Notes to Faithful, All Too Faithful

All notes in the main text are linked to this page, but it is easier to use your browser’s back and forward buttons to navigate between the main text and this notes page.   

1 This study originated as two articles published as long ago as Sep. 1993 and May 1994 in the (London) Wagner Society’s now defunct journal Wagner, xiv/3 and xv/2; they were much improved by the encouragement and scrutiny of its then editor Stewart Spencer. Patrick Swinkels afterwards published a partially revised online version in his ‘Wagner Library’ website. The present text updates, corrects and supersedes all earlier versions.

2 The Times, 19 Feb. 1883. On Julius Cyriax, see Barbara Eichner and Guy Houghton, ‘Rose Oil and Pineapples: Julius Cyriax’s Friendship with Wagner and the Early Years of the London Wagner Society’, The Wagner Journal, i/2 (2007), 19–49. Though the entry in the Dictionary of National Biography for John Liptrot Hatton (1809–86) mentions only two daughters, he also had two sons, ostentatiously christened together on 3 July 1856 as Johann Sebastian (b. 1853, d. before 1911) and George Frederick (1856–1918). The mourner was undoubtedly the elder son, ‘Johnny’. He had been a violinist in the orchestra for Wagner’s concerts at the Albert Hall in May 1877. Godfrey Henry Thornton (1856–fl.1906) was a member of the London branch of the Wagner Society and of the Theosophical Society, and was ‘late Lieut. 1st. Life Guards’, according to the 1881 census. He won joint third prize at the sporting dogs exhibition at Olympia, Kensington, with his Great Dane bitch by the name of Ortrud, according to The Times of 27 Apr. 1887. A letter from him is indexed in the Mathilde Wesendonck Nachlass in the Zurich Stadtarchiv (http://amsquery.stadt-zuerich.ch/Dateien/0/D3844.pdf). Dated as from Munich, 2 Mar. 1886, its subject is described as ‘content without significance’. According to James Money, Capri: Island of Pleasure (London, 1987; ebook edition 2012), Thornton abandoned a brief military career for a wayward and sybaritic life, during which he is said to have taken lessons with Clara Schumann. He was declared bankrupt in absentia in London in 1906. The date and place of his death are unknown.

3 George Ainslie Hight, in Richard Wagner: A Critical Biography (London, 1925), ii.251. Hight suggests that Ellis and Thornton sent separate tributes. There is no evidence they knew one another.

4 William Ashton Ellis, ‘Richard Wagner, as Poet, Musician and Mystic’, Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts, London, 1887, 4. The ‘band of German musicians’ comprised Angelo Neumann’s Touring Wagner Theatre, coincidentally in Venice, who played their tribute on the Grand Canal on 19 Apr. 1883.

5 William Ashton Ellis, ‘Translator’s Preface’, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, tr. and ed. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols (London, 1892–9; facsimile repr. 1993–5), i. (1892), xiii–xiv. Ironically, this preface, including its ‘Pfeffermühle voll Kommas, Semikolons, Kolons und Punkten’, would be translated into German, in the Bayreuther Blätter, xvi/5-6 (May 1893), 159–67.

6 Francis Hueffer, ‘Translator’s Preface’ to the Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt i. (London, 1888), xxiii-xxiv (cited from the 2nd edition, London, 1897). The first German edition had appeared in 1887. William Ashton Ellis oversaw the 1897 English edition and added an index and some corrections, without revising Hueffer’s translation.

7 Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, tr. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (London, 1987), viii.

8 Family Letters of Richard Wagner, tr. William Ashton Ellis (London, 1911); enlarged edition with introduction and notes by John Deathridge (London, 1991), xlii–xliii (Deathridge’s introduction).

9 Ernest Newman launched it in his Fact and Fiction About Wagner (London, 1931), in large part to refute the errors and insinuations of the American journalists Philip Dutton Hurn and Waverley Lewis Root in The Truth About Wagner (London, 1930).

10 Ernest Newman to Elbert Lenrow, letter of 22 Aug. 1930, cited in John Deathridge, ‘A Brief History of Wagner Research’, in the Wagner Handbook, ed. Ulrich Muller and Peter Wapnewski (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 205. The full text of the letter is given in Lenrow’s introduction to his edition of The Letters of Richard Wagner to Anton Pusinelli (New York, 1932), xix–xx, where Newman goes even further: ‘I doubt whether there is a single one of us who, in similar circumstances, would not act very much as Cosima and the others did in the early years after 1883. […] I am not inclined now to condemn them all as criminals for their little concealments and manipulations; they have merely been human.’

11 Patrick Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (New Haven and London, 2006). Reaction may be setting in: Raymond Furness, echoing Roger Scruton, has recently expressed a yearning for a return to a ‘truthful’ style such as the 2001 Seattle Ring: ‘Bearskins and horned helmets may be out, but so should computers, dustbins, swastikas, sex shops and sundry vulgarity.’ Raymond Furness, Richard Wagner (London, 2013), 202.

12 See John W. Barker’s Wagner and Venice (Rochester, NY, 2008) and especially his Wagner and Venice Fictionalized (Rochester, NY, 2012).

13 The modern English language reappraisal began with Thomas S. Grey’s Wagner’s Musical Prose (Cambridge, 1995), though around the same time Michael Tanner’s Wagner (London, 1996) sought to minimise the significance of the prose works. Since then, important new English translations of The Artwork of the Future, by Emma Warner (The Wagner Journal, 2013), and Beethoven, by Roger Allen (Rochester, NY, 2014) have appeared; in his preface, Roger Allen is unexpectedly gracious about Ellis’s translations. Cambridge University Press has reprinted Ellis’s translations of the letters to Minna, the letters to Wesendonck et al., the family letters, and the letters to Emil Heckel.

14 Stewart Spencer, ‘Collected Writings’, in The Wagner Compendium, ed. Barry Millington (London, 1992), 196.

15 Wagner Handbook (note 10), 638–51. ‘PW’ is now the standard bibliographic abbreviation for references to Ellis’s translation. In 1902 Ellis announced that he was altering his own cross-referential abbreviation for the Prose Works from P.W. to simply P., ‘not out of deference to the humorous protestation of a critic that “P.W.” is the recognised abbreviation for Pearson’s Weekly, but to economise space.’ (!) William Ashton Ellis, Life of Richard Wagner, 6 vols (London, 1900–08), ii.7.

16 Wagner on Music and Drama: a selection from Richard Wagner’s prose works, arranged and with an introduction by Albert Goldman and Evert Sprinchorn, translated by H. Ashton Ellis (London, 1970, originally published New York, 1964, subsequent editions 1977 and 1992).

17 Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner, Theory and Theatre (original German edition 1982), tr. Stewart Spencer (London, 1991), ‘Translator’s Foreword’, unnumbered page v. Though the same translator re-translates Wagner’s prose ‘afresh’ and does not consider textual references to Ellis ‘useful’, cross-references to the Ellis Prose Works are still included in the chronological ‘Catalog of Wagner’s Writings’ in the English translation of Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s Wagner Androgyne, 1990 (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 303, ‘for the sake of convenience’. A highly critical contemporary view of Ellis’s translations can be found at http://thinkclassical.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/appalling-state-of-english-translation.html#!/2012/02/appalling-state-of-english-translation.html. Its author, whose nom-de-blog is the old cryptogram ‘Sator Arepo’, concludes: ‘Indeed, this Nazification of Wagner’s thinking long after his death possibly has English origins in the wilful and malicious violation of Wagner’s writings that occurs in the Ellis “translations”. – It simply highlights one fact: never trust a single world [sic] of any English translations of Wagner’s prose works by Ellis or anyone remotely associated with Chamberlain. You must always go back to the Urtext.’

18 Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, 4 vols (London, 1933–47, repr. Cambridge, 1976), ii. (1936), 564, note. Newman’s references are to Cosima Wagner und Houston Stewart Chamberlain im Briefwechsel 1888–1908, ed. Paul Pretzsch (Leipzig, 1934), 354 [‘Es bleibe mir der gute Ashton Ellis! aber – aber ach! das ist ein trauriges Kapitel. Erst habe ich seine Arbeit als Übersetzer untersucht und halte sie für eine wahre Kalamität.’], and 363 [‘Kein Engländer, der Deutsch nicht kann, versteht diesen Ellischen Stil. Bezuglich der Treue ist übrigens Ellis dem Worte wohl treu, allzu treu, dem Sinne aber durchaus nicht.’]. Cosima relied upon Chamberlain’s estimate, as an (ex-) Englishman, of Ellis’s worth as prophet in another country. See also Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: the Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New York, 1981), 137–8.

19 Ellis, ‘Translator’s Preface’ in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (note 5), i. (1892), vii.

20 My earlier versions of the above list included an indexed 1894 ‘article in the New York Review of Reviews’ entitled ‘Wagner and Grieg’, which indeed appeared in the Apr. 1894 issue of that journal. But I subsequently found it was also published simultaneously in its British parent version under the title ‘Wagner and His Critics: Replies by Mr. W. Ashton Ellis.’ This wasn’t an article by Ellis but a short précis (presumably by the editor W.T. Stead) of Ellis’s disparaging remarks on Grieg in The Meister of 13 Feb. 1894. See the Review of Reviews ix (London), 270.

21 The merest clue Ellis himself gave publicly about his age was his statement that ‘In 1885 Mr Praeger was aged 70, as we are informed by himself, and I – well, less than half that.’ (William Ashton Ellis, Life of Richard Wagner (note 15), v.377.) The American scholar Anne Dzamba Sessa researched Ellis’s work extensively for her seminal Richard Wagner and the English (Cranbury, NJ, 1979), but she was still guessing at 1853 for his birth year in ‘At Wagner’s Shrine: British and American Wagnerians’, in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed. David C. Large and William Weber (Ithaca, NY, 1984), 268.

22 After twenty years of searching I obtained the signed portrait photograph (reproduced here) in Aug. 2013 through the catalogue of the Antiquariat und Verlag Prof. Dr. Hans Schneider OHG, Tutzing. The cabinet photo was made by the studio of Hughes & Mullins, Ryde, Isle of Wight, and is dated ‘Oct. 3. 1889’. The back of the photo has the stamp of ‘Doct. E. Henrotin, 10 Rue Paul Spaak, Bruxelles.’ He may have been Dr E. Henrotin, connected with medical education in Brussels; Dr Edmond Henrotin, photographic collector associated with Baudelaire; or Edmond Maximilian Clement Henrotin (d. 1894), captain-commandant of artillery, who married the painter Marie Collart (1842–1911) in 1871.

23 ‘Colonel Richard George Gregson Ellis, aged 65, director of the Ruthin mineral water firm, collapsed and died suddenly at Rhyl Station yesterday as he was climbing the bridge stairs.’ (The Times, 28 Aug. 1920.) He had been an executor of Robert Ellis (senior)’s will.

24 It’s likely he was the Robert Ellis, ‘a young chemist’ at University College, London, whose paper ‘On a New Method of Testing Arsenic’ appeared in The Lancet for 11 Nov. and 23 Dec. 1843.

25 For details of Charles Bagley Uther’s connection with the firm of Forsyth & Co., see W. Keith Neal and D.H.L. Back, Forsyth & Co.: Patent Gunmakers (London, 1969). The Rev. Alexander Forsyth (1769–1843) developed the percussion lock eventually adopted in place of the flintlock by the British army in the 1840s, but after handing his firm over to Uther he returned to the parish of Belhelvie in Aberdeenshire to succeed his father as minister. Uther had to protect the firm’s assets. In 1850 he testified in the Old Bailey after a number of guns and pistols, valued at £130, were stolen during a break-in at 8 Leicester Street. A 19-year-old culprit Joseph Brooks was convicted and sentenced to seventeen years transportation (see http://www.oldbaileyonline.org).

26 Report of the Consistory Court, Monday 27 Nov. 1826, in The Times the following day.

27 Mary Ann Eliza’s brother Charles returned to England and married Friderika Wilhelmina Angelbauer, from Schorndorf, Württemberg, in Chelsea in 1874. He died in Chelsea aged 73 in 1896. Mary Ann Eliza Ellis’s will of 1898 made provision for her widowed sister-in-law but Friderika died aged 68 the following year, in Battle, Sussex.

28 William Ashton Ellis, ‘Wagner and Schopenhauer’, in Fortnightly Review, lxv (new series), 427 (1 Mar. 1899).

29 Letter to Shaw of 14 Dec. 1904, cited in David Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?” Bernard Shaw’s Agitation for William Ashton Ellis’s Civil List Pension’, in Wagner, xxiii/2 (Oct. 2002), 88. The Uther name itself was not quite extinct, as we shall see.

30 The dispensary was founded in 1812 with the support of William Wilberforce. It was demolished in 1902.

31 See the entry for Francis Seymour Haden (1818–1910) in the Dictionary of National Biography (Supplement Jan. 1901–Dec. 1911 (London [1976]), 180–82; John Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians (London, 1991), 96–9; and Reginald Blunt, An Illustrated Historical Handbook to the Parish of Chelsea (London, 1900), 148–9. For references to Jane Austen and earlier occupants of 62, 63 and 64 Sloane Street, see Thea Holme, Chelsea (London, 1972), 128, 132 and 133.

32 SPCK, Minutes of the General Literature Committee, 20 Oct. 1848, kindly copied by the archivist and librarian, Dr Gordon Huelin, F.S.A.

33 The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot, ed. Larry J. Schaaf (https://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk). 

34 Robert Ellis, Disease in Childhood (London, 1852), 3 and 5. In the same year Ellis also published a 23-page pamphlet On a New Method of Treating Certain Diseases of the Cervix Uteri (London, 1852). On 9 Nov. 1853 The Times reported the publication in London of Robert Ellis’s Childhood in Health and Disease […] adapted for the Use of Young and Inexperienced Mothers.

35 Disease in Childhood, 162–3 and 170.

36 The Lancet, 15 Feb. 1862.

37 Among other Lancet articles by Ellis were: ‘Phases of the uterine ulcer’ (6 Jul., 27 Jul., 24 Aug., 2 Nov. and 9 Nov. 1861); ‘Mr. Ellis’s apparatus for electric cauterization’ (21 Dec. 1861); ‘Radical cure of prolapsus uteri (24 Dec. 1864); ‘On anaesthesia by mixed vapours’ (10 Feb., 12 May 1866); and ‘On a new system of abscess drainage by spiral wire tubes (24 Jul. 1869). In 1868 the Transactions of the Obstetrical Society of London published illustrated descriptions of his ‘new expanding speculum’ and ‘self-retaining tenaculum’ (ix, 86–9).

38 Drawn from his articles on anaesthesia in The Lancet of 10 Feb., 12 May, 30 Jun. and 25 Aug. 1866. An example of his inhaler is in the Wellcome Institute collection in the Science Museum in London, exhibit ref. A625282.

39 The National Society for the Promotion of Education of the Poor opened its teacher training college for women at Whitelands House, Kings Road, Chelsea, in 1842. John Ruskin was a benefactor. In 1931 the college moved to Putney, where it is now part of the Roehampton Institute. The Hans Town School of Industry was founded around 1804 and moved to new premises at 103 Sloane Street in 1849. It prepared girls aged 8 to 16 (many of them orphans) for entering domestic service. It closed in 1886.

40 See ‘The Catalogue’s Account of Itself’ in Household Words, 23 Aug. 1852. Chimborazo is Ecuador’s highest peak (6,310 m), thought at the time to be the highest point on the planet.

41 See the Official Descriptive and Illustrative Catalogue to the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, (London, 1851), i., preface v–vi and 82–7. For Robert Ellis’s publications generally, see the British Library catalogue entries for him, and his entry in the Biographisches Lexikon der hervorragenden Ärtzte aller Zeiten und Völker, ed. Wilhelm Haberling, Franz Hübotter and Hermann Vierordt, ii. (Berlin, 1930), 402.

42 Information kindly provided by the Linnean Society’s librarian and archivist, Gina Douglas.

43 Surrey Advertiser, 1 Dec. 1866. The paper regaled its genteel Surrey readership with sensational stories culled from sources far and wide in a manner too familiar today. The original report of ‘The Crinoline Tragedy’ appeared in The Times on 27 Nov. 1866.

44 The Times, 25 Apr. 1873.

45 The Times, 25 Jan., 3 Feb. and 20 Feb. 1871.

46 The Times, 4 May 1877.

47 The Times, 14 Jun. 1877.

48 ‘Translator’s Preface’ to Family Letters of Richard Wagner (note 8), vi, and enlarged edition (note 8), i. 

49 Her death notice in The Times for 1 Aug. 1936 reads: ‘On July 30, 1936, at Porlock, ADA MATILDA ELLIS, eldest daughter and last surviving child of the late Dr. Robert Ellis, of Sloane Street.’

50 Robert Uther Ellis married Frances Eleanor Sprange on 19 Dec. 1871. He was entered on the Dentists’ Register on 24 Dec. 1878 at 32 Lisson Grove, Marylebone. As a widower, he married again (in a Catholic ceremony) Annie Elizabeth Watson, ten years his junior, on 3 Jun. 1884. A son by one of his marriages, also called Robert Uther Ellis, died in St Thomas, Ontario, Canada, in 1907. Robert Uther Ellis was last registered as a dentist in 1910. He died on 22 Mar. 1921, aged 73.

51 For outline details of Ellis’s education see ‘Official Appointments and Notices’ in The Times, 3 Sep. 1872; Frederic H. Forshall, Westminster School Past and Present (London, 1884), 385; G.F. Russell Barker and Alan H. Stenning, The Record of Old Westminsters i. (London, 1928), 310; and R.R. James, St George’s Pupils’ Register (Royal College of Surgeons, London, 1931), entry number 5010. Among the same intake at St George’s (entry number 5008) was Francis Darwin (1848–1925), son of Charles Darwin.

52 Though born in Strasbourg and fluent in German, Dannreuther learned English from the age of 2 in Cincinnati (where his father had a piano factory), before coming to England in 1863. He was naturalised as a British subject in 1871.

53 Edward Dannreuther, Richard Wagner: His Tendencies and Theories (London, 1873), 1 and 104 (reissued in revised form as Wagner and the Reform of the Opera in 1904).

54 From 1867 the so-called ‘Working Men’s Society’ made ‘quite unobtrusive propaganda’ in London for Wagner and Liszt. Besides Dannreuther the other members were Karl Klindworth, Frits Hartvigson, Walter Bache, Alfred James Hipkins and Walter Kumpel. See Constance Bache, Brother Musicians: Reminiscences of Edward and Walter Bache (London, 1901), 197–201. As Liszt explained to Hans von Bülow on 3 Aug. 1863: ‘Bache: prononcez à l’anglais: Bätsch.’ See Briefwechsel zwischen Franz Liszt und Hans von Bülow, ed. La Mara [Ida Marie Lipsius, 1837–1927] (Leipzig, 1898), 316.

55 See David Cormack, ‘Our English Monster-Man’, The Wagner Journal, vii/3 (2013), 4–5.

56 On the London Parsifal bells, see David Cormack, ‘Parsifal as English Oratorio’, Musical Times, cxlviii (Spring 2007), 89–90.

57 Especially his lengthy entry on ‘Wagner’, in George Grove, ed., A Dictionary of Music and Musicians iv. (London, 1890), 346–74.

58 Alexander William Crawford Lindsay, 25th Earl of Crawford and 8th Earl of Balcarres, b. 16 Oct. 1812 in Muncaster Castle, Yorkshire, educated at Eton and Trinity College Cambridge, d. 13 Dec. 1880 in Villa Palmieri, Florence, Italy. His embalmed body was entombed on 29 Dec. 1880 in the vault of the mortuary chapel he had built at Dunecht House, Aberdeenshire. It was later stolen, recovered, and reinterred in Wigan – another ancestral seat – in 1882. See David Cormack, ‘Of Earls and Egypt: founders of the first London Wagner Societies’, Musical Times, cl (Summer 2009), 27–42, esp. 27–30.

59 Manchester Guardian, 16 Mar. 1872. Wagner had authorised the Patronatscheine (patrons’ certificates) in a letter to Dannreuther of 9 Jan. 1873. At this date the foundation stone of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus had not yet been laid. As we have seen, later that same year Dannreuther anticipated the Ring Festival in 1874. In 1874 itself Hueffer would write that ‘at the present moment the realisation of the scheme at Bayreuth in the spring of 1875 seems no longer doubtful’: Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future (London, 1874), 99–100. The deferrals can hardly have assisted the London Wagner Society’s fundraising efforts. Its treasurer was John Simeon Bergheim (1844–1912). He was born in ‘Turkey in Asia’ (1901 census; in Jerusalem – 1881 census), naturalised British in 1871, domiciled between Vienna and London, innovative photographer, civil engineer and international oil and petroleum entrepreneur. He died following a motor car accident near Ripley, Surrey, on 10 Sep. 1912. He probably deserves a thorough biography, though Mary Shenai’s Finding the Bergheims of Belsize Court (London, 2007) is a fine example of local history research which includes the Bergheims’ encouragement of Anton Rubinstein during his visits to London.

60 See The Times, 12 Nov. 1873. According to Dannreuther himself, ‘The London Wagner Society’s Orchestral Concerts took place Feb. 19, 27, May 9, Nov. 14, Dec. 12, 1873; and Jan. 23, Feb. 13, March 13, May 13, 1874.’ See ‘Wagner’, in Grove (note 57), 363, note.

61 William Ashton Ellis, Life of Richard Wagner (note 15), v.376–7.

62 The Meister, v, no. 20 (14 Nov. 1892), 100–101.

63 Undated (1877) autograph note on a subscription form from Dannreuther to J.W. Davison, in the possession of the present writer. The Albert Hall concert promoters Hodge & Essex remitted £700 to Bayreuth. Wagner returned the £561 raised through Dannreuther’s appeal. See Francis Hueffer, Half a Century of Music in England 1837–1887 (London, 1889), 76–8.

64 Minutes of the Committee of Management of the Western Dispensary, 18 Sep. 1878. Hereafter referred to as ‘Minutes’, they are in the keeping of the library of the Royal College of Physicians (Reference code: GB 0113 MS-WESTERN).

65 In 1881 the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814–1906), possessing inherited wealth said to be second only to Queen Victoria, married her secretary William Lehman Ashmead Bartlett (1851–1921), born a British subject in New Brunswick, USA. 37 years her junior, he took her surname. He was an elected MP for Westminster from 1885 until his death.

66 In 1989 it became a residential nursing home called Kent House, whose 1996 prospectus gives the dispensary’s 1899 staffing and attendance figures.

67 J.E. Smith, St. John the Evangelist, Westminster: Parochial Memorials (London, 1892), 503–5.

68 The quarterly Westminster, i/7 (1 Jun. 1897), documented the history of the Western Dispensary in a series entitled ‘Local Institutions’, though Ellis is not mentioned by name.

69 Minutes (note 64), 15 Feb. 1882.

70 Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner (note 18), iv.665.

71 Ellis, Life of Richard Wagner (note 15), v.376.

72 Supplement published with the Bayreuther Blätter, viii/1 (Jan. 1885). On Armbruster see David Cormack, ‘“A Bayreuth Extension Lecturer”: Carl Armbruster’s Music in the Park’, Musical Times, clii (Spring 2011), 61–86.

73 On Carrie Pringle see Stewart Spencer’s article ‘Er starb, – ein Mensch wie alle’, in the programme for the 2004 Bayreuth Festival, 73–85, reprinted in Wagner, xv/2 (Sep. 2004), 55–77, and additional research by the present author in ‘“Wir welken und sterben dahinnen” – Carrie Pringle and the solo Flowermaidens of 1882’, Musical Times, cxlvii (Spring 2005), 16–31; ‘English Flowermaidens (and other transplants) at Bayreuth’, Musical Times, cl (Winter 2009), 95–102; ‘In the shadow of La Sphinx Cosima’, Musical Times, xlvi (Winter 2015), 81–100.

74 Ellis, ‘Richard Wagner, as Poet, Musician and Mystic’ (note 4), 4.

75 Angelo Neumann, Personal Recollections of Wagner, tr. Edith Livermore (London, 1909), 284–5.

76 Hueffer, Half a Century of Music in England (note 63), 68. Hueffer refers to ‘the foundation of the first Wagner Society in 1873’, but it was in March 1872 that Dannreuther announced its 1873 programme of fundraising concerts for Bayreuth.

77 For Mosely’s biographical details see Cormack, ‘Of Earls and Egypt' (note 58), 30–42.

78 ‘Im Wahnfried-Archiv befindet sich ein Brief von Dr. L. Mosely’: Cosima Wagner: Die Tagebücher 1869–1883, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, 2 vols (Munich, 1976–7), ii.1184.

79 I am grateful to Kristina Unger of the Richard-Wagner-Museum in Bayreuth for searching the archive and supplying a photocopy. The German editors of Cosima’s diaries oddly speculated in their notes (i., 1162) that her entry for 9 Nov. 1870 (‘Todesanzeige eines Freundes, Mosonyi aus Pest’) might be a reference to ‘D.L. Mosely’ when it was clearly a reference to the composer Mihály Mosonyi (1814–70).

80 Julius Cyriax’s report on 24 Mar. 1884 to Glasenapp, cited in Eichner and Houghton, ‘Rose Oil and Pineapples’ (note 2), 33 (tr. slightly altered).

81 The Times, 20 Mar. 1884. A similar advertisement on 8 Mar. gave the name as ‘B.L. Moseley’, not for the first or last time.

82 Cyriax cited in Barbara Eichner and Guy Houghton, ‘Rose Oil and Pineapples’, 33.

83 Louis N. Parker, ‘Lettre d’Angleterre’, La revue wagnérienne, 8 May 1886, 119, note.

84 La revue wagnérienne, 8 Jun. 1886, 176; cf. Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, iii., The Final Years, 1861–1886 (London, 1997), 494, which notes that a ‘valedictory address’ was given to Liszt on 17 Apr. 1886 at the Crystal Palace on behalf of ‘the London Branch of the Richard Wagner Society’, but doesn’t mention by whom.

85 La revue wagnérienne, 8 Feb. 1886, 32, and 8 Jul. 1885, 181.

86 Notice of a General Meeting of the Richard Wagner Society (London Branch) to be held on 25 Jan. 1888 (copy in the archive of the Richard-Wagner-Museum, kindly made available by Kristina Unger). This shows that Mosely made a donation that year to branch funds of £1. 8s. and of £5 to the Bayreuth Patronats-Verein, similar sums being donated to the latter by Walter Bache, Julius Cyriax, Avigdor Birnstingl, ‘A Friend of J. Cyriax, Esq.’, Dr H.J. Plimmer, G. and A. Hartmann, Stuart Daniel, Frank Schuster and C. Westrow Hulse. Commensurate with his aristocracy, the Earl of Dysart donated £10 and £50 respectively. This Patronats-Verein, described as ‘a league, founded in 1885, for the purpose of perpetuating the representations of the Festival Plays at Bayreuth’, seems to have been a successor to the one wound up (to Cyriax’s annoyance) by Wagner in 1881. G.H. Thornton and a Mrs. Castle also donated £50 to it.

87 The Meister, ii, no. 6 (22 May 1889), 71.

88 Ibid.

89 Louis N. Parker, Several of My Lives (London, 1928), 129. Born at Luc-sur-Mer, Calvados, in Normandy, to an American father and English mother, Louis Napoleon Parker (1852–1944) was given his forenames by the French villagers who looked after his sickly mother in her husband’s (typical) absence, and had the child christened in a hurry as they thought him unlikely to live. After an early musical and teaching career he became a playwright and pageant-creator. He retained his US citizenship until he was naturalised British, patriotically, on 8 Jun. 1914.

90 The Times, 22 Jan. 1889.

91 The letter (in the Bayreuth archives) is cited in Eichner and Houghton, ‘Rose Oil and Pineapples’, 37.

92 Mosely continues to be recorded at 55 Tavistock Square in the 1881 and 1891 censuses. The site, like that of Leonard and Virginia Woolf at number 52, suffered bomb damage during the Second World War, and is now occupied by the Tavistock Hotel.

93 Information from Mosely’s birth certificate (registered 1 Jan. 1852); census returns; Michael Jolles, A Directory of Distinguished British Jews, 1830–1930 (London, 2000), 124; and Doreen Berger, ed., The Jewish Victorian: Genealogical Information from the Jewish Newspapers 1871–1880 (Witney, 1999), 407–8. I am also grateful to Hannah Baker, assistant archivist at the Middle Temple, and Theresa Thom, librarian of Gray’s Inn, who helped to establish that Mosely was not called to the Bar at Middle Temple as stated in Joseph Foster’s Men-at-the-Bar: A Biographical Handlist of the Members of the Various Inns of Court (London, 1885), but at Gray’s Inn.

94 The full title reads: Guide to the Legend, Poem and Music of Richard Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’ by Hans von Wolzogen. Translated and illustrated with extracts from Swinburne’s ‘Tristram of Lyonesse’ etc. by B.L. Mosely, LL.B., Barrister-at-Law (Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel; London, J. & A. Schulz-Curtius, 174, New Bond Street, W). Mosely’s footnote is at 10. Another edition appeared in 1902. Hans von Wolzogen published the third edition of his Thematischer Leitfaden durch die Musik zu Richard Wagners´s ‘Tristan and Isolde’ in 1888. The British Library’s catalogue has ‘Tristan und Isolde’. Ein Leitfaden durch Sage, Dichtung und Musik (Leipzig, 1880), but doesn’t help by confusing here and elsewhere Hans Paul von Wolzogen (1848–1938) with his half-brother Ernst Ludwig von Wolzogen (1855–1934).

95 Proceedings of the Musical Association, eighth session, 1 May 1882, 164.

96 Praeger in Wagner as I Knew Him (London, 1892), 293–4; Ellis in The Meister, v, no. 18 (22 May 1892), 62; Chamberlain in the Bayreuther Blätter, xvi/7 (1893), 235, note. Chamberlain refers to an 1884 edition of Wolzogen’s Leitfaden durch die Musik zu ‘Tristan’ and clearly identifies Mosely as the translator.

97 Cited in the Notebook of the Shelley Society: The First Performance of Shelley’s Tragedy, The Cenci (London, 1887, ‘Printed for Private Distribution’). The British Library’s catalogue includes Mosely’s settings of ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’ (1875) and ‘Slumber Song’ (1888). The Cenci (though apparently not in Shelley’s version) received full operatic treatment when Alberto Ginastera’s Beatrix Cenci was premiered in Washington in 1971.

98 Also ‘Printed for private distribution’ but reprinted in Theatre (1 May 1885), 225–30.

99 See Ginger Suzanne Frost, Promises Broken – Courtship, Class, and Gender in Victorian England (Charlottesville and London, 1995), 146.

100 National Archives, Kew, Divorce Court File J77/455.

101 See Vivien Allen, Hall Caine: Portrait of a Victorian Romancer (Sheffield, 1997), 322.

102 See G. Spiller, ed., Papers on Inter-Racial Problems Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress (London and Boston, 1911), xiii and xviii. Other notable representatives at the Congress included W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) of the US National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936).

103 See for instance the account of The Times’s ‘special correspondent’ of the ‘New Types of Players at the Tables’, 24 Mar. 1916: ‘Yet amid the turmoil of the great world war somnolent peace prevails throughout this miniature kingdom.’

104 Death notice in The Times (19 Jul. 1916). Probate documents in the National Archives at Kew, ref. FO 841/178. His death listing in Cyrus Adler, ed., American Jewish Year Book 5677 (Philadelphia, 1916), 324, described him as ‘Mosley [sic], B.L., barrister, formerly judge of Native Tribunals in Cairo’.

105 Mosely’s Last Will and Testament, third codicil dated 22 Sep. 1909. See also The Times (10 Oct. 1916), ‘Wills and Bequests’ 

106 Francis Hueffer, ‘Parsifal’: An Attempt at an Analysis (London, 1884).

107 The Meister, iii, no. 9 (13 Feb. 1890), 3. On Barnby’s performances see Cormack, ‘Parsifal as English Oratorio’ (note 56). Barnby (1838–96) became a committee member of the London branch of the United Wagner Society: see the committee list published in La revue wagnérienne (Mar. 1887), 62, and Musical Times, xxviii (1 Mar. 1887), 129. Apart from its President, Lord Dysart (1859–1935), other notable committee members included Emma Albani (1847–1930), Constance Bache (1846–1903), Charles A. Barry (1830–1915), Mary Davies (1855–1930), Viscountess Folkestone (Lady Radnor, 1846–1929), George Henschel (1850–1934), Lady Huntingtower (Lord Dysart’s mother, Katherine Elizabeth Camila née Burke, c.1817–96), Fredrick Jameson (1839–1916), Alfred H. Littleton (1845–1914), Edward Lloyd (1845–1927), Alexander C. Mackenzie (1847–1935), August Manns (1825–1907), Alma Murray (1854–1945), Louis N. Parker (1852–1944), Carl Rosa (1842–1889), Charles Santley (1834–1922), Frank Schuster (1852–1927), William Shakespeare (1849–1931), and Frederick Westlake (1840–98). The ‘Executive’ comprised Walter Bache (1842–88), Avigdor L. Birnstingl (1853–1924), Julius Cyriax (1840–92), Edward Dannreuther (1844–1905), Charles Dowdeswell (1856–1921), William Ashton Ellis (1852–1919), Alfred Forman (1840–1925), T. Henry Frood (1845–1927), Henry F. Frost (1848–1901), A.J. Hipkins (1826–1903), Edgar F. Jacques (1850–1906), B.L. Mosely (1851–1916), Hubert Parry (1848–1918), Ferdinand Praeger (1815–91) and J.S. Shedlock (1843–1919). According to the Bayreuther Blätter for Mar. 1893 the society’s recent annual report listed a more tight-knit committee comprising the Earl of Dysart (president), Avigdor L. Birnstingl (cashier), Edward Dannreuther, Charles Dowdeswell (honorary secretary), William Ashton Ellis, Alfred Forman, H.F. Frost, B.L. Mosely, Hubert Parry and Louis N. Parker, with W.H. Edwards (dates unknown) named as secretary. (Edwards was possibly the Germanophile William Hayden Edwards.) In all there were 243 members, of whom probably the last survivor was the novelist Eden Phillpotts (1862–1960).

108 Robert Collum (1816–1900) was the medical officer attached to Sir Charles Napier’s military expedition to Sind in 1842 when cholera claimed many of those on board the steamship Zenobia: ‘in addition to attending to the stricken, Dr. Collum also acted as pilot of the vessel’. He was mentioned in dispatches during the Afghan Wars, and acted as interpreter, administrator, surgeon and assay master. He retired from the service in 1857 and went into practice at Surbiton. He held the position of President of the Society of Members of the Royal College of Surgeons for seven years. See his obituaries in The Times (15 Jan. 1900), and in the British Medical Journal (3 Feb. 1900), 291. Warwick Charles Steele (1858–1902) was born in Dorchester, and became M.R.C.S. in 1879. After a spell as Assistant Medical Officer at the St Saviours Infirmary and workhouse in Southwark, he had a general practice in Ealing in the 1890s, but was resident in Hexham, Northumberland, when he died aged 44. Jonathan Nield Cook (1857–1913), born in Rochdale, became the brother-in-law of Madame Blavatsky’s sometime acolyte Mabel Collins (1851–1927). Like Ellis he was a member of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society, until he resigned from it along with T. Subba Row (1856–90) in Jun. 1888 in protest at the publication of Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine. From 1898 to 1906 he was Medical Officer of Health for Calcutta, having previously held a similar post in Madras for several years. See the British Medical Journal (20 Jan. 1906), 165.

109 See contributions to The Lancet (which editorially was sympathetic) from Ellis and others, 18 Apr. 1885, 726–7; 24 Oct. 1885, 765; 21 Nov. 1885, 975–6; 13 Feb. 1886, 326; and 29 Jan. 1887, 238; and the British Medical Journal, 3 Jan. 1885, 49–50; 18 Apr. 1885, 814; 27 Jun. 1885, 1315; 30 Oct. 1886, 843; 27 Oct. 1888, 964–5; 10 Nov. 1888, 1072; and 30 Mar. 1889, 741. Meanwhile, on medical matters proper, according to the London Medical Record, 15 Aug. 1885, 339, in Jun. 1885 Ellis published a paper in The Lancet on the ‘untoward effects’ of injecting osmic acid in cases of neuralgia.

110 British Medical Journal (30 Oct. 1886), 843.

111 Ibid. (27 Oct. 1888), 964–5.

112 British Medical Journal (30 Jan. 1892), 253. See also The Times Law Report for 26 Jan. 1892, published the day after the trial.

113 British Medical Journal (4 Jun. 1892), 1219–20. For the significance of the case in the development of the college see Zachary Cope, History of the Royal College of Surgeons (London, 1959), 112–15. Steele v Savory is still occasionally cited as precedent in cases relating to subpoenas to obtain evidence, for example the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1997. Incidentally, Zachary Cope (1881–1974) was the younger brother of Gilbert Edgar Cope (1874–1959), who would succeed Ellis on the medical staff of the Western Dispensary.

114 Robert Ellis’s last letter to The Times appeared on 4 May 1877, when his address was given as 106 Sloane Street. By the time of the 1881 census 63 Sloane Street had become the home of Anna Maria Duff Gordon, 45-year-old widow of Cosmo Lewis Duff Gordon, and mother of Cosmo Edmund Duff Gordon, the controversial first-class survivor of the Titanic.

115 It was also the home in 1897–98 of the painters William Nicholson (1872–1949) and his then infant son Ben Nicholson (1894–1982).

116 Ernest Charles Ellis was to be the father of Clarence Uther Ellis (1888–1947), and of Geoffrey Uther Ellis (1891–1964), a moderately successful novelist and literary critic in the 1920s and 30s. The Uther middle name had already been handed down to Robert Uther Ellis’s sons by his second marriage, Herbert William Uther Ellis (1885–1929) and Ethelbert Reginald Uther Ellis (1888–1926).

117 William White, History, Gazetteer & Directory of Devon, 1878–79 (Sheffield, 2nd edition, 1878–79), 845–6.

118 Newspaper references kindly provided by Jamie Campbell on behalf of the area librarian for the North Devon Library and Record Office. Captain G.F.M. Molesworth RN was the principal developer of Westward Ho! into a residential and tourist resort. Kingsley, who disapproved of the development, fell out with him.

119 Evelyn Campbell Ellis’s entry in Who Was Who, 1916–28 says only that he was educated ‘privately’.

120 The Illustrated London News (cited in The Leeds Mercury of 21 Aug. 1885) reported that ‘The whole real and personal estate is directed to be sold and (after payment thereout of a few legacies) equally divided among testator’s family.’ In March 1886 William Ashton Ellis, along with his younger brother Reginald Henry Uther Ellis ‘of Inglemere, Lower Tooting (Co. Surr.), mineral water manufacturer’, was assigned his late father’s joint mortgage of a property in Ancton, near Bognor Regis. The property was later reconveyed to its original owner, Frederick Dixon Dixon [sic] Hartland, MP (1832–1909), on 23 May 1889, upon repayment of the principal sum. (Details of the mortgage are held at the West Sussex Record Office in Chichester.) By the time of the 1891 census, Reginald was described (aged 33) as a ‘retired mineral water manufacturer’, living at ‘Inglemere’, Figgs Marsh, Mitcham, with his widowed mother (70), sister Ada (41), and brother Bertram, solicitor’s articled clerk aged 24.

121 Thanks to local historian Maureen Hughes in Westward Ho! for her assistance with information on ‘Sunset’ and Miss Wilkins.

122 Claude Bertram Ellis would survive William Ashton Ellis by five months. It seems he suffered from ‘infantile paralysis’ (polio), and his death on 21 June 1919 at the age of 51 was certified as partly a result of ‘malassimilation of food & gradual starvation’.

123 As reported in The Times on 21 Oct. 1913, ‘Mr. W. L. Burdetts-Coutts unveiled at the Western Dispensary, Rochester-row, Westminster, yesterday afternoon a memorial to Mr. F. C. Morgan, who was for 20 years secretary to the institution.’ Born in 1851, Morgan actually served for 26 years. The plaque is still to be seen on the wall of 38 and 40 Rochester Row.

124 Cited in William Kingsland, The Real H.P. Blavatsky (London, 1928), 20. Kingsland dates the letter to 1886, which must be an error since he gives the correct date of the events as March 1887 on p. 117 of his book.

125 Constance Wachtmeister, ‘At Wurzburg and Ostende’, in H.P.B. – In Memory of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky by some of her pupils (London, 1891), 20. Madame Gebhard was Marie Gebhard or Gebhardt (1831–91), from Elberfeld (now incorporated in Wuppertal). Born in Dublin, Marie married the German industrialist Gustav Gebhard(t), and helped found the German section of the Theosophical Society in Elberfeld in 1884.

126 Constance Wachtmeister, Reminiscences of H.P. Blavatsky and ‘The Secret Doctrine’ (London, 1893), cited in Kingsland, The Real H.P. Blavatsky, 118. This was the second apparently terminal illness from which – miraculously, of course – H.P.B. had recovered. Probably following Kingsland, Sessa gives the wrong year – 1886 – for the incident in Richard Wagner and the English (note 21),  and in ‘At Wagner’s Shrine’ (note 21), she describes it as Blavatsky’s ‘final illness’: H.P.B. actually died four years later.

127 ‘Letters of H.P. Blavatsky to her Family in Russia’, tr. Vera Johnston (Blavatsky’s niece) in the monthly Path, ed. William Q. Judge (Dec 1894–Dec. 1895), accessed online at http://www.blavatskyarchives.com/blavletc.htm. One wonders whether Ellis drew any personal parallel with Gurnemanz massaging Kundry back to life in Act III of Parsifal.

128 ‘A Word from Mr. Sinnett’, in H.P.B. – In Memory of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (note 125), 21–3.

129 For their contribution to Wagner literature, see in particular Cleather and Crump’s Parsifal, Lohengrin and the Legend of the Holy Grail, described and interpreted in accordance with Wagner’s own writings, in four editions (London) between 1904 and 1932. In the first edition (p. 178) they reproduce Wagner’s signature, ‘Ihr dankbarer Buddhist’, from a letter to ‘a friend in Paris’ in Sep. 1859, which ‘came into the hands of Messrs. Schott & Co., of London, only a few months ago.’ In the library at Wahnfried, ‘which, by the courtesy of Frau Wagner, we have been able to examine’, they claim that ‘all the sacred books of the East are there.’ Modern readers can confirm this for themselves from the catalogue which the Wagner Archive Bayreuth has placed online.

130 Alice Cleather, H.P. Blavatsky as I knew her (London, 1923), vii. Sinnett had been even more vituperatively treated in her H.P. Blavatsky: A Great Betrayal (London, 1922).

131 Cleather, H.P. Blavatsky as I knew her, 21.

132 ‘A Word from Mr. Sinnett’, in H.P.B. – In Memory of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (note 125), 23.

133 Addendum by Basil Crump in Cleather, H.P. Blavatsky as I knew her, 64–5.

134 The Meister, i, no. 3 (22 Jul. 1888), 84–5. Cleather and Crump would also aver that ‘This symbology has been reversed since Wagner’s death, Klingsor appearing in a white turban, and the Grail Knights in red.’ Parsifal, Lohengrin and the Legend of the Holy Grail (London, 1904), 134 (not in later editions).

135 Ellis, ‘Richard Wagner, as Poet, Musician and Mystic’ (note 4), 20–21. 

136 Ibid., 15.

137 Ibid., 20–21.

138 Ibid., 25–6.

139 Ibid., 30. The quotation – somewhat out of context – is from ‘On Poetry and Composition’; cf. Ellis’s rendering ten years later in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (note 5), vi. (1897), 145–6.

140 Works of Thomas Carlyle (London, 1896–9), xxvii.21–2. In his later translation, Ellis’s ‘blockheads’ revert to Carlyle’s ‘dunces’.

141 The essay is not separately catalogued under Ellis or Wagner in the British Library. It was reprinted in the French theosophical journal Le Lotus in 1887. According to Sessa in ‘At Wagner’s Shrine’ (note 21), 268 and 350, note, the essay was published in La société nouvelle in 1888. (Sessa was presumably unaware of the earlier publications.) La société nouvelle, published in Brussels between 1884 and 1914, was associated for a time with symbolist writers including Maurice Maeterlinck, and it published some early French translations of Nietzsche.

142 ‘Theosophy in the Works of Richard Wagner’, Transactions of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society, no. 11 (Aug. 1886), 1–2.

143 Ibid., 38.

144 An edited transcription by Michael Gomes of the shorthand notes of Blavatsky’s 1889 talks with English Blavatsky Lodge acolytes, including Ellis, can be accessed at https://www.theosophy.world/sites/default/files/ebooks/secret-doctrine-dialogues.pdf under the title of The Secret Doctrine Dialogues. Ellis’s contributions at the meeting held on 10 Jan. 1889 may represent his last direct engagement with Blavatsky. They include the remark: ‘One is constantly meeting with the absolute poverty of our language for purposes of translation. In German one or two words may require twenty for perfect translation.’

145 In the Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung of January 1896 Mathilde Wesendonck wrote of how the Wesendoncks’ ‘bond of friendship’ with Wagner remained unbroken after his marriage to Cosima: ‘Not one of the Festivals at Bayreuth did we miss.’ 

146 Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, tr. William Ashton Ellis (London, 1905), xl.

147 Ibid., following lxii. Ellis mentions ‘not only the letter facsimiled herewith’ but ‘several others addressed to myself (of no interest whatever to the public)’ (ibid., 373). Not long after receiving it, Ellis had referred obliquely to ‘this lady’s indignant denial, conveyed to me by herself, in a letter’, in The Meister, v, no. 18 (22 May 1892), 62.

148 British Library Manuscript Add.50512.ff.275-6. Ellis was in earnest correspondence with Shaw around the time of the publication of Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, and it’s possible he gave (or lent) Mathilde’s letter to Shaw in 1905. Ernest Newman cites the letter (from Ellis’s facsimile) in his preface to the 2nd edition of Wagner as Man and Artist (London, 1924), vii–viii. In his Fact and Fiction About Wagner (note 9), 278–9, Newman queried Mathilde’s reference to the ‘hinterlassene Schriften’. She could hardly have been referring to the posthumous ‘edition’ (by Wolzogen) of the Entwürfe. Gedanken. Fragmente. Aus nachgelassene Papieren zusammengestellt (Leipzig, 1885), which contains no reference at all to the ‘Bordeaux episode’. Newman believed she could only have been referring to the unpublished manuscript of Mein Leben itself, which he suggests had been made available in manuscript to the Wesendoncks. Shaw doubtless saw all this, but presumably didn’t realise the original of Mathilde’s letter was actually in his possession.

149 Review by ‘Anon’ in Lucifer, ii/8 (15 Apr. 1888), 166–7.

150 The Meister, i, no. 2 (22 May 1888), 53.

151 See The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, i., ed. John Kelly and Eric Domville (Oxford, 1986), 67 and 72 (letters to Katherine Tynan of early May 1888 and c. 15 Jun. 1888). Evelyn Pyne‘s poems were published extensively in Lucifer.

152 Evelyn Pyne’s contributions will be found in The Meister, iii, no. 10 (22 May 1890), 51–2; Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck (note 146), 375; and Life of Richard Wagner (note 18), vi.323, note. Ellis, after 1900 also in Sussex, presumably kept up some acquaintance with her after her marriage to Armitage in 1893.

153 Lucifer, i/4 (15 Dec. 1887), 296–8. The American aesthete Alfred Corning Clark (1844–96) would donate $50,000 to withdraw Hofmann – probably what we would now call an autistic savant – from the alleged danger of child exploitation until he could relaunch a mature pianistic career aged 18.

154 Lucifer, i/6 (15 Feb. 1888), 497–9. In theosophical circles William Charles Eldon Serjeant (1857–1930) was best known for his 1886 edition of William Lilly’s The Astrologer’s Guide, or Anima Astrologiae of 1676. He also wrote The Complete Guide to Company Drill in Close and Extended Order (London, 1884), and his entry in Who Was Who dwells on his military career from 1874; he reached the rank of Colonel, and was knighted in 1907.

155 The late Jonathan Harvey’s buddhistic opera Wagner Dream, premiered in Luxembourg by De Nederlandse Opera in April 2007, draws on this notion.

156 Lucifer, i/6 (15 Feb. 1888), 500–501.

157 Lucifer, ii/16 (15 Dec. 1888), 352.

158 See Louis N. Parker’s report in La revue wagneriènne (Mar. 1887), 61.

159 William Ashton Ellis to Julius Cyriax, letter of 5 May 1887 (unpublished – in the possession of the writer).

160 See Eichner and Houghton, ‘Rose Oil and Pineapples’ (note 2), 37.

161 Ibid.

162 Ellis does seem to have ‘converted’ (his word) the London theosophists Thomas Benfield Harbottle (1857–1904), who became chairman of the Blavatsky Lodge, and Bertram Keightley (1860–1945), to the Wagner Society shortly before his mission to Ostend: see a note to Julius Cyriax of 2 Feb. 1887 preserved in the Richard Wagner Archive in Bayreuth. (Thanks to Barbara Eichorn for this reference.)

163 The Yorkshire-born Zebulon Mennell (1851–1911) was the father of the eminent anaesthetist by the same name (1876–1959). He had treated Robert Louis Stevenson’s haemorrhages in Hyères (Provence) in 1884.

164 Ellis says he was put in communication with Smolian (1856–1911) by Hans von Wolzogen.

165 Life of Richard Wagner (note 15), ii.171, note. Ida Hahn-Hahn (1805–80) gained her dual name through a reluctant marriage to her cousin.

166 The Meister, viii, no. 32 (25 Nov. 1895), 108–10. Ellis’s extracts anticipated the standard translation of Richard Wagner’s Letters to August Roeckel, by Eleanor C. Sellar (Bristol, 1897), by two years: for her rendering of this particular letter see 127–45; cf. Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Briefe, i–ix, ed. Gertrud Strobel, Werner Wolf and others (Leipzig, 1967–2000); x–xxvii, ed. Andreas Mielke, Martin Dürrer and Margret Jestremski (Wiesbaden, 1999–), vii.126–33.

167 Life of Richard Wagner (note 15), v.103. The best known of Wagner’s London-based reflections on Buddhism is his letter to Liszt of 7 Jun. 1855: see Selected Letters of Richard Wagner (note 7), 342–7, and Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Briefe vii.203–9. On his return visit to London in 1877, according to Cosima’s diary for 1 May that year Wagner apparently again had a ‘pleasing impression’ on his first drive through the city, notwithstanding his later (24 May) famous comment on London’s steam and fog as ‘Alberich’s dream come true’. Cosima Wagner: Die Tagebücher (note 78).

168 Letter to Minna Wagner, 6 Mar. 1855, in Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, 328 and Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Briefe vii.42. See also the appendix to this study for the possibility that Wagner might not have been helpful about when he could be expected.

169 Cf. Denis Duveen, ‘James Price (1752–1783), Chemist and Alchemist,’ in the University of Chicago’s journal Isis, xli/3–4 (Dec. 1950), 281–3.

170 Robert Ellis, The Chemistry of Creation (London, 1850), 1–18.

171 Frederick Engels, ‘Dialectics of Nature (1873–86)’, in Marx and Engels, On Religion (Moscow, 1972), 165.

172 Rex Pogson, Miss Horniman and the Gaiety Theatre Manchester (London, 1952), 13. I am grateful to Sheila Gooddie, author of Annie Horniman: A Pioneer in the Theatre (London, 1990), for this reference, especially since I think the description of Ellis as ‘a bachelor of somewhat fussy habits’ rings true. Annie’s brother Emslie (1863–1932) was listed as a member of the London Wagner Society in 1887. Incidentally, Ellis’s brother, Reginald Henry Uther Ellis, was the compiler–editor in 1910 of the Alpine Profile Road Book published by the Cyclists’ Touring Club, of which Bernard Shaw was already an enthusiastic member.

173 The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, iv., ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford, 2003), 175 (letter of 10 Sep. 1905). Symons’ essay was ‘The Ideas of Richard Wagner’, later published in the collection Studies in Seven Arts (London, 1906), 225–98.

174  Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck (note 146), xlii, citing Meysenbug’s Memoiren einer Idealistin.

175 Born in 1816, Meysenbug died in Rome in 1903, but there is no evidence that Ellis had met or corresponded directly with her. Ellis was an infant during her years in London (1852–62).

176 Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, xlii–xliii. Another Minna–Mathilde suppression would be acknowledged by Ellis in 1911, where he remarks in a footnote that the omitted passage ‘will be found in loco in my Introduction to the “Mathilde Wesendonck” volume of the master’s letters [vii–viii]. Personally I see no reason for suppressing it – in fact, the contrary – but in deference to my friend Herr Glasenapp (who presumably complies with Wahnfried wishes) I follow his example in the present place.’ Family Letters of Richard Wagner (note 8), 215, note.

177 Mill, The Subjection of Women (London, 1869), chapter 4.

178 British Journal of Nursing, xxxii (5 Mar. 1904), 198. William Henry Allchin (1846–1912) was consulting physician to the Westminster Hospital as well as the Western and Marylebone General Dispensaries. He was knighted in 1907. The episode is also referred to by Anne Digby, in The Evolution of British General Practice 1850–1948 (Oxford, 1999), 160. She points out that the preferred male candidate had no experience with women and children. (Digby refers erroneously to the ‘Westminster Dispensary’.) Ethel Miller Vernon was born in Westminster in 1869. Her obituary appeared The Times on 5 Feb. 1936: ‘She qualified L.S.A. in 1897 from the London School of Medicine for Women, and later took the M.D. degree of London University. There were very few women doctors in those days, and Dr. Vernon was among the pioneers who showed by their example of courage and devotion that there was a definite sphere for women’s work in the medical profession. […] While taking a lively interest in the advance of women’s education and entry into the professions, she did not associate herself with the more active side of the suffrage movement.’

179 The anonymous author was Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer (1802–78). Published by the Religious Tract Society, The Peep of Day sold half a million copies in its first (1836) edition. An ‘updated’ version is still in print today (ISBN 1857925858).

180 Life of Richard Wagner (note 15), vi.7–8 and note.

181 Robt. J. Ashton, from whom William Ashton Ellis derived his middle name, was the solicitor Robert John Ashton (1813–60), son of an affluent ‘Retired Builder Proprietor of Houses & Fund Holder’ (1851 census). Like Robert Ellis, he was living in Brompton at the time of his marriage to Maryanne in 1849. After his death Marianne [sic] re-married in 1866. Her second husband was the artist Theodore Edwin Thrupp (1830–73). William Ashton Ellis maintained contact with his godmother, and holidayed at her home in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight in 1887. (Unpublished letter from Ellis to Julius Cyriax, 5 May 1887, in the writer’s possession.) Marianne Thrupp died aged 65 in 1893, and Ellis was named as an executor of her will. It was probably during a visit to her in 1889 that he had his photo taken at Hughes & Mullins’ studio in Ryde.

182 Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition i. (note 41), vi.

183 Ellis, The Chemistry of Creation (note 170), 440–41.

184 Ibid., 267.

185 La revue wagnérienne (Mar. 1887), 61. ‘The London Wagner Society has begun the new year boldly and in good heart. We presently have one hundred and seventy members who for the most part are well known in the musical world. We hope to increase this number to a thousand during the year so as to be able to give performances, or at least ONE performance of a Wagnerian drama: it’s not good intentions we lack, but money. The Society is also occupied with founding a Wagnerian journal to appear quarterly, since though the revue wagnérienne is well known in England we lack an English journal of our own.’

186 The Meister, i, no. 1 (13 Feb. 1888), 1.

187 The Meister, ii, no. 5 (13 Feb. 1889), 1.

188 The Meister, i, no. 1 (13 Feb. 1888), describing ‘Our Frontispiece’ below the Contents on the unnumbered reverse of the title-page. For Bernard Shaw’s comment, see Bernard Shaw, London Music in 1888–89: As Heard by Corno di Bassetto (London, 1937), 49. Despite this inauspicious reference, the American-born stage and costume designer Percy Anderson (1851–1928) became associated with Gilbert and Sullivan, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Hugh Walpole and Edward Elgar. His obituary in The Times (31 Oct. 1928) remarked that he ‘was an enthusiastic lover of music, and he had a keen sense of humour, which came out in occasional caricatures’.

189 The Meister, v, no. 18 (22 May 1892), 61–4. The Praeger controversy is examined later in this study.

190 The Meister, i, no. 1 (13 Feb. 1888), 16.

191 Ibid., 18.

192 Ibid., 19.

193 The Meister, vi, no. 23 (13 Aug. 1893), 104.

194 The Meister, vi, no. 24 (25 Nov. 1893), 120–21.

195 The Meister, ii, no. 8 (7 Nov. 1889), 146.

196 Shaw, London Music in 1888–89 (note 188), 181. Charles Dowdeswell (1856–1921) was the elder son of Charles William Dowdeswell (1832–1915), a London art-dealer and owner, with Charles and his younger son Walter (1858–1929), of Dowdeswells Gallery on New Bond Street from 1878 until it closed in 1912. The gallery was best known for its promotion of Whistler’s work. Charles jr was a friend and supporter of Ellis, and was described in his death notice in The Times for 21 Nov. 1921 as having been ‘for many years secretary of the Wagner Club’ [sic]. Carl Armbruster (1846–1917) was born in Andernach am Rhein but came to London in 1863 and took British citizenship in 1868. He developed a versatile career as a London-based pianist, arranger, conductor and lecturer. Between 1886 and 1894, Armbruster was a musical assistant (repetiteur and offstage conductor) at six consecutive Bayreuth Festivals, working alongside (amongst others) Engelbert Humperdinck, Wilhelm Kienzl, Heinrich Porges, Arthur Smolian, Richard Strauss, Siegfried Wagner and Felix Weingartner. In 1901 he became musical advisor to the London County Council’s Parks and Open Spaces Committee, an appointment which lasted until his retirement through ill-health in 1914. Pauline Cramer (1858–?) was the original (unvoiced) Grail-bearer at Bayreuth in 1882. Born in Munich, she performed as a concert singer in London from 1881, and appeared at Covent Garden as Venus in 1884 and Isolde in 1892. She sang in the first English performance of Schumann’s Genoveva on 8 Mar. 1887. In the 1890s she gave concert performances in London and other English cities under Hans Richter, and was frequently accompanied in recitals by Armbruster throughout Britain and in the USA. Ernest Newman lamented the necessity of lecture-recitals on the Ring given by Armbruster and Cramer in Manchester as late as 1906 (Manchester Guardian, 7 Feb. 1906). Cramer’s 1909 recording of ’A die Leyer’ appears on the EMI Classics compilation Schubert Lieder on Record I (1898–1939). After the Musical Times noticed her in a Brahms recital with Armbruster in Bradford in May 1912, no further trace of her seems discoverable in England; she seems to have retained her German citizenship, and may have returned to her homeland with the approach of war. For more about Armbruster and Cramer see Cormack, ‘“A Bayreuth Extension Lecturer”’, (note 72), 61–86. 

197 Shaw, London Music in 1888–89, 177.

198 Ibid., 309–10.

199 Ibid., 310.

200 Each bound volume in the current Wagner Society’s library seems to be inscribed in pencil ‘Mrs Bernard Shaw’, though Shaw didn’t marry until 1 Jun. 1898.

201 Bernard Shaw, Music in London 1890–94 (London, 1932), i.133–4, and London Music in 1888–89 (note 188), 325.

202 In which this article was appearing.

203 ‘Musical Mems: By The Star’s Own Captious Critic’, The Star (15 Feb. 1889), in Bernard Shaw, How to Become a Musical Critic, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London, 1960), 140. Pauline Cramer has already been mentioned. Bessie Bellwood (1856–96) 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, no. 13 (13 Feb. 1891), 5.

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

206 Ibid., 23–4.

207 See David Cormack, ‘“Consider Judaism again” – a rediscovered translation’, in Wagner, xxii/3 (Nov. 2001), 157–63. 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 30–33; cf. Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (note 5), 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 (note 8), xlii.

210 ‘Translator’s Preface’, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works vi. (1897), viii.

211 Bayreuther Blätter xvi/5-6 (May 1893), 159–67.

212 The Meister, iv, no. 14 (22 May 1891), 64.

213 Life of Richard Wagner (note 15), iv.387–8. 

214 The Meister, iv, no. 15 (14 Jul. 1891), 96.

215 Shaw, Music in London 1890–94 (note 201), i.203.

216 The Meister, iv, no. 16 (14 Nov. 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), 214, note. The reference is to the 1st edition of The Quintessence of Ibsenism (London, 1891), 161 (appendix).

218 Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, in Major Critical Essays (London, 1932), 21–2, note. 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 1st published edition, dated Jun. 1891, this footnote appeared on p. 14.

219 Musical Times, xxxiii (1 Apr. 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 Musical Times, xxxiv (1 Apr. 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 III prelude are still occasionally programmed. Ellis also ‘puffed’ Kunihild in the Daily Graphic on 1 Mar. and in The Athenæum on 4 Mar. 1893 according to an autograph letter to T.L Southgate of 8 Mar. 1893 (in the present writer’s possession).

221 The Meister, v, no. 17 (13 Feb. 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 (note 15), iv.217.

223 Ibid., v.442.

224 The Meister vi, no. 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 Aug. 1895).

227 J.A. Fuller Maitland, Masters of German Music (London, 1894), 281–9; cf. The Meister, vi, no. 22 (22 May 1893), 68.

228 The Meister, v, no. 20 (14 Nov. 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 of Richard Wagner, 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 (note 15), vi.53–5. 

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.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 (Leipzig, 1894–1911), i. (1894), 397, referring to 36, note.

235 Life of Richard Wagner i.32, note. 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 (Jun. 1905), 398. See also Eichner and Houghton, ‘Rose Oil and Pineapples’, note 2, 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, ed. John Deathridge, Martin Geck and Egon Voss (Mainz 1986), 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 Feb. 1892 in the archives of the Richard Wagner Museum in Bayreuth. Thanks to Barbara Eichner for drawing this to my attention.

241 The Meister, vii, no. 28 (25 Nov. 1894). A report of the dinner-recital appeared in the Daily Chronicle on 7 Nov.

242 The Times (21 Aug. 1896). Ellis’s letter published on 1 Aug. 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 Aug. 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 (note 201), ii.217–8.

244 The Meister, iv, no. 16 (14 Nov. 1891), 101. Ferdinand Christian Wilhelm Praeger was born (though Ellis was sceptical about this) in Leipzig on 22 Jan. 1815, was naturalised British in 1854, and died in London on 2 Sep. 1891.

245 Life of Richard Wagner (note 15), v. (1906), 377. Outside the Wagner Society, Praeger had been the translator of Emil Naumann’s five-volume History of Music (London, n.d.[1890?] – first published in 24 parts commencing Dec. 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 Jan. 1874).

247 Life of Richard Wagner v.377.

248 William Ashton Ellis to Julius Cyriax, letter of 5 Mar. 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, xxxiii (1 Apr. 1892), 324–5, and Ellis in The Meister, v, no. 18 (May 1892), 64.

250 Life of Richard Wagner (note 15) v.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 Ibid., 392.

252 Life of Richard Wagner vi.4. Wagner was quite amused, and described himself afterwards as Richard Wagner the elder: Sämtliche Briefe (note 166), 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, no. 19 (21 Jul. 1892), 96.

255 Shaw, Music in London 1890–94 (note 201), ii.35.

256 Ibid., iii.147–8.

257 The Meister, v, no. 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 (note 18), 354–8, cf. Field, Evangelist of Race (note 18), 137.

261 Ibid., 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 (note 15), v.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, no. 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 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             http://www.wrightanddavis.co.uk/GD/BLYTHLPRAEGERW.htm.

266 Oddly, though the other volumes carry pencilled or crayoned marks initialled by Ellis himself, the penultimate issue, no. 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 volume 8 of The Meister for the address, and R.R. James, St George’s Pupils’ Register (note 51) for the unlikely statement that Ellis was ‘in practice’ at Herne Hill in 1898.

268 Manchester Guardian (18 Mar. 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 (note 129), 184.

270 The Meister, iii, no. 9 (13 Feb. 1890), 35.

271 Death notices in The Times (9 Mar. 1892) and the Jewish Chronicle (2 Mar. 1894).

272 The Times (1 Feb. 1917).

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

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

275 Musical Times, li (1 Nov. 1910), 729; Parker, Several of My Lives (note 89), 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 (note 21), 348–9, note; and material in the possession of the current Wagner Society. The current London 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 (14 Dec. 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 (note 15), 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 (note 217). Sessa in Richard Wagner and the English (note 21), 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), 14–15. In fact, Newman never legally changed his name.

278 Life of Richard Wagner, v.431.

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

280 Ibid., 204.

281 Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’ (note 29), 85–7. Ellis wrote to Shaw on 11 Dec. 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 p. 6. Also in Ernest Newman, ed. Peter Heyworth, Berlioz, Romantic and Classic (London, 1972), a collection which takes its title from the essay in question, with the footnote at p. 23.

283 H.T. Finck, Wagner and His Works (London, 1893), i.vii; The Meister, vi, no. 24 (25 Nov. 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 (note 201), ii.231, and iii.151.

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

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

288 Ernest Newman, A Study of Wagner (note 217), ix.

289 Life of Richard Wagner (note 15), vi.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.144, note.

292 Shaw, Music in London 1890–94 (note 201), ii.151.

293 Letter to George Bernard Shaw of 11 Dec. 1904, in Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’ (note 29), 86.

294 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (27 May 1900), 8. The ’eminent musician’ was Sir George Alexander Macfarren (1813–87): see Jeremy Dibble, C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music (Oxford, 1992), 141.

295 Letters to Wesendonck et al., tr. William Ashton Ellis (London, 1899), 166, note.

296 ‘Books of the Week’, The Times (21 Sep. 1899).

297 Pall Mall Gazette (22 Aug. 1898).

298 Pall Mall Gazette (19 Jan. 1900).

299 Richard Wagner’s Prose Works (note 5), viii. (1899), xx–xxi.

300 The Times (15 Apr. 1901).

301 Life of Richard Wagner (note 15), 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”.’ Musical Times, xxxv (1 Feb. 1894).

302 Bayreuther Blätter, xv/2–3 (Feb.–Mar. 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 Roger Allen, ‘“Die Weihe des Hauses”: Houston Stewart Chamberlain and the Early Reception of Parsifal’ in A Companion to Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’, ed. William Kinderman and Katherine R. Syer (Rochester, NY, 2005), 245–76, and ‘“All Here is Music”: Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Der Ring des Nibelungen’ in wagnerspectrum (2006), no. 1, 155–77.

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 Dec. 1904 (manuscript corrections and additions absorbed), cited in Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’ (note 29), 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, 1888–94). See Walker, Franz Liszt, iii. (note 84), The Final Years, 1861–1886, 424, note.

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, xiv/1 (Mar. 2001), 35–51. The St Pancras vestryman Bernard Shaw was passionately involved.

310 Letter of 20 Mar. 1908, cited in Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’ (note 29).

311 Ellis would not have known that Richard Wagner regarded Glasenapp (1847–1915) as little more than a mediocre biographer – see Cosima’s diary (note 78) for 14 Jul. 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 (note 21), 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 (note 217), 385, note.

314 Life of Richard Wagner (note 15), iii. (1903), 410–12.

315 Ellis adduces Sir Anderson Critchett’s evidence in the Life of Richard Wagner vi.(1908), 53–4. Ellis had checked the facts for himself with Dannreuther and Critchetts in Apr. 1904.  

316 Letter of 3 Dec. 1904, cited in Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’ (note 29), 84. 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, xl/2 (Feb. 1956).

317 Life of Richard Wagner vi. (1908), 425, note, 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 28-page ‘Postscript concerning Wagner’s eyestrain’, 1908, reprinted from the Life, 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), 22–23, note. Ellis says that Lodge (1851–1940) delivered his lecture, ‘Radium and its meaning’, in Birmingham on 6 Jan. 1904. It was in fact given on 5 Jan., and reported extensively in The Times the following day. Ellis’s citations differ minutely from those in The Times.

319 Ellis, ‘Wagner and Schopenhauer’ (note 28), 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 Wesendonck et al. (note 295), ‘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, tr. William Ashton Ellis (London, 1909), i., ‘Translator’s Preface’, xvi.

325 Ibid., xviii. John Deathridge’s observation comes from his 1991 edition of the Family Letters of Richard Wagner (note 8), 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 (note 148), 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 (note 10), 182, note. 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 repr.), 183, note.

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 Newman, Wagner as Man and Artist, 4.

330 Richard Wagner's Prose Works (note 5), viii. (1899), ‘Translator’s Preface’, xxi.

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

332 Translator’s Preface to the Family Letters of Richard Wagner, xlix, 1991 edition (note 8). 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 Some have misinterpreted David Irvine’s The Badness of Wagner’s Bad Luck 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’, 59, note. 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.’ Musical Times, lii (1 Jun. 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 Jun. 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 of Richard Wagner, 1991 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 Nov. 1911), 87–8. 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 Nov. 1907, in Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters 1898–1910, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London, 1972), 723. According to Rex Pogson, Miss Horniman (note 172), 13, Annie Horniman was behind the campaign and ‘obtained the help’ of Shaw.

337 Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’ (note 29), 86.

338 Unpublished draft cited ibid., 91–3.

339 Ibid., 84.

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

341 Bernard Shaw to Annie Horniman, 27 Jul. 1906, cited in Rex Pogson, Miss Horniman, 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, l/100 (Dec. 1940), 546–72.

343 Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’, 97.

344 Ibid., 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 Cormack, ‘Antipodean: the Converse Life of David Irvine’ (note 320).

345 Shaw, How to Become a Musical Critic (note 203), 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 Oct. 2006). Speyer (1839–1934) had previously introduced Ellis to Elgar: for Christmas 1902 he sent the composer a complete set of Richard 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 Oct. 2006).

348 Cormack, ‘“Or is he a mere translator?”’ (note 29), 98.

349 Richard to Minna Wagner (note 324), i.xviii.

350 Family Letters of Richard Wagner (note 8), 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 of Richard Wagner, viii. The English Review was founded in 1908 by Ford Madox (son of Francis) Hueffer.

352 The British Library catalogue has Richard Wagner and [sic] Theodor Apel (Letters edited by Theodor Apel the Younger), Leipzig, 1910. This is almost certainly the original German edition published by Breitkopf & Härtel, Richard Wagner an Theodor Apel.

353 Letter dated 9 Aug. 1912 sent from Spetchley Park, Worcester, to a Mr Downing, whose price of 10/6 for a ‘Wagner-Ellis thing’ Newman found ‘much too dear. The volumes are only published at 12/6! About 5/6 per volume is as much as I feel inclined to pay.’ Autograph in the writer’s possession.

354 Ellis’s own description in his 1911 census return.

355 Laurance left £70.15s to William Ashton Ellis.

356 Ernest Newman, ‘Wagner’s Prose Works’, Musical Times (1 May 1913), 297.

357 The Meister, viii, no. 32 (25 Nov. 1895), 126–7, note. Carl Friedrich Glasenapp (born 3 October 1847 in Riga) lectured in German language and literature at the Riga Polytechnic from 1898 to 1912. In 1912 he was appointed to the Russian City Council for Riga; he was also an honorary citizen of Bayreuth. Ellis could not have known that after Glasenapp’s death his library, and indeed the contents of his entire workroom in Riga, were to be ‘rescued, amid unspeakable difficulties and danger, from the bolshevik terror-regime’ by his foster-child and amanuensis Helene Wallem (1873–1953), and taken to Bayreuth. See Rosa Eidam, Bayreuther Erinnerungen (Ansbach, 1930), 77 and 97.

358 William Ashton Ellis, ‘Wagner contra Militarism’, Musical Times (1 Jul. 1915), 396–8. Though awarded the Iron Cross in April 1915, Chamberlain did not renounce his British citizenship until 9 August the following year. By contrast with Ellis, Bernard Shaw remained equivocal about Chamberlain’s intellectual status until as late as 1936: see Stanley Weintraub, Bernard Shaw 1914–1918: Journey to Heartbreak (London, 1973 [1971]), 103. Even Thomas Mann had confessed some admiration in 1918: ‘As far as I am concerned, I admit that to me his behavior seems comparatively excusable, yes, justified.’ Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, tr. Walter D. Morris (New York, 1983), 414–15; Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Frankfurt, 1988), 554.

359 ‘In Germany To-Day. IX.- Output of War Literature. England the Only Foe. (From a Neutral Correspondent)’, The Times (31 May 1915).

360 William Ashton Ellis, ‘Wagner and Latter-day France’, Musical Times (1 Aug. 1915), 463–6. The article appeared below the vocal stave of La Marseillaise.

361 Richard Wagner's Prose Works (note 5), v. xiv-xviii, and vi. xiii-xxviii.

362 William Ashton Ellis, ‘Nietzsche Unveiled’, Musical Times (1 Sep. 1915), 525.

363 Minutes (note 64), 16 Feb. 1915.

364 Minutes, 15 Mar. 1915.

365 Minutes, 19 Apr. 1915.

366 Minutes, 20 Dec. 1915.

367 Minutes, 6 Jan. 1916. The Times’ deaths column for 10 Jan. 1957 would record the death aged 80 of Edith Clara Morgan, ‘only daughter of the late FRANCIS CHARLES and CLARA MORGAN, of Westminster’, suddenly on 8 Jan. 1957.

368 The Red Cross, Mar. 1918, 26.

369 William Ashton Ellis, ‘Wagner contra Militarism’, 396. The Esmarch triangular bandage was invented by Friedrich von Esmarch (1823–1908), army surgeon-general in the Franco-Prussian war, who in 1881 founded a course of battlefield first aid lectures modelled on the St John’s Ambulance classes in England. Esmarch’s lectures were in turn translated into English by Helena Augusta Victoria, Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, as First Aid to the Injured (London, 1882, running to a 7th edition in 1907).

370 The eighth of Robert Ellis’s nine children, Evelyn Campbell Ellis was born in 1865 and qualified as a solicitor in 1891. As an advocate he was sent in 1896 from Hong Kong to the Straits Settlements (Singapore), and he was acting Attorney-General there in 1912–13. By royal appointment he was an unofficial member of the Straits Legislative Council from 1908 until his retirement in 1916. He was made a Knight Bachelor in the Birthday Honours announced on 22 Jun. 1914. During the war he worked in government offices in London, and denounced disaffection among the Fifth Indian Light Infantry at Singapore in Feb. 1915 as having been engineered by German agents. His legal methods seem to have been blunt: ‘Neither in Court nor in Council would he brook opposition, and from the very definite way he had of stating his propositions he came early to be known as Cocky; one can say this, because he always insisted on his friends calling him by that name, which was one of affection, and intended only to sum up his very forceful character. Sir Evelyn was a monster for work, and if genius really is an infinite capacity for taking pains, then he possessed it.’ See Walter Makepeace, Gilbert E. Brooke, Roland St.J. Braddell, ed., One Hundred Years of Singapore, i. (London, 1921), 236, with Evelyn Ellis’s portrait photograph facing. In many respects this description brings to mind his elder brother. Evelyn Campbell Ellis died suddenly at Bournemouth on 1 Sep. 1920, aged 54, six months after his second marriage. His obituary appeared in The Times on 4 Sep. 1920 and he was buried at Brompton Cemetery on 6 Sep. (He is not to be confused with the Hon. Evelyn H. Ellis (1843–1913), a pioneer of early motoring in England and a founder of the Royal Automobile Club.)

371 The slip relates to a letter from Leroy apologising for his unintentional failure to acknowledge copyright, published in the Spectator of 31 Oct. 1925 following a review of his book. L. Archier Leroy seems to be little known, but Paul Nash’s ‘Wagner Suite’ of four cubist wood engravings produced for his book are widely noticed. Herbert Reginald Barbor was a short-lived (1893–1933) writer and journalist. Apart from a song, ‘The Curse’, set by Eugene Goossens (1919, op. 22), and a short drama about Cecil Rhodes later adapted as an early television screenplay, So Much to Do (1938), his renown failed to outlive the 1930s.

372 Gerald Jackson, ed. David Simmons, First Flute (London, 1968), 8.

373 Thomas Lear’s younger brothers Walter (1894–1981), Professor of Saxophone at Trinity College of Music, and Hiram (1888–1969), clarinettist in Dan Godfrey’s band in Bournemouth, are mentioned in Who’s Who in Music (London, 1949–50), 126, and in Stephen Lloyd, Sir Dan Godfrey (London, 1995), 177, note, and 21, as well as Gerald Jackson’s memoirs.

374 It would be recorded in 1933 by the Edison Bell Winner company with the Black Dyke Mills Band’s principal cornet Owen Bottomley. The printed music is still available through Schott/Boosey & Hawkes (BH 83269).

375 The Swiss-born bibliophile and autograph collector Alfred Bovet (1841–1900) was a financial patron of La revue wagnérienne and the Bayreuth Stipendiary Fund. In 1866 he married into the Peugeot family of Valentigney when it was manufacturing bicycles – its first motor car was produced in 1889. Bovet began his autograph collection in 1869. Most of it was catalogued and sold in 1887, though the musical items were sold in 1911. See Philippe Godet, Scripta Manent. A propos de la collection d’autographes de Alfred Bovet (Neuchâtel, 1887), 8, 17–18. Hans von Wolzogen left a fauning tribute ‘Alfred Bovet. 10 November 1900’, in the Bayreuther Blätter, xxiv/1–3 (Jan.–Mar. 1901), 87.

376 ‘We have lately seen some remarkably good and artistic likenesses of Richard Wagner, painted on stained glass by a Member of our Society, Mr J.S. Sparrow, of 13 Cantlowes Road, Camden Square, N.W. They are executed as panels for windows, or as circular plaques for hanging in same, and, we understand, run to about two guineas each.’ Notes, The Meister v, no. 17 (13 Feb. 1892).

377 The text is also reproduced by Deathridge in his edition of the Family Letters (note 8), xli, note. He describes the description of Ellis as the ‘author’ of the Prose Works as ‘a slip of nearly Freudian dimensions’.

378 Minutes (note 64), 21 Jan. 1919.

379 Ellis’ brother Claude Bertram Ellis would be buried there a few months later, in Jun. 1919. Douglas Uther Ellis had been buried there in 1898, aged 38, and Florence Mabel Ellis in 1916, aged 53. According to the parish records their mother, however, does not seem to have been buried there after her death in 1900. Burials at St Nicholas were discontinued after 1927 ‘for the protection of the public health’ (see the London Gazette, 30 Aug. 1927). The memorials in the graveyard, though it is still neatly mown, have been afflicted by weathering, wartime bombing and more recent vandalism.

380 Minutes, 21 Jan. 1919.

381 Parker, Several of My Lives (note 89), 129–30.

382 Reported in [unattributed] ‘The Wagner Association’, Musical Times, li (1 Nov. 1910), 729–30.

383 Hadow, Richard Wagner (note 284), 150, note.

384 These are offered as a footnote, as it were, to the footnotes of Stewart Spencer’s exhaustive researches in the British Library of sources concerning Wagner’s visits to London. See in particular Wagner, iii/4 (Oct. 1982), 98–123.

385 It was Watts who, after a long delay, tried unsuccessfully to return to Wagner in April 1840 the score of his Rule Britannia overture, which the Philharmonic Society had rejected on account of its being based on a ‘commonplace’ theme. See Stewart Spencer, ‘Wagner autographs in London’, Wagner, iv/4 (Oct. 1983), 101. Watts died in Jersey on 28 Dec. 1859, aged 81.

386 Letter to Ferdinand Praeger, 1 Feb. 1855, in Sämtliche Briefe (note 166), vi.341.

387 Letter to Ferdinand Praeger, 2 Mar. 1855, in Sämtliche Briefe vii.36.

388 The Manfred overture was given at the Crystal Palace under August Manns on Saturday 17 Apr. 1880. The Times merely noted that ‘The ordinary series of Crystal Palace concerts came to a close last Saturday week, when the programme included a fine performance of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, a march from Gounod’s Polyeucte, and a symphonic prelude to Byron’s Manfred, by Mr. F. Praeger.’ (The Times, 27 Apr. 1880.) When it was given again on 8 Dec. 1888 the London Correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (10 Dec. 1888) was less than enthusiastic: ‘At yesterday’s Crystal Palace Concerts two orchestral works well deserving of notice were performed, one the composition of the young Englishman (or perhaps he would rather be called a Scotchman) Mr. Hamish M’Cunn; the other of a German professor long resident in England, Mr. Ferdinand Praeger. Mr. Praeger’s work is very ambitious. It is a preamble to “Manfred”, and depicts more or less successfully the struggle of Manfred with the Spirits, his desire for self-forgetfulness, the vision of Astarte, Manfred’s renewed yearning for total oblivion, and finally his death. The work suggests in many respects (in particular by the systematic use of leading motives) the method of Wagner, whose earnest admirer Mr. Praeger is known to be. It was coldly received. Not so the spontaneous, fiery ballad of Mr. M’Cunn on the subject of “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” which was applauded to the echo.’ The largest and best curated collection of Praeger’s manuscripts and holographs is the Ferdinand Praeger Collection of Scores, circa 1829–1891, Music Library, The State University of New York at Buffalo.

389 The German-born Theodore Thomas (1835–1905) came to the US at the age of 10. In 1862 he formed the Theodore Thomas Orchestra which he conducted until it was dissolved in 1888. He founded the New York Wagner-Verein in 1872. If he wrote to Praeger it may have been as conductor (1877–91) of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. It was Thomas who had commissioned Wagner’s 1876 ‘American Centennial March’ (and was greatly disappointed at the return on his $5000 investment). In 1891 he became the founding director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He was a major promoter in the US of contemporary European music.