Chapter 4

What we do know is that standing there on the deck of the ship are two very tragic figures. They have drunk poison; they are consumed with passion one for the other; death is close at hand, and there is nothing to prevent them confessing their love and dying in each other's arms. If Wagner meant us to accept the love elixir as the genuine spring of the immediate drama, he might have saved himself the trouble. It is the imminent presence of death that brings their love to light, as it is their love that takes them to death. They gaze upon one another, and rush into each other's arms. Brangaena, turning round, is horrified to see what her officiousness has accomplished. The music rolls on in a torrent of almost unendurable sweetness; the ship reaches land, and the curtain drops as Tristan and Isolda, oblivious of all but themselves and their passion, stagger in one another's arms, and the trumpets sound without as the King approaches to claim his bride.

I hope I have succeeded in setting forth clearly the forces at work and the nature of the two people on whom they are working. Writers have indulged in grotesque pages of explanation and speculation, from which they might have been saved by a careful reading of the libretto, supplemented by a slight acquaintance with the music. The subject might easily have become intricate--in fact, hopelessly involved and entangled--but Wagner's consummate dramatic art, stage-craft, and knowledge of stage effect have combined to make all as clear as the day. The end of each act sees the lovers in a situation which is at heart the same, though in externals different. Rapt in each other, they care nothing about the sailors, attendants, approaching crowds, and the rest, at the end of the first act; at the end of the second they scarcely understand Mark's passionate affection--they only know it is an enemy of their love; and, finally, they are glad when death frees them from life, which means an incessant trouble and interruption to them. The tragedy deepens and grows more intense with each successive scene; each separates them more widely from life and all that life means, until in the last act the divorce is complete. This is the purpose of the drama; this _is_ the drama, and those who do not like it must turn to another opera.

If the drama is clear, so is the music. Wagner's powers were now at their fullest and ripest; in invention, technical skill, mastery of the colours of the orchestra, he towers far above every composer born in the nineteenth century. Nietzsche, in one of his many quarrelsome diatribes, says Wagner _determined_ to be a musician and made himself one by sheer will-power. But not by taking much thought, nor by determination, nor by exercise of will-power, does any man become an artistic inventor, as Nietzsche would have perceived had he himself been capable of more than spasmodic, fragmentary thought. _Tristan_ is full of great melodies: gigantic themes, like that which is played while Isolda awaits Tristan's entrance; tender ones, like the music given to Brangaena; passionate and intolerably sweet, like the duet of the pair after the drinking of the philtre. The other acts contain even more amazing things, and to them we shall come in due time. First let us note how Wagner sustains his background and atmosphere throughout the first act. At times, when our attention has to be concentrated on the personages on the opening stage, the sea song theme, with its smell of the pungent, salt sea air, disappears; then, as I have remarked, it gradually creeps in again, so that we do not realize that it has ever been absent; or, again, as during the conversation between Isolda and Brangaena, it breaks in abruptly, with the roar of the seamen's voices and Kurvenal's savage orders. It is managed with the most consummate skill. Though the tent blots out a view of the ocean, yet the mast and bellying sail (which ought to be visible), and the miraculous music, preserve an ever-present sense of the sea, and in that atmosphere of keen freshness and ozone the characters begin to work out their destiny. To understand Wagner's real greatness and the personal quality that differentiates his art from the art of all other musicians, let us try to realize what this means. Weber and Mendelssohn had written picturesque music; they gave us landscapes, the rolling sea, black woods, moaning winds; and having done that, they were satisfied. But where they left off Wagner began; their completed picture was for him nothing more than a background. Against it he placed his characters, with their different thoughts and emotions fully expressed. Now, in music you cannot express two or more conflicting emotions, even if you have two themes, each of which shows its own emotion when played separately, and set them going together. However many parts a piece of music may be written in, it is the mass of tone reaching our ears, it is the _ensemble_, that makes the effect. It is obvious, then, that when Wagner puts a shrieking female on the deck of a ship which is shouldering its way through a gently-rolling sea, the same music must serve for the lady and the sea: it must suggest the sea and express the lady's emotions. He could not give picturesque music to the orchestra and let the female indulge in real screams, or even musical imitations of real screams. That would be to step beyond the boundaries of art; for neither real screams nor their imitations are beautiful, and--if a truism may be pardoned to complete a nice sentence--without beauty there can be no art. In spite of much nonsense that has been written and talked, Wagner never sacrificed beauty. Those foolish tales which I used to read in my youth--of how Wagner appropriately, if daringly, sustained discords through long discordant situations--what are they but the blatherskite of long-tongued persons who could talk faster than they could think? Wagner would not sacrifice beauty. He made the characters say, in notes as well as words, what they had to say; he always got the colour and atmosphere of the scenic surroundings into the music. By inspiration and marvellous workmanship he made each phrase serve a double purpose: it expresses the emotion of the person who sings, it gives the atmosphere in which the person is singing. More than anything else, it is this that gives his music its individual character. Such music is bound to remain for ever fresh. So long as trees and grass, rain and sunshine, running waters and flying cloud-scud are things sweet to man's thought, so long will the music of Wagner's operas remain green, always new and refreshing, full and satisfying. He often achieved the task, or helped himself to achieve it, by showing us Nature in sympathy with the human mood of the moment (see the second scene in _Tannhäuser_, the last act of _Tristan_, the whole of the last act of _The Valkyrie_); but he succeeds equally well without these touches of his unrivalled stage-craft.

