CHAPTER III
THE ARTIST IN PRACTICE
I--THE EARLY MISCELLANEOUS WORKS
According to Wagner's own account, he sketched tragedies in his childhood, and worked out one that was a sort of blend of _Hamlet_ and _King Lear_; and, inspired by Beethoven's _Egmont_, he soon desired to adorn this grand tragedy with music of his own. A brief study of Logier's _Method of Thorough-Bass_ did not provide him with the needed technique, though, convinced that he was born to be a musician, he wrote a sonata, a quartet and an aria in secret. In his sixteenth year he placed himself under a teacher, who, however, could do nothing with him in the excessively febrile state in which he then was. His nervous excitement culminated in a round of the usual student excesses; and having calmed down again he set himself to study composition in earnest with Weinlig, the cantor of the Thomas School. Six months' work sufficed to satisfy Weinlig that his pupil was now competent to stand on his own legs. It is at this time (1831) that he produces the compositions that are the earliest we now possess of his.
At present he has apparently no inclination towards opera. The raw works of his adolescence had all been instrumental; among them was the Overture in B flat major (1830) that was performed in the Leipzig Theatre, and in which the drum-beat every four bars ended by moving the audience to uncontrollable merriment. It is not till the summer of 1832 that he plans a first opera. _Die Hochzeit_; he writes the text, but composes no more than a fragment of the music. Meanwhile he produces, as the result of Weinlig's schooling, a number of works more or less in the conventional style. The pianoforte sonata in B flat major that was published by Breitkopf & Härtel as the composer's Op. 1 is dedicated to Weinlig, under whose eye the work was written. His teacher had evidently seen the need for curbing the exuberance of the boy's undisciplined mind. He made him write simply, in the set forms, and with regard to the clarities of the pure vocal style. For this first sonata, Wagner tells us, Weinlig induced him to take an early sonata by Pleyel as a model; the whole work was to be shaped on "strictly harmonic and thematic lines." Wagner himself never thought much of it. But if it is no more than an imitation of the current sonata style, it is an unmistakably capable imitation. Weinlig was right; he had given his pupil independence. In all these youthful works, indeed, we are struck by the unquestioning self-confidence of the manner, and by the boyish vigour that animates them. As a reward for his docility in the matter of the sonata he was allowed by Weinlig to compose a pianoforte fantasia in F sharp minor. He treated this, he says, in a more informal style. It is really a quite powerful work for a boy of eighteen. It defines a mood, and maintains it with singular persistence; it expresses something truly felt; it comes from the brooding absorption of spirit that was afterwards to produce the _Faust_ Overture. It is liberally sown with recitative passages that suggest some knowledge of Bach (the Chromatic Fantasia or the G minor Fantasia for the organ), or of Beethoven (pianoforte sonata in A flat. Op. 110, &c.). The manner and feeling of the adagio suggest the slow movement of Beethoven's fifth symphony, the later ornamentation of the main melodic idea being quite in the style of that movement. Altogether the Fantasia is by no means a work to be despised; it is the one composition of Wagner's of this period in which we catch a decided note of promise for the future.
The Polonaise in D major for four hands (1831) is more in the conventional manner, but quite interesting, and as original as we can expect from the average young composer of eighteen. The A major sonata (Op. 4, 1831) flows on in the glib, confident way that is characteristic of all his early instrumental works, and has many good points. The weakest movement is the third--a rather amateurish fugue. There is some expression in the slow movement, and a general freedom of style everywhere except in the fugue. The idiom as a whole is that of the early Beethoven, but occasionally the writing suggests a boy who knew something of Weber and of the later Beethoven, though his invention and his technique were as yet equal only to imitating the simpler models.
For its day the Symphony in C major (1832) is a very capable piece of student work; the interest slackens very considerably in the finale, but the other movements are handled with the customary young-Wagnerian vigour and confidence. In spite of the ease and the cleverness of it, however, we can rarely feel that it is anything more than a piece of competent school work, though there is undeniable thoughtfulness in the andante.
The work of the next five years varies in quality and purpose in a most puzzling way. In 1832 he writes the _King Enzio_ Overture, under the influence, as he tells us in _Mein Leben_, of Beethoven. It is plainly modelled on the dramatic overture of the _Egmont_ and _Coriolan_ type--a type that Mendelssohn, in the _Ruy Blas_ and elsewhere, afterwards cultivated, without however adding anything to it. The young Wagner has a thorough grasp of the form. The Overture is concise and well balanced; all the details are clearly seen in relation to the dominant idea. The thematic invention is good, the themes being not only expressive in themselves but capable of bearing the weight of a certain amount of dramatic development. Yet after writing this fine Overture, that really may point without presumption to Beethoven as its parent, he was capable of producing in 1836 the shapeless and frothy _Polonia_ Overture, which is the oddest mixture of a pseudo-Polish idiom and the cheap, assertive melody of _Rienzi_. Here and there it gives us a foretaste of his later power of climax-building, but on the whole it is a feeble and amorphous work. The _Rule, Britannia_ Overture (1836) is hardly any better; it is a long-winded and pointless dissertation on our patriotic song, the original tune being by far the best thing in it. The _Columbus_ Overture of the preceding year is rather better. Its style is a curious blend of Beethoven, _Rienzi_, and the Italian opera; it is oddly anticipatory of Liszt in its repetitions and its make-believe development: but the work has a sort of strength. It is evidently the outcome of a vision clearly seen, and translated into as good music as Wagner's powers at that time permitted.
Meanwhile in 1832--the same year as the _King Enzio_ Overture and the C major symphony--he had written _Seven Compositions to Goethe's Faust_--"The soldiers' song," the "Peasants under the linden," "The song of the rat," "The song of the flea," Mephistopheles' song ("Was machst du mir vor Liebchens Tür"), Margaret's song ("Meine Ruh' ist hin"), and a "melodrama" to accompany the recitation of Margaret's prayer to the Virgin.[396] Almost all of these have individuality, the least notable being Mephistopheles' song. The soldiers' song is breezy, with one or two crudities in the vocal part-writing. The "Bauern unter der Linde" is fresh and gay; the rat and flea songs are fairly humorous; it is rather curious that Wagner's rat song should begin with the full scale of D major in descending motion, while that of Berlioz commences with the same scale in ascent. Margaret's song is quite good, though it moves a little stiffly, and has neither the ardour of Schubert's setting nor the perfect mating of idea and expression that we find in that masterpiece. Wagner, indeed, developed very slowly. For a long time his genius could only move heavily: there was no swiftness in him, either of idea or of form,--no consuming heat. The melodrama is expressive, and the reiterated syncopations are effective. Wagner probably chose the melodrama form, rather than a purely lyrical setting of the words, because he felt that the former gave the dramatist in him more scope.
In 1832-33 the dramatic impulse became very strong in him. He had written the _Hochzeit_ fragment and _Die Feen_ by the end of 1833, and between 1834 and 1836 he finished the _Liebesverbot_. Already he had a technique equal to the expression of all the dramatic thinking of which he was capable at that time. How dexterous his hand had become is shown incidentally in the aria he added to Marschner's _Vampyr_ in 1833,--a very vigorous and finished piece of work. There is the same skill in the "Romance of Max" that he added to the Singspiel _Marie, Max and Michel_ (1837). There is piquancy in the scoring of the latter, and the vocal part has a rhythmic variety that we do not often find in _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_. Apparently the only non-dramatic work he wrote at this time was the _New Year Cantata_, which is one of the freshest and most pleasing works of his youth. It consists of an overture and four other movements; the chorus takes part in the second and fourth of these, but in the latter the vocal parts are merely sketched in, and the words are lacking. In the slow opening section of the overture he introduces in the violas and 'cellos, with excellent effect, the theme of the andante of his C major symphony; it is apparently intended to symbolise the sadness of the departing year. It is impossible not to be captivated by the sincerity and the transparent simplicity of this little work.
During 1838 and 1839 his time was fully taken up with his theatrical duties at Königsberg and Riga, the composition of _Rienzi_, and the working out of other dramatic ideas; so that from 1837 to 1840 what may be called the occasional compositions are few in number. With the exception of the aria for _Marie, Max and Michel_, and the _Faust_ compositions, his vocal works had so far all been settings of words of his own. Between 1837 and 1844 the texts of almost all his songs and choral works were by other people. At Riga, in 1837, he set a poem by Harald von Brackel in praise of the Czar Nicholas, for soprano or tenor solo, chorus, and orchestra. The piece is appropriately broad and massive, and imposing enough in mere volume; but it is impossible to believe that Wagner's heart was in a work of this kind.
Of much more interest is _Der Tannenbaum_, a setting of a poem by Scheuerlein (end of 1838). The song is expressive, though the effect lies more in the general colour, the harmony, and the pictorial realisation of the scene--the brooding tree, the river, and the boy are all differentiated--than in any particularly striking quality in the melody. The vocal line has more flexibility than is usual with the young Wagner. In July 1839 he entered upon his Paris adventure. For a while he eagerly pursues his fortune among the theatrical directors; then, as his hopes fail him and need gnaws at his heart, he produces a number of vocal works that he trusts may appeal to the French singers and the French public. Some of these are pot-boilers pure and simple, the writing of which must have been gall and bitterness to the young composer who had begun to realise the wonderful music there was in him. The lowest depth is touched in the vaudeville chorus, _La Descente de la Courtille_ (1840)--a frank prostitution of his genius to the most superficial French taste of the time. Almost as bad is the song, _Les adieux de Marie Stuart_. A bar or two here and there bears the signature of the true Wagner--he cannot quite keep his real self out of it; but on the whole the song is a desperate, pitiful attempt to manufacture something in the conventional French and Italian operatic idiom of the day. Wagner's tongue must have been in his cheek when he penned such passages as these:
[Music: Ex. 1]
Je n'ai désiré d'être reine que pour régner sur les Français, que pour régner sur les Français.
To the same period and the same catchpenny mood belongs the _Aria of Orovisto_ that he wrote in the hope that Lablache would sing it in Bellini's _Norma_. It is an amusingly absurd but skilful imitation of all the tricks-of-the-trade of the Italian opera of the 'thirties.
Other works of this time are more sincere, and most of them have a decided charm. The _Albumblatt_ in E major, written for his friend Kietz, is a simple but engaging piece, with a touch or two of melodic commonplace--the occasional insertion, for example, of a triplet group in a duple-time phrase. The little work is curiously like the _Lohengrin_ of seven years later in general texture, in melodic and harmonic build, and in the peculiar white light in which it is bathed. The songs to French words, written at Paris in 1839-40, vary greatly in quality. The _Tout n'est qu'images fugitives_ never descends to the depth of banality reached in the _Marie Stuart_, but the effort to be ingratiatingly French is plainly evident. The _Dors, mon enfant_, _Mignonne_, and _Attente_ are all charming; he thinks of the French style and the French public no more than is necessary to lighten the heaviness of his native German manner, and the results are sometimes surprising, particularly in the matter of rhythm. For many years to come, as he admits in a well-known letter to Uhlig, he was obsessed by a vocal rhythm of this type:
[Music:]
--a type upon which hundreds of phrases in the _Flying Dutchman_, _Tannhäuser_, and _Lohengrin_ are constructed. The best of these French songs have a rhythmic freedom and flexibility that he rarely attained in his later operas. Look, for example, at the following delightfully elastic vocal line from _Attente_:
[Music: Ex. 2]
Cicogne, aux vieilles tours fidèle, ô vole et monte à tire d'aile de l'église à la citadelle, du haut clocher, du haut clocher au grand donjon.
It has always been evident that the rhythmic sameness of the earlier operas was mainly due to the monotonously regular recurrence of accents in the German verse he wrote at that time. These French songs make it clear--as, by the way, does the aria for _Marie, Max and Michel_--that when a more varied metrical scheme was given him his music spontaneously varied with it. One cannot help feeling that in some ways it is a pity he did not meet with more success at Paris--that he was not allowed, in fact, to write some large work with the deliberate intention of appealing to the French taste by an exploitation of the styles and the formulas the Parisian public loved most. Such a work would not have represented the real Wagner, and in the end would probably have been negligible; but it would have given a much needed lightness and elasticity to his imagination, without harming him in any way. He would have benefited by such an experience as emphatically as Handel and Mozart benefited by their experiences with Italian opera. As it was, a certain slowness and ponderousness remain characteristic of Wagner to the end of his days. This inability to concentrate rapidly is instructively shown in his French setting of Heine's _Les deux Grenadiers_ (1839-40). In general expressiveness the song need not fear comparison with Schumann's: perhaps Wagner's treatment of the "Marseillaise" at the end is even better. But the work has nothing of Schumann's terseness, ease, and lyric spontaneity; the whole thing moves a little stiff-jointedly.
The Paris period is a curious one in Wagner's artistic history. He wrote some very good songs, and one or two deplorable things like the _Marie Stuart_ and _La Descente de la Courtille_; at the same time he was finishing _Rienzi_ and working at the _Flying Dutchman_, and the _Faust_ Overture assumed its first form. In April 1842 he settled at Dresden. Between then and 1848 he composed _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_, and conceived the first idea of the _Ring_ and other works. During this period he wrote no songs or pianoforte pieces: the occasional compositions are all choral works, which is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that Wagner had a good male-voice choir at his disposal. The most considerable of these works is _The Love Feast of the Apostles_ (1843). Towards the end it has a touch of the melodic commonplace that Wagner found it so hard to avoid at this time; but the earlier choral portions are impressive in their simplicity and sincerity, and the whole thing is admirably stage-managed, so to speak. The effect of the voices from on high, and of the first entry of the orchestra at the descent of the Spirit, must have been very striking in the Dresden church.
The other choral works of this period are on a smaller scale. For the unveiling of a memorial to King Friedrich August I Wagner wrote in 1843 a _Weihegruss_ for male voices and brass orchestra, to words by Otto Hohlfeld. The choral portion of this work was published in 1906; the whole version is now published in Breitkopf & Härtel's _Gesamtausgabe_, and shows how indispensable is the orchestral part--the long-held vocal notes, for example, being helped out by trumpet, trombone, and horn fanfares, and the whole thing gaining enormously in richness by the discreet occasional entries of the brass. The general style of this work, as of the _Greeting of Friedrich August the Beloved by his Faithful Subjects_ (August 1844), is that of the _Tannhäuser-Lohengrin_ epoch; some passages in the _Greeting_, indeed, are extraordinarily reminiscent of the "Hall of song" chorus. For the re-interment of Weber's remains at Dresden, in December 1844, Wagner wrote a four-part male chorus that again recalls the operatic works of this time. It is the most expressive of Wagner's works of this class, but on the whole a little disappointing; his heart was so thoroughly with Weber that one would have thought the occasion would have wrung some music of the first class out of him.
II--THE EARLIEST OPERAS
Wagner worked out the drama of his first opera, _Die Hochzeit_ ("The Wedding"), in 1833, but his sister Rosalie's antipathy to the gory and gruesome subject turned him against the work after he had written only some thirty or forty pages of the score--an Introduction, chorus and septet. The style has little individuality, though the chorus of female voices is not without charm. The septet, however, is an excellent piece of work for a boy of nineteen,--lucid, freely written, and with a certain amount of dramatic differentiation in some of the vocal parts.
His first complete opera, _Die Feen_ (The Fairies), was written during his stay at Würzburg in 1833. The story, which may be read in _Mein Leben_ or any of the biographies of Wagner, has long lost any interest it may once have possessed. In psychology and in structure alike the drama is very primitive. The magic element in it is fit only for the nursery, though it has to be observed that here we have for the first time that notion of "redemption" that plays so large a part in Wagner's thinking to the very end of his life. The construction is formal and cumbersome: the two chief lovers have as a foil two subordinate lovers, while set off against these is a third pair, who provide a sort of comic interest; the whole past, present and future are explained in recitatives; everybody of any importance has his aria or his share in a concerted piece, and each Act ends with an imposing _ensemble_. The stage apparatus is romantic to the last degree. The music, however, is decidedly interesting. The third Act, in spite of a few strokes that get home, is much inferior to the other two, for which the fact that it was written in a month may be answerable. But the first two Acts and the overture are full of striking things. There is no question as to the thorough competence of Wagner's technique at this time: everything flows with the utmost ease and clearness from his pen. The opera has indeed a poise of manner and a unity of style that we do not find in some of the more mature works of his first period. In the _Flying Dutchman_, for example, there is a good deal of almost hobbledehoy awkwardness,--a sort of cubbish clumsiness, though any discerning observer could have seen even in those days that this was a cub of a leonine breed, that would some day swallow up most of the other animals in the menagerie. There is nothing of this cubbishness, this stumbling over his own good intentions, in _The Fairies_. Such as the ideas are,--and of course they never rise to anything like the height of the best things in the _Flying Dutchman_--they are expressed without effort, in an idiom and with a technique precisely congruous with them. Aria, duet, ensemble, dramatic contrast, dramatic transition,--the young composer is equal to whatever problem may be set him. The musical style as a whole reminds us of Weber and Marschner, but there is plenty of unmistakable Wagner in it. We are constantly meeting with progressions, turns of phrase, and devices that have been made familiar to us by the later operas. How like a score of melodies in _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ is the following, for example--
[Music: No. 1.]
When he wants to work up the excitement at the entry of Arindal he does it precisely in the way he whips up our interest in the coming of the hero in the second Act of _Tristan and Isolde_--by a series of breathless reiterations of the same figure--
[Music: No. 2.] When he has joy to express, he does so by means of the same ascending, bubbling phrases that he uses in the duet between Tannhäuser and Elisabeth (vocal score, p. 157, &c.)[397]--
[Music: No. 3.]
LORA: Dahin, dahin flieht alles Leiden, und alle ARINDAL: So viele Not im Heimatlande, &c. MORALD: Dahin, dahin flieht alles Leiden,
And although the duet between Drolla and her lover Gernot is subcomic in intention, their manner of rushing into each other's arms is precisely that of Tristan and Isolde--
[Music: No. 4.]
DROLLA: Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! 'tis thou, 'tis thou!
GERNOT: Drolla! Drolla! Drolla! Drolla! 'tis thou, 'tis thou, 'tis thou, 'tis thou, 'tis thou, 'tis thou, &c.
The style is frequently mature beyond the composer's actual years,--the admirable finish to the scene between Arindal and the others, for example (full score, p. 111), where the vocal themes are taken up by the orchestra and played out in a beautifully managed diminuendo; or the perfect little picture of the fairy garden at the commencement of the first Act (I question whether so imaginatively conceived and skilfully coloured a garden scene is to be found anywhere in previous or contemporary opera); or the expressive scoring of Ada's cavatina (full score, pp. 114 ff.); or the septet at the end of the first Act; or the fine management of the chorus of beaten warriors at the beginning of the second Act, with the reiterated calls in the bass horn and trumpet; or the fine _Schwung_ of the trio between Lora, Arindal and Morald (pp. 219 ff.); or the big aria of Ada in the second Act (pp. 251 ff.); or the charming theme that is used when the children are introduced. The born musical dramatist is seen in the variety of expression he can command even at this age; and one is struck by the first signs of the faculty that is so noticeable in the later Wagner,--that of always having something in reserve when a new and cumulative effect is needed. The larger the canvas to be covered, as in the final _ensembles_, the more resource does he show himself to possess. There is a good deal in _The Fairies_ that is quite boyish,--much that is conventional, many things to provoke a smile. But it is equally certain that there was not another young man in Europe capable of writing such a work at that time. The overture, which was written a few days before the last touches were put to the third Act, is excellently handled throughout; the invention never flags, the technique never fails; it is his best work of this order until we come to the overture to the _Flying Dutchman_,--finer in idea, closer in texture, and surer in touch than the _King Enzio_ Overture of 1832, and far beyond the _Columbus_, the _Polonia_, or the _Rule Britannia_. Altogether one imagines that, in spite of the old-fashioned quality of the libretto of _The Fairies_, one could listen to a stage performance of the opera with at least as much interest as to _Rienzi_. It was given for the first time in Munich under Hermann Levi in 1888, and between then and 1895 it ran to over fifty performances.
As we have seen, _Das Liebesverbot_ ("The Ban on Love") was a product of the wild days of 1834-5, when he had momentarily turned against sobriety both in life and in art. In framing his libretto he passed over everything in Shakespeare's _Measure for Measure_ that had a touch of moral gravity in it: he transports the action from Vienna to Sicily, brings the strait-laced viceroy Friedrich into the same focus as the other amorists, and makes the whole play an attack on "puritanical hypocrisy" and a laudation of "unrestrained physicalism." In the music he does his best to forget that "German style" in which, as he says, _Die Feen_ had been written, and copies to the best of his ability the more sparkling style of the lighter Italian and French opera. The work is in two Acts,--the only opera of Wagner's in this form--and in its structure follows the ordinary pattern of the day. Occasionally the spoken word takes the place of recitative.
In 1866 Wagner gave the score of the opera to King Ludwig, prefacing it with a stanza in which he spoke of it as a sin of his youth, for which he hoped to find pardon in his protector's grace. Apparently he always adopted this depreciatory attitude towards the work in later life. Glasenapp tells us that Wagner liked the overture to _Das Liebesverbot_ better than that to _Die Feen_, but thought the rest of _Das Liebesverbot_ "horrible," except the "Salve regina cœli."[398] A perusal of the score, however, will convince most people that he underrated the interest and the value of it. It almost invariably fails when it aims at expressing serious feeling; but the gay and humorous scenes are admirable, and the youthful gusto of the whole thing is irresistible. The general idiom may be a borrowed one, but for the most part Wagner uses it very skilfully, making at least as good a show with it as the ordinary French or Italian opera writer of the time. He has every trick of the trade at his finger-tips, every recipe for froth and foam and sparkle. He is as expert as any of them at lashing up the interest by the device of repeating a piquant figure a score of times: this, for example, from the overture--
[Music: No. 5]
It is given first of all mainly to the strings, with a little harmonic thickening in bassoons and horns. Then, as the melody goes an octave higher in the strings, it is doubled in the oboes and clarinets, with added harmonic enrichment in the wood-wind and brass. At the next repeat--an octave higher again--the melody is given out by piccolo, flutes, oboes, clarinets and violins in octaves, while trombones are added to the harmony. All the while the tone is growing louder and louder, with a crescendo roll in the tympani. One has to listen, whether one wants to or not; and it is impossible to keep the blood from tingling under the whip. The whole overture is very effective in this noisy, rather empty way; there is much use of castagnets, tambourine, triangle and cymbals. The general style of the writing may be gathered from a couple of examples--
[Music: No. 6.]
[Music: No. 7.]
either of which will serve to show the gulf that separates _Das Liebesverbot_ from _Die Feen_.
The opening scene is very animated, the chorus of the people being full of _entrain_; the whole manner is thoroughly Italian, the orchestra chattering away more or less irrelevantly, and the voices interjecting their remarks in a facile, half-melodic sort of way. How careless Wagner was with regard to deeper musical characterisation may be seen from the theme that accompanies the entry of Claudio,--one of those typical Italian operatic themes of which we can never be quite sure whether they are meant to be tragic or comic, though here it is apparently meant to be serious--
[Music: No. 8.]
Nor in any other work but this would Wagner have accompanied with so irresponsible a theme the appeal of Claudio (sentenced to death) to his friend Luzio to seek the aid of Isabella--
[Music: No. 9.]
Du kennest jenen stillen Ort, das Kloster der Elisabeth; Die &c.
The melody runs a thoroughly Italian course--
[Music: No. 10.]
O eile Freund, zu ihr dahin, o eile zu ihr dahin, sprich sie für mich um Hülfe an, sprich sie um Hülfe für mich an.
with liberal opportunities for the tenor to poise himself on a high note and deploy his resonance--
[Music: No. 11.]
Bewege sie, dass sie verzeih', dann bau' ich ganz auf ihren Muth. Bewege sie, dass sie verzeih',... dann bau' ich ganz auf ihren Muth.
The chorus that follows is also quite in the Italian stage style, the excitement being worked up according to the established recipes; and of course the purely musical stream flows on without the least regard to dramatic sense, Luzio saying every other minute "I hasten, friend," but without the slightest intention of hastening till the chorus is finished. But, as almost always happens even when Wagner is trying to be least like himself, a characteristic little touch cannot be prevented from stealing in: after the voices have ceased, the long-drawn theme of Claudio sings on in the 'cellos, set against the noisy chattering of the wood-wind and brass. It makes a most effective ending to the scene.
In the third scene appears a theme that was afterwards expanded and put to splendid use in _Tannhäuser_. Here the nuns sing it behind the scenes to the words "Salve regina cœli."
[Music No. 12.]
The florid duet between the two novices, Mariana and Isabella, is thoroughly Italian. Again one sees, by comparison of this music with any of that of _Die Feen_, how determined Wagner was to write down to the comprehension of the Italian-opera public: he evidently has his eye on the singers and the audience rather than on the psychology of the characters or the atmosphere of the scene. But in the admirable duologue that follows between Luzio and Isabella, the touch is again that of the born musical dramatist. It is all irresistibly animated; the music is psychologically characteristic, the blend of passion and irresponsibility in Luzio being particularly well suggested; and there are some striking pieces of orchestral colour.
The court scene,--the mock trial in which Brighella, the viceroy's servant, poses as the judge--is carried through excellently, with an abundance of light Italian-opera humour; the roguishly knowing theme to which Brighella sings his passion for the pretty Dorella may be taken as typical--
[Music: No. 13.]
Dieses kleine Schelmenauge macht mich wahrlich ganz verwirrt.
There are one or two happy instances of the tentative employment of the leading-motive system. The theme representative of Friedrich and his law against love (No. 18 below), for example, is parodied in this way when Brighella begins to try Pontio--
[Music: No. 14.]
and when Friedrich enters and asks Brighella what has been going on, the latter replies apologetically and evasively to the accompaniment of the previous theme of the mock court, the orchestra, quite in the later Wagnerian manner, being more truthful than he--
[Music: No. 15.]
