CHAPTER II

THE ARTIST IN THEORY

I

For a great revolutionary, Wagner was curiously long in coming to consciousness of himself. The record of his youth and early manhood is one of constant fluctuation between one ideal or influence and another. The most remarkable feature of him in these days, indeed, is his mental malleability. In his later years he is the centre of a solar system of his own; everything else in his orbit is a mere planet that must revolve around him or be cast out. In his younger days, on the contrary, he is extraordinarily sensitive to the changing currents of men and circumstances. One of the earliest writers to influence him was E. T. A. Hoffmann, under whose sway he fell apparently as early as 1827. It was about the same time that he first heard, at a Gewandhaus concert, some of Beethoven's music. During the early 'thirties he was deeply absorbed in Beethoven, especially in the Ninth Symphony--a work which, he tells us, was at that time regarded in Leipzig as the raving of a semi-madman. Wagner's knowledge of it was at first derived solely from copying the score; it was without having heard a performance of the work that he made in 1830 the two-hands pianoforte arrangement of it which he vainly tried to induce Schott to publish. His own Overture in D minor (1831), his _King Enzio_ Overture and his Symphony in C major (1832) were, as he admits, all inspired by Beethoven, the first of them being more particularly influenced by the _Coriolan_ Overture. He heard the Ninth Symphony for the first time at a Gewandhaus concert in the winter of 1831-2; the performance, under Pohlenz, seems to have been a very unintelligent one, and it left Wagner in considerable doubt as to the value of the work. "There arose in me," he says, "the mortifying doubt whether I had really understood this strange piece of music[289] or not. For a long time I gave up racking my brains about it, and unaffectedly turned my attention to a clearer and less disturbing sort of music."[290]

Weber's _Freischütz_ had also powerfully affected the boy's imagination; no doubt Weber struck him even then as a musician peculiarly German. In his own _Die Feen_ (1833), he tells us, he tried to write "in German style."[291] Nevertheless, in spite of all these influences, he turned for a while against German music, which he criticises with some frankness in an article on _Die deutsche Oper_,[292] published anonymously in the _Zeitung für die elegante Welt_ in June 1834. The Germans have no German opera, he says, for the same reason that they have no national drama. "We are too intellectual and much too learned to be able to create warm human figures." Mozart could do this in the Italian melodic style; but with their contempt for that style the modern Germans have got further from the path that Mozart opened out for dramatic music. "Weber did not understand how to handle song; Spohr is hardly any better"; yet it is through Song that a man expresses himself musically. Here the Italians have the advantage over the Germans. It is true that the Italians have abused the organ of late--"yet I shall never forget the impression that a Bellini opera lately made on me, after I had become heartily sick of the eternally allegorising orchestral bustle, and a simple and noble Song made its appearance again." Weber was too purely lyrical, and Spohr is too elegiac, for the drama. Weber's best work is consequently the romantic _Der Freischütz_; as for _Euryanthe_, "what paltry refinements of declamation, what a finiking use of this instrument or that for bringing out the expression of some word or other!" His style is not broad enough; it dissipates itself in mincing details. His _ensembles_ are almost without life. And as the audience do not understand a note of it, they console themselves by calling it amazingly _learned_, and respecting it accordingly. "O this fatal learnedness," he cries, "this source of all the evils that afflict us Germans!" In Bach's time music was regarded only from the learned side. The forms were then limited, but the composers full of learning. Now the forms are freer, but the composers have less learning, though they make a pretence of it. The public also wants to appear learned, affects to despise the simple, and is ashamed to admit that it enjoys a lively French opera. We must not be hypocritical, but must admit there is a good deal that is good in both French and Italian opera; we must throw over a lot of our affected science, and become natural men. No real German opera composer has appeared for some time, because no one has known how to "gain the voice of the people"--no one has grasped life in its real truth and warmth. We must find a form suited to the needs of our own days. "We must seize upon the epoch, and honestly try to perfect its new forms; and he will be the master who writes neither Italian nor French--nor even German."

The youthful essayist repeats a good deal of this, with additions, in an article entitled _Pasticcio_, published in the _Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_ in November of the same year, under the pseudonym of "Canto Spianato."[293] He is greatly concerned at the deplorable fact that there are hardly a couple of dozen well-trained singers in Germany. "Nowadays one hardly ever hears a really beautiful and technically perfect _trillo_; very rarely flawless mordents; very seldom a rounded _coloratura_, a genuine unaffected, soul-moving _portamento_, a perfect equalisation of the registers, and absolute maintenance of the intonation through all the various nuances of crescendo and diminuendo. Most singers, as soon as they attempt the noble art of _portamento_, get out of tune; and the public, accustomed to imperfect execution, overlooks the defects of the singer if only he is a capable actor and knows the routine of the stage."

Nor do our German composers know how to write for the voice; they are like bunglers who presume to orchestrate without having studied the peculiarities of the clarinet, say, as distinct from those of the pianoforte. "Most of our modern German vocal composers appear to regard the voice as merely a part of the instrumental mass, and misapprehend the true nature of Song. Our worthy opera-composers," in fact, "must take lessons in the good Italian cantabile style, taking care to steer clear of its modern excrescences, and, with their superior artistic capacity, give us something good in a good style. Then will vocal art bloom anew; then some day will a man come who in this good style shall re-establish on the stage the broken unity of Poetry and Song." He argues with portentous seriousness for ornate as well as simple Song; and ends with a claim that poetry is the only basis of opera,--poetry, of which words and tones are merely the expression. "The majority of our operas are merely a string of musical numbers without any psychological connection; our singers have been degraded into musical-boxes, set to a certain number of tunes, brought on to the stage, and started by a wave of the conductor's baton." Once more he lays it down that "he will be the master who writes neither Italian nor French--nor even German," and concludes thus: "But would you inspire, purify, and train yourselves by models, would you create living shapes in music, then combine, for example, Gluck's masterly declamation and dramatic power with Mozart's varied art of melody, _ensemble_ and orchestration, and you will produce dramatic works that will satisfy the strictest criticism."[294]

This enthusiasm for the Italian style was largely due to the overwhelming impression made on Wagner by the great singer and actress Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, whom he heard as Romeo in Bellini's _Montecchi e Capuleti_ in March 1834.[295] Her performance, however, magical as it must have been, would not have affected him so deeply had he not already been brought by other influences to a turning in the road. What these influences were he has himself told us in _Mein Leben_. Heinse's _Ardinghello_ and Laube's _Young Europe_ had inflamed the imagination of most of the young men of the day. Wagner was caught up by and carried along in a current of generous enthusiasm for a supposedly new spirit in art and literature; the older men were mercilessly ridiculed as pedants, and a newer and more sprightly art was to hustle the ponderous old one off the stage. Wagner's boyish life had been, in spite of an occasional wildness, one of almost morbid seriousness, culminating in what he calls "pathetic mysticism." The truth seems to have been that he was moving about in intellectual worlds too subtle for his spirit then to realise; he was mysteriously drawn to the greatest things in Beethoven and Weber, but when brought into actual contact with them he had to admit that they spoke a language he could hardly understand. The magnetic personality of Schröder-Devrient dissipated the clouds that had formed around him. He could hardly have been so much his own dupe as his confessions would lead us to believe. He knew that the performance of Weber's _Euryanthe_ he had recently heard was as superlatively bad as the performance of Bellini's opera was superlatively good; and he would have been a much worse reasoner than we know him to have been, had he not been able to see that from these facts no valid conclusion could be drawn as to the worth of the two works. We may reasonably assume that his volatile nature was ripe for another change of front--there were plenty more of a similar kind even in his mature life--and that these outer experiences only marked the moment of the turning. He as good as admits this, indeed, in _Mein Leben_. He was disposed, he says, to take as lightly as possible the problem[296] that had arisen before him, and to show his determination to get rid of all prejudice by writing the article on _Euryanthe_ in which he "simply jeered" at that work. "Just as I had passed in my student-time through my 'Flegeljahr,' I now boldly entered upon a similar development in my artistic taste."[297]

II

That the articles praising the Italians at the expense of the Germans were the products of more than the mere impression of Schröder-Devrient's singing and acting--that they came from the depths of a real change in his intellectual and emotional nature--is shown by the length of time he remained at the same standpoint.

The text of _Das Liebesverbot_ was written in a mood of fiery youthful protest against what he held to be the cramping puritanism of the moralists. He deliberately transforms Shakespeare's _Measure for Measure_. "_Young Europe_ and _Ardinghello_, helped by the strange antipathy I had conceived towards classical operatic music, gave me the keynote for my conception, which was especially directed against puritanical hypocrisy, and consequently led to the bold glorification of unfettered sensualism (_freien Sinnlichkeit_). I took care to understand the serious Shakespearean subject only in this sense; I saw only the gloomy strait-laced viceroy, himself burning with love for the beautiful novice, who, while she implores him to pardon her brother condemned to death for illicit love, kindles a ruinous fire in the rigid Puritan's breast by the lovely warmth of her own human emotion. The fact that these powerful motives are so richly developed by Shakespeare only in order that in the end they may be all the more seriously weighed in the scales of justice, did not concern me in the least; all I had in mind was to expose the sinfulness of hypocrisy and the unnaturalness of harsh moral judgments."[298] He adds that he was probably influenced by Auber's _Masaniello_ and the _Sicilian Vespers_.

The composition of _Das Liebesverbot_ carries us from 1834 to the spring of 1836, and still the Southern fever has not abated. In 1837 he carries the same enthusiasm about with him in Königsberg and Riga; we can imagine that the more serious side of him had some difficulty in developing in such an environment as a fourth-rate operatic and theatrical troupe. While in Magdeburg he writes a short article on "Dramatic Song," in which he returns to the thesis of three years before, though with more wisdom. "Why," he asks, "cannot we Germans see that we are not the possessors of everything; why cannot we openly and freely admit that the Italian is superior to the German in Song, and the Frenchman superior to him in the light and animated treatment of operatic music? Can he not oppose to these his deeper science, his more thorough culture, and above all the happy faculty that makes it possible for him easily to make the advantages of the Italians and the French his own, whereas they will never be able to acquire ours? The Italians are singers by nature. The less richly-endowed German can hope to emulate the Italian only by hard study." Wagner rightly points out that no artist can hope to achieve full expression of himself without a technique that has become second nature to him. It was the acquirement by Mozart of this technique in his childhood that gave his mature music its incomparable ease and finish, while there was always a certain awkwardness about Weber, owing to his having begun late and learned his technique during the years when he was actually practising his art. Without perfect vocal technique, the highest kind of dramatic expression is impossible. The great Schröder-Devrient, the finest operatic artist in Germany, was at one time within an ace of giving up her career as a singer, so great was the strain on her voice through a faulty production; but she studied hard on the right Italian lines, with the result that she can now sing the most trying parts without the slightest fatigue.[299] All this is sensible enough--so sensible, indeed, that Wagner could repeat it thirty years later in his "Report upon a proposed German School of Music for Munich." But that the nimble and relatively superficial Italian music still exercised something of its old fascination upon him is shown by another article of the same year on Bellini. Here, while admitting that a good deal of Italian music is poor stuff, and that the forms and tricks of the Bellinian opera are things only too easy to imitate, he yet lauds Bellini's melody at the expense of that of the Germans, and his simplicity at the expense of their clumsy erudition. "The German connoisseur of music," he says, "listens to one of Bellini's operas with the spectacles off his tired-out eyes," giving himself wholly up for once to "delight in lovely Song";[300] he evidently feels "a deep and ardent longing for a full deep breath, to win ease of being at one stroke, to get rid of all the stew of prejudice and pedantry that has so long compelled him to be a German connoisseur of music--to become instead a man at last, glad, free, and endowed with every glorious organ for perceiving beauty of every kind, no matter in what form it reveals itself." He has been enchanted by "the limpid melody, the simple, noble, lovely Song of Bellini. It is surely no sin to confess this and to believe in it; perhaps even it would not be a sin if before we went to sleep we were to pray Heaven that some day German composers might achieve such melodies and such an art of handling song. Song, Song, and yet again Song, ye Germans!"

We see again his temporary lack of sympathy with the richer German style in a passage like the following, which reads like one of the less intelligent criticisms of his own later music:

"When we consider the boundless disorder, the medley of forms, periods and modulations of so many of the new German opera composers, by which we are prevented from enjoying many an isolated piece of beauty, we often might wish to see this ravelled skein put in order by means of that stable Italian form.[301] As a matter of fact, the instantaneous clear apprehension of a whole dramatic passion is made much easier when, along with all its connected feelings and emotions, it is cast into one lucid intelligent melody at a single stroke, than when it is muddled up with a hundred little commentaries, with this and that harmonic nuance, this and that instrumental interpolation, till in the end it is subtilised out of existence."[302]

It was his "zeal and fervour for modern Italian and French opera," in fact, that procured for him the conductorship at Riga, where the Director, Holtei, was all for the lighter and more frivolous music.[303] At Riga Wagner met his old Leipzig mentor, Heinrich Dorn, who was, he says, surprised to see his former pupil, "the eccentric Beethoven worshipper, transformed into a partisan of Bellini and Adam."[304] The reaction, however, was coming fast. At Riga he seems to have passed through one of those spiritual crises that are not uncommon with artists of his many-sided temperament. The loneliness of Riga, he says, gave him an anxious feeling of homelessness, which developed into a passionate longing to escape from the turbid whirl of theatrical life. "The levity with which in Magdeburg I had both let my musical taste degenerate and had allowed myself to take pleasure in the most frivolous theatrical society, gradually faded away under the influence of this longing."[305] A bass aria which he interpolated into Winter's _Schweizerfamilie_ was "of a devotional character," and "bore witness to the great transformation that was taking place in my musical development."[306] In the winter of 1838 he derived much benefit from the study of Méhul's _Joseph in Egypt_ for the theatre. "Its noble and simple style, along with the moving effect of the music, contributed not a little to the favourable turn in my taste, which had been sadly debauched by my theatrical work."[307] At the same time he grew weary of the Bohemianism that had attracted him so strongly at Magdeburg, and consequently he got more and more out of touch with the actors and the management.

His weariness of it all culminated in a secret resolve to be quit of this kind of life as soon as possible. The deliverance was to be effected by his new opera, _Rienzi_.[308] He deliberately planned the opera on a scale so large that he would necessarily have to seek a better stage than that of Riga for its production. Everything conspired at the time to deepen his sense of the seriousness of things, and to make him loathe himself for having so long worshipped false gods both in art and in life. Matrimonial troubles crowded thick and fast upon him, and he lost his favourite sister, Rosalie, by death. In March 1839 he was dismissed from his post at the Riga theatre. Penniless as he was, he welcomed the discharge as the first step towards his redemption. To Paris he would go, and in Paris make his fortune: of that he had no doubt.

III

The miseries of his two years and a half in Paris are known to every reader of his life. Penury, deceptions, degradations, however, could not break him either intellectually or morally. A temperament so elastic as his could never be crushed, and least of all when it was young. He himself has told us of the amazement his associates expressed at the toughness and resilience of his spirit. But the fire he passed through in those dreadful days purified him as an artist. It was not alone the failure to get _Rienzi_ accepted at the Paris Opéra that caused him to turn away in disgust from the hollow world of make-believe around him; visions were coming to him of shining deeds to be done, of untried possibilities in music. As usual with him, an external event brought all his faculties and desires swiftly into the one focus. In the winter of 1839 he heard a number of rehearsals and a performance of the Ninth Symphony at the Conservatoire, under Habeneck. The interpretation, he says, was so perfect that "in a stroke the picture I had had of the wonderful work in the days of my youthful enthusiasm, and that had been effaced by the murderous performance of it given by the Leipzig Orchestra under the worthy Pohlenz, now rose up again before me in such clearness that it seemed as if I could grasp it with my hands. Where formerly I had seen nothing but mystic constellations and soundless magical shapes, there was now poured out, as from innumerable springs, a stream of inexhaustible and heart-compelling melody. The whole period of the degradation of my taste, which really began with my confusion as to the expression in Beethoven's later works, and had been so aggravated by my numbing association with the dreadful theatre, now fell away from me as into an abyss of shame and remorse. If this inner change had been preparing in me for some years--more particularly as a consequence of my painful experiences--it was the inexpressible effect of the Ninth Symphony, performed in a way I had hitherto had no notion of, that gave real life to my new-won old spirit; and so I compare this--for me--important event with the similarly decisive impression made on me, when I was a boy of sixteen, by the Fidelio of Schröder Devrient."[309]

The _Autobiographical Sketch_ which he wrote for Laube's _Zeitung für die elegante Welt_ in 1842, after his settling in Dresden, ends with these words: "As regards Paris itself I was now without prospects there for some years: so I left it in the spring of 1842. For the first time I saw the Rhine: with great tears in his eyes the poor artist swore eternal fidelity to his German fatherland." It was indeed the prodigal's return: the service that Paris did him was to make him a better German and so a better artist. Seen from a distance, Paris had once glittered before his dazzled eyes as a symbol of liberalism and freedom. Seen at too close quarters, Germany had laid itself bare to him in all its littlenesses, its stuffy provinciality. Now he saw them both from another angle. Paris was about him in all the cold brutality it can show to the stranger, the helpless, the penniless: its heart seemed to the eager young musician as hard as the stones of its streets. And he saw his native country as all exiles see theirs, with its asperities toned down, its little parochialisms hidden from view, and a certain kindly haze of idealism over all. It is with German affairs that he occupies himself as far as he can in the articles he writes at this time to keep the domestic pot boiling. The essay _On German Music_ (1840) is very touching in its wistful little visions of tiny, cosy German towns, each with its circle of humble musicians roughly but lovingly wooing their art in their own simple, honest way. The lonely and homesick German artist has his quiet revenge upon Paris in the delightfully humorous and satirical article upon the ludicrous French perversion of _Der Freischütz_ at the Opéra.[310] Beethoven is much in his mind: he begins the attempt to fathom the secret of Beethoven's power, to grasp the profoundly logical workings of his music, and to take his own bearings with regard to sundry æsthetic questions, such as "painting" in music, the reading of poetical ideas into purely instrumental works, the relations between vocal and instrumental music, and so on. His views upon Beethoven were far ahead of those of his contemporaries, to whom, indeed, they must have been in large part unintelligible. He was beginning to realise dimly that out of the Beethovenian melody he could himself beget a new art-work. In _A Pilgrimage to Beethoven_ he puts his own views of opera into the mouth of his predecessor. He has apparently already conceived the idea that instrumental music had come to the end of its resources with Beethoven, that music could in the future renew its vitality only by being "fertilised by poetry," and that the ideal music drama will be continuous in tissue. "Were I to make an opera after my own heart," he makes Beethoven say, "people would run away from it: for it would have no arias, duets, trios, or any of the other stuff with which operas are patched up to-day: and what I would put in the place of these no singer would sing and no audience would listen to. They all know nothing but glittering lies, brilliant nonsense and sugared tedium. Anyone who should write a real music drama would be taken for a fool." And the old composer proceeds to outline the theory of the relation between words and music that is made so familiar to us in Wagner's later writings. "The instruments represent the primal organs of Creation and Nature: what they express can never be clearly defined and settled, for they reproduce the primal feelings themselves as they emerged from the chaos of the first creation, when probably there was not one human being to take them up into his heart. It is quite otherwise with the genius of the human voice: this represents man's heart and its definite (_abgeschlossen_) individual emotion. Its character is therefore restricted, but definite and clear. Now bring these two elements together, unite them! Set against the wild-wandering, illimitable primal feeling, represented by the instruments, the clear definite emotion of the human heart, represented by the voice. The incoming of this second element will smooth and soothe the conflict of the primal feelings, will turn their flood into a definite, united course: while the human heart itself, taking up into itself those primal feelings, will be infinitely strengthened and expanded, and capable of feeling clearly its earlier indefinite presage of the Highest now transformed into god-like consciousness."[311]

IV

It has often been pointed out that the subjects of all Wagner's dramas were conceived by him before his fortieth year. It is equally true that virtually the whole of the æsthetic theories of his later life were immanent in him from the days of his Parisian sojourn, and needed only to be brought into clearer outline by the thought and the practice of the 'forties and 'fifties. In the essay on _Beethoven_ (1870) he insists that it is the human character of the voice, rather than the mere sentiment the voice is used to express, that gives the choral ending of the Ninth Symphony its tremendous significance. "Thus," he says, "with even what we have just called the ordaining will that led him to this melody" (_i.e._ the great melody of the final movement) "we see the master steadily remaining in music,--the idea of the world:[312] for in truth it is not the meaning of the Word that engages us at this entry of the human voice, but the character of the voice itself. Nor is it the thought expressed in Schiller's verses that henceforth occupies us, but the intimate timbre of the choral song, in which we feel ourselves invited to join, and so take part as a kind of congregation in an ideal divine service, as was the case at the entry of the chorale in the 'Passions' of Bach. It is quite evident, especially with regard to the main melody, that Schiller's words have been tacked on arbitrarily (_nothdürftig_) and with little skill: for this melody had first of all unfolded itself in all its breadth before us as a thing in itself, given to the instruments alone, and there had filled us with a nameless feeling of joy in a paradise regained."[313]

The same idea is seen in embryo in _A Pilgrimage to Beethoven_. "If men are to sing, they must have words. Yet who is capable of expressing in words the poetry that should form the basis of such a union of all the elements? The poem must of necessity be something inferior (_zurückstehen_), for words are too weak an organ for such a task.--You will soon meet with a new composition of mine, which will remind you of what I have just been descanting upon. It is a symphony with choruses. I ask you to observe how difficult it was for me to get over the inadequacy of the poetical art that I had called in to my aid. I have fully resolved to make use of our Schiller's beautiful hymn 'To Joy'; it is in any case a noble and uplifting poem, even if far from giving voice to what, in sooth, in this connection, no verses in the world could say."[314]

Here we light upon one of the fundamental principles of the Wagnerian æsthetic. Wagner did not set words to music: the words were merely the projection of an already conceived musical emotion into the sphere of speech.[315] There is in most musicians a certain amount of correspondence and interplay between the poetic and musical factors. With some composers the musical thought, having begun and completed itself along its own lines and according to its own laws, turns half appealingly, half condescendingly, to words for a title or an elucidation, as was often the case with Schumann. With others, as with Bach and Hugo Wolf and Strauss, the word, written or implied, is the generator of the musical idea. It would be the very midsummer madness of æsthetics to attempt to decide which is the more purely "musical" of these two types of mind. Neither of them is "the" musical mind, any more than Shakespeare's or Milton's or Browning's or Blake's or Pope's or Swinburne's is "the" poetical mind. It is only the most superficial of psychologists and æstheticians who can regard any human faculty as wholly cut off from the rest. Our perceptions of sight, of taste, of touch, of hearing, are inextricably inter-blended, as is shown by our constantly expressing one set of sensations in terms of another, as when we speak of the colour of music, the height, or depth, or thickness, or clarity, or muddiness of musical tone. In every poet there is something of the painter and the musician: in every musician, something of the poet and painter: in every painter, something of the musician and poet.[316] The character of the man's work will depend upon the strength or weakness of the tinge that is given to his own special art by the relative strength or weakness of the infusion of one or more of the other arts. In composers like Bach, Wagner, Berlioz, Schubert, Wolf, and Strauss the eye is constantly transmitting very definite impression to the brain, with the result that their music readily leans to realistic suggestion: on a composer like Brahms the actualities of the visible, mobile world make comparatively little impression.[317] No one of these types is _per se_ any better than the rest, or has any more right than his fellows to arrogate to himself the title of "pure" musician. We must just accept them all as branches of the one great tree.

