Part 4
But Fricka is right, after all. If Wotan had listened to her advice, he would have come out of all his difficulties much better. The fount of misfortune, as far as Fricka is concerned, was her failure to brush the dust off her own garments in the day of the first temptation. Loge knew where to touch the quick of her woman's weakness. "Will the gold make pretty ornaments for women?" she asked; and Loge, who, being the spirit of evil, well knew the root, declared that there was nothing which it could do better than that. And so Fricka stood actionless while Wotan went down to Niebelheim to rape the gold from Alberich.
Short-sighted Fricka! Mean-spirited Fricka! True woman Fricka! When she has tacitly consented to the theft of the gold, what does she? Seeing her poor old one-eyed husband struggling to escape the consequences of his guilt by creating a race of free agents to make the atonement for him, she pounces upon him with a stern demand that Siegmund shall die for violating her standards of virtue. But who ever expected to find a consistent logic in the mind of fair woman, even a resident of high Olympus?
Having turned upon the hand that sought to benefit her, what does she? She joins the procession of the futile and disappearing gods. Fricka mounts her ram-hauled chariot and slides away into the past, only to reappear in the chaste and general conflagration of the last great scene. She has served her purpose. She has made the drama of "Siegfried" imperatively necessary.
Siegmund being slain in answer to her inexorable demand, Brünnhilde must be punished for trying to carry out Wotan's original plot. Of course that is well enough. If Brünnhilde had had her way, there never would have been any drama of "Siegfried" and consequently no "Götterdämmerung." But without Siegfried things cannot go on. Sieglinde must hie her to the dark forest in the east, there to sob out her sweet but shadowed young life, and leave to the whining Mime the nursery task of rearing the youthful Volsung.
So much for the eternal feminine in the celestial circle of the trilogy. Poor little Gutrune! She's worth the whole lot of them. She at least was a gentle, soulful, loving woman, who was not troubling her spirit with a desire for gold, but who was possessed of an honest ambition to be the wife of the most important gentleman of the district. Social position was not what she sought, for she had that already. She was a Gibichung, which was the same in the Rhine valley as being a Biddle in Philadelphia. No; what she yearned for was distinction. She would have been a lady of the White House, if possible, had she lived in our time. Anyhow, she was a woman with whom one can sympathize, for she really liked Siegfried.
Last but not least of the "Rheingold" coterie are the giants. Fafner is an admirable character. He knows just what he wishes and he goes straight to the point. First of all, he wishes to possess himself of Freia because she would serve two purposes; namely, to keep house and cook for him and at the same time to preserve his youth. But the lumbering Fasolt, that overgrown blond basso, must go and fall in love with the simpering little soprano leggiere. How came Wagner not to remember the law of operatic tradition?
It is only another instance of his lack of the sense of humor. Fafner very properly disposes of Fasolt and goes off with the gold. And here follows one of the genuinely poetic touches of the tragedy. This scaly miser who has the hoard, the tarnhelm, and the ring, and who simply snuggles them up in a cave without reaping a single benefit from their possession, is put out of the drama by Siegfried, the embodiment of careless youth, hot blood, and human passion. Possibly Wagner thought of this, and possibly he did not; but at any rate we may do so, and thus intensify our poetic mood.
What effect has the disappearance of the futile gods upon the dramatic development of the story? Wotan is the hero of "Rheingold" and "Walküre." These two sections of the drama are concerned with the adventures of a god in search of a method of government. The hero of "Siegfried" and "Götterdämmerung" is Siegfried, a mortal in search of a _raison d'être_. The former plays bad politics and learns too late that in statecraft as in business honesty is the best policy. The latter follows the inspirations of youth and nature, and comes to grief because he is the Parsifal of the north, a "guileless fool."
