does not surprise me. The reverse would surprise me. The Germans have
modelled a Wagner for themselves, whom they can honour: never yet have
they been psychologists; they are thankful that they misunderstand.
But that people should also deceive themselves concerning Wagner in
Paris! Where people are scarcely anything else than psychologists. And
in Saint Petersburg! Where things are divined, which even Paris has no
idea of. How intimately related must Wagner be to the entire decadence
of Europe for her not to have felt that he was decadent! He belongs
to it: he is its protagonist, its greatest name.... We bring honour
on ourselves by elevating him to the clouds.--For the mere fact that
no one guards against him is in itself already a sign of decadence.
Instinct is weakened, what ought to be eschewed now attracts. People
actually kiss that which plunges them more quickly into the abyss.--Is
there any need for an example? One has only to think of the régime
which anæmic, or gouty, or diabetic people prescribe for themselves.
The definition of a vegetarian: a creature who has need of a
corroborating diet. To recognise what is harmful as harmful, to be able
to deny oneself what is harmful, is a sign of youth, of vitality. That
which is harmful lures the exhausted: cabbage lures the vegetarian.
Illness itself can be a stimulus to life: but one must be healthy
enough for such a stimulus!--Wagner increases exhaustion: _therefore_
he attracts the weak and exhausted to him. Oh, the rattlesnake joy of
the old Master precisely because he always saw "the little children"
coming unto him!
I place this point of view first and foremost: Wagner's art is
diseased. The problems he sets on the stage are all concerned with
hysteria; the convulsiveness of his emotions, his over-excited
sensitiveness, his taste which demands ever sharper condimentation,
his erraticness which he togged out to look like principles, and,
last but not least, his choice of heroes and heroines, considered
as physiological types (--a hospital ward!--): the whole represents
a morbid picture; of this there can be no doubt. _Wagner est une
nevrose._ Maybe, that nothing is better known to-day, or in any
case the subject of greater study, than the Protean character of
degeneration which has disguised itself here, both as an art and as
an artist. In Wagner our medical men and physiologists have a most
interesting case, or at least a very complete one. Owing to the very
fact that nothing is more modern than this thorough morbidness, this
dilatoriness and excessive irritability of the nervous machinery,
Wagner is the _modern artist par excellence,_ the Cagliostro of
modernity. All that the world most needs to-day, is combined in the
most seductive manner in his art,--the three great stimulants of
exhausted people: _brutality, artificiality_ and _innocence_ (idiocy).
Wagner is a great corrupter of music. With it, he found the means
of stimulating tired nerves,--and in this way he made music ill. In
the art of spurring exhausted creatures back into activity, and of
recalling half-corpses to life, the inventiveness he shows is of no
mean order. He is the master of hypnotic trickery, and he fells the
strongest like bullocks. Wagner's _success_--his success with nerves,
and therefore with women--converted the whole world of ambitious
musicians into disciples of his secret art. And not only the ambitious,
but also the _shrewd...._ Only with morbid music can money be made
to-day; our big theatres live on Wagner.
6.
--Once more I will venture to indulge in a little levity. Let us
suppose that Wagner's _success_ could become flesh and blood and assume
a human form; that, dressed up as a good-natured musical savant, it
could move among budding artists. How do you think it would then be
likely to express itself?--
My friends, it would say, let us exchange a word or two in private.
It is easier to compose bad music than good music. But what, if
apart from this it were also more profitable, more effective, more
convincing, more exalting, more secure, more _Wagnerian?... Pulchrum
est paucorum hominum._ Bad enough in all conscience! We understand
Latin, and perhaps we also understand which side our bread is buttered.
Beauty has its drawbacks: we know that. Wherefore beauty then? Why not
rather aim at size, at the sublime, the gigantic, that which moves
the _masses?_--And to repeat: it is easier to be titanic than to be
beautiful; we know that....
We know the masses, we know the theatre. The best of those who assemble
there,--German youths, horned Siegfrieds and other Wagnerites, require
the sublime, the profound, and the overwhelming. This much still lies
within our power. And as for the others who assemble there,--the
cultured _crétins,_ the _blasé_ pigmies, the eternally feminine, the
gastrically happy, in short the people--they also require the sublime,
the profound, the overwhelming. All these people argue in the same way.
"He who overthrows us is strong; he who elevates us is godly; he who
makes us wonder vaguely is profound."--Let us make up our mind then, my
friends in music: we do want to overthrow them, we do want to elevate
them, we do want to make them wonder vaguely. This much still lies
within our powers.
In regard to the process of making them wonder: it is here that our
notion of "style" finds its starting-point. Above all, no thoughts!
Nothing is more compromising than a thought! But the state of mind
which _precedes_ thought, the labour of the thought still unborn, the
promise of future thought, the world as it was before God created it
--a recrudescence of chaos.... Chaos makes people wonder ...
In the words of the master: infinity but without melody.
In the second place, with regard to the over-throwing,--this belongs
at least in part, to physiology. Let us, in the first place, examine
the instruments. A few of them would convince even our intestines
(--they _throw open_ doors, as Händel would say), others becharm our
very marrow. The _colour of the melody is_ all-important here; _the
melody itself_ is of no importance. Let us be precise about _this_
point. To what other purpose should we spend our strength? Let us be
characteristic in tone even to the point of foolishness! If by means of
tones we allow plenty of scope for guessing, this will be put to the
credit of our intellects. Let us irritate nerves, let us strike them
dead: let us handle thunder and lightning,--that is what overthrows....
But what overthrows best, is _passion._--We must try and be clear
concerning this question of passion. Nothing is cheaper than passion!
All the virtues of counterpoint may be dispensed with, there is no
need to have learnt anything,--but passion is always within our reach!
Beauty is difficult: let us beware of beauty!... And also of _melody!_
However much in earnest we may otherwise be about the ideal, let us
slander, my friends, let us slander,--let us slander melody! Nothing
is more dangerous than a beautiful melody! Nothing is more certain
to ruin taste! My friends, if people again set about loving beautiful
melodies, we are lost!...
_First principle:_ melody is immoral. _Proof:_ "Palestrina."
_Application:_ "Parsifal." The absence of melody is in itself
sanctifying....
And this is the definition of passion. Passion--or the acrobatic feats
of ugliness on the tight-rope of enharmonic.--My friends, let us dare
to be ugly! Wagner dared it! Let us heave the mud of the most repulsive
harmonies undauntedly before us. We must not even spare our hands! Only
thus, shall we become _natural...._
And now a last word of advice. Perhaps it covers everything.--_Let
us be idealists_/--If not the cleverest, it is at least the wisest
thing we can do. In order to elevate men we ourselves must be exalted.
Let us wander in the clouds, let us harangue eternity, let us be
careful to group great symbols all around us! _Sursum! Bumbum!--_
there is no better advice. The "heaving breast" shall be our argument,
"beautiful feelings" our advocates. Virtue still carries its point
against counterpoint. "How could he who improves us, help being
better than we?" man has ever thought thus. Let us therefore improve
mankind!--in this way we shall become good (in this way we shall even
become "classics"--Schiller became a "classic"). The straining after
the base excitement of the senses, after so-called beauty, shattered
the nerves of the Italians: let us remain German! Even Mozart's
relation to music--Wagner spoke this word of comfort to us--was at
bottom frivolous.... Never let us acknowledge that music "may be a
recreation," that it may "enliven," that it may "give pleasure." _Never
let us give pleasure!_--we shall be lost if people once again think of
music hedonistically.... That belongs to the bad eighteenth century....
On the other hand, nothing would be more advisable (between ourselves)
than a dose of--_cant, sit venia verbo._ This imparts dignity.--And
let us take care to select the precise moment when it would be fitting
to have black looks, to sigh openly, to sigh devoutly, to flaunt grand
Christian sympathy before their eyes. "Man is corrupt: who will save
him? _what will save him?"_ Do not let us reply. We must be on our
guard. We must control our ambition, which would bid us found new
religions. But no one must doubt that it is _we_ who save him, that in
_our_ music alone salvation is to be found.... (See Wagner's essay,
"Religion and Art")
7.
