CHAPTER II

THE REFORMS OF WAGNER

We may now approach the study in detail of Wagner's artistic aims. I have already said that his purpose was to restore artistic truth, dramatic sincerity, to the opera, and to bring it into some relation to the life of the German people. Recapitulated with more particulars, then, the reforms at which he aimed were these:

(1)--The music had come to be the end instead of a means of expression, and consequently musical forms dominated. Wagner strove to confine music to its proper function of expression. He desired to prevent its being regarded as the object of the lyric drama, but wished it to take its legitimate place as one of the factors in the composition of such a play. His labour in this direction included the disuse of the set musical forms.

(2)--He sought to make a complete organic union of the elements of the drama employed in opera, a union in which each part should be essential and all should work together for a common end, namely the embodiment of the poet's thought.

(3)--He endeavoured to make the "libretto" a consistent drama, but always suitable to the emotional expressiveness of music.

(4)--He aimed to bring the lyric drama out of the slough of mere commercialism, and give it a direct relation to and influence upon the intellectual and æsthetic life of the people.

We have seen that when he set out to free himself from the petty commercialism of the German theatre, Wagner fondly dreamed that with a "grand opera" produced on the stage of the Grand Opéra of Paris, he would emancipate himself. But in writing that work and labouring for its production, he learned two vital facts, namely, that artistic success could not be attained on the lines of the typical grand opera and that from petty commercialism he had only approached that of a larger field. He saw on every hand the theatre in the hands of mere speculators, who sought not art, but money, and who were ready to sink all artistic principles in order that they might appeal to the debased tastes of "the stolid German Philistine or the bored Parisian roué." When he turned his eyes backward along the path of history, he saw that it had been thus for centuries. In the end he came to the conclusion that only in the relation of the Greek drama to the Greek people could he find that Arcadian perfection for which he sought. And so he asked himself whether it was not possible to rise once again to the lofty level of the Greek tragedy and thus bring the theatre into relation to the heart and mind of the people. In his conception of the lyric drama he believed that he saw the means of doing this.

The student of his artistic work will find his ideas set forth in three of his literary compositions, "Art and Revolution," "The Art Work of the Future," and "Opera and Drama." In "Art and Revolution" he studied the theatre of Æschylus and Sophocles and examined the reasons for its decline. In the devotion of Greek religion to the ideals of beauty Wagner found the explanation of the Grecian fidelity to the true principles of all art and of the final union of the arts of poetry, music, and mimetics in the Greek drama. He saw the highest period of this drama coincident with the supremacy of Athens. With the decline of the Athenian state came the decline of the Greek drama, and "the mad laughter of Aristophanes." The spirit of community, he says, split into a thousand lines of egotism, and the union of the arts which made the drama also was dissolved.

Then came the era of philosophy, which was inimical to art, and the dawn of Christianity was still less favourable to it. The old Greek freedom in the contemplation of nature and untrammelled worship of beauty for its own sake could not live under the reign of Christian teaching. With the changes in public thought resultant on the new teachings of Christianity and philosophy, art assumed a new relation to the national life, and in Wagner's opinion a social revolution alone would be the instrument to restore it to its pristine standing. With his social views we need not now concern ourselves. The point for us to bear in mind is that, like the founders of opera, he went back to the Greek drama for his first principles and in it found a union of the arts of poetry, music, and action. This union suggested to him, as it had to Peri and his friends, the laws on which must stand the modern play in music.

From this point he starts in his "Art Work of the Future." He finds that after the dissolution of the old union of the arts, each sought its own development on independent lines and that each had at times sunk to the level of a mere amusement. Various unsuccessful attempts had been made to reunite these arts, but their independence had increased constantly till in Wagner's day each had touched the uttermost limits of its development and could not possibly go further. It was necessary, therefore, that each should sacrifice some measure of its independence in order to unite with the others in an artistic entity. This in Wagner's mind was a musical drama, in which poetry, painting, music, and acting should unite in an organic whole.

Having in this essay laid down the fundamental demands for his ideal lyric drama, he made in "Opera and Drama" an exhaustive study of this form of art. The first part of the work is devoted to a critical sketch of the development of opera. The text is that which we have already noted, that the means of expression, music, had been taken for the end, while the real object, the drama, had been made subsidiary to the production of pretty music in set forms. With this as his theme, Wagner examined the works of the various operatic masters and adduced evidence to establish his position. It was this part of his book which caused the bitterest comment at the time of publication.