Further back I referred to Wagner's earlier and later use of the _leit-motif._ In its naive, primitive simplicity the device is certainly not highly artistic. When our academic gentry use it in their festival oratorios, they are supposed to show themselves very advanced. But what purpose, musical or other, is subserved by arbitrarily allying a musical phrase to a personage or an idea and blaring it out whenever that personage or idea comes to the front? Wagner early realized the uselessness of the proceeding, and, as I pointed out, in _Tannhäuser_ there are no _leit-motifs_, though passages and parts of passages are repeated. In _Lohengrin_ it is used rather for a dramatic than a musical purpose. By the time he wrote _Tristan_ he had learnt the splendid artistic uses to which a rather commonplace device could be put. The differences between the _leit-motif_ in _Lohengrin_ and the _leit-motif_ in _Tristan_ are two: in _Tristan_ they are more significant--indeed, they are pregnant to bursting--and more fully charged with energy and colour; also they are not stated and restated in their elementary form as in _Lohengrin_, but continually subjected to a process of metamorphosis. This last mode of developing a theme he probably learnt from Liszt, and without it both _Tristan_ and the _Ring_ would be very different. But while these are the most striking characteristics of Wagner's later leading themes and mode of using them, it must be remembered that he was now absolute master of every device of operatic art previously known, and of many he invented as he went along. The same theme in _Tristan_ has a dozen functions to fulfil; it may be changed almost out of recognition to suit a particular occasion, and a few minutes later, for a dramatic purpose, it may be stated in all its original plainness. I advise all who wish to understand _Tristan_ not to fret themselves with those rascally and stupid guide books which merely addle the brain with their interminable lists of motives. Throughout the opera new matter is continually introduced, with old themes, changed or unchanged, woven into the tissue; and to go hunting for these old themes, to try to recognise them whenever they crop up, is not only to lose one's enjoyment of the music, but to run a fair risk of misapprehending it altogether, and the drama as well. This jack-fool twaddle about there being not a single phrase in an opera which has not grown out of another is manifestly absurd--for out of what does the first one grow?--and utterly untrue. In every scene of _Tristan_ an enormous amount of new material is added; it is the richest thematically of all the operas. But this labelling of nearly every phrase as the This, That, or the Other motive has confused thousands of people; they fatigue themselves by incessantly trying to remember the significance of a phrase which resembles one that has been heard before; and instead of letting the music make its natural and proper effect, they grow bewildered, and blame Wagner for what is in reality the fault of the analysis-makers. To follow _Tristan_, one need not know more than the few fragments I have quoted above; in fact, without any knowledge whatever it can be followed. The themes have no arbitrary significance attached to them; they are expressive music and tell their own tale. But, of course, when one has heard the opera many times--and twenty performances, supplemented by a study of Von Bülow's incomparable piano arrangement of the score, are hardly enough to enable us to begin to comprehend the real richness and vastness of _Tristan_--then gradually new features are found, new lights are thrown by the use of _leit-motifs_, and slowly the music yields us that multiplicity of complex delights--delights intellectual, emotional, or purely sensuous--that only the greatest works of art can give. Take, for example, the theme which Isolda sings when she perceives death to be the only cure for her woes. Later, when she is compelling Tristan to drink the poison-cup, the sailors break out into "Yo-heave-ho!" and he says, "Where are we?" "Near to the end!" she says, to the accompaniment of this same theme. To one who barely remembers the phrase the effect is marked enough, but to one who knows every phrase and its associations the double meaning is almost horrifying. It is idle to search out such points as this with the aid of a guide, for while you are waiting for them you lose the music in which they are set; the prevailing mood eludes you, and the points themselves fail to make their effect. There is another danger. People easily go _leit-motif_ mad, and their insane imagination creates a _leit-motif_ out of any two phrases that have a superficial and accidental resemblance. _Tristan_ and the _Ring_ are not musical puzzles. The themes are quite able to look after themselves, and to assert themselves at the proper moment. Many of them are not _leit-motifs_ at all. The passage out of the sea-song, which is heard constantly through the first act, is not a _leit-motif_, nor are many of the other subjects. They receive symphonic development; but, after all, the opening four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony do not form a _leit-motif_. I have dwelt at length upon this, for misguided people have blinded both themselves and others as to Wagner's true aims and methods and the splendour of the accomplished thing by trying to read into his music a host of trifling and pettifogging allusions which he never intended. There is enough to break our minds upon without troubling about these.

In the second act we are left in the dark as to what has happened since we left Isolda in Tristan's arms on the deck of the ship. Some years ago an excited discussion took place on a very momentous question--"Did Isolda marry King Mark or not?" If not, it was strange that she should have been left free enough apparently to see Tristan whenever she wished, and Mark's expostulations at the end of the act seem rather unwarranted in the mouth of a man whose honour, in the Divorce Court sense, has not been smirched; yet, on the other hand, it is unlikely that a legendary King, with the bride in his palace, would wait so long for the marriage as to allow the many pretty incidents mentioned by Brangaena to happen. Yet again, if they were married, Mark, in the third act, shows a more than heroic willingness and less than cuckold readiness to let Isolda go free. Probably Wagner never gave the problem a moment's consideration, which is hardly surprising when we consider his own multitudinous love affairs. He was not writing a Sunday-school tract, but a drama of passion so intense that purity, prudence and all such considerations were thrown to the winds.

The act opens with a very Proteus of a theme. Its entrance is like a thunder-clap in a cloudless sky. The conductor lifts his stick, and then--

--an unprepared discord which must have pained the ears and grieved the hearts of the ordinary opera-goers and pedants when the opera was first given. This subject is used in connection with the notion of daylight as a nuisance to lovers in the subsequent conversation of Tristan and Isolda--a notion which we shall examine presently. Presently another subject is heard, one of which extensive use is made in the first scene--

The curtain rises. It is a sultry summer night; the black woods stand round a garden; on the left is the castle of Mark, with a torch blazing at the doorway, making the surrounding night blacker. Sounds of hunting-horns are dying away in the distance. Brangaena and Isolda are there listening, and Brangaena, to music of enchanting beauty, is warning Isolda that the hunters can be no great way off. "Listen to the brook," says Isolda. "How could I hear that if the horns were near?" Then comes one of Wagner's matchless bits of painting--the brook rippling through the silent night. Isolda is now going to extinguish the torch, as a signal to Tristan that he may approach. Brangaena protests, and warns Isolda against Melot, who has arranged this night hunt as a trap to catch Tristan; and she bewails the officiousness which led her to substitute the love-philtre for the poison. The rest of the scene may be passed over. The music is woven out of themes just quoted, and another which will play a big part in the love-duet:

Of course, Isolda prevails. Brangaena is sent to keep watch, and Isolda throws down the torch to the Death motive. Tristan rushes in, and the most passionate love-duet ever written begins.

After the first ecstasies have subsided the lovers converse. They must talk about something--what should it be? As Wagner's thoughts were occupied with Schopenhauer at the time, he makes them talk a sort of pseudo-Schopenhauer. Light is their enemy; only in night--extinction--can perfect joy be found. It was the deceitful phantoms of daylight--worldly ambitions--that betrayed Tristan into acting so basely towards Isolda (before the drama opens); it was the light of the torch that kept him so long from her this night; and now in the darkness they find rapturous peace. This is the substance of what is said. Twice Brangaena warns them that the dawn is at hand, but they do not heed her. Her songs are exquisite enough, surely, but the lovers, steeped in their bliss, have no ears for them. Their own music is far more beautiful:

And again:

The lovers are presently awakened. At the very climax of a mad, tumultuous passage Brangaena gives a scream; Kurvenal rushes in, and then--enter Mark, Melot and the other hunters. Melot's trap has worked satisfactorily.

The cold red dawn slowly breaks. The phantoms of the daylight have broken in upon the dream of night, which alone is true. It is here that many would have the act terminate. Such an ending would leave the idea of the act half expressed, and shatter the noble architectonical scheme of the whole drama. The idea of the act--that the light is the lovers' enemy, the dark their friend and refuge--has to be worked out to prepare for the last act; the idea of the drama--that the lovers must be seen gradually thrust away from life (which is light) to death (which is eternal night)--must be carried one step further. Mark, in an agony of grief, asks them why they, the two he loves best in the world, dishonour him in so frightful a fashion. He presses home to them their sin and his suffering, his affection and their indifference to it; and he ends up with the question, "Why?" Tristan cannot answer; he perceives only that Mark's love is a more terrible menace for them than any trap laid by Melot. Without their passion they cannot live, and it is not Melot and the general outside world that threaten to sunder them, but their protector and dearest friend. The passion is irresistible, and Tristan faces the inevitable. He asks Isolda if she will follow him where he is now going: she replies that she will; and he, after taunting Melot with his treachery, lets him thrust him through with his sword. The drama has moved a stage further on, and there remains now only the logical completion. Anyone who thinks all this is to read into the opera a meaning that is not there merely accuses me of being greater than Wagner; without this we have only a commonplace Divorce Court episode.

The next act takes place in the courtyard of Tristan's castle in Brittany. It is in a state of decay. In the hot afternoon sun the sea shines like burnished metal, and Tristan, who has been brought there by Kurvenal, lies delirious. Presently one of the saddest songs ever written sounds from a shepherd's pipe without. It half awakens Tristan, and he talks of it--how it has haunted him since his childhood. Kurvenal tells him Isolda has been sent for. He becomes more and more delirious, and at last, after an outburst, he faints; then awakens and sings the sublime passage in which he sees Isolda coming over-seas, the ship covered with sweet-smelling flowers. The accompaniment to this piece of magic is a figure taken from the fourth theme I have quoted in this chapter. It is given at first to the horns, and over it sways a lovely melody, leading to Tristan's cry of "Oh, Isolda!" which occurs again and again until Isolda does come.

There are few tender and beautiful and pathetic things in music to match it. Presently the horn of the shepherd is heard again; but this time it plays a lively tune, as a signal that the ship is in sight. Tristan goes mad for joy, and tears the bandages from his wounds. As Isolda rushes in he staggers into her arms, and dies there to the phrases in which they had first spoken after drinking the love-philtre. Isolda's plaints are as touching and profound as those of Donna Anna in _Don Giovanni_ after her father has been murdered. There is again tumult; even at the last the lovers cannot be left alone; another ship comes in sight, and Melot and Mark's warriors rush in. Kurvenal fights and kills Melot, and is himself stabbed. He receives the wound, and feels his way to his master's side, and dies groping for his hand. Mark and Brangaena come in. She has confessed to the mistake she made in giving the wrong potion, and he has come to make all well. Isolda pays no attention, but, after a beautiful phrase from Brangaena, rises and sings the wonderful Death song. The drama is now ended; the lovers' passion has led them whither they knew it was leading them from the beginning. Night has come on, and Isolda falls on Tristan's body and dies, fulfilling the promise she had made--that where he went she would follow. And so ends the greatest music-drama ever written, and the greatest likely to be written for centuries to come.

We must pass on now to _The Mastersingers_, an old idea of Wagner's. The music was completed at Triebschen. Here is nothing of the tension, burning passion, and unfathomable depth of _Tristan_, but a pretty love-story, with some comedy and more than a little of very broad farce. In it Wagner determined to satirize the musical pedants, and he did so with considerable acerbity. But it is not to see his enemies roughly handled that we go to _The Mastersingers_: it is to hear one of Wagner's two most beautiful operas. There is no need to go through it closely, as in the case of _Tristan_. The methods are those of _Tristan_; we have the themes used as _leit-motifs_, and also long passages woven out of them and new matter; we have the harmonic freedom of _Tristan_, the same gorgeous orchestration, and even more than the same marvellous polyphonic writing. But, broadly speaking, the drama counts for comparatively little, and the opera consists of a series of enchanting songs and scenes. The very title tells us that we are not simply to follow the destinies of a hero and heroine. The person mostly in evidence is Hans Sachs, a sort of heavy father, who has some of the most glorious music. The young lover comes along--Walther--and tries to win Eva by gaining the prize in a contest of minstrels; Beckmesser, a pedant, opposes him. Sachs supports him, and he wins. Every note of the music can readily be understood. There are regular set numbers provided for in the structure of the libretto, so as to come in naturally; there is even a sextet--which I have often heard encored--and the opera winds up with a chorus. It disproves Wagner's theory that in the Ninth Symphony Beethoven had said the last word in pure music, and that henceforth words would always be necessary; for here the text is often a mere excuse for using the human voice, and little of the music would be unintelligible without it.

BAYREUTH