When Wagner was born in 1813, music had newly become the most
astonishing, the most fascinating, the most miraculous art in the world.
Mozart's Don Giovanni had made all musical Europe conscious of the
enchantments of the modern orchestra and of the perfect adaptability of
music to the subtlest needs of the dramatist. Beethoven had shown how
those inarticulate mood-poems which surge through men who have, like
himself, no exceptional command of words, can be written down in music
as symphonies. Not that Mozart and Beethoven invented these applications
of their art; but they were the first whose works made it clear that the
dramatic and subjective powers of sound were enthralling enough to stand
by themselves quite apart from the decorative musical structures of
which they had hitherto been a mere feature. After the finales in Figaro
and Don Giovanni, the possibility of the modern music drama lay bare.
After the symphonies of Beethoven it was certain that the poetry that
lies too deep for words does not lie too deep for music, and that
the vicissitudes of the soul, from the roughest fun to the loftiest
aspiration, can make symphonies without the aid of dance tunes. As much,
perhaps, will be claimed for the preludes and fugues of Bach; but
Bach's method was unattainable: his compositions were wonderful webs
of exquisitely beautiful Gothic traceries in sound, quite beyond all
ordinary human talent. Beethoven's far blunter craft was thoroughly
popular and practicable: not to save his soul could he have drawn one
long Gothic line in sound as Bach could, much less have woven several
of them together with so apt a harmony that even when the composer is
unmoved its progressions saturate themselves with the emotion which (as
modern critics are a little apt to forget) springs as warmly from our
delicately touched admiration as from our sympathies, and sometimes
makes us give a composer credit for pathetic intentions which he does
not entertain, just as a boy imagines a treasure of tenderness and noble
wisdom in the beauty of a woman. Besides, Bach set comic dialogue to
music exactly as he set the recitatives of the Passion, there being for
him, apparently, only one recitative possible, and that the musically
best. He reserved the expression of his merry mood for the regular
set numbers in which he could make one of his wonderful contrapuntal
traceries of pure ornament with the requisite gaiety of line and
movement. Beethoven bowed to no ideal of beauty: he only sought the
expression for his feeling. To him a joke was a joke; and if it sounded
funny in music he was satisfied. Until the old habit of judging all
music by its decorative symmetry had worn out, musicians were shocked by
his symphonies, and, misunderstanding his integrity, openly questioned
his sanity. But to those who were not looking for pretty new sound
patterns, but were longing for the expression of their moods in music,
he achieved revelation, because, being single in his aim to express his
own moods, he anticipated with revolutionary courage and frankness all
the moods of the rising generations of the nineteenth century.
The result was inevitable. In the nineteenth century it was no longer
necessary to be a born pattern designer in sound to be a composer.
One had but to be a dramatist or a poet completely susceptible to
the dramatic and descriptive powers of sound. A race of literary and
theatrical musicians appeared; and Meyerbeer, the first of them, made
an extraordinary impression. The frankly delirious description of his
Robert the Devil in Balzac's short story entitled Gambra, and Goethe's
astonishingly mistaken notion that he could have composed music for
Faust, show how completely the enchantments of the new dramatic music
upset the judgment of artists of eminent discernment. Meyerbeer was,
people said (old gentlemen still say so in Paris), the successor of
Beethoven: he was, if a less perfect musician than Mozart, a profounder
genius. Above all, he was original and daring. Wagner himself raved
about the duet in the fourth act of Les Huguenots as wildly as anyone.
Yet all this effect of originality and profundity was produced by a
quite limited talent for turning striking phrases, exploiting certain
curious and rather catching rhythms and modulations, and devising
suggestive or eccentric instrumentation. On its decorative side, it was
the same phenomenon in music as the Baroque school in architecture: an
energetic struggle to enliven organic decay by mechanical oddities and
novelties. Meyerbeer was no symphonist. He could not apply the thematic
system to his striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metric
patterns in the old style; and as he was no "absolute musician" either,
he hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, which
were either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by certain
brusqueries which, in the true rococo manner, owed their singularity to
their senselessness. He could produce neither a thorough music drama
nor a charming opera. But with all this, and worse, Meyerbeer had some
genuine dramatic energy, and even passion; and sometimes rose to the
occasion in a manner which, whilst the imagination of his contemporaries
remained on fire with the novelties of dramatic music, led them to
overrate him with an extravagance which provoked Wagner to conduct a
long critical campaign against his leadership. Thirty years ago this
campaign was mentably ascribed to the professional jealousy of a
disappointed rival. Nowadays young people cannot understand how anyone
could ever have taken Meyerbeer's influence seriously. Those who
remember how his reputation stood half a century ago, and who realize
what a nothoroughfare the path he opened proved to be, even to himself,
know how inevitable and how impersonal Wagner's attack was.
Wagner was the literary musician par excellence. He could not, like
Mozart and Beethoven, produce decorative tone structures independently
of any dramatic or poetic subject matter, because, that craft being
no longer necessary for his purpose, he did not cultivate it. As
Shakespeare, compared with Tennyson, appears to have an exclusively
dramatic talent, so exactly does Wagner compared with Mendelssohn.
On the other hand, he had not to go to third rate literary hacks for
"librettos" to set to music: he produced his own dramatic poems, thus
giving dramatic integrity to opera, and making symphony articulate. A
Beethoven symphony (except the articulate part of the ninth) expresses
noble feeling, but not thought: it has moods, but no ideas. Wagner added
thought and produced the music drama. Mozart's loftiest opera, his Ring,
so to speak, The Magic Flute, has a libretto which, though none the
worse for seeming, like The Rhine Gold, the merest Christmas tomfoolery
to shallow spectators, is the product of a talent immeasurably inferior
to Mozart's own. The libretto of Don Giovanni is coarse and trivial:
its transfiguration by Mozart's music may be a marvel; but nobody will
venture to contend that such transfigurations, however seductive, can
be as satisfactory as tone poetry or drama in which the musician and
the poet are at the same level. Here, then, we have the simple secret of
Wagner's preemminence as a dramatic musician. He wrote the poems as well
as composed the music of his "stage festival plays," as he called them.
Up to a certain point in his career Wagner paid the penalty of
undertaking two arts instead of one. Mozart had his trade as a musician
at his fingers' ends when he was twenty, because he had served an
arduous apprenticeship to that trade and no other. Wagner was very far
from having attained equal mastery at thirty-five: indeed he himself has
told us that not until he had passed the age at which Mozart died did he
compose with that complete spontaneity of musical expression which can
only be attained by winning entire freedom from all preoccupation with
the difficulties of technical processes. But when that time came, he was
not only a consummate musician, like Mozart, but a dramatic poet and a
critical and philosophical essayist, exercising a considerable influence
on his century. The sign of this consummation was his ability at last to
play with his art, and thus to add to his already famous achievements in
sentimental drama that lighthearted art of comedy of which the greatest
masters, like Moliere and Mozart, are so much rarer than the tragedians
and sentimentalists. It was then that he composed the first two acts of
Siegfried, and later on The Mastersingers, a professedly comedic work,
and a quite Mozartian garden of melody, hardly credible as the work of
the straining artifices of Tanehauser. Only, as no man ever learns to do
one thing by doing something else, however closely allied the two things
may be, Wagner still produced no music independently of his poems. The
overture to The Mastersingers is delightful when you know what it is
all about; but only those to whom it came as a concert piece without any
such clue, and who judged its reckless counterpoint by the standard of
Bach and of Mozart's Magic Flute overture, can realize how atrocious
it used to sound to musicians of the old school. When I first heard it,
with the clear march of the polyphony in Bach's B minor Mass fresh in my
memory, I confess I thought that the parts had got dislocated, and that
some of the band were half a bar behind the others. Perhaps they were;
but now that I am familiar with the work, and with Wagner's harmony, I
can still quite understand certain passages producing that effect organ
admirer of Bach even when performed with perfect accuracy.