BRIGHELLA: Verzeiht, ich wollt' Euch Müh ersparen, ich hielt Gericht, fand Widerstand &c.
Isabella's aria of intercession to Friedrich is rather poor, but the subsequent excitement is cleverly worked up, and there is some dramatic characterisation in the commanding phrases that are given to the viceroy. The finale is excellent: it has amazing fire, is full of quick resource, and, like the finales in _Die Feen_, shows how much reserve Wagner had to draw upon when an extra effort was required.
In the opening scene of the second Act,--the garden of the prison in which Claudio is awaiting death--we have another employment of the leit-motive, the oboe giving out softly the theme to which Claudio had previously urged Luzio to implore the help of Isabella, but now with appropriately altered harmonies--
[Music: No. 16.]
The orchestral prelude to the scene is expressive, Wagner putting off his Italian mask for the moment and speaking in his natural voice: the sense of gloom and impending tragedy is very well conveyed--
[Music: No. 17.]
But the strains in which Claudio addresses Isabella are again conventional: it was not easy at this time for Wagner to find original accents for grief and passion. He is best all through in scenes of humour, of comedy, of raillery. There is a charming, sunny trio later between Luzio, Isabella and Dorella; the whole of this scene, in fact, is one of the happiest in the opera. Friedrich's soliloquy in his room has a good deal of strength in it, an impressive effect being made by the frequent recurrence in the orchestra of the motive that symbolises the sternness of the attitude he has taken up towards the people's pleasures--
[Music: No. 18.]
When he utters the words
"Doch als mir Isabella die Erdenliebe erschloss, Da schmolz das Eis in tausend Liebesthränen."
("But when Isabella revealed earthly love to me, the ice was melted into a thousand tears of love"), the orchestra completes his thought with a reminiscence of the theme of Isabella's enchantment of him in the court (see No. 7, from the overture)--
[Music: No. 19.]
O war Dein Herz denn stets verschlossen, drang Liebe nie in Deine Brust?
The finale to the second Act is as admirably animated as its predecessor; Luzio's carnival song, the dance, and the chorus have a truly southern warmth in them; and there is a lively quartet between Isabella, Dorella, Luzio and Brighella.
Altogether _Das Liebesverbot_, like _Die Feen_, is a work upon which Wagnerian criticism will always look with an affectionate eye. If it contains much that Wagner did right to decline to take seriously in later life, there is also much in it that is eloquent of the coming dramatist in music,--a surprising quickness of apprehension, a faculty for big picture-building, and above all an irresistible ardour. Like all Wagner's music of this time, the score anticipates many of the mannerisms of the later operas. It is unusually generous with the typical Wagnerian "turn"; at one point what must be a rather comic effect in performance is made by a series of these turns being executed in octaves by piccolo, flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, violins and 'cellos--
[Music: No. 20.]
The later Wagnerian method of accumulating excitement, which we have seen anticipated in _Die Feen_, is employed also in _Das Liebesverbot_, as in the following passage, which, like the one previously quoted, gives us a decided foretaste of the meeting of Tristan and Isolde--
[Music: No. 21.]
And if for nothing else _Das Liebesverbot_ would be interesting for its use of the leit-motive. There was virtually none of it in _Die Feen_.
III.--THE OPERAS OF THE SECOND PERIOD
_Rienzi_ will always be something of a puzzle to the student. Wagner's own accounts of it in later years show that he too was a little uncertain as to the reasons for its obvious defects. He had tired of his life among little theatrical people in minor provincial towns, so he deliberately planned _Rienzi_ on an elephantine scale in order that it might be impossible except in one of the larger opera houses. He had "grand opera" in his mind throughout, he tells us; he intended not merely to imitate the showiest works of this _genre_ but to surpass them in prodigality. Yet to suppose, he adds, that this was all that was in his mind would be to do him an injustice. He was "really inspired" by the subject, and especially by the character of Rienzi. First and foremost he had _Rienzi_ in view, grand opera being only a secondary consideration; yet grand opera was "only the spectacles through which he saw the subject." He always saw it, he goes on to say, on its own merits, and never aimed consciously at merely musical effects; yet he could never see the material except in terms of the merely musical effects,--the arias, choruses, finales, processions, and so on,--of grand opera. "Thus on the one hand I was always influenced by my subject in working out the details of the work, while on the other hand I governed my subject entirely in accordance with the 'grand opera' form that was in my mind." It is pretty evident that he found it as difficult to come to any settled conclusion with regard to _Rienzi_ as we do. There is truth in the view that many of the banalities of it are due to his having the Paris opera and the Paris public in view. But we have only to study the score in conjunction with those of _Die Feen_ and _Das Liebesverbot_ to see that many of these same banalities are the logical outcome of his cast of mind and his musical attainments at that epoch, and would certainly have appeared in his music even if the idea of Paris had never occurred to him.
To put it familiarly, the youthful Wagner had been obviously shaping for some years for a bad attack of musical measles; he had to get it out of his system, and _Rienzi_ was the illness that enabled him to do so. To me it is the least satisfactory of all his works--far less enjoyable than _Die Feen_ or _Das Liebesverbot_. One can forgive the eager young-mannishness of these very youthful works: but at twenty-six or twenty-seven one expects a composer to show more indubitable signs of originality. The commonplace of _Rienzi_ is different from that of the preceding operas; it is almost an offensive commonplace; the outlines of the objectionable phrases have all been thickened and the body of them puffed out till they positively irritate us by their grossness and fatuousness. It is astounding how few phrases there are in all these six hundred pages[399] that really seize upon us: we could easily count them all on the fingers of one hand. On its harmonic side the opera gives us a strange impression of pretentious poverty. All through _Rienzi_ Wagner's mind seems to be struggling to fight its way through vapour and murk to the light. His dramatic intentions are evident enough, but he can rarely realise them. It is in vain that he exploits all the formulas for dramatic expression as they were understood at that time--diminished sevenths for horror, syncopations for agitation, and all the rest of it; in vain that he languishes or threatens, warbles unctuously or declaims aggressively, lets loose his noisy orchestra and piles up massive choral effects; they all fail to move us because there is hardly ever any bite in the phrases themselves. The obvious faults of the work are due not so much to technical inexperience or limitations of vocabulary as to a sheer failure of the imagination; with the possible exception of Rienzi himself, not one of the characters has been seen with vividness enough to wring a really characteristic musical symbol out of the composer. No one lives except Rienzi; and he, as far as his music is concerned, is little more than half alive. Any critically-minded contemporary friend of Wagner's who happened to know all his work up to that time might have been pardoned for thinking, on the basis of _Rienzi_, that the composer was deteriorating, that on the whole his imagination had hardly grown at all during the past couple of years, and that none of the earlier defects of style had been corrected, while half a dozen new ones had been added--an intolerable prolixity, a tendency to rely on elephantine effects to the neglect of finely wrought detail, and to trust to stage mechanism to eke out the weaknesses of his musical invention. The only improvement on the earlier Wagner that the friend would have been able to observe in _Rienzi_ would be that in spite of all its absurdities and infelicities, its commonness and elephantiasis, there is a new strength in the work. It is a strength clumsily used; the youthful hobbledehoy's limbs have hardened without his acquiring much more command over them than he had before, the boyish voice has gained in volume without much improvement in quality: but the general signs of muscular growth are unmistakable. Crude as the overture is, no one can deny its rampant, horse-power vigour. But the final convincing proof that though Wagner's voice was abnormally energetic in _Rienzi_ his imagination was virtually at a standstill is the fact that the opera has no colour, no atmosphere of its own. Every other work of Wagner has. In _Die Feen_, as Mr. Runciman acutely points out, there is a strange new feeling for light; in the _Flying Dutchman_ we are always conscious of the sea, in _Tannhäuser_ of a world of sensuous heat set over against a world of moral coolness and rather anæmic aspiration, in _Lohengrin_ of the gleaming river and the tenuous air of Monsalvat. _Rienzi_ conveys no pictorial or atmospheric suggestions of any kind.
But the opera was only a _reculer pour mieux sauter_. He needed a text that should be more purely musical in its essence than this; and when he found it, in the _Flying Dutchman_--the idea of which came to him shortly after he had commenced work on _Rienzi_--his genius took its first decisive leap forward. For some years he had been strangely undecided as to a suitable subject for an opera. He had experimented, and was still to experiment, in several fields. In 1836 he had turned König's novel _Die hohe Braut_ into a libretto, making quite a good romantic opera in four acts out of it.[400] (It was afterwards set by Joseph Kittl, in 1853, under the title of _Bianca und Giuseppe, oder die Franzosen vor Nizza_.) In 1837 he made a comic opera out of a story in the _Arabian Nights_, entitling it _Die glückliche Bärenfamilie, oder Männerlist grösser als Frauenlist_ ("The Happy Bear Family, or Woman outwitted by Man"). This is a delightfully vivacious little libretto, which might well be set by some modern composer. Wagner wrote some fragments of the music for it, but quickly became disgusted with the style, and turned his back on the piece. In Paris in 1841 he made a preliminary prose sketch for a libretto on a gloomy and rather striking subject of Hoffmann's, _Die Bergwerke zu Falun_ ("The Mines of Falun"), which one is sorry he did not set to music, for it has colour and a certain individuality: he would probably have made more of it than he did of _Rienzi_. But perhaps he felt that the sombre vein he would have had to pursue in _Die Bergwerke zu Falun_ had been worked out to the full extent of which he was capable in the _Flying Dutchman_. In the same winter of 1842 he made a first sketch of _Die Sarazenin_ ("The Saracen Woman"), expanding it in Dresden two years later.[401]
It was after all a sound instinct, no doubt, that made him concentrate on the _Flying Dutchman_ and let the other schemes drop, for the _Flying Dutchman_ gave him just what _Rienzi_ did not--a concentrated dramatic theme, and one with a very individual atmosphere. Had his dramatic and musical technique been more advanced than they were at that time he would probably have condensed the story still further. He saw clearly enough that the whole essence of the legend--or at any rate the whole of the musical essence of it--lay in the Dutchman and Senta, and that all the rest was mere scaffolding or trimming. "I condensed the material into a single Act, being chiefly moved to do this by the subject itself, since in this way I could compress it into the simple dramatic interaction of the principal characters, and ignore the musical accessories that had now become repellent to me."[402] But his musical faculties, which developed with a strange slowness, were still lagging a good deal behind his dramatic perceptions; and the result is that to us to-day there seem to be a good many superfluous "musical accessories" in the _Flying Dutchman_, owing to the fact that Wagner has not been able to give real musical life to such characters as Daland and Erik. He himself has described for us very lucidly in _A Communication to My Friends_ the diverging impulses in him that gave the _Flying Dutchman_ its present only partly satisfactory form. He was wholly possessed by his subject, saw that it was necessary to allow it to dictate its own musical form and method of treatment, and honestly thought that he had let it do so; but the traditional operatic form was more potent within him than he imagined at the time. As in _Rienzi_, aria, duet, trio and the other established forms somehow "found their way into" the opera without his consciously willing them.
Still the structure of the _Flying Dutchman_ is a great advance on that of _Rienzi_: what was really happening was that the musician in Wagner was beginning to see that the whole drama must be _musical_ drama, the poet not being allowed to insert anything that was inconsistent with the spirit of music. He himself persisted in putting it the other way,--that the poet in him gradually took over the guidance of the musician. But we can see now that he misread his own evolution. The poet in him undoubtedly outgrew, bit by bit, the musical forms that had become stereotyped in the opera of the day; but the poet's growth only became possible when the musician, beginning to feel his own strength, gave the poet more and more imperative orders to shape his "stuff" in a form that would afford the musician the freest course. Wagner in later years insisted that after he had elaborated Senta's ballad in the second Act, he found that he had unconsciously hit upon the thematic kernel of the whole, and that this thematic idea then spread itself naturally over the whole drama like a network. That is not true if we take his words literally, for of course a good deal of the thematic material of the _Flying Dutchman_ has no affiliation with Senta's ballad. But in the broad sense, and with regard more to his intentions than his achievements, we can see that he was right. The whole drama really emanates from Senta; the Dutchman himself, as Mr. Runciman puts it, is merely Senta's opportunity personified; the remaining characters are only there to make the before and after of the central episode clear. With more experience and a surer technique he could have cut away more of the excrescences of the libretto and concentrated the action still further, making it yet more purely musical, as he did with _Tristan_. But for the day he did marvellously well. With the _Flying Dutchman_ was born the modern musical drama.
There is no mistaking the intensity and certainty of his vision now. He no longer describes his characters from the outside: they are within him, making their own language and using him as their unconscious instrument. The portrait painter and the pictorial artist in him are both coming to maturity. The Dutchman and Senta are both drawn completely in the round; we feel, for the first time with any of Wagner's characters, that we might meet them any day and that they would be solid to the touch. Even Daland and Erik, though not as real as the other two--for Wagner had not yet the art of breathing life into every one of his subordinate characters--have a certain substantiality. And roaring and whistling and surging round them all is the sea,--not so much the mere background of the drama as the element that has given it birth. Stylistically and technically the new work is leagues beyond _Rienzi_. There is still something of the old melodic mannerism--which, indeed, he was not to lose for many years yet--but in many of the melodies there is a new leap, a new swing, a new articulation; harmonically the work is richer; it often attains a rhythmic freedom beyond anything that Wagner had been capable of before; he is learning to concentrate his expression, and to beat out pregnant little figures that limn a character or depict a natural force once for all; there is a new psychological as well as a musical logic, binding the whole scheme together and working up from the beginning to the end in one steady crescendo. Wherever the score is tested, it shows something not to be met with hitherto either in Wagner's previous work or in that of his contemporaries. His imagination is at last unlocked.
After this he develops steadily and rapidly until a fresh check is given him, it being borne in upon him that neither his imagination nor his technique is equal to the creation of the new world that he feels stirring vaguely within him. But for a time all goes well. The _Flying Dutchman_ had been finished in the winter of 1841. _Tannhäuser_ was fully ready by April 1845, and _Lohengrin_ by March 1848--just after he had completed his thirty-fifth year. In these seven years he exhausted all the possibilities of the style he had made his own; after _Lohengrin_ he instinctively feels that he is at the end of the one path and the beginning of a new one, though where this is to lead him he has as yet no inkling. Both the later operas represent a gradual clarification and intensification of the style he had tentatively used in the _Flying Dutchman_. The breach with the older opera is even yet not complete; disguise the conventional features of it as he will, they are still recognisable; aria and duet and _ensemble_ are still there, though they merge almost imperceptibly into each other. But if _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ are in large part still the old opera, they are the old opera transfigured. The musical web spreads itself more and more broadly over the whole poetic material. Recitative virtually disappears; the text still retains a number of non-emotional moments for which no really lyrical equivalent can be found, but what would have been recitative naked and unashamed in _Rienzi_ is now almost fully-clothed song--the address of the Landgrave to the Knights in the Hall of Song scene is an excellent illustration. The choral writing attains an unaccustomed breadth and sonority, and at the same time the chorus becomes a more efficient psychological instrument. The harmonic tissue becomes fuller. The melodic line becomes more and more expressive and sensitive. The orchestration begins to give a distinctive colour to both personages and scenes. A very ardent and penetrating imagination, the imagination of the born dramatist, seeing all his characters as creatures of flesh and blood, is now playing upon the material offered to the musician by the poet. Each scene suggests by its colouring its own indoor or outdoor setting, the hour of the day, the time of the year; yet each opera as a whole has a different light and is set in a different atmosphere from the others. The Wagner of this period reaches the supreme height of his powers in _Lohengrin_; and as one watches that diaphanous and finely-spun melodic web unfold itself, one is almost tempted for the moment to regret that the dæmon within him drove him on so relentlessly to another style. No one, of course, can be anything but thankful that Wagner evolved the splendid symphonic-operatic style of the second half of his life--the most serviceable operatic instrument that any musician has yet hit upon. But the more purely lyrical style of _Lohengrin_ is so exquisitely satisfying in itself that one would have been grateful had he turned back to it for a moment in later days, when his melodic invention was in its fullest glory. The main burden of the expression, in the later work, shifts more and more to the side of the orchestra. In _Lohengrin_ the voice is still the statue and the orchestra the pedestal. The whole work is the product of that equipoise of all the faculties that is often observable in composers at the end of their second period, a serenity resting upon their music that it never wins again in the more troubled after-years, when the soul is more at war with itself, and the lips can hardly find language for the pregnant images that crowd to them.
But vast as the imaginative growth had been from _Rienzi_ to _Lohengrin_, it seems almost like a mere marking time in comparison with the subsequent development. Most instructive in this respect are the alterations Wagner made in his earlier works in later life. The _Flying Dutchman_ ends with the destruction of the Dutchman's ship as Senta leaps into the sea. The stage directions in the first edition run thus: "In the glow of the setting sun the glorified forms of the Dutchman and Senta are seen rising above the wreck, clasped in each other's arms, soaring heavenward"; and the final page of the opera in its original form consisted of the "Redemption" motive followed by the motive of the Dutchman, the opera ending with the latter. When Wagner revised the work some years later, he was conscious of the abruptness and inconclusiveness of this ending. His pictorial imagination saw the transfigured forms of Senta and the Dutchman more vividly, and the more luminous vision found expression in the great stroke of genius with which the opera as we now have it ends. The thundering theme of the Dutchman no longer has the last word; the fortissimo swell of the full orchestra suddenly breaks, and in a slower _tempo_ there steals out in the soft, pure tones of the wood-wind and harps the theme of "Redemption" in the form it first assumes in Senta's ballad, but with an unexpected heavenward ascent in the violins at the finish--
[Music: No. 22.]
The effect is precisely as if the clouds had parted, and the figures of the Dutchman and Senta were seen soaring aloft in their purified and transfigured form.[403]
As the first version of the _Faust_ Overture (1840) has not been published, it is impossible to compare it with the version we now have, which was made in 1855; but we may be certain that the comparison would prove as interesting as that between the earlier and the later versions of the _Flying Dutchman_ finale. But the new Venusberg music that he wrote for the Paris production of _Tannhäuser_ (1861) shows as emphatically as the altered _Flying Dutchman_ ending how immeasurably greater than all his development from _Die Feen_ to _Lohengrin_ was the development from _Lohengrin_ to _Tristan_--for it was in the _Tristan_ period that he made this wonderful addition to _Tannhäuser_, the effect of which is to make the remainder of the score seem almost cold in comparison, a pale moon against a fiery sun. Had Wagner died after _Lohengrin_ he would still have been the greatest operatic composer of his time. But the work of the later years is so stupendous in every respect, imaginative, inventive, and technical, that even _Lohengrin_ seems hardly to be the product of the same mind.
IV.--THE MATURE ARTIST
1
The years 1848 and 1849 saw the climax of a great crisis both in Wagner's life and his art; it had been developing for two or three years before, and its reverberations did not wholly die away for some years after. All his life and his work at this time were, as I have already said, simply a violent purgation of the spirit--a nightmare agony from which he woke with a cry of relief. He shakes off the theatre, and faces the world on a new footing as a man. And in silence, unknown to everybody and almost to himself, he develops into a new musician. For the moment his mind is a jumble of art, ethics, politics and sociology. But as usual his artistic instincts guide him surely in the end. After many gropings in this direction and that, he settles down to the _Ring_ drama, which he first of all plans, in 1848, in the form of a three-act opera with the title of _Siegfried's Death_. He falters a little even then, being obsessed by two other subjects, _Jesus of Nazareth_ and _Friedrich Barbarossa_; but finally he rejects them both, the greater adaptability of the Siegfried drama for music being intuitively evident to him. The next twenty-six years are to be taken up with the working out of this gigantic theme, with _Tristan_ and the _Meistersinger_ as a kind of diversion in the middle of it; then comes the quiet end with _Parsifal_. I do not propose to discuss the philosophical--or pseudo-philosophical--ideas of any of these works. It is only as a musician that Wagner will live, and to a musician the particular philosophy or philosophies that he preached in the _Ring_ and _Tristan_ and _Parsifal_ are matters of very small concern. Wagner himself was always inclined to over-estimate the importance of his own philosophising, and his vehement garrulity has betrayed both partisans and opponents into taking him too seriously as a thinker. Had he not left us his voluminous prose works and letters, indeed, we should never have suspected the hundredth part of the portentous meanings that he and his disciples read into his operatic libretti. To those who still see profound metaphysical revelations in the later works it may be well to point out that Wagner saw revelations equally inspired and inspiring in the earlier ones, which no one takes with excessive seriousness to-day on their dramatic side. The philosophising all smacks too much, for our taste, of the sentimental Germany of the mid-nineteenth century. For Wagner, Senta is "the quintessence of Woman [_das Weib überhaupt_], yet the still to-be-sought-for, the longed-for, the dreamed-of, the infinitely womanly Woman--let me out with it in one word: the _Woman of the Future_."[404] Tannhäuser was "the spirit of the whole Ghibelline race for every age, comprehended in a single, definite, infinitely moving form; but at the same time a human being right down to our own day, right into the heart of an artist full of life's longing."[405] "Lohengrin sought the woman who should have faith in him; who should not ask who he was and whence he came, but should love him as he was, and because he was what he appeared to himself to be. He sought the woman to whom he should not have to explain or justify himself, but who would _love_ him unconditionally. Therefore he had to conceal his higher nature, for only in the non-revealing of this higher--or more correctly heightened--essence could he find surety that he was not wondered at for this alone, or humbly worshipped as something incomprehensible,--whereas his longing was _not_ for wonder or adoration, but for the only thing that could redeem him from his loneliness and still his yearning--for _Love, for being loved, for being understood through Love_.... The character and the situation of this Lohengrin I now recognise with the clearest conviction as the _type of the only really tragic material, of the tragic element of our modern life_; of the same significance, indeed, for the _Present_ as was the _Antigone_, in another relation, for the life of the Greek state.... Elsa is the unconscious, the un-volitional, into which Lohengrin's conscious, volitional being yearns to be redeemed; but that yearning is itself the unconscious, un-volitional in Lohengrin, through which he feels himself akin in being to Elsa. Through the capacity of this 'unconscious consciousness' as I myself experienced it in common with Lohengrin, the nature of Woman ... became more and more intimately revealed to me ... that _true Womanhood_ that should bring to me and all the world redemption, after man's egoism, even in its noblest form, had voluntarily broken itself before her. Elsa, the Woman ... made me a full-fledged revolutionary. She was the spirit of the folk, for redemption by whom I too, as artist-man, was yearning."[406]
This seems all very remote from us now; one wonders how any one, even Wagner himself, could ever have taken these operatic puppets with such appalling seriousness. The _Ring_ stands a little nearer to us; but no longer can we follow Wagner in his philosophising even there. For Wagner Siegfried was "the human being in the most natural and gayest fulness of his physical manifestation.... It was Elsa who had taught me to discover this man: to me he was the male-embodied [_der männlich-verkörperte_] spirit of the eternal and only involuntarily creative force [_Geist der ewig und einzig zeugenden Unwillkür_], of the doer of true deeds, of Man in the fulness of his most native strength and his most undoubted love-worthiness."[407] We can hardly regard Siegfried in that light to-day. As we meet with him in the libretto he is, as Mr. Runciman says, rather an objectionable young person; we cannot quite reconcile ourselves to his ingratitude and his super-athletic fatuousness; he reminds us too much of Anatole France's description of the burly, bullet-headed general in _Les Dieux ont Soif_--the sparrow's brain in the ox's skull. As we see him on the stage he is, under the best conditions, slightly ridiculous, a sort of overgrown Boy Scout. It is only in his music that he is so magnificently alive, so sure of our sympathy. Sensible musicians, indeed, do not trouble very much in these days about the metaphysics or the esoteric implications of the Wagnerian dramas. Wotan must stand or fall by his own dramatic grandeur and by the quality of the music that is given to him to sing, not by the degree of success with which he illustrates a particular theory of the Will. _Tristan_ is none the better for all its Schopenhauerisms, natural or acquired; we may be thankful that it is none the worse for them.
Wagner's philosophical stock, indeed, was never a very large one. The "problems" of his operas are generally problems of his own personality and circumstances. His art, like his life, is all unconscious egoism. _His_ problems are always to be the world's problems, _his_ needs the world's needs. Women obsessed him in art as in life: they kindled fiery passion in man, or they "redeemed" him from passion, or they set a sorrow's crown of sorrows on his head by failing to redeem him. Passion, redemption, renunciation--these are the three dominant motives of Wagner's work; and wherever we look in that work we find himself. Indulgence--revulsion; hope--frustration; passion--renunciation; these are the antitheses that are constantly confronting us. In the _Flying Dutchman_, Vanderdecken-Wagner is redeemed by the woman who loves and trusts him unto death. Tannhäuser-Wagner fluctuates between the temptress and the saint. Lohengrin-Wagner seeks in vain the woman who shall love him unquestioningly. Wieland the Smith, the hero of a libretto he sketched in 1849, is again Wagner, lamed by life, but healed at last by another "redeeming" woman. Wotan-Wagner, finding the world going another way than his, wills his own destruction and that of the world. Tristan-Wagner finds love insatiable, and death the only end of all our loving. Sachs-Wagner renounces love. Parsifal-Wagner finds salvation in flight from sensual love. Always there is this oscillation between desire and the slaying of desire, between hope for the world and despair for the world. In 1848, in an hour of physical and mental joy in life, he conceives a blithe and exuberant Siegfried, the super-man of the future, striding joyously and victoriously through life. But the revulsion comes almost in a moment. He realises his solitariness as man and artist. "I was irresistibly driven to write something that should communicate this grievous consciousness of mine in an intelligible form to the life of the present. Just as with my _Siegfried_ the strength of my yearning had borne me to the primal fount of the eternal purely-human; so now, when I found this yearning could never be stilled by modern life, and realised once again that redemption was to be had only in flight from this life, in escaping from its claims upon me by self-destruction, I came to the primal fount of every modern rendering of this situation--to the Man _Jesus of Nazareth_." Like Jesus, confronted with the materialism of the world, he longs for death, and reads a similar longing into all humanity.
