'Faithful, All Too Faithful' by David Cormack (Part 7)

201 Bernard Shaw, Music in London 1890-94 (London 1932), I, 133-4, and London Music in 1888-9, 325.

202 In which this article was appearing.

203 ‘Musical Mems: By The Star’s Own Captious Critic’, The Star, 15 February 1889, in Shaw, How to Become a Musical Critic, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London 1960), 140. Pauline Cramer has already been mentioned. Bessie Bellwood (1856-1896) was a raucous Irish-cockney music-hall artist. 'Ria' is a contraction of 'Maria', and 'what cheer' is supposed to be the origin of the cockney salutation 'wotcher'. Shaw never did contribute directly to The Meister.

204 The Meister, IV/13 (13 February 1891), 5.

205 William Ashton Ellis, ‘Richard Wagner’s Prose’, Proceedings of the Musical Association, nineteenth session, 13 December 1892, 22.

206 Ibidem, 23-4.

207 See David Cormack, ‘“Consider Judaism again” – a rediscovered translation’, in Wagner 22/3 (November 2001), 157-163. The RIPM documentary resource on the Musical World for the years 1866 to 1891 (2006) shows that the journal even reprinted Bridgeman’s translation in 1882 - it apparently still escaped Ellis’s attention.

208 ‘Richard Wagner’s Prose’, 27 and 30-3; cf. Prose Works I (1892), 137 and 152.

209 John Deathridge assumes it was Ernest Newman in his introduction to his expanded edition of The Family Letters of Richard Wagner, xlii.

210 ‘Translator’s Preface’, Prose Works VI (1897), viii.

211 Bayreuther Blätter XVI/5-6, 159-167.

212 The Meister, IV/14 (22 May 1891), 64.

213 Life of Richard Wagner IV (1904), 387-8.

214 The Meister, IV/15 (14 July 1891), 96.

215 Shaw, Music in London 1890-94, I, 203.

216 The Meister, IV/16 (14 November 1891), 127-8. Ellis seems to have amended Shaw’s ‘Gill’ to ‘Jill’ before Shaw himself did so in later editions of the Quintessence.

217 Ernest Newman, A Study of Wagner (London 1899), 214n. The reference is to the first edition of The Quintessence of Ibsenism (London 1891), 161 (appendix).

218 Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, in Major Critical Essays (London 1932), 21-2n. As a Fabian essay submitted under the rubric ‘Socialism in Contemporary Literature’ it was first read at a meeting chaired by Annie Besant at the St James’s Restaurant on 18 July 1890. In the first published edition, dated June 1891, this footnote appeared on page 14.

219 The Musical Times, 33/590 (1 April 1892), 216-217, concluded in the next number, 280. The American writer Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) published his utopian novel, actually entitled Looking Backward, in 1888 (the misquotation of the title may be The Musical Times report’s rather than Ellis’s). Whereas Bellamy envisioned a perfected consumer capitalism, William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) used the same ‘retrospective’ technique to conjure a communist utopia. Ellis’s inference that Wagner’s socialism had affinity with Bellamy rather than Morris is interesting.

220 The Musical Times, 34/602 (1 April 1893), 227. Kunihild was first presented at Sondershausen in 1884 but was revived more successfully at Würzburg nine years later. Brass or wind arrangements of its Act 3 prelude are still occasionally programmed. Ellis also ‘puffed’ Kunihild in the Daily Graphic on 1 March and in the Athenæum on 4 March 1893 according to an autograph letter to T.L Southgate of 8 March 1893 (in the present writer’s possession).

221 The Meister, V/17 (13 February 1892), 4-21. Any modern reader sufficiently intrigued, but unprepared to follow Ellis in offering up ‘a mute prayer for deliverance from a mental indigestion’ in the British Library, can peruse a facsimile of Fitzball’s ‘marvellous lucubration’ (Ellis’s irony) or ‘ridiculous rodomontade’ (Ellis’s equally prolix invective) in The Hour of One: Six Gothic Melodramas, ed. Stephen Wischhusen (London 1975), 139-63. Edward Fitzball was born in 1792 and died in 1873, but I’m not going to suggest that research should be done into whether he in turn attended L’Olandese Dannato at Drury Lane in 1870.

222 Life of Richard Wagner IV (1904), 217.

223 Life of Richard Wagner V (1906), 442.

224 The Meister VI/22 (22 May 1893), 64-79.

225 A work by Kistler was last programmed at the Proms in 1901. For a recent evaluation of Kistler see Barbara Eichner, History in Mighty Sounds: Musical Constructions of German National Identity 1848-1914 (Woodbridge, 2012), esp.147-8.

