Chapter 14

'THE NIBELUNG'S RING' AND 'THE RHINEGOLD'

I

In the case of few artists is there an account of the creation of their works worth serious consideration. In the colloquial as well as the true sense of the word they are apt to be imaginative, and such a story as Edgar Allen Poe's of the composition of the _Raven_ is not so much imaginative as imaginary. The creative artist is usually the last man in the world to give a veracious history of the genesis of his creations, for the simple reason that he does not know, and, during the later process of trying to find out, for his own private satisfaction, he is given to invent theories--or, let us say, hypotheses--which eventually he may come to believe pure fact. In music the act of creation is often done in a hypnotic state. Goethe mentions that his earlier songs were written in a state of clairvoyance. Many much more recent poets seem to have achieved their hugest popular successes whilst in a comatose state. Some, who also managed to secure a success with the public, apparently conceived and executed their mighty works in a state of hallucination--having somehow got the idea into their heads that they were poets. Handel, Mozart and Beethoven are three musicians who are known--if history may be at all believed--to have composed in a hypnotic state: Handel would sit for hours, unconscious of what went on around him; Mozart could not be trusted with a knife at dinner--when he had a dinner; Beethoven would pour cold water over his hands until the tenants beneath raised violent objections. No such tales are related of Bach, of Haydn, of Gluck, of Weber, nor of Wagner. If ever a man knew precisely what he had been doing, even if he was not self-conscious at the moment of doing it, that man was Wagner. He stands apart, therefore; apart from some of the greatest composers. His case, I take it, is analogous to that of a man who cannot remember a friend's address and thinks of it that night in a dream: how he chances to dream he cannot tell, but he knows what he has dreamt, and when.

It is worth insisting on this, partly because it is eminently characteristic of Wagner, partly because it enables us now to trace with some certainty the growth of the _Nibelung's Ring_, both drama and music, from its birth to its final execution. The history of the building-up of the drama, like the drama itself, is a mightily complicated and entangled matter. Some of it had to be related earlier in this book to account, so to say, for the way in which Wagner filled up his days; but it will be convenient to summarise it here. Let us begin with a few dates--

1848. Had studied the Nibelungen saga and sketched the plan of the whole gigantic work much as it now stands.

1850-51. Discusses _Siegfried's Death_ in letters to Uhlig and Liszt. Begins the poem in another form, which he abandons.

1852. Writes the poem for the work practically in its final form; privately printed the following year.

1853. Begins _Rhinegold_.

1854. Completes _Rhinegold_. Begins the _Valkyrie_, and sketches _Siegfried_ at the same time.

1856. Completes _Valkyrie_. Begins composition of _Siegfried_. Completes first and begins second act of _Siegfried_, and interrupts it to start work on _Tristan_.

1859. _Tristan_ completed.

1867. _Mastersingers_ completed. Composition of _Siegfried_ resumed. _Siegfried_ completed. _Dusk of the Gods_ begun. _Dusk of the Gods_ completed.

1876. The _Ring_ given at Bayreuth.

Wagner was thus occupied with the _Ring_ for fully twenty-five years. The _Rhinegold_ followed _Lohengrin_, but there was a gap of five years between them, mainly devoted to literary work (1848-53); and during that period his whole style in music underwent a vast change. In one respect the change is not so marked as that between the _Rhine__gold_ and the _Valkyrie_; in the first there is little of the passion, strength, grip and breadth of the others. While composing the _Rhinegold_ his powers were developing at a prodigious rate, and had the _Rhinegold_ been a better subject for the purpose they might have reached maturity while writing it. But there is no human element in it, and without that Wagner could not get on. We have already seen that he abandoned the idea of the _Mastersingers_ for years--until, in fact, he had created a soul for Sachs: then he went ahead and gave us a series of magnificent pictures of old Nuremberg. In the same way, though he wrote some fine music in the _Rhinegold_, in richness, splendour of colouring, it does not compare with the _Valkyrie_, where he is chiefly concerned with two human beings and a being who must be called only a demi-goddess, half-goddess and half-human. He could not compose unless he had the double inspiration, the human soul and the pictorial environment. If I had to select three of Wagner's works to live with I should take the _Valkyrie_, _Tristan_ and the _Mastersingers_. In them we find inspiration and craftmanship in absolute proportion; in the later dramas of the _Ring_ we shall see how craftsmanship outran inspiration--sometimes with results that can only be called deplorable. This matter must be reserved for discussion until we deal with the operas separately.