So the oscillation goes on to the very end of his days. There is no need, no reason, to discuss the "philosophy" of such a mind. He is no philosopher: he is simply a tortured human soul and a magnificent musical instrument. All that concerns us to-day is the quality of the music that was wrung from the instrument under the torture.
2
The most astounding fact in all Wagner's career was probably the writing of _Siegfried's Death_ in 1848. That drama is practically identical with the present _Götterdämmerung_; and we can only stand amazed at the audacity of the conception, the imaginative power the work displays, the artistic growth it reveals since _Lohengrin_ was written, and the total breach it indicates with the whole of the operatic art of his time. But _Siegfried's Death_ was impossible in the idiom of _Lohengrin_; and Wagner must have known this intuitively. This is no doubt the real reason for his writing no music for six years, from the completion of _Lohengrin_ in August 1847 to the commencement of work on the _Rhinegold_ at the end of 1853. His artistic instincts always led him infallibly, no matter what confusion might reign in the rest of his thinking. He conceives the idea of the _Meistersinger_, for instance, in 1845, just after finishing _Tannhäuser_. But a wise and kindly fate intervenes and turns him aside from the project. He was not ripe for the _Meistersinger_, either poetically or musically, as we can see not only by a comparison of his later musical style with that of _Tannhäuser_, but by comparing the sketch of the drama that he wrote in 1845 with the revised drafts of 1861. It was his original intention, again, to introduce Parsifal into the third Act of _Tristan_; but his purely artistic instincts were too sound to permit him to adhere to that plan. How unripe he was in 1848 for a setting of _Siegfried's Death_ hardly needs demonstration now. The swift and infallibly telling strokes with which he has drawn Hagen and Gutrune in the _Götterdämmerung_, for example, were utterly beyond him then; it took twenty years' evolution before he could attain to that luminousness and penetration of vision, that rapidity and certainty of touch. So much, again, of the tragic atmosphere in which the _Götterdämmerung_ is enveloped comes from the subtle harmonic idiom that Wagner had evolved by that time, that it is hard to imagine the extent of his probable failure had he persisted in setting the text to music in 1848. The lyrical style of _Lohengrin_, the leisurely spun tissue of that lovely work, were neither drastic enough, close enough, nor elastic enough for _Siegfried's Death_. And of this he must have had a dim consciousness.
So he puts the musical part of his task on one side for six years, broods continually over the subject, finds it growing within him, and at last shapes it into not one opera but four. When he begins work upon the music of the _Rhinegold_ he is a new being. His imagination has developed to an extent that is without a parallel in the case of any other musician. The characters and the _milieu_ of the _Rhinegold_ are themselves evidence of the audacious sweep of his vision: he undertakes to re-create in music gods and men and giants, creatures of the waters and creatures of the bowels of the earth; the music has to flood the scene now with water, now with fire, with the murky vapours of the underworld and the serene air of the heights over against Valhalla. Never before had any composer dreamed of an opera so rich in all varieties of emotion, of action, of atmosphere. The practice he had in the _Rhinegold_ developed his powers still further: in the _Valkyrie_ the painting grows surer and surer, the imagination sweeps on to conceptions beyond anything that any musician before him would have thought possible: in _Siegfried_ there is an absolute exultation of style; the music seems to dance and cry aloud out of pure joy in its own strength and beauty. His melody has already become terser and more suggestive in the _Rhinegold_, and has lost much of its earlier rhythmic formality. His harmonic range, while narrow enough compared with that of _Tristan_ and the _Götterdämmerung_, has yet developed greatly. He dares anything in pursuit of his ideal of finding in his music the full and perfect counterpart of the characters and the scenes; that endless E flat chord at the commencement of the _Rhinegold_ prelude is an innovation the audacity of which we can hardly estimate to-day.
It has been objected that the melody of the _Rhinegold_ is on the miniature side, and that the score has little of the grand surge and sweep of the later operas. It may be so, but the style of the music seems admirably suited to the broad and simple outlines of this drama and the relatively simple psychology of the beings who take part in it,--beings who are now taking only the first step along the path that is to lead them all into such tragic complications. But in any case Wagner was obeying a sound instinct when he abandoned the broader style of _Lohengrin_ in favour of the seemingly shorter-breathed style of the _Rhinegold_. It was the consequence of his intuition that his new dramatic ideas demanded a new musical form; we have to remember that everything he says on this topic in _Opera and Drama_ is the outcome of his reflection upon _Siegfried's Death_ and the best manner of its setting. The older forms of opera being inapplicable here, he had to devise a new method of unifying his vast design. He found the solution of his problem in an application to opera of the symphonic web-weaving of Beethoven; but for this he needed short and extremely plastic motives. That as yet he cannot weave these motives, and the episodical matter between them, into so continuous a tissue as that of the later works is only natural; to expect him to have done so would be as unreasonable as to expect the texture of Beethoven's second symphony to be as closely woven as that of his fifth. But Wagner knew he had a wonderful new instrument in his grasp, and he did well to learn the full use of it by cautious practice.
3
The leit-motive, of course, is not Wagner's invention. Other operatic composers had tentatively handled the device before him; and in his own day Schumann had seen the possibilities of such a method being applied to the song. In his _Frühlingsfahrt_, for example, the joyous major melody that accompanies the bright youths on their first setting out in life changes to the clouded minor as the poet tells of the ruin that came upon one of them; and everyone knows the sadly expressive effect of the winding up of the _Woman's Life and Love_ cycle with a reminiscence of the melody of the opening song. The device of reminiscence in poetic or dramatic music is indeed so obviously a natural one that we can only wonder that the pre-Wagnerian composers did not make more use of it. But Wagner did more than employ it as a sort of index or label; he turned it into the seminal principle of musical form for perhaps three-fourths of the music of our time. He made it not merely a dramatic but a symphonic-dramatic instrument. He had experimented with the device from his youth, but until now without perceiving its symphonic possibilities. We have seen him carrying forward a significant theme from one scene to another in _Das Liebesverbot_. In _Rienzi_ there is very little real use of the leit-motive. He will adopt a characteristic orchestral figure for a person or a situation at the commencement of a scene or "number," and play with it all through that particular set piece; but it is very rarely that he will remind us of a previous situation by importing the theme that symbolises it into a later situation. He does this, for example, with the "Oath" motive, which first accompanies Rienzi's story of his own vow to avenge his murdered brother (vocal score, pp. 77, 78), and is afterwards employed to accompany Colonna's threat of vengeance if Rienzi dooms him and his fellow conspirators to death (p. 266), Rienzi's rejection of Adriano's plea for mercy (p. 337), and finally Adriano's own resolve to be avenged upon Rienzi (p. 416). In the _Flying Dutchman_ the tissue is largely unified by typical themes, which, however, are as a rule merely repeated without substantial modification, though now and then a motive is melodically transformed to suggest a psychological variation, as when the "Redemption" theme from Senta's ballad--
[Music: No. 23.]
afterwards becomes the motive of "Love unto death"--
[Music: No. 24.]
In _Tannhäuser_ there is a good deal of recurrent material--the Bacchanale and the Pilgrims' Chorus, for instance--but the leit-motive can hardly be said to be used at all in the later sense. _Lohengrin_ is strewn with leit-motives that are marvels of characterisation; but here too they recur in their original form time after time. For the most part they merely label the character: they do not change as he changes, nor do they spread themselves over the score with the persistence of the motives of the later works.
4
The leit-motive in the _Ring_ is quite another matter. Most of the motives in the earlier operas were vocal in origin, and their relatively great length--which makes them as a rule unsuitable for a flexible symphonic treatment--is the direct consequence of the length of Wagner's poetic lines at that time. In _Rienzi_, for example, the motive of Rienzi's prayer, the "Sancto spirito cavaliere" motive, the "Freedom" motive, the motive of the "Messengers of Peace," and others, are all of this type. In the _Flying Dutchman_ the motive of "Longing for death," the two "Redemption" motives, the "Daland" motive, the "Festivity" motive, the "Rejoicing" motive, the "Longing for redemption" motive, and several others, are all vocal melodies in the first place; of the same kind are the motives of "Repentance," of "Love's magic," of "Love's renunciation" and others in _Tannhäuser_; and in _Lohengrin_, the "Grail" motive, the "Farewell" motive, the "Elsa's prayer" motive, the "Knight of the Grail" motive, the "Warning" motive, the "Doubt" motive, and others. All of these are fully developed, self-existent melodies, not germ-figures destined for the weaving of a quasi-symphonic web. And though some of the less important motives in the early operas are short, they were not made so with any intention of using them plastically. The first things that strike us in connection with the motives of the _Ring_ are their general shortness, their very plastic nature, and the sense they convey of not having been conceived primarily in a vocal form. It is true that some of them _are_ vocal in origin, but that fact does not stare us so aggressively in the face as it does in the previous works; while the lines of the _Ring_ are themselves so short that even when a phrase is modelled on one or two of them it never spreads itself out so extensively as the typical phrases of the _Flying Dutchman_, _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ do. This at first sight seems to imply that the poetic form of the _Ring_ exercised a powerful influence on the musical form. It is permissible for us to-day to invert that proposition. Wagner, writing in 1851, maintained that he had discarded the older form of verse, with its long lines and its terminal rhymes, because of his conviction that this was too conventional a garment to throw over the sturdy limbs of Siegfried, the untutored child of nature, and that he was therefore led to adapt the _Stabreim_ of the Folk. Consistently with the theory I have already advanced in these pages, I prefer to believe--guided, as of course Wagner himself could not be guided at that time, by the evidence of the function the music performs in his later works--that the new orchestral musician that was coming to birth within him felt the necessity of shorter and more plastic germ-themes, and instinctively urged the poet to cast _his_ material into a form that would place no obstacle in the musician's way. But explain it as we will, the fact remains that now he is coming to maturity his leit-motives are on the whole both more concentrated and more purely instrumental than they had been hitherto; as I have said, even when they come to us in the first place from the mouths of the characters, they assume quite naturally the quality of instrumental themes in the subsequent course of the opera, whereas a purely orchestral rendering of the themes of _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ can never disguise their vocal origin. It is comparatively rarely that the _Ring_ motives extend beyond two bars, or at the most three. The "Servitude" motive is virtually only one bar in length; so are the "Rhine Maidens' song," the "Smithing" motive, and the "Reflection" motive; the "Waves" motive, the "Ring" motive, the "Valhalla" motive, the "Might of youth " motive, the "Twilight" motive, the "Norns" motive, the "Dusk of the gods" motive, are all comprised within a couple of bars; several others run to three bars, and only one or two run to four.
In this respect, as in some others, the _Meistersinger_ stands in a class apart from the other works of Wagner's maturity. It is the most purely vocal of all his later works, in the sense that while the orchestral tissue is superbly full and unceasing in its flow, the voice parts have an independence that is rare in the later Wagner. The style is in a way almost a reversion to that of _Lohengrin_, allowance being made, of course, for the more symphonic nature of the orchestral portion, and the more continuous nature of the whole. The _Meistersinger_ is full of "set" pieces--arias, duets, trios, a quintet, choruses, _ensembles_, and so on. The necessity for all these lay in the nature of the subject; and Wagner, at that time at the very height of his powers, has so cunningly mortised all the components of the opera that not a join is observable anywhere. A superficial glance at a table of the _Meistersinger_ motives would be enough to convince us, without any knowledge of the opera, that a great many of the themes have had a vocal origin, either solo or choral. Others owe their length to the fact that Wagner is painting masses rather than individuals; only a fairly extended theme could depict, for instance, the sturdy, pompous old Meistersingers and their stately processions. Where he is not following a vocal line or painting with broad sweeps of the brush, and is free to invent motives for purely orchestral use, he generally throws them into the same concise form as those of the _Ring_--the "Wooing" motive, for example--
[Music: No. 25.]
which, by reason of its brevity, is one of the most plastic motives in the score. But as a whole the _Meistersinger_ lives in a different world from the _Ring_ or _Tristan_. There is no great fateful principle running through it, that can be symbolised in a short orchestral figure and flashed across the picture at any desired moment, after the manner of the "Curse" or the "Hagen" motive in the _Ring_, or the "Death" motive in _Tristan_. The people in the _Meistersinger_ carry hardly any shadows about with them. Their natures are mostly ingenuous, transparent, unsubtle: such as we see them on the stage at any given moment, such are they to themselves and others in every hour of their lives. It was natural then that they should take upon themselves more of the burden of the drama than the characters of the _Ring_ as a whole,--for these are only instruments in the hand of a fate that is best symbolised by the ever-present orchestra--and that the instrumental voices should co-operate joyously with them, rather than dog them and lie in wait for them, as in the _Ring_, with symbols of reminiscence and foreboding. That the whole essence of the _Meistersinger_ lies in its simple human characterisation and simple story-telling is shown again by Wagner's reverting in the Prelude to the _pot-pourri_ feuilleton form of the _Tannhäuser_ overture,--a form he never used again after 1845, except here.
5
As he proceeds with the _Ring_ his leit-motives in general become more and more concentrated. Now and then he will employ a fairly extended theme, but never without a good psychological reason. One of the longest motives in the whole tetralogy is that of the "Volsung race." Its length is justified by the duty it has to perform: to concentrate the nobility and the suffering of that race into a chord or two would be beyond the powers of any musician; none but Wagner, indeed, could have expressed such an infinity of elevated grief within the compass of seven or eight bars. Some of the other motives are astounding in their brevity and eloquence. Not till after his work on the _Rhinegold_ had unsealed his imagination and perfected his technique could he have hoped to hit off the wild, half-animal energy of the Valkyries in some four or five notes that are merely the expansion of a single chord, or have dared to trust to what is virtually only a series of syncopations to symbolise Alberich's work of destruction (the _Vernichtungsarbeit_ motive). Never before could he have written anything so eloquent of death as the "Announcement of death" motive in the _Valkyrie_. In _Siegfried_, though the number of new motives is comparatively small, the same process of concentration is observable. The god-like nature and the stately gait of the Wanderer are suggested to us in three or four notes. And in the _Götterdämmerung_ the concentration is amazing. In that stupendous work he is, in my opinion, at the very summit of his powers. He never wastes a note now: every new stroke he deals is incredibly swift, direct and telling. Absolutely sure of himself, he dispenses with a prelude--for the few bars of orchestral writing before the voices enter can hardly be called one--and trusts to the colour of a mere couple of chords to tune the audience's imagination to the atmosphere of the opening scene. One short characteristic figure suffices for the motive of Hagen, and nowhere in the whole of Wagner's or anyone else's work is a figure of two notes used so multifariously and with such far-reaching suggestion. It is evident that he now feels the harmonic instrument to be the most serviceable and flexible of all; and hundreds of his most overpowering effects in the _Götterdämmerung_ are achieved by harmonic invention or harmonic transformation. The grisliness of the Hagen theme comes in large part--putting aside the question of orchestral colour--from the sort of dour, irreconcilable element it seems to introduce into certain chords,--though in reality the harmony has nothing essentially far-fetched in it--as in that tremendous passage near the end of the first Act of the _Götterdämmerung_--
[Music: No. 26.]
Hagen!
The new themes, too, rely for a great deal of their poignancy upon some subtle and fleeting taste of sweetness or some swift suggestion of darkness and mystery in the harmony, as in the exquisite motive that is associated with the wedding of Gutrune--
[Music: No. 27.]
or in the motive of "Magic deceit"--
[Music: No. 28.]
while others make their effect by means of the utmost concentration of melodic meaning, like the "Blood-brotherhood" motive, or by an epigrammatic condensation of rhythm, like the "Oath of fidelity" motive, which only Wagner could have invented, and which no other composer but Beethoven would have dared to use if it had been offered to him--
[Music: No. 29.]
_Bruckmann_ [Illustration: RICHARD WAGNER. From the painting by H. Herkomer at Bayreuth.]
It is on harmonic alteration that he chiefly relies again, in the latter stages of the _Ring_, to suggest the fateful gloom that is gradually closing in upon the drama; much of the tense and tragic atmosphere of the _Götterdämmerung_ comes from this clouding of the simpler texture of the motives of the earlier operas. One of the most remarkable instances of this is his treatment of the "Servitude" motive, that is generally associated with Alberich. In the _Rhinegold_ it appears in a variety of simple forms, such as this--
[Music: No. 30.]
and this--
[Music: No. 31.]
In the _Götterdämmerung_ a sense of almost intolerable strain, of a great tragedy sweeping to its inevitable end, is conveyed by various subtilisations of the harmony, of which the following may stand as a type--
[Music: No. 32.]
When Siegfried appears on Brynhilde's rock, disguised as Gunther, the theme of the latter is metamorphosed from--
[Music: No. 33.]
into--
[Music: No. 34.]
Here everything is exquisitely calculated,--the harmonic alteration, the orchestral colouring (the soft mysterious tones of trumpet and trombones), the interrupted ending, and the long fateful silence that follows.
When Alberich, in his colloquy with Hagen at the commencement of the second Act of the _Götterdämmerung_, looks forward to the approaching destruction of the gods, the "Valhalla" motive becomes altered from the familiar--
[Music: No. 35.]
to--
[Music: No. 36.]
Many other illustrations might be given of this harmonic intensification of themes.
6
It has to be admitted, however, that Wagner's use of the leit-motive presents some singularities, and is at times open to criticism. He undoubtedly introduces the motives more frequently than they are really needed; there is no necessity, for example, for the "Siegfried's horn" motive to be sounded at almost every appearance of Siegfried or every mention of his name. Debussy has made merry over this superfluity of reference, comparing it to a lunatic presenting his card to you in person. But we can easily forgive Wagner this little excess of zeal. He was doing something absolutely new for his time. He had a gigantic mass of material to unify, and this incessant recurrence of significant themes seemed to him the only way to do it. He could not foresee how familiar the operas and their motives would be to the whole musical world half a century later. In any case this peculiarity of his style can be passed over with a mere mention. Of more importance is his habit of making many of the motives so much alike that a certain amount of confusion is set up even in the minds of those who know the operas well. The "Servitude" motive, for example, is so like the opening of the Rhine Maidens' song that everyone goes astray over the two themes now and then in the first stages of his acquaintance with the _Ring_. Still more confusing is his habit of taking a motive that at first has only a particular meaning, and making it express a general concept, the result being that we frequently associate it with the wrong character. His mind was curiously like Bach's in this respect, that having fixed upon a figure that seemed to him an adequate symbol for an action, a person, an animal, or a material object, he would use it for all future phenomena of the same kind. But Bach's procedure is rather more logical, for his typical themes have as a rule a pictorial or semi-pictorial character, and so they can be applied without incongruity to a number of pictures of the same general order. A phrase that symbolises waves, for example, in one work may be legitimately employed to symbolise waves in another, for the theme itself is so constructed as to suggest the motion of waves: at least that is the intention. But Wagner necessarily has to find musical symbols for all kinds of things in his operas for which it is quite impossible to discover an unmistakable, self-explanatory musical equivalent. The symbol has therefore to be an arbitrary one; it has no claim to pictorial veracity, but we agree to accept it because it fulfils a useful musical purpose. The "Fire" motive conveys a real suggestion of fire; the _Rhinegold_ prelude has certain qualities that make us willing to associate it with a mighty rolling river. But the "Ring" motive does not convey the slightest suggestion of a ring, nor has the "Gold" motive any resemblance to gold.
Wagner runs, then, a risk of being misunderstood, or not understood at all, when he takes an arbitrary symbol which we are willing to concede him in one case, and applies it to another. It would tax all the ingenuity of the thorough-going Wagnerian to justify, for instance, in the scene of the Norns in the _Götterdämmerung_, the employment of the "Sleep" motive that is inevitably associated in our minds with Wotan's parting from Brynhilde at the end of the _Valkyrie_. When Brynhilde is taking leave of Siegfried, in the second scene of the _Götterdämmerung_, and giving him Grane as a perpetual reminder of herself, the orchestra accompanies his words with the "Love" motive from the duet between Siegmund and Sieglinde in the first act of the _Valkyrie_. So profound has been the impression we have received from it there that it is impossible for us to associate it with any other pair of lovers; and we cannot help wondering what Siegmund and Sieglinde have to do with Siegfried and Brynhilde and Grane. When Hagen describes the coming of Siegfried down the Rhine, it is quite right that the orchestra should give out the typical Siegfried theme, but quite wrong, surely, that this theme should be combined with that of the Rhine Maidens from the _Rhinegold_. The intention presumably is that from the Rhine Maidens we are to infer the Rhine;[408] but the musical intelligence does not like having to diverge into deductive reasoning of this kind. Anyone who has learnt to associate the theme with the Rhine Maidens will naturally suppose either that they are to appear in person or that some allusion is to be made to them, neither of which things happens. The "Treaty" motive of the _Rhinegold_, again, has become so firmly associated in our minds with the agreement between Wotan and the giants that we involuntarily think of them when we hear it again in the orchestra during the swearing of Blood-brotherhood by Siegfried and Gunther (_Götterdämmerung_, vocal score, p. 92).
One of the most curious uses of the leit-motive is to be found in _Siegfried_ (V. S. p. 35). Siegfried, pouring contempt on the idea that Mime can be his father, is telling him how he once saw the reflection of his own face in the brook:
Unlike unto thee there did I seem: as like as a toad to a glittering fish.
There is excellent reason for accompanying the third line with the "Smithing" motive that so often characterises Mime; but what reason can there be for accompanying the fourth line with the "Waves" motive from the prelude to the _Rhinegold_? As it is not in the Rhine but in a brook that Siegmund has seen his reflection, the motive here can only be taken as symbolising not the waves of a particular and already familiar river--a procedure for which there might be some excuse--but waves in general, which is quite illegitimate. Wagner goes too far, as Bach used to go too far, in importing into the line a pictorial allusion that is not already there, and that we can only put there by an effort. For Bach also was in the habit of making his music argue, as it were, from one external fact to another. We can permit this within certain limits, but both Bach and Wagner sometimes go beyond all limits. When Bach has to set to music a stanza in which the faithful are spoken of as Christ's sheep (_Beglückte Herde, Jesu Schafe_, in the cantata _Du Hirte Israel_) he obviously aims at creating a pastoral atmosphere by the use of the oboes; and our imagination here is quite willing to accept the naïf translation of the religious idea into a pictorial image. But when Bach, possessed by the image of Jesus calling His disciples to be fishers of men (in the cantata _Siehe, ich will viel Fischer aussenden_), makes use of a motive of a type that he always employs to symbolise waves, we can only say, with all respect, that we had rather he did not ask us to deduce the necessity of waves from the fact that there are fish. So with this passage from _Siegfried_: we should be quite satisfied with the mere comparison between the toad and the fish; to lay it down with such portentous gravity that where there are fish there must necessarily be water is to reduce pictorialism to an absurdity.
There is no lack of examples of this process of illegitimate inference and illegitimate association. After Mime has answered the first of the Wanderer's three questions, the latter congratulates him in this wise (_Siegfried_, vocal score, p. 74):
Right well the name of the race dost thou know: sly, thou rascal, thou seemest!
--to the same phrase that is often used in the _Rhinegold_ to suggest the trickiness of Loge in particular, but also, apparently, to suggest deceit in general. It accompanies, for example, Fafner's remark to Fasolt, _à propos_ of the attempt of Wotan to evade the promised payment for Valhalla--
My trusty brother, seest thou, fool, his deceit?
(V. S. 89, 90); and again the words in which Wotan tries to calm the apprehensions of Fricka--
Where simple strength serves, of none ask I assistance: but to force the hate of foes to help me, needs such craft and deceit as Loge the artful employs.
(V. S. 82, 83). That is to say, a purely arbitrary musical figure is to be taken as symbolising not merely the slyness of a particular person, but slyness in the abstract--a length to which we must decline to go with Wagner.
And as with his waves and his moral qualities, so with his animals; they too are both particular and universal. When Alberich, at the urging of Loge, turns himself into a serpent (_Rhinegold_, p. 182), it is to the accompaniment of a motive that is itself admirably pictorial. But in _Siegfried_, (p. 7, etc.), and the _Götterdämmerung_ (p. 34, etc.), the same motive is always used to characterise Fafner, after he has turned himself into a dragon. One need not enlarge upon the confusion this is bound to create.
We are willing again, to accept the "Swan" motive in _Lohengrin_ as a purely conventional symbol; but the same motive strikes rather oddly on our ears when it is used to particularise the swan in _Parsifal_. If in _Lohengrin_ it typifies that particular swan, it is obviously not right to employ it for a totally different bird in another opera; for there is nothing in the outline of the theme that can be said to bear the remotest resemblance to a swan in the way that an arpeggio theme may be said to resemble waves, or a crepitating theme to suggest fire. Again, Wagner only confuses us when he uses the motive that accompanies Kundry's ride in the first scene of _Parsifal_ to accompany Parsifal's description of the horsemen he had once seen in the wood:
And once upon the fringe of the wood, on glorious creatures mounted, men all glittering went by me; fain had I been like them: with laughter they swept on their way. And then I ran, but never again I saw them; through deserts wide I wandered, o'er hill and dale; oft fell the night, then followed day: etc.