226 The Times, 12 August 1895.

227 J.A. Fuller Maitland, Masters of German Music (London 1894), 281-9; cf. The Meister, VI/22 (22 May 1893), 68.

228 The Meister, V/20 (14 November 1892), 99-104.

229 Ellis also met Houston Stewart Chamberlain and the American critic Henry Krehbiel (1854-1923) that year. Subsequently there is evidence of Ellis’s presence at the 1894, 1896 (when he witnessed the ‘imperial majesty’ of Marie Brema as Fricka in the ‘resurrected’ Ring of that year – Life, iv, 403), and 1901 Bayreuth Festivals. The Festival ‘rest’ years were 1893, 1895, 1898, 1900, 1903, 1905, 1907, 1910 and 1913.

230 Life of Richard Wagner VI (1908), 53-5. Ellis had checked the facts for himself with Dannreuther and Critchetts in April 1904. Wagner’s astigmatism was significant for Ellis. In 1908 he published a 28-page ‘Postscript concerning Wagner’s eyestrain’, reprinted from the Life, and in 1910 ‘The Pessimist – Added Testimony in Wagner’s Case’, incorporated as a chapter in the final (sixth) volume of George M. Gould’s Biographic Clinics (Philadelphia 1910). Since 1905 Ellis had been in correspondence with the American ophthalmologist George Milbry Gould (1848-1922), citing his researches on astigmatic celebrities in the fourth volume of the Life. In a letter of 3 December 1904, Ellis had written enthusiastically, and on a personal note, to Bernard Shaw: ‘It will interest you to know that I now know from Sir A. Critchett himself that Wagner had astigmatism. - I have also found the right oculist, & he has done my sight a lot of good. Remember him! L.V. Cargill, F.R.C.S., 31 Harley Street (of King’s Hosp., quite a youngish man).’ Lionel Vernon Cargill (1866-1955) became consulting ophthalmic surgeon at King’s College Hospital. See David Cormack, ‘”Or is he a mere translator?” Bernard Shaw’s Agitation for William Ashton Ellis’s Civil List Pension’, 84.

231 Thomas Burbidge and Thomas Farries were also early members of the London branch of the Wagner Society.

232 Naturalisation certificate A4201, in the National Archives at Kew.

233 Life of Richard Wagner VI (1908), 428. According to the probate record, ‘Julius Theodor Friedrich Cyriax merchant of 16 Coleman Street London died September 29, 1892, at Sanna near Iön Köping Sweden’. Born in Gotha in 1840, Cyriax moved to London in 1859. Coleman Street was the address of Cyriax’s pharmaceuticals firm: he had a private address at 32 Douglas Road, Canonbury, N. Cyriax’s son Edgar (1874-1955) practised at Henrik Kellgren’s Swedish medical gymnastics institute in Jönköping; he became Kellgren’s son-in-law and was himself a celebrated physiotherapist.

234 Carl Friedrich Glasenapp, Das Leben Richard Wagners in sechs Büchern I (1894), (appendix) 397, referring to 36n.

235 Life of Richard Wagner I (1900), 32n. The cabinet was passed down through Cyriax’s family, but apparently did not survive the London Blitz.

236 An older sister, Anna Antonie Brünnhilde Cyriax, had been born in 1876. Glasenapp recalled ‘Lang blüh’ und wachs’ mein guter Cyriax!’ as one of Wagner’s frequent name-rhymes in an article on ‘Richard Wagner als “Lyrischer” Dichter’ in Die Musik, June 1905, 398. See also Eichner and Houghton, ‘Rose Oil and Pineapples’, 25 and 30.

237 Letter on the company history pages of the Kirin Brewery website (not now accessible). After Cyriax’s death the firm continued (as Burgoyne Burbidges & Co.) until 1956. The name is now used by an Indian chemicals concern.

238 Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis, eds. John Deathridge, Martin Geck, Egon Voss (Mainz 1985), 522.

239 Siegfried Wagner, Erinnerungen (Stuttgart 1923), 45, 133, 136 and 146. Neither Cyriax nor Ellis is actually mentioned.

240 Postcard from Ellis to Cyriax dated 5 February 1892 in the archives of the Richard Wagner Museum in Bayreuth. Thanks to Barbara Eichner for drawing this to my attention.

242 The Meister, VII/28 (25 November 1894). A report of the dinner-recital appeared in the Daily Chronicle on 7 November.

242 The Times, Friday 21 August 1896. Ellis’s letter published on 1 August 1896 (sent from ‘Bayreuth, July 27’) had set forth historic justifications based on testimony from Hans von Wolzogen, Gustav Schönaich and Felix Mottl, for the ‘sword business’ in Das Rheingold. In his letter of 11 August 1896, Frederick Jameson (1839-1916), translator of Wagner’s libretti and a committee member of the London Wagner Society, actually posed some prophetic questions (try substituting ‘directing’ for ‘conducting’): ‘Is this institution [Bayreuth] to become a mere appanage of the Wagner family, where youthful scions of the house may play at conducting whenever it pleased them to turn their attention to music and they can find a Richter or a Mottl obliging enough to rehearse and prepare performances for them? If so, farewell to the home of art the master designed and fondly hoped Bayreuth would become.’

243 Shaw, Music in London 1890-94, II, 217-8.

244 The Meister, IV/16 (14 November 1891), 101. Ferdinand Christian Wilhelm Praeger was born (though Ellis was sceptical about this) in Leipzig on 22 January 1815, was naturalised British in 1854, and died in London on 2 September 1891.

245 Life of Richard Wagner V (1906), 377. Outside the Wagner Society, Praeger (1815-91) had been the translator of Emil Naumann’s five-volume History of Music (London, n.d.[?1890] – first published in 24 parts commencing December 1881), which managed to include mention of ‘Ferdinand Praeger, of London’ as a modern composer belonging to ‘the New German School’ (V, 1213). Cyrill Kistler is not mentioned.

246 Manchester Guardian, 22 January 1874.

247 Life of Richard Wagner V (1906), 377.

248 William Ashton Ellis to Julius Cyriax, letter of 5 March 1892 (unpublished – in the possession of the writer). While continuing to discuss with him business relating to The Meister Ellis knew Cyriax was unwell, but it came as a shock when Cyriax died during recuperation in Sweden the following September.

249 Charles Ainslie Barry in The Musical Times for 1 April 1892 (33/590, 324-5) and Ellis in The Meister for May 1892 (V/18, 64).

250 Life of Richard Wagner V (1906), 392-3. See also Houston Stewart Chamberlain (ed.), Richard Wagner an Ferdinand Praeger (Leipzig 1908/1912), which reprinted his two accounts of the matter in the Bayreuther Blätter from 1893 and 1894 with introductory matter.

251 Ibidem, 392.

252 Life of Richard Wagner VI (1908), 4. Wagner was quite amused, and described himself afterwards as Richard Wagner the elder (Sämtliche Briefe vii, 246 and 277). Richard Wagner Praeger died at sea, a second mate aged 22, in the loss of the cargo ship Corinna en route from Cardiff to Malta in March 1878. Brunhilde Claire Myria Praeger married Frederick James Harriman in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1919; I have not established the date of her death. Edward Dannreuther’s children were Tristan (1872-1963), Sigmund [sic] (1873-1965), Wolfram (1875-1950), Isolde (1877-1953), and Hubert (after Parry, 1880-1977).

253 William Ashton Ellis, 1849. A Vindication (London 1892), iii-iv. At Chamberlain’s urging Hans von Wolzogen later edited a German edition ‘in conformity with the author’s intentions’ under the title 1849. Der Aufstand in Dresden: Ein geschichtlicher Rückblick zur Rechtfertigung Richard Wagner’s von William Ashton Ellis (Leipzig 1894).

254 The Meister, V/19 (21 July 1892), 96.

255 Bernard Shaw, Music in London 1890-94, II, 35.

256 Ibidem, III, 147-8.

257 The Meister, V/18 (22 May 1892), 61.

258 The 1891 census shows it was the residence of a widow, Barbara Parkin, 66 and ‘living on her own means’, together with her single daughter Barbara L. Parkin (40), a cook and a housemaid. Barbara L.A. Parkin had become head of the household by the time of the 1901 census. The address is no longer traceable. Chamberlain’s last visits to England were in 1907 and 1908 according to his Ravings of a Renegade as translated by Charles H. Clarke (London, 1915), 39.

259 In 1911 the castle would be purchased from Mrs Guthrie by Sir Fitzroy Maclean (1835-1936) and restored as his clan’s ancestral home.

