Last work of Lorenz Gedon, in possession of Friedrich Schön, of Worms.
]
The association with the text is, of course, the key-note of Wagner’s
_leit motif_ system. There can be no successful refutation of the
assertion that a few of the leading themes of the Bayreuth music-dramas
are arbitrary in their formation. There are themes which are intended to
represent purely intellectual processes, and this is something that
music cannot do. But we need never be at a loss as to Wagner’s intent.
No lecturer nor handbook is necessary as a guide through the music of
these works when the hearer has once grasped the idea that every _leit
motif_ is associated with the words or the acts which explain its
design, and this, too, almost invariably on its first appearance. All
that the hearer needs to know is the text. It was not a part of Wagner’s
theory that his listeners should commit to memory a string of titles of
motives, such as the “Love Renunciation Motive,” the “Hero Idea,” the
“Love Thrills,” the “Decree of Fate.” Many of these titles have been
invented by the handbook makers, who, in their eagerness to explain
Wagner to the world, have done much to persuade the world that he is
incomprehensible. The student of Wagner needs no translation of the
music, except the text. Wagner did not believe, as many have asserted,
that music was capable of definite expression as words are. On the
contrary, in his prose works, he again and again declared that music was
incapable of telling a story, that it demanded the assistance of text,
and that the two must be joined in such close wedlock that they would
operate upon the mind and emotions of the hearer as a single indivisible
force. Therefore the student of these works needs only to make himself
master of the poems, and then to note carefully the music that
accompanies every sentiment or deed. In the Nibelung tetralogy, the
music of “Rheingold” is the foundation of all that follows, and it must
be known first. As each new motive appears in that work, it is
explained. Two or three illustrations will suffice. In the first scene,
the three Rhine-maidens sing this:—
[Illustration:
Rhinegold, Rhinegold, lustrous delight,
Thou laughest in radiance rare.
]
When Siegfried, having slain the dragon, comes out of the cave, that
music is heard in the orchestra. Does any one need a handbook to tell
him that it refers to the hero’s being now the master of the Rhine gold?
Again, after telling Alberich that he who can make a ring out of the
Rhine gold will have unlimited power, one of the girls sings this:—
[Illustration:
But he who passion’s power forswears,
And from delights of love forbears,
But he the magic commandeth the prize to mould to a ring.
]
Here the text fully identifies the music as the motive of renunciation,
and as such we recognize this melody when Wotan in the last scene of
“Die Walküre” parts from his best beloved daughter, Brünnhilde. This
first identification of a theme enables the composer to attain some of
his finest effects, for he makes some motives have an air of prophecy.
For instance, two motives are especially connected with Siegfried, and
one of them refers to his being a great hero. This motive is first heard
in the last scene of “Die Walküre” before Siegfried is born, and before
Brünnhilde knows that he is to be her lover. Yet it is Brünnhilde who
voices it in foretelling his birth to Sieglinde:—
[Illustration:
The highest hero of worlds hid’st thou,
O wife, in sheltering shrine.
]
Thenceforward we know that melody to be the theme of Siegfried, the
hero. Immediately following this is introduced a theme which appears
again in the full voicing of the orchestra after Brünnhilde has restored
the Rhine gold to its rightful owners and immolated herself on
Siegfried’s funeral pyre at the end of the last drama of the series. If
we wonder at its meaning there, we refer to its first appearance in “Die
Walküre,” and find that Sieglinde utters it as a proclamation of the
divine womanhood of Brünnhilde:—
[Illustration:
Oh, marvelous sayings,
Maiden divine.
]
Another example will show how a representative theme may be modified,
according to the development of the person whom it represents, without
losing its identity. The theme which has special reference to
Siegfried’s buoyancy of spirit, the producer of youthful enthusiasm, is
intoned by the hero on his horn thus:—
[Illustration: [Music]]
In “Die Götterdämmerung,” when Siegfried has become a fully developed
man, this melody is modified so as to signify his mature heroism. It is
then proclaimed by the orchestra thus:—
[Illustration: [Music]]
As the writer has had occasion to say elsewhere, “The alteration to
which the music is subjected is one of rhythm. The _motif_ changes from
six-eight to common rhythm. The effect produced is one of those which
are founded upon the nature of music. A six-eight rhythm is light and
tripping; a four-beat rhythm is firm and solid.” This alteration of the
representative theme, then, “develops the character of the melody along
the same lines as Siegfried’s character has developed,—from lightness
and ebulliency to firmness and solidity.” These examples should be
sufficient to give the reader a tolerable comprehension of the manner in
which Wagner worked out his new operatic form. It seems necessary now
only to lay special stress upon the suggestion already offered, that the
listener at the performance of a Wagner music-drama does not treat
either himself or the composer fairly when he busies his mind wholly
with the identification of the themes as they present themselves
successively to his hearing. The proper effort is to get at the organic
connection between action or thought and the music, to read each by the
light of the other, and to see whether it is not possible to penetrate
by means of the two into the spirit of the drama. If the hearer
accomplishes this, he will have at least the right to say that he has
approached the consideration of this art work of Wagner’s in a spirit of
fairness; and though he may not know the title of a single theme, he
will have a far better understanding of their meaning than they who have
committed to memory some one of the thematic handbooks.
This exposition of Wagner’s theories will have failed to achieve its
purpose if the reader does not now clearly perceive that its fundamental
postulate is that the opera is a _drama_ in which music is merely the
chief vehicle of expression. This ruling idea led Wagner not only to
abandon the old formulæ, but to do many things which would, perhaps, be
inexpedient to attempt in absolute music. The great Bayreuth master has
been severely censured, by those who cling to the belief that music
should always be pretty, for having written many harsh progressions and
for having indulged in remarkable boldness in his harmonies. These
so-called sins of the master must find their justification in the fact
that he was not aiming at purely musical beauty. The whole purpose of
his work was “exact and lifelike embodiment of the poet’s thought.” When
the emotion of an actor was harsh, the music had to be harsh. When the
emotions were grand and beautiful, the music had to be of a similar
character. It is for these reasons that we find the snarling anger of
Alberich and Mime, the bitter hatred of Ortrud, the fury of Isolde,
voiced in music which is not pretty, but which is truthful. But on the
other hand, when Wagner has to express the sorrows of the Volsungs, the
fierce and sudden passion of Siegmund and Sieglinde, the awful revulsion
of feeling in the death of Siegfried, or the highest elevation of
woman’s love in the last moments of Isolde, he rises to a sublime height
of melody, an overwhelming dignity of harmony, and an irresistible
eloquence of instrumentation not equalled by any other composer. As
Louis Ehlert, not a Wagnerite, has well said: “Wagner’s music always
impresses us with the idea that we are in the presence of genius. It may
at times be ugly, obtrusive, and noisy; but it is never silly and
insignificant.”[20]
Much of the pungency of Wagner’s music, which makes it disagreeable to
timid ears, is due to his progressiveness in the matter of harmony. He
has gone to the furthest limit in the use of passing notes, as primarily
embodied in the polyphony of Bach. He has followed the rule thus
formulated by Dr. Parry:—
“Suspensions are now taken in any form and position which can in the
first place be possibly prepared even by passing notes, or in the second
place be possibly resolved even by causing a fresh discord, so long as
the ultimate resolution into concord is feasible in an intelligible
manner.”[21]
Many of Wagner’s harmonic progressions belong to that class which
instruct rather than obey the theorists. These progressions have all
been found capable of justification by analysis, and will therefore
remain as part of Wagner’s contributions to the development of musical
science and art. In considering these novelties, we must remember that
genius is usually in advance of its day, and what sounded strange at
first by reason of its novelty will in good time become part of the
common diction of the art. In instrumentation, Wagner also made many
innovations, and it is indisputable that he was the greatest master of
the art of scoring who has ever lived. He showed a profounder insight
into the individual capacity of every instrument than any composer
except Berlioz, and in fecundity of combination he excelled even the
gifted Frenchman. He enriched the body of tone of the modern orchestra
by the employment of the tenor tuba, and emphasized the value of the
neglected bass trumpet. His addition to the customary number of horn
parts splendidly improved the mellow tone and solidity of the brass
choir, and his use of the bass clarinet, not simply as a solo
instrument, but as a re-enforcement of the organ-like bass of the
woodwind department, was a stroke of genius. He further developed the
expressiveness of the woodwind band by the novelty of his distribution
of harmony among its members. Not only did he allot solos to them with
unerring judgment, but departing from the conventional style of the
classic symphonists, who used their wood instruments in pairs playing in
thirds and sixths, he wrote for these instruments in a marvellously
effective dispersed harmony. In writing for the strings, Wagner divided
them more frequently than his predecessors had done, often making six or
eight real parts among the violins alone. Altogether his instrumentation
is richer in its polyphony and more solid in its body of tone than that
of any other composer. He has been accused of being noisy, but power of
sound is not necessarily noise. There is more noise in some of Verdi’s
shrieking piccolo passages, accentuated with bass-drum thumps, than in
the loudest passage that Wagner ever wrote.
Taking him by and large, as the sailors say, Wagner is the most striking
figure in the history of music. Whether the future will or will not
accord to him the position granted by the musical world of the
present—that of the greatest genius (though not the profoundest
musician) the art has produced—he will remain fixed upon the records as
the most commanding intellect that ever sought to express its thought
and accomplish its purposes though the medium of music. His influence
upon his contemporaries has been larger than that of any other master
since the science of modern music began. One has only to study the
latest operas of that real genius, Verdi, to perceive how one of the
most gifted musical minds of our time was forced to yield to the
convincing truth of Wagner’s ideas. As for those of less original force
than Verdi, they have one and all—even Mascagni, who is as purely
Italian as Wagner was purely Teutonic—been swayed by his irresistible
influence. Even the symphonic writers have been guided by him, and no
man can ever again write an orchestral score as if Wagner had not lived.
The futile controversy about his theories and his style will probably be
kept alive for some years by those who persistently refuse to remodel
their inflexible conceptions of what ought to be after the splendid
pattern of what is. But Wagner’s theories will live, for he was the
fulfillment of the prophetic words of Herder on Gluck: “The progress of
the century led us to a man, who, despising the frippery of wordless
tones, perceived the necessity of an intimate connection of human
feeling and of the myth itself with his tones. From that imperial height
on which the ordinary musician boasts that poetry serves his art he
stepped down and made his tones only serve the words of feeling, the
action itself. He has emulators, and perhaps some one will soon outstrip
him in zeal, overthrowing the whole shop of slashed and mangled
opera-jingle, and erecting an Odeon, a consistently lyric edifice, in
which poetry, music, action, and decoration unite in one.”
[Illustration: N. J. Henderson.]
[Illustration:
THE ANIMATED FORGE MOVEMENT.
]
[Illustration: