Chapter 9

"Aïda" is a different matter, though not so very different a matter. Here we have the young Verdi--Verdi in his early prime, for he was only fifty-eight; here also we have a story more likely to stir his rowdy imagination, if not more susceptible of effective treatment in the young Verdi manner. The misfortune is that the book is a very excerebrose affair. The drama does not begin until the third act: the two first are yawning abysms of sheer dulness. Who wants to _see_ that Radames loves Aïda, that Amneris, the king's daughter, loves Radames, that Aïda, a slave, is the daughter of the King of the Ethiopians, that Radames goes on a war expedition against that king, beats him and fetches him back a prisoner, that the other king gives Radames his daughter in marriage, that Radames, highly honoured, yet wishes to goodness he could get out of it somehow? A master of drama would begin in the third act, reveal the whole past in a pregnant five minutes, and then hold us breathless while we watched to see whether Radames would yield to social pressure, marry Amneris, and throw over Aïda, or yield to passion, fly with Aïda, and throw over his country. All this shows the bad influence of Scribe, who usually spent half his books in explaining matters as simple and obvious as the reason for eating one's breakfast. Verdi knew this as well as anyone, and used the two first acts as opportunities for stage display. For "Aïda" was written to please the Khedive of Egypt; and Verdi, always keenly commercial, probably knew his man. Now, when the masters of opera--Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Weber--got hold of a bad book, they nearly invariably "faked" it by getting swiftly over the weak points and dwelling on the strong; and, above all, they flooded the whole thing with a stream of delicious melody that hypnotises one, and for the time puts fault-finding out of the question. Not so Verdi. He wrote to please his audience, and he knew that what one can only call dark-skinned local colour was still fresh in spite of "L'Africaine," and that the vulgar would find delight in a blaze of glaring banners and showy spectacle. So he set the two first acts as they stood, trusting to local colour and spectacle to make them popular; and, as we know, at the time they were popular, and the populace exalted Verdi far above such second-rate fellows as Mozart and Beethoven. But now, when local colour has been done to death, and when it has had a quarter of a century to bleach out of Verdi's canvases, what remains to interest, I do not say to touch, one? Certainly not the expression of Radames' or Aïda's love, for here as everywhere Verdi fails to communicate any new phase of emotion, but (precisely as he did in "Falstaff" and "Otello") has written music which indicates that he had some inkling of the emotion of the scene, and could write strains calculated not to prevent the scene making its effect. That Verdi has no well-spring of original feeling, perhaps explains why he is so poor in the scenes with Radames, Amneris, and Aïda. (Also, perhaps, it explains why he has fallen back in his best period upon masterpieces of dramatic art for his librettos. It is almost outside human possibility to add anything to "Falstaff" or "Otello"; and such success as Verdi has made with them is the result of writing what is, after all, only glorified incidental music--music which accompanies the play. To class these accompaniments with the masterpieces of original opera is surely the most startling feat of modern musical criticism.) Moreover, the plan of writing each scene in a series of detached numbers--for, even where song might flow naturally into song, the two are quite detached--breaks up the interest as effectually as it does in "Traviata"; and the songs do not themselves interest. Verdi's music is not based, like the masters', upon the inflexions of the human voice under stress of sincere feeling, but upon figures and passages easily executed upon certain instruments. The great composers strove to make instruments speak in the accent of the human voice, while Verdi has always tried to make the voice sound like an instrument. His roulades and cadenzas, for example, sound prettier on the clarinet than on the voice, as one hears when he sets the one chasing the other in "Traviata"; and if only our orchestral players would take the trouble to play with the same expression as the stage artists sing, we might soon be content to have a repetition (with a difference) of the feat of the old-world conductor who, in the absence of the hero, played the part upon the harpsichord with universal applause. The stock patterns out of which the songs are made soon grow old-fashioned, and are superseded by fresh ones: hence Verdi's songs are the earliest portions of his operas to wither. There are two powerful scenes in "Aïda"--the second of the second act, and the final in the last act. The last is certainly terribly repulsive at the first blush; but the weird chant of the priestesses in the brightly-lit temple, where the workmen are closing the entrance to the vault underneath in which we see Radames left to die, contrasts finely with the sweet music that accompanies the declaration of Aïda that she has hidden there to die with him; and, while guessing at the splendour of the music Wagner might have given us here, one may still admit Verdi to have succeeded well in a smaller way than Wagner's. But on the whole "Aïda" is to be heard once and have done with, for save these scenes there is little else in it to engage one. Aïda is alive, but Amneris is a hopeless piece of machinery--something between the stage conception of a princess and the Lady with the Camellias, any difference in modesty being certainly not in favour of Amneris. The music very rarely rises above commonness--that commonness which is proclaimed in every bar of Verdi's instrumentation, and in his shameless Salvation Army rhythms; and it is sometimes (as in the Priest's solo with chorus in the last scene of the second act) odiously vulgar. "Aïda" is more dramatic than "Traviata," has more of Verdi's brusque energy, less of his sentimentality; but it has none of the youthful freshness of his latest work. The young Verdi has already aged--how long will the old Verdi remain young?

"THE FLYING DUTCHMAN"

Wagner took "The Flying Dutchman", "Tannhäuser," and "Lohengrin," in three long running steps; from "Lohengrin" he made a flying leap into the air, and, after spending some five or six years up there, he landed safely on "The Nibelung's Ring." The leap was a prodigious one, and you may search history in vain for its like; and still more astounding was it if you reckon from the point where the run was commenced. "The Flying Dutchman" was avowedly that point. "Die Feen" is boyish folly, and "Rienzi" an attempt to out-Meyer Meyerbeer. But in the "Dutchman" Wagner sought seriously to realise himself, to find the mode of best expressing the best that was in him. That mode he found in "The Rheingold" and mastered in "The Valkyrie," with its continuous development and transmogrification of themes. And (to discard utterly my former metaphor) after steeping oneself for several nights in that last great river of melody, wide and deep and clear, it is interesting to be led suddenly to its source, and see it bubbling up with infinite energy, a good deal of frothing, and some brown mud.

Compared with "The Valkyrie," "The Flying Dutchman" is ill-contrived and stagy. It is flecked here and there with vulgarity. It has far less of pure beauty; it has only its moments, whereas "The Valkyrie" gives hours of unbroken delight. "The Valkyrie" appeals to the primary instincts of our nature--instincts and desires that will remain in us so long as our nature is human; while for a large part of its effect the "Dutchman" trusts to a feeling which is elusive at all times and has no permanent hold upon us. Horror of the supernatural is not very deeply rooted in us, after all. Modern training tends to eliminate it altogether. In later life Goethe could not call up a single delightful shiver. There are probably not half a dozen stories in the world from which we can get it a second time. The unexpected plays a part in producing it, and the same means does not produce it twice with anything approaching the same intensity. Hence the Dutchman's phantom ship must be more ghost-like at each representation, its blood-red sails a bloodier red; and in the long-run, do what the stage carpenters will, we coldly sit and compare their work with previous ships. True, the music which accompanies its entry is always impressively ghastly; yet, while we know this, we are acutely conscious that our feeling is more or less a laudable make-believe--a make-believe that requires some little effort. Then Heine's notion, which seemed so brilliant at first, that the Dutchman could be redeemed by the unshakable love of a woman, has now all the disagreeable staleness of a decrepit and obvious untruth. It has no essential verity to give it validity, it is no symbol of a fact which is immediately and deeply felt to be a fact. The condition of redemption is entirely arbitrary: it might as reasonably be that the Dutchman should find a woman who would not shrink from eating his weather-stained hat. What was it to the Dutchman's damned soul if all the women in the world swore to love him eternally, so long as he was unable to love one of them? The true Wandering Jew is not the unloved man, but the man who cannot love, who is destitute of creative emotion and cannot build up for himself a world in which to dwell, but must needs live in hell--a world that others make, a world where he has no place. Wagner knew this, and makes the Dutchman fall in love with Senta; and that only leaves the drama more than ever in a muddle. One wants a reason for his suddenly being able to love. It cannot be because Senta promises to love him till death; for he has had hundreds of fruitless love-affairs before, and knows that all women promise that, and some of them mean it. Besides, the highest moment of the drama ought either to arrive when he feels love dawning in his loveless heart, or when he renounces his chance of salvation and sails away to eternal torment, believing that Senta made her promise in a passing fit of enthusiasm; and at one or other of those moments we ought to have some sign that he is redeemed. There is no such sign. The phantom ship falls to pieces, and the Dutchman is freed from his curse when Senta casts herself into the waves; and the highest moment of the whole drama is that in which the dreamy monomaniac, the modern Jeanne d'Arc, the real heroine of the opera, wins her own salvation, masters the world and makes it her heaven, by taking her fate in both hands and setting out to do the thing she feels most strongly impelled to do. If the Dutchman's salvation depends on himself, it is evidently unnecessary for Senta to be drowned; if it depends upon her, it only shows that Wagner, writing fifty years ago, and dazzled by the brilliance of a new idea, could not see so clearly as can be seen to-day that Senta was her own and not the Dutchman's saviour; and if (as it apparently does) it depends upon both Dutchman and Senta, then, at a performance at least, one can merely feel that something in the drama is very much askew, without knowing precisely what.

