things he loved, and how he sought in others the decadence that was
really in himself. He tried to embody this decadence in Wagner, and, led
away by his flights of fancy and his mania for paradox (which would be
laughable if one did not remember that his whims were not hatched in
hours of happiness), he denied Wagner his most obvious qualities--his
vigour, his determination, his unity, his logic, and his power of
progress. He amused himself by comparing Wagner's style with that of
Goncourt, by making him--with amusing irony--a great miniaturist
painter, a poet of half-tones, a musician of affectations and
melancholy, so delicate and effeminate in style that "after him all
other musicians seemed too robust."[108] He has painted Wagner and his
time delightfully. We all enjoy these little pictures of the Tetralogy,
delicately drawn and worked up by the aid of a
magnifying-glass--pictures of Wagner, languishing and beautiful, in a
mournful salon, and pictures of the athletic meetings of the other
musicians, who were "too robust"! The amusing part is that this piece of
wit has been taken seriously by certain arbiters of elegance, who are
only too happy to be able to run counter to any current opinion,
whatever it may be.
[Footnote 108: F. Nietzsche, _Der Fall Wagner_.]
I do not say that there may not be a decadent side in Wagner, revealing
super-sensitiveness or even hysteria and other modern nervous
affections. And if this side was lacking he would not be representative
of his time, and that is what every great artist ought to be. But there
is certainly something more in him than decadence; and if women and
young men cannot see anything beyond it, it only proves their inability
to get outside themselves. A long time ago Wagner himself complained to
Liszt that neither the public nor artists knew how to listen to or
understand any side of his music but the effeminate side: "They do not
grasp its strength," he said. "My supposed successes," he also tells us,
"are founded on misunderstanding. My public reputation isn't worth a
walnut-shell." And it is true he has been applauded, patronised, and
monopolised for a quarter of a century by all the decadents of art and
literature. Scarcely anyone has seen in him a vigorous musician and a
classic writer, or has recognised him as Beethoven's direct successor,
the inheritor of his heroic and pastoral genius, of his epic
inspirations and battlefield rhythms, of his Napoleonic phrases and
atmosphere of stirring trumpet-calls.
Nowhere is Wagner nearer to Beethoven than in _Siegfried_. In _Die
Walküre_ certain characters, certain phrases of Wotan, of Brünnhilde,
and, especially, of Siegmund, bear a close relationship to Beethoven's
symphonies and sonatas. I can never play the recitative _con espressione
e semplice_ of the seventeenth sonata for the piano (Op. 31, No. 2)
without being reminded of the forests of _Die Walküre_ and the fugitive
hero. But in _Siegfried_ I find, not only a likeness to Beethoven in
details, but the same spirit running through the work--both the poem and
the music. I cannot help thinking that Beethoven would perhaps have
disliked _Tristan_, but would have loved _Siegfried_; for the latter is
a perfect incarnation of the spirit of old Germany, virginal and gross,
sincere and malicious, full of humour and sentiment, of deep feeling, of
dreams of bloody and joyous battles, of the shade of great oak-trees and
the song of birds.
* * * * *
In my opinion, _Siegfried_, in spirit and in form, stands alone in
Wagner's work. It breathes perfect health and happiness, and it
overflows with gladness. Only _Die Meistersinger_ rivals it in
merriment, though even there one does not find such a nice balance of
poetry and music.
And _Siegfried_ rouses one's admiration the more when one thinks that it
was the offspring of sickness and suffering. The time at which Wagner
wrote it was one of the saddest in his life. It often happens so in art.
