmaker who practiced making monotypes. This technique provides excellent opportunities for an artist working in a free, painterly style. The artist works directly on a metal plate using ordinary brushes rather than specialized printmaking tools. Since in most cases only one example of the

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monotype can be drawn from the plate, it is a unique object and in this sense more like a painting than a multiple. The size of Sargent’s work, nearly two feet in width, makes it comparable to a monochrome oil painting. The monotype was published in black and white in 1897 under its unusual title along with some works by Jefferson.23 Sargent adopts a viewpoint close to the orchestra pit using warm, brown tones. The emphasis is on the scale of Wagner’s opera with its large cast and orchestra. The distant, hazy figures of the crowd scene on the stage cannot be identified while the silhouettes of the orchestral musicians loom larger, as in some of the ballet pictures of the 1870s by Edgar Degas, an artist much admired by Sargent. Lohengrin, in particular its prelude, seems to have attracted the attention of a number of artists and writers of the period such as Henri Fantin-Latour. Sargent’s work and its title curiously recall a passage by the great poet and critic Charles Baudelaire. Writing about a concert of his own works Wagner conducted in 1861, Baudelaire recalled that in his response to the prelude to Lohengrin he felt released from the bonds of gravity and rediscovering in memory the extra-ordinary sensuality that circulates in high places. “Next I involuntarily painted for myself the delicious state of a man visited by a great dream in an absolute solitude, but a solitude with an immense horizon and a broadly diffused light; immensity without décor other than itself.”24 Baudelaire goes on to describe his experience of the music as an increasing intensity of white light and heat, or synesthesia, in which one sensory impression (hearing) is perceived as another (visual stimulation). Likewise, the author of the article on monotypes comments favorably on Sargent’s broad handling and the use he makes of the white of the paper. The core of white light in the center adds to the diffuse, dreamlike quality of the image. Sargent’s love for Wagner’s music no doubt was lifelong. On February 16, 1901, Impressionist painter Claude Monet, in London to work on his Thames River series, visited Sargent at home and found him playing Wagner on the piano.25 However, no Wagnerian images by Sargent are securely datable after 1890. The demands of his career as a portraitist and, later, his murals for the Boston Public Library occupied an increasing portion of his time. Given that Sargent explored a number of Wagnerian themes in graphic media, why did he not develop any of these into paintings, his primary medium of expression? Sargent rarely exhibited or sold his works on paper other than the watercolors. At the same time, dramatic scenes from history or literature were rare in Sargent’s oeuvre. The main exceptions were a few copies of works by the old masters and the highly stylized scenes of the history of religion in the Boston Public Library murals, which were, and remain, the most controversial aspect of his career.26 In his portraits, landscapes, and

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genre scenes from his travels, Sargent preferred to paint what was before his eyes rather than subjects from the imagination. In this regard, despite the difference in their styles, he more closely resembled the Impressionist Monet than such Wagnerian modernist artists as Fantin-Latour, Odilon Redon, and Aubrey Beardsley. All of Sargent’s Wagnerian projects, with the exception of the monotype A Dream of Lohengrin, remained in the form of sketches. If his scattered drawings, like his paintings, ever become the subject of a catalogue raisonné, it seems likely that additional works may be located demonstrating the artist’s documented love of Wagner’s music. The 1880s marked the high point of Wagner’s influence on the visual arts. The prestige of Wagner’s operas was very great, and those artists who could made the pilgrimage to the Bayreuth Festival. Those who lived in cities like London and Brussels had access to Wagner opera performances of excellent quality and of a greater frequency than is usually the case today. Wagner’s advocacy of the Gesamtkunstwerk, disseminated in his extensive writings, also accorded with the then current artistic interest in synesthesia and with Baudelaire’s theories of the correspondences between the arts. In the increasing focus after 1900 on formal experimentation in art rather than on subject matter, Sargent’s style and content would have looked increasingly old-fashioned. It is in our own time, with its emphasis on diversity of styles and its expanded canon of major artists, that John Singer Sargent’s work has been re-evaluated favorably.

Notes 1.  Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Complete Paintings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998–2016). 2. Central-Leitung des Allgemeinen Richard-Wagner-Vereins, Baÿreuther Festblaetter in Wort und Bild (Munich: Verlag des Autotype Company, 1884). For a discussion of art included in the Wagner memorial album project, see chapter 6. 3.  Judith Gautier, Richard Wagner and His Poetical Work: From Rienzi to Parsifal, trans. L. S. Jackson (Boston: A. Williams, 1883). 4.  Judith Gautier, Wagner at Home, trans. Effie Dunreith Massie (New York: John Lane, 1911). 5.  Richard Wagner and Cosima Wagner, Richard et Cosima Wagner: Lettres à Judith Gautier, Léon Guichard, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). 6.  Wagner and Wagner, Lettres à Judith Gautier, no. 59, September 25–29, 1876; translation in Joanna Richardson, ed., Judith Gautier: A Biography (London: Quartet, 1986), 125. 7. Richardson, Judith Gautier, 126. 8. Richardson, Judith Gautier, 145 (letter to David McKibben, April 16, 1948).

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  9.  Sargent’s drawings at Harvard are discussed, though not reproduced, in Miriam Stewart and Kerry Schauber, “Catalogue of Sketchbooks and Albums by John Singer Sargent at the Fogg Art Museum,” Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin 7, no. 1 (Fall 1999–Winter 2000): 16–38. Most though not all of the Sargent-Wagner material discussed here is now illustrated in the Harvard Art Museums online collection catalog at www.harvardartmuseums.org. 10.  Miriam Stewart, personal communication, July 3, 2019. 11. Charles Dowdeswell, “Tristan und Isolde,” Art Journal (November 1886): 345–48, ill. 348. 12.  Ormond and Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent, 5:141, letter of May 17, 1886. 13.  Letter to C. S. Reinhart, November 12, 1885. Cited in Marc Simpson, “Sargent in Paris, 1874–1885: The Omnivore’s Delight,” in National Portrait Gallery, London. Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, exh. cat. (2015): 28 and 247n39. 14.  Stanley Olson, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait (London: Macmillan, 1986), 71–73, 126. 15.  Ormond and Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent, vol. 5, letter of April 3, 1886. 16.  Ormond and Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent, vol. 5, letter of April 3, 1886. 17.  Simpson, “Sargent in Paris,” 28 and 247n44. 18.  Evan Charteris, John Singer Sargent (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1927), 146. 19. Charteris, John Singer Sargent, 148. 20.  Ormond and Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent, vol. 5, cat. 889. 21. Olson, John Singer Sargent, 161. 22.  Ormond and Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent, 5:28n168. 23.  William A. Coffin, “Monotypes,” Century Magazine 53 (April 1897): 517–24, ill. 523. 24. Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques (Paris: Garnier, 1962), 697; translated in Stephen Walsh, Debussy: A Painter in Sound (London: Faber & Faber, 2018), 65. 25.  Ormond and Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent, 5:66. 26.  See Sally M. Promey, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of Religion at the Boston Public Library (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Plate 1.1.  Scene from Tannhäuser. Source: Anon., manner of Eugène Delacroix, Tannhäuser on the Venusberg, gouache, c. 1861, Werner-Coninx-Stiftung, Zurich, © Peter Schälchli, Zurich

Plate 1.2.   Scene from Tannhäuser. Source: Henri Fantin-Latour, Scene from Tannhäuser, oil on canvas, 1864. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Boyer (59.62). Digital Image ©2023 Museum Associates/LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY

Plate 2.1.  Luigi Cherubini and the Muse of Lyric Poetry. Source: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Luigi Cherubini and the Muse of Lyric Poetry, oil on canvas, 1836–1842. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Franck Raux / RMN © 2023 RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY

Plate 3.1.  Parsifal. Source: Odilon Redon, Parsifal, pastel and charcoal. Photo: Hervé Lewandowski, Musée d’Orsay, Paris © 2023 RMN- Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY

Plate 3.2.   Brünnhilde on Horseback. Source: Odilon Redon, Brünnhilde on Horseback, pastel, private collection, New York. Reproduced courtesy of Lynton Gardiner

Plate 4.1.  Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother, Slain in a Skirmish between the Colonna and the Orsini Factions. Source: William Holman Hunt, Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother, Slain in a Skirmish between the Colonna and the Orsini Factions, 1848–1849, oil on canvas, Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

Plate 4.2.   Mariana in the Moated Grange. Source: John Millais, Mariana in the Moated Grange, 1850–1851, oil on panel, Tate, London/Bridgeman Images

Plate 4.3.  Claudio and Isabella. Source: William Holman Hunt, Claudio and Isabella, 1850– 1853, oil on panel, The Makins Collection/Bridgeman Images

Plate 4.4.  La Belle Iseult. Source: William Morris, La Belle Iseult, c. 1857, oil on canvas. Bequeathed by Miss May Morris 1939. © Tate, London/Art Resource, NY

Plate 4.5.  Sir Tristram and la Belle Ysoude Drinking the Love Potion. Source: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, designer, William Morris & Co., Sir Tristram and la Belle Ysoude Drinking the Love Potion, 1862–1863, stained glass, Bradford Art Galleries and Museums, West Yorkshire, UK © Bradford Museums and Galleries/Bridgeman Images

Plate 4.6.   Laus Veneris. Source: Edward Burne-Jones, Laus Veneris, c. 1873–1875, oil on canvas with gold paint, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK © Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums/Bridgeman Images

Plate 4.7.   A Design for a Motif from Parsifal Source: Simeon Solomon, A Design for a Motif from Parsifal, 1894, blue chalk, Private Collection / Photo © Peter Nahum at The Leicester Galleries, London/Bridgeman Images

Plate 5.1.  Isolde. Source: Aubrey Beardsley, Isolde, ink and watercolor, 1895. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop. Photo: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1943.656

Plate 7.1.   A Dream of Lohengrin. Source: John Singer Sargent, A Dream of Lohengrin, monotype, 1890. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum Purchase, gift of Mrs. Hamilton Vreeland Jr. and Aschenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts Endowment Fund, 1981.1.191. Photo: Museums.

Plate 8.1.   At the Conservatory. Source: James Ensor, At the Conservatory. Oil on canvas, mounted on panel, 22 1/16 X 28 1/8 in. (56 X 71.5 cm). RF2009-4. Photo: Patrice Schmidt. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY/© 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 8.2.  The Entrance of Christ into Brussels. Source: James Ensor, The Entrance of Christ into Brussels, engraving with watercolor, 1898, Private Collection © Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images

Plate 8.3.  Amusements of the Valkyries. Source: James Ensor, Amusements of the Valkyries, drawing, c. 1905. MuZEE, Ostend, www.artinflanders.be, photo: Hugo Maertens

Plate 8.4.   The Ride of the Valkyries. Source: James Ensor, The Ride of the Valkyries, oil on canvas, 1938 © akg-images.

Plate 8.5.  Secret/Reflections. Source: Fernand Khnopff, Secret/Reflections, c. 1902, two drawings, pastel and colored pencils, in artist-designed frame. Groeningemuseum, Bruges © Lukas-Art in Flanders VZW/Bridgeman Images.

Plate 8.6.  Isolde. Source: Fernand Khnopff, Isolde, c. 1905, charcoal, pastel, and white chalk on tinted paper. Location unknown. From Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Fernand Khnopff 1859–1921, 2004, 202, no. 133

Plate 8.7.   Tristan and Isolde (Liebestod). Source: Jean Delville, Tristan and Isolde (Liebestod), 1887, pencil, black chalk, and charcoal. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (Brussels), inv. 7927, photo: J. Geleyns. On deposit at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (Brussels), Gillion Crowet collection. Jean Victor Delville © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels

Plate 8.8.  Parsifal. Source: Jean Delville, Parsifal, 1894, oil on canvas (Musée fin de siècle, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, on deposit, Gillion Crowet collection, inv. GC178. Photo: Bruno Piazza. Jean Victor Delville © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels

Plate 9.1.  The Valkyrie. Source: Constantin Meunier, The Valkyrie, charcoal, pastel, and black chalk, c. 1886. Ostend, Belgium, private collection (Brussels: Galerie Maurice Tzwern/Pandora, Hommage à Constantin Meunier, 1831–1905, 1998), 140, cat. no. 58)

Plate 9.2.  Dead Hero. Source: Constantin Meunier, Dead Hero, lithograph, frontispiece, Raphael Petrucci, Le livre de la vie, de la mort, et de la nuit (Brussels?: Balat, c. 1901) PQ2631. E39 L57 1901x, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Plate 10.1.  Wagnerhof, Rotterdam, general view from the Vijverlaan Source: Wagnerhof, Rotterdam, general view from the Vijverlaan, photo: Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, Amersfoort.

Plate 10.2.  Jan van Teeffelen, plan for a double villa, blueprint, 1904 (courtesy Stadsarchief, Rotterdam). Source: Jan van Teeffelen, plan for a double villa, blueprint, 1904 (courtesy Stadsarchief, Rotterdam)

Plate 10.3.  Walhalla Theater, Rotterdam, 1898. Source: Walhalla Theater, Rotterdam, 1898, courtesy Vanschagen Architecten, Scagliola Brakkee Photography

CHAPTER EIGHT

Richard Wagner and the Artists of the Belgian Avant-Garde

Richard Wagner’s posthumous influence reached its peak in the late 1880s and 1890s not only among younger composers but also among writers and in particular visual artists.1 Both Wagner’s music and his voluminous writings were widely disseminated internationally for the first time during this period. Ironically, in France where German operas were virtually banned in the decades following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, the composer had an enormous effect on the emerging Symbolist movement in literature and painting. For example, the newly founded Revue wagnérienne (1885–1888) became highly influential, with many leading writers and artists making contributions inspired by Wagner’s works. In their subject matter, Symbolist artists in France and in other countries rejected the everyday realism that by 1850 had become the dominant international style in advanced painting, preferring instead to paint literary, imaginary, and even fantastic themes in a variety of styles. Wagnerian operas, with their remote medieval and mythological subjects, provided ideal themes for Symbolist artists. Symbolism quickly spread from France to Belgium, and Brussels became second only to Paris as a center of the movement. Though small, the country was going through a period of great affluence, at least for the upper classes, and avant-garde artists found wide support among Belgian collectors and institutions. Works by Belgian Symbolist writers were in turn adapted by opera composers in other countries: Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande was set nearly word for word by Claude Debussy, while Georges Rodenbach’s novel Bruges-la-morte later provided the libretto for Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt. 103

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The modern critical literature on Symbolism and on Belgian modernist art of the late nineteenth century is vast. Many Belgian artists, particularly those of the Symbolist movement, depicted Wagnerian subjects. Of the works of nineteenth-century avant-garde Belgian artists who admired Wagner, only James Ensor’s Wagnerian images have been the subject of a separate study.2 In taking a new look at these works, we will contrast Ensor’s Wagnerism with that of two other leading Belgian avant-garde painters of the period: the Symbolists Fernand Khnopff and Jean Delville. Working in different styles, each artist produced a small but significant body of Wagnerian paintings and finished drawings. Each would choose to depict only those of Wagner’s operas that reflected his own personality and interests.

James Ensor During the late 1880s the painter James Ensor (1860–1949) was working in a style that approached abstraction more closely than that of any other artist in Europe, and that is his chief art-historical importance. Many artists have a brief period that is considered important. Approximately 90 percent of Vincent Van Gogh’s best works were painted in a two-year period. Of Ensor’s Wagnerian works, the one that is closest to abstraction is the watercolor The Ride of the Valkyries. Ensor’s work is not particularly well known in the United States despite the presence of his largest and most important painting Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Much of Ensor’s work has remained in Belgian museums and private collections. Nevertheless, there is an impressively large and recent literature on Ensor’s oeuvre in many languages.3 In addition, Ensor readily acknowledged that he worked in multiple modes, making it difficult to identify a single Ensor style. The masks he depicted in many of his works function at a basic level as symbols: a mask represents the wearer as something other than his or her true identity. Nevertheless, Ensor, proud of his independence, avoided identifying with Symbolism, which was the dominant current in Belgian avant-garde art of the 1880s and 1890s. Ensor is also often paired with his contemporary the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944) as a precursor of the stylistic mode known as Expressionism, characterized by the display of intense emotions, often in strong colors and jagged, painterly brushwork. In Ensor’s Wagnerian works, this comes out mainly as satire as in his painting At the Conservatory (plate 8.1; another famous precursor of the Expressionist mode is the slightly older Dutch painter Van Gogh). All of these artists came from northern Europe, which had a long

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tradition of Expressionism particularly in religious paintings and sculpture. These proto-Expressionist artists had great influence on several twentiethcentury artistic movements including German Expressionism in the decade before World War I and American Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. Despite this pairing, Ensor and Munch have very different styles. Ensor uses jarring color contrasts and a rough painting technique often involving the use of heavy impasto. Munch generally creates a relatively matte painting surface with an emphasis on flowing overall patterns. Munch’s content during his best-known period is famously anxiety-ridden or depressive; by contrast, Ensor’s bizarre treatments, often nominally of traditional religious subjects or of current social issues, suggest undercurrents of anger and, at times, paranoia. Ensor spent most of his life in the provincial coastal town of Ostend. In his youth Ostend was a small fishing village that later became a fashionable summer resort patronized by the Belgian royal family. The town drew tourists and expatriates from a wide area of northern Europe. Though Ostend is in the Flemish-speaking region of Belgium, the townspeople who dealt with tourists were expected to speak French (Ensor’s first language) and perhaps other languages. James Ensor’s father was English, and the painter retained his English nationality until late in life. His family background was modest. Although well educated, his father was often without work and died relatively young, probably as a result of alcoholism. The women of the family, including Ensor’s mother, aunts, and sister, had little interest in art; nevertheless, Ensor was permitted to attend the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Ensor’s mother ran a curio shop—the Ensors’ main source of income—in a building owned by her family, and Ensor maintained his painting studio in the attic of this building for many years. One of the shop’s specialties was the sale of grotesque masks and costumes to be worn in February during Carnival, a popular event in Ostend and elsewhere in Belgium. Such masks, giving the wearers ambiguous identities, were to play a prominent role in some of Ensor’s best-known paintings. Though Ensor is often called the “painter of masks,” this critical attempt at branding characterizes only one current within his highly diverse work. Ensor had relatively good opportunities to see and hear Wagner’s operas. The composer visited Belgium only once, in March 1860, to conduct a concert of excerpts from his operas in Brussels at La Monnaie, then as now one of Europe’s more important opera houses. The program followed that of his recent concerts in Paris: the overture of The Flying Dutchman; four pieces from Tannhäuser; and three excerpts from Lohengrin. Only the prelude to Tristan und Isolde was omitted—in Paris no one, including the sophisticated composer Hector Berlioz, had understood it. The Brussels concert was well

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received; however, Wagner’s subsequent efforts to organize a production of Lohengrin (an opera with some local resonance since it is set in medieval Antwerp) bore fruit only in 1870. Thereafter most of Wagner’s operas, except Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, were performed in Belgium within the next two decades making Brussels, after London, the leading non-Germanic venue for productions of Wagner’s works. In addition, a substantial contingent of Belgian critics and art administrators traveled to Bayreuth for the premiere of the Ring in 1876 and of Parsifal in 1882. By 1891 only eight years after Wagner’s death, Edmond Evenepoel was able to publish a threehundred-page history of the reception of Wagnerian operas in Belgium.4 As was the practice at the time, opera performances often were given in translation in the local language. In Belgium, French was the idiom of the cultural elite in music and art. Thus even in Flemish-speaking Antwerp, Wagner’s operas were given in French translations. Surprisingly, Wagner had little objection to translations having already followed this course in his 1861 Paris production of Tannhäuser. Though we think of Wagner’s German text and music as intimately related, the composer, in an era before supertitles, wanted foreign audiences to understand what was being sung on the stage. In 1881 Wagner, chronically short of money, arranged for the impresario Angelo Neumann to circulate the original production of the Ring operas. The 1876 scenery and costumes, designed for the setting of the Bayreuth theater, would now travel to the opera houses of Europe. After performances in Berlin, Hamburg, and Amsterdam, the production arrived at La Monnaie in January 1883. Though the traveling cast was uneven in talent and vocal ability, Amalia Materna, Wagner’s original Brünnhilde, reprised the role with great success. The production aroused considerable anticipation. The performances in German were deemed unusual, and the leading Belgian arts journal, L’art moderne, devoted four articles in advance to lengthy synopses of the operas’ plots. Enthusiastic reviews were soon followed, however, by the announcement of Wagner’s death on February 13, 1883. In 1887 a new French translation of Die Walküre, titled La Valkyrie, was performed numerous times at La Monnaie. There is little documentary evidence regarding James Ensor’s attendance at specific performances of Wagner’s operas. Ensor’s musical tastes were eclectic, ranging from opera to popular music-hall, marionette theater, and outdoor brass-band performances in the summer in Ostend. As we shall see, he also harbored personal ambitions as a composer. During Ensor’s period as a student at the art academy in Brussels (1877–1880), Wagnerian productions at La Monnaie included a revival of Lohengrin (seventeen performances between 1878 and 1880). In addition, the conductor Joseph Dupont, a