260 Ironically this was the same letter in which Chamberlain found the work of translation by ‘the good Ellis’ himself to be a ‘real calamity’, to which Cosima response on 8 October was: ‘It’s very sad that A. Ellis’s translation is not accurate. Ach Gott!’ See Cosima Wagner und Houston Stewart Chamberlain im Briefwechsel 1888-1908, 354-8 (cf. Field, Evangelist of Race, 137).

261 Cosima Wagner und Houston Stewart Chamberlain im Briefwechsel 1888-1908, 356-8, esp. 358. Anachronistic shades of Bertie Wooster would be irresistible here, had Chamberlain been less cynical .

262 ‘Genötig, die Abschriften in kurzer Zeit und unter nervenmarternden Bedingungen zu machen’: Chamberlain, Wagner an Praeger (Leipzig 1908), 10.

263 Life of Richard Wagner V (1905), 418. I hesitate before compounding the evidence at this point, but I think it would be wrong to withhold transcriptions of four previously unpublished letters by Praeger (or rather three and one on his behalf by his wife) in the Manuscripts department of the British Library, and they are appended to this study. They suggest to me that the root of Praeger’s ‘misstatements’ was that he was both circumstantially overwhelmed by Wagner’s arrival in London in 1855, and an inveterate compulsive self-seeker.

264 The Meister, VIII/30 (22 May 1895), 71-2. William John Manners Tollemache (1859-1935) was the ninth Earl of Dysart. He succeeded to the title on the death of his grandfather on 23 September 1878. There are photographic portraits of him in 1920 by Bassano & Co. in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Ham House, where he was born and which he did much to restore, passed to the National Trust in 1948. He died at his other seat at Buckminster Park (largely demolished in the 1950s). His obituary in The Times of 23 November 1935 noted that ‘In spite of his great handicap he found a solace in music. He was a Wagnerite, and had a deep interest in the earlier forms of Church music.’

265 Cited in the Life of Richard Wagner V (1905), 415. Ferdinand Praeger’s youngest son Wilfred George Frederick Praeger (1869-1955) became Lord Dysart’s secretary: see Sally Davis (researcher into members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), at www.wrighrp.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/GD/BLYTHPRAEGERW.htm, accessed on 2 October 2013.

266 Oddly, though the other volumes carry pencilled or crayoned marks initialled by Ellis himself, the penultimate issue, Number 31, was not bound in with the 1895 set in the current Wagner Society’s library when I consulted it in 1993.

267 See the contents page in the British Library’s copy of The Meister, VIII, for the address, and R.R. James, St George’s Pupils’ Register (London 1931) for the unlikely statement that Ellis was ‘in practice’ at Herne Hill in 1898.

268 Manchester Guardian, 18 March 1901. If his affinities were French as well as German, he may have been Philip A. Wilkins (1871-1943), a bullion broker who was also the author of The History of the Victoria Cross (London 1904), the Honorary Secretary of the London Committee of the French Red Cross Society during the Great War (see its advertisement in The Times on 21 May 1915), and the translator of (inter alia) Marie François Goron’s Behind the French C.I.D. (London 1940), Maxime du Camp’s Paris After the Prussians (London 1940), and André Gide’s Recollections of the Assize Court (London 1941).

