THE ARTIST IN THEORY
I
For a great revolutionary, Wagner was curiously long in coming to
consciousness of himself. The record of his youth and early manhood
is one of constant fluctuation between one ideal or influence and
another. The most remarkable feature of him in these days, indeed, is
his mental malleability. In his later years he is the centre of a solar
system of his own; everything else in his orbit is a mere planet that
must revolve around him or be cast out. In his younger days, on the
contrary, he is extraordinarily sensitive to the changing currents of
men and circumstances. One of the earliest writers to influence him
was E. T. A. Hoffmann, under whose sway he fell apparently as early as
1827. It was about the same time that he first heard, at a Gewandhaus
concert, some of Beethoven's music. During the early 'thirties he was
deeply absorbed in Beethoven, especially in the Ninth Symphony--a work
which, he tells us, was at that time regarded in Leipzig as the raving
of a semi-madman. Wagner's knowledge of it was at first derived solely
from copying the score; it was without having heard a performance of
the work that he made in 1830 the two-hands pianoforte arrangement of
it which he vainly tried to induce Schott to publish. His own Overture
in D minor (1831), his _King Enzio_ Overture and his Symphony in C
major (1832) were, as he admits, all inspired by Beethoven, the first
of them being more particularly influenced by the _Coriolan_ Overture.
He heard the Ninth Symphony for the first time at a Gewandhaus concert
in the winter of 1831-2; the performance, under Pohlenz, seems to have
been a very unintelligent one, and it left Wagner in considerable
doubt as to the value of the work. "There arose in me," he says, "the
mortifying doubt whether I had really understood this strange piece
of music[289] or not. For a long time I gave up racking my brains
about it, and unaffectedly turned my attention to a clearer and less
disturbing sort of music."[290]
Weber's _Freischütz_ had also powerfully affected the boy's
imagination; no doubt Weber struck him even then as a musician
peculiarly German. In his own _Die Feen_ (1833), he tells us, he
tried to write "in German style."[291] Nevertheless, in spite of all
these influences, he turned for a while against German music, which
he criticises with some frankness in an article on _Die deutsche
Oper_,[292] published anonymously in the _Zeitung für die elegante
Welt_ in June 1834. The Germans have no German opera, he says, for the
same reason that they have no national drama. "We are too intellectual
and much too learned to be able to create warm human figures." Mozart
could do this in the Italian melodic style; but with their contempt
for that style the modern Germans have got further from the path that
Mozart opened out for dramatic music. "Weber did not understand how to
handle song; Spohr is hardly any better"; yet it is through Song that a
man expresses himself musically. Here the Italians have the advantage
over the Germans. It is true that the Italians have abused the organ
of late--"yet I shall never forget the impression that a Bellini
opera lately made on me, after I had become heartily sick of the
eternally allegorising orchestral bustle, and a simple and noble Song
made its appearance again." Weber was too purely lyrical, and Spohr
is too elegiac, for the drama. Weber's best work is consequently the
romantic _Der Freischütz_; as for _Euryanthe_, "what paltry refinements
of declamation, what a finiking use of this instrument or that for
bringing out the expression of some word or other!" His style is not
broad enough; it dissipates itself in mincing details. His _ensembles_
are almost without life. And as the audience do not understand a note
of it, they console themselves by calling it amazingly _learned_, and
respecting it accordingly. "O this fatal learnedness," he cries, "this
source of all the evils that afflict us Germans!" In Bach's time music
was regarded only from the learned side. The forms were then limited,
but the composers full of learning. Now the forms are freer, but the
composers have less learning, though they make a pretence of it. The
public also wants to appear learned, affects to despise the simple, and
is ashamed to admit that it enjoys a lively French opera. We must not
be hypocritical, but must admit there is a good deal that is good in
both French and Italian opera; we must throw over a lot of our affected
science, and become natural men. No real German opera composer has
appeared for some time, because no one has known how to "gain the voice
of the people"--no one has grasped life in its real truth and warmth.
We must find a form suited to the needs of our own days. "We must seize
upon the epoch, and honestly try to perfect its new forms; and he will
be the master who writes neither Italian nor French--nor even German."
The youthful essayist repeats a good deal of this, with additions, in
an article entitled _Pasticcio_, published in the _Neue Zeitschrift
für Musik_ in November of the same year, under the pseudonym of "Canto
Spianato."[293] He is greatly concerned at the deplorable fact that
there are hardly a couple of dozen well-trained singers in Germany.
"Nowadays one hardly ever hears a really beautiful and technically
perfect _trillo_; very rarely flawless mordents; very seldom a rounded
_coloratura_, a genuine unaffected, soul-moving _portamento_, a
perfect equalisation of the registers, and absolute maintenance of the
intonation through all the various nuances of crescendo and diminuendo.
Most singers, as soon as they attempt the noble art of _portamento_,
get out of tune; and the public, accustomed to imperfect execution,
overlooks the defects of the singer if only he is a capable actor and
knows the routine of the stage."
Nor do our German composers know how to write for the voice; they
are like bunglers who presume to orchestrate without having studied
the peculiarities of the clarinet, say, as distinct from those of the
pianoforte. "Most of our modern German vocal composers appear to regard
the voice as merely a part of the instrumental mass, and misapprehend
the true nature of Song. Our worthy opera-composers," in fact, "must
take lessons in the good Italian cantabile style, taking care to
steer clear of its modern excrescences, and, with their superior
artistic capacity, give us something good in a good style. Then will
vocal art bloom anew; then some day will a man come who in this good
style shall re-establish on the stage the broken unity of Poetry and
Song." He argues with portentous seriousness for ornate as well as
simple Song; and ends with a claim that poetry is the only basis of
opera,--poetry, of which words and tones are merely the expression.
"The majority of our operas are merely a string of musical numbers
without any psychological connection; our singers have been degraded
into musical-boxes, set to a certain number of tunes, brought on to the
stage, and started by a wave of the conductor's baton." Once more he
lays it down that "he will be the master who writes neither Italian nor
French--nor even German," and concludes thus: "But would you inspire,
purify, and train yourselves by models, would you create living shapes
in music, then combine, for example, Gluck's masterly declamation and
dramatic power with Mozart's varied art of melody, _ensemble_ and
orchestration, and you will produce dramatic works that will satisfy
the strictest criticism."[294]
This enthusiasm for the Italian style was largely due to the
overwhelming impression made on Wagner by the great singer and actress
Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, whom he heard as Romeo in Bellini's
_Montecchi e Capuleti_ in March 1834.[295] Her performance, however,
magical as it must have been, would not have affected him so deeply
had he not already been brought by other influences to a turning
in the road. What these influences were he has himself told us in
_Mein Leben_. Heinse's _Ardinghello_ and Laube's _Young Europe_ had
inflamed the imagination of most of the young men of the day. Wagner
was caught up by and carried along in a current of generous enthusiasm
for a supposedly new spirit in art and literature; the older men were
mercilessly ridiculed as pedants, and a newer and more sprightly art
was to hustle the ponderous old one off the stage. Wagner's boyish life
had been, in spite of an occasional wildness, one of almost morbid
seriousness, culminating in what he calls "pathetic mysticism." The
truth seems to have been that he was moving about in intellectual
worlds too subtle for his spirit then to realise; he was mysteriously
drawn to the greatest things in Beethoven and Weber, but when brought
into actual contact with them he had to admit that they spoke a
language he could hardly understand. The magnetic personality of
Schröder-Devrient dissipated the clouds that had formed around him. He
could hardly have been so much his own dupe as his confessions would
lead us to believe. He knew that the performance of Weber's _Euryanthe_
he had recently heard was as superlatively bad as the performance
of Bellini's opera was superlatively good; and he would have been a
much worse reasoner than we know him to have been, had he not been
able to see that from these facts no valid conclusion could be drawn
as to the worth of the two works. We may reasonably assume that his
volatile nature was ripe for another change of front--there were plenty
more of a similar kind even in his mature life--and that these outer
experiences only marked the moment of the turning. He as good as admits
this, indeed, in _Mein Leben_. He was disposed, he says, to take as
lightly as possible the problem[296] that had arisen before him, and
to show his determination to get rid of all prejudice by writing the
article on _Euryanthe_ in which he "simply jeered" at that work. "Just
as I had passed in my student-time through my 'Flegeljahr,' I now
boldly entered upon a similar development in my artistic taste."[297]
II
That the articles praising the Italians at the expense of the
Germans were the products of more than the mere impression of
Schröder-Devrient's singing and acting--that they came from the depths
of a real change in his intellectual and emotional nature--is shown by
the length of time he remained at the same standpoint.
The text of _Das Liebesverbot_ was written in a mood of fiery youthful
protest against what he held to be the cramping puritanism of the
moralists. He deliberately transforms Shakespeare's _Measure for
Measure_. "_Young Europe_ and _Ardinghello_, helped by the strange
antipathy I had conceived towards classical operatic music, gave me
the keynote for my conception, which was especially directed against
puritanical hypocrisy, and consequently led to the bold glorification
of unfettered sensualism (_freien Sinnlichkeit_). I took care to
understand the serious Shakespearean subject only in this sense; I
saw only the gloomy strait-laced viceroy, himself burning with love
for the beautiful novice, who, while she implores him to pardon her
brother condemned to death for illicit love, kindles a ruinous fire
in the rigid Puritan's breast by the lovely warmth of her own human
emotion. The fact that these powerful motives are so richly developed
by Shakespeare only in order that in the end they may be all the more
seriously weighed in the scales of justice, did not concern me in the
least; all I had in mind was to expose the sinfulness of hypocrisy and
the unnaturalness of harsh moral judgments."[298] He adds that he was
probably influenced by Auber's _Masaniello_ and the _Sicilian Vespers_.
The composition of _Das Liebesverbot_ carries us from 1834 to the
spring of 1836, and still the Southern fever has not abated. In 1837
he carries the same enthusiasm about with him in Königsberg and Riga;
we can imagine that the more serious side of him had some difficulty
in developing in such an environment as a fourth-rate operatic and
theatrical troupe. While in Magdeburg he writes a short article on
"Dramatic Song," in which he returns to the thesis of three years
before, though with more wisdom. "Why," he asks, "cannot we Germans
see that we are not the possessors of everything; why cannot we openly
and freely admit that the Italian is superior to the German in Song,
and the Frenchman superior to him in the light and animated treatment
of operatic music? Can he not oppose to these his deeper science, his
more thorough culture, and above all the happy faculty that makes it
possible for him easily to make the advantages of the Italians and the
French his own, whereas they will never be able to acquire ours? The
Italians are singers by nature. The less richly-endowed German can
hope to emulate the Italian only by hard study." Wagner rightly points
out that no artist can hope to achieve full expression of himself
without a technique that has become second nature to him. It was the
acquirement by Mozart of this technique in his childhood that gave his
mature music its incomparable ease and finish, while there was always
a certain awkwardness about Weber, owing to his having begun late and
learned his technique during the years when he was actually practising
his art. Without perfect vocal technique, the highest kind of dramatic
expression is impossible. The great Schröder-Devrient, the finest
operatic artist in Germany, was at one time within an ace of giving up
her career as a singer, so great was the strain on her voice through
a faulty production; but she studied hard on the right Italian lines,
with the result that she can now sing the most trying parts without
the slightest fatigue.[299] All this is sensible enough--so sensible,
indeed, that Wagner could repeat it thirty years later in his "Report
upon a proposed German School of Music for Munich." But that the nimble
and relatively superficial Italian music still exercised something of
its old fascination upon him is shown by another article of the same
year on Bellini. Here, while admitting that a good deal of Italian
music is poor stuff, and that the forms and tricks of the Bellinian
opera are things only too easy to imitate, he yet lauds Bellini's
melody at the expense of that of the Germans, and his simplicity at the
expense of their clumsy erudition. "The German connoisseur of music,"
he says, "listens to one of Bellini's operas with the spectacles off
his tired-out eyes," giving himself wholly up for once to "delight in
lovely Song";[300] he evidently feels "a deep and ardent longing for
a full deep breath, to win ease of being at one stroke, to get rid
of all the stew of prejudice and pedantry that has so long compelled
him to be a German connoisseur of music--to become instead a man at
last, glad, free, and endowed with every glorious organ for perceiving
beauty of every kind, no matter in what form it reveals itself." He
has been enchanted by "the limpid melody, the simple, noble, lovely
Song of Bellini. It is surely no sin to confess this and to believe in
it; perhaps even it would not be a sin if before we went to sleep we
were to pray Heaven that some day German composers might achieve such
melodies and such an art of handling song. Song, Song, and yet again
Song, ye Germans!"
We see again his temporary lack of sympathy with the richer German
style in a passage like the following, which reads like one of the less
intelligent criticisms of his own later music:
"When we consider the boundless disorder, the medley of forms, periods
and modulations of so many of the new German opera composers, by which
we are prevented from enjoying many an isolated piece of beauty, we
often might wish to see this ravelled skein put in order by means of
that stable Italian form.[301] As a matter of fact, the instantaneous
clear apprehension of a whole dramatic passion is made much easier
when, along with all its connected feelings and emotions, it is cast
into one lucid intelligent melody at a single stroke, than when it
is muddled up with a hundred little commentaries, with this and that
harmonic nuance, this and that instrumental interpolation, till in the
end it is subtilised out of existence."[302]
It was his "zeal and fervour for modern Italian and French opera,"
in fact, that procured for him the conductorship at Riga, where
the Director, Holtei, was all for the lighter and more frivolous
music.[303] At Riga Wagner met his old Leipzig mentor, Heinrich Dorn,
who was, he says, surprised to see his former pupil, "the eccentric
Beethoven worshipper, transformed into a partisan of Bellini and
Adam."[304] The reaction, however, was coming fast. At Riga he seems
to have passed through one of those spiritual crises that are not
uncommon with artists of his many-sided temperament. The loneliness
of Riga, he says, gave him an anxious feeling of homelessness, which
developed into a passionate longing to escape from the turbid whirl of
theatrical life. "The levity with which in Magdeburg I had both let my
musical taste degenerate and had allowed myself to take pleasure in
the most frivolous theatrical society, gradually faded away under the
influence of this longing."[305] A bass aria which he interpolated into
Winter's _Schweizerfamilie_ was "of a devotional character," and "bore
witness to the great transformation that was taking place in my musical
development."[306] In the winter of 1838 he derived much benefit from
the study of Méhul's _Joseph in Egypt_ for the theatre. "Its noble and
simple style, along with the moving effect of the music, contributed
not a little to the favourable turn in my taste, which had been sadly
debauched by my theatrical work."[307] At the same time he grew weary
of the Bohemianism that had attracted him so strongly at Magdeburg, and
consequently he got more and more out of touch with the actors and the
management.
His weariness of it all culminated in a secret resolve to be quit
of this kind of life as soon as possible. The deliverance was to be
effected by his new opera, _Rienzi_.[308] He deliberately planned the
opera on a scale so large that he would necessarily have to seek a
better stage than that of Riga for its production. Everything conspired
at the time to deepen his sense of the seriousness of things, and to
make him loathe himself for having so long worshipped false gods both
in art and in life. Matrimonial troubles crowded thick and fast upon
him, and he lost his favourite sister, Rosalie, by death. In March
1839 he was dismissed from his post at the Riga theatre. Penniless
as he was, he welcomed the discharge as the first step towards his
redemption. To Paris he would go, and in Paris make his fortune: of
that he had no doubt.
III
The miseries of his two years and a half in Paris are known to
every reader of his life. Penury, deceptions, degradations, however,
could not break him either intellectually or morally. A temperament
so elastic as his could never be crushed, and least of all when it
was young. He himself has told us of the amazement his associates
expressed at the toughness and resilience of his spirit. But the fire
he passed through in those dreadful days purified him as an artist.
It was not alone the failure to get _Rienzi_ accepted at the Paris
Opéra that caused him to turn away in disgust from the hollow world of
make-believe around him; visions were coming to him of shining deeds
to be done, of untried possibilities in music. As usual with him, an
external event brought all his faculties and desires swiftly into
the one focus. In the winter of 1839 he heard a number of rehearsals
and a performance of the Ninth Symphony at the Conservatoire, under
Habeneck. The interpretation, he says, was so perfect that "in a stroke
the picture I had had of the wonderful work in the days of my youthful
enthusiasm, and that had been effaced by the murderous performance
of it given by the Leipzig Orchestra under the worthy Pohlenz, now
rose up again before me in such clearness that it seemed as if I
could grasp it with my hands. Where formerly I had seen nothing but
mystic constellations and soundless magical shapes, there was now
poured out, as from innumerable springs, a stream of inexhaustible
and heart-compelling melody. The whole period of the degradation of
my taste, which really began with my confusion as to the expression
in Beethoven's later works, and had been so aggravated by my numbing
association with the dreadful theatre, now fell away from me as into
an abyss of shame and remorse. If this inner change had been preparing
in me for some years--more particularly as a consequence of my painful
experiences--it was the inexpressible effect of the Ninth Symphony,
performed in a way I had hitherto had no notion of, that gave real life
to my new-won old spirit; and so I compare this--for me--important
event with the similarly decisive impression made on me, when I was a
boy of sixteen, by the Fidelio of Schröder Devrient."[309]
The _Autobiographical Sketch_ which he wrote for Laube's _Zeitung
für die elegante Welt_ in 1842, after his settling in Dresden, ends
with these words: "As regards Paris itself I was now without prospects
there for some years: so I left it in the spring of 1842. For the first
time I saw the Rhine: with great tears in his eyes the poor artist
swore eternal fidelity to his German fatherland." It was indeed the
prodigal's return: the service that Paris did him was to make him a
better German and so a better artist. Seen from a distance, Paris had
once glittered before his dazzled eyes as a symbol of liberalism and
freedom. Seen at too close quarters, Germany had laid itself bare to
him in all its littlenesses, its stuffy provinciality. Now he saw
them both from another angle. Paris was about him in all the cold
brutality it can show to the stranger, the helpless, the penniless:
its heart seemed to the eager young musician as hard as the stones of
its streets. And he saw his native country as all exiles see theirs,
with its asperities toned down, its little parochialisms hidden from
view, and a certain kindly haze of idealism over all. It is with German
affairs that he occupies himself as far as he can in the articles he
writes at this time to keep the domestic pot boiling. The essay _On
German Music_ (1840) is very touching in its wistful little visions
of tiny, cosy German towns, each with its circle of humble musicians
roughly but lovingly wooing their art in their own simple, honest way.
The lonely and homesick German artist has his quiet revenge upon Paris
in the delightfully humorous and satirical article upon the ludicrous
French perversion of _Der Freischütz_ at the Opéra.[310] Beethoven
is much in his mind: he begins the attempt to fathom the secret of
Beethoven's power, to grasp the profoundly logical workings of his
music, and to take his own bearings with regard to sundry æsthetic
questions, such as "painting" in music, the reading of poetical ideas
into purely instrumental works, the relations between vocal and
instrumental music, and so on. His views upon Beethoven were far ahead
of those of his contemporaries, to whom, indeed, they must have been
in large part unintelligible. He was beginning to realise dimly that
out of the Beethovenian melody he could himself beget a new art-work.
In _A Pilgrimage to Beethoven_ he puts his own views of opera into
the mouth of his predecessor. He has apparently already conceived the
idea that instrumental music had come to the end of its resources with
Beethoven, that music could in the future renew its vitality only by
being "fertilised by poetry," and that the ideal music drama will be
continuous in tissue. "Were I to make an opera after my own heart," he
makes Beethoven say, "people would run away from it: for it would have
no arias, duets, trios, or any of the other stuff with which operas are
patched up to-day: and what I would put in the place of these no singer
would sing and no audience would listen to. They all know nothing but
glittering lies, brilliant nonsense and sugared tedium. Anyone who
should write a real music drama would be taken for a fool." And the old
composer proceeds to outline the theory of the relation between words
and music that is made so familiar to us in Wagner's later writings.
"The instruments represent the primal organs of Creation and Nature:
what they express can never be clearly defined and settled, for they
reproduce the primal feelings themselves as they emerged from the
chaos of the first creation, when probably there was not one human
being to take them up into his heart. It is quite otherwise with the
genius of the human voice: this represents man's heart and its definite
(_abgeschlossen_) individual emotion. Its character is therefore
restricted, but definite and clear. Now bring these two elements
together, unite them! Set against the wild-wandering, illimitable
primal feeling, represented by the instruments, the clear definite
emotion of the human heart, represented by the voice. The incoming of
this second element will smooth and soothe the conflict of the primal
feelings, will turn their flood into a definite, united course: while
the human heart itself, taking up into itself those primal feelings,
will be infinitely strengthened and expanded, and capable of feeling
clearly its earlier indefinite presage of the Highest now transformed
into god-like consciousness."[311]
IV
It has often been pointed out that the subjects of all Wagner's
dramas were conceived by him before his fortieth year. It is equally
true that virtually the whole of the æsthetic theories of his later
life were immanent in him from the days of his Parisian sojourn, and
needed only to be brought into clearer outline by the thought and the
practice of the 'forties and 'fifties. In the essay on _Beethoven_
(1870) he insists that it is the human character of the voice, rather
than the mere sentiment the voice is used to express, that gives the
choral ending of the Ninth Symphony its tremendous significance.
"Thus," he says, "with even what we have just called the ordaining will
that led him to this melody" (_i.e._ the great melody of the final
movement) "we see the master steadily remaining in music,--the idea of
the world:[312] for in truth it is not the meaning of the Word that
engages us at this entry of the human voice, but the character of the
voice itself. Nor is it the thought expressed in Schiller's verses that
henceforth occupies us, but the intimate timbre of the choral song, in
which we feel ourselves invited to join, and so take part as a kind
of congregation in an ideal divine service, as was the case at the
entry of the chorale in the 'Passions' of Bach. It is quite evident,
especially with regard to the main melody, that Schiller's words have
been tacked on arbitrarily (_nothdürftig_) and with little skill: for
this melody had first of all unfolded itself in all its breadth before
us as a thing in itself, given to the instruments alone, and there had
filled us with a nameless feeling of joy in a paradise regained."[313]
The same idea is seen in embryo in _A Pilgrimage to Beethoven_. "If men
are to sing, they must have words. Yet who is capable of expressing
in words the poetry that should form the basis of such a union of
all the elements? The poem must of necessity be something inferior
(_zurückstehen_), for words are too weak an organ for such a task.--You
will soon meet with a new composition of mine, which will remind you of
what I have just been descanting upon. It is a symphony with choruses.
I ask you to observe how difficult it was for me to get over the
inadequacy of the poetical art that I had called in to my aid. I have
fully resolved to make use of our Schiller's beautiful hymn 'To Joy';
it is in any case a noble and uplifting poem, even if far from giving
voice to what, in sooth, in this connection, no verses in the world
could say."[314]
Here we light upon one of the fundamental principles of the Wagnerian
æsthetic. Wagner did not set words to music: the words were merely
the projection of an already conceived musical emotion into the
sphere of speech.[315] There is in most musicians a certain amount of
correspondence and interplay between the poetic and musical factors.
With some composers the musical thought, having begun and completed
itself along its own lines and according to its own laws, turns
half appealingly, half condescendingly, to words for a title or an
elucidation, as was often the case with Schumann. With others, as with
Bach and Hugo Wolf and Strauss, the word, written or implied, is the
generator of the musical idea. It would be the very midsummer madness
of æsthetics to attempt to decide which is the more purely "musical"
of these two types of mind. Neither of them is "the" musical mind, any
more than Shakespeare's or Milton's or Browning's or Blake's or Pope's
or Swinburne's is "the" poetical mind. It is only the most superficial
of psychologists and æstheticians who can regard any human faculty
as wholly cut off from the rest. Our perceptions of sight, of taste,
of touch, of hearing, are inextricably inter-blended, as is shown by
our constantly expressing one set of sensations in terms of another,
as when we speak of the colour of music, the height, or depth, or
thickness, or clarity, or muddiness of musical tone. In every poet
there is something of the painter and the musician: in every musician,
something of the poet and painter: in every painter, something of the
musician and poet.[316] The character of the man's work will depend
upon the strength or weakness of the tinge that is given to his own
special art by the relative strength or weakness of the infusion of one
or more of the other arts. In composers like Bach, Wagner, Berlioz,
Schubert, Wolf, and Strauss the eye is constantly transmitting very
definite impression to the brain, with the result that their music
readily leans to realistic suggestion: on a composer like Brahms the
actualities of the visible, mobile world make comparatively little
impression.[317] No one of these types is _per se_ any better than the
rest, or has any more right than his fellows to arrogate to himself the
title of "pure" musician. We must just accept them all as branches of
the one great tree.
It is no paradox to say that though Wagner was irresistibly impelled to
express himself in the form of opera he was by nature an instrumental
composer of the line of Bach and Beethoven. It is the orchestra that
always bears the main burden of expression in his later works. His
ideal was a stream of endless melody in the orchestra, to the moods of
which the words give a definiteness unattainable by music alone. And
so, just as he did not "set words to music" in the ordinary way, so
he did not set poetic ideas to music in the ordinary way. No man was
ever more prompt to interpret great musical works in terms of poetry or
life, as anyone may see by reading his elucidations of the Beethoven
symphonies or the great C sharp minor quartet. But it is important to
remember, if we are not to misunderstand him utterly, that he never
supposed that the music was developed consciously out of any such
poetic scheme as our fantasy may read into it. The music grew out of
the spirit of music, and only rouses a poetic vision in us because it
is the generalised expression of many particular visions of the kind.
This conception of music was rooted in him from his earliest days of
maturity, as we may see from the article _A Happy Evening_, which he
wrote in Paris in 1841. The narrator of the story is discussing with
a friend--evidently intended for Wagner himself--a concert at which
they have just heard performances of Mozart's Symphony in E flat and
Beethoven's in A. The question arises as to what it is that Beethoven
has expressed. The friend, who is designated R., objects energetically
to an arbitrary romance being foisted upon the symphony:
"It is unfortunate that so many people give themselves useless trouble
to confuse musical speech with poetical speech, and to make one of them
supplement or replace the other where, in their limited view, this
is incomplete. It remains true once for all that music begins where
speech leaves off. Nothing is more intolerable than the preposterous
pictures and stories that people imagine to be at the basis of those
instrumental works. What quality of mind and feeling is displayed when
the hearer of a Beethoven symphony can only keep his interest in it
alive by imagining that the musical flood is the reproduction of the
plot of some romance? These people in consequence often grumble at
the great master when some unexpected stroke disturbs the even tenour
of the little tale they have foisted on the work: they reproach the
composer with unclearness and disconnectedness, and lament his lack of
coherency. Oh the ninnies!"
R. is afterwards careful to explain that he has no objection to
each hearer associating the music, as he hears it, with any moods or
episodes he likes out of his own experience. All he objects to is the
audience having the terms of the poetic association dictated to them
by the musical journalists. "I should like to tear the hair from their
silly heads when they stuff this stupid nonsense into honest people,
and so rob them of all the ingenuousness with which they would have
otherwise have given themselves up to hearing Beethoven's symphony.
Instead of abandoning themselves to their natural feelings, the poor
deluded people of full heart but feeble head think themselves obliged
to follow the course of some village wedding, a thing of which they
probably know nothing at first hand, and in place of which they would
certainly have been much more likely to imagine something quite
different, something from the circle of their own experience.... I hold
that no one stereotyped interpretation is admissible. Definitely as
the purely musical edifice stands complete and rounded in the artistic
proportions of a Beethoven symphony, perfect and indivisible as it
appears to the higher sense, just so is it impossible to reduce the
effects of the work on the human heart to one authoritative symbol.
This is more or less the case with the creations of the other arts:
how diversely will one and the same picture, one and the same drama,
affect diverse individuals, and even the same individual at different
times! And yet how much more definitely and positively the painter
or the poet must draw his figures than the instrumental composer,
who is not bound, like them, to model his form by the appearances
of the everyday world, but who has at his disposal an immeasurable
realm in a super-terrestrial kingdom, and to whose hand is given the
most spiritual of substances--tone! But it is degrading to this high
office of the musician to force him to make him fit his inspiration
to the appearances of the everyday world; and still more would the
instrumental composer deny his mission, or expose his own weakness, who
should try to carry the restricted proportions of merely worldly things
into the realm of his own art."[318]
"In instrumental music," he said in later life, "I am a
_Réactionnaire_, a conservative. I dislike everything that requires
a verbal explanation beyond the actual sounds."[319] In the light
of this declaration, and of the æsthetic doctrines he expounds in
the article _On Franz Liszt's Symphonic Poems_ and elsewhere, it is
interesting to see him setting forth the same doctrine of music as
early as 1840. In _A Happy Evening_ R. lays it down that he rejects all
tone-painting, except when it is used in jest or to reproduce purely
musical phenomena.[320] He further dissents from his friend's theory
that whereas Mozart's symphonies came from nothing but a purely inward
musical source, Beethoven may have "first of all conceived and worked
out the plan of a symphony according to a certain philosophical idea,
before he left it to his imagination to invent the musical themes." The
friend adduces the _Eroica_ Symphony in support of this contention.
"You know that it was at first intended that this symphony should bear
the title 'Bonaparte.' Can you deny, then, that Beethoven was inspired
to this gigantic work, and the plan of it decided, by an idea outside
the realm of music?"
R. sweeps his friend off his feet with the vehemence of his reply. The
_Eroica_ Symphony, he contends, is not a translation into music of the
petty details of Napoleon's first Italian campaign. Nowhere does the
work suggest that the composer has had his eye on any special episode
in the general's career. No realistic explanation of this kind can be
made to square with the Funeral March, the Scherzo with the hunting
horns, or the Finale with its soft, emotional Andante. "Where is the
bridge of Lodi, where the battle of Arcola, where the march to Leoben,
where the victory under the Pyramids, where the 18th Brumaire? Are
these not incidents which no composer of our day would have passed by
had he been writing a biographical symphony on Bonaparte?" Then R.
gives his own theory of the genesis of such a work as the _Eroica_.
What stimulates the musician to composition in the first place is a
purely musical mood: it may have come from either an inner or an outer
experience, but it is wholly musical in essence and in its manner of
expression. "But the grand passions and enduring emotions that dominate
the current of our feelings and ideas for months or for half a year,
it is these that urge the musician to those ampler, more comprehensive
concepts to which we owe, among others, the origin of a _Sinfonia
eroica_. These great moods, as deep suffering of soul or mighty
exaltation, may derive from outer events, for we are human beings and
our fate is ruled by external circumstances: but when they impel the
musician to production these great moods have already turned to music
within him, so that in the moment of creative inspiration it is no
longer the outer events that guide and govern the composition, but the
musical emotion that this event has generated." We may imagine that the
republican Beethoven's emotional nature had been fired by the career
and character of Napoleon. "He was no general,--he was a musician: and
in his own domain he saw the spirit in which he could accomplish the
equivalent of what Bonaparte had accomplished on the plains of Italy."
The product of this passionate yearning for self-realisation was the
_Eroica_ Symphony, "and as he knew well to whom he owed the impulse
to this gigantic work, he inscribed the name of Bonaparte on the
title-page. Yet not a single feature of the development of the symphony
can be said to have an immediate outer connection with the fate of the
hero."[321]
V
Of even more importance than the article _A Happy Evening_ in the
story of Wagner's development is the essay on _The Overture_ that
appeared in the _Gazette Musicale_ in January 1841,--that is to say,
a couple of months after the completion of _Rienzi_, and nearly six
months before the commencement of the _Flying Dutchman_. Here he
anticipates some of the æsthetic he was afterwards to expound so
eloquently and so convincingly in the great article on Beethoven
and elsewhere. He begins with a survey of the early history of the
Overture. There had always been, apparently, a reluctance to plunging
the spectator forthwith into the opera, just as in earlier times a
prologue had always preceded the play. The prologue, however, had
this at any rate to be said for it, that it summarised the action of
the coming play, and in this and other ways prepared the spectator
to listen more intelligently. The early Overture, however, could not
do this, for at that time the psychological powers of music were not
sufficiently developed to permit of the summarising in a few minutes
of the actions and the motives of an opera. It became a conventional,
not a characteristic prelude. Later on a regular "Overture form" was
elaborated, but even this was psychologically impotent. What connection
has the overture to the _Messiah_, for example, with the oratorio
itself? Would it not serve equally well as prelude to a hundred others
of the old oratorios or operas? Practically the only method of musical
development these composers had at their service was the fugal: it was
impossible for them to work out an extended musical piece by means of
ever-widening circles of pure feeling.
Next came a tripartite form of overture,--an opening and closing
movement in quicker time, with an intermediate section in slower time
and of softer character. This gave a certain amount of opportunity
for the presentation of one or two of the main moods or episodes
or characters of the opera: and in the "Symphony" that introduces
the _Seraglio_, Mozart has given us a little masterpiece in this
_genre_. But there was a certain helplessness in the division of the
"Symphony" into three sections, and in the predetermined nature of
their contents: and in course of time there was evolved the operatic
overture proper,--a continuous musical piece, making a sort of dramatic
play with the main motives of the opera. This was the form with which
Gluck and Mozart worked such wonders. Gluck's masterpiece is the
overture to _Iphigenia in Aulis_: Mozart's, those to the _Magic Flute_,
_Figaro_, and _Titus_. According to Wagner, Mozart's merit was that he
did not attempt to express in his overture all the details of the plot,
but "fastened with his poet's eye on the leading idea of the drama,
divested it of all its inessentials and material accidentiæ, and set
it forth as a musically transfigured creation, a passion personified
in tones, and presented it to the main idea as the justificatory
counterpart of this,--a something through which the idea, and even
the dramatic action itself, became intelligible to the spectator's
feeling." At the same time the overture became a self-contained
tone-piece,--this being true even of an overture like that to _Don
Giovanni_, which runs without any formal close into the first scene
of the opera. This form of overture became the property of Cherubini
and Beethoven. The former remained mostly faithful to the transmitted
type, which Beethoven also used in the E major overture to _Fidelio_.
But Beethoven in time broke through the cramping limitations of this
form. His "prodigious dramatic instinct," having never found the opera
into which it could pour the whole of itself, turned for an outlet to
instrumental music pure and simple,--to the field in which he could
"shape in his own way the drama of his desire out of pure tone-images,"
a drama "set free from the petty trimmings of the timorous playwright."
The result of this effort was the great _Leonora_ overture, which, "far
from giving us a musical introduction to the drama, really sets that
drama before us more completely and more affectingly than the ensuing
broken action does. This work is no longer an overture, but itself the
mightiest of dramas."[322]
Weber too is commended for making his overtures dramatic "without
losing and wasting himself in a painful depiction of insignificant
accessories of the plot." Even when his rich fantasy led him to
incorporate more subsidiary musical motives than the form transmitted
to him could conveniently carry, he always managed to preserve the
dramatic unity of his conception. He invented a new form, that of
the "dramatic fantasia," of which the _Oberon_ overture is one of
the finest examples. "Nevertheless," says Wagner,--and here again
we see his rooted antipathy to anything in the nature of excessive
detail-painting in music[323]--"it is not to be denied that the
independence of purely musical production must suffer by subordination
to a dramatic thought, if this thought is not seized in one broad trait
consistent with the spirit of music,--for the composer who tries to
depict the details of the action itself cannot develop his dramatic
theme without breaking his musical work to fragments." The inevitable
ending of this style of overture is the _pot-pourri_,--a form of which
Spontini's overture to the _Vestale_ may be said to have been the
beginning. The public liked this kind of thing because it dished up for
them again the most effective snatches of melody from the operas.
The summing up is that the ideal form and ideal achievement are
those of the _Don Giovanni_ and _Leonora_ overtures. In the former no
attempt is made to reproduce the course of the drama itself step by
step: the drama is freshly conceived as the contest between two broad
principles--the arrogance of Don Giovanni and the anger of a higher
power--and "the invention, as well as the conduct," of these symbolic
motives "belongs quite unmistakably to no other province than that of
music." Beethoven's method in the _Leonora_ overture, on the other
hand, is "to concentrate in all its noble unity the _one_ sublime
action which, in the drama itself, is weakened and impeded by the
necessity of padding it out with trivial details,--to show this action
in its ideal new motion, nourished only by its inner impulses." This
"ideal action" is, of course, the loving self-sacrifice of Leonora.
But by reason of its very greatness and its intense dramatic quality,
the _Leonora_ overture ceases to be an _overture_ in the proper sense
of the word. It anticipates too fully the completed drama: if it is
not understood by the hearer, because of his lack of knowledge of the
opera, it conveys only a fragment of its real message to him: if it is
wholly understood, it weakens his subsequent enjoyment of the drama
itself.
Wagner therefore returns to the overture to _Don Giovanni_ as the
ideal, because here "the leading thought of the drama is worked out
in a purely musical, not a dramatic, form." In this way the musician
"most surely attains the general artistic aim of the overture, which
is simply an ideal prologue, transporting us into that higher sphere
in which to prepare our mind for the drama." The musical conception
of the main idea of the drama can still be distinctly worked out and
brought to a definite close; in fact "the overture should form a
musical art-work complete in itself." No better model could be had
than Gluck's overture to _Iphigenia in Aulis_. In a word, though the
overture must not attempt to reproduce stage by stage all the episodes
of the story, it can suggest in its own way the dramatic contest of two
main principles by a contest between two symbolic musical ideas: only
the working-out of these musical ideas must follow from the nature of
the themes themselves. But it must be always borne in mind--and the
frequency with which Wagner returns to this point shows the importance
he attached to it--that "the working-out must always take its rise from
the purely musical significance of the themes: never should it take
account of the course of events in the drama itself, for this would at
once destroy the sole effective character of a piece of music."
As I have already pointed out, this and one or two of the other
articles of the Paris time are interesting because they show us
the mature æsthetics of the 'sixties and 'seventies trying to find
expression in the young Wagner of 1840. To most of the principles here
laid down he remained faithful, as we shall see, to the end of his
days. But it is interesting also to note that though theoretically he
always remained constant to the guiding principles he here lays down
for the overture, his practice by no means always conformed to them.
His ideal overture, as we have just seen, was one of the type of that
to _Don Giovanni_ or that to _Iphigenia in Aulis_--_i.e._ one that
either made no use at all of thematic material from the opera itself,
or the minimum use of it, the dramatic conflict of the stage action
being fought out ideally, as it were, in the overture, in the persons
of two symbolic musical themes. "In this conception of the overture,"
he says, "the highest task would be to reproduce the characteristic
idea of the drama by means pure and simple (_mit den eigentlichen
Mitteln_) of self-subsistent (_selbstständigen_) music, and to conduct
it to a conclusion which should correspond, by anticipation, with the
solution of the problem in the scenic play."
It is difficult to square his practice in some of his own overtures
with the theoretical principles he here lays down. Not one of
his overtures corresponds with the form he so greatly admired
in the overtures to _Don Giovanni_ and _Iphigenia in Aulis_,--a
re-presentation of the coming dramatic conflict in terms of a musical
piece that made no drafts at all, or practically none, upon the
thematic material of the opera itself. The brief Prelude to _Lohengrin_
comes under no suspicion of being a _pot-pourri_ of motives from
the opera; but then it achieves its concision and its singular air
of detachment from anything in the nature of mere story-telling in
music by failing to do just what Mozart and Gluck are commended for
doing--summing up the ensuing dramatic conflict by the opposition of
two main musical moods and their final resolution. The _Lohengrin_
Prelude tells us nothing of any dramatic contest,--not even that
which rages in the heart of Elsa. It shows us only Lohengrin, the
representative of the Grail, coming to earth and leaving it again.
There is no hint of the reason for his return to Monsalvat: there is
no hint even that his stay on earth has been in any degree troubled by
enemies or evil. Beautiful as it is, therefore, and eloquently as it
sings of Lohengrin himself, the Prelude is not in the full sense of
the word a real prelude to the drama. On the other hand, when Wagner
_does_ make his overture a genuine introduction to, and instrumental
summary of, the opera, he inevitably approaches the _pot-pourri_. It
is true that his fine sense of form mostly saves him from attempting
to reproduce in the overture _all_ the dramatic or thematic motives
of the opera. In the _Flying Dutchman_ overture, for example, there
is no reference to Erik: so far as the overture itself is concerned,
no such person might have ever come into the lives of Senta and the
Dutchman. There is no mention of Daland, and no reference to the
spinning scene--the latter a musical motive that, it is safe to say,
none of the French or Italian writers of overtures, or perhaps even
Weber himself, would have had the heart to set aside. On the whole
the _Flying Dutchman_ overture is concerned simply with the Dutchman,
his curse and his grief, with Senta, and with the sea that forms the
imaginative background to their drama:[324] and though of course the
overture is entirely built up of thematic material derived from the
opera, this is all so freshly and imaginatively treated, and made into
so coherent and organic a piece of instrumental music, that, though
the overture is by no means of the type of those to _Don Giovanni_ and
_Iphigenia in Aulis_, which Wagner praised as models, nothing could
be further removed from the old-style _pot-pourri_. The overtures to
_Tannhäuser_ and the _Meistersinger_, however, must frankly be called
_pot-pourris_,--though _pot-pourris_ of genius. In the _Tannhäuser_
overture we are given not merely an instrumental symbol of the drama,
but the drama itself compressed into a sort of feuilleton. The ground
covered is so vast, and the expression so intense, that at the end of
the overture we are inclined to ask ourselves whether it has not, like
the great _Leonora_ overture, made a good deal of the ensuing drama
almost superfluous, a mere padding out or watering down of the emotions
and the spiritual oppositions set before us with such drastic power in
the overture itself. One is inclined to say that an overture lasting
nearly a quarter of an hour is not so much the door to a mansion as
a cottage in itself. A work like the _Tannhäuser_ overture has its
justification as a kind of symphonic poem for the concert room; it has
little justification as a prelude to a drama in the theatre.
In any case a piece of prolonged story-telling of this kind is
not what Wagner had in his mind when he wrote the article on _The
Overture_: it is not too much to say, indeed, that it is the very type
of musical introduction he expressly wished to bar. It is true that
he advises the composer who wishes to make his overture "reproduce
the characteristic idea of the drama by means pure and simple of
self-subsistent music, and to conduct it to a conclusion which shall
correspond, by anticipation, with the solution of the problem in the
scenic play," to give the introductory instrumental piece some thematic
connection with the opera. But not, be it observed, by utilising
long stretches of this material, as is done in the _Tannhäuser_
overture. Wagner's advice to the composer is "to introduce into the
characteristic motives of his overture certain melismic or rhythmic
features that are of importance in the dramatic action itself--not
features, however, strewn accidentally among the action, but such as
play a decisively weighty part in it, characteristics that determine,
as it were, the orientation of a human action on a specific _terrain_,
and so give an individual stamp to the overture. These features must
of course be purely musical in their nature, _i.e._ such motives
from the world of tone as have a relation to human life. I would
cite as excellent examples the trombone blasts of the Priests in the
_Magic Flute_, the trumpet signal in the _Leonora_, and the call of
the magic horn in _Oberon_. These musical motives from the opera,
employed in advance in the overture, serve, when introduced there at
the decisive moment, as veritable points of contact of the dramatic
with the musical motion, and effect a happy individualisation of the
tone-piece, which is intended to be a mood-defining introduction to a
particular dramatic subject."[325] The ideal overture that Wagner had
in his mind at this time was evidently something very different from
the one he subsequently wrote for _Tannhäuser_: but the discrepancy
between his theory and his practice is still more strikingly shown by a
sentence that appears in the French version of the article but not in
the German. In the French, the passage quoted above, commencing with
the words "these features must of course be purely musical in their
nature," was prefaced by the following: "But one should never forget
that they [_i.e._ "the melismic or rhythmical features" from the opera
that were to be interwoven into the tissue of the overture] should be
entirely musical in their source, and not borrow their significance
from the words that accompany them in the opera. The composer would
in this case commit the error of sacrificing both himself and the
independence of his art to the intervention of an alien art. These
elements, I say, must be in their nature purely musical, and I would
cite as examples," &c.
It is at once evident that this bars out whole passages such as the
Pilgrims' Chorus, The Sirens' Chorus, and Tannhäuser's Hymn to Venus,
and, in the _Meistersinger_ overture, such passages as Sachs's final
address, the phrases in which the populace jeer at Beckmesser, &c.
Strictly speaking, indeed, neither of these overtures can be made
to square with Wagner's theoretical principles. The question of the
overture was one of those on which he never attained to complete
consistency. In _Tristan_, as in _Lohengrin_, he devotes himself
simply to working out in a broad form one great emotional motive of
the drama. The overtures to _Tannhäuser_ and the _Meistersinger_, and,
in a lesser degree, that to the _Flying Dutchman_, are a mixture of
the _pot-pourri_ and the symphonic poem. The Prelude to _Parsifal_
is again a sort of _pot-pourri_, though here, of course, there is no
attempt at story-telling in detail, the Prelude setting before us, as
Wagner himself said, the three motives of "Love, Faith and Hope," and
showing, as it were, the emotional outcome of them. To the _Rhinegold_
there is no overture, or even a Prelude in the formal sense of that
word: the long-drawn chord of E flat is merely the oral counterpart of
the visible sensation given the spectator by the Rhine. Similarly the
preludial bars to the _Valkyrie_ only paint the storm in which Siegmund
is flying from his enemies.
Even the greatest men and the boldest revolutionaries are fettered
in their thinking by the age in which they live. Only in this way can
we account for Wagner's failure to see that the true solution of the
problem of the overture was to abolish the overture. It had never any
real æsthetic justification. As he himself points out, it had its
origin simply in the fact that at one stage of the development of
opera the composer saw the necessity of keeping the audience occupied
in some way for a few minutes before it would be safe to raise the
curtain on the play. It is one more of the many illustrations that may
be cited of what may be called the dead hand in art,--the survival in
a new art of some method of procedure that had its origin under quite
other conditions. Pottery, for instance, continued for long to be
decorated with lines that were merely imitations in clay--unnecessary
imitations--of the designs and colours of the interlaced osiers out of
which the primitive vessel was made. The symphony developed out of the
custom of stringing certain dance movements into a suite: and in spite
of the clearly recognised fact that there is no logical justification
either in art or in life for casting the modern symphony into this
arbitrary four-movement form, composers still weakly adhere to it.
Wagner was fond of pointing out, again, how Beethoven's congenital
inability to break away from the sonata form of his day led to a clash
between this form and the purely dramatic, onward-urging impulse of
the great _Leonora_ overture. It is little wonder, therefore, that
Wagner was so far the slave of his epoch that it never occurred to
him, and least of all in 1841, to question the necessity of having
any overture at all. The freer thought of the present day has been
able either to reduce the overture to a few bars of prelude, simply
attuning the mind of the spectator to the coming scene, as in Debussy's
_Pelleas and Melisande_, or to dispense altogether with an instrumental
introduction, as in _Salome_ and _Elektra_.
VI
After the Paris articles of 1841 Wagner wrote little or nothing upon
the æsthetics of his art for some ten years. For a time, indeed, he
wrote practically no prose of any kind. He left Paris for Dresden in
April 1842. At the end of that year he wrote his _Autobiographical
Sketch_ for Laube's _Zeitung für die elegante Welt_. His pen was
then silent until 1844, in which year we have the _Account of the
bringing home of Weber's remains from London to Dresden_, and the
_Speech at Weber's Grave_. To 1846 belongs the programme he wrote
for the performance of Beethoven's choral symphony on Palm Sunday at
Dresden.[326] No doubt his duties at the Dresden Opera, which he seems
to have fulfilled with great thoroughness and conscientiousness, left
him little time for anything else but these and the composition of
_Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_. When he at length took up the pen again
it was not to expound a system of musical æsthetics but to preach a
social evangel, and to come to the first grips with the new dramatic
ideas that had been slowly maturing in him. In May 1848 he submits to
the Minister his _Project for the Organisation of a German National
Theatre for the Kingdom of Saxony_. In September he sketches two
operatic poems, _Siegfried's Death_ and _Friedrich Barbarossa_, the
former of which he works out in detail by November. Early in January
the religious drama _Jesus of Nazareth_ is sketched. In the summer of
1848 he writes the essay on the _Wibelungen_.
During these years his discontent with the social and political
conditions of the times had been slowly rising. Though it would be
unfair to Wagner to attribute this discontent solely to the miserable
circumstances of his own life, it is certain that his poverty, his
debts and his disappointments had a good deal to do with making him a
rebel against the established order of things. Mr. H. S. Chamberlain
holds that Wagner was already a "revolutionist against the artistic
world of the present" in Paris in 1840. It is quite possible, for
Wagner was even poorer in Paris at that time than he was a few years
later in Dresden. Gustav Levy agrees with Mr. Chamberlain, but even
his own sympathetic summary of the case unconsciously makes it clear
that Wagner's personal experiences and circumstances had something to
do with making a revolutionary of him. "Beginning of November (1847),
Wagner returns (from Berlin)[327] in a state of discouragement. The
incessant difficulties in the way of winning appreciation for his
works, and his consequently ever-increasing financial embarrassments,
as well as the persistent enmity of the press, the lack of support
he received from Meyerbeer, and the refusal of Lüttichau[328] to
take up his reform of the Opera, bring on an illness: he thinks of
suicide. Everything in him presses powerfully towards the _spiritual_
revolution, to the freeing of art from the fetters of un-German feeling
and conventional, deeply-rooted ignorance (_Unverstand_)."[329]
VII
The years 1848 to 1852 were for Wagner a long spell of intellectual and
spiritual indigestion; his too receptive brain was taking into itself
more impressions of all kinds than it could assimilate. Art and life,
opera and politics, called clamorously to him, and all at the same
time, deafening and confusing him. With _Lohengrin_ his second great
creative epoch, that had commenced with the _Flying Dutchman_, had
come to its perfect end. New ideas of music and drama were ripening
in him, but as yet he had no clear conception of their drift. He had
gradually become profoundly disgusted with the theatre, yet saw no
possible reformation of it except by way of a reformation of man and
society as a whole. So he became a revolutionist,--not for politics'
sake but for art's sake. To cooler heads than his own he seemed to
be drifting towards destruction. Minna saw clearly enough that his
views on politics were too idealistic to have any real bearing on the
practicalities of the day; and other sympathisers no doubt regretted
that the artist in him should be in danger of being ruined by the
politician.[330]
At first he thought it possible to reform the theatre from the inside:
and apparently nothing could surpass the zeal he showed in his work
at the opera house, or the sincerity of his desire to raise the music
of the town to the highest possible efficiency. In February 1846 he
drafted a scheme for the improvement of the orchestra, that runs to
nearly sixty pages of close print in the _Gesammelte Schriften_, and
leaves not the smallest practical detail untouched.[331] Two years
later he worked out his admirable scheme for the organisation of a
German National Theatre for the Kingdom of Saxony. Here again one is
struck by the practical nature of his genius.[332] But once more his
appeal fell on deaf ears.
His failure to interest the theatre authorities in his schemes for the
regeneration of the drama and music drove him deeper into politics.
Only from a new humanity, a new relationship between man and the
State, could come a clean and healthy and art-loving civilisation. In
June 1848 he made his famous "Vaterlandsverein" speech, that created
so many new enemies for him at the Court.[333] In February 1849 he
wrote an article on "Man and Existing Society"[334] for Roeckel's
_Volksblätter_, and in April one on "The Revolution" for the same
journal.[335] Each of these is a passionate cry of welcome to the
new era that he thought was dawning. "In the year 1848 began the war
of man's fight against existing society." For society as at present
constituted "is an attack on man: the ordering of existing society is
inimical to the destiny, the right of man.... Man's destiny is, through
the ever higher perfecting of his mental, moral, and bodily faculties,
to attain an ever higher, purer happiness. Man's right is, through the
ever higher perfecting of his mental, moral and bodily faculties, to
achieve the enjoyment of a constantly increasing, purer happiness."
But this can only be done by the union of all, not by the unit. "Men
therefore are not only entitled but bound to demand of society that it
shall lead them to ever higher, purer happiness through the perfecting
of their mental, moral and bodily faculties." The second of the essays
chants a dithyramb to the coming revolution. Volcano rumblings are to
be heard beneath the soil of all Europe; soon the great upheaval will
come. "The old world is crumbling to ruin; a new world will be born
from it." The artist burns with sympathy for the poor, the suffering,
the oppressed, and looks forward to a new civilisation, in which man
will be free and have joy of his labour. It is impossible not to be
moved to this day by the eloquence and passionate sincerity of his cry,
and the purity of his hopes.
But the end was near,--a very different end from the one anticipated by
this ardent soul. All hope of success faded before the Prussian rifles,
and on the 9th May the disillusioned idealist was in flight.
It was long, however, before the hopes and dreams of 1848 and 1849
finally forsook him. From his Swiss and Parisian exile he sent forth
two treatises--_Art and Revolution_ (written in June 1849), and the
_Art-Work of the Future_ (written in October of the same year),--in
which he voices once more his aspirations for a new humanity and a new
art.
VIII
In an interesting introduction that he wrote to _Art and Revolution_
when reprinting the essay in his collective works in 1872, Wagner
speaks of the influence of Feuerbach upon him at this time: in
Feuerbach's conception of art he thought he recognised his own artistic
ideal. What that ideal was is painted for us in full in the heated
pages of _Art and Revolution_.
His central point is the one to which he remained true his whole life
long,--that art should be the pure expression of a free community's
joy in itself; it should be accessible to all, and placed beyond the
necessity of maintaining itself by commercial means. He paints a fancy
picture of "the free Greek,"--a being evolved by Wagner out of his own
inner consciousness,--and elaborates the theory that the community as
a whole creates great art. "The tragedies of Æschylus and Sophocles
were the work of Athens." "The public art of the Greeks, which reached
its highest point in tragedy, was the expression of the deepest and
noblest consciousness of the people: with _us_ the deepest and noblest
of man's consciousness is the direct antithesis of this,--the denial of
our public art." The Greek tragedy was witnessed by the whole populace:
in our superior theatres only the well-to-do can watch the play. Among
the Greeks the production of a tragedy was a religious festival: in
the modern State art is only an amusement or a distraction for tired
people in the evening. The Greek was educated to make an artistic
whole of his body and his spirit; we are trained merely for industrial
gain. "Whereas the Greek artist found his reward in his own enjoyment
of the work of art, in its success, and in the public approval, the
modern artist is maintained--and _paid_. Thus we attain the clear
definition of the essential distinction between the two. Greek public
art was really _Art_; with us it is artistic _handicraft_." He admits
that the Greek freedom was the result of the State being founded on
slavery; but to-day _all_ are slaves together. "Our god is gold, our
religion the pursuit of wealth." With the Greeks, art lived in the
public conscience: with us it lives only in the conscience of private
individuals. "Greek art was therefore _conservative_, because it was a
worthy and adequate expression of the public conscience: with us, true
art is _revolutionary_, because it exists only in opposition to the
community in general." "This is art," he cries, "as it now fills the
whole civilised world. Its real essence is industry; its ethical aim
the gaining of gold; its æsthetic pretext the entertainment of bored
minds."
In _Art and Revolution_ we get the first hint of that "united
art-work" that was to occupy his mind so much during the succeeding
years.[336] He holds that "with the Greeks the perfect work of art,
the drama, was the sum and substance of all that could be expressed in
the Greek nature; it was--in intimate connection with its history--the
nation itself that stood facing itself in the art-work, that became
conscious of itself, and, during a few hours, rapturously devoured,
as it were, its own essence." With the later downfall of tragedy,
"art became less and less the expression of the public conscience:
the drama split up into its component parts,--rhetoric, sculpture,
painting, opera, &c., forsook the ranks in which they had formerly
moved together, and now went each its own way and pursued its own
development, self-sufficing, indeed, but lonely and egoistic." The
great "unified art-work" has been lost for us; only the dissevered arts
exist now. In each of them wonders have been wrought; "but the one true
art has never been born again, either in the Renaissance or since."