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champion of Wagner’s music, organized all-Wagner concerts in Brussels nearly annually from 1877 on. Significantly for Ensor’s work, these usually included arrangements of the Ride of the Valkyries (act 3 of Die Walküre), which was performed with a chorus from 1885 onward.5 When he later wrote to art critic Pol de Mont describing his background and interests, Ensor laid particular emphasis on Wagner’s influence on him around the time he was an art student as a model of the independent artist. After describing his distaste for the rigid curriculum at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ensor continued, It was at this time that I became enthusiastic about Richard Wagner. This extraordinary genius influenced and sustained me. I glimpsed an enormous and magnificent world. I suffered intensely when the public laughed or became indignant, and this tone was general among the bourgeoisie. I learned then to despise them, and this feeling has not completely subsided.6

Wagner for Ensor became the prototype of the adventurous creative artist not bound by academic rules. As early as 1882, the year of Parsifal, Ensor produced an unpublished still-life drawing (Ostend, private collection) showing a pile of clothing on a cabinet above books or scores marked “Schumann” (another favorite composer) and “Wagner.” The drawing was possibly intended for use as a concert program cover.7 Though Ensor had returned to his native Ostend in 1880, he was a frequent visitor to Brussels, where he lodged with friends. A letter in one of Ensor’s sketchbooks dated March 2, 1883, and addressed to the artist’s Brussels friend Mariette Rousseau clearly indicates his presence at the January 1883 Ring performances. Drawings in another sketchbook of a row of audience members watching a performance and a female figure on the stage also may indicate his attendance at the opera around this time though they do not relate specifically to the Ring operas. In the letter, speaking of Rousseau’s praise of his playing and composing on the piano, Ensor concludes, I remembered some motifs from the Nibelungen. I play them badly and on a bad piano. . . . A bellowing tempest rattles our windowpanes with furious whistling. Desperate cries ring out as in Die Walküre, ships sink very near the coast. The sailors [drown?] bravely, with the accompaniment of a magnificent orchestra serving as their funeral march. It’s annoying that Théodore [Théo Hannon, Mme. Rousseau’s brother] didn’t see that; he really would have rejoiced.8

Ensor certainly had seen Die Walküre and perhaps all four Ring operas. Though in his agitated writing style he jumps from one subject to another, he appears to continue to speak about Wagner at the end of this passage. This

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wording suggests Ensor’s familiarity with the last scene of The Flying Dutchman in which, after Senta’s self-sacrifice, the Dutchman’s ship sinks with its crew. The Flying Dutchman had not been performed in Brussels since 1872. However, as Edmond Evenepoel reports, a German company had given five performances of this work around Christmas in 1880—the year Ensor left the art academy in Brussels—at the Grand-Théâtre in nearby Ghent.9 The Ostend-based artist easily could have seen it there. If so, then all the Wagnerian performances Ensor saw through 1883 had been given, atypically for Belgium at the time, in German rather than in French. Ensor had at least a passing familiarity with nearly all of Wagner’s operas. In an undated letter in code to Mariette Rousseau, perhaps of 1883, Ensor uses wordplay to refer to the titles of all the operas from Rienzi to Parsifal, with the exception of Die Meistersinger.10 For example, goterdamerhumgiguefrite equals Götterdämmerung/Siegfried. Ensor often used nonsense language derived from French or Dutch in his later writing and even in public addresses. He did not, however, depict scenes from any of these operas except Die Walküre. Ensor does not seem to have essayed other Wagnerian subjects except Portrait of Richard Wagner, a drawing dating from 1883, the year of Wagner’s death. In 1893 Ensor’s friend Eugène Demolder said of Ensor’s technique, “His drawing style is learned, solid and magnificent, as . . . in a prodigious portrait of Richard Wagner with the clear, well-minted purity of an ancient imperial medallion.”11 The format, evidently in profile, suggests that the image was copied from one of the many portraits of Wagner in various media published in newspapers and journals after the composer’s death. In 1922 this work belonged to the Belgian musician Gustave Kéfer in Paris but it is now lost.12 Ensor was particularly drawn to the Ride of the Valkyries, depicting it at least four times in drawings and a painting. In addition, his satirical drawing (c. 1890) and painting (c. 1902) of a concert at the Brussels Conservatoire suggest that the singers and orchestra are performing this piece. The group of works relating to Die Walküre is small compared with Ensor’s lifetime production of paintings, drawings, and prints. Nevertheless, Ensor’s interest in the subject was of unusual duration, lasting more than fifty years in works extending from 1886–1888 through 1938. In many ways the scene of the Ride of the Valkyries with its scoring for chorus and display of violent, lurid action (the Valkyries, on horseback, are bringing the bodies of slain warriors) is atypical of the Ring or of Wagner’s later operas in general. It was written in 1853–1854, twenty years before Götterdämmerung when Wagner was still developing his mature style. Ensor’s initial interest in depicting it probably stems from his fondness for dramatic, agitated, multifigure pictorial compositions such as Christ’s Entry into Brus-

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sels in 1889 (plate 8.2) and Tribulations of Saint Anthony. As Norbert Hostyn has commented, “In Ensor the choice of this theme seems guided by a taste for theatricality rather than by any profound affinities with Wagner’s mental universe.”13 Ensor’s enthusiasm for depicting the Ride of the Valkyries as performed on the stage or in the concert hall and his probable reference to The Flying Dutchman show his preference for Wagner’s earlier operas rather than more recent and contemplative works such as Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, the Wagnerian operas favored by the leading Belgian Symbolist painters Fernand Khnopff and Jean Delville, who were close in age to Ensor. As with other European avant-garde artists of the period such as Odilon Redon and Aubrey Beardsley, Ensor interpreted Wagner in his own way and according to the needs of his artistic personality. Ensor’s first version of The Ride of the Valkyries is an eponymous watercolor dating from about 1886–1888. The work is not documented and has been dated largely on the basis of style. It belongs to a period in the late 1880s when Ensor was painting traditional subjects in a violently expressionistic, nearly abstract style. The most extreme example is a painting of 1889, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp), in which the falling angels are reduced to little more than vertical red streaks, anticipating the American Abstract Expressionist action paintings of the 1950s. A larger canvas, close in date to The Ride of the Valkyries, is Tribulations of Saint Anthony (1887; Museum of Modern Art, New York). This subject had often been treated by early Netherlandish painters such as Hieronymus Bosch, who was much admired by Ensor. In Ensor’s version the saint is distracted from his books by two nude temptresses at the left. Between them, in a kind of infernal machine, sits a figure wearing a large, grotesque mask. From the sky rain down human, animal, and composite creatures, an arrangement similar to that of The Ride of the Valkyries. In the watercolor The Ride of the Valkyries, rapidly drawn yet detailed figures of the Valkyries on horseback rush frantically across a cloudy sky. The main elements of the composition are suggested rather than precisely delineated. The pigments are applied roughly and appear scraped away in many places. The towers of a city, or perhaps Valhalla, are drawn below in a core area of red pigment. The dark, sea-green area at the bottom filled with difficult-to-read lines (possibly sea monsters) provides a counterweight to the forceful movement of the figures and clouds above and to the right. Ensor was to return to this composition a half century later in an oil painting of the same title but with a radically different interpretation.

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Around 1890 Ensor entered a new stylistic phase in which caricature and social commentary played a large part. At this time he made little distinction between drawing and painting. A series of works violently attacks groups of authority figures in Belgian society. These include The Wise Judges; The Bad Doctors; and The Dangerous Cooks (a satire on the leading art critics, who serve up Ensor’s head). His images of the king and his entourage at this time cross the boundaries of the obscene. In 1890 in the Salon Les XX—a prominent alternative exhibition group of which he was a founding member—Ensor exhibited a drawing titled Indignant Bourgeois Whistling [hissing at] Wagner in Brussels in 1880 (Ensor was a student in 1880). This drawing is probably a composition in colored pencil on tan paper. In this work, which looks quite different from The Ride of the Valkyries, a conductor at right leads five male string and brass players as well as a possibly female figure with kettledrums at the left. The musicians are identified by their dark blue costumes. In the center a woman sings facing forward, and a later oil version will specifically relate this figure to Die Walküre. Though hard to distinguish, a separate group of seven figures around her talk with animation, their mouths open. These are evidently the indignant bourgeois, a group whose pretentions as music connoisseurs are satirized here. Wagner himself is present in the form of a crude portrait hanging on the rear wall. With a pained expression, he stops his ears with his fingers to shut out the sound of the noisy audience or of the performers or both. The conductor, François Gervaerts of the Royal Conservatory, evidently did not mind the caricature; he owned the work, which remained in his family for many years. During the late 1880s Ensor had been busy producing Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889. Realizing its importance, Ensor kept it with him for the rest of his life though he was unable to exhibit it for forty years due to its controversial nature. In 1898 he decided to disseminate the composition through an engraving, some examples of which are hand-colored in watercolor (plate 8.2). In the middle ground of the reversed image, Christ, his features perhaps based on Ensor’s, rides a donkey, entering not Jerusalem but the Belgian capital. He is almost lost in a carnival crowd that includes a large brass band. As in Passion scenes by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the most important figure is barely visible, implying, perhaps, that we often are distracted by trivia and fail to recognize what is most significant. In the Ensor picture, some figures in the huge crowd wear masks and others merely have grotesque faces, suggesting the artist’s low opinion of his fellow citizens. The street is hung with banners, including some with political slogans, the largest of which praises socialism. By 1898 Ensor was already distancing himself somewhat from his political radicalism of a decade earlier, and he

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removed the large banner from the engraving though he added others. A vertical banner near the right border reads “Phalange Wagner Fracassant [Sensational (or Deafening) Wagner Phalanx].” Wagner himself at least during his youth before the Revolution of 1848 might have been pleased to be associated with radical politics. Or the banner might simply reflect a widespread opinion at the time that Wagner’s music was too loud. A banner hung on a balcony above and to the left reads “Les vivisecteurs Belges insensibles [Insensitive Belgian Vivisectionists],” referring to a cause associated with Wagner. In 1902 if not earlier, Ensor returned to the composition of Indignant Bourgeois but this time in an oil painting more discreetly titled At the Conservatory. Such repetitions, a regular part of Ensor’s artistic practice, often involved radical changes in handling. In addition to its larger size and richer colors, the painting is brighter than the earlier version due mainly to the strong white tonality of the rear wall. This area is now covered with a variety of rising or falling objects including a cat, a duck, various wrapped floral bouquets, carrots, and a herring (standing for harang saur, or pickled herring, a critic’s French pun on “Art Ensor” that the artist adopted as a kind of signature). The portrait of the unhappy Wagner, now more recognizable, occupies a larger portion of the space. The singer in the center holds a score marked “Valkyrie” on which such markings as “hoyhotoyo” are followed by similarsounding but meaningless wordplay in French. Since the singer is alone rather than in a chorus, the passage may be Brünnhilde’s solo of the Valkyrie motif at the beginning of act 2. Ensor may be lampooning the performance but not Wagner, who is consistently held in high regard in Ensor’s writings. Ensor’s fervent admirers did not like paintings of this kind, which they felt did not show what the artist could do. When the picture was exhibited in 1930, however, Ensor wrote that he was quite fond of it and that all the musicians could be identified.14 The most prominent figure, at left, is the internationally known violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe. The playful dedication at lower right, “to the future Baron Rindskopf,” names another musician, Léon Rindskopf, conductor of the Kursaal Orchestra of Ostend. Although At the Conservatory like the earlier Indignant Bourgeois has a rough-and-ready handling that suggests an impromptu effort, in fact Ensor followed time-honored artistic practice by making preparatory drawings for the painting. An unpublished pencil sketch for the central section, now in a Belgian collection, shows that Ensor made numerous changes before arriving at the final composition. The portrait of Wagner on the rear wall originally took up even more of the space, and the violinist Ysaÿe was placed to its right.

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After 1900 Ensor began to receive belated recognition in the form of awards and honors, culminating in the title of baron, granted by the king in 1929. Ironically, this period and the following decades have generally been seen as marking a decline in Ensor’s artistic abilities. He no longer attempted large paintings, and he often produced variations on earlier compositions, including those on Wagnerian subjects, in a calmer style. Ensor’s fate resembles that of Edvard Munch, who after a hospitalization for a nervous breakdown, produced less emotionally intense works that, until recently, have been less appreciated than those of his earlier career. There is no critical consensus on the quality of Ensor’s later works. He had always liked to repeat and vary compositions, even adding new figures to existing works. Thus the repetitions in his later works are consistent with his earlier artistic practice.15 Ensor returned to the Valkyrie theme in a drawing of perhaps 1905, Amusements of the Valkyries (plate 8.3). The drawing is dedicated to Alice Frey (born 1885), a young neighbor from Ostend whom Ensor had encouraged to attend art school. Still highly energized, the Valkyries now take up more of the picture space but, at least in the center, have the aspect of so-called Amazones, or fashionable young horsewomen who ride to entertain themselves. Wagner’s name continued to be mentioned in Ensor’s later articles, letters, and speeches and sometimes in unexpected contexts. In an article of 1914 when dealing with the supposed excesses in the paintings of his rival Fernand Khnopff, Ensor digresses, “Of course, I want to tell it in a mimed ballet, the divine Wagner carried on less when, walking on his hands and then capering about, he long amused the excellent Kufferath.”16 The image of Wagner—who must have been over sixty—entertaining the visiting Belgian musicologist Maurice Kufferath by walking on his hands seems improbable at best. Nevertheless, there are other accounts of Wagner showing unusual bursts of physical enthusiasm where he literally climbed on the scenery during rehearsals so the story cannot be entirely discounted. Ensor referred to another little-known aspect of the German composer’s persona in a speech in 1925 when he added Wagner’s name to a list of distinguished supporters of one of Ensor’s favorite causes, anti-vivisection. Ensor evidently knew that Wagner had written the letter “Against Vivisection” in 1879.17 Ensor never forgot the hostility toward Wagner’s music he had observed in his youth, conflating it with negative reactions to some of his own early works. On April 14, 1934, Ensor, then seventy-four, was invited to address the Bal des Arts in Brussels. This was typically a raucous annual event patronized by art students and young bohemians. Taking the theme of the cold welcome Belgium had given to newly arrived literary, musical, and artistic geniuses (including himself), the painter was not sparing of his listeners.

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You, the misshapen descendants of the bourgeois of 1880, you haven’t evolved since your predecessors. Your kind, just like your rigid ancestors, rejected our proud saviors, misunderstood Baudelaire, insulted Wagner and his pal King Ludwig, and your refined mussel-eaters hissed at the Woman Eating Oysters [an important early painting by Ensor]. . . . You called Verlaine a swine.18

The reaction of the audience to Ensor’s remarks is not recorded. During the decades of the early twentieth century, there is no evidence that Ensor essayed any new Wagnerian subjects. Beginning in 1911 he produced a drawing and two paintings that he titled Ballerinas Transformed into Flowers. Some have found in this a reference to the Flower Maidens of the second act of Wagner’s Parsifal. The only surviving example, a very late painting of 1940, shows a large group of dancers wearing the traditional ballerina costume.19 There are no obvious references to the characters or settings of Wagner’s opera. And since it was also around 1911 that Ensor was most involved in writing a ballet, the association with Wagner is unlikely. After an interval of half a century, Ensor, approaching the age of eighty, returned to the subject of his Ride of the Valkyries. As had been the case with the oil At the Conservatory, the 1938 Valkyries painting is considerably lighter in tonality than the earlier version (plate 8.4). The central register through which the Valkyries ride is nearly pure white, and as in Tribulations of Saint Anthony and the 1902 Conservatory picture, the background is littered with an odd assortment of floating or falling objects including banners and brooms. The composition is remarkably similar to that of a half century earlier though it de-emphasizes some areas (the city towers) and elaborates on others. The strangest addition is in the lower right where an elderly man dressed rather like a wizard discusses the airborne spectacle with a smiling, many-toothed reptile (the dragon Fafner?). Sometime after he had completed this painting, Ensor entered a quick sketch of the composition in colored pencils into his Liber Veritatis, or register of authentic paintings. In doing so, Ensor was following the example of earlier painters, including English landscape specialist J. W. M. Turner (1775–1851), an artist he admired. Even in this small drawing, Ensor could not resist making changes: the flying figures of the Valkyries, for example, are sketched in red. There are extensive notations in graphite, and Ensor has added to the title Homage to Richard Wagner.20 This was Ensor’s last treatment of a Wagnerian theme. James Ensor was eccentric even by the generous standards of the artistic bohemia of his day. Some have claimed to find in him symptoms of paranoia such as delusions of grandeur (his self-identification with Christ) and of

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persecution by other artists and art critics (like Saint Anthony, tormented by demons). In the second half of his life, Ensor, in addition to devoting more time to writing and public speaking, thought of producing an elaborate musical composition for the stage. He confided to a friend that he should have gone into music, his true talent, rather than painting. This statement is strange in several regards. Although he had impressive artistic talents in drawing, color, and composition, Ensor, as he must have known, had only a minimal technical knowledge of music. In his later years the painter nevertheless liked to be photographed not at his easel but dressed in bourgeois attire at the keyboard of his harmonium. However, the Belgian composer Auguste de Boeck (1865–1937), about whom Ensor published two articles and painted a memorial picture, had this to say about the painter’s musical ambitions: Ensor couldn’t put a single note on paper. He was genuinely terrified by the white keys, so much so that he executed his entire oeuvre on the harmonium in D-flat or G-flat. He placed a landscape sketch on the podium instead of a score. . . . Do not expect to find the magnificent colors of his paintings in his music. His music is of no consequence.21

In 1906 when he received the harmonium as a gift, Ensor began work on a ballet for marionettes to be titled La gamme d’amour [The scale of love]. Marionette performances had been quite popular during Ensor’s youth; even Richard Wagner had been fond of them since he admired the puppet master’s control of all artistic aspects of the performances. Ensor’s ballet was to be a light entertainment in the manner of the traditional Italian commedia dell’arte. Ensor would provide both the scenario and the music, and in this he certainly had in mind the model of the Wagnerian idea of Gesamtkunstwerk. In addition, Ensor would surpass Wagner by also designing the sets and costumes. Even Wagner had never attempted to produce his own stage designs. The work progressed slowly. Ensor needed the help of a collaborator to notate the music and another to orchestrate it. The ballet received a fully staged premiere in Antwerp in 1924, and the music, scenario, and lithographs of the stage designs were published as an album in 1929.22 Ballet at this period was a highly prestigious genre; it was the vehicle for some of the most advanced musical expression, most spectacularly in Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913). However, though La gamme d’amour saw a few more productions during Ensor’s lifetime, it is generally regarded as a slight work, and it has not remained in the repertory. Despite the generally negative opinion of Ensor’s musical talents, Belgian musicologists have devoted extended essays to his knowledge of music23 and to his marionette ballet in particular.24 Recently Stéphanie Moris, a Laca-

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nian psychoanalyst, published a book (not the first attempt to psychoanalyze Ensor posthumously) in which she seeks to explain the painter’s growing preoccupation with music.25 She sees this as a successful effort by Ensor at autotherapy in resolving severe, even psychotic, conflicts brought on by a traumatic childhood (caused by a destructive relationship between his parents) and by real or imagined early professional setbacks. The great period of Ensor’s painting (about 1883–1900) corresponds, in her view, with the onset of his borderline psychosis. His later work, though less psychologically charged, is brighter in tonality and, she argues, no less interesting. The result of Ensor’s engagement with music was that he became happier and remained productive as an artist for many years. During these years he simultaneously practiced painting, writing, and music, often eliding the boundaries between these arts. Thus in his writing, for example, he seems to concentrate more on sound effects than on meaning. This combination of artistic interests is in part a result of Wagner’s pervasive influence also seen in the works of other Belgian painters. In opposition to Moris’s theory, however, it should be said that the Wagnerian works of Ensor’s great period (The Ride of the Valkyries and the Indignant Bourgeois) show no obvious signs of psychosis. The same is true of the colossal Christ’s Entry into Brussels, the composition of which would probably be too complex for a psychotic artist to organize. At most these works show a strong tendency toward social satire, a tradition in Netherlandish art that may be traced back to the pickpockets, charlatans, and rich art patrons occasionally depicted by Bosch or Pieter Breugel the Elder. What did Ensor think of leading Belgian Symbolist painters who essayed Wagnerian themes? Fernand Khnopff, who with Ensor was the most important artist of the period in Belgium, had been Ensor’s classmate and friend at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1870s. Their relationship ended in 1886. After the publication of an article praising Khnopff in L’art moderne, Ensor sent the editor a letter comparing Khnopff’s work unfavorably with his own. He may also have implied that Khnopff plagiarized one of his compositions, though this is not specifically stated. (The two works usually cited were similar in subject though quite different in treatment.) Later Ensor appeared jealous of the favoritism shown by Maurice Kufferath, as director of La Monnaie, in commissioning costume designs from Khnopff for many operas from 1903 onward. In his addresses and articles Ensor generously acknowledged the work of many Belgian artists who were not well known even in their own time while remaining sparing in his praise for those who might be considered his rivals. Thus Ensor conceded that Jean Delville was a good colorist (an important value for Ensor) but maintained his distance from Delville’s Idealist subject

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matter. Addressing the Royal Academy of Belgium upon his election to membership in 1925, Ensor said of Delville (who was already a member), “I saw the ships of my colleague Delville sink in a sea of oil, perhaps overloaded with idealist cargo; I was able to avoid his solidly anchored fire-vessels.”26 Ensor’s references to Khnopff’s works remained unenthusiastic. He continued to pour out lengthy, somewhat rambling critiques of Khnopff both in letters and in articles published in Belgian periodicals.27 To cite one example, in discussing a painting by Khnopff, Ensor derides, sometimes in crude language, what he sees as its mélange of influences ranging from Classical (represented by Orpheus, the god of music) to Oriental: “Despite Orpheus, the composition is scarcely symphonic.”28 Elsewhere he describes Khnopff’s frequent depictions of female heads or portraits as inexpressive and empty.29 James Ensor’s lifelong admiration for the operas of Richard Wagner, as evidenced in Ensor’s surviving works, derived from the painter’s response to Wagner’s grandiose and dramatic qualities.30 This is most in evidence in Ensor’s huge Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889: too large to sell to a private owner, it was also too controversial to exhibit publicly for many years. Like Wagner before him, Ensor moved from an early social radicalism to a more comfortable relationship with the upper levels of society. Ensor’s large corpus of drawings, now widely scattered in private collections, may include additional Wagnerian works that are not yet published.