269 Cited in Cleather and Crump, Parsifal Lohengrin and the Legend of the Holy Grail (London 1904), 184.

270 The Meister, III/9 (13 February 1890), 35.

271 Death notices in The Times 9 March 1892 and The Jewish Chronicle 2 March 1894.

272 The Times, 1 February 1917.

273 Elgar’s ‘dirge’ may have been his arrangement of the Loughborough Memorial Chime (1923).

274 The Times, 20 October 1910. Sydney Loeb (1876-1964) was Hans Richter’s son-in-law. No details for F.A. Richards.

275 The Musical Times, 51/813 (1 November 1910), 729; Louis N. Parker, Several of My Lives (London 1928), 134-7; Christopher Fifield, True Artist and True Friend: a Biography of Hans Richter (London 1993), 439; Large and Weber, Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, 348-9n.; and material in the possession of the current Wagner Society. The current UK Wagner Society was founded in 1953 by Major Harry Edmonds (1891-1989), a remarkable man. Christopher Hudson wrote of him as an example of ‘This Bulldog Breed’ in the Daily Mail on 14 December 1996. ‘Take Major Harry Edmonds, who died a few years ago on Armistice Day, during an ambulance strike. He went to sea before the mast at 15, rounding the Horn three times; fought in World War I at Gallipoli; flew in Royal Flying Corps biplanes as an artillery spotter; fought on the Somme, where in the severe winter of 1916 he made his men rub their feet with whale oil to prevent frostbite; and was wounded and gassed at Passchendaele, returning to his battery after ten days in hospital. / Following a bitter quarrel with his commanding officer, who refused to recognise the bravery of Edmonds’ battery after a particularly desperate engagement, Harry Edmonds spent a night as a prisoner in the Tower of London. He was offered sick leave but managed to return to the war as a lieutenant in the Naval Intelligence Division, for which he later went on a secret mission to study German airships. / A lover of opera, he founded the Wagner Society; and during World War II he worked for the Australian Red Cross. At 75 he took up gliding and he celebrated his 80th birthday by making a record solo flight.’ Edmonds persuaded Ernest Newman to became the first president of the post-war Wagner Society in 1953.

276 Life of Richard Wagner V (1906), 430.

277 Ernest Newman’s first book under that name was his Gluck and the Opera of 1895, and his A Study of Wagner of 1899 has already been mentioned. Sessa in Richard Wagner and the English, 82, says that William Roberts changed his name to Ernest Newman in 1905, but this is contradicted by Vera Newman’s account of her wedding in 1919: ‘As E.N. had not changed his name by deed poll I had to be married in both names. I had to say that I took Ernest Newman otherwise William Roberts for my husband, and I thought it sounded so funny that I had difficulty in suppressing a fit of the giggles.’ Vera Newman, Ernest Newman: a Memoir by his Wife (London 1963), 14-5. In fact, Newman never legally changed his name.

278 Life of Richard Wagner V (1906), 431.

279 Ernest Newman, Wagner: The Music of the Masters (London and New York, 1906 [1904]), xvi.

280 Ibidem, 204.

281 See Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’, 85-87. Ellis wrote to Shaw on 11 December 1904 that ‘in an evil moment’ David Irvine had drawn his attention to Newman’s ‘2/6 Wagner’.

282 Ernest Newman, ‘Wagner, Berlioz, Liszt, and Mr. Ashton Ellis’, appendix to the 2nd edition of Musical Studies, (London n.d. [1910]), 305. The collection reprints Newman’s essay on Berlioz with the footnote to which Ellis took exception at page 6. Also in Ernest Newman, ed. Peter Heyworth, Berlioz, Romantic and Classic, (London 1972), with the footnote at page 23, a collection which takes its title from the essay in question.

283 H.T. Finck, Wagner and His Works (London 1893), I, vii; The Meister, VI/24 (25 November 1893), 123-8. Henry Theophilus Finck (1852-1926) published his two-volume biography in 1893 simultaneously in New York (Scribner’s) and in London (Grevel’s). Ellis also took exception to Finck’s slang (‘Nuff said’), ‘cheap irony’ and ‘breach of manners in invariably referring to Madame Wagner as “Cosima”!’.

284 W.H. Hadow, Richard Wagner (London 1934), 151. I like the ‘clouds of mosquitoes’ as much as the ‘pepperbox of commas’.

285 Shaw, Music in London 1890-94, ii, 231, and iii, 151.

286 Bernard Shaw, Agitations: Letters to the Press 1875-1950, eds. Dan H. Laurence and James Rambeau (New York 1985), 43-9.

287 Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite, preface to the 1st edition (1898), cited from the 4th edition (London 1923), xxii.

288 Ernest Newman, A Study of Wagner, ix.

289 Life of Richard Wagner VI (1908), 194.

290 Charles (Carl) Lüders (1813-1883) was a German-born pianist and close friend of the violinist Prosper Sainton (1813-90). Wagner remained grateful for the support of both during his Philharmonic season in London.

291 Life of Richard Wagner V (1906), 144n.

292 Shaw, Music in London 1890-94, II, 151.

293 Letter to George Bernard Shaw of 11 December 1904, in Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’, 86.

294 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 27 May 1900, 8. The 'eminent musician' was Sir George Alexander Macfarren (1813-87): see Jeremy Dibble, (Oxford 1992), 141.

295 Letters to Wesendonck et al. (London 1899), 166n.

296 ‘Books of the Week’, The Times, 21 September 1899.