Musically "Rheingold" is a vorspiel. It introduces a few fundamental themes, rings the harmonic changes on them, and makes way for the real first movement, "Die Walküre." Of this work the music is the salvation, for its second act is dramatically so feeble, so ill-made, and so prosy that it would drive people out of the theatre were it not for its melodic richness. Fricka's lecture of Wotan, one of the vital scenes of the whole trilogy, is dramatically a bore; but musically it is strong and interesting, and it approaches its end with one of the most imposing phrases conceived by the wizard of Bayreuth, the phrase with which Fricka intones the words:--
"Deiner ew'gen Gattin Heilige Ehre Schirme heut' ihr Schild."
"The holy honor of thy eternal spouse as a shield this day protects her." That is Wagner's one proclamation of the majesty of Fricka and the chastity of the law which she represented. It is the finest musical thought in the whole second act of "Die Walküre," for, after all, the much-vaunted "Todesverkündigung" is a situation rather than a theme. The brass melody of it is not genuinely imposing, especially when the impersonator of Brünnhilde does not know how to appear mysterious and foreboding. The fight in the clouds is one of Wagner's impracticable conceptions. When it is perfectly executed, it is unconvincing; when it is not, it is quite incomprehensible, and sometimes it is even comic.
Musically "Die Walküre" consists of the first and last acts, and the first really begins with the duet between Siegmund and Sieglinde. All that goes before is preparation, interesting by reason of its musical narrative, but much too prolix, as all Wagner's explanations are. Siegmund's narrative is three times as long as is necessary to afford a reason for the hatred of Hunding. It would have been more subtle and more dramatic, anyhow, to let Hunding's thirst for vengeance rest entirely upon his discovery of the interest of his wife and the visitor for each other.
But let that pass. The duet of Siegmund and Sieglinde is generally accepted as one of Wagner's great achievements in sustained melody. The love-song is babbled now by musical babes. It is very pretty, and it has a manly ring, which we may all admire. But the third act of "Die Walküre" dwells from beginning to end in the sunlit regions of genius.
The feebleness of Wotan here loses itself in a sea of infinite pathos. The power of the magic hand of Wagner in the creation of dramatic atmosphere is seen in the tumultuous storming of the Valkyrs through the inky air. "How now, ye secret black and midnight hags; what is't ye do?" The salutation of Macbeth to the witches pales before the lightnings of the winged steeds. Into the midst of this festival of the furies plunges the ill-assorted pair, Brünnhilde and Sieglinde.
Thundering upon their traces comes Wotan, the irate god, whose well-meant efforts to escape the complications wrought by his own misdeeds have been thwarted by the erring wish maiden. Hearken to the old scold berating his frightened daughters: "Out with ye, hussies. Your sister has been disobedient. Speak to her, and I'll whip ye, too."
Slinking away into the waning storm, they leave the father and the foolishly loving daughter together. The mighty seething of the musical sea subsides, leaving a deep underrunning swell of feeling. The billowing rush of the Valkyr theme gives way to the plaintive flow of the motive of Brünnhilde's pleading, one of the most poignantly expressive melodies ever conceived by Wagner. How it wells upward in the tender voices of the wood wind!
The stricken Valkyr grovels at the feet of the perplexed Wotan. What will he do with her? The two engage in a long and unnecessary wordy wrangle over the deed of the goddess. Wagner must talk, talk, talk. He is a German dramatist. His music alone saves him from perdition. Prate as he may of the organic union of the arts, the magic of melody and harmony is his wand of transformation.
With that he lifts the tiresome rehearsal of the incidents of "Rheingold" by Wotan to eloquence. With that he changes the hair-splitting of Tristan and Isolde to the most passionate of love duets. With that he makes almost a miracle of Siegfried's condensed narrative in the last act of "Götterdämmerung." The theory is a perfect one; Wagner's practice is wholly faulty. His music saves him. He is sometimes no better than an old-fashioned opera librettist, and writes long pages of bald text simply in order to clothe them with musical glory.
