THE argument of the late Herr Wagner was that grand opera—the music
drama, as he called it—included, and therefore did away with the
necessity for—all other arts. Music in all its branches, of course, it
provides: so much I will concede to the late Herr Wagner. There are
times, I confess, when my musical yearnings might shock the late Herr
Wagner—times when I feel unequal to following three distinct themes at
one and the same instant.
“Listen,” whispers the Wagnerian enthusiast to me, “the cornet has now
the Brunnhilda motive.” It seems to me, in my then state of depravity,
as if the cornet had even more than this the matter with him.
“The second violins,” continues the Wagnerian enthusiast, “are carrying
on the Wotan theme.” That they are carrying on goes without saying: the
players’ faces are streaming with perspiration.
“The brass,” explains my friend—his object is to cultivate my ear—“is
accompanying the singers.” I should have said drowning them. There are
occasions when I can rave about Wagner with the best of them. High class
moods come to all of us. The difference between the really high-class
man and us commonplace, workaday men is the difference between, say, the
eagle and the barnyard chicken. I am the barnyard chicken. I have my
wings. There are ecstatic moments when I feel I want to spurn the sordid
earth and soar into the realms of art. I do fly a little, but my body is
heavy, and I only get as far as the fence. After a while I find it
lonesome on the fence, and I hop down again among my fellows.
Listening to Wagner, during such temporary Philistinic mood, my sense of
fair play is outraged. A lone, lorn woman stands upon the stage trying
to make herself heard. She has to do this sort of thing for her living;
maybe an invalid mother, younger brothers and sisters are dependent upon
her. One hundred and forty men, all armed with powerful instruments,
well-organised, and most of them looking well-fed, combine to make it
impossible for a single note of that poor woman’s voice to be heard above
their din. I see her standing there, opening and shutting her mouth,
getting redder and redder in the face. She is singing, one feels sure of
it; one could hear her if only those one hundred and forty men would ease
up for a minute. She makes one mighty, supreme effort; above the banging
of the drums, the blare of the trumpets, the shrieking of the strings,
that last despairing note is distinctly heard.
She has won, but the victory has cost her dear. She sinks down fainting
on the stage and is carried off by supers. Chivalrous indignation has
made it difficult for me to keep my seat watching the unequal contest.
My instinct was to leap the barrier, hurl the bald-headed chief of her
enemies from his high chair, and lay about me with the trombone or the
clarionet—whichever might have come the easier to my snatch.
“You cowardly lot of bullies,” I have wanted to cry, “are you not ashamed
of yourselves? A hundred and forty of you against one, and that one a
still beautiful and, comparatively speaking, young lady. Be quiet for a
minute—can’t you? Give the poor girl a chance.”
A lady of my acquaintance says that sitting out a Wagnerian opera seems
to her like listening to a singer accompanied by four orchestras playing
different tunes at the same time. As I have said, there are times when
Wagner carries me along with him, when I exult in the crash and whirl of
his contending harmonies. But, alas! there are those other moods—those
after dinner moods—when my desire is for something distinctly resembling
a tune. Still, there are other composers of grand opera besides Wagner.
I grant to the late Herr Wagner, that, in so far as music is concerned,
opera can supply us with all we can need.
But it was also Wagner’s argument that grand opera could supply us with
acting, and there I am compelled to disagree with him. Wagner thought
that the arts of acting and singing could be combined. I have seen
artists the great man has trained himself. As singers they left nothing
to be desired, but the acting in grand opera has never yet impressed me.
Wagner never succeeded in avoiding the operatic convention and nobody
else ever will. When the operatic lover meets his sweetheart he puts her
in a corner and, turning his back upon her, comes down to the footlights
and tells the audience how he adores her. When he has finished, he, in
his turn, retires into the corner, and she comes down and tells the
audience that she is simply mad about him.
Overcome with joy at finding she really cares for him, he comes down
right and says that this is the happiest moment of his life; and she
stands left, twelve feet away from him, and has the presentiment that all
this sort of thing is much too good to last. They go off together,
backwards, side by side. If there is any love-making, such as I
understand by the term, it is done “off.” This is not my idea of acting.
But I do not see how you are going to substitute for it anything more
natural. When you are singing at the top of your voice, you don’t want a
heavy woman hanging round your neck. When you are killing a man and
warbling about it at the same time, you don’t want him fooling around you
defending himself. You want him to have a little reasonable patience,
and to wait in his proper place till you have finished, telling him, or
rather telling the crowd, how much you hate and despise him.
When the proper time comes, and if he is where you expect to find him
while thinking of your upper C, you will hit him lightly on the shoulder
with your sword, and then he can die to his own particular tune. If you
have been severely wounded in battle, or in any other sort of row, and
have got to sing a long ballad before you finally expire, you don’t want
to have to think how a man would really behave who knew he had only got a
few minutes to live and was feeling bad about it. The chances are that
he would not want to sing at all. The woman who really loved him would
not encourage him to sing. She would want him to keep quiet while she
moved herself about a bit, in case there was anything that could be done
for him.