(vocal score, p. 54); afterwards to accompany Kundry's account of the death of Herzeleide:
As I rode by I saw her dying, and, Fool, she sent thee her greeting;
(V. S. p. 57); after that, again, to accompany Kundry as she hastens to the spring in the wood to get water for the fainting Parsifal (V. S. p. 58); after that to describe the rush of Klingsor's warriors to the ramparts (V. S. p. 120); after that to accompany the thronging of the Flower Maidens to the scene (V. S. p. 156); again to give point to Parsifal's words:
And I, the fool, the coward, to deeds of boyish wildness hither fled--
(V. S. p. 203); and to accompany--for what reason it is difficult to say--Kundry's threat that she will call the spear against Parsifal if he continues to repulse her (V. S. p. 222); and finally, as an accompaniment to her last words to Parsifal:
For fleddest thou from here, and foundest all the ways of the world, the one that thou seek'st, that path thy foot shall find never;
(V. S. p. 225). No ingenuity can justify the employment of the same motive for so many different purposes. As a matter of fact, after we have once become conscious of it as accompanying Kundry's ride in the first scene of the opera, it is inevitable that we should associate it with her at each subsequent recurrence of it.
Another peculiarity of Wagner's use of the leit-motive may be noted; once or twice he gives a meaning to a theme in the later stages of the _Ring_ that we cannot be sure of it possessing at first. The most striking instance of this is the "Reflection" motive. In _Siegfried_ it is exclusively employed in connection with Mime, and the manner of its employment leaves no room for doubt that the commentators are right in giving it this title. The prelude to _Siegfried_ commences with it; it is used there to suggest to us Mime pondering over the problem of the forging of the sword. It frequently recurs with the same significance in the scene that follows. It is used again all through the scene of questions and answers between the Wanderer and Mime, to suggest the dwarf putting his considering cap on after or during each of the Wanderer's posers. Yet on its first appearance in the _Rhinegold_ (vocal score, p. 151) there is nothing whatever to indicate that the theme is to be taken as symbolical of reflection. It accompanies Mime's plaint to Wotan and Loge--
What help for me? I must obey the commands of my brother, who holds me bondsman to him.
* * * * *
By evil craft fashioned Alberich from the ravished Rhinegold a yellow ring: etc.
(Vocal score, p. 151.) From the words one would be _a priori_ inclined to associate the music with Alberich rather than with Mime; and as it is not employed again in the _Rhinegold_, the meaning we are suddenly asked to attach to it at the opening of _Siegfried_ seems a little far-fetched.
7
Wagner was not long in realising that however thrilling the timbre of the human voice may be, and useful as it is for making clear the course of the action and the sentiments of the characters, the orchestra is the most powerful and most resourceful of all the instruments at the disposal of the operatic composer. More and more the main current of his thinking goes into this. In the _Rhinegold_ the orchestral texture is by no means continuous; frequently it merely punctuates or supports the vocal declamation by means of a detached chord or two, much in the way that it used to sustain the older recitative. As the _Ring_ proceeds, pages of this kind become rarer: the orchestra thrusts itself more and more to the centre of the picture. It would be impossible to make the tissue of the _Rhinegold_ intelligible without the voices: but the orchestral part of the _Götterdämmerung_ would flow on with hardly a break if the vocal part were omitted; so also would large sections of _Tristan_ and the _Meistersinger_. It was inevitable that under these circumstances the vocal writing should occasionally become a little perfunctory. It is frequently said that the balance between the vocal and orchestral parts is most perfectly maintained in _Tristan_; but the most cursory examination of the score shows that even there Wagner could not always find, or would not take the trouble to find, a vocal line of equal melodic interest with that of the orchestra, in the opening scene, for instance, it is transparently clear that the really expressive voice is the orchestra, and that the vocal parts have been inserted, sometimes rather carelessly and unskilfully, after the orchestral tissue has been completed. The vocal writing in _Tristan_ falls into four main categories. The first is that to which I have already referred; wholly absorbed in the orchestral working out of a theme, Wagner seems to pay the minimum of attention to the vocal line, which sometimes has as little real relevance to the music as a whole as if it had been added by another person. As a specimen of this kind of writing we may cite the music to the words of Brangaene at the commencement of the opera--
Bluish strips are stretching along the west; swiftly the ship sails to the shore: if restful the sea by eve we shall readily set foot on land.
(Vocal score, pp. 7, 8.)
To the second category belong passages in which the voice is frankly in the forefront of the picture and the orchestra is merely a background--as in the colloquy between Tristan and Brangaene (vocal score, pp. 18 ff.), or in the music to Isolde's words shortly after the beginning of the second Act--
BRANGAENE. I still hear the sound of horns. ISOLDE. No sound of horns were so sweet; yon fountain's soft murmuring current moves so quietly hence; if horns yet brayed how could I hear that?
(Vocal score, pp. 90, 91.)
To the third category belong the passages in which the voice simply sings the same melody as the orchestra, as on p. 177 of the vocal score ("Thy kingdom thou art showing," etc.); and to the fourth, those in which it sings a real counterpoint to the orchestra--not a mere piece of padding like the passage I have cited from pp. 7, 8 of the score, but a vocal line of genuine melodic interest--as in a good deal of the scene of the third Act through which there runs the melancholy cor anglais melody.
_Tristan_, in fact, in spite of the splendour of its orchestral polyphony, by no means exhibits Wagner's symphonic powers in their full evolution. The most wonderful of his works in this respect is the _Götterdämmerung_, the stupendous strength of which is beyond words and almost beyond belief. The world had not seen a musical brain working at such tremendous and long-sustained pressure since the days when the B minor Mass and the "Matthew Passion" were written; and even those masterpieces have not the continuity of texture of the _Götterdämmerung_, nor do they show so giant a hand at its work of unification. Turn almost where you will, the course of the drama is told with absolute clearness in the orchestra itself. Yet in spite of his concentrating so largely on the orchestra, the vocal parts have an extraordinary aptness; it would be hard to find a passage in the score as perfunctory as some that might be quoted from _Tristan_. The voice, it is true, is often used simply as another counterpoint among those of the orchestra; but as a counterpoint it generally has a dramatic appositeness and a melodic beauty of its own.
In _Parsifal_ this tendency to make the orchestra the principal dramatic speaker goes so far that very frequently the vocal writing is thoroughly bad. Some writers have attributed this to a decline of mental power in Wagner's old age. I do not think that this is the correct explanation. I can see no general decadence of musical invention in the music of _Parsifal_: I am willing to believe that the peculiar emotional and intellectual world of the opera makes no appeal to many people; but the style as a whole is as admirably suited to that world as the styles of _Tristan_ and the _Meistersinger_ are to their respective subjects, and I for one see no failure of inspiration except in some of the choral writing in the first Act, where there is occasionally an undeniable touch of commonplace. Part of the admitted colourlessness of some of the vocal passages is to be accounted for, I think, by the utterly unmusical quality of the words. The defect is not in Wagner the musician but in Wagner the poet, who has forgotten for the moment several of the principles he had laid down in his prose works and put into successful practice in the six great operas of his prime. The text of _Parsifal_ contains a large amount of quite unmusical matter, especially at the commencement. Many of the lines have evidently not roused the slightest interest in the composer. He knew that the orchestral part was alive, and always developing the emotional possibilities of the situation; and when he comes to an obviously impossible verbal patch,--necessary for the telling of the story, but containing no stimulus for the musician--he simply refuses to waste time or trouble upon it. Take as an example one of the very worst passages for the voice in the whole opera--the words of Parsifal just before the beginning of the transformation music in the first Act--
[Music: No. 37.]
PARSIFAL.
I hardly stir, and yet I move apace.
Granting that the words are unfit for music, it is incredible that Wagner could not have found a more interesting musical outline for them than this, if it had occurred to him to try. But I take it that he would not try, or saw no necessity for trying; his mind was wholly bent on working out his orchestral picture, which, after all, is the only thing that really matters here as in so many other places. In other passages, such as the long recital of Kundry to Parsifal commencing "I saw the babe upon its mother's breast" (vocal score, p. 187), the orchestral part is a sort of small symphonic movement in itself, in which the voice mostly sings the same melody as the orchestra. Where it does not do this in the symphonic passages the vocal writing again becomes a trifle careless, as in the Good Friday music. The self-contained completeness of the orchestral part here is conclusively shown by its perfect adaptation to the concert room; and I take it that, feeling that virtually all he had to say had been said by the orchestra, Wagner worked out the mood of the scene with complete satisfaction to himself in that medium, and then added the vocal part as best he could--sometimes quite well, sometimes by no means well. He had largely given up, indeed, thinking simultaneously in terms of both voice and orchestra, as in the best parts of _Tristan_, the _Meistersinger_ and the _Götterdämmerung_. Those who will may put this down to a decline of his musical powers. To me it seems more probable that as a musician he came to rely more and more on his most eloquent instrument, the orchestra. It may even be that his carelessness with regard to the text of _Parsifal_, his inclusion of a number of episodes that he must have known were essentially foreign to his own ideal of music, can be accounted for by his belief that he could rely on the expressiveness and the continuity of the orchestral web to see him through all the inevitable difficulties. As one looks at the score of _Parsifal_ one can readily understand his desire to try his hand at a symphony in the last years of his life.
8
It is open to doubt, indeed, whether Wagner ever attained the homogeneity of form that was his ideal. His most homogeneous work is probably _Lohengrin_; after his developing imagination and technique had made him dissatisfied with the style of that opera, and pointed him on to more difficult achievements, he does indeed paint pictures of magnificent scope and exquisite fineness of detail, but he hardly attains the perfect balance of all the factors and the perfect consistency of style that make _Lohengrin_ flow so smoothly. The reason, I think, is that while he was urged on to this reform and that by the logical quality of his mind, he was never quite logical enough--which is only another way of saying that even the greatest minds cannot create a new form of their own in art. All they can do is to add something to the structure they have inherited from their predecessors, and pass the transformed product on to their successors as something to be transformed still further. An ideal like that of Wagner--to create an art form that should be musical through and through, a continuous, endlessly varied web of melody,--is realisable in instrumental music pure and simple, but hardly in connection with the stage. Concentrate the dramatic action as he would, so as to provide the musician with a framework that should be musical in every fibre, the poet was still compelled to retain a certain amount of non-musical matter in order to tell his story clearly to the audience. The concision of _Tristan_ is wonderful; but even in the first Act of _Tristan_ there are verse-passages the pedestrian quality of which the composer has not been able to disguise. The style of all his later works fluctuates in character because he is divided between a desire to keep the actors in the forefront and the necessity for relegating them to the background in order to give the orchestra an absolutely free course. We feel with Wagner, as we do with certain others of the most fertile minds in art--with Goethe, with Leonardo, with Hokusai--that one human life-time was too pitifully short for the realisation of everything of which the great brain was capable; that the body broke down while the mind was still capable of adding to its store of knowledge and feeling. All Wagner's greatest works, regarded from the standpoint of the twentieth century, are hardly more than magnificent attempts to find a compromise between drama and music. At times the compromise worked admirably; at others there is perceptible friction. His dilemma was the one that has confronted every composer of opera since the day when opera was invented. Poetry and music are not the loving sisters that the fancy of the literary man would make them out to be; they are rival goddesses, very jealous and intolerant of each other. The poet, in proportion as his work is genuine, faultless poetry, has no need of the musician. Music is cruel, ravenous, selfish, overbearing with poetry; it deprives it, for its own ends, of almost everything that makes it poetry, altering its verbal values, disregarding its rhymes, substituting another rhythm for that of the poet. It has no need of anything but the poetic idea, and to get at that kernel it ruthlessly tears away all the delicacies of tissue that enclose it. Wagner himself, however much he might theorise about poetry, was never a poet; he was simply a versifier who wrote words for music, sometimes admirably adapted for this purpose, sometimes exceedingly ill adapted. In _Tristan_, which he himself regarded as the one of all his poems that was best suited for music, what he writes is generally not poetry at all. Who would give that title to lines that scorn all grace of rhythm, all variety of cadence, all the magic that comes of the perfect fusion of speech and expression: lines like those of the final page, for example:
Heller schallend mich umwallend, sind es Wellen sanfter Lüfte? Sind es Wogen wonniger Düfte? Wie sie schwellen mich umrauschen, soll ich atmen, soll ich lauschen? Soll ich schlürfen, untertauchen? Süss in Düften mich verhauchen? In dem wogenden Schwall, in dem tönenden Schall, in des Welt-Atems wehendem All,-- ertrinken,-- versinken,-- unbewusst,-- höchste Lust!
or those at the meeting of Tristan and Isolde in the second Act--
TRISTAN. Isolde! Geliebte! ISOLDE. Tristan! Geliebter! Bist du mein? TRISTAN. Hab' ich dich wieder? ISOLDE. Darf ich dich fassen? TRISTAN. Kann ich mir trauen? ISOLDE. Endlich! Endlich! TRISTAN. An meine Brust! ISOLDE. Fühl' ich dich wirklich? TRISTAN. Seh' ich dich selber? ISOLDE. Dies deine Augen? TRISTAN. Dies dein Mund? ISOLDE. Hier deine Hand? TRISTAN. Hier dein Herz? ISOLDE. Bin ich's? Bist du's? Halt' ich dich fest? TRISTAN. Bin ich's? Bist du's? Ist es kein Trug? BOTH. Ist es kein Traum? O Wonne der Seele, o süsse, hehrste, kühnste, schönste, seligste Lust! TRISTAN. Ohne Gleiche! ISOLDE. Überreiche! TRISTAN. Überselig! ISOLDE. Ewig!
If this telegraphic style, as Emil Ludwig calls it, is poetry, then we shall have to give that word a meaning it has never yet had.
But if the _Tristan_ order of verse is not poetry, it is magnificently adapted to the needs of the symphonic musician. It is unobtrusive; it is pliant; it serves to _préciser_ the musical emotion without fettering the orchestral composer either melodically or rhythmically. Compare now with the previous extracts one or two from _Parsifal_--
Denn ihm, da wilder Feinde List und Macht des reinen Glaubens Reich bedrohten, ihm neigten sich in heilig ernster Nacht dereinst des Heilands sel'ge Boten:
(To him, when 'gainst the savage foeman's might this realm of faith he had defended, oh wonder rare! in solemn, holy night from heaven the Saviour's messengers descended)
Des eig'nen sündigen Blutes Gewell' in wahnsinniger Flucht muss mir zurück dann fliessen, in die Welt der Sündensucht mit wilder Scheu sich ergiessen: von neuem sprengt es das Tor, daraus es nun strömt hervor, hier durch die Wunde, der seinen gleich, geschlagen von desselben Speeres Streich, der dort dem Erlöser die Wunde stach, aus der mit blut'gen Tränen der Göttliche weint' ob der Menschheit Schmach in Mitleid's heiligem Sehnen,-- und aus der nun mir, an heiligster Stelle, dem Pfleger göttlichster Güter, des Erlösungsbalsams Hüter, das heisse Sündenblut entquillt, ewig erneut aus des Sehnens Quelle, das, ach! keine Büssung je mir stillt!
(In maddest tumult, by sin defiled, my blood back on itself doth turn and rage within me; to the world where sin is lord in frenzied fear is it surging; again it forces the door, in torrents it poureth forth, here through the spear-wound, alike to His, and dealt me by the self-same deadly spear that once the Redeemer pierced with pain, and, tears of blood outpouring, the Holy One wept for the shame of man, in pity's god-like yearning,-- and from this my wound, the Grail's own chosen, the holy relics' guardian, of redemption's balm the warder, the sinful fiery flood wells forth, ever renewed from the fount of longing that, ah! never penance more may still!)
So hofft sein sündenreu'ger Hüter, da er nicht sterben kann, wann je er ihn erschaut, sein Ende zu erzwingen, und mit dem Leben seine Qual zu enden.
(Thus hopes its sin-repentant guardian, since he can perish not while on it he doth gaze, by force to draw death to him, and with his life to end his cruel torment.)
How incredibly careless is the construction here--the long, involved sentences, the parentheses, the separation of substantive and verb by several lines! It is this absence of poetic concentration that makes _Parsifal_ a trifle _langweilig_ at times; for no matter how expressive Wagner may make the orchestral music, he cannot quite reconcile us to the frequent flatness of the vocal writing and the difficulty we often have in getting the sense, or even the grammatical construction, of the words. That Wagner at the end of his life could put together a text like _Parsifal_ after having made the poems of _Tristan_ and the _Ring_ is not in the least a proof of mental collapse, but only of the almost insuperable difficulties in the way of finding a perfect compromise between music and dramatic poetry. He was fortunate enough, in the case of _Tristan_, to hit upon a subject that was comparatively easy to concentrate. Two duties, it must be remembered, an operatic poem has to perform: it has to provide the composer with opportunities for emotional expression, and it has to make a story clear to the spectator. The ideal text would be that in which the action was implicit in the emotion, that is to say, one in which there was no need for any explanation, through the mouth of this or that actor, of events that were happening off the stage or that had occurred before the drama began. It is when the composer has to interrupt his purely emotional outpouring in order to allow the poet to become explanatory that he realises the difficulty of making his opera musical throughout. Even in _Tristan_ Wagner could not wholly dispense with a certain amount of explanation, in the first act, of the events in Ireland and Cornwall that have led up to the situation in which Tristan and Isolde now find themselves. The music in consequence halts decidedly at times; all the art of the composer cannot disguise the fact that he is momentarily being held up by the exigencies of the stage poet. In the _Ring_, as it was first drafted, Wagner was faced with the same problem, but he solved it in another way. _Siegfried's Death_ was to be merely the climax of a long sequence of tragic events. Without some knowledge of these events, however, the spectator would be unable to understand the final tragedy. So Wagner resorted to the device of making the characters themselves recapitulate the earlier stages of the story, in much the same way that Isolde, in the first act of _Tristan_, tells Brangaene--for the benefit of the audience, of course--all about the coming of Tristan to Ireland, his slaying of Morold, her nursing of the wounded Cornish hero, his wooing her as bride for King Marke, and so on. In the opening scene of _Siegfried's Death_ the Norns tell each other--again for the benefit of the audience--how Alberich ravished the gold from the Rhine, made a ring from it, and enslaved the Nibelung race; how the ring was stolen, and Alberich himself became a thrall; how the giants built Valhalla for the gods, and, denied their promised reward, got possession of the ring that the gods had stolen from Alberich; how there was born a free hero, destined to redeem the gods from _their_ bondage; how Siegfried slew the dragon and wakened Brynhilde from her sleep. Having made all this clear in an introductory scene, Wagner raises the curtain upon Siegfried and Brynhilde. Later, Hagen tells Gunther,--all for the sake of the audience--how Wotan begot the Volsung race; how the twin-born Volsung pair Siegmund and Sieglinde had for son the mighty hero, Siegfried, who "closed the ravenous maw" of the dragon with his "conquering sword." In the next scene Siegfried explains to the audience--_viâ_ Hagen and Gunther--how he came into possession of the tarnhelm and the ring, whereupon Hagen describes the virtues of the former. In the third scene the Valkyries[409] fly to the solitary Brynhilde and learn of her awakening by Siegfried, and of the intervention of Wotan in the combat between Siegmund and Hunding. In the first scene of the second Act Alberich tells Hagen how he won the gold and forged the ring, and compelled Mime to make the tarnhelm for him; how the ring was ravished from him by the gods and given to the giants; how one of the latter guarded it in the form of a dragon; how Siegfried slew the latter and Mime. In the second scene of the third Act Siegfried tells the Gibichungs--the audience overhearing--how Mime tended the dying Sieglinde in the wood, saved her child, and brought him up to his own craft of smith; how he (Siegfried) forged his father's sword anew and did the dragon to death; how the bird warned him of Mime's plot against his life, told him of the powers of the ring and tarnhelm, and sent him to rouse Brynhilde from her sleep on the fire-girt rock.
Wagner must have felt the clumsiness of this method of constant explanation, and anticipated that it would impede the free flow of his music; while in any case the audience would probably still not be quite clear as to certain points. So, as all the world knows, he first of all prefixed to _Siegfried's Death_ another drama--_The Young Siegfried_--designed to put the bearing of all the stages of the action beyond the possibility of misunderstanding. But again the fear haunts him that there may still be some things insufficiently accounted for; so even _The Young Siegfried_ has to have a certain number of pages of explanation. The fact of Siegfried being there at all has to be explained by Mime, as well as the further facts of the death of Siegmund in battle and the perishing of Sieglinde in giving birth to Siegfried. In the next scene, almost the whole story of what afterwards became the _Rhinegold_ and the _Valkyrie_ is told afresh in the competition of questions and answers between the Wanderer and Mime. In the first scene of the third Act, we have the completion of the story of the _Valkyrie_ given to the audience in the dialogue between the Wanderer and Erda--how the earth-goddess bore a daughter, Brynhilde, to Wotan, how she flouted the god's will, and for punishment was doomed to sleep on the fiery fell. Not content with all this, Wagner afterwards stages, in a third opera, the _Valkyrie_, the whole of the action that has been told and told again in _Siegfried_ and the _Götterdämmerung_, from the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde down to the punishment of Brynhilde. Even here he has to find room for explanations; in the first scene of the second Act Wotan tells the audience--_viâ_ Brynhilde--the whole story of the rape of the gold by Alberich and all the events that followed from it. Finally Wagner comes to the conclusion that the whole action, from its beginning in the depths of the Rhine, had better be put visibly upon the stage; and so the _Rhinegold_, the story of which has been already told more than once, is prefixed to the _Valkyrie_. But in spite of his having shown everything so completely that nothing remains to be explained by word of mouth, he still retains all the explanations he had inserted in the three other dramas of the tetralogy. No doubt he was aware of their superfluity, but shrank, as he might well do, from the enormous task of reconstructing the whole work yet again. He may have argued, too, that as each of the operas would have to stand by itself on the particular occasion of its performance, it would be no disadvantage to have the events of the preceding evening fully explained, even at the cost of some otherwise needless repetition.
I have not gone over this long familiar ground merely to tell again a thrice-told tale, but to bring into higher relief the fundamental difficulty of the musical dramatist who is working along the Wagnerian lines--the difficulty of taking up the whole of the poet's work into the being of music, when the poet, in order to leave no room for misunderstanding on the part of the audience of the reason for the visible actions and the audible sentiments of the actors, has to pad out his poem with a certain amount of matter that is explanatory of the past rather than emotional in the present. So desperate a device as the visible representation in three or four evenings of every stage of a dramatic action was obviously not to be resorted to again. It was equally impossible to reduce the story of _Parsifal_ to the highly concentrated form into which he had managed to cast _Tristan_. So he had to do what it had been his first impulse to do in the _Ring_--elucidate the visible action of the moment by a narrative of all that had happened before the action, or that particular stage of the action, began, and trust to the orchestra to maintain the musical interest by means of the interplay of leit-motives. Hence the lumbering stage technique of the first Act of _Parsifal_, and the _raison d'être_ for the endless garrulity of Gurnemanz. That venerable worthy is not a character; he is merely a walking and talking guide book; he stands outside the real drama, somewhat in the style of the _compère_ in a revue; and the proof of his almost complete nullity is that Wagner has been utterly unable to characterise him musically. Every other character in his operas--even the minor personages, such as Kurvenal and David and Gutrune--exists for us as a definite personality, someone drawn in the round in music as effectively as a painter or sculptor could have shown him forth. But even Wagner has been unable to invent a single phrase that shall be characteristic of Gurnemanz and Gurnemanz alone. He is the one Wagnerian character who simply does not exist for musicians. As far as his music is concerned he has neither mental characteristics nor bodily form; we remember him solely for his interminable talk.
9
If Wagner failed in his struggle with the musical-dramatic form, it was the failure of a Titan in a struggle that only a Titan would have ventured upon. Form and the perfection of form are simple enough matters for the smaller musical intelligences, for whom form means merely a symmetrical mould to be filled. It is for the greater minds that the problem of form is always a torture, for their ideas are perpetually outgrowing the mould. In sheer fertility of idea Wagner was probably the greatest musician the world has ever seen. It was of the very essence of his work that there should be no repetition either of mood or of procedure. Without, indeed, making the necessarily futile attempt to decide which is _per se_ the finer order of musical mind, the dramatic or the symphonic, it may be confidently said that to a dramatist--or at all events a dramatist like Wagner--there is permitted no such easy returning upon his own tracks, no half-mechanical manipulation of the same order of ideas time after time, as is possible to the worker in the stereotyped instrumental forms. Great as is the inventive power of a Bach, a Beethoven or a Brahms, it cannot be denied that much of their work is simply a varied exploitation of a relatively small number of formulas,--that a very small amount of thematic invention can be made to go a very long way under the guidance of an established pattern. Nor, broadly speaking, is the same intensity of imagination, or the same scope of imagination, required to invent a hundred ordinary fugal or symphonic themes as to find a hundred themes that are the veritable musical counterparts of as many human beings. The family resemblance between "subjects" that is permitted to a Bach or a Beethoven is not permitted to a Wagner: the dramatist's work must be a perpetual re-creation--and a definite, unmistakable re-creation--of the life around him in all its multiformity. In this sense Wagner is without an equal among composers; never has there been a brain so apt at limning character and suggesting the _milieu_ in music. We can speak of the Wagnerian imagination as we can speak of the Shakespearean imagination; Wagner's is the only imagination in music that can be compared with Shakespeare's in dramatic fertility and comprehensiveness. It pours itself over the whole surface of a work, into every nook and cranny of it. It is a vast mind, infinite in its sympathies, protean in its creative power. For sheer drastic incisiveness of theme he has not his equal in all music; each vision instinctively, without an effort, finds its own inevitable utterance. In the works of his great period every motive has a physiognomy as distinct from all others as the face of any human being is distinct from all other faces. The motives are unforgettable once we have heard them. They depict their subject once for all: who to-day, enormously as the apparatus of musical expression has developed since Wagner's time, would dare to try to find better symbols than those he has invented for the tarnhelm, the fire, the Rhine, the sword, the dragon, the potion that brings oblivion to Siegfried; or for any of the men and women of the operas--for Wotan, for Siegfried, for Mime, for the "reine Thor," for Herzeleide, for Hagen, for Gutrune, for Brynhilde, and for a dozen others? To hear any of these themes to-day, after a generation or more of daily familiarity with them, is like looking at a medallion of a hundred years ago in which not a point of the outline or a single plane of the relief has been blurred, nor a single grain of its first sharp milling been lost. They are what they are because they combine in the fullest measure and in impeccable proportion the two great preservatives of all artistic work,--a luminous personal vision and consummate style.
10
In the operas of his prime, every one of his characters is musically alive, down to the smallest. Tristan is not more real to us than Kurvenal, nor Walther more real than David, nor Brynhilde than Gutrune. His fiery imagination saw over the whole field of the drama with the same intensity. In this respect, as in so many others, not one of his successors can compare with him. Strauss, for instance, has always failed to give reality to any but the leading characters of his operas. His Faninal in the _Rosenkavalier_ is decidedly not alive, nor is his Chrysothemis in _Elektra_. There is not a single truly characteristic phrase by which the musician can recall the former to his memory in the way that he can recall David or Kurvenal or Mime; the only piece of music by which he can recall Chrysothemis is an atrocious rag-time waltz that he would prefer to forget. Strauss's minor characters are known to us through the poem rather than the music; while Wagner's minor characters are clear-cut personalities to thousands of opera-goers who have never read the poem. And like the true dramatist, Wagner has no moral prejudices; for the time being he puts himself into the skin of each of his characters and looks at the world solely through his eyes. Nowhere is the author to be detected in the work, just as Shakespeare is nowhere to be detected in his; each of the characters sees the world from his own standpoint, and while he is talking we are for the moment bound to see the world precisely as he sees it. In any one else's hands Alberich would have been a mere conventional villain of melodrama. As Wagner draws him he is as real as Iago,--an enemy of the light and all that live in the light, but their enemy by reason of the very nature of his being, following his own instincts with perfect naturalness and perfect consistency. So it comes about that we invariably believe in Alberich and the justice of his cause when he is speaking for himself; nowhere is he a mere foil or relief to characters with whom we may have more moral sympathy. No one can fail to be moved, for instance, by his appeal to Hagen in the second Act of the _Götterdämmerung_--the genuine heart-hunger of this, repulsive gnome, lusting for power with all the passion and all the sincerity of his narrow soul. How vast and terrible a force of evil, again, is Hagen, but at the same time how natural, how inevitable. Even Mime is always right from Mime's point of view: the spectator can for the moment no more turn against him than against Alberich.
It is one of the mysteries of human psychology, indeed, how the mind that could be so incurably egoistic in the ordinary affairs of life, so incapable of seeing people as they really were, and not merely as they were in relation to the gratification or frustration of his own desires, should be capable of such universal sympathy in his artistic creation. The crowning wonder of Wagner's artistic psychology is his treatment of Beckmesser. We have seen what a deadly and unreasoning hatred he had for Hanslick, and that it was Hanslick he had in view in the later poetical drafts of the character. Yet in the opera, though Beckmesser is made appropriately ridiculous, he is handled almost throughout without a touch of the malice one might have expected when one knows that the character is meant as a satire upon a detested enemy. I say "almost throughout," for it has always seemed to me that there is just a shade of unnecessary harshness in Sachs's words after Beckmesser has left the house with the manuscript of Walther's song in his pocket:
A heart more base I never have known, Ere long he'll be paid for his spite: Though men cast reason down from its throne They cannot deny it quite: Some day the net is spread before them: In it they fall, and we triumph o'er them.
Beckmesser, for all his wiles, has not hitherto struck us as being base (_boshaft_). We laugh at him, but we love him, as we love all the fools and rogues of pure comedy. I fancy I can detect in this passage the last angry flash of the eye and the snap of the jaw as Wagner thought of Hanslick. But apart from this little lapse it is wonderful with what detachment the composer has been able to see his personal enemy. The artist in him was too strong, too infallible, to permit of his fouling the ideal world of his art with any breath from the bitter, muddy world of real life. Mr. Bernard Shaw is of the opinion that Strauss, in _Ein Heldenleben_, gives "an orchestral caricature of his enemies which comes much closer home than Wagner's mediævally disguised Beckmesser." I hardly think the musical world as a whole will agree with Mr. Shaw. The "Adversaries" section of _Ein Heldenleben_ always strikes me as a mere outburst of rather stupid bad temper: the humour is as ill-conditioned as the psychology is crude and the expression commonplace. We have long since ceased to bestow on it the compliment of even as much thin laughter as we gave it when it was quite new. It is bad art for this reason if for no other,--that the petty, snappy hero shown in this section is inconsistent with the sort of super-man who figures in the rest of the work; who can believe that the hero of the noble ending, set high above earth and all its littlenesses, is the same individual as the small bundle of wounded vanity and irritated nerves whose reply to his critics takes the form of putting out his tongue and "talking back" like a street urchin? Wagner's caricature is at once deeper, truer, kindlier, more universal and more enduring. He could be little enough in his life: in his art the gods took care that he should never be anything but magnanimity itself.
And if there has never been a brain in music that saw so deeply into the springs of character, there has never been a musical brain with such a grasp of a drama as a whole. It was the mighty, tireless synthetic engine that we meet with only some score of times, perhaps, in the whole history of human thought,--in two or three great military commanders, a few great architects, and half-a-dozen philosophers. It is becoming more and more evident each year that since his death there has been no single composer of anything like his bigness, no single composer capable of work at once so new and so coherently wrought. His was the last truly great mind to find expression in music. That statement is not at all inconsistent with the admission that modern composers have said many hundreds of things that Wagner could never have thought of: I simply mean that the brains of Strauss and Debussy or any two others put together would not equal Wagner's in range, in depth, in staying power. There has not been a musician since his time who can "think in continents" as he did. The more we study him, indeed, the more wonderful do this sweep of vision and tenacity of hold become to us. There is nothing in all other men's music comparable to Wagner's feat of keeping the vast scheme of the _Ring_ in his head for more than a quarter of a century, and actually laying it aside completely for eleven years during that time, without relaxing his grip for a moment upon the smallest limb of the great drama. It is in virtue of this fiery and unceasing play of the imagination and this stupendous synthetic power that he takes his place among the half-dozen most comprehensive minds that have ever worked in art.
In music there are only two brains--those of Bach and Beethoven--to compare with his in breadth of span. Say what we will about the repetitions and the _longueurs_ of the _Ring_, there is nothing in all music, and very little else in any other art, to compare with that wonderful work for combined scope and concentration of design. Wagner had in abundance the rarest of all artistic gifts,--the faculty, as a great critic has put it, of seeing the last line in the first, of never losing sight of the whole through all the tangle of detail. One might almost say that no other modern brain except Napoleon's and Herbert Spencer's has been able to keep all the minutiæ of a gigantic problem so unfailingly within the one sphere of vision. Wagner forgot nothing in his work: at any stage of it he could summon up at a moment's notice not only any figure he wanted, in all its natural warmth of life, but the very atmosphere that surrounded it, the very mood it induced in others. To me one of the most marvellous instances of this has always been the passage in Waltraute's recital in the third scene of the _Götterdämmerung_, in which, in the midst of that extraordinary picture of the frustrated Wotan brooding among the joyless gods in Valhalla, she speaks of the god remembering his favourite and banished child:
Then soft grew his look: He remembered, Brynhilde, thee!
It is a far cry at this stage from the parting of the god and his daughter in the _Valkyrie_; but at the mere mention of it there wells up in Wagner, after twelve years or more, all the emotion of the wonderful union between them, and the gloomy, careworn music melts for a bar or two into a tear-compelling tenderness. Another magnificent illustration of this gift of his of looking before and after may be had in the third Act of the _Meistersinger_, just after the greeting of Sachs by the populace of Nuremberg. That reception is surely the most overwhelming thing of its kind the earth has ever seen or heard; it has always been a mystery to me how any merely human singer can find a voice in which to respond to it. But it is precisely here that we realise the subtlety of Wagner's conception of Sachs, the profoundly imaginative way in which he saw him, and his ever-present sense of the fundamentals of the character through apparently the most distracting vicissitudes. Any other operatic librettist and composer, after that million-throated outburst, would have set a strutting Sachs on his feet, smilingly and condescendingly accepting the homage of the multitude. Wagner makes _his_ Sachs realise nothing but his own unworthiness and the sense of something hollow and fleeting in all this vociferation; and there is hardly an effect in all music to compare for subtlety, for poetry, for the profundity of its humanity, with the instantaneous melting of the crimson and purple strains of the folk into the quiet grey theme of Sachs' sorrow in the strings. It was the only possible outlet from what any other sincere composer would have instinctively felt to be an emotional impasse; and it was only Wagner who could have found the outlet. He is great in many ways, but in no way greater than in this faculty of keeping the burning vision of the moment always in touch with those that have passed and those that are to come; in all contemporary music there is not to be found a brain with a third of his power in this respect. In the latest operas of Strauss, strewn with fine things as they are, there is no such unity of style, no such ardour of conception, no such unrelaxing hold upon every character in every phase of it; and of course no purely orchestral work can compare with even a single opera of Wagner's for combined sweep of design and closeness of texture.
11
The clarity and unity of Wagner's vision are evident again in the pictorial element that plays so large a part in his works. He was often pictorial without intending it, and was himself probably unconscious of many of the effects of light, colour, and atmosphere that delight us in his music. Mr. Runciman has done well to insist upon the gift, exhibited as early as _Die Feen_, for not only visualising a scene or a character for us but giving it us in its natural tints. We have happily got past the day when old-fashioned theorists used to lay it down that "pure" music was "concerned with nothing but itself," and that whoever made it concern itself with appearances of the visible world was at the best no more than half a musician. As I have argued in an earlier chapter of this book, we cannot parcel off the human consciousness into psychology-tight bulkheads in this way. The various faculties are always crossing over into each other's territories for a moment, and coming back with spoils that they refuse to surrender for the rest of their days. The theorists have always been telling us that music cannot "paint." The composers, knowing much more about the matter than the theorists, have always gone on painting to their heart's content,--Bach, for example, being incorrigibly realistic. The three minds with the most pronounced bias towards tone-painting were probably those of Bach, Schubert (in his songs), and Wagner. But between the musician-painters there are as many differences of vision and of manner as there are between "pure" musicians or "pure" painters; and Wagner, in this regard as in every other, brought certain new elements into music, and still stands in a class by himself.
The curious thing about him is that while no other man's music gives us such an impression of being bound up at almost every point with the visible world in which we live and move, actual realism of the ordinary kind is comparatively rare with him, and it is certainly the least important factor in this impression. Now and again, of course, he does "paint" the concrete in the realistic way made familiar to us by the modern symphonic poem-writers. But this way is not at all a new way. The music of Schubert and that of Bach, as has been said, is full of realism of this order,--Schubert's spinning-wheel and Bach's serpents, to give merely two well-known instances. To this category belong Wagner's Rhine, and his fire music, and the whinnying of the Valkyries' horses. But there is really not much realism of that sort in Wagner's music. He objected to it in Berlioz and others unless there was a very good reason for it, and never employed it himself except where it complied with the dual condition of being thoroughly justified by the scene and unquestionably within the scope of musical expression. Wagner does comparatively little tone-painting of the purely realistic kind, but of course he does it always with superb certainty, profiting by a hundred years of evolution of technique since Bach, and by the gorgeous instrument that the modern orchestra places at his disposal.
A subtler sort of pictorialism,--subtler because it is unpremeditated and unconscious,--is that to which Mr. Runciman has drawn attention. No one except Hugo Wolf has ever approached Wagner in the capacity for bathing each scene, each character, in a light and an atmosphere of its own. (Wolf's achievements in this line were of course on a much smaller scale than Wagner's, but some of them are hardly less wonderful if we take into consideration the limitations of the black-and-white medium in which he worked.) This is surely one of the most baffling mysteries in music,--how the same few dozen tones and colours can be made to suggest such differently coloured aspects of the visible world, a world, we must remember, from which music is utterly cut off by the very nature of its medium. But whatever the explanation, the fact is indubitable; though it is a comparatively new thing in music, and indeed would not be possible without our modern developments of harmony, colour and technique. It is virtually unknown in pre-Wagnerian music. I do not mean that no previous composer ever gave a specially appropriate tint to a particular scene. That was frequently done; but it was done more or less by a convention, by the use of instruments having a particular association in the minds of the audience, as when the oboe or the cor anglais would be used for suggesting a pastoral scene, or the horns,--as in the beautiful passage at the commencement of the _Freischütz_ overture--for suggesting a wood. The Wagnerian and Wolfian method to which I am now referring is something quite different from this. The term "method," indeed, is inappropriate, for it is impossible to reduce it to any rules or to trace the secret of its effect, as we can in the two other general instances I have cited. It is possible to say that the cold, bare effect of Wolf's _Das verlassene Mägdlein_ comes from the peculiar harmonies he uses, and the pitch at which they are used,--just as the pastoral effect of the "Scène aux champs" in Berlioz's _Symphonie fantastique_ comes from the use of the cor anglais. But the difference is this,--that you can standardise, as it were, the pastoral effects of the oboe or the cor anglais, whereas you cannot standardise the effects of _Das verlassene Mägdlein_. Even in the hands of a fifth-rate composer the oboe may be made to suggest a shepherd: but give Wolf's harmonies to a second-rate musician and tell him to "paint" with them as Wolf has done, and he will soon realise that the "painting" is really not separable from _the music as a whole_, even though we may be able to say analytically that it is due to one factor more than another. The truth is that the scene has been perceived with such intensity of vision by the composer that, unknown to him, and without any volition on his part, the vision has made its own idiom for itself, incarnated itself in lines and colours that are expressive of it and it alone.
It is this subtle faculty that is always unconsciously operative in Wagner. It first comes to light in _Die Feen_. It gave parts of the _Flying Dutchman_ their strange salt tang. It makes the peculiar white light of _Lohengrin_. And after that opera, when Wagner had attained full command of his powers, it did astounding things for him. There is a different light, a different air, in each of the four dramas of the _Ring_; and this broad difference between any two of the four is maintained in spite of there being minor differences of colour between the various scenes of each of them. How mysterious and infallible this faculty is in its workings is best seen from the fact that when Wagner took up the second half of _Siegfried_, in 1869, after having suspended work upon it in 1857, he did what no other musician before him or since could have done--spontaneously, unconsciously reverted to the idiom of twelve years before. Between those two dates he had travelled an incredibly long path as a musician; he had written _Tristan_ and the _Meistersinger_, two works with as many differences of idiom between themselves as there are between either of them and the _Ring_. Yet the wonderful brain could sweep itself clear of all the new impressions that had fed it during those twelve years, and, though the new acquisitions of technique of course remained, he thinks himself back in a flash to the very centre of the souls of the _Ring_ characters and the very colour and temperature of the scenes he had parted from so long ago.
This is the pictorial instinct of Wagner seen in its totality. In its detail it is equally marvellous. Each scene is so bathed in its own appropriate light and colour, and strewn with its own peculiar shadows, that the music itself, apart from the scenic setting, is eloquent of the place and the hour of the action. In Wagner's music, as in Wolf's, one is conscious not only of the locality and the person and the race: one can almost tell the time of day. Music like that at the awakening of Brynhilde would go with nothing but a mountain height in blinding sunlight. Hunding is not physically darker to the eye than he is to the ear in that marvellous tuba motive that accompanies his first entry in the _Valkyrie_. The gait of Siegfried's music is as rapid as Mime's; but the differing stature of the two men is unmistakable from the music alone. One might multiply instances by the hundred of effects of realistic differentiation obtained not merely by orchestral colour, but by something subtly inter wrought into the very texture of the music. (The Hunding theme, for example, is "black" and sinister even on the pianoforte.) It is just this faculty of seeing everything with the most precise of painter's eyes, and then finding the infallibly right musical correlative of it, that enables Wagner to achieve such variety among pictures that are in essence the same. How many and how different woodlands there are in his music, how many degrees of sunlight, how many shades and qualities of darkness! The storm that maddens Mime after the exit of Siegfried is a very different storm from the one through which Siegmund rushes to the house of Hunding. What other man could have written _two_ Rhine-Maidens' trios like those in the _Rhinegold_ and the _Götterdämmerung_, each so liquid, so mobile, so sweet with the primal innocence of the world, and therefore so alike in many respects, yet so absolutely different?
So it comes about that without any tone-painting in the ordinary acceptation of the word, Wagner succeeds in bringing the visible universe before our eyes in a way and to an extent that no other musician has done. Of tone-painting pure and simple there is practically none in _Tristan_. Wagner is here concerned solely with a man and woman; yet how actual he makes every scene in which they move, and this without a single realistic stroke. In the garden scene he uses none of the conventional musical recipes--there is no obvious rustling of leaves, no sighing of the breeze, no purling of the brooks,--yet how the magic of the garden and of the hour steals through us and intoxicates us! How hot and dry the air has become in the third Act,--as dry to us as to the parched tongue of the wounded man alone on the castle walls, with the mid-day sun turning the blue sea beyond to a vibrating, blinding haze. And--to me the most wonderful of all--how sinister is the atmosphere he creates through virtually the whole of the _Götterdämmerung_; how, though indeed it is mostly set in the daylight, one feels that here among these Gibichungs, with gaunt, grim Hagen for weaver of the web of fate, the very earth has lost the radiant smile it had in Siegfried's forest and on Brynhilde's mountain top. The sun no longer warms, the Rhine no longer laughs and glints and gladdens. And finally, how exquisitely adapted is the melodic and harmonic idiom of _Parsifal_,--so smoothly flowing, so full of melting and caressing tenderness,--to that static world from which, with the purging from it of so much human passion, so much even of the ordinary physical energy of humanity too has gone. For this, as for everything else, he found the right, the only musical equivalent, without seeking for it. His visions painted themselves.
12
Even the best of Wagnerians to-day become a little impatient at the occasional _longueurs_ in his operas. Not merely does he plan them on a scale that makes it almost impossible to give some of them in their entirety under ordinary conditions, but he sometimes lapses into a prolixity that is regrettable or maddening according to the frame of mind we happen to be in at the moment. Most of his prolixity is to be accounted for by that bad text-construction to which I have drawn attention. Music, let it be said again and again, is primarily an emotional art, and the less it has to do with mere dramatic explanation the better. We can never tire of Wotan pouring out his heart in loving farewell to his child; but we can hear Wotan tell the long story of his financial and matrimonial troubles once too often. We could listen as often to Kundry's story of Herzeleide as to the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony or the "Kleine Nacht-Musik" of Mozart; but wild horses would not drag us to the theatre to listen to old Gurnemanz's too-often-told tale of Amfortas and Klingsor, and how the sacred spear was lost. Yet though the poet Wagner is generally answerable for the occasional tedious quarters-of-an-hour in the operas, the musician Wagner is not wholly free from blame. He never managed to get quite rid of the slow-footedness that was characteristic of his music from the first; to the very end he sometimes takes rather longer to drive his points home than is absolutely necessary; and in these more rapid and impatient days that goes against him sorely. He is often reproached with rhythmical monotony. There is some truth in the charge, which as a whole he himself would probably not have taken the trouble to repel. There is a passage in one of his letters in which he recognises that his music is not so rhythmical as it might be, but he holds that some lack of rhythmical variety is inseparable from an ideal of dramatic music such as his. As I have attempted to show, he relied much more on harmonic effect than on rhythm, the latter being more peculiarly the instrument of the symphonic composer, while harmonic change is more suited to depict the varying aspects of a dramatic action. But against the comparative regularity of his rhythms is to be set his sense of style. He had an intuitive knowledge of how and when to break up a melodic line that was in danger of becoming too uniform. One of the simplest illustrations of this may be seen in the _Parsifal_ Prelude (vocal score, p. 5, lines 1 and 2); just at the moment when we are beginning to suspect that the theme of "Faith" has been repeated quite often enough and to dread the further repetition that has already got under weigh, he alters the signature from 6/4 to 9/4, and gives a new rhetorical turn to the familiar melody. In Wotan's _Abschied_, again, we are unconscious of the uniformity of the rhythm in phrase after phrase, so consummate is the art with which the interest is always being transferred from one part of the combined vocal and orchestral tissue to another, and so beautifully planned is not only each section in itself but what may be called the exposition and development and cadence of the whole scene. Wagner could afford to dispense with the smaller rhythmical manœuvring of individual musical phrases; he had the much greater faculty of endowing long scenes and even whole operas with a vast dramatic rhythm of their own. Hundreds of smaller composers can give this page or that of their music a rhythmic piquancy that Wagner could never have attained on the same small scale; but not one of them could achieve such a rhythm as that of the second Act of _Tristan_, with its slow, steady, imperceptible transition from night and its rapture to daylight and its cruel disillusioning glare.
Wagner's prolixity, again, is not the flabby dulness of a mind that is merely maundering on and on from sheer incompetence to get to grips with the essentials of an emotion, but the over-copiousness of an inexhaustibly rich brain. And if this quality of his has its occasional bad side, we do well to remember that it is accountable also for some of his most gigantic achievements in expression. Were it not for the endless inventive power and the never-failing sense of beauty in it, a work like _Tristan_, that never pauses till the last drop of bitter-sweet juice has been squeezed out of the theme, would be hardly bearable. Like Bach, Wagner could never conceive any emotion without intensifying it to the utmost. The barest hint of joy in one of Bach's texts will set him carolling like a lark; the barest hint of mortality will bedim his music with all the tears of all the universe for its dead. Wagner has the same insatiable hunger for expression. In _Tristan_ in particular every emotion is developed to its furthest limit of poignancy. The passion of love becomes almost delirium; when Tristan, in the third Act, sings of the thirst caused by his wound, our very mouths, our very bones, seem dried as if by some burning sirocco blowing from the desert; when the sick man praises Kurvenal for his devotion it is a cosmic pæan to friendship that he sings. In hundreds of other cases it is not by elaboration of speech that he makes his overwhelming effect, but by a sort of volcanic concentration. Mingled rage and grief and despair have never found such colossal expression anywhere, in any art, as in those few bars given to the frustrated and maddened Wotan after Fricka has foiled his plan for the protection of Siegmund in the fight (the _Valkyrie_, vocal score, pp. 118, 119). Pathos will never find more touching accents than those of Brynhilde in her last great scene with Wotan (_Valkyrie_, pp. 292, 293); few things in all music convey such a sense of tears as the strange salt tones of the oboe and cor anglais here. For concentrated fury there is nothing to compare with the outburst of the bound and impotent Alberich as he dismisses the Nibelungs who have witnessed his shame (the _Rhinegold_, pp. 199-201); technically this is one of the most effective crescendi in all Wagner's works. His imagination always takes fire at a single touch, a single suggestion, and there is no staying it until the fire has burnt itself completely out. In the _Siegfried Idyl_ he has only to think of the child whose coming meant so much to him, and all the fountains of human tenderness are unsealed; this is not an individual father musing over his child's cradle, but all nature crooning a song of love for its little ones. It is this intensification of every emotion he has to express that makes each of his characters, like Shakespeare's, seem the epitome of that particular phase of human nature. Tristan and Isolde are the world's most passionate and most tragic lovers: the opera is the very quintessence of the egoism of sexual love. So with a score of other characters. The last word--for our own day at any rate--in god-like majesty has been uttered in Wotan; the last word of womanly gentleness and sweetness in Eva and Gutrune; the last word of tragic womanhood in Sieglinde; the last word of superb womanhood in Brynhilde; the last word of mellow and kindly middle age in Hans Sachs; the last word of scheming feebleness in Mime; the last word of elemental savagery in the Valkyries; the last word of youthful irresponsibility in the _Meistersinger_ apprentices; the last word of human grimness in Hagen; the last word of dog-like devotion in Kurvenal. The character-drawing is endless in its variety and infallible in its touch.
13
_Parsifal_ stands in a class apart from all the other works of Wagner. Its characterisation is not individual but symbolic; Amfortas and Parsifal and Kundry and Klingsor are not men and women whom we might meet any day in the flesh, but simply types of human aspiration or failure. We have outgrown the mental world of the work; the religious symbolism of it, _quâ_ religious symbolism, leaves many of us unimpressed; yet the basic emotional stuff of it all is enduring, and we must not allow ourselves to be set against the opera because the forms in which Wagner has embodied a durable philosophy are themselves of a time instead of all time. Evidently the symphonist in him was at this stage overpowering the dramatist. The symphonist can safely deal with types or abstractions; the dramatist can only deal with individuals. Wagner has made the blunder of trying to translate the most delicate, the most esoteric perceptions into the language of the theatre, of setting symbols upon the stage. The force of a poetic symbol lies wholly in the imagination: as soon as a dramatist or a painter tries to set it visibly before us, the free flight of the imagination is curbed by the physical obviousness, the physical limitations, of the figure that is put before the eye; the universal cannot be perceived for the particular. Wagner's root idea in _Parsifal_ was to show us, in Kundry, a living symbol of the dual nature of woman, half-angel and half-beast, in turns sensual and repentant, the destroyer and the saviour of man. But it is precisely symbols of this kind, cutting down to the obscurest depths of human psychology, that cannot retain their vast suggestiveness after they have been narrowed down to the personality of a single actor. We no longer see the eternal and infernal womanly; it is only a German prima-donna, stout of build and heavy of movement, that we see upon the stage. So with Parsifal himself. Mr. Huneker has called him "that formidable imbecile." So might we style St. Francis of Assisi, or the Buddha, or any other of the simple wise ones of the world, if we persist in looking at them through unsympathetic and unimaginative eyes. The conception of Parsifal is fine enough in itself--an unstained soul made divinely wise by its very simplicity, its love, its pity. But a character of this kind should be left to the imagination, or to music to suggest to the imagination: it is impossible to realise it behind the footlights in the person of an actor. A Parsifal is a figure for the quiet of one's chamber, not for a crowded theatre lying the other side of the box office. Hundreds of people must have felt, as I have done for twenty years, that a good deal of _Parsifal_ affects us more deeply at home than it ever does in the theatre, the loss of the orchestral colour being more than made up for by the gain in imaginative intensity. And the difficulty of making such a character vital and credible upon the stage is increased when he is made the centre of a quasi-religious ritual that has long ceased to have a meaning for many people.
