The preparation of a Second Edition of this booklet is quite the most
unexpected literary task that has ever been set me. When it first
appeared I was ungrateful enough to remonstrate with its publisher for
printing, as I thought, more copies than the most sanguine Wagnerite
could ever hope to sell. But the result proved that exactly one person
buys a copy on every day in the year, including Sundays; and so, in the
process of the suns, a reprint has become necessary.
Save a few verbal slips of no importance, I have found nothing to alter
in this edition. As usual, the only protests the book has elicited are
protests, not against the opinions it expresses, but against the facts
it records. There are people who cannot bear to be told that their
hero was associated with a famous Anarchist in a rebellion; that he
was proclaimed as "wanted" by the police; that he wrote revolutionary
pamphlets; and that his picture of Niblunghome under the reign of
Alberic is a poetic vision of unregulated industrial capitalism as it
was made known in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century by
Engels's Condition of the Laboring classes in England. They frantically
deny these facts, and then declare that I have connected them with
Wagner in a paroxysm of senseless perversity. I am sorry I have hurt
them; and I appeal to charitable publishers to bring out a new life of
Wagner, which shall describe him as a court musician of unquestioned
fashion and orthodoxy, and a pillar of the most exclusive Dresden
circles. Such a work, would, I believe, have a large sale, and be read
with satisfaction and reassurance by many lovers of Wagner's music.
As to my much demurred-to relegation of Night Falls On The Gods to
the category of grand opera, I have nothing to add or withdraw. Such a
classification is to me as much a matter of fact as the Dresden rising
or the police proclamation; but I shall not pretend that it is a matter
of such fact as everybody's judgment can grapple with. People who prefer
grand opera to serious music-drama naturally resent my placing a very
grand opera below a very serious music-drama. The ordinary lover of
Shakespeare would equally demur to my placing his popular catchpenny
plays, of which As You Like It is an avowed type, below true
Shakespearean plays like Measure for Measure. I cannot help that.
Popular dramas and operas may have overwhelming merits as enchanting
make-believes; but a poet's sincerest vision of the world must always
take precedence of his prettiest fool's paradise.
As many English Wagnerites seem to be still under the impression that
Wagner composed Rienzi in his youth, Tannhauser and Lohengrin in his
middle age, and The Ring in his later years, may I again remind them
that The Ring was the result of a political convulsion which occurred
when Wagner was only thirty-six, and that the poem was completed when
he was forty, with thirty more years of work before him? It is as much
a first essay in political philosophy as Die Feen is a first essay in
romantic opera. The attempt to recover its spirit twenty years later,
when the music of Night Falls On The Gods was added, was an attempt to
revive the barricades of Dresden in the Temple of the Grail. Only those
who have never had any political enthusiasms to survive can believe that
such an attempt could succeed. G. B. S.