Chapter 13

The Meiningen orchestra is famous for its wind, and when, at the first concert, I heard Beethoven's Rondino for wind instruments, it seemed to me that I was hearing brass for the first time as I had imagined brass ought to sound. Here was, not so much a new thing which one had never thought possible, as that precise thing which one's ears had expected, and waited for, and never heard. One quite miraculous thing these wind players certainly did, in common, however, with the whole orchestra. And that was to give an effect of distance, as if the sound came actually from beyond the walls. I noticed it first in the overture to "Leonore," the first piece which they played; an unparalleled effect and one of surprising beauty.

Another matter for which the Meiningen orchestra is famous is its interpretation of the works of Brahms. At each concert some fine music of Brahms was given finely, but it was not until the fourth concert that I realised, on hearing the third Symphony, everything of which Brahms was capable. It may be that a more profound acquaintance with his music would lead me to add other things to this thing as the finest music which he ever wrote; but the third Symphony certainly revealed to me, not altogether a new, but a complete Brahms. It had all his intellect and something more; thought had taken fire, and become a kind of passion.

MOZART IN THE MIRABELL-GARTEN

They are giving a cycle of Mozart operas at Munich, at the Hof-Theater, to follow the Wagner operas at the Prinz-Regenten-Theatre; and I stayed, on my way to Salzburg, to hear "Die Zauberflöte." It was perfectly given, with a small, choice orchestra under Herr Zumpe, and with every part except the tenor's admirably sung and acted. Herr Julius Zarest, from Hanover, was particularly good as Papageno; the Eva of "Die Meistersinger" made an equally good Pamina. And it was staged under Herr von Possart's direction, as suitably and as successfully, in its different way, as the Wagner opera had been. The sombre Egyptian scenes of this odd story, with its menagerie and its pantomime transformation, were turned into a thrilling spectacle, and by means of nothing but a little canvas and paint and limelight. It could have cost very little, compared with an English Shakespeare revival, let us say; but how infinitely more spectacular, in the good sense, it was! Every effect was significant, perfectly in its place, doing just what it had to do, and without thrusting itself forward for separate admiration. German art of to-day is all decorative, and it is at its best when it is applied to the scenery of the stage. Its fault, in serious painting, is that it is too theatrical, it is too anxious to be full of too many qualities besides the qualities of good painting. It is too emphatic, it is meant for artificial light. If Franz Stuck would paint for the stage, instead of using his vigorous brush to paint nature without distinction and nightmares without imagination on easel-canvases, he would do, perhaps rather better, just what these scene-painters do, with so much skill and taste. They have the sense of effective decoration; and German art, at present, is almost wholly limited to that sense.

I listened, with the full consent of my eyes, to the lovely music, which played round the story like light transfiguring a masquerade; and now, by a lucky chance, I can brood over it here in Salzburg, where Mozart was born, where he lived, where the house in which he wrote the opera is to be seen, a little garden-house brought over from Vienna and set down where it should always have been, high up among the pinewoods of the Capuzinerberg. I find myself wondering how much Mozart took to himself, how much went to his making, in this exquisite place, set in a hollow of great hills, from which, if you look down upon it, it has the air of a little toy town out of a Noah's Ark, set square in a clean, trim, perfectly flat map of meadows, with its flat roofs, packed close together on each side of a long, winding river, which trails across the whole breadth of the plain. From the midst of the town you look up everywhere at heights; rocks covered with pine-trees, beyond them hills hooded with white clouds, great soft walls of darkness, on which the mist is like the bloom of a plum; and, right above you, the castle, on its steep rock swathed in trees, with its grey walls and turrets, like the castle which one has imagined for all the knights of all the romances. All this, no doubt, entered into the soul of Mozart, and had its meaning for him; but where I seem actually to see him, where I can fancy him walking most often, and hearing more sounds than elsewhere come to him through his eyes and his senses, in the Mirabell-Garten, which lies behind the palace built by an Archbishop of Salzburg in the seventeenth century, and which is laid out in the conventional French fashion, with a harmony that I find in few other gardens. I have never walked in a garden which seemed to keep itself so reticently within its own severe and gracious limits. The trees themselves seem to grow naturally into the pattern of this garden, with its formal alleys, in which the birds fly in and out of the trellised roofs, its square-cut bushes, its low stone balustrades, its tall urns out of which droop trails of pink and green, its round flower-beds, each of a single colour, set at regular intervals on the grass, its tiny fountain dripping faintly into a green and brown pool; the long, sad lines of the Archbishop's Palace, off which the brown paint is peeling; the whole sad charm, dainty melancholy, formal beauty, and autumnal air of it. It was in the Mirabell-Garten that I seemed nearest to Mozart.

The music of Mozart, as one hears it in "Die Zauberflöte," is music without desire, music content with beauty, and to be itself. It has the firm outlines of Dürer or of Botticelli, with the same constraint within a fixed form, if one compares it with the Titian-like freedom and splendour of Wagner. In hearing Mozart I saw Botticelli's "Spring"; in hearing Wagner I had seen the Titian "Scourging of Christ." Mozart has what Coventry Patmore called "a glittering peace": to Patmore that quality distinguished supreme art, and, indeed, the art of Mozart is, in its kind, supreme. It has an adorable purity of form, and it has no need to look outside those limits which it has found or fixed for itself. Mozart cares little, as a rule, for what he has to express; but he cares infinitely for the way in which he expresses everything, and, through the mere emotional power of the notes themselves, he conveys to us all that he cares to convey: awe, for instance, in those solemn scenes of the priests of Isis. He is a magician, who plays with his magic, and can be gay, out of mere pleasant idleness, fooling with Papagenus as Shakespeare fools in "Twelfth-Night." "Die Zauberflöte" is really a very fine kind of pantomime, to which music lends itself in the spirit of the thing, yet without condescending to be grotesque. The duet of Papagenus and Papagena is absolutely comic, but it is as lovely as a duet of two birds, of less flaming feather. As the lovers ascend through fires and floods, only the piping of the magic flute is heard in the orchestra: imagine Wagner threading it into the web of a great orchestral pattern! For Mozart it was enough, and for his art, it was enough. He gives you harmony which does not need to mean anything outside itself, in order to be supremely beautiful; and he gives you beauty with a certain exquisite formality, not caring to go beyond the lines which contain that reticent, sufficient charm of the Mirabell-Garten.

NOTES ON WAGNER AT BAYREUTH

I. BAYREUTH AND MUNICH

Bayreuth is Wagner's creation in the world of action, as the music-dramas are his creation in the world of art; and it is a triumph not less decisive, in its transposition of dream into reality. Remember that every artist, in every art, has desired his own Bayreuth, and that only Wagner has attained it. Who would not rather remain at home, receiving the world, than go knocking, humbly or arrogantly, at many doors, offering an entertainment, perhaps unwelcome? The artist must always be at cautious enmity with his public, always somewhat at its mercy, even after he has conquered its attention. The crowd never really loves art, it resents art as a departure from its level of mediocrity; and fame comes to an artist only when there is a sufficient number of intelligent individuals in the crowd to force their opinion upon the resisting mass of the others, in the form of a fashion which it is supposed to be unintelligent not to adopt. Bayreuth exists because Wagner willed that it should exist, and because he succeeded in forcing his ideas upon a larger number of people of power and action than any other artist of our time. Wagner always got what he wanted, not always when he wanted it. He had a king on his side, he had Liszt on his side, the one musician of all others who could do most for him; he had the necessary enemies, besides the general resistance of the crowd; and at last he got his theatre, not in time to see the full extent of his own triumph in it, but enough, I think, to let him die perfectly satisfied. He had done what he wanted: there was the theatre, and there were his works, and the world had learnt where to come when it was called.

And there is now a new Bayreuth, where, almost as well as at Bayreuth itself, one can see and hear Wagner's music as Wagner wished it to be seen and heard. The square, plain, grey and green Prinz-Regenten Theatre at Munich is an improved copy of the theatre at Bayreuth, with exactly the same ampitheatrical arrangement of seats, the same invisible orchestra and vast stage. Everything is done as at Bayreuth: there are even the three "fanfaren" at the doors, with the same punctual and irrevocable closing of the doors at the beginning of each act. As at Bayreuth, the solemnity of the whole thing makes one almost nervous, for the first few minutes of each act; but, after that, how near one is, in this perfectly darkened, perfectly quiet theatre, in which the music surges up out of the "mystic gulf," and the picture exists in all the ecstasy of a picture on the other side of it, beyond reality, how near one is to being alone, in the passive state in which the flesh is able to endure the great burdening and uplifting of vision. There are thus now two theatres in the world in which music and drama can be absorbed, and not merely guessed at.

II. THE LESSON OF PARSIFAL

The performance of "Parsifal," as I saw it at Bayreuth, seemed to me the most really satisfying performance I had ever seen in a theatre; and I have often, since then, tried to realise for myself exactly what it was that one might learn from that incarnation of the ideas, the theoretical ideas, of Wagner. The music itself has the abstract quality of Coventry Patmore's odes. I cannot think of it except in terms of sight. Light surges up out of it, as out of unformed depths; light descends from it, as from the sky; it breaks into flashes and sparkles of light, it broadens out into a vast sea of light. It is almost metaphysical music; pure ideas take visible form, humanise themselves in a new kind of ecstasy. The ecstasy has still a certain fever in it; these shafts of light sometimes pierce the soul like a sword; it is not peace, the peace of Bach, to whom music can give all he wants; it is the unsatisfied desire of a kind of flesh of the spirit, and music is but a voice. "Parsifal" is religious music, but it is the music of a religion which had never before found expression. I have found in a motet of Vittoria one of the motives of "Parsifal," almost note for note, and there is no doubt that Wagner owed much to Palestrina and his school. But even the sombre music of Vittoria does not plead and implore like Wagner's. The outcry comes and goes, not only with the suffering of Amfortas, the despair of Kundry. This abstract music has human blood in it.

What Wagner has tried to do is to unite mysticism and the senses, to render mysticism through the senses. Mr. Watts-Dunton has pointed out that that is what Rossetti tried to do in painting. That mysterious intensity of expression which we see in the faces of Rossetti's latest pictures has something of the same appeal as the insatiable crying-out of a carnal voice, somewhere in the depths of Wagner's latest music.

In "Parsifal," more perhaps than anywhere else in his work, Wagner realised the supreme importance of monotony, the effect that could be gained by the incessant repetition of a few ideas. All that music of the closing scene of the first act is made out of two or three phrases, and it is by the finest kind of invention that those two or three phrases are developed, and repeated, and woven together into so splendid a tissue. And, in the phrases themselves, what severity, what bareness almost! It is in their return upon themselves, their weighty reiterance, that their force and significance become revealed; and if, as Nietzsche says, they end by hypnotising us, well, all art is a kind of hypnotic process, a cunning absorption of the will of another.

"Parsifal" presents itself as before all things a picture. The music, soaring up from hidden depths, and seeming to drop from the heights, and be reflected back from shining distances, though it is, more than anything I have ever heard, like one of the great forces of nature, the sea or the wind, itself makes pictures, abstract pictures; but even the music, as one watches the stage, seems to subordinate itself to the visible picture there. And, so perfectly do all the arts flow into one, the picture impresses one chiefly by its rhythm, the harmonies of its convention. The lesson of "Parsifal" is the lesson that, in art, rhythm is everything. Every moment in the acting of this drama makes a picture, and every movement is slow, deliberate, as if automatic. No actor makes a gesture, which has not been regulated for him; there is none of that unintelligent haphazard known as being "natural"; these people move like music, or with that sense of motion which it is the business of painting to arrest. Gesture being a part of a picture, how should it but be settled as definitely, for that pictorial effect which all action on the stage is (more or less unconsciously) striving after, as if it were the time of a song, or the stage direction: "Cross stage to right"? Also, every gesture is slow; even despair having its artistic limits, its reticence. It is difficult to express the delight with which one sees, for the first time, people really motionless on the stage. After all, action, as it has been said, is only a way of spoiling something. The aim of the modern stage, of all drama, since the drama of the Greeks, is to give a vast impression of bustle, of people who, like most people in real life, are in a hurry about things; and our actors, when they are not making irrelevant speeches, are engaged in frantically trying to make us see that they are feeling acute emotion, by I know not what restlessness, contortion, and ineffectual excitement. If it were once realised how infinitely more important are the lines in the picture than these staccato extravagances which do but aim at tearing it out of its frame, breaking violently through it, we should have learnt a little, at least, of what the art of the stage should be, of what Wagner has shown us that it can be.

Distance from the accidents of real life, atmosphere, the space for a new, fairer world to form itself, being of the essence of Wagner's representation, it is worth noticing how adroitly he throws back this world of his, farther and farther into the background, by a thousand tricks of lighting, the actual distance of the stage from the proscenium, and by such calculated effects, as that long scene of the Graal, with its prolonged movement and ritual, through the whole of which Parsifal stands motionless, watching it all. How that solitary figure at the side, merely looking on, though, unknown to himself, he is the centre of the action, also gives one the sense of remoteness, which it was Wagner's desire to produce, throwing back the action into a reflected distance, as we watch someone on the stage who is watching it!

The beauty of this particular kind of acting and staging is of course the beauty of convention. The scenery, for instance, with what an enchanting leisure it merely walks along before one's eyes, when a change is wanted! Convention, here as in all plastic art, is founded on natural truth very closely studied. The rose is first learned, in every wrinkle of its petals, petal by petal, before that reality is elaborately departed from, in order that a new, abstract beauty may be formed out of those outlines, all but those outlines being left out. And "Parsifal," which is thus solemnly represented before us, has in it, in its very essence, that hieratic character which it is the effort of supreme art to attain. At times one is reminded of the most beautiful drama in the world, the Indian drama "Sakuntala": in that litter of leaves, brought in so touchingly for the swan's burial, in the old hermit watering his flowers. There is something of the same universal tenderness, the same religious linking together of all the world, in some vague enough, but very beautiful, Pantheism. I think it is beside the question to discuss how far Wagner's intentions were technically religious: how far Parsifal himself is either Christ or Buddha, and how far Kundry is a new Magdalen. Wagner's mind was the mind to which all legend is sacred, every symbol of divine things to be held in reverence; but symbol, with him, was after all a means to an end, and could never have been accepted as really an end in itself. I should say that in "Parsifal" he is profoundly religious, but not because he intended, or did not intend, to shadow the Christian mysteries. His music, his acting, are devout, because the music has a disembodied ecstasy, and the acting a noble rhythm, which can but produce in us something of the solemnity of sensation produced by the service of the Mass, and are in themselves a kind of religious ceremonial.

III. THE ART OF WAGNER

In saying, as we may truly say, that Wagner made music pictorial, it should be remembered that there is nothing new in the aim, only in the continuity of its success. Haydn, in his "Creation," evoked landscapes, giving them precision by an almost mechanical imitation of cuckoo and nightingale. Trees had rustled and water flowed in the music of every composer. But with Wagner it may be said that the landscape of his music moves before our eyes as clearly as the moving scenery with which he does but accentuate it; and it is always there, not a decor, but a world, the natural world in the midst of which his people of the drama live their passionate life, and a world in sympathy with all their passion. And in his audible representation of natural sounds and natural sights he does, consummately, what others have only tried, more or less well, to do. When, in the past at least, the critics objected to the realism of his imitative effects, they forgot that all other composers, at one time or another, had tried to be just as imitative, but had not succeeded so well in their imitations. Wagner, in his painting, is the Turner of music. He brings us nature, heroically exalted, full of fiery splendour, but nature as if caught in a mirror, not arranged, subdued, composed, for the frame of a picture. He is afraid of no realism, however mean, because he has confidence in nature as it is, apprehended with all the clairvoyance of emotion.

Between the abyss of the music, out of which the world rises up with all its voices, and the rocks and clouds, in which the scenery carries us onward to the last horizon of the world, gods and men act out the brief human tragedy, as if on a narrow island in the midst of a great sea. A few steps this way or that will plunge them into darkness; the darkness awaits them, however they succeed or fail, whether they live nobly or ignobly, in the interval; but the interval absorbs them, as if it were to be eternity, and we see them rejoicing and suffering with an abandonment to the moment which intensifies the pathos of what we know is futile. Love, in Wagner, is so ecstatic and so terrible, because it must compass all its anguish and delight into an immortal moment, before which there is only a great darkness, and only a great darkness afterwards. Sorrow is so lofty and so consoling because it is no less conscious of its passing hour.

And meanwhile action is not everything, as it is for other makers of drama; is but one among many modes of the expression of life. Those long narratives, which some find so tedious, so undramatic, are part of Wagner's protest against the frequently false emphasis of action. In Wagner anticipation and memory are seen to be often equally intense with the instant of realisation. Siegfried is living with at least as powerful and significant a life when he lies under the trees listening to the song of the birds as when he is killing the dragon. And it is for this that the "motives," which are after all only the materialising of memory, were created by Wagner. These motives, by which the true action of the drama expresses itself, are a symbol of the inner life, of its preponderance over outward event, and, in their guidance of the music, their indication of the real current of interest, have a spiritualising effect upon both music and action, instead of, as was once thought, materialising both.

Wagner's aim at expressing the soul of things is still further helped by his system of continuous, unresolved melody. The melody which circumscribes itself like Giotto's _O_ is almost as tangible a thing as a statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air, flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying poise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to wood and wind, is more than a mere heightening of speech: it partakes of the nature of thought, but it is more than thought; it is the whole expression of the subconscious life, saying more of himself than any person of the drama has ever found in his own soul.

It is here that Wagner unites with the greatest dramatists, and distinguishes himself from the contemporary heresy of Ibsen, whose only too probable people speak a language exactly on the level of their desks and their shop-counters. Except in the "Meistersinger," all Wagner's personages are heroic, and for the most part those supreme sublimations of humanity, the people of legend, Tannhauser, Tristan, Siegfried, Parsifal, have at once all that is in humanity and more than is hi humanity. Their place in a national legend permits them, without disturbing our critical sense of the probability of things, a superhuman passion; for they are ideals, this of chivalry, that of love, this of the bravery, that of the purity, of youth. Yet Wagner employs infinite devices to give them more and more of verisimilitude; modulating song, for instance, into a kind of chant which we can almost take for actual speech. It is thus the more interesting to note the point to which realism conducts him, the limit at which it stops, his conception of a spiritual reality which begins where realism leaves off.