'Wir welken und sterben dahinnen': Carrie Pringle and the solo Flowermaidens of 1882

Musical Times, Spring 2005 by Cormack, David

[...]

Next day [5 February 1882] they all discussed the future casting of Parsifal. It is not only possible but probable that Carrie Pringle's name cropped up. She was by then studying in Italy, chaperoned by her parents, and there is a distinct likelihood that Wagner - at first unbeknown to Cosima - asked Levi to invite her to Venice for an audition.36

[...]

On the evidence of their daughter Isolde, Wagner and Cosima had a fierce altercation next morning [13 February 1883], probably over Carrie Pringle's summons to Venice. Nothing else can account for Cosima's enigmatic behavior in the next few hours, or for Dr. Keppler's strange aside in his report on the cause of death.* The end had been hastened, he said, by 'mental excitements.' He went on: 'The actual attack that so abruptly terminated the master's life must have been similarly occasioned, but it is not for me to engage in conjecture on the subject.' Why did Keppler underline the word 'must'? Had some member of the family or household staff let slip what everyone by then preferred to forget?

Wagner rose very late that morning. 'I must take care of myself today,' he told his manservant, Georg, while getting dressed. Despite his malaise, he took coffee with Cosima - and that, it seems clear, was when they quarrelled over Carrie Pringle's forthcoming visit.37

Gregor-Dellin did draw on some identifiable if unacknowledged sources. These include the nearly first-hand account of Wagner's death by Paul von Joukowsky (echoed in the close second-hand account by Hugh Reginald Haweis).38 The text of Keppler's report is given in an endnote on p.884 in Gregor-Dellin's German edition, referenced with the asterisk above. Its source is not mentioned, but the book concerned is listed in Gregor-Dellin's bibliography on p.895. Decades before Gregor-Dellin, Ernest Newman had at least acknowledged Henry Peri's Richard Wagner in Venedig as the source of Keppler's report, though he was unaware of who 'Henry Perl' was.39 The matter has been explained more recently:

Wagner already knew the local doctor, Friedrich Keppler, from an earlier visit to the city. Keppler had a practice in Venice, where he worked as a surgeon and gynaecologist, but spent the summer months running a practice in Wildbad. [...] The travel writer and journalist Henriette Perl ('Henry Perl', 1845-1915) prefaced her short story Richard Wagner in Venedig: Mosaikbilder aus seinen letzten Lebenstagen [Augsburg 1883] with a letter from Keppler explaining his assessment of Wagner's illnesses. [...] Keppler's findings were noted on 15 February 1883, when the body was embalmed,* and were published only in Henriette Peri's short story. Since Perl was herself in dire financial straits at this time, these findings need to be treated with the utmost caution, not least because their authenticity has never been properly established.40

The still ongoing speculation about the relationship between Wagner and Carrie Pringle can be traced to an article, 'Absturz aus Klingsors Zaubergarten', by Herbert Conrad in the Nordbayerischer Kurier (supplement Heimatbote 8) in 1978, re-worked by Curt von Westernhagen in The Musical Times the following year.41 What Martin Gregor-Dellin accepted as established fact in 1980 Geoffrey Skelton regarded as 'too tenuous for full acceptance' by 1982.42 By contrast there is incontrovertible evidence for Wagner's continuing and late erotic attachment to Judith Gautier, who turned up for the 1882 Parsifal performances - but there is also, unfortunately for the scandalmongers, incontrovertible evidence for Cosima's ability to cope with it. The facts concerning Carrie Pringle are less demonstrable.