And now, O Nibelungen Spectator, pluck up; for all allegories come to an
end somewhere; and the hour of your release from these explanations is
at hand. The rest of what you are going to see is opera, and nothing
but opera. Before many bars have been played, Siegfried and the wakened
Brynhild, newly become tenor and soprano, will sing a concerted
cadenza; plunge on from that to a magnificent love duet; and end with
a precipitous allegro a capella, driven headlong to its end by the
impetuous semiquaver triplets of the famous finales to the first act of
Don Giovanni or the coda to the Leonore overture, with a specifically
contrapuntal theme, points d'orgue, and a high C for the soprano all
complete.
What is more, the work which follows, entitled Night Falls On The Gods,
is a thorough grand opera. In it you shall see what you have so far
missed, the opera chorus in full parade on the stage, not presuming
to interfere with the prima donna as she sings her death song over the
footlights. Nay, that chorus will have its own chance when it first
appears, with a good roaring strain in C major, not, after all, so very
different from, or at all less absurd than the choruses of courtiers
in La Favorita or "Per te immenso giubilo" in Lucia. The harmony is no
doubt a little developed, Wagner augmenting his fifths with a G sharp
where Donizetti would have put his fingers in his ears and screamed for
G natural. But it is an opera chorus all the same; and along with it
we have theatrical grandiosities that recall Meyerbeer and Verdi: pezzi
d'insieme for all the principals in a row, vengeful conjurations for
trios of them, romantic death song for the tenor: in short, all manner
of operatic conventions.
Now it is probable that some of us will have been so talked by the more
superstitious Bayreuth pilgrims into regarding Die Gotterdammerung as
the mighty climax to a mighty epic, more Wagnerian than all the other
three sections put together, as not to dare notice this startling
atavism, especially if we find the trio-conjurations more exhilarating
than the metaphysical discourses of Wotan in the three true music
dramas of The Ring. There is, however, no real atavism involved.
Die Gotterdammerung, though the last of The Ring dramas in order of
performance, was the first in order of conception and was indeed the
root from which all the others sprang.
The history of the matter is as follows. All Wagner's works prior to The
Ring are operas. The last of them, Lohengrin, is perhaps the best known
of modern operas. As performed in its entirety at Bayreuth, it is even
more operatic than it appears at Covent Garden, because it happens that
its most old-fashioned features, notably some of the big set concerted
pieces for principals and chorus (pezzi d'insieme as I have called
them above), are harder to perform than the more modern and
characteristically Wagnerian sections, and for that reason were cut out
in preparing the abbreviated fashionable version. Thus Lohengrin came
upon the ordinary operatic stage as a more advanced departure from
current operatic models than its composer had made it. Still, it is
unmistakably an opera, with chorus, concerted pieces, grand finales,
and a heroine who, if she does not sing florid variations with
flute obbligato, is none the less a very perceptible prima donna. In
everything but musical technique the change from Lohengrin to The Rhine
Gold is quite revolutionary.
The explanation is that Night Falls On The Gods came in between them,
although its music was not finished until twenty years after that of
The Rhine Gold, and thus belongs to a later and more masterful phase of
Wagner's harmonic style. It first came into Wagner's head as an opera
to be entitled Siegfried's Death, founded on the old Niblung Sagas, which
offered to Wagner the same material for an effective theatrical tragedy
as they did to Ibsen. Ibsen's Vikings in Helgeland is, in kind, what
Siegfried's Death was originally intended to be: that is, a heroic piece
for the theatre, without the metaphysical or allegorical complications
of The Ring. Indeed, the ultimate catastrophe of the Saga cannot by any
perversion of ingenuity be adapted to the perfectly clear allegorical
design of The Rhine Gold, The Valkyries, and Siegfried.