In minor respects "The Flying Dutchman" falls considerably short of perfection, even of reasonableness. For example, the comings and goings of Daland are fearfully stagy. But worst of all are the arrangements of the first act. I can go as far as most people in accepting stage conventions. If Wagner brought on a four-eyed, eight-horned, twenty-seven-legged monster and called it a Jabberwock, I should not so much as ask why the legs were not all in pairs, like the horns and eyes, so long as I saw in the animal's habits a certain congruity, a conformity to what I would willingly regard as Jabberwock nature. But who can pretend to believe in a ship which comes against the rocks in a storm and anchors there while the captain goes ashore to see whether shipwreck is imminent? That the majority of opera-goers cannot live near the sea is self-evident, and that few of them should ever have seen a shipwreck unavoidable; but surely anyone who has crossed the Channel must have a vague suspicion that to place this vessel against the rocks in a tempest is the last thing a seaman would dream of doing, and that, if he were driven there and managed to get ashore, he would call his men after him (if they needed calling), and trouble neither about casting anchor nor going aboard again. The thing is ludicrously stagy. I suppose that Wagner was too sea-sick to observe what happened during his weeks of roughing it in the North Sea. But the second scene is admirable. That monotonous drowsy hum of the Spinning song is exactly what is needed to put one in the mood for sympathising with Senta and her dreams. With the third there is an occasional return to the bad stagecraft of Scribe; but there are also hints of the simple directness of the later Wagner.

The music is like the stagecraft: now and then simply dramatic, now and then stagily undramatic; sometimes rich and splendid, sometimes threadbare and vulgar. And by this I do not mean that the old-fashioned set pieces are of necessity bad, and the freer portions necessarily good. Good and bad may be found in the new and the old Wagner alike. That sailor's dance is to me as odious as anything in Meyerbeer, and the melody which ends the love-duet is scarcely more tolerable. On the other hand, not even in "The Valkyrie" did Wagner write more picturesquely weird music than most of the first act. The shrilling of the north wind, the roaring of the waves, the creaking of cordage, the banging of booms, an uncanny sound in a dismal night at sea,--these are suggested with wonderful vividness. At times Wagner gives us gobbets of unassimilated Weber and Beethoven, but some passages are as original as they are magnificent. The finest bars in the work are those in which Senta declares her faith in her "mission," and the Dutchman yields himself to unreasoning adoration. Other moods came to Wagner, but never again that mood of rapturous self-effacement. It is perhaps a young man's mood; certainly it is identical with the ecstasy with which one contemplates a perfect piece of art, or a life greatly lived; and here it finds splendid expression.

