From a photograph from life taken in Vienna about 1875 by Fr.
Luckhardt.
]
He found the germs of his future musical system in the ballad of Senta.
In this the legend of the unhappy Hollander is told, and in its musical
investiture Wagner invented two melodic themes with distinct purposes.
The first was intended to illustrate the personality of the Dutchman as
an embodiment of yearning for rest. The second was designed to represent
the redeeming principle, the _ewig weibliche_, the eternal womanhood,
which became the ruling ethical feature of all Wagner’s lyric works.
Here are the two themes:—
[Illustration: [Music]]
[Illustration: [Music]]
These two themes being designed to represent certain ideas, it was
inevitable that the composer should use them whenever those ideas
recurred. As he tells us himself in the essay quoted above:—
“I had merely to develop, according to their respective tendencies, the
various thematic germs comprised in the ballad, to have, as a matter of
course, the principal mental moods in definite thematic shapes before
me. When a mental mood returned, its thematic expression also, as a
matter of course, was repeated, since it would have been arbitrary and
capricious to have sought another _motive_ so long as the object was an
intelligible representation of the subject, and not a conglomeration of
operatic pieces.”
We have now traced the origin of the three elementary principles out of
which Wagner elaborated his system: First, the dramatic advantage of
mythological or legendary subjects; second, the “intelligible
representation of the subject”; and third, the use of the representative
theme, “typical phrase” or _leit motif_. In “The Flying Dutchman” we
find his system in its embryonic state, but the perfected system, as
displayed in “Tristan” and “The Ring,” is only a logical outcome of
these first thoughts, intensified, as it were, by his realization that
the whole thing was simply a modernization of the practice of the
greatest Greek dramatists. This realization caused him to question
whether, through the medium of an art founded on his theories, the
modern stage could not acquire a national importance and influence, such
as the Greek theatre possessed. It will undoubtedly be easier for the
reader now to take a comprehensive survey of the full-blown Wagnerian
system than to try to follow its growth through the transitional stage
of “Tannhäuser” and “Lohengrin.”
Wagner’s first law, as formulated succinctly by W. F. Apthorp in a
magazine article, is: “That the text—what in old-fashioned dialect was
called the libretto—once written by the poet, all other persons who have
to do with the work—composer, stage architect, scene painter, costumer,
stage manager, conductor, and singing actors—should aim at one thing
only: the most exact, perfect, and lifelike embodiment of the poet’s
thought.” So far as the composition of the music is concerned, this is
precisely what Peri and Gluck believed. But Peri had to invent dramatic
recitative; and standing, as it were, just on the hither side of chaos,
he could not be expected to produce at once a perfected art world. The
materials of operatic art were in process of making; the first builder
had not the wherewith to rear a musical cathedral. Gluck erred in
preserving the cut-and-dried operatic forms which made it impossible for
him to achieve his sincere design,—“to reduce music to its proper
function, that of seconding poetry by enforcing the expression of the
sentiment and the interest of the situations, without interrupting the
action, or weakening it by superfluous ornament.” It was comparatively
easy to get rid of the “superfluous ornament”; but the methodical
distribution of the old forms was found to interrupt the action. It
remained for Wagner to see that these forms were unavailable for the
composer who aimed at the complete embodiment of the poet’s thought; and
it remained for him also to discern that the ideal lyric drama demanded
an ideal harmony among its various elements. In other words, the
perfected Wagnerian theory of the lyric drama contemplates the compact
union of poetry, music, painting, action, and all the other factors of
dramatic illusion on a basis of common interdependence, so binding that
it shall be impossible to say that one is more important than another,
so perfect that no separation can be made without a loss of vital force.
Wagner discerned in the theatre the source of such art influence as
reached the great mass of the people. Looking upon its managers and its
public as they actually appeared before his eyes, he saw the theatre in
the hands of those to whom art was nothing and gain everything, while
the public, jaded and sated, ceaselessly clamored for new sensations.
Continued attempts of the money-seeking managers to satisfy this public
demand, which was in its very nature insatiable, had led to a condition
of opera in which the music had no organic connection with the text, the
pageantry and ballets no logical relation to the pictorial ensemble.
Turning his gaze backward to the home of true art, Greece, he saw a
drama in which poetry, action, and music were indissolubly united.
“Thus,” he says, “we can by no means recognize in our theatrical art the
genuine drama; that one, indivisible, supreme creation of the mind of
man. Our theatre merely offers the convenient _locale_ for the tempting
exhibition of the heterogeneous wares of art manufacture. How incapable
is our stage to gather up each branch of art in its highest and most
perfect expression—the drama—it shows at once in its division into the
two opposing classes, play and opera; whereby the idealizing influence
of music is forbidden to the play, and the opera is forestalled of the
living heart and lofty purpose of actual drama. Thus on the one hand the
spoken play can never, with but few exceptions, lift itself up to the
ideal flight of poetry; but, for very reason of the poverty of its means
of utterance,—to say nothing of the demoralizing influence of our public
life,—must fall from height to depth, from the warm atmosphere of
passion to the cold element of intrigue. On the other hand the opera
becomes a chaos of sensuous impressions jostling one another without
rhyme or reason, from which each one may choose at will what pleases
best his fancy; here the alluring movements of a dancer, there the
_bravura_ passage of a singer; here the dazzling effect of a triumph of
the scene painter, there the astounding efforts of a Vulcan of the
orchestra....”
“The public art of the Greeks, which reached its zenith in their
tragedy, was the expression of the deepest and the noblest principles of
the people’s consciousness; with _us_ the deepest and noblest principle
of man’s consciousness is the direct opposite of this, namely, the
denunciation of our public art. To the Greeks the production of a
tragedy was a religious festival, where the gods bestirred themselves
upon the stage and bestowed on men their wisdom; _our_ evil conscience
has so lowered the theatre in public estimation that it is the duty of
the police to prevent the stage from meddling in the slightest with
religion; a circumstance as characteristic of our religion as of our
art. Within the ample boundaries of the Grecian amphitheatre the whole
populace was wont to witness the performances: in our superior theatres
loll only the affluent classes. The Greeks sought the instruments of
their art in the products of the highest associate culture: we seek ours
in the deepest social barbarism. The education of the Greek, from his
earliest youth, made himself the subject of his own artistic treatment
and artistic enjoyment in body as in spirit: our foolish education,
fashioned for the most part to fit us merely for future industrial gain,
gives us a ridiculous, and withal arrogant, satisfaction with our own
unfitness for art, and forces us to seek the subjects of any kind of
artistic amusement outside ourselves.”[13]
Making due allowance for the heated utterance of one to whom the
questions at issue had such grave personal importance as to prevent
judicial calmness of speech, we cannot fail to perceive that Wagner had
penetrated to the essence of the difference between the stage of Greece
and that of Europe in his day. The compact union of the arts tributary
to the stage had been at once the outcome and the embodiment of that
intensely national art-feeling which he contrasted so bitterly with the
modern European lack of art-feeling, as he saw it. With the downfall of
the Athenian, state tragedy fell also, and “art became less and less the
expression of the public conscience.” In Wagner’s mind this downfall
resembled that of the tower of Babel, with its subsequent dispersion of
the tribes. The dramatic union of arts was dismembered. Poetry,
painting, music, rhetoric, all separated, and each went its own way in
pursuit of its own ends. No one who has reviewed the history of the fine
arts in the Middle Ages can fail to have observed how blindly they
seemed to grope their way toward the gates of truth until the guiding
light of the Renaissance, with its new revelation of the classic
antiquity, was turned upon Italy by the scholars driven out of
Constantinople by the fall of Rome’s Eastern Empire. Wagner has reviewed
the dissevered condition of the arts and their employment as means, and
not ends, in a few terse sentences in the essay already quoted; and then
he says:—
“Each one of these dissevered arts, nursed and luxuriously tended for
the entertainment of the rich, has filled the world to overflowing with
its products; in each great minds have brought forth marvels; but the
one true art has not been born again, either in or since the
Renaissance. The perfect art work, the great united utterance of a free
and lovely public life, the _Drama_, _Tragedy_,—howsoever great the
poets who have here and there indited tragedies,—is not yet born again;
for the reason that it cannot be reborn, but must be born anew.”[14]
This, then, was the herculean task which this self-appointed reformer of
the drama set before him; to demonstrate that the modern theatre had the
power to bring itself into the same relation to the noblest ideal life
of man as the Greek theatre had; and in order that this might be
achieved it was necessary, in his opinion, to return to that union of
the arts, which has been mentioned so often. He believed that in his day
each art had done all that it could do without the aid of the other.
Music unaided could go no further than it had in Beethoven’s symphonies.
Indeed, even the mighty Ludwig had called in the help of poetry to
complete his Ninth Symphony. Poetry could rise no higher than the wings
of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller had carried her. At this point,
then, must come that fusion of the arts, in which each would sacrifice
something of its egotism for the sake of the splendid whole; and that
whole would be the art work of the future, the drama for the people. In
order fairly to appreciate Wagner’s purposes we must pause here to
inquire, what people? The answer to this question lies at the root of
the whole controversy which has arisen about Wagner’s works; or perhaps
it would be more accurate to say that it is the neglect to make and
properly answer this inquiry which leads insufficiently informed persons
to look upon Wagner as a rabid iconoclast. The people for whom he sought
to rear anew the ideal drama was the German people. As Mr. Krehbiel has
expressed it: “Wagner believes that the elements of the lyric drama
ought to be adapted to the peculiarities, and to encourage the national
feeling of the people for whom it is created.... One of Wagner’s most
persistent aims was to reanimate a national art spirit in Germany. The
rest of the world he omitted from his consideration.”[15] This was an
inevitable result of his conviction, acquired from study of the Greek
stage, that the ideal drama should be national in spirit.
We have already seen that, according to his ideas, the union of poetry,
painting, music, and action in the “art work of the future” could be
effected only by some sacrifice on the part of each art. Wagner plainly
saw, as we must see, that the special feature which must yield to the
necessary modification was _form_, or, more strictly speaking,
_formality_. It was not form in the abstract that must be sacrificed,
but forms in the concrete,—forms which owed their preservation to
tradition, and not to any intrinsic worth or imperative demand of art.
To preserve the old-fashioned operatic forms would have been to continue
the dominance of music in the drama; for the poet would still have been
a mere librettist, bound to provide for the aria, the duet, and the
finale. To introduce a distinctive kind of versification, such as the
Alexandrine, or the Spencerian stanza, would have made poetry the
controlling element. The first problem set before Wagner, then, was to
find subjects which would admit of the utmost freedom and
unconventionality of treatment. Already in the embryonic state of his
theories, the myth had forced itself upon his mind as the necessary kind
of subject; and in the final working out of those theories to their end,
the myth stood the test, with this important corollary, that it must be
a myth embodying one of the great elementary thoughts of mankind. Turn
which way he would, he found support for his belief. Did the legendary
beings of the Greek stage lack the humanity and the ethical conditions
necessary for great tragedy? On the contrary, as Mr. Stedman has put
it:—
“The high gods of Æschylus and Sophocles for the most part sit above the
thunder: but the human element pervades these dramas; the legendary
demigods, heroes, _gentes_, that serve as the personages,—Hermes,
Herakles, the houses of Theseus, Atreus, Jason,—all are types of human
kind, repeating the Hebraic argument of transmitted tendency, virtue and
crime, and the results of crime especially from generation to
generation.”[16]
And when Wagner turned from the Greek drama to the philosophy of his
beloved Schopenhauer, he found the same convictions forced upon him
again by his teacher’s art theory. This theory is propounded in Book
III. of “The World as Will and Representation.” The writer begs leave to
quote a summary of it which he has made in a study of “Tristan”:—
“Divested of its robes of metaphysical terminology, it is this: When the
human mind rises from the study of the location, period, causes, and
tendencies of things to the undivided examination of their essence, and
when, further, this consideration takes place, not through the medium of
abstract thought, but in calm contemplation of the immediately present
natural object, then the mind is brought face to face with eternal
ideas. Art, the work of genius, repeats these eternal ideas, which are
the essential and permanent things in the phenomena of the world. In
other words, art endeavors to exhibit to us the eternal essence of
things by means of prototypes.”[17]
[Illustration: