[Illustration: Some bars of music]
standing for Vanderdecken, the curse laid on him, and the whole idea of
the phantom ship; the second--
[Illustration: Some bars of music]
for Senta. They are short and clean-cut; they recur when wanted, and are
subjected to little modification. There is not a single theme of this
description in _Tannhäuser_. The first act is perfectly easy to follow.
There are no _leit-motifs_. The Venus and bacchantic music will be heard
again in the second and third acts; but the rest consists of numbers
almost as completely detached as those that make up the _Dutchman_,
though the joinings are not only more skilful, but are real music and
not mere padding. Wagner had not by any means yet arrived at the
continuous music of his later work; in spite of his desire to sweep on
from the beginning to the end of each scene, he was still forced to take
frequent breath and disguise the stoppage as cleverly as he could. The
first scene contains many of Wagner's most inspired melodies, notably
the despairing song of Venus towards the end, a tune that might have
come from Schubert. The old Weber influence is to be seen in the
contours of many of the themes, as well as their orchestral colour; and
the steadfast four-bar rhythm reminds one, in spite of the difference of
subject, irresistibly of _Euryanthe_. It was not until the _Tristan_
period that Wagner got rid of this. In the second scene of the first act
we find all the musical machinery of old-fashioned opera, but used with
a mastery that leaves the _Dutchman_ far behind. There is first the
shepherd's delightfully fresh song, in wonderful contrast to the scents
and stifling heat of the Venus cave music; then comes the Pilgrims'
Chorus; then come Tannhäuser's friends with at least one number,
Wolfram's appeal, which is distinct and separate from the rest of the
music as a goldfish is from the water it swims in. The act ends with a
regular set finale, altogether on the old models.
The second act opens with Elisabeth's _scena;_ then follow her duet with
Tannhäuser, the march and chorus as the company troop in to hear the
contest of minstrels, the various songs, Tannhäuser's fatal mistake,
Elisabeth's intercession for him, the voices of the pilgrims setting out
for Rome, and Tannhäuser's rush to overtake them. No use is made of the
_leit-motif;_ only when Tannhäuser loses his wits and sings in praise of
Venus do we get reminiscences of the Venusberg music. In the third act
the structure is the same. Number flows into number, it is true, without
full-closes--without full-stops, so to speak; but those who have never
before heard a note of Wagner can follow as easily as they could a Gluck
or Mozart opera. The Pilgrims' Chorus occurs again, and again we have
the Venus music, when Tannhäuser, demented, sees her in the heart of the
mountain and hears her calling him.
In 1845 _Tannhäuser_ was produced. When the score was published--those
quaint lithographed scores: I believe some of them still exist in the
British Museum--Schumann got it, and seemed to like it, since he showed
it as a treasure to Hanslick, a musical critic of Vienna. Mendelssohn
also liked a canon in the second act--Mendelssohn, who ought to have
understood and loved the picturesque in it better than anyone. All
fantastic dreams of another _Rienzi_ and a huge popular success had long
since melted away: the creative instinct in Wagner was master of the
situation; never again did he plan anything to please the public, save,
comical to relate, when he began on the story of _Tristan_.
In _The Flying Dutchman_ Wagner had exploited the uncanny, the terror
and mystery of gray winter seas; in _Tannhäuser_ he turned to the
conflict between the gross, lurid passions of man and the sane, pure
side of his nature; and now, in _Lohengrin_, he was to give us an opera
which for sheer sustained loveliness has only one parallel in his
works--the _Mastersingers_. It is the most delicately beautiful thing he
wrote; its freshness is the freshness that seems unlikely to fade with
the passage of time. Curiously, too, while full of the spirit of
Weber--it is the most Weberesque of all his operas--of Weber who loved
darksome woods, haunted ruins and all the machinery of the romantics, it
is full of sweet sunlight and cool morning winds: the atmosphere of
Montsalvat, the land where it is always dawn, pervades it. As a painter
in music of landscape, seascape, of storm, rain amongst the leaves,
spring mornings, and calm sunny woodland scenes, Wagner has no equal.
There is nothing theatrical on this side of his art: the footlights and
back-cloths disappear, and the very thing itself is before us.
In or about 1847 _Lohengrin_ was finished. The tale is of the simplest.
Elsa is in distress. She is the daughter of the late Duke, and her
brother, the heir to the title and lands, has been changed into a swan
by the enchantments of Ortruda, wife of Frederick, who says that Elsa
has murdered him. Ortruda's tale is believed and Elsa is charged with
the crime before the King, Henry the Fowler. Frederick brings the charge
and claims the possessions and everything as the rightful heir. Henry
asks whether she is willing that some champion should fight on her
behalf. She consents. The herald calls for the champion; no one appears,
and the case is about to be decided against her when a knight is seen in
a magic boat on the river drawn by a swan. He offers to fight for her on
one condition: that she will never ask his name or whence he comes. She
promises, and in a few minutes Frederick is overcome and, with his wife,
disgraced, and the act ends with a regular opera finale. Next, Ortruda
comes as a suppliant in the night to Elsa, gains admittance, and poisons
her mind with doubts about Lohengrin. However, the wedding arrangements
go forward, and at the very church door Frederick interrupts the
procession, and accuses Lohengrin of witchcraft and what not. He is put
aside; but in the next act we see the poison at work in Elsa's mind. She
and her unknown husband are left alone, and, as Nietzsche observed, they
sit up too late. Elsa, with all the exasperating pertinacity of an
illogical, curious woman, persists in questioning Lohengrin, getting
nearer and nearer to the vital matter, until at last she can restrain
herself no longer. In fancy she sees the swan returning to carry off her
lover; and, wholly terrified, she asks, "Who are you and where do you
come from?" At the moment Frederick rushes in with some confederates,
only to be slain by Lohengrin. Sadly Lohengrin says that all now is
ended; his hopes are shattered because his bride could not subdue her
inquisitiveness for a year. In the next act he appears before the King
and nobles; he relates what has happened, says that he comes from
Montsalvat, where his father, Parcival, is King, and now he must return.
Ortruda breaks through the crowd, and in malicious triumph confesses her
crime. Lohengrin prays to Heaven; the swan is changed back to Elsa's
brother, a dove descends and is attached to the boat, and Lohengrin
sails away up the shining river, while all give a cry of distress.
We have here a simple fairy story. It is the only opera in which
character, a personal idiosyncrasy as distinct from an overwhelming
passion, produces the dramatic action. It has been urged that
Lohengrin's stipulation is monstrous; but seeing that he is bound--we do
not know how--and that if Elsa had not agreed her fate had been quickly
settled, it seems to me that (accepting the magical and supernatural
elements on which the whole thing rests) it was perfectly reasonable. I
fancy that Wagner, after some years with his very stupid wife, Minna,
was getting thoroughly angry with the irrational curiosity of women and
the idiotic demands which they make on their life-mates. Anyhow, though
he gives Elsa some very beautiful music to sing, he does not spare her
in drawing her character. It is one of the few characters he did attempt
to draw, and by far the most important of them. In the _Mastersingers_
Walther and Eva are sketched, and Hans Sachs is worked out in some
detail; but nothing in their nature especially affects the drama. In
_Lohengrin_ the tragedy is directly produced by Elsa's weakness and
curiosity. The characterization is by no means profound or microscopic.
It is, indeed, a question whether music is capable of anything of the
sort, whether it can render anything save bold, simple outlines. In
_Figaro_ and _Don Giovanni_ Mozart was content with this, and yet his
characterization appears subtle in comparison with that of every other
composer, with the exception of Wagner with his Elsa. Music can express
things that lie outside the range of literature; and perhaps fine and
delicate portrait and character painting are things that lie outside the
range of music.
In the _Dutchman_, I have said, we have the North Sea for a background,
in _Tannhäuser_ the sultry, scented cave of Venus. In _Lohengrin_ it is
the broad, shining river, flowing ceaselessly from far-away lands to the
distant sea, and on it the swan floats--the swan which throughout is
used as the symbol of the river. In the first act it gives the pervading
atmosphere and colour; in the third it recurs with amazing effect in the
midst of one of Elsa's paroxysms. Here is the simple phrase by which
such magic is wrought:
[Illustration: Some bars of music]
No changes are made in this theme. It occurs again and again, without
wearying the ear; it keeps the atmosphere charged with mystery and
suggestions of that far-away land where it is always dawn. It is the
calm, refreshing, gently-rippling river; the cool, placid water sliding
through many countries, with the swan as symbol and token of all that is
strange and beautiful where it has its source. It is less a theme
capable of purely musical development to form pattern after pattern of
entrancing beauty, like the Grail or Montsalvat theme, than the
equivalent in music of tender colour. It never sings out from the
orchestra without carrying the imagination for a moment from the scene
before one's eyes to the _fernem Land_. It blends the actual with the
dream, and imbues all the drama with a delicious romantic mysticism. I
dwell on it because without this prevailing colour and atmosphere the
story of _Lohengrin_ is a plain prosaic fairy-tale to amuse children.
Further, in the most important musical theme in the opera it is there
also--the Montsalvat theme:
[Illustration: Some bars of music]
The characteristic chords in the second bar cannot escape notice. This
motive, one of the sweetest Wagner invented, is long, and less of the
nature of a _leit-motif_--as I have explained the _leit-motif_--than a
passage like the Venus music in _Tannhäuser_. Just as Senta's ballad of
the Flying Dutchman is the germ of that opera, so this is the germ of
_Lohengrin_. It is worked out at great length when Lohengrin's narrative
arrives, and he declares his name, parentage, and country. The Swan or
River theme can scarcely be called a _leit-motif_ in the elementary
meaning of the phrase. For a fair example of this we must go to the
passage used by Lohengrin when he warns Elsa that she must ask no
questions:
[Illustration: Some bars of music]
This is never developed at all. It recurs only when Elsa's pertinacious
inquisitiveness threatens to rupture their somewhat hastily arranged
alliance. Then it sounds out sinister, menacing, and the effect, both
dramatic and musical, is overwhelming. Another example is the phrase
representing Lohengrin simply as a heroic knight. Save in the finale of
the first act, no great use is made of it.
It is unnecessary for me to describe in further detail an opera which is
so well known, and can be followed at a first hearing very much more
easily than _Tannhäuser_. While there is a great deal of recitative,
there are also many numbers merely joined together in the _Tannhäuser_
manner. Such numbers as the Prayer and Finale of the first act, Elsa's
Song and the Processional March in the second, the Wedding Chorus in the
last, are simply placed there; they do not grow out of themes, as they
would have grown had the opera been written when Wagner was ten years
older. The love duet which takes place after the marriage is a series of
his most generously inspired melodies. There are enough beautiful and
passionate tunes there to make the fortune of half a dozen Italian
operas.
After _Lohengrin_ the composer wrote nothing more for some years, though
we may be sure he was eternally planning. He was intensely interested in
politics. Revolution was in the air, and Wagner had to have his say on
that as on every other topic. He made speeches and published pamphlets;
and just as his musical schemes seemed wild to such contemporaries as
the late Charles Hallé, so his ideas of social regeneration must have
seemed Utopian to the point of sheer lunacy to the very comrades with
whom he was acting. The explosion came; barricades were thrown up in the
Dresden streets, and Wagner sought to bring about a quiet ending to the
crisis by appealing to the Imperial soldiers to join with, and not to
fight against, their own countrymen. Whether he actually shouldered a
musket or not it is hard to say. This much is certain, however: that
Wagner did take part in the rising, and that a warrant was issued for
his arrest. The fiasco resulted in a great gain to music, and, as far as
Wagner was concerned, there was no political loss. Had the insurgents by
some unthinkable chance succeeded, he would soon have been on worse
terms with them than ever he was with Kings and Imperial personages.
They tried revolt because they wished to alter all the conditions under
which men lived. Wagner, too, wanted to alter the conditions of life,
but mainly with a view of carrying out his operatic reforms. Look where
we will in his writings, we see that to be the secret of all his
incursions into practical politics. Passionate--a bursting volcano of
elemental energy--he was always a man of one idea at a time, and that
idea always involved Richard Wagner playing an important rôle, for he
was one of the most splendid egoists to be met in history.