It is no paradox to say that though Wagner was irresistibly impelled to express himself in the form of opera he was by nature an instrumental composer of the line of Bach and Beethoven. It is the orchestra that always bears the main burden of expression in his later works. His ideal was a stream of endless melody in the orchestra, to the moods of which the words give a definiteness unattainable by music alone. And so, just as he did not "set words to music" in the ordinary way, so he did not set poetic ideas to music in the ordinary way. No man was ever more prompt to interpret great musical works in terms of poetry or life, as anyone may see by reading his elucidations of the Beethoven symphonies or the great C sharp minor quartet. But it is important to remember, if we are not to misunderstand him utterly, that he never supposed that the music was developed consciously out of any such poetic scheme as our fantasy may read into it. The music grew out of the spirit of music, and only rouses a poetic vision in us because it is the generalised expression of many particular visions of the kind. This conception of music was rooted in him from his earliest days of maturity, as we may see from the article _A Happy Evening_, which he wrote in Paris in 1841. The narrator of the story is discussing with a friend--evidently intended for Wagner himself--a concert at which they have just heard performances of Mozart's Symphony in E flat and Beethoven's in A. The question arises as to what it is that Beethoven has expressed. The friend, who is designated R., objects energetically to an arbitrary romance being foisted upon the symphony:

"It is unfortunate that so many people give themselves useless trouble to confuse musical speech with poetical speech, and to make one of them supplement or replace the other where, in their limited view, this is incomplete. It remains true once for all that music begins where speech leaves off. Nothing is more intolerable than the preposterous pictures and stories that people imagine to be at the basis of those instrumental works. What quality of mind and feeling is displayed when the hearer of a Beethoven symphony can only keep his interest in it alive by imagining that the musical flood is the reproduction of the plot of some romance? These people in consequence often grumble at the great master when some unexpected stroke disturbs the even tenour of the little tale they have foisted on the work: they reproach the composer with unclearness and disconnectedness, and lament his lack of coherency. Oh the ninnies!"

R. is afterwards careful to explain that he has no objection to each hearer associating the music, as he hears it, with any moods or episodes he likes out of his own experience. All he objects to is the audience having the terms of the poetic association dictated to them by the musical journalists. "I should like to tear the hair from their silly heads when they stuff this stupid nonsense into honest people, and so rob them of all the ingenuousness with which they would have otherwise have given themselves up to hearing Beethoven's symphony. Instead of abandoning themselves to their natural feelings, the poor deluded people of full heart but feeble head think themselves obliged to follow the course of some village wedding, a thing of which they probably know nothing at first hand, and in place of which they would certainly have been much more likely to imagine something quite different, something from the circle of their own experience.... I hold that no one stereotyped interpretation is admissible. Definitely as the purely musical edifice stands complete and rounded in the artistic proportions of a Beethoven symphony, perfect and indivisible as it appears to the higher sense, just so is it impossible to reduce the effects of the work on the human heart to one authoritative symbol. This is more or less the case with the creations of the other arts: how diversely will one and the same picture, one and the same drama, affect diverse individuals, and even the same individual at different times! And yet how much more definitely and positively the painter or the poet must draw his figures than the instrumental composer, who is not bound, like them, to model his form by the appearances of the everyday world, but who has at his disposal an immeasurable realm in a super-terrestrial kingdom, and to whose hand is given the most spiritual of substances--tone! But it is degrading to this high office of the musician to force him to make him fit his inspiration to the appearances of the everyday world; and still more would the instrumental composer deny his mission, or expose his own weakness, who should try to carry the restricted proportions of merely worldly things into the realm of his own art."[318]

"In instrumental music," he said in later life, "I am a _Réactionnaire_, a conservative. I dislike everything that requires a verbal explanation beyond the actual sounds."[319] In the light of this declaration, and of the æsthetic doctrines he expounds in the article _On Franz Liszt's Symphonic Poems_ and elsewhere, it is interesting to see him setting forth the same doctrine of music as early as 1840. In _A Happy Evening_ R. lays it down that he rejects all tone-painting, except when it is used in jest or to reproduce purely musical phenomena.[320] He further dissents from his friend's theory that whereas Mozart's symphonies came from nothing but a purely inward musical source, Beethoven may have "first of all conceived and worked out the plan of a symphony according to a certain philosophical idea, before he left it to his imagination to invent the musical themes." The friend adduces the _Eroica_ Symphony in support of this contention. "You know that it was at first intended that this symphony should bear the title 'Bonaparte.' Can you deny, then, that Beethoven was inspired to this gigantic work, and the plan of it decided, by an idea outside the realm of music?"

R. sweeps his friend off his feet with the vehemence of his reply. The _Eroica_ Symphony, he contends, is not a translation into music of the petty details of Napoleon's first Italian campaign. Nowhere does the work suggest that the composer has had his eye on any special episode in the general's career. No realistic explanation of this kind can be made to square with the Funeral March, the Scherzo with the hunting horns, or the Finale with its soft, emotional Andante. "Where is the bridge of Lodi, where the battle of Arcola, where the march to Leoben, where the victory under the Pyramids, where the 18th Brumaire? Are these not incidents which no composer of our day would have passed by had he been writing a biographical symphony on Bonaparte?" Then R. gives his own theory of the genesis of such a work as the _Eroica_. What stimulates the musician to composition in the first place is a purely musical mood: it may have come from either an inner or an outer experience, but it is wholly musical in essence and in its manner of expression. "But the grand passions and enduring emotions that dominate the current of our feelings and ideas for months or for half a year, it is these that urge the musician to those ampler, more comprehensive concepts to which we owe, among others, the origin of a _Sinfonia eroica_. These great moods, as deep suffering of soul or mighty exaltation, may derive from outer events, for we are human beings and our fate is ruled by external circumstances: but when they impel the musician to production these great moods have already turned to music within him, so that in the moment of creative inspiration it is no longer the outer events that guide and govern the composition, but the musical emotion that this event has generated." We may imagine that the republican Beethoven's emotional nature had been fired by the career and character of Napoleon. "He was no general,--he was a musician: and in his own domain he saw the spirit in which he could accomplish the equivalent of what Bonaparte had accomplished on the plains of Italy." The product of this passionate yearning for self-realisation was the _Eroica_ Symphony, "and as he knew well to whom he owed the impulse to this gigantic work, he inscribed the name of Bonaparte on the title-page. Yet not a single feature of the development of the symphony can be said to have an immediate outer connection with the fate of the hero."[321]

V

Of even more importance than the article _A Happy Evening_ in the story of Wagner's development is the essay on _The Overture_ that appeared in the _Gazette Musicale_ in January 1841,--that is to say, a couple of months after the completion of _Rienzi_, and nearly six months before the commencement of the _Flying Dutchman_. Here he anticipates some of the æsthetic he was afterwards to expound so eloquently and so convincingly in the great article on Beethoven and elsewhere. He begins with a survey of the early history of the Overture. There had always been, apparently, a reluctance to plunging the spectator forthwith into the opera, just as in earlier times a prologue had always preceded the play. The prologue, however, had this at any rate to be said for it, that it summarised the action of the coming play, and in this and other ways prepared the spectator to listen more intelligently. The early Overture, however, could not do this, for at that time the psychological powers of music were not sufficiently developed to permit of the summarising in a few minutes of the actions and the motives of an opera. It became a conventional, not a characteristic prelude. Later on a regular "Overture form" was elaborated, but even this was psychologically impotent. What connection has the overture to the _Messiah_, for example, with the oratorio itself? Would it not serve equally well as prelude to a hundred others of the old oratorios or operas? Practically the only method of musical development these composers had at their service was the fugal: it was impossible for them to work out an extended musical piece by means of ever-widening circles of pure feeling.

Next came a tripartite form of overture,--an opening and closing movement in quicker time, with an intermediate section in slower time and of softer character. This gave a certain amount of opportunity for the presentation of one or two of the main moods or episodes or characters of the opera: and in the "Symphony" that introduces the _Seraglio_, Mozart has given us a little masterpiece in this _genre_. But there was a certain helplessness in the division of the "Symphony" into three sections, and in the predetermined nature of their contents: and in course of time there was evolved the operatic overture proper,--a continuous musical piece, making a sort of dramatic play with the main motives of the opera. This was the form with which Gluck and Mozart worked such wonders. Gluck's masterpiece is the overture to _Iphigenia in Aulis_: Mozart's, those to the _Magic Flute_, _Figaro_, and _Titus_. According to Wagner, Mozart's merit was that he did not attempt to express in his overture all the details of the plot, but "fastened with his poet's eye on the leading idea of the drama, divested it of all its inessentials and material accidentiæ, and set it forth as a musically transfigured creation, a passion personified in tones, and presented it to the main idea as the justificatory counterpart of this,--a something through which the idea, and even the dramatic action itself, became intelligible to the spectator's feeling." At the same time the overture became a self-contained tone-piece,--this being true even of an overture like that to _Don Giovanni_, which runs without any formal close into the first scene of the opera. This form of overture became the property of Cherubini and Beethoven. The former remained mostly faithful to the transmitted type, which Beethoven also used in the E major overture to _Fidelio_. But Beethoven in time broke through the cramping limitations of this form. His "prodigious dramatic instinct," having never found the opera into which it could pour the whole of itself, turned for an outlet to instrumental music pure and simple,--to the field in which he could "shape in his own way the drama of his desire out of pure tone-images," a drama "set free from the petty trimmings of the timorous playwright." The result of this effort was the great _Leonora_ overture, which, "far from giving us a musical introduction to the drama, really sets that drama before us more completely and more affectingly than the ensuing broken action does. This work is no longer an overture, but itself the mightiest of dramas."[322]

Weber too is commended for making his overtures dramatic "without losing and wasting himself in a painful depiction of insignificant accessories of the plot." Even when his rich fantasy led him to incorporate more subsidiary musical motives than the form transmitted to him could conveniently carry, he always managed to preserve the dramatic unity of his conception. He invented a new form, that of the "dramatic fantasia," of which the _Oberon_ overture is one of the finest examples. "Nevertheless," says Wagner,--and here again we see his rooted antipathy to anything in the nature of excessive detail-painting in music[323]--"it is not to be denied that the independence of purely musical production must suffer by subordination to a dramatic thought, if this thought is not seized in one broad trait consistent with the spirit of music,--for the composer who tries to depict the details of the action itself cannot develop his dramatic theme without breaking his musical work to fragments." The inevitable ending of this style of overture is the _pot-pourri_,--a form of which Spontini's overture to the _Vestale_ may be said to have been the beginning. The public liked this kind of thing because it dished up for them again the most effective snatches of melody from the operas.

The summing up is that the ideal form and ideal achievement are those of the _Don Giovanni_ and _Leonora_ overtures. In the former no attempt is made to reproduce the course of the drama itself step by step: the drama is freshly conceived as the contest between two broad principles--the arrogance of Don Giovanni and the anger of a higher power--and "the invention, as well as the conduct," of these symbolic motives "belongs quite unmistakably to no other province than that of music." Beethoven's method in the _Leonora_ overture, on the other hand, is "to concentrate in all its noble unity the _one_ sublime action which, in the drama itself, is weakened and impeded by the necessity of padding it out with trivial details,--to show this action in its ideal new motion, nourished only by its inner impulses." This "ideal action" is, of course, the loving self-sacrifice of Leonora. But by reason of its very greatness and its intense dramatic quality, the _Leonora_ overture ceases to be an _overture_ in the proper sense of the word. It anticipates too fully the completed drama: if it is not understood by the hearer, because of his lack of knowledge of the opera, it conveys only a fragment of its real message to him: if it is wholly understood, it weakens his subsequent enjoyment of the drama itself.

Wagner therefore returns to the overture to _Don Giovanni_ as the ideal, because here "the leading thought of the drama is worked out in a purely musical, not a dramatic, form." In this way the musician "most surely attains the general artistic aim of the overture, which is simply an ideal prologue, transporting us into that higher sphere in which to prepare our mind for the drama." The musical conception of the main idea of the drama can still be distinctly worked out and brought to a definite close; in fact "the overture should form a musical art-work complete in itself." No better model could be had than Gluck's overture to _Iphigenia in Aulis_. In a word, though the overture must not attempt to reproduce stage by stage all the episodes of the story, it can suggest in its own way the dramatic contest of two main principles by a contest between two symbolic musical ideas: only the working-out of these musical ideas must follow from the nature of the themes themselves. But it must be always borne in mind--and the frequency with which Wagner returns to this point shows the importance he attached to it--that "the working-out must always take its rise from the purely musical significance of the themes: never should it take account of the course of events in the drama itself, for this would at once destroy the sole effective character of a piece of music."

As I have already pointed out, this and one or two of the other articles of the Paris time are interesting because they show us the mature æsthetics of the 'sixties and 'seventies trying to find expression in the young Wagner of 1840. To most of the principles here laid down he remained faithful, as we shall see, to the end of his days. But it is interesting also to note that though theoretically he always remained constant to the guiding principles he here lays down for the overture, his practice by no means always conformed to them. His ideal overture, as we have just seen, was one of the type of that to _Don Giovanni_ or that to _Iphigenia in Aulis_--_i.e._ one that either made no use at all of thematic material from the opera itself, or the minimum use of it, the dramatic conflict of the stage action being fought out ideally, as it were, in the overture, in the persons of two symbolic musical themes. "In this conception of the overture," he says, "the highest task would be to reproduce the characteristic idea of the drama by means pure and simple (_mit den eigentlichen Mitteln_) of self-subsistent (_selbstständigen_) music, and to conduct it to a conclusion which should correspond, by anticipation, with the solution of the problem in the scenic play."

It is difficult to square his practice in some of his own overtures with the theoretical principles he here lays down. Not one of his overtures corresponds with the form he so greatly admired in the overtures to _Don Giovanni_ and _Iphigenia in Aulis_,--a re-presentation of the coming dramatic conflict in terms of a musical piece that made no drafts at all, or practically none, upon the thematic material of the opera itself. The brief Prelude to _Lohengrin_ comes under no suspicion of being a _pot-pourri_ of motives from the opera; but then it achieves its concision and its singular air of detachment from anything in the nature of mere story-telling in music by failing to do just what Mozart and Gluck are commended for doing--summing up the ensuing dramatic conflict by the opposition of two main musical moods and their final resolution. The _Lohengrin_ Prelude tells us nothing of any dramatic contest,--not even that which rages in the heart of Elsa. It shows us only Lohengrin, the representative of the Grail, coming to earth and leaving it again. There is no hint of the reason for his return to Monsalvat: there is no hint even that his stay on earth has been in any degree troubled by enemies or evil. Beautiful as it is, therefore, and eloquently as it sings of Lohengrin himself, the Prelude is not in the full sense of the word a real prelude to the drama. On the other hand, when Wagner _does_ make his overture a genuine introduction to, and instrumental summary of, the opera, he inevitably approaches the _pot-pourri_. It is true that his fine sense of form mostly saves him from attempting to reproduce in the overture _all_ the dramatic or thematic motives of the opera. In the _Flying Dutchman_ overture, for example, there is no reference to Erik: so far as the overture itself is concerned, no such person might have ever come into the lives of Senta and the Dutchman. There is no mention of Daland, and no reference to the spinning scene--the latter a musical motive that, it is safe to say, none of the French or Italian writers of overtures, or perhaps even Weber himself, would have had the heart to set aside. On the whole the _Flying Dutchman_ overture is concerned simply with the Dutchman, his curse and his grief, with Senta, and with the sea that forms the imaginative background to their drama:[324] and though of course the overture is entirely built up of thematic material derived from the opera, this is all so freshly and imaginatively treated, and made into so coherent and organic a piece of instrumental music, that, though the overture is by no means of the type of those to _Don Giovanni_ and _Iphigenia in Aulis_, which Wagner praised as models, nothing could be further removed from the old-style _pot-pourri_. The overtures to _Tannhäuser_ and the _Meistersinger_, however, must frankly be called _pot-pourris_,--though _pot-pourris_ of genius. In the _Tannhäuser_ overture we are given not merely an instrumental symbol of the drama, but the drama itself compressed into a sort of feuilleton. The ground covered is so vast, and the expression so intense, that at the end of the overture we are inclined to ask ourselves whether it has not, like the great _Leonora_ overture, made a good deal of the ensuing drama almost superfluous, a mere padding out or watering down of the emotions and the spiritual oppositions set before us with such drastic power in the overture itself. One is inclined to say that an overture lasting nearly a quarter of an hour is not so much the door to a mansion as a cottage in itself. A work like the _Tannhäuser_ overture has its justification as a kind of symphonic poem for the concert room; it has little justification as a prelude to a drama in the theatre.

In any case a piece of prolonged story-telling of this kind is not what Wagner had in his mind when he wrote the article on _The Overture_: it is not too much to say, indeed, that it is the very type of musical introduction he expressly wished to bar. It is true that he advises the composer who wishes to make his overture "reproduce the characteristic idea of the drama by means pure and simple of self-subsistent music, and to conduct it to a conclusion which shall correspond, by anticipation, with the solution of the problem in the scenic play," to give the introductory instrumental piece some thematic connection with the opera. But not, be it observed, by utilising long stretches of this material, as is done in the _Tannhäuser_ overture. Wagner's advice to the composer is "to introduce into the characteristic motives of his overture certain melismic or rhythmic features that are of importance in the dramatic action itself--not features, however, strewn accidentally among the action, but such as play a decisively weighty part in it, characteristics that determine, as it were, the orientation of a human action on a specific _terrain_, and so give an individual stamp to the overture. These features must of course be purely musical in their nature, _i.e._ such motives from the world of tone as have a relation to human life. I would cite as excellent examples the trombone blasts of the Priests in the _Magic Flute_, the trumpet signal in the _Leonora_, and the call of the magic horn in _Oberon_. These musical motives from the opera, employed in advance in the overture, serve, when introduced there at the decisive moment, as veritable points of contact of the dramatic with the musical motion, and effect a happy individualisation of the tone-piece, which is intended to be a mood-defining introduction to a particular dramatic subject."[325] The ideal overture that Wagner had in his mind at this time was evidently something very different from the one he subsequently wrote for _Tannhäuser_: but the discrepancy between his theory and his practice is still more strikingly shown by a sentence that appears in the French version of the article but not in the German. In the French, the passage quoted above, commencing with the words "these features must of course be purely musical in their nature," was prefaced by the following: "But one should never forget that they [_i.e._ "the melismic or rhythmical features" from the opera that were to be interwoven into the tissue of the overture] should be entirely musical in their source, and not borrow their significance from the words that accompany them in the opera. The composer would in this case commit the error of sacrificing both himself and the independence of his art to the intervention of an alien art. These elements, I say, must be in their nature purely musical, and I would cite as examples," &c.

