BAYREUTH IN 1912
In 1912 I received an invitation from Herr Siegfried Wagner to be present
at the _General-Probe_ (dress rehearsal) of the Bayreuth Festival. My
daughter Iris, my usual travelling companion, went with me.
There is a certain quaint charm, an individuality, about the old German
towns that once upon a time, in days which are after all not so very
remote, were the seats of small princely Courts and Governments. Bayreuth
was a typical example of an old “Residenz.” Broad streets flanked by
substantial houses, squares with fountains or statues adorning their
centres, an old palace or castle—the relic of feudal times—and a more
modern palace of French eighteenth-century inspiration; outside the town
a “Hermitage,” with a Temple of the Sun, sham ruins and other rococo
follies built of cement plastered with mosaics of coloured stone and
rock-crystal or glass, in a garden with deliciously shaded, cool walks:
these are the legacies of former glories, when the “high-well-born”
who crowded to the palace elbowed and jostled for a bow, a smile, or a
gracious word from a Markgraf or a Markgräfin with all the honour-hunger
of men and women in all times and in all Courts.
Think of the bitterness and mortification of a lady left out from a
garden-party at the Hermitage when there were to be private theatricals
in the Roman Theatre, at which Voltaire was to be stage-manager and act
with her Royal Highness in person! Think of the triumph, not untinged
with spite, of her next-door neighbour who could flaunt in her face
the coveted invitation card! Oh, it was a very real Court! There were
chamberlains with their wands; ladies-in-waiting, maids-of-honour,
privy councillors, officials of all grades, an army chiefly composed
of officers. There were hoop petticoats, powder and rouge and patches,
red-heeled shoes, and if there were not many diamonds we may be sure that
there was plenty of paste. Just such a Court as Thackeray and Offenbach
loved to make fun of, and even Frederick the Great, as we shall presently
see, made the target at which to sling his ridicule.
Hauff, writing in the first years of the nineteenth century, in his
sardonic “Memoiren des Satans,” whom, by the by, he represents as taking
a special interest in the pigmy Courts, makes Satan ask the Wandering
Jew whether there is anything more grotesque to be seen than “diese
duodez Länder,” these duodecimo countries. So it was not foreigners
only who laughed at the absurdities which they presented. However, _de
mortuis nil nisi bonum_. All now vanished! Gone the transparencies,
gone the chamberlains and the Court ladies, gone General Bourn and his
staff! All shades—shades that have crossed the Styx. The metamorphosis
is complete. The palaces are used as museums or public offices, the
houses of the “high-well-born” are shops and places of business, the
fountains, in which admiring courtiers saw the rivals of the Grandes Eaux
de Versailles, play for an hour on Sundays for the benefit of honest
burghers waxing fat upon their afternoon lager, as good Bavarians should,
in the groves of the once exclusive Hermitage, turned by the wheel of
time into a glorified beer-garden.
The memoirs of the Markgräfin Wilhelmine give a perfect, but none too
attractive, picture of the little Court of Bayreuth. She was the daughter
of King Frederick William of Prussia, and her mother was a Princess of
Hanover, sister of George the First of England. Her life as a child and
as a young lady was one long misery. Her mother hated her, and the hatred
was increased by the failure of all her conspiracies to marry the girl
to her first cousin, the Prince of Wales. Her father, too, had his views
as to marrying her to suit his whims or interests, so that she became
immeshed in a perfect network of intrigues and plots and counterplots.
Frederick William was a man of such a violent temper that one is tempted
sometimes to doubt his sanity. His cruelty to his children was, even if
we largely discount the Markgräfin’s story, simply incredible. His son,
afterwards Frederick the Great, when a grown-up youth, beaten, cuffed,
kicked, and dragged round the room by his hair; later on arrested,
threatened with torture, and his best friend, Katt, beheaded before
his face;—Wilhelmine struck in the face with his clenched fist and
handed over to governesses who ill-used and tortured her. He was a man
of no little political sagacity, and he laid the foundation upon which
Frederick the Great built up the greatness of Prussia, but in his home
he was a savage utterly without control. The marriage with the Prince of
Wales fell through because King George very properly refused to subscribe
to the King of Prussia’s conditions; the suitors favoured by the King
were sent to the right-about by Wilhelmine’s own strength of character.
She fought with her back to the wall, she won the day, and they were
dismissed. And so it came to pass that at the age of twenty-two she, in
1731, married the hereditary Prince of Bayreuth.
The Royal Family of Prussia were anything but a happy gathering. The
King and Queen were objects of terror so little tempered by any dutiful
regard that, although Wilhelmine now and again makes little attempts at
an expression of filial affection, too gushing to be real, they were
rather hated than beloved by their children: the sisters were for ever
quarrelling and plotting the one against the other, and as they grew
up and married small Princes there was plenty of opportunity for the
exhibition of petty jealousies and spite. Between Wilhelmine and her
brother, Frederick the Great, there was some show of affection, at any
rate on her side, and in the days of his dire calamities she did what
she could to stand between him and the cruelty of their father; but on
his side the affection was only intermittently returned; and indeed by
her own showing she can hardly have been the sort of person who would
arouse sympathy or attract love: clever she was, beyond a doubt—her
correspondence with Voltaire testifies to that; but there was nothing
soft or womanly about her character.
Her father-in-law, the Markgraf, was the object of her special hatred and
of a contempt which she did not care to conceal. When the poor drunken
fool was dying she was away at Potsdam with her father, and she received
the intelligence with undisguised pleasure. “Les nouvelles que je reçus
de Bareith furent bien satisfaisantes. Mlle. de Sonsfeld me mandait que
la santé du Margrave dépérissait à vue.” He did not die until two years
later, in May, 1735—a long period of waiting for a Princess who was in a
hurry to be promoted to her full dignities!
Frederick the Great entertained a very adequate respect for the glories
of a Markgraf’s Court, nor had he the consideration for his sister’s
feelings which might have curbed his satire. When, shortly before the
death of their father, the King of Prussia, he paid his sister a visit
at Bayreuth, he seems rather to have taken pains to mortify her: “Il se
fit présenter toute la Cour, et se contenta de regarder tous ceux qui
la composaient d’un air moqueur, après quoi nous nous mimes à table. Il
ne fit dans toute la conversation que turlupiner tout ce qu’il voyait
en me répétant plus de cent fois le mot de petit prince et de petite
Cour. J’étais outrée.” Poor little Court! But there was to be worse
within the sacred precincts themselves than the cruellest mockery from
outside. When the Princess became Markgräfin her favourite maid-of-honour
was a certain Fräulein von Marwitz, of whom in 1735 she wrote: “Pour la
Marwitz je l’aimais à la passion; nous n’avions rien caché l’une pour
l’autre. Je n’ai jamais vu un rapport de caractère pareil au nôtre; elle
ne pouvait vivre sans moi, ni moi sans elle; elle ne faisait pas un pas
sans me consulter et elle était approuvée de tout le monde.” A beautiful
friendship! But alas for the inconstancy of female alliances! It was not
very long before the lovely Marwitz—for she was lovely—fulfilled her
courtly mission by setting her cap at the Markgraf, and stealing his
heart from the mistress who loved her, if indeed she ever loved anybody
but herself.
As I said before, it was a very real Court. It was a centre of political
intrigues; for the rivalries of Austria and Prussia kept the small
capitals of Germany in a continual fever; while, apart from greater
questions of policy, jealousies, ambitions, and heart-burnings worthy of
Versailles and the Œil de Bœuf were directed upon petty promotions and
evanescent favouritisms. As for the chief luminaries, they shed a light
over their little firmament relatively not inferior to that of the Roi
Soleil himself.
The last years of the Markgräfin’s chequered life were by far the
happiest. Their correspondence during those years shows the revival
of a complete understanding between Frederick the Great and her, and
bears every witness of mutual admiration. He appreciated her undoubted
talents; she sympathized with his endeavours and gloried in his success.
Their affection was warmer and more real than it had been even in their
childhood. She speaks of it with delight as a “retour de sentiments des
personnes qu’on aime.”
Besides this natural source of a great joy there was also her
intellectual friendship with Voltaire. She made his acquaintance in 1740
at Reinsberg, a country place where the great Frederick had gathered
together a whole assembly of men of letters and science, whom in
spare moments he refreshed with his flute. Three years later Voltaire
accompanied the King to Bayreuth, where he outstayed his royal patron
for a fortnight, during which he helped the Markgräfin in a whole series
of entertainments and theatricals. Their correspondence, in which
she delighted, lasted till her death, upon which he wrote one of the
trashiest sonnets that ever appeared signed by a great name. The editor
of her journal calls it a “monument immortel”!
The Markgräfin Wilhelmine was not only a woman of remarkable talent, but
she was a Princess typical of the times in which she lived and of the
position which she occupied. If she did not directly play a leading part
in the historical events of those days, she was intimately mixed up with
those who did. She left her mark upon her husband’s principality, and it
will always be difficult to think of Bayreuth without remembering her as
a most notable personality in its princely family.
Times have changed; but if the tinsel of a pinchbeck Court has
disappeared, Bayreuth to-day is more brilliant and more famous than it
was in the days when the smiles or frowns of the Markgrafen and their
consorts made the Paradise or the Gehenna of their courtiers. Then the
old Franconian capital could hardly have been known outside of Germany
or Austria, and even there it only ranked as one of many such towns. Now
the mighty genius of one man has transformed it into the Mecca of a great
cult, celebrated wherever the magic power of poetry, music, and art holds
sway, drawing the willing pilgrims to its shrine.
The performance of a drama at the Fest-Spiel-Haus gives the impression
of something sacred, something of the nature of a religious ceremony.
All the circumstances combine to give intensity to that idea. From the
beginning of time, ever since the Sumerians raised the Tower of Babel,
as we are now told to imitate the sacred pinnacles of the highlands from
which they swept down upon the Mesopotamian plain; long before Babylon
or Nineveh were cities, hills and mountains in every country have been
places of worship. Mount Zion, Sinai, Carmel, Ararat, Olympus, Fuji in
far Japan, a thousand peaks in a thousand lands tell the same tale.
Outside the town of Bayreuth, at a distance of perhaps half a mile is
a little hill, and upon this fitting site is erected the Temple of
the great High Priest of Art. An avenue of horse-chestnut trees some
thirty years old, that have just reached the dignity of giving a little
welcome shade, leads up to it. And here on a day when one of the great
masterpieces is to be played, for a full hour before the given time you
may see a long stream of the faithful toiling up under broiling sun or
pouring rain, careless of either, only eager to be in time when the
trumpet shall sound to tell that the doors are open. Laggards there are
none.
The Fest-Spiel-Haus (call it not a theatre!) is a very simple,
unpretentious building: it is guiltless of all ornamentation both outside
and inside: a covered verandah for shelter runs round it, but there is
nothing superfluous, no pillars or gewgaws or caryatides, nothing to
convey an idea of the feast of poetry that will presently be opened. Only
the rapt look in the faces of the worshippers tells of expectancy and
the knowledge of the joy to come. It is the expression which may be read
in the features of a pious Mussulman when at eventide he kneels on his
prayer-carpet and turns his face towards the holy city of his faith; it
is a look that you may see in a procession of poor Russian pilgrims when
they come in sight of the walls of Jerusalem.