One goes astray in trying to interpret an artist's life by his work, for
it is exceptional to find one a counterpart of the other. It is more
likely that an artist's work will express the opposite of his life--the
things that he did not experience. The object of art is to fill up what
is missing in the artist's experience: "Art begins where life leaves
off," said Wagner. A man of action is rarely pleased with stimulating
works of art. Borgia and Sforza patronised Leonardo. The strong,
full-blooded men of the seventeenth century; the apoplectic court at
Versailles (where Fagon's lancet played so necessary a part); the
generals and ministers who harassed the Protestants and burned the
Palatinate--all these loved pastorales. Napoleon wept at a reading of
_Paul et Virginie_, and delighted in the pallid music of Paesiello. A
man wearied by an over-active life seeks repose in art; a man who lives
a narrow, commonplace life seeks energy in art. A great artist writes a
gay work when he is sad, and a sad work when he is gay, almost in spite
of himself. Beethoven's symphony _To Joy_ is the offspring of his
misery; and Wagner's _Meistersinger_ was composed immediately after the
failure of _Tannhäuser_ in Paris. People try to find in _Tristan_ the
trace of some love-story of Wagner's, but Wagner himself says: "As in
all my life I have never truly tasted the happiness of love, I will
raise a monument to a beautiful dream of it: I have the idea of _Tristan
und Isolde_ in my head." And so it was with his creation of the happy
and heedless _Siegfried_.
* * * * *
The first ideas of _Siegfried_ were contemporary with the Revolution of
1848, which Wagner took part in with the same enthusiasm he put into
everything else. His recognised biographer, Herr Houston Stewart
Chamberlain--who, with M. Henri Lichtenberger, has succeeded best in
unravelling Wagner's complex soul, though he is not without certain
prejudices--has been at great pains to prove that Wagner was always a
patriot and a German monarchist. Well, he may have been so later on, but
it was not, I think, the last phase of his evolution. His actions speak
for themselves. On 14 June, 1848, in a famous speech to the National
Democratic Association, Wagner violently attacked the organisation of
society itself, and demanded both the abolition of money and the
extinction of what was left of the aristocracy. In _Das Kunstwerk der
Zukunft_ (1849) he showed that beyond the "local nationalism" were signs
of a "supernational universalism." And all this was not merely talk, for
he risked his life for his ideas. Herr Chamberlain himself quotes the
account of a witness who saw him, in May, 1849, distributing
revolutionary pamphlets to the troops who were besieging Dresden. It was
a miracle that he was not arrested and shot. We know that after Dresden
was taken a warrant was out against him, and he fled to Switzerland,
with a passport on which was a borrowed name. If it be true that Wagner
later declared that he had been "involved in error and led away by his
feelings" it matters little to the history of that time. Errors and
enthusiasms are an integral part of life, and one must not ignore them
in a man's biography under the pretext that he regretted them twenty or
thirty years later, for they have, nevertheless, helped to guide his
actions and impressed his imagination. It was out of the Revolution
itself that _Siegfried_ directly sprang.
In 1848, Wagner was not yet thinking of a Tetralogy, but of an heroic
opera in three acts called _Siegfried's Tod_, in which the fatal power
of gold was to be symbolised in the treasure of the Niebelungen; and
Siegfried was to represent "a socialist redeemer come down to earth to
abolish the reign of Capital." As the rough draft developed, Wagner went
up the stream of his hero's life. He dreamed of his childhood, of his
conquest of the treasure, of the awakening of Brünnhilde; and in 1851 he
wrote the poem of _Der Junge Siegfried_. Siegfried and Brünnhilde
represent the humanity of the future, the new era that should be
realised when the earth was set free from the yoke of gold. Then Wagner
went farther back still, to the sources of the legend itself, and Wotan
appeared, the symbol of our time, a man such as you or I--in contrast to
Siegfried, man as he ought to be, and one day will be. On this subject
Wagner says, in a letter to Roeckel: "Look well at Wotan; he is the
unmistakable likeness of ourselves, and the sum of the present-day
spirit, while Siegfried is the man we wait and wish for--the future man
whom we cannot create, but who will create himself by our
annihilation--the most perfect man I can imagine." Finally Wagner
conceived the Twilight of the Gods, the fall of the Valhalla--our
present system of society--and the birth of a regenerated humanity.
Wagner wrote to Uhlig in 1851 that the complete work was to be played
after the great Revolution.
The opera public would probably be very astonished to learn that in
_Siegfried_ they applaud a revolutionary work, expressly directed by
Wagner against this detested Capital, whose downfall would have been so
dear to him. And he never doubted that he was expressing grief in all
these pages of shining joy.
Wagner went to Zurich after a stay in Paris, where he felt "so much
distrust for the artistic world and horror for the restraint that he was
forced to put upon himself" that he was seized with a nervous malady
which nearly killed him. He returned to work at _Der Junge Siegfried_,
and he says it brought him great joy.
