He was now, indeed, in a pretty pickle. At Dresden he had an assured
livelihood and time to write operas; and, despite his former experience
of hunger and want, he threw away his position for the sake of an idea.
He afterwards was wont to complain that he only wished to be kept alive
in reasonable comfort, and he would in return present the world with
masterpieces. Yet he was not content when he was, for a comparatively
slight return in daily labour, kept comfortably alive. But, after all,
what appears at first to have been an act of madness turned out anything
but disastrous in the long-run. It is true that without the generous
help of Liszt, Wesendonek and others he could not have lived as he did
in Zurich, and, as it was, constant apprehensions of approaching
poverty harassed him. The old fear of an empty belly which got into his
very blood and bones in the Riga--Paris period now began to show itself
in those appealing letters written to his friends when there appears to
have been no necessity whatever. He had exaggerated hopes and
exaggerated fears. The hopes were realized--as well as anything can be
realized in this imperfect world--at Bayreuth; the fears found
expression in the begging letters of which advantage was taken by every
mean and cowardly spirit without the intelligence to understand his real
greatness. Mendelssohn, we are reminded, wrote no such letters; but
Mendelssohn, it may be remarked, was always rich, and has no such record
of charitable deeds as stands to Wagner's credit. The nearest parallel
to the case of Wagner is that of Beethoven in his old age. He, although
perfectly well off, scared himself almost to death with his dread of
poverty. Wagner's letters written about this time are well worth
reading. There is no need to discuss them; they should be read and
carefully weighed. Nor do I propose to spend any great space on the
prose writings of the period. They are full of theories which were no
sooner formulated than they had to be discarded in practice. At a time
when Wagner was quite thoroughly misunderstood, the notion--perhaps
naturally--became prevalent that he was simply completing a work
commenced by Gluck. Now, no two men ever had more widely different aims
than Wagner and Gluck. True, both wrote for the theatre, both employed
singers and orchestra; and there the likenesses terminate. Gluck never
sought to change the musical forms in use in opera. He retained the old
recitatives, airs, concerted numbers, and choruses; not Handel himself
clung more firmly to the old forms and formalities than Gluck did in
_Orpheus_ and _Iphigenia_. He sought, in the first place, to substitute
worthy and dignified subjects for the ancient frivolities which had
inspired composers since opera became popular; he wanted those subjects
treated in a sufficiently dignified way, and, above all, in a reasonable
way; he resolved that his music should be worthy of the drama. No
concessions were to be made to the prima donna or vain tenor: the music
had to be dramatically appropriate. He got magnificent results; and when
the leaven of Wagnerism has ceased to work and froth and bubble in the
public brain--in a word, when Wagner's music is no longer mere exciting
new wine, and we are as accustomed to it as we are to the music of
Beethoven--then we shall turn back to Gluck (and also to Mozart) and
find them as young and fresh as ever.
Wagner's aim was totally different. First, music, he held, was played
out: one must have the spoken word with it. He went to the myth for
subjects, and gave plentiful reasons, which need not detain us, for the
choice. Then--and here the effect of his early association with the
theatre shows itself--the music was in nowise to hinder the actor;
therefore all formal set numbers must be discarded and replaced by his
"speech-singing" expressive recitative which should be beautiful as
sheer music, and not hinder the actors from playing their parts as well
as singing them. And, finally, he came to the conclusion that in his
music-drama he could effect a synthesis of all the arts. Music and
acting were the basis; there had to be scenery, and the scenery must
form pictures, with the figures always properly placed, according to
what I suppose painters would call, or refuse to call, the laws of
composition. But each of the figures, or groups of figures, on the stage
had also to be regarded as an entity, and as sculpture had not to be
excluded from the synthesis, the poses must always be sculpturesque.
Here was a programme indeed! Very fine it seemed to his young followers;
when new it seemed wholly admirable. Unfortunately, as Wagner found, the
moment it was tried it proved impracticable and useless. Take sculpture,
for example. Sculpture, I take it, has reached a fairly high point when
the marble figure gives one the sense of life and of motion. Wagner,
with his sculpturesque poses, instead of letting the living figure give
us directly the impression of life and of motion, sought (always
theoretically) to attain the end by an imitation of an imitation.
Moreover, no moving figure ever did or can suggest sculpture--even if we
wanted such a suggestion, which we don't. Even the Commandatore in _Don
Giovanni_, with the aid of stiff gestures and plentiful whitewash,
ceases to look like a statue as soon as he opens his mouth to sing.
Consider, too, the notion of making, so to speak, set pictures--of
dealing, that is, with his puppets and scenery in exactly the opposite
spirit to that in which he wished to deal with vocal music. A realistic
picture suggests Nature, and if the figures are well done they suggest
human figures; a well-arranged scene does the same. There was no reason
for getting indirectly, again by an imitation of an imitation, an effect
that can be got directly. As for producing a series of "composed"
pictures, it was practically impossible and highly undesirable. A
carefully-composed picture needs time for its appreciation, and no one
could, or would, try to judge or be affected by an ever-changing series
of pictures. Besides, if one did try, the attention would be hopelessly
withdrawn from the main things--the drama that is going forward and the
music. The picture plan is still tried at Bayreuth, with disastrous
results. With the most beautiful scenery it would fail; and the Wagner
family appear to be colour-blind, the magic garden, for instance, in
_Parsifal_ looking like a cheap bed-hanging.
Then take, again, the set forms. Wagner eliminated the double bars and
full stops, even as Beethoven had done, to an extent, in the "Heroic"
Symphony, where theme leads into theme without a break; but his music is
full of form, and also of forms, and the more he wrote the more careless
he became about keeping up an appearance of continuity when vital
continuity there was none. Wagner's forms were vaster than those of his
predecessors; but for all that they are there.
Wagner's essays are worth reading by those who have the time and the
physical and mental strength, if only because they reveal a man thinking
on wrong lines while he is doing on right ones; but they are terribly
long-winded, and many weary pages are devoted to demonstrations of the
obvious or the actually fallacious. Mr. W. Ashton Ellis has given many
years of a valuable life to translating them into something which is not
English and not German. For the ordinary music-lover I believe the above
summary will be sufficient to enable him to understand Wagner's aims at
this period, and we shall presently see how far he was able to attain
them, and to what extent they refused to be, and could not be, attained.
The most valuable of his writings are those on conducting and on
Beethoven. The latter has some bumptious and comical allusions to "world
conquerors," the Germans suffering badly at the time from an attack of
swelled head, subsequent to their defeat of the unhappy, unprepared
French.
At Zurich Wagner was occupied with a multiplicity of other pamphlets,
with conducting concerts, with his librettos, and so on. Hans von Bülow
came to him as a pupil, and proved a devoted friend, afterwards letting
him take his wife, Cosima, of whom he, Bülow, it is true, stood in no
particular need. Wagner had sent the score of _Lohengrin_ to Liszt, and
it was produced at Weimar in 1850. It presently went from opera-house to
opera-house, and everywhere triumphed, so that a few years later Wagner
could complain that he was probably the only German who had not heard
it. In 1853 he published the words of _The Nibelung's Ring_, which
aroused the premature ire of those who did not know how he intended to
treat it musically.
I may here say that my ear is not sufficiently attuned nor my mind
accustomed to the subtleties of German for me to offer any judgment on
the prosody of Wagner's librettos. So far as I can understand them, they
are uncouth enough. On the other hand, dramatically they are admirably
constructed; and when we compare the words with the completed musical
setting we can see how the drama was, so to speak, always latent; the
words are as an invisible writing, on which the music is poured like a
liquid, and out starts the drama, unmistakable and irresistible.
In 1855 Wagner went to London to conduct a season of the Philharmonic
Society. That body invited him on the recommendation of Sainton, the
violinist, and the season was one of its most successful. The feuds that
arose, and the newspaper and other squabblings, have small interest for
us now; but it is certain that the finer spirits appreciated, or partly
appreciated, him, and Royalty flattered him. Into this period comes the
Paris performance of _Tannhäuser_, which was a disgraceful failure--I
mean disgraceful to the Parisians, and especially to their Jockey Club,
which resolutely went to work to prevent the music being heard by
cat-calls and shoutings. The event was not of any great artistic
importance--indeed, it is hardly worth calling an event; it was only
one more sin on the soul of a musically benighted people.
Wagner's prospects were still of the poorest; he was still living mainly
on charity; but in 1859 he had finished _Tristan_, and much of the
_Ring_ was sketched or actually written. He was amnestied and free to
return to Germany, and he could do little good there. _Tristan_ was
accepted at Vienna, but the production was put off. He was busy on the
_Mastersingers_--busy with all manner of impracticable dreams, and could
not earn a livelihood. His concert tours brought him little or no
profit; in Paris a series of concerts cost him 10,000 francs, and where
on earth he found the money I do not pretend to know. He was fifty-one
years of age; his fortunes seemed at their very worst, the outlook was
of the blackest, when of a sudden all was changed. King Ludwig of
Bavaria sent for him, and promised to help him in every possible way. He
had many rebuffs to face, but from this time (1864) his ultimate victory
was assured.