But in spite of it all, _Parsifal_ is a masterpiece. The story of it seems to arouse a violent antipathy in some people, who apparently regard it as an immoral work. The pleasant little game of _Parsifal_-baiting began with Nietzsche, who said that he despised everyone who did not regard the opera as an outrage on morals.
Like most philosophers, Nietzsche had the charming failing of imagining that the only right way for the world to go was his way. He was singularly taken with that notion of his of the super-man--a mythical and unidentifiable mammal about which we have never been able to get any definite information, either from Nietzsche or from any of his disciples. Now Nietzsche found this ideal of his in Siegfried, and he loathed _Parsifal_ because it preached the negation of life, the denial of the Will to Power. Later writers, like Mr. Runciman and Mr. Huneker, who are not, I think, Nietzscheans, agree with him in seeing something peculiarly weak in the philosophy--to call it by that name--of _Parsifal_. They see in the opera not merely moral weakness but moral nastiness. I remember one of the simpler adherents of this theory telling me, in awe-stricken tones, that this "sexless" opera was the resort of a set of men who were mixed up in a German scandal of a few years ago that sent its unwholesome odour through the civilised world: and he obviously thought that this discredited Wagner's _Parsifal_, whereas it struck me as being very like asking us to give up having breakfast because Dr. Crippen and Charles Peace liked bacon and eggs.
Nor can any moral flabbiness, I think, be discovered in _Parsifal_ except by people who make the mistake of thinking that the "philosophy" of any musical work matters very much. Mr. Runciman detests Parsifal and calls him a perfect idiot--that epithet being Mr. Runciman's playful intensification of Wagner's "pure [i.e. stainless] fool"--"fool" being unfortunately the only monosyllable we have in English for the translation of "Thor." But even supposing Parsifal were an idiot--which I dispute--would it greatly matter? Mr. Runciman has launched his full battery against the Siegfried of Wagner's poem--a swaggering, quarrelsome, ungrateful young noodle; but, as Mr. Runciman's own eloquent description of the opera shows, the Siegfried of Wagner's music is a vastly more interesting and sympathetic person than the Siegfried of Wagner's verse. Similarly, even if I could think, when reading the libretto, that Parsifal is an idiot, I could never think so when listening to the music. The truth is that a good many of Wagner's characters and dramatic motives seem rather foolish to us nowadays. For my part I do not know or care whether or how Parsifal is to "redeem" the world. The word redemption has no meaning for me in the sense in which Wagner and the theologians use it. I can believe that redemption is a concrete reality in the pawnbroking business; but if any one tells me that men's souls are to be bought and sold, or lost and found again, without any volition of their own, I can only say that all this conveys about as much to my intelligence as talk about a quadrilateral triangle would do. But to appreciate a work of art it is not in the least necessary to subscribe to its author's philosophical or religious opinions; a rationalist can be as deeply thrilled by the _Matthew Passion_ as any Christian can be. The "thesis" of a work of art is the one thing in it that does not concern us as artists. Who is to decide between rival philosophies or sociologies? Personally I believe that one philosophy is just as good as another, and worse, as the Irishman would say; but if an artist chooses to set forward a character as the embodiment of some philosophy that possesses him at the moment, I am willing to listen to him so long as he can talk interestingly about it, without my wishing either to subscribe to the philosophy or to dissent from it. Mr. Runciman thinks there is something frightful in the thesis--let us call it that--of _Parsifal_. I do not see anything frightful in it. I do not believe in it as the only rule of life; but then I do not believe--in _that_ sense--in Senta's "redemption" of the Dutchman, or Elisabeth's "redemption" of Tannhäuser, or that Lohengrin was right in withholding his name from Elsa and then going off in a huff when she asked for it. But all these fantastic motives, in which I have no belief, no more affect my appreciation of the operas than my disbelief in ghosts affects my appreciation of _Hamlet_. I do not want any of my friends to be like Parsifal, Amfortas, or Klingsor--especially Klingsor: but neither do I want any of them to be like Lohengrin or Elsa or Senta or the Flying Dutchman. A real world run on the lines of _Parsifal_ would probably drive normal men mad in a month: but then who could live in a world in which Senta-sentimental maidens insisted on jumping into the sea to "redeem" master mariners, taking no account of the able seamen and the stokers and the stewards, who, from anything I can gather to the contrary in the text of the _Flying Dutchman_, all go to Davy Jones's locker in a state of pure damnation what time the captain and the girl ascend to glory? No, we had better leave alone the question of what the world would be like if we were to try to model it on _Parsifal_. We know very well that nothing of the sort will ever happen, just as we know that Little Red Riding Hood's wolf will not gobble up little Phyllis on her way to the High School next week, or the door of the safe fly open when the burglar says "Sesame." These be but fairy tales. We can still sleep in our beds o' nights: and we can still go to _Parsifal_ without either having our morals corrupted or feeling that we are encouraging race suicide.
I listen to _Parsifal_, then--and I imagine most other people do the same--as I would to any other outpouring of a great man's spirit on a world of ideas that fascinated him for the moment, and without any more impulse to translate it all into terms of reality than when I am listening to the _Flying Dutchman_ or _Lohengrin_. The opera is in no sense the work of an exhausted old man. It has been alleged that the plot is "the work of Wagner's tired-out old age." But _Parsifal_ was sketched as early as 1857, worked out in detail in 1864 (when Wagner was only fifty-one), and turned into verse in 1877. Further, the central ideas of the drama are to be found both in the sketches of _Jesus of Nazareth_ (1848) and _The Victors_ (1856); while in 1855 it was Wagner's intention to bring Parsifal on the stage in the final scene of _Tristan_, opposing him, as a symbol of renunciation, to Tristan as a symbol of passion. At almost any time of Wagner's life, indeed, he might have written a _Parsifal_. All his life through he fluctuated between intense eroticism and an equally intense revulsion from the erotic. One may say, in truth, that such a man _had_ to write a _Parsifal_ before he died. "Il est à remarquer, mon fils," says the excellent Abbé Coignard in Anatole France's _La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque_, "que les plus grands saints sont des pénitents, et, comme le repentir se proportionne à la faute, c'est dans les plus grands pêcheurs que se trouve l'étoffe des plus grands saints. La matière première de la sainteté est la concupiscence, l'incontinence, toutes les impuretés de la chair et de l'esprit. Il importe seulement, après avoir amassé cette matière, de la travailler selon l'art théologique et de la modeler, pour ainsi dire, en figure de pénitence, ce qui est l'affaire de quelques années, de quelques jours et parfois d'un seul instant, comme il se voit dans le cas de la contrition parfaite."
In the great book of sex there are many chapters, and _Parsifal_ is simply the last of them for some people. For others it is a chapter that they turn to again and again in moments of revulsion from the illusions of passion. Wagner's insight was clear enough: the Parsifals are no more denials of the Life-Force than the Tristans are; they are simply another phase of the Life-Force. When we disengage the central idea of _Parsifal_ from its rather unskilful operatic setting, the work is simply an artist's dream of an ideally innocent world, purged of the lust, the hatred, the cruelty that deface the world we live and groan in. This is the world the _music_ paints for us--
"Summers of the snakeless meadow, unlaborious earth and oarless sea";
and the cumbrous, old-fashioned stage framework upon which the drama is constructed means no more to me than a clumsily-drafted programme to a great symphonic poem,--it detracts no more from my musical enjoyment than that would do. The music itself, apart from a few commonplaces in the first Act, is marvellous. It is indeed an old man's music, but only in the sense that it opens windows for us upon regions of the soul to which only the old and emotionally wise have access. Swinburne somewhere speaks of Blake's face having the look of being lit up from the inside. I see a similar luminous transfiguration in the later portraits of Wagner[410]--they have the look of a man who has penetrated to the great underlying simplicities of things; and I find in the music of _Parsifal_ the same subtle, searching simplicity, the same almost unearthly illumination. Nowhere does the great master seem to me more truly powerful than in these quiet strains, whose suggestiveness, as is the case with the last Italian songs of Hugo Wolf, is inexplicably out of proportion to the quiet economy of their tissue. To the last the wonderful brain kept growing. He makes a new musical idiom, a new texture, for _Parsifal_ as he had done for every other of his works; above all a harmonic language of incomparable subtlety, a gliding, melting chromaticism that searches us through and through. It is from this novel chromaticism--a very different one from that of _Tristan_--that the harmony of César Franck has come, and all the modern harmony that builds upon Franck.
14
Wagner saw his own work as a transmutation and amplification of the speech of Beethoven--infinitely changeful, but controlled in every bar by a never-sleeping sense of the organic unity of the whole; but it is clear to us now that many features in his work derive from Bach, or are a re-discovery of certain principles of form that Bach affected. It is from Bach, rather than from Beethoven, that such things as the _Tristan_ Prelude come, with their incessant evolution of new life out of a single thematic germ, and their adoption of a conical form of slow ascent to a climax and descent from it, in place of the square symphonic form of return and re-start. In Bach, again, will be found the basis both of Wagner's realism and of the Wagnerian system of allusive "motives." The towering greatness of Wagner is nowhere more strikingly shown than in the failure of all his successors to handle his form--or, indeed, any other--with anything like the same power, freedom and consistency; both the opera and symphonic music are waiting for someone big enough to build afresh upon the foundations Wagner has laid, and with the materials he has left. At present the most that any of his successors can do is to fit a few of the more manageable of the stones together, with a deplorable quantity of waste and confusion all around and in between. _Salome_ and the _Rosenkavalier_ may be taken as instructive examples. There is not a living man big enough to occupy more than a room or two at a time of the vast house that Wagner reared about him. It is true that in certain details--in the furnishing and decoration of one or two of the rooms, let us say--modern music has gone beyond him. Strauss's orchestration has an eloquence--not merely a colour, but a soul and a voice--of which Wagner probably never suspected the possibility. Strauss, Wolf, and others have shaken off the rhythmic fetters that sometimes hampered the movement both of Wagner's poetry and of his music. Wolf and Strauss have shown us the possibilities of what may be called a prose style in music--a more continuous and less formal style than that of verse, with the rhythmic joints and pivots more skilfully concealed. Superb examples of it are to be found in the later scene between Octavian and the Princess in the first Act of the _Rosenkavalier_, and in the great trio in the third Act. Wagner, it is safe to say, would have flatly pronounced it impossible to make rhythmic music of a piece of frank prose like the latter, in which there is not a suspicion of a pretext for any of the staple rhythmic formulas.
But though the Wagnerian apparatus has been improved upon at these and other points--Strauss, for example, has subtilised the employment of the leit-motive--no one has been great enough to manipulate the apparatus as a whole with anything like Wagner's power, scope and freedom, and opera is still waiting for its new redeemer. Even an anti-Wagnerian work like _Pelleas and Melisande_ is, in a sense, a tribute to the Titan: the very sharpness and thoroughness of its recoil from everything that hints at Wagner is an admission of the impossibility of continuing his work on its own lines. And after all, _Pelleas and Melisande_ is only a beautiful and wonderful _tour de force_--a sort of glorified musical mule, without pride of ancestry or hope of posterity. Its idiom is too small for the expression of great things; we might as well try to build a city out of nothing but mother-of-pearl and opals.
Like Bach and like Beethoven, Wagner closes a period, and exhausts a form. And as with Bach and Beethoven to-day, it is indirectly rather than directly that his best influence is being exerted; there is no room for imitation of him, but his speech and his vision are eternal stimuli to our imaginations. It is inevitable that in some quarters a reaction should have set in against his music and his influence. He has been too overpowering a force. His music has been performed with such fatal frequency that the merest amateur can hardly remain unconscious of the weak points in it; and for a whole generation he made all but the very strongest minds among composers a mere shadow and echo of himself. Music, as was only to be expected, has now gone beyond him in certain respects, and the erstwhile anarch is now one of the greatest of the forces that conservatism claims for its own. The French and some of the Russians have revolted against what is less a Wagnerian than a German domination of all European music. A number of our very newest young men are delightfully contemptuous of him: every puny whipster now raises his little hand to deal the reeling colossus another blow. But the colossus will easily right himself. There are moments when one is tempted to say that he and Bach and Beethoven have expressed between them almost all that is essentially original and great in the music of the last two centuries. When a composer is so mighty of body as this, he can well afford to lose a drop or two of blood on his pilgrimage through the ages.
"In music, as in nature," says Vincent d'Indy, "there are mountains and valleys; there are artists of genius who raise their art to such heights that the herd of second-rank creators, unable to breathe in these altitudes, is forced to descend again to more temperate levels (which, however, are often sown with charming flowers), until the eruption of a new genius heaves up a new mountain peak.
"Such were Bach, Haydn, Beethoven and César Franck in the symphonic order; and in the dramatic order, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Rameau, Gluck and Wagner. At the present moment we are descending the slope created by the Wagnerian upheaval, and we are hastening gently towards the hopeful presage of a new summit. But all our drama--even that of the composers who most energetically deny the imputation--comes from the spring which rises at the feet of the titanic Wagner.
"Richard Wagner still casts his great shadow over all our musico-dramatic production. But it is certain that the latent work that is going on in the souls of creative artists is to favour the ascent towards a distant height, of which we cannot yet foresee either the glaciers or the precipices."
His work, in truth, will flower afresh some day in some great composer who will sum up in himself, as Wagner did, all the finest impulses of the music of his day,--who will have absorbed the essential, durable part of the spirit of his predecessors, and who will have at his command an idiom, a vocabulary and a technique competent to express every variety of human emotion. But we may hazard the conjecture that the new flowering will be in instrumental music rather than in the opera. It seems to be a law of musical evolution that at the end of a period of crisis the seminal force that has exhausted itself in one _genre_ passes over to, and finds a new life in, a wholly different _genre_. Beethoven left no real successors in the classical symphony,--for great as Schumann and Brahms are, they are in this field no more than epigones of Beethoven. It is in the Wagnerian opera that the new expressive, half-poetic power of Beethoven's music finds its further logical development. All the opera writers that have followed in Wagner's tracks--Strauss included--are to Wagner simply what Brahms was to Beethoven. As Beethoven fertilised not the symphony but the music-drama, so Wagner has fertilised not the music-drama but poetic instrumental music,--the innumerable symphonic poems and programme symphonies of the last fifty years. The idea of the new form may have been Liszt's as much as Wagner's, or even more; but Liszt's music was not rich enough to do the full work of fertilisation. Now, apparently, we are nearing the end of a period of transition. Already there are signs that the formal programme was little more than a crutch for poetic music in the days of its hesitating growth. Composers are beginning to master the art of suggesting the dramatic inner conflicts of the soul without needing to rely on any outer apparatus of suggestion. We are probably developing towards a form of symphonic music that shall be to the art of its own day what the Beethoven symphony of the middle period was to the art of his time,--a musical drama-without-words, and perfectly lucid without words. When the new instrumental music has assimilated all the finest spirit and mastered the full harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary and the best technique of the new day, some future Wagner will perhaps turn the mighty stream into a fresh dramatic channel, the nature of which it is almost impossible to anticipate. So the great series of cross-cycles will no doubt go on and on, into a day when dramatic music shall no more resemble Wagner's than Wagner's music resembles that of Palestrina. In that distant day he may be no more to mankind than Monteverdi is to us; but music will still be something different from what it would have been had he never been born; and of only some half-dozen composers in the whole history of the art can that be said.
FOOTNOTES:
[396] Three years before this Berlioz had written _Eight Scenes from Goethe's Faust_--the germ of his _Damnation of Faust_.
[397] All references to the operas are to the new editions of Breitkopf and Härtel.
[398] Glasenapp, vi. 187.
[399] The opera should be studied in Breitkopf and Härtel's new edition. Former editions have been printed from the curtailed score that was generally used for performances. The Breitkopf edition reproduces the original manuscript.
[400] In _Mein Leben_ he speaks of it being in five acts, but in the form in which we have it, it has only four.
[401] Accounts of most of these experiments will be found in _Mein Leben_ and elsewhere. The libretti and sketches are printed in the new eleventh volume of the _G.S._
[402] _Mein Leben_, p. 220. Wagner always intended that the _Flying Dutchman_ should be given in one Act. It was played in this way for the first time at Bayreuth in 1901. The necessary skips in the ordinary three-act score are indicated in Breitkopf's edition, pp. 76 and 180.
[403] The overture has been altered to correspond with the altered ending of the opera. Our concert audiences need to remember that the electrifying effect of this wood-wind entry in the overture is an after-thought on Wagner's part. At some time or other he added to the score the following stage directions at the point in the final scene where the passage just quoted enters: "A dazzling glory illumines the group in the background; Senta raises the Dutchman, presses him to her breast, and points him towards heaven with hand and glance." This note is given in the Fürstner score, but not in that of Breitkopf and Härtel.
[404] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 266.
[405] _Ibid._, iv. 272.
[406] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 295, 297, 298, 301, 302.
[407] _Ibid._, iv. 328.
[408] It is possible, of course, for any Wagnerian commentator to give another reason for the introduction of the motive here; but the mere fact that more than one explanation can be given is itself a proof that Wagner has miscalculated.
[409] In the _Götterdämmerung_ Wagner sends only one Valkyrie, Waltraute.
[410] The anti-Wagnerians take a malicious delight in pointing to the old-age portrait of Wagner by Renoir (it is reproduced in Emil Ludwig's recent diatribe _Wagner, oder die Entzauberten_). This shows us a rather flabby and senile face, with a pronounced relaxation of the mouth. But Renoir was an impressionist, and inclined to take the usual impressionist's liberty with his subject. Moreover, the portrait is the product of no more than half-an-hour's sitting, given much against Wagner's will one afternoon after he had tired himself with talking to this new visitor, who saw him on that occasion for the first and, I think, the last time in his life. To ask us to believe that this slap-dash thing is the only veracious portrait of Wagner is making too great a demand on our credulity.
APPENDIX A
THE RACIAL ORIGIN OF WAGNER
Wagner's Autobiography has thrown a good deal of light on certain obscure episodes in his career, but it has signally failed to satisfy the world's curiosity on perhaps the most interesting point of all--the question as to who was Wagner's father. Was it the Leipzig police actuary, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wagner, or the actor, painter, poet, singer, dramatist and what not, Ludwig Heinrich Christian Geyer, who married Frau Wagner some nine months after the decease of her first husband? Under normal circumstances the question would have little or no interest except for the sort of people who dearly love a scandal, even if it be a century and a quarter old. What gives the question its piquancy to-day is the fact that Geyer was a Jew--or at least has always been held to have been one. Now Wagner hated Jews all his life with an insensate hatred, and to have it proved that the composer himself was a Jew on his father's side would give a malicious pleasure to many people to whom Wagner's whole character is a trifle repugnant. Moreover Wagner was always insisting on the specially German quality of his life's work; and again it would be amusing if it should turn out that the greatest "national" art-work of modern Germany was the creation of a Jew. As might be expected, those who have a bone to pick with Wagner on any subject under the sun are delighted to point at this supposed bar-sinister in his escutcheon. Wagner did not like Brahms, and so he accused poor Johannes of being a Jew. It was therefore natural that the out-and-out Brahms partisans should hail with glee any opportunity of making a retort in kind upon Wagner. This is attempted by Sir Charles Stanford in a preface to a volume of Brahms's compositions recently issued by Messrs. T. C. & E. C. Jack. He affirms afresh--what we all knew quite well--that Brahms was of the purest Teutonic blood; and, in his opinion, "the humour of the situation reaches its climax when it is discovered that the very man who attacked any music or musician of Jewish connection was himself tarred with the brush with which he had been endeavouring to orientalise his blue-eyed, fair-haired, and high-instepped German contemporary." So confident, it will be seen, is this statement of the Hebraic origin of Wagner that any plain man, unversed in these matters, who happens to read Sir Charles Stanford's preface, will naturally assume that Wagner's Hebraism is as universally admitted as the death of Queen Anne. Yet Sir Charles offers no evidence as to Wagner being a Jew; he simply tells us that the fact has been "discovered."
Where and when, we may ask, was this "discovery" made? We know that there has long been tittle-tattle current to the effect that Wagner's real father was not the police official whose name he bears, but the brilliant actor, musician, painter and dramatist, who came to the rescue of Wagner's mother in the early days of her widowhood, and married her some nine months afterwards. For the last generation or two a certain number of people have been going about the world shaking their heads mysteriously and darkly hinting at what they could tell if their lips were not sealed. The root of the legend is a notorious remark of Nietzsche's. That philosopher had seen one of the privately printed copies of the Autobiography about 1870, and his query in the postscript to _Der Fall Wagner_, "was Wagner a German at all?" and his point-blank statement that "his father was an actor of the name of Geyer," were supposed to have their justification in the Autobiography. It was confidently asserted that when _that_ appeared the truth would be made known to all the world in Wagner's own confession. Well, the Autobiography _has_ appeared, and what Wagner says there is that Friedrich Wagner was his father. There is not the shadow of a hint in the book that Geyer was anything more than a friend of the family. (Mr. James Huneker, who discusses the subject in an essay in his book _The Pathos of Distance_ (1913) thinks he sees such a hint, and a pretty broad one, in one passage that he quotes; but the wish, I imagine, is father to the thought: few people would care to put the construction upon it that he does.) Mr. Huneker as good as asserts that the commencement of the Autobiography has been tampered with. The reputation of Villa Wahnfried in editorial matters is certainly not of the best; but after the express assurance that has been given the world that the Autobiography has been printed just as Wagner left it, something more than mere suspicion is required to bolster up a charge of such atrocious bad faith. Mr. Huneker tells us that "the late Felix Mottl [the conductor], in the presence of several well-known musical critics of New York City, declared in 1904 that he had read the above statement" (_i.e._ "I am the son of Ludwig Geyer"). That is a little staggering: but again one prefers to think that Mottl or someone else was mistaken, rather than that Cosima and Siegfried Wagner have been guilty of an incredible piece of literary dishonesty. As for Mr. Huneker's further "fact"--that there are portraits of Wagner's mother and of Geyer at Wahnfried, and none of Friedrich Wagner--that is easily accounted for; no portrait of the latter has ever been traced, with the exception of a small pastel, while Geyer was an artist and fond of painting himself.
Sir Charles Stanford attempts to support his very dubious thesis by some show of musical argument. He alleges that the most marked characteristic in such little Jewish music as still exists is the continual repetition of short phrases--a method, he says, which Mendelssohn "uses to the verge of monotony" in his later works, and which is visible again in Wagner's employment of leading motives. Note, to begin with, the restriction of the use of this method to Mendelssohn's _later_ works. Being a Jew, Mendelssohn surely would have betrayed this characteristic in the work of his whole life, if it really be a characteristic rooted in the Hebrew nature. It looks as though the ingenuous argument were that there is no Jew like an old Jew. But it is of even less applicability to Wagner than to Mendelssohn. It is true that in the _Ring_ Wagner worked to a great extent upon short leading motives; but the employment of these was due to the special problems of structure which he was then engaged in working out. Sir Charles Stanford, with his extensive knowledge of Wagner's music, must know that the short phrase is not a characteristic of Wagner's style as a whole. The phrases in _Rienzi_, the _Flying Dutchman_, _Tannhäuser_, _Lohengrin_, the youthful Symphony, the _Faust Overture_, and half-a-dozen other works, are as long-breathed as any of Brahms's. Moreover Sir Charles Stanford admits that in at least half of his work Wagner was a typical Teuton. He speaks of Brahms's melodies as being "long, developed, diatonic, and replete with a quality which may, for lack of a better term, be called 'swing.'" We get precisely the same qualities in the _Meistersinger_. Sir Charles Stanford can hardly be serious when he lays it down that Wagner was a typical Teuton when he wrote the _Meistersinger_, and a typical Jew when he wrote the _Ring_. But further, _is_ the short thematic phrase a characteristic of the Hebrew composer? Will Sir Charles be good enough to illustrate this point for us from the work of Jewish composers like Mabler and Max Bruch? If, indeed, we are to attribute Hebraic ancestry to a composer on the strength merely or mainly of a certain shortness of melodic breath, there are dozens of composers who would have difficulty in repelling the imputation. Was there ever a composer who habitually worked upon such short phrases as Grieg, for example? Is there anything to equal for brevity some of the themes with which Beethoven worked such wonders? And what precisely _is_ a short phrase? Will some one provide us with a sort of inch-rule and table of measurements, by the application of which we shall be able to say precisely where musical Judaism ends and Gentilism begins?
These are surely very flimsy foundations on which to erect a theory that Wagner was a Jew. It is, of course, not impossible: nothing is impossible in this world. One of the rumours afloat is that Wagner himself, in private, spoke of Geyer as being his father. Again proof or disproof is impossible; though Mrs. Burrell gives a facsimile of a letter from Wagner of the 23rd October 1872 (sending Feustel a certificate of baptism), in which he goes out of his way to call himself "Polizei-Amts-Actuarius-Sohn" (Police-actuary's son).
