The primal organ of utterance of the inner man is tone-speech, the

fundamental nature of which may be seen by removing the consonants from

our word-speech. The latter is the result of the addition of prefixes

and suffixes to the open sound, as distinguishing and delimiting signs

of objects. In this way speech-roots were formed from the primal melody

of tone-speech. In alliteration, or _Stabreim_, speech, by combining

these roots according to similarity and kinship, "made equally plain

to the feeling both the impression of the object and its corresponding

expression, through an increased strengthening of that expression";

showed, that is, the unity in multiplicity of the object. _Stabreim's_

similarity of syllabic sounds brings a collective image to the feeling.

The _Stabreim_ and the word-verse were fundamentally conditioned by

that melody which is the expression of primal human feeling, because

the breathing-conditions of man's organism determined the duration

and segmentation of the utterance. When poetry developed along the

line of the understanding instead of that of the feeling, word-speech

became dissociated from its sister, tone-speech; and having lost the

instinctive sense of this bond, it tried to find "another bond of union

with the melodic breathing-pauses." This was done in the _end-rhyme_,

which was the sign that the natural bond of tone-speech and word-speech

in the _Stabreim_ had been forgotten. This line of degeneration ended

in "the dreary turmoil of prose"; and the separation from the feeling

was complete. We now go upon convention instead of upon conviction.

We cannot properly express our emotions in our present language,

for it allows us to speak only to the understanding, not to the

feeling; which is why the feeling "has tried to escape from absolute

intellectual-speech into absolute tone-speech--our music of to-day."

The poet, then, cannot realise his aim in modern speech, because he

cannot speak directly to the feeling. Yet he must not simply work

out his drama on the lines of the understanding, and then try to add

expression to it by means of music. _This was the error of opera._ The

emotional expression itself must _also_ be governed by the poetical

aim. "_A tone-speech to be struck-into from the outset_ is therefore

the organ of expression by means of which the poet must make himself

intelligible by turning from the understanding to the feeling, and

for this purpose he has to take his stand upon a soil on which he can

have intercourse with feeling alone." We must go back, in fact, to

the primal _melodic_ faculty, to which is given the expression of the

purely-human; the drama must utter itself in a form that shall be the

marriage of understanding and feeling, of word-speech and tone-speech.

III. Until now the poet has tried in two ways to attune the organ of

the understanding--word-speech--to an emotional expression which would

find its way to the feeling; through _rhyme_ and through _melody_. It

was a mistake to try to import the rhythms of Greek verse into modern

poetry, for these rhythms were conditioned by the gestures of the

dance, and the dislocation of the speaking-accents was atoned for by

melody. Our modern languages not being adapted to this ruling into

longs and shorts, Greek prosody is impossible for us. Our iambic verse,

for example, hobbles along mechanically, "putting grievous constraint

upon the live accent of speech for the sake of this monotonous rhythm."

"Longs" become "shorts," and "shorts" become "longs," simply to

get the requisite number of feet into the line. On the other hand,

where, as among the Romanic peoples, this kind of rhythm is not in

vogue, the _end-rhyme_ has been imported into poetry, and has become

indispensable. The whole line is built up with reference to this

end-rhyme, as the up-stroke to the down-stroke. The result is that the

attention of the ear is only momentarily won, and the poet does not

reach the _feeling_, for all he does is to make understanding speak to

understanding.

We have seen that word-speech and melody have travelled along

divergent lines of development, and now neither can be properly applied

to the other. Even where, as in Gluck's music, the composer tries to

find a bond of union in the speaking-accent of the word-speech, his

selection of this mere rhetorical accent leads to a disintegration of

the rest of the line as _poetry_; it becomes dissolved into prose, and

the melody itself becomes merely musical prose. The usual course is for

the melody to do what it likes with the verse; to dislocate its rhythm,

ignore its accents, and drown its end-rhyme, according to its own

pleasure. The poet ought really "so to employ the speaking accent as

the only determinative 'moment' for his verse, that in its symmetrical

return it should clearly define a wholesome rhythm, as necessary to the

verse itself as to the melody." Instead of this, we find on the one

hand that many of Goethe's verses are declared too beautiful to be set

to music, while on the other hand Mendelssohn writes _Songs without

Words_.

We shall have to deal with speech as we dealt with action and the

content of the drama. Just as we took away from the action all that was

extraneous and accidental; just as we took away from the content all

that savoured of the State or of history, in order to reach simply the

purely-human; so we must "cut away from the verbal expression all that

springs from and answers to these disfigurements of the purely-human

and emotionally necessary," so that only the purely-human core shall

remain. Thus we shall arrive "at the natural basis of rhythm in the

spoken verse, as revealed in the _liftings_ and _lowerings_ of the

accent," which in turn can only find full expression when intensified

into musical rhythm. The strong and weak accents must correspond to

the "good" and "bad" halves of the musical bar. We must reach back

through the understanding and its organ to "the sensuous substance of

our _roots of speech_"; we must breathe the breath of life into the

defunct organism of speech. This breath is music. The roots of words

were brought into being by the Folk's primal emotional stress; the

essence of these roots is the open vowel sound, which finds its fullest

sensuous uplifting in music; while the function of the consonants

is to determine the general expression to a particular one. The

_Stabreim_ indicates to the feeling the unity of sensation underlying

the roots--shows their emotional kinship. It appeals, as it were, to

the "eye" of hearing, while the vowel is addressed to the "ear" of

hearing. And as a man only reveals himself fully to us by addressing

both eye and ear at once, so "the communicating-organ of the inner man

only completely convinces our hearing when it addresses itself with

equal persuasiveness to both 'eye and ear' of this hearing. But this is

possible only in _word-tone-speech_. Poet and musician have hitherto

each addressed no more than half the man: the poet turned towards

this hearing's eye alone, the musician only to its ear." The musician

will take the vowel-sounds of the poet, and display their fundamental

kinship by giving them their full emotional value by means of musical

tone. Here then the word-poet ends, and the tone-poet begins. The

melody of the musician is "the redemption of the endlessly-conditioned

poetic thought into a deep-felt consciousness of the highest emotional

freedom." This was the melody that rose from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

to the light of day.

When Beethoven wrote the simple melody with which he accompanies

the "_Freude, schöner Götterfunken_," he was writing as an absolute

musician. This melody "did not arise out of the poem of Schiller, but

rather was invented outside the word-verse and merely spread above

it." But in the "_Seid umschlungen, Millionen_," and the "_Ahnest

du den Schöpfer, Welt?_" he obeys the dictates of the poetic aim,

and the broadening of the key-kinship leads the feeling back to the

purely-human.

The kinship of feeling which the poet can only approximately

express by _Stabreim_, the musician can bring to full expression by

key-modulation. Take, for example, the line "_Liebe giebt Lust zum

Leben_." The one emotion being expressed throughout, the musician

would keep in one key. When setting "_Die Liebe bringt Lust und

Leid_," however, the change of feeling at the end of the line would be

expressed by a modulation; while if this line were followed by "_Doch

in ihr Weh auch webt sie Wonnen_,"[351] at the _webt_ a modulation

would be effected back into the original key. It is from this

poetico-musical "_period_" that the true art-work, the perfected drama,

must take its rise.

Melody is the horizontal surface of harmony; and in harmony "the

ear ... obtains an entire fulfilling--and thus a satisfying--of its

capacity for sensuous impression, and consequently can devote itself

with the necessary composure to the apt emotional expression of

the melody." But harmony in absolute music has existed solely for

and in itself: whereas the melody ought to be conditioned by the

speaking-verse, and the concurrent harmony be used for making this

obvious to the feeling.

In the drama of the future there must be no characters whose only

function is to swell the harmonic volume of sound; there must only be

such characters as are essential in themselves to the plot. The chorus,

then, "as hitherto employed in opera, ... will have to disappear from

our drama." Neither the chorus nor the main characters "are to be used

by the poet as a musical symphonic tone-body for making the underlying

harmonic conditions of the melody perceptible." The musician, however,

possesses an organ which can make plain the harmony and characterise

the melody in a far superior way to that of the vocal mass. This organ

is the orchestra, which is an immense aid in the realisation of the

poetic aim. Until now the error has consisted in writing _absolute_

melody in opera--melody, that is, which was conditioned by the

orchestra itself, not by the word-verse, and which was therefore only

"vocal" melody in the sense that it was given to the voice. It ought

really to come from "an announcement of the purely emotional content of

the verse, through a dissolution of the vowel into the musical tone";

the verse melody in this way becoming the mediator and bond of union

between word-speech and tone-speech, the offspring of the marriage of

poetry and music.

The great value of the orchestra is its power of uttering the

_unspeakable_, _i.e._ that which is unutterable through the organ

of the understanding. It may do this in three ways--by its organic

alliance with _gesture_, by bringing up the _remembrance_ of an

emotion, when the singer is not giving voice to it, and by giving a

foreboding of moods as yet unspoken.

All the constituents of drama have now been enumerated. It only

remains to consider how they are to be knit together into a single

form corresponding to the single substance. Just as the poet obtained

his action by compressing all the motives into an easily comprehended

content, so, for the realisation of this action, must he proceed

with the composition on the same principles. The expression, like

the action, must be free from the accidental, the contingent, the

superfluous.

We approach the drama in a mood of expectancy, that is ministered to

by the orchestra in its quality of a producer of foreboding--although

this preliminary utterance of the orchestra must by no means be

interpreted to mean the ordinary "overture." This expectancy is

afterwards satisfied by the word-speech of the performer, lifted into

the higher emotional sphere of tone-speech. The unity of content in the

drama must be made evident in a unity of artistic expression; that is,

the expression "must convey to the feeling the most comprehensive aim

of the poetic understanding." Wherever the word-speech approaches the

language of ordinary life--the organ of understanding--the orchestra

must keep the expression still on the higher plane, by means of its

faculty of conveying foreboding or remembrance. Yet it must assume this

function not through the mere caprice of the musician, but in obedience

only to the poet's aim. Unity of content and unity of expression must

go hand in hand. These melodic moments of the orchestra will take their

rise only from the _weightiest motives of the drama_, which are the

pillars of the edifice. In this way a binding principle of musical form

may be obtained which springs directly from the poetic aim, and far

surpasses the arbitrary, _merely musical_ form of the old opera, which

was loose, uncentralised, and inorganic.

Finally let us ask, "Has the poet to _restrict_ himself in presence

of the musician, and the musician in presence of the poet?" The

answer is that they ought not to restrict each other, but raise each

other to higher potency, in order thus to generate the true drama. If

both the poet's aim and the musician's expression are visible, the

necessary inspiration of each by each has not been effected. We must

not be reminded of either aim or expression, "but the content must

instinctively take possession of us as a human action fully justified

to our feeling." In every moment of the musician's expression the

poetic aim must be contained; and this poetic aim must always find

complete realisation in the musician's expression. Whereas Voltaire

said, "When a thing is too silly to be said, one sings it," we now may

say "What is not worth being sung is not worth the poet's pains to

tell."

There is no need to assume that poet and musician must necessarily be

one person. Only in the present egoistic relations of these two--who

are types of the egoism of the modern State--does it seem necessary for

one man to become the unit of creation.

Three nations--the Italian, French and German--have contributed to

the evolution of opera; but the German language alone "still coheres

directly and unmistakably with its roots," and therefore is alone

adapted for the new art-work. But the practice of singing operas

with German words merely translated from the French or Italian, and

therefore not coinciding in meaning and accent with the music, has mis

educated and demoralised German singers. In the new drama, the melody

will always be conditioned by the word-verse, and singers must learn to

render it intelligently, bringing out not merely the melodic sequence

but the _verbal sense_ of the melody. And gesture must be employed with

intelligent understanding, in order to make the orchestral moments of

foreboding and remembrance[352] in their turn intelligible. But the

primary condition for this new drama is a new public, that shall look

at it seriously, as at an organism; a public that wants an art-work,

not a mere evening's distraction. We are less fortunate than the older

artists, whose audience, whatever its social faults may have been, had

at least delicacy and high breeding; whereas we are ruled by the vulgar

and ignorant Philistine, the characteristic product of our commercial

civilisation. Yet even under the _débris_ of modern life the artist can

see the primal source of things, can reach to the _human being_, to

whom the future belongs.

XI

It will be seen from this summary that Wagner, though now mainly

occupied with purely æsthetic ideas, was still unable to refrain from

mixing these up with political and other considerations that were

quite alien to them. He still believes in the "Folk" as "always ...

the fructifying source of all art."[353] He is still angry--almost

comically angry at times--with the richer classes, who, in the

Wagnerian philosophy of that period, are always to the Folk what the

aristocratic villain of the melodrama is to the poor but virtuous

hero. He might have forgiven Meyerbeer for writing bad music; but he

could never forgive him for being a banker. The State too is still the

most persistent of bees in his bonnet. He solemnly assures us that the

reason for the decline in dramatic character-drawing since Shakespeare

is "the influence of the State, with its perpetual tendency to make

everything uniform, and to suppress, with more and more deadly power,

the might of free personality."[354] This wicked "political State,"

indeed, "lives entirely on the vices of Society, the virtues of which

are the product of the human individuality exclusively.... The State is

the oppressor of Society, in proportion as the latter turns its vicious

side to the individual"; though it is a comfort to know that "the

downfall of the State" is "necessary."[355]

And he is as insensitive as ever to the appeal of the other arts. All

the arts except drama "merely indicate." The "only real kind of art"

is the drama, because there the thing portrayed is not left to the

imagination, but is presented bodily to the eye. So blind is he to

the characteristic essence and charm of painting and sculpture--for

painters and sculptors--that he can speak of the new drama as not

only "uniting within itself all the features of plastic art," but

even "carrying these to higher perfections otherwise unattainable."

A "literary poem" is merely a "miserable shadow" of the real

art-work.[356] In one of his letters to Uhlig he goes even further than

this, actually laying it down that "plastic art must cease entirely in

the future."[357] The poor practitioners of these "egoistically severed

arts" are majestically swept aside: "only a true artist,--an artistic

man, in fact, can understand this matter; but no other, even though he

has the best will in the world to do so. Who, for instance, amongst our

art-egoistic handicraft-copying, can comprehend the natural attitude

of plastic art to the direct, purely-human art? I altogether set aside

what a statue sculptor or a historical painter would say to this."[358]

In the _Communication to my Friends_, that followed _Opera and

Drama_ at an interval of a few months, he once more insists on the

impossibility of the dissevered arts continuing to exist after the

way to the one true art has been pointed out. "Together with the

historico-political _subject_ I also of necessity rejected that

dramatic _art-reform_ in which alone it could have been embodied; for

I recognised that this form had only issued from that subject, and

by it alone could be justified, and that it was utterly incapable of

convincingly communicating to the feeling the purely human subject that

alone I had in my eye; and therefore, with the disappearance of the

historico-political subject there must necessarily also vanish, in the

future, the spoken play [_die Schauspielform_], as inadequate for the

novel subject, unwieldy and defective."[359]

Everywhere, as usual with him, he not only sees everything from his

own angle, but is quite incapable of understanding how anyone else can

have a different view-point. Just as he had nothing of the painter's

or sculptor's feeling for painting or sculpture, so he had little of

the poet's feeling for poetry. Apparently all that he assimilated

from poetry was the idea; the characteristic charm of poetry,--the

subtle interlacement or inter blending of idea and expression--did not

exist for him. To what may be called the poetic atmosphere or aroma

of words he was quite insensitive. For the poet the bare idea is next

to nothing: the value of the idea, for him as for us, lies in the

imaginative heat it engenders, the imaginative odours it diffuses.

It is doubtful, indeed, whether there is anything either original or

striking in nine poetical ideas out of ten; the poet's traffic must

of necessity be for the most part with sentiments that, taken in

themselves, have been the merest commonplaces for thousands of years.

What difference is there, purely in idea, between "we are here to-day

and gone to-morrow" and Shakespeare's

"We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep"?

Shakespeare's magic is in the phrasing,--not, be it remembered, a

merely extraneous, artificial grace added to the idea, a mere clothing

that can be put on or off it at will, but a subtle interaction

and mutual enkindlement of idea and expression. For the musician

that enkindlement comes from the adding of music to the words: the

music does for the idea what the style does for it in the case of

the poet,--raises it to a higher emotional power, gives it colour,

odour, incandescence, wings. Brynhilde comes to tell Siegfried that

he must die. The mere announcement of the fact is next to nothing;

the infinities and the solemn silences only gather about it when the

orchestra gives out the wonderful theme.

[Music:]

The pure poet, working in his own material alone, would give us this

sense of illimitable sadness by the infusion into the mere idea of some

remote, unanalysable wizardry of words and rhythms, as in Clough's

"Ah, that I were far away from the crowd and the streets of the city,

Under the vine-trellis laid, O my beloved, with thee!"

or Arnold's

"Hear it from thy broad lucent Arno-vale

(For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep

The morningless and unawakening sleep

Under the flowery oleanders pale)."

Wagner was blind to this super-intellectual quality in words because

for him that quality was most naturally added to them by music.

Speech was with him always "the organ of the intellect"; our modern

speech was "utterly feelingless": the poet cannot communicate feeling

because "articulate language" is capable only of "description and

indication."[360] He himself was strictly speaking hardly a poet at

all: he was simply a writer of words for music,--words to which the

music had to add the emotional beauty that the genuine poet would have

conveyed by speech alone. We are therefore not in the least surprised

to learn that Wagner first of all wrote his "poems" in prose, which

he then turned into rhyme or rhythm at his leisure. We possess, in

_Wieland the Smith_,[361] an intended operatic libretto of his that

never got past the prose stage. Having decided not to set it to music

himself, he offered it to Liszt. "The poem," he writes to the Princess

Wittgenstein, "is fully worked out; nothing remains to be done [_sic_]

but the simple versification, which any tolerably skilful verse-maker

could do. Liszt will easily find one. In the most important places I

have written the verses myself."[362]

Hence all this elaborate analysis of vowels and consonant sounds is

quite beside the mark. He imagines "the feeling" of a word to reside

in the "root-syllable" of it,--"which was invented or discovered by

the primitive emotional need of humanity" (_die aus der Nothwendigkeit

des ursprünglichsten Empfindungszwanges des Menschen erfunden oder

gefunden ward_). And the fountain of that emotional force in the root

is the vowel sound, which is "the inner feeling incarnate" (_das

verkörperte innere Gefühl_).[363] Portentous attributes are also given

to the consonants, and the initial consonant is pronounced to be of

more significance than the terminal. Most of this is merely fantastic.

Words, especially in the hands of a poet, are not simply clothed vowel

sounds; they are entities with a marvellous life of their own. The

appeal of Keats's

"The same that ofttimes hath

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,"

has nothing whatever to do with vowels and consonants: we no more

think of these than we think of vibration numbers when we listen to

a succession of musical harmonies. The beauty of the lines is in the

totality and the rareness of the imaginative picture they flash upon

our vision; and to attempt to explain the secret of this in terms of

vowels and consonants is as futile as to try to explain a flower by its

physical particles.

XII

One is sometimes amazed, in reading _Opera and Drama_, at the

persistence with which Wagner pursues the obvious, hunting it down, as

Oscar Wilde said of James Payn, with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted

detective. He is almost as elaborately absurd over his vowels and

consonants as M. Jourdain. The explanation is to be sought partly

in the tendency to long-windedness, the passion for pursuing every

idea to the death, that was always characteristic of him,--it derived

ultimately from the inexorably logical nature of his mind,--and partly

from the fact that he had a very stupid public and a very stupid set

of artists to educate. _Opera and Drama_ has been made both more lucid

and somewhat obvious for us to-day by Wagner's own operas. If there is

less need to-day to labour certain points as he does, it is because

they are now such universally accepted truths that it is hard for us

to imagine a time when people needed to have them driven into them at

the point of a pen. Here and there his letters give us an inkling of

the difficulties with which he had to contend. Few people in the middle

of the nineteenth century, apparently, had any idea of real drama in

opera.[364] Even the singers,--with the exception of a born genius here

and there like Schröder-Devrient,--had little notion that their parts

consisted of anything but so many words to be sung as brilliantly as

possible. In one of his letters to Liszt, Wagner describes his horror

at seeing, in the Dresden opera house, the Tannhäuser, in the "Hall

of Song" scene, shouting his declaration of unholy love for Venus

straight into the face of the chaste Elisabeth!--and this in spite of

the composer having taken particular care to have all directions copied

in full in the separate vocal parts. "What result was possible but that

the public should be confused and not know in the least what to make of

it? Indeed, I discovered in Dresden that the public became acquainted

with the dramatic contents of the opera only by reading the text-book;

that is, they only came to understand the performance by abstracting

their minds from the actual performance and filling-in from their own

imagination."[365] And as he hints, if these things could be done in a

first-class opera house like Dresden, what hair-raising horrors must go

on in the smaller theatres?

A good deal of _Opera and Drama_, then, took its rise in the immediate

circumstances of the German operatic life of the early nineteenth

century, and has no particular validity for the world in general

to-day.[366] Other portions of it relate only or mainly to the

_Ring_. For all his insistence on the necessity of alliterative verse

(_Stabreim_), he virtually discarded it when he had finished with the

_Ring_. The _Meistersingers_ is written throughout in rhymed verse. In

_Tristan_ he employs in turn alliteration, rhyme, and unrhymed verse;

_Parsifal_ fluctuates between a sort of _vers libre_ that is often

as near as possible to prose, and a rhymed stanza-form for the more

pronouncedly lyric portions. _Opera and Drama_, in fact, was in large

part the reduction to theory of the principles of structures that

were slowly taking shape within him as he pondered on the Siegfried

legend. As with all great artistic creators, each subject was seen so

vividly, took such complete possession of him, that it unconsciously

made for itself its own inevitable form. He himself knew that it was

in the _Ring_ that the theories of _Opera and Drama_ had their origin.

"Even now," he writes to Uhlig, "must I learn that I should not have

discovered the most important conditions for the conformation of the

drama of the future had I not, as artist, lighted quite unconsciously

upon them in my _Siegfried_."[367] And working backwards, as it were,

from the completed work as we have it now, it is easy enough to see

how the subject led him of itself to a new theory of opera. He had

a gigantic saga to condense into the dimensions of a normal stage

action; the most drastic economy of words was therefore necessary.

As the burden of the emotional expression was to be undertaken by

the music, the purely verbal portion would have to be reduced to the

barest essentials consistent with making the conduct of the drama and

the motives of the characters clear. And as every word had to be vital

to the drama, and the musical phrase was to fit the verbal phrase as

if the two had been predestined for each other from the beginning of

time, each line, short as it might be, had to be packed with accents as

salient as those of the music itself. This condition seemed to be most

perfectly fulfilled in _Stabreim_, because there the vowel or consonant

that gave definition to the word was thrown into the highest possible

relief at the very moment of the incidence of the musical accent. The

following quotations from the _Valkyrie_ will make this clear:

A

[Music:]

Die Betrog'ne lass auch zertreten.

Let them trample on the betrayed one.

B

[Music:]

Dass mit Zwang ich halte, was dir nicht haftet.

That by force I hold what denies thee homage.

C

[Music:]

Wer bist du, sag', die so schön und ernst mir erscheint?

Who art thou, say, who dost stand so beauteous and stern?

It was therefore, as usual, the musician in him controlling the poet,

although he always strenuously denied this, and indeed his complaint

against the old-time opera was that the poet was held in servitude

to the musician. In each case the poet was the serf, but the terms

of slavery were different. In the older opera he had to work within

the limits of a set scheme that gave him little or no scope for

character-drawing or for the natural evolution of a great dramatic

action. In the Wagnerian opera the poet was indeed allowed to make his

portion of the work worthy and consistent, but he was permitted no

further scope than was consistent with the necessities of the music. If

it be true that Wagner restored the poet to liberty by making the drama

the end and the music the means, it was only in the sense that he first

of all made the drama of the dimensions and the pattern that music

required. Beyond these dimensions, away from that pattern, it could not

be allowed to go.

That the musician in Wagner ruled the poet is plain enough to us now,

but it was always denied by Wagner himself. In the _Communication to my

Friends_, that elucidates so gratefully for us so many dark passages

in _Opera and Drama_, he is persistently blind to the fact that is

obvious enough to everyone else. As far as _Rienzi_, he tells us, he

had taken his operatic subjects from ready-made stories, while with the

_Flying Dutchman_ he struck out a new path, framing his own libretto

out of the simple unpolished outlines of a folk-saga. "Henceforward,"

he goes on to say, "with regard to all my dramatic works I was in

the first instance _Poet_, and only in the complete working out of

the poem did I become once more _Musician_. Only," he rather naïvely

continues, "_I was a poet who was conscious in advance of the power of

musical expression for the working out of his poems._"[368] Quite so:

when a subject took possession of him he would see it all in terms of

musical expression and development; and unconsciously the poem would be

so planned as to provide the needful framework, and no more, for the

musical emotion. Later on, after arguing that music is the emotional

expression _per se_, but that it can only ally itself with words that

contain the possibility of emotion, he once more lets us see that it

was the musician in him that determined his choice of subject and the

manner of its treatment. "What I perceived, I now looked at solely

with the eyes of music [_nur aus dem Geiste der Musik_]; though not,"

he rightly points out, "_that_ music whose formal rules might still

have embarrassed my expression, but the music that was complete within

me, and in which I could express myself as in a mother tongue."[369]

Granting that the musical world from the centre of which he wished to

pour himself out upon poetry was not that of the stereotyped operatic

composer, the fact remains that it was from the centre of music itself

that the outpouring was to come. And we may further grant that "it was

precisely by the facility of musical expression" he had acquired that

"he became a poet." What had happened in the interval between _Rienzi_

and the _Flying Dutchman_, and still more in the interval between the

_Flying Dutchman_ and the _Ring_, was that his musical sense had so

enormously expanded that it was now capable of weaving a continuous

emotional tissue of its own,--a tissue, however, that required the

framework of poetry to make it definite. He was right; it was of

the musician in him that the poet was born. And it was the musician

insisting on the dramatic "stuff" being reduced to its pure essentials

that led him to reject the wide-spreading romance and history, and to

seize upon the myth, in which a human content was presented in the

simplest possible form.

XIII

The musician, then, being at the basis of all his æsthetics, all

his theories of opera and drama, the question arises, what sort of

a musician was he? He was the spiritual son of Beethoven; a remoter

ancestor was Bach. This is the cardinal fact in the psychology of

Wagner; and it will need to be examined in all its bearings.

Wagner was one of those dynamically charged personalities after whose

passing the world can never be the same as it was before he came--one

of the tiny group of men to whom it is given to bestride an old world

and a new, but to sunder them by a gulf that becomes ever more and more

impassable; one of the very few who are able so to fill the veins of

a whole civilisation with a new principle of vitality that the tingle

of it is felt not only by the rarer but by the commonest spirits--some

new principle from which, whether a man likes it or not, he will find

it impossible to escape. Wagner is probably the only figure in the

whole history of music of whom this can be said. Bach created no such

upheaval. He counts for next to nothing in the music of his own day

and that of the two generations that followed him. He did not make a

new world in music: rather had a new world to be made before men's

eyes were competent to take the measure of that towering stature,

or men's hearts quick enough with life to respond to the profound

humanism of that great soul. We were not fit for Bach until Beethoven

and Wagner--and Wagner, perhaps, even more than Beethoven--made us

so. Beethoven, again, had it not been for Wagner, would probably not

have meant as much to us as he does now, or become the fertilising

force he is in modern music; and even that fertilisation is effected

through Wagner's work rather than along lines in continuation of

Beethoven's own. If anyone doubts this, let him ask himself what new

spirit of enduring vitality and power of propagation has come out of

the classical symphony pure and simple. Not Brahms, assuredly, great

as he is: "arrested development" is written large upon the forms and

the ideas of all the music that has come out of Brahms's symphonies

as clearly as upon those symphonies themselves. So far as modern

instrumental music has developed in humanity of utterance or in breadth

of structure, it is from assimilating from Beethoven, through Wagner,

just the urgent poetic spirit that Brahms passed by in Beethoven,--the

spirit of which Beethoven was himself only dimly conscious, but which

Wagner from the beginning saw to be inherent in him, and which he

distilled from the general tissue of Beethoven's work and used in a

new form for magical results of his own. The only explosive force

in music at all comparable in general to Wagner was Monteverdi. But

Monteverdi came a couple of hundred years too soon. The world was not

ready for him--it is hardly a paradox to say that he was not ready for

himself--and his explosion mostly spent itself in a desert. Wagner

had first-rate luck in this as in everything else in his life that

really mattered to him as an artist; not only had he the right dynamic

spark within him, but he was born into an atmosphere made electrically

ready by the passionate soul's cry of Beethoven. The explosion came--a

cataclysmic upheaval, leading to a new geological formation, as it

were, in music, new geographical delimitations, a new fauna and flora.

He had access to Beethoven's heart: and from the blood in Beethoven's

veins he won the strength both for his own new expression and his

new freedom of form. It is one of the things we should be constantly

thanking Providence for that the natural man in him insisted on making

its own world in its own way. Busoni, in his suggestive _Entwurf einer

neuen Aesthetik der Tonkunst_, has remarked upon the curious formalism

of most music, even the greatest. Here is an art fortunate enough to be

free from all material factors: it is, as Busoni says, simply "sounding

air," and is therefore presumably capable of a freedom of handling that

should be the despair of workers in the other arts. Perfect freedom

has yet to come; looked at from the heights, even giants like Bach and

Beethoven and Mozart are seen to be loaded with chains of their own and

their fellows' forging, and to be performing the same timid evolutions

again and again in one small corner of a field, while glorious leagues

of unexplored country unroll themselves all around them. Bach and

Beethoven enriched music by a sort of intensive culture of an inherited

estate. Wagner was really the first to leap the fences and break down

the gates and send his ploughshare deep into the bowels of a new

earth. Almost from his earliest years he had an instinctive sense of

the great force of emotional liberation that was struggling for an

outlet in Beethoven's music. He was probably the only man in Europe to

be aware of it and its tremendous significance for the future. There

were plenty of men who felt the greatness of Beethoven; but not one of

them, apparently, saw him as Wagner did. It is evident that people like

Mendelssohn and Robert and Clara Schumann, for example, with whom he

talked much in the 'forties, had no inkling that out of the spume of

this eager, restless mind the future of music was to be born. To them

his far-darting talk about Beethoven was apparently no more than the

interesting speculations of a clever but slightly eccentric visionary.

From the first he fastened upon the seminal essence of Beethoven's

later work--the attempt of a great soul, hampered somewhat by a

transmitted form, to pour out an endless fund of quasi-dramatic emotion

in music. The problem that lay before Wagner was how to release this

fund of emotion, to give it wings that would carry it over the whole

field of human life, to give it a new and more wonderful articulation.

After years of struggling he found his way to the light. It was one of

the extremely lucky "throws" of nature--a throw she will probably not

achieve again for generations--that within the musician who had this

unique vision of a music infinitely human and perfectly free there was

a dramatist capable of providing the definite framework upon which the

indefinite musical emotion could be woven into firm, coherent shapes.

His theory that purely instrumental music had shot its last bolt with

Beethoven, and that the choral ending to the Ninth Symphony is the

unconscious, instinctive cry of the musician for the redemption of

music by poetry, is the soundest of æsthetics if we do not take it too

literally. Music _did_ need this fertilisation by poetry if it was to

win a new procreative power. Agreeable music has been made, and will

continue to be made, by the passionless, disinterested weaving for its

own sake of beautiful strands of tone. But great music must go deeper

than this, and the deeper it goes the closer it comes to the heart; and

our name for the necessities of the heart is poetry.

XIV

Having thus summarised the attitude of Wagner to Beethoven and to

poetic music in general, let us proceed to fill in the details of the

theory, allowing Wagner, wherever possible, to speak for himself.

He has set forth his views upon Beethoven with the greatest

positiveness in his letters to Uhlig, and much more lucidly there than

in _Opera and Drama_.[370] He saw in Beethoven's music the struggle to

express a definite poetic idea in an abstract form that necessarily

made the communication of the nature of the idea itself impossible. He

always protested against the current fashion of performing Beethoven's

symphonies as if they were nothing more than agreeable or exciting

musical patterns. They were tone poems, and could mean nothing to the

hearer unless the poetry at the core of them was made clear. "The

essence of the great works of Beethoven," he writes to Uhlig, "is that

they are only in the last place _Music_, but contain in the first place

a poetic subject. Or shall we be told that this _subject_ is only

taken from music itself? Would not this be like saying that the poet

takes his subject from speech, and the painter his from colour? The

musical conductor who sees in one of Beethoven's tone-works nothing

but the music, is exactly like a reciter who should hold only by the

language of a poem, or the explainer of a picture who could not get

beyond its colour. This, however, is the case with our conductors,

even in the best instances--for many do not even so much as understand

the music; they understand the key, the themes, the working of the

parts, the instrumentation, and so on, and think that with these they

understand the whole of the content of the tone-work."[371] And again:

"The characteristic of the great compositions of Beethoven is that they

are veritable poems, in which it is sought to bring a real subject

to representation. The obstacle to their comprehension lies in the

difficulty of finding with certainty the subject that is represented.

Beethoven was completely possessed by a subject: his most significant

tone pictures are indebted almost solely to the individuality of the

subject that filled him; the consciousness of this made it seem to him

superfluous to indicate his subject otherwise than in the tone picture

itself. Just as our literary poets really address themselves only to

other literary poets, so Beethoven, in these works, involuntarily

addressed himself only to tone poets. The absolute musician, that is to

say the manipulator of absolute music, could not understand Beethoven,

because this absolute musician fastens only on the 'How,' and not

the 'What.' The layman, on the other hand, could but be completely

confused by these tone pictures, and at best only receive pleasure

from _that_ which to the tone poet was merely the material means of

expression."[372]

Wagner recognised, however, the difficulty of grasping a poetic subject

that had not been revealed by the composer, and held that it could

only be divined by a poetic musician of the same kind. "If no special

poetic subject is expressed in the tone speech, it may undoubtedly

pass as easily understandable; for there can here be no question of

_real_ understanding. If, however, the expression of the tone speech is

conditioned by a poetic subject, this speech at once becomes the most

incomprehensible of all, unless the poetic subject be at the same time

defined by some other means of expression than those of absolute music.

"The poetic subject of a tone piece by Beethoven is thus only to

be divined by a tone poet; for, as I remarked before, Beethoven

involuntarily appealed only to such, to those who were of like

feelings, like culture, aye, well-nigh like capability with himself.

Only a man like this can make these compositions intelligible to the

laity, and above all by making the subject of the tone poem clear

both to the executants and to the audience, and thus making good an

involuntary error in the technique of the tone poet, who omitted

this indication. Any other sort of performance of one of Beethoven's

veritable tone poems, however technically perfect it may be, must

remain incomprehensible in proportion as the understanding is not

facilitated in the way I have suggested."[373]

This indeed, he held, was Beethoven's error--an error forced upon him

by the conditions of his time--that he should endeavour to make his

music truly human without giving the hearer the clue to the emotions

upon which it was based. Beethoven's mistake, he says, in one of the

happiest and most famous of his analogies, was the same as that of

Columbus, who, though merely trying to find the way to the India that

was already known, actually discovered thereby a new world.[374] His

vain effort to "achieve the artistically necessary in the artistically

impossible" has, however, revealed to the modern world the infinitely

expressive capacity of music. But though it is only by being fertilised

by poetry that music can attain to the full expression of the truly

human, Wagner, as was to be expected from one who allowed so little

liberty to the imagination in art, was against this fertilisation

taking the form of programme music. The poetic content must be

communicated immediately and visibly to the hearer by presentation on

the stage. In all this, of course, he was once more merely expressing

an individual bias, and one that is not in the least binding upon

musicians in general. When the musician, he tells us, tries to paint by

means of the orchestra alone, what he produces is neither music nor a

painting.[375] He failed to perceive not only that instrumental music

offers numberless instances of quite successful tone painting, but that

a good deal of the pictorialism of his own music has to justify itself

by means of the imagination alone. Every time the _Feuerzauber_, for

example, is played in the concert room the imagination supplies, quite

successfully, the spectacle of the flames; and even in the theatre it

is left to the imagination to picture to itself the waves of the Rhine

in the opening scene of the _Rhinegold_, for while the wave music

is going on from the commencement the curtain does not rise until

the 126th bar. There is no need to elaborate the point. Hundreds of

composers, from Bach to the present day, have "painted" in music time

without number without the assistance of a stage setting, the subject

of the painting being quite sufficiently indicated either by the words

of the poem,--the spinning-wheel in Schubert's _Gretchen am Spinnrade_,

for example,--or by means of an explanatory note or title, as with the

modern symphonic poem.

Without pursuing this side issue further now, let us follow up the

more essential lines of the Wagnerian theory. We have seen him first

of all frame his dramatic action in such a way that while making

itself fully intelligible to the spectator it supplies the music with

endless opportunities for the outpouring of feeling. Romance and

"historical" drama have both been rejected because of their containing

so much that, according to Wagner, appeals less to the feeling than

to the intellect. It was in the myth that he found the condensation

he desired. Upon the myth the composer was to pour out the full flood

of his emotion. The form and quality of the musical utterance are to

be determined by the poem. Lyrism must no longer be imposed upon the

drama from without, as in the older opera, but must grow out of the

drama as a necessary consequence. It follows that neither the chorus

nor any of the characters is to be employed purely for the purposes of

concerted music. In the orchestra the musician has at his disposal an

instrument of unlimited expressiveness. The orchestra, as Wagner says,

has a capacity of its own for speech. In the Beethoven symphony this

capacity was developed to such a height as to urge the orchestra to

make the vain attempt to deliver a message which from its very nature

it was impossible for it to deliver clearly. That message, however, can

be _précisé_ by the Word: and the true function of the orchestra is to

announce what cannot be conveyed by speech.[376] Its specific meaning

can be still further _précisé_ by means of gesture--not the ordinary

gesture of the older opera, which derived solely from the dance

pantomime, but gesture that is the visible counterpart of the auditory

sensation communicated by the orchestra. The range of this kind of

gesture is as wide as human emotion itself. Moreover, the orchestra can

carry on the action even after speech and gesture have ceased; it can

use themes in such a way as to create presentiment, and it can recall

the past. The orchestra in fact, is to the drama of the future what

the chorus was to the Greek drama,--a totalised individuality apart

from, yet intimately bound up with, the separate individualities on the

stage. The musical expression will vary in intensity according to the

intensity of the situations. The form of the music drama will therefore

be a unified one, but one containing the possibility of an infinite

variety of expressions; but it will not be permissible to introduce

any expression for the mere sake of musical effect; everything must

grow spontaneously out of the emotions and situations presented by the

poet. The drama can be thoroughly unified by the employment of salient

"leading motives";[377] whereas the older opera had no unity at all,

but was a mere conglomeration of arias, duets, _ensembles_, and so

on.[378]

XV

It must be clear to almost every reader, after this exposition

of Wagner's own views upon music in general and dramatic music in

particular, that, paradoxical as it may seem, he was under a life-long

illusion as to the nature of his own genius and the origin and

significance of his reforms. So far from the poet in him shaping and

controlling the musician, it was the musician who led the poet where

he would have him go; so far from drama being with him the end and the

music the means, it was music that was more than ever the end, to which

the drama only served as means; and so far from Wagner being first and

last a dramatist, the whole significance of his work lay precisely

in the fact that he was a great symphonist. This last conclusion too

may seem a paradox; but on a broad survey it will, I think, be seen

to be true. It was not for nothing that Wagner always claimed descent

from Beethoven rather than from even the greatest of opera writers,

such as Gluck and Mozart and Weber. His instinct was a sound one; it

was Beethoven's work that he was really carrying on. The whole of

his productivity is given us, in essence, in the later stages of the

_Ring_, in _Tristan_, and in the _Meistersinger_. It was to achieve

such an expression, such a tissue, as this that he had been labouring

and experimenting and thinking for nearly thirty years; and what are

these works, seen with the historical eye of the twentieth century,

but stupendous symphonies for orchestra and voices? He himself always

proudly pointed to _Tristan_ as the supremely successful realisation

of all his theories as to the expressive capacity and the formal

possibilities of music. Very well; _Tristan_ is of all his works the

most symphonic, the one that least needs the apparatus of the stage,

the one in which the actors could most easily be dispensed with for

long stretches of time with the minimum of loss.

I have already pointed out that he was probably the only musician in

Europe in the 'thirties and 'forties with an intuition of all that the

achievements of the later Beethoven meant for music.[379] All through

Wagner's theoretical writings runs the same simile of music as a vast

sea, on which Beethoven alone had so far been able to trust himself

with any freedom. While the other composers of his day--and indeed of a

later day, as the case of Brahms shows--had little idea beyond cruising

in Beethoven's track with more or less varied merchandise, Wagner even

as a boy saw the infinite wonders that were awaiting the first mariner

who should have the courage to leave the shelter of the great bay and

adventure out into the unknown main. He knew all that Beethoven had

added to German music, the new emotions he had poured into it, the

new logic of form with which he had endowed it. He knew also that as

much could still be superadded to Beethoven as Beethoven had added to

Mozart and Haydn; and the story of his evolution, both as dramatist and

musician, is the story of this gradual extension of the borders of the

Beethoven territory.

He had in abundance what has hitherto been almost the exclusive

possession of the German school of music,--the sense of a far-sweeping

logic of form. He had the rigorous, clean-cutting intellect that

instinctively makes straight for what is the very essence of form--the

spontaneous shaping of an idea, by itself, for itself, into the

lines and colours most natural to it. "Swords without blades" was

his contemptuous description of the empty rules of "form" that they

sell in schools and text-books, much as the chemist sells the dried

leaves of flowers. The true artist, he says, is always creating forms

without knowing it.[380] _His_ problem was to find the new form that

should be as valid for what he had to say as Beethoven's form was

for him. No such form was then in existence. In this respect he was

far less fortunate than any of his great predecessors or successors;

each of them had found his work all the easier in that he began

with an inherited form, of opera or of instrumental music, which he

simply exploited or expanded according to his necessities. Wagner's

glance round upon the music of his day showed him that there was no

form that _he_ could take up and patch or hammer into a serviceable

instrument. The symphony was not, nor is it yet, a truly logical form.

Its divisions, the number of its divisions, the order of its divisions,

are all in large part arbitrary and conventional. Within each of the

frames made by these divisions it had to submit itself to a more

or less formalistic method of procedure that was often at variance

with the very nature of the idea. Even Beethoven, giant as he was,

could not quite burst the bonds of custom and prescription. Wagner's

favourite illustration of the clash that sometimes occurred between

the traditional form and a new artistic purpose was the repeat in the

_Leonora No. 3_ Overture. The controlling influence in the evolution

of symphonic form had been the dance; the business of music had

primarily been to make what variable play it could with certain given

thematic figures. But bit by bit there had stolen into instrumental

music the desire for more than this--the desire to follow out in tone

not the changing aspects of a theme alone but the vicissitudes of a

dramatic idea; and composers had long felt that the logic of the latter

must be something other than the logic of the former, though as yet

they did not quite know how to attain the structure they wanted. The

purely thematic working-out aimed mostly at alternation: the dramatic

working-out must depend mostly on psychological development. "It is

obvious," says Wagner, "that in the conflict of a dramatic idea with

[symphonic] form, there must at once arise the necessity of either

sacrificing the development (the idea) to the alternation (the form),

or the latter to the former.... I once held up Gluck's Overture to

_Iphigenia in Aulis_ as a model, because the master, with the surest

feeling for the nature of the problem we are now considering, had here

so happily understood that he must open his drama with an alternation

of moods and their antitheses, in keeping with the overture form,

instead of with a development impossible in that form. That the great

masters who came after him, however, felt themselves circumscribed by

this, we may clearly see in Beethoven's overtures; the composer knew

the infinitely richer delineations of which his music was capable; he

felt equal to carrying out the idea of development; and nowhere do we

realise this more distinctly than in the great _Leonora_ Overture. But

anyone with eyes can see precisely in this overture how prejudicial to

Beethoven the retention of the transmitted form was bound to be; for

who that is capable of understanding such a work will not agree with me

that its weakness consists in the repetition of the first part after

the middle section, whereby the idea of the work is marred almost to

the point of making it unintelligible; and that the more as in all the

other parts, and especially at the end, Beethoven is obviously governed

simply by the dramatic development? But whoever is intelligent and

unprejudiced enough to see this must also admit that this mishap could

only have been avoided by forswearing the repetition altogether--which,

however, would mean the abrogation of the overture form, _i.e._ the

original symphonic dance form with its mere play of motives (_nur

motivirte_), and the first step towards the shaping of a new form."[381]

XVI

Beethoven, in fact, had brought a new spirit into the symphony and

the overture without being able to discover a new and inevitable form

in which this spirit could express itself. Wagner from his earliest

years must have felt that he too had a dim perception of a new world

of expression, if only he could discover the form for it. That form

clearly did not exist in the symphony even as Beethoven had left it,

for Wagner's vision was ready to take a bolder poetic flight even than

Beethoven's, and it would have been as sadly hampered by the more

freely symphonic but still largely formal method of Beethoven as the

latter had been by the traditions of form he had taken over from his

predecessors. It was still more useless for Wagner to seek the new

logic of form in the other great art-genre of his day--the opera--for

here illogic reigned supreme. The opera not only did not achieve the

unity it professed to aim at; it did not even let either of its two

great and ever warring constituents tyrannise effectively over the

other. Instead, each merely lamed the other; the average opera was

neither a good play spoiled by music, nor good music spoiled by a play,

but merely a bad play and formless music adding each to the other's

foolishness. How hopelessly impotent the current opera was to furnish a

form that should be adequate for all that a modern musician might have

to say was shown by the practice of Beethoven: the greatest musical

brain of its epoch turned in anger and disappointment and disgust from

the opera after one experiment with it, and concentrated more and more

on the symphonic forms, endeavouring to make these more expansive and

more flexible.

A hundred composers and theorists had for a century past realised

the insufficiency of the opera. Gluck's manifestos are known to

every student. More than a generation after Gluck the same problems

were still being discussed in virtually the same terms and with the

same results. Theory was evidently a long way ahead of practice; but

even theory failed because it missed just the one seminal thing that

it was Wagner's function to bring to light. The excellencies and

the final limitations of the theory of the time are best seen in a

rather remarkable work--Ignaz Franz Mosel's _Versuch einer Aesthetik

des dramatischen Tonsatzes_ ("Attempt at an Æsthetic of the Musical

Drama")--that, curiously enough, was published in the year of Wagner's

birth.[382] Much in this book might have been written by Gluck; some

of it might even have been written by Wagner himself. Mosel expresses

more clearly perhaps than any previous writer that conception of the

unified art-work upon which Wagner so strongly insisted. For Mosel the

ideal opera is a combination, on practically equal terms, of poetry,

music, acting, singing and the art of the stage; the plastic arts,

however, play a smaller part in his theory than they do in Wagner's.

He regards the drama as the basis of opera. He sees, as Wagner did,

that the rules of procedure of pure music are not applicable in their

entirety to the dramatic stage. Like Wagner, again, he holds that

complicated subjects, founded on intrigue or political action, are

unsuitable for opera. Music being a purely emotional art, addressing

itself more to the heart than the head, the best subject is that that

gives full play to the emotional power of tone. The best subjects

are the mythological ones. The poet must so shape his text that it

is "thoroughly musical, that is, not only containing nothing that is

outside the possibility of musical expression, but also nothing to

which music cannot give a heightened beauty and a strengthened effect."

The verse should be of such a kind that the composer's melody can

spring naturally out of it. As a rule one syllable should be set to one

note only. The melody must rise or fall precisely at the point where a

good declaimer of the verses who is not musical would make them do so.

Mosel sees that dramatic music frequently demands a different method of

structure from that of pure music; as he puts it, the so-called musical

period of two, four or eight-bar melodies can often be departed from

with advantage. The style of the music as a whole must vary with the

quality of the poetic subject; and not only must the general nature

of the theme be reproduced in music, but also the physical, moral or

conventional character of each person; and this adaptability of style

to subject must be preserved in the orchestra as well as in the voice.

The overture, having for its subject the preparation of the hearer for

what is to come, must bear the same character as that which is dominant

in the opera itself. There must be as little distinction as possible

between recitative and aria. Form and expression must always follow the

feeling. And so on and so on.

This was the sole result of a hundred years of keen theory and ardent

practice. The form of opera remained virtually what it always had been;

the most that anyone could suggest was a rationalising of the form here

and there, the ridding it of some excrescence or absurdity. And so,

in all probability, it would have remained for another hundred years,

had not Wagner come with the conception that the old form itself was

not worth tinkering with, but must be cast aside, and a new one made,

not out of Mozart, not out of Gluck, not, indeed, out of any opera

whatever, but _out of the instrumental music of Beethoven_. And this,

I repeat, was a marvellous perception for one man out of all Europe's

music-making millions to have.

His own accounts of the dawning of this idea upon him betray a

fundamental inconsistency. On the one hand he is always stoutly

asserting that he only found his way to the new music at the impulse

and under the guidance of the poet. On the other hand it is clearer to

us than it was to him that the poet in him was allowed to co-operate

with the musician only in much the same way that he is allowed to

co-operate in the symphonic poem. The musician, that is to say, feels a

vague desire to express certain emotions of love, of pity, of terror,

of aspiration; and he calls in the poet to supply him with a framework

that shall be able to give consistency to his emotions and make the

sequence of them intelligible to his hearers. Wagner, in his analysis

of his own psychological processes, inverted the real relations of

them, misled by the fact that _as a musician he developed much later

than as a poet_--the obvious reason for this being that in poetry he

had not, as in music, to make a new instrument, a new vocabulary and a

new technique for himself. But even from his own account it is evident

that the new ideal of music drama arose in him through the convergence

of two great impressions--the acting and singing of Schröder-Devrient,

and the later symphonies and quartets of Beethoven. He was amazed

to find how much Schröder-Devrient could do in the way of dramatic

expression with the poor puppets and absurd situations of the Italian

opera stage. "I said to myself, what an incomparable work must that be,

that in all its parts should be worthy of the histrionic talent of such

an artist, and still more, of a body of artists like her." Then, he

says, he got the idea of what could be done with the operatic _genre_

"by turning the whole rich stream of German music, that Beethoven had

swelled to the full, into the bed of the musical drama."[383]

And the essence of Beethoven's achievement, as he saw, was that not

only had all the earlier formalism become inevitable form, but that

form itself was dissolved in the idea; the Beethoven symphony becomes

in the end simply a continuous flood of meaningful melody. "For it is

surprising," he says, "that this method of procedure, developed in the

field of instrumental music, should have been employed to some degree

in mixed choral and orchestral music, but as yet never properly in

opera.... Yet the possibility must exist of obtaining in the dramatic

poem itself a poetic counterpart to the symphonic form, which, while it

completely fills this copious form, should at the same time correspond

to the inmost laws of dramatic form."[384]

The real ancestry of Wagner the opera writer is then clear enough; it

is not an operatic but a symphonic ancestry. I therefore cannot wholly

agree with Dr. Guido Adler that "as an opera composer Wagner stands

in the frame of Renaissance art and culture. His fundamental aims

coincide more or less with those of the founders of this culture epoch

in general and of the representatives of the High Renaissance in the

musical drama in particular.... The founders of the opera created the

_stilo rappresentativo_, in which the musical expression was to follow

the representation and the action as closely as possible.... The true

theatre style proceeds historically from Peri, Monteverde and Cavalli

to Wagner and Verdi. These are the representatives of emotionalism

in music, of that fundamental æsthetic principle that recognises

expression as the sole or main essence of music."[385] Resemblances

between Wagner and the Renaissance founders of the opera there

certainly are; but in comparison with the basic difference between

him and them the resemblances are superficial. That basic difference

is that while their reforms were born of the desire to model music

upon and control it by speech,[386] Wagner's reform was born of the

conception that the most copious and eloquent of musical instruments is

the orchestra, to the emotions of which the voices, by means of words,

can give direction and precision. Wagner's true lineage is that of

instrumental music, the symphony and the symphonic poem. He is not the

child either of the stage or of the song; the instrumental musician in

him simply enters into an alliance with these for purposes of his own.

XVII

Of this he was more than half conscious himself; and it was always

clear to him that as he was in the great line of instrumental

succession, and that what he was doing was to extend still further the

expressive range of instrumental, endlessly melodic music, it might

be urged against him that the logical outcome of all his theory and

his practice was not the opera but the symphonic poem or the programme

symphony. But against that conclusion he always strenuously protested

in advance. Something he saw there _must_ be to make definite to the

hearer the indefinite emotion of the music alone. He knew that the

classical symphony was a work of composite origin, one movement of

it--the Minuet or Scherzo,--still maintaining almost unchanged its

dance-like character, while in the others the composer aimed more and

more at emotional expression. But the musician was hampered here by

the fact that the expression of emotion could not rise above a certain

intensity without bursting the symphonic mould, and indeed prompting

in the hearer a question as to the source of that emotion. There was,

as Wagner says, "a certain fear of overstepping the bounds of musical

expression, and especially of pitching the passionate, tragic tendency

too high, for that would arouse feelings and expectations that would

awake in the hearer the disquieting question of 'Why,'--which the

musician himself could not answer satisfactorily."[387] But Wagner

would not admit that this something might be a mere programme. "Not

a programme, which rather provokes than silences the troublesome

question of 'Why,' can therefore express the meaning of the symphony,

but only the scenically-represented dramatic action itself."[388] With

the liberation of musical expression from the stereotyped images set

before it in the ordinary musical verse, and with the liberation of

musical technique effected by the breaking down of the old operatic

conventions of form, the power of music could be extended indefinitely.

The poet would discover that "melodic form is capable of endlessly

richer development than had previously been possible in the symphony

itself, and, with a presentiment of this development, he will already

project the poetical conception with perfect freedom. Thus where even

the symphonist timidly reached back to the original dance-form--never

daring, even for his expression, wholly to pass the boundaries that

kept him in communication with this form--the poet will now cry to

him: 'Throw yourself fearlessly into the full stream of the sea of

music: hand in hand with me you can never lose touch with what is most

comprehensible to all mankind; for through me you always stand on the

ground of the dramatic action, and this action, in the moment of its

representation on the stage, is the most immediately intelligible of

all poems. Stretch your melody boldly out, that it may pour through the

whole work like an endless flood: in it say what I leave unsaid, since

only you can say it, and in silence I will utter all, since it is I who

lead you by the hand."[389]

Here he is expressing only a personal bias. His own imagination

was somewhat timid; it preferred the seen to the unseen, and he was

consequently quite unable to take up the point of view of people

to whom a thing mentally conceived is as impressive as, or even

more impressive than, the same thing set bodily before their eyes.

Had he had any inkling of this, he would not have brought so many

animals upon the scene. The most striking instance of his inability

to trust to the spectator's imagination is his vacillation over the

ending of _Tannhäuser_. In the first version of the final scene, the

last attempt of Venus to win back her old lover was shown only as a

struggle in the mind of the frenzied Tannhäuser, with a red glow in the

direction of the distant Hörselberg to make the cause of the madness

clear. The death of Elisabeth was merely divined by the intuition

of Wolfram, while the sound of far-off bells and the faint light of

torches on the Wartburg gave the spectator the hint he needed for

the full comprehension of the scene. Wagner was uncomfortable until

he had made everything visible that had formerly been left to the

imagination; Venus had to appear in person to Tannhäuser, and the bier

of Elisabeth had to be carried across the stage. It would have been

better, in this and in many other cases, had he reposed more faith in

the imagination of his audience. But his theory and his practice were

often inconsistent in this as in so many other cases. We have seen him

objecting, _à propos_ of Berlioz's _Romeo and Juliet_, to music that

required an explanation outside itself to make it clear. But several

of his own orchestral pieces are unintelligible without a verbal

explanation or its equivalent. Who could make anything of the prelude

to the third Act of _Tannhäuser_, for example, in the absence of such

an explanation? It cannot even be said that the dramatic play of the

motives is clear to anyone who has listened carefully to the opera, for

the theme of Tannhäuser's pilgrimage, that is of such importance in the

prelude, does not occur till the third Act; during the prelude to that

Act the hearer who is listening to it for the first time is ignorant

not merely of its meaning but of its very existence. How, again, can

the audience be expected to know, the first time they hear it, that the

opening theme of the prelude to the third Act of the _Meistersinger_

symbolises Sachs's renunciation of Eva? The theme has appeared in the

second Act as an orchestral counterpoint during one of the stanzas of

the cobbling song. Even supposing the hearer to have any notion on that

occasion that the theme is more than an ordinary counterpoint--that

it has a psychological significance--how is he to know what this

significance is; and how is he to read this meaning into it when he

hears it at the commencement of the third Act? It all has to be made

clear to him by a prose explanation, as Wagner himself recognised

when he wrote his explanatory programme note upon the prelude. In the

light of this and other instances that could be cited, how can Wagner

consistently deny to other composers the right to call in the aid of

verbal explanations for their symphonic poems or programme symphonies?

XVIII

There are as many contradictions between Wagner's theory and

practice, indeed, as between his life and his art. Without attempting

the impossible task of trying to reconcile them all, let us cast a

rapid glance over the main features of his practice, which are far

more important than his theory. From every side we are driven to the

conclusion that the dominating force in him was the instrumental

musician who was born to continue Beethoven's work in another sphere.

As his powers developed, his music becomes more symphonic,[390] and he

intuitively shapes his poems so as to allow the freest possible play

to the symphonic succession and interweaving of themes. The characters

serve to make the course of the story clear, and to give precision

to the emotions that are being expressed by the orchestra. He saw in

Beethoven's later works a colossal effort to make music free. Logic of

some kind there must be in every piece of music. This logic depends

fundamentally upon showing the inter-relation of each part of the

music by the recurrence of significant themes; and broadly speaking

there are only two ways of achieving this--by way of pattern or by way

of poetry. At bottom all form, all logic, in music, in fiction, in

drama, in architecture, in sculpture, is one in object and process;

a coherent whole has to be made out of parts, and the parts have to

justify their existence by showing themselves indispensable to the

whole. Pattern form and poetic form embrace between them every mode of

structure of which music is capable. Sometimes a piece of music leans

markedly to the one or the other; but in the vast majority of cases

the actual form is a union of the two, or a compromise between them.

It was a compromise of this kind that Wagner detected in some of the

greatest works of Beethoven; the form that had been evolved mainly with

reference to pattern was being applied, with only partial success, to

music the prime impulse of which was poetic--however vague this poetry

might be, however incapable of expression in words. But while pattern

form pure and simple tells its own story and is its own justification,

poetic form needs to be explained and justified by the poetic idea

that is at the root of it. Go beyond Beethoven, says Wagner, in the

expression of poetic emotion, and your form will become so free that

the hearer will no longer be able to see it in terms of the old pattern

logic, and the music will seem to him formless and incoherent. You

can only win the full freedom you need for the expression of definite

as distinguished from indefinite emotion by telling the hearer the

nature and the source of this emotion. As Wagner put it, poetic music

in pattern form always prompts the question "Why?" The symphonic-poem

writer answers with his programme: Wagner answered with the characters

and the action of the programme set visibly before us on a stage. There

is no such fundamental æsthetic difference between the two methods as

Wagner imagined; the differences are only in detail.[391]

The curious thing is that, for all his theories, Wagner himself

now and then wrote instrumental pieces that prompt a "Why?" as

emphatically as anything of Beethoven's. He despised what he called

the "quadrature musicians"--the composers who take refuge in phrases

cut to a regulation length and pattern and worked-out in a stereotyped

four-square form. Music meant little or nothing to him unless it spoke

directly of humanity and to humanity. No theme must be invented for

mere invention's sake, or worked-out for the mere sake of working-out;

it must spring into being as the expression of an overwhelming human

need or of some blinding vision, and must answer in all its changes

to the changing life of the man or mood it painted. It was this

inevitableness of idea and of form that he admired in Beethoven and

missed in Brahms. His inability to compromise on the matter made him

contemptuously sweep out of existence most of the music of his day. It

was precisely in this broadening of the Beethovenian spirit and design,

and the making them capable of expressing every emotion that mankind

can feel, that he opened out such enormous possibilities in music.

The ordinary "abstract" composer's mind must have been a pure puzzle

to a man like him, who could not understand how modern music could

have any _raison d'être_ apart from something definitely poetic or

pictorial to be expressed. To invent a theme for its own abstract

sake, to pare and shape it till it was "workable," and then to weave

it along with others of the same kind into a pattern of which the main

lines were predetermined for him by tradition--this was something he

could not imagine himself doing, and that he scoffed at when he found

the Conservatoire musician engaged in it. "I simply cannot compose at

all," he said once, "when nothing occurs to me."[392] He must always

have a definite subject, which was to determine the nature, of the

theme and control the whole course of the development. Looking back

through the music of the generation that has followed him, we can see

how penetrating his vision was in all questions of expression and

form. Beethoven's innovations, he points out, were mostly in the field

of rhythmic distribution, not that of harmonic modulation. Rhythmic

changes of all kinds come naturally within the scope of the ordinary

symphonic movement, which is in essence an ideal dance; but startling

melodic or harmonic changes, or attempted subtleties of form, generally

prompt that awkward question "Why?" and leave it unanswered. Take,

for example, the efforts that have been made in our own day to unify

the four-movement sonata form by the carrying over of themes from

one movement to another, as in César Franck's violin and pianoforte

sonata. Attach a poetic significance to a theme, and its recurrence

in another movement explains itself; but in a piece of ostensibly

abstract music the recurrence simply puzzles us. No satisfactory answer

can be given--except in terms of a programme--to the question why a

theme that has apparently served its purpose should be resuscitated

by the composer at a later stage, in preference to the invention of

a fresh theme. For every effect the composer makes, the logician in

us insists upon knowing the cause. Hence the soundness of Wagner's

advice to the modern composer--Do not consciously aim at harmonic

and instrumental effects, but wait till there is a sufficient cause

for them.[393] His own practice was a model of restraint: not one

modulation, not one subtilisation of the harmony, not one addition

to the orchestral weight without a thoroughly good reason, rooted in

the nature of the idea itself. "In the instrumental prelude to the

_Rhinegold_, for instance," he says, "it was impossible for me to quit

the fundamental note, for there was no reason whatever for changing it.

A great part of the not unanimated theme that follows between Alberich

and the Rhine Maidens permitted of modulation only to the most closely

related keys, since passion still expresses itself here in its most

primitive _naïveté_."[394] The rule he would enforce upon pupils is

this, "Never leave a key so long as what you have to say can still

be said in it." And only when the emotion becomes more complex must

the harmony be coloured more subtly to correspond. This, he lays it

down, constitutes the great difference between the symphonic and the

dramatic development of themes. In the former the effect is meant to be

kaleidoscopic; and a real master can work wonders in the arabesque-like

combination and transformation of simple material. But do what he

will he cannot venture upon the variety of the dramatic composer,

for if he goes beyond a certain point of audacity or singularity he

ceases to be intelligible in terms of pure music. "Neither a mere

play of counterpoint, nor the most fanciful devices of figuration

or harmonic invention, either could or should transform a theme so

characteristically and give it so many and so varied expressions--and

yet keep it always recognisable--as true dramatic art can do quite

naturally." Proof of this can be had by pursuing the simple theme of

the Rhine Maidens--

[Music:]

Rhinegold! Rhinegold!

"through all the changing passions of the four-part drama, down to

Hagen's watch song in the first Act of the _Götterdämmerung_, where

it appears in a form that, to me at any rate, is simply unthinkable

as the theme of a symphonic movement, albeit it still has its _raison

d'être_ in the laws of harmony and thematism, though only in their

application to the drama. But to try to apply what is thus made

possible to the symphony itself must necessarily lead to the complete

ruin of the latter; for there it would be merely a deliberate 'effect,'

while in the other case it has a motive."[395] And he ends with the

theory that symphonic music and dramatic music are two quite different

modes of expression, and that only errors of practice and of judgment

can come from the attempt to blend them. This dictum the musicians of

a later day can accept only with reservations. We admit that he did

well to draw a line of sharp distinction between the older symphonic

moods and forms and those of musical drama. But he overlooked the fact

that the basic distinction was not between symphony and drama, but

between purely abstract music of all kinds and purely poetic music

of all kinds. There are procedures open to the latter that are still

not open to the former--virtually as many procedures, indeed, as are

open to opera itself. For the principle of the symphonic poem is at

bottom the same as that of the musical drama--to follow in music the

vicissitudes of a poetic idea; and given a knowledge on our part of

this idea, whether it be communicated to us by a stage action or by

a prose or poetic explanation, the composer is at liberty to indulge

in as many audacities of melody, of harmony, of modulation as may

be justified by the nature of his subject. Wagner, as I have tried

to show, was prevented from applying his own principles to purely

instrumental poetic music by his inability to follow the "moments" of

an action that was merely suggested to him, instead of being realised

in a theatre. But there is no reason why _we_ should fail to draw the

conclusion that is obviously implicit in Wagner's own argument as to

the relations of music and poetic suggestion. The strange thing is

that every now and then he himself made an excursion into the fields

he attempted to close to others. His _Faust Overture_, for example, is

a pure symphonic poem, the full meaning of which only becomes apparent

to us when we know the poetic subject. The opening tuba theme is of a

type that a composer would hesitate to use for the opening "subject"

of a symphony; it receives both its explanation and its justification

solely from our knowledge that it depicts the world-weary Faust. The

case of the _Siegfried Idyl_ is still more instructive. That exquisite

piece of music puzzles us once or twice by the apparent abruptness of

its transitions. We might have guessed, from our knowledge of Wagner's

precepts and practice, that he is following a quasi-poetic scheme of

his own, and that the music does not always tell a coherent story to us

because he has seen fit to keep this scheme from us. We now know for

certain, on the testimony of Glasenapp, that this is so. Here we have

another instance of flat contradiction between Wagner's theory and his

practice. But had he reflected that a knowledge of the poetic basis

of the _Siegfried Idyl_ is necessary to us if we are to see the same

coherence in the music that he saw, he would have been bound to admit

that the communication of the poetic basis of any symphonic poem will

justify the composer writing in a style that would be unsuitable to

abstract music--a style differing very little in its fundamentals from

that of the Wagnerian stage. No middle course is possible: whatever

justifies the Wagnerian music drama justifies also _Till Eulenspiegel_

and the _L'Après-midi d'un Faune_--not for Wagner perhaps, but

certainly for us.

His intransigent attitude towards programme music is all the stranger

in view of the fact that he persistently read concrete meanings or

events into the music that moved him. Everyone knows his interpretation

of certain of Beethoven's symphonies and the C sharp minor quartet. He

read quasi-pictures and even words into certain of Bach's fugues; for

the seventeenth fugue and the twenty-fourth prelude he had half a mind

to write appropriate words. He ought to have seen that if instrumental

music could thus suggest concrete associations, similar associations

could also suggest music to correspond with them, and that the logical

and inevitable outcome of this alliance between music and poetic

suggestion is programme music. It is interesting to learn, however,

that in his last days he often talked of writing a symphony. He had,

he says, no lack of ideas; his difficulty was to stop inventing. His

symphony would have been in one movement only; "the finales are the

awkward things [_Klippe_]; I will steer clear of them; I will keep to

one-movement symphonies." Nor would he base them on the old system

of theme-contrast. Beethoven had exhausted the possibilities of that

form. His own style would be that of an endless melodic web--the

principle, indeed, that we can see at work in all the operas of his

maturity. "Only," he added, "no drama"; evidently his prejudice against

story music apart from the stage persisted to the end. The projected

symphonies would apparently have been on the lines of the _Siegfried

Idyl_ and the larger pianoforte works such as the _Albumblatt for

Betty Schott_ (1875), the _Albumblatt for the Princess Metternich_

(1861), the _Album Sonata for Frau Wesendonck_ (1853), and the _Ankunft

bei den schwarzen Schwänen_ (1861). If so, we should probably be

compelled to pass the same criticism upon the symphonies as we do

upon these works--that in spite of their unquestionable beauty we are

sometimes at a loss to see the same coherence in them that they must

have had for him. In the lengthy _Album Sonata for Frau Wesendonck_,

for example, we feel that he is all the while following the outlines of

some unavowed poetic theme, slackening and tightening the expression,

lightening and darkening it, hurrying and pausing, in conformity with

the demands of that. A musical picture of this kind, that disdains

formal development of the pattern order, and simply weaves its tissue

out of moods, is much more difficult on a large scale than on a small

one. The trouble begins when a transition has to be made from one

mood to another. In his last days Wagner was capable of wonderful

quasi-symphonic meditations on a given theme; nothing could surpass

for pure beauty or for continuity of invention the long orchestral

passage that accompanies Kundry's account of Parsifal's mother (vocal

score, p. 187 ff.). We feel that Wagner could have indeed worked

marvels in this way to the end: but, as he himself once said in a

letter to Frau Wesendonck, the art of composition is really the art of

transition; and one fears that his symphonic transitions would have

failed to make their reasons clear to us. The astounding tissue of the

_Götterdämmerung_ teems with transitions of the most abrupt kind; but

they are all intelligible because the physiognomies of the leit-motives

are familiar to us, and every allusion is instantaneously clear. Their

logic is only partly in themselves, and partly in the poetic ideas of

which they are the symbols. It seems probable that his symphonies would

have been Siegfried Idyls on a larger scale, possessing every virtue

but that of inevitable continuity.

[Illustration: RICHARD WAGNER, 1877.]

FOOTNOTES:

[289] He seems to be referring more particularly to the fourth movement.

[290] _Mein Leben_, p. 73.

[291] _Mein Leben_, p. 94.

[292] _G.S._, xii. 1 ff.

[293] _G.S._, xii. 5 ff.

[294] _Pasticcio_, in _G.S._, xii. 5 ff.

[295] Mr. Dannreuther, in his article on Wagner in _Grove's Dictionary

of Music_ (v. 391), thinks that the young enthusiast for Beethoven

perceived the weakness of Bellini's music clearly enough, yet the

impression Mme. Devrient made upon him was powerful and artistic. The

first statement hardly squares with all the facts as we now know them.

[296] _I.e._ as to why the poorer opera had impressed him more than the

better one.

[297] _Mein Leben_, p. 102.

[298] _Mein Leben_, p. 104.

[299] See the article on _Der dramatische Gesang_, in _G.S._, xii. 15.

[300] The German "Gesang" is perhaps best translated here and elsewhere

by this general term.

[301] _I.e._ the conventional forms of Italian opera.

[302] See the article _Bellini, ein Wort zu seiner Zeit_, in _G.S._,

xii. 19. It must be remembered that this article, which was published

anonymously, was intended to stimulate the interest of the Riga public

in Bellini's _Norma_, which opera Wagner had selected for his benefit

in December 1837. It is possible, therefore, that the impecunious

young musician may have said a trifle more than he really thought. It

is significant that Wagner omitted all these articles--_Die deutsche

Oper_, _Pasticcio_, _Der dramatische Gesang_, and _Bellini_--from the

collected edition of his works.

[303] _Mein Leben_, p. 174.

[304] _Mein Leben_, p. 175.

[305] _Mein Leben_, p. 175.

[306] _Mein Leben_, p. 175.

[307] _Mein Leben_, p. 179.

[308] He had put aside his comic opera _Die glückliche Bärenfamilie_,

as the performing of this "Musik à la Adam" would only have still

further tightened his connection with the frivolous theatrical world

about him.

[309] _Mein Leben_, pp. 210, 211.

[310] _Le Freischütz_, in _G.S._, i. 220 ff.

[311] _Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven_, _G.S._, i. 90 ff.

[312] The reader may be reminded that Wagner has been expounding the

Schopenhauerian theory of music as the idea of the world.

[313] _Beethoven_, in _G.S._, ix. 101.

[314] _G.S._, i. in. 111.

[315] This explains why he was so unapt at setting anyone's poetry but

his own.

[316] On this point see Albert Schweitzer's _J. S. Bach_ (Eng. trans.),

chap. xx.

[317] And of course the quality of the mixture of these factors may

vary in different works of the same composer.

[318] _Ein glücklicher Abend_, in _G.S._, i. 143, 144.

[319] See Mr. E. Dannreuther's article on Wagner in the new edition of

_Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians_, v. 414.

[320] Like all musicians of that time, Wagner had no suspicion of the

enormous amount of tone-painting there is in Bach.

[321] _Ein glücklicher Abend_, in _G.S._, i. 147, 148.

[322] He expresses the same idea nearly thirty years later in his essay

on Beethoven. "What is the dramatic action of the _Leonora_ opera-text

but an almost disagreeable watering down of the drama we have lived

through in the overture,--as it were a tedious explanatory commentary

by Gervinus on a scene by Shakespeare?" _Beethoven_, in _G.S._, ix. 105.

[323] This was the explanation of his dislike for much of Berlioz's

music. See his remarks on Berlioz in the article _On Liszt's Symphonic

Poems_ (_G.S._, v. 193, 194), and a similar passage in the conversation

quoted by Mr. Dannreuther (_Grove's Dictionary_, v. 414): "The middle

of Berlioz's touching _scène d'amour_ in his _Romeo and Juliet_ is

meant by him to reproduce in musical phrases the lines about the lark

and the nightingale in Shakespeare's balcony scene, but it does nothing

of the sort--it is not intelligible as music."

[324] The only other element introduced is the song of the Norwegian

sailors from the last Act, which, however good in itself, is perhaps a

superfluity in the overture,--a slight concession to that passion for

reproducing the details of the drama that Wagner reprobated in others.

The true symbolic conflict of the governing desires and principles of

the opera can and should be all suggested in the music of Senta and the

Dutchman.

[325] _Loc. cit._, i. 204, 205.

[326] The "Report" that accompanies this programme in the Prose Works

is an extract from the (at that time) unpublished _Mein Leben_.

[327] He had gone there to produce _Rienzi_, and to try to arrange for

a performance of _Lohengrin_. _Rienzi_ was a failure.

[328] The Intendant of the Dresden Opera.

[329] Gustav Levy, _Richard Wagners Lebensgang in tabellarischer

Darstellung_, p. 32.

[330] Liszt writes thus in June or July 1849, _i.e._ a month or six

weeks after Wagner's flight from Dresden. "Forgive me if I suggest

that you should manage so that you are not of necessity brought into

enmity with things and men who bar your road to success and glory. A

truce therefore to political commonplaces, socialistic balderdash, and

personal hatreds. On the other hand, good courage, strong patience, and

plenty of fire, which will not be difficult for you with the volcanoes

you have in your brain." _Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt_, i.

24.

[331] _Die Königliche Kapelle betreffend_, in _G.S._, xii. 149 ff. No

notice was taken of the Report by the authorities for a year; then they

refused to act upon it.

[332] The essay--_Entwurf zur Organisation eines Deutschen

National-Theaters für das Konigreich Sachsen_, in _G.S._, ii. 233

ff.--must be read in full. "My plan," he says, "was not merely to

rescue the theatre, but at the same time to conduct it, under the

shelter and inspection of the State, to a noble significance and

efficacy." His main thesis was that "the Theatre should have no other

purpose than the ennoblement of taste and manners." See Wagner's own

account of the affair in _Mein Leben_, pp. 444 ff.

[333] See _Mein Leben_, pp. 434 ff.

[334] _G.S._, xii. 238 ff.

[335] _G.S._, xii. 243 ff.

[336] In the _Entwurf zur Organisation eines Deutschen

National-Theaters für das Konigreich Sachsen_ (_G.S._, ii. 248) he

speaks of "demanding the fullest and most active interest of the whole

nation in an artistic establishment that, conjointly with all the other

arts, has for its object the ennobling of taste and manners." He does

not develop the idea, however.

[337] See the important letter of September 1850, in the Uhlig

correspondence.

[338] _Mein Leben_, p. 546.

[339] _Mein Leben_, pp. 566 ff.

[340] See the passionate and almost hysterical passage commencing "Not

ye wise ones, therefore, are the inventors, but the Folk, for Need

drove the Folk to invention." _Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft_, in _G.S._,

iii. 53.

[341] _G.S._, iii. 60.

[342] Had he been a trifle less Teutonic, less given to the national

failing of imagining that a new truth has been established when all

that has happened is that a new word has been manufactured or a mystic

meaning perceived in an old one, he might have reflected that in other

languages there is no etymological connection between art and the

capacity for "canning."

[343] _Mein Leben_, pp. 691, 692.

[344] He plainly knew nothing of the sculpture of the Middle Ages, and

regarded all modern sculpture as an imitation of the antique.

[345] This was the first form of the drama that ultimately became the

_Ring_. It virtually corresponded with the present _Twilight of the

Gods_. He afterwards saw the necessity of setting visibly before the

audience a good deal that was only implied or narrated in _Siegfried's

Death_. Accordingly a prefatory drama was written and called _Young

Siegfried_. The same process was twice repeated, the _Valkyrie_ and

_Rhinegold_ being added in turn. _Young Siegfried_ was then entitled

_Siegfried_, and _Siegfried's Death_ became _The Twilight of the Gods_.

[346] Letter of 12th September 1852, in _Briefe an Röckel_, p. 10.

[347] See Wagner's further account of this article in _Mein Leben_, p.

545.

[348] This and other statements as to the genesis of opera are not

historically correct.

[349] The most admired of libretto writers of the eighteenth century.

[350] The latest edition of the _Gesammelte Schriften_ (which contains

more than one regrettable error), has "_auf natürlichem, künstlichem

Boden gewachsen_," instead of _unnatürlichem_ as in the earlier

editions. See _G.S._, iv. 15.

[351] I borrow Mr. Edwin Evans's alliterative rendering of these three

lines,--"Life's delight is love"; "True love doth lighten loss"; "For

'tis from woe she weaves her wonders." See his translation of _Opera

and Drama_, ii. 520 ff.

[352] _I.e._, in modern phrase, the "leading-motives."

[353] _G.S._, iii. 267.

[354] _G.S._, iii. 269.

[355] _G.S._, iv. 65, 66.

[356] _G.S._, iv. 2.

[357] "But if I wish to show that plastic art, being only an artificial

art, one abstracted from real art, must cease entirely in the future;

if consequently to this plastic art--painting and sculpture--that

to-day claims to be the principal art, I utterly deny a life in the

future, you will admit that this should not and could not be done with

two strokes of the pen." (Letter of 12th January 1850; _Briefe an

Uhlig, &c._, p. 26.)

[358] Letter 14 to Uhlig (undated), in _Briefe_, p. 46. Mr. Shedlock,

in his admirable English version of these letters, translates

"art-egoistic" (künstlerisch-egoistischen) in the second sentence

as "artificial egoistic," having apparently read "künstlerisch" as

"künstlich."

[359] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 315. He is

discussing the reasons that led him to give up the idea of a play on

the subject of Friedrich Barbarossa.

[360] "In modern speech, poetical creation is impossible; that is to

say, a poetic purpose cannot be _realised_ in it, but only suggested"

(_sondern eben nur als solche ausgesprochen werden_). _Opera and

Drama_, in _G.S._, iv. 98. There are many other passages of the same

tenour.

[361] _G.S._, iii. 178 ff.

[362] _Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt_, i. 324.

[363] _G.S._, iv. 128, 129.

[364] In the scene of the Contest of Song in the second Act of

_Tannhäuser_, he says, "my real object was, if possible, to compel

the hearer, for the first time in the history of opera, to take an

interest in a poetic idea, and to follow it up in all its necessary

developments." _Mein Leben_, p. 364.

[365] Letter of 8th September 1850; _Briefwechsel_, i. 75.

[366] Much of his laborious insistence on the proper relation between

word and tone was due to the disregard of any coincidence between

verbal and musical accents in most of the German opera texts and

translations of his time, and to the bad enunciation of so many of

the singers. He was still complaining of this latter--"the chaotic

vocal style of our singers"--in 1879. See _Über das Opern-Dichten und

Komponieren im Besonderen_, in _G.S._, x. 166.

[367] Letter 21 (beginning of February 1851), p. 80.

[368] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 316.

[369] _G.S._, iv. 318, 319.

[370] It must always be remembered that the Beethoven of whom Wagner

speaks is the Beethoven of the later symphonies, sonatas, and quartets.

[371] Letter 57 (15th February 1852) in _Briefe an Uhlig_, p. 160. It

was his complaint against Mendelssohn's conducting of the Beethoven

symphonies that it brought out "merely their purely musical side,"

not their poetical content. Not understanding the spirit of them,

Mendelssohn kept to the letter. His inability to understand the inner

meaning of the music caused him to fall into the grossest errors of

_tempo_. He took the first movement of the Ninth Symphony, for example,

so fast that "the whole thing became the direct opposite of what it

really is" (Letter 56 to Uhlig, 15th February 1852, p. 162).

[372] Letter 56 to Uhlig, 15th February 1852, p. 157.

[373] Letter 55 to Uhlig (15th February, 1852), pp. 158, 159.

[374] _Opera and Drama_, in _G.S._, iii. 278. The whole of this section

should be read carefully.

[375] _Opera and Drama_, in _G.S._, iv. 3.

[376] _Opera and Drama_, in _G.S._, iv. 173.

[377] This term, it must be remembered, is not Wagner's own. It has

come into such general use, however, and is so thoroughly expressive,

that it is better to employ it than to adopt Wagner's rather

circumlocuitous way of expressing the same thing.

[378] The reader who is unable to follow Wagner's exposition in _Opera

and Drama_ should turn to _A Communication to my Friends_, in which

practically the same ground is covered, but in a much more luminous

style.

[379] E. T. A. Hoffmann before him had been very enthusiastic over

Beethoven, and no doubt Wagner had been stimulated by Hoffmann in

this as in so many other matters. See in particular Hoffmann's

_Fantasiestücke_.

[380] _On Franz Liszt's Symphonic Poems_, in _G.S._, v. 187.

[381] _On Franz Liszt's Symphonic Poems_, in _G.S._, v. 109.

[382] It has recently been re-published with an introduction and notes

by Dr. Eugen Schmitz. (Verlag Dr. Heinrich Lewy, Munich.)

[383] _Zukunftsmusik_, in _G.S._, vii. 97.

[384] _Zukunftsmusik_, in _G.S._, vii. 127, 128.

[385] Guido Adler, _Richard Wagner: Vorlesungen gehalten an der

Universität zu Wien_, pp. 3 ff.

[386] This is a broadly true statement of the historical facts, though

it has to be remembered that the theory that the _first_ Florentine

reformers aimed at a recitative-like delivery of a dramatic idea

is only one of the errors of the popular historian. Their earliest

attempts were more in the arioso form. See Hugo Riemann's _Handbuch der

Musikgeschichte_, ii. 2, chap. xxiii.

[387] _Zukunftsmusik_, in _G.S._, vii, 128.

[388] _Ibid._, vii, 129.

[389] _Zukunftsmusik_, in _G.S._, vii. 129.

[390] I do not mean, of course, that it has anything to do with

the symphony in the formal sense, but that the orchestra weaves a

continuous tissue of its own, instead of merely accompanying the voices

as in the earlier operas.

[391] See Appendix B.

[392] _On Operatic Poetry and Composition_, in _G.S._, x. 172.

[393] _On the Application of Music to the Drama_, in _G.S._, x. 186.

[394] _Ibid._, x. 186, 187.

[395] _On the Application of Music to the Drama_, in _G.S._, x. pp.

189, 190. The variation of the theme to which Wagner refers is as

follows:

[Music:]