And only "the great revolution of mankind" can restore to us this
art-work. "If the Greek art-work comprehended the spirit of a beautiful
nation, the art-work of the future must comprehend the spirit of a free
humanity soaring above all barriers of race." The new art demands a
new mankind, and, as a preliminary, a return to nature. Man has been
destroyed by culture. The goal both of art and of the social impulse
must be "the strong and beautiful man, to whom _revolution_ shall give
his _strength_, and _art_ his _beauty_."
He looks forward to the time when man shall be free from care for
the material things of life, with which the collective wisdom of the
community will supply him; and "then will man's enfranchised energy
manifest itself only in artistic impulse." Every man will become
an artist, and the expression of the artistic emotion of the whole
community will be the drama. But art will not be practised for gain.
The theatre too must be freed from the greed of industrial speculation.
The care of the theatre will be the first concern of an emancipated and
enlightened community; it must be managed by "the whole body of the
artists themselves, who unite in the art-work and ensure the success
of their common efforts by proper co-operation." Admission to the
theatre must be free, the community recompensing the dramatists and the
performers.
The essay is written at a white heat throughout. His dreams are
unrealisable in any world that we can think of at present: but he
evidently believed in not only the possible but the speedy realisation
of them. In Dresden, in the days before the rising, he expounded them
enthusiastically to everyone he met. And he clung to them long after
his flight from Dresden. Though he thought nothing was now to be
achieved by working for reform, and that only by revolution could a new
heaven and a new earth be brought into being,[337] in the possibility
of this new heaven and earth he continued to believe. To Sulzer, in
Zürich, he "insisted in attaching to the artistic destiny of mankind
an importance far above that of any concern of the State."[338] Even
in 1851 he had not given up hope that the social revolution that would
bring with it the artistic revolution was near at hand. "I assumed that
there would soon come a huge revulsion with regard to the public and
indeed our whole social life; for the new resulting state of affairs
and its real needs I believed that the right material for a quite new
and instantaneous relationship of art to the public lay in the work I
had sketched so boldly." He saw that the political movement had been
crippled, but hoped all the more from the social movement, especially
in France. He counted on a great blow for freedom being struck in the
French presidential election of 1852. "The condition of the other
European States, in which every aspiration was suppressed with stupid
brutality, justified one in thinking that this state of affairs also
could not last very long anywhere, and everything seemed to be looking
towards the great decision that was to be taken in the following
year." Uhlig, as he says, argued against him: but nothing could shake
Wagner's faith. "Whenever we had to complain of any baseness, I always
pointed him to this hopeful and fateful year, my opinion being that we
should calmly wait for the expected upheaval, so that when no one else
should know what to do, we could make a start. I cannot measure how
deeply this hope had taken root in me; I soon, however, was forced to
recognise that the confident pride of my assumptions and affirmations
was largely due to the greatly increased excitement of my nerves. The
news of the _coup d'état_ of the 2nd December in Paris seemed to me
absolutely incredible: I was certain the world was coming to an end.
When the news was confirmed, and it became clear that events no one had
thought possible had happened and seemed likely to endure, I turned
away from the investigation of this enigmatic world, as one turns from
a mystery the fathoming of which no longer seems to be worth while."
So deep was his disappointment at the triumph of reaction that for a
little while his health was affected.[339]
IX
It was while he was still panting in the mists of idealism that he
wrote _The Art-Work of the Future_, in which the æsthetic ideas that
had been maturing in him during the latter part of the Dresden period
found their first full expression.
The basis of his theory is again the belief that we shall not have a
real art until we have a new and free humanity. "Man will never be
what he can and should be, until his life is a true mirror of nature,
a conscious following of the only real necessity, _the inner natural
necessity_, and not subjected to an _outer_, imaginary, and so not a
necessary but an arbitrary power." He is still vibrating with anger
against the politicians of the day, to whom he attributes all the evils
under the sun; and of course he idealises that mysterious abstraction
"the Folk," to whom he sings a rapturous pæan.[340] It is the Folk
alone that acts as Necessity dictates,--the Folk being defined as "the
sum of all those who feel a common need"; while opposed to the Folk
are all those "who feel no want," whose motive force is an artificial
and egoistic need, satisfaction for which they seek in luxury,--"which
can only be generated and maintained in opposition to and at the cost
of the sacrifices of the needy." These were not the views he held
upon luxury in later years, when he, one of the most luxurious-souled
of men, had the opportunity to satisfy his cravings for silk
dressing-gowns and lace shirts and other vanities of this world. His
fulminations against luxury are simply the eternal cry of the Have-nots
against the Haves.
He is, as always, discontented with the life and the art of his
day, both of which seem to him fundamentally false and artificial.
"The spirit, in its artistic striving for reunion with nature in
the art-work, must either look forward with hope to the future, or
mournfully practise resignation." He recognises that we can find
redemption only in the art-work that is physically present to the
senses (_nur im sinnlich gegenwärtigen Kunstwerke_), "thus only in a
truly art-needing, _i.e._ art-conditioning Present that shall bring
forth art from its own natural truth and beauty": that is to say, he
has faith in the power of Necessity, for which this work of the Future
is reserved.... "The great united art-work, that must embrace all
the _genres_ of art and in some degree undo [_verbrauchen_] each of
them in order to use it as a means to an end, to annul it in order to
attain the common aim of _all_, namely, the unconditioned, immediate
representation of perfected human nature,--this great united art-work
we cannot recognise as the arbitrary need of the individual, but only
as the inevitable [_nothwendig denkbare_] associated work of the
humanity of the future."[341]
He proceeds to elaborate his idea of this united art-work, though
the full exposition of it is only to be found in _Opera and Drama_.
With his Teutonic passion for categorisation, he divides man up into
neat mental parcels. The intellect has for its organ speech; the
organ of feeling is tone. Speech gives determination to the otherwise
indeterminate vocal tone: it is "the condensed element of the voice,
and the word is the consolidated measure of tone." The whole man is the
man of intellect (speech), heart (tone) and body (gesture). Thus the
three primeval intertwining sisters of art are Dance, Tone, and Poetry:
and true art is a union of the three. Such an art expresses all the
faculties of man, whereas the separate arts,--the art-varieties, as he
calls them,--only issue from and express this or that faculty. Art must
appeal to the eye. "Unless it communicates itself to the eye, all art
remains unsatisfying, and thus itself unsatisfied, unfree. No matter
how fully it may express itself to the ear, or merely to the combining
and mediately compensating faculty of thought [_das kombinierende,
mittelbar ersetzende Denkvermögen_], until it communicates itself
intelligibly to the eye it remains only a thing that _wills_, and
not yet fully _can_. Art, however, must _can_--it is from _können_
that art, in our language, has acquired the appropriate name of _Die
Kunst_."[342]
Each of the dissevered arts longs for reunion with the others, "Dance
longs to pass over into Tone, there to find herself again and know
herself; Tone in turn receives the marrowy frame of its structure
from the rhythm of Dance.... But Tone's most living flesh is the
human voice; the Word again is as it were the bony, muscular rhythm
of the human voice." Thus the emotion that overflowed from Dance
into Tone finds definition and certainty in the Word, and so is able
to reveal itself clearly. The union of these three is "the united
lyric art-work," of which the perfected form is the drama. Both the
music and the poetry of to-day are impotent. He looks forward to "the
overwhelming blow of fate that shall make an end of all the unwieldy
musical trash, to make room for the art-work of the future." Nor can
poetry alone create the genuine art-work, for no genuine art-work is
possible without an appeal to the eye. Poetry should be written to be
acted, not read. "The whole impenetrable medley of stored-up literature
is in truth--in spite of its million phrases--nothing but the toilsome
stammering of speech-impotent thought that longs to pass over into
natural immediacy,--a stammering that has been going on for centuries,
in verse and prose, without achieving the living Word." Shakespeare
was to the art-work of the future no more than Thespis was to the
perfected Greek drama. "The deed of the unique Shakespeare, which
made a universal man, a very god of him, is yet only the deed of the
solitary Beethoven, that revealed to him the language of the artistic
manhood of the future. Only where these two Prometheus,--Shakespeare
and Beethoven--shall reach out hands to one another; where the marble
creations of Phidias shall become living, moving flesh and blood; where
Nature, instead of being represented on a narrow canvas on the chamber
walls of the egoist, shall unfold herself luxuriantly on the ample
stage of the future, swept by the warm breath of life,--only then, in
the fellowship of his fellow artists, will the poet find redemption."
It is evident throughout that his theory is the product of his own
æsthetic bias. _He_ can express himself only in terms of poetry and
music on the stage; it is therefore illegitimate for any other artist
to adopt any other medium of expression. Poetry without music, music
without poetry, cannot satisfy _him_; therefore no one else has any
right to be satisfied with either of these arts separately. The truth
is that he was utterly insensitive to the peculiar qualities in each
of the separate arts that constitute its special charm for those who
practise it exclusively. When he was in Milan in 1859 he suddenly
realised, he tells us, that he was "no good as a judge of pictures,
because the subject, when once it had made a clear and sympathetic
appeal to me, at once and completely decided me."[343] The confession
is quite superfluous. It is writ large over all his prose works that
he had nothing of the painter's delight in painting, or any real
understanding of its æsthetic effect. He seems to have been equally
blind or deaf to the peculiar appeal of the other arts. If it were
not so, he would hardly have laid it down, in all seriousness, that
"literature poetry," as the "mere organ of the intellect," should be
dissolved, self-abrogated, into the "unified art-work of the future,"
or that architecture decays when it passes from the service of the
State and religion into the service of the "egoistic individual," or
that sculpture too has become a merely "egoistic" art, only to be
"redeemed" by being taken up into the "united art-work,"[344] or that
painting too must seek a similar "redemption." His notions that the
landscape painter will find his impulses satisfied in the painting
of scenery or a background for the living man of drama, and that the
gestures of the mime will amply compensate us for the cessation of
sculpture, are indeed not to be taken seriously; they are possible only
to a man without the least understanding of the plastic arts. It is of
course quite untrue that in such a union of the arts as he suggests
"the highest faculty of each is unfolded to the fullest." Even in the
Wagnerian opera none of the contributing arts receives anything like
its full unfolding except music. The truth is that Wagner had still not
rid his artistic ideas of their political encumbrances. He was poor,
and unable to realise himself in the world as it was then. He naturally
supposed there must be something fundamentally wrong with a world of
that kind, and he looked forward to a speedy dissolution of it, and the
rising of a new civilisation from its ashes. He saw the rich buying
pictures and sculptures and building houses for themselves, and the
ordinary people reading poetry or prose, instead of them all flocking
to the opera. People had a reprehensible passion for being what he
called "units," each of them enjoying his own art in his own way.
"True" art, therefore, would be possible only in a society in which the
unit had lost consciousness of himself in the community. The communal
art, the art enjoyed by great masses of people in the same place and
at the same time, is the drama. The "units" who could not quite stifle
their liking for painting and sculpture must therefore be satisfied
with so much of these as could be given them in the theatre. It was a
very logical and symmetrical piece of pleading: the only defect in it
was that it left just one thing out of account--human nature.
His political speculations have the triple disadvantage that they are
rarely true in themselves, they are too obviously the product merely
of the circumstances of Wagner's own time and place, and they have no
practical bearing upon art. The angry idealist overshoots his mark when
he tells us that our modern States are the most unnatural associations
of men, inasmuch as they arose solely out of a "mere external caprice,
_i.e._ dynastic family interests," and that "they yoke together
once for all a certain number of men for an aim that either never
corresponded to a need they had in common, or, owing to the changes
wrought by time, is certainly no longer common to them now." Even if
it were true it would be without any practical significance either for
politics or art,--for politics, because there is no one art that can
be said to possess the imagination of a complex modern State, no one
"need" for the satisfaction of which it is possible to induce all the
citizens to labour: and for art, because art's business is to display
to us the endless beauty and interest of things, not to argue us into
the adoption of this or that view of this infinite, incomprehensible
world. Too much of Wagner's political theorising is the mere outcome
of affairs as they happened to be in Germany at the latter end of the
first half of the nineteenth century. He idealised the "Folk" because
that unfixable abstraction was the natural antithesis of the rich
governing class whom he held in abhorrence. It is right that the artist
should have his dreams of life as well as of art, and if he chooses
to find his ideal in an abstraction no one can say him nay. But when
he proceeds to endow that abstraction with all the impossible virtues
under the sun, when he tells us that "the artist of the future" will
be, not the poet, the actor, the musician or the plastician, but the
"Folk,"--"to whom alone we owe all Art itself,"--we can only decline
to keep company with him until he shall be able to use words with some
meaning in them. There is, in fact, a sort of nonsense prose as there
is a nonsense verse. Wagner's dithyrambs upon the Folk--and upon many
another topic--are simply the prose counterpart of Lear and Carroll.
X
Wagner was the most many-sided of musicians, as a glance at the titles
of his prose works will show. He benefited greatly by his versatility:
no one can doubt that his music is all the richer for the stimuli his
nature received from so many quarters. But if he gained something by
it, it is probable that the world lost as much. There are few of us
who would not give three-fourths of the prose works for another opera
from his pen; and he would have had time to write half a dozen if
he had abstained from all this prose. But the prose was a necessity
to him; it was a needed purgation of the intellect, without which
the emotion could not function fully and freely. The most striking
illustration of this is _Opera and Drama_. Wagner had already poured
out his ideas upon man and art at great length in _Art and Revolution_
and the _Art-Work of the Future_. His mind was now brooding upon the
great dramatic subject that was to occupy the bulk of his thinking
for the next twenty years or more of his life. It was only for the
realisation of this dream that he now clung to existence. Yet the dæmon
within him drove him to postpone the composition of this poem until he
had produced yet another huge theoretical treatise. The reasons for
this were two-fold. In the first place he had a despairing sense of
the futility of bringing so new and vast a work into being until he
had educated the artistic public of that day to comprehend his novel
aims and style. In the second place, he felt an imperative need of
coming to an understanding with himself. He probably saw the whole plan
and technique of _Siegfried's Death_[345] more or less vaguely--too
vaguely for him to be willing to trust himself all at once on that
huge uncharted sea. It would clarify his own ideas, as well as prepare
the public, if he were to draw out the ground plan, as it were, of
the music drama of the future. This he accordingly did in _Opera and
Drama_. "My literary works," he wrote to Roeckel, "were testimonies
to my want of freedom as an artist; it was dire compulsion alone that
wrung them from me."[346]
_Opera and Drama_ was written in the winter of 1850-1. As it is the
most thorough and the most comprehensive statement that Wagner has
given us of his theory of drama and music, it will be as well to
summarise its arguments and conclusions for the reader.
I. Until the present time, men have indeed felt that the opera was a
monument of the corruption of artistic taste, but criticism has not
fully fathomed the matter: and it therefore becomes the task of the
creative artist to practise criticism, in order at once to "annihilate
error and uplift criticism." The writer of an article on modern opera
in Brockhaus' Lexicon[347] has pointed out the defects of this form of
art, showing its artificialities and conventions; but when he comes to
the practical problem, "How is all this to be remedied?" he can only
regret that Mendelssohn's too early death should have "prevented the
solution of the riddle." But this is still proceeding on the wrong
track. Had Mendelssohn any musical gift which Mozart, for example, did
not possess? Could anything, from the standpoint of music, be more
perfect than each individual number of _Don Giovanni_? Plainly the
critic cannot wish for better music than this. It is evident, then,
that what he wants in opera is the power and force of _drama_. But he
is blind enough still to expect this from the _musician_; that is,
wanting a house built for him, he applies, not to the architect, but
to the upholsterer. And by the very failure of the critic's effort to
solve the problem in this way, there is driven home the conclusion that
_this way_ the problem is really insoluble. Yet the true solution, so
far from being difficult of attainment, simply stares one in the face;
and the formula for it is that--
"The error in the art-genre of Opera consists in the fact that _a
Means of Expression (Music) has been made the object, while the Object
of Expression (the Drama) has been made a means_."
The truth of this formula can be attested by an appeal to the history
of the opera. It arose, not from the folk-plays of the Middle Ages,
in which there were the rudiments of a natural co-operation of music
and drama, but at the luxurious courts of Italy, where the aristocrats
engaged singers to entertain them with arias, that is, with "folk-tunes
stripped of their _naïveté_ and natural truth," embroidered on a
story whose only _raison d'être_ was the occasional advent of these
arias.[348] Music, in fact, was the all-in-all of opera, as is clearly
shown by the old-time domination of the singer: while all the poet had
to do was to stand as little as possible in the way of the musician.
The great merit of Metastasio,[349] according to the standard of the
practice of his own day, was that he almost effaced his own art in
favour of music--"never embarrassed the musician in the least, never
advanced any unusual claim upon him from the dramatic standpoint."
Nor has the situation changed, in its main features, down even to the
present day. It still is held to be necessary for the poet to shape his
material according to the necessities of the musician from first to
last. The whole aim of the opera is simply _music_, the dramatic story
being only utilised to serve music as a means for its own display. The
anomaly has finally become so fundamental a part of men's lives that
they no longer realise that it _is_ an anomaly: and accordingly they
still have hopes of erecting the genuine drama on the basis of absolute
music--that is, of achieving the impossible. The object of _Opera and
Drama_ is to prove that great artistic results can follow from the
collaboration of music with dramatic poetry, while from the unnatural
position which music bears towards opera in our present system nothing
but sterility can result.
Let us, then, in the first place, consider "Opera and the Nature of
Music."
Music has been betrayed into a position where she has lost sight of
her own limitations; although in herself she is simply an "organ of
expression," she has fallen into "the error of desiring to define
with perfect clearness the thing to be expressed." The musical basis
of the opera was the aria, that is, the folk-song deprived of its own
original words, and adapted at once to the vanity of the singer and the
luxurious tastes of the world of rank. Aria and dance-tune, with an
admixture of recitative, made up an opera, into the musical domain of
which the poet was only allowed to enter in order to supply a little
narrative cohesion. The significance of the so-called reformation of
Gluck has been greatly exaggerated. All he did was to curtail the
arrogant pretensions of the singer, while leaving the texture and
plan of opera untouched. His was a revolt of the composer fighting
merely for his own hand, not for the ends of _drama_: and every means
by which he increased the power of music in opera was necessarily a
further shackle on the limbs of the poet. Méhul, Cherubini and Spontini
in their turn broadened the old musical forms of opera, and made the
musical expression more consonant with that of the words, but did
nothing for opera except from the standpoint of music. The poet may now
have had to provide a slightly better and firmer groundwork for the
musician, but it was to the musician, and to him alone, that he still
owed his existence in opera. People failed to see that the source of
regenerative power could be nowhere but in the drama: and the trouble
was that music tried by itself to perform the functions of drama, to be
a "content" instead of mere "expression."
Mozart, again, was so entirely a musician that his work throws the
clearest light on the relations of musician and poet; and we find him
unable to write at his best where the poem was flat and meaningless.
He could not write music for _Tito_ like that of _Don Giovanni_, or
for _Cosi fan tutte_ like that of _Figaro_. He, the most absolute of
all musicians, would long ago have solved the operatic problem had he
met the proper poet. This poet he was never fortunate enough to meet:
all his "poets" did was to give him a medley of arias, duets, and
_ensembles_ to set to music. But the flood of beauty and expression
which Mozart poured into opera was too great for that narrow bed; the
stream overflowed into wider and freer channels, until it became a
mighty sea in the symphonies of Beethoven.
The aria was a degeneration of the folk-song, in which poetry and music
had been spontaneously one. The operatic aria was the music of the
folk-song, arbitrarily wrested from the words, and made to serve the
indolent pleasure of the man of luxury. In course of time people forgot
that a word-stave should by rights go with the melody. It was Rossini
who took this artificial flower, drenched it with manufactured perfume,
and gave it the semblance of life. Rossini saw that the life-blood
of ordinary opera was melody--"naked, ear-tickling, absolute-melodic
melody." Spontini erred in imagining the "dramatic tendency" to be
the essence of opera: the real essence, as Rossini showed, and as the
future history of opera proves, was simply absolute melody.
Earnest composers, however, while by no means denying the claims of
melody, held that Rossini's melody was cheap and superficial, and
endeavoured to derive theirs more directly from the fountains of
expression of the Folk. This was the course taken by Weber, who gave
opera-aria the deep and genuine feeling of the folk-song; though the
flower, thus torn from its native meadow, could not thrive in the
salons of modern luxury and artificiality. And Weber, no less than
Rossini, made his melody the main factor of opera, though of course
it was far worthier and more honest than the melody of the Italian
composer. Weber directed and constrained the poet of _Der Freischütz_
as emphatically as Rossini did the poet of _Tancredi_. And Weber's
failure proves afresh the assertion that instead of the drama being
taken up into the being of music, music must be taken up into the drama.
Weber's success in harking back to the Folk was envied by the
composers of other nationalities, and a number of operas were produced
which tried to proceed on similar lines--such as _Masaniello_ and
_William Tell_. The Folk, in fact, was exploited, but its real
inspiration could not, from the very nature of the case, be embodied
in opera. In the epic and the drama the Folk celebrated the deeds of
the Hero, and in true drama the action and the character are recognised
as necessary; but under the influence of the modern State, dramatic
characters lose their personality and become mere masks. This was
particularly the case in opera, where the folk-song has degenerated
into the aria, and the Folk itself has become the Mass, the Chorus.
"Historic" opera became the fashion, and even Religion was dragged
upon the stage, as in the operas of Meyerbeer. But the outlandishness
thus imported into opera led in its turn to worse degeneration:
and the "historic" mania became "hysteric" mania--in other words,
Neo-romanticism.
Up to this time, every influence that had shaped the course of opera
had come from the domain of absolute music alone. After Rossini,
operatic melody was varied by the introduction of instrumental melody.
People had not perceived that instrumental music was also unfruitful,
by reason of its not expressing the purely-human in the form of
definite, individual feelings.
"That the expression of an absolutely definite and
clearly-understandable individual Content was in truth impossible
in this language that was capable only of generalised emotional
expression, could not be demonstrated until the coming of that
instrumental composer in whom the longing to express such a Content
became the burning, consuming motive-force of all artistic
conception."
It was the function of Beethoven to show what music can do if it
confines itself to its true sphere, that of expression. In his later
works, Beethoven, having his mind filled with a definite content, burst
the bounds of many of the old absolute forms, and stammered through
tentative new ones. Future symphonists followed him from this point,
without seeing what it was in Beethoven that made him act in this way;
they consequently misapplied his forms, copying the externals only.
Hence the vogue of programme music, of which the great representative
is Berlioz. Then there came an influx of the wealth of instrumental
music (developed independently of vocal music) into operatic melody.
This is modern _characteristic_, of which Meyerbeer, the cosmopolitan
Jew, is the great exploiter, and which differs from that of Gluck and
Mozart in that the poet is infinitely more degraded, and absolute
melody more exalted. This held good even in Paris, where the poet had
hitherto always had _some_ rights; but now Meyerbeer forced Scribe,
his librettist, to run wherever he chose to drive him. The secret of
his music is "Effect without Cause." Yet even Meyerbeer wrote fine
music where he allowed the poet to guide him--as in parts of the great
love-scene in the fourth act of _Les Huguenots_.
To sum up, then, Music has tried to be the drama, and the attempt
has ended in impotence. The only salvation for it lies in sensible
co-operation with the poet. This may be seen by a glance at the nature
of our present music. The most perfect expression of the inner being
of music is melody; it is to harmony and rhythm what the external side
of the organism is to the internal. Now the Folk's melodies were a
revelation of the nature of things. Christianity, however, with its
anxiety to lay bare the soul, found itself face to face not with life
but death; and the Folk-song, the indivorcible union of poetry and
music, almost died out. In the ages of human mechanism the longing of
things was to produce the real man, which man "was really none other
than Melody, _i.e._ the moment of most definite, most convincing
manifestation of Music's actual, living organism." The struggle of
Beethoven's great works is the struggle of mechanism to become a man,
an organism, uttering itself in melody. Thus while other composers
merely took melody, ready-made, from the mouth of the Folk, and applied
it to their own purposes, Beethoven's melody was the spontaneous effort
of Music's inner organism to find expression. But it is only in the
verbal outburst of the Ninth Symphony that Beethoven brings melody
to true life; music was sterile until fertilised by the poet. The
error had always been that operatic melody, coming as it did from the
Folk-song, ran on certain rhythmical and structural lines, beyond which
the musician could not stray; so that melody had no chance to be born
spontaneously out of poetry, for the poet had simply to adapt his words
to the one invariable musical scaffolding. "Every musical organism
is by its nature a womanly; it is merely a bearer, not a begetter;
the begetting force lies outside it, and without fecundation by this
force it cannot bear." In the Choral Symphony Beethoven had to call in
the poet to fertilise absolute music; and the folly of the latter is
seen in its attempts not only to bear but also to beget. "_Music is a
woman_," whose nature is to surrender in love. Who now is to be the Man
to whom this surrender is to be made? Let us look at _the Poet_.
II. When Lessing tries to mark out the boundaries of poetry and
painting in the _Laocöon_, he has in his eye merely descriptive,
literary poetry, not "the dramatic art-work brought immediately into
view by physical performance." Now the literary poem is an artificial
art, appealing to the imagination instead of to the senses. All
the egoistically severed arts, indeed, appeal only to the force of
imagination. They "_merely suggest_; an _actual presentation_ would be
possible to them only if they could address themselves to the totality
of man's artistic receptivity, communicate with his entire perceptive
organism, instead of merely his faculty of imagination; for the real
art-work only comes into being when it passes from imagination into
actuality, _i.e._ physical presentation." There should be no _arts_,
there should be _one veritable Art_. It is an error to look upon Drama
as merely a _branch of literature_; although it is true that our drama
is no more true Drama than a single musical instrument is an orchestra.
The modern drama has a two-fold origin--in Romance, and in the Greek
drama; the flower of the former being Shakespeare--of the latter,
Racine. Our dramatic literature hovers undecidedly between these two
extremes. The romance was not the portrayal of the complete man; this
only became possible in drama, which actualised life, presented it
visibly to the senses. Shakespeare "condensed the narrative romance
into the drama"--made it, that is, suitable for stage representation.
The great characteristic of his art was that human actions did not come
before us merely in descriptive poetry, but by the actors addressing
themselves directly to the actual eye, and the poet had to narrow
down the diversity of the old Folk-stage to suit the scenic and other
demands of the theatre. The action and the characters had to be made
more definite, more individual, more circumstantial, in order to give
the spectators the impression of an artistic whole. The appeal, in
short, was no longer to fancy but to sense, the only domain left to
fancy being _the imagining the scene itself_--for the stage-craft
of those days fell short of actually _representing_ reality. This
mixture of fancy and sense-presentation in the drama was the source of
endless future confusion in dramatic art; the giving-up to fancy of the
representation of the scene left an open door in drama through which
romance and history might pass in and out at pleasure.
In the French drama, outward unity of scene determined the whole
structure of the play, diminishing the part played by action, and
increasing the function of "mere delivery of speeches." For the same
reason, the French dramatists could not choose for representation the
romance, with its bewildering multiplicity of incident; they had to
fall back on the already condensed plots which they found in Greek
mythology. Instead of dealing with his own people's life, then, as
Shakespeare had tried to do, the French tragedian merely imitated the
finished Greek drama. This unnatural, artificial world was reproduced
in French opera, and most saliently in the French opera of Gluck.
"Opera was thus the premature bloom on an unripe fruit grown from
an unnatural,[350] artificial soil. The outer form, with which the
Italian and French drama _began_, must be attained by the new drama by
organic evolution from within, on the path of the Shakespearean drama;
then first will ripen, also, the natural fruit of musical drama."
German dramatic art found itself between the Shakespearean play on the
one side and the scenic Southern opera on the other--between the appeal
to hearing, aided slightly by fancy in the representation of the scene,
and the appeal to the eye alone. There were two final courses open:
either, as Tieck suggested, to act Shakespeare with no more scenery
than was employed in Shakespeare's own theatre, or to represent each
change of scene in the plays--that is, employ the gigantic apparatus of
scenic opera.
The result to the modern poet was perplexity and disillusion. The play
was neither literature--as it was when men merely read it, allowing
their imagination to represent the scene--nor actual, visualised drama.
Hence the poet either wrote plays simply to be read, not acted, or,
if he wrote for the stage, he employed the reflective type of drama,
the modern origin of which may be traced to the pseudo-antique drama,
constructed according to Aristotle's rules of unity. These results
and tendencies are exhibited in Goethe and Schiller. Goethe, after
various experiments, found his full expression in _Faust_, which makes
no pretence of stage-representation, and is therefore really neither
romance nor drama. _Faust_ is "the point of separation between the
mediæval _romance_ ... and the real _dramatic matter_ of the future."
Schiller was always perplexed by the contradiction between history
and drama. The whole dilemma is this. On the one side are romance and
history, with all their multiplicity of character and action: on the
other is the ideal dramatic form, presenting a simple, definite action
and real moving characters visibly to the eye; and a compromise has
to be effected between these two. The plain truth is "that we have no
drama, and can have no drama; that our literary-drama is as far removed
from the genuine drama as the pianoforte from the symphonic song of
human voices; that in the modern drama we can arrive at the production
of poetry only by the most calculated devices of literary mechanism,
just as on the pianoforte we only arrive at the production of music by
means of the most complicated devices of technical mechanism--that is
to say, a soulless poetry, a toneless music." With _this_ drama true
music can have nothing to do.
Man, conceiving the external world, is impelled to reproduce his
conceptions in art in a mode that shall be intelligible to others. This
has only once been done thoroughly--in the expression of the Greek
world-view in the Greek drama. The material of this drama was the
myth--the Folk's mode of condensation of the phenomena of life--"the
poem of a life-view in common." The Christian myth was concerned with
death where the Greek had been concerned with life. It could therefore
be painted or described, but not _represented_ in drama. The Germanic
myth, like the Greek, was in its essence a religious intuition, a
life-view in common; but Christianity laid hold of it and dispersed it
into fragments of fable and legend--the Romance of the Middle Ages.
What the artist had to do was to find _Man_ under all this _débris_.
Now whereas the drama selects an action from a mass of actions, and
limits the surroundings to just so much as will illuminate and justify
this action, the romance has to enter circumstantially and at great
length into the surrounding circumstances, in order to make the action
and the character artistically convincing. The drama goes from within
outwards, the romance from without inwards: the drama lays bare the
organism of mankind, the romance shows us merely the mechanism of
history; the art-procedure in drama is organic, in romance merely
mechanical; the drama gives us the man, the romance the citizen; the
drama exhibits the fullness of human nature, the romance the penury of
the State. In the evolution that has gone on since the Middle Ages,
Burgher-society has come uppermost; but it offers nothing to romance
but unloveliness. Everything in life is being disintegrated past the
capacity of art to reunite it; the poet's art has turned to politics,
and until we have no more politics the poet cannot come to light again.
As Napoleon said, the rôle of Fate in the ancient world is filled in
the modern by politics; and this is what we shall have to comprehend
before we can discover the true content and form of drama.
Now the myth is true for all time, and its content forever
inexhaustible. Understanding it well, we see in it "an intelligible
picture of the whole history of mankind, from the beginnings of
society to the necessary downfall of the State." The political State
lives on the vices of society; salvation and art are only to be found
in the free, purely-human individual. The essence of the State is
_caprice_, of the free individual, _necessity_. It is then essential
for us to annul the State and create afresh the free individual. The
poet who tried to portray this individual found that he was face to
face with him _only as he had been shaped by the State_; he could not
then portray him, but only imagine him; could only represent him to
thought, not to feeling. Our drama, in consequence, has been forced to
make its appeal to the _understanding_ instead of the _feeling_. Out
of the mass of man's modern surroundings the poet has to reconstruct
the individual, and present him to feeling, to sense, instead of to
understanding. But this the poet cannot do; he can only address the
understanding, and that through the organ of understanding "abstract
and conditioned word-speech." "The course to be taken by the drama of
the future will be a return from understanding to feeling, in so far
as we advance from the mentally-conceived individuality to an actual
individuality." By the annihilation of the State, society will realise
its purely-human essence, and determine the free individual. And it is
only in the most perfect art-work, the drama, that the poet's insight
into life can find complete expression, because this drama will address
not the understanding, but the feeling, through the senses. It will
present the poet's view of life physically to the eye; it will be a
true _emotionalisation of the intellect_. It must present things to
us in such a manner that we cannot help realising their necessity.
This can only be done by avoiding the by-paths of the intellect, and
by appealing directly to the feeling. The _action_, then, must be so
chosen as to make this appeal instinctively. Now an historic action,
or one "which can only be justified from the standpoint of the State,"
is only representable to the understanding, not to the feeling; that
is, by its very multiplicity and lack of warmth it cannot be seized
definitely and quickly by the senses, but needs the combining function
of thought. The true dramatic "action" must be seen at once to be the
essential centre of the periphery of circumstance. Man and nature, as
cognised by the understanding, are split up into fragments; it is the
_feeling_ that grasps the organic unity of things, and it is from this
point _outwards_ that the true drama must work. In other words, it must
be generated from the _myth_.
Up to a certain point the intellect can work in the selection of
material, and express itself through its own organ, word-speech;
but for the full _realisation_ of the action and the motives to the
feeling, the organ of feeling--tone-speech--has to be called in.
"Tone-speech is the beginning and end of word-speech, as the feeling is
beginning and end of the understanding, as myth is beginning and end
of history, as lyric is beginning and end of poetry." The lyric "holds
within itself all the germs of the essential art of poetry, which
in the end can only be the justification of the lyric; and the work
that accomplishes this justification is nothing but the highest human
art-work, the _complete drama_."