Another branch of the argument is that Wagner was typically Jewish in appearance. I question whether that theory would ever have gained currency except for the back-stairs gossip with regard to his supposed paternity. It has long been a puzzle to the present writer to discover what there is particularly Jewish in Wagner's face. It is true that his nose was large and to some extent aquiline; but it is certainly not the nose that we are accustomed to regard as typically Jewish. The portraits of Geyer that we possess do not show a physiognomy that anybody would call peculiarly Hebraic. On the other hand, Wagner's mother had a nose not only very prominent and curved like Wagner's, but suggesting a Jewish origin far more than either his or Geyer's. For the rest there is nothing whatever in Wagner's face that could lead anyone to think he was a Jew. Let us take Sir Charles Stanford's own test. He remarks that "no one who had known Brahms, especially in his later years, when the Jewish type, if it exists in the blood, is most accentuated, could fail to see that in face, in complexion, in hair and in gait he was a pure Teuton, without a trace of Eastern relationship or characteristics." Let us admit, for the sake of argument, that it is in a man's later years that Jewish characteristics in the blood show themselves most markedly in the face. Now Wagner, so far from looking more Jewish in his maturity and old age, looked decidedly less Jewish. In some of the later full-faced portraits, indeed, the face bears an extraordinary resemblance to that of Mr. Asquith. Some people would call it a very English face. And what of the other members of the Wagner family? We have portraits of his uncle Adolf (1774-1835) and his brother Albert (the latter was born fourteen years before Wagner, and long before Geyer comes into the story). But these faces are unmistakably of the same general cast as Wagner's: that of Albert, indeed, is almost exactly the face of Wagner, but without the genius. The bust of Adolf Wagner shows a nose, forehead, and other features very like those of Richard. The chin is not so pronounced, but the two faces are incontestably of the same type. According to Frau Rose, the daughter of Carl Friedrich Wagner's friend, Gustav Zocher, Wagner's father "was small and slightly crooked, but had a fine face." "I have often thought," says Mrs. Burrell, to whom Frau Rose made this communication, "in looking at Wagner, that he had a narrow escape of deformity; he was not in the least deformed, yet the immense head was poised on the shoulders at the angle peculiar to hunchbacks." The mother also was tiny and eccentric, with "an electric disposition." No judge and jury would say on this evidence that there was any reason whatever to doubt the German paternity of Wagner and assume the Jewish.
There are one or two facts, however, that must be taken into consideration on the other side. Why should Geyer, a struggling artist, be so willing to assume the burden of the widow Wagner and her seven young children? A man of the highest character and the warmest heart he certainly was: are these sufficient explanation of his chivalrous conduct? We have letters of his to Frau Wagner during the weeks that immediately followed the husband's death. The tone of them is warm, but friendly and sympathetic rather than loving. He generally addresses her simply as "Friend," or "Dear Friend." His goodness of heart is shown by such remarks as that _à propos_ of the recovery of the little Albert from illness: "I have indeed felt sincerely with you in your terrible experience, for if Albert were my own son he could not be nearer to my heart." There is not a line in the letters that shows any more affection for Richard than for Albert; the latter, indeed, is mentioned the more frequently. Yet some suspicion clusters round a fact that cannot be discovered from the ordinary biographies of Wagner. The date of the marriage of Johanna Wagner and Geyer is not generally known; it cannot be found, for example, in Glasenapp's big official life of Wagner; while in other biographies the date is variously given as from one month to two or three years after Carl Friedrich's death. The marriage is now known to have taken place in August 1814--on the 14th according to Otto Bournot, on the 28th according to Mrs. Burrell;[411] and a daughter, Cäcilie, was born to them on the 26th February 1815,--_i.e._ six months later. This fact must necessarily count somewhat in our estimate of the nature of the earlier relations between Geyer and Frau Wagner.
On the whole the weight of external evidence is against the theory that Geyer was Wagner's father: the facial resemblances between Richard, his brother Albert, his sister Ottilie (born 14th March 1811), and his uncle Adolf, and Frau Rose's testimony as to the size and appearance of the police actuary, Carl Friedrich, make it more than probable that the last was the composer's father. But the explicit statements of Nietzsche and Mottl cannot be disregarded. The question of their veracity, however, could very easily be settled. There must be more than a dozen of the early copies of _Mein Leben_ in existence. Mrs. Burrell, who seems to have spent a life-time and a fortune in accumulating Wagner letters and documents,[412] actually managed to buy a copy of this privately printed edition. One gathers that she knew Wagner and Cosima, and had evidently small liking for the latter. She appears to have been horrified by the picture Wagner gives of himself and his friends, and at the many evasions, suppressions and distortions of the truth in the work. "This unmentionable book," she calls it in one place. She doubts whether Wagner wrote it, and hints that it has really been pieced together--presumably by Cosima: "To the well-informed and candid mind the book cannot fail to give the impression of being written up after conversations; the exact words are not remembered, and the writer unconsciously imparts another stamp to the language; it is not the German of a German," which is an obvious side-blow at the Franco-Hungarian-Jewish Cosima. "The easily proved inaccuracies are legion...." "The unmistakable purpose of the book is to ruin the reputation of everyone connected with Wagner.... I maintain that Wagner consented under pressure to the book being put together, that he yielded to the temptation of allowing everyone else's character to be blackened in order to make his own great fault [apparently his conduct towards von Bülow] pale before the iniquities, real or invented, of others.... The poet who wrote the pure and impassioned poems of which Senta and Elsa are the heroines could never have conceived so flat and prosaic a plan of revenge upon everyone that had ever annoyed or thwarted him, yes, and worse still, upon many who had benefited and befriended him." She concludes that "Richard Wagner is not responsible for the book."
These remarks are interesting as showing the disgust felt by one who knew something of Wagner at the many basenesses perpetrated in _Mein Leben_--a disgust that thousands of readers have felt since the publication of the book. There may be something in Mrs. Burrell's theory as to how the work was put together; but Wagner undoubtedly assumed full responsibility for it, as is shown by the letter of his to the printer, Bonfantini, Basel (1st July 1870), of which Mrs. Burrell gives a facsimile: he is having fifteen copies printed "dans le seul but d'éviter la perte possible du seul manuscrit, et de les remettre entre les mains d'amis fidèles et [conscientieux?] qui les doivent garder pour un avenir lointain" ("with the object simply of guarding against the possible loss of the sole manuscript, and of placing the copies in the hands of faithful and [conscientious?] friends, who should keep them for a distant future"). But Mrs. Burrell is generally right in her facts, and there may be something more than mere conjecture in her hint that the book, so far as its actual composition is concerned, is Cosima's work at least as much as Wagner's. This would account, among other things, for the tone of enmity or contempt towards almost everyone who had come into his life before herself. But the point with which we are most closely concerned here is not how _Mein Leben_ came to be written, but what it contains on the first page. The copies that Nietzsche and Mottl saw belonged to the same imprint as Mrs. Burrell's copy. This last must still be in existence somewhere. If the possessor would allow an inspection of it, it could be settled once for all whether the first page opens with the words "I am the son of Ludwig Geyer," or "My father, Friedrich Wagner...." If Mottl was speaking the truth, there is an end of the matter--except that our last remaining shred of respect for the editorial probity of Wahnfried will be gone. If Mottl was deceiving himself and others, we can only fall back on a balance of the evidence I have tried to marshal in the preceding pages.
A touch of unconscious humour has been given to the situation by a recent book of Otto Bournot, _Ludwig Heinrich Christian_ [strange name this for a Jew!] _Geyer, der Stiefvater Richard Wagners_. Bournot has delved with Teutonic thoroughness into the records of the Geyer family, has traced it back to 1700, in which year one Benjamin Geyer was a "town musician" in Eisleben, and has established the piquant facts that all the Geyers were of the evangelical faith, that most of them were Protestant church organists, and that all of them married maidens of unimpeachable German extraction. It makes one smile to find how many of these alleged Jews had "Christian" as one of their forenames, as Wagner's putative father had. Even, therefore, if it should be proved at some time or other that Geyer was Richard Wagner's real father, this can only bring with it the admission that the amount of Jewish blood in the composer's veins must have been negligibly small. At the worst he was much more of a German than, say, a semi-Dutchman like Beethoven; much more German than the present English royal family is English; and Bournot is therefore justified in holding that in the last resort the question of Wagner's paternity cannot affect the "national" quality of the work of Bayreuth.
FOOTNOTES:
[411] Mrs. Burrell tells us that the Saxon law forbade a woman to marry again until ten months after the death of her husband. This apparently means "in the tenth month" for only nine full months had elapsed between 22nd November 1813 and the 28th August 1814.
[412] She compiled a biography of him covering the years 1813-1834, which was published in sumptuous form in 1898, after her death. Only one hundred copies were printed, or rather engraved. The book may be seen in the British Museum.
APPENDIX B
WAGNER AND SUPER-WAGNER
[This appendix is a slight expansion of an article that originally appeared in the _Musical Times_ for February 1913. One or two points in it have already been dwelt upon in the foregoing pages, but I have ventured to reprint the article here, even at the cost of a little repetition, because in this form it presents concisely and compactly the argument as to the possibility of a further development from Wagner's own principles.]
I
It would be very interesting if some enterprising interviewer in the shades could procure for us Wagner's opinion upon the course of events in music in general and the opera in particular during the thirty years that have elapsed since his death. He would probably cling with his characteristic tenacity to the views he held in his life-time; but if he were candid he would have to admit that the old problems have latterly taken on a new aspect. The theories he expounded so eagerly in his prose works and illustrated so eloquently in his music-dramas have not passed through the fire of thirty years' criticism without suffering some loss of vitality. Supposing a brain as comprehensive, as variously gifted, and as forceful as his were now to take up the problem of opera, seeing it all afresh as Wagner did, and combining, like him, all the potencies of the best instrumental and operatic music of his day into one vast synthesis, what would be the new form he would strike out--for that a new form is now a necessity is evident on _a priori_ and _a posteriori_ grounds. Music could no more stand still after Wagner than after Bach or Beethoven; a new humanity must find a new expression for its own reading of life. And a survey of the opera since Wagner's death leaves no room for doubt that the emotions and aspirations of the new humanity have not yet found the form most appropriate to them. Wagner has no more succeeded in making his special type of musical drama the norm for latter generations than Bach succeeded in imposing the forms of _his_ music upon the art of the epochs that have followed him. In each case the spirit endures, but not the form. Some elements of the Wagnerian form have of course become, as far as we can judge, permanent factors in opera in general,--the use of leading themes, for example, and the system of entrusting a melodious, flowing, quasi-symphonic development to the orchestra. But not even these elements are recognised as indispensable constituents of opera everywhere: Debussy, for instance, discards both of them in the greater part of his _Pelleas and Melisande_. For the rest, the departures from Wagner's precepts are noticeable enough, especially as regards the poetic basis of opera. Putting aside the negligible work of his second-rate imitators, it would be hard to point to a single opera by a man of original genius that follows Wagner in his reliance upon the primitive myth as the clearest and most fundamental expression of the "purely human," or in his planning of the subject so as to reduce to a minimum the less musical matter in the text, and make the whole opera, as far as may be, a pure expression of nothing but "soul-states."
II
Wagner's famous formula was that hitherto the means in opera (the music) had been taken for the end, and the end (the drama) for the means. His own avowed object was to restore to the drama the right of pre-eminence in opera. His claim to have done so is only valid if we define music and drama in the rather limited senses he had in view when framing his theory. His proposition is correct enough if we take it to mean that music must not, as in the Italian opera, occupy the ear to the exclusion of all worth in the story and all psychological interest in the characters. In the sense that he made opera acceptable to men's heads and hearts as well as their ears, Wagner certainly did make the drama the end, and music the means. But viewed more broadly, his work was really the greatest glorification of music that the theatre had ever seen: for while he enormously increased the expressive scope of the music, he cut out of drama more than half the elements that give that word a meaning apart from music. Drama, with him, meant in the last analysis little more than the best possible text for theatre music. He would have denied this interpretation of his theories and practice, but all the same that is the upshot of them. "Word-speech," he argues, is merely the organ of the intellect, and has therefore the right of entry into music--the emotional art _par excellence_--only so far as it is necessary to give coherence to the rich but indeterminate flood of feeling that music pours out; and music can, and ought, only to ally herself with words that have themselves an emotional content. It was for this reason that he rejected historical and political subjects, and found the ideal "stuff" for opera in the "purely human" legends of the folk; and in _A Communication to my Friends_ he traces in close detail the gradual growth of his perceptions in this respect. What was hidden from him, what, indeed, he persistently denies, is now evident to everyone else,--that the change in his theories and practice was due to the musician in him slowly asserting himself with greater and greater urgency, and finally demanding imperatively a form of text that would allow his gift of musical expression the utmost possible freedom. It must always be borne in mind that Wagner's theory of a unification of all the arts in the one art-work was the product of a brain that had comparatively little sympathy with, or understanding of, any art but music. This may seem a hard saying, but the proof of it is to be found in many declarations in his prose works, his letters, and _Mein Leben_. He could never see in painting, in the prose drama, in poetry, and in sculpture, precisely what painters, dramatists, poets, and sculptors saw there. He seriously thought that "the spoken form of play" (_die Schauspielform_) must "necessarily vanish in the future"; and that painters would give up their "egoistic" decorating of little canvases and be content to devote their powers to contributing, along with the poet, the musician, and the rest of the theatrical forces, to the "united art-work of the future." Clearly it was Wagner the musician who dominated all the other Wagners, and determined both the choice of subject for his operas and the manner of their treatment. "What I saw," he says in _A Communication to My Friends_, "I now looked at solely with the eyes of music." He is careful to add, not of the formal, cramping style of music, but of the kind that came straight from the heart and which he could pour out like a speech in a mother-tongue. That is the whole secret; the "music" he wishes to see made subordinate to "drama" is merely the music that claims to pursue an egoistic existence, bound by its own arbitrary laws alone; but though _his_ music must be natural and unfettered by conventional formulas, and must aim at giving heightened emotional expression to the feeling suggested by the verse and the action, it is still the predominant partner in the union, and only so much of the stuff of the verbal drama will be permitted in the art-work as will give point to the vague musical emotion without hindering its full expression. Like a true musician, he saw drama from a purely musical angle.
III
But granting the premisses implicit in Wagner's theory,--that music is an art of intensely emotional expression, that it can only ally itself with poetry and drama on the condition that these allow themselves to be bent to its will, and that the ideal "stuff" for an opera is that which contains the minimum of matter that music cannot take up into itself and endow with its own loftier and warmer life,--it surely becomes evident that the theory cannot be allowed to end there. In a long article on programme music in my _Musical Studies_ (1905), I have argued that the strictly logical conclusion of Wagner's own theory is not the music-drama but the symphonic poem. He himself admitted that the more we can refine away from the music-drama all the non-musical matter,--the matter that is required merely to make the nature of the characters and the thread of the story intelligible to an audience sitting on the other side of the footlights--the nearer we shall approach the ideal. It was for this reason that he was dissatisfied with his earlier works, and so proud--justifiably proud--of _Tristan_, where, as he said, he "immersed himself in the depths of soul-events pure and simple, and from out this innermost centre of the world fearlessly fashioned its outward form. A glance at the volumen of this poem will show you at once that the copious detail which an historical poet has to employ in order to make the outer connections of his plot evident, to the detriment of a clear exposition of its inner motives, I now trusted myself to apply to these latter alone. Life and death, the whole significance and existence of the external world, here turn on nothing but the inner movements of the soul." There is a touch of exaggeration in the claim, but in the main it holds good; _Tristan_ comes nearer to being _all music and nothing else but music_ than any other work of Wagner. I suggested that in the symphonic poem, rightly planned and rightly worked out, we had the nearest possible approach to this ideal, and I availed myself of a simile Browning uses in _The Ring and the Book_--that of the jeweller who finds it advantageous to mix a certain amount of alloy with the gold while he is working at the ring, but afterwards burns it out with a spirt of acid, leaving simply the circlet of pure gold. The practice of the composer of the symphonic poem seems to me to be analogous to this: he uses the poetic alloy in the conceptual stage of his work to give coherence to the tissue of it, but leaves none of the alloy visible in the completed work itself; to vary the simile, he uses poetry as his scaffolding, but as his scaffolding only. The trouble with opera--viewed from an ideal standpoint--is that it too often shows the scaffolding projecting at a score of points through the finished building. Even in _Tristan_--especially the earlier scenes--we are too conscious at times of verbal matter that all the genius of the musician has not been able to fuse into music. We accept it, but we are not convinced of the absolute necessity of it.
IV
Apart from theory, we have only to look at a few concrete instances of both types of art to see that the ideal symphonic poem is the unalloyed quintessence of opera, and that the average opera is merely a symphonic poem puffed out to three Acts, and made rather loose of tissue in the process. What could be easier than to make a three-act opera of _Ein Heldenleben_,--and what more futile? Apart from the Adversaries, there are only two characters in _Ein Heldenleben_, and we cannot fill up a whole theatrical evening with two characters alone. To have made an opera of it Strauss would have had to get a librettist to surround the only two persons who really matter with a number of minor persons who do not matter in the least; and after spending three or four hours in the theatre we should come away with precisely the same fundamental impression as _Ein Heldenleben_ gives us in the concert-room in about forty minutes,--that a hero has passed through sundry spiritual crises and developments, and at last, after much battling and much error, attained to a super-earthly resignation. This is the ring; everything else we should see and hear in the theatre would only be so much alloy, pleasurable or tiresome. Who does not feel, again, that all the essential emotions of the story of Francesca da Rimini are given us in Tchaikovski's tone-poem? Who wants to see the merely historical and topographical details that would be inevitable in an opera on the subject? Who wants to see the furniture of the house of Malatesta, and the ladies and gentlemen moving about among it? Who wants to see and hear Giovanni? He interests us only as a fragment of the force of fate that drives Paolo and Francesca to love and death; surely we are content to accept his existence as assumed in the great central tragedy, without having him put before us in the flesh to sing a lot of words that do not matter? Who does not feel that Strauss has given us the quintessence of _Macbeth_ in his symphonic poem, and that no opera on that subject could hope to express the spiritual tragedy of Macbeth so swiftly and so drastically? Or, to look at the matter from the other side, take the case of Strauss's _Salome_. Does anything really count there but the train of moods in Salome's soul, and is not all this expressed fully and incomparably in the great final scene,--with perhaps a little assistance from the music of the impassioned monologue of Salome to Jochanaan in the earlier part? What is all the rest of the opera but a mere recital or representation of a story the details of which everyone in the theatre already knows quite well? How Herod was married to Herodias, the mother of Salome, how Herod gave a banquet and became enamoured of his step-daughter, how one Jochanaan, a Jewish prophet, had been imprisoned by order of Herod, how Salome conceived an unholy passion for Jochanaan, how she danced for Herod and won as her reward the head of Jochanaan on a charger--who needs to go to the theatre to be told all this: who takes more than the most languid interest in the telling of it? Music has next to no concern with most of it, because it is of a quality that prevents music attaining to its full emotional incandescence; and it is only when it is playing with ease and ardour round a subject fit to call out the best there is in it that music is really worth writing. If anyone doubts that it is only the final scene and the monologue of _Salome_ that count for anything in the opera, let him ask himself how many people would stay away from the theatre or the concert-room because _only_ these portions were being given, and how many people would go to the theatre if it were known that these portions were to be omitted. Or again, does the whole opera of _Tannhäuser_ tell us very much that is not already told us in the Overture? I am not alleging, of course, that there is not a great deal of very interesting music in the opera. The question is whether the essence of the struggle in Tannhäuser's soul between spiritual and physical love is not fully given us in the Overture, and whether, had this alone been written, we should have felt any more need for an opera upon the subject than we do for an opera on the subject of _Ein Heldenleben_. What is the opera of _Fidelio_, Wagner himself asked, but a mere lengthy watering down of the dramatic motives that have been painted so finely for us in the great _Leonora No. 3_ Overture? May we not say as much of _Tannhäuser_? Is not a great deal of this also a mere padding-out of the subject to comply with the exigencies of a whole evening in the theatre?
V
It is true that Wagner tried to demonstrate that the symphonic poem was a less perfect art-form than the music-drama, inasmuch as it left it to the imagination to supply the characters, the events, or the pictures upon which the music is founded, whereas these really ought to be shown to the eye upon the stage. But a two-fold answer can be given to Wagner. In the first place, there are dozens of passages in his own works that depend for their effect upon precisely that visualising power of the imagination the legitimacy of which he denied in the case of the symphonic poem. Is Siegfried's Rhine Journey, for example, intelligible on any other supposition than that with each change of theme in the music the hearer's imagination visualises a fresh episode in the hero's course? How do we listen to the _Meistersinger_ Overture except just in the way we listen to a symphonic poem--the imagination calling up before it the bodily presence of each of the characters in turn? In the second place, the evidence is overwhelming that Wagner's own imagination was much more restricted in this respect than that of other people; and it was precisely this inability to trust very much to the visualising power of the imagination that made him fall into so many crude errors of realism. All his life through he was unable to see that the imagination has a much wider scope than the eye, because, not being tied down to the mere spatial dimensions of an object, it can add enormously to it out of its own store of memory and vision. Vastness is a quality inseparable from any concept of a god; but can the grandest creation of sculpture or the most heroic of stage figures ever hope to give us such a sense of the illimitable power and beauty of godhead as the imagination can supply? Whose god comes nearest to filling the earth with his presence--the invisible one of Milton or Spinoza, or the visible Wotan of Wagner? Does not the least analytical spectator of a Wagnerian opera often feel that it would have been better if the composer had insisted less on material facts upon the stage and left our imagination a freer wing? How much of the exquisite poetry of the idea of the _Waldweben_--the natural, untainted boy at home in nature's heart, dowered by his native innocence with the gift of understanding the song of birds--is spoiled for us by the grossly unideal presence of the average actor, by the reduction of the wayward breath and infinite soul of nature to a few yards of painted pasteboard, and by the narrowing down of all our ideas of the lyric freedom of bird-life to one poor piece of stuffed mechanism jerked at the end of a wire, and a tremulous soprano somewhere up in the wings? Who would exchange the imagination's vision of the glorious Valkyrie-flight through the storm and the cloud-wrack for the actual visible Grane, with his evident air of having been borrowed from the mews round the corner? Who that is moved by the Grail music in _Parsifal_ has not felt his heart sink within him at the sight of the slow mechanical evolutions of the Knights in the Grail scene at Bayreuth? Who has not felt at the sight of the "property" swan that the rarefied atmosphere of Monsalvat has gone, and with it most of the remoteness, the shining whiteness, of Lohengrin? Or, not to multiply instances of this kind from the Wagnerian operas themselves, who can doubt the general proposition that the more the subject approaches the sublime the more it demands purely poetic or musical treatment, and the more lamentably it suffers by being narrowed down to a canvas or a stage? What painter could hope to suggest, even in the largest picture, the vision of the vast evil form of Lucifer, the mighty sweep of his fall, and the horror of the fiery underworld, that Milton can give us in a line or two;[413] and who, in spite of all the splendour of the music of the _Ring_, does not feel that the actual _spectacle_ of gods and heroes that has been put before our eyes on the stage cannot compare in true sublimity with the picture given us in the great opening lines of Morris's _Sigurd the Volsung_:
"There was a dwelling of kings ere the world was waxen old; Dukes were the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold; Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors; Earls' wives were the weaving-women, queens' daughters strewed its floors, And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast. There dwelt men merry-hearted, and in hope exceeding great Met the good days and the evil as they went the way of fate: There the gods were unforgotten, yea whiles they walked with men, Though e'en in that world's beginning rose a murmur now and then Of the midward time and the fading and the last of the latter days, And the entering in of the terror, and the death of the People's Praise."
How the imagination fills out the ample spaces here left to it to play among--how great and god-like and noble and beautiful a world of men and women it is that the poet evokes for us!
VI
The elimination from an opera-text of everything that is not suited to musical expression is perhaps an unattainable ideal. It is only the titanic _musical_ genius of Wagner that makes us more or less tolerant of what we may call the baser metal in the structure of his music-dramas. Since his day the problem has proved so baffling a one that composers have frankly given it up in despair. Wagner was right: the simpler the story or legend on which we found an opera,--the more it can be trusted to make its own motives and development clear,--the less non-musical matter shall we be burdened with, and the more chance we shall have of being able to keep the musical tissue on a consistently high level. The proof of this is to be found not only in Wagner's own work but in that of his successors. It is hardly possible to recall a modern opera in which, at some point or other, the composer has not tried to delude us into the belief that the music means something when it really means nothing. Take, for example, the opening scene of _Elektra_. The scene is _dramatically_ necessary because it informs the spectator of the relations between Elektra and her mother, and explains the miserable servitude of the maiden in the house of her murdered father. But no man that ever lived could set such words as these to good music; and all that Strauss can do is to make a mere pretence of writing music, let the orchestra play almost anything and the voices shriek almost anything, and trust to the audience being carried blindly along, partly by the excitement of the noise, partly by the bustling stage-movement. Wagner's superior artistic sense would have seen from the outset that this part of the libretto was outside the sphere of music, and, being his own librettist, he would, in obedience to the prompting of the musician in him, have so re-shaped the opera that there would have been no need to communicate that particular piece of information to us in this particular form. The procedure of Strauss and Hofmannsthal is hardly less absurd than that of the old composers who used to set to music not only the actual words of the Bible but "Here beginneth the ... chapter of the ... book of...."
