From a family group, photographed shortly before his death.
]
Of course, Wagner could not find prototypes embodying “the eternal
essence of things” in the small and shallow stories to which the
librettists of the majority of the popular operas of his time had
turned. He must seek for material which had its roots in the great heart
of the people; which was not the fancy of a single mind, but the
formulation of a people’s ideal. To the myth, then, he turned, impelled
by his own reasoning, by the arguments of divine philosophy, as he read
them, and by the equally eloquent example of revered antiquity. And,
indeed, we must all admit that the true myth is the individualization of
an abstract ideal, and if we accept the Wagnerian theory, that abstract
ideal should be embodied in the personages of the drama, we must also
accept the myth. Even if we refuse to believe that ideals, or even
types, should be the actors in a drama, we shall probably have no
hesitation in admitting that for _musical exposition_ only the broad,
elementary emotions of humanity are well suited; and these are always
found most freely and powerfully displayed in the great world-thoughts
of mythology. Thus Wagner’s Tristan and his Isolde are plainly intended
to be embodiments of the elementary man and woman, standing in primeval
barbarian grandeur at gaze one upon the other, and overwhelmed by the
tragic power of mastering passion. The history of the Tristan legend,
which has found its way in different forms into the literature of
several languages, is proof that the world has so regarded it. For six
hundred years poets have accepted Tristan and Isolde as the most
convincing representatives of the mastery and the misery of love. In
this they stand sharply distinguished from the hero and heroine of
Wagner’s comedy, “Die Meistersinger.” Walther and Eva, moving in a story
whose design is to touch the manners of a time with the gentle reproof
of satire, are not the embodiments of elementary thoughts, but are
circumscribed by the manifest environments of locality and period. But
Tristan and Siegfried are the unfettered, unconventioned man of all
times and places; while Brünnhilde and Isolde are visible forms of the
highest of Wagner’s ideals, the eternal womanhood. It is a significant
fact that this master, in the first works produced after he had
abandoned the old style,—“The Flying Dutchman,” and “Tannhäuser,”—dealt
with these eternal types, while in “Lohengrin” he confined himself
within comparatively narrower limits, returning to his first position
when he had fully formulated the theories whose promptings rose within
him as only vague, artistic instincts in his early works. And having
cleared his theories from all doubts in his own mind, he emphasized the
humanity of his mythical characters by some of his finest touches.
“The northern Scalds created tremendous myths. The spirit of their poems
was colossal. Passions and sweetness stood side by side and were
delineated with master strokes. Lofty sentiment and heroic deed were
darkened by unspeakable crime and black tragedy. The German bards
denuded these old poems of their glory and made their personages small.
The heroes and heroines of the Sagas were enormous unrealities; those of
the Nibelungen Lied were almost pretentious nonentities. Wagner seized
upon every trait of character and every incident that was most human and
made masterly use of it. It is the ease with which we recognize in the
people of ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ primeval human types that makes us
receptive of their influence and movable by their greatness.”[18]
Having found his people, the next object of the poet-composer was to
select a flexible and yielding form for their utterance. He must find a
form of verse which could be organically united with music, which would
suggest a rhythmical basis for the melody, yet not control its
construction. The various forms of modern versification, founded on the
rhetorical accent of words, offered him no advantages, but, on the
contrary, placed difficulties in the path of his movement. Rhyme, for
instance, has no value whatever for the composer, unless he constructs
the phrases and sections of his melody with the same number of feet and
the same metrical pauses as are found in the verse; and this method, of
course, gives the mere formalism of the poetry the government of the
process of composition. On the other hand, blank verse is bound to find
the same treatment in music as prose does. Wagner, therefore, turned to
the metrical basis of all Teutonic poetry, namely, the alliterative
line, as it is found in the “Eddas.” The peculiarity of this line is the
emphasizing of its rhythm by the employment of similar sounds at the
beginning of the accented syllables. A fair specimen of it is the
opening of Siegmund’s love song in “Die Walküre”:—
“Winterstürme wichen
Dem Wonnemond;
In milden Lichte
Leuchtet der Lenz;
Auf linden Lüften,
Leicht und lieblich,
Wunder webend
Er sich wiegt.”
[Illustration:
RICHARD WAGNER AT BAYREUTH.—By G. Papperitz.
]
A clause such as “Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond” readily suggests to
the ear the position of musical accents which will be identical with
those of the verse, but which leave the composer wholly free in his
melodic treatment of _lines_. A single glance will demonstrate to the
reader that the above words can be placed in lines three or four times
as long without making the slightest change in the rhythmical effect
produced by the alliteration.
We now come to Wagner’s musical method, the nature of which has already
been briefly indicated in the account of the birth in his mind of his
new ideas. In his search after a modern substitute for the sustained
intonation of the Greek drama, he had before him for study the dramatic
recitative of Peri and the dramatic _arioso_ style of Gluck. The former
was wholly unavailable. Years of use had fastened upon it a collection
of traditional phrases, familiar to the ear of every one who goes often
to hear opera or oratorio. These traditional phrases, hopelessly
inflexible, made dramatic recitative a thing of conventionalities, and
unconventionality was the only hope for Wagner’s system. The Gluck
_arioso_ style was equally unsuited to his purpose, because, as we have
been obliged to note before, it preserved the formalities of the
old-fashioned opera,—those very formalities which Wagner felt that he
must abandon if he would secure his compact union of the arts tributary
to the stage. He needed a style of composition which would permit the
music to flow freely from the words and which would impose no obligation
on the composer to repeat certain words or lines in order that certain
passages of music might be rounded out to a pretty close as in the
old-fashioned aria. He was in search of lyric expressiveness freed from
lyric conventionality. He therefore decided that each act of any one of
his music-dramas must consist of one unbroken stream of melody. In other
words, as long as there were persons or scenes before the audience,
there must be a musical exposition of their moods, and that exposition
must be unbroken and apparently unartificial in form, just as a train of
moods is.
But to make the actors sing without cessation would fatigue both them
and the audience; and, moreover, it would be untrue to nature, since men
and women do not frame every thought and emotion in words. Hence Wagner
conceived the idea of allotting the voicing of the ceaseless melody to
the orchestra, while the personages of the drama should utter their
words in a form of lyric recitative based on the broader principles of
Peri, as expressed in his preface to “Eurydice,” but freed from acquired
conventions and modified according to the promptings of Wagner’s own
musical genius. Naturally, then, the question arose in the composer’s
mind, “What form is my melody to have?” For he knew as well as Schumann
did that music demands first of all things form. Now, the basis of
musical form is the repetition of melodic phrases. There is no form, and
therefore no coherence, no sense, in music consisting of disjointed
phrases, each of which is heard once and never again. Yet to repeat them
in any of the old-fashioned ways would have been to load himself down
with some one of the set forms which he was trying to escape.
Consequently this formidable problem was before him: How was he to make
his endless melody intelligible to the auditor, to give it a palpable
significance, to convey through it to the hearer the emotional moods of
his personages, and yet impose upon it musical form, based upon
repetition, but free from the artificiality of the older formulas? He
found the solution in the suggestion which had come to him when he
invented the two principal themes of Senta’s ballad in “The Flying
Dutchman.” The solution of the problem was the perfection of this system
of representative themes, each designed to stand for a particular
person, thought, mood, or action, and to be repeated by the orchestra or
vocalist whenever its subject had significance, though not necessarily
presence, in the scene before the audience.
How are these representative themes obtained? Does Wagner construct a
melody arbitrarily according to his fancy, and label it the “Siegfried”
motive, the “Brünnhilde” motive? A moment’s reflection will suffice to
convince the reader that such a system would be worse than puerile. It
would not be in any sense as good as the method of Donizetti, who could
at least give a pathetic color to the aria of his moribund tenor.
Wagner’s high purpose was to make an indissoluble organic union between
the poem and the music, and this purpose forbade all arbitrary or
haphazard procedure in the construction of a _leit motif_. Music has a
certain power of emotional expression; therefore Wagner’s endeavor was
to invent themes representative of characteristic traits or emotional
tendencies of his personages. In some cases when he required a musical
representation of an inanimate object, he invented a theme which would
suggest the object by suggesting emotions associated with it. Another
class of themes is descriptive of externals, and belongs to what has
been well called scenic music. The last class is the smallest, for, as a
rule, Wagner’s scenic music serves its purpose but once. When it is
intended for only one hearing, it is simply descriptive music, freely
composed. When intended for more than one hearing, it has a deeper
significance. Let us make a closer examination of the master’s processes
in the construction of these leading motives, and that we may be
logical, let us begin with the lowest order, the scenic.
[Illustration: