Chapter 7

"All this forms a sort of psalmody, possessing neither tune nor time. But if by any chance a lively air is played, there is a general stamping; the audience is set in motion, and follows, with a great deal of trouble and noise, some performer in the orchestra. Delighted to feel for a few moments the rhythm that is so lacking, they torment the ear, the voice, the arms, the legs, and all the body, to chase after a tune that is ever ready to escape them...."

I have quoted this rather long passage to show how the impression made by one of Rameau's operas on his contemporaries resembled that made by Wagner on his enemies. It was not without reason that Rameau was said to be Wagner's forerunner, as Rousseau was Tolstoy's forerunner.

In reality, it was not against _Siegfried_ itself that Tolstoy's criticism was directed; and Tolstoy was closer than he thought to the spirit of this drama. Is not Siegfried the heroic incarnation of a free and healthy man, sprung directly from Nature? In a sketch of _Siegfried_, written in 1848, Wagner says:

"To follow the impulses of my heart is my supreme law; what I can accomplish by obeying my instincts is what I ought to do. Is that voice of instinct cursed or blessed? I do not know; but I yield to it, and never force myself to run counter to my inclination."

Wagner fought against civilisation by quite other methods than those employed by Tolstoy; and if the efforts of the two were equally great, the practical result is--one must really say it--as poor on one side as on the other.

What Tolstoy's raillery is really aimed at is not Wagner's work, but the way in which his work was represented. The splendours of the setting do not hide the childishness of the ideas behind them: the dragon Fafna, Fricka's rams, the bear, the serpent, and all the Valhalla menagerie have always been ridiculous. I will only add that the dragon's failure to be terrifying was not Wagner's fault, for he never attempted to depict a terrifying dragon. He gave it quite clearly, and of his own choice, a comic character. Both the text and the music make Fafner a sort of ogre, a simple creature, but, above all, a grotesque one.

Besides, I cannot help feeling that scenic reality takes away rather than adds to the effect of these great philosophical fairylands. Malwida von Meysenbug told me that at the Bayreuth festival of 1876, while she was following one of the _Ring_ scenes very attentively with her opera-glasses, two hands were laid over her eyes, and she heard Wagner's voice say impatiently: "Don't look so much at what is going on. Listen!" It was good counsel. There are dilettanti who pretend that at a concert the best way to enjoy Beethoven's last works--where the sonority is defective--is to stop the ears and read the score. One might say with less of a paradox that the best way to follow a performance of Wagner's operas is to listen with the eyes shut. So perfect is the music, so powerful its hold on the imagination, that it leaves nothing to be desired; what it suggests to the mind is infinitely finer than what the eyes may see. I have never shared the opinion that Wagner's works may be best appreciated in the theatre. His works are epic symphonies. As a frame for them I should like temples; as scenery, the illimitable land of thought; as actors, our dreams.

* * * * *

The first act of _Siegfried_ is one of the most dramatic in the Tetralogy. Nothing satisfied me more completely at Bayreuth, both as regards the actors and the dramatic effects. Fantastic creatures like Alberich and Mimi, who seem to be out of their element in France, are rooted deep down in German imaginations. The Bayreuth actors surpassed themselves in making them startlingly lifelike, with a trembling and grimacing realism. Burgstaller, who was then making his debut in _Siegfried_, acted with an impetuous awkwardness which accorded well with the part. I remember with what zest--which seemed in no way affected--he played the hero smith, labouring like a true workman, blowing the fire and making the blade glow, dipping it in the steaming water, and working it on the anvil; and then, in a burst of Homeric gaiety, singing that fine hymn at the end of the first act, which sounds like an air by Bach or Händel.

But in spite of all this, I felt how much better it was to dream, or to hear this poem of a youthful soul at a concert. It is then that the magic murmurs of the forest in the second act speak more directly to the heart. However beautiful the scenery of glades and woods, however cleverly the light is made to change and dance among the trees--and it is manipulated now like a set of organ stops--it still seems almost wrong to listen with open eyes to music that, unaided, can show us a glorious summer's day, and make us see the swaying of the tree-tops, and hear the brush of the wind against the leaves. Through the music alone the hum and murmur of a thousand little voices is about us, the glorious song of the birds floats into the depths of a blue sky; or comes a silence, vibrating with invisible life, when Nature, with her mysterious smile, opens her arms and hushes all things in a divine sleep.

* * * * *

Wagner left _Siegfried_ asleep in the forest in order to embark on the funereal vessel of _Tristan und Isolde_. But he left Siegfried with some anguish of heart. When writing to Liszt in 1857, he says:

"I have taken young Siegfried into the depths of a lonely forest; there I have left him under a lime-tree, and said good-bye to him with tears in my eyes. It has torn my heart to bury him alive, and I had a hard and painful fight with myself before I could do it.... Shall I ever go back to him? No, it is all finished. Don't let us speak of it again."

Wagner had reason to be sad. He knew well that he would never find his young Siegfried again. He roused him up ten years later. But all was changed. That splendid third act has not the freshness of the first two. Wotan has become an important figure, and brought reason and pessimism with him into the drama. Wagner's later conceptions were perhaps loftier, and his genius was more master of itself (think of the classic dignity in the awakening of Brünnhilde); but the ardour and happy expression of youth is gone. I know that this is not the opinion of most of Wagner's admirers; but, with the exception of a few pages of sublime beauty, I have never altogether liked the love scenes at the end of _Siegfried_ and at the beginning of _Götterdämmerung_. I find their style rather pompous and declamatory; and their almost excessive refinement makes them border upon dulness. The form of the duet, too, seems cut and dried, and there are signs of weariness in it. The heaviness of the last pages of _Siegfried_ recalls _Die Meistersinger_, which is also of that period. It is no longer the same joy nor the same quality of joy that is found in the earlier acts.

Yet it does not really matter, for joy is there, nevertheless; and so splendid was the first inspiration of the work that the years have not dimmed its brilliancy. One would like to end with _Siegfried_, and escape the gloomy _Götterdämmerung_. For those who have sensitive feelings the fourth day of the Tetralogy has a depressing effect. I remember the tears I have seen shed at the end of the _Ring_, and the words of a friend, as we left the theatre at Bayreuth and descended the hill at night: "I feel as though I were coming away from the burial of someone I dearly loved." It was truly a time of mourning. Perhaps there was something incongruous in building such a structure when it had universal death for its conclusion--or at least in making the whole an object of show and instruction. _Tristan_ achieves the same end with much more power, as the action is swifter. Besides that, the end of _Tristan_ is not without comfort, for life there is terrible. But it is not the same in _Götterdämmerung_; for in spite of the absurdity of the spell which is set upon the love of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, life with them is happy and desirable, since they are beings capable of love, and death appears to be a splendid but awful catastrophe. And one cannot say the _Ring_ breathes a spirit of renunciation and sacrifice like _Parsifal_; renunciation and sacrifice are only talked about in the _Ring_; and, in spite of the last transports which impel Brünnhilde to the funeral pyre, they are neither an inspiration nor a delight. One has the impression of a great gulf yawning at one's feet, and the anguish of seeing those one loves fall into it.

I have often regretted that Wagner's first conception of _Siegfried_ changed in the course of years; and in spite of the magnificent _dénouement_ of _Götterdämmerung_ (which is really more effective in a concert room, for the real tragedy ends with Siegfried's death), I cannot help thinking with regret how fine a more optimistic poem from this revolutionary of '48 might have been. People tell me that it would then have been less true to life. But why should it be truthful to depict life only as a bad thing? Life is neither good nor bad it is just what we make it, and the result of the way in which we look at it. Joy is as real as sorrow, and a very fertile source of action. What inspiration there is in the laugh of a great man! Let us welcome, therefore, the sparkling if transient gaiety of _Siegfried_.

Wagner wrote to Malwida von Meysenbug: "I have, by chance, just been reading Plutarch's life of Timoleon. That life ended very happily--a rare and unheard-of thing, especially in history. It does one good to think that such a thing is possible. It moved me profoundly."

I feel the same when I hear _Siegfried_. We are rarely allowed to contemplate happiness in great tragic art; but when we may, how splendid it is, and how good for one!

"TRISTAN"

Tristan towers like a mountain above all other love poems, as Wagner above all other artists of his century. It is the outcome of a sublime conception, though the work as a whole is far from perfect. Of perfect works there is none where Wagner is concerned. The effort necessary for the creation of them was too great to be long sustained; for a single work might means years of toil. And the tense emotions of a whole drama cannot be expressed by a series of sudden inspirations put into form the moment they are conceived. Long and arduous labour is necessary. These giants, fashioned like Michelangelo's, these concentrated tempests of heroic force and decadent complexity, are not arrested, like the work of a sculptor or painter, in one moment of their action; they live and go on living in endless detail of sensation. To expect sustained inspiration is to expect what is not human. Genius may reveal what is divine; it may call up and catch a glimpse of _die Mütter_, but it cannot always breathe in the exhausted air of this world. So will must sometimes take the place of inspiration; though the will is uncertain and often stumbles in its task. That is why we encounter things that jar and jolt in the greatest works--they are the marks of human weakness. Well, perhaps there is less weakness in _Tristan_ than in Wagner's other dramas--_Götterdämmerung_, for instance--for nowhere else is the effort of his genius more strenuous or its flight more dizzy. Wagner himself knew it well. His letters show the despair of a soul wrestling with its familiar spirit, which it clutches and holds, only to lose again. And we seem to hear cries of pain, and feel his anger and despair.

"I can never tell you what a really wretched musician I am. In my inmost heart I know I am a bungler and an absolute failure. You should see me when I say to myself, 'It ought to go now,' and sit down to the piano and put together some miserable rubbish, which I fling away again like an idiot. I know quite well the kind of musical trash I produce.... Believe me, it is no good expecting me to do anything decent. Sometimes I really think it was Reissiger who inspired me to write _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_."

This is how Wagner wrote to Liszt when he was finishing this amazing work of art. In the same way Michelangelo wrote to his father in 1509: "I am in agony. I have not dared to ask the Pope for anything, because my work does not make sufficient progress to merit any remuneration. The work is too difficult, and indeed it is not my profession. I am wasting my time to no purpose. Heaven help me!" For a year he had been working at the ceiling of the Sixtine chapel.

This is something more than a burst of modesty. No one had more pride than Michelangelo or Wagner; but both felt the defects of their work like a sharp wound. And although those defects do not prevent their works from being the glory of the human spirit, they are there just the same.

I do not want to dwell upon the inherent imperfections of Wagner's dramas; they are really dramatic or epic symphonies, impossible to act, and gaining nothing from representation. This is especially true of _Tristan_, where the disparity between the storm of sentiment depicted, and the cold convention and enforced timidity of action on the stage, is such that at certain moments--in the second act, for example--it pains and shocks one, and seems almost grotesque.

But while admitting that _Tristan_ is a symphony that is not suitable for representation, one also recognises its blemishes and, above all, its unevenness. The orchestration in the first act is often rather thin, and the plot lacks solidity. There are gaps and unaccountable holes, and melodious lines left suspended in space. From beginning to end, lyrical bursts of melody are broken by declamations, or, what is worse, by dissertations. Frenzied whirlwinds of passion stop suddenly to give place to recitatives of explanation or argument. And although these recitatives are nearly always a great relief, although these metaphysical reveries have a character of barbarous cunning that one relishes, yet the superior beauty of the movements of pure poetry, emotion, and music is so evident, that this musical and philosophical drama serves to give one a distaste for philosophy and drama and everything else that cramps and confines music.

But the musical part of _Tristan_ is not free either from the faults of the work as a whole, for it, too, lacks unity. Wagner's music is made up of very diverse styles: one finds in it Italianisms and Germanisms and even Gallicisms of every kind; there are some that are sublime, some that are commonplace; and at times one feels the awkwardness of their union and the imperfections of their form. Then again, perhaps two ideas of equal originality come together and spoil each other by making too strong a contrast. The fine lamentation of King Mark--that personification of a knight of the Grail--is treated with such moderation and with so noble a scorn for outward show, that its pure, cold light is entirely lost after the glowing fire of the duet.

The work suffers everywhere from a lack of balance. It is an almost inevitable defect, arising from its very grandeur. A mediocre work may quite easily be perfect of its kind; but it is rarely that a work lofty aim attains perfection. A landscape of little dells and smiling meadows is brought more readily into pleasing harmony than a landscape of dazzling Alps, torrents, glaciers, and tempests; for the heights may sometimes overwhelm the picture and spoil the effect. And so it is with certain great pages of _Tristan_. We may take for example the verses which tell of excruciating expectation--in the second act, Isolde's expectation on the night filled with desire; and, in the third act, Tristan's expectation, as he lies wounded and delirious, waiting for the vessel that brings Isolde and death--or we may take the Prelude, that expression of eternal desire that is like a restless sea for ever moaning and beating itself upon the shore.

* * * * *

The quality that touches me most deeply in _Tristan_ is the evidence of honesty and sincerity in a man who was treated by his enemies as a charlatan that used superficial and grossly material means to arrest and amaze the public eye. What drama is more sober or more disdainful of exterior effect than _Tristan_? Its restraint is almost carried to excess. Wagner rejected any picturesque episode in it that was irrelevant to his subject. The man who carried all Nature in his imagination, who at his will made the storms of the _Walküre_ rage, or the soft light of Good Friday shine, would not even depict a bit of the sea round the vessel in the first act. Believe me, that must have been a sacrifice, though he wished it so. It pleased him to enclose this terrible drama within the four walls of a chamber of tragedy. There are hardly any choruses; there is nothing to distract one's attention from the mystery of human souls; there are only two real parts--those of the lovers; and if there is a third, it belongs to Destiny, into whose hands the victims are delivered. What a fine seriousness there is in this love play. Its passion remains sombre and stern; there is no laughter in it, only a belief which is almost religious, more religious perhaps in its sincerity than that of _Parsifal_.

It is a lesson for dramatists to see a man suppressing all frivolous trifling and empty episodes in order to concentrate his subject entirely on the inner life of two living souls. In that Wagner is our master, a better, stronger, and more profitable master to follow, in spite of his mistakes, than all the other literary and dramatic authors of his time.

* * * * *

I see that criticism has filled a larger place in these notes than I meant it to do. But in spite of that, I love _Tristan_; for me and for others of my time it has long been an intoxicating draught. And it has never lost anything of its grandeur; the years have left its beauty untouched, and it is for me the highest point of art reached by anyone since Beethoven's death.

But as I was listening to it the other evening I could not help thinking: Ah, Wagner, you will one day go too, and join Gluck and Bach and Monteverde and Palestrina and all the great souls whose names still live among men, but whose thoughts are only felt by a handful of the initiated, who try in vain to revive the past. You, also, are already of the past, though you were the steady light of our youth, the strong source of life and death, of desire and renouncement, whence we drew our moral force and our power of resistance against the world. And the world, ever greedy for new sensations, goes on its way amid the unceasing ebb and flow of its desires. Already its thoughts have changed, and new musicians are making new songs for the future. But it is the voice of a century of tempest that passes with you.

CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS

M. Saint-Saëns has had the rare honour of becoming a classic during his lifetime. His name, though it was long unrecognised, now commands universal respect, not less by his worth of character than by the perfection of his art. No artist has troubled so little about the public, or been more indifferent to criticism whether popular or expert. As a child he had a sort of physical repulsion for outward success:

"De l'applaudissement J'entends encor le bruit qui, chose assez étrange, Pour ma pudeur d'enfant était comme une fange Dont le flot me venait toucher; je redoutais Son contact, et parfois, malin, je l'évitais, Affectant la raideur."[110]

[Footnote 110:

Of applause I still hear the noise; and, strangely enough, In my childish shyness it seemed like mire About to spot me; I feared Its touch, and secretly shunned it, Affecting obstinacy.

These verses were read by M. Saint-Saëns at a concert given on 10 June, 1896, in the Salle Pleyel, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his _début_, which he made in 1846. It was in this same Salle Pleyel that he gave his first concert.]

Later on, he achieved success by a long and painful struggle, in which he had to fight against the kind of stupid criticism that condemned him "to listen to one of Beethoven's symphonies as a penance likely to give him the most excruciating torture."[111] And yet after this, and after his admission to the Academy, after _Henry VIII_ and the _Symphonie avec orgue_, he still remained aloof from praise or blame, and judged his triumphs with sad severity:

"Tu connaîtras les yeux menteurs, l'hypocrisie Des serrements de mains, Le masque d'amitié cachant la jalousie, Les pâles lendemains

"De ces jours de triomphe où le troupeau vulgaire Qui pèse au même poids L'histrion ridicule et le génie austère Vous mets sur le pavois."[112]

M. Saint-Saëns has now grown old, and his fame has spread abroad, but he has not capitulated. Not many years ago he wrote to a German journalist: "I take very little notice of either praise or censure, not because I have an exalted idea of my own merits (which would be foolish), but because in doing my work, and fulfilling the function of my nature, as an apple-tree grows apples, I have no need to trouble myself with other people's views."[113]

[Footnote 111: C. Saint-Saëns, _Harmonie et Mélodie_, 1885.]

[Footnote 112: C. Saint-Saëns, _Rimes familières_, 1890.

You will know the lying eyes, the insincerity Of pressures of the hand, The mask of friendship that hides jealousy. The tame to-morrows

Of these days of triumph, when the vulgar herd Crowns you with honour; Judging rare genius to be Equal in merit to the wit of clowns.

]

[Footnote 113: Letter written to M. Levin, the correspondent of the _Boersen-Courier_ of Berlin, 9 September, 1901.]

Such independence is rare at any time; but it is very rare in our day, when the power of public opinion is tyrannical; and it is rarest of all in France, where artists are perhaps more sociable than in other countries. Of all qualities in an artist it is the most precious; for it forms the foundation of his character, and is the guarantee of his conscience and innate strength. So we must not hide it under a bushel.

* * * * *

The significance of M. Saint-Saëns in art is a double one, for one must judge him from the inside as well as the outside of France. He stands for something exceptional in French music, something which was almost unique until just lately: that is, a great classical spirit and a fine breadth of musical culture--German culture, we must say, since the foundation of all modern art rests on the German classics. French music of the nineteenth century is rich in clever artists, imaginative writers of melody, and skilful dramatists; but it is poor in true musicians, and in good and solid workmanship. Apart from two or three splendid exceptions, our composers have too much the character of gifted amateurs who compose music as a pastime, and regard it, not as a special form of thought, but as a sort of dress for literary ideas. Our musical education is superficial: it may be got for a few years, in a formal way, at a Conservatoire, but it is not within reach of all; the child does not breathe music as, in a way, he breathes the atmosphere of literature and oratory; and although nearly everyone in France has an instinctive feeling for beautiful writing, only a very few people care for beautiful music. From this arise the common faults and failings in our music. It has remained a luxurious art; it has not become, like German music, the poetical expression of the people's thought.