How much of the merest putty, again, is left visible in the libretti of Puccini, Charpentier, and others--passages that are essential if the story is to be made clear to the spectator, but absolutely defying musical treatment. There is scarcely a single opera of which the music gives one the impression of pure necessity from first to last; every now and then our teeth are set on edge by some pieces of grit left by the bad cooks in an otherwise good dish. The handling of passages of this kind has become the most stereotyped of formulæ; the characters talk rather than sing, while the orchestra keeps the ear interested by playing pretty tunes on its own account, much as a nurse tells a child fairy tales to keep it quiet during the misery of the bath. Only the easy-going attitude towards all questions of form that is bred in us by theatrical art could possibly blind us for a moment to the helplessness and ineptitude of a method of this kind. Debussy evades the difficulty in another way. He starts with a text that is already a complete, self-sufficing work of art, capable, without the assistance of music, of holding an audience interested in it by virtue of its own dramatic life and its fine literary quality. He is thus, to begin with, in a far stronger position than that of nineteen opera composers out of twenty, whose texts have no artistic quality of their own, and have to receive the whole breath of their life from the music. Having the good fortune to be working upon a libretto that is itself moving and beautiful, Debussy can frequently afford to leave it to speak for itself, his own contribution to it being sometimes no more than a momentary heightening of the force of the words by means of a poignant harmony or a suggestive touch of colour. I hope I shall not be held to be insensitive to the peculiar charm of Debussy's _Pelleas and Melisande_, or to the rare musical invention of the more continuous portions of it, if I say that a good deal of the opera could have been written by a much less gifted man. Now that the novelty of it has passed off, it is seen to be not at all a difficult matter to subtilise a stage effect by the addition of a poignant chord here and there. _Pelleas and Melisande_ is an extremely beautiful work, but it will probably have no posterity,--because, while the more musical portions of it depend less for their effect on any essential novelty of form than upon the very individual quality of Debussy's imagination, the style of the other--the merely atmospheric--portions is so easy to imitate that it is within the scope of dozens of composers with only a quarter of Debussy's genius. Debussy, then, has not, any more than his contemporaries, solved the problem of weaving the combined vocal and orchestral tissue of the opera into a continuous and homogeneous whole; for a great part of the time he simply evades the problem. _Pelleas and Melisande_ is a _tour de force_ that will probably never be repeated; it depended for its success on the concurrence of a number of factors that are hardly likely to be met with in combination again.
VII
To recapitulate, then, for a moment: Wagner's theory of the ideal music-drama is sound enough, but neither he nor any of his successors has been able to realise the theory in practice. In every combination of music with the other arts it must of necessity play the leading rôle, because of the greater expansiveness and superior warmth of its expression.[414] As Wagner saw, it will tolerate no text but one that is thoroughly musical in essence--that is to say, one that is so purely emotional throughout that at no time can we feel that in order to associate with it music has had to descend from its ideal sphere. It is in the process of making the action clear to the spectator that opera generally has to admit certain elements that drag music down from its high estate. We have therefore at present two chief forms of the association of poetry and music--the opera, in which actual characters, using actual words, are shown to us in the actuality of the stage, and the symphonic poem, in which we are given not the characters but the emotions of the characters, and not the scene but an imaginative suggestion of the scene, while the general nature of the subject is communicated to us by means of a printed explanation or a title. This necessity of putting the hearer _en rapport_ with the story by a device that stands outside the music seems to many people an ineradicable flaw in the symphonic poem; a work of art, they say, should be self-contained, and opera, with all its admitted faults, has the virtue of being its own explanation. I do not think, however, that this matter is so simple as it looks.
Closer analysis will show first of all that many apparently self-contained musical works are as greatly in need of verbal expression as a symphonic poem, and secondly, that in the full sense of the term hardly any opera or drama can be said to be wholly self-explanatory, inasmuch as, at every hearing of it except the first, we witness the unfolding of the earlier stages of the action with a knowledge of the later stages, and are thus as effectually adding something from an outside source to the visual and auditory impressions of the moment as when we follow a symphonic poem with the story in our minds that we have just read in the programme book. What real difference, for example, is there between the frame of mind in which we listen to the _Tannhäuser_ Overture and that in which we listen to _Ein Heldenleben_? In each case we are conscious that the music is not self-existent and self-explanatory, but depends for its full intelligibility on our knowledge of the characters and incidents upon which it is based. We get this knowledge in the case of _Ein Heldenleben_ from a book; in the case of the _Tannhäuser_ Overture we get it from our experience of the opera on the stage.[415] What essential difference is there between the two cases? In each of them we have to rely upon experience outside the work itself in order to grasp the full meaning of it. The _Tannhäuser_ Overture and other works of that class are, in fact, artistic solecisms. No one, surely, will contend that at the _first_ performance of _Tannhäuser_ the Overture conveyed its poetic meaning to the audience any more clearly than a performance of _Ein Heldenleben_ would do without a literary explanation of its contents. The Overture does not explain the opera, but is explained by it, and it is consequently absurd to play it first. It only happens to come first because the old practice of having an orchestral introduction to an opera was unthinkingly retained long after the character of the introduction had so altered that there was no longer any sense in its use. The purpose of the Overture originally was simply to play the audience into their seats. We see it performing this function in an overture like that to the _Messiah_: the music has nothing to do with the oratorio, and any one of a hundred other orchestral introductions would do just as well. But when opera composers began to make the overture a summary of the opera itself, they entered upon a course that ultimately made it an absurdity. In so far as the overture sums up the opera, and therefore depends for its intelligibility on a knowledge of the opera, it ought logically to be played not at the commencement of the evening, but at the end. Modern composers have instinctively recognised the truth of all this, and the operatic overture is now virtually abolished; there is none, for instance, to _Salome_, _Elektra_, or _Pelleas and Melisande_.
All the overtures, then, that epitomise the opera with which they are connected are in the same category as the symphonic poem; for an understanding of the literary basis of them we have to go to a source outside themselves. The theory that a piece of music is bad music unless it is "self-sufficing" and "self-explanatory" is a mere nightmare of the arm-chair æsthetician. There are thousands of pages in Bach that only yield up their full secret to us when we get some outside light upon the sequence of poetic ideas in his mind at the time of writing. This is the case with many of the chorale preludes, for example. But Bach's music is often rich in a kind of allusive symbolism greatly resembling Wagner's use of the leading motive, though it is bolder than that, inasmuch as the musical symbol has not been made familiar to us by a previous definite use of it in the same work of art. In the _Christmas Oratorio_ Bach sets the words of a chorale addressed to the infant Jesus to the music of another chorale that was already associated in the minds of the congregation with the Passion--thus in a flash bringing the death of the Saviour into the same mental picture as the birth.[416] The chorale fantasia which the blind old man dictated to his pupil Altnikol a few days before his death united the music of the hymn "In our hour of direst need," with the words of "I come before thy throne." And who can forget the effect, comparable to some of the most thrilling of those that Wagner makes with his leading motives, of the trumpet pealing out with the melody of "Great God, what do I see and hear! The end of things created" in the midst of the bass recitative describing the terrors of the Day of Judgment (in the cantata _Wachet, betet_). Bach anticipated, as he did most things in modern music, the Wagnerian use of the leading motive, the function of which is to suggest to the hearer's imagination another idea simultaneously with the one the music is explicitly expressing. I think Bach would have smiled at anyone who chose to object that his chorale in the _Christmas Oratorio_ was not self-sufficing, inasmuch as it depended for its affecting double meaning upon knowledge that the hearer had gathered elsewhere. He would probably have been satisfied with the unshakable fact that the hearer _had_ this knowledge, and that it was therefore quite safe to rely on his making use of it. Surely the composer of the symphonic poem and allied forms is also justified in trusting occasionally to his auditors' outside knowledge of the subject of his work. Is there anything less legitimate in Strauss's trusting to our imagination to summon up at performance the scenes and the figures of _Don Quixote_, than there is in Wagner's trusting to it, during the _Tannhäuser_ or _Meistersinger_ Overture, to summon up the scenes and figures of the opera? I have already pointed out that in his music-dramas Wagner is continually asking us, by means of recurrent leading motives, to visualise more than is actually set before us on the stage--thus flying in the face of his own theoretical arguments. It only needs to be added that he also relied, at times, as much as the writer of symphonic poems does, upon the hearer's or spectator's knowing more about the course of the drama than has been revealed to him in the drama itself. How do we know, for example, that the "Sword" motive in the final scene of the _Rhinegold_ is a "Sword" motive at all? How do we know the train of thought running through Wotan's mind at this point as he looks into the future? Simply by antedating the information we have gained from the later dramas of the _Ring_. At the time the "Sword" motive is first heard there has never been the slightest suggestion of the sword that is to help to lift the curse from the gods; not only Siegfried but Siegfried's parents are as yet unborn. Again, the phrase that _Tannhäuser_ sings to the words "Ha, jetzt erkenne ich sie wieder, die schöne Welt der ich entrückt" in the first Act of the opera is explained only by the association of it with Elisabeth and the Hall of Song in the second Act. Anyone with a knowledge of the Wagnerian operas can multiply these instances for himself.
Does not everything, in fact, point to the impossibility of our listening to any performance of a drama or opera, _except the first one_, with a mind that is absolutely a clean slate? Are we not always drawing consciously or unconsciously upon our store of acquired knowledge of the work, and blending this with the visual or auditory impressions of the moment? Do we not all know, long before it happens, that the screen will fall down at a certain climactic point in the _School for Scandal_ and show us Lady Teazle hiding behind it? Is not our appreciation of all the dialogue of this scene whetted by our knowledge--gained from "outside" sources--of what is going to happen at the end of it? The instructed spectator or reader invariably keeps looking ahead, his interest or delight in what is occurring at the moment being intensified by what may be called anticipatory memory. It is only at the first time of reading _Tom Jones_ that we can be in the slightest doubt as to who is the hero's mother. The ever-present clue to the solution of the mystery does not spoil our pleasure, however, in the second and subsequent readings; nay, it rather adds to it, for it makes us conscious of a number of cunning strokes of construction that we had not noticed at the first reading. At the second and every subsequent performance of Mr. John Galsworthy's _The Pigeon_ a thrill of horror goes through us at the exit of Mrs. Megan in the second Act, for we know--what we did not know at the first performance--that she means to throw herself into the river; and for this reason the second performance necessarily makes a profounder effect on us than the first. I take it, then, that an exaggerated importance can be attached to the principle of art being "self-sufficing" and "self-explanatory" at the first time of hearing or seeing; the subject is a far more complex one than the amateur æstheticians have imagined. They had only to turn to the Greek drama to see a form of art in which deliberate advantage was taken by every author of the fact that the audience had an "outside" knowledge of the characters and events of the play. The Greek drama, broadly speaking, did not rely, as ours does, on the effect of a slow unfolding of a complicated plot--the main art of which consists in first of all giving the audience something to hunt for and then finding it for them. The Greek drama was based on a myth or a legend every detail of which was known to every member of the audience. _At a first performance_, therefore, the audience would be in precisely the same position as a modern audience is when it reads in its programme-book the analysis of a new symphonic poem that is about to be performed. And this knowledge, so far from diminishing the audience's enjoyment of the drama, actually intensified it, and permitted to the author an amount of subtle psychological allusion that can only be compared with the effects of the leading motive in modern opera. When Clytemnestra, for instance, in Æschylus's drama, greets Agamemnon with falsely-fawning words, the thrill that ran through the Athenian audience came not from any feeling of foreboding inspired by the visible situation or the actual words, but from its _outside_ knowledge that all this was feigning, and that the hounds of death were already hot on the track of the unsuspecting king. Wagner would have flashed the same light upon Clytemnestra's words by means of an orchestral motive. An Athenian, again, at the first performance of the _Œdipus Rex_, must have known the whole of the story from the beginning. There could be for him none of the cumulative surprise at the slow unravelling of the web that we feel at a first reading of the tragedy; rather did he accompany the first blind steps of Œdipus with a pity born of the knowledge--the _outside_ knowledge--of the doom the gods had woven for him.
VIII
If, then, there is no æsthetic falsity involved in assuming some previous knowledge of the action or the motive on the part of the spectator, or in communicating this knowledge by other means than a stage presentation, why should we not boldly recognise that the time is ripe for a new form of art that shall carry the potency of music a step further than it was carried by Wagner? After all, it is the music that counts for ninety-five per cent, of our enjoyment of a Wagner opera. The "philosophy" of the _Ring_ may be something to write or read about in the study, but in the theatre it really goes for very little. It is interesting to talk about the Schopenhauerian or Hindoo significance of the discourse of the lovers, in the second Act of _Tristan_, upon Love and Death, and Night and Day; but again--for how much does this count in the theatre? Has there ever been a single spectator, since _Tristan_ was first given, who could make out from the performance alone what philosophy it was the lovers were talking, or whether they were talking philosophy at all? And how many people who _do_ know the text at this point--because they have read it--feel in the theatre that very much of the essential emotion of the work would be lost if the characters sang Chinese words, or Choctaw words, or no words at all, so long as the music was left to tell its own tale? I must guard against possible misunderstanding here. I am not for a moment urging that speech should henceforth be banished from opera as a mere superfluity.[417] There are many subjects in which it will always be a necessity; the world of the _Meistersinger_, for instance, could have been made real to us in no other medium than that of music with words. But I do contend that there are many poetic subjects in which virtually the whole of the expression could be entrusted with perfect safety to music alone,--not necessarily in the form of a symphonic poem, but in a sort of drama without actors--if the paradox may be permitted--or with speechless actors. And could we not in this way approach a step nearer to the ideal musical art-work, in which all the needful suggestiveness of poetry was retained without any admixture of the cruder non-musical elements that at present merely go to make plot and persons intelligible to the auditor?
IX
Maeterlinck and others have of late familiarised us with the idea of a "static" as distinguished from the older "dynamic" drama. It is highly probable that in the future men will go to the theatre craving the satisfaction of rather different desires from those they seek to satisfy there now. That "drama" is capable of more than one meaning is proved by the existence of dramatic forms so varied as those of the Greek drama, the Shakespearean drama, the Maeterlinckian drama, the _Atalanta in Calydon_ of Swinburne, _The Dynasts_ of Mr. Thomas Hardy, and the _Getting Married_ of Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is quite reasonable to suppose, therefore, that a new generation may read another new meaning into the word. Among the finer minds of the present day there is a decided movement away from what seems to them the crudity of the old-style "well-constructed" drama of action. Maeterlinck, in one or two of his essays, has given eloquent expression to the feelings that inspire this movement of revolt. Many of the time-honoured dramatic "motives" are already sadly discredited. The dagger and the poison-bowl no longer play the part in tragedy that they used to play. Humanity has come to see that things of this kind are the mere excrescences of a dramatic action,--the mere crude outward and visible signs of desires and passions working in secret in the souls of men,--and their gaze is being turned more and more on the psychological springs of action rather than on the visible actions themselves. Drama, in the hands of thoughtful poetical writers, is becoming more and more an affair of the inner rather than the outer man; and it is probable that, as time goes on, still less reliance will be placed on the crude stage effect of violent action. It need hardly be said that as drama dispenses with piece after piece of action and explanation, and comes deeper down to the essence of tragedy as a war of impulses in a man's soul or of the fates about his path, it approaches more nearly to the mood of music. We may look in the future to a yet further purging of poetic drama of many of the tedious conventional devices on which it is still dependent so long as it has to play off a number of characters against each other like chessmen on a few square yards of board in a theatre. I think I can foresee the time when most of what now passes for "plot interest"--the pretence on the author's part of hiding something merely in order that it may in due time be triumphantly found again--will be regarded as something almost childish in the naïve quality of its appeal, and will be relegated to forms of art as much below the general intellectual level of the literature of the day as the detective story is below the intellectual level of our own better novels and dramas. The more artistic the race becomes, the less will it crave for mere facts and events in drama, and the more for an imaginative reading of the soul on which the facts and events have written their record. Again let me interpolate a word of warning against a misunderstanding of my thesis. I am not supposing that a time will ever come when the drama as we have it now will have disappeared from the stage. I fully recognise that there are certain dramatic concepts that can never be adequately expressed except by means of clashing and marching and counter-marching characters, and action more or less violent or clockworklike. But I fancy that in the not distant future the more poetic side of man will demand a form of art in which very little happens or is told, but in which the soul of the spectator is flooded by emotions of pity and sorrow and love that are all the more penetrating because they do not come to us through the relatively cold medium of words and the childish, creaking clockwork of exits and entrances and surprises and intrigue.
X
It is this attitude of the artistic mind of the future towards drama that will, I think, find utterance in a form of quasi-dramatic music in which we shall be rid of all or most of the mere scaffolding of narration or action that serves at present simply to give intellectual support to the music of opera. Even in Wagner are we not painfully conscious at times of the fact that the music, which matters a great deal, is being diluted and made turbid by a quantity of baser matter the only function of which is to make it clear to us why these particular people are there at that particular moment, and what it is that they are doing? It cannot be reiterated too often that it is only the music that can keep alive any form of art into which music enters. The mere facts in an art-work lose their force with repetition; it is only artistic emotion that can be born anew again and again and yet again. Who feels anything but a glow of rapturous anticipation when the first notes of the _Liebestod_ or of Wotan's _Abschied_ are sounded? He may have heard it all a hundred times before, and know every note of it by heart; but it will all be as new and wonderful and inevitable to him at the hundredth hearing as at the first. But who does not involuntarily emit a groan from the very depths of his being when Wagner's first care at the moment is not to kindle us with great music but to tell us through Wotan's lips at great length, and for the hundredth time, certain mere facts that have long lost their absorbing interest for us. And even in his most compact work, _Tristan_, is there not a great deal that is, from the highest point of view, superfluous? We can bear to hear the same glorious music time without number; but we will not bear being told time without number who Tristan and Isolde and Marke and Morold are, and how Tristan slew Morold, and how Isolde nursed Tristan back to health, and all the rest of it. I can imagine a _Tristan_ in which things of this kind would be assumed to be matters of common knowledge on the part of the audience, as the characters and motives of Tchaikovski's _Romeo and Juliet_ or _Francesca da Rimini_ are assumed to be common knowledge, or those of Strauss's _Macbeth_ or _Till Eulenspiegel_, or those of Beethoven's _Coriolan_ and _Egmont_ Overtures or the _Leonora No. 3_, or those of Dukas's _L'Apprenti Sorcier_. Then the whole of the composer's time and the audience's attention could be devoted to that full musical exposition of nothing else but the protagonists' "soul-states" and "soul-events" which Wagner avowed as the ideal of music-drama, but which is virtually an impossible ideal so long as opera is compelled to utilise so many actors on so much and no more of a stage, and to occupy precisely so many hours of an evening.
As it happens, we already have in the Greek drama,--especially that of the older type,--a form of poetic art strongly resembling that which I am here suggesting might be now produced in music. Not only did the old Greek dramatist, as we have seen, largely rely on the audience's knowledge of the characters and events of his play, and so save himself the necessity of much action or much scene-shifting, but he cast the drama into a concentrated form that enabled him to appeal rather to the spectator's sense of poetry than to the mere delight in external catastrophe and the unravelling of plot; while in the chorus he had under his hand an instrument capable of extraordinary emotional expression. The Greek drama, in fact, was singularly akin to the music-drama of Wagner. As Wagner saw, the true modern equivalent of the Greek chorus is the orchestra; it is at once part of the action and aloof from it, an ideal spectator, sympathising, commenting, correcting. The Greek drama resembles ideal opera, again, in that the ultimate sentiment disengaged from it is one not of facts shown, or of interest held by the mere interplay of intrigue, but of a high poetic spirit, purifying and transfiguring the common life of things.
Is not this form capable of further development? Is it not possible to construct an art-form in which the mere facts that it is necessary for us to know are either assumed as known or set before us in the briefest possible way, so that music can take upon itself the whole burden of expression, and the whole work of art be nothing but an outpouring of lofty, quintessential emotion? Can we not imagine something like the second Act of _Tristan_ with silent and only dimly visible actors, the music, helped by their gestures, telling us all that is in their souls, while they are too remote from us for the crude personality of the actors and the theatrical artificiality of the stage-setting to jar upon us as they do at present? Cannot some story be taken as so well known to everyone that only the shadowiest hints of the course of it need be given to the spectator, the real drama being in the music? Or, to go a step further, cannot we dispense altogether with the stage and the visible actor, such external coherence as the music needs being afforded by impersonal voices floating through a darkened auditorium?[418] The effect of disembodied voices can be made extraordinarily moving; in all my experience of concert-going I can remember no sensations comparable to those I felt during the Grail scene from _Parsifal_ at one of the Three Choirs Festivals; the exquisite beauty of the boys' voices floating down from one knew not where was something almost too much for mortal senses to endure. Here, in the concealed, impersonal choir, is an instrument, I think, the full emotional power of which is not yet suspected by composers. It lends itself admirably to just that desire for the exploration of the mysteries around us that music is always endeavouring to satisfy. As the cruder kind of action goes out of drama, the hovering Fates will come in. Mr. Hardy, in _The Dynasts_, has given us a hint of what may be done by a partial reversion to the Greek type of drama, the purblind, struggling human protagonists being surrounded by an invisible chorus of Fates that see to the hidden roots of things. A poetic scheme of this kind could be made extremely impressive by music,--say a series of orchestral pictures of human desires and passions, having a simple intellectual co-ordination of their own, with an invisible chorus commenting upon it all now and then in the style of the Fates of Mr. Hardy or the chorus of Æschylus. There are, I think, several possible new art-forms open to us when we shall have learned to dispense, for certain purposes, with the actor and his speech, to rely upon the audience's previous knowledge of some story of universal interest and significance, and to leave it to music alone to express the whole of the dramatic or poetic implications of the story. But it is perhaps vain to try to forecast these future developments by means of reason. They will certainly come, but not by theorists taking thought of them; they will have to be born, as the Wagnerian drama was, out of the burning need of some great soul.
FOOTNOTES:
[413] See _Paradise Lost_, Book I, lines 44 ff. Compare the passage in which Lessing (_Laokoön_, Chap. XII) is discussing the felling of Mars by Minerva by means of a huge stone. The overthrown god, according to Homer, "covered seven acres." "It is impossible," says Lessing, "that the painter could give this extraordinary size to the god; but if he does not give it him, then Mars does not lie upon the ground like the Homeric Mars, but like a common warrior."
[414] This is the explanation of the fact that good music often floats a poor poem, while the best of poems has never been able to float poor music.
[415] We may, of course, get it from a programme note, but this in turn must have been derived from some experience of the opera, either on the stage or in the printed score.
[416] A correspondent of the _Musical Times_ objected to this statement, alleging that the so-called Passion chorale is really the tune of the Communion chorale _Herzlich tut mich verlangen_, which is used for a variety of other hymns, including the _O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden_. "The result is," he said, "that to the German mind it conveys no particular association, just because it is so frequently used and at the most varied occasions." As a matter of fact, it is precisely to "the German mind" that it _does_ convey the Passion association I suggested, as is shown by the remarks of such writers as Spitta (_Life of Bach_, Eng. trans., ii. 579), Schweitzer (_J. S. Bach, le musicien-poète_, p. 281), Arnold Schering (_Bachs Textbehandlung_, p. 19), and Wolfrum (_Johann Sebastian Bach_, ii. 14, 15).
[417] Nor, I should think I scarcely need add, do I imagine that opera will die out in the near future, though some critics of the original article naïvely attributed this view to me!
[418] Mr. Rutland Boughton has already made a very suggestive beginning on this line.
SYNTHETIC TABLE OF WAGNER'S LIFE AND WORKS AND SYNCHRONOUS EVENTS
YEAR. LIFE. MUSICAL WORKS. PROSE AND SYNCHRONOUS POETICAL WORKS. EVENTS.
1813 22nd May. Born at Verdi born. Leipzig. Rossini's 22nd Nov. His father _Tancredi_. dies.
1814 14th Aug. His mother marries Ludwig Geyer.
August. The family removes to Dresden.
1815 Weber called to Dresden to found a German Opera.
1818 Spohr's _Faust_.
1819 Schopenhauer's _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_.
1821 30th Sept. Weber's Death of Geyer. _Der Freischütz_.
1822 César Franck born.
1823 Weber's _Euryanthe_.
Schubert's _Rosamunde_.
1824 Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Bruckner born.
1826 Weber's _Oberon_.
Death of Weber.
1827 The family Death of removes to Leipzig. Beethoven
1828 "Leubald und Adelaide" Death of (unpublished). Schubert.
Marschner's _Der Vampyr_.
1829 1st Sonata in Auber's D minor. _Masaniello_.
Quartet in D major. Rossini's _William Tell_.
1830 Arrangement of Berlioz' Beethoven's _Symphonie 9th Symphony Fantastique_. for two hands. Auber's Overture in C major _Fra Diavolo_. (6/8 time). Bellini's Overture in B flat _Romeo and (performed at Leipzig Juliet_ under H. Dorn on Christmas Day).
1831 Feb. Studies Pianoforte Sonata in Meyerbeer's music with B flat major (Op. 1). _Robert the Devil_. Weinlig. Polonaise in D major Bellini's for four hands _La Somnambula_. (Op. 2). (Both published by Hérold's _Zampa_. Breitkopf & Härtel, 1832).
Pianoforte Fantasia in F sharp minor (not published in Wagner's life-time; first issued by Kahnt, Leipzig, 1905).
Overture to Raupach's _König Enzio_ (finished 3rd Feb. 1832. Performed in Leipzig Theatre, as prelude to the play, 16th March 1832. Published by Breitkopf & Härtel, 1907).
Concert Overture in D minor (never published; performed at a "Euterpe" Concert, Leipzig, Christmas 1831, and at a Gewandhaus Concert, 23rd Feb. 1832).
Concert Overture in C with fugue (never published; performed at a "Euterpe" concert, Leipzig, winter 1831-2, and at a Gewandhaus Concert, 30th April 1832).
1832 Symphony in C major Bellini's (performed at Prague _Norma_. Conservatoire under Dionys Weber, Death of summer 1832, Goethe. also at Leipzig, Christmas 1832 and 10th Jan. 1833).
_Die Hochzeit_ begun. Text completed, but music never finished.
Setting of "Glockentöne" (poem by T. Apel).
Seven compositions for Goethe's _Faust_ (Op. 5). (Not published till 1914.)
1833 Jan. At Würzburg. Returns to Leipzig at Christmas.
6th Aug. Finishes Sept. Allegro for Marschner's