Richard Wagner: His Life and Works from 1813 to 1834

Mary Burrell’s biography of Richard Wagner is only a fragment, but is nevertheless regarded today as one of the most significant contributions to Wagner scholarship. Mary Burrell (1850-1898) was the daughter of Sir John Banks, the Royal Doctor in Ireland. She spoke and wrote German fluently, and was a devoted, but critical admirer of the music of Richard Wagner. The then current hagiographical literature on the ‘Master’ did not satisfy her, and so for years she collected all the documents she could that would help her paint a true picture of Wagner’s life. Wagner’s widow Cosima had set herself the same task at the same time, though her goal was diametrically opposed to Burrell’s. The latter sought the truth, while Cosima wanted censorship. Everything that did not conform to her idealistic view of her deceased husband and his works was to be either corrected or destroyed.

It is thanks to Mary Burrell that many important Wagner sources were saved for posterity. Her primary source was Natalie Bilz (née Planer), the illegitimate daughter of Wagner’s first wife, Minna, by a previous relationship. Natalie was living at the time in a house for underprivileged women in Leisnig near Dresden. She had been more or less compelled to give back many documents to Wagner’s heirs, but she still possessed the early correspondence between Wagner and Minna. In Mary Burrell, she found someone who shared her own distrust of Cosima, and thus it was that Burrell was able to buy Natalie’s collection of autographs. When she died in 1898, Burrell had only completed the first part of her planned biography. Her husband, Willoughby Burrell, published this fragment that same year as a monument to her labours. Only one hundred copies were made; the paper contains Wagner’s signature as a watermark; the book has 64 facsimiles and many other illustrations, all of an astonishingly high quality; and it was printed in elephant folio.

Even over a hundred years after its publication, Mary Burrell’s biography is considered essential to Wagner scholarship on account of the information that it contains. However, it is also extremely rare. We do not know how many of the hundred copies made are still in existence. The book is known to be held by a few libraries, and is considered a great rarity by the antiquarian trade. Our reprint is the first ever made. Practical considerations have led us to publish the book in black and white, and in reduced format (the enormous size of the type means that everything remains easily legible). Since the few colour facsimiles in the original were in effect black-and-white illustrations printed on a coloured background, the reader loses only the tint here, but nothing of the content. The present reprint makes this significant source of information on Wagner’s life and work available at a mere fraction of the market price of the original, in the hope that it will at last reach the wider public that Mary Burrell’s work deserves.

Chris Walton

Zentralbibliothek Zürich