297 Pall Mall Gazette, 22 August 1898.

298 Pall Mall Gazette, 19 January 1900.

299 Prose Works VIII (1899), xx-xxi.

300 The Times, Monday 15 April 1901.

301 Life of Richard Wagner I (1900), vii; II (1902), v; III (1903), v; IV (1904), vi. Dropping Glasenapp’s name from the title page apparently caused Ellis’s binders some confusion on the spines of some of the printings. That Ellis had been following Glasenapp’s revised editions is clear from his letter published in The Musical Times in 1894, acknowledging information from an ‘advance copy’ of ‘Herr C.F. Glasenapp’s forthcoming new and much enlarged edition of his “Life of Richard Wagner”.’ The Musical Times, 35/612 (1 February 1894).

302 Bayreuther Blätter, XV/2-3 (February-March 1892). The other contributions were Chamberlain, Aus dem Briefe eines Engländers an einen Franzosen, and Bonnier, Aus dem Briefe eines Franzosen an einen Deutschen. Charles Bonnier (1863-1926), a contributor to La Revue Wagnérienne, was the ‘French friend and admirer of Wagner’ mentioned by Engels in the well-known footnote to the fourth edition (1891) of his Origin of the Family as dissenting from Marx’s observation on ‘these lascivious Wagnerian gods who in truly modern style are rendering their love quarrels more spicy by a little incest.’

303 Possibly the Dresden writer Anna Brunnemann, who translated Gobineau’s Die Renaissance from the French in 1922, as well as Murger’s Die Bohème, not to mention works by Thomas Hardy.

304 The Jena academic and Germanist Rudolf Schlösser (1867-1920) was a contributor to the Bayreuther Blätter. His son Rainer (1899-1945) became Nazi ‘Reichsdramaturg’ in Berlin under Goebbels.

305 After 28 years of marriage, in 1906 Chamberlain (1855-1927) separated from his first wife Anna née Horst (dates uncertain – she is said to have been ten years older than Chamberlain), and married Wagner’s daughter Eva on 26 December 1908. In his biography of Cosima Wagner, Herrin des Hügels (Munich 2007), Oliver Hilmes paints an unflattering portrait of Chamberlain and his determination to seize power in Wahnfried, in contrast to Roger Allen’s quasi-rehabilitation of Chamberlain as a Wagnerite: see Allen ‘“Die Weihe des Hauses”: Houston Stewart Chamberlain and the Early Reception of Parsifal’ in A Companion to Wagner’s Parsifal (eds. William Kinderman and Katherine R. Syer), (Rochester NY 2005), 245-276, and ‘“All Here is Music”: Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Der Ring des Nibelungen’ in wagnerspectrum 2006/1 (Würzburg 2006), 155-177.

306 Julius Cyriax had been an intermediary between Ellis and Glasenapp during the first years of The Meister. See Eichner and Houghton, ‘Rose Oil and Pineapples’, 37.

307 Letter of 27 December 1904 (manuscript corrections and additions absorbed), cited in Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’, 89. The article includes commentary on Mary Benson (1841-1918), her sister Eleanor Sidgwick (1845-1936), and her companion Lucy Tait (1856-1938). After Archbishop Edward White Benson’s death in 1896, Mrs Benson and Lucy Tait lived at Tremans, a mile, as Ellis says, to the south of Horsted Keynes.

308 She was a friend of Liszt’s biographer Lina Ramann (1833-1912), who had stayed with her in Lewes in the summer of 1882 when she was working on the second volume of Liszt als Künstler und Mensch (Leipzig 1880-94). See Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, Volume 3, The Final Years, 1861-1886,, 424n.

309 For a contemporary (1900) account of a dispute over the ‘abomination’ of a proposed women’s public convenience in Camden Town, see Barbara Penner, ‘A World of Unmentionable Suffering: Women’s Public Conveniences in Victorian London’, in the Journal of Design History, 14/1 (March 2001), 35-51. The St Pancras vestryman Bernard Shaw was passionately involved.

310 Letter of 20 March 1908, cited in Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’

311 Ellis would not have known that Richard Wagner regarded Glasenapp (1847-1915) as little more than a mediocre biographer - see Cosima’s Diaries for 14 July 1878. Method combined with loyalty, however, became much appreciated in Wahnfried, and Siegfried Wagner went so far as to risk ridicule by nominating Glasenapp for the 1902 Nobel Prize for Literature. See Large and Weber, Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, 104-5. The prize went to the historian Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903).

312 In 1899 the names of ‘Ellis, Havelock’ and ‘Ellis, William Ashton’ had appeared alphabetically one after the other on the Contents page for Volume LXV of The Fortnightly Review.

313 Newman, A Study of Wagner, 385n.

314 Life of Richard Wagner III (1903), 410-2.

315 Ellis adduces Sir Anderson Critchett’s evidence in the Life of Richard Wagner VI (1908), 53-4.

316 Letter of 3 December 1904, cited in Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’ At the time Ellis consulted him, Lionel Vernon Cargill (1866-1955) had been house surgeon to Sir Joseph Lister and was assistant ophthalmic surgeon at King’s College Hospital, London, and ophthalmic surgeon to the Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital, Greenwich. He went on to become surgeon oculist to Edward VII and George V. See his obituary in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, 40/2 (February 1956).

317 Life of Richard Wagner VI (1908), 425n. and V (1906), 444. According to Judson Bennett Gilbert, Disease and Destiny. A Bibliography of Medical References to the Famous (London 1962), 516, as well as his ‘Postscript’ on Wagner’s eyestrain published in 1908 Ellis contributed ‘The Pessimist: added testimony in Wagner’s case’ to the 1909 edition of the American ophthalmologist George M. Gould’s Biographic Clinics, vi, 209-32. The full title reads: Biographic Clinics. Origin of the Ill-Health of De Quincey, Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, Browning, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Wagner, Parkman, Jane Welsh Carlyle, Spencer, Whittier, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Nietzsche. Essays concerning the Influence of Visual Function Pathologic and Physiologic upon the Health of Patients. Gould (1848-1922) published the work in six successive volumes (Philadelphia, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1909).

318 Cited in the Life of Richard Wagner IV (1904), 22-23n. Ellis says that Lodge (1851-1940) delivered his lecture, ‘Radium and its meaning’, in Birmingham on 6 January 1904. It was in fact given on 5 January, and reported extensively in the Times the following day. Ellis’s citations differ minutely from those in the Times.

319 William Ashton Ellis, ‘Wagner and Schopenhauer’, in The Fortnightly Review, LXV (1899), 432.

320 In The Badness of Wagner’s Bad Luck (London 1912), David Irvine would rebuke his friend Ellis for having ‘allowed himself, very unadvisedly, to be betrayed into a most shallow adverse criticism of Schopenhauer’ at this point. See David Cormack, ‘Antipodean: the Converse Life of David Irvine’ in The Wagner Journal, I/2 (July 2007), 50-67.

321 Life of Richard Wagner VI (1908), 28-41.

322 Letters to [Otto] Wesendonck et al., ‘Translator’s Preface’, ix-x.

323 See also J. Cuthbert Haddon, Composers in Love and Marriage (London 1913), 214, who after paraphrasing him on Mathilde adds: ‘Thus the innocent Ellis.’

324 Richard to Minna Wagner (London 1909), i, ‘Translator’s Preface’, xvi.

325 Ibidem, xviii. John Deathridge’s observation comes from his 1991 edition of the Family Letters of Richard Wagner, xxix.

326 For Ernest Newman’s characterisation of Ellis’s denigration of Minna Wagner in the Fortnightly Review as the ‘climax of comic pettishness’ see Wagner as Man and Artist (London 1923 [1914]), 44. The same example was later described by Elbert Lenrow as ‘One of [Ellis’s] most childish and irrelevant observations’ in his edition of The Letters of Richard Wagner to Anton Pusinelli (New York 1972), 182n. Lenrow (1903-93) taught at the New School of Social Research in New York. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were among his pupils.

327 (Henry) Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), The World of Dreams (London 1911, cited from the 1915 reprint), 183n.

328 William Ashton Ellis preferred the spelling ‘Wesendonck’ as used by Otto and Mathilde themselves, whereas the form ‘Wesendonk’ was adopted along with the aristocratic ‘von’ in 1899 by their son Karl (1857-1934), and used retrospectively by Wolfgang Golther in his 1904 German edition of the Letters.

329 Ernest Newman, Wagner as Man and Artist, 4.

330 Prose Works VIII (1899), ‘Translator’s Preface’, xxi.

331 Richard Graf Du Moulin Eckart, Cosima Wagner, II (Munich 1931), 500.

332 Translator’s Preface to the Family Letters, xlix (Deathridge edition). As he subsequently refers twice to Mein Leben in footnotes (his preface is dated July 1911), Ellis clearly had access to an early copy.