It is at once evident that this bars out whole passages such as the Pilgrims' Chorus, The Sirens' Chorus, and Tannhäuser's Hymn to Venus, and, in the _Meistersinger_ overture, such passages as Sachs's final address, the phrases in which the populace jeer at Beckmesser, &c. Strictly speaking, indeed, neither of these overtures can be made to square with Wagner's theoretical principles. The question of the overture was one of those on which he never attained to complete consistency. In _Tristan_, as in _Lohengrin_, he devotes himself simply to working out in a broad form one great emotional motive of the drama. The overtures to _Tannhäuser_ and the _Meistersinger_, and, in a lesser degree, that to the _Flying Dutchman_, are a mixture of the _pot-pourri_ and the symphonic poem. The Prelude to _Parsifal_ is again a sort of _pot-pourri_, though here, of course, there is no attempt at story-telling in detail, the Prelude setting before us, as Wagner himself said, the three motives of "Love, Faith and Hope," and showing, as it were, the emotional outcome of them. To the _Rhinegold_ there is no overture, or even a Prelude in the formal sense of that word: the long-drawn chord of E flat is merely the oral counterpart of the visible sensation given the spectator by the Rhine. Similarly the preludial bars to the _Valkyrie_ only paint the storm in which Siegmund is flying from his enemies.

Even the greatest men and the boldest revolutionaries are fettered in their thinking by the age in which they live. Only in this way can we account for Wagner's failure to see that the true solution of the problem of the overture was to abolish the overture. It had never any real æsthetic justification. As he himself points out, it had its origin simply in the fact that at one stage of the development of opera the composer saw the necessity of keeping the audience occupied in some way for a few minutes before it would be safe to raise the curtain on the play. It is one more of the many illustrations that may be cited of what may be called the dead hand in art,--the survival in a new art of some method of procedure that had its origin under quite other conditions. Pottery, for instance, continued for long to be decorated with lines that were merely imitations in clay--unnecessary imitations--of the designs and colours of the interlaced osiers out of which the primitive vessel was made. The symphony developed out of the custom of stringing certain dance movements into a suite: and in spite of the clearly recognised fact that there is no logical justification either in art or in life for casting the modern symphony into this arbitrary four-movement form, composers still weakly adhere to it. Wagner was fond of pointing out, again, how Beethoven's congenital inability to break away from the sonata form of his day led to a clash between this form and the purely dramatic, onward-urging impulse of the great _Leonora_ overture. It is little wonder, therefore, that Wagner was so far the slave of his epoch that it never occurred to him, and least of all in 1841, to question the necessity of having any overture at all. The freer thought of the present day has been able either to reduce the overture to a few bars of prelude, simply attuning the mind of the spectator to the coming scene, as in Debussy's _Pelleas and Melisande_, or to dispense altogether with an instrumental introduction, as in _Salome_ and _Elektra_.

VI

After the Paris articles of 1841 Wagner wrote little or nothing upon the æsthetics of his art for some ten years. For a time, indeed, he wrote practically no prose of any kind. He left Paris for Dresden in April 1842. At the end of that year he wrote his _Autobiographical Sketch_ for Laube's _Zeitung für die elegante Welt_. His pen was then silent until 1844, in which year we have the _Account of the bringing home of Weber's remains from London to Dresden_, and the _Speech at Weber's Grave_. To 1846 belongs the programme he wrote for the performance of Beethoven's choral symphony on Palm Sunday at Dresden.[326] No doubt his duties at the Dresden Opera, which he seems to have fulfilled with great thoroughness and conscientiousness, left him little time for anything else but these and the composition of _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_. When he at length took up the pen again it was not to expound a system of musical æsthetics but to preach a social evangel, and to come to the first grips with the new dramatic ideas that had been slowly maturing in him. In May 1848 he submits to the Minister his _Project for the Organisation of a German National Theatre for the Kingdom of Saxony_. In September he sketches two operatic poems, _Siegfried's Death_ and _Friedrich Barbarossa_, the former of which he works out in detail by November. Early in January the religious drama _Jesus of Nazareth_ is sketched. In the summer of 1848 he writes the essay on the _Wibelungen_.

During these years his discontent with the social and political conditions of the times had been slowly rising. Though it would be unfair to Wagner to attribute this discontent solely to the miserable circumstances of his own life, it is certain that his poverty, his debts and his disappointments had a good deal to do with making him a rebel against the established order of things. Mr. H. S. Chamberlain holds that Wagner was already a "revolutionist against the artistic world of the present" in Paris in 1840. It is quite possible, for Wagner was even poorer in Paris at that time than he was a few years later in Dresden. Gustav Levy agrees with Mr. Chamberlain, but even his own sympathetic summary of the case unconsciously makes it clear that Wagner's personal experiences and circumstances had something to do with making a revolutionary of him. "Beginning of November (1847), Wagner returns (from Berlin)[327] in a state of discouragement. The incessant difficulties in the way of winning appreciation for his works, and his consequently ever-increasing financial embarrassments, as well as the persistent enmity of the press, the lack of support he received from Meyerbeer, and the refusal of Lüttichau[328] to take up his reform of the Opera, bring on an illness: he thinks of suicide. Everything in him presses powerfully towards the _spiritual_ revolution, to the freeing of art from the fetters of un-German feeling and conventional, deeply-rooted ignorance (_Unverstand_)."[329]

VII

The years 1848 to 1852 were for Wagner a long spell of intellectual and spiritual indigestion; his too receptive brain was taking into itself more impressions of all kinds than it could assimilate. Art and life, opera and politics, called clamorously to him, and all at the same time, deafening and confusing him. With _Lohengrin_ his second great creative epoch, that had commenced with the _Flying Dutchman_, had come to its perfect end. New ideas of music and drama were ripening in him, but as yet he had no clear conception of their drift. He had gradually become profoundly disgusted with the theatre, yet saw no possible reformation of it except by way of a reformation of man and society as a whole. So he became a revolutionist,--not for politics' sake but for art's sake. To cooler heads than his own he seemed to be drifting towards destruction. Minna saw clearly enough that his views on politics were too idealistic to have any real bearing on the practicalities of the day; and other sympathisers no doubt regretted that the artist in him should be in danger of being ruined by the politician.[330]

At first he thought it possible to reform the theatre from the inside: and apparently nothing could surpass the zeal he showed in his work at the opera house, or the sincerity of his desire to raise the music of the town to the highest possible efficiency. In February 1846 he drafted a scheme for the improvement of the orchestra, that runs to nearly sixty pages of close print in the _Gesammelte Schriften_, and leaves not the smallest practical detail untouched.[331] Two years later he worked out his admirable scheme for the organisation of a German National Theatre for the Kingdom of Saxony. Here again one is struck by the practical nature of his genius.[332] But once more his appeal fell on deaf ears.

His failure to interest the theatre authorities in his schemes for the regeneration of the drama and music drove him deeper into politics. Only from a new humanity, a new relationship between man and the State, could come a clean and healthy and art-loving civilisation. In June 1848 he made his famous "Vaterlandsverein" speech, that created so many new enemies for him at the Court.[333] In February 1849 he wrote an article on "Man and Existing Society"[334] for Roeckel's _Volksblätter_, and in April one on "The Revolution" for the same journal.[335] Each of these is a passionate cry of welcome to the new era that he thought was dawning. "In the year 1848 began the war of man's fight against existing society." For society as at present constituted "is an attack on man: the ordering of existing society is inimical to the destiny, the right of man.... Man's destiny is, through the ever higher perfecting of his mental, moral, and bodily faculties, to attain an ever higher, purer happiness. Man's right is, through the ever higher perfecting of his mental, moral and bodily faculties, to achieve the enjoyment of a constantly increasing, purer happiness." But this can only be done by the union of all, not by the unit. "Men therefore are not only entitled but bound to demand of society that it shall lead them to ever higher, purer happiness through the perfecting of their mental, moral and bodily faculties." The second of the essays chants a dithyramb to the coming revolution. Volcano rumblings are to be heard beneath the soil of all Europe; soon the great upheaval will come. "The old world is crumbling to ruin; a new world will be born from it." The artist burns with sympathy for the poor, the suffering, the oppressed, and looks forward to a new civilisation, in which man will be free and have joy of his labour. It is impossible not to be moved to this day by the eloquence and passionate sincerity of his cry, and the purity of his hopes.

But the end was near,--a very different end from the one anticipated by this ardent soul. All hope of success faded before the Prussian rifles, and on the 9th May the disillusioned idealist was in flight.

It was long, however, before the hopes and dreams of 1848 and 1849 finally forsook him. From his Swiss and Parisian exile he sent forth two treatises--_Art and Revolution_ (written in June 1849), and the _Art-Work of the Future_ (written in October of the same year),--in which he voices once more his aspirations for a new humanity and a new art.

VIII

In an interesting introduction that he wrote to _Art and Revolution_ when reprinting the essay in his collective works in 1872, Wagner speaks of the influence of Feuerbach upon him at this time: in Feuerbach's conception of art he thought he recognised his own artistic ideal. What that ideal was is painted for us in full in the heated pages of _Art and Revolution_.

His central point is the one to which he remained true his whole life long,--that art should be the pure expression of a free community's joy in itself; it should be accessible to all, and placed beyond the necessity of maintaining itself by commercial means. He paints a fancy picture of "the free Greek,"--a being evolved by Wagner out of his own inner consciousness,--and elaborates the theory that the community as a whole creates great art. "The tragedies of Æschylus and Sophocles were the work of Athens." "The public art of the Greeks, which reached its highest point in tragedy, was the expression of the deepest and noblest consciousness of the people: with _us_ the deepest and noblest of man's consciousness is the direct antithesis of this,--the denial of our public art." The Greek tragedy was witnessed by the whole populace: in our superior theatres only the well-to-do can watch the play. Among the Greeks the production of a tragedy was a religious festival: in the modern State art is only an amusement or a distraction for tired people in the evening. The Greek was educated to make an artistic whole of his body and his spirit; we are trained merely for industrial gain. "Whereas the Greek artist found his reward in his own enjoyment of the work of art, in its success, and in the public approval, the modern artist is maintained--and _paid_. Thus we attain the clear definition of the essential distinction between the two. Greek public art was really _Art_; with us it is artistic _handicraft_." He admits that the Greek freedom was the result of the State being founded on slavery; but to-day _all_ are slaves together. "Our god is gold, our religion the pursuit of wealth." With the Greeks, art lived in the public conscience: with us it lives only in the conscience of private individuals. "Greek art was therefore _conservative_, because it was a worthy and adequate expression of the public conscience: with us, true art is _revolutionary_, because it exists only in opposition to the community in general." "This is art," he cries, "as it now fills the whole civilised world. Its real essence is industry; its ethical aim the gaining of gold; its æsthetic pretext the entertainment of bored minds."

In _Art and Revolution_ we get the first hint of that "united art-work" that was to occupy his mind so much during the succeeding years.[336] He holds that "with the Greeks the perfect work of art, the drama, was the sum and substance of all that could be expressed in the Greek nature; it was--in intimate connection with its history--the nation itself that stood facing itself in the art-work, that became conscious of itself, and, during a few hours, rapturously devoured, as it were, its own essence." With the later downfall of tragedy, "art became less and less the expression of the public conscience: the drama split up into its component parts,--rhetoric, sculpture, painting, opera, &c., forsook the ranks in which they had formerly moved together, and now went each its own way and pursued its own development, self-sufficing, indeed, but lonely and egoistic." The great "unified art-work" has been lost for us; only the dissevered arts exist now. In each of them wonders have been wrought; "but the one true art has never been born again, either in the Renaissance or since." And only "the great revolution of mankind" can restore to us this art-work. "If the Greek art-work comprehended the spirit of a beautiful nation, the art-work of the future must comprehend the spirit of a free humanity soaring above all barriers of race." The new art demands a new mankind, and, as a preliminary, a return to nature. Man has been destroyed by culture. The goal both of art and of the social impulse must be "the strong and beautiful man, to whom _revolution_ shall give his _strength_, and _art_ his _beauty_."

He looks forward to the time when man shall be free from care for the material things of life, with which the collective wisdom of the community will supply him; and "then will man's enfranchised energy manifest itself only in artistic impulse." Every man will become an artist, and the expression of the artistic emotion of the whole community will be the drama. But art will not be practised for gain. The theatre too must be freed from the greed of industrial speculation. The care of the theatre will be the first concern of an emancipated and enlightened community; it must be managed by "the whole body of the artists themselves, who unite in the art-work and ensure the success of their common efforts by proper co-operation." Admission to the theatre must be free, the community recompensing the dramatists and the performers.

The essay is written at a white heat throughout. His dreams are unrealisable in any world that we can think of at present: but he evidently believed in not only the possible but the speedy realisation of them. In Dresden, in the days before the rising, he expounded them enthusiastically to everyone he met. And he clung to them long after his flight from Dresden. Though he thought nothing was now to be achieved by working for reform, and that only by revolution could a new heaven and a new earth be brought into being,[337] in the possibility of this new heaven and earth he continued to believe. To Sulzer, in Zürich, he "insisted in attaching to the artistic destiny of mankind an importance far above that of any concern of the State."[338] Even in 1851 he had not given up hope that the social revolution that would bring with it the artistic revolution was near at hand. "I assumed that there would soon come a huge revulsion with regard to the public and indeed our whole social life; for the new resulting state of affairs and its real needs I believed that the right material for a quite new and instantaneous relationship of art to the public lay in the work I had sketched so boldly." He saw that the political movement had been crippled, but hoped all the more from the social movement, especially in France. He counted on a great blow for freedom being struck in the French presidential election of 1852. "The condition of the other European States, in which every aspiration was suppressed with stupid brutality, justified one in thinking that this state of affairs also could not last very long anywhere, and everything seemed to be looking towards the great decision that was to be taken in the following year." Uhlig, as he says, argued against him: but nothing could shake Wagner's faith. "Whenever we had to complain of any baseness, I always pointed him to this hopeful and fateful year, my opinion being that we should calmly wait for the expected upheaval, so that when no one else should know what to do, we could make a start. I cannot measure how deeply this hope had taken root in me; I soon, however, was forced to recognise that the confident pride of my assumptions and affirmations was largely due to the greatly increased excitement of my nerves. The news of the _coup d'état_ of the 2nd December in Paris seemed to me absolutely incredible: I was certain the world was coming to an end. When the news was confirmed, and it became clear that events no one had thought possible had happened and seemed likely to endure, I turned away from the investigation of this enigmatic world, as one turns from a mystery the fathoming of which no longer seems to be worth while." So deep was his disappointment at the triumph of reaction that for a little while his health was affected.[339]

IX

It was while he was still panting in the mists of idealism that he wrote _The Art-Work of the Future_, in which the æsthetic ideas that had been maturing in him during the latter part of the Dresden period found their first full expression.

The basis of his theory is again the belief that we shall not have a real art until we have a new and free humanity. "Man will never be what he can and should be, until his life is a true mirror of nature, a conscious following of the only real necessity, _the inner natural necessity_, and not subjected to an _outer_, imaginary, and so not a necessary but an arbitrary power." He is still vibrating with anger against the politicians of the day, to whom he attributes all the evils under the sun; and of course he idealises that mysterious abstraction "the Folk," to whom he sings a rapturous pæan.[340] It is the Folk alone that acts as Necessity dictates,--the Folk being defined as "the sum of all those who feel a common need"; while opposed to the Folk are all those "who feel no want," whose motive force is an artificial and egoistic need, satisfaction for which they seek in luxury,--"which can only be generated and maintained in opposition to and at the cost of the sacrifices of the needy." These were not the views he held upon luxury in later years, when he, one of the most luxurious-souled of men, had the opportunity to satisfy his cravings for silk dressing-gowns and lace shirts and other vanities of this world. His fulminations against luxury are simply the eternal cry of the Have-nots against the Haves.

He is, as always, discontented with the life and the art of his day, both of which seem to him fundamentally false and artificial. "The spirit, in its artistic striving for reunion with nature in the art-work, must either look forward with hope to the future, or mournfully practise resignation." He recognises that we can find redemption only in the art-work that is physically present to the senses (_nur im sinnlich gegenwärtigen Kunstwerke_), "thus only in a truly art-needing, _i.e._ art-conditioning Present that shall bring forth art from its own natural truth and beauty": that is to say, he has faith in the power of Necessity, for which this work of the Future is reserved.... "The great united art-work, that must embrace all the _genres_ of art and in some degree undo [_verbrauchen_] each of them in order to use it as a means to an end, to annul it in order to attain the common aim of _all_, namely, the unconditioned, immediate representation of perfected human nature,--this great united art-work we cannot recognise as the arbitrary need of the individual, but only as the inevitable [_nothwendig denkbare_] associated work of the humanity of the future."[341]

He proceeds to elaborate his idea of this united art-work, though the full exposition of it is only to be found in _Opera and Drama_. With his Teutonic passion for categorisation, he divides man up into neat mental parcels. The intellect has for its organ speech; the organ of feeling is tone. Speech gives determination to the otherwise indeterminate vocal tone: it is "the condensed element of the voice, and the word is the consolidated measure of tone." The whole man is the man of intellect (speech), heart (tone) and body (gesture). Thus the three primeval intertwining sisters of art are Dance, Tone, and Poetry: and true art is a union of the three. Such an art expresses all the faculties of man, whereas the separate arts,--the art-varieties, as he calls them,--only issue from and express this or that faculty. Art must appeal to the eye. "Unless it communicates itself to the eye, all art remains unsatisfying, and thus itself unsatisfied, unfree. No matter how fully it may express itself to the ear, or merely to the combining and mediately compensating faculty of thought [_das kombinierende, mittelbar ersetzende Denkvermögen_], until it communicates itself intelligibly to the eye it remains only a thing that _wills_, and not yet fully _can_. Art, however, must _can_--it is from _können_ that art, in our language, has acquired the appropriate name of _Die Kunst_."[342]

Each of the dissevered arts longs for reunion with the others, "Dance longs to pass over into Tone, there to find herself again and know herself; Tone in turn receives the marrowy frame of its structure from the rhythm of Dance.... But Tone's most living flesh is the human voice; the Word again is as it were the bony, muscular rhythm of the human voice." Thus the emotion that overflowed from Dance into Tone finds definition and certainty in the Word, and so is able to reveal itself clearly. The union of these three is "the united lyric art-work," of which the perfected form is the drama. Both the music and the poetry of to-day are impotent. He looks forward to "the overwhelming blow of fate that shall make an end of all the unwieldy musical trash, to make room for the art-work of the future." Nor can poetry alone create the genuine art-work, for no genuine art-work is possible without an appeal to the eye. Poetry should be written to be acted, not read. "The whole impenetrable medley of stored-up literature is in truth--in spite of its million phrases--nothing but the toilsome stammering of speech-impotent thought that longs to pass over into natural immediacy,--a stammering that has been going on for centuries, in verse and prose, without achieving the living Word." Shakespeare was to the art-work of the future no more than Thespis was to the perfected Greek drama. "The deed of the unique Shakespeare, which made a universal man, a very god of him, is yet only the deed of the solitary Beethoven, that revealed to him the language of the artistic manhood of the future. Only where these two Prometheus,--Shakespeare and Beethoven--shall reach out hands to one another; where the marble creations of Phidias shall become living, moving flesh and blood; where Nature, instead of being represented on a narrow canvas on the chamber walls of the egoist, shall unfold herself luxuriantly on the ample stage of the future, swept by the warm breath of life,--only then, in the fellowship of his fellow artists, will the poet find redemption."

It is evident throughout that his theory is the product of his own æsthetic bias. _He_ can express himself only in terms of poetry and music on the stage; it is therefore illegitimate for any other artist to adopt any other medium of expression. Poetry without music, music without poetry, cannot satisfy _him_; therefore no one else has any right to be satisfied with either of these arts separately. The truth is that he was utterly insensitive to the peculiar qualities in each of the separate arts that constitute its special charm for those who practise it exclusively. When he was in Milan in 1859 he suddenly realised, he tells us, that he was "no good as a judge of pictures, because the subject, when once it had made a clear and sympathetic appeal to me, at once and completely decided me."[343] The confession is quite superfluous. It is writ large over all his prose works that he had nothing of the painter's delight in painting, or any real understanding of its æsthetic effect. He seems to have been equally blind or deaf to the peculiar appeal of the other arts. If it were not so, he would hardly have laid it down, in all seriousness, that "literature poetry," as the "mere organ of the intellect," should be dissolved, self-abrogated, into the "unified art-work of the future," or that architecture decays when it passes from the service of the State and religion into the service of the "egoistic individual," or that sculpture too has become a merely "egoistic" art, only to be "redeemed" by being taken up into the "united art-work,"[344] or that painting too must seek a similar "redemption." His notions that the landscape painter will find his impulses satisfied in the painting of scenery or a background for the living man of drama, and that the gestures of the mime will amply compensate us for the cessation of sculpture, are indeed not to be taken seriously; they are possible only to a man without the least understanding of the plastic arts. It is of course quite untrue that in such a union of the arts as he suggests "the highest faculty of each is unfolded to the fullest." Even in the Wagnerian opera none of the contributing arts receives anything like its full unfolding except music. The truth is that Wagner had still not rid his artistic ideas of their political encumbrances. He was poor, and unable to realise himself in the world as it was then. He naturally supposed there must be something fundamentally wrong with a world of that kind, and he looked forward to a speedy dissolution of it, and the rising of a new civilisation from its ashes. He saw the rich buying pictures and sculptures and building houses for themselves, and the ordinary people reading poetry or prose, instead of them all flocking to the opera. People had a reprehensible passion for being what he called "units," each of them enjoying his own art in his own way. "True" art, therefore, would be possible only in a society in which the unit had lost consciousness of himself in the community. The communal art, the art enjoyed by great masses of people in the same place and at the same time, is the drama. The "units" who could not quite stifle their liking for painting and sculpture must therefore be satisfied with so much of these as could be given them in the theatre. It was a very logical and symmetrical piece of pleading: the only defect in it was that it left just one thing out of account--human nature.

His political speculations have the triple disadvantage that they are rarely true in themselves, they are too obviously the product merely of the circumstances of Wagner's own time and place, and they have no practical bearing upon art. The angry idealist overshoots his mark when he tells us that our modern States are the most unnatural associations of men, inasmuch as they arose solely out of a "mere external caprice, _i.e._ dynastic family interests," and that "they yoke together once for all a certain number of men for an aim that either never corresponded to a need they had in common, or, owing to the changes wrought by time, is certainly no longer common to them now." Even if it were true it would be without any practical significance either for politics or art,--for politics, because there is no one art that can be said to possess the imagination of a complex modern State, no one "need" for the satisfaction of which it is possible to induce all the citizens to labour: and for art, because art's business is to display to us the endless beauty and interest of things, not to argue us into the adoption of this or that view of this infinite, incomprehensible world. Too much of Wagner's political theorising is the mere outcome of affairs as they happened to be in Germany at the latter end of the first half of the nineteenth century. He idealised the "Folk" because that unfixable abstraction was the natural antithesis of the rich governing class whom he held in abhorrence. It is right that the artist should have his dreams of life as well as of art, and if he chooses to find his ideal in an abstraction no one can say him nay. But when he proceeds to endow that abstraction with all the impossible virtues under the sun, when he tells us that "the artist of the future" will be, not the poet, the actor, the musician or the plastician, but the "Folk,"--"to whom alone we owe all Art itself,"--we can only decline to keep company with him until he shall be able to use words with some meaning in them. There is, in fact, a sort of nonsense prose as there is a nonsense verse. Wagner's dithyrambs upon the Folk--and upon many another topic--are simply the prose counterpart of Lear and Carroll.

X

Wagner was the most many-sided of musicians, as a glance at the titles of his prose works will show. He benefited greatly by his versatility: no one can doubt that his music is all the richer for the stimuli his nature received from so many quarters. But if he gained something by it, it is probable that the world lost as much. There are few of us who would not give three-fourths of the prose works for another opera from his pen; and he would have had time to write half a dozen if he had abstained from all this prose. But the prose was a necessity to him; it was a needed purgation of the intellect, without which the emotion could not function fully and freely. The most striking illustration of this is _Opera and Drama_. Wagner had already poured out his ideas upon man and art at great length in _Art and Revolution_ and the _Art-Work of the Future_. His mind was now brooding upon the great dramatic subject that was to occupy the bulk of his thinking for the next twenty years or more of his life. It was only for the realisation of this dream that he now clung to existence. Yet the dæmon within him drove him to postpone the composition of this poem until he had produced yet another huge theoretical treatise. The reasons for this were two-fold. In the first place he had a despairing sense of the futility of bringing so new and vast a work into being until he had educated the artistic public of that day to comprehend his novel aims and style. In the second place, he felt an imperative need of coming to an understanding with himself. He probably saw the whole plan and technique of _Siegfried's Death_[345] more or less vaguely--too vaguely for him to be willing to trust himself all at once on that huge uncharted sea. It would clarify his own ideas, as well as prepare the public, if he were to draw out the ground plan, as it were, of the music drama of the future. This he accordingly did in _Opera and Drama_. "My literary works," he wrote to Roeckel, "were testimonies to my want of freedom as an artist; it was dire compulsion alone that wrung them from me."[346]

_Opera and Drama_ was written in the winter of 1850-1. As it is the most thorough and the most comprehensive statement that Wagner has given us of his theory of drama and music, it will be as well to summarise its arguments and conclusions for the reader.

I. Until the present time, men have indeed felt that the opera was a monument of the corruption of artistic taste, but criticism has not fully fathomed the matter: and it therefore becomes the task of the creative artist to practise criticism, in order at once to "annihilate error and uplift criticism." The writer of an article on modern opera in Brockhaus' Lexicon[347] has pointed out the defects of this form of art, showing its artificialities and conventions; but when he comes to the practical problem, "How is all this to be remedied?" he can only regret that Mendelssohn's too early death should have "prevented the solution of the riddle." But this is still proceeding on the wrong track. Had Mendelssohn any musical gift which Mozart, for example, did not possess? Could anything, from the standpoint of music, be more perfect than each individual number of _Don Giovanni_? Plainly the critic cannot wish for better music than this. It is evident, then, that what he wants in opera is the power and force of _drama_. But he is blind enough still to expect this from the _musician_; that is, wanting a house built for him, he applies, not to the architect, but to the upholsterer. And by the very failure of the critic's effort to solve the problem in this way, there is driven home the conclusion that _this way_ the problem is really insoluble. Yet the true solution, so far from being difficult of attainment, simply stares one in the face; and the formula for it is that--

"The error in the art-genre of Opera consists in the fact that _a Means of Expression (Music) has been made the object, while the Object of Expression (the Drama) has been made a means_."

The truth of this formula can be attested by an appeal to the history of the opera. It arose, not from the folk-plays of the Middle Ages, in which there were the rudiments of a natural co-operation of music and drama, but at the luxurious courts of Italy, where the aristocrats engaged singers to entertain them with arias, that is, with "folk-tunes stripped of their _naïveté_ and natural truth," embroidered on a story whose only _raison d'être_ was the occasional advent of these arias.[348] Music, in fact, was the all-in-all of opera, as is clearly shown by the old-time domination of the singer: while all the poet had to do was to stand as little as possible in the way of the musician. The great merit of Metastasio,[349] according to the standard of the practice of his own day, was that he almost effaced his own art in favour of music--"never embarrassed the musician in the least, never advanced any unusual claim upon him from the dramatic standpoint." Nor has the situation changed, in its main features, down even to the present day. It still is held to be necessary for the poet to shape his material according to the necessities of the musician from first to last. The whole aim of the opera is simply _music_, the dramatic story being only utilised to serve music as a means for its own display. The anomaly has finally become so fundamental a part of men's lives that they no longer realise that it _is_ an anomaly: and accordingly they still have hopes of erecting the genuine drama on the basis of absolute music--that is, of achieving the impossible. The object of _Opera and Drama_ is to prove that great artistic results can follow from the collaboration of music with dramatic poetry, while from the unnatural position which music bears towards opera in our present system nothing but sterility can result.

Let us, then, in the first place, consider "Opera and the Nature of Music."

Music has been betrayed into a position where she has lost sight of her own limitations; although in herself she is simply an "organ of expression," she has fallen into "the error of desiring to define with perfect clearness the thing to be expressed." The musical basis of the opera was the aria, that is, the folk-song deprived of its own original words, and adapted at once to the vanity of the singer and the luxurious tastes of the world of rank. Aria and dance-tune, with an admixture of recitative, made up an opera, into the musical domain of which the poet was only allowed to enter in order to supply a little narrative cohesion. The significance of the so-called reformation of Gluck has been greatly exaggerated. All he did was to curtail the arrogant pretensions of the singer, while leaving the texture and plan of opera untouched. His was a revolt of the composer fighting merely for his own hand, not for the ends of _drama_: and every means by which he increased the power of music in opera was necessarily a further shackle on the limbs of the poet. Méhul, Cherubini and Spontini in their turn broadened the old musical forms of opera, and made the musical expression more consonant with that of the words, but did nothing for opera except from the standpoint of music. The poet may now have had to provide a slightly better and firmer groundwork for the musician, but it was to the musician, and to him alone, that he still owed his existence in opera. People failed to see that the source of regenerative power could be nowhere but in the drama: and the trouble was that music tried by itself to perform the functions of drama, to be a "content" instead of mere "expression."

Mozart, again, was so entirely a musician that his work throws the clearest light on the relations of musician and poet; and we find him unable to write at his best where the poem was flat and meaningless. He could not write music for _Tito_ like that of _Don Giovanni_, or for _Cosi fan tutte_ like that of _Figaro_. He, the most absolute of all musicians, would long ago have solved the operatic problem had he met the proper poet. This poet he was never fortunate enough to meet: all his "poets" did was to give him a medley of arias, duets, and _ensembles_ to set to music. But the flood of beauty and expression which Mozart poured into opera was too great for that narrow bed; the stream overflowed into wider and freer channels, until it became a mighty sea in the symphonies of Beethoven.

The aria was a degeneration of the folk-song, in which poetry and music had been spontaneously one. The operatic aria was the music of the folk-song, arbitrarily wrested from the words, and made to serve the indolent pleasure of the man of luxury. In course of time people forgot that a word-stave should by rights go with the melody. It was Rossini who took this artificial flower, drenched it with manufactured perfume, and gave it the semblance of life. Rossini saw that the life-blood of ordinary opera was melody--"naked, ear-tickling, absolute-melodic melody." Spontini erred in imagining the "dramatic tendency" to be the essence of opera: the real essence, as Rossini showed, and as the future history of opera proves, was simply absolute melody.

Earnest composers, however, while by no means denying the claims of melody, held that Rossini's melody was cheap and superficial, and endeavoured to derive theirs more directly from the fountains of expression of the Folk. This was the course taken by Weber, who gave opera-aria the deep and genuine feeling of the folk-song; though the flower, thus torn from its native meadow, could not thrive in the salons of modern luxury and artificiality. And Weber, no less than Rossini, made his melody the main factor of opera, though of course it was far worthier and more honest than the melody of the Italian composer. Weber directed and constrained the poet of _Der Freischütz_ as emphatically as Rossini did the poet of _Tancredi_. And Weber's failure proves afresh the assertion that instead of the drama being taken up into the being of music, music must be taken up into the drama.

Weber's success in harking back to the Folk was envied by the composers of other nationalities, and a number of operas were produced which tried to proceed on similar lines--such as _Masaniello_ and _William Tell_. The Folk, in fact, was exploited, but its real inspiration could not, from the very nature of the case, be embodied in opera. In the epic and the drama the Folk celebrated the deeds of the Hero, and in true drama the action and the character are recognised as necessary; but under the influence of the modern State, dramatic characters lose their personality and become mere masks. This was particularly the case in opera, where the folk-song has degenerated into the aria, and the Folk itself has become the Mass, the Chorus. "Historic" opera became the fashion, and even Religion was dragged upon the stage, as in the operas of Meyerbeer. But the outlandishness thus imported into opera led in its turn to worse degeneration: and the "historic" mania became "hysteric" mania--in other words, Neo-romanticism.

Up to this time, every influence that had shaped the course of opera had come from the domain of absolute music alone. After Rossini, operatic melody was varied by the introduction of instrumental melody. People had not perceived that instrumental music was also unfruitful, by reason of its not expressing the purely-human in the form of definite, individual feelings.

"That the expression of an absolutely definite and clearly-understandable individual Content was in truth impossible in this language that was capable only of generalised emotional expression, could not be demonstrated until the coming of that instrumental composer in whom the longing to express such a Content became the burning, consuming motive-force of all artistic conception."

It was the function of Beethoven to show what music can do if it confines itself to its true sphere, that of expression. In his later works, Beethoven, having his mind filled with a definite content, burst the bounds of many of the old absolute forms, and stammered through tentative new ones. Future symphonists followed him from this point, without seeing what it was in Beethoven that made him act in this way; they consequently misapplied his forms, copying the externals only. Hence the vogue of programme music, of which the great representative is Berlioz. Then there came an influx of the wealth of instrumental music (developed independently of vocal music) into operatic melody. This is modern _characteristic_, of which Meyerbeer, the cosmopolitan Jew, is the great exploiter, and which differs from that of Gluck and Mozart in that the poet is infinitely more degraded, and absolute melody more exalted. This held good even in Paris, where the poet had hitherto always had _some_ rights; but now Meyerbeer forced Scribe, his librettist, to run wherever he chose to drive him. The secret of his music is "Effect without Cause." Yet even Meyerbeer wrote fine music where he allowed the poet to guide him--as in parts of the great love-scene in the fourth act of _Les Huguenots_.

To sum up, then, Music has tried to be the drama, and the attempt has ended in impotence. The only salvation for it lies in sensible co-operation with the poet. This may be seen by a glance at the nature of our present music. The most perfect expression of the inner being of music is melody; it is to harmony and rhythm what the external side of the organism is to the internal. Now the Folk's melodies were a revelation of the nature of things. Christianity, however, with its anxiety to lay bare the soul, found itself face to face not with life but death; and the Folk-song, the indivorcible union of poetry and music, almost died out. In the ages of human mechanism the longing of things was to produce the real man, which man "was really none other than Melody, _i.e._ the moment of most definite, most convincing manifestation of Music's actual, living organism." The struggle of Beethoven's great works is the struggle of mechanism to become a man, an organism, uttering itself in melody. Thus while other composers merely took melody, ready-made, from the mouth of the Folk, and applied it to their own purposes, Beethoven's melody was the spontaneous effort of Music's inner organism to find expression. But it is only in the verbal outburst of the Ninth Symphony that Beethoven brings melody to true life; music was sterile until fertilised by the poet. The error had always been that operatic melody, coming as it did from the Folk-song, ran on certain rhythmical and structural lines, beyond which the musician could not stray; so that melody had no chance to be born spontaneously out of poetry, for the poet had simply to adapt his words to the one invariable musical scaffolding. "Every musical organism is by its nature a womanly; it is merely a bearer, not a begetter; the begetting force lies outside it, and without fecundation by this force it cannot bear." In the Choral Symphony Beethoven had to call in the poet to fertilise absolute music; and the folly of the latter is seen in its attempts not only to bear but also to beget. "_Music is a woman_," whose nature is to surrender in love. Who now is to be the Man to whom this surrender is to be made? Let us look at _the Poet_.

II. When Lessing tries to mark out the boundaries of poetry and painting in the _Laocöon_, he has in his eye merely descriptive, literary poetry, not "the dramatic art-work brought immediately into view by physical performance." Now the literary poem is an artificial art, appealing to the imagination instead of to the senses. All the egoistically severed arts, indeed, appeal only to the force of imagination. They "_merely suggest_; an _actual presentation_ would be possible to them only if they could address themselves to the totality of man's artistic receptivity, communicate with his entire perceptive organism, instead of merely his faculty of imagination; for the real art-work only comes into being when it passes from imagination into actuality, _i.e._ physical presentation." There should be no _arts_, there should be _one veritable Art_. It is an error to look upon Drama as merely a _branch of literature_; although it is true that our drama is no more true Drama than a single musical instrument is an orchestra.

The modern drama has a two-fold origin--in Romance, and in the Greek drama; the flower of the former being Shakespeare--of the latter, Racine. Our dramatic literature hovers undecidedly between these two extremes. The romance was not the portrayal of the complete man; this only became possible in drama, which actualised life, presented it visibly to the senses. Shakespeare "condensed the narrative romance into the drama"--made it, that is, suitable for stage representation. The great characteristic of his art was that human actions did not come before us merely in descriptive poetry, but by the actors addressing themselves directly to the actual eye, and the poet had to narrow down the diversity of the old Folk-stage to suit the scenic and other demands of the theatre. The action and the characters had to be made more definite, more individual, more circumstantial, in order to give the spectators the impression of an artistic whole. The appeal, in short, was no longer to fancy but to sense, the only domain left to fancy being _the imagining the scene itself_--for the stage-craft of those days fell short of actually _representing_ reality. This mixture of fancy and sense-presentation in the drama was the source of endless future confusion in dramatic art; the giving-up to fancy of the representation of the scene left an open door in drama through which romance and history might pass in and out at pleasure.

In the French drama, outward unity of scene determined the whole structure of the play, diminishing the part played by action, and increasing the function of "mere delivery of speeches." For the same reason, the French dramatists could not choose for representation the romance, with its bewildering multiplicity of incident; they had to fall back on the already condensed plots which they found in Greek mythology. Instead of dealing with his own people's life, then, as Shakespeare had tried to do, the French tragedian merely imitated the finished Greek drama. This unnatural, artificial world was reproduced in French opera, and most saliently in the French opera of Gluck.

"Opera was thus the premature bloom on an unripe fruit grown from an unnatural,[350] artificial soil. The outer form, with which the Italian and French drama _began_, must be attained by the new drama by organic evolution from within, on the path of the Shakespearean drama; then first will ripen, also, the natural fruit of musical drama."

German dramatic art found itself between the Shakespearean play on the one side and the scenic Southern opera on the other--between the appeal to hearing, aided slightly by fancy in the representation of the scene, and the appeal to the eye alone. There were two final courses open: either, as Tieck suggested, to act Shakespeare with no more scenery than was employed in Shakespeare's own theatre, or to represent each change of scene in the plays--that is, employ the gigantic apparatus of scenic opera.

The result to the modern poet was perplexity and disillusion. The play was neither literature--as it was when men merely read it, allowing their imagination to represent the scene--nor actual, visualised drama. Hence the poet either wrote plays simply to be read, not acted, or, if he wrote for the stage, he employed the reflective type of drama, the modern origin of which may be traced to the pseudo-antique drama, constructed according to Aristotle's rules of unity. These results and tendencies are exhibited in Goethe and Schiller. Goethe, after various experiments, found his full expression in _Faust_, which makes no pretence of stage-representation, and is therefore really neither romance nor drama. _Faust_ is "the point of separation between the mediæval _romance_ ... and the real _dramatic matter_ of the future." Schiller was always perplexed by the contradiction between history and drama. The whole dilemma is this. On the one side are romance and history, with all their multiplicity of character and action: on the other is the ideal dramatic form, presenting a simple, definite action and real moving characters visibly to the eye; and a compromise has to be effected between these two. The plain truth is "that we have no drama, and can have no drama; that our literary-drama is as far removed from the genuine drama as the pianoforte from the symphonic song of human voices; that in the modern drama we can arrive at the production of poetry only by the most calculated devices of literary mechanism, just as on the pianoforte we only arrive at the production of music by means of the most complicated devices of technical mechanism--that is to say, a soulless poetry, a toneless music." With _this_ drama true music can have nothing to do.

Man, conceiving the external world, is impelled to reproduce his conceptions in art in a mode that shall be intelligible to others. This has only once been done thoroughly--in the expression of the Greek world-view in the Greek drama. The material of this drama was the myth--the Folk's mode of condensation of the phenomena of life--"the poem of a life-view in common." The Christian myth was concerned with death where the Greek had been concerned with life. It could therefore be painted or described, but not _represented_ in drama. The Germanic myth, like the Greek, was in its essence a religious intuition, a life-view in common; but Christianity laid hold of it and dispersed it into fragments of fable and legend--the Romance of the Middle Ages. What the artist had to do was to find _Man_ under all this _débris_. Now whereas the drama selects an action from a mass of actions, and limits the surroundings to just so much as will illuminate and justify this action, the romance has to enter circumstantially and at great length into the surrounding circumstances, in order to make the action and the character artistically convincing. The drama goes from within outwards, the romance from without inwards: the drama lays bare the organism of mankind, the romance shows us merely the mechanism of history; the art-procedure in drama is organic, in romance merely mechanical; the drama gives us the man, the romance the citizen; the drama exhibits the fullness of human nature, the romance the penury of the State. In the evolution that has gone on since the Middle Ages, Burgher-society has come uppermost; but it offers nothing to romance but unloveliness. Everything in life is being disintegrated past the capacity of art to reunite it; the poet's art has turned to politics, and until we have no more politics the poet cannot come to light again. As Napoleon said, the rôle of Fate in the ancient world is filled in the modern by politics; and this is what we shall have to comprehend before we can discover the true content and form of drama.

Now the myth is true for all time, and its content forever inexhaustible. Understanding it well, we see in it "an intelligible picture of the whole history of mankind, from the beginnings of society to the necessary downfall of the State." The political State lives on the vices of society; salvation and art are only to be found in the free, purely-human individual. The essence of the State is _caprice_, of the free individual, _necessity_. It is then essential for us to annul the State and create afresh the free individual. The poet who tried to portray this individual found that he was face to face with him _only as he had been shaped by the State_; he could not then portray him, but only imagine him; could only represent him to thought, not to feeling. Our drama, in consequence, has been forced to make its appeal to the _understanding_ instead of the _feeling_. Out of the mass of man's modern surroundings the poet has to reconstruct the individual, and present him to feeling, to sense, instead of to understanding. But this the poet cannot do; he can only address the understanding, and that through the organ of understanding "abstract and conditioned word-speech." "The course to be taken by the drama of the future will be a return from understanding to feeling, in so far as we advance from the mentally-conceived individuality to an actual individuality." By the annihilation of the State, society will realise its purely-human essence, and determine the free individual. And it is only in the most perfect art-work, the drama, that the poet's insight into life can find complete expression, because this drama will address not the understanding, but the feeling, through the senses. It will present the poet's view of life physically to the eye; it will be a true _emotionalisation of the intellect_. It must present things to us in such a manner that we cannot help realising their necessity. This can only be done by avoiding the by-paths of the intellect, and by appealing directly to the feeling. The _action_, then, must be so chosen as to make this appeal instinctively. Now an historic action, or one "which can only be justified from the standpoint of the State," is only representable to the understanding, not to the feeling; that is, by its very multiplicity and lack of warmth it cannot be seized definitely and quickly by the senses, but needs the combining function of thought. The true dramatic "action" must be seen at once to be the essential centre of the periphery of circumstance. Man and nature, as cognised by the understanding, are split up into fragments; it is the _feeling_ that grasps the organic unity of things, and it is from this point _outwards_ that the true drama must work. In other words, it must be generated from the _myth_.

Up to a certain point the intellect can work in the selection of material, and express itself through its own organ, word-speech; but for the full _realisation_ of the action and the motives to the feeling, the organ of feeling--tone-speech--has to be called in. "Tone-speech is the beginning and end of word-speech, as the feeling is beginning and end of the understanding, as myth is beginning and end of history, as lyric is beginning and end of poetry." The lyric "holds within itself all the germs of the essential art of poetry, which in the end can only be the justification of the lyric; and the work that accomplishes this justification is nothing but the highest human art-work, the _complete drama_."

The primal organ of utterance of the inner man is tone-speech, the fundamental nature of which may be seen by removing the consonants from our word-speech. The latter is the result of the addition of prefixes and suffixes to the open sound, as distinguishing and delimiting signs of objects. In this way speech-roots were formed from the primal melody of tone-speech. In alliteration, or _Stabreim_, speech, by combining these roots according to similarity and kinship, "made equally plain to the feeling both the impression of the object and its corresponding expression, through an increased strengthening of that expression"; showed, that is, the unity in multiplicity of the object. _Stabreim's_ similarity of syllabic sounds brings a collective image to the feeling. The _Stabreim_ and the word-verse were fundamentally conditioned by that melody which is the expression of primal human feeling, because the breathing-conditions of man's organism determined the duration and segmentation of the utterance. When poetry developed along the line of the understanding instead of that of the feeling, word-speech became dissociated from its sister, tone-speech; and having lost the instinctive sense of this bond, it tried to find "another bond of union with the melodic breathing-pauses." This was done in the _end-rhyme_, which was the sign that the natural bond of tone-speech and word-speech in the _Stabreim_ had been forgotten. This line of degeneration ended in "the dreary turmoil of prose"; and the separation from the feeling was complete. We now go upon convention instead of upon conviction. We cannot properly express our emotions in our present language, for it allows us to speak only to the understanding, not to the feeling; which is why the feeling "has tried to escape from absolute intellectual-speech into absolute tone-speech--our music of to-day."

The poet, then, cannot realise his aim in modern speech, because he cannot speak directly to the feeling. Yet he must not simply work out his drama on the lines of the understanding, and then try to add expression to it by means of music. _This was the error of opera._ The emotional expression itself must _also_ be governed by the poetical aim. "_A tone-speech to be struck-into from the outset_ is therefore the organ of expression by means of which the poet must make himself intelligible by turning from the understanding to the feeling, and for this purpose he has to take his stand upon a soil on which he can have intercourse with feeling alone." We must go back, in fact, to the primal _melodic_ faculty, to which is given the expression of the purely-human; the drama must utter itself in a form that shall be the marriage of understanding and feeling, of word-speech and tone-speech.

III. Until now the poet has tried in two ways to attune the organ of the understanding--word-speech--to an emotional expression which would find its way to the feeling; through _rhyme_ and through _melody_. It was a mistake to try to import the rhythms of Greek verse into modern poetry, for these rhythms were conditioned by the gestures of the dance, and the dislocation of the speaking-accents was atoned for by melody. Our modern languages not being adapted to this ruling into longs and shorts, Greek prosody is impossible for us. Our iambic verse, for example, hobbles along mechanically, "putting grievous constraint upon the live accent of speech for the sake of this monotonous rhythm." "Longs" become "shorts," and "shorts" become "longs," simply to get the requisite number of feet into the line. On the other hand, where, as among the Romanic peoples, this kind of rhythm is not in vogue, the _end-rhyme_ has been imported into poetry, and has become indispensable. The whole line is built up with reference to this end-rhyme, as the up-stroke to the down-stroke. The result is that the attention of the ear is only momentarily won, and the poet does not reach the _feeling_, for all he does is to make understanding speak to understanding.

We have seen that word-speech and melody have travelled along divergent lines of development, and now neither can be properly applied to the other. Even where, as in Gluck's music, the composer tries to find a bond of union in the speaking-accent of the word-speech, his selection of this mere rhetorical accent leads to a disintegration of the rest of the line as _poetry_; it becomes dissolved into prose, and the melody itself becomes merely musical prose. The usual course is for the melody to do what it likes with the verse; to dislocate its rhythm, ignore its accents, and drown its end-rhyme, according to its own pleasure. The poet ought really "so to employ the speaking accent as the only determinative 'moment' for his verse, that in its symmetrical return it should clearly define a wholesome rhythm, as necessary to the verse itself as to the melody." Instead of this, we find on the one hand that many of Goethe's verses are declared too beautiful to be set to music, while on the other hand Mendelssohn writes _Songs without Words_.

We shall have to deal with speech as we dealt with action and the content of the drama. Just as we took away from the action all that was extraneous and accidental; just as we took away from the content all that savoured of the State or of history, in order to reach simply the purely-human; so we must "cut away from the verbal expression all that springs from and answers to these disfigurements of the purely-human and emotionally necessary," so that only the purely-human core shall remain. Thus we shall arrive "at the natural basis of rhythm in the spoken verse, as revealed in the _liftings_ and _lowerings_ of the accent," which in turn can only find full expression when intensified into musical rhythm. The strong and weak accents must correspond to the "good" and "bad" halves of the musical bar. We must reach back through the understanding and its organ to "the sensuous substance of our _roots of speech_"; we must breathe the breath of life into the defunct organism of speech. This breath is music. The roots of words were brought into being by the Folk's primal emotional stress; the essence of these roots is the open vowel sound, which finds its fullest sensuous uplifting in music; while the function of the consonants is to determine the general expression to a particular one. The _Stabreim_ indicates to the feeling the unity of sensation underlying the roots--shows their emotional kinship. It appeals, as it were, to the "eye" of hearing, while the vowel is addressed to the "ear" of hearing. And as a man only reveals himself fully to us by addressing both eye and ear at once, so "the communicating-organ of the inner man only completely convinces our hearing when it addresses itself with equal persuasiveness to both 'eye and ear' of this hearing. But this is possible only in _word-tone-speech_. Poet and musician have hitherto each addressed no more than half the man: the poet turned towards this hearing's eye alone, the musician only to its ear." The musician will take the vowel-sounds of the poet, and display their fundamental kinship by giving them their full emotional value by means of musical tone. Here then the word-poet ends, and the tone-poet begins. The melody of the musician is "the redemption of the endlessly-conditioned poetic thought into a deep-felt consciousness of the highest emotional freedom." This was the melody that rose from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to the light of day.

When Beethoven wrote the simple melody with which he accompanies the "_Freude, schöner Götterfunken_," he was writing as an absolute musician. This melody "did not arise out of the poem of Schiller, but rather was invented outside the word-verse and merely spread above it." But in the "_Seid umschlungen, Millionen_," and the "_Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?_" he obeys the dictates of the poetic aim, and the broadening of the key-kinship leads the feeling back to the purely-human.

The kinship of feeling which the poet can only approximately express by _Stabreim_, the musician can bring to full expression by key-modulation. Take, for example, the line "_Liebe giebt Lust zum Leben_." The one emotion being expressed throughout, the musician would keep in one key. When setting "_Die Liebe bringt Lust und Leid_," however, the change of feeling at the end of the line would be expressed by a modulation; while if this line were followed by "_Doch in ihr Weh auch webt sie Wonnen_,"[351] at the _webt_ a modulation would be effected back into the original key. It is from this poetico-musical "_period_" that the true art-work, the perfected drama, must take its rise.

Melody is the horizontal surface of harmony; and in harmony "the ear ... obtains an entire fulfilling--and thus a satisfying--of its capacity for sensuous impression, and consequently can devote itself with the necessary composure to the apt emotional expression of the melody." But harmony in absolute music has existed solely for and in itself: whereas the melody ought to be conditioned by the speaking-verse, and the concurrent harmony be used for making this obvious to the feeling.

In the drama of the future there must be no characters whose only function is to swell the harmonic volume of sound; there must only be such characters as are essential in themselves to the plot. The chorus, then, "as hitherto employed in opera, ... will have to disappear from our drama." Neither the chorus nor the main characters "are to be used by the poet as a musical symphonic tone-body for making the underlying harmonic conditions of the melody perceptible." The musician, however, possesses an organ which can make plain the harmony and characterise the melody in a far superior way to that of the vocal mass. This organ is the orchestra, which is an immense aid in the realisation of the poetic aim. Until now the error has consisted in writing _absolute_ melody in opera--melody, that is, which was conditioned by the orchestra itself, not by the word-verse, and which was therefore only "vocal" melody in the sense that it was given to the voice. It ought really to come from "an announcement of the purely emotional content of the verse, through a dissolution of the vowel into the musical tone"; the verse melody in this way becoming the mediator and bond of union between word-speech and tone-speech, the offspring of the marriage of poetry and music.

The great value of the orchestra is its power of uttering the _unspeakable_, _i.e._ that which is unutterable through the organ of the understanding. It may do this in three ways--by its organic alliance with _gesture_, by bringing up the _remembrance_ of an emotion, when the singer is not giving voice to it, and by giving a foreboding of moods as yet unspoken.

All the constituents of drama have now been enumerated. It only remains to consider how they are to be knit together into a single form corresponding to the single substance. Just as the poet obtained his action by compressing all the motives into an easily comprehended content, so, for the realisation of this action, must he proceed with the composition on the same principles. The expression, like the action, must be free from the accidental, the contingent, the superfluous.

We approach the drama in a mood of expectancy, that is ministered to by the orchestra in its quality of a producer of foreboding--although this preliminary utterance of the orchestra must by no means be interpreted to mean the ordinary "overture." This expectancy is afterwards satisfied by the word-speech of the performer, lifted into the higher emotional sphere of tone-speech. The unity of content in the drama must be made evident in a unity of artistic expression; that is, the expression "must convey to the feeling the most comprehensive aim of the poetic understanding." Wherever the word-speech approaches the language of ordinary life--the organ of understanding--the orchestra must keep the expression still on the higher plane, by means of its faculty of conveying foreboding or remembrance. Yet it must assume this function not through the mere caprice of the musician, but in obedience only to the poet's aim. Unity of content and unity of expression must go hand in hand. These melodic moments of the orchestra will take their rise only from the _weightiest motives of the drama_, which are the pillars of the edifice. In this way a binding principle of musical form may be obtained which springs directly from the poetic aim, and far surpasses the arbitrary, _merely musical_ form of the old opera, which was loose, uncentralised, and inorganic.

Finally let us ask, "Has the poet to _restrict_ himself in presence of the musician, and the musician in presence of the poet?" The answer is that they ought not to restrict each other, but raise each other to higher potency, in order thus to generate the true drama. If both the poet's aim and the musician's expression are visible, the necessary inspiration of each by each has not been effected. We must not be reminded of either aim or expression, "but the content must instinctively take possession of us as a human action fully justified to our feeling." In every moment of the musician's expression the poetic aim must be contained; and this poetic aim must always find complete realisation in the musician's expression. Whereas Voltaire said, "When a thing is too silly to be said, one sings it," we now may say "What is not worth being sung is not worth the poet's pains to tell."

There is no need to assume that poet and musician must necessarily be one person. Only in the present egoistic relations of these two--who are types of the egoism of the modern State--does it seem necessary for one man to become the unit of creation.

Three nations--the Italian, French and German--have contributed to the evolution of opera; but the German language alone "still coheres directly and unmistakably with its roots," and therefore is alone adapted for the new art-work. But the practice of singing operas with German words merely translated from the French or Italian, and therefore not coinciding in meaning and accent with the music, has mis educated and demoralised German singers. In the new drama, the melody will always be conditioned by the word-verse, and singers must learn to render it intelligently, bringing out not merely the melodic sequence but the _verbal sense_ of the melody. And gesture must be employed with intelligent understanding, in order to make the orchestral moments of foreboding and remembrance[352] in their turn intelligible. But the primary condition for this new drama is a new public, that shall look at it seriously, as at an organism; a public that wants an art-work, not a mere evening's distraction. We are less fortunate than the older artists, whose audience, whatever its social faults may have been, had at least delicacy and high breeding; whereas we are ruled by the vulgar and ignorant Philistine, the characteristic product of our commercial civilisation. Yet even under the _débris_ of modern life the artist can see the primal source of things, can reach to the _human being_, to whom the future belongs.

XI

It will be seen from this summary that Wagner, though now mainly occupied with purely æsthetic ideas, was still unable to refrain from mixing these up with political and other considerations that were quite alien to them. He still believes in the "Folk" as "always ... the fructifying source of all art."[353] He is still angry--almost comically angry at times--with the richer classes, who, in the Wagnerian philosophy of that period, are always to the Folk what the aristocratic villain of the melodrama is to the poor but virtuous hero. He might have forgiven Meyerbeer for writing bad music; but he could never forgive him for being a banker. The State too is still the most persistent of bees in his bonnet. He solemnly assures us that the reason for the decline in dramatic character-drawing since Shakespeare is "the influence of the State, with its perpetual tendency to make everything uniform, and to suppress, with more and more deadly power, the might of free personality."[354] This wicked "political State," indeed, "lives entirely on the vices of Society, the virtues of which are the product of the human individuality exclusively.... The State is the oppressor of Society, in proportion as the latter turns its vicious side to the individual"; though it is a comfort to know that "the downfall of the State" is "necessary."[355]

And he is as insensitive as ever to the appeal of the other arts. All the arts except drama "merely indicate." The "only real kind of art" is the drama, because there the thing portrayed is not left to the imagination, but is presented bodily to the eye. So blind is he to the characteristic essence and charm of painting and sculpture--for painters and sculptors--that he can speak of the new drama as not only "uniting within itself all the features of plastic art," but even "carrying these to higher perfections otherwise unattainable." A "literary poem" is merely a "miserable shadow" of the real art-work.[356] In one of his letters to Uhlig he goes even further than this, actually laying it down that "plastic art must cease entirely in the future."[357] The poor practitioners of these "egoistically severed arts" are majestically swept aside: "only a true artist,--an artistic man, in fact, can understand this matter; but no other, even though he has the best will in the world to do so. Who, for instance, amongst our art-egoistic handicraft-copying, can comprehend the natural attitude of plastic art to the direct, purely-human art? I altogether set aside what a statue sculptor or a historical painter would say to this."[358]

In the _Communication to my Friends_, that followed _Opera and Drama_ at an interval of a few months, he once more insists on the impossibility of the dissevered arts continuing to exist after the way to the one true art has been pointed out. "Together with the historico-political _subject_ I also of necessity rejected that dramatic _art-reform_ in which alone it could have been embodied; for I recognised that this form had only issued from that subject, and by it alone could be justified, and that it was utterly incapable of convincingly communicating to the feeling the purely human subject that alone I had in my eye; and therefore, with the disappearance of the historico-political subject there must necessarily also vanish, in the future, the spoken play [_die Schauspielform_], as inadequate for the novel subject, unwieldy and defective."[359]

Everywhere, as usual with him, he not only sees everything from his own angle, but is quite incapable of understanding how anyone else can have a different view-point. Just as he had nothing of the painter's or sculptor's feeling for painting or sculpture, so he had little of the poet's feeling for poetry. Apparently all that he assimilated from poetry was the idea; the characteristic charm of poetry,--the subtle interlacement or inter blending of idea and expression--did not exist for him. To what may be called the poetic atmosphere or aroma of words he was quite insensitive. For the poet the bare idea is next to nothing: the value of the idea, for him as for us, lies in the imaginative heat it engenders, the imaginative odours it diffuses. It is doubtful, indeed, whether there is anything either original or striking in nine poetical ideas out of ten; the poet's traffic must of necessity be for the most part with sentiments that, taken in themselves, have been the merest commonplaces for thousands of years. What difference is there, purely in idea, between "we are here to-day and gone to-morrow" and Shakespeare's

"We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep"?

Shakespeare's magic is in the phrasing,--not, be it remembered, a merely extraneous, artificial grace added to the idea, a mere clothing that can be put on or off it at will, but a subtle interaction and mutual enkindlement of idea and expression. For the musician that enkindlement comes from the adding of music to the words: the music does for the idea what the style does for it in the case of the poet,--raises it to a higher emotional power, gives it colour, odour, incandescence, wings. Brynhilde comes to tell Siegfried that he must die. The mere announcement of the fact is next to nothing; the infinities and the solemn silences only gather about it when the orchestra gives out the wonderful theme.

[Music:]

The pure poet, working in his own material alone, would give us this sense of illimitable sadness by the infusion into the mere idea of some remote, unanalysable wizardry of words and rhythms, as in Clough's

"Ah, that I were far away from the crowd and the streets of the city, Under the vine-trellis laid, O my beloved, with thee!"

or Arnold's

"Hear it from thy broad lucent Arno-vale (For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep The morningless and unawakening sleep Under the flowery oleanders pale)."

Wagner was blind to this super-intellectual quality in words because for him that quality was most naturally added to them by music. Speech was with him always "the organ of the intellect"; our modern speech was "utterly feelingless": the poet cannot communicate feeling because "articulate language" is capable only of "description and indication."[360] He himself was strictly speaking hardly a poet at all: he was simply a writer of words for music,--words to which the music had to add the emotional beauty that the genuine poet would have conveyed by speech alone. We are therefore not in the least surprised to learn that Wagner first of all wrote his "poems" in prose, which he then turned into rhyme or rhythm at his leisure. We possess, in _Wieland the Smith_,[361] an intended operatic libretto of his that never got past the prose stage. Having decided not to set it to music himself, he offered it to Liszt. "The poem," he writes to the Princess Wittgenstein, "is fully worked out; nothing remains to be done [_sic_] but the simple versification, which any tolerably skilful verse-maker could do. Liszt will easily find one. In the most important places I have written the verses myself."[362]

Hence all this elaborate analysis of vowels and consonant sounds is quite beside the mark. He imagines "the feeling" of a word to reside in the "root-syllable" of it,--"which was invented or discovered by the primitive emotional need of humanity" (_die aus der Nothwendigkeit des ursprünglichsten Empfindungszwanges des Menschen erfunden oder gefunden ward_). And the fountain of that emotional force in the root is the vowel sound, which is "the inner feeling incarnate" (_das verkörperte innere Gefühl_).[363] Portentous attributes are also given to the consonants, and the initial consonant is pronounced to be of more significance than the terminal. Most of this is merely fantastic. Words, especially in the hands of a poet, are not simply clothed vowel sounds; they are entities with a marvellous life of their own. The appeal of Keats's

"The same that ofttimes hath Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,"

has nothing whatever to do with vowels and consonants: we no more think of these than we think of vibration numbers when we listen to a succession of musical harmonies. The beauty of the lines is in the totality and the rareness of the imaginative picture they flash upon our vision; and to attempt to explain the secret of this in terms of vowels and consonants is as futile as to try to explain a flower by its physical particles.

XII

One is sometimes amazed, in reading _Opera and Drama_, at the persistence with which Wagner pursues the obvious, hunting it down, as Oscar Wilde said of James Payn, with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective. He is almost as elaborately absurd over his vowels and consonants as M. Jourdain. The explanation is to be sought partly in the tendency to long-windedness, the passion for pursuing every idea to the death, that was always characteristic of him,--it derived ultimately from the inexorably logical nature of his mind,--and partly from the fact that he had a very stupid public and a very stupid set of artists to educate. _Opera and Drama_ has been made both more lucid and somewhat obvious for us to-day by Wagner's own operas. If there is less need to-day to labour certain points as he does, it is because they are now such universally accepted truths that it is hard for us to imagine a time when people needed to have them driven into them at the point of a pen. Here and there his letters give us an inkling of the difficulties with which he had to contend. Few people in the middle of the nineteenth century, apparently, had any idea of real drama in opera.[364] Even the singers,--with the exception of a born genius here and there like Schröder-Devrient,--had little notion that their parts consisted of anything but so many words to be sung as brilliantly as possible. In one of his letters to Liszt, Wagner describes his horror at seeing, in the Dresden opera house, the Tannhäuser, in the "Hall of Song" scene, shouting his declaration of unholy love for Venus straight into the face of the chaste Elisabeth!--and this in spite of the composer having taken particular care to have all directions copied in full in the separate vocal parts. "What result was possible but that the public should be confused and not know in the least what to make of it? Indeed, I discovered in Dresden that the public became acquainted with the dramatic contents of the opera only by reading the text-book; that is, they only came to understand the performance by abstracting their minds from the actual performance and filling-in from their own imagination."[365] And as he hints, if these things could be done in a first-class opera house like Dresden, what hair-raising horrors must go on in the smaller theatres?

A good deal of _Opera and Drama_, then, took its rise in the immediate circumstances of the German operatic life of the early nineteenth century, and has no particular validity for the world in general to-day.[366] Other portions of it relate only or mainly to the _Ring_. For all his insistence on the necessity of alliterative verse (_Stabreim_), he virtually discarded it when he had finished with the _Ring_. The _Meistersingers_ is written throughout in rhymed verse. In _Tristan_ he employs in turn alliteration, rhyme, and unrhymed verse; _Parsifal_ fluctuates between a sort of _vers libre_ that is often as near as possible to prose, and a rhymed stanza-form for the more pronouncedly lyric portions. _Opera and Drama_, in fact, was in large part the reduction to theory of the principles of structures that were slowly taking shape within him as he pondered on the Siegfried legend. As with all great artistic creators, each subject was seen so vividly, took such complete possession of him, that it unconsciously made for itself its own inevitable form. He himself knew that it was in the _Ring_ that the theories of _Opera and Drama_ had their origin. "Even now," he writes to Uhlig, "must I learn that I should not have discovered the most important conditions for the conformation of the drama of the future had I not, as artist, lighted quite unconsciously upon them in my _Siegfried_."[367] And working backwards, as it were, from the completed work as we have it now, it is easy enough to see how the subject led him of itself to a new theory of opera. He had a gigantic saga to condense into the dimensions of a normal stage action; the most drastic economy of words was therefore necessary. As the burden of the emotional expression was to be undertaken by the music, the purely verbal portion would have to be reduced to the barest essentials consistent with making the conduct of the drama and the motives of the characters clear. And as every word had to be vital to the drama, and the musical phrase was to fit the verbal phrase as if the two had been predestined for each other from the beginning of time, each line, short as it might be, had to be packed with accents as salient as those of the music itself. This condition seemed to be most perfectly fulfilled in _Stabreim_, because there the vowel or consonant that gave definition to the word was thrown into the highest possible relief at the very moment of the incidence of the musical accent. The following quotations from the _Valkyrie_ will make this clear:

A [Music:]

Die Betrog'ne lass auch zertreten. Let them trample on the betrayed one.

B [Music:]

Dass mit Zwang ich halte, was dir nicht haftet. That by force I hold what denies thee homage.

C

[Music:]

Wer bist du, sag', die so schön und ernst mir erscheint? Who art thou, say, who dost stand so beauteous and stern?

It was therefore, as usual, the musician in him controlling the poet, although he always strenuously denied this, and indeed his complaint against the old-time opera was that the poet was held in servitude to the musician. In each case the poet was the serf, but the terms of slavery were different. In the older opera he had to work within the limits of a set scheme that gave him little or no scope for character-drawing or for the natural evolution of a great dramatic action. In the Wagnerian opera the poet was indeed allowed to make his portion of the work worthy and consistent, but he was permitted no further scope than was consistent with the necessities of the music. If it be true that Wagner restored the poet to liberty by making the drama the end and the music the means, it was only in the sense that he first of all made the drama of the dimensions and the pattern that music required. Beyond these dimensions, away from that pattern, it could not be allowed to go.

That the musician in Wagner ruled the poet is plain enough to us now, but it was always denied by Wagner himself. In the _Communication to my Friends_, that elucidates so gratefully for us so many dark passages in _Opera and Drama_, he is persistently blind to the fact that is obvious enough to everyone else. As far as _Rienzi_, he tells us, he had taken his operatic subjects from ready-made stories, while with the _Flying Dutchman_ he struck out a new path, framing his own libretto out of the simple unpolished outlines of a folk-saga. "Henceforward," he goes on to say, "with regard to all my dramatic works I was in the first instance _Poet_, and only in the complete working out of the poem did I become once more _Musician_. Only," he rather naïvely continues, "_I was a poet who was conscious in advance of the power of musical expression for the working out of his poems._"[368] Quite so: when a subject took possession of him he would see it all in terms of musical expression and development; and unconsciously the poem would be so planned as to provide the needful framework, and no more, for the musical emotion. Later on, after arguing that music is the emotional expression _per se_, but that it can only ally itself with words that contain the possibility of emotion, he once more lets us see that it was the musician in him that determined his choice of subject and the manner of its treatment. "What I perceived, I now looked at solely with the eyes of music [_nur aus dem Geiste der Musik_]; though not," he rightly points out, "_that_ music whose formal rules might still have embarrassed my expression, but the music that was complete within me, and in which I could express myself as in a mother tongue."[369] Granting that the musical world from the centre of which he wished to pour himself out upon poetry was not that of the stereotyped operatic composer, the fact remains that it was from the centre of music itself that the outpouring was to come. And we may further grant that "it was precisely by the facility of musical expression" he had acquired that "he became a poet." What had happened in the interval between _Rienzi_ and the _Flying Dutchman_, and still more in the interval between the _Flying Dutchman_ and the _Ring_, was that his musical sense had so enormously expanded that it was now capable of weaving a continuous emotional tissue of its own,--a tissue, however, that required the framework of poetry to make it definite. He was right; it was of the musician in him that the poet was born. And it was the musician insisting on the dramatic "stuff" being reduced to its pure essentials that led him to reject the wide-spreading romance and history, and to seize upon the myth, in which a human content was presented in the simplest possible form.

XIII

The musician, then, being at the basis of all his æsthetics, all his theories of opera and drama, the question arises, what sort of a musician was he? He was the spiritual son of Beethoven; a remoter ancestor was Bach. This is the cardinal fact in the psychology of Wagner; and it will need to be examined in all its bearings.

Wagner was one of those dynamically charged personalities after whose passing the world can never be the same as it was before he came--one of the tiny group of men to whom it is given to bestride an old world and a new, but to sunder them by a gulf that becomes ever more and more impassable; one of the very few who are able so to fill the veins of a whole civilisation with a new principle of vitality that the tingle of it is felt not only by the rarer but by the commonest spirits--some new principle from which, whether a man likes it or not, he will find it impossible to escape. Wagner is probably the only figure in the whole history of music of whom this can be said. Bach created no such upheaval. He counts for next to nothing in the music of his own day and that of the two generations that followed him. He did not make a new world in music: rather had a new world to be made before men's eyes were competent to take the measure of that towering stature, or men's hearts quick enough with life to respond to the profound humanism of that great soul. We were not fit for Bach until Beethoven and Wagner--and Wagner, perhaps, even more than Beethoven--made us so. Beethoven, again, had it not been for Wagner, would probably not have meant as much to us as he does now, or become the fertilising force he is in modern music; and even that fertilisation is effected through Wagner's work rather than along lines in continuation of Beethoven's own. If anyone doubts this, let him ask himself what new spirit of enduring vitality and power of propagation has come out of the classical symphony pure and simple. Not Brahms, assuredly, great as he is: "arrested development" is written large upon the forms and the ideas of all the music that has come out of Brahms's symphonies as clearly as upon those symphonies themselves. So far as modern instrumental music has developed in humanity of utterance or in breadth of structure, it is from assimilating from Beethoven, through Wagner, just the urgent poetic spirit that Brahms passed by in Beethoven,--the spirit of which Beethoven was himself only dimly conscious, but which Wagner from the beginning saw to be inherent in him, and which he distilled from the general tissue of Beethoven's work and used in a new form for magical results of his own. The only explosive force in music at all comparable in general to Wagner was Monteverdi. But Monteverdi came a couple of hundred years too soon. The world was not ready for him--it is hardly a paradox to say that he was not ready for himself--and his explosion mostly spent itself in a desert. Wagner had first-rate luck in this as in everything else in his life that really mattered to him as an artist; not only had he the right dynamic spark within him, but he was born into an atmosphere made electrically ready by the passionate soul's cry of Beethoven. The explosion came--a cataclysmic upheaval, leading to a new geological formation, as it were, in music, new geographical delimitations, a new fauna and flora.

He had access to Beethoven's heart: and from the blood in Beethoven's veins he won the strength both for his own new expression and his new freedom of form. It is one of the things we should be constantly thanking Providence for that the natural man in him insisted on making its own world in its own way. Busoni, in his suggestive _Entwurf einer neuen Aesthetik der Tonkunst_, has remarked upon the curious formalism of most music, even the greatest. Here is an art fortunate enough to be free from all material factors: it is, as Busoni says, simply "sounding air," and is therefore presumably capable of a freedom of handling that should be the despair of workers in the other arts. Perfect freedom has yet to come; looked at from the heights, even giants like Bach and Beethoven and Mozart are seen to be loaded with chains of their own and their fellows' forging, and to be performing the same timid evolutions again and again in one small corner of a field, while glorious leagues of unexplored country unroll themselves all around them. Bach and Beethoven enriched music by a sort of intensive culture of an inherited estate. Wagner was really the first to leap the fences and break down the gates and send his ploughshare deep into the bowels of a new earth. Almost from his earliest years he had an instinctive sense of the great force of emotional liberation that was struggling for an outlet in Beethoven's music. He was probably the only man in Europe to be aware of it and its tremendous significance for the future. There were plenty of men who felt the greatness of Beethoven; but not one of them, apparently, saw him as Wagner did. It is evident that people like Mendelssohn and Robert and Clara Schumann, for example, with whom he talked much in the 'forties, had no inkling that out of the spume of this eager, restless mind the future of music was to be born. To them his far-darting talk about Beethoven was apparently no more than the interesting speculations of a clever but slightly eccentric visionary. From the first he fastened upon the seminal essence of Beethoven's later work--the attempt of a great soul, hampered somewhat by a transmitted form, to pour out an endless fund of quasi-dramatic emotion in music. The problem that lay before Wagner was how to release this fund of emotion, to give it wings that would carry it over the whole field of human life, to give it a new and more wonderful articulation. After years of struggling he found his way to the light. It was one of the extremely lucky "throws" of nature--a throw she will probably not achieve again for generations--that within the musician who had this unique vision of a music infinitely human and perfectly free there was a dramatist capable of providing the definite framework upon which the indefinite musical emotion could be woven into firm, coherent shapes. His theory that purely instrumental music had shot its last bolt with Beethoven, and that the choral ending to the Ninth Symphony is the unconscious, instinctive cry of the musician for the redemption of music by poetry, is the soundest of æsthetics if we do not take it too literally. Music _did_ need this fertilisation by poetry if it was to win a new procreative power. Agreeable music has been made, and will continue to be made, by the passionless, disinterested weaving for its own sake of beautiful strands of tone. But great music must go deeper than this, and the deeper it goes the closer it comes to the heart; and our name for the necessities of the heart is poetry.

XIV

Having thus summarised the attitude of Wagner to Beethoven and to poetic music in general, let us proceed to fill in the details of the theory, allowing Wagner, wherever possible, to speak for himself.

He has set forth his views upon Beethoven with the greatest positiveness in his letters to Uhlig, and much more lucidly there than in _Opera and Drama_.[370] He saw in Beethoven's music the struggle to express a definite poetic idea in an abstract form that necessarily made the communication of the nature of the idea itself impossible. He always protested against the current fashion of performing Beethoven's symphonies as if they were nothing more than agreeable or exciting musical patterns. They were tone poems, and could mean nothing to the hearer unless the poetry at the core of them was made clear. "The essence of the great works of Beethoven," he writes to Uhlig, "is that they are only in the last place _Music_, but contain in the first place a poetic subject. Or shall we be told that this _subject_ is only taken from music itself? Would not this be like saying that the poet takes his subject from speech, and the painter his from colour? The musical conductor who sees in one of Beethoven's tone-works nothing but the music, is exactly like a reciter who should hold only by the language of a poem, or the explainer of a picture who could not get beyond its colour. This, however, is the case with our conductors, even in the best instances--for many do not even so much as understand the music; they understand the key, the themes, the working of the parts, the instrumentation, and so on, and think that with these they understand the whole of the content of the tone-work."[371] And again: "The characteristic of the great compositions of Beethoven is that they are veritable poems, in which it is sought to bring a real subject to representation. The obstacle to their comprehension lies in the difficulty of finding with certainty the subject that is represented. Beethoven was completely possessed by a subject: his most significant tone pictures are indebted almost solely to the individuality of the subject that filled him; the consciousness of this made it seem to him superfluous to indicate his subject otherwise than in the tone picture itself. Just as our literary poets really address themselves only to other literary poets, so Beethoven, in these works, involuntarily addressed himself only to tone poets. The absolute musician, that is to say the manipulator of absolute music, could not understand Beethoven, because this absolute musician fastens only on the 'How,' and not the 'What.' The layman, on the other hand, could but be completely confused by these tone pictures, and at best only receive pleasure from _that_ which to the tone poet was merely the material means of expression."[372]

Wagner recognised, however, the difficulty of grasping a poetic subject that had not been revealed by the composer, and held that it could only be divined by a poetic musician of the same kind. "If no special poetic subject is expressed in the tone speech, it may undoubtedly pass as easily understandable; for there can here be no question of _real_ understanding. If, however, the expression of the tone speech is conditioned by a poetic subject, this speech at once becomes the most incomprehensible of all, unless the poetic subject be at the same time defined by some other means of expression than those of absolute music.

"The poetic subject of a tone piece by Beethoven is thus only to be divined by a tone poet; for, as I remarked before, Beethoven involuntarily appealed only to such, to those who were of like feelings, like culture, aye, well-nigh like capability with himself. Only a man like this can make these compositions intelligible to the laity, and above all by making the subject of the tone poem clear both to the executants and to the audience, and thus making good an involuntary error in the technique of the tone poet, who omitted this indication. Any other sort of performance of one of Beethoven's veritable tone poems, however technically perfect it may be, must remain incomprehensible in proportion as the understanding is not facilitated in the way I have suggested."[373]

This indeed, he held, was Beethoven's error--an error forced upon him by the conditions of his time--that he should endeavour to make his music truly human without giving the hearer the clue to the emotions upon which it was based. Beethoven's mistake, he says, in one of the happiest and most famous of his analogies, was the same as that of Columbus, who, though merely trying to find the way to the India that was already known, actually discovered thereby a new world.[374] His vain effort to "achieve the artistically necessary in the artistically impossible" has, however, revealed to the modern world the infinitely expressive capacity of music. But though it is only by being fertilised by poetry that music can attain to the full expression of the truly human, Wagner, as was to be expected from one who allowed so little liberty to the imagination in art, was against this fertilisation taking the form of programme music. The poetic content must be communicated immediately and visibly to the hearer by presentation on the stage. In all this, of course, he was once more merely expressing an individual bias, and one that is not in the least binding upon musicians in general. When the musician, he tells us, tries to paint by means of the orchestra alone, what he produces is neither music nor a painting.[375] He failed to perceive not only that instrumental music offers numberless instances of quite successful tone painting, but that a good deal of the pictorialism of his own music has to justify itself by means of the imagination alone. Every time the _Feuerzauber_, for example, is played in the concert room the imagination supplies, quite successfully, the spectacle of the flames; and even in the theatre it is left to the imagination to picture to itself the waves of the Rhine in the opening scene of the _Rhinegold_, for while the wave music is going on from the commencement the curtain does not rise until the 126th bar. There is no need to elaborate the point. Hundreds of composers, from Bach to the present day, have "painted" in music time without number without the assistance of a stage setting, the subject of the painting being quite sufficiently indicated either by the words of the poem,--the spinning-wheel in Schubert's _Gretchen am Spinnrade_, for example,--or by means of an explanatory note or title, as with the modern symphonic poem.

Without pursuing this side issue further now, let us follow up the more essential lines of the Wagnerian theory. We have seen him first of all frame his dramatic action in such a way that while making itself fully intelligible to the spectator it supplies the music with endless opportunities for the outpouring of feeling. Romance and "historical" drama have both been rejected because of their containing so much that, according to Wagner, appeals less to the feeling than to the intellect. It was in the myth that he found the condensation he desired. Upon the myth the composer was to pour out the full flood of his emotion. The form and quality of the musical utterance are to be determined by the poem. Lyrism must no longer be imposed upon the drama from without, as in the older opera, but must grow out of the drama as a necessary consequence. It follows that neither the chorus nor any of the characters is to be employed purely for the purposes of concerted music. In the orchestra the musician has at his disposal an instrument of unlimited expressiveness. The orchestra, as Wagner says, has a capacity of its own for speech. In the Beethoven symphony this capacity was developed to such a height as to urge the orchestra to make the vain attempt to deliver a message which from its very nature it was impossible for it to deliver clearly. That message, however, can be _précisé_ by the Word: and the true function of the orchestra is to announce what cannot be conveyed by speech.[376] Its specific meaning can be still further _précisé_ by means of gesture--not the ordinary gesture of the older opera, which derived solely from the dance pantomime, but gesture that is the visible counterpart of the auditory sensation communicated by the orchestra. The range of this kind of gesture is as wide as human emotion itself. Moreover, the orchestra can carry on the action even after speech and gesture have ceased; it can use themes in such a way as to create presentiment, and it can recall the past. The orchestra in fact, is to the drama of the future what the chorus was to the Greek drama,--a totalised individuality apart from, yet intimately bound up with, the separate individualities on the stage. The musical expression will vary in intensity according to the intensity of the situations. The form of the music drama will therefore be a unified one, but one containing the possibility of an infinite variety of expressions; but it will not be permissible to introduce any expression for the mere sake of musical effect; everything must grow spontaneously out of the emotions and situations presented by the poet. The drama can be thoroughly unified by the employment of salient "leading motives";[377] whereas the older opera had no unity at all, but was a mere conglomeration of arias, duets, _ensembles_, and so on.[378]

XV

It must be clear to almost every reader, after this exposition of Wagner's own views upon music in general and dramatic music in particular, that, paradoxical as it may seem, he was under a life-long illusion as to the nature of his own genius and the origin and significance of his reforms. So far from the poet in him shaping and controlling the musician, it was the musician who led the poet where he would have him go; so far from drama being with him the end and the music the means, it was music that was more than ever the end, to which the drama only served as means; and so far from Wagner being first and last a dramatist, the whole significance of his work lay precisely in the fact that he was a great symphonist. This last conclusion too may seem a paradox; but on a broad survey it will, I think, be seen to be true. It was not for nothing that Wagner always claimed descent from Beethoven rather than from even the greatest of opera writers, such as Gluck and Mozart and Weber. His instinct was a sound one; it was Beethoven's work that he was really carrying on. The whole of his productivity is given us, in essence, in the later stages of the _Ring_, in _Tristan_, and in the _Meistersinger_. It was to achieve such an expression, such a tissue, as this that he had been labouring and experimenting and thinking for nearly thirty years; and what are these works, seen with the historical eye of the twentieth century, but stupendous symphonies for orchestra and voices? He himself always proudly pointed to _Tristan_ as the supremely successful realisation of all his theories as to the expressive capacity and the formal possibilities of music. Very well; _Tristan_ is of all his works the most symphonic, the one that least needs the apparatus of the stage, the one in which the actors could most easily be dispensed with for long stretches of time with the minimum of loss.

I have already pointed out that he was probably the only musician in Europe in the 'thirties and 'forties with an intuition of all that the achievements of the later Beethoven meant for music.[379] All through Wagner's theoretical writings runs the same simile of music as a vast sea, on which Beethoven alone had so far been able to trust himself with any freedom. While the other composers of his day--and indeed of a later day, as the case of Brahms shows--had little idea beyond cruising in Beethoven's track with more or less varied merchandise, Wagner even as a boy saw the infinite wonders that were awaiting the first mariner who should have the courage to leave the shelter of the great bay and adventure out into the unknown main. He knew all that Beethoven had added to German music, the new emotions he had poured into it, the new logic of form with which he had endowed it. He knew also that as much could still be superadded to Beethoven as Beethoven had added to Mozart and Haydn; and the story of his evolution, both as dramatist and musician, is the story of this gradual extension of the borders of the Beethoven territory.

He had in abundance what has hitherto been almost the exclusive possession of the German school of music,--the sense of a far-sweeping logic of form. He had the rigorous, clean-cutting intellect that instinctively makes straight for what is the very essence of form--the spontaneous shaping of an idea, by itself, for itself, into the lines and colours most natural to it. "Swords without blades" was his contemptuous description of the empty rules of "form" that they sell in schools and text-books, much as the chemist sells the dried leaves of flowers. The true artist, he says, is always creating forms without knowing it.[380] _His_ problem was to find the new form that should be as valid for what he had to say as Beethoven's form was for him. No such form was then in existence. In this respect he was far less fortunate than any of his great predecessors or successors; each of them had found his work all the easier in that he began with an inherited form, of opera or of instrumental music, which he simply exploited or expanded according to his necessities. Wagner's glance round upon the music of his day showed him that there was no form that _he_ could take up and patch or hammer into a serviceable instrument. The symphony was not, nor is it yet, a truly logical form. Its divisions, the number of its divisions, the order of its divisions, are all in large part arbitrary and conventional. Within each of the frames made by these divisions it had to submit itself to a more or less formalistic method of procedure that was often at variance with the very nature of the idea. Even Beethoven, giant as he was, could not quite burst the bonds of custom and prescription. Wagner's favourite illustration of the clash that sometimes occurred between the traditional form and a new artistic purpose was the repeat in the _Leonora No. 3_ Overture. The controlling influence in the evolution of symphonic form had been the dance; the business of music had primarily been to make what variable play it could with certain given thematic figures. But bit by bit there had stolen into instrumental music the desire for more than this--the desire to follow out in tone not the changing aspects of a theme alone but the vicissitudes of a dramatic idea; and composers had long felt that the logic of the latter must be something other than the logic of the former, though as yet they did not quite know how to attain the structure they wanted. The purely thematic working-out aimed mostly at alternation: the dramatic working-out must depend mostly on psychological development. "It is obvious," says Wagner, "that in the conflict of a dramatic idea with [symphonic] form, there must at once arise the necessity of either sacrificing the development (the idea) to the alternation (the form), or the latter to the former.... I once held up Gluck's Overture to _Iphigenia in Aulis_ as a model, because the master, with the surest feeling for the nature of the problem we are now considering, had here so happily understood that he must open his drama with an alternation of moods and their antitheses, in keeping with the overture form, instead of with a development impossible in that form. That the great masters who came after him, however, felt themselves circumscribed by this, we may clearly see in Beethoven's overtures; the composer knew the infinitely richer delineations of which his music was capable; he felt equal to carrying out the idea of development; and nowhere do we realise this more distinctly than in the great _Leonora_ Overture. But anyone with eyes can see precisely in this overture how prejudicial to Beethoven the retention of the transmitted form was bound to be; for who that is capable of understanding such a work will not agree with me that its weakness consists in the repetition of the first part after the middle section, whereby the idea of the work is marred almost to the point of making it unintelligible; and that the more as in all the other parts, and especially at the end, Beethoven is obviously governed simply by the dramatic development? But whoever is intelligent and unprejudiced enough to see this must also admit that this mishap could only have been avoided by forswearing the repetition altogether--which, however, would mean the abrogation of the overture form, _i.e._ the original symphonic dance form with its mere play of motives (_nur motivirte_), and the first step towards the shaping of a new form."[381]

XVI

Beethoven, in fact, had brought a new spirit into the symphony and the overture without being able to discover a new and inevitable form in which this spirit could express itself. Wagner from his earliest years must have felt that he too had a dim perception of a new world of expression, if only he could discover the form for it. That form clearly did not exist in the symphony even as Beethoven had left it, for Wagner's vision was ready to take a bolder poetic flight even than Beethoven's, and it would have been as sadly hampered by the more freely symphonic but still largely formal method of Beethoven as the latter had been by the traditions of form he had taken over from his predecessors. It was still more useless for Wagner to seek the new logic of form in the other great art-genre of his day--the opera--for here illogic reigned supreme. The opera not only did not achieve the unity it professed to aim at; it did not even let either of its two great and ever warring constituents tyrannise effectively over the other. Instead, each merely lamed the other; the average opera was neither a good play spoiled by music, nor good music spoiled by a play, but merely a bad play and formless music adding each to the other's foolishness. How hopelessly impotent the current opera was to furnish a form that should be adequate for all that a modern musician might have to say was shown by the practice of Beethoven: the greatest musical brain of its epoch turned in anger and disappointment and disgust from the opera after one experiment with it, and concentrated more and more on the symphonic forms, endeavouring to make these more expansive and more flexible.

A hundred composers and theorists had for a century past realised the insufficiency of the opera. Gluck's manifestos are known to every student. More than a generation after Gluck the same problems were still being discussed in virtually the same terms and with the same results. Theory was evidently a long way ahead of practice; but even theory failed because it missed just the one seminal thing that it was Wagner's function to bring to light. The excellencies and the final limitations of the theory of the time are best seen in a rather remarkable work--Ignaz Franz Mosel's _Versuch einer Aesthetik des dramatischen Tonsatzes_ ("Attempt at an Æsthetic of the Musical Drama")--that, curiously enough, was published in the year of Wagner's birth.[382] Much in this book might have been written by Gluck; some of it might even have been written by Wagner himself. Mosel expresses more clearly perhaps than any previous writer that conception of the unified art-work upon which Wagner so strongly insisted. For Mosel the ideal opera is a combination, on practically equal terms, of poetry, music, acting, singing and the art of the stage; the plastic arts, however, play a smaller part in his theory than they do in Wagner's. He regards the drama as the basis of opera. He sees, as Wagner did, that the rules of procedure of pure music are not applicable in their entirety to the dramatic stage. Like Wagner, again, he holds that complicated subjects, founded on intrigue or political action, are unsuitable for opera. Music being a purely emotional art, addressing itself more to the heart than the head, the best subject is that that gives full play to the emotional power of tone. The best subjects are the mythological ones. The poet must so shape his text that it is "thoroughly musical, that is, not only containing nothing that is outside the possibility of musical expression, but also nothing to which music cannot give a heightened beauty and a strengthened effect." The verse should be of such a kind that the composer's melody can spring naturally out of it. As a rule one syllable should be set to one note only. The melody must rise or fall precisely at the point where a good declaimer of the verses who is not musical would make them do so. Mosel sees that dramatic music frequently demands a different method of structure from that of pure music; as he puts it, the so-called musical period of two, four or eight-bar melodies can often be departed from with advantage. The style of the music as a whole must vary with the quality of the poetic subject; and not only must the general nature of the theme be reproduced in music, but also the physical, moral or conventional character of each person; and this adaptability of style to subject must be preserved in the orchestra as well as in the voice. The overture, having for its subject the preparation of the hearer for what is to come, must bear the same character as that which is dominant in the opera itself. There must be as little distinction as possible between recitative and aria. Form and expression must always follow the feeling. And so on and so on.

This was the sole result of a hundred years of keen theory and ardent practice. The form of opera remained virtually what it always had been; the most that anyone could suggest was a rationalising of the form here and there, the ridding it of some excrescence or absurdity. And so, in all probability, it would have remained for another hundred years, had not Wagner come with the conception that the old form itself was not worth tinkering with, but must be cast aside, and a new one made, not out of Mozart, not out of Gluck, not, indeed, out of any opera whatever, but _out of the instrumental music of Beethoven_. And this, I repeat, was a marvellous perception for one man out of all Europe's music-making millions to have.

His own accounts of the dawning of this idea upon him betray a fundamental inconsistency. On the one hand he is always stoutly asserting that he only found his way to the new music at the impulse and under the guidance of the poet. On the other hand it is clearer to us than it was to him that the poet in him was allowed to co-operate with the musician only in much the same way that he is allowed to co-operate in the symphonic poem. The musician, that is to say, feels a vague desire to express certain emotions of love, of pity, of terror, of aspiration; and he calls in the poet to supply him with a framework that shall be able to give consistency to his emotions and make the sequence of them intelligible to his hearers. Wagner, in his analysis of his own psychological processes, inverted the real relations of them, misled by the fact that _as a musician he developed much later than as a poet_--the obvious reason for this being that in poetry he had not, as in music, to make a new instrument, a new vocabulary and a new technique for himself. But even from his own account it is evident that the new ideal of music drama arose in him through the convergence of two great impressions--the acting and singing of Schröder-Devrient, and the later symphonies and quartets of Beethoven. He was amazed to find how much Schröder-Devrient could do in the way of dramatic expression with the poor puppets and absurd situations of the Italian opera stage. "I said to myself, what an incomparable work must that be, that in all its parts should be worthy of the histrionic talent of such an artist, and still more, of a body of artists like her." Then, he says, he got the idea of what could be done with the operatic _genre_ "by turning the whole rich stream of German music, that Beethoven had swelled to the full, into the bed of the musical drama."[383]

And the essence of Beethoven's achievement, as he saw, was that not only had all the earlier formalism become inevitable form, but that form itself was dissolved in the idea; the Beethoven symphony becomes in the end simply a continuous flood of meaningful melody. "For it is surprising," he says, "that this method of procedure, developed in the field of instrumental music, should have been employed to some degree in mixed choral and orchestral music, but as yet never properly in opera.... Yet the possibility must exist of obtaining in the dramatic poem itself a poetic counterpart to the symphonic form, which, while it completely fills this copious form, should at the same time correspond to the inmost laws of dramatic form."[384]

The real ancestry of Wagner the opera writer is then clear enough; it is not an operatic but a symphonic ancestry. I therefore cannot wholly agree with Dr. Guido Adler that "as an opera composer Wagner stands in the frame of Renaissance art and culture. His fundamental aims coincide more or less with those of the founders of this culture epoch in general and of the representatives of the High Renaissance in the musical drama in particular.... The founders of the opera created the _stilo rappresentativo_, in which the musical expression was to follow the representation and the action as closely as possible.... The true theatre style proceeds historically from Peri, Monteverde and Cavalli to Wagner and Verdi. These are the representatives of emotionalism in music, of that fundamental æsthetic principle that recognises expression as the sole or main essence of music."[385] Resemblances between Wagner and the Renaissance founders of the opera there certainly are; but in comparison with the basic difference between him and them the resemblances are superficial. That basic difference is that while their reforms were born of the desire to model music upon and control it by speech,[386] Wagner's reform was born of the conception that the most copious and eloquent of musical instruments is the orchestra, to the emotions of which the voices, by means of words, can give direction and precision. Wagner's true lineage is that of instrumental music, the symphony and the symphonic poem. He is not the child either of the stage or of the song; the instrumental musician in him simply enters into an alliance with these for purposes of his own.

XVII

Of this he was more than half conscious himself; and it was always clear to him that as he was in the great line of instrumental succession, and that what he was doing was to extend still further the expressive range of instrumental, endlessly melodic music, it might be urged against him that the logical outcome of all his theory and his practice was not the opera but the symphonic poem or the programme symphony. But against that conclusion he always strenuously protested in advance. Something he saw there _must_ be to make definite to the hearer the indefinite emotion of the music alone. He knew that the classical symphony was a work of composite origin, one movement of it--the Minuet or Scherzo,--still maintaining almost unchanged its dance-like character, while in the others the composer aimed more and more at emotional expression. But the musician was hampered here by the fact that the expression of emotion could not rise above a certain intensity without bursting the symphonic mould, and indeed prompting in the hearer a question as to the source of that emotion. There was, as Wagner says, "a certain fear of overstepping the bounds of musical expression, and especially of pitching the passionate, tragic tendency too high, for that would arouse feelings and expectations that would awake in the hearer the disquieting question of 'Why,'--which the musician himself could not answer satisfactorily."[387] But Wagner would not admit that this something might be a mere programme. "Not a programme, which rather provokes than silences the troublesome question of 'Why,' can therefore express the meaning of the symphony, but only the scenically-represented dramatic action itself."[388] With the liberation of musical expression from the stereotyped images set before it in the ordinary musical verse, and with the liberation of musical technique effected by the breaking down of the old operatic conventions of form, the power of music could be extended indefinitely. The poet would discover that "melodic form is capable of endlessly richer development than had previously been possible in the symphony itself, and, with a presentiment of this development, he will already project the poetical conception with perfect freedom. Thus where even the symphonist timidly reached back to the original dance-form--never daring, even for his expression, wholly to pass the boundaries that kept him in communication with this form--the poet will now cry to him: 'Throw yourself fearlessly into the full stream of the sea of music: hand in hand with me you can never lose touch with what is most comprehensible to all mankind; for through me you always stand on the ground of the dramatic action, and this action, in the moment of its representation on the stage, is the most immediately intelligible of all poems. Stretch your melody boldly out, that it may pour through the whole work like an endless flood: in it say what I leave unsaid, since only you can say it, and in silence I will utter all, since it is I who lead you by the hand."[389]

Here he is expressing only a personal bias. His own imagination was somewhat timid; it preferred the seen to the unseen, and he was consequently quite unable to take up the point of view of people to whom a thing mentally conceived is as impressive as, or even more impressive than, the same thing set bodily before their eyes. Had he had any inkling of this, he would not have brought so many animals upon the scene. The most striking instance of his inability to trust to the spectator's imagination is his vacillation over the ending of _Tannhäuser_. In the first version of the final scene, the last attempt of Venus to win back her old lover was shown only as a struggle in the mind of the frenzied Tannhäuser, with a red glow in the direction of the distant Hörselberg to make the cause of the madness clear. The death of Elisabeth was merely divined by the intuition of Wolfram, while the sound of far-off bells and the faint light of torches on the Wartburg gave the spectator the hint he needed for the full comprehension of the scene. Wagner was uncomfortable until he had made everything visible that had formerly been left to the imagination; Venus had to appear in person to Tannhäuser, and the bier of Elisabeth had to be carried across the stage. It would have been better, in this and in many other cases, had he reposed more faith in the imagination of his audience. But his theory and his practice were often inconsistent in this as in so many other cases. We have seen him objecting, _à propos_ of Berlioz's _Romeo and Juliet_, to music that required an explanation outside itself to make it clear. But several of his own orchestral pieces are unintelligible without a verbal explanation or its equivalent. Who could make anything of the prelude to the third Act of _Tannhäuser_, for example, in the absence of such an explanation? It cannot even be said that the dramatic play of the motives is clear to anyone who has listened carefully to the opera, for the theme of Tannhäuser's pilgrimage, that is of such importance in the prelude, does not occur till the third Act; during the prelude to that Act the hearer who is listening to it for the first time is ignorant not merely of its meaning but of its very existence. How, again, can the audience be expected to know, the first time they hear it, that the opening theme of the prelude to the third Act of the _Meistersinger_ symbolises Sachs's renunciation of Eva? The theme has appeared in the second Act as an orchestral counterpoint during one of the stanzas of the cobbling song. Even supposing the hearer to have any notion on that occasion that the theme is more than an ordinary counterpoint--that it has a psychological significance--how is he to know what this significance is; and how is he to read this meaning into it when he hears it at the commencement of the third Act? It all has to be made clear to him by a prose explanation, as Wagner himself recognised when he wrote his explanatory programme note upon the prelude. In the light of this and other instances that could be cited, how can Wagner consistently deny to other composers the right to call in the aid of verbal explanations for their symphonic poems or programme symphonies?

XVIII

There are as many contradictions between Wagner's theory and practice, indeed, as between his life and his art. Without attempting the impossible task of trying to reconcile them all, let us cast a rapid glance over the main features of his practice, which are far more important than his theory. From every side we are driven to the conclusion that the dominating force in him was the instrumental musician who was born to continue Beethoven's work in another sphere. As his powers developed, his music becomes more symphonic,[390] and he intuitively shapes his poems so as to allow the freest possible play to the symphonic succession and interweaving of themes. The characters serve to make the course of the story clear, and to give precision to the emotions that are being expressed by the orchestra. He saw in Beethoven's later works a colossal effort to make music free. Logic of some kind there must be in every piece of music. This logic depends fundamentally upon showing the inter-relation of each part of the music by the recurrence of significant themes; and broadly speaking there are only two ways of achieving this--by way of pattern or by way of poetry. At bottom all form, all logic, in music, in fiction, in drama, in architecture, in sculpture, is one in object and process; a coherent whole has to be made out of parts, and the parts have to justify their existence by showing themselves indispensable to the whole. Pattern form and poetic form embrace between them every mode of structure of which music is capable. Sometimes a piece of music leans markedly to the one or the other; but in the vast majority of cases the actual form is a union of the two, or a compromise between them. It was a compromise of this kind that Wagner detected in some of the greatest works of Beethoven; the form that had been evolved mainly with reference to pattern was being applied, with only partial success, to music the prime impulse of which was poetic--however vague this poetry might be, however incapable of expression in words. But while pattern form pure and simple tells its own story and is its own justification, poetic form needs to be explained and justified by the poetic idea that is at the root of it. Go beyond Beethoven, says Wagner, in the expression of poetic emotion, and your form will become so free that the hearer will no longer be able to see it in terms of the old pattern logic, and the music will seem to him formless and incoherent. You can only win the full freedom you need for the expression of definite as distinguished from indefinite emotion by telling the hearer the nature and the source of this emotion. As Wagner put it, poetic music in pattern form always prompts the question "Why?" The symphonic-poem writer answers with his programme: Wagner answered with the characters and the action of the programme set visibly before us on a stage. There is no such fundamental æsthetic difference between the two methods as Wagner imagined; the differences are only in detail.[391]

The curious thing is that, for all his theories, Wagner himself now and then wrote instrumental pieces that prompt a "Why?" as emphatically as anything of Beethoven's. He despised what he called the "quadrature musicians"--the composers who take refuge in phrases cut to a regulation length and pattern and worked-out in a stereotyped four-square form. Music meant little or nothing to him unless it spoke directly of humanity and to humanity. No theme must be invented for mere invention's sake, or worked-out for the mere sake of working-out; it must spring into being as the expression of an overwhelming human need or of some blinding vision, and must answer in all its changes to the changing life of the man or mood it painted. It was this inevitableness of idea and of form that he admired in Beethoven and missed in Brahms. His inability to compromise on the matter made him contemptuously sweep out of existence most of the music of his day. It was precisely in this broadening of the Beethovenian spirit and design, and the making them capable of expressing every emotion that mankind can feel, that he opened out such enormous possibilities in music.

The ordinary "abstract" composer's mind must have been a pure puzzle to a man like him, who could not understand how modern music could have any _raison d'être_ apart from something definitely poetic or pictorial to be expressed. To invent a theme for its own abstract sake, to pare and shape it till it was "workable," and then to weave it along with others of the same kind into a pattern of which the main lines were predetermined for him by tradition--this was something he could not imagine himself doing, and that he scoffed at when he found the Conservatoire musician engaged in it. "I simply cannot compose at all," he said once, "when nothing occurs to me."[392] He must always have a definite subject, which was to determine the nature, of the theme and control the whole course of the development. Looking back through the music of the generation that has followed him, we can see how penetrating his vision was in all questions of expression and form. Beethoven's innovations, he points out, were mostly in the field of rhythmic distribution, not that of harmonic modulation. Rhythmic changes of all kinds come naturally within the scope of the ordinary symphonic movement, which is in essence an ideal dance; but startling melodic or harmonic changes, or attempted subtleties of form, generally prompt that awkward question "Why?" and leave it unanswered. Take, for example, the efforts that have been made in our own day to unify the four-movement sonata form by the carrying over of themes from one movement to another, as in César Franck's violin and pianoforte sonata. Attach a poetic significance to a theme, and its recurrence in another movement explains itself; but in a piece of ostensibly abstract music the recurrence simply puzzles us. No satisfactory answer can be given--except in terms of a programme--to the question why a theme that has apparently served its purpose should be resuscitated by the composer at a later stage, in preference to the invention of a fresh theme. For every effect the composer makes, the logician in us insists upon knowing the cause. Hence the soundness of Wagner's advice to the modern composer--Do not consciously aim at harmonic and instrumental effects, but wait till there is a sufficient cause for them.[393] His own practice was a model of restraint: not one modulation, not one subtilisation of the harmony, not one addition to the orchestral weight without a thoroughly good reason, rooted in the nature of the idea itself. "In the instrumental prelude to the _Rhinegold_, for instance," he says, "it was impossible for me to quit the fundamental note, for there was no reason whatever for changing it. A great part of the not unanimated theme that follows between Alberich and the Rhine Maidens permitted of modulation only to the most closely related keys, since passion still expresses itself here in its most primitive _naïveté_."[394] The rule he would enforce upon pupils is this, "Never leave a key so long as what you have to say can still be said in it." And only when the emotion becomes more complex must the harmony be coloured more subtly to correspond. This, he lays it down, constitutes the great difference between the symphonic and the dramatic development of themes. In the former the effect is meant to be kaleidoscopic; and a real master can work wonders in the arabesque-like combination and transformation of simple material. But do what he will he cannot venture upon the variety of the dramatic composer, for if he goes beyond a certain point of audacity or singularity he ceases to be intelligible in terms of pure music. "Neither a mere play of counterpoint, nor the most fanciful devices of figuration or harmonic invention, either could or should transform a theme so characteristically and give it so many and so varied expressions--and yet keep it always recognisable--as true dramatic art can do quite naturally." Proof of this can be had by pursuing the simple theme of the Rhine Maidens--

[Music:]

Rhinegold! Rhinegold!