"LOHENGRIN"

"Lohengrin" has been sung scores of times at Covent Garden in one fashion or another; but I declare that we heard something resembling the real "Lohengrin" for the first time when the late Mr. Anton Seidl crossed the Atlantic to conduct it and other of Wagner's operas. We had come to regard it as a pretty opera--an opera full of an individual, strange, indefinable sweetness; but Mr. Anton Seidl came all the way from New York city to show us how out of sweetness can come forth strength. Mr. Seidl was a Wagner conductor of the older type, and with some of the faults of that type; he knew little or nothing of the improvements in the manner of interpreting Wagner's music effected by Mottl, Levi, and that stupendous creature Siegfried Wagner; he was a survival of the first enthusiastic reaction against Italian ways of misdoing things; and he was, if anything, a little too strongly inclined to go a little too far in the opposite direction to the touch-and-go conductors. But there is so much of sweetness and delicacy in "Lohengrin" that the whole opera, including the sweet and delicate portions, actually gains from a forceful and manly handling--gains so immensely that, as already said, those of us who heard it under Mr. Seidl's direction must have felt that here, at last, was the true "Lohengrin," the "Lohengrin" of Wagner's imagination. It was a pleasure merely to hear the band singing out boldly, getting the last fraction of rich tone out of each note, in the first act; to hear the string passages valiantly attacked, and the melodies treated with breadth, and the trumpets and trombones playing out with all their force when need was, holding the sounds to the end instead of letting them slink away ashamed in the accepted Italian style. And not only were these things in themselves delightful--they also served to make the drama doubly powerful, and the tender parts of the music doubly tender, to show how splendid in many respects was Wagner's art in the "Lohengrin" days, and to prove that Maurel's way of doing the part of Telramund some years ago was, as Maurel's way of doing things generally are, perfectly right. Maurel, it will be remembered, stuck a red feather in his cap; and the eternally wise critics agreed in thinking this absolutely wrong. They told him the feather was out of place--it made him appear ridiculous, and so on. Maurel retorted that he was playing the part of a fierce barbarian chief who would not look, he thought, like a gilded butterfly, and that his notion was to look as ferocious as he could. Now the odd thing is, that though Maurel was right, we critics were in a sense right also. As the music used to be played, a Telramund one degree nearer to a man than the average Italian baritone seemed ludicrously out of place; and when, in addition, the Lohengrin was a would-be lady-killer without an inch of fight in him, Henry the Fowler a pathetic heavy father, and Elsa a sentimental milliner, there was something farcical about Maurel's red feather and generally militant aspect. What we critics had not the brains to see was that the playing of the music was wrong, and that Maurel was only wrong in trying to play his part in the right manner when Lohengrin, Elsa, King, and conductor were all against him in their determination to do their parts wrong. Mr. Bispham follows in Maurel's footsteps, as he frequently does, in a modified costume, but when for the first time the orchestra played right he would not have seemed ridiculous had he stuck Maurel's red feather into his helmet. The whole scene became a different thing: we were thrown at once into the atmosphere of an armed camp full of turbulent thieves and bandits itching for fighting, and wildly excited with rumours of conflicts near at hand. Amidst all this excitement, and amidst all the unruly fighters, Telramund, strongest, fiercest, most unruly of them all, has to open the drama; and to command our respect, to make us feel that it is he who is making the drama move, that it is because all the barbarians are afraid of him that the drama begins to move at all, he cannot possibly look too ferocious and hot-blooded, too strong of limb and tempestuous of temper. The proof that this (Seidl's) reading of the opera was the right one, was that, in the first place, the drama immediately interested you instead of keeping you waiting for the entry of Elsa; and, in the second place, that the noisy, energetic playing of the opening scene threw the music of Elsa and Lohengrin into wonderfully beautiful relief--a relief which in the old way of doing the opera was very much wanting. To play "Lohengrin" in the old way is to deny Wagner the astonishing sense of dramatic effect he had from the beginning; to play it as Seidl played it is to prove that the conductor appreciates the perfection of artistic sense that led, compelled, Wagner to set the miraculous vision of Lohengrin against a background made up of such stormy scenes. Had Seidl kept his vigour for the stormy scenes, and given us a finer tenderness in the prelude, the love-music, and Lohengrin's account of himself, his rendering would have been a flawless one.