Brünnhilde complains: "Why are you angry at me, father?" He answers, "You know well enough what you've done." "You told me to do it," says she. "But afterward I told you not to do it," says he. "But you really didn't mean that. You wished me to protect Siegmund," declares Brünnhilde. "You made the other order because you were afraid of Fricka." And then Brünnhilde takes forty lines to tell Wotan what she did, which both he and we already know. Wotan takes just forty lines more to tell Brünnhilde that while he has been struggling with his problems she has had nothing to do but enjoy herself (how many mortal fathers talk thus to their daughters)! and that now he has no further use for her light soul.
Thus they bandy words till finally we come to Hecuba. Wotan tells her that she is to be put to sleep and that the man who awakens her shall have her. She begs for the protection of the magic fire, and this far-seeing god stares amazed and enraptured at the birth of a new idea. Glorious! He will commit this precious jewel of his soul to the guardianship of his arch enemy, Loge, the fire spirit, the treacherous, the shifty, the ultimate destroyer, not only of Brünnhilde, but of Walhalla and its futile brood.
Oh, Wagner, how much more prescient were the skalds than thou! But who thinks of all this while the performance is in progress? No one. The triumphant music swells to the very bursting point of emotional rhapsody. The entrance of the farewell of Wotan is one of the sublimest conceptions of the master craftsman in tone.
But there is a moment, a great, overmastering, torrential moment, in this scene, which is equalled only once or twice elsewhere in the trilogy. It is the moment when Brünnhilde and Wotan stand and gaze one upon the other, like the transformed Tristan and Isolde, and the plaintive, pitiful motive of the Valkyr's pleading rises into a tremendous, pealing burst of passionate yearning, which sets the whole orchestra reeling and rocking with the poignancy of its melody and wrings the tears from the eyes of the listener.
That is the climax of "Die Walküre." It is the victory of the child's love over the futile and disappearing All-Father. It is the last utterance of the majesty of Walhalla. Thenceforward godhood disappears not only from Brünnhilde, but from all Walhalla. The human hero is now to come, to see, and to command.
And as the curtain slowly shuts the pathetic figures from our sight, Loge--flickering, fluttering Loge--satisfied for once that he is master of the situation, sings out the comedy in the major mode. The spiritual tonality of Loge for once is fixed and inexorable. The sleep of Brünnhilde is the prologue to her immolation, and the fire at her bedside is the precursor of the fire of her funeral pyre which shall engulf the futile gods. "Rest, perturbed spirit." Rest in the victorious publication of thy conquest in fundamental harmonies. A primeval element art thou not, but a physical investiture of the shifting soul. Thou art the master of this hour--yea, even of the unconscious Brünnhilde and the equally unconscious Wagner. He builded better than he knew. The seed of the serpent hath bruised the heel of the woman.
III--BACK-WORLDS GODS AND OVER-WOMAN
And those same torches, flaring by her bed, Lighted her downward path among the dead.
MELEAGER.
(_Translated by_ JANE MINOT SEDGWICK.)
The drama of "Siegfried" opens with a reintroduction of one of Wagner's most subtle studies. Mime in "Rheingold" plays almost no part at all. There the local interest of Niebelheim is centred in that peevish parody of Napoleonic ambition, Alberich, whose curse is launched upon the entire succeeding series of incidents. In "Siegfried" Alberich is shown to us a helpless watcher on the outskirts of events, the complement of the wondering Wotan.
Both of the principal workers on the beginning of the web have been forced to let the threads slip from their feeble hands. Siegfried, the young, hot-blooded embodiment of humanity, and Mime, the last receptacle of underground craft and cunning, struggle for the supremacy. Alberich is absurd.
The battle of the dwarfs in the first scene of the second act is one of Wagner's pieces of grotesquery. Did he see the ridiculous aspect of it? One can hardly believe so. He seems to take it very seriously, but it refuses to be serious. Mime, however, is a genuine creation. Search opera from its inception to the disclosure of this extraordinary work and you will not find another such product of the imagination. Mime is the perfect type of a low cunning mind plotting to use a noble and generous nature for its own ends and then to consign that nature to destruction.