The second part of the work is given to a study of the spoken drama, and it shows that Wagner was a close student of the works of the leading English, French, and German dramatists. It is in this survey that he indicates the special nature of the difficulties placed in the way of dramatic treatment by historical subjects, which he himself found impracticable for operas. He notes how Schiller laboured unsuccessfully to give clearness and form to the mass of historical details which he introduced into his "Wallenstein," while Shakespeare rested upon the firm ground of the auditor's imagination and painted in broad lines. Here the author propounds his own theory that for an ideal drama a mythical subject is the best, because it admits of a centralisation of the poet's thought upon the characters and emotions of the personages and rids him of the limitations of historical colour, or conventions of time or place.

"In the drama," he says, "we must become knowers through the Feeling. The Understanding tells us 'So is it,' only when the Feeling has told us, 'So must it be.' Only through itself, however, does this Feeling become intelligible to itself; it understands no other language than its own. Things which can only be explained to us by the infinite accommodations of the Understanding embarrass and confound the Feeling. In Drama, therefore, an action can only be explained when it is completely vindicated by the Feeling; and it thus is the dramatic poet's task, not to invent actions, but to make an action so intelligible through its emotional necessity, that we may altogether dispense with the intellect's assistance in its vindication. The poet, therefore, has to make its main scope the choice of the Action,--which he must so choose that, alike in its character as in its compass, it makes possible to him its entire vindication from out the Feeling; for in this vindication alone resides the reaching of his aim."

This is the kernel of the second part of "Opera and Drama." In the third part he examines the materials of the poetic drama. He studies the technical resources of rhythm and rhyme and endeavours to show how far they can be utilised by the dramatist. From this he advances to an examination of the type of verse best suited to the purpose of the lyric drama, and here we are made acquainted with the theory of his own verse. He discourses on the functions of melody and harmony in the expression of the feelings of a drama and expounds his ideas as to the powers and uses of the orchestra. Finally he shows how he believes that the development of a drama should lead to periods of emotional exaltation, or, technically, emotional "situations," in which the expressiveness of melody would be employed with all its resources to enforce the poet's thought. The principal tenet of this part of the book is that the music must grow inevitably out of the emotional character of the scene, and that its technical potencies must be employed in proportion to their fitness for specific kinds of expression.

It is in his studies of the spoken historical drama and his expression of his ideas as to the proper materials for the lyric story that we must find the formation of Wagner's fundamental theory that the myth offered the best subject-matter for the musical dramatist. The details of movement and accessories required in a historical drama are in the way of the necessary process of focussing the music on the grand emotions of the play. The simplification of the story, so that its central situations are emotional and not merely theatric, is impossible when historic truth is preserved. But all mythology is the embodiment of primary world-thoughts. It is the poetry of peoples, and he who looks below the surface will find in it the whole heart of a nation. And thus the personages of mythologic story became world-types. They are embodiments of racial or national ideals. They are free, unconventional, elemental. Wagner came to discern in their qualities the requisites for heroes and heroines of the lyric drama. And from the philosophy of Schopenhauer, of which he was a student, he drew encouragement and support.

According to Schopenhauer it is the work of Art to represent for us the eternal essence of things by means of prototypes. The human mind should rise above the conditions of time and place, cause and tendency, and thus come to the contemplation of eternal ideas. This contemplation is the privilege and the duty of Art. Where, then, was Wagner to find eternal ideas suitable for dramatic treatment except in their personifications in mythology? Certainly they were not to be found in librettos of the "Semiramide" or "Sonnambula" variety. Again turning his eyes to the Greek theatre, he found that Æschylus and Sophocles had used the great myths of their people, and that by doing so they had brought their theatre into direct relation with the national life and thought. Why, then, could not he, by using the myths of the Teutonic races, create genuine works of art and reknit the bond between the stage and the national heart? This was the splendid vision which dwelt in his mind in the days of poverty and struggle. It was this which stayed his hand when easy offers of pecuniary success were almost within his grasp. It was this hope which led him forever away from the "pomp and circumstance" of the historical opera, and brought forth works whose kinship to "Rienzi" is so difficult to trace.

The myth, then, became the subject-matter on which he reared his poetic structure. As he has summarised his thoughts on this topic for us in "A Communication to My Friends" it may be well to quote his words:

"I turned for the selection of my material once for all from the domain of history to that of legend.... All the details necessary for the description and preservation of the conventionally historic, which a fixed and limited historical epoch demands in order to make the action clearly intelligible--and which are therefore carried out so circumstantially by the historical novelists and dramatists of to-day--could be here omitted. And by this means the poetry, and especially the music, were freed from the necessity of a method of treatment entirely foreign to them, and particularly impossible as far as music was concerned. The legend, in whatever age or nation it may be placed, has the advantage that it comprehends only the purely human portion of this age or nation, and presents this portion in a form peculiar to it, thoroughly concentrated, and therefore easily intelligible.... This legendary character gives a great advantage to the poetic arrangement of the subject for the reason already mentioned, that, while the simple process of the action--easily comprehensible as far as its outward relations are concerned--renders unnecessary any painstaking for the purpose of explanation of the course of the story, the greatest possible portion of the poem can be devoted to the portrayal of the inner motives of the action--those inmost motives of the soul, which, indeed, the action points out to us as necessary, through the fact that we ourselves feel in our hearts a sympathy with them."

With the idea of founding a national drama on the great mythological thoughts of his people, and keeping constantly in mind the conviction that his business was not the mere telling of a story in verse and music, but the presentation to the minds of his auditors of the underlying emotions of the drama, he quickly realised that the set forms of the old opera were of no use to him. He could not construct a libretto with the regularly recurring duets, trios, and ensembles, if he meant to be true to dramatic art. To abandon these established patterns, however, meant to throw over both the poetic and musical fashions of the older lyric writers. If his people were not to sing arias and duets, but to speak a convincing dialogue, with speech raised to a higher power by the use of music instead of blank verse, as in the spoken drama, he must find new types, both poetic and musical. But with Wagner it must be constantly borne in mind that the dramatic speech is not text first and music afterward, but is both at once. His conception of the talk of his dramas was that of words made vocal in the musical sense by their own inner demand for emotional symbolism. In other words the music must be the direct and inevitable outgrowth of the poetry and the two must be joined in a perfect organic union.

It became necessary, therefore, that he should cast about for some new musical form for the foundation of his drama, for there cannot be music without form. The new pattern did not develop itself immediately in his mind. The first principle of it occurred to him when he was writing "Der Fliegende Holländer." This first principle was that the musical expression of a particular mood, having been found, should be retained. "When a mental mood returned," he says, "its thematic expression also, as a matter of course, was repeated, since it would have been arbitrary and capricious to have sought another motive so long as the object was an intelligible representation of the subject and not a conglomeration of operatic pieces." This at once disposed of the aria, which was a completed musical piece. Wagner conceived the music to be inseparable from the speech and therefore to be completed only at the end of the drama. The melody had thus to become endless, a melody made up of many thematic ideas, all worked up wholly for the purpose of mood painting, and built into a grand form dictated and justified solely by the emotional scheme of the play. With this conviction he steered a happy course between mere formalism and chaotic formlessness. He avoided the set patterns of the older school and escaped the dictation by the verse of the musical shape and figure, yet he also weathered the shoals of musical incoherency. For the identification of the thematic ideas with the poetic thoughts enabled him to make on perfectly logical and natural grounds those melodic repetitions without which music is devoid of form.

Every student of music knows that a melody is constructed of certain phrases which have identifiable rhythmic and melodic shape. The identity of any tune is established by the repetition of these phrases in a regular order. When the repetitions are arranged on a plan similar to that of a verse of poetry, as in the case of such a tune as "Home, Sweet Home," the form of the music becomes that known as the song form, which lies at the basis of nearly every musical composition not strictly contrapuntal. Any music in which certain melodic shapes, known as figures, are not preserved and repeated, in which each phrase once heard is not heard again, is absolutely chaotic and does not convey to the human mind the conception of design, and hence also not of melody. Wagner, in striving to avoid the musical domination of the older forms, had to see to it that he did not fall into this kind of chaos. He had to devise a larger and less confining form, but he had to have a form nevertheless.

But as soon as he had conceived the idea of preserving throughout his drama the first thematic expression of any mental mood or idea, he had the solution of his problem in his hands. For now the musical repetitions were bound to become numerous and to acquire from the text a direct and unmistakable significance which they could not possibly have by themselves. And the criticism to which this form might be open, if it were used as a purely musical one, at once falls to the ground when it is remembered that the object is not musical alone, but also dramatic, or musico-textual. The organic union of the word and the tone makes the assistance given by the text in explaining the meaning (sometimes arbitrary) of the music entirely defensible, and indeed thoroughly commendable.