THE CHARACTER OF THE MAN
"Close up his eyes and draw the curtains close,
And let us all to meditation."--HENRY VI.
"The noble and kindly man as his friends knew him, and the aggressive
critic and reformer addressing the public, were as two distinct
individuals." These words of Edward Dannreuther are the explanation
of the many contradictory reports as to the personality of Wagner.
Those to whom he opened his inner self, to whom he addressed his
feelings and his hopes, who, in a word, understood him as both man
and artist, were united in praise of his personality. Liszt, Praeger,
Uhlig, Roeckel, Fischer, Von Bülow, Judith Gautier, Baudelaire, Frau
Wille--all the company of Wagner's friends and helpers loved his
nature and found in him none of that arrogance, that intolerance,
that insufferable conceit, which the unsympathetic outer world
condemned. With his friends, who understood the purpose of his
life and the aims of his ambition, he was generally in a state of
spiritual relaxation, and was simply himself. With those who failed
to understand him, and with all those whom he recognised as enemies
of his artistic ideas, he never relaxed the spirit of determined
opposition to indolent and slothful conceptions of life and art; and
with them he was consequently always in a mood of hostility. To such
he was rude, discourteous, and intolerant. His nature was irritable,
and even his friends had to endure curt and hasty speech at times.
To his enemies he was never polite, except occasionally in written
communication. He was not a politic man, for he was too nervous in
habit and too impulsive in utterance. He possessed the gentle art of
making enemies as few other men could, yet he was highly successful
in gaining friends, and those whom he got he kept. His early Dresden
friends were always his friends. The Zurich coterie adored him to
the end. Those who were intimately associated with him in Bayreuth
loved and reverenced him. Muncker, the burgomaster of Bayreuth, whose
book was translated into curious English by another German,[29] could
write thus of him:
"With passionate warmth he was beloved by numerous friends
who for a lengthy space of time could not grasp the idea
of his death. In a full measure he deserved this love. He
was a man as good as he was great. In his nature height
of mind, depth of feeling, and childlike amiability were
blended. The energetic strength of his will was paired
with heartfelt mildness; the susceptibility of his
mood, attributable to his many adversities and to his
heart trouble, with an unfailing and sincere desire for
reconciliation; the seriousness of his mind, which in
social intercourse involuntarily mastered all, with an
inexhaustible love for jest and humour. He loved and was
mindful for every creature, man or animal, that needed help
or sympathy. Courageous truthfulness was the foundation of
his character. Therefore he was simple and natural in his
demeanour and an outspoken enemy of all bombast. He was
proud, but modest in spite of his consciousness of what he
desired, knew, and accomplished. As his memory retained
alive what long already was past, so he thankfully never
forgot the good that others had done him, and faithfully
clung to his friends, even if time and space separated them
from him. Himself clear in his thoughts and intentions,
he demanded the same clearness in those who wished to
associate with him."
[Footnote 29: I have taken the liberty of changing the wording of the
translation in two places where the meaning was obscure.]
The testimony of others who knew Wagner longer and more intimately
than Muncker is in a similar vein. It is difficult in the face of
such evidence to accept the assertions of those contemporaries who
saw in him only the narrowest and most selfish egotism. That he had
serious faults and many foibles goes without saying. That he was an
agreeable companion to any one not absorbed in his artistic ideas
cannot be believed. Geniuses, self-centred as they must be, devoured
day and night by passionate yearning for the attainment of ideal
ends, are not often pleasant acquaintances. Wagner did not differ
from other great men. People who were uncongenial to him have said
that he was invariably rude and overbearing. Edward Dannreuther, who
was his friend, says: "He had no pronounced manners in the sense
of anything that can be taught or acquired by imitation. Always
unconventional, his demeanour showed great refinement. His habits
in private life are best described as those of a gentleman. He
liked domestic comforts, had an artist's fondness for rich color,
harmonious decoration, out-of-the-way furniture, well-bound books and
music, etc."
And here we come upon one of the traits of this singular man,
which has properly given rise to the largest amount of derogatory
comment. He certainly had luxurious tastes, and he never resisted
the temptation to gratify them even when he could not afford to
do so. He loved fine surroundings. He was fond of rich garments,
especially for indoor wear during his working hours. In later years,
when his worldly position had improved somewhat, he employed an
expensive Viennese dressmaker to make the silken robes which he
wore in the house. He sent her the most elaborate designs for his
dressing-gowns, which he seems to have planned with fastidious care.
He paid her absurd prices for his robes. This was only one form of
Wagner's extravagance. He wore silk underwear at all times, and
Praeger endeavours to show that he was forced to do this in order to
diminish as far as possible the irritability of his skin caused by
the erysipelas, of which he was a lifelong victim. Wagner himself
realised that his habits were luxurious, but he held that luxury was
a necessity to him. He knew that he would be blamed for taking this
position, and in a letter of 1854 to Liszt he wrote:
"How can I expect a Philistine to comprehend the transcendent part of
my nature, which in the conditions of my life impelled me to satisfy
an immense inner desire by such external means as must to him appear
dangerous and certainly unsympathetic? No one knows the needs of
people like us. I am myself frequently surprised at considering so
many 'useless' things indispensable." Later in the same year he wrote
a letter in which he shows plainly how his craving for luxurious
surroundings as an aid to work affected his financial affairs. He
said:
"I cannot live like a dog. I cannot sleep on straw and
drink bad whiskey. I must be coaxed in one way or another
if my mind is to accomplish the terribly difficult task
of creating a non-existent world. Well, when I resumed
the plan of the 'Nibelungen' and its actual execution,
many things had to co-operate in order to produce in
me the necessary, luxurious art mood. I had to adopt
a better style of life than before. The success of
'Tannhäuser,' which I had surrendered solely in this
hope, was to assist me. I made my domestic arrangements
on a new scale. I wasted (good Lord, wasted!) money on
one or the other requirement of luxury. Your visit in the
summer, your example, everything, tempted me to a forcibly
cheerful deception, or rather desire of deception, as to
my circumstances. My income seemed to me an infallible
thing. But after my return from Paris my situation again
became precarious. The expected orders for my operas, and
especially for 'Lohengrin,' did not come in; and as the
year approaches its close I realise that I shall want much,
very much, money in order to live in my nest a little
longer."
That there is a plaintive and unmanly weakness in all this is not
to be denied. But we have to bear in mind that if Wagner had not
received the assistance of his friends and been enabled to live as he
wished to live and to work according to his fancies, we should not
require biographies of him, and his great dramas would not have been
the delight of two continents. That there was still further weakness
in the metal of this man is shown by the extremities of depression
into which he sank. Suicidal thoughts were no strangers to him and
restlessness and discouragement were much too common. In a letter of
March 30, 1853, he says to Liszt:
"What can help me? My nights are mostly sleepless, weary, and
miserable. I rise from my bed to see a day before me which will bring
me not one joy. Intercourse with people who torture me and from whom
I withdraw to torture myself! I feel disgust at whatever I undertake.
This cannot go on. I cannot bear life much longer."
Yet in spite of these pitiable feelings the artistic impulse was all
potent within him. In the beginning of 1859 he wrote to his fidus
Achates: "Believe me implicitly when I tell you that the only reason
for my continuing to live is the irresistible impulse of creating
a number of works of art which have their vital force in me. I
recognise beyond all doubt that this act of creating and completing
alone satisfies me and fills me with a desire of life, which
otherwise I should not understand." And yoked with these ideas always
went his conviction that the world owed him a gratuitous living that
he might accomplish the creative functions of his genius. In October,
1855, he wrote to the amiable Franz:
"America is a terrible nightmare. If the New York people
should ever make up their minds to offer me a considerable
sum, I should be in the most awful dilemma. If I refused, I
would have to conceal it from all men, for everyone would
charge me in my position with recklessness. Ten years
ago I might have undertaken such a thing, but to have to
walk in such by-ways now in order to live would be too
hard--now when I am fit only to do and to devote myself to
that which is strictly my business. I should never finish
the 'Nibelungen' in my life. Good gracious! such sums as
I might earn in America people ought to give me without
asking anything in return beyond what I am actually doing,
and which is the best that I can do."
And then he adds pathetically that he is better fitted to spend money
than to earn it.
In such a man as Wagner the artistic traits are dominant. They rule
the personality. The conviction of this man that he had in him the
conception of epoch-making works, and his recognition of the fact
that the world was his artistic enemy, were the moving forces of his
life. Without constantly keeping this in mind, it is quite impossible
to comprehend the character of Wagner. It explains at once its
weakness and its strength. It accounts even for his domestic history,
while it does not justify it. His first wife was a good woman, and
in a way he loved her. But she was never able to become an essential
part of his life, because she could not enter into his artistic
thoughts and purposes. Hence she was unable to control his impulses
to wander. Cosima von Bülow understood him before she went to live
under the immediate influence of his mind. That they should have
been drawn to one another was inevitable. He who in letters to Liszt
had cried out in anguish of his need of a home and woman's care was
very ready to accept them at her hands at no matter what sacrifice,
and she in the same spirit was ready to give them. To her Wagner
was constant in spite of the fact that temperamentally he was an
inconstant man. She controlled his desires, and they needed control.
The artistic aspirations which governed his entire career made
it a disappointment. Wagner died a disappointed man. That he was
gratified by the production of the "Ring" at Bayreuth there need be
no denial. That he enjoyed to the fullest the praises of those who
seemed to comprehend his ideals is beyond doubt. But, nevertheless,
he realised that he had not penetrated the public mind. He saw
plainly that the applause for his works was not for their revelation
of a new standpoint in operatic art, but for their purely theatrical
effectiveness. The public never saw beneath the surface. He felt that
he was wholly misunderstood. In a letter of 1859 to Liszt he said:
"I never had much pleasure in the performance of one of my
operas, and shall have much less in the future. My ideal
demands have increased, compared with former times, and
my sensitiveness has become much more acute during the
last ten years while I lived in absolute separation from
artistic public life. I fear that even you do not quite
understand me in this respect, and you should believe my
word all the more implicitly."
Again and again he spoke in no doubtful terms of his knowledge that
the public did not understand his aims. He was delighted by every
evidence of sympathy, but he suffered untold agonies of mind from the
fact that "Tannhäuser," "Lohengrin," and "Die Meistersinger" were
treated by the world as mere operas, and that there was no evidence
that the operatic public understood his departure from the old and
insincere methods of the commercial theatre. The disappointment which
Wagner experienced from the failure of the world to grasp his ideals
would have continued, had he lived longer. Even now only a few ardent
lovers of the loftiest things in art have entered fully into the
spirit of his conceptions. One has only to attend a performance of
"Siegfried" before an ordinary audience of professed Wagnerites to
see how far short of a complete understanding of Wagner his friends
still are. Thousands of well-meaning persons regard themselves as
disciples of this unique master when they have learned the contents
of Hans von Wolzogen's handbooks and can identify every leading
motive in each score when it is heard in the orchestra. The praise of
all such people was vinegar and gall to Wagner. He felt that he was
utterly misunderstood, and that was torture to his sensitive spirit.
He was unhappy, too, because he could not get his works properly
performed. Perhaps he never experienced deep delight at any
representation except the first of "Tristan und Isolde," in which
the splendid work of Schnorr filled him with joy. But his "Lohengrin"
and his "Tannhäuser" were never given to his satisfaction, for there
were absolutely no singers who united the ability to declaim the
recitative and to deliver the plentiful cantilena also. Not only
was there a lack of singers, but there were no stage managers who
understood him, and so all over Germany his works were performed
in a spirit foreign to their poetic content, and the master was
misrepresented to a public which would have found it almost
impossible to comprehend him in the most favourable conditions.
Mr. Dannreuther says: "The composer of 'Tristan' confronted by the
Intendant of some Hoftheater, fresh from a performance of Herr von
Flotow's 'Martha'! A comic picture, but unfortunately a typical one,
implying untold suffering on Wagner's part."
Wagner was under medium size, but had the appearance of being
somewhat taller than he really was. In 1849 the police description
of him ran thus: "Wagner is 37 to 38 years old, of middle height,
has brown hair, wears glasses; open forehead; eyebrows brown; eyes
grey-blue; nose and mouth well proportioned; chin round. Particulars:
in speaking and moving he is hasty." Animation marked all his ways,
and at times he revelled in the wildest spirits. Periods of deep
depression occurred to him, but his nervous energy seldom deserted
him.
The study of his personality will always bring one back to the same
point. He was entirely dominated by his artistic nature and ambition.
His life can be understood only by an analysis of his motives based
on this premise. Wagner, the man, was the creature of Wagner, the
dreamer of "Siegfried." There has never been a clearer instance of
the mastery of genius. He was unceasingly driven by it from boyhood
to the grave. It made him selfish, intolerant, dogmatic, dictatorial.
But it achieved its ends. The grave at Wahnfried contains only ashes.
All that was vital in Richard Wagner lives still in the dramas
and the prose works. The forces which were in the man are just as
active now as they were when he laughed and stormed in the villa at
Bayreuth.
PART II
THE ARTISTIC AIMS OF WAGNER
"Every bar of dramatic music is justified only by the
fact that it explains something in the action or in the
character of the actor."--WAGNER TO LISZT, SEPTEMBER,
1850.
CHAPTER I
THE LYRIC DRAMA AS HE FOUND IT
What was this man Wagner trying to do?
Broadly stated, the purpose of his life was to reform the lyric
drama, to restore to it the artistic nature with which it was born,
and to bring it into direct relation to the life of the German
people. His ideal was the highest form of the drama, with music as
the chief expository medium; and his most earnest desire, to make
that drama national, both in its expression of the loftiest artistic
impulses of the Teutonic people and in their recognition of that
fact. The whole controversy about the works of Wagner arose from
the determined opposition of those who were unwilling to see the
existing order of things operatic changed. The opera, as it was when
Wagner hurled his new ideas and works into the theatrical arena, was
a vastly different thing from the music-drama, and the confusion in
the public and critical mind, resulting from the fact that Wagner
used the outward and visible signs of opera, brought about a bitter
conflict. This conflict cannot end till the whole public realises
that although it goes on Monday night to hear "Lucia di Lammermoor"
and on Wednesday to hear "Tristan und Isolde," both employing song
instead of speech, and both outwardly built on theatrical lines, it
is nevertheless confronted by two radically different forms of art,
working for diametrically opposite results.
That we may the better understand the matter we must shortly rehearse
the story of the birth and development of the lyric drama. The
opera was born at the end of the sixteenth century of an effort to
reconstruct the extinct Greek drama. The projectors of the movement
knew that the Greeks delivered the lines of their tragedies in an
artificial manner closely resembling chanting. In their endeavours to
provide something similar to this, they invented dramatic recitative.
At first this recitative was employed only in the construction of
monologues, but as the explorers in new musical territory gained
confidence, they made wider reaches. At the close of the century
"Eurydice," a drama in music, by Rinuccini and Peri, was publicly
performed. The new form of play gained immediate popularity, and the
progress of the lyric drama was begun.
The inventors of the new form had just ideas. Peri believed it to be
the office of dramatic music to embody, intensify, and convey to the
hearer the emotional content of the text. His method of accomplishing
this was to imitate in music the nuances of the voice in speaking. In
agitated passages he used a faster movement and irregular rhythm. In
unimpassioned speech he wrote his music more smoothly. His ideas were
undeniably correct, but they could not be adequately carried out with
the resources of vocal music in his day. The art of solo writing was
in its infancy, and the melodic and harmonic expression of dramatic
emotion had just begun. Consequently Peri's music was monotonous.
There was no wide difference between his delineation of sadness
and his embodiment of despair. Furthermore his attempted fidelity
to the inner nature of speech led him away from definite musical
phraseology. His music was totally deficient in form, and it was the
discernment of this weakness and the attempts of his successors to
provide the remedy that led the opera out of the path of dramatic
sincerity.
Monteverde, the most gifted of the early composers of opera, made
remarkable essays at combining musical clearness and symmetry with
dramatic expression, but his works show us that the materials of the
art were as yet so embryonic as to prohibit complete success. But
the instantaneous popularity of opera made it a veritable gold-field
for composers, and it speedily became the California of all the
adventurous spirits of music in the beginning of the seventeenth
century. These writers naturally sought the shortest and easiest
path to popularity, and this was soon proved to be in the provision
of vocal airs of simple, clearly defined form and pretty melody. The
operatic aria was thus developed and became the central sun of the
operatic system.
But as solo arias could not make up the entire scheme of the opera,
duets, trios, and quartettes were introduced, care being taken to
conserve in them the principles of the air. It was soon found that
a sharp demarcation had to be made between these set pieces and the
ordinary dialogue by means of which the stories of the operas were
told. So gradually an opera came to be a symmetrically arranged
series of solos, duets, trios, quartettes, and other set pieces,
joined by a chain of recitative. In all this development purely
musical requirements had been considered. The librettist, therefore,
was merely the servant of the composer, and it was his business to
arrange his book with a view to a pleasing succession of pieces in
the aria form, or some form very similar to it. His story had to be
so constructed that it could be told in the dialogue between the set
pieces, and by means of this dialogue it should lead up to situations
at which the arias could be effectively, if not quite appropriately,
introduced.
This was the condition of the opera in the middle of the eighteenth
century at the advent of Mozart and Gluck. It should be noted that
occasionally composers arose who had some sense of their obligations
to dramatic art and who endeavoured to improve the æsthetic nature
of the opera. Lully and Rameau in France did much along this line
and established traditions which have been of lasting benefit to the
lyric art of their country. But neither they nor their immediate
successors discovered the radical evil of the system upon which
they were working. The ground-plan of the opera was still musical.
There was still no thought of first writing a dramatic poem and then
setting it to music. The demands of the score formulated the plan for
the libretto.
Mozart had not a drop of the reformer's blood in his veins. The
incongruity of the extant form of the opera seems never to have
occurred to his mind. He accepted the plan of the lyric drama as it
was handed down to him by his forerunners without question, and by
the sheer force of his incomparable genius succeeded in writing
immortal apologies for its existence. In his hands the aria took a
new meaning, and the recitative became a flexible and responsive
instrument. His treatment of the carefully built ensembles, which
had come to be a feature of opera, was that of a genius of the
first order. So great, indeed, was this man that to-day the works
of all his successors who wrote operas on the old plan become as
farthing rushlights before the splendour of his glowing masterpieces.
Antiquated as the style of Mozart's music is, his operas speak
the accents of inspiration and come before us with the gesture of
authority.
Gluck, on the other hand, without the musical genius of Mozart,
had the insight of a cosmopolitan coupled with the impulses of a
progressist. The external defects of the opera were patent to his
sane consideration, and he sought at once for the corrective. He was
a sincere, conscientious reformer; and he did not a little to cut
away the growth of underbrush which had sprung up around the trunk
of operatic art. But he did not discern that the twig had been bent,
the tree inclined; and that the trunk itself needed to be hewn down
and the growth started again from the root. He saw that there was too
much difference between the recitative and the aria, and that the
latter was an impediment to the progress of the drama. He perceived
that the composers had catered too much to the vanity of singers
and had permitted a richly ornamental style of song, antagonistic
to broad dramatic expression, to become the type of operatic music.
He refused to write with a constant view to helping the singer to
display his voice and technic. He insisted that the business of
the music was to voice the content of the text, or as he himself
expressed it, "I endeavoured to reduce music to its proper function,
that of seconding poetry by enforcing the expression of the sentiment
and the interest of the situations without interrupting the action or
weakening it by superfluous ornament." He strove to curtail the empty
parade of musical devices and to restore that intimacy between text
and song which had been the chief charm and the most potent argument
for the existence of the "Drama per Musica" in its original form.
But Gluck failed to achieve his purpose because he retained the set
musical forms which dictated the shape of the text and demanded the
old-fashioned arrangement of the scenario. He did not reach that
level of enlightenment from which he might have seen that the radical
error of opera lay in regarding music as an end and not as a means.
The stumbling-block of the lyric drama had been the aria, and to this
fact Gluck was strangely blind. It may not be amiss to conjecture
that, even if he had perceived the nature of this fault, he would not
have known how to correct it; for the development of musical design
had not advanced far enough to offer the suggestion of a better plan.
Gluck saw the evil effect of the empty repetitions in the aria and
expressly forbade them; but he was too wise to believe that he could
proceed wholly without musical design. To have done so would have
thrown him back to the era of Peri and would have resulted in chaos
and a confusion of the public mind. Therefore, retaining the aria in
a slightly modified form, he strove with the deepest earnestness and
with admirable skill to infuse into the music of his works a genuine
dramatic expressiveness. He made his arias delineative of the
situations and he paid the homage of an artist to the text, instead
of writing pretty tunes for their own sake. He tried to arrange
the ballets, which his French public demanded, so that they should
constitute part of the action of the drama and not be an interruption
to it. And he made a special study of the resources of instrumental
expression.
His public at first fought him with stubborn determination, but he
conquered it in the end. Yet his influence on the operatic stage was
not permanently felt outside of France. The impetus given to Italian
opera by the easily attained popularity of the aria writers and the
bent imparted to it by their style remained. The applause of the
unthinking, who constitute the vast majority of theatre-goers in all
countries, is much more readily obtained by the agile delivery of
a brilliant air with a simple dance rhythm as its basis than by a
seriously conceived dramatic piece, which demands that the auditor
shall bring both intelligence and sensibility into the presence of
the singer. The Italian writers sought for this easy applause, and
the famous Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini, who were the princes of
the Italian stage when Wagner was born, wrote wholly for the pleasure
of the ear. The Italian opera was in its entirety a musical product,
making but the shallowest pretence at representation of the thought
of the text, and scorning real dramatic sincerity. The old forms
prevailed and the librettist was but a purveyor to the composer.
In France some outward pretence of adhering to the long-established
dramatic principles of the French lyric drama remained, but here the
musical dictator of the day was Meyerbeer, a man who sought popular
applause as ardently as any Italian, but who adopted a slightly
different plan of gaining it. Whereas the Italian appealed to his
public chiefly by musical sweet-meats, Meyerbeer deftly aimed at
a combination of showy musical effects with all the resources of
theatricalism. He brought to its perfection the ground-plan of the
French grand opera, in which a striking succession of scenes is one
of the most potent elements of attractiveness. Here the librettist
must not only provide for the usual alternation of solos with duets,
trios or quartettes, and ensembles, but must also plan the story of
his book so that a simple cottage or moonlight love scene shall be
followed by a grand pageant or a glittering ballet. One has only to
recall the progress of the scenes in "L'Africaine" or "Les Huguenots"
to see how the Meyerbeerian plan is worked out, and to realise how it
has dominated the modern opera in such creations as Gounod's "Faust"
and Verdi's "Aida."
The theatricalism of the ground-plan infused itself into the music
with Meyerbeer. He was always planning for the immediate theatrical
effect, never thinking of the deep dramatic truthfulness which might
be imparted to music. For this reason his music is hollow and the
bones of it rattle. Occasionally he is carried away by a really noble
dramatic situation and writes greatly, as in the final duet of "Les
Huguenots." But the problem of Meyerbeer was precisely the same as
that of Rossini, namely, how best to tickle quickly the fancy of
the great unthinking masses and to fill the theatre. Thus Wagner
found the opera established on a purely commercial basis, with art
degraded to the dust. It was this which filled him with disgust, and
against which he fought throughout his life. It is not to be denied
that in the beginning he tried to reach the public by the same means
as Meyerbeer. He tried to serve both art and Mammon, but he speedily
discovered that real success could not be thus gained. He learned in
writing "Rienzi" that he was following the wrong path. In entering
upon this path, however, he was certainly led astray partly by the
victories of Weber.
