Part 3

It would be absurd to deny, of course, that "Salome" is in many ways a noteworthy and brilliant--and, for the curious student of musical evolution--a fascinating work. Its musicianship--the sheer technical artistry which contrived it--is stupefying in its enormous and inerrant mastery. The quality of its inspiration and its success as a musico-dramatic commentary, which have been the prime considerations in this discussion, have been measured, of course, by the most exacting standards--by the standards set in other and greater works of Strauss, in comparison with which it is lamentably inferior in vitality, sincerity, and importance. In at least one respect, however, it compels the most unreserved praise; and that is in the case of its superlative orchestration. Strauss has written here for a huge and complicated body of instruments, and he has set them an appalling task. Never in the history of music has such instrumentation found its way onto the printed page. Yet, though he requires his performers to do impossible things, they never fail to contribute to the effect of the music as a whole; for the dominant and wonderful distinction of the scoring lies precisely in the splendour of its total effect, and the almost uncanny art with which it is accomplished. One finds upon every page not only new and superlative achievements in colouring, unimagined sonorities, but a keenly poetic feeling for the timbre which will most intensify the dramatic moment. The instrumentation, from beginning to end, is a gorgeous fabric of strange and novel and obsessing colours--for in such orchestral writing as this, sound becomes colour, and colour sound: it is not a single sense which is engaged, but a subtle and indescribable complex of all the senses; one not only hears, one also imagines that one sees and feels these tones, and is even fantastically aware of their possessing exotic and curious odours, vague and singular perfumes. It is when one turns from the bewildering magnificence of its orchestral surfaces to a consideration of the actual substance of the music, the fundamental ideas which lie within the dazzling instrumental envelope, that it is possible to realise why, for many of his most determined admirers, this work marks a pathetic decline from the standard set by Strauss in his former achievements. The indisputable splendour of this music, its marvellous witchery, are incurably external. It is a gorgeous and many-hued garment, but that which it clothes and glorifies is a poor and unnurtured thing. There is little vitality, little true substance, within this dazzling instrumental envelope; and for any one who is not content with its brave exterior panoply, and who seeks a more permanent and living beauty within, the thing seems but a vast and empty husk. It is not that the music is at times cacophonous in the extreme, that its ugliness ranges from that which is merely harsh and unlovely to that which is brutally and deliberately hideous; for we have not to learn anew, in these days of post-Wagnerian emancipation, that a dramatic exigency justifies any possible musical means that will appropriately express it: to-day we cheerfully concede that, when a character in music-drama tells another character that his body is "like the body of a leper, like a plastered wall where vipers crawl ... like a whitened sepulchre, full of loathsome things," the sentiment may not be uttered in music of Mendelssohnian sweetness and placidity. It is because the music is so often vulgarly sentimental, when it should be terrible and unbridled in its passion, that it seems to some a defective performance. For sheer commonness, allied with a kind of emotionalism that is the worse for being inflated in expression, it would be hard to find, in any score of the rank of "Salome," the equal of the two themes which Strauss uses so extensively that they stand almost as the dominant motives in the score: the theme which is associated with _Salome's_ desire to kiss the lips of _John_, and that other theme--it has been called that of "Ecstasy"--which begins like the _cantabile_ subject in the first movement of Tschaikowsky's "Pathetic" Symphony, and ends--well, like Strauss at his worst.

An astounding score!--music that is by turns gorgeous, banal, delicate, cataclysmic, vulgar, sentimental, insinuating, tornadic: music which is as inexplicable in its shortcomings as it is overwhelming in its occasional triumphs.

We may now consider that other aspect from which, I have said, the candid observer is compelled to regard this remarkable work.

Those over-zealous friends of Strauss who have sought to justify the offensiveness of "Salome" by alleging the case of Wagner's "Die Walküre," and the relationship that is there shown to exist between the ill-starred Volsungs, are worse than misguided; for however unhallowed that relationship may be, it conveys no hint of sexual malaise. _Siegmund_ and _Sieglinde_ are superbly healthful and untainted animals: to name their exuberant passion in the same breath with the horrible lust of _Salome_ is stupid and absurd.

Let us not confuse the issue: The spectacle of a woman fondling passionately a severed and reeking head and puling over its dead lips, is not necessarily deleterious to morals, nor is it necessarily an act of impudicity; it is merely, for those whose calling does not happen to induce familiarity with mortuary things, horrible and revolting. No matter how, in practice on the stage, the thing may be ameliorated, the fact,--the situation as conceived and ordered by the dramatist,--is inescapable. It has been said that this scene is not really so sickening as it is alleged to be, since the stage directions require that _Salome's_ kisses be bestowed in the obscurity of a darkened stage. But to that it may be replied, in the first place, that darkness does little to mitigate the horror of the scene as conveyed by the words of _Salome_--so little, in fact, that _Herod_, who was anything but a person of fastidious sensibilities, is overcome with loathing and commands her despatch; and, secondly, that the stage directions expressly declare for an illumination of the scene by a "moonbeam" ... which "covers her with light," just before the end, while she is at the climax of her ghastly _libido_.

Mr. Ernest Newman, a thoroughly sane and extremely able champion of all that is best in Strauss, has said, in considering this aspect of "Salome," that "the whole outcry against it comes from a number of too excitable people who are not artists, and who therefore cannot understand the attitude of the artist towards work of this kind. Human nature," he goes on, "breaks out into a variety of forms of energy that are not at all nice from the moral point of view--murder, for example, or forgery, or the struggle of the ambitious politician for power, or the desire to get rich quickly at other people's expense. But because these things are objectionable in themselves and dangerous to social well-being there is no reason why the artist should not interest us in them by the genius with which he describes them. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde was a dangerous person whom, in real life, we should want the police to lay by the heels; but sensible people who read the story do not bristle with indignation at Stevenson for creating such a character; they simply enjoy the art of it. The writing of the story did not turn Stevenson into a monster of deception and cruelty, nor does the reading of it have that effect on us. Things are different in art from what the same things would be in real life, and an artist's joy in the depiction of some dreadful phase of human nature does not necessarily mean that, as a private individual, he is depraved, or that the spectacle of his art will make for depravity in the audience. Now Wilde and Strauss have simply drawn an erotic and half-deranged Oriental woman as they imagine she may have been. They do not recommend her; they simply present her, as a specimen of what human nature can be like in certain circumstances.... The hysterical moralists who cry out against 'Salome' ... have a terrified, if rather incoherent, feeling that if women in general were suddenly to become abnormally morbid, conceive perverse passions for bishops, have these holy men decapitated when their advances were rejected, and then start kissing the severed heads in a blind fury of love and revenge in the middle of the drawing-room, the respectable £40 a year householder would feel the earth rocking beneath his feet. But women are not going to do these spicy things simply because they saw _Salome_ on the stage do something like them, any more than men are going to walk over the bodies of little children because they read that Mr. Hyde did so, or murder their brothers because Hamlet's uncle murdered his."

Now that, of course, is irresistible. But Mr. Newman's gift of vivacious and telling statement, and his natural impatience with the cant of those who hold briefs for a facile morality, have here led him, as it seems to me, astray. To deny that an intimate and vital relationship exists between the subject chosen by an artist and its probable effect upon the public is to yield the whole case to those who hold that this relationship, in the case of the theatre (and, of course, the opera house), is merely casual and inconsequential: it is to yield it to the upholder of the stage as an agent of "relaxation," an agent either of mere entertainment or mere sensation. It is not unlikely that Mr. Newman would be the first to admit that, if the prime function of art can be postulated at all, it might be conceived to be that of enlarging the sense of life: as an agency for liberating and mellowing the spirit: as an instrument primarily quickening and emancipative. "The sadness of life is the joy of art," said Mr. George Moore. The sadness of life, yes; and the evil and tragedy, the terror and violence, of life: for the contemplation of these may, through the evoking of pity, nourish and enlarge the spirit of the beholder. But are we very greatly nourished by the contemplation of that which must inevitably arouse disgust rather than compassion? I do not speak of "morality" or "immorality," since there is nothing stable in the use or understanding of these terms. But those aspects of life which sicken the sense, which are loathsome rather than terrible--are they fit matter for the artist?

It is a much mauled and much tortured point, and I, for one, am not unwilling to leave the matter in the condition in which Dr. Johnson left the subject of a future state, concerning which a certain lady was interrogating him. "She seemed", recounts the admirable Boswell, "desirous of knowing more, but he left the matter in obscurity."

To return, in conclusion, to Strauss the musician: Where, one ends by wondering, is the earlier, the greater, Strauss?--the unparalleled maker of music, the indisputable genius who gave us a sheaf of masterpieces: who gave us "Don Quixote," "Ein Heldenleben," "Zarathustra," "Tod und Verklärung." Has he passed into that desolate region occupied in his day by Hector Berlioz, for whom a sense of the tragic futility of talent without genius did not exist--the futility of application, of ingenuity, of constructive resource, without that ultimate and unpredictable flame? Is not Strauss, in such a work as "Salome," but another Berlioz (though a Berlioz with a gleaming past)? Is he not here as one disdainfully indifferent to the ministrations of that "Eternal Spirit" which, in Milton's wonderful phrase, "sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases"?

