The youthful Karl Tausig, bearing credentials from Liszt, appeared on the scene in May, 1858, and the entire household was soon in an uproar. Luckily, Wagner had persuaded Minna to take a cold-water cure at a sanatorium some distance from Zurich, so he could handle the wild-eyed Tausig, whose volcanic piano performances at the age of sixteen made the mature composer both wonder and admire. Tausig smoked black cigars, a trait he imitated from Liszt, and almost lived on coffee. Here is a curious criticism of him made by Cosima Von Bülow, who, it must be remembered, was both the daughter and wife of famous pianists. She said: "Tausig has no touch, no individuality; he is a caricature of Liszt." This, in the light of Tausig's subsequent artistic career, sounds almost comical; it also shows the intensely one-sided temperament of a remarkable woman, who banished from her life both von Bülow and her father, Franz Liszt, when Wagner entered into her dreams. The fortitude she displayed after her Richard's death in 1883 was not tempered by any human feeling toward her father. His telegrams were unanswered. She denied herself to him. She became a Brünnhilde frozen into a symbol of intolerable grief.
Of her personal fascination the sister of Nietzsche, Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, told me, when I last saw her at Weimar. Von Bülow succumbed to this charm; Rubinstein also (query: perhaps that is the reason he so savagely abused Wagner in his Conversations on Music?), and, if gossip doesn't lie, Nietzsche was another victim.
On September 17, 1858, after a general row, Wagner left his home on the green hill, his "Asyl," for ever. Why? Plenty of conjectures, no definite statements. He makes a great show of frankness in his diaries, in his autobiography; but they were obviously "edited" by Baireuth. Tristan and Isolde remains as evidence that a mighty emotion had transfigured the nature of a genius, and instead of an erotic anecdote the world of art is richer in the possession of a moving drama of desire and woe and tragedy. At the Berlin premiere of Tristan the old Kaiser Wilhelm remarked: "How Wagner must have loved when he wrote the work;" which is sound psychology.
The two books discussed are constructive in nature; not so the book by Emil Ludwig, Wagner, or the Disenchanted, which is frankly destructive. Since The Wagner Case by Nietzsche--and not Nietzsche at his best--there has not been written a book so overflowing with hatred for Wagner, the man as well as the musician. Ludwig is the author of poems, plays, and a study of Bismarck, the latter a noteworthy achievement. He is thorough in his attacks, though he does not measure up to Ernest Newman in his analysis of Wagner's poetry, libretti, and philosophy. The English critic's studies remain the best of its kind, because it is written without parti-pris.