This master had in his "Der Freischütz" produced in 1821 a work
which not only was essentially German, but which abandoned much of
the outward appearance of opera. He announced his position by the
definition of opera as "an art work complete in itself, in which all
the parts and contributions of the related and utilised arts meet
and disappear in each other, and, in a manner, form a new world by
their own destruction." It was his belief that a libretto should
not be made simply as a framework for the old-fashioned sequence of
tunes, but should have an organic union with the music, and he said,
"It is the first and most sacred duty of song to be truthful with
the utmost fidelity possible in declamation." He had no respect for
the established forms, but held that the form of the music should be
prescribed by the poem. Nevertheless one finds that in its outward
aspects the Weber opera, by reason of its employment of the German
folk-song style, treads a path not remote from that of the aria. For
Weber did not discover any principle of musical design which would
enable him to free himself from some restraint by the cyclical song
form. Spoken dialogue takes the place of recitative in his works,
but the vocal numbers, introduced in much the same way as in the
older works, are of the song family, and in spite of an immensely
widened and deepened expression, the dominance of a purely musical
pattern is not escaped.
Such was the condition of operatic art and such the natural attitude
of the public toward it when Richard Wagner began to look beyond the
narrow boundaries of his small estate and dream of fame as an artist.
The burning desire of the Königsberg and Riga period was, as he has
expressed it in the "Communication to My Friends," "to extricate
myself from the petty commerce of the German stage, and straightway
try my luck in Paris." But it was only the puny huckstering of
the little theatres which offended him. He had yet to learn that
the commercial element was just as conspicuously present in more
pretentious undertakings. He fell in love with Bulwer's "Rienzi," and
at once saw in it material for an opera.
"This Rienzi with great thoughts in his head, great
feelings in his heart, amid an entourage of coarseness and
vulgarity, set all my nerves a-quivering with sympathy and
love; yet my plan for an art work based thereon sprang
first from a perception of the purely lyric element in the
hero's atmosphere. The Messengers of Peace, the Church's
summons to awake, the battle hymns--these were what
impelled me to make an _opera_: 'Rienzi.'"
In trying to make this opera he learned that the impulse of a true
art work must come not from without, but from within; that an opera
which might be truly called a lyric drama could not be created out
of the desire of some one to set the tempting portions of a lyric
book to tuneful music, but only out of the demand of a great drama
for the musical form of speech. In writing the book of "Rienzi" he
thought only of producing an effective opera libretto, and to this
end he followed the Meyerbeerian ground-plan. His goal was the Paris
Grand Opéra, and a grand opera was what he wrote. The materials of
the story he saw "in no other light than that of a five-act opera,
with five brilliant finales, and filled with hymns, processions, and
the musical clash of arms." But even while fashioning this material
for purely theatrical effect, he sought to make contributions toward
real art, and it was the impossibility of combining the Meyerbeerian
make-believe with the fruit of his artistic nature that showed him
how far he was astray from the path leading to substantial and
permanent success. Nevertheless he would no doubt have struggled on
to force himself to travel the highway toward the Grand Opéra, had he
not found the gates locked against him. It was in his despair that he
at last resolved to write that which was in him and take no thought
of external success. And it was of this first travail of freed genius
that were brought to birth the fundamental tenets of his dramatic
creed, previously cherished only in the secret womb of his mind.
CHAPTER II
THE REFORMS OF WAGNER
We may now approach the study in detail of Wagner's artistic aims.
I have already said that his purpose was to restore artistic
truth, dramatic sincerity, to the opera, and to bring it into some
relation to the life of the German people. Recapitulated with more
particulars, then, the reforms at which he aimed were these:
(1)--The music had come to be the end instead of a means of
expression, and consequently musical forms dominated. Wagner strove
to confine music to its proper function of expression. He desired
to prevent its being regarded as the object of the lyric drama, but
wished it to take its legitimate place as one of the factors in the
composition of such a play. His labour in this direction included the
disuse of the set musical forms.
(2)--He sought to make a complete organic union of the elements of
the drama employed in opera, a union in which each part should be
essential and all should work together for a common end, namely the
embodiment of the poet's thought.
(3)--He endeavoured to make the "libretto" a consistent drama, but
always suitable to the emotional expressiveness of music.
(4)--He aimed to bring the lyric drama out of the slough of mere
commercialism, and give it a direct relation to and influence upon
the intellectual and æsthetic life of the people.
We have seen that when he set out to free himself from the petty
commercialism of the German theatre, Wagner fondly dreamed that with
a "grand opera" produced on the stage of the Grand Opéra of Paris,
he would emancipate himself. But in writing that work and labouring
for its production, he learned two vital facts, namely, that artistic
success could not be attained on the lines of the typical grand opera
and that from petty commercialism he had only approached that of a
larger field. He saw on every hand the theatre in the hands of mere
speculators, who sought not art, but money, and who were ready to
sink all artistic principles in order that they might appeal to the
debased tastes of "the stolid German Philistine or the bored Parisian
roué." When he turned his eyes backward along the path of history,
he saw that it had been thus for centuries. In the end he came to
the conclusion that only in the relation of the Greek drama to the
Greek people could he find that Arcadian perfection for which he
sought. And so he asked himself whether it was not possible to rise
once again to the lofty level of the Greek tragedy and thus bring the
theatre into relation to the heart and mind of the people. In his
conception of the lyric drama he believed that he saw the means of
doing this.
The student of his artistic work will find his ideas set forth in
three of his literary compositions, "Art and Revolution," "The Art
Work of the Future," and "Opera and Drama." In "Art and Revolution"
he studied the theatre of Æschylus and Sophocles and examined the
reasons for its decline. In the devotion of Greek religion to the
ideals of beauty Wagner found the explanation of the Grecian fidelity
to the true principles of all art and of the final union of the
arts of poetry, music, and mimetics in the Greek drama. He saw the
highest period of this drama coincident with the supremacy of Athens.
With the decline of the Athenian state came the decline of the
Greek drama, and "the mad laughter of Aristophanes." The spirit of
community, he says, split into a thousand lines of egotism, and the
union of the arts which made the drama also was dissolved.
Then came the era of philosophy, which was inimical to art, and the
dawn of Christianity was still less favourable to it. The old Greek
freedom in the contemplation of nature and untrammelled worship of
beauty for its own sake could not live under the reign of Christian
teaching. With the changes in public thought resultant on the new
teachings of Christianity and philosophy, art assumed a new relation
to the national life, and in Wagner's opinion a social revolution
alone would be the instrument to restore it to its pristine standing.
With his social views we need not now concern ourselves. The point
for us to bear in mind is that, like the founders of opera, he went
back to the Greek drama for his first principles and in it found a
union of the arts of poetry, music, and action. This union suggested
to him, as it had to Peri and his friends, the laws on which must
stand the modern play in music.
From this point he starts in his "Art Work of the Future." He
finds that after the dissolution of the old union of the arts, each
sought its own development on independent lines and that each had at
times sunk to the level of a mere amusement. Various unsuccessful
attempts had been made to reunite these arts, but their independence
had increased constantly till in Wagner's day each had touched
the uttermost limits of its development and could not possibly go
further. It was necessary, therefore, that each should sacrifice some
measure of its independence in order to unite with the others in an
artistic entity. This in Wagner's mind was a musical drama, in which
poetry, painting, music, and acting should unite in an organic whole.
Having in this essay laid down the fundamental demands for his
ideal lyric drama, he made in "Opera and Drama" an exhaustive study
of this form of art. The first part of the work is devoted to a
critical sketch of the development of opera. The text is that which
we have already noted, that the means of expression, music, had been
taken for the end, while the real object, the drama, had been made
subsidiary to the production of pretty music in set forms. With this
as his theme, Wagner examined the works of the various operatic
masters and adduced evidence to establish his position. It was this
part of his book which caused the bitterest comment at the time of
publication.
The second part of the work is given to a study of the spoken drama,
and it shows that Wagner was a close student of the works of the
leading English, French, and German dramatists. It is in this survey
that he indicates the special nature of the difficulties placed
in the way of dramatic treatment by historical subjects, which
he himself found impracticable for operas. He notes how Schiller
laboured unsuccessfully to give clearness and form to the mass of
historical details which he introduced into his "Wallenstein," while
Shakespeare rested upon the firm ground of the auditor's imagination
and painted in broad lines. Here the author propounds his own theory
that for an ideal drama a mythical subject is the best, because it
admits of a centralisation of the poet's thought upon the characters
and emotions of the personages and rids him of the limitations of
historical colour, or conventions of time or place.
"In the drama," he says, "we must become knowers through
the Feeling. The Understanding tells us 'So is it,' only
when the Feeling has told us, 'So must it be.' Only through
itself, however, does this Feeling become intelligible to
itself; it understands no other language than its own.
Things which can only be explained to us by the infinite
accommodations of the Understanding embarrass and confound
the Feeling. In Drama, therefore, an action can only be
explained when it is completely vindicated by the Feeling;
and it thus is the dramatic poet's task, not to invent
actions, but to make an action so intelligible through
its emotional necessity, that we may altogether dispense
with the intellect's assistance in its vindication. The
poet, therefore, has to make its main scope the choice
of the Action,--which he must so choose that, alike in
its character as in its compass, it makes possible to him
its entire vindication from out the Feeling; for in this
vindication alone resides the reaching of his aim."
This is the kernel of the second part of "Opera and Drama." In the
third part he examines the materials of the poetic drama. He studies
the technical resources of rhythm and rhyme and endeavours to show
how far they can be utilised by the dramatist. From this he advances
to an examination of the type of verse best suited to the purpose of
the lyric drama, and here we are made acquainted with the theory of
his own verse. He discourses on the functions of melody and harmony
in the expression of the feelings of a drama and expounds his ideas
as to the powers and uses of the orchestra. Finally he shows how he
believes that the development of a drama should lead to periods of
emotional exaltation, or, technically, emotional "situations," in
which the expressiveness of melody would be employed with all its
resources to enforce the poet's thought. The principal tenet of this
part of the book is that the music must grow inevitably out of the
emotional character of the scene, and that its technical potencies
must be employed in proportion to their fitness for specific kinds of
expression.
It is in his studies of the spoken historical drama and his
expression of his ideas as to the proper materials for the lyric
story that we must find the formation of Wagner's fundamental theory
that the myth offered the best subject-matter for the musical
dramatist. The details of movement and accessories required in a
historical drama are in the way of the necessary process of focussing
the music on the grand emotions of the play. The simplification of
the story, so that its central situations are emotional and not
merely theatric, is impossible when historic truth is preserved. But
all mythology is the embodiment of primary world-thoughts. It is the
poetry of peoples, and he who looks below the surface will find in it
the whole heart of a nation. And thus the personages of mythologic
story became world-types. They are embodiments of racial or national
ideals. They are free, unconventional, elemental. Wagner came to
discern in their qualities the requisites for heroes and heroines of
the lyric drama. And from the philosophy of Schopenhauer, of which he
was a student, he drew encouragement and support.
According to Schopenhauer it is the work of Art to represent for
us the eternal essence of things by means of prototypes. The human
mind should rise above the conditions of time and place, cause and
tendency, and thus come to the contemplation of eternal ideas. This
contemplation is the privilege and the duty of Art. Where, then, was
Wagner to find eternal ideas suitable for dramatic treatment except
in their personifications in mythology? Certainly they were not to
be found in librettos of the "Semiramide" or "Sonnambula" variety.
Again turning his eyes to the Greek theatre, he found that Æschylus
and Sophocles had used the great myths of their people, and that by
doing so they had brought their theatre into direct relation with
the national life and thought. Why, then, could not he, by using
the myths of the Teutonic races, create genuine works of art and
reknit the bond between the stage and the national heart? This was
the splendid vision which dwelt in his mind in the days of poverty
and struggle. It was this which stayed his hand when easy offers of
pecuniary success were almost within his grasp. It was this hope
which led him forever away from the "pomp and circumstance" of the
historical opera, and brought forth works whose kinship to "Rienzi"
is so difficult to trace.
The myth, then, became the subject-matter on which he reared his
poetic structure. As he has summarised his thoughts on this topic
for us in "A Communication to My Friends" it may be well to quote his
words:
"I turned for the selection of my material once for all
from the domain of history to that of legend.... All the
details necessary for the description and preservation of
the conventionally historic, which a fixed and limited
historical epoch demands in order to make the action
clearly intelligible--and which are therefore carried
out so circumstantially by the historical novelists
and dramatists of to-day--could be here omitted. And
by this means the poetry, and especially the music,
were freed from the necessity of a method of treatment
entirely foreign to them, and particularly impossible
as far as music was concerned. The legend, in whatever
age or nation it may be placed, has the advantage that
it comprehends only the purely human portion of this age
or nation, and presents this portion in a form peculiar
to it, thoroughly concentrated, and therefore easily
intelligible.... This legendary character gives a great
advantage to the poetic arrangement of the subject for
the reason already mentioned, that, while the simple
process of the action--easily comprehensible as far as its
outward relations are concerned--renders unnecessary any
painstaking for the purpose of explanation of the course of
the story, the greatest possible portion of the poem can
be devoted to the portrayal of the inner motives of the
action--those inmost motives of the soul, which, indeed,
the action points out to us as necessary, through the fact
that we ourselves feel in our hearts a sympathy with them."
With the idea of founding a national drama on the great mythological
thoughts of his people, and keeping constantly in mind the conviction
that his business was not the mere telling of a story in verse and
music, but the presentation to the minds of his auditors of the
underlying emotions of the drama, he quickly realised that the set
forms of the old opera were of no use to him. He could not construct
a libretto with the regularly recurring duets, trios, and ensembles,
if he meant to be true to dramatic art. To abandon these established
patterns, however, meant to throw over both the poetic and musical
fashions of the older lyric writers. If his people were not to sing
arias and duets, but to speak a convincing dialogue, with speech
raised to a higher power by the use of music instead of blank verse,
as in the spoken drama, he must find new types, both poetic and
musical. But with Wagner it must be constantly borne in mind that the
dramatic speech is not text first and music afterward, but is both at
once. His conception of the talk of his dramas was that of words made
vocal in the musical sense by their own inner demand for emotional
symbolism. In other words the music must be the direct and inevitable
outgrowth of the poetry and the two must be joined in a perfect
organic union.
It became necessary, therefore, that he should cast about for some
new musical form for the foundation of his drama, for there cannot
be music without form. The new pattern did not develop itself
immediately in his mind. The first principle of it occurred to him
when he was writing "Der Fliegende Holländer." This first principle
was that the musical expression of a particular mood, having been
found, should be retained. "When a mental mood returned," he
says, "its thematic expression also, as a matter of course, was
repeated, since it would have been arbitrary and capricious to have
sought another motive so long as the object was an intelligible
representation of the subject and not a conglomeration of operatic
pieces." This at once disposed of the aria, which was a completed
musical piece. Wagner conceived the music to be inseparable from
the speech and therefore to be completed only at the end of the
drama. The melody had thus to become endless, a melody made up of
many thematic ideas, all worked up wholly for the purpose of mood
painting, and built into a grand form dictated and justified solely
by the emotional scheme of the play. With this conviction he steered
a happy course between mere formalism and chaotic formlessness.
He avoided the set patterns of the older school and escaped the
dictation by the verse of the musical shape and figure, yet he also
weathered the shoals of musical incoherency. For the identification
of the thematic ideas with the poetic thoughts enabled him to make
on perfectly logical and natural grounds those melodic repetitions
without which music is devoid of form.
Every student of music knows that a melody is constructed of certain
phrases which have identifiable rhythmic and melodic shape. The
identity of any tune is established by the repetition of these
phrases in a regular order. When the repetitions are arranged on a
plan similar to that of a verse of poetry, as in the case of such a
tune as "Home, Sweet Home," the form of the music becomes that known
as the song form, which lies at the basis of nearly every musical
composition not strictly contrapuntal. Any music in which certain
melodic shapes, known as figures, are not preserved and repeated,
in which each phrase once heard is not heard again, is absolutely
chaotic and does not convey to the human mind the conception of
design, and hence also not of melody. Wagner, in striving to avoid
the musical domination of the older forms, had to see to it that he
did not fall into this kind of chaos. He had to devise a larger and
less confining form, but he had to have a form nevertheless.
But as soon as he had conceived the idea of preserving throughout
his drama the first thematic expression of any mental mood or idea,
he had the solution of his problem in his hands. For now the musical
repetitions were bound to become numerous and to acquire from the
text a direct and unmistakable significance which they could not
possibly have by themselves. And the criticism to which this form
might be open, if it were used as a purely musical one, at once falls
to the ground when it is remembered that the object is not musical
alone, but also dramatic, or musico-textual. The organic union of
the word and the tone makes the assistance given by the text in
explaining the meaning (sometimes arbitrary) of the music entirely
defensible, and indeed thoroughly commendable.
CHAPTER III
THE MUSICAL SYSTEM
In its details this Wagnerian system of musico-textual speech divides
itself into music constructed of leading motives, or themes with
a specified meaning, and music of the picture, or purely scenic
music, such as that of the sailors in the first scene of "Tristan
und Isolde," or the "Waldweben" of "Siegfried." And again the sung
parts of the score divide themselves into ordinary speech, or
quasi-recitative, and the speech of the high emotional situation,
which is either intensely declamatory or extraordinarily melodious,
according to the nature of the mood which has been reached.[30] A
further feature of the scheme, which must not be overlooked, is
that the repetitions of the thematic ideas are given chiefly to the
orchestra, which thus becomes not a mere accompaniment, but a most
potent explicator of the drama. This treatment of the orchestra makes
it the creator of a musical atmosphere which surrounds the actors
in the drama. Even when one has no acquaintance whatever with the
specified meanings of the "leading motive" ("leading" should read
"guiding"), the dramatic influence of the musical background is such
that he is brought into a complete emotional accord with the action
on the stage. Thus the orchestra becomes a most potent factor in
demonstrating and making effective Wagner's tenet that "In the drama
we must become knowers through the Feeling. The Understanding tells
us 'So is it,' only when the Feeling has told us, 'So must it be.'"
It was with thoughts of this in his mind that Wagner wrote on Sept.
9, 1850, to Herr Von Zigesar:
"An audience which assembles in a fair mood is satisfied as
soon as it distinctly understands what is going forward,
and it is a great mistake to think that a theatrical
audience must have a special knowledge of music in order
to receive the right impression of a musical drama. To
this entirely erroneous opinion we have been brought by
the fact that in opera music has wrongly been made the
aim,--while the drama was merely a means for the display of
the music. Music, on the contrary, should do no more than
contribute its full share towards making the drama clearly
and quickly comprehensible at every moment. While listening
to a good--that is, a rational--opera, people should, so
to speak, not think of the music at all, but only feel it
in an unconscious manner, while their fullest sympathy
should be wholly occupied by the action represented. Every
audience which has an uncorrupted sense and a human heart
is therefore welcome to me as long as I may be certain that
the dramatic action is made more immediately comprehensible
and moving by the music, instead of being hidden by it."
[Footnote 30: Even the purely lyric style is sometimes employed in
strong situations where a song might be used, as in the case of
Siegmund's Love Song.]
From the actual potency of Wagner's music in producing the proper
emotional mood in the auditor and from his own words, such as the
above, the present writer has frequently argued that an intimate
acquaintance with the leitmotiv scheme is not necessary to an
understanding of the Wagner dramas. To comprehend and appreciate the
grandeur of such scenes as the "Todesverkündigung" in "Die Walküre,"
the death of Siegfried and the immolation of Brünnhilde it is not
needful to be able to catalogue the guiding themes as they pass
through the vistas of the glowing score. All that is essential is an
open mind. The eloquence of the music will do the rest. And if the
guiding motives fail to create the proper emotional investiture for
the same, then they are valueless, even at Wagner's own rating, for
he says that we must feel before we can understand a drama. And we
ourselves can readily see how useless it is to tell us the specified
meanings of sweet musical phrases if they do not, when heard, help to
warm into a vitalising glow the significance of the text and action.
If they fail to do this, the organic union so ardently sought by
Wagner does not exist. If they succeed, it matters not at all whether
we know their names.
But we are all Elsas to these Lohengrins and Wagner himself was one
of the Ortruds, for he has tempted us to ask the question, which is,
fortunately for us, not fatal to our happiness. It becomes natural
and proper therefore for every student of this master's works to
take cognisance of the leitmotiv system and to aim at a thorough
comprehension of its nature and its purpose. These have been very
often misrepresented, and, even by many devoted admirers of Wagner's
works, are yet misunderstood.
It was out of his first conviction that the musical embodiment of a
mood having once been found should not be changed that the leit motif
system grew. This first conviction led him to adopt in "Der Fliegende
Holländer" certain musical phrases as typical of principal ideas in
the play. He made a theme for the Dutchman's personality, a melody
for his longing, another for the personality of Senta, the redeeming
potency in the drama. In making these themes he sought to render
them expressive not only of their primary dramatic ideas, but of the
beautiful symbolism which lay behind these ideas. As this symbolism
appealed largely to the sensibility of the hearer, it was peculiarly
fitting that he should summon the aid of the music to the work for
which it was best suited, namely the awakening of the sensibilities
and through them of the emotions.
Out of this first experimental use of leading themes, Wagner
gradually advanced to a complete and elaborate system. The student
will look in vain for the finished system in "Tannhäuser" and
"Lohengrin." In the former of these two works the leit motif is not
employed and there is rather a tendency to use what is called "music
of the scene" as a reminder of the place of the occurrence of an
action than to repeat music expressive of the emotion lying behind
the action itself. In "Lohengrin," however, one finds the leading
motive employed in a few instances in precisely the same manner as it
is in "Siegfried" or "Tristan," but not with the same persistency. It
was in the construction of the great trilogy and its prologue that he
found the full value of his system of musical cross-references, for
in the vast complexity of this story, the explanatory force of music
to which a direct meaning had been given was afforded the widest
possible field of action.
The student of the system will find that the leading motives,
guiding themes, typical phrases, or whatever one pleases to call
them, are of several kinds. Some are employed very arbitrarily, it
must be admitted, but the text always makes their meaning clear
and thereafter one easily understands the composer's intent. They
may be divided as follows: motives of personalities, as the Donner,
the Siegfried-Hero, the Brünnhilde motive; those of the moving
forces of the drama, as the contract, the need of the Gods, and
the curse; those of the tribal or racial elements, as the Volsung,
or the Nibelung motive; those of places, objects, and occupations,
as the smithy, the sword, the Walhalla, and those of the scene, as
the Rhine music, the forging, and the fire music. This is a rude
classification, but it will answer the present object, which is
an exposition of the nature and aims of the system. The music of
the tribal or racial elements and that of the scene, the student
will find, is seldom modified in the course of the drama, while
that relating to personalities is often changed in conformity with
alterations in the characters of which it is typical. In "Der Ring
des Nibelungen" the motives of the Tarnhelm, the gold, the Rhine, the
sword, the dragon, and similar musical devices retain their original
form almost always, though occasionally the demands of harmony and
figure call for more or less altered suggestions of them.
But the personal themes are sometimes submitted to the processes of
thematic development employed in symphonic composition, and this
resource of music is always used by Wagner with a direct intention
to depict some development of character. The system of alteration
may be summarised in this rule: if the object represented in the
music is one subject to change, its representative theme is liable to
development, but otherwise it will keep its original form, unless
there is a musical necessity for slight change or the possibility of
dramatic suggestion in it. Those familiar with the dramas will recall
that in the last scene of "Götterdämmerung" the Rhine music undergoes
a harmonic change eloquently expressive of the mood of the Rhine
maidens after the refusal of Siegfried to return the ring. It will be
found, too, that any scenic music which is designed for more than one
hearing has a deeper purpose than mere pictorial description and is
designed as an aid in the creation of a proper mood of receptivity in
the auditor, and thus as an assistance to complete understanding.
In the earlier dramas the proportion of scenic music to what may
be called expository music is large. One finds many pages of
"Lohengrin," for example, which consist of purely scenic writing.
The arrival of Lohengrin and the combat in the first act, the
approach to the cathedral in the second, the bridal chorus--these,
when examined, are found to be pure music of the scene. The motives
which are repeated with specified significance are few, and they deal
chiefly with the moving forces of the drama, the Grail and the fatal
question, the hatred of Ortrud and the knightly power of Lohengrin.
But the early works of Wagner show his musical system in its
embryonic state, and, while the study of the scores is from
that point of view particularly interesting, for satisfactory
illustrations of the method we must go to the later dramas. Here we
are constantly confronted with evidence of Wagner's sincerity of
purpose, his unflagging endeavour to achieve that organic union of
text and music which was so dear to his heart. In "Das Rheingold,"
for instance, occurs for the first time a theme to be heard often in
the subsequent dramas, the theme of the sword. The composer was not
content to make a theme of any sort and arbitrarily call it the sword
motive. He tried to produce something which should suggest the sword
and the heroic uses to which it was to be put, and thus he composed
this brilliant and martial theme, intoned by a trumpet:
[Music]
Another artistically constructed motive, which may be quoted here, is
that representative of the Tarnhelm, the mystic cap which Mime makes
for Alberich and which renders the wearer invisible. In this motive
Wagner creates the atmosphere of mystery by making the tonality of
the music uncertain through the use of the empty "fifth."
[Music]
Some of the most effective themes are those which are associated
with personalities in their visible aspects, as the fire music,
which represents Loge, and the "Ritt-Motiv," or galloping figure, of
Kundry in "Parsifal." Motives of this kind Wagner devised with great
musical skill, for they impress the mind of the hearer in two ways,
bringing before it a part of the pictorial movement of the drama and
also representing certain personal attributes, while at the same
time they are so made that they readily lend themselves to thematic
variation without losing their identity.
The attentive listener to these later dramas of Wagner, then, will
find, in the fully developed musical system, voice parts which
consist of declamation occasionally rising into the sublimest kind
of arioso, without once sacrificing the poetic spirit to any demand
of mere musical formalism, and an orchestral accompaniment which
is not an accompaniment in the sense of merely affording support
to the singer's voice, but is independent and expressive of much
that the actors do not utter. This expressiveness is gained by the
employment of themes to which a definite meaning has been attached,
no matter how arbitrarily, by their association with a picture,
an action, a personality, or a thought. This association is made
perfectly comprehensible to every listener who bears in mind that
the text is the explanation of this music, and its only explanation.
The music never exists for its own sake, but is a vital part of the
speech of the drama. The orchestra is always an explicator, never
a mere support. And here and there we meet with passages of merely
descriptive or scenic music, in which not even guiding themes of
scenic nature are used. The ultimate purpose of the entire musical
scheme is organic union with the text so that the music shall give
perfect expression to the drama of emotions which is being enacted,
and place the hearer in the proper moods for the reception of it.
While all the old musical forms employed in opera are abandoned,
Wagner avoids formlessness by the repetition of identified themes.
In summing up this important matter let me quote Wagner's own words
from "A Communication to My Friends":
"This opera form [the old form] was never of its very
nature a form embracing the whole drama, but rather an
arbitrary conglomerate of separate smaller forms of song,
whose fortuitous concatenation of arias, duos, trios, etc.,
with choruses and so-called ensemble-pieces, made out the
actual edifice of opera. In the poetic fashioning of my
stuffs [materials] it was henceforth impossible for me to
contemplate a filling of these ready-moulded forms, but
solely a bringing of the drama's broader object to the
cognisance of the feeling. In the whole course of the drama
I saw no possibility of division or demarcation, other than
the acts in which the place or time, or the scenes in which
the _dramatis personæ_ change. Moreover the plastic unity
of the mythic stuff brought with it this advantage, that,
in the arrangement of my scenes, all those minor details
which the modern playwright finds so indispensable for the
elucidation of involved historical occurrences were quite
unnecessary, and the whole strength of the portrayal could
be concentrated upon a few weighty and decisive moments of
development. Upon the working out of these fewer scenes
in each of which a decisive 'Stimmung' [mood] was to be
given its full play, I might linger with an exhaustiveness
already reckoned for in the original draft; I was not
compelled to make shift with mere suggestions, and--for
the sake of economy--to hasten on from one suggestion to
another; but with needful repose I could display the simple
object in the very last connections required to bring it
home to the dramatic understanding. Through this natural
attribute of the stuff I was not in the least coerced to
strain the planning of my scenes into any preconceived
conformity with given musical forms, since they dictated
of themselves their mode of musical completion. In the
ever surer feeling hereof it thus could no more occur to
me to rack with wilful outward canons the musical form
that sprang self-bidden from the very nature of these
scenes, to break its natural mould by violent grafting-in
of conventional slips of operatic song. Thus I by no
means set out with the fixed purpose of a deliberate
iconoclast [Formumänderer--lit., changer of forms], to
destroy, forsooth, the prevailing operatic forms of aria,
duet, etc., but the omission of these forms followed from
the very nature of the stuff, with whose intelligible
presentment to the feeling through an adequate vehicle I
alone had to do....
"Just as the joinery of my individual scenes excluded every
alien and unnecessary detail, and led all interest to the
dominant Chief-mood, so did the whole building of my drama
join itself into one organic unity, whose easily surveyed
members were made out by those fewer scenes and situations
which set the passing mood: no mood could be permitted
to be struck in any one of these scenes that did not
stand in a weighty relation to the mood of all the other
scenes, so that the development of the moods from out each
other, and the constant obviousness of this development,
should establish the unity of the drama in its very mode
of expression. Each of these Chief-moods, in keeping with
the nature of the stuff, must also gain a definite musical
expression, which should display itself to the sense
of hearing as a definite musical theme. Just as in the
progress of the drama the intended climax of a decisory
Chief-mood was only to be reached through a development,
continuously present to the feeling, of the individual
moods already roused, so must the musical expression, which
directly influences the physical feeling, necessarily take
a decisive share in this development to a climax; and
this was brought about quite of itself, in the shape of
a characteristic issue of principal themes, that spread
itself not over one scene only (as heretofore in separate
operatic 'numbers'), but over the whole drama, and that in
intimate connection with the poetic aim."
Where Gluck had sought to make music enforce the expression of the
sentiment of the text, Wagner aimed to make it the very expression
itself, and in following out this purpose he elaborated the system
of musical presentation of the content of a drama which carried him
entirely away from the beaten paths of opera. It was the radical
departure of his system which aroused the opposition of a deep
misunderstanding. His contemporaries saw what he had abolished from
his works, but could not comprehend the substitute. And even to-day,
when the Wagner drama is accepted the world over, there is still a
general failure to understand that the leitmotiv system was conceived
as the only preservation of necessary musical method in a drama which
had banished from its scheme the use of the established operatic
forms.
CHAPTER IV
THE SYSTEM AS COMPLETED
Wagner, in striving for a complete and natural revelation of the
emotional content of his dramas, discovered that the continual flow
of music which he had adopted was not possible if fixed verse-figures
were employed. The verse-figure prescribes and limits the musical
figure. Nevertheless there must be some rhythmic principle in the
verse. Wagner found that which was most suited to his needs in the
ancient staff-rhyme, or alliterative verse. The fundamental basis
of this verse is consonance of sounds, not confined to the final
rhyme but employed in the body of the verse and thus made a part
of its inner nature. Not a little excellent information as to the
exact nature of the alliterative verse may be obtained from the
introductory essay to the second volume of Percy's "Reliques."
It should be mentioned that Percy was acquainted with Icelandic
literature and first made it known in England when he translated
Mallet's "Northern Antiquities." He tells us that the Icelandic
language is of the same origin as the Anglo-Saxon, and that was the
reason why both employed the staff-rhyme. The alliteration consisted
in "a certain artful repetition of sounds in the middle of the
verses. This was adjusted according to their rules of prosody, one
of which was that every distich should contain at least three words
beginning with the same letter or sound. Two of these correspondent
sounds might be placed either in the first or second line of the
distich, and one in the other; but all three were not regularly to be
crowded into one line. This will best be understood by the following
examples:
"Meire og Minne Gab Ginunga
Moga heimdaller. Enn Gras huerge."
This verse was used by the old poets of the Saxons in Britain. The
epic of "Beowulf" is written in this style and so are the poems of
Caedmon, the noted paraphraser of the scriptures. An authoritative
writer says:
"The poetry of the Anglo-Saxons was neither modulated
according to foot-measure, like that of the Greeks and
Romans, nor written with rhymes, like that of modern
languages. Its chief and universal characteristic was
a very regular alliteration, so arranged that in every
couplet there should be two principal words in the first
line beginning with the same letter, which letter must also
be the initial of the first word on which the stress of
the voice falls in the second line. The only approach to a
metrical system yet discovered is that two risings and two
fallings of the voice seem necessary to each perfect line."
A specimen of this alliterative verse from the works of Caedmon shows
the peculiarity of the construction.
"Se him cwom to frofre.
& to feorh-nere.
Mid lufan & mid lisse.
Se thone lig tosceaf.
Halig and heofon-beohrt.
Hatan fyres.
Tosweop hine & toswende.
Thurh tha swithan miht.
Ligges leoma."[31]
[Footnote 31:
Who to them came for comfort,
And for their lives' salvation,
With love and with grace;
Who the flames scattered
(Holy and heaven-bright)
Of the hot fire,
Swept at and dashed away,
Through his great might,
The beams of flame.
--Paraphrase of the Song of Azariah.
Thorpe's translation.]
The reader will note the alliteration of the l's in the third and
fourth lines, and the h's in the next two. The change in vowel sounds
following the consonants was deemed by Wagner as of especial value in
music.
As the English language developed, this method of rhythmic
construction remained in use, and we find that it is used in such old
poems as "Piers Plowman's Vision" (about 1350).
"In a Somer Season when hot was the Sunne,
I Shope me into Shroubs as I a Shepe were;
Habite as an Harmet, unHoly of werkes,
Went Wyde in thys world Wonders to heare."
Wagner, however, modelled his verse on that of the original writers
of it, as their language was more closely affiliated with German
than the early English was. He made an exhaustive study of the
constitution of the staff-rhyme, and saw in its conservation of
the elementary principles of poetic speech the factor necessary to
the perfection of an organic union with music. For those who have
studied the conventional formulas of musical expression--the major
and minor modes, chromatic progressions, the declamatory style as
opposed to the pure cantilena, the crescendo and diminuendo, the
agitato--know that all these have been transferred from the natural
employment of vocal tone and articulation in speech as influenced by
the emotions which these musical symbols are intended to represent.