In their appreciations of other men’s writings professed critics,
especially when their desire is to praise, are often led into
metaphysical analyses in which subtleties are discovered at which no one
could be more astonished than the authors to whom they are ascribed.
When Pope was attacked by Crousaz for the heterodox opinions put forth
in the “Essay on Man,” Bishop Warburton, who, by the by, had previously
himself fallen foul of the poet for the same reason, took up the cudgels
for him, professing to have discovered certain hidden meanings which had
previously escaped him. Pope in his gratitude wrote: “You understand my
work better than I do myself.” We almost feel that there is just a little
tinge of perhaps unconscious satire in his gratitude.
Much has in this same analytical way been read into Wagner’s work by his
admirers and disciples. Yet there was no need for it, for the Tone-Poet
has himself told us of the motives and ideas which were at work in his
brain when he gradually gave birth to his great inventive conception, the
Tone-Drama.[49] But even when Wagner himself becomes his own interpreter
we prefer the work to the interpretation; for that is apt to be as
cryptic to the average reader as St. Peter found the epistles of “our
beloved brother Paul”—“in which are some things hard to be understood,
which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the
other scriptures, unto their own destruction.”
A great work of art, as it seems to me, needs no interpreter. If a poem,
a picture, or a musical composition fails to touch me, then I think that
there must be something lacking, either in my power of apprehension, or
in the work of art itself. In neither case will the interpreter be able
to fill the gap. If my senses or my understanding are hard, he cannot
soften them. If the work is faulty, all the preaching in the world will
not make it right. The true test of a work of art is its power of appeal.
The master is the man who can make his fellow-men thrill with pleasure or
shiver with horror; if he needs a third person to explain his meaning,
then he is no true artist, and his work is for the scrap-heap. Wagner
was essentially above all men of his time the one master who could stir
the feelings of those whom he addressed, the one man who could make
his own art an article of faith in others. To split hairs as to the
why and the wherefore of his power, to read into his work metaphysical
intentions, appears to me to be unnecessary and trivial, and therefore
almost a sacrilege. If by all the analyses and verbiage with which he
has been plastered you could educate other Wagners there would be some
justification for them; but you cannot make Wagners, and his imitators
have been without exception wretched failures.
On the other hand, the relation of the mental processes by which he
arrived at his great invention of the Tone-Drama is a psychological
study of absorbing interest, and a story of profound significance in the
history of art. Most of the commentators are long and wearisome beyond
words—especially is this the case with some of the lesser Germans. Would
they but lay to heart old Hesiod’s warning, νήπιοι οὔδ’ ἴσασιν πλέον
ἥμισυ πάντος. Children! and they know now how much better the half than
the whole.
Richard Wagner was but six months old when his father, Friedrich, died.
He was a registrar of police in Leipzig, a man of a culture far above
the ordinary level of his humble official position. By the law he won
his bread, but his heart was in the theatre, and it was owing to him
that his friend, Ludwig Geyer, painter and actor, who had himself been
educated for the law, definitely adopted the stage as his profession, in
which he attained a great success. A few months after Friedrich’s death,
this Geyer, a good and worthy man, married the widow and devoted himself
with all a parent’s affectionate care to little Richard, who knew no
other father, and loved him dearly. But the tender relationship did not
last long. Before Richard was nine years old Frau Geyer was again left
a widow. “She was a good wife and mother,” we are told, “and her son
idolized her. The memory of her love supported him in all the storms of
his life, and he was talking of her on the evening before his death.”
After Geyer’s loss she seems to have been the centre of a small literary,
artistic, and theatrical coterie which met at her house, and in these
surroundings Richard Wagner’s childhood budded and bloomed. For him in
his earliest days the theatre was everything—always the theatre. He was
the constant companion and playmate of his stepfather, who carried the
child with him even to rehearsals. Indeed, the whole family was bitten
by the stage-craze. His eldest brother, brought up to be a doctor,
threw away pills and potions and lancet, and became an actor; his three
sisters followed the same bent: what wonder that this child, full of
imagination and poetic fancy, brought up in the glare of the footlights,
should catch the contagious fever which was burning up all those near and
dear to him? Even in the next generation the flame was still blazing.
The voice and acting of his niece Johanna is yet a glorious memory among
the very oldest opera-goers, and his son Siegfried, an architect by
profession, has found his true vocation in the direction of the Bayreuth
theatre, and is known as himself a composer of operas.
The dramatic impulse was vibrating in every fibre of Richard’s nature. By
the time he was sixteen he had completed a tragedy suggested partly by
_King Lear_, partly by _Hamlet_, inspired wholly by heredity. And here
was laid the foundation of that dramatic art which was destined to bring
a new revelation to the world. He was a Poet—above all things a Poet; but
it was borne in upon him that the message of the Poet must be incomplete
as a language speaking to the soul unless it were united to the mystery
of another power; that power was music, and of music he knew nothing, or
no more than what enabled him to play the piano by ear.
But he felt his vocation. Listen to what he says of those early days.
“Whilst I was finishing my great Tragedy I for the first time became
acquainted with Beethoven’s music at the concerts of the Gewandhaus at
Leipzig; its impression upon me was all-powerful; with Mozart, too, I
made friends, especially through his _Requiem_. Beethoven’s incidental
music for _Egmont_ inspired me so that for nothing in the world would I
let my finished Tragedy leave the stocks until it should be furnished
with similar music. Without a moment’s hesitation I felt confident that
I could myself write this all-important music, but still thought well
first to furnish myself with a few chief rules of thorough-bass. In order
to achieve this as far as possible, I obtained a week’s loan of Logier’s
‘Methode des General-basses,’ and worked at it zealously. But the study
did not bear fruit so quickly as I had thought. Its difficulties charmed
and riveted me; I determined to become a musician.” And this, remember,
was a boy of sixteen. Icarus himself, harnessing the horses of the Sun,
was not more audacious. But Wagner was not to share the fate of Icarus.
I remember how once when a lady consulted Lord Leighton about her boy,
who showed a great talent for painting, his answer was: “Let him have the
education of a gentleman in the first place, then, if he should still
have an inclination for art, let him specialize.” The story of Wagner
shows the wisdom of those words. His biographer tells us how greatly
Wagner profited by his classical education, and he points out what an
untold advantage this gave him over the other great musical writers, such
as Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck. Had Mozart, for instance, as he suggests,
been kept at school instead of being trotted out as an infant phenomenon
at Courts and in the palaces of great nobles, would he have allied the
genius of his music to such piteous libretti as those with which he had
to be satisfied? Is it not possible that in him, as in Wagner, the poet
might have been united with the composer?
In Wagner, as we have seen, the poet came first, then the musician: the
education of the gentleman was the dominant influence. During his school
and college life he showed such a predilection for language that his
masters thought that he would become a great philological professor. They
missed the point that it was language in the singular, not in the plural,
that fascinated him: he had not the gift of tongues, nor did he take any
special interest in comparative philology, but the power of expression,
the poet’s power, inspired his music, in the same way that his music
gave birth to his poetry. The two wedded made him unique. Without his
classical education, which opened out to him Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles,
and drove him to learn English in order that he might enjoy Shakespeare
untranslated, the two could never have grown to the noble stature which
they assumed; possibly they might never have been born.
To dwell upon the wretchedness, the poverty, the hunger, the crushed
hopes of many years, to recall the miseries of a union with a wife who,
full of good intentions as she was, neither understood him nor believed
in the ultimate victory of his mighty genius—to think of Wagner, “the
most German of all artists,” banished from the Fatherland which he loved
so passionately, eating such bitter bread of sorrow that one cannot
at this distance of time read the story without emotion—all this is
only so far necessary to an understanding of Bayreuth as it shows the
indomitable courage of the hero.
That he should have lived through the tragic days of Paris and Zurich
is little short of miraculous. Happily better times were in store for
him. He was able to come back to Germany. Poor Minna Planer, from whom
he had been separated for many years, died in 1866. Death severed a tie
that must have been intolerable to both. Marriage must be a vengeance of
devils or a reward of the gods. Wagner tasted both, for in his second
marriage he found all the comfort, the agreement, and the faith in him
which had been lacking in the first.
Minna Planer, the actress wife, had been nothing but a hindrance, a
millstone round the eager man’s neck. To be the helpmeet of a prophet,
a seer, a man of genius, a woman must above all things believe in her
husband, in his power to dominate men, in the magnetism of his will. What
would Mohammed have been without the faith of Khadijah, who trusted him
when even his own relations cried “Fool” and “Madman”? Prince Siddartha
deserted his wife and her babe to wander into the wilderness in search
of wisdom, but sweet Yasodhara bore him no grudge, for she had faith in
his mission, and when at last he became Buddha she joined the company of
believers and followed his teaching. This is the sort of trust that it
was not in the nature of Minna to give. Her commonplace soul could not
understand his impatience of the bonds of convention, or the wild flights
of his soaring imagination. How he must have fretted under the galling
restraint! How the sword must have strained to leap from the scabbard!
Happily the last years of his life were blessed by the loving care and
sympathy of Cosima, the daughter of his best friend, Franz Liszt—a wife
rare among women, whose soul and heart were in unison with his own—and
cheered by watching the growth of children whom he adored, reared in the
home which he had made beautiful for their joy. But this is no attempt to
give even the thinnest outline of the Master’s life. For a biography and
for a complete study of his work the curious must go to the fountain head.
From such study we may learn much. We hear wild talk about Wagner’s
“operas”: it would be well that we should arrive at some understanding
as to how far he may be said to have composed “operas” at all—that is to
say, “operas” in the old accepted sense of the word. Probably the best
way of facing the problem will be to take refuge in a compromise.
The Master’s life has been divided into two equal halves—the first
lasting from his birth in 1813 to 1848, the year of those political
troubles in which he became so unhappily involved; the second from 1848
to his death in 1883. His creative activity began when he was yet a
child—we have seen how when he was but sixteen years old he had completed
his “great tragedy,” which taught him that music was essential to drama,
that the language of the senses must find its complement in the language
of the soul, that music alone can appeal to the fancy and the imagination
as poetry does to the reason.
This of course at once throws down the gauntlet to argument: no poet
that ever lived has been gifted with the musical faculty as was Richard
Wagner, yet who can assert that Shakespeare, Dante, that great prose poet
Cervantes, were not kings over the fancy and imagination of mankind?
Can they be said to be incomplete because their works were not wedded
to music? Still this was the principle which was the guiding beacon of
the Wagnerian inspiration, and from that he never steered aside. The
arguments of enthusiasm are sometimes hard to follow. We are warned that
we must not look upon Wagner “as a poet and a musician as if he were in
some monstrous way gifted with two extraordinary talents, but that the
yearning for music in the deepest and most hidden depths underlies the
poetical impulse, and that music which then pours forth from the poetry
like perfume from the leaves and flowers of trees, is in very truth the
informing though unseen sap of this tree.”
Here, we are told, is the key to the understanding of this poet. And
yet we have seen that the boy was first of all a poet, and that it
was the poetic faculty which called forth the musical faculty! I find
it difficult to reconcile the two ideas. Apart from the merits of his
work, the great gulf which separates him from all other composers lies
in the fact that whereas before him there have been great poets and
great musicians—Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart,
Gluck, and others—it was in Wagner that for the first time the genius of
music and the genius of poetry were united. But it was not until he had
discovered his power in poetry that his power in music was revealed to
him. This seems to me unanswerable. But there is further evidence to be
brought forward in the shape of his own _Frederick Barbarossa_. Here was
a work which, when he had completed it, he found to be unsuited to music:
it failed to inspire him and so it remained unwedded. That teaches us
much in regard to the relationship between poetry and music in Wagner—not
all poetry was to be expressed in music. We must return to this question
later.
The works of the first half of Wagner’s life were operas in the strict
sense of the word. That they differed from all existing operas is
certain, but that was no more than would be expected from their genesis
and their author. So do Rossini’s operas differ from Mozart’s,—the whole
Italian school from the German. _Die Feen_ and _Das Liebesverbot_,
founded on Shakespeare’s _Measure for Measure_; _Rienzi_ and _The Flying
Dutchman_, _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ (surely the most entrancing of
all romantic operas), _Siegfried’s Death_, can have no other title;
and—apart from _Barbarossa_, which had no claim to it—they make up the
sum of the theatrical work executed before 1848. Wagner, writing for the
stage, found the model in existence and adopted it. Even the strictest
of his disciples admit this. Indeed how can they deny what he himself
asserted?
Those were hard times. But music which had come at the Poet’s call
furnished him a scanty means of life as Kapellmeister. Then came 1848
and banishment, days of still greater stress and need, and misery
indescribable, when only the dreariest drudgery of a music-seller’s hack
kept body and soul together. Yet those were the days when he threw off
the last shackles of conventionality and gave to the world the newly born
idea of the Tone-Drama. That was the time when he first found himself and
opened the wings of his mighty genius, soaring into regions which no man
before him had dared or indeed been able to attempt.
The unsuitability to music of his _Barbarossa_ had opened out a new
conviction in the Tone-Poet’s mind. Music and poetry must go hand in
hand; the idea of writing music to another man’s verse—that is to say,
to command—was intolerable to him; but that the union should be happy
the subject must be fitting; it must be “the purely human freed from all
conventionality.” Again: “When I with full consciousness and of my own
free will gave up Frederick [Barbarossa], I had entered upon a new and
decisive period of my development as artist and as man, the period when
my conscious artistic will set out upon an entirely new path made with
unconscious necessity, a path upon which I am now starting as artist and
man to meet a new world.” Upon this his greatest critic says: “The works
which followed, created upon this foundation and freed from the Ghost of
Opera, reveal this _new world_.”
Wagner recognizes the dual nature of man. There is the outer man and the
inner man. The perfect drama appeals to both. But music is the language
of the inner man, which has for its special duty the expression of
feelings and sensibilities—indeed, it can represent nothing else.
No man that ever lived was so fitted both by nature and by experience
to appreciate the true functions of the drama as Richard Wagner—he was
born a poet, he was cradled in the theatre, his classical education,
“the education of a gentleman,” as Leighton put it, opened out to him
the masterpieces of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. When under the
spell of a distinctly felt want he took to music, behold! that was his
birthright also—he was the child of the Muses. His long apprenticeship as
Kapellmeister—conductor of the orchestra—in the Opera House at Dresden
made him familiar with the operatic works of the great masters. But it
taught him a great lesson: it showed him what was the true value of
music, what was its relation to the sister art of poetry, and he, poet
and musician as he was, learnt how to give the highest dignity to both.
Their union was his task, and in 1848 he had come to the realization of
the significance of that task, for he felt in the fullest degree the
fetters in which the masters who preceded him had worked. He perceived
that their noblest inspirations were only to be found in the expression
of feelings: where they failed was when they attempted to describe facts.
“Music,” said Schopenhauer, “never expresses a manifestation, but only
the inner essence of all manifestations.” The key to Wagner’s music is
to be found in the following propositions which he himself lays down as
fundamental:
“1. Feelings and sensibilities alone are what is to be expressed in the
language of music. It expresses in the fullness of perfection the inner
feeling of the purely human language set free from that language of words
which has become the special organ of the understanding.
“2. That which is impossible of expression in the absolute language of
music is the exact definition of the subject of feeling and sensibility
in which these reach a true reality.
“3. The widening and extension of the musical expression consists in the
winning of the power to indicate that which is individual and special
with clear distinctness, and
“4. The language of music can only attain this in its marriage with the
language of words.
“5. This marriage can only be successful when the language of music is
at once joined to so much of the language of words as is in harmonious
relation to itself; the union must go forward exactly in the direction
where the language of words has itself already manifested an imperious
necessity for true sensuous expression of feeling.
“6. This is defined only according to the inner meaning of that which is
to be expressed, so far as this grows from a matter of understanding to
a matter of feeling—an inner meaning which can only be grasped by the
understanding remains only expressible by the language of words, but the
more it extends to a movement of feeling the more explicitly it needs a
means of expression with which the language of music alone can furnish
it. (Conclusion from these premises.) Here then is clearly defined that
which the word-and-tone poet has to express: it is the purely human
set free from all conventionality (from all that which is formal and
historical).”
Such are the principles upon which the second half of Wagner’s work,
that which was carried out after 1848, is based; at least such is
Wagner’s own setting forth of those principles. How far these views,
so confidently laid down as artistic canon law, are justified by his
own creations and by those of others is a question capable of being
debated. Wagner’s own work is not uniformly in consonance with them. If
the historical and the formal are to be shut out from the realm of music
as unfitting, how can we account for so grand a conception as _Rienzi_,
a work at least as historical and formal as the discarded _Barbarossa_?
If nothing conventional is to be portrayed, what is to be said of the
_Meistersinger_, one of the greatest of all Tone-Dramas, though it is
throughout a picture of medieval middle-class life in Germany? Divest it
of the poet’s inspiration and of the magic charm of music and it sinks at
once into the commonplace from which genius has lifted it.
As a matter of fact there is no phase of man’s life and man’s activity
so prosaic that “das rein-menschliche,” the purely human or ideal, is
not in some shape or other contained in it. To amplify Schopenhauer’s
dictum, music cannot describe a cathedral with its apse, its nave, its
clerestory, its towers; but it can and does describe the spirit of piety
which raised that monument of faith; and it is conceivable that a great
tone-poet, such as Beethoven, should even describe in music the act of
building it. Wagner himself described the forging of the sword by the
Dwarf. He could not in the language of music have portrayed the sword
when forged. The question is to find the ideal wherever it may be hidden.
Wagner found it in _Rienzi_ and in the _Meistersinger_: he failed to find
it in _Barbarossa_. Here surely is one of those arbitrary contradictions
with which we occasionally meet in men of transcendent genius. It is only
the smooth man of average brains that is uniformly consistent.
The triumph of the ideal is revealed in the _Ring des Nibelungen_,
which is wholly Fairy Tale, and in _Parsifal_, which is wholly
Worship. In these as poet and as musician Wagner reaches his highest
achievement—poetry and music are united in an indissoluble wedlock; the
senses are enthralled, and the world bows before the great wizard.
If we turn for a moment to the dramatic composition of other composers
we shall see how entirely they are at their best when their works are
inspired by the ideal, “das rein-menschliche.” That is where the great
oratorios derive their glory. They are the musical expression of the
loftiest thoughts of which man’s soul is capable; that is why such
a masterpiece as the opening recitative of Handel’s _Messiah_ cries
directly to the soul—no one who once heard Sims Reeves deliver the great
message of comfort could ever forget it. To go to the opposite pole
of music, the brightest comic opera that ever was produced was surely
Rossini’s _Barbiere_. I am old enough to have heard it sung by the
greatest cast that could be imagined—Bosio as Rosina, Mario Almaviva,
the grand old Lablache as Dottor Bartolo, Ronconi the barber, Tagliafico
Don Basilio. Rendered by such incomparable singers and actors, the whole
opera sparkled from the first bar to the finale.
But what took one out of one’s self was Don Basilio’s _La Calunnia_,
a piece of almost Wagnerian declamation. Calumny is “purely human,”
indeed a human monopoly, for animals do not traduce one another, and as
Tagliafico, a great artist, told the tale, the effect was electric. The
trivial and commonplace but quite delightful prettiness of the rest was
forgotten in the presence of a great dramatic effect. It would be easy to
multiply instances, but these two suffice to show the overwhelming power
of music to express the ideal.
A main difference between Wagner’s Tone-Drama and what we have known
as “opera” lies in the union of the Tone-Poem with the Word-Poem as
two sisters of equal rank, each prepared as the occasion requires it
to give precedence to the other. In the so-called opera the music is
everything; the book may be, and often is, the merest balderdash, void
of all literary or poetic worth. In what Wagner calls “the art work of
the future,” the music, as he himself puts it, “has to take up a quite
different position; it is only where the music is the predominant partner
that it may unfold itself to its full breadth; but, on the other hand,
wherever dramatic speech is the most important, there the music must
absolutely subordinate itself to it. But it so happens that music has the
capability, without being altogether silent, of so imperceptibly effacing
itself before language that is teeming with thought, as to make it appear
that that alone is of importance and yet to continue giving it support.”
It must be evident that this perfect accord between the poem and the
music is one of the secrets of the incomparable dignity of Wagner’s
work. The recognition of the equal value of both precludes the infusion
of anything mean or trivial into either. Here again we may bring into
comparison the oratorio, in which the music is wedded to the glorious
language of the Bible.
Probably one reason why it was so long before Wagner achieved anything
like general success outside of Germany lay in the misuse of the word
“opera,” and also in the fact that his dramas were brought out in
theatres intimately associated with works of less lofty aspirations.
Smart ladies, mounted in diamonds, and white-waistcoated dandies, had
been accustomed to listen entranced to lovely, if somewhat sugary,
melodies threaded like pearls on strings of recitative, during which
conversation and flirtation were not only permitted but expected.
They came to hear Wagner looking for the same musical diet, and were
disappointed. They expected to hear Wotan grind out barrel-organ tunes,
or Brünnhilde declare with many trills that she is “vergine vezzosa.”
The dignified declamation of Wagner’s heroes and heroines was lost upon
them. Philistia was bored and showed it. At first they did not realize
the fact that a work like the _Ring des Nibelungen_ is one comprehensive
whole, of which one part separated from the rest tells no tale. They know
better now; yet even to-day people go into raptures over one portion of
the _Ring_ without hearing what has gone before or what is to follow.
They believe that they have heard a Wagner “opera.” The great tragedy of
Wotan is missed. _Lohengrin_, with its romantic and beautiful poem, took
the fancy of the English public much more readily. _Tristan_ too became
a favourite; but I have often wondered whether the _Meistersinger_, in
spite of the noble character of the poet-shoemaker Hans Sachs, has ever
quite appealed to nine-tenths of the Covent Garden audience.
But at any rate Wagner has become the fashion, and it is now essential
to good breeding and a reputation for culture that he should be received
as The great master—always, be it understood, of “opera.” Yet for the
reasons at which I have hinted I rather doubt the sincerity of the
adoration which is expressed. Dr. Johnson once said, “No man is a
hypocrite in his pleasures”; had Dr. Johnson seen the tiaras and the
white waistcoats displaying their nobility in the boxes and stalls of
Covent Garden he might have seen fit to modify his opinion.
At Bayreuth things are very different: the sincerity of the audience is
almost as striking as the beauty of the performance. A drama given in the
Fest-Spiel house is no mere theatrical entertainment; it is more like
a religious ceremony. The people standing outside the building, like a
congregation in some country churchyard waiting for service to begin, are
very quiet, speaking little, and that little in hushed voices, tuning
themselves to the diapason of the solemn feast which is in store for
them. When the doors are opened they troop in silently, and reverently
take their places. There is no chatter; if speech be needed it is in a
whisper. The audience—worshippers would be a better word—sit in rapt
contemplation, waiting for the ceremony to begin.
After a while subdued and solemn strains from the hidden orchestra creep
into the theatre—the opening notes of the _Rheingold_. The performance
of the _Ring des Nibelungen_ has begun. The house is darkened, and will
have no more light than what is sent to it from the stage. Slowly, very
slowly, the curtain is drawn aside, and through a dim mist faintly we
see the Rhine-maidens swimming in the sacred stream. So perfect is the
illusion that we seem to be looking into the very depths of the river
from some fairy vantage-ground. The poetry of music, language, motion
(dancing was one of those elements of the ancient Greek drama of which
Wagner recognized the value), all combine to make that perfect appeal to
sight and hearing and the senses of the soul which is the essence of the
Tone-Drama.
There is no dropping of the curtain at the end of the first act—clouds
of steam roll up lazily in the foreground, and are met by falling mists
of gauze and network—the stage grows dimmer and more dim, until all is
hidden. Slowly and mysteriously the clouds fade away, and the second
scene is revealed. Beautiful as are the first two scenes, I think that
the Cave of the Dwarfs is even more captivating. The great rocks on the
right of the stage run back into the mystery of space; the trickling of
water gleaming here and there amid the mosses gives a most realistic
effect—just what may be seen in some natural Alpine cavern. On the left
is the glowing forge of the gnomes, which looks as if the whole stage
must presently blaze into flames. The horrors of this miniature hell,
with the appearance of the laidly worm and the little crooked dwarfs
rushing about intent upon some weird business, leave the impression
of a Satan’s Sabbath. It is a scenic effect beyond all anticipation,
difficult to realize. Wagner was a great magician, and could transport
his people whither he listed—for, mark you! it is all his doing—his the
conception, his the execution. The book, the music, the scenery, the
stage-management, all the invention of that one brain. What a power he
wielded!
You must journey to Bayreuth to feel its full force. There the master
mind, the singers, the orchestra, and last, not least, the audience, are
all in sympathy, and it is the creation of this sympathy which shows how
great Wagner was.
The religious feeling which runs through the performance, the reverence
with which it is received, are enhanced by the abstention from anything
like applause. The nearest approach to it is something approaching to
a sob of relief which follows upon such supreme moments as the fall of
the curtain upon the flames of Valhalla (in the _Götterdämmerung_); but
that sob says more than all the ridiculous calls before the curtain with
which we destroy any illusion that may have been created by the finest
efforts of our actors. Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Ophelia, Othello
and Desdemona called to life again to grin a fatuous good-night to the
audience! _Proh pudor!_ Let the players go to Bayreuth and learn what is
due, if not to the dignity of their own art, at any rate to the genius of
the poet whose interpreters they are.
Wagner felt music as the revelation of the language of another world—a
language of which Beethoven, Mozart, Bach were the teachers. We have seen
how the music of _Egmont_ appealed to him as a boy. With what force he
used that language to appeal to the deepest feelings of those to whom he
specially addressed himself will best be recognized by those who may have
the privilege of attending the _General-Probe_, the dress rehearsal of
one of the festivals.
Here are no tourists, no sham amateurs travelling to the little
Franconian town because it is “the thing” to do, and as though the
pilgrimage conferred a degree in culture. The guests are all invited from
the very flower of Germany’s intellect—men who have earned honour in the
most varied careers, women who are famous in many branches of work. These
are the worshippers who flock to the shrine of the Cult, these the minds
that the great poet holds in the thraldom of his genius. With the silence
of conviction they accept his preaching: the Early Christians meeting in
the Catacombs could hardly have been more reverent or more reserved.
In any sketch of Bayreuth, however flimsy, a word must be said about
Wahnfried, the home of Wagner’s happiest days, the house where those who
were nearest and dearest to him must almost feel as if they were still
under the guardianship of that mighty soul: so filled is the place with
memories of his presence that even strangers seem to be held by the spell
of his spirit hovering over the trees that he loved, the garden that he
laid out with such care and such consummate simplicity.
There is nothing ambitious, nothing pretentious here. It is just a plain,
dignified gentleman’s home, _entre cour et jardin_; the court surrounded
on three sides by shady alleys, an avenue of horse-chestnuts leading
to a little forecourt in which the central ornament is a bust of King
Louis of Bavaria, after Liszt, Wagner’s greatest friend, and certainly a
powerful protector, who would have done so much more for him had he been
able. Over the doorway is a sgraffito, “Wotan the Wanderer”; no other
decoration save only in great letters the famous inscription, “Hier we
mein Wähnen Frieden fand WAHNFRIED sei dieses Haus von mir benannt.”
“Here where my wild dreams peace attained WAHNFRIED [Dreams-Peace] be
this house by me named.” A poor jingle of a translation, but perhaps the
original is not to be rendered in another tongue. But what a tinge of
melancholy lies in it! A long day of struggles and misery, an evening of
peace and happiness, and then suddenly at Venice—the Night!
Few people will deny that in a man’s home much of himself will be found
reflected. I am not now speaking of those houses built to a pattern,
even if it be a fanciful one, and adorned and furnished by some famous
decorator: in these the reflection is that not of a mind, but of a firm,
and there is a brotherly or at farthest a cousinly likeness between all
those that are the work of the same partners: the difference is mainly
one of pounds, shillings, and pence: even the books in the library look
as if they had been ordered by the yard. The piano is placed for looks,
not for sound. The pictures are chosen by the fashionable dealer of the
day.
The house of a man of character and distinction bears the impress of his
own imagination. Especially is this the case when he himself has built
it. In Wahnfried everything speaks to you of Wagner. The design was his:
the admirably proportioned rooms were planned and measured by him: every
detail was thought out with strenuous care and loving foresight. The
library, it has been said, “bears eloquent testimony to the universality
of Wagner’s genius.” The works of art, the knick-knacks, all tell their
story. There are several quite admirable portraits by Lenbach, pictures
that will live; one portrait especially of Frau Wagner is a masterpiece
that will not be denied.
But a likeness of Schopenhauer, painted by Lenbach after the
philosopher’s death, has a story that is worth repeating. When
Schopenhauer died, Wagner, who had the greatest admiration for him,
begged Lenbach to paint a portrait of him. “But I never saw him,” said
the artist, and declared that it was impossible. Now it so happened
that a certain photographer, in cleaning out his drawers, came upon
a photograph of Schopenhauer, the existence of which he had quite
forgotten. Wagner, who had secured it, showed it to Lenbach and asked him
whether that would not help him. The painter looked at it, and exclaimed,
“Why that is my little old man!” and then told the tale of how one
day walking in the street he had met a curiously comic little old man
fidgeting about hither and thither from one shop-window to another, and
had been so struck by the grotesqueness of the little creature that he
followed him about, making mental notes of him, for the whole afternoon.
So he was delighted to undertake the portrait, and by the help of the
photograph, supplementing his own memory, produced what must be reckoned
a famous work of art.
At the back of the house is the garden. Here too the all-embracing genius
of the master found room for play. He laid it out with exquisite and
delicate taste. A lawn with flowers leads to a little shady wood, and
that again opens on to the public gardens of the town. In front of the
wood, or rather in a recess screened and shaded by it, is a bust of the
master facing the house. It marks his grave. He lies in the home which he
loved, in the place where he found Peace.
It was in this sacred grove that I had the honour of being received by
the gracious lady of Wahnfried. She is now, alas! able to see very few
people, but she made an exception in my favour, and I had half an hour’s
delightful conversation with her. In appearance I thought her little
altered from what I remember her in 1877, when she came with her husband
for the great concerts at the Albert Hall, and when those who had not the
privilege of speaking with her were fascinated by her beautiful presence.
Though she is not strong, the years have touched her lightly—a little
more snow in the hair, the features a little more marked, reminding one
more than ever of her great father, Franz Liszt—but she has retained all
the grace, all the charm, all the magic of sympathy, all the keenness of
thought for which she has been world-famous. Indeed, the world owes her
no small meed of gratitude for the zeal and brilliant talent with which
after the master’s death she threw herself into the work of keeping alive
the great performances of the Fest-Spiel-Haus.
There was a moment of financial difficulty when the fate of Bayreuth
trembled in the balance; she has swept away all doubt, and her enthusiasm
has been so infectious that the little Franconian town has become one of
the centres of the world’s culture: all its past is forgotten, even Jean
Paul is hardly remembered, so all-absorbing is the Wagnerian aura. Royal
personages, the princes in the several realms of art, science, letters,
and politics, men and women famous in all the walks of life, have made
these celebrations their trysting-place, and people who elsewhere grumble
at the highest extravagance of luxury are content to put up with the
simplest of fare and the humblest accommodation if only they may be
allowed to lay their tribute on the high altar of genius.
A gathering at Wahnfried is something to remember; it is a goodly
company, a cosmopolitan galaxy of talent. Failing health prevents the
great hostess from welcoming her guests in person, but she is well
represented by her children, Siegfried Wagner and his sister, round whom
are assembled all the most distinguished of the visitors to the town. It
is a company in which a man must needs feel very humble. For here every
one has achieved something in the world. Here is a recognized authority
as antiquary and historian; there the great physician who watched over
Prince Bismarck’s latest years: famous musicians, learned professors,
a few notable soldiers, are much to the front: one lady is translating
into German an American philosophical work; other ladies are engaged in
various branches of art; some are successful actresses, others well-known
and cherished singers; here are painters who have achieved fame, younger
men who are climbing that same giddy ladder; of literary men there is no
lack. The conversation is brilliant; it is only interrupted now and then
by such music as would compel even the Philistines to hold their peace.
It would be strange indeed if in the home of Richard Wagner obedience
were not given to the old Italian warning, “Il più grande omaggio alla
musica è il silenzio.”