Enough! Enough! I fear that, beneath all my merry jests, you are
beginning to recognise the sinister truth only too clearly--the picture
of the decline of art, of the decline of the artist. The latter, which
is a decline of character, might perhaps be defined provisionally in
the following manner: the musician is now becoming an actor, his art is
developing ever more and more into a talent for _telling lies._ In a
certain chapter of my principal work which bears the title "Concerning
the Physiology of Art,"[3] I shall have an opportunity of showing more
thoroughly how this transformation of art as a whole into histrionics
is just as much a sign of physiological degeneration (or more
precisely a form of hysteria), as any other individual corruption, and
infirmity peculiar to the art which Wagner inaugurated: for instance
the restlessness of its optics, which makes it necessary to change
one's attitude to it every second. They understand nothing of Wagner
who see in him but a sport of nature, an arbitrary mood, a chapter of
accidents. He was not the "defective," "ill-fated," "contradictory"
genius that people have declared him to be. Wagner was something
_complete,_ he was a typical _decadent,_ in whom every sign of "free
will" was lacking, in whom every feature was necessary. If there is
anything at all of interest in Warner, it is the consistency with which
a critical physiological condition may convert itself, step by step,
conclusion after conclusion, into a method, a form of procedure, a
reform of all principles, a crisis in taste.
At this point I shall only stop to consider the question of _style._
How is _decadence_ in _literature_ characterised? By the fact that in
it life no longer animates the whole. Words become predominant and
leap right out of the sentence to which they belong, the sentences
themselves trespass beyond their bounds, and obscure the sense of
the whole page, and the page in its turn gains in vigour at the
cost of the whole,--the whole is no longer a whole. But this is the
formula for every decadent style: there is always anarchy among the
atoms, disaggregation of the will,--in moral terms: "freedom of the
individual,"--extended into a political theory: "_equal_ rights for
all." Life, equal vitality, all the vibration and exuberance of life,
driven back into the smallest structure, and the remainder left almost
lifeless. Everywhere paralysis, dis-tress, and numbness, or hostility
and chaos: both striking one with ever increasing force the higher the
forms of organisation are into which one ascends. The whole no longer
lives at all: it is composed, reckoned up, artificial, a fictitious
thing.
In Wagners case the first thing we notice is an hallucination, not
of tones, but of attitudes. Only after he has the latter does he
begin to seek the semiotics of tone for them. If we wish to admire
him, we should observe him at work here: how he separates and
distinguishes, how he arrives at small unities, and how he galvanises
them, accentuates them, and brings them into pre-eminence. But in
this way he exhausts his strength: the rest is worthless. How paltry,
awkward, and amateurish is his manner of "developing," his attempt at
combining incompatible parts. His manner in this respect reminds one
of two people who even in other ways are not unlike him in style--the
brothers Goncourt; one almost feels compassion for so much impotence.
That Wagner disguised his inability to create organic forms, under the
cloak of a principle, that he should have constructed a "dramatic
style" out of what we should call the total inability to create any
style whatsoever, is quite in keeping with that daring habit, which
stuck to him throughout his life, of setting up a principle wherever
capacity failed him. (In this respect he was very different from
old Kant, who rejoiced in another form of daring, _i.e.:_ whenever
a principle failed him, he endowed man with a "capacity" which took
its place....) Once more let it be said that Wagner is really only
worthy of admiration and love by virtue of his inventiveness in small
things, in his elaboration of details,--here one is quite justified in
proclaiming him a master of the first rank, as our greatest musical
_miniaturist,_ who compresses an infinity of meaning and sweetness
into the smallest space. His wealth of colour, of chiaroscuro, of
the mystery of a dying light, so pampers our senses that afterwards
almost every other musician strikes us as being too robust. If people
would believe me, they would not form the highest idea of Wagner from
that which pleases them in him to-day. All that was only devised for
convincing the masses, and people like ourselves recoil from it just
as one would recoil from too garish a fresco. What concern have we
with the irritating brutality of the overture to the "Tannhäuser"?
