the world owed him a living. In support of this belief, he borrowed money from everybody who was good for a loan ― men, women, friends, or strangers. He wrote begging letters by the score, sometimes groveling without shame, at others loftily offering his intended benefactor the privilege of contributing to his support, and being mortally offended if the recipient declined the honor.
7 What money he could lay his hand on he spent like an Indian rajah. No one will
ever know ― certainly he never knows ― how much money he owed. We do know that his greatest benefactor gave him $6,000 to pay the most pressing of his debts in one city, and a year later had to give him $16,000 to enable him to live in another city without being thrown into jail for debt.
8 He was equally unscrupulous in other ways. An endless procession of women
marched through his life. His first wife spent twenty years enduring and forgiving his infidelities. His second wife had been the wife of his most devoted friend and admirer, from whom he stole her. And even while he was trying to persuade her to leave her first husband he was writing to a friend to inquire whether he could suggest some wealthy woman ― any wealthy woman ― whom he could marry for her money.
9 He had a genius for making enemies. He would insult a man who disagreed with
him about the weather. He would pull endless wires in order to meet some man who admired his work and was able and anxious to be of use to him ― and would proceed to make a mortal enemy of him with some idiotic and wholly uncalled-for exhibition of arrogance and bad manners. A character in one of his operas was a caricature of one of the most powerful music critics of his day. Not content with burlesquing him, he invited the critic to his house and read him the libretto aloud in front of his friends.
10 The name of this monster was Richard Wagner. Everything I have said about
him you can find on record ― in newspapers, in police reports, in the testimony of people who knew him, in his own letters, between the lines of his autobiography. And the curious thing about this record is that it doesn’t matter in the least.
11 Because this undersized, sickly, disagreeable, fascinating little man was right all
the time, the joke was on us. He was one of the world’s greatest dramatists; he was a great thinker; he was one of the most stupendous musical geniuses that, up to now, the world has ever seen. The world did owe him a living. What if he did talk about himself all the time? If he talked about himself for twenty-four hours every day for the span of his life he would not have uttered half the number of words that other
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