A PERFECT MUSIC-DRAMA

I

Somewhat less than a century ago William Hazlitt, whose contempt for opera as a form of art was genuine and profound, observed amiably that the "Opera Muse" was "not a beautiful virgin, who can hope to charm by simplicity and sensibility, but a tawdry courtesan, who, when her paint and patches, her rings and jewels are stripped off, can excite only disgust and ridicule." It may be conceded that matters have improved somewhat since that receding day when Hazlitt, whose critical forte was not urbanity, uttered this acrimonious opinion. The opera is doubtless still, as it was in his day, ideally and exquisitely contrived "to amuse or stimulate the intellectual languor of those classes of society on whose support it immediately depends." Yet the shade of Hazlitt might have been made sufficiently uncomfortable by being confronted, half a century after his death, by the indignant and voluble apparition of Richard Wagner. To tell the truth, though, Wagner is scarcely the opera-maker with whose example one might to-day most effectually rebuke the contempt of Hazlitt. While the Muse which presided at the birth of the Wagnerian music-drama can certainly not be conceived as "a tawdry courtesan," neither can she be conceived as precisely virginal, persuasive by reason of her "simplicity" and "sensibility." Wagner, for all his dramatic instinct, was, as we are growing to see, as avid of musical effect, achieved by whatever defiance of dramatic consistency, as was any one of the other facile and conscienceless opera-wrights whom his doctrines contemned. The ultimate difference between him and them, aside from any questions of motive, principle, or method, is simply that he was a transcendent genius who wrote music of superlative beauty and power, whereas they were, comparatively speaking, Lilliputians.

Mr. William F. Apthorp, speaking of the condition of the Opera before Wagner's reforms were exerted upon it, observes that it "remained (despite the efforts of Gluck) virtually what Cesti had made it--not a drama with auxiliary music, but a _dramma per musica_--a drama for (the sake of) music." Now it was, of course, the passionate aim of Wagner to write music-dramas which should be dramas with auxiliary music, rather than dramas for the sake of music; yet it is becoming more and more obvious that what he actually succeeded in producing, despite himself, were dramas which we tolerate to-day only because of their transfiguring and paramount music. In view of recent developments in the modern lyric-drama which have resulted from both his theories and his practice, it may not be without avail to review certain aspects of his art in the perspective afforded by the quarter-century which now stretches lengtheningly between ourselves and him.

II

It is, of course, a truism to say that the corner-stone of Wagner's doctrinal arch was that music in the opera had usurped a position of pre-eminence to which it was not entitled, and which was not to be tolerated in what he conceived to be the ideal music-drama. He conceived the true function of music in its alliance with drama to be strictly auxiliary--an aid, and nothing more than an aid, to the enforcement, the driving home, of the play. As Mr. Apthorp has excellently stated it, his basic principle was that "the text (what in old-fashioned dialect was called the libretto) once written by the poet, all other persons who have to do with the work--composer, stage-architect, scene-painter, costumer, stage-manager, conductor and singing actors--should aim at one thing only: the most exact, perfect, and lifelike embodiment of the poet's thought." Wagner's chief quarrel with the opera as he found it was with the preponderance of the musical element in its constitution. If there is one principle that is definite, positive, and unmistakable in his theoretical position it is that, in the evolution of a true music-drama, the dramatist should be the controlling, the composer an accessory, factor--like the scene-painter and the costumer, ancillary and contributive. If it can be shown that in the actual result of his practice this relationship between the drama and the music is inverted--that in his music-dramas the music is supreme, both in its artistic quality and in its effect, while the drama is a mere framework for its splendours--it becomes obvious that he failed (gloriously, no doubt, but still definitively) in what he set out to achieve. It was his dearest principle that, in Mr. Apthorp's words, "in any sort of drama, musical or otherwise, the play's the thing." Yet what becomes of "Tristan und Isolde," of "Meistersinger," of "Götterdämmerung," when this principle is tested by their quality and effect? Would even the most incorruptible among the Wagnerites of a quarter of a century ago, in the most exalted hour of martyrdom, have ventured to say that in "Tristan," for example, the play's the thing? Imagine what the second act, say, divorced from the music, would be like; and then remember that the music of this act, with the voice-parts given to various instruments, might, with a little adjustment and condensation, be performed as a somewhat raggedly constructed symphonic poem. The test is a rough and partial one, no doubt, and it is subject to many modifications and reservations. It is not to be disputed, of course, that here is music which is always and everywhere transfused with dramatic emotion, and that its form is dramatic form and not musical form; but is there to-day a doubt in the mind of any candid student of Wagner as to the element in this musico-dramatic compound which is paramount and controlling?

It should be remembered that what Wagner thought he was accomplishing, or imagined he had accomplished, is not in question. He conceived himself to be primarily a dramatist, a dramatist using music solely and frankly as an auxiliary, as a means of intensifying the action and the moods of the play; and this end he pathetically imagined that he had achieved. Yet it is becoming more and more generally recognised and admitted, by the sincerest appreciators of his art, that as a dramatist he was insignificant and inferior. Had any temerarious soul assured him that his dramas would survive and endure by virtue of their music alone, it is easy to fancy his mingled incredulity and anger. He was not, judged by an ideal even less uncompromising than his own, a musical dramatist at all. It is merely asserting a truth which has already found recognition to insist that he was essentially a dramatic symphonist, a writer of programme-music who used the drama and its appurtenances, for the most part, as a mere stalking-horse for his huge orchestral tone-poems. He was seduced and overwhelmed by his own marvellous art, his irrepressible eloquence: his drama is distorted, exaggerated, or spread to an arid thinness, to accommodate his imperious musical imagination; he ruthlessly interrupts or suspends the action of his plays or the dialogue of his personages in order that he may meditate or philosophise orchestrally. He called his operas by the proud title of "music-dramas"; yet often it is impossible to find the drama because of the music.

It was not, as has been said before, that he fell short, but that he went too far; he should have stopped at eloquent and pointed intensification. Instead, he smothered his none too lucid dramas in a welter of magnificent and inspired music--obscured them, stretched them to intolerable lengths, filled up every possible space in them with his wonderful tonal commentary, by which they are not, as he thought, upborne, but grievously overweighted. Mr. James Huneker has remarked that Wagner was the first and only Wagnerite. As a matter of sober fact, he was one of the most formidable antagonists that Wagnerism ever had.

It appears likely that his lyric-dramas will endure on the stage both in spite of and because of their music. The validity and persuasiveness of "Tristan" and the "Ring" as music-dramas, as consistent and symmetrical embodiments of Wagner's ideals, seems less certain than of old. But the music, _qua_ music, is of undiminished potency--it is still, regarded as an independent entity, of almost unlimited scope in its voicing of the moods and emotions of men and the varied pageant of the visible world; and it will always float and sustain his dramas and make them viable. Gorgeous and exquisite, epical and tender, sublimely noble, and earthly as passion and despair, it is still, at its best, unparalleled and unapproached; and, as Pater prophesied of the poetry of Rossetti, more torches will be lit from its flame than even enthusiasts imagine. Nothing can ever dim the glory of Wagner the conjurer of tones. His place is securely among the Olympians, where he sits, one likes to fancy, apart--a little lonely and disdainful. In his music he is almost always, as Arnold said of the greatest of the Elizabethans, "divinely strong, rich, and attractive"; and at his finest he is incomparable. No one but a master of transcendent genius, and the most amazingly varied powers of expression, could have conceived and shaped such perfect yet diverse things as those three matchless passages in which he is revealed to us as the riant and tender humanist, the impassioned lyrist, and the apocalyptic seer: the exquisite close of the second act of "Die Meistersinger," where is achieved a blend of magically poetic tenderness and comedy for which there are analogies only in certain supreme moments in Shakespeare; the tonal celebration of the ecstatic swoon of _Tristan_ and _Isolde_ in the midst of which the warning voice of the watcher on the tower is borne across an orchestral flood of ineffable and miraculous beauty; and that last passage to which this wonderful man set his hand, the culminating moment in the adoration of the Grail by the transfigured Parsifal--music that is as the chanting of seraphs: in which censers are swung before celestial altars. Of the genius who could contrive such things as these, one can say no less than that, regarded from any æsthetic standpoint at all, he is, as the subtle appreciator whom I have quoted said of a great though wayward poet, "a superb god of art, so proudly heedless or reckless that he never notices the loss of his winged sandals, and that he is stumbling clumsily when he might well lightly be lifting his steps against the sun-way where his eyes are set."

III

As music-dramas, then, appraised by his own standard, the deficiency of Wagner's representative works must be held to be the subordination of the dramatic element in them to a constituent part--their music--which should be accessory and contributive rather than essential and predominant. This tyranny is exercised chiefly--and, let it be cheerfully owned, to the glory of musical art--through Wagner's orchestra: that magnificent vehicle of a tone-poet who was at once its master and its slave. Yet Wagner sinned scarcely less flagrantly against his most dearly held principles in his treatment of the voice. He conceived it to be of vital importance that in the construction of the voice-parts no merely musical consideration of any kind should be permitted to interfere with the lucid utterance of the text. His singers were to employ a kind of heightened and intensified speech, necessarily musical in its intervals, but never musical at the expense of truthfully expressive declamation. Yet in some of the vocal writing in his later works he is false to this principle, for he not infrequently permits himself to be ravishingly lyrical at moments where lyricism is superfluous and distracting when it is not impertinent. Again he is too much the musician; too little the musical dramatist.