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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2011
In April 1880, one of the most intriguing lost opportunities in musical-literary history took place. Henry James and Richard Wagner were staying in Posilippo, near Naples. James was beginning a two-month visit to Italy, whilst Wagner was living in the Italian town with his family, working on essays including ‘Religion und Kunst’ (1880) and preparing the staging for Parsifal (1882). A mutual friend, Paul von Joukowsky, suggested to James that he and Wagner meet but the offer provoked an emphatic rejection from the American novelist. It would have taken place amid the heady bohemianism, homosexuality and obsessive aestheticism of Wagner's Italian circle of which Joukowsky was a part. No doubt their meeting would have been stilted and strained, suffused with various forms of social awkwardness, yet, as we shall see, James's explanation of his refusal has the overtones of a justification. Despite – or because of – the aborted meeting, James repeatedly returned to this unrealized encounter in his writing. He referred to the composer or his works in more than a dozen of his novels and short stories from the 1880s to the early twentieth century; these muted but resonant references suggest an informed and engaged response to Wagner and his works. It is as if, though these allusions, James re-imagined this event, composer and novelist encountering each other in numerous texts over a period of 20 years
1 I retain James's spelling of the town and of (as it would now be) Zhukovski.
2 Despite alluding to the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi in ‘The Grand Canal’ (1892), James makes no mention of Wagner's death there. James, Henry, Italian Hours, ed. Auchard, John (Philadelphia/Harmondsworth: Pennsylvania State University Press/Penguin, 1995): 49,Google Scholar n.
3 James, Henry, The Sacred Fount, ed. Lyon, John (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994).Google Scholar
4 James, Henry, Letters, ed. Edel, Leon, 4 vols (London: Macmillan, 1975–1984), vol. 2: 73.Google Scholar Nonetheless, James's fiction has been a fruitful source for operatic adaptation. See Halliwell, Michael, ed. Bernhart, Walter, Opera and the Novel: The Case of Henry James, Word and Music Studies 6 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005).Google Scholar For a summary of James's interest in and fictional allusions to opera, see Tintner, Adeline R., The Cosmopolitan World of Henry James: An Intertextual Study (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1991): 281–307Google Scholar.
5 Edel, Leon and Tintner, Adeline, eds, ‘The Library of Henry James, from Inventory, Reviews, and Library Lists’, Henry James Review 4 (Spring 1983): 158–90.Google Scholar Here, I use the term ‘literary Wagnerism’ broadly, to refer to writing that alludes to Wagner, reworks aspects of the operas or music dramas, or otherwise makes explicit reference to the composer or his work. See Furness, Raymond, Wagner and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press and New York: St Martin's, 1982)Google Scholar; Martin, Stoddard, Wagner to ‘The Waste Land’: A Study of the Relationship of Wagner to English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1982)Google Scholar; Sutton, Emma, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Fuller, Sophie and Losseff, Nicky, eds, The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); andGoogle ScholarSutton, Emma, ‘“The Music Spoke for Us”: Music and Sexuality in Fin-de-siécle Poetry’, in Weliver, Phyllis, ed., The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007): 213–29Google Scholar.
6 Edel, Leon, Henry James: A Life (London: Collins, 1987): 77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Ibid., 229.
8 James, , Letters, vol. 2, 282–3.Google ScholarPubMed
9 Ibid., 287–8.
10 The Oxford English Dictionary, prepared by Simpson, J.A. and Weiner, E.S.C., 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989).Google Scholar
11 James, , The Sacred Fount, 12.Google Scholar
12 Ibid., 173
13 Blackall, Jean Frantz, Jamesian Ambiguity and ‘The Sacred Fount’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965): 95–8.Google Scholar
14 Ibid., 107–8.
15 Blackall discusses the narrator's allusion to Ludwig in some detail in her monograph on The Sacred Fount (ibid.), emphasizing that Ludwig's identity as introspective Wagnerian and extravagant builder informs James's reference in the novel. I suggest in addition that James was fascinated by Ludwig's personal relationship with Wagner, and that the Posilippo episode had extensive repercussions in his fiction.
16 Twain, Mark, A Tramp Abroad, intro. Bruce, Robert Gray and Hill, Hamlin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997): 58–9.Google Scholar
17 Blackall, , Jamesian Ambiguity, 102.Google Scholar The article in question is: Evans, E.P., ‘A Mad Monarch’, Atlantic Monthly 58 (Oct. 1886): 449–55Google Scholar.
18 James, Henry, The Bostonians, ed. Gooder, R.D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984): 285–6;Google Scholar ‘Glasses’, in The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Edel, Leon, 12 vols (London: Hart-Davis, 1962–1964): vol. 9, 317–70Google Scholar.
19 Gerard, Frances, The Romance of Ludwig II. of Bavaria (London: Hutchinson, 1899): 54.Google Scholar
20 Ibid., 53; E.E., , ‘The King of Bavaria’, Lippincott's Magazine 12 (Oct. 1873): 413;Google ScholarReclus, E., ‘Louis II. of Bavaria: Or, Romanticism on the Throne’, Galaxy 19/4 (Apr. 1875): 605Google Scholar.
21 Gerard, , Ludwig II, facing 160.Google Scholar
22 Ibid., 164.
23 James, , Letters, vol. 2, 283.Google ScholarPubMed
24 Was James also recalling Keats's ‘Ode to Psyche’ (1820)? The poet's account of the lovers ‘couched side by side / In deepest grass’ follows the request that Psyche grant ‘pardon that thy secrets should be sung’. The Poems of John Keats, ed. Stillinger, Jack (London: Heinemann, 1978): 364–6; 364Google Scholar
25 James had met Zola in December 1875 in Paris in the company of Catulle Mendés, later editor of the Revue wagnérienne (1885–88), and was to become increasingly appreciative of Zola's work. (James gives an account of the meeting in Letters, vol. 2: 15.) L'oeuvre portrays a group of French Wagnerians, mainly painters, similar to the Parisian Wagnerians with whom Joukowsky was associated; it may have been based on the Marseilles Wagner Society, of which Zola was a member. Zola, Émile, The Masterpiece, trans. Walton, Thomas, rev. Pearson, Roger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
26 Finck, Henry T., Wagner and his Works: The Story of his Life with Critical Comments, 2 vols (London: H. Grevel, 1893), vol. 2: 464.Google Scholar The etymological association of ‘fanaticism’ and ‘fan’ is also pertinent to these negotiations of intimacy with admirers and friends.
27 E.E., , ‘The King of Bavaria’, 410–15.Google Scholar
28 Reclus, , ‘Louis II’, 533 and 604.Google Scholar
29 Nordau, Max, Degeneration, trans. anon. (Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press, 1993): 206Google Scholar; Nietzsche, Friedrich, Nietzsche contra Wagner, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, Walter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982): 676 (emphasis in original)Google Scholar.
30 We might note, too, how frequently Thomas Mann associates Wagner with the debilitating effects of erotic desire and lack of (aesthetic) discipline: see, for example, ‘Tristan’ (1903), Tonio Kröger (1903) and ‘Der Tod in Venedig’ (1912).
31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Case of Wagner: ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ and ‘The Case of Wagner’, trans Kaufmann, Walter. (New York: Vintage, 1967): 166.Google Scholar David Huckvale makes the intriguing suggestion that Bram Stoker's character Dracula was influenced by stereotypes about ‘Wagnerian’ aesthetic effect as well as by the autocratic personalities of Wagner's father-in-law Franz Liszt and the ambivalently Wagnerian Henry Irving. Huckvale, David, ‘Wagner and Vampires’, Wagner 18/3 (Sep. 1997): 127–41Google Scholar.
32 Edel, , Henry James: A Life, 253.Google Scholar
33 James, , Letters, vol. 2: 289,Google Scholar editorial note. Sheldon Novick proposes that James's feelings for Joukowsky, especially during their friendship in Paris, were more intense than has generally been recognized; thus his disillusionment was greater. James may have been wounded too by the rapidity of Joukowsky's allegiance to Wagner whom Joukowsky had met only three months previously, on 20 January 1880. Novick, Sheldon M., Henry James: The Young Master (New York: Random House, 1996): 336–42 and 409–11;Google ScholarMedlicott, Andrew, ‘“Klingsor's Magic Garden is Found!”: Some Notes on Parsifal's First Designer’, Wagner 3/2 (May 1982): 41.Google Scholar See also Edel, Leon, Henry James: The Conquest of London 1870–1883 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962): 408–10.Google Scholar
34 James, , Letters, vol. 2, 47 and 74Google ScholarPubMed
35 Ibid., 287.
36 But by his own account, and in the affectionate allusions to their intimacy in Wagner's letters and Cosima Wagner's diaries, Joukowsky's ‘freely given dependence with love’ was an ecstatic fulfilment that had ‘gradually come to fill my whole being’. Glasenapp, Carl Friedrich, Das Leben Richard Wagners, 6 vols (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1905–1912), vol. 6: 733–4, andGoogle ScholarKönig Ludwig II. und Richard Wagner: Briefwechsel, ed. Strobel, Otto, 5 vols (Karlsruhe: G. Braun, 1936–1939), vol. 3: 177,Google Scholar quoted in Medlicott, , ‘“Klingsor's Magic Garden is Found!”’, 44 and 42Google Scholar (emphasis in original).
37 James, , Letters, vol. 2, 287.Google Scholar It is pertinent too that in Paris during the mid-1870s James was, to a certain extent, dependent on Joukowsky to facilitate his much-desired friendship with Turgenev, and that Turgenev himself was, at this date, under the apparently tyrannical domestic rule of the singer Pauline Viardot. Edel, , Henry James: A Life, 184.Google Scholar
38 James, , Letters, vol. 2, 42Google ScholarPubMed
39 James, Henry, The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Bradbury, Nicola (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995): 517.Google Scholar Novick proposes that Gilbert Osmond, a dilettantish painter, is a ‘wicked caricature’ of Joukowsky. Novick, , Henry James, 419.Google Scholar
40 Ibid., 342; James, Henry, The American, ed. Poole, Adrian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): x; andGoogle ScholarEdel, , Henry James: The Conquest of London, 261.Google Scholar
41 ‘Collaboration’, in The Complete Tales of Henry James, vol. 8: 407–31.
42 Humperdinck's Wagnerian career is an intriguing counterpart to that of Joukowsky: after years of passionate Wagnerism that included the preparation of reduced scores for performances by ‘Le petit Bayreuth’ , he met Wagner in March 1880, was present at Posilippo at the same time as Joukowsky, and spent much of 1881 and 1882 at Bayreuth copying the score of Parsifal and acting as Wagner's musical assistant. He did, of course, unlike Joukowsky, go on to have a distinguished and varied independent career as a composer. See Delage, Roger, ‘Chabrier and Wagner’, Wagner 17/3 (Sep. 1996): 115Google Scholar, and Sadie, Stanley, ed.,New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 20 vols (London: Macmillan, 1980), vol. 8: 789.Google Scholar
43 James, , Letters, vol. 2, 46Google ScholarPubMed
44 See, for example, the work of Freedman, Jonathan, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), andGoogle ScholarGagnier, Regenia, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. (Aldershot: Scolar, 1987)Google Scholar on nineteenth-century aesthetics and commercialism.
45 For an introduction to Wagner's cultural influence during the nineteenth century, see Large, David C. and Weber, William, eds, Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1984).Google Scholar For a discussion of Wagnerism and commercialism in the fin de siécle see Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley, especially Chapter 4.
46 James, , Letters, vol. 4, 170Google Scholar (emphasis in original).
47 Did James also know that Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas had taken a villa at Posilippo in 1897, just after Wilde's release from prison and their reunion? See Ellmann, Richard, Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987/1997): 517–18Google Scholar.
48 Woolson's neice, Clare Benedict, who was intermittently her companion from 1879, was a keen Wagnerian who attended Bayreuth and published, in 1913, a eulogistic account of Wagner in The Divine Spark. Anne Dzamba Sessa, ‘At Wagner's Shrine: British and American Wagnerians’, in Large, and Weber, , Wagnerism, 253–55Google Scholar.
49 See Furness, Wagner and Literature; Martin, Wagner to ‘The Waste Land’; Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley; Sutton, “‘The Music Spoke for Us”’.