"through all the changing passions of the four-part drama, down to Hagen's watch song in the first Act of the _Götterdämmerung_, where it appears in a form that, to me at any rate, is simply unthinkable as the theme of a symphonic movement, albeit it still has its _raison d'être_ in the laws of harmony and thematism, though only in their application to the drama. But to try to apply what is thus made possible to the symphony itself must necessarily lead to the complete ruin of the latter; for there it would be merely a deliberate 'effect,' while in the other case it has a motive."[395] And he ends with the theory that symphonic music and dramatic music are two quite different modes of expression, and that only errors of practice and of judgment can come from the attempt to blend them. This dictum the musicians of a later day can accept only with reservations. We admit that he did well to draw a line of sharp distinction between the older symphonic moods and forms and those of musical drama. But he overlooked the fact that the basic distinction was not between symphony and drama, but between purely abstract music of all kinds and purely poetic music of all kinds. There are procedures open to the latter that are still not open to the former--virtually as many procedures, indeed, as are open to opera itself. For the principle of the symphonic poem is at bottom the same as that of the musical drama--to follow in music the vicissitudes of a poetic idea; and given a knowledge on our part of this idea, whether it be communicated to us by a stage action or by a prose or poetic explanation, the composer is at liberty to indulge in as many audacities of melody, of harmony, of modulation as may be justified by the nature of his subject. Wagner, as I have tried to show, was prevented from applying his own principles to purely instrumental poetic music by his inability to follow the "moments" of an action that was merely suggested to him, instead of being realised in a theatre. But there is no reason why _we_ should fail to draw the conclusion that is obviously implicit in Wagner's own argument as to the relations of music and poetic suggestion. The strange thing is that every now and then he himself made an excursion into the fields he attempted to close to others. His _Faust Overture_, for example, is a pure symphonic poem, the full meaning of which only becomes apparent to us when we know the poetic subject. The opening tuba theme is of a type that a composer would hesitate to use for the opening "subject" of a symphony; it receives both its explanation and its justification solely from our knowledge that it depicts the world-weary Faust. The case of the _Siegfried Idyl_ is still more instructive. That exquisite piece of music puzzles us once or twice by the apparent abruptness of its transitions. We might have guessed, from our knowledge of Wagner's precepts and practice, that he is following a quasi-poetic scheme of his own, and that the music does not always tell a coherent story to us because he has seen fit to keep this scheme from us. We now know for certain, on the testimony of Glasenapp, that this is so. Here we have another instance of flat contradiction between Wagner's theory and his practice. But had he reflected that a knowledge of the poetic basis of the _Siegfried Idyl_ is necessary to us if we are to see the same coherence in the music that he saw, he would have been bound to admit that the communication of the poetic basis of any symphonic poem will justify the composer writing in a style that would be unsuitable to abstract music--a style differing very little in its fundamentals from that of the Wagnerian stage. No middle course is possible: whatever justifies the Wagnerian music drama justifies also _Till Eulenspiegel_ and the _L'Après-midi d'un Faune_--not for Wagner perhaps, but certainly for us.

His intransigent attitude towards programme music is all the stranger in view of the fact that he persistently read concrete meanings or events into the music that moved him. Everyone knows his interpretation of certain of Beethoven's symphonies and the C sharp minor quartet. He read quasi-pictures and even words into certain of Bach's fugues; for the seventeenth fugue and the twenty-fourth prelude he had half a mind to write appropriate words. He ought to have seen that if instrumental music could thus suggest concrete associations, similar associations could also suggest music to correspond with them, and that the logical and inevitable outcome of this alliance between music and poetic suggestion is programme music. It is interesting to learn, however, that in his last days he often talked of writing a symphony. He had, he says, no lack of ideas; his difficulty was to stop inventing. His symphony would have been in one movement only; "the finales are the awkward things [_Klippe_]; I will steer clear of them; I will keep to one-movement symphonies." Nor would he base them on the old system of theme-contrast. Beethoven had exhausted the possibilities of that form. His own style would be that of an endless melodic web--the principle, indeed, that we can see at work in all the operas of his maturity. "Only," he added, "no drama"; evidently his prejudice against story music apart from the stage persisted to the end. The projected symphonies would apparently have been on the lines of the _Siegfried Idyl_ and the larger pianoforte works such as the _Albumblatt for Betty Schott_ (1875), the _Albumblatt for the Princess Metternich_ (1861), the _Album Sonata for Frau Wesendonck_ (1853), and the _Ankunft bei den schwarzen Schwänen_ (1861). If so, we should probably be compelled to pass the same criticism upon the symphonies as we do upon these works--that in spite of their unquestionable beauty we are sometimes at a loss to see the same coherence in them that they must have had for him. In the lengthy _Album Sonata for Frau Wesendonck_, for example, we feel that he is all the while following the outlines of some unavowed poetic theme, slackening and tightening the expression, lightening and darkening it, hurrying and pausing, in conformity with the demands of that. A musical picture of this kind, that disdains formal development of the pattern order, and simply weaves its tissue out of moods, is much more difficult on a large scale than on a small one. The trouble begins when a transition has to be made from one mood to another. In his last days Wagner was capable of wonderful quasi-symphonic meditations on a given theme; nothing could surpass for pure beauty or for continuity of invention the long orchestral passage that accompanies Kundry's account of Parsifal's mother (vocal score, p. 187 ff.). We feel that Wagner could have indeed worked marvels in this way to the end: but, as he himself once said in a letter to Frau Wesendonck, the art of composition is really the art of transition; and one fears that his symphonic transitions would have failed to make their reasons clear to us. The astounding tissue of the _Götterdämmerung_ teems with transitions of the most abrupt kind; but they are all intelligible because the physiognomies of the leit-motives are familiar to us, and every allusion is instantaneously clear. Their logic is only partly in themselves, and partly in the poetic ideas of which they are the symbols. It seems probable that his symphonies would have been Siegfried Idyls on a larger scale, possessing every virtue but that of inevitable continuity.

FOOTNOTES:

[289] He seems to be referring more particularly to the fourth movement.

[290] _Mein Leben_, p. 73.

[291] _Mein Leben_, p. 94.

[292] _G.S._, xii. 1 ff.

[293] _G.S._, xii. 5 ff.

[294] _Pasticcio_, in _G.S._, xii. 5 ff.

[295] Mr. Dannreuther, in his article on Wagner in _Grove's Dictionary of Music_ (v. 391), thinks that the young enthusiast for Beethoven perceived the weakness of Bellini's music clearly enough, yet the impression Mme. Devrient made upon him was powerful and artistic. The first statement hardly squares with all the facts as we now know them.

[296] _I.e._ as to why the poorer opera had impressed him more than the better one.

[297] _Mein Leben_, p. 102.

[298] _Mein Leben_, p. 104.

[299] See the article on _Der dramatische Gesang_, in _G.S._, xii. 15.

[300] The German "Gesang" is perhaps best translated here and elsewhere by this general term.

[301] _I.e._ the conventional forms of Italian opera.

[302] See the article _Bellini, ein Wort zu seiner Zeit_, in _G.S._, xii. 19. It must be remembered that this article, which was published anonymously, was intended to stimulate the interest of the Riga public in Bellini's _Norma_, which opera Wagner had selected for his benefit in December 1837. It is possible, therefore, that the impecunious young musician may have said a trifle more than he really thought. It is significant that Wagner omitted all these articles--_Die deutsche Oper_, _Pasticcio_, _Der dramatische Gesang_, and _Bellini_--from the collected edition of his works.

[303] _Mein Leben_, p. 174.

[304] _Mein Leben_, p. 175.

[305] _Mein Leben_, p. 175.

[306] _Mein Leben_, p. 175.

[307] _Mein Leben_, p. 179.

[308] He had put aside his comic opera _Die glückliche Bärenfamilie_, as the performing of this "Musik à la Adam" would only have still further tightened his connection with the frivolous theatrical world about him.

[309] _Mein Leben_, pp. 210, 211.

[310] _Le Freischütz_, in _G.S._, i. 220 ff.

[311] _Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven_, _G.S._, i. 90 ff.

[312] The reader may be reminded that Wagner has been expounding the Schopenhauerian theory of music as the idea of the world.

[313] _Beethoven_, in _G.S._, ix. 101.

[314] _G.S._, i. in. 111.

[315] This explains why he was so unapt at setting anyone's poetry but his own.

[316] On this point see Albert Schweitzer's _J. S. Bach_ (Eng. trans.), chap. xx.

[317] And of course the quality of the mixture of these factors may vary in different works of the same composer.

[318] _Ein glücklicher Abend_, in _G.S._, i. 143, 144.

[319] See Mr. E. Dannreuther's article on Wagner in the new edition of _Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians_, v. 414.

[320] Like all musicians of that time, Wagner had no suspicion of the enormous amount of tone-painting there is in Bach.

[321] _Ein glücklicher Abend_, in _G.S._, i. 147, 148.

[322] He expresses the same idea nearly thirty years later in his essay on Beethoven. "What is the dramatic action of the _Leonora_ opera-text but an almost disagreeable watering down of the drama we have lived through in the overture,--as it were a tedious explanatory commentary by Gervinus on a scene by Shakespeare?" _Beethoven_, in _G.S._, ix. 105.

[323] This was the explanation of his dislike for much of Berlioz's music. See his remarks on Berlioz in the article _On Liszt's Symphonic Poems_ (_G.S._, v. 193, 194), and a similar passage in the conversation quoted by Mr. Dannreuther (_Grove's Dictionary_, v. 414): "The middle of Berlioz's touching _scène d'amour_ in his _Romeo and Juliet_ is meant by him to reproduce in musical phrases the lines about the lark and the nightingale in Shakespeare's balcony scene, but it does nothing of the sort--it is not intelligible as music."

[324] The only other element introduced is the song of the Norwegian sailors from the last Act, which, however good in itself, is perhaps a superfluity in the overture,--a slight concession to that passion for reproducing the details of the drama that Wagner reprobated in others. The true symbolic conflict of the governing desires and principles of the opera can and should be all suggested in the music of Senta and the Dutchman.

[325] _Loc. cit._, i. 204, 205.

[326] The "Report" that accompanies this programme in the Prose Works is an extract from the (at that time) unpublished _Mein Leben_.

[327] He had gone there to produce _Rienzi_, and to try to arrange for a performance of _Lohengrin_. _Rienzi_ was a failure.

[328] The Intendant of the Dresden Opera.

[329] Gustav Levy, _Richard Wagners Lebensgang in tabellarischer Darstellung_, p. 32.

[330] Liszt writes thus in June or July 1849, _i.e._ a month or six weeks after Wagner's flight from Dresden. "Forgive me if I suggest that you should manage so that you are not of necessity brought into enmity with things and men who bar your road to success and glory. A truce therefore to political commonplaces, socialistic balderdash, and personal hatreds. On the other hand, good courage, strong patience, and plenty of fire, which will not be difficult for you with the volcanoes you have in your brain." _Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt_, i. 24.

[331] _Die Königliche Kapelle betreffend_, in _G.S._, xii. 149 ff. No notice was taken of the Report by the authorities for a year; then they refused to act upon it.

[332] The essay--_Entwurf zur Organisation eines Deutschen National-Theaters für das Konigreich Sachsen_, in _G.S._, ii. 233 ff.--must be read in full. "My plan," he says, "was not merely to rescue the theatre, but at the same time to conduct it, under the shelter and inspection of the State, to a noble significance and efficacy." His main thesis was that "the Theatre should have no other purpose than the ennoblement of taste and manners." See Wagner's own account of the affair in _Mein Leben_, pp. 444 ff.

[333] See _Mein Leben_, pp. 434 ff.

[334] _G.S._, xii. 238 ff.

[335] _G.S._, xii. 243 ff.

[336] In the _Entwurf zur Organisation eines Deutschen National-Theaters für das Konigreich Sachsen_ (_G.S._, ii. 248) he speaks of "demanding the fullest and most active interest of the whole nation in an artistic establishment that, conjointly with all the other arts, has for its object the ennobling of taste and manners." He does not develop the idea, however.

[337] See the important letter of September 1850, in the Uhlig correspondence.

[338] _Mein Leben_, p. 546.

[339] _Mein Leben_, pp. 566 ff.

[340] See the passionate and almost hysterical passage commencing "Not ye wise ones, therefore, are the inventors, but the Folk, for Need drove the Folk to invention." _Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft_, in _G.S._, iii. 53.

[341] _G.S._, iii. 60.

[342] Had he been a trifle less Teutonic, less given to the national failing of imagining that a new truth has been established when all that has happened is that a new word has been manufactured or a mystic meaning perceived in an old one, he might have reflected that in other languages there is no etymological connection between art and the capacity for "canning."

[343] _Mein Leben_, pp. 691, 692.

[344] He plainly knew nothing of the sculpture of the Middle Ages, and regarded all modern sculpture as an imitation of the antique.

[345] This was the first form of the drama that ultimately became the _Ring_. It virtually corresponded with the present _Twilight of the Gods_. He afterwards saw the necessity of setting visibly before the audience a good deal that was only implied or narrated in _Siegfried's Death_. Accordingly a prefatory drama was written and called _Young Siegfried_. The same process was twice repeated, the _Valkyrie_ and _Rhinegold_ being added in turn. _Young Siegfried_ was then entitled _Siegfried_, and _Siegfried's Death_ became _The Twilight of the Gods_.

[346] Letter of 12th September 1852, in _Briefe an Röckel_, p. 10.

[347] See Wagner's further account of this article in _Mein Leben_, p. 545.

[348] This and other statements as to the genesis of opera are not historically correct.

[349] The most admired of libretto writers of the eighteenth century.

[350] The latest edition of the _Gesammelte Schriften_ (which contains more than one regrettable error), has "_auf natürlichem, künstlichem Boden gewachsen_," instead of _unnatürlichem_ as in the earlier editions. See _G.S._, iv. 15.

[351] I borrow Mr. Edwin Evans's alliterative rendering of these three lines,--"Life's delight is love"; "True love doth lighten loss"; "For 'tis from woe she weaves her wonders." See his translation of _Opera and Drama_, ii. 520 ff.

[352] _I.e._, in modern phrase, the "leading-motives."

[353] _G.S._, iii. 267.

[354] _G.S._, iii. 269.

[355] _G.S._, iv. 65, 66.

[356] _G.S._, iv. 2.

[357] "But if I wish to show that plastic art, being only an artificial art, one abstracted from real art, must cease entirely in the future; if consequently to this plastic art--painting and sculpture--that to-day claims to be the principal art, I utterly deny a life in the future, you will admit that this should not and could not be done with two strokes of the pen." (Letter of 12th January 1850; _Briefe an Uhlig, &c._, p. 26.)

[358] Letter 14 to Uhlig (undated), in _Briefe_, p. 46. Mr. Shedlock, in his admirable English version of these letters, translates "art-egoistic" (künstlerisch-egoistischen) in the second sentence as "artificial egoistic," having apparently read "künstlerisch" as "künstlich."

[359] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 315. He is discussing the reasons that led him to give up the idea of a play on the subject of Friedrich Barbarossa.

[360] "In modern speech, poetical creation is impossible; that is to say, a poetic purpose cannot be _realised_ in it, but only suggested" (_sondern eben nur als solche ausgesprochen werden_). _Opera and Drama_, in _G.S._, iv. 98. There are many other passages of the same tenour.

[361] _G.S._, iii. 178 ff.

[362] _Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt_, i. 324.

[363] _G.S._, iv. 128, 129.

[364] In the scene of the Contest of Song in the second Act of _Tannhäuser_, he says, "my real object was, if possible, to compel the hearer, for the first time in the history of opera, to take an interest in a poetic idea, and to follow it up in all its necessary developments." _Mein Leben_, p. 364.

[365] Letter of 8th September 1850; _Briefwechsel_, i. 75.

[366] Much of his laborious insistence on the proper relation between word and tone was due to the disregard of any coincidence between verbal and musical accents in most of the German opera texts and translations of his time, and to the bad enunciation of so many of the singers. He was still complaining of this latter--"the chaotic vocal style of our singers"--in 1879. See _Über das Opern-Dichten und Komponieren im Besonderen_, in _G.S._, x. 166.

[367] Letter 21 (beginning of February 1851), p. 80.

[368] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 316.

[369] _G.S._, iv. 318, 319.

[370] It must always be remembered that the Beethoven of whom Wagner speaks is the Beethoven of the later symphonies, sonatas, and quartets.

[371] Letter 57 (15th February 1852) in _Briefe an Uhlig_, p. 160. It was his complaint against Mendelssohn's conducting of the Beethoven symphonies that it brought out "merely their purely musical side," not their poetical content. Not understanding the spirit of them, Mendelssohn kept to the letter. His inability to understand the inner meaning of the music caused him to fall into the grossest errors of _tempo_. He took the first movement of the Ninth Symphony, for example, so fast that "the whole thing became the direct opposite of what it really is" (Letter 56 to Uhlig, 15th February 1852, p. 162).

[372] Letter 56 to Uhlig, 15th February 1852, p. 157.

[373] Letter 55 to Uhlig (15th February, 1852), pp. 158, 159.

[374] _Opera and Drama_, in _G.S._, iii. 278. The whole of this section should be read carefully.

[375] _Opera and Drama_, in _G.S._, iv. 3.

[376] _Opera and Drama_, in _G.S._, iv. 173.

[377] This term, it must be remembered, is not Wagner's own. It has come into such general use, however, and is so thoroughly expressive, that it is better to employ it than to adopt Wagner's rather circumlocuitous way of expressing the same thing.

[378] The reader who is unable to follow Wagner's exposition in _Opera and Drama_ should turn to _A Communication to my Friends_, in which practically the same ground is covered, but in a much more luminous style.

[379] E. T. A. Hoffmann before him had been very enthusiastic over Beethoven, and no doubt Wagner had been stimulated by Hoffmann in this as in so many other matters. See in particular Hoffmann's _Fantasiestücke_.

[380] _On Franz Liszt's Symphonic Poems_, in _G.S._, v. 187.

[381] _On Franz Liszt's Symphonic Poems_, in _G.S._, v. 109.

[382] It has recently been re-published with an introduction and notes by Dr. Eugen Schmitz. (Verlag Dr. Heinrich Lewy, Munich.)

[383] _Zukunftsmusik_, in _G.S._, vii. 97.

[384] _Zukunftsmusik_, in _G.S._, vii. 127, 128.

[385] Guido Adler, _Richard Wagner: Vorlesungen gehalten an der Universität zu Wien_, pp. 3 ff.

[386] This is a broadly true statement of the historical facts, though it has to be remembered that the theory that the _first_ Florentine reformers aimed at a recitative-like delivery of a dramatic idea is only one of the errors of the popular historian. Their earliest attempts were more in the arioso form. See Hugo Riemann's _Handbuch der Musikgeschichte_, ii. 2, chap. xxiii.

[387] _Zukunftsmusik_, in _G.S._, vii, 128.

[388] _Ibid._, vii, 129.

[389] _Zukunftsmusik_, in _G.S._, vii. 129.

[390] I do not mean, of course, that it has anything to do with the symphony in the formal sense, but that the orchestra weaves a continuous tissue of its own, instead of merely accompanying the voices as in the earlier operas.

[391] See Appendix B.

[392] _On Operatic Poetry and Composition_, in _G.S._, x. 172.

[393] _On the Application of Music to the Drama_, in _G.S._, x. 186.

[394] _Ibid._, x. 186, 187.

[395] _On the Application of Music to the Drama_, in _G.S._, x. pp. 189, 190. The variation of the theme to which Wagner refers is as follows:

[Music:]