And we know, too, that the reflex action of music in producing in the
hearer the emotions which it aims to depict is due to its adoption
of methods founded on man's oral expression of his feeling. Wagner
saw in the staff-rhyme the first attempt to systemise into poetry the
elevated speech of emotion, and he discerned in it technical features
admirably suited to his plan. In "Opera and Drama" he says:
"In Stabreim the kindred speech-roots are fitted to one
another in such a way that, just as they sound alike
to the physical ear, they also knit like objects into
one collective image in which the Feeling may utter
its conclusions about them. Their sensibly cognisable
resemblance they win either from a kinship of the vowel
sounds, especially when these stand open in front without
any initial consonant ('Erb und eigen.' 'Immer und ewig');
or from the sameness of the initial consonant itself, which
characterises the likeness as one belonging peculiarly to
the object ('Ross und Reiter.' 'Froh und frei'); or again,
from the sameness of the terminal consonant that closes
up the root from behind (as an assonance), provided the
individualising force of the word lies in that terminal
('Hand und Mund.' 'Recht und Pflicht')."
The fruits of these philological considerations reveal themselves
to the hearer of the works in a wonderfully delicate perfection of
accentuation and cadence, which simulates that of the spoken line
in a vivifying manner. One has only to read, as one would naturally
speak, such words as "Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond," and
then sing them to the opening notes of "Siegmund's Love Song" to
see how beautifully this staff-rhyme adapts itself to the needs of
what Wagner called "Word-tone-speech," an expression which explains
itself. Furthermore, these lines of staff-rhyme have no metrical
domination over the music. A single reading of any familiar passage
in the later works will show the reader that the lines of the verse
do not set the limits for the phrases of the music as they do in
the old song forms, but that the composer is entirely free in his
phraseology, while he can never quite obliterate the rhythmic
basis of the verse. This plasticity was of inestimable importance
in the Wagnerian system, with its endless melody, its independent
accompaniments, and its disuse of the old forms.
We have now made an examination of the artistic aims and methods of
Wagner. The reader should now be able to grasp the basic truth that
his mature works are not to be viewed as operas but as poetic dramas.
The argument is frequently made that no serious criticism of opera
is necessary because it is an absurdity throughout. People do not
sing; therefore all attempts at dramatic verity in the lyric drama
are useless. And from this is drawn the conclusion that it makes no
difference whether composers write pretty tunes merely for their own
sake, and use the set forms and conventions of the old opera, or
write an endless recitation with an orchestral background. The object
should be to please, and since the entertainment is musical, let us
have pretty tunes at all costs.
The same arguments, of course, apply in a way to all forms of the
poetic drama. People do not speak blank verse, nor talk in metaphors.
It is altogether improbable that Henry V. or Richard II. or Macbeth
even rose to such heights of speech as Shakespeare's personages. The
ground upon which the poetic drama rests is that of symbolism, and
in the lyric play this, by reason of the flexibility of music, may
reach its highest elevation. The symbolism of the Wagnerian drama is
both poetic and musical. With the former I shall attempt to deal in
the study of the individual plays; but of the musical symbolism it
may here be said that while technically the speech of the Wagnerian
drama is but blank verse raised by song to its highest power, the
representation of emotional moods by the musical symbols, vocal or
orchestral, is cast in a mould far grander than that of the spoken
drama, and its influence upon the auditor is immeasurably larger. If
by the employment of these musical symbols the dramatist can cause
the auditor to throb with the emotions of the personages in the
drama, he has accomplished the ultimate aim of his art and justified
his form.
To achieve this result requires perfect sincerity on the part of the
dramatist and the most exquisite adaptation of the theatrical means
to the end in view. The old opera had abandoned all but a shallow
pretence of these, and had given itself to the easy business of
tickling the ear. Wagner's work is an appeal to the intelligence
through the feeling. His ambition was to give the lyric theatre
vitality and an influence with the public. To do this he was forced
to abandon all that he found ready to hand, and to build again
from the foundations. In doing so he restored some of the outward
semblance of the conventions. He wrote duets, as in the second act of
"Tristan und Isolde." But he did this with a perfect comprehension
of the power of music to symbolise an emotional state shared by two
lovers. On the other hand, he raised the orchestra to the position of
an exponent of the dramatic thought, and this, again, was done with
a masterly conception of the potency of absolute music in painting
mood-pictures. Here he found an agency for symbolism in the poetic
drama far beyond the loftiest dreams of the poet of the spoken play.
The motto of the attendant at Wagner performances, then, must be,
"The play's the thing," and he must measure their value and estimate
their influence upon him wholly from that point of view. A drama
in music was the conception of the originators of what came to be
called Opera; but it had been, as we have seen, lost to sight in
Wagner's youth by reason of the immense popularity of the easily
made productions of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini, in which the
music was the ultimate object and the libretto only a means toward
its production. Wagner's ideal was a drama in which music should be
a factor valuable wholly because of its power to embody and convey
emotions. That such a form of drama departed from the more material
realism of the spoken play was not a matter to trouble a profoundly
æsthetic intellect. Wagner, like the greatest masters in all forms of
art, was opposed to that kind of realism which bases its claims on
its copying of mere objects or external phenomena. This is the cheap
realism of the sensational drama, which puts fire engines and hansom
cabs and professional burglars on the stage, and holds that it thus
reproduces human life. It is, perhaps, a form of art, but it is a low
one, because it has not the imaginative or symbolical elements which
are essential to high art. It is the art which copies, not that which
creates. The painter who reproduces on his canvas a group of flowers
or a human form may be a master of the technics of painting, but
the fervid imagination of Turner's "Slave Ship," with its ill-drawn
figures, is worth a thousand copies of real things.
As art rises in the scale of nobility, it appeals more and more to
the imagination, till it reaches that point at which, in Schumann's
words, "only genius understands genius." Advancing along this path,
art tends always toward the employment of symbolism. Poetry is in
every nation the first and most convincing demonstration of the
feeling of humanity for symbolical expression. Poetic forms are in
themselves symbolic, and the figures of speech employed in them are
word-symbols meant to awaken the imaginative powers of the reader.
The drama in its earliest phases was purely artistic, coupling, as
it did, the symbolism of a highly organised mythology with poetic
speech. The blank-verse plays of Shakespeare are filled with the
noblest symbolism of the spoken play, and those who decry them
as unreal because of their poetic form and diction show an utter
inability to understand artistic design.
In its inception the opera was, as we have seen, an attempt to revive
the form of the antique drama of Greece. Its originators cherished
an honest purpose, but their knowledge was not sufficient to carry
it to a successful issue. Neither had they at their command a rich
enough _materia musica_, for until their day composers had devoted
themselves to the expression of contemplative religious feeling
and the musical symbols of human passion were yet undeveloped.
Unfortunately for the "Drama per musica," as the early masters called
it, the first attempts at the construction of definite operatic forms
led directly away from the honesty of dramatic art and turned opera
into a series of tunes, each complete in itself, and strung upon a
slender thread of recitative. Wagner, setting out as he did to build
a national drama, had no reason whatever for following the methods
of the Italian composers. His aim was to embody certain national
thoughts, as projected in the great folk-legends of the Teutonic
people, in artistic plays, and to use for that embodiment the most
influential means at his command. Music was his vocal instrument
instead of speech, not simply because he was a musician, but also
because he was convinced that it would afford him the loftiest
utterance for the emotional substance of his dramas.
For these were not to be dramas in which the mere telling of a
story was the object in view. The drama was to be, not a series of
incidents of pictorial efficiency, but a development of feelings
and an exhibition of typical humanity, embracing those wonderful
world-heroes and heroines into whose conception have been poured the
concentrated imaginings of several races and centuries. For such
a play as "Tristan und Isolde," in which the movement is entirely
emotional and not incidental, the spoken form would have been prolix
and wearisome. This play, given without music, would become a dreary
stretch of talk. On the other hand, the simplicity of the action
and the intensity of the emotions permit the composer to expend
his entire force upon the musical expression of feeling, thereby
confining himself strictly to the province of music and raising the
symbolism of the drama to the highest power. Herein lies one of the
principal differences between the spoken and the sung play. Yet in
it also is to be seen a demonstration of the indisputable fact that
the works of Wagner are dramas. So, then, we must view them; and,
so doing, we shall approach the contemplation of Wagner's art work
from the point desired by him. We shall enter into his domain in
the spirit of sympathetic understanding, and it will be to us not a
valley of shadows, as it is to those who enter with closed eyes, but
a sea of splendour and sunlight, where the spirit may
"Burst all links of habit--there to wander far away
On from island unto island at the gateways of the day."
PART III
THE GREAT MUSIC DRAMAS
INTRODUCTORY
It is customary to divide the artistic career of Wagner into three
periods, the first embracing the production of the early works and
"Rienzi," the second that of "Der Fliegende Holländer," "Tannhäuser,"
and "Lohengrin," and the third that of the remaining works. It is
the opinion of the present writer that the recognition of four
periods would make the matter clearer to the lover of this master's
creations. The early works, which are not heard except in one or
two places, may be left out of consideration. We may then classify
"Rienzi" as the production of the first period. "Der Fliegende
Holländer" should stand in a period by itself, as representing the
purely embryonic epoch of the true Wagner, while "Tannhäuser" and
"Lohengrin" may properly be allotted to a third or transition period.
The remaining works may be regarded as belonging to the period of
the mature Wagner, though there would be no serious difficulty
in subdividing this part of his artistic career. It seems to me,
however, that no satisfactory end would be gained by doing so.
The reader of this book has already seen that in writing "Rienzi"
Wagner was actuated by purposes entirely different from those which
moved him in the creation of "Der Fliegende Holländer." The first of
the lyric dramas presently to be examined was, as its maker said, a
grand opera pure and simple. Then came the days of despair in Paris,
when Wagner, hoping nothing for the future, gave free rein to his
artistic impulses and produced the dramatic story of the unhappy
Vanderdecken. In the creation of this drama nothing influenced
Wagner's mind but the desire to write according to the dictates of
his own artistic conscience. But he had not yet worked out a scheme
of dramatic composition. He had only just come upon the fundamental
ideas of his plan. Its details were still far away from his
conception. "Embryonic," then, is the term to apply to this period of
his productivity.
With "Tannhäuser" there entered into the field of his artistic vision
those broader musical and ethical conceptions of the lyric drama
which afterward developed themselves into a complex and influential
system. With "Lohengrin" we see these ideas taking more definite
shape. The literary and musical plan of the drama is more closely
organised, and the musical style is more clearly defined. The diction
becomes more akin to that of later works, and the methods show more
certainty and more mastery. "Lohengrin" is a long advance beyond
"Der Fliegende Holländer." It prepares us for such a work as "Die
Meistersinger," though hardly in full for "Parsifal." It must be
borne in mind that the original conception of "Die Meistersinger"
belongs to the same period as "Lohengrin," and that although the
music was not written till long afterward, the score must naturally
have been coloured by the first thoughts of the work and so have come
somewhat under the influence of the "Lohengrin" style.
In the early dramas we meet with Wagner's inclusion of ethical ideas
in his designs. One seeks in vain among the old popular operas of the
Rossini or Meyerbeer schools for a drama with a moral. But owing to
Wagner's adoption of the myth as the material from which to erect his
dramatic structures, the inclusion of an ethical lesson in each of
his schemes followed almost inevitably. For mythology is essentially
ethical. Wagner, however, humanised the teachings of the mythologies
into which he delved by emphasising the beautiful idea of the saving
grace of woman. He did not, perhaps, deliberately adopt as the motto
of his works the line of Goethe, "The woman-soul leadeth us ever
upward and on," but it may be inscribed upon them without violence to
their intent. We may see by an examination of the original sources of
the dramas how the importance of this thought in the works is due to
the deliberate purpose of Wagner himself to bring it to the front. In
some of the original stories it plays little or no part, but in the
Wagner music drama the "Ewig-Weibliche" is always impressed upon the
imagination of the auditor with all the skill of the dramatist and
all the eloquence of the musician.
In "Lohengrin," as the reader can see for himself, the master made a
special point of excluding the operation of this principle, because
he desired to bring forward a study of a woman who had no love in
her nature. With Wagner the woman-soul could be influential for good
only when acting under the guidance of love. Ortrud acted under the
dictates of hate, and her influence was therefore destructive, but
ultimately futile. The reader will readily perceive the dramatic,
poetic, and musical value of this thought. In all the Wagnerian
dramas we are confronted with studies of the warring of good and evil
principles. When the good principle is identified or associated with
the love of woman, and that love is made the saving grace of its
object, the dramatic force of the story is splendidly intensified,
the scope of the poetry and the music immeasurably widened.
Especially is the music benefited by the possibility of identifying
the highest ethical idea of the poem with the most beautiful and
potent of its emotions; for it is the peculiar privilege of the music
to voice the emotional content of the drama, and when this becomes
one with the ethical idea, the auditor is led by the music into the
very shrine of the poet's imagination. The reader will note, too,
that in those dramas in which the love of a woman does not figure as
a saving influence, the tragic fate of the hero is accentuated, and
the woman herself is made a more conspicuous embodiment of grief.
In most of the works of Wagner there is to be found a philosophical
or metaphysical basis, and this is most easily discovered in the
later dramas. The poet-composer was at different times deeply
influenced by the writings of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. From the
former he obtained some of the vaguer conceptions of his philosophy,
but the latter supplied him with definite ideas. It was in the early
fifties that Wagner was a student of Feuerbach, and his mind eagerly
caught at the thoughts contained indefinitely in such phrases as
"highest being--the community of being," "death, the fulfilment of
love," and such declarations as "only in love does the finite become
the infinite." These ideas later took clearer shape in his mind when
he gathered from Schopenhauer the sharply cut description of the
negation of the will to live as the highest abstraction and elevation
of thought.
With love figuring as a community of being, with death as its
highest fulfilment, and with the absolute effacement of the desire
of life as the loftiest aspiration of human passion, Wagner was
equipped with a philosophical background for several of his most
dramatic conceptions, notably for "Tristan und Isolde." Yet one has
no difficulty in understanding his own assertion that the negation
of the will to live and the community of being had entered his mind
in an indefinite shape long before he read the works of the two
philosophers, for they may be traced in the story of "Der Fliegende
Holländer."
Some of Wagner's biographers, notably Houston Stewart Chamberlain, to
whom this master was little short of a divinity, have devoted much
space to the consideration of Wagner as a philosopher. The truth is
that he was never a philosopher at all in the strict sense of that
term. He was a groper after philosophies. He sought for a rational
foundation for his artistic theories and endeavoured to found them
upon metaphysical tenets borrowed from works which seemed to meet
his needs. But there is no difficulty in perceiving that what always
appealed to him in a philosophy was its poetic or dramatic material.
That he was sometimes mistaken as to the real value of that material
is not astonishing. The best text-books of Wagner's philosophy are
his dramas. Therein one finds that the ethical side of a philosophy
was what touched him most directly, and that it did so because of
its close relation to the principles underlying the tragic in human
experience. This is paying a higher compliment to Wagner than to call
him a philosopher, for it is practically asserting that his dramatic
nature was his guiding star.
It is easy to note that in "Der Fliegende Holländer" Wagner more
nearly rid himself of those hampering historical details to which
he objected than he did in "Tannhäuser," and more especially than
in "Lohengrin." The legend of the "Flying Dutchman" was not one
of the great world-thoughts, but it had the advantages of being
founded on an incident which might be repeated at any time and
in any place--namely, the periodical landing of the wanderer.
In "Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin," and in "Parsifal," Wagner used
material found in the great cycle of tales belonging to the Christian
mythology of Germany, England, and France. He found himself unable
to avoid introducing some of the historical details contained in
the original stories. Because of their sources and nature these
three dramas have been classed as the Christian trilogy of Wagner in
contradistinction to the Nibelung works, which are called the pagan
trilogy. While this classification is justified by the nature of the
works, it should be remembered that Wagner himself repudiated any
intention to produce works charged with a religious purpose. Ethical
ideas, indeed, he always cherished, but he denied that he taught
Christianity. He recognised the assistance which art had given to
religion, and he saw that in Greece the dramatisation of national
religious beliefs had given to the stage a power unknown in modern
times. But he himself was too wise to dream of making the lyric
drama a mere corollary or illustration to the pulpit text. A passage
in "A Communication to My Friends," quoted in the account of his
resumption of work on "Tannhäuser," explains the mood which governed
him in the composition of the score. He says that at the time he
was yearning for a pure and unapproachable ideal of love. "What, in
fine," he continues, "could this love-yearning, the noblest thing my
heart could feel, what other could it be than a longing for release
from the present, for absorption into an element of endless love,
a love denied to earth and reachable through the gates of death
alone?... How absurd, then, must those critics seem to me, who,
drawing all their wit from modern wantonness, insist on reading into
my 'Tannhäuser' a specifically Christian and impotently pietistic
drift!"
We may now proceed to the study of the great dramas which have for
so many years been the joy of the artistic mind and the torture
of the indolent. The last word of this author on the subject of
studying these dramas is this: Learn the text. By the text the music
must be measured. By the text the music must be understood. By the
music the text is illuminated and made vital. But every measure of
Wagner's music is explained by the poetry. It is useless to go to the
performance of a Wagner drama with your mind charged with thoughts
of the music. Think of the play and let the music do its own work.
That is what Wagner himself asks you to do, and it is the only fair
test to which to put him. If his music vitalises the drama for you,
it matters not whether you know the leading motives or the harmonic
scheme or the orchestration. The work of the music is accomplished.
But that work cannot be accomplished if you are in the dark as to its
purpose. And in the dark you must always be unless you have a full
knowledge of "what is going forward on the stage." To gain that you
must know the entire text. Therefore the written word of the drama is
your guide to its comprehension.
RIENZI
THE LAST OF THE TRIBUNES
Grand Tragic Opera in Five Acts.
First performed at the Royal Saxon Court Theatre, Dresden, October
20, 1842.
_Original Cast._
Cola Rienzi Tichatschek.
Irene Fräulein Wüst.
Steffano Colonna Dettmer.
Adriano Mme. Schroeder-Devrient.
Paolo Orsini Wächter.
Raimondo Vestri.
Baroncelli Reinhold.
Cecco del Vecchio Risse.
A Messenger of Peace Thiele.
Hamburg, 1844; Königsberg, 1845; Berlin, Oct. 26, 1847; Prague, 1859;
Hanover, 1859; Weimar, Wiesbaden, and Darmstadt, 1860; Mayence, 1863;
Stockholm, 1864; Bremen, Gratz, and Stettin, 1865; Würzburg, 1866;
Schwerin, 1867; Rotterdam, 1868; Leipsic, 1869; Paris (in French
translation by Charles Nuitter and J. Guillaume), April 6, 1869;
Cassel, 1870; Augsburg, Carlsruhe, Vienna, and Munich, 1871; Mannheim
and Magdeburg, 1872; Brunswick, 1873; Venice, 1874; Strassburg and
Breslau, 1875; Bologna and Madrid, 1876; Cologne and Florence, 1877;
Riga, 1878; New York, in German by the Pappenheim-Adams Co., Mar. 4,
1878, and in English, Jan. 27, 1879; London, Italian and English,
1879; St. Petersburg, 1879; Rome, Innspruck, Freiburg, and Ghent,
1880; Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1881, and Basle, 1882.
First performance in New York, Academy of Music, March 4, 1878, by
the Pappenheim-Adams Company.
_Cast._
Adriano Mme. Eugenia Pappenheim.
Irene Miss Alexandre Human.
Cola Rienzi Charles Adams.
Paolo Orsini A. Blum.
Steffano Colonna H. Wiegand.
Raimondo F. Adolphe.
A Messenger of Peace Miss Cooney.
Conductor, Max Maretzek.
The names of the singers of Baroncelli and Cecco del Vecchio were not
advertised nor mentioned in the newspapers.
RIENZI
The first of the series of great musical works by which the fame of
Wagner was made does not call for extended discussion. Its source
is familiar to every reader of English literature, and its method
of construction and style of composition are those employed in the
operas of the Meyerbeerian school. In the fact that Wagner wrote his
own libretto, which awakened the interest even of Hector Berlioz,
and in the immense vigour and wonderful colour of the score, lie the
chief indications of the Wagner of the future. The reader has already
learned how Wagner undertook this work with the deliberate purpose
of making it a lever to pry open the doors of the Paris Grand Opéra.
With that idea in mind it is not at all astonishing that he should
have followed the model of Meyerbeer, who was in Wagner's early days
the master spirit of the world of French music.
Wagner in subsequent years was extremely particular to keep before
the minds of his friends the fact that it was not simply pecuniary
success that he sought. He was eager to shine as an artist. That
we must concede. He was, indeed, ambitious, and had a profound
conviction of his own genius. But in these early days, when the inner
artistic struggle found its companion piece in the outward fight for
existence, Wagner had not reached the æsthetic convictions which
afterward came to him. Therefore his conception of Bulwer's "Rienzi"
was wholly as material for the libretto of a grand opera of the
Meyerbeerian school. We have seen how his first attempt to enter
Paris was with the scenario of "Die Hohe Braut," which was sent to
Scribe, but lost in the mail for want of proper prepayment of the
postal charges. We then find that Wagner wrote in 1837 to his Leipsic
friend Lewald, who had some acquaintance in Paris, telling him that
he had in his mind the book of "Rienzi."
"I intend," he said, "to compose it in the German language,
to make an attempt whether there is a possibility of
getting it performed in Berlin in the course of fifty
years, if God grant me so long a life. Perhaps Scribe will
like it, in which case Rienzi will learn to sing French in
a moment; or else this might be a way to goad Berliners
into accepting the opera if they were told that Paris was
ready to bring it out, but that preference was for once
to be given to Berlin; for a stage like that of Berlin or
Paris is absolutely necessary to bring out such a work
properly."
Nothing came of this correspondence, and Wagner's "Rienzi" was not
permitted to astonish the Parisians. Nevertheless he began himself to
write the libretto at Riga in the summer of 1838. In the spring of
1839 he had composed the music of the first two acts, and with this
uncompleted score he set out from Riga on the voyage which ultimately
landed him in Paris. Of his meeting with Meyerbeer at Boulogne, his
exhibition of his manuscript to the great dictator, his completion
of the work in the days of his hardship in Paris (in 1841), and the
sending of the bulky score to Dresden the story has been told in the
biographical part of this book. It need not now be repeated. Of the
instantaneous success of the opera at Dresden there is plentiful
evidence. It was in the style which the public of the time admired
and it heaped up effects enough to dazzle the crowd. But it must be
said for Wagner that he had some dim thought when he began this work
of producing something really artistic. He was simply mistaken as to
the method. At this point I must ask the reader to accept Wagner's
own words as a better exposition of himself and his purposes than
anything which I can invent. In the "Autobiographic Sketch" he says:
"Since I was so completely bare of Paris prospects, I took
up once more the composition of my 'Rienzi.' I now destined
it for Dresden: in the first place, because I knew that
this theatre possessed the very best material--Devrient,
Tichatschek, etc.; secondly, because I could more
reasonably hope for an entrée there, relying upon the
support of my earliest acquaintances. My 'Liebesverbot'
I now gave up almost completely; I felt that I could no
longer regard myself as its composer. With all the greater
freedom I followed now my true artistic creed in the
prosecution of the music to my 'Rienzi.'"
Further, let the reader note well these passages from "A
Communication to My Friends":
"My home troubles increased; the desire to wrest myself
from a humiliating plight now grew into an eager longing
to begin something on a grand and inspiring scale, even
though it should involve the temporary abandonment of any
practical aim. This mood was fed and fostered by my reading
Bulwer's 'Rienzi.' From the misery of modern private life,
whence I could nowhere glean the scantiest stuff for
artistic treatment, I was borne away by the picture of a
great historico-political event, in lingering on which
I needs must find a salutary distraction from the cares
and conditions that appeared to me as nothing else than
absolutely fatal to art. In accordance with my particular
artistic bent, however, I still kept more or less to the
purely musical, or rather, operatic standpoint. This
Rienzi with great thoughts in his head, great feelings in
his heart, amid an entourage of coarseness and vulgarity,
set all my nerves a-quivering with sympathy and love; yet
my plan for an art-work based thereon sprang first from
the perception of a purely lyric element in the hero's
atmosphere. The 'Messengers of Peace,' the Church's summons
to awake, the Battle hymns--these were what impelled me to
an opera: 'Rienzi.'"...
"To write an opera for whose production only the most
exceptional means should suffice--a work, therefore, which
I should never feel tempted to bring before the public
amid such cramping relations as those which then oppressed
me, and the hope of whose eventual production should thus
incite me to make every sacrifice in order to extricate
myself from those relations,--this is what resolved me
to resume and carry out with all my might my former plan
for 'Rienzi.' In the preparation of this text also I took
no thought for anything but the writing of an effective
operatic libretto. The 'Grand Opéra' with all its scenic
and musical display, its sensationalism and massive
vehemence, loomed large before me; and not merely to copy
it, but with reckless extravagance to outbid it in its
every detail became the object of my artistic ambition.
However, I should be unjust to myself did I represent this
ambition as my only motive for the conception and execution
of my 'Rienzi.' The stuff really aroused my enthusiasm, and
I put nothing into my sketch which had not a direct bearing
on the grounds of this enthusiasm. My chief concern was
my Rienzi himself; and only when I felt quite contented
with him did I give rein to the notion of a 'grand opera.'
Nevertheless from a purely artistic point of view this
'grand opera' was the pair of spectacles through which I
unconsciously regarded my Rienzi-stuff; nothing in that
stuff did I find enthrall me but what could be looked at
through these spectacles. True, that I always fixed my gaze
upon the stuff itself, and did not keep one eye open for
certain ready-made musical effects which I might wish to
father on it by hook or crook; only, I saw it in no other
light than that of a 'five-act-opera,' with five brilliant
'finales,' and filled with hymns, processions, and the
musical clash of arms. Thus I bestowed no greater care upon
the verse and diction than seemed needful for turning out a
good and not trivial opera-text. I did not set out with the
object of writing duets, trios, &c., but they found their
own way in here and there because I looked upon my subject
exclusively through the medium of 'Opera.' For instance,
I by no means hunted about in my stuff for a pretext
for a ballet; but with the eyes of the opera-composer I
perceived in it a self-evident festival that Rienzi must
give to the People, and at which he would have to exhibit
to them in dumb show a drastic scene from their ancient
history: this scene being the story of Lucretia and the
consequent expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome. Thus in
every department of my plan I was certainly ruled by the
stuff alone; but, on the other hand, I ruled this stuff
according to my only chosen pattern, the form of the Grand
Opera. My artistic individuality, in its dealings with the
impressions of life, was still entirely under the influence
of purely artistic, or rather art-formalistic, mechanically
operating impressions."[32]
[Footnote 32: Prose Works, Vol. I., W.A. Ellis's translation.]
The reader will now understand the artistic ideas which governed
Wagner in the production of his only "grand opera." He was, as he
himself declares, true to the artistic creed which he cherished at
that time, but that creed was opposed to the one afterward formulated
in his mind. His first artistic beliefs were founded on the theory
that not the ground-plan, but the external treatment, of the grand
opera was at fault. He fancied that he could preserve the element
which he has called "art-formalistic" and yet reach dramatic verity.
He aimed at a consistent embodiment of character in his hero; he
sought to give to all the factors of the opera, even such accessories
as the ballet, a direct and powerful dramatic significance; but it
had not yet come to him that he must, in order to make a consistent
drama in music, sacrifice form to content, and get rid of the
whole mechanical apparatus of the spectacular opera. Here, then,
let me quote the most significant passage of all, one from the
"Autobiographic Sketch":
"When in the autumn [of 1838] I began the composition
of my 'Rienzi,' I allowed naught to influence me except
the single purpose to answer to my subject. I set myself
no model, but gave myself entirely to the feeling which
now consumed me, the feeling that I had already so far
progressed that I might claim something significant from
the development of my artistic powers, and expect some not
insignificant result. The very notion of being consciously
weak or trivial--even in a single bar--was appalling to me."
The frequent iteration of such statements shows how anxious Wagner
was in subsequent years lest he should be accused of deliberately
pandering to that depraved public taste which he decried. In his
endeavour to treat the grand-opera form honestly he accepted as his
musical models several of his predecessors. In "Die Feen" he believed
that he was following the lead of Beethoven, Weber, and Marschner,
and in "Das Liebesverbot" he turned for help to Auber and Bellini.
In "Rienzi" he utilised elements from all of these, and added to
them the pomp of Spontini and the external glare of Meyerbeer. The
libretto, as he says, is simply a good opera book. One looks in
vain through it for more than traces of the dramatic power and real
poetry to be found in the later works. Similarly the music is just
good opera music of the most pretentious kind. It glitters, but
seldom glows. It astonishes, but seldom moves. The instrumentation
shows many of the idiosyncrasies of the later Wagner, but it is
generally without inner strength. The whole work is superficial,
and calls for precisely the same sort of criticism as the operas of
Meyerbeer do. And this result came in spite of the fact that Wagner,
according to his own account, was appalled by the very thought of
being consciously weak or trivial for a moment. That he was weak and
trivial often will be patent to any hearer of the opera. Indeed,
one need not go so far as that. The overture is played often in
concert and a novice can easily detect the bombastic emptiness of its
resounding finale, even at the same time as he notes the resemblance
of the sequences of chords in the brass to some afterward heard in
"Der Fliegende Holländer." But Wagner himself tells us that before
he had completed "Rienzi" he became doubtful as to the possibility
of bringing about any real success by the methods which he was
employing. He began to foresee the future with its wide departure for
him from the traditions of opera. He began to realise that he could
not cater to the extant public taste, but must create for himself a
new one. But it was not till despair made him withdraw himself from
all relations to the outer world that he entered upon the development
of the true Wagnerian music drama.
"Rienzi," then, must be viewed simply as a grand opera of the
old-fashioned sort. We must regard its libretto as an exemplification
of the clever ground-plan of Meyerbeer, its music as the artistic
offspring of the "Jewish banker to whom it occurred to write music,"
of Spontini, Rossini, and other composers of the pseudo-grand style.
The story of the opera is substantially that of Bulwer's novel, and
needs no review here. In the making of this book Wagner was simply
an adapter. He re-created nothing. In his other works we shall find
that he added to the literary substance of every subject which he
treated. But such was not the case with "Rienzi." The joints are
plainly visible. The carpenter work is creditable, but it is not
architecture. One might almost say the same thing about the music.
It is in the main good, workmanlike music, with inspiration carefully
fanned by the breaths of older composers. Occasionally the real
Wagner peeps out and there are some passages of fine vigour and even
expressiveness. But this is an opera in which one can go through the
score and pick out the "good things," just as one could from the old
scores of Donizetti and Bellini.
The reader of Bulwer, for instance, will miss from the opera the
figure of Nina, the wife of Rienzi, but he will find that her
place is well filled by the sister, Irene, of whom Wagner makes a
conspicuously noble character. Furthermore Wagner in drawing the
character of his hero went to the original historical sources and so
made him a stronger personage than Bulwer did. "Un signor valoroso,
accorto, e saggio" is this Rienzi, as Petrarch called him. He speaks
in broad and commanding accents, as in his address to the nobles and
in the prayer. And it is at such points that we find the best music.
The prayer is set to one of the finest melodies in all opera. Again
we see that in the chorus and solo of the messengers of peace Wagner
found material for good writing of both verse and music. The prayer
opens the fifth act, when Rienzi, feeling that the end is near, calls
on the Lord to preserve the work which he has achieved.
"Allmächt'ger Vater, blick' herab,
Hör mich im Staube zu dir fleh'n!
Die Macht, die mir dein Wunder gab,
Lass jetzt noch nicht zu Grunde geh'n!"
Almighty Father, look on me!
Hear thou my humble fervent prayer!
Let not the power I had from Thee
Pass from me in this dark despair.
With the second stanza comes the fine melody heard in the overture:
[Music:
Du stärktest mich, du gabst mir hohe Kraft,
du liehest mir erhab'ne Eigenschaft,
zu helfen dem, der niedrig denkt,
zu heben, was im Staub versenkt. &c.]
Thou gavest me of Thy all-wondrous might,
High gifts, O Lord, didst Thou on me bestow,
To light up those who live in night,
To raise up those who bend so low.
M. Schuré has said:
"'Rienzi' is a work of the composer's youth, unequal, but
already full of force and strength, brilliant and full
of fire. The reformatory ideas of the author are not yet
apparent. The libretto is cut according to the rules of
tradition--choruses, ensembles, resounding marches, grand
airs, trios, septets, ballet--nothing is wanting. The
music, without betraying any imitation in particular,
has a strong Italian colouring, but the individuality of
the composer is shown as well in the heroic grandeur of
his broad melodies as in the warmth and riches of his
instrumentation. In short, 'Rienzi' is already the work of
an independent master without being that of an innovator."
In the last sentence M. Schuré has nearly touched the truth, but I
am inclined to think that he and Mr. Hueffer somewhat overrate the
importance of this work. It is most probable that the melody of the
prayer will come to be accepted as the one inspired thing in the
whole score. Certainly the air of Adriano, so often sung on the
concert stage, is but a weak and bombastic imitation of a Weber grand
aria of the style of "Ocean, thou mighty monster," with leanings
toward the manner employed in the monologue of Ortrud in Act II. of
"Lohengrin."
We may therefore dismiss "Rienzi" as a mistake of Wagner's youth. He
had not yet found himself. He might have achieved popularity and made
money with this sort of writing, and knowing his great vanity and
love of luxury we should not have been surprised if he had continued
to produce works of this pattern if the first one had brought him
immediate success. We ought, perhaps, to be very grateful to the
years of privation in Paris which developed the real Wagner, though
it is possible that his own ambition to stand alone would have had
the desired result in the course of time, even had the years 1840 and
1841 been easier for him.
DER FLIEGENDE HOLLÄNDER
Romantic Opera in Three Acts.
First performed at the Royal Saxon Court Theatre, Dresden, Jan. 2,
1843.
_Original Cast._
Senta Mme. Schroeder-Devrient.
The Dutchman Wächter.
Daland Risse.
Erik Reinhold.
Mary Mme. Wächter.
Helmsman Bielezizky.
Conductor, Richard Wagner.
Riga and Cassel, 1843; Berlin, 1844; Zurich, 1852; Schwerin,
Weimar, and Breslau, 1853; Frankfort and Wiesbaden, 1854; Hanover,
Carlsruhe, and Prague, 1857; Mayence and Vienna, 1860; Königsberg,
1861; Lucerne, 1862; Munich, 1864; Stuttgart, 1865; Olmütz, 1866;
Rotterdam and Dessau, 1869; Hamburg, Darmstadt, Mannheim, Gratz,
1870; London (Italian), July 23, 1870; Vienna, Brunswick, and Brünn,
1871; Brussels and Stockholm, 1872; Budapesth, Stettin, Augsburg,
Magdeburg, Sondershausen, and Baden, 1874; Strassburg, 1875; Lübeck,
Freiburg, and Salzburg, 1876; Philadelphia, 1876; Dublin and
Bologna, 1877; Würzburg, 1877; New York, Jan. 26, 1877; Innspruck,
1880.
First performed in America as "Il Vascello Fantasma," in
Philadelphia, Nov. 8, 1876, by the Pappenheim Company.