"But I am unhappy in not being able to apply myself to anything but
music. I know I am feeding on an illusion, and that reality is the
only thing worth having. My health is not good, and my nerves are
in a state of increasing weakness. My life, lived entirely in the
imagination and without sufficient action, tires me so, that I can
only work with frequent breaks and long intervals of rest;
otherwise I pay the penalty with long and painful suffering.... I
am very lonely. I often wish for death.
"While I work I forget my troubles; but the moment I rest they come
flocking about me, and I am very miserable. What a splendid life is
an artist's! Look at it! How willingly would I part with it for a
week of real life.
"I can't understand how a really happy man could think of serving
art. If we enjoyed life, we should have no need of art. When the
present has nothing more to offer us we cry out our needs by means
of art. To have my youth again and my health, to enjoy nature, to
have a wife who would love me devotedly, and fine children--for
this I would give up _all my art_. Now I have said it--give me what
is left."
Thus the poem of the Tetralogy was written with doubts, as he said, as
to whether he should abandon art and all belonging to it and become a
healthy, normal man--a son of nature. He began to compose the music of
the poem while in a state of suffering, which every day became more
acute.
"My nights are often sleepless; I get out of bed, wretched and
exhausted, with the thought of a long day before me, which will not
bring me a single joy. The society of others tortures me, and I
avoid it only to torture myself. Everything I do fills me with
disgust. It can't go on for ever. I can't stand such a life any
longer. I will kill myself rather than live like this.... I don't
believe in anything, and I have only one desire--to sleep so
soundly that human misery will exist no more for me. I ought to be
able to get such a sleep somehow; it should not be really
difficult."
For distraction he went to Italy; Turin, Genoa, Spezia, and Nice. But
there, in a strange world, his loneliness seemed so frightful that he
became very depressed, and made all haste back to Zurich. It was there
he wrote the happy music of _Das Rheingold_. He began the score of _Die
Walküre_ at a time when his normal condition was one of suffering. Then
he discovered Schopenhauer, whose philosophy only helped to confirm and
crystallise his instinctive pessimism. In the spring of 1855 he went to
London to give concerts; but he was ill there, and this fresh contact
with the world only served to annoy him further. He had some difficulty
in again taking up _Die Walküre_; but he finished it at last in spite of
frequent attacks of facial erysipelas, for which he afterwards had to
undergo a hydropathic cure at Geneva. He began the score of _Siegfried_
towards the end of 1856, while the thought of Tristan was stirring
within him. In _Tristan_ he wished to depict love as "a dreadful
anguish"; and this idea obsessed him so completely that he could not
finish _Siegfried_. He seemed to be consumed by a burning fever; and,
abandoning _Siegfried_ in the middle of the second act, he threw himself
madly into _Tristan_. "I want to gratify my desire for love," he says,
"until it is completely satiated; and in the folds of the black flag
that floats over its consummation I wish to wrap myself and die."[109]
_Siegfried_ was not finished until 5 February, 1871, at the end of the
Franco-Prussian war--that is fourteen years later, after several
interruptions.
Such is, in a few words, the history of this heroic idyll. It is perhaps
as well to remind the public now and then that the hours of distraction
they enjoy by means of art may represent years of suffering for the
artist.
* * * * *
[Footnote 109: The quotations from Wagner are taken from his letters to
Roeckel, Uhlig, and Liszt, between 1851 and 1856.]
Do you know the amusing account Tolstoy gave of a performance of
_Siegfried_? I will quote it from his book, _What is Art_?--
"When I arrived, an actor in tight-fitting breeches was seated
before an object that was meant to represent an anvil. He wore a
wig and false beard; his white and manicured hands had nothing of
the workman about them; and his easy air, prominent belly, and
flabby muscles readily betrayed the actor. With an absurd hammer he
struck--as no one else would ever strike--a fantastic-looking
sword-blade. One guessed he was a dwarf, because when he walked he
bent his legs at the knees. He cried out a great deal, and opened
his mouth in a queer fashion. The orchestra also emitted peculiar
noises like several beginnings that had nothing to do with one
another. Then another actor appeared with a horn in his belt,
leading a man dressed up as a bear, who walked on all-fours. He let
loose the bear on the dwarf, who ran away, but forgot to bend his
knees this time. The actor with the human face represented the
hero, Siegfried. He cried out for a long time, and the dwarf
replied in the same way. Then a traveller arrived--the god Wotan.