Or with the Walkyrie Circus? Whatever has become popular in Wagner's
art, including that which has become so outside the theatre, is in bad
taste and spoils taste. The "Tannhäuser" March seems to me to savour
of the Philistine; the overture to the "Flying Dutchman" is much ado
about nothing; the prelude to "Lohengrin" was the first, only too
insidious, only too successful example of how one can hypnotise with
music (--I dislike all music which aspires to nothing higher than to
convince the nerves). But apart from the Wagner who paints frescoes
and practises magnetism, there is yet another Wagner who hoards small
treasures: our greatest melancholic in music, full of side glances,
loving speeches, and words of comfort, in which no one ever forestalled
him,--the tone-master of melancholy and drowsy happiness.... A lexicon
of Wagner's most intimate phrases--a host of short fragments of from
five to fifteen bars each, of music which _nobody knows...._ Wagner had
the virtue of _décadents,_--pity....
8.
--"Very good! But how can this _décadent_ spoil one's taste if
perchance one is not a musician, if perchance one is not oneself
a _décadent?"_--Conversely! How can one _help_ it! _Just_ you try
it!--You know not what Wagner is: quite a great actor! Does a more
profound, a more _ponderous_ influence exist on the stage? Just look at
these youthlets,--all benumbed, pale, breathless! They are Wagnerites:
they know nothing about music,--and yet Wagner gets the mastery of
them. Wagner's art presses with the weight of a hundred atmospheres:
do but submit, there is nothing else to do.... Wagner the actor is a
tyrant, his pathos flings all taste, all resistance, to the winds.
--Who else has this persuasive power in his attitudes, who else sees
attitudes so clearly before anything else! This holding-of-its-breath
in Wagnerian pathos, this disinclination to have done with an intense
feeling, this terrifying habit of dwelling on a situation in which
every instant almost chokes one.----
Was Wagner a musician at all? In any case he was something else to _a
much greater degree_--that is to say, an incomparable _histrio,_ the
greatest mime, the most astounding theatrical genius that the Germans
have ever had, our _scenic artist par excellence._ He belongs to some
other sphere than the history of music, with whose really great and
genuine figure he must not be confounded. Wagner _and_ Beethoven--this
is blasphemy--and above all it does not do justice even to Wagner....
As a musician he was no more than what he was as a man: he _became_ a
musician, he _became_ a poet, because the tyrant in him, his actor's
genius, drove him to be both. Nothing is known concerning Wagner, so
long as his dominating instinct has not been divined.
Wagner was _not_ instinctively a musician. And this he proved by the
way in which he abandoned all laws and rules, or, in more precise
terms, all style in music, in order to make what he wanted with it,
_i.e.,_ a rhetorical medium for the stage, a medium of expression, a
means of accentuating an attitude, a vehicle of suggestion and of the
psychologically picturesque. In this department Wagner may well stand
as an inventor and an innovator of the first order--he _increased the
powers of speech of music to an incalculable degree_--: he is the
Victor Hugo of music as language, provided always we allow that under
certain circumstances music may be something which is not music, but
speech--instrument--_ancilla dramaturgica._ Wagner's music, _not_
in the tender care of theatrical taste, which is very tolerant, is
simply bad music, perhaps the worst that has ever been composed. When
a musician can no longer count up to three, he becomes "dramatic," he
becomes "Wagnerian." ...
Wagner almost discovered the magic which can be wrought even now
by means of music which is both incoherent and _elementary._ His
consciousness of this attains to huge proportions, as does also
his instinct to dispense entirely with higher law and _style._ The
elementary factors--sound, movement, colour, in short, the whole
sensuousness of music--suffice. Wagner never calculates as a musician
with a musician's conscience: all he strains after is effect, nothing
more than effect. And he knows what he has to make an effect upon!--In
this he is as unhesitating as Schiller was, as any theatrical man must
be; he has also the latter's contempt for the world which he brings to
its knees before him. A man is an actor when he is ahead of mankind in
his possession of this one view, that everything which has to strike
people as true, must not be true. This rule was formulated by Talma: it
contains the whole psychology of the actor, it also contains--and this
we need not doubt--all his morality. Wagner's music is never true.
--But it is supposed to be so: and thus everything is as it should be.
As long as we are young, and Wagnerites into the bargain, we regard
Wagner as rich, even as the model of a prodigal giver, even as a great
landlord in the realm of sound. We admire him in very much the same
way as young Frenchmen admire Victor Hugo--that is to say, for his
"royal liberality." Later on we admire the one as well as the other for
the opposite reason: as masters and paragons in economy, as _prudent_
amphitryons. Nobody can equal them in the art of providing a princely
board with such a modest outlay.--The Wagnerite, with his credulous
stomach, is even sated with the fare which his master conjures up
before him. But we others who, in books as in music, desire above all
to find _substance,_ and who are scarcely satisfied with the mere
representation of a banquet, are much worse off. In plain English,
Wagner does not give us enough to masticate. His recitative--very
little meat, more bones, and plenty of broth--I christened "_alia
genovese_": I had no intention of flattering the Genoese with this
remark, but rather the _older recitativo,_ the _recitativo secco._
And as to Wagnerian _leitmotif,_ I fear I lack the necessary culinary
understanding for it. If hard pressed, I might say that I regard it
perhaps as an ideal toothpick, as an opportunity of ridding one's self
of what remains of one's meal. Wagner's "arias" are still left over.
But now I shall hold my tongue.
9.
Even in his general sketch of the action, Wagner is above all an actor.
The first thing that occurs to him is a scene which is certain to
produce a strong effect, a real _actio,_[4] with a basso-relievo of
attitudes; an _overwhelming_ scene, this he now proceeds to elaborate
more deeply, and out of it he draws his characters. The whole of what
remains to be done follows of itself, fully in keeping with a technical
economy which has no reason to be subtle. It is not Corneille's public
that Wagner has to consider, it is merely the nineteenth century.
Concerning the "actual requirements of the stage" Wagner would have
about the same opinion as any other actor of to-day: a series of
powerful scenes, each stronger than the one that preceded it,--and,
in between, all kinds of _clever_ nonsense. His first concern is to
guarantee the effect of his work; he begins with the third act, he
_approves_ his work according to the quality of its final effect.
Guided by this sort of understanding of the stage, there is not much
danger of one's creating a drama unawares. Drama demands _inexorable_
logic: but what did Wagner care about logic? Again I say, it was not
Corneille's public that he had to consider; but merely Germans!
Everybody knows the technical difficulties before which the dramatist
often has to summon all his strength and frequently to sweat his blood:
the difficulty of making the _plot_ seem necessary and the unravelment
as well, so that both are conceivable only in a certain way, and so
that each may give the impression of freedom (the principle of the
smallest expenditure of energy). Now the very last thing that Wagner
does is to sweat blood over the plot; and on this and the unravelment
he certainly spends the smallest possible amount of energy. Let anybody
put one of Wagner's "plots" under the microscope, and I wager that he
will be forced to laugh. Nothing is more enlivening than the dilemma
in "Tristan," unless it be that in the "Mastersingers." Wagner is _no_
dramatist; let nobody be deceived on this point. All he did was to
love the word "drama"--he always loved fine words. Nevertheless, in
his writings the word "drama" is merely a misunderstanding (--_and_ a
piece of shrewdness: Wagner always affected superiority in regard to
the word "opera"--); just as the word "spirit" is a misunderstanding
in the New Testament.--He was not enough of a psychologist for drama;
he instinctively avoided a psychological plot--but how?--by always
putting idiosyncrasy in its place ... Very modern--eh? Very Parisian!
very decadent! ... Incidentally, the _plots_ that Wagner knows how to
unravel with the help of dramatic inventions, are of quite another
kind. For example, let us suppose that Wagner requires a female voice.
A whole act without a woman's voice would be impossible! But in this
particular instance not one of the heroines happens to be free. What
does Wagner do? He emancipates the oldest woman on earth, Erda: "Step
up, aged grand-mamma! You have got to sing!" And Erda sings. Wagner's
end has been achieved. Thereupon he immediately dismisses the old lady:
"Why on earth did you come? Off with you! Kindly go to sleep again!"
In short, a scene full of mythological awe, before which the Wagnerite
_wonders_ all kinds of things....