A ward politician or a Wall Street operator Mime might have been in a more advanced state of society. It was his misfortune and not his fault that he was born a cave-dweller. Wagner falls into ludicrous difficulties in his endeavors to disclose the inner workings of this nature. In the first act he has recourse to the old-fashioned operatic duet, in which two persons standing at opposite sides of the stage bellow antagonistic sentiments at the top of their lungs, yet do not hear each other.
The factitious veritism of the music drama crumbles into absurdity in the presence of this illogical scene. Wagner as frankly asks us to accept the unreal conventions of the stage as ever did Donizetti or Meyerbeer. And this, too, in the midst of his most elaborate and pretentious creation. But here again music, heavenly maid, saves the situation. The splendor of the climax of the forging episode dazzles judgment. One cannot analyze the dramatic verities when his heart is thumping under his ribs with the trip-hammer rhythm of this tremendous composition.
In the second act, when Mime is endeavoring to induce Siegfried to take the potion, we are asked to understand that the bird has warned Siegfried, and that the hero is enabled to discern behind Mime's utterances the real meanings which he strives to conceal. Wagner's conception was dramatically impracticable, and so he makes Mime utter his secret thoughts aloud, so that we, as well as Siegfried, may know them.
It is a cumbersome and feeble device. Here again, however, the music comes to the dramatist's aid. The exquisitely artistic contrast between the craft and malice of Mime and the ingenuousness of the youthful hero is expressed perfectly by the opposing natures of their musical measures, and a final touch of most eloquent suggestion is supplied by the half-whispered instrumental repetition of the bird phrase. This is dramatic music of the most potent.
The keynote of Mime is sounded in the orchestra in the beginning of Act I. with the motive of reflection,--that hollow, sinister duet of two bassoons, so devilish, so serpentine in the mockery of its descending thirds. Whoever before heard the lascivious harmony of the third made to chant a psalm of mischief? Deep reflection, far-sighted wickedness, lies in those few sinister, sepulchral notes, and as the curtain rises and shows us the shaggy little elf bent hopeless over his forging and searching his evil mind for some solution of the problem of the lost hoard, we fall with him into a frame of mind fit for treasons.
And Loge? Is the embodiment of craft absent? Not he. Loge deserts not his kind. In the flickering flame of the forge he lurks in waiting. He will weld the sword "Nothung," which was shivered on Wotan's spear, and this time it will shatter that spear and break the power of the futile and disappearing gods. Loge will answer the call of Siegfried and rise in his might. Joyously will he blaze to melt the splinters, for this forging is but another act in the drama of his triumph. How can the dotard Wotan sit by the hearthstone playing at riddles with Mime and not feel the breath of Loge on his neck?
What a new and unheard of thing is the vocal style of Mime! The creation of this weird recitation is one of Wagner's most notable achievements. The sharp, cackling treble staccato, which sinks ever and anon into an indescribable gurgle of subterranean low tones and again rises to a shrill and infantile falsetto,--this is something that no old-time musician, who appealed to the outward ear alone, could ever have conceived. Its importance in the expression of grotesque and grim humor cannot be overestimated. It is neither speech nor song. It is not recitative. It is not declamation. It is simply the snarling, the barking, the whining of malice, cowardice, and sneaking treachery. It is the very thing itself that Wagner sought. It was a triumph of genius.
Has it ever occurred to you, gentle reader, that up to the last act of "Siegfried" this same music of Mime supplies the only psychologic element in the play so far as the musical part is concerned? Mime is the one scheming, introspective character in the work. Every musical thought in the score which is connected with him reveals an inner life. The rest is nearly all scenic or external music.
Siegfried's entrance is bodied forth in a gust of forest freshness sweeping into the noisome air of the cavern. The famous wanderlied of the youth is not introspective. It breathes not the yearning of the hero for a free life, but the spirit of the unbounded world itself. It is a song of the receding horizon.