He had a wig, too; and, settling himself down with his spear, in a
silly attitude, he told Mimi all about things he already knew, but
of which the audience was ignorant. Then Siegfried seized some bits
that were supposed to represent pieces of a sword, and sang:
'Heaho, heaho, hoho! Hoho, hoho, hoho, hoho! Hoheo, haho, haheo,
hoho!' And that was the end of the first act. It was all so
artificial and stupid that I had great difficulty in sitting it
out. But my friends begged me to stay, and assured me that the
second act would be better.
"The next scene represented a forest. Wotan was waking up the
dragon. At first the dragon said, 'I want to go to sleep'; but
eventually he came out of his grotto. The dragon was represented by
two men clothed in a green skin with some scales stuck about it. At
one end of the skin they wagged a tail, and at the other end they
opened a crocodile's mouth, out of which came fire. The dragon,
which ought to have been a frightful beast--and perhaps he would
have frightened children about five years old--said a few words in
a bass voice. It was so childish and feeble that one was astonished
to see grown-up people present; even thousands of so-called
cultured people looked on and listened attentively, and went into
raptures. Then Siegfried arrived with his horn. He lay down during
a pause, which is reputed to be very beautiful; and sometimes he
talked to himself, and sometimes he was quite silent. He wanted to
imitate the song of the birds, and cut a rush with his horn, and
made a flute out of it. But he played the flute badly, and so he
began to blow his horn. The scene is intolerable, and there is not
the least trace of music in it. I was annoyed to see three thousand
people round about me, listening submissively to this absurdity
and dutifully admiring it.
"With some courage I managed to wait for the next
scene--Siegfried's fight with the dragon. There were roarings and
flames of fire and brandishings of the sword. But I could not stand
it any longer; and I fled out of the theatre with a feeling of
disgust that I have not yet forgotten."
I admit I cannot read this delightful criticism without laughing; and it
does not affect me painfully like Nietzsche's pernicious and morbid
irony. It used to be a grief to me that two men whom I loved with an
equal affection, and whom I reverenced as the finest spirits in Europe,
remained strangers and hostile to each other. I could not bear the
thought that a genius, hopelessly misunderstood by the crowd, should be
bent on making his solitude more bitter and narrow by refusing, with a
sort of jealous waywardness, to be reconciled to his equals, or to offer
them the hand of friendship. But now I think that perhaps it was better
so. The first virtue of genius is sincerity. If Nietzsche had to go out
of his way _not_ to understand Wagner, it is natural, on the other hand,
that Wagner should be a closed book to Tolstoy; it would be almost
surprising if it were otherwise. Each one has his own part to play, and
has no need to change it. Wagner's wonderful dreams and magic intuition
of the inner life are not less valuable to us than Tolstoy's pitiless
truth, in which he exposes modern society and tears away the veil of
hypocrisy with which she covers herself. So I admire _Siegfried_, and
at the same time enjoy Tolstoy's satire; for I like the latter's sturdy
humour, which is one of the most striking features of his realism, and
which, as he himself noticed, makes him closely resemble Rousseau. Both
men show us an ultra-refined civilisation, and both are uncompromising
apostles of a return to nature.
Tolstoy's rough banter recalls Rousseau's sarcasm about an opera of
Rameau's. In the _Nouvelle Héloïse_, he rails in a similar fashion
against the sadly fantastic performances at the theatre. It was, even
then, a question of monsters, "of dragons animated by a blockhead of a
Savoyard, who had not enough spirit for the beast."
"They assured me that they had a tremendous lot of machinery to
make all this movement, and they offered several times to show it
to me; but I felt no curiosity about little effects achieved by
great efforts.... The sky is represented by some blue rags
suspended from sticks and cords, like a laundry display.... The
chariots of the gods and goddesses are made of four joists in a
frame, suspended by a thick rope, as a swing might be. Then a plank
is stuck across the joists, and on this is seated a god. In front
of him hangs a piece of daubed cloth, which serves as a cloud upon
which his splendid chariot may rest.... The theatre is furnished
with little square trap-doors which, opening as occasion requires,
show that the demons can be let loose from the cellars. When the
demons have to fly in the air, dummies of brown cloth are
substituted, or sometimes real chimney-sweeps, who swing in the
air, suspended by cords, until they are gloriously lost in the rag
sky....