The labyrinthine libretto owes its defects not to the many years it took to write--for when once Wagner set to work it was done in a single breath--but to the nature of the subject and the very German way in which a German composer inevitably felt impelled to treat that subject. In Chapter X, p. 193 and onward, the reader will recollect certain letters: I beg him, before going further, to turn back to these and mark with care Wagner's own story of the growth of this gigantic opera. The letter on p. 227 is most characteristic of a German. _Siegfried's Death_ did not explain enough, so an explanation had to be offered; that explanation needed explaining, so a second explanation was made; this left matters in as unsatisfactory a state as ever, so, finally, the first opera of the four, the _Rhinegold_, was written--and with that Wagner mercifully stopped. He had set himself a task simply appalling in the demands it must needs make on his time and creative energy; moreover, he had set himself a task just as hard in the demands it made on his stage-craft. The four dramas could not but overlap, and they do overlap to such an extent that in the very near future "cuts" will be made freely to eliminate repetitions which have even now grown a weariness to the flesh. The poem--or, more properly, the four opera-books--must now be summarised, and I will endeavour to avoid imitation of Wagner by not going over the same ground twice, or more than twice.

II

The central figure of the _Ring_, considered as a whole, is Wotan. He is absolute lord of earth and heaven as long as his luck lasts. The luck lasts no longer than is determined, not by the hours, but by some mysterious something, some unfathomable mystery of a power, behind the hours. When the hour strikes, his stately home in the heavens shall be rolled up like a scroll, shall be consumed in flames; Wotan and the minor gods shall perish; a new start shall be made in the world. Now, this idea of the old saga is clearly enough a way of stating, in the guise of a story, a simple historical fact, that with the coming of the White Christ the old deities were driven out. There is no drama inherent in it: for the drama Wagner went to the explanatory story of how the _dénouement_ came about, of the causes which brought it about, which, with the self-contradictoriness of most of those primitive attempts to account for the mystery of the world, were not causes at all, but only incidents by the way, since the catastrophe had been arranged for since the beginning of time. The main cause (in this sense) is Wotan's lust for power, and Wagner reads it thus: since to hold and exercise this power compels Wotan to do things which are a violence to his best nature, to thrust love from him, he voluntarily abdicates and calmly awaits the end. He first makes several struggles to keep the power while shifting its responsibilities, and these form the subject of three of the four dramas.

The power is symbolised by the gold of the Rhine; this gold, made into a Ring--the _Nibelung's Ring_--gives absolute power to its possessor. It is accursed; the curse being what I have just mentioned--that the power cannot be exercised without its possessor doing violence to his nature, thereby destroying that nature. Wotan thinks if an absolutely free agent, a hero owing nothing to any one, bound by no conditions, could gain this Ring, his power might be preserved: he might defy even Fate, since no conditions were attached to the possession of it. He makes the initial mistake when he determines to raise up such a hero: the hero's act is as much Wotan's as if Wotan had himself committed it.

After this description of the main dramatic motive of the _Ring_, those--if there are any now alive--who are unfamiliar with the work may have no desire to see it, whilst those who know it may imagine that I am purposely misrepresenting it. I beg both classes of readers to be patient. If this were the whole _Ring_ it would indeed be a barren, bleak and desolate affair. This is nothing more than the frame which contains the dramas which make the _Ring_ the great work it is--the dramas with their wealth of passion and colour, their hundred varied emotions and scenes of love and tragedy. Before proceeding to deal with them separately, let me again mention one point. There is the flat contradiction between the Wotan who knows that when the moment arrives his reign must automatically end, and the Wotan who hopes to go on reigning by getting possession of the Ring through the agency of a fearless hero who has struck no bargain with the powers who are stronger than the gods. That contradiction is inherent in the saga, and had Wagner been able to eliminate it--as he tried by diving through the saga and to the myth behind--the very essence and atmosphere of the drama would have been eliminated also. The idea of predetermined destiny colours that drama throughout; the whole thing might be the old Scandinavian way of stating a problem older than Scandinavia, that of free-will and predestination.

III

The curtain rises, and we are in the depths of the Rhine; water-nymphs sport about; Alberich, an evil being of the river, tries in vain to catch them. The water grows brighter with the rising of the sun, and the Rhinegold is seen to glow on the summit of a high rock. Defeated in his attempts to capture a nymph, Alberich scales the rock, seizes the gold and makes off with it. The silly creatures have told him that their innocent toy, shaped into a ring, would confer upon its possessor power to rule the whole world, on condition that he surrendered love; and love being something Alberich is incapable of understanding, though he is amorous enough, he willingly pays the price for the sake of the power--that is, the power costs him nothing. The light-giving gold being raped, darkness falls on the river.

The next scene is on a plateau; beyond it lies the valley of the Rhine; further off is a mountain; light mists hover over the summit; and, as they clear away in the early morning sunshine, a gorgeous castle, Valhalla, gradually becomes visible. Wotan and Fricka his wife lie in slumber. Fricka wakes first, and is startled, not to say horrified, by the apparition. The Giants, Fasolt and Fafner, have built the castle, and the promised payment is Freia, Fricka's sister, whose apples all gods and goddesses must eat every day, else they will fade and perish. Fricka tries to awaken Wotan: in his dreams he talks of endless, omnipotent power, and of his castle, to be peopled by heroes to fight for him against the brute forces of the earth. When he is aroused he gazes at the building in deepest joy: _now_ his ambition will be gratified. In vain Fricka expostulates, repeating (in homely phrase), "What about Freia?" Wotan smiles a superior smile: he has arranged that matter, and all will be well.

This is the beginning of Wotan's tragedy, the huge drama of which the others constitute the working out. From this scene to the end we are to see Wotan gradually forced into a corner. He has to learn by slow degrees that you cannot have anything without paying the price. It is in vain he argues with Fricka. She stands for law--inexorable law. She seems a disagreeable woman, and it would be much more pleasant for everybody concerned if she could be induced to hold her tongue and let things take their course. So is what we call the law of gravitation a disagreeable thing; all the same, we know that if we fall off a house-roof we shall break our necks. In the Scandinavian cosmogony Wotan holds sway only by treaties, bargains struck with the powers that only sustain him so long as he sticks to his word, and are capable of thrusting him down if he breaks his word. Even omnipotence may be bought too dearly, and Wotan is not destined to taste the sweets of even a quarter of an hour's omnipotence. In vain he tries to evade responsibility, to get something for nothing; and his tragedy is consummated when in _Siegfried_ he realises that omnipotence can never be his. Then he renounces it.

This is by way of being a digression; but, for a clear understanding of this main drama of the _Ring_, it is absolutely necessary that we should see the source of Wotan's troubles, and here it is: that Fricka will not allow him, figuratively, to jump off a house-top without breaking his neck. What she tells him swiftly proves true. Freia flies in, pursued by the Giants, who demand to be paid. "You rule by treaties alone," they say. Wotan looks anxiously round for Loge, the treacherous god of fire and lies. He has promised to find something that the Giants will accept instead of Freia; and when he enters he confesses to failure--there is nothing, in the estimation of an earth-born creature, that is equal to a woman. But he tells of the theft of the gold; the Giants listen greedily, and they agree to take it, if Wotan can get it, instead of Freia. Wotan has a double motive: he does not want all the gold, or, indeed, any of it, save the Ring shaped by the Nibelung; that he determines to grasp, else the Nibelung will become _his_ master. He has trusted to lies and trickery, and has been swindled; but so overpowering is his thirst for universal rule that he again trusts himself to Loge. The Giants hold Freia as a hostage; presently all the gods begin to lapse into a comatose state--they have not eaten of her apples that day--and in desperation Loge and Wotan set out for the Nibelung's abode. The Nibelungs are the slaves and sons of toil; they labour incessantly for Alberich; him only does Wotan fear: he must get the Ring from them at all costs. The pair descend into the Nibelung's cave. The Ring is already forged, and the Tarnhelm--the cap of invisibility--is made which enables him to render himself invisible or to change himself into any animal he wishes. By a trick Wotan gets Alberich into his power, carries him to the upper earth, and only lets him go free after he has surrendered Tarnhelm, Ring and all the hoard of gold. Then the turn of the Giants comes. The pile of gold they demand must hide Freia from sight; and in the end she can still be seen, and Wotan must sacrifice the one thing precious to him, the Ring. That is accursed, and no sooner have Fafner and Fasolt got it than they quarrel; Fafner kills Fasolt, and goes off with all to change himself into a dragon and to hide himself in a cavern with his treasure. Wotan, in his extremity, has summoned Erda, the wisdom of the earth, and she has counselled him to give up the Ring, and it is with horror that he sees how wise she was. But his ambition is boundless; he cannot give up the idea of reigning supreme; and when things seem at their worst he has a sudden inspiration--that, already mentioned, of raising up a hero who will freely take the Ring from Fafner, and, by letting Wotan have it, free of treaties, enable him to reign supreme. The thought is told us only in the music, and in the music only in the light of the later operas of the series. Then the gods cross a rainbow bridge, somewhat hastily thrown up by Donner, the god of storms, and enter Valhalla; and underneath the dreary wail of the Rhinemaidens is heard as they lament their loss. With this the _Rhinegold_ closes.

IV

Now let us consider the music of the _Rhinegold._

Already the discrepancy of styles has been referred to. The _Rhinegold_, coming between _Lohengrin_ and _Tristan_, suffers from an odd sort of pettiness of phrase--a pettiness which in all probability we should not feel if we did not judge it by _Tristan_. The wide sweep of the tide of music that we find in the _Valkyrie_ is absent; there is a tendency to shorten the measures, a hesitation between boldly going on, as in his later manner, and the symmetrical four-bar measures of _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_. The opening of the second scene is in structure that of a Handel opera air: we have the ritornello, and presently the same music is repeated as the accompaniment of Wotan's salute to his castle. This smallness of design, it must be remembered, is only comparative: compared with anything of the sort done before, the design is big and broad. The Wagner of the _Valkyrie_, of _Tristan_ and of the _Mastersingers_, has not acquired full mastery of his new art; there are still plenty of full closes, and, though words are not repeated, the effect at times would hardly be more conventional if they were.

But in all the music we have the first-fruits of Wagner's walks amongst the Swiss mountains. When he sent the book of the _Ring_ to Schopenhauer, that crotchety critic wrote in it that it seemed mainly concerned with clouds; and truly it very largely is. The _Rhinegold_ ends with a storm, the flash of lightning and the roar of thunder; in each Act of the _Valkyrie_ there is a storm; the Third Act of _Siegfried_ opens with a storm; there is one storm in the _Dusk of the Gods_. Wind screaming through the pines, the plash of rain, the driving of thunder-clouds--these are the pictorial inspiration of the _Ring_ as surely as old Nuremberg is the pictorial inspiration of the _Mastersingers_. These Scandinavian gods are the divinities of river and wood and mountain, and Wagner made full use of them. The _Ring_ is far too lengthy, and the main drama is apt to get forgotten; the repetitions, due to Wagner's desire not to let it be forgotten, are wearisome. But one thing can never be forgotten--the sense of the open air, the freshness of nature, the loveliness and health of the green earth: that sense keeps the gigantic, overgrown thing sweet and an endless delight.

The opening is as sublime in its simplicity as the first bars of the _Lohengrin_ prelude. As the curtain rises on the depths of the Rhine, "greenish twilight, lighter above, darker below," the lowest E flat booms softly out (it has to be done by an organ pedal-pipe), the deep voice of the river as it rolls massively on its course towards the sea; and the effect is overwhelming. A theme then makes its appearance in its first vague form, a theme which in one shape or another Wagner uses throughout the four operas for the elemental beings--here, the water nymphs, afterwards Erda. The mass of tone swells out; the music becomes more active; and at last the voices of the Rhinemaidens are heard. The whole of this is one of Wagner's most delightful things. It is another illustration of his rule that a composer should never leave a key as long as he can say what he wants while staying in it; for some hundreds of bars there is no change, and then only a slight one. With the entry of Alberich modulations begin. Here we have the wonderful inventive Wagner: that figure, in the inner part of the musical tissue, would alone stamp him as a great composer: the composer who could invent such a theme could not possibly be a small composer. The mock-coaxing of the nymphs might be a parody of the Venusberg scene in _Tannhäuser_; and later on there occurs a passage that might be a parody on parts of _Tristan_. When Alberich steals the gold we get that degenerate form of the Valhalla theme repeated again and again, and the full effect of the device is only felt when, with the change of scene, we hear the passage in all its nobility and splendour. Wotan's greeting to his new castle is rather grandiose than really fine: one feels the theatrical baritone; one feels also that the quality of homeliness which makes Sachs a great character is sadly lacking. In the _Valkyrie_ this unpretentiousness, so to speak, is always present, and the music gains proportionately in impressiveness. Wotan's opening phrase, grand and sweeping though it is, somehow evokes a vision of an Italian opera baritone expanding his chest, with arms extended in the direction of the more expensive seats: this is neither the mighty Wotan of the _Valkyrie_, nor even of the underground scene in this opera.

Nor is the vocal writing, in another respect, that of the greatest Wagner. I have already spoken of the perfect fusion of vocal and orchestral parts which we find in _Tristan_ and the _Mastersingers_. To that perfection Wagner had not attained when he began the _Ring_; and much of this first speech of Wotan consists of notes written simply to fit in with the Valhalla theme. That theme shows traces of its descent from the Alberich motive--the greed for power--in that it does not bear real development, but only variation; it is, in fact, not a musical subject in the sense in which, say, the _Tristan_ subjects are musical subjects, but is, properly speaking, a figure. But shaped to a stately rhythm and richly harmonised, and moreover gorgeously orchestrated, it glitters with sufficient magnificence. Fricka's remonstrances are at first querulous, but with the passage beginning "Um des Gatten Treue besorgt" we get one of Wagner's matchless bits of lovely melody. The entry of Freia, flying from the Giants, is theatrically effective, and here we find for the first time the phrase, already alluded to in the chapter on _Tristan_, which throughout the _Ring_ is made to serve so many purposes. In this scene I still feel the halting between the _Lohengrin_ style and later, the indecision--nay, the uncertainty--in the handling of the musical material. There are no regular four-bar measures and full closes as in the earlier work; but a great deal is nothing more than dry recitative disguised. The first scene of the _Rhinegold_ is purely symphonic: even if Alberich's spasmodic, jerky exclamations seem to be written in to fit the nature of this being, his whole mode of speech--harsh, unmusical--renders the fact less glaring; and the tide of music flows steadily on, reaching climax upon climax, until the final crash when he disappears with the gold. Wagner did not find it possible to get this continuity when he came to set to music the arguments amongst Wotan, Fricka and Freia: there are short cantilenas, but they are constantly broken by recitative.

With the entry of the Giants the music makes, so to say, a fresh start. The old themes are welded to or interwoven with new material, and a perfect symphonic whole results, one that can be listened to with delight without stage accessories. I do not mean that music intended for the theatre should stand the test of playing away from the theatre, but that here Wagner, while writing strictly and immensely effective theatre music, has got such a grip of his art that he can combine the two things, dramatic truth, and symphonic beauty and cohesion. The flood sweeps on, undisturbed in its flow by the entry of the other deities, or by the introduction of themes full of significance in the light of their after development. But another fact must not go unnoticed. There is in the _Rhinegold_ little of the spring freshness of the _Valkyrie_. The melody associated with Freia's apples is supremely beautiful; but it is a mere short phrase, several times repeated, and the mass of music in which it is embedded smells more of the study and the lamp than of the mountains and the woods. The Froh theme, too, is a trifle flat: it does not effervesce or sparkle: the "dewy splendour" of the _Valkyrie_ music is not on it. This is not to be hypercritical: it is to compare, as one must, a great achievement with an achievement in all respects very much, immeasurably, greater. Had we only the _Rhinegold_, with all its plentiful lack of inspiration and its theatricality, it would rank very high; but Wagner himself in the _Valkyrie_ set the standard by which inevitably it must be judged.

When Wotan and Loge descend to the Nibelung's cave to steal the treasure Wagner frankly lets himself loose. Here we have the hobgoblins of the Teutonic imagination and the rude, boisterous, humorous Wotan of the Scandinavian imagination--the Odin who tried to drink the sea dry and laughed to find he could not. As the once-celebrated Sir Augustus Harris declared, "This is pantomime." Perhaps the scene is unduly protracted, but the music goes on merrily enough. The renewed altercation with the Giants calls for little remark. When, however, the Giants demand the Ring and Wotan calls up Erda, the wisdom of the earth, a passage occurs which, though more or less of an irrelevant interpolation, gives Wagner a chance of putting forth his strength. Erda rises to most mysterious music, counsels Wotan to surrender the Ring, and sinks down again to her sleep; and one forgets the irrelevancy in the thrill of this vision of the Mother Earth, the spirit that sleeps amongst the everlasting hills. Finally the composer gets his great chance, and shows that, like Handel and his own Donner, he "could strike like a thunderbolt." The gods are all disheartened; mists have gathered; Donner--our old friend Thor--raises his hammer and smashes something; there is a flash of lightning and a peal of thunder; the mists and clouds clear away; and we see there the rainbow bridge over which the gods wend on their way to Valhalla. We have Wagner the sublime pictorial musician. The Rainbow motive is perhaps not very graphic in itself, but it serves as a basis for a delicious passage--evening calm and sunset after storm--comparable only with a parallel passage in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. The storm itself is Wagner in the plenitude of his power. It is short: it is not "worked up": in a few strokes, brief and telling as Donner's own hammer-strokes, the whole thing is done. Then the Valhalla music, glorified by a gorgeous accompaniment, is heard again, only interrupted by the wail of the Rhinemaidens below, sorrowing for the loss of their pretty, harmless toy. Wotan hears the cry, and passes on to feast in his castle. Grim care goes with him; but he has the consoling idea of the free hero and the irresistible sword. So ends the _Rhinegold_--Fricka content to have both Wotan and Freia; the other gods not much concerned about anything; Wotan full of apprehensions and also of determination--determination to rule without paying the price of rulership.

V

I have attempted nothing more than a broad and rough description of the _Rhinegold_. The opera was planned as a prelude, and suffers from the defects of the plan, as well as from the fact that it was written before Wagner's new method was ripe. He wrote to Liszt that the music came up "like wild," or, as an irreverent critic once observed, like mould on a pot of jam; and the second description is truer than the speaker thought. The _Rhinegold_ has aged faster than any other of the great works. Alongside of the sublime we find the petty; after phrases as sweet and fresh as raindrops on young spring leaves we find stodgy, "made," music; the atmosphere is not preserved. But gigantic possibilities are opened out. The Rhine music is afterwards used to splendid ends; the Spear motive, which makes its first appearance in rather a trivial form--it might be a quotation from Weber or Spohr--becomes later one of the crowning glories of the _Ring_; the Fire music--the Loge theme--comes out at once in its full magnificence. It is fair criticism to say that had Wagner written the opera again after finishing the _Valkyrie_ he might have wrought up his material into a perfect work of art. A mere mortal, even the greatest mortal, could hardly be expected to attempt the task, and the _Rhinegold_ is a little less than perfect. Moreover, it is superfluous. We can follow the _Valkyrie_, _Siegfried_ and the _Dusk of the Gods_ quite well without it. Still, it is a part of Wagner's scheme, and for many a long year will be enjoyed for its power and beauty, a power and beauty that seem small only in comparison with the greater operas.