If a mob is climbing the stairs thirsting for your blood, you do not want
to stand upright with your arms stretched out, a good eighteen inches
from the door, while you go over at some length the varied incidents
leading up to the annoyance. If your desire were to act naturally you
would push against that door for all you were worth, and yell for
somebody to bring you a chest of drawers and a bedstead, and things like
that, to pile up against it. If you were a king, and were giving a
party, you would not want your guests to fix you up at the other end of
the room and leave you there, with nobody to talk to but your own wife,
while they turned their backs upon you, and had a long and complicated
dance all to themselves. You would want to be in it; you would want to
let them know that you were king.
In acting, all these little points have to be considered. In opera,
everything is rightly sacrificed to musical necessity. I have seen the
young, enthusiastic opera-singer who thought that he or she could act and
sing at the same time. The experienced artist takes the centre of the
stage and husbands his resources. Whether he is supposed to be indignant
because somebody has killed his mother, or cheerful because he is going
out to fight his country’s foes, who are only waiting until he has
finished singing to attack the town, he leaves it to the composer to make
clear.
Also it was Herr Wagner’s idea that the back cloth would leave the
opera-goer indifferent to the picture gallery. The castle on the rock,
accessible only by balloon, in which every window lights up
simultaneously and instantaneously, one minute after sunset, while the
full moon is rushing up the sky at the pace of a champion comet—that
wonderful sea that suddenly opens and swallows up the ship—those
snow-clad mountains, over which the shadow of the hero passes like a
threatening cloud—the grand old chateau, trembling in the wind—what need,
will ask the opera-goer of the future, of your Turners and your Corots,
when, for prices ranging from a shilling upwards, we can have a dozen
pictures such as these rolled up and down before us every evening?
But perhaps the most daring hope of all was the dream that came to Herr
Wagner that his opera singers, his grouped choruses, would eventually
satisfy the craving of the public for high class statuary. I am not
quite sure the general public does care for statuary. I do not know
whether the idea has ever occurred to the Anarchist, but, were I myself
organising secret committee meetings for unholy purposes, I should invite
my comrades to meet in that section of the local museum devoted to
statuary. I can conceive of no place where we should be freer from
prying eyes and listening ears. A select few, however, do appreciate
statuary; and such, I am inclined to think, will not be weaned from their
passion by the contemplation of the opera singer in his or her various
quaint costumes.
And even if the tenor always satisfied our ideal of Apollo, and the
soprano were always as sylph-like as she is described in the libretto,
even then I should doubt the average operatic chorus being regarded by
the _connoisseur_ as a cheap and pleasant substitute for a bas relief
from the Elgin marbles. The great thing required of that operatic chorus
is experience. The young and giddy-pated the chorus master has no use
for. The sober, honest, industrious lady or gentleman, with a knowledge
of music is very properly his ideal.
What I admire about the chorus chiefly is its unity. The whole village
dresses exactly alike. In wicked, worldly villages there is rivalry,
leading to heartburn and jealously. One lady comes out suddenly, on,
say, a Bank Holiday, in a fetching blue that conquers every male heart.
Next holiday her rival cuts her out with a green hat. In the operatic
village it must be that the girls gather together beforehand to arrange
this thing. There is probably a meeting called.
“The dear Count’s wedding,” announces the chairwoman, “you will all be
pleased to hear, has been fixed for the fourteenth, at eleven o’clock in
the morning. The entire village will be assembled at ten-thirty to await
the return of the bridal _cortège_ from the church, and offer its
felicitations. Married ladies, will, of course, come accompanied by
their husbands. Unmarried ladies must each bring a male partner as near
their own height as possible. Fortunately, in this village the number of
males is exactly equal to that of females, so that the picture need not
be spoiled. The children will organise themselves into an independent
body and will group themselves picturesquely. It has been thought
advisable,” continues the chairwoman, “that the village should meet the
dear Count and his bride at some spot not too far removed from the local
alehouse. The costume to be worn by the ladies will consist of a short
pink skirt terminating at the knees and ornamented with festoons of
flowers; above will be worn a bolero in mauve silk without sleeves and
cut _décolleté_. The shoes should be of yellow satin over flesh-coloured
stockings. Ladies who are ‘out’ will wear pearl necklaces, and a simple
device in emeralds to decorate the hair. Thank God, we can all of us
afford it, and provided the weather holds up and nothing unexpected
happens—he is not what I call a lucky man, our Count, and it is always as
well to be prepared for possibilities—well, I think we may look forward
to a really pleasant day.”
It cannot be done, Herr Wagner, believe me. You cannot substitute the
music drama for all the arts combined. The object to be aimed at by the
wise composer should be to make us, while listening to his music,
forgetful of all remaining artistic considerations.