The bandying of conundrums between Wotan and Mime leaves all the psychology to the dwarf. The rest is commemorative. It is a repetition of old themes to recall Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Giants and their unrequited labor, Walhall and its vanishing limelight glories. Take again the opening scene of Act II. How much introspection is there in Wotan's interesting interview with the unseen Fafner? Atmospheric, indeed, this music is, but not psychologic. It has a very suspicious resemblance to the famous scene before the tomb of Ninus in "Semiramide." But it is conducted more decorously, and instead of "Oh, horror!" we hear the more comforting "Lass't mich schlafen."
In the scene which follows we are presented with the picture of the young hero reclining under a linden tree and reflecting on his unique position in the primeval world. He hears the murmur of the wind among the branches of the trees and watches the shadows play at hide and seek. The music is purely descriptive and scenic. A bird carols among the foliage. It is a strain of unaffected melody, and surely none would affront a cheerful birdling by charging it with psychologic intent.
The young man, seeking for some channel of cheerful communication with his own antecedents, tries to fashion a pipe on which to imitate the bird's lay. In vain. So, forth with the familiar waldhorn and therewith wind a challenging blast. How did Siegfried learn his own musical theme? There is a psychologic tangle here, but it was in the thinking of Wagner, not in that of the hero. Siegfried had no business to know that there was an orchestra and that he had a theme. But let that pass.
Behold Fafner, clad in the shapeless form of a thing that never was, lumbering out of the cavern and wagging his sapient head and bannered tail with the aid of all too visible wires. Oh, Siegfried and Fafner, Fafner and Siegfried, which of ye is the more comic? Was it not cruel to place a "treasure of the world," a "smiling hero," in such a position, to make him do combat amid hissing steam and the shock of thunderous battle music with a most disillusioning dragon of papier-maché? Again hear the external music, the sword and the vigor of the young man.
After the fight the bird sings once more, this time in a soprano voice and with text. Mime enters and psychology reappears. After Mime's death, more external music, till the bird tells of the enchanted Princess asleep on the mountain top, and then there is a burst of hot blood, a rush of musical energy which has in it something more than mere external description. Nevertheless, in all music there is nothing else which so clearly demonstrates the ease with which the purely pictorial in the tone art may be confounded with the introspective as this second act of "Siegfried," for here the mood of nature and the mood of the chief actor, whose soul is to be laid bare, are one.
With the opening of Act III. we have the scene between Wotan and Erda. Here, again, the character of the music is chiefly descriptive. The storm is contrasted with the vague tonalities and muted voicing of Erda's music. After the spear of Wotan is shattered by the rewelded "Nothung," Loge fills the mountains with his radiance and his shimmering music. The last of the futile and disappearing gods has passed from the scene of action. The human drama which is to lead to the dusk of the high ones has begun. Loge's labor is almost completed.
With the change from the pealing music to which Siegfried ascends the mountain to the long-drawn strains of the strings which lead him to the couch of his desire, we enter upon a scene of soul revelation. What a marvellous inspiration of genius is the awakening of Brünnhilde! She went to sleep a weeping, supplicating goddess, deprived of her divinity. She wakes to the majestic chords which announce her assumption of a grander divinity, the might and majesty of perfect womanhood. The duo between her and Siegfried is all psychologic, not subtle, for the blazing of passion is not subtle, but none the less the delineation of an inward state.
Of all the dramas of the tetralogy "Siegfried" is that in which pure beauty is most plentiful. Here is a problem for musical philosophers. Is Strauss not a maker, but a product? Is the embodiment of subtle psychologic problems in tone hostile to unaffected beauty? Must the lyric drama follow the march of symphonic music into the screaming regions of the Strauss soul analysis? "Siegfried" is quite devoid of the elements of tragedy. The death of Fafner is not tragic; on the contrary, it is comic. There is even a touch of bathos in the dying speech of the transmogrified Bottom of the Wagnerian drama. The conundrum scene is childish. The bird belongs to the world of the infantile fairy tale. But the spirit of buoyant youth is in the work. Its music is nearly all external, and unaffectedly beautiful.
"Siegfried," revelling in purely descriptive music, devoid of mental sickness contracted from much study of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, breathes the spirit of a free world's youth.