"But you can have no idea of the dreadful cries and roarings with
which the theatre resounds.... What is so extraordinary is that
these howlings are almost the only things that the audience
applaud. By the way they clap their hands one would take them to be
a lot of deaf creatures, who were so delighted to catch a few
piercing sounds now and then that they wanted the actors to do them
all over again. I am quite sure that people applaud the bawling of
an actress at the opera as they would a mountebank's feats of skill
at a fair--one suffers while they are going on, but one is so
delighted to see them finish without an accident that one willingly
demonstrates one's pleasure.... With these beautiful sounds, as
true as they are sweet, those of the orchestra blend very worthily.
Imagine an unending clatter of instruments without any melody; a
lingering and endless groaning among the bass parts; and the whole
the most mournful and boring thing that I ever heard in my life. I
could not put up with it for half an hour without getting a violent
headache.
"All this forms a sort of psalmody, possessing neither tune nor
time. But if by any chance a lively air is played, there is a
general stamping; the audience is set in motion, and follows, with
a great deal of trouble and noise, some performer in the
orchestra. Delighted to feel for a few moments the rhythm that is
so lacking, they torment the ear, the voice, the arms, the legs,
and all the body, to chase after a tune that is ever ready to
escape them...."
I have quoted this rather long passage to show how the impression made
by one of Rameau's operas on his contemporaries resembled that made by
Wagner on his enemies. It was not without reason that Rameau was said to
be Wagner's forerunner, as Rousseau was Tolstoy's forerunner.
In reality, it was not against _Siegfried_ itself that Tolstoy's
criticism was directed; and Tolstoy was closer than he thought to the
spirit of this drama. Is not Siegfried the heroic incarnation of a free
and healthy man, sprung directly from Nature? In a sketch of
_Siegfried_, written in 1848, Wagner says:
"To follow the impulses of my heart is my supreme law; what I can
accomplish by obeying my instincts is what I ought to do. Is that
voice of instinct cursed or blessed? I do not know; but I yield to
it, and never force myself to run counter to my inclination."
Wagner fought against civilisation by quite other methods than those
employed by Tolstoy; and if the efforts of the two were equally great,
the practical result is--one must really say it--as poor on one side as
on the other.
What Tolstoy's raillery is really aimed at is not Wagner's work, but the
way in which his work was represented. The splendours of the setting do
not hide the childishness of the ideas behind them: the dragon Fafna,
Fricka's rams, the bear, the serpent, and all the Valhalla menagerie
have always been ridiculous. I will only add that the dragon's failure
to be terrifying was not Wagner's fault, for he never attempted to
depict a terrifying dragon. He gave it quite clearly, and of his own
choice, a comic character. Both the text and the music make Fafner a
sort of ogre, a simple creature, but, above all, a grotesque one.
Besides, I cannot help feeling that scenic reality takes away rather
than adds to the effect of these great philosophical fairylands. Malwida
von Meysenbug told me that at the Bayreuth festival of 1876, while she
was following one of the _Ring_ scenes very attentively with her
opera-glasses, two hands were laid over her eyes, and she heard Wagner's
voice say impatiently: "Don't look so much at what is going on. Listen!"
It was good counsel. There are dilettanti who pretend that at a concert
the best way to enjoy Beethoven's last works--where the sonority is
defective--is to stop the ears and read the score. One might say with
less of a paradox that the best way to follow a performance of Wagner's
operas is to listen with the eyes shut. So perfect is the music, so
powerful its hold on the imagination, that it leaves nothing to be
desired; what it suggests to the mind is infinitely finer than what the
eyes may see. I have never shared the opinion that Wagner's works may
be best appreciated in the theatre. His works are epic symphonies. As a
frame for them I should like temples; as scenery, the illimitable land
of thought; as actors, our dreams.
* * * * *