333 Derrick Everett’s website at www.home.no/derrick/booksfaq.htm misinterpreted David Irvine’s Wagner’s Bad Luck (London 1911) as stating that the 1911 translation of Mein Leben was ‘begun by Wm. Ashton Ellis, completed by an anonymous hand.’ David Irvine shared the publisher Grevel with Ellis in 1897 and 1899, and was a close personal ally of Ellis by 1908; he would have been well aware of Ellis’s relationship with Wahnfried. See Cormack, ‘Antipodean: the Converse Life of David Irvine’, 59n. On the appearance of the German first edition, The Musical Times review noted merely that ‘An English translation by Messrs. Constable was issued a few days ago.’ The Musical Times, 52/821 (1 June 1911), 368. Constable & Co. are now part of Constable & Robinson Ltd. I enquired whether there was anything in the archive that might shed light on the commissioning of the translation. Their Rights Director, Eryl Humphrey Jones, informed me (11 June 2007) that ‘a large part of the Constable archive was misplaced when Constable & Co moved from their premises in Orange Street twenty years ago. Many books and papers did not survive the move. We have almost nothing here, and the material from this office that has been archived does not go as far as the early 20th century, so I am sorry to tell you we are of little help.’

334 Family Letters (Deathridge edition), xlix.

335 Ernest Belfort Bax, ‘Richard Wagner’ [review of My Life and the Family Letters of Richard Wagner], in The New Age, X/4 (23 November 1911), 87-88. David Irvine was also an occasional contributor to The New Age. Both Irvine and Bax translated (short) works of Schopenhauer. Belfort Bax (1853-1926) was the uncle of the composer Arnold Bax (1883-1953).

336 Letter of 16 November 1907, in Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1898-1910, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London 1972), 723. According to Rex Pogson, Miss Horniman, 13, Annie Horniman was behind the campaign and ‘obtained the help’ of Shaw.

337 Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’, 86.

338 Unpublished draft cited in Cormack, ibidem, 91-93.

339 Cormack, ibidem, 84.

340 Cormack, ibidem, 90. Elgar had received his knighthood the previous July.

341 Bernard Shaw to Annie Horniman, 27 July 1906, cited in Rex Pogson, Miss Horniman and the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester (London 1952), 13. Shaw probably knew Richard Burdon Haldane through his fellow Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

342 Elision in the original. See Higgs’ correspondence with Shaw in Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’, 94-7. Higgs’ obituary in The Times of 24 May 1940 spoke of ‘his cool prudence and fair but clear incisive judgment of men and things’. A lengthy obituary by Clara Collet and John Maynard Keynes appeared in The Economic Journal, 50/100 (December 1940), 546-572.

343 Ibidem, 97.

344 Ibidem, 98. George Charles Ashton Jonson (1861-1930) was the author of A Handbook to Chopin’s Works (1905). He was known to Shaw through his marriage to the playwright Dorothy Leighton, a founder of the Independent Theatre in London. David Henderson Irvine (1856-1930) has already been mentioned. He left Britain in 1912 for Australia (where his father had made his fortune in the 1850s), probably in search of better health. He died of prostate cancer in Sydney. See David Cormack, ‘Antipodean: the Converse Life of David Irvine.’

345 Bernard Shaw, How to Become a Musical Critic, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London 1960), 282. Even later, Shaw’s Pen Portraits and Reviews (London 1932), 24, still recalled how the ‘almost destitute’ Ellis received ‘a wretched pittance of £80 a year’.

346 Signed autograph letter on letterhead embossed ‘Plas Gwyn, Hereford’, offered for sale by Kotte Autographs, Stuttgart, at €900 (accessed online, 9 October 2006). Speyer (1839-1934) had previously introduced Ellis to Elgar: for Christmas 1902 he sent the composer a complete set of Wagner’s Prose Works.

347 Der Traum des Gerontius, Novello and Company Limited (London 1901), Cardinal Newman’s text translated into German by Julius Buths. Offered for sale by Peter Harrington, Antiquarian Bookseller, Chelsea, at £1,250 (accessed online, 9 October 2006).

348 Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’, 98.

349 Richard to Minna Wagner (London 1909), xviii.

350 Family Letters of Richard Wagner, liv. The Lear family (who inherited Ellis’s estate) has passed on to me a first edition of the Family Letters so minutely corrected in pencil - mostly for purely typographic presentation (a full stop instead of a comma and vice versa, a smudged space piece, a misalignment or irregular space between characters) - that I have no doubt that it belonged to its obsessively pedantic redacteur. There was to be no subsequent edition, not even Deathridge’s, incorporating these corrections.

351 Family Letters, viii. The English Review was founded in 1908 by Ford Madox (son of Francis) Hueffer.

for continuation of article, click here

Return to Archive