Fernand Khnopff Symbolism was a literary movement that first gained attention in Paris in 1886. To the extent that there was a comparable movement in the visual arts, it was to some degree an invention of literary critics. Like James Ensor, Fernand Khnopff did not consider himself a Symbolist, and he was at pains to separate himself from artists, such as Paul Gauguin, who were widely identified as Symbolists. The wish not to be identified with any school or movement also was current among avant-garde artists in France and Belgium including Odilon Redon. Nevertheless, the sharp distinction in his subject matter from that of the dominant Realist and Impressionist modes in painting and its sense of having meaning beyond that which appeared on the surface has led him to be grouped under the rubric of Symbolism. Perhaps this formulation helps audiences of today understand an avantgarde that, increasingly in the late 1880s, rejected the modern everyday world for a withdrawal into a private realm of the imagination. This might take the form of a physical withdrawal, as in the case of Gauguin’s relocation to the South Seas, or of the use of private imagery incomprehensible to anyone but the artist, who might not choose to explain himself. The mythical

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or quasi-historical world of Richard Wagner’s operas was to play a significant role in the imagination of Belgian artists of this period. While James Ensor came from a family of shopkeepers, Fernand Khnopff (1858–1921) had an upper-class background. He was born in his maternal grandfather’s castle near Dendermonde, Belgium. The Khnopff family, Austrian in origin, had been settled for generations in the medieval city of Bruges not far from Ensor’s Ostend. Khnopff spent his early childhood in Bruges where his father was a magistrate and was profoundly influenced by his memories of the ancient city. After his family moved to Brussels, Khnopff received an excellent private education, attaining complete fluency in English and an early introduction to music and art. By the late 1870s Khnopff, like Ensor, was a student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Both artists, while still young, received much favorable attention for works they showed in exhibitions. Khnopff, who remained in Brussels, soon had a flourishing career as a painter. Versatile, he also practiced sculpture, photography, engraving, and costume and interior design. In addition, like Ensor and Delville, Khnopff wrote extensively as a critic, serving as the Brussels correspondent for London’s Magazine of Art from 1894 to 1914. While in London he met and befriended the older Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and he was strongly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite school’s taste, particularly by their forcefully depicted women. Between 1888 and 1892 Khnopff provided frontispiece illustrations for four books by the Parisian novelist and art impresario Joséphin Péladan, and during the 1890s he exhibited in Péladan’s Symbolist Salons de la Rose + Croix. Khnopff’s work was also well known in modernist circles in Vienna, where he exhibited with much success. Khnopff’s personality and loyalties were complex and contradictory. Aloof and aristocratic in manner, he was invariably photographed wearing a frock coat and tie even when painting at his easel. The reserved Burne-Jones, with whom Khnopff exchanged drawings, found the Belgian artist rather distant. However, despite his arcane, personal subject matter, Khnopff, like some other Symbolists, had a paradoxical commitment to advancing social change. He lectured on art at a socialist-organized workers’ center in Brussels, where his talks were well received, and he served on the center’s board. Khnopff also seems to have supported the movement to grant women the right to vote, a liberal political position at the time. Khnopff’s experience of opera in general, and Wagner in particular, is even harder to document than that of Ensor. Like other members of his social class, Khnopff had ample opportunity in the 1880s and 1890s to attend opera and concert performances in Brussels and elsewhere though there is no definite information regarding such experiences. His artistic milieu, including

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the Les XX exhibition group of which he, like Ensor, was a founding member, was strongly Wagnerian in orientation. In 1887 his brother Georges Khnopff attended the Bayreuth Festival in the company of the influential poet and critic Emile Verhaeren. Georges reviewed the event for the journal L’art moderne and later published a translation of Wagner’s private writings of the 1850s.31 Sources differ as to whether Fernand also took part in the 1887 trip though he was listed as a subscriber (donor) to the Bayreuth Festival in 1889.32 Later in a letter of July 2, 1899, to Fernand Khnopff, the prominent sculptor Constantin Meunier apologized that he was unable to accept an offer to accompany Khnopff to Bayreuth due to issues of work and health.33 Khnopff belonged to a Wagner-influenced circle; for example, the musicologist and administrator Maurice Kufferath, who later commissioned many costume designs from Khnopff for the La Monnaie opera, during the 1890s produced no fewer than six volumes analyzing operas by Wagner. Although one of Khnopff’s first important paintings, a bourgeois drawingroom scene titled Listening to Schumann, dates from 1883, no works derived from Wagner can be identified before 1905. Khnopff’s reputation today rests primarily on a few of his earlier canvases, including portraits of his sister Marguerite. He also produced fantastic scenes in which the bodies of women are combined with those of felines or birds. Works by Khnopff are scarce in American public collections. A painting of the 1880s, Portrait of Jeanne Kéfer (Getty Museum, Los Angeles), depicts a small girl whose form is locked into an architectural background with a mathematical rigor worthy of a Vermeer. Typical of his mysterious subjects of the 1890s is the pastel The Offering (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which depicts a semi-nude woman touching a sculpted portrait bust. Khnopff’s portraits and imaginary subjects are executed with precise, detailed drawing unlike the much looser styles of James Ensor or the French Post-Impressionist painters whose works were shown regularly at Les XX in Brussels. After 1900, Khnopff’s most frequent and characteristic works were finished drawings, and his Wagnerian subjects fall into this category. The drawings often depict women’s faces with an enigmatic meaning that was important to Khnopff. In this private imagery he gave evidence of his affiliation with the Symbolist movement, avoiding scenes of everyday life favored by the French Impressionists and their successors. A typical example of Khnopff’s work from this period is Secret/Reflection (Groeningemuseum, Bruges; plate 8.5) in which two large, seemingly unrelated drawings are mounted together in a frame probably designed by Khnopff. The upper drawing, in pastel, shows a veiled woman resembling a Roman priestess touching the lips of a plaster

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mask (depicting a sculpture by Khnopff) as if urging it to keep a secret. The figure may depict Khnopff’s most frequent model, Marguerite, with whom the painter had a complicated relationship. The face of the figure and the androgynous mask have a close similarity, like that of the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde in Die Walküre. Below the veiled woman is a drawing in colored pencil of the medieval Saint John’s Hospital (today the Hans Memling Museum) in Bruges as it appears from the roadway crossing the adjacent canal. At around that time Khnopff did many views of the ancient city of his childhood though often with subtle changes. The diffuse technique of these works creates a mood of nostalgic distance. The artist has chosen a time of day when the reflections on the water blur the distinction between the building and its mirror image. The woman’s face and the mask may likewise be seen as mirror images or reflections. The relation between the two drawings thus is intellectual or intuitive. The modern, urban world in which Khnopff lived his daily life is nowhere to be seen here. In 1903 Khnopff was invited to provide costume designs for the world premiere of Ernest Chausson’s Wagner-influenced opera Le roi Arthus at La Monnaie in Brussels. Thereafter he created costume designs—and advised on stage settings—for new or revived opera productions at La Monnaie nearly

Figure 8.1.  Klingsor, costume study for a production of Parsifal. Source: Fernand Khnopff, Klingsor, costume study for a production of Parsifal, c. 1913, pencil (art market, Basel, 1987). From Robert L. Delevoy, Catherine De Croës, and Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque, Fernand Khnopff (Paris: Bibliothèque des arts, 2nd ed., 1987), 377, cat. no. 517.

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every year. Among the distinguished operatic works for which he designed costumes were Gluck’s Alceste and Armide; Mozart’s The Magic Flute; Weber’s Oberon; Berlioz’s Les Troyens; Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande; Strauss’s Elektra; and Wagner’s Parsifal in 1914. Costumes from other operas were sometimes reused for some of the characters, leaving Khnopff to design the remainder. His stage settings, however, seem only to have been suggestions, the final designs and their execution being left to specialists. This involvement at a time when Khnopff had many other projects suggests that he had a long-standing interest in opera before 1903 even if this cannot be demonstrated in his earlier work, which generally depicted subjects of his own invention. Khnopff’s career, more than that of Odilon Redon or James Ensor, carried the Wagnerian works of the artistic avant-garde through the end of the so-called long nineteenth century—that is, until 1914. The outbreak of World War I and the German occupation of Belgium precluded further costume design work for the opera. In addition, like Ensor and other artists, around this time Khnopff had developed a totalizing project that went beyond painting, perhaps influenced by the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. This was his unique, templelike home and studio in Brussels, the interior of which was designed in 1900 and sparsely decorated by the painter himself. By the time of his death, Khnopff’s reputation had already declined as had those of most of the Symbolists. Their work was considered too literary and not in tune with the formal concerns of modernist art. Not until around 1970 with the lessened dominance of abstract art did a revival of interest in Khnopff’s work take place. His art again became well known internationally to art historians, curators, and collectors. Today many of Khnopff’s works on paper, including those on Wagnerian subjects, remain in Belgian private collections. In 2004 Khnopff’s rediscovery culminated in a massive exhibition of his work in Brussels, and selections of his artworks were then shown in Vienna and in Boston.34 The Boston exhibition, the only major museum exhibition to date of Khnopff’’s work in the United States, consisted predominantly of works on paper. Given the absence of Wagnerian subjects in Khnopff’s earlier work, it is surprising to find no fewer than three finished drawings of Isolde dating from circa 1905. La Monnaie planned German-language performances of Tristan und Isolde in May 1907, and the Isolde drawings could have been related to this project. We know that Khnopff’s later design work on Parsifal for La Monnaie, discussed below, began some two years before that opera was premiered. The finished drawings of Isolde differ in technique from Khnopff’s known costume designs. One Belgian musicologist points out possible sources for the Tristan story though Wagner’s is the best-known version.35 Still,

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Khnopff’s interest in this subject, even if not for a specific opera production, seems related to his involvement with costume design at La Monnaie. Two of three drawings titled Isolde, now in unidentified private collections, have been reproduced in color. In what is probably the first version, Khnopff uses a refined technique, creating a bust-length, nearly life-size drawing, about twenty inches in height, in charcoal on pinkish-yellow tinted paper36 (compare plate 8.6). Isolde, wearing a dark, sleeveless dress, at first glance more nearly resembles a Belgian society woman of 1900 than Wagner’s medieval heroine yet the work was exhibited on several occasions and published at the time under this title. Following his frequent practice, Khnopff or a collaborator made a black-and-white photographic print of this version. Khnopff then drew on it in pencil to further explore the composition (Stedelijke Musea Dendermonde). The photographic print is 18 centimeters (about 7 inches) in height, a standard format at the time. Aside from its smaller size and the absence of tinted paper, the photographic version repeats the original with very few compositional changes. The drawing is signed in block letters on the lower left border, and the photographic version has a handwritten signature. The Isolde drawings are atypical for Khnopff in having an identifiable subject. Unlike many of Khnopff’s frontal, immobile, somewhat expressionless women, Isolde turns sharply toward the viewer, her head tilted back and lips parted. Usually Isolde is depicted as successively angry, dreamily in love, or grieving. The Isolde shown here has drunk the love potion, which seems to have had an immediate effect. The eroticism of the representation, though perhaps less striking today, made a strong impression on viewers of Khnopff’s time. As the critic Louis Dumont-Wilden, writing in 1907, described it, It is the triumph of the bestial that is translated in that mouth, in those teeth that surrender, in that gaze, in which the soul shatters itself, dissolves, vanishes. . . . To be sure, Khnopff’s Isolde is perhaps not as possessed by the romantic madness that fills Wagner’s heroine. But whatever the case! Even if she is a bit more civilized, why should this figure, eternal victim of love, be less revealing?37

The passage perhaps tells us more about fin-de-siècle male fantasies of female sexuality than what Wagner may have had in mind when he was composing Tristan in 1858. For an artist who devoted so much of his work to the female image, Khnopff left little documentary evidence of his attitude toward women. In 1908 at the age of fifty he married a much younger woman but divorced a few years later. Thereafter he lived alone in his extraordinary house. In the case of the Isolde drawing, the intensity of Khnopff’s handling

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makes James Ensor’s various treatments of the Valkyries seem lighthearted and a little impersonal by comparison. The precision of the drawing is stylistically far from Ensor’s rapid technique; likewise, there is no overlap in the two artists’ Wagnerian subjects since Khnopff restricts himself to depicting Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. Dumont-Wilden thought that the drawing was made in preparation for a full-scale picture of Tristan and Isolde, but no work of this kind was ever executed. The high level of finish is not typical either of preparatory sketches for paintings or of costume designs nor is the fact that Khnopff repeated the same composition three times in different media. The third version is slightly smaller than the first largely due to the reduction of the bottom and right areas (plate 8.6).38 Isolde’s face now takes up more of the composition, creating a more forceful impression. Her right arm and sleeveless dress have been replaced by a simpler, more sober costume. In addition to giving the image a more timeless quality, the area of the dress now allows Khnopff to experiment with more complex media, including charcoal, pastels, and white chalk on dark gray–tinted paper. Khnopff highlights the front of the face and side of the neck in white chalk, producing a vivid image. This strong depiction of a female subject in all three versions recalls works by English Pre-Raphaelite painters of the previous generation, especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti, though Khnopff’s draftsmanship is superior to that of Rossetti. Little remains of Khnopff’s decade-long work on original designs for operatic costumes––perhaps totaling more than fifty drawings––which largely vanished in the chaos of World War I. We know what they looked like because some were published. Most were straightforward, relatively simple pencil drawings that could be followed easily by the technicians making the costumes. A number of costume designs for Chausson’s Le roi Arthus, though not used in the production, were illustrated throughout Dumont-Wilden’s book in 1907 but are now lost. Three much more finished surviving studies in graphite and colored pencil depict the Tristan-like triangle of Arthus, Queen Genièvre, and Sir Lancelot.39 The costumes themselves did not survive but photographs of the singers taken during the production at La Monnaie reveal that the finished costumes were close to the designs in the colored pencil drawings.40 Khnopff also made a few studies in pastel that were intended to show the general effect the stage lighting would produce on the costumes in the theater. Two such studies survive depicting Klytemnestra from Strauss’s Elektra41 and Rezia from Weber’s Oberon.42 Details of both the costumes and the faces are subordinated to the study of color and lighting so works of this kind were not used by the costume designers.

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Of Khnopff’s original drawings for operatic costume designs from 1903 to 1914, only one that is probably more typical of his works of this kind is known to have survived to recent times: a study of Klingsor for the production of Parsifal that premiered on January 5, 1914. This was the first authorized production outside Bayreuth after the copyright on the opera had expired (unauthorized performances had taken place in the United States, which was not bound by European copyright laws). As such it was considered an important cultural event. Maurice Kufferath, director of La Monnaie, was presented with a score of Parsifal that had a drawing by Khnopff on the front cover. The subject of the design is not known, however, for this work is lost. The Klingsor drawing (figure 8.1), despite its simplicity, is of relatively good size, over fourteen inches in height. In 1987 it was on the art market in Switzerland43 but its subsequent location is unknown. It is executed in pencil, with Khnopff’s gallery stamp at the lower right. Typical for costume designs, the figure is nearly frontal, giving the costume makers the clearest possible view. Klingsor wears Oriental robes and a kind of turban. This would be in keeping with the interpretation of this character and his entourage as Muslim foes of the Christian knights of the Grail in medieval Spain, a concept also seen in some twenty-first-century productions of the opera. The artist makes no attempt at interpreting Klingsor’s personality or motivations. Since Parsifal was an entirely new production at La Monnaie, it is likely that Khnopff produced costume designs for all the major characters. In an article published in The Studio in December 1912, a visitor to Khnopff’s home reported that the artist was already at work on Parsifal designs, including models of proposed stage settings.44 A higher percentage of Khnopff’s Wagnerian work probably has been lost than that of any other major nineteenthcentury artist. Hopefully additional drawings will eventually be rediscovered, providing a fuller idea of Khnopff’s concept for staging a Wagner opera.

Jean Delville Another Belgian Symbolist who depicted Wagnerian subjects in drawings and paintings was Jean Delville (1867–1953). Like Khnopff, Delville was known internationally but he was largely forgotten after 1920 though he lived past the midcentury. Compared to Ensor and Khnopff, Delville is less known today; nevertheless, his treatments of Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal (if those indeed are his subjects) are among the most extraordinary Wagnerian pictures of the nineteenth century. Delville’s obscurity is due in part to conscious choices the artist made in the latter part of his career. Unlike Khnopff whose Symbolism was expressed

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in hermetic personal imagery, Delville sought a more public, didactic role for his works, an Idealism that was often esoteric yet aimed at the largest possible audience. While Khnopff worked increasingly in drawings meant for intimate contemplation, Delville moved toward making paintings on a large, even colossal scale that could be viewed by a broad public and could convey a moral lesson. Such works were too large for private homes and were intended to be seen in public spaces––state buildings, churches, and museums. Unfortunately some of these paintings fared badly in the destruction of the two world wars; in several cases they are known today only from oil sketches or black-and-white photographs. Most of Delville’s surviving major works, with one important exception, have remained in Belgium; few, if any, are in British or American collections. Unlike Ensor and Khnopff, Delville was never the subject of a monographic biography during his lifetime. Within the past few years, however, there has been a revival of interest in this artist. In 2015 Brendan Cole published the first full-length scholarly monograph on Delville, writing almost entirely about the artist’s work before 1900.45 A first international museum exhibition of his work has also been organized.46 Nevertheless, a full view of this many-faceted artist has proved elusive for biographers and art historians. Recently documentarian and collector Daniel Guéguen has produced a study covering Delville’s entire career.47 More than earlier writers, Guéguen emphasizes, perhaps excessively, the effect on Delville’s art of the painter’s involvement in esoteric movements including Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and Theosophy, with a focus on the artist’s later career. Guéguen does not reproduce any of Delville’s depictions of scenes from Wagner’s operas, which do not fit comfortably into this framework. Delville’s Wagnerian pictures, all belonging to his early career, are clearer in content than his later works. They also largely predate Delville’s extensive theoretical writings on the relation of art to esoteric philosophies. Of Wagner’s operas, the one that most strongly attracted Delville’s interest was Parsifal, which is the one most concerned with spiritual matters and most in keeping with Delville’s Symbolist inclinations. These artworks already indicate, at the beginning of Delville’s career, his movement away from social realism toward Idealist themes. Delville’s images of Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal often have multiple interpretations that can make it difficult to distinguish the Wagnerian references from other literary or mythological associations. Delville would not have seen this ambiguity as a problem: in his aesthetic, the same work could easily have more than one meaning. Delville’s place in the complex art-politics of late-nineteenth-century Belgium is discussed in detail by Cole, who relies primarily on the exhibition

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catalogs and copious art criticism in periodicals of the time and on Delville’s own writings. Despite his obvious talent, Delville was never invited to exhibit with Les XX, the leading avant-garde exhibition vehicle in Belgium. Delville was doubly an outsider: his unusual subject matter clearly separated him from academic painting yet he used traditional techniques that relied on detailed drawing and subdued color. In this regard he differed from modernist painters such as Vincent Van Gogh and Georges Seurat (both of whom exhibited at Les XX), who used novel methods of paint application and brilliant colors. The organizers of Les XX exhibitions were interested in such technical innovations and in the depiction of modern life rather than in the messages that might be contained in Delville’s pictures. Delville’s combative denunciations in print of most leading academic, Realist, Impressionist, and Symbolist artists also did not win him friends. Later Delville pursued a traditional academic career, teaching drawing for nearly forty years at institutions in Scotland and Belgium and holding private painting classes. Among his students were the future Surrealists Paul Delvaux and René Magritte. Many followed Delville’s example at least to the extent of favoring precise drawing over a painterly approach. Delville sought to distinguish his work from that of Symbolists like Khnopff and Paul Gauguin by describing it as Idealist—that is, conveying moral, didactic content explicitly or implicitly to its audience. Excluded from avant-garde exhibition venues, the energetic Delville organized his own Salons of Idealist Art, even founding and writing short-lived publications that reviewed these exhibitions. At the same time he pursued a literary career, publishing four volumes of poetry and substantial works on art theory and esoteric philosophies. Something of a prodigy, Delville had been admitted to evening classes at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Brussels in 1879 at the age of twelve when the older Ensor and Khnopff were full-time students there. Delville’s early work, shown at L’Essor, another exhibition group, dealt with social themes such as coal miners and other impoverished members of Belgian society, subjects to whom Delville, with his working-class background, was sympathetic. Delville’s earliest work thus already displayed his belief in the possibility of changing society through art. Within a few years, however, Delville had switched to a mode of pure aestheticism, depicting literary or imaginary subjects while still aiming to reform society. Delville’s exceptional skills as a draftsman are already in evidence in his Tristan and Isolde, or Liebestod, which he completed in 1887 at the age of twenty (plate 8.7). This large drawing in pencil, black chalk, and charcoal is one of the earliest examples of Delville’s move away from socially conscious

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scenes of modern life. Although Tristan und Isolde was not performed in Brussels until 1894, Delville was thoroughly familiar with Wagner’s text. Delville’s first published book of poetry, Les horizons hantés [Haunted horizons] (1892), included the poem “Le désir suprême [Supreme desire],” which conflates eroticism with death. He prefaced the poem with a free translation of a quote from Tristan: “Will you, Isolde, follow Tristan where he now is going? In the land that Tristan means, no sunlight shines” (Tristan und Isolde, II, iii). In the same year, Delville prefaced the catalog to his first salon, Pour l’art, with a quotation attributed to Wagner, “Art begins where life stops,” thus emphasizing the organizer’s disinterest in realistic or naturalistic art. In the 1887 drawing we see Isolde expiring on the already-dead Tristan. Though the subject seems familiar, it has unexplained elements that do not correspond to Wagner’s scenario. Isolde holds aloft a cup, perhaps the love potion, though it is out of place in the opera’s final scene. The lovers are united completely only in death. Plant tendrils already entwine their bodies, suggesting the downward pull of earthly desires, though at their feet appear a swarm of butterflies, symbols of the release of the soul. The scene is lit at the center by a sunburst producing rays that often represent divine illumination. Delville himself seldom provided titles for the drawings that are now thought to depict Wagner’s operas nor do the works appear to have been exhibited at the time under their current titles. The titles may first have been applied to the works by dealers or curators during the revival of interest in Symbolist art in the 1970s. It has been suggested that the scene depicted comes from a Symbolist novel, Axël, by the French Parnassien poet Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–1889).48 In that work a pair of lovers, having discovered a treasure they were seeking, commit suicide by drinking poison. The novel was well known in its time and later provided the title for Edmund Wilson’s classic study of modern French literature Axel’s Castle (1931). Long in gestation, the novel was not published until 1890 after Villiers’s death, but Delville, who had mingled in Symbolist circles on visits to Paris, probably had met Villiers and could have known the plot of Axël. In the novel the scene takes place in a cave-like vault illuminated from above by a window but neither this setting nor the treasure is obvious in Delville’s drawing. A year later Delville made a small pencil drawing of the final scene from Axël that corresponds more closely to that story: two black-robed figures are in a vaulted Gothic interior lit by a distant window.49 In all likelihood Delville’s Tristan and Isolde is a hybrid of scenes from Wagner’s opera and Villiers’s novel. The cup might also be associated with the Eucharist. Such multiple associations would have been entirely in keeping with Delville’s Symbolist theories. Villiers himself was strongly Wagnerian

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in orientation, and he had paid Wagner extended visits twice in Switzerland during the 1860s. Delville continued to explore Wagnerian subject matter in his remarkable 1890 charcoal drawing of Parsifal (figure 8.2). At the time Parsifal was still a very recent work of musical art, the opera having received its premiere in 1882. Today this is one of Delville’s best-known images, often appearing (without any credit to the artist) in new-age media. Again it is uncertain whether this title was given to the work in Delville’s time or much later. Like some other intellectual artists, Delville seems more at home in the drawing medium than in painting; his large, later paintings often rely on close color values that produce a somewhat monochrome effect. In this work Parsifal’s face, his eyes shut, is seen from below. It is covered by a fine, nearly transparent veil, perhaps representing something that must be lifted from the hero’s eyes before he can attain full enlightenment. The rather androgynous face rests on a rounded structure that might be a lyre, with straight vertical lines representing strings at the center. Other symbolic elements may depict horns and a sunburst (above) and a heart (below). While the ambiguity of the picture has invited elaborate interpretations, the composition anticipates others by Delville for which the subjects are known. In 1893 he painted Death of Orpheus, in which the severed head of the musician, seen from below and resting on his lyre, floats, still singing, down a blue river. A much less naturalistic depiction of the same theme is Prometheus, a design that Delville drew in 1908 for the cover of the orchestral score of Prometheus, or the Poem of Fire by his friend, the Wagner-influenced, Brussels-based Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. In this case a more abstract face stares straight ahead, again resting on a lyre. Another possible association for the Parsifal drawing is the image of the head of Saint John the Baptist on a plate, a ubiquitous theme at the time. In each of these images Delville concentrates on the head, the locus of thought and spirit. It is possible that all of these works had multiple meanings for the artist: Parsifal, Orpheus, Prometheus, and Saint John the Baptist at once. All of these figures could be among the “great initiates” (including Christ) who attained a high level of spiritual understanding as propounded by another friend of Delville, the French writer Edouard Schuré. This author published an article on Parsifal and a book on the mystical aspects of Wagner and provided the preface to Delville’s book The Mission of Art (1900).50 In the mid-1890s Delville also came increasingly under the influence of another French author, Joséphin Péladan, a prolific novelist and critic, cultural impresario, and self-proclaimed guru of a revived Rosicrucian esoteric sect. Péladan’s Salons of the Rose + Croix, held in Paris from 1892 to 1897,

Figure 8.2.  Parsifal. Source: Jean Delville, Parsifal, 1890, charcoal. (Private collection, Italy.) From Musée Félicien Rops, Namur, Belgium, Jean Delville (1867–1953) Maître de l’Idéal, exh. cat., 2014, 65. Jean Victor Delville © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels

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provided Delville with a prominent and much-needed venue in which to display his paintings. At the 1895 Salon de la Rose + Croix, Delville exhibited a life-size portrait of the flamboyant, bearded “Sâr” Péladan (as he was known) dressed in vaguely Eastern robes and in an attitude of preaching (1894; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nîmes).51 He also painted the sets (now lost) for a play by Péladan that was performed in Paris and Brussels in 1894–1895. This was an early example of theater design by a modernist artist. Like Schuré, Péladan was a committed Wagnerian who wrote extensively about the composer’s works, and this no doubt had an effect on Delville’s continued depictions of scenes from Wagner at this period. The salons included a variety of works with Wagnerian subjects ranging from a woodcut portrait of the composer by the Swiss Nabi painter Félix Vallotton (1892) to a series of etchings on Parsifal by Wagner’s Spanish friend Rogelio de Egusquiza, shown in 1896. One of these was Amfortas, repeating the composition of a drawing the Spanish artist had contributed to the memorial album for Wagner published in Munich in 1884 (figure 6.4). Péladan strongly influenced Delville’s aesthetic theories though the painter eventually drifted toward Theosophy, finding Péladan’s Rosicrucianism too elitist and too Catholic. Significantly, Delville rarely treated the traditional Christian religious themes that were ubiquitous in Péladan’s salons. Delville’s next depiction of Parsifal, though more naturalistic, is equally strange in imagery. In his only oil painting of a Wagnerian subject (1894; plate 8.8) and exhibited under this title in 1897, a Germanic Parsifal stares upward at an expansive landscape with a domed building on a hill. Is this Monsalvat, the castle of the Knights of the Grail (acts 1 and 3)? Or is it Klingsor’s magic castle (act 2)? Wagner’s libretto describes only the surroundings of Monsalvat: “A forest, shadowy and impressive, but not gloomy. Rock-strewn ground. A clearing in the middle. Left rises the way to the castle of the Grail. The background slopes steeply down in the center to a forest lake. Daybreak.”52 The left half of Delville’s painting corresponds approximately with this setting. Catherine Morris Westcott in an article published in a journal devoted to the art of the occult suggests that a swan barely visible in the lower left is the bird unthinkingly killed by Parsifal at the beginning of the opera, thus starting his journey on the path to greater spiritual enlightenment.53 Other elements of the picture are more difficult to reconcile with this interpretation. As in Tristan and Isolde, prominent rays of light fall on the figure of Parsifal suggesting he has already achieved divine illumination. Parsifal’s masses of blond curls mingle with cascades of petals that when seen in a gallery seem

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to cling anti-illusionistically to the picture plane, contradicting the illusion of depth conveyed in the rest of the picture. This prominent aspect of the composition is certainly intentional. Could the petals be an allusion to the Flower Maidens? The most unusual element of the iconography, however, is a tent-like textile that Parsifal pushes aside as he peers upward at the castle. This concealing device does not correspond to anything in Wagner’s scenario and would certainly be out of place in act 1 when Parsifal knows little or nothing about the nature of the Grail castle. Westcott likens this element to the transparent covering on Parsifal’s face in the charcoal drawing of 1890: it is a veil of ignorance that must be lifted for the hero to be initiated into full enlightenment.54 Given Delville’s growing involvement with esoteric doctrines, particularly Rosicrucianism and Masonic rites with their emphasis on initiation, this interpretation is plausible though it is not immediately obvious to most gallery visitors. Of all Wagner’s operas, Parsifal most clearly traces a hero’s journey from darkness to enlightenment. Delville’s next important finished drawing, The Idol of Perversity (1891; collection of F. W. Neess, Wiesbaden, Germany), is a nearly life-size half figure depicting a sinister, semi-nude temptress. The negative connotations of such an image, so different from the works just discussed, could have been derived from images of the femme fatale that were frequently represented in the art of the time as in Gustave Moreau’s depictions of Salome. Delville’s Isolde, as well as those by Khnopff, could also fit into this category. Maria Luisa Frongia and Cole suggest yet another source of inspiration from Parsifal: the character of Kundry.55 Kundry represents the sensual, earthly temptation that must be overcome by the successful spiritual initiate, and Amfortas fails this test whereas Parsifal ultimately succeeds. Another possible Wagnerian prototype suggested by Cole is the sensual Venus of Tannhäuser seen as a negative influence on the hero in contrast to the saintly Elizabeth.56 A fine drawing dated 1894 shows a head in profile facing to the right. It is executed in a technique called bleuine, or blue pencil, and it again demonstrates both Delville’s drawing skills and his tendency to favor monochrome compositions. The uniform blue tonality, also seen in Delville’s contemporaneous painting Orpheus, was the color of choice for representing spirituality in Symbolist art. The subject has long, flowing hair, which may be why this work has been exhibited as Study of a Young Woman though the Parsifal in the painting of the same year has equally long locks. In fact, “Parsifal” is written on the reverse of the drawing, highlighting the frequent androgyny of Delville’s figures. While the face of the charcoal Parsifal of 1890 inclines to the feminine, the bleuine figure has a forceful and rather masculine cast.

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A second version in bleuine, also of 1894, is identical in composition except that the figure has shorter hair, adding to its masculine aspect.57 This version may illustrate Delville’s long-held belief that the androgyne represents a spiritually superior being, having passed beyond sexuality. The face in the drawing has been compared to that in a beautiful bleuine portrait of the painter’s wife, Marie Delville, in half profile (1893), and Marie was indeed her impecunious husband’s principal model at this time.58 It is difficult to compare the two portraits on account of the different poses and facial expressions, but they do not seem to depict the same model, leaving the Parsifal interpretation open. One unexplained element in the composition is the thin band encircling the model’s head. Too narrow to be a headband, it more closely recalls the band supporting Wotan’s eye patch in Wagner’s Ring operas though the subject is too young to be the ruler of the gods. Catherine Morris Westcott in her study of occult symbolism in Delville’s Parsifal pictures confidently identifies the band as “Ishtar’s circlet,” indicating that Marie, by her recent marriage to Delville, “has become Isis, the celestial virgin.”59 While such a meaning is possible given Delville’s wide readings in occult literature, it is not subject to proof or disproof. The figure’s ambiguous gender leaves the question further in doubt. Delville’s later career was devoted mainly to producing very large paintings with allegorical or historical subjects of his own invention, the most successful of which was his School of Plato (1898; Musée d’Orsay, Paris). The bearded, Christ-like philosopher is shown seated outdoors in the center lecturing forcefully to twelve languid nude or semi-nude young men. The picture is a tribute to the ultimate philosophical source for Delville’s aesthetic Idealism, which views objects in nature as merely visible manifestations of a higher spiritual idea. The conspicuous nudity and androgyny of the young men is not intended to be erotic; rather, it is another indication of Delville’s belief in androgyny as a sign of spiritual advancement. The composition also echoes, in a very different context, the many pictures of the Last Supper Delville would have seen in Italy during his years as a winner of the Belgian Prix de Rome competition, the most notable of which is Leonardo da Vinci’s mural in Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. Like so many other artists of the period, Delville, following the example of Wagner, planned an artwork that would exceed the boundaries of a single discipline. Delville’s Gesamtkunstwerk would combine his proven talents as a painter and a poet. He envisioned an opera based on the novel Zanoni (1843) by the popular Victorian writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the author of such historical works as Rienzi: The Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835), a subject

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set as an opera by Richard Wagner. Zanoni was perceived as sharing some of the ideas of Rosicrucianism so this was undoubtedly its attraction for Delville, who was heavily involved in this movement during the first half of the 1890s. Delville set out to provide a libretto in verse for the opera and also made pen drawings, which have been published, for the stage settings.60 Unlike his other works, Delville’s Zanoni drawings do not foreground the human figure, depicting instead the interiors and formal gardens of the palaces in Rome and Naples in which the story takes place. It is difficult to date this project, which extended over a period of several years. Delville might have done some work on it during his time in Glasgow (1900–1905) or during his family’s flight to London during the 1914–1918 war. However, Delville quotes from Bulwer-Lytton’s “great Rosicrucian novel” in his book The Mission of Art, the writing of which was finished by 1899 at the latest, so the libretto very likely was underway by then.61 Daniel Guéguen recently has published documents showing that although Delville had begun Zanoni by 1899, he was still working on the project many years later.62 Unlike James Ensor’s marionette ballet La gamme d’amour, however, Zanoni was never completed since Delville did not find a composer to provide the music. The bulk of Delville’s writings on aesthetic theory and on occult philosophy, particularly Theosophy, can be dated, like the School of Plato, after the period of the Wagnerian pictures, during which Delville was still formulating his aesthetics. Delville’s move away from Wagnerian subjects does not mean, however, that he had lost interest in Wagner and his operas. He mentions the composer several times in The Mission of Art as an example of genius. Delville’s youngest son, Olivier (born 1904), in a memoir of his father, recalls being taken as a child to performances of Lohengrin, Parsifal, and Die Walküre and hearing his father pick out “The Ride of the Valkyries” (James Ensor’s favorite piece) on the family piano.63 As late as 1940 an oil study— over five feet in width—for an unexecuted fresco or mosaic titled The Holy Grail suggests Delville’s residual attachment to the story of Parsifal. Here the long-lived Delville, like his compatriot Ensor, returned to subject matter that had preoccupied him a half century earlier, circa 1890. An identical pair of angels hover symmetrically, supporting the Grail in their hands in the dome of a Byzantine church the same style as that of the building at which Parsifal peers in the 1894 oil. The setting suggests the location of the boy choir that sings during the Grail ceremony in Parsifal though there is no specific reference to Wagner’s opera. The rigid stylization of the image is characteristic of much of Delville’s late work.64 Like the writers Péladan and Schuré, Delville saw mystical elements in Wagner’s operas. He expressed this with greater originality than any other nineteenth-century artist and perhaps most strikingly in the charcoal Parsi-

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fal. The surviving Wagnerian works of Khnopff and those of Delville differ from each other in many respects. The drawings by Khnopff come from his later career whereas Delville’s works are among his earliest. If Khnopff’s Isolde drawings are highly realistic, Delville’s Wagnerian works are more fanciful in content and to some extent anti-naturalistic. The similarities between Khnopff and Delville are equally evident. Neither artist seems concerned with reproducing the composer’s own conception of his operas in visual form. Both rely on a refined drawing technique derived from the traditions of academic art. Both artists limit their Wagnerian subjects, as far as is known, to two of Wagner’s later operas, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, just as James Ensor limited himself to depicting the earlier Die Walküre. The reflective, even philosophical nature of the two later operas contrasted with the more externalized action of Die Walküre and was more in tune with the escapist, otherworldly interests of many artists of the 1890s. Delville and Khnopff were among the last avant-garde artists to be inspired by Wagner’s operas. Modernist painters of the next generation, however, did not forget Wagner’s example. The abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky, for example, in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), seeks to break down the boundaries between painting and music, recalling the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Kandinsky discusses Wagner’s use of leitmotives associated with an opera’s characters even when they are not present on the stage. He compares this to unseen spiritual auras surrounding ordinary persons as propounded by the Theosophists, whom he, like Delville, admired.65 Kandinsky did not, however, choose to depict scenes from Wagner’s operas or other literary sources even in his earliest works, preferring generic subjects. A revival of avant-garde interest in painting Wagnerian themes would only occur in a differing context of ruminations on German national identity in the works of the postmodernist German painter Anselm Kiefer during the 1970s and 1980s.

Notes *In addition to those mentioned in the Acknowledgments I would like to express my appreciation to the following for information, images, or advice: Brendan Cole, Michel Draguet, Daniel Guéguen, Jeffery Howe, and Roland Van der Hoeven.   1.  Wagnerian paintings by leading artists from many countries are reproduced in color in Paul Lang, ed., Richard Wagner: Visions d’artistes, d’Auguste Renoir à Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat. (Geneva, Musées d’Art et d’Histoire, 2005). See also Emma Sutton,

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“Wagner in the Visual Arts,” in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, Nicholas Vazsonyi, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 682–90.  2. Xavier Tricot, “James Ensor, wagnériste,” in James (art) Ensor, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2009), 74–79. For Wagner’s influence on Symbolist artists generally, see Wolfgang Storch and Josef Mackert, eds., Die Symbolisten und Richard Wagner (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1991). The situation in regard to the Belgian Symbolist art is discussed in Michel Draguet, “Wagnerkult,” in Der Kuss der Sphinx: Symbolismus in Belgien, exh. cat. (Vienna: BA-CA Kunstforum, 2007): 169–71, cat. nos. 72–83.   3.  There are numerous illustrated books and exhibition catalogs on the life and works of James Ensor. See for example James Ensor, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009). Ensor’s large production of drawings is discussed in Between Street and Mirror: The Drawings of James Ensor, exh. cat. (New York: The Drawing Center, 2001). All of the artist’s works in painting are catalogued in Xavier Tricot, James Ensor: The Complete Paintings (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009).  4. Edmond Evenepoel, Le Wagnérisme hors Allemagne (Bruxelles et la Belgique) (Brussels: Schott, 1891). Wagner’s influence on Belgian writers, particularly critics, is discussed in Jacques De Decker, “Wagner chez les Belges,” Bulletin de l’Académie Royale de Langue et de la Littérature Françaises de Belgique 89 (2011): 1–4, 65–75.  5. Evenepoel, Le Wagnérisme, 285–95. Evenepoel gives a complete list of Wagnerian opera and concert performances in Belgium through 1890.   6.  James Ensor to Pol de Mont, late 1894–early 1895, in Ensor, Lettres (Brussels: Labor, 1999), 124 (my translation).   7.  Personal communication from Patrick Florizoone, Ghent, December 13, 2016.   8.  The theater sketches are reproduced in Michel Draguet, James Ensor ou la fantasmagorie (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), figs. 221 and 222. The letter of March 2, 1883, to Marianne Rousseau is in a sketchbook of drawings at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, inv. no. 10290. Text courtesy of Xavier Tricot, Ostend, in an email, March 23, 2016 (my translation). A draft, evidently for this letter, is in another sketchbook at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, inv. no. 2709A.  9. Evenepoel, Le Wagnérisme, 172f. 10. Text from Archives d’art contemporain, Musées Royaux des Beaux-arts de Belgique, Brussels, quoted in full in Stéphanie Moris, James Ensor: Miousic! (Brussels: Editions Le Bord de l’Eau, 2015), 42. 11. Eugène Demolder, James Ensor (Brussels: Paul Lacomblez, 1892), 17 (my translation). 12.  Grégoire Le Roy, James Ensor (Brussels: Van Oest, 1922), 178. 13.  Norbert Hostyn, Ensor: La collection du Musée des Beaux-Arts, Ostende (Ghent: Ludion, 1999), 121 (my translation). 14.  James Ensor to François Franck, March 17, 1931, in James Ensor, Lettres, 385. 15.  On Ensor’s copying of his own compositions as a process of elaboration, see Susan M. Canning, “The Devil’s Mirror,” in Between Street and Mirror, 48f.

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16.  “Les aquarellistes d’aujourd’hui: Parodies, réflexions, et lignes caricaturales,” Domino (1914), in James Ensor, Mes écrits, 5th ed. (Liège: Éditions nationales, 1974), 31 (my translation). 17.  Address of February 14, 1925, in Ensor, Mes écrits, 100 (my translation). 18. Ensor, Mes écrits, 187 (my translation). 19. Tricot, James Ensor, cat. no. 843. 20. Liber Veritatis, Chicago Art Institute, folio 42, drawing dated February 13, 1938. 21.  Cited by Patrick Florizoone in James Ensor, exh. cat., Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein, eds. (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle, 2005), 264. 22.  La gamme d’amour (flirt de marionettes): Ballet-pantomime de James Ensor, en un acte et deux tableaux; Musique de James Ensor (Brussels: Joris Vriamont, 1929). 23.  Godelieve Spiessens, “Vive le son! James Ensor en de Musiek,” in MuseumMagazine 3–4 (1985): 62–75 (my translation). 24.  R. Wangermée, “La gamme d’amour et les musiques ensoriennes,” in Ensor, exh. cat. (Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, 1999): 54–62. 25. Moris, James Ensor. 26.  “Discours pour la réception à l’Académie Royale de Belgique,” 1925, in Ensor, Mes écrits, 95 (my translation). 27.  The origin of Ensor’s dispute with Khnopff is discussed, and many of Ensor’s comments are quoted, in Henry Bounameaux, “Ensor–Khnopff: La querelle d’une image?” in Bulletin des Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique, 1992–93, nos. 1–4: 127–47. 28.  “Les acquarellistes d’aujourd’hui,” 1914, in Ensor, Mes écrits, 30. 29. Ensor, Mes écrits, 15. 30.  This aspect of Ensor’s Wagnerism is emphasized in Herwig Todts, James Ensor, Occasional Modernist (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018). 31.  Georges Khnopff, trans., Richard Wagner à Mathilde Wesendon[c]k, journal et lettres 1853–1871, 2 vols. (Berlin: A. Duncker, 1905). 32.  Jeffery W. Howe, The Symbolist Art of Fernand Khnopff (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1982), 227n49. 33.  Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels, Archives et Musée de la Littérature, L07065/0255. Cited in Micheline Jérome-Schotsmans, Constantin Meunier: Sa vie, son oeuvre (Brussels: Olivier Bertrand, 2012), 139n151 and 289n432. 34. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Fernand Khnopff, 1859–1921 (exh. cat., 2004). The Boston segment of the exhibition was mounted at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College. Khnopff is discussed in the wider context of Belgian Symbolist art in Francine-Claire Legrand, Le symbolisme en Belgique (Brussels: Laconti, 1971). 35.  Mark Van Kerckhoven, “Fernand Khnopff en de musiek,” Bulletin des Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique 1–3 (1981–1984): 165–76. Productions of Wagner’s operas in Brussels, including those Khnopff might have seen, are discussed in Manuel Couvreur, ed., La Monnaie wagnérienne (Brussels: Université libre, GRAM, 1998).

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The Symbolist musical milieu, particularly in opera, that was familiar to artists like Khnopff and Jean Delville is discussed in various articles by Roland Van der Hoeven, most recently “L’idéalo-wagnérisme à Paris et Bruxelles, 1880–1914: Un chemin de traverse à l’histoire du cinéma,” in Opéra et cinéma, Aude Ameille et al., eds. (Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017), 63–74. 36.  Illustrated in color in Michel Draguet, Fernand Khnopff, ou l’ambigu poétique (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 405. 37.  Louis Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff (Brussels: Van Oest, 1907), 55–56. 38.  Illustrated in color in Brussels, Musées royaux, Fernand Khnopff, 202, cat. no. 133. 39.  Musées royaux, Fernand Khnopff, 67, ill. cat. 7. 40. For a discussion of Khnopff’s work as a costume designer, see Joris Van Grieken, “Fernand Khnopff and the ‘Théâtre Royal de La Monnaie,’” in Musées royaux, Fernand Khnopff, 65–69. 41.  Liège, Musée de l’Art wallon, Splendeurs de l’Idéale: Rops Khnopff Delville et leur temps (exh. cat., 1997), 269. 42.  Robert L. Delevoy, Catherine De Croës, and Gisele Ollinger-Zinque, Fernand Khnopff, 2nd ed., (Paris: Bibliothèque des arts, 1987), no. 486. 43.  Delevoy, De Croës, and Ollinger-Zinque, Fernand Khnopff, no. 517. 44.  Hélène Laillet, “The Home of an Artist: M. Fernand Khnopff’s villa at Brussels,” The Studio 57 (December 1912): 201–7, 230–32. 45.  Brendan Cole, Jean Delville: Art between Nature and the Absolute (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). 46. Musée Félicien-Rops, Namur, Jean Delville (1867–1953): Maître de l’idéal (2014). Most of Delville’s important works are reproduced in color in the catalog. A version of the exhibition subsequently traveled to Prague. See Prague City Gallery, Jean Delville [1867–1953] (exh. cat. in English, 2015). 47.  Daniel Guéguen, Jean Delville: La contre-histoire (Paris: LienArt, 2016). 48. See Donald Flanell Friedman, Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas, Les XX and the Belgian Avant-Garde (exh. cat., 1992), 171–72; and “L’évocation du Liebestod par Jean Delville,” in La peinture (d)écrite, Textyles, nos. 17–18 (Brussels: Le Cri, 2000): 79–84. Among numerous unpublished studies of Delville, at least one deals specifically with this work: Marie Decoodt, “Tristan en Isolde of De liefde der Zeilen: Androgyny en maniërisme in het oeuvre van Jean Delville” (dissertation, University of Ghent, 2000). 49.  Pencil, 12 x 8.5 cm., c. 1888. Liège, Splendeurs de l’Idéale, 141. 50. Edouard Schuré, Les grands initiés: Esquisse de l’histoire secrète des religions, Rama, Krishna, Hermes, Moise, Orphée, Pythagore, Platon, Jesus (Paris: Perrin, 1889); also Edouard Schuré, “Parsifal,” La revue wagnérienne 10 (November 8, 1885): 271–81; and Edouard Schuré, The Mystical Idea in Wagner, trans. Fred Rothwell (Hampstead, London: Priory Press, 1908). 51.  Several works that Delville showed at the Salons de la Rose + Croix, including The Death of Orpheus and the portrait of Péladan, have been exhibited in New

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York. See Guggehein Museum, Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose + Croix in Paris, 1892–1897 (exh. cat., 2017), 64–67. 52.  Translated by Andrew Porter in James Steakley, ed., German Opera Libretti (New York: Continuum, 1995), 106. 53. Catherine Morris Westcott, “The ‘Parsifal’ Influence in the Work of Jean Delville,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 3, no. 1 (1990): 5–14. 54.  Westcott, “The ‘Parsifal’ Influence,” 11. 55.  Maria Luisa Frongia, Il simbolismo di Jean Delville (Bologna: Pàtron, 1978), 55; and Cole, Jean Delville, 258. 56. Cole, Jean Delville, 265. 57.  Sale, Salle de ventes De Vuyst [Brussels], 10 March 2012, lot 78, 25.5 x 19. 5 cm. 58. Namur, Jean Delville, 2014, ill. 123. 59.  Westcott, “The ‘Parsifal’ Influence,” 12. 60.  Illustrated in Maria Luisa Frongia, “I bozzetti de Jean Delville per le scene del drama lirico inedita Zanoni,” Storia dell’arte 71 (1991): 137–51. 61.  Jean Delville, La mission d’art: Etude d’esthétique idéaliste (Brussels: G. Balat, 1900), 161–62. Eduard Schuré’s preface, which must have been written after Delville’s text was completed, is dated December 1899. 62. Guéguen, Jean Delville, 187–97. 63.  Olivier Delville, Jean Delville, peintre, 1867–1953 (Brussels: Laconti, 1984), 14, 24. 64.  Sale, Hôtel de ventes Horta, Brussels, May 15–18, 2009, lot 51. I am grateful to Brendan Cole and Miriam Delville for informing me of this image. A scan in the online site Archives de l’art contemporain en Belgique, Musées Royaux des BeauxArts de Belgique, Brussels, shows a somewhat more detailed version of this composition signed and dated by Delville, perhaps a preparatory study in pencil or pen. 65.  Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. Michael T. H. Sadler (Boston: MFA Publications, 2006), 28–29, 33.

CHAPTER NINE

Constantin Meunier’s Bronze Valkyrie

Wagner’s impact on artists such as Delacroix, Fantin-Latour, Redon, Sargent, Beardsley, and Ensor was probably the greatest of any composer in history. When we turn to sculpture, however, the situation is somewhat different. The economic nexus in which sculptors worked was unique: the raw materials of their art, whether bronze or marble, tended to be expensive. Often the assistance of skilled collaborators such as bronze foundry workers was an additional expense. For these reasons there was a greater need for commissions in sculpture and especially in large, ambitious projects. Sculptors were less likely to create works on speculation and offer them to the public at the official salons—the principal venues for artists to display their work before the development of the modern art gallery system. Thus despite substantial public enthusiasm for Wagner’s works, opportunities to depict them were fewer for sculptors. Moreover, the violent action in many of Wagner’s operas is difficult to depict in sculpture—though as we shall see by no means impossible. One prominent artist whose enthusiasm for Wagner is well documented is the Belgian sculptor Constantin Meunier (1831–1905). Meunier’s artistic career took an unusual form. He received a standard academic training in both sculpture and painting in Brussels in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Following this training, he functioned almost exclusively as a painter for the next thirty years. Meunier had a penchant for serious themes. He produced many works on historical and religious subjects that were shown in official exhibitions in Brussels and Paris. He was well respected as a painter but not famous. 139

Figure 9.1.   Dock Worker. Source: Constanin Meunier, The Dock Hand, bronze, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Helen and Alice Colburn Fund, 60.235 © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Shortly before 1880, Meunier began to visit the industrial installations around Brussels—iron foundries, glass works—that helped make diminutive Belgium a powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution and produced great wealth—at least for some elements of the population. Meunier was struck by the difficult, often dangerous conditions under which much of the industrial workforce labored. He made sketches on the spot and sought to render his impressions in painting. However, he was not satisfied with the result and felt that his view of the workers could be rendered more forcefully in sculpture. At the age of fifty he returned to making sculpture, and although he never entirely gave up painting, he devoted an increasing portion of his time to sculpture. This somewhat risky career change eventually brought him an international reputation. In those times sculpture, especially if monumental in size and in an outdoor setting, was devoted almost entirely to representations of kings, political leaders, or successful generals. Meunier’s goal of making life-size or even larger figures of industrial or agricultural laborers was virtually unprecedented. The workers in Meunier’s subjects were shown in their everyday clothing, including protective gear, and generally were not idealized. On the contrary, many were middle aged and displayed decided signs of weariness or strain. Other workers were depicted as young, still self-confident, and assertive. Perhaps Meunier’s most popular bronze was The Dock Hand (fig. 9.1). Meunier sketched it in the harbor of Antwerp as early as 1880. Dozens of casts, ranging up to life-size, exist in different materials—the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for example, owns two bronzes. The young worker projects a self-assurance that is almost heroic. The depiction of the costume, including a jute sack for a head covering, is completely authentic. Meunier’s aestheticism, however, often involved references to art-historical precedents, in this case Michelangelo’s marble David. In 1896 a retrospective exhibition of Meunier’s work was held in the Parisian gallery of Siegfried Bing, the high priest of the Art Nouveau movement in the decorative arts. The show was noted by many artists, including those who were politically sympathetic to socialism or anarchism. In an undated letter, the Neo-Impressionist painter Maximilien Luce wrote to his colleague Henri-Edmond Cross, At Bing’s, an exhibition of Constantin Meunier; superb things: sculptures and drawings. . . . The impression of pity and sadness that emanates from all this is really astonishing. . . . From the philosophical point of view, it makes you think that everything [today] is not for the best. I think you will be in Paris in time to see it; it would be too bad to miss it.1

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Luce made drawings, at no charge, of the principal sculptures in the Meunier exhibition that later were printed serially in issues of La sociale, an anarchist weekly. In the late 1890s, successful exhibitions in Paris, Vienna, and Berlin resulted in a meteoric rise in Meunier’s reputation and an improvement in his sometimes precarious finances. An illustrated monograph on his work appeared in Germany in 1898, the first of nearly a dozen such books or exhibition catalogs published within the next decade.2 By the early 1900s Meunier, then over seventy, was the most famous sculptor in Europe after Auguste Rodin, who himself expressed admiration for Meunier’s work. Given Meunier’s concentration on modern life and the problems of the working class, it may seem unlikely that he would be attracted by Wagner’s world of remote mythology and medieval heroes. We may recall, however, that Wagner himself in his youth had engaged in revolutionary politics though by 1880 he had long distanced himself from such ideas. Few of Meunier’s surviving works deal with Wagnerian subjects. Nevertheless, there is ample evidence of his fondness for Wagner’s operas. After 1870, La Monnaie was one of the leading centers outside Germany for Wagnerian productions especially considering the near ban on Wagner’s operas in France for a generation after the Franco-Prussian War. Most of these productions were given in French, the local literary language (rather than Flemish). The most important Wagnerian event of the period in Brussels, however, was the arrival in January 1883 of Angelo Neumann’s traveling production of the Ring with the original sets and costumes of the 1876 premiere in Bayreuth as well as some of its leading singers. Meunier was in Spain at the time working on a government commission to copy a large Flemish painting in the cathedral of Seville. Nevertheless, he wrote to his wife, Léocadie, urging her to attend.3 She wrote that one of Wagner’s works had been a great success in Brussels, and on January 27, 1883, Meunier replied, So the work by Wagner is so beautiful? That doesn’t astonish me, but how happy I am about his success in Brussels! What a fine man he is! But at the same time I’m unhappy not to have been there: I really have no luck, I who really would have enjoyed hearing this work, for you know how much this music thrills and moves me. If successes like this can temper the public’s taste and make it renounce the stupid coloratura of the opéra-comique, we will have, at least at La Monnaie, a repertory of works worthy of being heard.4

On March 21, 1886, the Brussels journal L’art moderne reported that on the fifteenth, Meunier’s sculpture studio had been given over to a concert of Wagnerian opera excerpts.

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In the vast atelier of C. Meunier and before a large and select audience, the first of the Wagner evenings organized by the Belgian committee of the Wagner Society [took place]. The program included all of Act l and the third scene of Act III [Wotan’s farewell to Brünnhilde] of Die Walküre,5 translated by M. H. La Fontaine. . . . Monsieur and Madame Meunier very graciously received the numerous guests. The second evening, which will consist of excerpts from Parsifal, will take place during the month of April.6

The program, which probably was based on the piano score, may have been in anticipation of the premiere of a new production of Die Walküre at La Monnaie planned for the following year. It was around this time that Meunier produced a large drawing titled The Valkyrie (plate 9.1). The work is executed in a complex technique of charcoal, pastel, and black chalk, and clearly intended as a finished drawing not a sketch, it was signed by the artist. In the center a mounted figure, presumably Brünnhilde, charges up a hill, her arm raised in signal to her companions. Three mounted Valkyries race across the sky brandishing weapons while a heavily armed Valkyrie below busies herself in collecting the body of a dead warrior. The violent action and dramatic subject of the drawing are quite different from Meunier’s oil paintings, most of which are restrained in movement. The drawing has been photographed under strong lighting to bring out the details, revealing a reddish undertone in the work. Again, most of Meunier’s paintings are rather subdued in color. Like many sculptors, he thinks more in terms of form than of color. The artist has chosen to show Brünnhilde’s warlike side rather than the caring side of her character as seen in her desire to help Siegmund and Sieglinde. The empathy that Maximilien Luce noted in Meunier’s worker sculptures is not in evidence here. The artist’s response to Wagner’s opera has brought out a different aspect of his work. Meunier spent seven years in a teaching position in Louvain then returned to Brussels for an intense schedule of work as the demand for his sculptures increased. In 1898 he found time to produce a bronze titled Valkyrie. Again his treatment of the subject is quite dramatic. With her arm raised as in the earlier drawing and her mouth open, Brünnhilde rushes forward on her horse while turning her head back sharply toward her companions. She wears a skirt over tight-fitting armor, probably of leather. As in the earlier drawing in Ostend, the violent action of the scene is atypical, particularly in Meunier’s sculpture. Modern photographs of the bronze against a white background emphasize its dark, gleaming patina but tend to obscure details. A photograph published in 1905, taken from a low viewpoint, reveals more of the composition (figure 9.2). The horse appears to trample a seething mass of fighting men and body

Figure 9.2.  The Valkyrie. Source: Constantin Meunier, The Valkyrie, bronze, 1898, side view, from Constantin Meunier et son oeuvre [Paris: Éditions de la Plume, 1905], 88. Ixelles, Musée Constantin Meunier.

Figure 9.3.   The Valkyrie, front view. Source: Constantin Meunier, The Valkyrie, front view (photo: Musée Constantin Meunier, Ixelles)

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parts that are ignored by the rider. Sculpture, unlike painting, may have multiple viewpoints. A more recent photograph, taken toward the front, reveals a detail not immediately apparent in the side view: the horse and rider lean sharply to the right as they rush forward (figure 9.3). Brünnhilde’s winged helmet is more clearly visible here. The bronze, a unique example, is now in Meunier’s house museum in Ixelles, a suburb of Brussels. Most likely Meunier produced it for himself. It remained in his family until 1936, when it was transferred to the museum. Meunier usually made wax or clay models in working out his compositions but none of this work are known at present. The small scale of the work (height 55.5 centimeters, or about 22 inches) would have made it suitable to display in the home. An idea of the scale may be gained from a photograph of a display of Meunier’s works in the Fifth Exhibition (1899) of the prestigious Vienna Secession, a progressive art group to which many of Europe’s leading artists lent their works (figure 9.4). Valkyrie is the small work at the far right. The Reaper (June), a plaster figure of at least life-size at the far left, is a more typical example of Meunier’s sculptural subjects. An agricultural worker pauses to raise his wrist to wipe the sweat from his brow in a gesture recalling some ancient Greek sculptures. Though not well known, Valkyrie was shown in other exhibitions, including a memorial show for Meunier at the Hagenbund, another Vienna art exhibition group.7 It was given a full-page illustration (figure 9.2) in Constantin Meunier et son oeuvre, an ambitious collaborative project with which Meunier cooperated. Did Meunier complete any other sculptures on Wagnerian themes? In 1909 a commemorative exhibition was held in Louvain, where Meunier had worked for some years. The 250 works shown there included the bronze Valkyrie and a bronze sculpture of Wotan.8 With a height of 68 centimeters (about 27 inches), the standing figure of Wotan was somewhat larger than the sculpture of Brünnhilde on horseback. According to the catalog, the work was a commission by Henri Seguin, the bass who had taken the role of the ruler of the gods in productions of both Die Walküre and Das Rheingold at La Monnaie. Born in 1854, Seguin was something of a Wagner specialist. His roles included Hans Sachs, Telramund, and Kurwenal.9 In a second more complete catalog, the same authors expanded their discussion of the work. The catalog was not illustrated but contained a lengthy description of the piece. After repeating the comments in the exhibition catalog on the role of Wotan among the gods and the commissioning of the sculpture, the authors continued,

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Figure 9.4.   Meunier room, Fifth Exhibition, Vienna Secession, 1899. Source: Meunier room, Fifth Exhibition, Vienna Secession, 1899 (from Davy Depelchin and Francisca Vandepitte, Constantin Meunier Museum (Ghent: Snoeck, 2021), 25, fig. 15

The athletic god, with a long beard, is shown leaning heavily on his spear, his helmet embellished with large wings, its peak dominated by a metallic crest. The tunic is richly decorated with embroidered lozenges. A wide belt of Merovingian workmanship serves to gird a long sword with a straight hilt; a cloak thrown back in three immense folds borders a heavy shield crowned with a serpent and leaning against a rock. The impression of force that all the details contribute to rendering [the god] dominant is remarkable in this small statuette. The warrior, standing straight with his feet wide apart, seems to defy an imaginary enemy.10

The current location of the statue is unknown. Nevertheless, this description bears a striking resemblance to a publicity photograph of Henri Seguin as Wotan in Die Walküre (Claude-P. Perna, Operabilia Collection, Brussels). Seguin created the role in a new production at La Monnaie in 1887–1888 then reprised it in a revival in 1897–1898, and it is likely that the photograph dates from one of these two seasons. The similarity of the costume (the

