Braut und Schwester bist du dem Bruder: Wagner, Otto and the three Mathildes

Chris Walton considers the role of one of the Wagner circle’s more shadowy and misunderstood figures

Julius Roetingıs 1860 portrait of Otto Wesendonck (Stadtmuseum Bonn)

Otto Wesendonck ought to be the object of our envy. His name is familiar to music-lovers across the globe; few patrons of the arts have attained his degree of immortality. And yet he is famous really only at two removes. He owes his fame to his wife Mathilde, who owes hers in turn to her relationship with Richard Wagner. As ‘the husband of Wagner’s muse’, Otto’s fame is in fact that of the cuckolded husband: a stock figure of fun as old as the comic stage. Polite commentators have described him as the model for Pogner in Wagner’s Meistersinger, the less kind as the model for Hunding in the Walküre and for King Mark in Tristan. He is thus known to the world through his operatic portrayal by the very man who deceived him: a high price to pay for immortality, by any standards.

The importance of Mathilde for Wagner’s life and work has never been doubted, though she herself rapidly receded into the background. Not until 1990 was she accorded the honour of a full biographical study. Otto Wesendonck is an even more shadowy figure whom scholars have long deemed unworthy of closer attention. He ran jointly one of the most profitable textile import businesses in New York, and was rich and powerful enough to consolidate his social position by building a neo-Classical villa on a hill outside Zurich. From there, he could look down upon his neighbours geographically, just as he was presumably accustomed to looking down upon them socially. He was by nature a hard-headed businessman who would later shock Cosima Wagner by asking for an advance estimate of costs when requested to help fund the Bayreuth Festival. He realised at an early date that any ‘loan’ that he gave Wagner would never be repaid. And yet, as Egon Voss has pointed out, Otto’s assistance was, relative to his own means, far greater than that ever given to Wagner by King Ludwig II. Why should a successful capitalist have given such massive support to a semi-plebeian, would-be revolutionary with designs on his wife? Why did he tolerate that same composer’s penchant for writing operas in which the heroine abandons a rich husband of high social standing for the charms of a man more charismatic, but lower in the social hierarchy? And why, when that composer had humiliated him by allowing private passions to become public knowledge, did Otto continue to support him? Surely this went far beyond any patronage of the arts that Otto might have considered his upper-middle-class duty? The answer cannot lie in Otto’s musical tastes, for these were both Classical and non-Wagnerian — Wagner once even wrote mockingly to Mathilde, promising to compose a cadence every eight bars to satisfy her husband.

Historians have hitherto sought a sole answer in the person of Mathilde, who, it is implied, must have exerted an overpowering influence on her husband, cajoling him into supporting the very man with whom she is supposed to have betrayed him. Perhaps Otto does fit the cliché, beloved of Hollywood and the tabloid press, of the older man powerful in the world, yet ruled at home by his younger wife. But such a simplistic explanation runs the risk of turning Otto yet again into little more than a cipher. If we try to explain the relationship between Otto, Wagner and Mathilde as a ‘love triangle’ determined purely by the ebb and flow of sexual attraction, then that is tantamount to seeing it as a mirror of Tristan und Isolde or the first act of the Walküre — in other words, what is purported to be Wagner’s own dramatic portrayal of their relationship. We would do well to remember that this ‘Wagnerian’ interpretation of their relationship is fatally flawed, for the battle for Mathilde — if indeed it ever really took place — was one that Otto won decisively. After all, when Wagner’s passion for her became common knowledge in 1858, making his departure from Zurich inevitable, he left alone. In his music dramas, love conquers all, while in the real world, capital was triumphant: Mathilde chose her rich husband above her debt-ridden composer. But this, too, is a cliché. If we wish for a closer understanding of Wagner’s biography, more differentiated than hitherto, then we must first undertake a more thorough investigation of the biographies of Otto and Mathilde avant Wagner. There is in fact remarkably little historical evidence to be found, so concrete conclusions can be but few. But a strange, compelling web of coincidences does unveil itself that can alter our perception of both Otto and Mathilde, and thereby shed new light on the gestation of Wagner’s music dramas in the 1850s and beyond.