The new century is at hand--I am not one of those chronologically stupid
persons who believes that we are now in it--and tottering as I am on its
brink, the brink of my grave, and of all born during 1900, it might
prove interesting as well as profitable for me to review my musical
past. I hear the young folks cry aloud: "Here comes that garrulous old
chap again with his car-load of musty reminiscences! Even if Old Fogy
did study with Hummel, is that any reason why we should be bored by the
fact? How can a skeleton in the closet tell us anything valuable about
contemporary music?"
To this youthful wail--and it is a real one--I can raise no real
objection. I am an Old Fogy; but I know it. That marks the difference
between other old fogies and myself. Some English wit recently remarked
that the sadness of old age in a woman is because her face changes; but
the sad part of old age in a man is that his mind does not change. Well,
I admit we septuagenarians are set in our ways. We have lived our lives,
felt, suffered, rejoiced, and perhaps grown a little tolerant, a little
apathetic. The young people call it cynical; yet it is not
cynicism--only a large charity for the failings, the shortcomings of
others. So what I am about to say in this letter must not be set down as
either garrulity or senile cynicism. It is the result of a half-century
of close observation, and, young folks, let me tell you that in fifty
years much music has gone through the orifices of my ears; many artistic
reputations made and lost!
I repeat, I have witnessed the rise and fall of so many musical
dynasties; have seen men like Wagner emerge from northern mists and die
in the full glory of a reverberating sunset. And I have also remarked
that this same Richard the Actor touched his apogee fifteen years ago
and more. Already signs are not wanting which show that Wagner and
Wagnerism is on the decline. As Swinburne said of Walt Whitman: "A
reformer--but not founder." This holds good of Wagner, who closed a
period and did not begin a new one. In a word, Wagner was a theater
musician, one cursed by a craze for public applause--and shekels--and
knowing his public, gave them more operatic music than any Italian who
ever wrote for barrel-organ fame. Wagner became popular, the rage; and
today his music, grown stale in Germany, is being fervently imitated,
nay, burlesqued, by the neo-Italian school. Come, is it not a comical
situation, this swapping of themes among the nations, this picking and
stealing of styles? And let me tell you that of all the Robber Barons of
music, Wagner was the worst. He laid hands on every score, classical or
modern, that he got hold of.
But I anticipate; I put the _coda_ before the dog. When _Rienzi_
appeared none of us were deceived. We recognized our Meyerbeer
disfigured by clumsy, heavy German treatment. Wagner had been to the
opera in Paris and knew his Meyerbeer; but even Wagner could not
distance Meyerbeer. He had not the melodic invention, the orchestral
tact, or the dramatic sense--at that time. Being a born mimicker of
other men, a very German in industry, and a great egotist, he began
casting about for other models. He soon found one, the greatest of all
for his purpose. It was Weber--that same Weber for whose obsequies
Wagner wrote some funeral music, not forgetting to use a theme from the
_Euryanthe_ overture. Weber was to Wagner a veritable Golconda. From
this diamond mine he dug out tons of precious stones; and some of them
he used for _The Flying Dutchman_. We all saw then what a parody on
Weber was this pretentious opera, with its patches of purple, its stale
choruses, its tiresome recitatives. The latter Wagner fondly imagined
were but prolonged melodies. Already in his active, but musically-barren
brain, theories were seething. "How to compose operas without music"
might be the title of all his prose theoretical works. Not having a
tail, this fox, therefore, solemnly argued that tails were useless
appanages. You remember your Æsop! Instead of melodic inspiration,
themes were to be used. Instead of broad, flowing, but intelligible
themes, a mongrel breed of recitative and _parlando_ was to take their
place.
It was all very clever, I grant you, for it threw dust in the public
eye--and the public likes to have its eyes dusted, especially if the
dust is fine and flattering. Wagner proceeded to make it so by labeling
his themes, leading motives. Each one meant something. And the Germans,
the vainest race in Europe, rose like catfish to the bait. Wagner, in
effect, told them that his music required brains--Aha! said the German,
he means _me_; that his music was not cheap, pretty, and sensual, but
spiritual, lofty, ideal--Oho! cried the German, he means _me_ again. I
am ideal. And so the game went merrily on. Being the greatest egotist
that ever lived, Wagner knew that this music could not make its way
without a violent polemic, without extraneous advertising aids. So he
made a big row; became socialist, agitator, exile. He dragged into his
music and the discussion of it, art, politics, literature, philosophy,
and religion. It is a well-known fact that this humbugging comedian had
written the _Ring of the Nibelungs_ before he absorbed the
Schopenhauerian doctrines, and then altered the entire scheme so as to
imbue--forsooth!--his music with pessimism.