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decorations on the tunic and helmet, the sword hilt) is only to be expected: Seguin probably wore this costume, or one very similar, in all the performances of Die Walküre. Still the similarities extend even to the pose. With his feet wide apart, Wotan is leaning on his spear and looking intently at something outside the picture space. In this pose Wotan’s eye patch is nearly invisible in the photograph, and it also is not mentioned in the description of the sculpture. One difference is the absence of a shield leaning against a rock as mentioned in the description in the larger catalog. A shield featured in some publicity photographs of other Wagnerian singers going back to the premiere Ring performances of 1876 in Bayreuth.11 There could have been several photographs of Seguin in this role, with and without the shield, with which Meunier might have been familiar. The busy Seguin may not have had time to pose in costume for the sculptor. Meunier’s sculptures of industrial workers, who also probably did not have time to pose, began with rapid pencil sketches made on the spot. Though they did not like to admit it, many nineteenth-century painters and sculptors worked from photographs, and we cannot exclude the possibility that Meunier did so in developing the composition of this now-lost sculpture. The Wagnerian works by Meunier discussed so far are associated with Die Walküre. Did any of the artist’s works relate to other operas by Wagner? Of the more than seven hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints listed in the 1909 oeuvre catalog and in the various collection catalogs of the Musée Constantin Meunier, some have titles (e.g., Guerrier [Warrior]) that are too generic to identify. One of Meunier’s lithographs, however, at least suggests his awareness of another of Wagner’s greatest works. Meunier made a number of lithographic illustrations for literary works. One such work was a book of poetry, Raphael Petrucci’s Le livre de la vie, de la mort, et de la nuit, published in 1901. Petrucci, a specialist in Oriental art as well as a poet, was a friend of Meunier, and after the artist’s death, Petrucci’s recollections of the sculptor were translated and published in London’s Burlington Magazine. The frontispiece of Petrucci’s book, a lithograph signed by Meunier but not titled, shows a young soldier in medieval costume lying dead on his back, his eyes open (plate 9.2). He wears what may be leather armor on his upper body while a shield is beneath his right hand and his helmet lies nearby. A long object lying on his left is probably the scabbard of his sword. He has no obvious wounds though some blood appears to trickle down the lower right side of his face. In the background is a sketchy depiction of a low stone wall or parapet with faint indications of a shoreline at the right. Beyond in the

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center is the vast expanse of the sea. At the upper right a large bird of prey, no doubt a vulture, descends toward the body. The scene is a depiction of the second poem in the collection, “The Hero’s Voice.” In it the dead warrior speaks of his interrupted journey: “The iron of a sword laid me on the road.” In morbid fin-de-siècle style, the hero addresses the vulture. He invites the bird to pluck out his eyes, drain his skull, eat the marrow of his bones, and drink his blood. Though defeated, the warrior’s courage will make the bird larger and stronger. Meunier’s illustration, like the poem, gives no indication of exactly how the hero died or the specific location of the scene. Subjects in period costume are rare in Meunier’s late works, which mostly depict the modern world. Several dead heroes figure in Wagner’s operas (Siegmund, Siegfried) and may have influenced Meunier’s conception of the scene. The only Wagnerian character who dies in view of the sea is the hero of Tristan und Isolde. The opera received its first Brussels performances in 1894–1895 and was revived in the 1900–1901 season shortly before Petrucci’s book appeared. Tristan, who has been wounded in a fight with Melot, dies outside his castle on a terrace where he had been watching for Isolde’s ship. In Meunier’s lithograph, the hero dies alone and without the carnage of the last scenes of Wagner’s opera. Still the artist may have had the operatic precedent in mind. There is evidence that Meunier’s enthusiasm for Wagner continued into his last years. On July 2, 1899, he wrote to a much younger Fernand Khnopff, who had invited Meunier to join him in attending the Wagner festival in Bayreuth. Meunier regretfully declines, citing work and health issues. At the time he was working on an equestrian sculpture though more typical of his style than the bronze Valkyrie. This was the life-size L’abreuvoir [At the watering place], showing a weary rider on an equally weary horse that lowers its head to drink from a stream. He was completing the plaster version, later to be cast in bronze and placed outdoors. Meunier was moving soon to a new studio and had to finish work on the huge piece so that he would not have to move it twice. Meunier commented to Khnopff, in regard to missing the Bayreuth Festival, “Isn’t it sad to be deprived by circumstances of an immense impression of art.”12 As late as 1900–1902 Meunier was in correspondence with Maurice Kufferath, the director of La Monnaie. Kufferath, a musicologist, had published books on a number of individual operas by Wagner, and Wagner was a subject of their communications.13 Did Meunier’s fondness for Wagner’s operas have any bearing on his famous but seemingly unrelated sculptures of industrial and agricultural workers? The very extensive literature on Meunier

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mentions his Wagnerian interests rarely if at all. No doubt they did not seem to fit with Meunier’s image as the “workers’ sculptor.” Membership in the Wagner cult, particularly as practiced in Bayreuth, still had a decidedly elitist connotation in Meunier’s time. Much of the literature on Meunier emphasizes his desire to ennoble the industrial and agricultural workers of his time in his sculptures without sentimentality or any overt political agenda. During the ascendancy of abstract art in the mid-twentieth century, Meunier’s sculpture, like much of nineteenthcentury art in realist styles, was somewhat neglected. In the catalog of the Meunier exhibition in Brussels in 1998—one of the first signs of a revival of interest in the artist—Sura Levine writes of Meunier’s “desire to monumentalize the anonymous workers” but with a “complete lack of narrative or moralizing content.”14 Michel Draguet goes further, speculating on the possible influence of Wagner’s operas on Meunier’s art: “If Wagnerism did not really penetrate Meunier’s aesthetic, perhaps it will be appropriate one day to analyze its significance in the symbolic and ideological elaboration that led Meunier to heroize the moral principle of work.”15 In this formulation, Wagner’s appeal to Meunier may have been the composer’s ability to create larger-than-life characters (Brünnhilde, Tristan, Isolde), an analogy to the heroism Meunier sought to impart to the anonymous workers in his sculptures.

Notes *I would like to express my thanks to the staffs of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and the Frick Art Reference Library, New York, for providing access to rare publications on Meunier. 1.  Robert Rousseau, “Maximilien Luce et la Belgique: Un néo-impressioniste au pays noir,” In Charleroi, Belgium, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Maximilien Luce (exh. cat. 1966), n.p. (my translation). 2. A recent monographic exhibition catalog is by Francisca Vandepitte, ed., Constantin Meunier, 1831–1905 (2014), Brussels, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. A new text in English that discusses Meunier’s life, work, and house museum is Davy Depelchin and Francisca Vandepitte, Constantin Meunier Museum (Ghent: Snoeck, 2021). 3.  Micheline Jerome-Schotsmans, Constantin Meunier: Sa vie, son oeuvre (Brussels: Olivier Bertrand Editions, 2011), 139. 4.  Transcribed and published in Armand Behets, Constantin Meunier: L’homme, l’artiste, et l’oeuvre (Brussels: Office de Publicité, 1942), 74 (my translation).

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  5.  Quoted in Jerome-Schotsmans, Constantin Meunier (my translation). Another account mentions the inclusion of a scene from Götterdämmerung. See Michel Draguet, “Wagnerkult,” in Vienna, BA-CA Kunstforum, Der Kuss der Sphinx: Symbolismus in Belgien (2007), 169.  6. Vienna, Hagenbund, Constantin Meunier-Ausstellung (1906), cat. no. 137.  7. Constantin Meunier et son oeuvre (Paris: Éditions de la Plume, 1905).   8.  Armand Thiéry and Emile Van Dievoet, Exposition de l’oeuvre de Constantin Meunier (Louvain: Université Catholique, 1909), cat. nos. 80 and 180.   9.  The singers in early Wagner productions are listed in “Calendrier Wagner à Bruxelles,” koregos.org/fr/roland-van-der-hoeven-wagner-a-bruxelles/. 10.  Armand Thiéry and Emile Van Dievoet, Catalogue complet des oeuvres dessinées peintes et sculptées de Constantin Meunier (Louvain: Nova & Velera, 1909), cat. no. 180 (my translation). 11.  Photographs of a Wotan (without a shield) and a Siegfried (with a shield) at Bayreuth in 1876 are reproduced in Hans-Werner Schmidt, ed., Richard Wagner, Max Klinger, Karl May: Weltenschöpfer, Leipzig, Museum der Bildenden Künste (exh. cat., 2013), 56, 124. 12. Jerome-Schotsmans, Constantin Meunier, 139, 289. 13.  Cited by Michel Draguet in Brussels, Galerie Maurice Tzwern, Hommage à Constantin Meunier, 1831–1905 (Antwerp: Pandora, 1998), 140. The correspondence is unpublished. 14. Sura Levine in Brussels, Galerie Maurice Tzwern, Hommage à Constantin Meunier, 19. 15.  Michel Draguet in Brussels, Galerie Maurice Tzwern, Hommage à Constantin Meunier, 140.

CHAPTER TEN

Wagnerian Architecture: The Wagnerhof in Rotterdam

Richard Wagner’s influence on the music of such younger composers as Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, and Richard Strauss is well known. In addition, Wagner, perhaps of all composers, had the greatest impact on leading painters and graphic artists of his time. The majority of their Wagnerian works were created during the twenty years following the composer’s death in 1883 when his influence was at its peak, resulting in a Wagner craze that affected many aspects of culture. Architecture, the most abstract of the visual arts, would seem an unlikely medium in which to memorialize Wagner’s works. Of the visual arts, it was nevertheless the one in which Wagner showed the greatest interest due to its potential for contributing both to his desired personal comfort and to his theatrical Gesamtkunstwerk. He made a significant contribution to architecture as a patron of and a collaborator in building design. Most buildings named after composers are devoted to the performance or teaching of music; for example, the Mozarteum in Salzburg, the Teatro Rossini in Pesaro, the Liszt Conservatory in Budapest. In addition, a complex of ten houses in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, designed and built from 1903 to 1906, forms a unique memorial to Wagner’s operas conceived by an enthusiast of his music. Walking through the semi-suburban district of Kralingen in Rotterdam on the quiet Vijverlaan, or Vijverweg, one comes upon a group of imposing houses in a uniform style bordering a small pond (plate 10.1). Several of the houses face a small private street that comes to a dead end. This cul-de-sac 153

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arrangement reduces automobile traffic to a minimum, creating a peaceful environment that seems far removed from the city. A small sign on a fence surrounding the pond announces that this is the Wagnerhof. Johannes Eckhardt Dulfer (1858–1943), the creator of Wagnerhof, was a Rotterdam businessman. Dulfer was clearly an admirer of Wagner’s operas though the exact nature of his involvement remains elusive. Dulfer purchased a house built circa 1870—known as Villa Nuova—and renamed it Villa Wagner. In its extensive gardens, he built ten houses: two free-standing ones and four double villas, naming each one after a Wagnerian opera or character. The names are displayed in large gold letters high on the facade of each house. It is difficult to see the entire project from any one viewpoint on the grounds. An aerial view, however, shows all of the houses. Starting at the lower left (south) and moving approximately clockwise to the upper right are the villas Rienzi; Tristan and Isolde; Parsifal; Rheingold and Siegfried; Wotan and Walküre; and Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. At right center is the largest home, Villa Wagner, built in an eclectic style with a neo-Gothic octagonal tower. All of the homes are privately owned and are not open to the public. There are relatively few references to Wagnerhof in the substantial literature on Rotterdam’s history and architecture. Because the complex is designated a Dutch national historical site, however, a detailed architectural survey of each house is available online through various governmental websites.1 For this reason we will look at the Wagnerhof less as an aspect of architectural than of social history: a product of the Wagner craze of the period. One wonders what Richard Wagner would have thought of a residential architectural complex named after him and his operas had he lived into the early twentieth century like his contemporary Giuseppe Verdi. Though Wagner was not known for modesty, the two buildings he commissioned in Bayreuth, when he was over sixty, did not originally bear his name. The home he called Villa Wahnfried is still known by that name, and his theater, though now officially the Richard-Wagner-Festspielhaus, has always been known to the general public simply as the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Wagner was intensely involved in architectural projects to build a theater according to his specifications, which would maximize the effect of his opera productions. As early as 1850 he was thinking about a temporary building that would emulate the communal aspect of ancient Greek theater. Wagner’s involvement in these projects is well documented. His first opportunity came in 1864 when his patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, decreed that a large brick theater would be built in Munich as a showcase for Wagner’s operas. The project was given to the distinguished architect Gottfried Semper, the

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designer of the Dresden Royal Opera (now Semperoper), where Wagner had been music director in the 1840s. Wagner conferred intensively with Semper and particularly about his primary interest, the design of the theater’s auditorium. Here is part of what Semper had to say about this aspect of the proposed project. The nucleus of the building, around which everything else will be arranged in an ancillary role, is the large auditorium with the stage. The construction of both of these differs in some important respects from traditional theaters. The architect was governed by the following specifications: Complete separation of the ideal world on the stage from the reality represented by the audience. In accordance with this separation, the orchestra to be unseen, perceptible only to the ear. Of these two, the latter is particularly important in its consequences for the construction of the auditorium, and indeed of the whole building. For the only way to conceal the orchestra from every member of the audience, without placing it so low beneath the floor of the auditorium and the stage as to impair or even disrupt altogether the indispensable interrelationship between the performance on the stage and the performance of the orchestra, is to model the auditorium on the ancient Greek and Roman pattern with rows of seats rising step by step (cavea), and to abandon altogether the modern convention of vertical tiers of boxes. It is thus not an antiquarian fancy that dictates this form of auditorium, but first and foremost the necessity of satisfying the client’s requirements. It has, however, much to recommend it from acoustic, as well as optical, considerations, inasmuch as it enables all the different elements of dramatic presentation to make their effect that much more easily, in particular to be equally effective for every seat in the theater.2

The theater was never built. Nevertheless, the plan outlined for the auditorium will be familiar to anyone who has visited the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, built by Wagner a decade later. It is difficult to determine which of the ideas are Wagner’s and which are Semper’s, but Wagner helped himself freely to the earlier plan when he was finally able to build his theater. For both Wahnfried and the Festspielhaus, Wagner made his preferences clear to the architects with whom he worked. Wagner had long spoken of building a house that would meet all his needs and facilitate his work—this despite the fact that he frequently had no steady source of income. The choices made in designing Wahnfried reflect Wagner’s wishes. The house presents an elegantly sober exterior in warm-colored stone. The main decorative element, above the door, is a sgraffito frieze by Robert Krausse. Called

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The Artwork of the Future, here members of Wagner’s circle are depicted in allegorical guise. Inside is a large central living space suitable for receptions, lectures, and recitals. This design decision meant that some practical architectural elements, such as staircases, are pushed to the sides. Most of the funds available for the Festspielhaus were put into the interior of the theater, leaving little to expend on the facade. The reactions of early audience members to the facade were mixed: the French novelist Colette remarked that it reminded her of a gas works. The auditorium, on the other hand, attracted great interest even before the theater opened. Wagner issued a publication on the ongoing project, complete with architectural plans, in 1873,3 including drawings showing a section and view of the interior (figure 10.1). Returning to Johannes Dulfer’s plans for Wagnerhof, Dulfer soon hired a young Rotterdam architect, Jan van Teeffelen, to design the new buildings and remodel Villa Wagner. It was van Teeffelen’s first major project. Much later in the 1930s he became known for designing homes in the starkly modernist International Style. The architecture of Wagnerhof, however, is in a restrained version of Jugendstil, itself a Germanic variant of Art Nouveau, a style that had been dominant internationally since the mid-1890s. In a city that before 1945 was not known for avant-garde architecture, this was

Figure 10.1.   View of the auditorium, Festspielhaus, Bayreuth, woodcut. Source: View of the auditorium, Festspielhaus, Bayreuth, woodcut. From Richard Wagner, Das Bühnenfestspielhaus zu Bayreuth: Nebst einem Berichte über die Grundsteinlegung desselben (Leipzig: E.W. Fritzsch, 1873), supplement, plate 4, F (TS 239.299.90), Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University

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a relatively adventurous stylistic choice as was the selection of white for the facades, which was rare in the Netherlands at the time. Some modernist architects like the American Louis Sullivan may have wished to channel Wagner’s music into their building designs, but the young Dutch architect had no such aspirations for Wagnerhof. Herman van Bergeijk, who has published the principal study of van Teeffelen’s works,4 evaluates the architect’s intentions as more decorative than functional and designed to appeal to members of the rising middle class, to which he and Dulfer belonged. The homes eventually were purchased mainly by lawyers, accountants, and insurance executives. Elements of Jugendstil are seen in the arched windows, some subdued decorations on the facades, and the lettering of the names of the villas. Most of the houses have large windows to maximize exposure to the sometimesinfrequent Dutch sunlight. The villas have been well maintained. At present each exterior is pure white except for the traditional red tile roof and the gold lettering. There is evidence, however, that Wagnerhof did not originally have such a uniform appearance. In a photograph taken circa 1906 (figure 10.2), the facades of the houses were more varied. Some had balcony-like structures of cast iron or wood on the second floor. Others were enlivened with dark, horizontal, decorative bands. These elements, as well as later ac-

Figure 10.2.  Wagnerhof, general view, ca. 1905–1906. Source: Wagnerhof, general view, ca. 1905–1906. From Hans Baaij and Jan Oudenaarden, Monumenten uit Rotterdam (Rotterdam: Phoenix & den Oudsten, 1992), 34

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cretions such as ivy, were removed in subsequent restorations, resulting in a more unified look. Given the nature of architecture, specific references to Wagner and his works are rather subtle. The only two free-standing homes in the complex are Villa Rienzi, referring to Wagner’s first successful opera and possibly the first home to be built, and Villa Parsifal, recalling Wagner’s last opera. Villa Tristan and Villa Isolde, perhaps inevitably, is a conjoined double house with mirrorlike similarity of detail. Dulfer evidently was pleased with van Teeffelen’s work. In 1909 he hired the architect again to produce another housing development, known as Villapark, in the northern Rotterdam district of Hillegersberg. Consisting of thirteen attached houses and one detached building, the development again had Jugendstil decorations on the facades. Villapark, described by van Bergeijk as a scaled-down version of Wagnerhof, had only limited variations in the design of the individual facades. On each facade the architect placed a saying or motto (instead of Wagnerian names), a decorative detail already found in some Viennese Jugendstil buildings. Wagnerhof and Villapark remained somewhat isolated stylistically in Rotterdam, and van Teeffelen himself moved onward to explore other styles. Facts about Dulfer’s personal life and his interest in Wagner’s operas are elusive. He was born in The Hague, married there, and had numerous children though several did not survive to adulthood. Dulfer has been described as a manufacturer of candies or pastries or as having made a fortune as an importer of sugar, from which he derived the financial resources for such an obviously expensive project as Wagnerhof. None of his commercial activities, however, can be documented. Dulfer’s business interests may be traced through numerous items from Rotterdam newspapers of the period.5 Beginning in the late 1880s, Dulfer placed numerous advertisements in local newspapers for a pastry bakery he owned in central Rotterdam. In addition, the establishment advertised gourmet meals that could be prepared and delivered to patrons’ homes. Also sold were rare Tokay wines from Hungary, which were said to have medicinal benefits. In the late 1890s Dulfer added advertisements for real estate offerings both for sale and for rent. By 1900 this seems to have been his primary or perhaps only business activity. He had already completed at least one large project as a real estate developer. Though not a political figure, Dulfer was not shy about presenting his opinions to the public. In 1903, the year during which he acquired the Wagnerhof property, Dulfer wrote a lengthy letter to the editor that was published on the front pages of two local newspapers.6 The subject was a street tax, evidently a new form of property tax in Rotterdam. In sarcastic

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terms, he rehearsed familiar arguments against such taxes: that they would lower property values, add to a housing shortage, and lead to the abandonment of properties. According to one report, there are printed references to the businessman as financially supporting performances of Wagner’s operas in the Netherlands.7 To date it has not been possible to confirm this. Performances of Wagnerian operas took place during Rotterdam’s May Festival at the Groote Schouwburg, the city’s most important theater. Productions included Götterdämmerung (1908) and Der fliegende Höllander (1909). Gustaaf Vossenaar of the Wagner Society of the Netherlands has not heard of Dulfer’s involvement in Wagnerian operas but thinks it is quite possible: recent research has shown that a wealthy, German-born Amsterdam banker and grain merchant, Julius Carl Bunge, provided such financial backing during this period.8 Bunge, who also was president of the Wagner Society of the Netherlands, built an enormous country house at Aerdenhout in 1908, calling it “Kareol”—undoubtedly a reference to Tristan’s ancestral castle in Brittany (Tristan und Isolde, act 3).9 All published or online references to Wagnerhof state that Dulfer acquired the property in either 1904 or 1905. A recent title search, however, has shown that the transfer occurred somewhat earlier.10 On October 17, 1903, the notarial registry of deeds recorded that Johannes Frederik Kesting, manufacturer, had sold Villa Nuova and adjacent property to Johannes Eckhardt Dulfer, merchant and store owner, both of Rotterdam.11 This description makes it unlikely that Dulfer accumulated his fortune manufacturing candies; however, the designation “merchant” does not rule out the possibility that he engaged in the lucrative importation of sugar. The price mentioned for the sale was 42,500 guilders, a considerable sum in 1903. Work on the development began quite soon. In the Rotterdam pandkaarten, or record of building permits, are numerous references to Vijverlaan 71, Kralingen, which was to be the address of Villa Wagner and eight of the ten new villas.12 The earliest dated reference, for the addition of a glassenclosed veranda, was recorded on February 23, 1904. Since work probably had not begun on the new villas at this early date, this must refer to an improvement to the former Villa Nuova. By May, Dulfer had begun to submit plans for the new Wagnerhof villas. All of the plans relating to the Vijverlaan 71 buildings were subsequently destroyed in the German bombing of Rotterdam in May 1940; however, plans have survived for the double villa at Vijverlaan 61–63, known as villas Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. A fine blueprint showing the floor plan and elevation of the as-yet-unnamed double villa, dated May 1904, is signed by

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the architect van Teeffelen and by Dulfer (plate 10.2). It was accompanied by a simple map of the area showing only Villa Wagner and the proposed double villa as well as a handwritten statement by Dulfer. There is no evidence that Dulfer himself ever used Villa Wagner either as a permanent residence or a summer home; his other home and business addresses were always in central Rotterdam. In any case, by March 1907 he was advertising the villa for either purchase or rent.13 The owners of the other Wagnerhof villas sometimes advertised them for sale, mainly in the early 1920s, a relatively affluent period. The asking prices hovered around 15,000 or 16,000 guilders, rising to 18,000 by 1926. By one estimate the purchasing power of one Dutch guilder in the early twentieth century was equivalent to that of ten dollars a century later, and it probably was relatively stable. This suggests that the total cost to Dulfer of purchasing Villa Nuova, hiring an architect, and designing and building ten villas was probably equivalent to well over a million dollars today. Of course he hoped to recoup his investment and make a profit by selling the villas. Dulfer might have had one or more silent partners in making this large investment. Bergeijk mentions that one of Dulfer’s brothers, E. E. Theodorus Dulfer, was a real estate developer in Rotterdam though Theodorus is not named in the notarial deed of sale of Villa Nuova. On the other hand, Dulfer’s ability to finance the project himself is suggested by the appearance of his name in a published list of the 927 largest taxpayers in the province of Zuid-Holland, including Rotterdam and The Hague. No other member of the Dulfer family is mentioned in the list.14 Wagnerhof, though architecturally cohesive, is not a gated community separated from its surrounding neighborhood. It faces other houses across the street, some of them mansions in a variety of architectural styles, and several of these were also owned by Dulfer at various times. It was probably these houses that Dulfer advertised as “mansions for rent” on the Vijverweg in September 1903 before the sale of the Villa Nuova property.15 Dulfer made one decision that significantly affected the character of the entire neighborhood. He had the double villas Rheingold and Siegfried built directly across the path of the private lane branching off the Vijverlaan. This ensured that the lane could never be extended to the next through street, thereby greatly reducing the possibility of traffic in the area and preserving its peaceful nature. Although the Wagnerhof project was ambitious, it perhaps was not Dulfer’s first architectural acknowledgment of Richard Wagner. In 1898 Dulfer had erected a large, multipurpose commercial building in the Katendrecht district near the port of Rotterdam, then as now the largest in Europe.

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In this case the blueprint for the building, designed in a traditional architectural style, was signed only by Dulfer. The building, consisting mostly of offices, may have been designed by the contractor (a common practice for commercial buildings) or by Dulfer himself.16 Part of the ground floor, occupying one third of the frontage, was intended as a public space—from the blueprint it seems to have been planned as a café. It now houses an intimate performance space called the Walhalla Theater, recalling the abode of the gods in Wagner’s Ring (plate 10.3). The arched tops of the windows and the flowing decorations of the window frames and pilasters of the wooden facade place the theater solidly within the Art Nouveau style and must belong to the original design. Too small for opera performances, the space can accommodate up to one hundred seats depending on the configuration. Still in use today, the theater mainly hosts concerts by small groups performing popular music. Ancillary functions such as storage and a canteen are relegated to nearby modern buildings. The history of the theater is complicated by the fact that at one point the space was occupied by a popular dance hall called Dancing Walhalla. Photographs from the 1940s show the facade of the dance hall as much the same as today except that plate glass has now been installed in the two central windows, providing a view into the interior. Whether there ever was a café, or whether it also was called Walhalla, is uncertain, but the original plans almost certainly did not include a dance hall. In any event, the use of a name with Wagnerian associations here, as later in Dulfer’s Kralingen houses, is unlikely to be a coincidence. Given his obvious interest in Wagner’s operas, how much of a background did Dulfer have in music? One possible hint appears in a newspaper article published in 1915 reporting on a meeting of the Rotterdam branch of a society called Ons Leger [Our Army].17 The main part of the program was a lecture by a Major R. MacLeod about a war in the Dutch East Indies in the late 1890s against the Sumatran rebel chieftain Tokoe Omar. Despite his Scottish-sounding name, Major MacLeod had fought as an officer in the Dutch army. The meeting also included a musical performance by a singer, Mr. E. Miedema, accompanied by Joh. E. Dulfer on the piano. The contents of the musical offering were not reported. Miedema must have been a professional or semi-professional musician. We find him performing a recital in the large Kurzaal of the beach resort of Schveningen, near The Hague, in August 1918.18 The program consisted of music by the French operatic composer Jules Massenet, who had died in 1912. The pianist at the Ons Leger meeting may have been Dulfer. Like other members of the upper middle class, he may have received some musical

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training, probably during his childhood. However, this remains uncertain. One of Dulfer’s sons, an architect born in 1886, was also named Johannes Eckhardt Dulfer so the pianist cannot be definitively identified. Johannes Dulfer was twenty-five at the time of Wagner’s death in 1883. By that time he could have seen a number of productions of Wagner operas. Beginning in the late 1850s, the Netherlands hosted more Wagner productions than any other non-German-speaking country.19 Many of these were presented by traveling German troupes such as Angelo Neumann’s tour of the original production of Wagner’s Ring, which reached Amsterdam in January 1883. The same year saw the publication of the first Dutch biography of the German composer, written by the musicologist and conductor Henri Viotta. Viotta’s lengthy study concluded with the following paragraph, printed in bold. The name Richard Wagner will be recorded in the annals of Art with golden letters and mentioned with respect by posterity, so long as the words Art and Civilization are no vain sounds.20

Musicologist Olga de Kort in an article on Wagnerhof proposes that Dulfer could have read this biography and taken Viotta’s suggestion literally, transferring the “golden letters” of Wagner’s name twenty years later to the facades of Villa Wagner and Wagnerhof.21 Johannes Dulfer’s project has retained its distinctive identity for nearly 120 years. During World War II the Nazi bombing of Rotterdam in 1940 was followed by a long German occupation. After the war, reminders of German culture were not popular, and for a time the golden letters on the Wagnerhof buildings were prudently whitewashed.22 This phase did not last long, however, and within a few years the lettering was restored. Wagnerhof is not the only architectural project that has been named after Richard Wagner and his works. In 1929–1930 the architect Hubert Ritter designed an enormous apartment complex for Leipzig, Wagner’s native city. Known as Rundling or Nibelungenring, it consists of a series of concentric rings of buildings in a modernist style rising up a hill with streets named for characters associated with the Ring. Badly damaged in World War II, it has now been restored. In German-speaking countries today there are numerous hotels, condominiums, and apartment complexes called “Wagnerhof.” Johannes Dulfer’s architectural project, however, is the only one of its kind that was organized by a patron who was a contemporary of (though considerably younger than) Richard Wagner. (I might note also that Dulfer was of approximately the

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same age as the painters Fernand Khnopff, James Ensor, and John Singer Sargent.) The twenty-year gap between Wagner’s death and the beginning of work on Wagnerhof may perhaps be ascribed to the time Dulfer needed to accumulate the substantial capital necessary to finance this ambitious project. The status of Wagnerhof as a Dutch national historic site, and the beauty of its setting, highlight the value of this unique architectural tribute to Richard Wagner and his work.

Notes *My thanks to the staff of the following institutions for their assistance: Stadsarchief, Rotterdam; Royal Library, The Hague; Central Library, Amsterdam; Richard Wagner Society of the Netherlands, Amsterdam; and Kadaster.nl, Apeldoorn. Donald H. Mader first introduced me to Wagnerhof, and Avi Eindorot provided technical advice regarding translations.  1. See descriptions (in English) with photographs of the ten villas and Villa Wagner at www.rijksmonumenten.nl and www.rotterdamwoont.nl/projecten/ wagnerhof. Several books on Kralingen have a few early photographs of Wagnerhof but little text. The best printed reference is by Hans Baaij and Jan Oudenaarden, Monumenten Uit Rotterdam (Rotterdam: Phoenix & den Oudsten, 1992), 34.  2. Manfred Semper, Das Münchner Festspielhaus, Gottfried Semper und Richard Wagner (Hamburg: C. H. A. Kloss, 1906), 107f; translated in Herbert Barth et al., Wagner: A Documentary Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 206.  3. Richard Wagner, Das Bühnenfestspielhaus zu Bayreuth: Nebst einem Berichte über die Grundsteinlegung desselben (Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1873). Wagner’s illustrations and text are reprinted in Heinrich Habel, Festspielhaus und Wahnfried (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1985), 428–33, 641–48.   4.  H. van Bergeijk, “Wenen aan de Maas: Het werk van architect Jan van Teeffelen in Rotterdam,” Eigenbouwer 7 (2017): 2–17.  5. All my newspaper citations have been taken from www.delpher.nl, which archives all Dutch newspapers published since 1615.   6.  Johannes Eckhardt Dulfer, “Straatsbelasting,” De Maasbode, January 20, 1903, p. 1; and Rotterdamsch nieuwsblad, January 22, 1903, p. 1.   7.  Donald H. Mader in conversation with author, October 2019.   8.  Gustaaf Vossenaar in an email to the author, March 7, 2021.   9.  Further information on Bunge is provided in van Bergeijk, “Wenen aan de Maas.” 10.  The search was performed at my request by Kadaster, a Dutch land title search agency. 11.  Rotterdam deed no. 1261/1262. 12.  Stadsarchief, Rotterdam.

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13.  Rotterdamsch nieuwsblad, March 9, 11, 12, 1907. 14.  Nederlandsche staatscourant, June 15, 1916, app. 13. 15.  Rotterdamsch nieuwsblad, September 17, 1903. 16.  Joop Verkamman, Stadsarchief Rotterdam, in an email to the author, May 4, 2021. 17.  Nieuwe Rotterdamsche courant, March 21, 1915. 18.  Belgisch dagblad, August 8, 1918. 19.  Alfred Loewenberg, Annals of Opera, 1597–1940 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1978). 20.  Henri Viotta, Richard Wagner: Zijn Leven en zijne Werken (Sneek: Van Druten, 1883), 248 (my translation). 21. Olga de Kort, “Wagnerhof in Rotterdam,” De Nieuwe Muze 5 (2018). An English translation of this article appears at www.rotterdamwoont.nl. 22.  Ron van Welzenes, “Rijksmonumenten in Rotterdam: Het Wagnerhof,” Ons Rotterdam 2 (2013): 37.

Index

Note: Photo plates are indicated by “A, B, C…”

Abbey, Edwin Austin, 95, 98 Abstract Expressionist, American, 109 abstraction, xv, 33, 57, 104 The Achieving of the Sangreal (drawing), 63 advertisements, xiv, 64–65, 158, 160 Aestheticism, 48, 126 allegory, xv, 16–17, 20, 84, 131, 155–56 Alvary, Max, 67 amateur musicians, xv–xvi, 24, 90, 95 Amfortas (drawing), 81, 81–82 Amsterdam, xiv, 106, 162 Amusements of the Valkyries (drawing), 112, K anarchism, 141–42 androgyny, 51; in works by Beardsley, 62, 63; in works by Delville, J., 119, 127, 130–31; in works by Redon, 30–31 anti-vivisection, 111–12 architecture, 153–62, O, P

Art and Revolution (Wagner, R.,), 5–6 Art Journal, 93, 96 L’art moderne (journal), 106, 115, 142–43 Art Nouveau, xiv, 46, 51, 141–42, 161 arts and crafts movement, 62–63 The Artwork of the Future (Krausse), 155–56 Ascent to the Grail Mountain (sketch), 82, 83 At the Conservatory (painting), 104, 111, 113, J Austria, xvi, 2, 117 Avant-Garde. See specific subjects Axël (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam), 126–27 Axel’s Castle (Wilson), 126 Bal des Arts, 112–13 Ballerinas Transformed into Flowers (drawing/paintings), 113 Baudelaire, Charles, xv, 2–4, 8–9, 24, 49, 99–100, 113

165

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Bayreuth, Germany, 9, 25, 100, 142; Parsifal performances in, xiv, 26, 51, 95–96, 106; Ring performances in, 15, 26, 84, 96, 106, 148 Baÿreuther Blätter (publication), 82 Baÿreuther Festblaetter (journal), 75 Bayreuth Festival, 20, 91, 93, 95–96, 118 Beardsley, Aubrey, 33, 46, 89–90, 100, 109; androgyny in, 62, 63; BurneJones and, 51–53; death of, 54, 57– 59, 71; illustrations by, 52–54, 53, 58, 61–70, 62, 66, 67, 68, 70; Wagnerian subjects in, 58–71, 62, 66, 67, 68, 70 Beerbohm, Max, 69 Beethoven, Ludwig Van, xiii, 4, 17, 82 The Beggar’s Opera, xiii–xiv Belgium, 105–6, 107, 117, 119–20, 141; La Monnaie in, 146–47; Symbolism in, xiv, 103–4, 115, 118, 123–25. See also Brussels, Belgium La Belle Iseult (painting), 44, G Bellini, Vincenzo, 43 Bergeijk, Herman van, 157, 160 Berlioz, Hector, 16, 23, 25, 84, 105 black-and-white, 13, 23, 75 Black Coffee (drawing), 64 Blake, William, 60 blue, 51; bleuine drawings, I, 130–31 Bocca Baciata (painting), 48 Böcklin, Arnold, xvi, 19, 76, 80, 80 Boeck, Auguste de, 114 Bosch, Hieronymus, 109 Boston Public Library, 99 Brahms, Johannes, xiii, xvi, 82 Brangäne (character/subject), 61, 66, 70, 86, 92–93, 94 The Briar Wood (painting), 52 bronze/bronze sculptures, 139–40; Valkyrie, 143, 144–45, 146 Bruegel the Elder, Pieter, 110 Bruges, Belgium, 117, 119 Bruges-la-morte (Rodenbach), 103 Brünnhilde (character/subject), 32, 32, 34–35, 106; in Fantin-Latour works,

15–16; in Redon works, D, 26–28, 27, 29, 30–31; in Sargent drawings, 96–98, 97, 98; in Valkyrie, 143, 144–45, 145 Brünnhilde (drawing), 26–28, 29, 34–35 Brünnhilde (lithograph), 32, 32 Brünnhilde on Horseback (lithograph), 27, 27–28 Brussels, Belgium, 105–6; Bal des Arts, 112–13; Flying Dutchman performed in, 108; Royal Academy of Fine Arts, xiv; Tristan und Isolde performed in, 149 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 40, 132–33 Bunge, Julius Carl, 159 Burlington Magazine, 148 Burne-Jones, Edward, xiv, 44, 46, 62–63, 70, 117, H; Beardsley and, 51–53; Morris collaboration with, 48–49 caricatures, xvi–xvii, 60, 71, 96–98, 97, 98, 110 Catholicism, 54, 69 Cézanne, Paul, 9–10 Chabrier, Emmanuel, 84 Le chant d’amour (painting), 50, 70 Le Charivari (journal), 96 Charteris, Evan, 96 Chausson, Ernest, 24, 119, 122 Chesneau, Ernest, 5 Chopin, Frédéric, 3, 16–17 Christian, John, 49 Christian themes, 43, 123, 129 Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (painting), 104, 110–11, K Clark, Kenneth, 66, 68–69 Claudio and Isabella (painting), 42, F Clésinger, Auguste, 16–17 Cole, Brendan, 124–25, 130 collaboration, 42, 48–49 Colligan, Colette, 60 color, 1–4, 8, 46, 49–50, 64–65, 72n1, 122; in bleuine drawings, 130–31; in Meunier paintings, 143; in PRB

Index  •  167

Wagnerian subjects in, 124–27, 128, 129–33 Demolder, Eugène, 108 Dent, J. M., 61–63 Design for a Motif from Parsifal (drawing), I, 51 Display of Enchantments (painting), 8 Dock Worker (bronze), 140, 141 Dolan, Therese, 6–7 Don Carlos (Verdi), xiii Donizetti, Gaetano, 43 La donna serpente (Gozzi), 40 Dowdeswell, Charles, 85 Draguet, Michel, 150 drawings, I, 51, 58–59, 143; caricatures as, xvi–xvii, 60, 71, 96–98, 97, 98, 110; by Delville, J., M, 125–27, 128, 130–33; by Ensor, 107–8, 110, 112– 13, K; by Khnopff, L, M, 118–23; by Redon, C, D, 26–28, 29; by Sargent, Danchev, Alex, 9 90–93, 92, 95–96, 100; by Solomon, Dancing Walhalla, 161 47, 47–48. See also illustrations Dead Hero (lithograph), O A Dream of Lohengrin (monotype), Death of Orpheus (painting), 127 98–100, J Death of Sir Galahad (drawing), 51 Dresden, Germany, 1, 6, 39, 77 The Death of Tristan (drawing), 85, Dresden Opera, 41 85–86, 90, 93, 96 Dulfer, E. E. Theodorus, 160 death of Wagner, R., 23, 25, 75, 106, 108, 153, 162; Fantin-Latour on, 16, Dulfer, Johannes Eckhardt, 154, 156, 158–63 16. See also Wagner Memorial Album Dumont-Wilden, Louis, 121–22 (1884) Dupont, Joseph, 106–7 death/s, 51, 89, 105, 120, 148; of Duret, Théodore, 4 Beardsley, 54, 57–59, 71 Debussy, Claude, 103, 153 Egusquiza, Rogelio de, 81, 81–82, 129 decadence, 58–59, 69 Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (painting), Degas, Edgar, 64, 99 94 De Groux, Henry, xiv England. See London, England Delacroix, Eugène, 3–9, 23, A English (language), 15, 45, 117 Delvaux, Paul, 125 Delville, Jean, xiv, M, 30–31, 104, 109, engravings, 1, 43, 110–11, K 115–16; androgyny in, 119, 127, 130– Ensor, James, xiv, xvi, 114, 117; At the Conservatory, 104–5, J; Delville, J., 31; drawings by, M, 125–27, 128, compared to, 132–33; drawings by, 130–33; Ensor compared to, 132–33; 107–8, 110, 112–13, K; Khnopff and, Khnopff compared to, 123–24, 133; 104, 109, 115, 121–22; Liber Veritatis,

works, 41; in works by Redon, C, 33–34 The Comedy of the Rheingold (Beardsley project), 60 commissions, 44–45; for Beardsley, 61–62; sculpture, 139, 146–47 Comyns Carr, Joseph, 95–97 Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky), 133 Concerts Lamoureux (Paris), 24–25 copyright, 123 Cornelius, Peter, 76 costumes, 41, 94, 105, 113; designs by Khnopff, 119, 119–20, 122–23 costumes, Wagner opera, xv–xvi, 1–2, 106; in Die Walküre, 147–48; for Ring, 142 Courcy Duncan, Mabel de, 91

168  •  Index

113; paintings by, L, 104–5, 109–13, J, N; The Ride of the Valkyries, 104; Wagnerian subjects in, 104–9, 111– 13, 115; Wagnerian subjects in works by, 104–9, 111–13, 115 eroticism, 47, 51, 62–63, 121, 126 escapism, xiv–xv, 133 etchings, 23, 81–82 Evenepoel, Edmond, 106, 108 Evocation of Erda (lithograph), 16 Expressionism, 104–5, 109 Fafner as a Dragon Guarding the Nibelung Hoard (drawing), 80, 81 The Fall of the Rebel Angels (painting), 109 Fantin-Latour, Henri, xv, 16, 20, 40, 58, 99–100; lithographs by, 7, 15–18, 25– 26; Tannhäuser painting by, xvi–xvii, 49, 82, 83, 84, B; Wagnerian subjects in, 15–16, 82, 84 Die Feen (opera), 40 Festspielhaus, Bayreuth, 154–56, 156 Fidelio (opera), xiii, 17 La fille du régiment (opera), 43 Flemish (language), 106 Der fliegende Höllander/Flying Dutchman (opera), xv, 41, 105–9, 159 Fourcaud, Louis de, 90 France, 25–26, 71, 103, 142; Impressionism in, 40, 118. See also Paris, France Franco-Prussian War, 2, 24, 90, 103, 142 Franz Liszt (drawing), 79, 79 French (language), xiii, 6, 59, 69; spoken in Belgium, 105–6; Wagner productions in, 142 French Revolution, 17 Frey, Alice, 112 Frongia, Maria Luisa, 130 Frontispiece to Chopin’s “Nocturnes” (drawing), 66

La gamme d’amour (marionette ballet), 114, 132 Gauguin, Paul, xv, 23, 84, 116, 125 Gautier, Judith, 90–91 Gay, John, xiii–xiv Gedon, Lorenz, 76 gender, 50–51, 68–69, 131. See also androgyny German (language), xvi, 46, 106, 120 Germany/German, xvi, 45, 105, 162; Belgium occupied by, 120; Sargent in, 95–96, 100. See also specific cities Gervaerts, François, 110 Gesamtkunstwerk (Wagnerian concept), xv, 27, 76, 100, 120, 132–33, 153; Beardsley on, 60 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 2 Götterdämmerung (opera), 28, 52, 108, 159 gouache, 3–8, A Goya, Francisco, 23 Gozzi, Carlo, 40 Grane (horse), 27, 28 Grisebach, Eduard, 82 group portraits, 7–8 Guéguen, Daniel, 124, 132 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 42 health, 20; of Beardsley, 54, 58–60, 65; of Ensor, 112; of Meunier, 118 Heyneman, Julie H., 96 Hogarth, William, xiii–xiv Holy Grail (story), 40, 49, 51, 57 Homage to Delacroix (painting), 8 homoerotic, 47, 47 Les horizons hantés (Delville, J.), 126 Hostyn, Norbert, 109 How La Beale Isoud Nursed Sir Tristram (drawing), 61 How Sir Tristram Drank of the Love Drink (drawing), 61–63, 62, 66–67, 70–71 Hueffer, Francis, 46 Les Huguenots (opera), 43

Index  •  169

Hunt, William Holman, D, 39, 41–43, F kakemono (Japanese pillar prints), 67 Kalergi, Marie, 5 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 10, 26 Kandinsky, Wassily, 133 Kéfer, Gustave, 108 Idealism, 17, 124–25, 131 Kesting, Johannes Frederik, 159 identity, 54, 70, 104–5 Khnopff, Fernand, M, 40, 48, 117–20, The Idol of Perversity (drawing), 130 130, 149; costumes designs by, illustrations, 117; by Beardsley, 52–54, 119, 119–20, 122–23; Delville, J., 53, 58, 61–70, 62, 66, 67, 68, 70; in compared to, 123–24; Ensor and, 104, Wagner Memorial album, 79, 79–82, 109, 115, 121–22 80, 81. See also lithographs Impressionism, xiv, 2–4, 19, 40, 76, 116, Khnopff, Georges, 118 Kiefer, Anselm, 133 118; Redon on, 23–24 Kilmurray, Elaine, 85, 92 Indignant Bourgeois (painting), 110–11 industrial/agricultural subjects, 139, 141, Klavsky (watercolor/ink), 66–67, 67, 69–70 146, 149–50 Klavsky, Katharina, 66–67, 67 Industrial Revolution, 45, 141 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 17–18, Klinger, Max, xiv, 82 Klingsor (drawing), 123 B Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, 103 international reach, xiv, 103, 124 Kort, Olga de, 162 Iphégenie en Aulide (opera), 2 Krausse, Robert, 13, 155 Isolde (character/subject), 8, 149; for Beardsley, 61–64, 62, 71; for Khnopff, Kufferath, Maurice, 112, 123, 149 120–21; for Sargent, 85–86, 92–93, Lacavalerie, Xavier, 69 93 landscapes, 5, 8, 28, 82, 113, 129; Isolde (drawings), M, 64, 120–22, 133 Sargent, 89, 99–100 Isolde (watercolor), I language/s, 66, 75, 90, 106, 108; Isolde, Brangäne and a Messenger English, 15, 45, 117. See also French (sketch), 92–93 (language); translations Italian Renaissance, 48, 50, 71, 76 Laus Veneris (painting), 49–50, H Italy, 19, 42, 76 Leger, Ons, 161 Leipzig, Germany, 82, 162 El Jaleo (painting), 94 Lenbach, Franz von, 19–20, 76, 79, James, Henry, 96 79–80 Japanese themes, 63, 67 Levine, Sura, 150 Jefferson, Joseph, 98–99 Liber Veritatis (authentic paintings by Jockey Club, 2 Ensor), 113 Judaism, 47–48, 69 Liebestod (drawing), 125–26 Judaism in Music (Beardsley), 69 Das Liebesverbot (opera), 40, 42–43, Jugendstil (Germanic Art Nouveau), 54n3 156–58 life size, 130; sculptures, 141, 146 Jullien, Adolphe, 15 Listening to Schumann (painting), 118 Jumeau-Lafond, Jean-David, 51 Liszt, Franz, 79, 79–80

170  •  Index

Massenet, Jules, 161 Materna, Amalia, 106 May Festival, Rotterdam, 159 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 40 medievalism, 3–4, 39–40, 142; in works by Meunier, 148–49; in works by PRB, 41, 43, 46, 48 Die Meistersinger (opera), 39, 45, 108 Mendelssohn, Felix, 71 Meunier, Constantin, 118, 139, 140, 141, 147–48, N, O; Valkyrie, 143, 144–45, 146; on Wagner, R., 142–43, 149–50; Wagnerian subjects in, 142– 43, 144–45, 146–48, 147 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 2, 41, 43 Michelangelo, 141 Miedema, E., 161 Millais, John, 39, 41–44, E Millet, Lucia, 95–96 The Mission of Art (Delville, J.), 127, 132 modernism/modernist, 33, 84, 117, 129, 133; architecture, 156–57; of Beardsley, 62, 62, 64 Monet, Claude, 23, 99–100 Mac Leod, R., 161 La Monnaie (theater), 105–6, 115, 142, Madness of Sir Tristram (stained glass 146–47, 149; Khnopff designing for, design), 48 122, 130; Parsifal performed at, 121, Maeterlinck, Maurice, 103 123 Magazine of Art, 117 monotypes, 98–99, J Magdeburg, Germany, 42 Mont, Pol de, 107 Magritte, René, 125 Moore, Henry, 28 Mahler, Gustav, 67, 153 Moreau, Gustave, 5, 26 Maître, Edmond, 20 Morice, Charles, 28 Makart, Hans, xvi Moris, Stéphanie, 114–15 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 26–27 Malory, Thomas, 44–46, 48, 61–62, 67, Morris, William, 62–63, G; stained glass project of, 44–46, 48–49, H 69 Le Morte d’Arthur (Malory), 44–46, 48, Manet, Edouard, 3, 6–9 61–63, 67, 69 Mantegna, Andrea, 71 Munch, Edvard, 104–5, 112 marble sculptures, 16–17, 82 Munich, Germany, 79, 81 “Mariana” (Tennyson), 42 Mariana in the Moated Grange (painting), The Murder of the Bishop of Liège (painting), 3 42, E The Muse (lithograph), 13, 14, 15, 17–18 marionette performances, 114–15 The Musician (lithograph), 18 masks, 104–5, 109, 118–19

lithographs, 23, 64–65, 82, 84; FantinLatour, 7, 15–18, 25–26; by Meunier, 148–49, O; by Redon, 27, 27–28, 30–33, 31, 32 Le livre de la vie (Petrucci), 148–49 livre de raison (authenticated Redon works), 25, 27, 32, 34, 36n5 Loeffler, Charles, 96 Loge (character/subject), 59 Lohengrin (opera), xvii, 24, 105–6 Lohengrin (sketch), 77, 78 London, England, 51–52, 58, 59, 65–66, 94–96, 98; PRB popularity in, 40; Wagner, R., on, 45 Louvain, Belgium, 146 Love and the Pilgrim (painting), 52–53 Luce, Maximilien, 143 Lucie-Smith, Edward, 18 Ludwig I (King), 77 Ludwig II (King), 13, 15, 113, 154 Luigi Cherubini and the Muse of Lyric Poetry (painting), 17–18, B

Index  •  171

paintings, 9, 17, 41, A, B, E, F, G, H; by Burne-Jones, 70; by Delacroix, 3–8, A; by Delville, J., 127, 129, 131–32; by Ensor, L, 104–5, 109–13, J, N; Expressionist, 104–5; by Khnopff, Napoleon III (Emperor), 1–2 118; by Meunier, 143; by Sargent, 89, Nazarine school, 76–77 91, 94, 99–100; scale of, xvi–xvii, 48, Nazi Germany, 162 94, 124; sculpture compared to, 146; neo-Romanticism, xiv, 23 Symbolist, 104. See also watercolors; the Netherlands, 153–54, 156–63 specific paintings Der neue Tannhäuser (Grisebach), 82 Palermo, Italy, 19, 42, 76 Neumann, Angelo, 106, 142, 162 Paris, France, 25; Sargent in, 84, 90, 96; New York, US, 97–98 Symbolism in, 94, 116; Tannhäuser Nibelungenlied (epic poem), 49, 77, 79 in, xiv–xv, 1–3, 6–7, 24, 82, 84; Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 4 Wagner, R., in, 1–3, 17, 76–77 Norse mythology, 48–49 Paris Exposition Universelle (1889), 94 northern Europe, 104–5 nudes, 35; semi, 4, 13, 14, 118, 130–31; Paris Opéra, xiii, 1, 41 Paris Salon, 7, 15, 23–24, 86, 89, 91 Venus, 50, 82 Parsifal (drawing), C, 34, 127, 128, 130, 132–33 occult, 129, 131–32 Parsifal (opera), xiv, 25, 47, 49, 51, 76, Odin (stained-glass design), 48–49 106–7, 113; Delville, J., works about, The Offering (pastel drawing), 118 124, 129–32; Khnopff study for, Ons Leger (Our Army), Rotterdam, 161 123; performed in New York, 97–98; On the Death of Richard Wagner Redon works about, C, 26, 30–31, 31, (lithograph), 16, 16, 18, 84 35–36; seen by Egusquiza, 81; seen by Opéra Impérial, 1, 5–7 Sargent, 95–96 operas by Wagner, xiii, xvi, 9–10, 103; Parsifal (painting), 129–30, N Beardsley on, 59–60, 67–68; Ensor on, 106–9, 111–12; Fantin-Latour on, Parsifal II (lithograph), 30, 31 82, 84; Khnopff on, 117–18; Meunier Pasdeloup, Jules, 95 Pater, Walter, xvi, 26, 48 on, 142–43; performed in Belgium, patrons, 38n21, 162–63; Ludwig II, 154 105–6; PRB works compared to, Péladan, Joséphin, 117, 127, 129, 132 xvii, 39–51; Redon on, 24–25, Pelléas et Mélisande (play), 103 32; Romantic medievalism of, 39; pentimento (trace images), 28, 35 Sargent on, 86, 89, 93–99. See also costumes, Wagner opera; sets/scenery, Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 2 Petrucci, Raphael, 148–49 Wagner opera; specific operas photographs, 63, 71, 92, 117, 121–22, Ormond, Richard, 85 147–48; of Valkyrie, 143, 144–45, Orpheus (painting), 130 146; Wagner, R., preferring, 19–20, Ostend, Belgium, 105, 107, 117 21, 76; Wagnerhof, 157, 157 Ostini, Karl Freiherr von, 75 Pierrot (commedia dell’arte figure), 70 Overture to Tannhäuser (painting), 9 Poe, Edgar Allan, 23, 36 Music in the Tuilleries (painting), 6–7 mythology, xv, 4, 24, 48–49, 52, 77, 79, 142

172  •  Index

Les revenants de musique (drawing), 69–70, 70 Revue wagnérienne (journal), 16, 27–28, 30, 103 Das Rheingold (opera), 98, 146; Beardsley works about, 58–60, 71; premiere attended by Judith Gautier, 91 Richard Wagner (Jullien), 15 Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris (Baudelaire), 6 Richter, Hans, 95 The Ride of the Valkyries (painting), L, 104, 109–10, 113 Rienzi (Bulwer-Lytton), 40–41 Rienzi (opera), 1, 24, 40–42 Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother (painting), D, 41–42 Rienzo, Cola di, 40–41 Ring (operas), xiv–xv, xvii, 35, 45, 49, 107–8, 162; based on Nibelungenlied, 77, 79; Beardsley works about, 58; produced by Neumann, 142; seen by Egusquiza, 81; Wotan in, 131. See also Das Rheingold (opera); Die Walküre Quentin Durward (Scott), 3 (opera) radicalism, political/social, 110–11, 116 Ritter, Hubert, 162 Roche, Edmond, 3 Raffalovich, Marc-André, 69 Rodenbach, Georges, 103 Raphael, 42, 76 Rodin, Auguste, 142 Reade, Brian, 68 Le roi Arthus (opera), 119, 119–20, 122 Realism, xiv, 103, 116, 124–25; Redon Romantic period/Romanticism, xiii–xiv, on, 23–24 3–4, 17, 39, 54 The Reaper (June), 146 Rosicrucianism, 124, 129–32 A rebours (Huysmans), 26 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 39, 40, 44, 48, Redon, Odilon, xvi, C, 71, 84, 100, 122; stained glass by, 45–46, H 109, 116; livre de raison, 25, 27, 32, Rossini, Gioachino, 4–5 34, 36n5; Mallarmé and, 26–27; Wagnerian subjects in, 23, 25–30, 27, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 153–54, 156–63 34–36 Rouanet, Léo, 28 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 9, 19, 23, 76 Rousseau, Mariette, 107–8 Répétition of ‘Tristan und Isolde’ (india Royal Academy of Fine Arts, 94, 105–8, ink), 65, 65–66, 71 115–17; PRB painters at, 41, 46 reproductions, 15, 30, 63, 72n1, 75, 77, Royal Italian Opera, 96 86 Poems (Rosetti), 46 The Poet and the Muse (lithograph), 18 Portrait of Jeanne Kéfer (painting), 118 Portrait of Richard Wagner (drawing), 108 portraits, 7–8, 15, 111, 116, 131; allegorical, xv, 20, 84; by Beardsley, 66–67, 69–70; by Fantin-Latour, 84; by Khnopff, 118, 120–22; by Sargent, 91; of Wagner, C., 49–50; of Wagner, R., 18–20, 76 posters, xiv, 64–65 Pour l’art (Delville, J., catalog), 126 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), xvii, 39–47, 51–52 Pre-Raphaelites, xiv, xvii, 33, 44, 46, 62, 117, 122; Beardsley associated with, 51–52 Prettejohn, Elizabeth, 46 Prometheus (drawing), 127 Prometheus (orchestral score), 127 The Proscribed Royalist (painting), 43 psychosis, 115 I puritan (opera), 43

Index  •  173

Rundling/Nibelungenring (Leipzig), 162 Salome (Wilde), 51, 69 Salon de la Rose + Croix, 81, 117, 127, 129 Salon Les XX (exhibition group), 110 Sargent, John Singer, xvi, 40, J; in Paris, 84, 90, 96; Wagnerian subjects in, 84–86, 85, 89–94, 93, 96–100, 97, 98 satire/satirical, 60, 65–66, 68–69, 104–5, 108, 110–11, 115 Savoy (magazine), 60, 65, 71 scale, xv, 41; of bronze sculptures, 141, 146; of paintings, xvi–xvii, 48, 94, 124 Scene from Tannhäuser (gouache), A Scene from Tannhäuser (lithograph), 15 Scene from Tannhäuser (painting), 7–9, B Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Julius, 77, 78, 79 Scholderer, Otto, 20 School of Plato (painting), 131–32 Schroeder-Devrient, Wilhemine, 13, 15 Schumann, Robert, 16, 25, 84 Schuré, Edouard, 30, 127, 129, 132 Scott, Walter, 3 Scriabin, Alexander, 127 sculpture, 16–17, 76, 82, 146, 149–50; bronze, 139, 140, 141 Secret/Reflection (drawings), L, 118–19 Seguin, Henri, 146–48 self-portrait, 70 semi-nude, 4, 13, 14, 118, 130, 131 Semper, Gottfried, 154 La serva padrona (opera), 2 sets/scenery: by Delville, J., 129; by Khnopff, 119–20 sets/scenery, Wagner opera, xv–xvi, 106, 114; in Paris, 1–2; for Ring, 15, 142 Seurat, Georges, 125 sexuality/sexual symbolism, 8, 31, 50, 121, 131; in works by Beardsley, 58, 60, 62–63; in works by Sargent, 91–92

Shakespeare, William, 4, 40, 42, 94 Siegfried (opera), 49, 52 Siegfried Bing (gallery), 141–42 Sigurd the Volsung (Morris, W.), 45 Sir Tristram and la Belle Ysoude Drinking the Love Potion (stained glass), 45–46, H Sloan, Rachel, 71 socialism, 44–45, 110–11, 117, 141–42 Solomon, Simeon, I, 46–48, 47, 50–51 Spain, 94 The Spanish Dance (painting), 85–86, 94 stained glass, 44–46, 48–49, H The Story of Briar Rose (series), 52 The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser (Beardsley project), 52, 60, 66, 69 Strassburg, Gottfried von, 61 Strauss, Richard, 153 Strettell, Alma, 95 Studies of Isolde and Brangäne (drawing), 92–94, 93, 97 The Studio (publication), 59, 64, 70, 123 Study of a Young Woman (drawing), 130–31 suicide, 126 Sullivan, Louis, 157 Surrealism, 82, 125 Sutton, Emma, 52, 69–70 Swinburne, Algernon, 49 Switzerland, 90–91 Symbolism, xiv, 23, 28, 31, 48, 51, 76; Belgian, xiv, 103–4, 115, 118, 123–25 Symons, Arthur, 71 synesthesia, 99–100 Tannhäuser (drawing), 52 Tannhäuser (opera), xiii–xiv, 43, 49, 67, 105–6, 130, A, B; Beardsley works about, 52–54, 53, 58–60, 71; in Dresden, 77; medievalism in, 45; in Paris, xiv–xv, 1–3, 6–7, 24, 82, 84; Redon works on, 32 Tannhäuser legend, 43 Tennyson, Alfred, 42

174  •  Index

Theosophy, 124, 129, 132–33 Thieme, Karl Ludwig, 86 Tieck, Ludwig, 49 Titian, 48 titles, artwork, 44, 59, 69, 126 To Myself (Redon), 25–26 Die tote Stadt (opera), 103 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 65 translations, 40; English, 15, 45; French, 6, 59, 106 Tribulations of Saint Anthony (painting), 108–9, 113 Tristan (character/subject), 149; in works by Beardsley, 61, 66, 68, 71 Tristan (Strassburg), 61 Tristan and Isolde (story), 35–36, 40, 44–46, 48 Tristan und Isolde (opera), xvi, 1, 6, 96, 105–6, 149, H; Beardsley works about, 58–71, 62, 65, 68, 70; Delville, J., works about, 124–27; Sargent works about, 85, 85, 90–94, 93; in The Wagnerites, 89–90 The Trusty Eckart (Tieck), 49 tuberculosis, 54, 57–59 Turner, J. W. M., 113 Valkyrie (bronze), 143, 144–45, 146 The Valkyrie (drawing), 143, N Vallotton, Félix, 129 Van Gogh, Vincent, xv, 104 van Teeffelen, Jan, 156–60, P Venus/Venusberg (character/subject), 4, 6–8, 15, 43, 49–50; nude, 50, 82; in works by Beardsley, 53–54, 60 Les Vêpres Siciliennes (Verdi), xiii Verdi, Giuseppe, xiii, 5, 71, 154 Verhaeren, Emile, 118 Vienna Secession (Fifth Exhibition, 1899), 146, 147 Villa Nuova/Villa Wagner, 154, 159 Villapark (Rotterdam), 158 Villa Wahnfried (Bayreuth), 154–56

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste, 126–27 Viotta, Henri, 162 von Schmaedel, Joseph Ritter, 75, 84 Vossenaar, Gustaaf, 159 Wagner, Cosima, 13, 18–19, 45, 49–50, 77, 79–80, 90–91 Wagner, Richard. See specific topics Wagnerhof (Rotterdam), 153–54, 156– 63, 157, O Wagnerian subjects, 104; in works by Beardsley, 58–71, 62, 66, 67, 68, 70; in works by Delville, J., 124–27, 128, 129–33; in works by Egusquiza, 81, 81–82; in works by Ensor, 104–9, 111–13, 115; in works by FantinLatour, 15–16, 82, 84; in works by Khnopff, 118–22; in works by Meunier, 142–43, 144–45, 146–48, 147; in works by Redon, 23, 25–30, 27, 34–36; in works by Sargent, 84– 86, 85, 89–94, 93, 96–100, 97, 98 Wagnerites (enthusiasts), 52, 89–90 The Wagnerites (drawing), 68, 68–69, 89–90 Wagner Memorial Album (1884), xv, 75–77, 78, 79–86, 90–93, 129 Wagner Society of the Netherlands, 159 Walhalla Theater, 122, 161, P Die Walküre (opera), 15–16, 86, 91, 106, 133, 143; Ensor on, 107–8, 110; Sargent caricatures on, xvi–xvii, 96–98, 97, 98; Seguin in, 146–48 Wallace, John, 64–65 watercolors/inks, 3, 85, 85–86, K; by Beardsley, M, 63–64, 71; by Burne-Jones, 48–49; The Ride of the Valkyries, 104, 109–10; by Rossetti, 44, 46, 48 Weber, Carl Maria von, 9, 23, 71 Wesendonck, Mathilde, 91 Westcott, Catherine Morris, 129, 131 Whistler, James McNeill, 8, 48

Index  •  175

White, Gleeson, 59 Wilde, Oscar, 51, 64 Wilson, Edmund, 126 Wolff, Hellmuth Christian, 82 World War I, 120, 122 World War II, 162 Wotan (character/subject), 59, 146–48; in Sargent drawings, 96–98, 97, 98 writings by Wagner, R., 5–6, 45, 71, 75–76, 90; in German, 106;

international reach of, 103 Wyzewa, Teodor de, 28 Les XX (exhibition group), 28, 117–18, 125 Ysaÿe, Eugène, 111 Zanoni (Bulwer-Lytton), 132–33 Zanoni (drawings), 131–32

About the Author

Donald A. Rosenthal studied archaeology and art history at Yale University and Columbia University where he received a PhD. A specialist in nineteenthcentury painting and photography, he is the author of Orientalism: The Near East in French Painting, 1800–1880; and British Watercolors from the West Foundation. His articles have appeared in the Art Bulletin and Burlington Magazine, and he is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography. Now retired after a career as a museum curator, Dr. Rosenthal lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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