Richard Wagner and copyright law
Translated by Elena Berezantseva
Illustration by ChatGPT
In 1913, musical theatres around the world celebrated the 30th anniversary of Richard Wagner's death. The sad anniversary also brought good news: in Germany, copyright protection for the composer's works was about to expire. This meant that, from the following year, Wagner's works could be performed freely on stage, without the consent of Wagner's heirs and without the payment of royalties in their favour. And Parsifal, the maestro's last opera, which had been staged exclusively in Bayreuth, could now be performed on any stage in the world.
In the past, payments from theatres to Wagner's heirs have been impressive. The royalties for the production of The Ring of the Nibelung, for example, amounted to 15 per cent of the box-office receipts, of which two-thirds went to Cosima Wagner, the composer's widow, and one-third to Alfred Gross, a friend, treasurer and lawyer of the Wagner family, who took over the copyright protection.
Cosima lobbied for a special law that would have allowed the family wallet to be replenished for another twenty years, but the Reichstag did not support her initiative. The fiasco was expected, but still unpleasant. The annual Wagner Festival in Bayreuth required a large financial investment. So Cosima decided not to take any active steps and not to cancel the copyright agreements with the opera houses. If they continued to pay, it was their choice. If they stopped, she would pretend that she was not really counting on their money!
By this time, ten of Richard Wagner's operas had been performed on the stages of the Russian Empire. They were performed more often than the works of any other foreign composer, and Wagner's popularity was second only to that of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The management of the Russian Imperial Theatres paid the Wagner family considerable royalties.
Over the first ten days of 1914, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg and Parsifal were performed in the capital of the Empire. For the remaining four months of the theatre season, almost forty more performances of Wagner's works were planned. Suddenly it occurred to the officials of the Imperial Theatres Office that they had still not terminated the copyright agreements with Mr Gross and the publisher Schott – should they continue to pay them royalties?
A file in the State Historical Archive of St Petersburg entitled “On the termination of copyright to the works of the composer Richard Wagner” shows that Mr Lebedev, legal councillor to His Imperial Majesty's Cabinet, helped to resolve the matter.
Referring to the German Copyright Act of 1901 and the 1913 Convention between Russia and Germany for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the lawyer reassured the music officials that the payment of royalties “does not seem to be obligatory now” and that the contracts with Wagner's heirs “become null and void due to the loss of their rights to the subject matter of the contracts”.
It seemed that the matter had been resolved: the money did not go to Bayreuth, but remained in the Russian treasury. A month later, however, it became clear that Richard Wagner had no regard for the law or basic business ethics during his lifetime. The maestro was constantly in debt and at the same time wanted to live in luxury. He resold the librettos of his works and opera scores, even unfinished ones, several times. The number of people who had rights to the composer's musical legacy grew steadily.
After Wagner's death, some “buyers” behaved honourably. For example, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the maestro's main patron, transferred his rights to the operas to the Bayreuth Festival, which belonged to Wagner's family. Yet the publisher Franz Schott – the same Schott who resented Richard's excessive financial demands and advised him to find either the richest banker or a prince with millions – traded Wagner's scores in the hope of recouping the cost of their acquisition. As a result, the right to distribute the score of the music drama Tristan and Isolde passed to Paul Neldner of Riga, one of the largest music publishers in the Russian Empire.
Mr Neldner, who had no rights to the production itself, made a business out of renting out musical material. The Directorate of the Imperial Theatres of the Russian Empire paid him one hundred roubles for each performance of “Tristan and Isolde”. At that time, the composer's remuneration for writing the opera ranged from five hundred to one and a half thousand roubles. Based on this, a hundred roubles from a performance for simply renting sheet music can be considered an over-reasonable fee.
The archive file mentioned above reveals an interesting fact. In February 1914, Neldner, referring to the expiry of Wagner's copyright, offered the Imperial Theatre Directorate to buy the score of Tristan for five hundred roubles or to continue to use it for half the "rent". Nikolai Malko, the director of the Imperial Theatre Orchestra, an excellent conductor but little versed in the law, begged the Directorate to buy the score. After all, it was in excellent condition and contained all the notes the musicians needed! This time they forgot to consult a lawyer and paid the publisher.
There would have been no need to regret the five hundred roubles spent if Russian audiences had been able to continue to enjoy the brilliant production by Vsevolod Meyerhold at the Mariinsky Theatre. But the First World War broke out before long. Tristan and Isolde, like other Wagner operas, like all things German, was boycotted. And when the war ended, the timeless drama of love and passion did not fit in with the ideology of Soviet society.
It was not until 2005 that the score, sold by publisher Paul Neldner to the Directorate of the Imperial Theatres, was taken out of the archives. Conductor Valery Gergiev and director Dmitry Chernyakov staged Wagner's musical drama Tristan and Isolde at the Mariinsky Theatre.