Wagner died suddenly at Venice February 13, 1883, and a few days later
was buried in the garden of Villa Wahnfried, Bayreuth. For a really
great composer he had quite a long life, and he lived it out
strenuously; and if he struggled and suffered during a great portion of
it, at any rate his last years brought him peace, undisturbed by the old
nightmare dread of poverty.
His activity manifested itself in three forms: the reforms he effected
in the theatre and the concert-room, his own music dramas, and the prose
writings, in which he both advocated the reforms and argued for his
theories. The prose, I have said, is of very small account now, and,
with the exception of the essays mentioned earlier, his essays and
articles have only a curious interest. His theatrical reforms consisted
in making the artistes sing intelligently and with care, and in
demanding realistic scenery. Intelligence and pains--these are the two
new elements he introduced into the theatre; and if most operatic
performances to-day are not absolutely ridiculous, we owe this
miraculous change to Wagner alone. The notion that anything, however
slovenly and stupid, is good enough for opera was dissipated by him
alone. A book of an interesting gossipy sort might be compiled to show
the difference between opera representations before Bayreuth and those
of a post-Bayreuth date, but there is no space for any such excursions
here. At the risk of turning this sketch into something like an
analytical programme, I have concentrated my attention on his operas,
and have tried to show how the later Wagner--the Wagner of the _Ring_,
the _Mastersingers_, and of _Tristan_--grew out of the earlier Wagner,
who composed as everyone else did at the time. He created a new form of
art, and no serious composer will ever dream of going back to the
ancient form of Gluck, Mozart and Weber. From the historical point of
view, it is the creation of this new form that gives him his importance.
He did for opera what George Stevenson did for vehicular traffic. The
music drama has driven out Italian opera as completely and irrevocably
as the steam-engine drove out the stage-coach. As far as his choice of
subjects, there is no reason on earth why he should be followed. The
myth suited him because he happened to be the Wagner he was, but there
are a hundred reasons why present-day composers should leave the myth
alone. The myth gave him opportunities to display his passion, keen
sympathy with picturesque nature, tremendous sense of a remote past that
never existed; but other composers have other mental and artistic
qualities, and for them there are fresh fields to be explored. No one
need trouble about the myth unless he is prepared to show us something
finer than anything in Wagner.
I have been compelled to leave out much interesting matter--Wagner's
trips to London, his difficulties in getting his theatre built, the
financial failure of Bayreuth at first, its success afterwards. Nor can
I say much about the man. He was certainly an overwhelming personality.
In his train followed such really great musicians as Liszt, von Bülow,
Tansig, and others. Richter was his copyist and disciple. He crushed all
originality out of Jensen, and, doubtless, others. Kings and Princes
were his very humble servants. And at Bayreuth he had round him a pack
of fools to do his bidding, as well as a number of intelligent
mediocrities, who wrote books and printed newspapers about him, inspired
by the mediocrity's ordinary ambition to become known through attaching
one's self to a famous man.
The fighting is over and done; there remain to us the glorious music
dramas. After more than twenty years Wagner's fame is still growing, and
it seems impossible that it will ever wane or that he will not, in
far-off times, be numbered with the greatest of the great. "He sleeps,
or wakes, with the enduring dead."