Ludwig slashes à la Nietzsche, though he cannot boast that poet's diamantine style. He accuses Wagner of being paroxysmal, erotic--a painter of moods; he couldn't build a Greek temple like Beethoven--weak as a poet, inconclusive as a musician. For Tristan and Die Meistersinger he has words of hearty praise. The Ludwig book stirred up a nest of hornets, and one lawsuit resulted. A newspaper critic presumed to criticise, and the sensitive poet, who calls Wagner every bad name in the Schimpf Lexicon, invoked the aid of the law. We know only too well, thanks to that ill-tasting but engrossing autobiography, that Wagner was a monster of ingratitude. Hasn't Nietzsche, against his own natural feeling, proclaimed the futility of gratitude? Perhaps he learned this lesson from his hard experience with Wagner. We also know that Wagner wanted to run the universe, but after a brief note from Ludwig II he left Munich rather than face the angry burghers.
He attempted to coerce Bismarck, but there he ran up against a wall of granite. Bismarck was a Beethoven lover, and he abhorred, as did Von Beust, revolutionists. Thereat Wagner wrote sarcastic things about the uselessness and vanity of statesmen. He didn't treat Ludwig II right when he announced from Venice that he wasn't in sufficient health and spirits to grant the King's request for a performance of the prelude to Lohengrin in a darkened theatre with one listener, Ludwig II. (By the way, Ludwig II never sat through a performance alone of Parsifal. Once and once only, years before the completion of the work, he heard a performance of the prelude in Munich given for his sole benefit.) Wagner's gruff letter wounded the sensitive idealist. In 1866, a few weeks after the death of Minna Wagner-Planer, Cosima von Bülow-Liszt followed Wagner to Switzerland. Probably the hostile attitude of Liszt in the affair was largely inspired by the fact that when Richard and Cosima married, the latter abjured Catholicism and became a Protestant. Liszt, a religious man (despite his pyrotechnical virtuosity in the luxurious region of sentiment), never could reconcile himself to this defection on the part of a beloved child.
It angered Nietzsche to discover in Wagner a leaning toward mysticism, toward religion: witness the mock-duck mysticism and burlesque of religious ritual in Parsifal. After Feuerbach came Arthur Schopenhauer in the intellectual life of Wagner. This was in 1854. His friend Wille lent him the book. Immediately he started to "Schopenhauerise" the Ring, thereby making a hopeless muddle of situation and character. The enormous vitality of Wagner's temperament expressed itself in essentially optimistic terms. He was not a pessimist, and he hopelessly misunderstood his new master. Wotan must needs become a Schopenhauerian; and Siegfried, a pessimist at the close.