In all this, it will be observed, there is nothing new. The musical
fabric is enormously elaborate and gorgeous; but you cannot say, as you
must in witnessing The Rhine Gold, The Valkyries, and the first two acts
of Siegfried, that you have never seen anything like it before, and that
the inspiration is entirely original. Not only the action, but most
of the poetry, might conceivably belong to an Elizabethan drama. The
situation of Cleopatra and Antony is unconsciously reproduced without
being bettered, or even equalled in point of majesty and musical
expression. The loss of all simplicity and dignity, the impossibility
of any credible scenic presentation of the incidents, and the extreme
staginess of the conventions by which these impossibilities are got
over, are no doubt covered from the popular eye by the overwhelming
prestige of Die Gotterdammerung as part of so great a work as The Ring,
and by the extraordinary storm of emotion and excitement which the music
keeps up. But the very qualities that intoxicate the novice in music
enlighten the adept. In spite of the fulness of the composer's technical
accomplishment, the finished style and effortless mastery of harmony and
instrumentation displayed, there is not a bar in the work which moves
us as the same themes moved us in The Valkyries, nor is anything but
external splendor added to the life and humor of Siegfried.
In the original poem, Brynhild delays her self-immolation on the pyre of
Siegfried to read the assembled choristers a homily on the efficacy of
the Love panacea. "My holiest wisdom's hoard," she says, "now I make
known to the world. I believe not in property, nor money, nor godliness,
nor hearth and high place, nor pomp and peerage, nor contract and
custom, but in Love. Let that only prevail; and ye shall be blest in
weal or woe." Here the repudiations still smack of Bakoonin; but the
saviour is no longer the volition of the full-grown spirit of Man, the
Free Willer of Necessity, sword in hand, but simply Love, and not even
Shelleyan love, but vehement sexual passion. It is highly significant
of the extent to which this uxorious commonplace lost its hold of Wagner
(after disturbing his conscience, as he confesses to Roeckel, for years)
that it disappears in the full score of Night Falls On The Gods, which
was not completed until he was on the verge of producing Parsifal,
twenty years after the publication of the poem. He cut the homily out,
and composed the music of the final scene with a flagrant recklessness
of the old intention. The rigorous logic with which representative
musical themes are employed in the earlier dramas is here abandoned
without scruple; and for the main theme at the conclusion he selects a
rapturous passage sung by Sieglinda in the third act of The Valkyries
when Brynhild inspires her with a sense of her high destiny as the
mother of the unborn hero. There is no dramatic logic whatever in the
recurrence of this theme to express the transport in which Brynhild
immolates herself. There is of course an excuse for it, inasmuch as both
women have an impulse of self-sacrifice for the sake of Siegfried; but
this is really hardly more than an excuse; since the Valhalla theme
might be attached to Alberic on the no worse ground that both he and
Wotan are inspired by ambition, and that the ambition has the same
object, the possession of the ring. The common sense of the matter is
that the only themes which had fully retained their significance in
Wagner's memory at the period of the composition of Night Falls On The
Gods are those which are mere labels of external features, such as
the Dragon, the Fire, the Water and so on. This particular theme of
Sieglinda's is, in truth, of no great musical merit: it might easily
be the pet climax of a popular sentimental ballad: in fact, the gushing
effect which is its sole valuable quality is so cheaply attained that
it is hardly going too far to call it the most trumpery phrase in the
entire tetralogy. Yet, since it undoubtedly does gush very emphatically,
Wagner chose, for convenience' sake, to work up this final scene with it
rather than with the more distinguished, elaborate and beautiful themes
connected with the love of Brynhild and Siegfried.
He would certainly not have thought this a matter of no consequence had
he finished the whole work ten years earlier. It must always be borne
in mind that the poem of The Ring was complete and printed in 1853,
and represents the sociological ideas which, after germinating in the
European atmosphere for many years, had been brought home to Wagner,
who was intensely susceptible to such ideas, by the crash of 1849 at
Dresden. Now no man whose mind is alive and active, as Wagner's was to
the day of his death, can keep his political and spiritual opinions,
much less his philosophic consciousness, at a standstill for quarter
of a century until he finishes an orchestral score. When Wagner first
sketched Night Falls On The Gods he was 35. When he finished the score
for the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 he had turned 60. No wonder he
had lost his old grip of it and left it behind him. He even
tampered with The Rhine Gold for the sake of theatrical effect when
stage-managing it, making Wotan pick up and brandish a sword to give
visible point to his sudden inspiration as to the raising up of a
hero. The sword had first to be discovered by Fafnir among the Niblung
treasures and thrown away by him as useless. There is no sense in this
device; and its adoption shows the same recklessness as to the original
intention which we find in the music of the last act of The Dusk of the
Gods. [*]
* Die Gotterdammerung means literally Godsgloaming. The
English versions of the opera are usually called The Dusk of
the Gods, or The Twilight of the Gods. I have purposely
introduced the ordinary title in the sentence above for the
reader's information.