Nor was there ever such folly, such arrant "faking" as this! What has
philosophy, religion, politics to do with operatic music? It cannot
express any one of them. Wagner, clever charlatan, knew this, so he
worked the leading-motive game for all it was worth. Realizing the
indefinite nature of music, he gave to his themes--most of them borrowed
without quotation marks--such titles as Love-Death; Presentiment of
Death; Cooking motive--in _Siegfried_; Compact theme, etc., etc. The
list is a lengthy one. And when taxed with originating all this futile
child's-play he denied that he had named his themes. Pray, then, who
did? Did von Wolzogen? Did Tappert? They worked directly under his
direction, put forth the musical lures and decoys and the ignorant
public was easily bamboozled. Simply mention the esoteric, the
mysterious omens, signs, dark designs, and magical symbols, and you
catch a certain class of weak-minded persons.
Wagner knew this; knew that the theater, with its lights, its scenery,
its costumes, orchestra, and vocalizing, was the place to hoodwink the
"cultured" classes. Having a pretty taste in digging up old fables and
love-stories, he saturated them with mysticism and far-fetched musical
motives. If _The Flying Dutchman_ is absurd in its story--what possible
interest can we take in the _Salvation_ of an idiotic mariner, who
doesn't know how to navigate his ship, much less a wife?--what is to be
said of _Lohengrin_? This cheap Italian music, sugar-coated in its
sensuousness, the awful borrowings from Weber, Marschner, Beethoven, and
Gluck--and the story! It is called "mystic." Why? Because it is _not_, I
suppose. What puerile trumpery is that refusal of a man to reveal his
name! And _Elsa_! Why not Lot's wife, whose curiosity turned her into a
salt trust!
You may notice just here what the Wagnerians are pleased to call the
Master's "second" manner. Rubbish! It is a return to the Italians. It is
a graft of glistening Italian sensuality upon Wagner's strenuous study
of Beethoven's and Weber's orchestras. _Tannhäuser_ is more manly in its
fiber. But the style, the mixture of styles; the lack of organic unity,
the blustering orchestration, and the execrable voice-killing vocal
writing! The _Ring_ is an amorphous impossibility. That is now
critically admitted. It ruins voices, managers, the public purse, and
our patience. Its stories are indecent, blasphemous, silly, absurd,
trivial, tiresome. To talk of the _Ring_ and Beethoven's symphonies is
to put wind and wisdom in the same category. Wagner vulgarized
Beethoven's symphonic methods--noticeably his powers of development.
Think of utilizing that magnificent and formidable engine, the Beethoven
symphonic method, to accompany a tinsel tale of garbled Norse mythology
with all sorts of modern affectations and morbidities introduced! It is
maddening to any student of pure, noble style. Wagner's Byzantine style
has helped corrupt much modern art.
_Tristan und Isolde_ is the falsifying of all the pet Wagner
doctrines--Ah! that odious, heavy, pompous prose of Wagner. In this
erotic comedy there is no action, nothing happens except at long
intervals; while the orchestra never stops its garrulous symphonizing.
And if you prate to me of the wonderful Wagner orchestration and its
eloquence, I shall quarrel with you. Why wonderful? It never stops, but
does it ever say anything? Every theme is butchered to death. There is
endless repetition in different keys, with different instrumental
_nuances_, yet of true, intellectual and emotional mood-development
there is no trace; short-breathed, chippy, choppy phrasing, and never
ten bars of a big, straightforward melody. All this proves that Wagner
had not the power of sustained thoughts like Mozart or Beethoven. And
his orchestration, with its daubing, its overladen, hysterical color!
What a humbug is this sensualist, who masks his pruriency back of poetic
and philosophical symbols. But it is always easy to recognize the cloven
foot. The headache and jaded nerves we have after a night with Wagner
tell the story.
I admit that _Die Meistersinger_ is healthy. Only it is not art. And
don't forget, my children, that Wagner's prettiest lyrics came from
Schubert and Schumann. They have all been traced and located. I need not
insult your intelligence by suggesting that the _Wotan_ motive is to be
found in Schubert's _Wanderer_. If you wish for the _Waldweben_ just go
to Spohr's _Consecration of Tones_ symphony, first movement. And Weber
also furnishes a pleasing list, notably the _Sword_ motive from the
_Ring_, which may be heard in _Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster_. _Parsifal_ I
refuse to discuss. It is an outrage against religion, morals, and
music. However, it is not alone this plagiarizing that makes Wagner so
unendurable to me. It is his continual masking as the greatest composer
of his century, when he was only a clever impostor, a theater-man, a
wearer of borrowed plumage. His influence on music has been deplorably
evil. He has melodramatized the art, introduced in it a species of
false, theatrical, _personal_ feeling, quite foreign to its nature. The
symphony, not the stage, is the objective of musical art.
Wagner--neither composer nor tragedian, but a cunning blend of
both--diverted the art to his own uses. A great force? Yes, a great
force was his, but a dangerous one. He never reached the heights, but
was always posturing behind the foot-lights. And he has left no school,
no descendants. Like all hybrids, he is cursed with sterility. The
twentieth century will find Wagner out. _Nunc Dimittis!_