THE ARTIST IN PRACTICE
I--THE EARLY MISCELLANEOUS WORKS
According to Wagner's own account, he sketched tragedies in his
childhood, and worked out one that was a sort of blend of _Hamlet_ and
_King Lear_; and, inspired by Beethoven's _Egmont_, he soon desired
to adorn this grand tragedy with music of his own. A brief study of
Logier's _Method of Thorough-Bass_ did not provide him with the needed
technique, though, convinced that he was born to be a musician, he
wrote a sonata, a quartet and an aria in secret. In his sixteenth year
he placed himself under a teacher, who, however, could do nothing
with him in the excessively febrile state in which he then was. His
nervous excitement culminated in a round of the usual student excesses;
and having calmed down again he set himself to study composition in
earnest with Weinlig, the cantor of the Thomas School. Six months'
work sufficed to satisfy Weinlig that his pupil was now competent to
stand on his own legs. It is at this time (1831) that he produces the
compositions that are the earliest we now possess of his.
At present he has apparently no inclination towards opera. The raw
works of his adolescence had all been instrumental; among them was
the Overture in B flat major (1830) that was performed in the Leipzig
Theatre, and in which the drum-beat every four bars ended by moving the
audience to uncontrollable merriment. It is not till the summer of 1832
that he plans a first opera. _Die Hochzeit_; he writes the text, but
composes no more than a fragment of the music. Meanwhile he produces,
as the result of Weinlig's schooling, a number of works more or less
in the conventional style. The pianoforte sonata in B flat major
that was published by Breitkopf & Härtel as the composer's Op. 1 is
dedicated to Weinlig, under whose eye the work was written. His teacher
had evidently seen the need for curbing the exuberance of the boy's
undisciplined mind. He made him write simply, in the set forms, and
with regard to the clarities of the pure vocal style. For this first
sonata, Wagner tells us, Weinlig induced him to take an early sonata
by Pleyel as a model; the whole work was to be shaped on "strictly
harmonic and thematic lines." Wagner himself never thought much of it.
But if it is no more than an imitation of the current sonata style, it
is an unmistakably capable imitation. Weinlig was right; he had given
his pupil independence. In all these youthful works, indeed, we are
struck by the unquestioning self-confidence of the manner, and by the
boyish vigour that animates them. As a reward for his docility in the
matter of the sonata he was allowed by Weinlig to compose a pianoforte
fantasia in F sharp minor. He treated this, he says, in a more informal
style. It is really a quite powerful work for a boy of eighteen.
It defines a mood, and maintains it with singular persistence; it
expresses something truly felt; it comes from the brooding absorption
of spirit that was afterwards to produce the _Faust_ Overture. It is
liberally sown with recitative passages that suggest some knowledge of
Bach (the Chromatic Fantasia or the G minor Fantasia for the organ), or
of Beethoven (pianoforte sonata in A flat. Op. 110, &c.). The manner
and feeling of the adagio suggest the slow movement of Beethoven's
fifth symphony, the later ornamentation of the main melodic idea being
quite in the style of that movement. Altogether the Fantasia is by no
means a work to be despised; it is the one composition of Wagner's of
this period in which we catch a decided note of promise for the future.
The Polonaise in D major for four hands (1831) is more in the
conventional manner, but quite interesting, and as original as we
can expect from the average young composer of eighteen. The A major
sonata (Op. 4, 1831) flows on in the glib, confident way that is
characteristic of all his early instrumental works, and has many good
points. The weakest movement is the third--a rather amateurish fugue.
There is some expression in the slow movement, and a general freedom
of style everywhere except in the fugue. The idiom as a whole is that
of the early Beethoven, but occasionally the writing suggests a boy
who knew something of Weber and of the later Beethoven, though his
invention and his technique were as yet equal only to imitating the
simpler models.
For its day the Symphony in C major (1832) is a very capable piece of
student work; the interest slackens very considerably in the finale,
but the other movements are handled with the customary young-Wagnerian
vigour and confidence. In spite of the ease and the cleverness of it,
however, we can rarely feel that it is anything more than a piece of
competent school work, though there is undeniable thoughtfulness in the
andante.
The work of the next five years varies in quality and purpose in a most
puzzling way. In 1832 he writes the _King Enzio_ Overture, under the
influence, as he tells us in _Mein Leben_, of Beethoven. It is plainly
modelled on the dramatic overture of the _Egmont_ and _Coriolan_
type--a type that Mendelssohn, in the _Ruy Blas_ and elsewhere,
afterwards cultivated, without however adding anything to it. The young
Wagner has a thorough grasp of the form. The Overture is concise and
well balanced; all the details are clearly seen in relation to the
dominant idea. The thematic invention is good, the themes being not
only expressive in themselves but capable of bearing the weight of a
certain amount of dramatic development. Yet after writing this fine
Overture, that really may point without presumption to Beethoven as its
parent, he was capable of producing in 1836 the shapeless and frothy
_Polonia_ Overture, which is the oddest mixture of a pseudo-Polish
idiom and the cheap, assertive melody of _Rienzi_. Here and there it
gives us a foretaste of his later power of climax-building, but on
the whole it is a feeble and amorphous work. The _Rule, Britannia_
Overture (1836) is hardly any better; it is a long-winded and pointless
dissertation on our patriotic song, the original tune being by far the
best thing in it. The _Columbus_ Overture of the preceding year is
rather better. Its style is a curious blend of Beethoven, _Rienzi_, and
the Italian opera; it is oddly anticipatory of Liszt in its repetitions
and its make-believe development: but the work has a sort of strength.
It is evidently the outcome of a vision clearly seen, and translated
into as good music as Wagner's powers at that time permitted.
Meanwhile in 1832--the same year as the _King Enzio_ Overture and
the C major symphony--he had written _Seven Compositions to Goethe's
Faust_--"The soldiers' song," the "Peasants under the linden," "The
song of the rat," "The song of the flea," Mephistopheles' song ("Was
machst du mir vor Liebchens Tür"), Margaret's song ("Meine Ruh' ist
hin"), and a "melodrama" to accompany the recitation of Margaret's
prayer to the Virgin.[396] Almost all of these have individuality, the
least notable being Mephistopheles' song. The soldiers' song is breezy,
with one or two crudities in the vocal part-writing. The "Bauern
unter der Linde" is fresh and gay; the rat and flea songs are fairly
humorous; it is rather curious that Wagner's rat song should begin with
the full scale of D major in descending motion, while that of Berlioz
commences with the same scale in ascent. Margaret's song is quite
good, though it moves a little stiffly, and has neither the ardour of
Schubert's setting nor the perfect mating of idea and expression that
we find in that masterpiece. Wagner, indeed, developed very slowly. For
a long time his genius could only move heavily: there was no swiftness
in him, either of idea or of form,--no consuming heat. The melodrama
is expressive, and the reiterated syncopations are effective. Wagner
probably chose the melodrama form, rather than a purely lyrical setting
of the words, because he felt that the former gave the dramatist in him
more scope.
In 1832-33 the dramatic impulse became very strong in him. He had
written the _Hochzeit_ fragment and _Die Feen_ by the end of 1833, and
between 1834 and 1836 he finished the _Liebesverbot_. Already he had
a technique equal to the expression of all the dramatic thinking of
which he was capable at that time. How dexterous his hand had become
is shown incidentally in the aria he added to Marschner's _Vampyr_ in
1833,--a very vigorous and finished piece of work. There is the same
skill in the "Romance of Max" that he added to the Singspiel _Marie,
Max and Michel_ (1837). There is piquancy in the scoring of the latter,
and the vocal part has a rhythmic variety that we do not often find in
_Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_. Apparently the only non-dramatic work
he wrote at this time was the _New Year Cantata_, which is one of
the freshest and most pleasing works of his youth. It consists of an
overture and four other movements; the chorus takes part in the second
and fourth of these, but in the latter the vocal parts are merely
sketched in, and the words are lacking. In the slow opening section of
the overture he introduces in the violas and 'cellos, with excellent
effect, the theme of the andante of his C major symphony; it is
apparently intended to symbolise the sadness of the departing year. It
is impossible not to be captivated by the sincerity and the transparent
simplicity of this little work.
During 1838 and 1839 his time was fully taken up with his theatrical
duties at Königsberg and Riga, the composition of _Rienzi_, and the
working out of other dramatic ideas; so that from 1837 to 1840 what
may be called the occasional compositions are few in number. With the
exception of the aria for _Marie, Max and Michel_, and the _Faust_
compositions, his vocal works had so far all been settings of words
of his own. Between 1837 and 1844 the texts of almost all his songs
and choral works were by other people. At Riga, in 1837, he set a poem
by Harald von Brackel in praise of the Czar Nicholas, for soprano or
tenor solo, chorus, and orchestra. The piece is appropriately broad and
massive, and imposing enough in mere volume; but it is impossible to
believe that Wagner's heart was in a work of this kind.
Of much more interest is _Der Tannenbaum_, a setting of a poem by
Scheuerlein (end of 1838). The song is expressive, though the effect
lies more in the general colour, the harmony, and the pictorial
realisation of the scene--the brooding tree, the river, and the boy
are all differentiated--than in any particularly striking quality in
the melody. The vocal line has more flexibility than is usual with the
young Wagner. In July 1839 he entered upon his Paris adventure. For a
while he eagerly pursues his fortune among the theatrical directors;
then, as his hopes fail him and need gnaws at his heart, he produces a
number of vocal works that he trusts may appeal to the French singers
and the French public. Some of these are pot-boilers pure and simple,
the writing of which must have been gall and bitterness to the young
composer who had begun to realise the wonderful music there was in him.
The lowest depth is touched in the vaudeville chorus, _La Descente
de la Courtille_ (1840)--a frank prostitution of his genius to the
most superficial French taste of the time. Almost as bad is the song,
_Les adieux de Marie Stuart_. A bar or two here and there bears the
signature of the true Wagner--he cannot quite keep his real self out
of it; but on the whole the song is a desperate, pitiful attempt to
manufacture something in the conventional French and Italian operatic
idiom of the day. Wagner's tongue must have been in his cheek when he
penned such passages as these:
[Music: Ex. 1]
Je n'ai désiré d'être reine que pour régner sur les Français,
que pour régner sur les Français.
To the same period and the same catchpenny mood belongs the _Aria of
Orovisto_ that he wrote in the hope that Lablache would sing it in
Bellini's _Norma_. It is an amusingly absurd but skilful imitation of
all the tricks-of-the-trade of the Italian opera of the 'thirties.
Other works of this time are more sincere, and most of them have a
decided charm. The _Albumblatt_ in E major, written for his friend
Kietz, is a simple but engaging piece, with a touch or two of melodic
commonplace--the occasional insertion, for example, of a triplet
group in a duple-time phrase. The little work is curiously like the
_Lohengrin_ of seven years later in general texture, in melodic and
harmonic build, and in the peculiar white light in which it is bathed.
The songs to French words, written at Paris in 1839-40, vary greatly
in quality. The _Tout n'est qu'images fugitives_ never descends to the
depth of banality reached in the _Marie Stuart_, but the effort to
be ingratiatingly French is plainly evident. The _Dors, mon enfant_,
_Mignonne_, and _Attente_ are all charming; he thinks of the French
style and the French public no more than is necessary to lighten the
heaviness of his native German manner, and the results are sometimes
surprising, particularly in the matter of rhythm. For many years to
come, as he admits in a well-known letter to Uhlig, he was obsessed by
a vocal rhythm of this type:
[Music:]
--a type upon which hundreds of phrases in the _Flying Dutchman_,
_Tannhäuser_, and _Lohengrin_ are constructed. The best of these French
songs have a rhythmic freedom and flexibility that he rarely attained
in his later operas. Look, for example, at the following delightfully
elastic vocal line from _Attente_:
[Music: Ex. 2]
Cicogne, aux vieilles tours fidèle,
ô vole et monte à tire d'aile de l'église
à la citadelle, du haut clocher, du
haut clocher au grand donjon.
It has always been evident that the rhythmic sameness of the earlier
operas was mainly due to the monotonously regular recurrence of accents
in the German verse he wrote at that time. These French songs make it
clear--as, by the way, does the aria for _Marie, Max and Michel_--that
when a more varied metrical scheme was given him his music
spontaneously varied with it. One cannot help feeling that in some
ways it is a pity he did not meet with more success at Paris--that he
was not allowed, in fact, to write some large work with the deliberate
intention of appealing to the French taste by an exploitation of the
styles and the formulas the Parisian public loved most. Such a work
would not have represented the real Wagner, and in the end would
probably have been negligible; but it would have given a much needed
lightness and elasticity to his imagination, without harming him in any
way. He would have benefited by such an experience as emphatically as
Handel and Mozart benefited by their experiences with Italian opera. As
it was, a certain slowness and ponderousness remain characteristic of
Wagner to the end of his days. This inability to concentrate rapidly
is instructively shown in his French setting of Heine's _Les deux
Grenadiers_ (1839-40). In general expressiveness the song need not
fear comparison with Schumann's: perhaps Wagner's treatment of the
"Marseillaise" at the end is even better. But the work has nothing of
Schumann's terseness, ease, and lyric spontaneity; the whole thing
moves a little stiff-jointedly.
The Paris period is a curious one in Wagner's artistic history. He
wrote some very good songs, and one or two deplorable things like
the _Marie Stuart_ and _La Descente de la Courtille_; at the same
time he was finishing _Rienzi_ and working at the _Flying Dutchman_,
and the _Faust_ Overture assumed its first form. In April 1842 he
settled at Dresden. Between then and 1848 he composed _Tannhäuser_
and _Lohengrin_, and conceived the first idea of the _Ring_ and other
works. During this period he wrote no songs or pianoforte pieces: the
occasional compositions are all choral works, which is sufficiently
accounted for by the fact that Wagner had a good male-voice choir at
his disposal. The most considerable of these works is _The Love Feast
of the Apostles_ (1843). Towards the end it has a touch of the melodic
commonplace that Wagner found it so hard to avoid at this time; but
the earlier choral portions are impressive in their simplicity and
sincerity, and the whole thing is admirably stage-managed, so to speak.
The effect of the voices from on high, and of the first entry of the
orchestra at the descent of the Spirit, must have been very striking in
the Dresden church.
The other choral works of this period are on a smaller scale. For the
unveiling of a memorial to King Friedrich August I Wagner wrote in 1843
a _Weihegruss_ for male voices and brass orchestra, to words by Otto
Hohlfeld. The choral portion of this work was published in 1906; the
whole version is now published in Breitkopf & Härtel's _Gesamtausgabe_,
and shows how indispensable is the orchestral part--the long-held
vocal notes, for example, being helped out by trumpet, trombone, and
horn fanfares, and the whole thing gaining enormously in richness by
the discreet occasional entries of the brass. The general style of
this work, as of the _Greeting of Friedrich August the Beloved by his
Faithful Subjects_ (August 1844), is that of the _Tannhäuser-Lohengrin_
epoch; some passages in the _Greeting_, indeed, are extraordinarily
reminiscent of the "Hall of song" chorus. For the re-interment of
Weber's remains at Dresden, in December 1844, Wagner wrote a four-part
male chorus that again recalls the operatic works of this time. It is
the most expressive of Wagner's works of this class, but on the whole
a little disappointing; his heart was so thoroughly with Weber that
one would have thought the occasion would have wrung some music of the
first class out of him.
II--THE EARLIEST OPERAS
Wagner worked out the drama of his first opera, _Die Hochzeit_ ("The
Wedding"), in 1833, but his sister Rosalie's antipathy to the gory and
gruesome subject turned him against the work after he had written only
some thirty or forty pages of the score--an Introduction, chorus and
septet. The style has little individuality, though the chorus of female
voices is not without charm. The septet, however, is an excellent piece
of work for a boy of nineteen,--lucid, freely written, and with a
certain amount of dramatic differentiation in some of the vocal parts.
His first complete opera, _Die Feen_ (The Fairies), was written during
his stay at Würzburg in 1833. The story, which may be read in _Mein
Leben_ or any of the biographies of Wagner, has long lost any interest
it may once have possessed. In psychology and in structure alike the
drama is very primitive. The magic element in it is fit only for the
nursery, though it has to be observed that here we have for the first
time that notion of "redemption" that plays so large a part in Wagner's
thinking to the very end of his life. The construction is formal and
cumbersome: the two chief lovers have as a foil two subordinate lovers,
while set off against these is a third pair, who provide a sort of
comic interest; the whole past, present and future are explained in
recitatives; everybody of any importance has his aria or his share in
a concerted piece, and each Act ends with an imposing _ensemble_. The
stage apparatus is romantic to the last degree. The music, however, is
decidedly interesting. The third Act, in spite of a few strokes that
get home, is much inferior to the other two, for which the fact that it
was written in a month may be answerable. But the first two Acts and
the overture are full of striking things. There is no question as to
the thorough competence of Wagner's technique at this time: everything
flows with the utmost ease and clearness from his pen. The opera has
indeed a poise of manner and a unity of style that we do not find in
some of the more mature works of his first period. In the _Flying
Dutchman_, for example, there is a good deal of almost hobbledehoy
awkwardness,--a sort of cubbish clumsiness, though any discerning
observer could have seen even in those days that this was a cub of
a leonine breed, that would some day swallow up most of the other
animals in the menagerie. There is nothing of this cubbishness, this
stumbling over his own good intentions, in _The Fairies_. Such as the
ideas are,--and of course they never rise to anything like the height
of the best things in the _Flying Dutchman_--they are expressed without
effort, in an idiom and with a technique precisely congruous with them.
Aria, duet, ensemble, dramatic contrast, dramatic transition,--the
young composer is equal to whatever problem may be set him. The musical
style as a whole reminds us of Weber and Marschner, but there is
plenty of unmistakable Wagner in it. We are constantly meeting with
progressions, turns of phrase, and devices that have been made familiar
to us by the later operas. How like a score of melodies in _Tannhäuser_
and _Lohengrin_ is the following, for example--
[Music: No. 1.]
When he wants to work up the excitement at the entry of Arindal he
does it precisely in the way he whips up our interest in the coming
of the hero in the second Act of _Tristan and Isolde_--by a series of
breathless reiterations of the same figure--
[Music: No. 2.] When he has joy to express, he does so by means of
the same ascending, bubbling phrases that he uses in the duet between
Tannhäuser and Elisabeth (vocal score, p. 157, &c.)[397]--
[Music: No. 3.]
LORA: Dahin, dahin flieht alles Leiden, und alle
ARINDAL: So viele Not im Heimatlande, &c.
MORALD: Dahin, dahin flieht alles Leiden,
And although the duet between Drolla and her lover Gernot is subcomic
in intention, their manner of rushing into each other's arms is
precisely that of Tristan and Isolde--
[Music: No. 4.]
DROLLA: Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! 'tis thou,
'tis thou!
GERNOT: Drolla! Drolla! Drolla! Drolla! 'tis thou, 'tis thou,
'tis thou, 'tis thou, 'tis thou, 'tis thou, &c.
The style is frequently mature beyond the composer's actual
years,--the admirable finish to the scene between Arindal and the
others, for example (full score, p. 111), where the vocal themes are
taken up by the orchestra and played out in a beautifully managed
diminuendo; or the perfect little picture of the fairy garden at the
commencement of the first Act (I question whether so imaginatively
conceived and skilfully coloured a garden scene is to be found anywhere
in previous or contemporary opera); or the expressive scoring of Ada's
cavatina (full score, pp. 114 ff.); or the septet at the end of the
first Act; or the fine management of the chorus of beaten warriors
at the beginning of the second Act, with the reiterated calls in the
bass horn and trumpet; or the fine _Schwung_ of the trio between
Lora, Arindal and Morald (pp. 219 ff.); or the big aria of Ada in the
second Act (pp. 251 ff.); or the charming theme that is used when
the children are introduced. The born musical dramatist is seen in
the variety of expression he can command even at this age; and one
is struck by the first signs of the faculty that is so noticeable in
the later Wagner,--that of always having something in reserve when
a new and cumulative effect is needed. The larger the canvas to be
covered, as in the final _ensembles_, the more resource does he show
himself to possess. There is a good deal in _The Fairies_ that is quite
boyish,--much that is conventional, many things to provoke a smile. But
it is equally certain that there was not another young man in Europe
capable of writing such a work at that time. The overture, which was
written a few days before the last touches were put to the third Act,
is excellently handled throughout; the invention never flags, the
technique never fails; it is his best work of this order until we come
to the overture to the _Flying Dutchman_,--finer in idea, closer in
texture, and surer in touch than the _King Enzio_ Overture of 1832,
and far beyond the _Columbus_, the _Polonia_, or the _Rule Britannia_.
Altogether one imagines that, in spite of the old-fashioned quality of
the libretto of _The Fairies_, one could listen to a stage performance
of the opera with at least as much interest as to _Rienzi_. It was
given for the first time in Munich under Hermann Levi in 1888, and
between then and 1895 it ran to over fifty performances.
As we have seen, _Das Liebesverbot_ ("The Ban on Love") was a product
of the wild days of 1834-5, when he had momentarily turned against
sobriety both in life and in art. In framing his libretto he passed
over everything in Shakespeare's _Measure for Measure_ that had a touch
of moral gravity in it: he transports the action from Vienna to Sicily,
brings the strait-laced viceroy Friedrich into the same focus as the
other amorists, and makes the whole play an attack on "puritanical
hypocrisy" and a laudation of "unrestrained physicalism." In the music
he does his best to forget that "German style" in which, as he says,
_Die Feen_ had been written, and copies to the best of his ability the
more sparkling style of the lighter Italian and French opera. The work
is in two Acts,--the only opera of Wagner's in this form--and in its
structure follows the ordinary pattern of the day. Occasionally the
spoken word takes the place of recitative.
In 1866 Wagner gave the score of the opera to King Ludwig, prefacing
it with a stanza in which he spoke of it as a sin of his youth, for
which he hoped to find pardon in his protector's grace. Apparently
he always adopted this depreciatory attitude towards the work in
later life. Glasenapp tells us that Wagner liked the overture to _Das
Liebesverbot_ better than that to _Die Feen_, but thought the rest of
_Das Liebesverbot_ "horrible," except the "Salve regina cœli."[398]
A perusal of the score, however, will convince most people that he
underrated the interest and the value of it. It almost invariably fails
when it aims at expressing serious feeling; but the gay and humorous
scenes are admirable, and the youthful gusto of the whole thing is
irresistible. The general idiom may be a borrowed one, but for the most
part Wagner uses it very skilfully, making at least as good a show with
it as the ordinary French or Italian opera writer of the time. He has
every trick of the trade at his finger-tips, every recipe for froth
and foam and sparkle. He is as expert as any of them at lashing up the
interest by the device of repeating a piquant figure a score of times:
this, for example, from the overture--
[Music: No. 5]
It is given first of all mainly to the strings, with a little harmonic
thickening in bassoons and horns. Then, as the melody goes an octave
higher in the strings, it is doubled in the oboes and clarinets, with
added harmonic enrichment in the wood-wind and brass. At the next
repeat--an octave higher again--the melody is given out by piccolo,
flutes, oboes, clarinets and violins in octaves, while trombones are
added to the harmony. All the while the tone is growing louder and
louder, with a crescendo roll in the tympani. One has to listen,
whether one wants to or not; and it is impossible to keep the blood
from tingling under the whip. The whole overture is very effective
in this noisy, rather empty way; there is much use of castagnets,
tambourine, triangle and cymbals. The general style of the writing may
be gathered from a couple of examples--
[Music: No. 6.]
[Music: No. 7.]
either of which will serve to show the gulf that separates _Das
Liebesverbot_ from _Die Feen_.
The opening scene is very animated, the chorus of the people being full
of _entrain_; the whole manner is thoroughly Italian, the orchestra
chattering away more or less irrelevantly, and the voices interjecting
their remarks in a facile, half-melodic sort of way. How careless
Wagner was with regard to deeper musical characterisation may be
seen from the theme that accompanies the entry of Claudio,--one of
those typical Italian operatic themes of which we can never be quite
sure whether they are meant to be tragic or comic, though here it is
apparently meant to be serious--
[Music: No. 8.]
Nor in any other work but this would Wagner have
accompanied with so irresponsible a theme the appeal of Claudio
(sentenced to death) to his friend Luzio to seek the aid of Isabella--
[Music: No. 9.]
Du kennest jenen stillen Ort, das Kloster der Elisabeth; Die &c.
The melody runs a thoroughly Italian course--
[Music: No. 10.]
O eile Freund, zu ihr dahin, o eile zu ihr dahin, sprich sie für
mich um Hülfe an, sprich sie um Hülfe für mich an.
with liberal opportunities for the tenor to poise himself on a high
note and deploy his resonance--
[Music: No. 11.]
Bewege sie, dass sie verzeih', dann bau' ich ganz auf ihren Muth.
Bewege sie, dass sie verzeih',...
dann bau' ich ganz auf ihren Muth.
The chorus that follows is also quite in the Italian stage style,
the excitement being worked up according to the established recipes;
and of course the purely musical stream flows on without the least
regard to dramatic sense, Luzio saying every other minute "I hasten,
friend," but without the slightest intention of hastening till the
chorus is finished. But, as almost always happens even when Wagner is
trying to be least like himself, a characteristic little touch cannot
be prevented from stealing in: after the voices have ceased, the
long-drawn theme of Claudio sings on in the 'cellos, set against the
noisy chattering of the wood-wind and brass. It makes a most effective
ending to the scene.
In the third scene appears a theme that was afterwards expanded and
put to splendid use in _Tannhäuser_. Here the nuns sing it behind the
scenes to the words "Salve regina cœli."
[Music No. 12.]
The florid duet between the two novices, Mariana and Isabella, is
thoroughly Italian. Again one sees, by comparison of this music with
any of that of _Die Feen_, how determined Wagner was to write down to
the comprehension of the Italian-opera public: he evidently has his
eye on the singers and the audience rather than on the psychology of
the characters or the atmosphere of the scene. But in the admirable
duologue that follows between Luzio and Isabella, the touch is again
that of the born musical dramatist. It is all irresistibly animated;
the music is psychologically characteristic, the blend of passion and
irresponsibility in Luzio being particularly well suggested; and there
are some striking pieces of orchestral colour.
The court scene,--the mock trial in which Brighella, the viceroy's
servant, poses as the judge--is carried through excellently, with an
abundance of light Italian-opera humour; the roguishly knowing theme to
which Brighella sings his passion for the pretty Dorella may be taken
as typical--
[Music: No. 13.]
Dieses kleine Schelmenauge macht mich wahrlich ganz verwirrt.
There are one or two happy instances of the tentative employment of the
leading-motive system. The theme representative of Friedrich and his
law against love (No. 18 below), for example, is parodied in this way
when Brighella begins to try Pontio--
[Music: No. 14.]
and when Friedrich enters and asks Brighella what has been going on,
the latter replies apologetically and evasively to the accompaniment of
the previous theme of the mock court, the orchestra, quite in the later
Wagnerian manner, being more truthful than he--
[Music: No. 15.]
BRIGHELLA: Verzeiht, ich wollt' Euch Müh ersparen, ich hielt Gericht,
fand Widerstand &c.
Isabella's aria of intercession to Friedrich is rather poor, but the
subsequent excitement is cleverly worked up, and there is some dramatic
characterisation in the commanding phrases that are given to the
viceroy. The finale is excellent: it has amazing fire, is full of quick
resource, and, like the finales in _Die Feen_, shows how much reserve
Wagner had to draw upon when an extra effort was required.
In the opening scene of the second Act,--the garden of the prison in
which Claudio is awaiting death--we have another employment of the
leit-motive, the oboe giving out softly the theme to which Claudio had
previously urged Luzio to implore the help of Isabella, but now with
appropriately altered harmonies--
[Music: No. 16.]
The orchestral prelude to the scene is expressive, Wagner putting off
his Italian mask for the moment and speaking in his natural voice: the
sense of gloom and impending tragedy is very well conveyed--
[Music: No. 17.]
But the strains in which Claudio addresses Isabella are again
conventional: it was not easy at this time for Wagner to find original
accents for grief and passion. He is best all through in scenes of
humour, of comedy, of raillery. There is a charming, sunny trio later
between Luzio, Isabella and Dorella; the whole of this scene, in fact,
is one of the happiest in the opera. Friedrich's soliloquy in his room
has a good deal of strength in it, an impressive effect being made by
the frequent recurrence in the orchestra of the motive that symbolises
the sternness of the attitude he has taken up towards the people's
pleasures--
[Music: No. 18.]
When he utters the words
"Doch als mir Isabella die Erdenliebe erschloss,
Da schmolz das Eis in tausend Liebesthränen."
("But when Isabella revealed earthly love to me, the ice was melted
into a thousand tears of love"), the orchestra completes his thought
with a reminiscence of the theme of Isabella's enchantment of him in
the court (see No. 7, from the overture)--
[Music: No. 19.]
O war Dein Herz denn stets verschlossen, drang Liebe nie in Deine
Brust?
The finale to the second Act is as admirably animated as its
predecessor; Luzio's carnival song, the dance, and the chorus have a
truly southern warmth in them; and there is a lively quartet between
Isabella, Dorella, Luzio and Brighella.
Altogether _Das Liebesverbot_, like _Die Feen_, is a work upon which
Wagnerian criticism will always look with an affectionate eye. If it
contains much that Wagner did right to decline to take seriously in
later life, there is also much in it that is eloquent of the coming
dramatist in music,--a surprising quickness of apprehension, a faculty
for big picture-building, and above all an irresistible ardour. Like
all Wagner's music of this time, the score anticipates many of the
mannerisms of the later operas. It is unusually generous with the
typical Wagnerian "turn"; at one point what must be a rather comic
effect in performance is made by a series of these turns being executed
in octaves by piccolo, flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, violins and
'cellos--
[Music: No. 20.]
The later Wagnerian method of accumulating excitement, which we have
seen anticipated in _Die Feen_, is employed also in _Das Liebesverbot_,
as in the following passage, which, like the one previously quoted,
gives us a decided foretaste of the meeting of Tristan and Isolde--
[Music: No. 21.]
And if for nothing else _Das Liebesverbot_ would be interesting for its
use of the leit-motive. There was virtually none of it in _Die Feen_.
III.--THE OPERAS OF THE SECOND PERIOD
_Rienzi_ will always be something of a puzzle to the student. Wagner's
own accounts of it in later years show that he too was a little
uncertain as to the reasons for its obvious defects. He had tired of
his life among little theatrical people in minor provincial towns, so
he deliberately planned _Rienzi_ on an elephantine scale in order that
it might be impossible except in one of the larger opera houses. He
had "grand opera" in his mind throughout, he tells us; he intended not
merely to imitate the showiest works of this _genre_ but to surpass
them in prodigality. Yet to suppose, he adds, that this was all that
was in his mind would be to do him an injustice. He was "really
inspired" by the subject, and especially by the character of Rienzi.
First and foremost he had _Rienzi_ in view, grand opera being only
a secondary consideration; yet grand opera was "only the spectacles
through which he saw the subject." He always saw it, he goes on to
say, on its own merits, and never aimed consciously at merely musical
effects; yet he could never see the material except in terms of the
merely musical effects,--the arias, choruses, finales, processions, and
so on,--of grand opera. "Thus on the one hand I was always influenced
by my subject in working out the details of the work, while on the
other hand I governed my subject entirely in accordance with the 'grand
opera' form that was in my mind." It is pretty evident that he found it
as difficult to come to any settled conclusion with regard to _Rienzi_
as we do. There is truth in the view that many of the banalities of it
are due to his having the Paris opera and the Paris public in view. But
we have only to study the score in conjunction with those of _Die Feen_
and _Das Liebesverbot_ to see that many of these same banalities are
the logical outcome of his cast of mind and his musical attainments at
that epoch, and would certainly have appeared in his music even if the
idea of Paris had never occurred to him.
To put it familiarly, the youthful Wagner had been obviously shaping
for some years for a bad attack of musical measles; he had to get it
out of his system, and _Rienzi_ was the illness that enabled him to
do so. To me it is the least satisfactory of all his works--far less
enjoyable than _Die Feen_ or _Das Liebesverbot_. One can forgive the
eager young-mannishness of these very youthful works: but at twenty-six
or twenty-seven one expects a composer to show more indubitable signs
of originality. The commonplace of _Rienzi_ is different from that
of the preceding operas; it is almost an offensive commonplace; the
outlines of the objectionable phrases have all been thickened and the
body of them puffed out till they positively irritate us by their
grossness and fatuousness. It is astounding how few phrases there
are in all these six hundred pages[399] that really seize upon us:
we could easily count them all on the fingers of one hand. On its
harmonic side the opera gives us a strange impression of pretentious
poverty. All through _Rienzi_ Wagner's mind seems to be struggling
to fight its way through vapour and murk to the light. His dramatic
intentions are evident enough, but he can rarely realise them. It is
in vain that he exploits all the formulas for dramatic expression as
they were understood at that time--diminished sevenths for horror,
syncopations for agitation, and all the rest of it; in vain that he
languishes or threatens, warbles unctuously or declaims aggressively,
lets loose his noisy orchestra and piles up massive choral effects;
they all fail to move us because there is hardly ever any bite in the
phrases themselves. The obvious faults of the work are due not so much
to technical inexperience or limitations of vocabulary as to a sheer
failure of the imagination; with the possible exception of Rienzi
himself, not one of the characters has been seen with vividness enough
to wring a really characteristic musical symbol out of the composer.
No one lives except Rienzi; and he, as far as his music is concerned,
is little more than half alive. Any critically-minded contemporary
friend of Wagner's who happened to know all his work up to that time
might have been pardoned for thinking, on the basis of _Rienzi_, that
the composer was deteriorating, that on the whole his imagination had
hardly grown at all during the past couple of years, and that none of
the earlier defects of style had been corrected, while half a dozen
new ones had been added--an intolerable prolixity, a tendency to rely
on elephantine effects to the neglect of finely wrought detail, and
to trust to stage mechanism to eke out the weaknesses of his musical
invention. The only improvement on the earlier Wagner that the friend
would have been able to observe in _Rienzi_ would be that in spite of
all its absurdities and infelicities, its commonness and elephantiasis,
there is a new strength in the work. It is a strength clumsily used;
the youthful hobbledehoy's limbs have hardened without his acquiring
much more command over them than he had before, the boyish voice has
gained in volume without much improvement in quality: but the general
signs of muscular growth are unmistakable. Crude as the overture is, no
one can deny its rampant, horse-power vigour. But the final convincing
proof that though Wagner's voice was abnormally energetic in _Rienzi_
his imagination was virtually at a standstill is the fact that the
opera has no colour, no atmosphere of its own. Every other work of
Wagner has. In _Die Feen_, as Mr. Runciman acutely points out, there is
a strange new feeling for light; in the _Flying Dutchman_ we are always
conscious of the sea, in _Tannhäuser_ of a world of sensuous heat set
over against a world of moral coolness and rather anæmic aspiration,
in _Lohengrin_ of the gleaming river and the tenuous air of Monsalvat.
_Rienzi_ conveys no pictorial or atmospheric suggestions of any kind.
But the opera was only a _reculer pour mieux sauter_. He needed a
text that should be more purely musical in its essence than this; and
when he found it, in the _Flying Dutchman_--the idea of which came to
him shortly after he had commenced work on _Rienzi_--his genius took
its first decisive leap forward. For some years he had been strangely
undecided as to a suitable subject for an opera. He had experimented,
and was still to experiment, in several fields. In 1836 he had turned
König's novel _Die hohe Braut_ into a libretto, making quite a good
romantic opera in four acts out of it.[400] (It was afterwards set by
Joseph Kittl, in 1853, under the title of _Bianca und Giuseppe, oder
die Franzosen vor Nizza_.) In 1837 he made a comic opera out of a story
in the _Arabian Nights_, entitling it _Die glückliche Bärenfamilie,
oder Männerlist grösser als Frauenlist_ ("The Happy Bear Family, or
Woman outwitted by Man"). This is a delightfully vivacious little
libretto, which might well be set by some modern composer. Wagner wrote
some fragments of the music for it, but quickly became disgusted with
the style, and turned his back on the piece. In Paris in 1841 he made a
preliminary prose sketch for a libretto on a gloomy and rather striking
subject of Hoffmann's, _Die Bergwerke zu Falun_ ("The Mines of Falun"),
which one is sorry he did not set to music, for it has colour and a
certain individuality: he would probably have made more of it than he
did of _Rienzi_. But perhaps he felt that the sombre vein he would have
had to pursue in _Die Bergwerke zu Falun_ had been worked out to the
full extent of which he was capable in the _Flying Dutchman_. In the
same winter of 1842 he made a first sketch of _Die Sarazenin_ ("The
Saracen Woman"), expanding it in Dresden two years later.[401]
It was after all a sound instinct, no doubt, that made him concentrate
on the _Flying Dutchman_ and let the other schemes drop, for the
_Flying Dutchman_ gave him just what _Rienzi_ did not--a concentrated
dramatic theme, and one with a very individual atmosphere. Had his
dramatic and musical technique been more advanced than they were at
that time he would probably have condensed the story still further.
He saw clearly enough that the whole essence of the legend--or at any
rate the whole of the musical essence of it--lay in the Dutchman and
Senta, and that all the rest was mere scaffolding or trimming. "I
condensed the material into a single Act, being chiefly moved to do
this by the subject itself, since in this way I could compress it into
the simple dramatic interaction of the principal characters, and ignore
the musical accessories that had now become repellent to me."[402] But
his musical faculties, which developed with a strange slowness, were
still lagging a good deal behind his dramatic perceptions; and the
result is that to us to-day there seem to be a good many superfluous
"musical accessories" in the _Flying Dutchman_, owing to the fact that
Wagner has not been able to give real musical life to such characters
as Daland and Erik. He himself has described for us very lucidly in _A
Communication to My Friends_ the diverging impulses in him that gave
the _Flying Dutchman_ its present only partly satisfactory form. He was
wholly possessed by his subject, saw that it was necessary to allow it
to dictate its own musical form and method of treatment, and honestly
thought that he had let it do so; but the traditional operatic form was
more potent within him than he imagined at the time. As in _Rienzi_,
aria, duet, trio and the other established forms somehow "found their
way into" the opera without his consciously willing them.
Still the structure of the _Flying Dutchman_ is a great advance on
that of _Rienzi_: what was really happening was that the musician in
Wagner was beginning to see that the whole drama must be _musical_
drama, the poet not being allowed to insert anything that was
inconsistent with the spirit of music. He himself persisted in putting
it the other way,--that the poet in him gradually took over the
guidance of the musician. But we can see now that he misread his own
evolution. The poet in him undoubtedly outgrew, bit by bit, the musical
forms that had become stereotyped in the opera of the day; but the
poet's growth only became possible when the musician, beginning to feel
his own strength, gave the poet more and more imperative orders to
shape his "stuff" in a form that would afford the musician the freest
course. Wagner in later years insisted that after he had elaborated
Senta's ballad in the second Act, he found that he had unconsciously
hit upon the thematic kernel of the whole, and that this thematic idea
then spread itself naturally over the whole drama like a network. That
is not true if we take his words literally, for of course a good deal
of the thematic material of the _Flying Dutchman_ has no affiliation
with Senta's ballad. But in the broad sense, and with regard more to
his intentions than his achievements, we can see that he was right.
The whole drama really emanates from Senta; the Dutchman himself, as
Mr. Runciman puts it, is merely Senta's opportunity personified; the
remaining characters are only there to make the before and after of
the central episode clear. With more experience and a surer technique
he could have cut away more of the excrescences of the libretto and
concentrated the action still further, making it yet more purely
musical, as he did with _Tristan_. But for the day he did marvellously
well. With the _Flying Dutchman_ was born the modern musical drama.
There is no mistaking the intensity and certainty of his vision
now. He no longer describes his characters from the outside: they
are within him, making their own language and using him as their
unconscious instrument. The portrait painter and the pictorial artist
in him are both coming to maturity. The Dutchman and Senta are both
drawn completely in the round; we feel, for the first time with any
of Wagner's characters, that we might meet them any day and that they
would be solid to the touch. Even Daland and Erik, though not as real
as the other two--for Wagner had not yet the art of breathing life into
every one of his subordinate characters--have a certain substantiality.
And roaring and whistling and surging round them all is the sea,--not
so much the mere background of the drama as the element that has given
it birth. Stylistically and technically the new work is leagues beyond
_Rienzi_. There is still something of the old melodic mannerism--which,
indeed, he was not to lose for many years yet--but in many of the
melodies there is a new leap, a new swing, a new articulation;
harmonically the work is richer; it often attains a rhythmic freedom
beyond anything that Wagner had been capable of before; he is learning
to concentrate his expression, and to beat out pregnant little figures
that limn a character or depict a natural force once for all; there
is a new psychological as well as a musical logic, binding the whole
scheme together and working up from the beginning to the end in one
steady crescendo. Wherever the score is tested, it shows something not
to be met with hitherto either in Wagner's previous work or in that of
his contemporaries. His imagination is at last unlocked.
After this he develops steadily and rapidly until a fresh check is
given him, it being borne in upon him that neither his imagination
nor his technique is equal to the creation of the new world that he
feels stirring vaguely within him. But for a time all goes well. The
_Flying Dutchman_ had been finished in the winter of 1841. _Tannhäuser_
was fully ready by April 1845, and _Lohengrin_ by March 1848--just
after he had completed his thirty-fifth year. In these seven years he
exhausted all the possibilities of the style he had made his own; after
_Lohengrin_ he instinctively feels that he is at the end of the one
path and the beginning of a new one, though where this is to lead him
he has as yet no inkling. Both the later operas represent a gradual
clarification and intensification of the style he had tentatively used
in the _Flying Dutchman_. The breach with the older opera is even yet
not complete; disguise the conventional features of it as he will,
they are still recognisable; aria and duet and _ensemble_ are still
there, though they merge almost imperceptibly into each other. But if
_Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ are in large part still the old opera,
they are the old opera transfigured. The musical web spreads itself
more and more broadly over the whole poetic material. Recitative
virtually disappears; the text still retains a number of non-emotional
moments for which no really lyrical equivalent can be found, but what
would have been recitative naked and unashamed in _Rienzi_ is now
almost fully-clothed song--the address of the Landgrave to the Knights
in the Hall of Song scene is an excellent illustration. The choral
writing attains an unaccustomed breadth and sonority, and at the same
time the chorus becomes a more efficient psychological instrument.
The harmonic tissue becomes fuller. The melodic line becomes more and
more expressive and sensitive. The orchestration begins to give a
distinctive colour to both personages and scenes. A very ardent and
penetrating imagination, the imagination of the born dramatist, seeing
all his characters as creatures of flesh and blood, is now playing upon
the material offered to the musician by the poet. Each scene suggests
by its colouring its own indoor or outdoor setting, the hour of the
day, the time of the year; yet each opera as a whole has a different
light and is set in a different atmosphere from the others. The Wagner
of this period reaches the supreme height of his powers in _Lohengrin_;
and as one watches that diaphanous and finely-spun melodic web unfold
itself, one is almost tempted for the moment to regret that the dæmon
within him drove him on so relentlessly to another style. No one, of
course, can be anything but thankful that Wagner evolved the splendid
symphonic-operatic style of the second half of his life--the most
serviceable operatic instrument that any musician has yet hit upon.
But the more purely lyrical style of _Lohengrin_ is so exquisitely
satisfying in itself that one would have been grateful had he turned
back to it for a moment in later days, when his melodic invention was
in its fullest glory. The main burden of the expression, in the later
work, shifts more and more to the side of the orchestra. In _Lohengrin_
the voice is still the statue and the orchestra the pedestal. The
whole work is the product of that equipoise of all the faculties that
is often observable in composers at the end of their second period, a
serenity resting upon their music that it never wins again in the more
troubled after-years, when the soul is more at war with itself, and the
lips can hardly find language for the pregnant images that crowd to
them.
But vast as the imaginative growth had been from _Rienzi_ to
_Lohengrin_, it seems almost like a mere marking time in comparison
with the subsequent development. Most instructive in this respect are
the alterations Wagner made in his earlier works in later life. The
_Flying Dutchman_ ends with the destruction of the Dutchman's ship as
Senta leaps into the sea. The stage directions in the first edition
run thus: "In the glow of the setting sun the glorified forms of the
Dutchman and Senta are seen rising above the wreck, clasped in each
other's arms, soaring heavenward"; and the final page of the opera in
its original form consisted of the "Redemption" motive followed by the
motive of the Dutchman, the opera ending with the latter. When Wagner
revised the work some years later, he was conscious of the abruptness
and inconclusiveness of this ending. His pictorial imagination saw the
transfigured forms of Senta and the Dutchman more vividly, and the
more luminous vision found expression in the great stroke of genius
with which the opera as we now have it ends. The thundering theme of
the Dutchman no longer has the last word; the fortissimo swell of the
full orchestra suddenly breaks, and in a slower _tempo_ there steals
out in the soft, pure tones of the wood-wind and harps the theme of
"Redemption" in the form it first assumes in Senta's ballad, but with
an unexpected heavenward ascent in the violins at the finish--
[Music: No. 22.]
The effect is precisely as if the clouds had parted, and the figures of
the Dutchman and Senta were seen soaring aloft in their purified and
transfigured form.[403]
As the first version of the _Faust_ Overture (1840) has not been
published, it is impossible to compare it with the version we now have,
which was made in 1855; but we may be certain that the comparison
would prove as interesting as that between the earlier and the later
versions of the _Flying Dutchman_ finale. But the new Venusberg music
that he wrote for the Paris production of _Tannhäuser_ (1861) shows as
emphatically as the altered _Flying Dutchman_ ending how immeasurably
greater than all his development from _Die Feen_ to _Lohengrin_ was the
development from _Lohengrin_ to _Tristan_--for it was in the _Tristan_
period that he made this wonderful addition to _Tannhäuser_, the effect
of which is to make the remainder of the score seem almost cold in
comparison, a pale moon against a fiery sun. Had Wagner died after
_Lohengrin_ he would still have been the greatest operatic composer of
his time. But the work of the later years is so stupendous in every
respect, imaginative, inventive, and technical, that even _Lohengrin_
seems hardly to be the product of the same mind.
IV.--THE MATURE ARTIST
1
The years 1848 and 1849 saw the climax of a great crisis both in
Wagner's life and his art; it had been developing for two or three
years before, and its reverberations did not wholly die away for
some years after. All his life and his work at this time were, as
I have already said, simply a violent purgation of the spirit--a
nightmare agony from which he woke with a cry of relief. He shakes off
the theatre, and faces the world on a new footing as a man. And in
silence, unknown to everybody and almost to himself, he develops into
a new musician. For the moment his mind is a jumble of art, ethics,
politics and sociology. But as usual his artistic instincts guide him
surely in the end. After many gropings in this direction and that,
he settles down to the _Ring_ drama, which he first of all plans, in
1848, in the form of a three-act opera with the title of _Siegfried's
Death_. He falters a little even then, being obsessed by two other
subjects, _Jesus of Nazareth_ and _Friedrich Barbarossa_; but finally
he rejects them both, the greater adaptability of the Siegfried drama
for music being intuitively evident to him. The next twenty-six years
are to be taken up with the working out of this gigantic theme, with
_Tristan_ and the _Meistersinger_ as a kind of diversion in the middle
of it; then comes the quiet end with _Parsifal_. I do not propose to
discuss the philosophical--or pseudo-philosophical--ideas of any of
these works. It is only as a musician that Wagner will live, and to a
musician the particular philosophy or philosophies that he preached
in the _Ring_ and _Tristan_ and _Parsifal_ are matters of very small
concern. Wagner himself was always inclined to over-estimate the
importance of his own philosophising, and his vehement garrulity has
betrayed both partisans and opponents into taking him too seriously
as a thinker. Had he not left us his voluminous prose works and
letters, indeed, we should never have suspected the hundredth part
of the portentous meanings that he and his disciples read into his
operatic libretti. To those who still see profound metaphysical
revelations in the later works it may be well to point out that Wagner
saw revelations equally inspired and inspiring in the earlier ones,
which no one takes with excessive seriousness to-day on their dramatic
side. The philosophising all smacks too much, for our taste, of the
sentimental Germany of the mid-nineteenth century. For Wagner, Senta
is "the quintessence of Woman [_das Weib überhaupt_], yet the still
to-be-sought-for, the longed-for, the dreamed-of, the infinitely
womanly Woman--let me out with it in one word: the _Woman of the
Future_."[404] Tannhäuser was "the spirit of the whole Ghibelline
race for every age, comprehended in a single, definite, infinitely
moving form; but at the same time a human being right down to our own
day, right into the heart of an artist full of life's longing."[405]
"Lohengrin sought the woman who should have faith in him; who should
not ask who he was and whence he came, but should love him as he was,
and because he was what he appeared to himself to be. He sought the
woman to whom he should not have to explain or justify himself, but
who would _love_ him unconditionally. Therefore he had to conceal
his higher nature, for only in the non-revealing of this higher--or
more correctly heightened--essence could he find surety that he was
not wondered at for this alone, or humbly worshipped as something
incomprehensible,--whereas his longing was _not_ for wonder or
adoration, but for the only thing that could redeem him from his
loneliness and still his yearning--for _Love, for being loved, for
being understood through Love_.... The character and the situation of
this Lohengrin I now recognise with the clearest conviction as the
_type of the only really tragic material, of the tragic element of
our modern life_; of the same significance, indeed, for the _Present_
as was the _Antigone_, in another relation, for the life of the Greek
state.... Elsa is the unconscious, the un-volitional, into which
Lohengrin's conscious, volitional being yearns to be redeemed; but that
yearning is itself the unconscious, un-volitional in Lohengrin, through
which he feels himself akin in being to Elsa. Through the capacity of
this 'unconscious consciousness' as I myself experienced it in common
with Lohengrin, the nature of Woman ... became more and more intimately
revealed to me ... that _true Womanhood_ that should bring to me and
all the world redemption, after man's egoism, even in its noblest form,
had voluntarily broken itself before her. Elsa, the Woman ... made
me a full-fledged revolutionary. She was the spirit of the folk, for
redemption by whom I too, as artist-man, was yearning."[406]
This seems all very remote from us now; one wonders how any one, even
Wagner himself, could ever have taken these operatic puppets with
such appalling seriousness. The _Ring_ stands a little nearer to us;
but no longer can we follow Wagner in his philosophising even there.
For Wagner Siegfried was "the human being in the most natural and
gayest fulness of his physical manifestation.... It was Elsa who had
taught me to discover this man: to me he was the male-embodied [_der
männlich-verkörperte_] spirit of the eternal and only involuntarily
creative force [_Geist der ewig und einzig zeugenden Unwillkür_],
of the doer of true deeds, of Man in the fulness of his most native
strength and his most undoubted love-worthiness."[407] We can hardly
regard Siegfried in that light to-day. As we meet with him in the
libretto he is, as Mr. Runciman says, rather an objectionable young
person; we cannot quite reconcile ourselves to his ingratitude and
his super-athletic fatuousness; he reminds us too much of Anatole
France's description of the burly, bullet-headed general in _Les Dieux
ont Soif_--the sparrow's brain in the ox's skull. As we see him on
the stage he is, under the best conditions, slightly ridiculous, a
sort of overgrown Boy Scout. It is only in his music that he is so
magnificently alive, so sure of our sympathy. Sensible musicians,
indeed, do not trouble very much in these days about the metaphysics
or the esoteric implications of the Wagnerian dramas. Wotan must stand
or fall by his own dramatic grandeur and by the quality of the music
that is given to him to sing, not by the degree of success with which
he illustrates a particular theory of the Will. _Tristan_ is none the
better for all its Schopenhauerisms, natural or acquired; we may be
thankful that it is none the worse for them.
Wagner's philosophical stock, indeed, was never a very large one. The
"problems" of his operas are generally problems of his own personality
and circumstances. His art, like his life, is all unconscious egoism.
_His_ problems are always to be the world's problems, _his_ needs the
world's needs. Women obsessed him in art as in life: they kindled
fiery passion in man, or they "redeemed" him from passion, or they
set a sorrow's crown of sorrows on his head by failing to redeem him.
Passion, redemption, renunciation--these are the three dominant motives
of Wagner's work; and wherever we look in that work we find himself.
Indulgence--revulsion; hope--frustration; passion--renunciation;
these are the antitheses that are constantly confronting us. In the
_Flying Dutchman_, Vanderdecken-Wagner is redeemed by the woman who
loves and trusts him unto death. Tannhäuser-Wagner fluctuates between
the temptress and the saint. Lohengrin-Wagner seeks in vain the woman
who shall love him unquestioningly. Wieland the Smith, the hero of
a libretto he sketched in 1849, is again Wagner, lamed by life, but
healed at last by another "redeeming" woman. Wotan-Wagner, finding the
world going another way than his, wills his own destruction and that
of the world. Tristan-Wagner finds love insatiable, and death the only
end of all our loving. Sachs-Wagner renounces love. Parsifal-Wagner
finds salvation in flight from sensual love. Always there is this
oscillation between desire and the slaying of desire, between hope for
the world and despair for the world. In 1848, in an hour of physical
and mental joy in life, he conceives a blithe and exuberant Siegfried,
the super-man of the future, striding joyously and victoriously through
life. But the revulsion comes almost in a moment. He realises his
solitariness as man and artist. "I was irresistibly driven to write
something that should communicate this grievous consciousness of mine
in an intelligible form to the life of the present. Just as with my
_Siegfried_ the strength of my yearning had borne me to the primal
fount of the eternal purely-human; so now, when I found this yearning
could never be stilled by modern life, and realised once again that
redemption was to be had only in flight from this life, in escaping
from its claims upon me by self-destruction, I came to the primal fount
of every modern rendering of this situation--to the Man _Jesus of
Nazareth_." Like Jesus, confronted with the materialism of the world,
he longs for death, and reads a similar longing into all humanity.
So the oscillation goes on to the very end of his days. There is no
need, no reason, to discuss the "philosophy" of such a mind. He is
no philosopher: he is simply a tortured human soul and a magnificent
musical instrument. All that concerns us to-day is the quality of the
music that was wrung from the instrument under the torture.
2
The most astounding fact in all Wagner's career was probably the
writing of _Siegfried's Death_ in 1848. That drama is practically
identical with the present _Götterdämmerung_; and we can only stand
amazed at the audacity of the conception, the imaginative power the
work displays, the artistic growth it reveals since _Lohengrin_ was
written, and the total breach it indicates with the whole of the
operatic art of his time. But _Siegfried's Death_ was impossible in the
idiom of _Lohengrin_; and Wagner must have known this intuitively. This
is no doubt the real reason for his writing no music for six years,
from the completion of _Lohengrin_ in August 1847 to the commencement
of work on the _Rhinegold_ at the end of 1853. His artistic instincts
always led him infallibly, no matter what confusion might reign in the
rest of his thinking. He conceives the idea of the _Meistersinger_, for
instance, in 1845, just after finishing _Tannhäuser_. But a wise and
kindly fate intervenes and turns him aside from the project. He was not
ripe for the _Meistersinger_, either poetically or musically, as we can
see not only by a comparison of his later musical style with that of
_Tannhäuser_, but by comparing the sketch of the drama that he wrote in
1845 with the revised drafts of 1861. It was his original intention,
again, to introduce Parsifal into the third Act of _Tristan_; but his
purely artistic instincts were too sound to permit him to adhere to
that plan. How unripe he was in 1848 for a setting of _Siegfried's
Death_ hardly needs demonstration now. The swift and infallibly
telling strokes with which he has drawn Hagen and Gutrune in the
_Götterdämmerung_, for example, were utterly beyond him then; it took
twenty years' evolution before he could attain to that luminousness
and penetration of vision, that rapidity and certainty of touch. So
much, again, of the tragic atmosphere in which the _Götterdämmerung_ is
enveloped comes from the subtle harmonic idiom that Wagner had evolved
by that time, that it is hard to imagine the extent of his probable
failure had he persisted in setting the text to music in 1848. The
lyrical style of _Lohengrin_, the leisurely spun tissue of that lovely
work, were neither drastic enough, close enough, nor elastic enough for
_Siegfried's Death_. And of this he must have had a dim consciousness.
So he puts the musical part of his task on one side for six years,
broods continually over the subject, finds it growing within him, and
at last shapes it into not one opera but four. When he begins work
upon the music of the _Rhinegold_ he is a new being. His imagination
has developed to an extent that is without a parallel in the case of
any other musician. The characters and the _milieu_ of the _Rhinegold_
are themselves evidence of the audacious sweep of his vision: he
undertakes to re-create in music gods and men and giants, creatures of
the waters and creatures of the bowels of the earth; the music has to
flood the scene now with water, now with fire, with the murky vapours
of the underworld and the serene air of the heights over against
Valhalla. Never before had any composer dreamed of an opera so rich
in all varieties of emotion, of action, of atmosphere. The practice
he had in the _Rhinegold_ developed his powers still further: in the
_Valkyrie_ the painting grows surer and surer, the imagination sweeps
on to conceptions beyond anything that any musician before him would
have thought possible: in _Siegfried_ there is an absolute exultation
of style; the music seems to dance and cry aloud out of pure joy in
its own strength and beauty. His melody has already become terser and
more suggestive in the _Rhinegold_, and has lost much of its earlier
rhythmic formality. His harmonic range, while narrow enough compared
with that of _Tristan_ and the _Götterdämmerung_, has yet developed
greatly. He dares anything in pursuit of his ideal of finding in
his music the full and perfect counterpart of the characters and
the scenes; that endless E flat chord at the commencement of the
_Rhinegold_ prelude is an innovation the audacity of which we can
hardly estimate to-day.
It has been objected that the melody of the _Rhinegold_ is on the
miniature side, and that the score has little of the grand surge and
sweep of the later operas. It may be so, but the style of the music
seems admirably suited to the broad and simple outlines of this drama
and the relatively simple psychology of the beings who take part in
it,--beings who are now taking only the first step along the path that
is to lead them all into such tragic complications. But in any case
Wagner was obeying a sound instinct when he abandoned the broader
style of _Lohengrin_ in favour of the seemingly shorter-breathed style
of the _Rhinegold_. It was the consequence of his intuition that his
new dramatic ideas demanded a new musical form; we have to remember
that everything he says on this topic in _Opera and Drama_ is the
outcome of his reflection upon _Siegfried's Death_ and the best manner
of its setting. The older forms of opera being inapplicable here, he
had to devise a new method of unifying his vast design. He found the
solution of his problem in an application to opera of the symphonic
web-weaving of Beethoven; but for this he needed short and extremely
plastic motives. That as yet he cannot weave these motives, and the
episodical matter between them, into so continuous a tissue as that of
the later works is only natural; to expect him to have done so would be
as unreasonable as to expect the texture of Beethoven's second symphony
to be as closely woven as that of his fifth. But Wagner knew he had a
wonderful new instrument in his grasp, and he did well to learn the
full use of it by cautious practice.
3
The leit-motive, of course, is not Wagner's invention. Other operatic
composers had tentatively handled the device before him; and in his
own day Schumann had seen the possibilities of such a method being
applied to the song. In his _Frühlingsfahrt_, for example, the joyous
major melody that accompanies the bright youths on their first setting
out in life changes to the clouded minor as the poet tells of the ruin
that came upon one of them; and everyone knows the sadly expressive
effect of the winding up of the _Woman's Life and Love_ cycle with
a reminiscence of the melody of the opening song. The device of
reminiscence in poetic or dramatic music is indeed so obviously a
natural one that we can only wonder that the pre-Wagnerian composers
did not make more use of it. But Wagner did more than employ it as a
sort of index or label; he turned it into the seminal principle of
musical form for perhaps three-fourths of the music of our time. He
made it not merely a dramatic but a symphonic-dramatic instrument.
He had experimented with the device from his youth, but until now
without perceiving its symphonic possibilities. We have seen him
carrying forward a significant theme from one scene to another in
_Das Liebesverbot_. In _Rienzi_ there is very little real use of the
leit-motive. He will adopt a characteristic orchestral figure for a
person or a situation at the commencement of a scene or "number," and
play with it all through that particular set piece; but it is very
rarely that he will remind us of a previous situation by importing
the theme that symbolises it into a later situation. He does this,
for example, with the "Oath" motive, which first accompanies Rienzi's
story of his own vow to avenge his murdered brother (vocal score, pp.
77, 78), and is afterwards employed to accompany Colonna's threat of
vengeance if Rienzi dooms him and his fellow conspirators to death (p.
266), Rienzi's rejection of Adriano's plea for mercy (p. 337), and
finally Adriano's own resolve to be avenged upon Rienzi (p. 416). In
the _Flying Dutchman_ the tissue is largely unified by typical themes,
which, however, are as a rule merely repeated without substantial
modification, though now and then a motive is melodically transformed
to suggest a psychological variation, as when the "Redemption" theme
from Senta's ballad--
[Music: No. 23.]
afterwards becomes the motive of "Love unto death"--
[Music: No. 24.]
In _Tannhäuser_ there is a good deal of recurrent material--the
Bacchanale and the Pilgrims' Chorus, for instance--but the leit-motive
can hardly be said to be used at all in the later sense. _Lohengrin_ is
strewn with leit-motives that are marvels of characterisation; but here
too they recur in their original form time after time. For the most
part they merely label the character: they do not change as he changes,
nor do they spread themselves over the score with the persistence of
the motives of the later works.
4
The leit-motive in the _Ring_ is quite another matter. Most of
the motives in the earlier operas were vocal in origin, and their
relatively great length--which makes them as a rule unsuitable for a
flexible symphonic treatment--is the direct consequence of the length
of Wagner's poetic lines at that time. In _Rienzi_, for example, the
motive of Rienzi's prayer, the "Sancto spirito cavaliere" motive,
the "Freedom" motive, the motive of the "Messengers of Peace," and
others, are all of this type. In the _Flying Dutchman_ the motive
of "Longing for death," the two "Redemption" motives, the "Daland"
motive, the "Festivity" motive, the "Rejoicing" motive, the "Longing
for redemption" motive, and several others, are all vocal melodies in
the first place; of the same kind are the motives of "Repentance," of
"Love's magic," of "Love's renunciation" and others in _Tannhäuser_;
and in _Lohengrin_, the "Grail" motive, the "Farewell" motive, the
"Elsa's prayer" motive, the "Knight of the Grail" motive, the "Warning"
motive, the "Doubt" motive, and others. All of these are fully
developed, self-existent melodies, not germ-figures destined for the
weaving of a quasi-symphonic web. And though some of the less important
motives in the early operas are short, they were not made so with any
intention of using them plastically. The first things that strike us in
connection with the motives of the _Ring_ are their general shortness,
their very plastic nature, and the sense they convey of not having been
conceived primarily in a vocal form. It is true that some of them _are_
vocal in origin, but that fact does not stare us so aggressively in the
face as it does in the previous works; while the lines of the _Ring_
are themselves so short that even when a phrase is modelled on one or
two of them it never spreads itself out so extensively as the typical
phrases of the _Flying Dutchman_, _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ do.
This at first sight seems to imply that the poetic form of the _Ring_
exercised a powerful influence on the musical form. It is permissible
for us to-day to invert that proposition. Wagner, writing in 1851,
maintained that he had discarded the older form of verse, with its long
lines and its terminal rhymes, because of his conviction that this was
too conventional a garment to throw over the sturdy limbs of Siegfried,
the untutored child of nature, and that he was therefore led to adapt
the _Stabreim_ of the Folk. Consistently with the theory I have already
advanced in these pages, I prefer to believe--guided, as of course
Wagner himself could not be guided at that time, by the evidence of
the function the music performs in his later works--that the new
orchestral musician that was coming to birth within him felt the
necessity of shorter and more plastic germ-themes, and instinctively
urged the poet to cast _his_ material into a form that would place no
obstacle in the musician's way. But explain it as we will, the fact
remains that now he is coming to maturity his leit-motives are on
the whole both more concentrated and more purely instrumental than
they had been hitherto; as I have said, even when they come to us in
the first place from the mouths of the characters, they assume quite
naturally the quality of instrumental themes in the subsequent course
of the opera, whereas a purely orchestral rendering of the themes of
_Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ can never disguise their vocal origin. It
is comparatively rarely that the _Ring_ motives extend beyond two bars,
or at the most three. The "Servitude" motive is virtually only one bar
in length; so are the "Rhine Maidens' song," the "Smithing" motive, and
the "Reflection" motive; the "Waves" motive, the "Ring" motive, the
"Valhalla" motive, the "Might of youth " motive, the "Twilight" motive,
the "Norns" motive, the "Dusk of the gods" motive, are all comprised
within a couple of bars; several others run to three bars, and only one
or two run to four.
In this respect, as in some others, the _Meistersinger_ stands in
a class apart from the other works of Wagner's maturity. It is the
most purely vocal of all his later works, in the sense that while the
orchestral tissue is superbly full and unceasing in its flow, the
voice parts have an independence that is rare in the later Wagner.
The style is in a way almost a reversion to that of _Lohengrin_,
allowance being made, of course, for the more symphonic nature of
the orchestral portion, and the more continuous nature of the whole.
The _Meistersinger_ is full of "set" pieces--arias, duets, trios, a
quintet, choruses, _ensembles_, and so on. The necessity for all these
lay in the nature of the subject; and Wagner, at that time at the very
height of his powers, has so cunningly mortised all the components of
the opera that not a join is observable anywhere. A superficial glance
at a table of the _Meistersinger_ motives would be enough to convince
us, without any knowledge of the opera, that a great many of the themes
have had a vocal origin, either solo or choral. Others owe their length
to the fact that Wagner is painting masses rather than individuals;
only a fairly extended theme could depict, for instance, the sturdy,
pompous old Meistersingers and their stately processions. Where he is
not following a vocal line or painting with broad sweeps of the brush,
and is free to invent motives for purely orchestral use, he generally
throws them into the same concise form as those of the _Ring_--the
"Wooing" motive, for example--
[Music: No. 25.]
which, by reason of its brevity, is one of the most plastic motives
in the score. But as a whole the _Meistersinger_ lives in a different
world from the _Ring_ or _Tristan_. There is no great fateful principle
running through it, that can be symbolised in a short orchestral
figure and flashed across the picture at any desired moment, after
the manner of the "Curse" or the "Hagen" motive in the _Ring_, or
the "Death" motive in _Tristan_. The people in the _Meistersinger_
carry hardly any shadows about with them. Their natures are mostly
ingenuous, transparent, unsubtle: such as we see them on the stage
at any given moment, such are they to themselves and others in every
hour of their lives. It was natural then that they should take upon
themselves more of the burden of the drama than the characters of
the _Ring_ as a whole,--for these are only instruments in the hand
of a fate that is best symbolised by the ever-present orchestra--and
that the instrumental voices should co-operate joyously with them,
rather than dog them and lie in wait for them, as in the _Ring_, with
symbols of reminiscence and foreboding. That the whole essence of the
_Meistersinger_ lies in its simple human characterisation and simple
story-telling is shown again by Wagner's reverting in the Prelude to
the _pot-pourri_ feuilleton form of the _Tannhäuser_ overture,--a form
he never used again after 1845, except here.
5
As he proceeds with the _Ring_ his leit-motives in general become more
and more concentrated. Now and then he will employ a fairly extended
theme, but never without a good psychological reason. One of the
longest motives in the whole tetralogy is that of the "Volsung race."
Its length is justified by the duty it has to perform: to concentrate
the nobility and the suffering of that race into a chord or two would
be beyond the powers of any musician; none but Wagner, indeed, could
have expressed such an infinity of elevated grief within the compass
of seven or eight bars. Some of the other motives are astounding in
their brevity and eloquence. Not till after his work on the _Rhinegold_
had unsealed his imagination and perfected his technique could he have
hoped to hit off the wild, half-animal energy of the Valkyries in some
four or five notes that are merely the expansion of a single chord, or
have dared to trust to what is virtually only a series of syncopations
to symbolise Alberich's work of destruction (the _Vernichtungsarbeit_
motive). Never before could he have written anything so eloquent of
death as the "Announcement of death" motive in the _Valkyrie_. In
_Siegfried_, though the number of new motives is comparatively small,
the same process of concentration is observable. The god-like nature
and the stately gait of the Wanderer are suggested to us in three or
four notes. And in the _Götterdämmerung_ the concentration is amazing.
In that stupendous work he is, in my opinion, at the very summit of
his powers. He never wastes a note now: every new stroke he deals is
incredibly swift, direct and telling. Absolutely sure of himself,
he dispenses with a prelude--for the few bars of orchestral writing
before the voices enter can hardly be called one--and trusts to the
colour of a mere couple of chords to tune the audience's imagination to
the atmosphere of the opening scene. One short characteristic figure
suffices for the motive of Hagen, and nowhere in the whole of Wagner's
or anyone else's work is a figure of two notes used so multifariously
and with such far-reaching suggestion. It is evident that he now feels
the harmonic instrument to be the most serviceable and flexible of all;
and hundreds of his most overpowering effects in the _Götterdämmerung_
are achieved by harmonic invention or harmonic transformation. The
grisliness of the Hagen theme comes in large part--putting aside the
question of orchestral colour--from the sort of dour, irreconcilable
element it seems to introduce into certain chords,--though in
reality the harmony has nothing essentially far-fetched in it--as
in that tremendous passage near the end of the first Act of the
_Götterdämmerung_--
[Music: No. 26.]
Hagen!
The new themes, too, rely for a great deal of their poignancy upon
some subtle and fleeting taste of sweetness or some swift suggestion of
darkness and mystery in the harmony, as in the exquisite motive that is
associated with the wedding of Gutrune--
[Music: No. 27.]
or in the motive of "Magic deceit"--
[Music: No. 28.]
while others make their effect by means of the utmost concentration
of melodic meaning, like the "Blood-brotherhood" motive, or by an
epigrammatic condensation of rhythm, like the "Oath of fidelity"
motive, which only Wagner could have invented, and which no other
composer but Beethoven would have dared to use if it had been offered
to him--
[Music: No. 29.]
_Bruckmann_
[Illustration: RICHARD WAGNER. From the painting by H. Herkomer at
Bayreuth.]
It is on harmonic alteration that he chiefly relies again, in the
latter stages of the _Ring_, to suggest the fateful gloom that is
gradually closing in upon the drama; much of the tense and tragic
atmosphere of the _Götterdämmerung_ comes from this clouding of the
simpler texture of the motives of the earlier operas. One of the most
remarkable instances of this is his treatment of the "Servitude"
motive, that is generally associated with Alberich. In the _Rhinegold_
it appears in a variety of simple forms, such as this--
[Music: No. 30.]
and this--
[Music: No. 31.]
In the _Götterdämmerung_ a sense of almost intolerable strain, of a
great tragedy sweeping to its inevitable end, is conveyed by various
subtilisations of the harmony, of which the following may stand as a
type--
[Music: No. 32.]
When Siegfried appears on Brynhilde's rock, disguised as Gunther, the
theme of the latter is metamorphosed from--
[Music: No. 33.]
into--
[Music: No. 34.]
Here everything is exquisitely calculated,--the harmonic alteration,
the orchestral colouring (the soft mysterious tones of trumpet and
trombones), the interrupted ending, and the long fateful silence that
follows.
When Alberich, in his colloquy with Hagen at the commencement of the
second Act of the _Götterdämmerung_, looks forward to the approaching
destruction of the gods, the "Valhalla" motive becomes altered from the
familiar--
[Music: No. 35.]
to--
[Music: No. 36.]
Many other illustrations might be given of this harmonic
intensification of themes.
6
It has to be admitted, however, that Wagner's use of the leit-motive
presents some singularities, and is at times open to criticism. He
undoubtedly introduces the motives more frequently than they are really
needed; there is no necessity, for example, for the "Siegfried's horn"
motive to be sounded at almost every appearance of Siegfried or every
mention of his name. Debussy has made merry over this superfluity of
reference, comparing it to a lunatic presenting his card to you in
person. But we can easily forgive Wagner this little excess of zeal.
He was doing something absolutely new for his time. He had a gigantic
mass of material to unify, and this incessant recurrence of significant
themes seemed to him the only way to do it. He could not foresee how
familiar the operas and their motives would be to the whole musical
world half a century later. In any case this peculiarity of his style
can be passed over with a mere mention. Of more importance is his habit
of making many of the motives so much alike that a certain amount of
confusion is set up even in the minds of those who know the operas
well. The "Servitude" motive, for example, is so like the opening
of the Rhine Maidens' song that everyone goes astray over the two
themes now and then in the first stages of his acquaintance with the
_Ring_. Still more confusing is his habit of taking a motive that at
first has only a particular meaning, and making it express a general
concept, the result being that we frequently associate it with the
wrong character. His mind was curiously like Bach's in this respect,
that having fixed upon a figure that seemed to him an adequate symbol
for an action, a person, an animal, or a material object, he would use
it for all future phenomena of the same kind. But Bach's procedure is
rather more logical, for his typical themes have as a rule a pictorial
or semi-pictorial character, and so they can be applied without
incongruity to a number of pictures of the same general order. A phrase
that symbolises waves, for example, in one work may be legitimately
employed to symbolise waves in another, for the theme itself is so
constructed as to suggest the motion of waves: at least that is the
intention. But Wagner necessarily has to find musical symbols for
all kinds of things in his operas for which it is quite impossible
to discover an unmistakable, self-explanatory musical equivalent.
The symbol has therefore to be an arbitrary one; it has no claim to
pictorial veracity, but we agree to accept it because it fulfils a
useful musical purpose. The "Fire" motive conveys a real suggestion
of fire; the _Rhinegold_ prelude has certain qualities that make us
willing to associate it with a mighty rolling river. But the "Ring"
motive does not convey the slightest suggestion of a ring, nor has the
"Gold" motive any resemblance to gold.
Wagner runs, then, a risk of being misunderstood, or not understood
at all, when he takes an arbitrary symbol which we are willing to
concede him in one case, and applies it to another. It would tax all
the ingenuity of the thorough-going Wagnerian to justify, for instance,
in the scene of the Norns in the _Götterdämmerung_, the employment of
the "Sleep" motive that is inevitably associated in our minds with
Wotan's parting from Brynhilde at the end of the _Valkyrie_. When
Brynhilde is taking leave of Siegfried, in the second scene of the
_Götterdämmerung_, and giving him Grane as a perpetual reminder of
herself, the orchestra accompanies his words with the "Love" motive
from the duet between Siegmund and Sieglinde in the first act of the
_Valkyrie_. So profound has been the impression we have received
from it there that it is impossible for us to associate it with any
other pair of lovers; and we cannot help wondering what Siegmund and
Sieglinde have to do with Siegfried and Brynhilde and Grane. When Hagen
describes the coming of Siegfried down the Rhine, it is quite right
that the orchestra should give out the typical Siegfried theme, but
quite wrong, surely, that this theme should be combined with that of
the Rhine Maidens from the _Rhinegold_. The intention presumably is
that from the Rhine Maidens we are to infer the Rhine;[408] but the
musical intelligence does not like having to diverge into deductive
reasoning of this kind. Anyone who has learnt to associate the theme
with the Rhine Maidens will naturally suppose either that they are to
appear in person or that some allusion is to be made to them, neither
of which things happens. The "Treaty" motive of the _Rhinegold_, again,
has become so firmly associated in our minds with the agreement between
Wotan and the giants that we involuntarily think of them when we hear
it again in the orchestra during the swearing of Blood-brotherhood by
Siegfried and Gunther (_Götterdämmerung_, vocal score, p. 92).
One of the most curious uses of the leit-motive is to be found in
_Siegfried_ (V. S. p. 35). Siegfried, pouring contempt on the idea that
Mime can be his father, is telling him how he once saw the reflection
of his own face in the brook:
Unlike unto thee
there did I seem:
as like as a toad
to a glittering fish.
There is excellent reason for accompanying the third line with the
"Smithing" motive that so often characterises Mime; but what reason
can there be for accompanying the fourth line with the "Waves" motive
from the prelude to the _Rhinegold_? As it is not in the Rhine but in
a brook that Siegmund has seen his reflection, the motive here can
only be taken as symbolising not the waves of a particular and already
familiar river--a procedure for which there might be some excuse--but
waves in general, which is quite illegitimate. Wagner goes too far,
as Bach used to go too far, in importing into the line a pictorial
allusion that is not already there, and that we can only put there by
an effort. For Bach also was in the habit of making his music argue,
as it were, from one external fact to another. We can permit this
within certain limits, but both Bach and Wagner sometimes go beyond all
limits. When Bach has to set to music a stanza in which the faithful
are spoken of as Christ's sheep (_Beglückte Herde, Jesu Schafe_, in the
cantata _Du Hirte Israel_) he obviously aims at creating a pastoral
atmosphere by the use of the oboes; and our imagination here is quite
willing to accept the naïf translation of the religious idea into
a pictorial image. But when Bach, possessed by the image of Jesus
calling His disciples to be fishers of men (in the cantata _Siehe,
ich will viel Fischer aussenden_), makes use of a motive of a type
that he always employs to symbolise waves, we can only say, with all
respect, that we had rather he did not ask us to deduce the necessity
of waves from the fact that there are fish. So with this passage from
_Siegfried_: we should be quite satisfied with the mere comparison
between the toad and the fish; to lay it down with such portentous
gravity that where there are fish there must necessarily be water is to
reduce pictorialism to an absurdity.
There is no lack of examples of this process of illegitimate inference
and illegitimate association. After Mime has answered the first of the
Wanderer's three questions, the latter congratulates him in this wise
(_Siegfried_, vocal score, p. 74):
Right well the name
of the race dost thou know:
sly, thou rascal, thou seemest!
--to the same phrase that is often used in the _Rhinegold_ to suggest
the trickiness of Loge in particular, but also, apparently, to suggest
deceit in general. It accompanies, for example, Fafner's remark to
Fasolt, _à propos_ of the attempt of Wotan to evade the promised
payment for Valhalla--
My trusty brother,
seest thou, fool, his deceit?
(V. S. 89, 90); and again the words in which Wotan tries to calm the
apprehensions of Fricka--
Where simple strength serves,
of none ask I assistance:
but to force the hate
of foes to help me,
needs such craft and deceit
as Loge the artful employs.
(V. S. 82, 83). That is to say, a purely arbitrary musical figure is to
be taken as symbolising not merely the slyness of a particular person,
but slyness in the abstract--a length to which we must decline to go
with Wagner.
And as with his waves and his moral qualities, so with his animals;
they too are both particular and universal. When Alberich, at the
urging of Loge, turns himself into a serpent (_Rhinegold_, p. 182), it
is to the accompaniment of a motive that is itself admirably pictorial.
But in _Siegfried_, (p. 7, etc.), and the _Götterdämmerung_ (p. 34,
etc.), the same motive is always used to characterise Fafner, after
he has turned himself into a dragon. One need not enlarge upon the
confusion this is bound to create.
We are willing again, to accept the "Swan" motive in _Lohengrin_ as a
purely conventional symbol; but the same motive strikes rather oddly on
our ears when it is used to particularise the swan in _Parsifal_. If
in _Lohengrin_ it typifies that particular swan, it is obviously not
right to employ it for a totally different bird in another opera; for
there is nothing in the outline of the theme that can be said to bear
the remotest resemblance to a swan in the way that an arpeggio theme
may be said to resemble waves, or a crepitating theme to suggest fire.
Again, Wagner only confuses us when he uses the motive that accompanies
Kundry's ride in the first scene of _Parsifal_ to accompany Parsifal's
description of the horsemen he had once seen in the wood:
And once upon the fringe of the wood,
on glorious creatures mounted,
men all glittering went by me;
fain had I been like them:
with laughter they swept on their way.
And then I ran,
but never again I saw them;
through deserts wide I wandered,
o'er hill and dale;
oft fell the night,
then followed day: etc.
(vocal score, p. 54); afterwards to accompany Kundry's account of the
death of Herzeleide:
As I rode by I saw her dying,
and, Fool, she sent thee her greeting;
(V. S. p. 57); after that, again, to accompany Kundry as she hastens
to the spring in the wood to get water for the fainting Parsifal (V.
S. p. 58); after that to describe the rush of Klingsor's warriors to
the ramparts (V. S. p. 120); after that to accompany the thronging of
the Flower Maidens to the scene (V. S. p. 156); again to give point to
Parsifal's words:
And I, the fool, the coward,
to deeds of boyish wildness hither fled--
(V. S. p. 203); and to accompany--for what reason it is difficult to
say--Kundry's threat that she will call the spear against Parsifal
if he continues to repulse her (V. S. p. 222); and finally, as an
accompaniment to her last words to Parsifal:
For fleddest thou from here,
and foundest all the ways of the world,
the one that thou seek'st,
that path thy foot shall find never;
(V. S. p. 225). No ingenuity can justify the employment of the same
motive for so many different purposes. As a matter of fact, after we
have once become conscious of it as accompanying Kundry's ride in the
first scene of the opera, it is inevitable that we should associate it
with her at each subsequent recurrence of it.
Another peculiarity of Wagner's use of the leit-motive may be noted;
once or twice he gives a meaning to a theme in the later stages of
the _Ring_ that we cannot be sure of it possessing at first. The most
striking instance of this is the "Reflection" motive. In _Siegfried_ it
is exclusively employed in connection with Mime, and the manner of its
employment leaves no room for doubt that the commentators are right in
giving it this title. The prelude to _Siegfried_ commences with it; it
is used there to suggest to us Mime pondering over the problem of the
forging of the sword. It frequently recurs with the same significance
in the scene that follows. It is used again all through the scene
of questions and answers between the Wanderer and Mime, to suggest
the dwarf putting his considering cap on after or during each of the
Wanderer's posers. Yet on its first appearance in the _Rhinegold_
(vocal score, p. 151) there is nothing whatever to indicate that the
theme is to be taken as symbolical of reflection. It accompanies Mime's
plaint to Wotan and Loge--
What help for me?
I must obey
the commands of my brother,
who holds me bondsman to him.
* * * * *
By evil craft fashioned Alberich
from the ravished Rhinegold a yellow ring: etc.
(Vocal score, p. 151.) From the words one would be _a priori_ inclined
to associate the music with Alberich rather than with Mime; and as it
is not employed again in the _Rhinegold_, the meaning we are suddenly
asked to attach to it at the opening of _Siegfried_ seems a little
far-fetched.
7
Wagner was not long in realising that however thrilling the timbre of
the human voice may be, and useful as it is for making clear the course
of the action and the sentiments of the characters, the orchestra is
the most powerful and most resourceful of all the instruments at the
disposal of the operatic composer. More and more the main current of
his thinking goes into this. In the _Rhinegold_ the orchestral texture
is by no means continuous; frequently it merely punctuates or supports
the vocal declamation by means of a detached chord or two, much in
the way that it used to sustain the older recitative. As the _Ring_
proceeds, pages of this kind become rarer: the orchestra thrusts itself
more and more to the centre of the picture. It would be impossible to
make the tissue of the _Rhinegold_ intelligible without the voices: but
the orchestral part of the _Götterdämmerung_ would flow on with hardly
a break if the vocal part were omitted; so also would large sections
of _Tristan_ and the _Meistersinger_. It was inevitable that under
these circumstances the vocal writing should occasionally become a
little perfunctory. It is frequently said that the balance between the
vocal and orchestral parts is most perfectly maintained in _Tristan_;
but the most cursory examination of the score shows that even there
Wagner could not always find, or would not take the trouble to find,
a vocal line of equal melodic interest with that of the orchestra, in
the opening scene, for instance, it is transparently clear that the
really expressive voice is the orchestra, and that the vocal parts have
been inserted, sometimes rather carelessly and unskilfully, after the
orchestral tissue has been completed. The vocal writing in _Tristan_
falls into four main categories. The first is that to which I have
already referred; wholly absorbed in the orchestral working out of a
theme, Wagner seems to pay the minimum of attention to the vocal line,
which sometimes has as little real relevance to the music as a whole
as if it had been added by another person. As a specimen of this kind
of writing we may cite the music to the words of Brangaene at the
commencement of the opera--
Bluish strips
are stretching along the west;
swiftly the ship
sails to the shore:
if restful the sea by eve
we shall readily set foot on land.
(Vocal score, pp. 7, 8.)
To the second category belong passages in which the voice is frankly
in the forefront of the picture and the orchestra is merely a
background--as in the colloquy between Tristan and Brangaene (vocal
score, pp. 18 ff.), or in the music to Isolde's words shortly after the
beginning of the second Act--
BRANGAENE. I still hear the sound of horns.
ISOLDE. No sound of horns
were so sweet;
yon fountain's soft
murmuring current
moves so quietly hence;
if horns yet brayed
how could I hear that?
(Vocal score, pp. 90, 91.)
To the third category belong the passages in which the voice simply
sings the same melody as the orchestra, as on p. 177 of the vocal score
("Thy kingdom thou art showing," etc.); and to the fourth, those in
which it sings a real counterpoint to the orchestra--not a mere piece
of padding like the passage I have cited from pp. 7, 8 of the score,
but a vocal line of genuine melodic interest--as in a good deal of the
scene of the third Act through which there runs the melancholy cor
anglais melody.
_Tristan_, in fact, in spite of the splendour of its orchestral
polyphony, by no means exhibits Wagner's symphonic powers in their
full evolution. The most wonderful of his works in this respect is
the _Götterdämmerung_, the stupendous strength of which is beyond
words and almost beyond belief. The world had not seen a musical brain
working at such tremendous and long-sustained pressure since the days
when the B minor Mass and the "Matthew Passion" were written; and
even those masterpieces have not the continuity of texture of the
_Götterdämmerung_, nor do they show so giant a hand at its work of
unification. Turn almost where you will, the course of the drama is
told with absolute clearness in the orchestra itself. Yet in spite of
his concentrating so largely on the orchestra, the vocal parts have an
extraordinary aptness; it would be hard to find a passage in the score
as perfunctory as some that might be quoted from _Tristan_. The voice,
it is true, is often used simply as another counterpoint among those
of the orchestra; but as a counterpoint it generally has a dramatic
appositeness and a melodic beauty of its own.
In _Parsifal_ this tendency to make the orchestra the principal
dramatic speaker goes so far that very frequently the vocal writing
is thoroughly bad. Some writers have attributed this to a decline
of mental power in Wagner's old age. I do not think that this is
the correct explanation. I can see no general decadence of musical
invention in the music of _Parsifal_: I am willing to believe that the
peculiar emotional and intellectual world of the opera makes no appeal
to many people; but the style as a whole is as admirably suited to
that world as the styles of _Tristan_ and the _Meistersinger_ are to
their respective subjects, and I for one see no failure of inspiration
except in some of the choral writing in the first Act, where there is
occasionally an undeniable touch of commonplace. Part of the admitted
colourlessness of some of the vocal passages is to be accounted for,
I think, by the utterly unmusical quality of the words. The defect is
not in Wagner the musician but in Wagner the poet, who has forgotten
for the moment several of the principles he had laid down in his prose
works and put into successful practice in the six great operas of
his prime. The text of _Parsifal_ contains a large amount of quite
unmusical matter, especially at the commencement. Many of the lines
have evidently not roused the slightest interest in the composer. He
knew that the orchestral part was alive, and always developing the
emotional possibilities of the situation; and when he comes to an
obviously impossible verbal patch,--necessary for the telling of the
story, but containing no stimulus for the musician--he simply refuses
to waste time or trouble upon it. Take as an example one of the very
worst passages for the voice in the whole opera--the words of Parsifal
just before the beginning of the transformation music in the first Act--
[Music: No. 37.]
PARSIFAL.
I hardly stir, and yet I move apace.
Granting that the words are unfit for music, it is incredible that
Wagner could not have found a more interesting musical outline for
them than this, if it had occurred to him to try. But I take it that
he would not try, or saw no necessity for trying; his mind was wholly
bent on working out his orchestral picture, which, after all, is
the only thing that really matters here as in so many other places.
In other passages, such as the long recital of Kundry to Parsifal
commencing "I saw the babe upon its mother's breast" (vocal score,
p. 187), the orchestral part is a sort of small symphonic movement
in itself, in which the voice mostly sings the same melody as the
orchestra. Where it does not do this in the symphonic passages the
vocal writing again becomes a trifle careless, as in the Good Friday
music. The self-contained completeness of the orchestral part here is
conclusively shown by its perfect adaptation to the concert room; and
I take it that, feeling that virtually all he had to say had been said
by the orchestra, Wagner worked out the mood of the scene with complete
satisfaction to himself in that medium, and then added the vocal part
as best he could--sometimes quite well, sometimes by no means well.
He had largely given up, indeed, thinking simultaneously in terms
of both voice and orchestra, as in the best parts of _Tristan_, the
_Meistersinger_ and the _Götterdämmerung_. Those who will may put this
down to a decline of his musical powers. To me it seems more probable
that as a musician he came to rely more and more on his most eloquent
instrument, the orchestra. It may even be that his carelessness with
regard to the text of _Parsifal_, his inclusion of a number of episodes
that he must have known were essentially foreign to his own ideal of
music, can be accounted for by his belief that he could rely on the
expressiveness and the continuity of the orchestral web to see him
through all the inevitable difficulties. As one looks at the score of
_Parsifal_ one can readily understand his desire to try his hand at a
symphony in the last years of his life.
8
It is open to doubt, indeed, whether Wagner ever attained the
homogeneity of form that was his ideal. His most homogeneous work is
probably _Lohengrin_; after his developing imagination and technique
had made him dissatisfied with the style of that opera, and pointed
him on to more difficult achievements, he does indeed paint pictures
of magnificent scope and exquisite fineness of detail, but he hardly
attains the perfect balance of all the factors and the perfect
consistency of style that make _Lohengrin_ flow so smoothly. The
reason, I think, is that while he was urged on to this reform and
that by the logical quality of his mind, he was never quite logical
enough--which is only another way of saying that even the greatest
minds cannot create a new form of their own in art. All they can do
is to add something to the structure they have inherited from their
predecessors, and pass the transformed product on to their successors
as something to be transformed still further. An ideal like that of
Wagner--to create an art form that should be musical through and
through, a continuous, endlessly varied web of melody,--is realisable
in instrumental music pure and simple, but hardly in connection with
the stage. Concentrate the dramatic action as he would, so as to
provide the musician with a framework that should be musical in every
fibre, the poet was still compelled to retain a certain amount of
non-musical matter in order to tell his story clearly to the audience.
The concision of _Tristan_ is wonderful; but even in the first Act of
_Tristan_ there are verse-passages the pedestrian quality of which
the composer has not been able to disguise. The style of all his
later works fluctuates in character because he is divided between
a desire to keep the actors in the forefront and the necessity for
relegating them to the background in order to give the orchestra an
absolutely free course. We feel with Wagner, as we do with certain
others of the most fertile minds in art--with Goethe, with Leonardo,
with Hokusai--that one human life-time was too pitifully short for
the realisation of everything of which the great brain was capable;
that the body broke down while the mind was still capable of adding
to its store of knowledge and feeling. All Wagner's greatest works,
regarded from the standpoint of the twentieth century, are hardly
more than magnificent attempts to find a compromise between drama
and music. At times the compromise worked admirably; at others there
is perceptible friction. His dilemma was the one that has confronted
every composer of opera since the day when opera was invented. Poetry
and music are not the loving sisters that the fancy of the literary
man would make them out to be; they are rival goddesses, very jealous
and intolerant of each other. The poet, in proportion as his work is
genuine, faultless poetry, has no need of the musician. Music is cruel,
ravenous, selfish, overbearing with poetry; it deprives it, for its own
ends, of almost everything that makes it poetry, altering its verbal
values, disregarding its rhymes, substituting another rhythm for that
of the poet. It has no need of anything but the poetic idea, and to get
at that kernel it ruthlessly tears away all the delicacies of tissue
that enclose it. Wagner himself, however much he might theorise about
poetry, was never a poet; he was simply a versifier who wrote words
for music, sometimes admirably adapted for this purpose, sometimes
exceedingly ill adapted. In _Tristan_, which he himself regarded as the
one of all his poems that was best suited for music, what he writes is
generally not poetry at all. Who would give that title to lines that
scorn all grace of rhythm, all variety of cadence, all the magic that
comes of the perfect fusion of speech and expression: lines like those
of the final page, for example:
Heller schallend
mich umwallend,
sind es Wellen
sanfter Lüfte?
Sind es Wogen
wonniger Düfte?
Wie sie schwellen
mich umrauschen,
soll ich atmen,
soll ich lauschen?
Soll ich schlürfen,
untertauchen?
Süss in Düften
mich verhauchen?
In dem wogenden Schwall,
in dem tönenden Schall,
in des Welt-Atems
wehendem All,--
ertrinken,--
versinken,--
unbewusst,--
höchste Lust!
or those at the meeting of Tristan and Isolde in the second Act--
TRISTAN. Isolde! Geliebte!
ISOLDE. Tristan! Geliebter!
Bist du mein?
TRISTAN. Hab' ich dich wieder?
ISOLDE. Darf ich dich fassen?
TRISTAN. Kann ich mir trauen?
ISOLDE. Endlich! Endlich!
TRISTAN. An meine Brust!
ISOLDE. Fühl' ich dich wirklich?
TRISTAN. Seh' ich dich selber?
ISOLDE. Dies deine Augen?
TRISTAN. Dies dein Mund?
ISOLDE. Hier deine Hand?
TRISTAN. Hier dein Herz?
ISOLDE. Bin ich's? Bist du's?
Halt' ich dich fest?
TRISTAN. Bin ich's? Bist du's?
Ist es kein Trug?
BOTH. Ist es kein Traum?
O Wonne der Seele,
o süsse, hehrste,
kühnste, schönste,
seligste Lust!
TRISTAN. Ohne Gleiche!
ISOLDE. Überreiche!
TRISTAN. Überselig!
ISOLDE. Ewig!
If this telegraphic style, as Emil Ludwig calls it, is poetry, then we
shall have to give that word a meaning it has never yet had.
But if the _Tristan_ order of verse is not poetry, it is magnificently
adapted to the needs of the symphonic musician. It is unobtrusive;
it is pliant; it serves to _préciser_ the musical emotion without
fettering the orchestral composer either melodically or rhythmically.
Compare now with the previous extracts one or two from _Parsifal_--
Denn ihm, da wilder Feinde List und Macht
des reinen Glaubens Reich bedrohten,
ihm neigten sich in heilig ernster Nacht
dereinst des Heilands sel'ge Boten:
(To him, when 'gainst the savage foeman's might
this realm of faith he had defended,
oh wonder rare! in solemn, holy night
from heaven the Saviour's messengers descended)
Des eig'nen sündigen Blutes Gewell'
in wahnsinniger Flucht
muss mir zurück dann fliessen,
in die Welt der Sündensucht
mit wilder Scheu sich ergiessen:
von neuem sprengt es das Tor,
daraus es nun strömt hervor,
hier durch die Wunde, der seinen gleich,
geschlagen von desselben Speeres Streich,
der dort dem Erlöser die Wunde stach,
aus der mit blut'gen Tränen
der Göttliche weint' ob der Menschheit Schmach
in Mitleid's heiligem Sehnen,--
und aus der nun mir, an heiligster Stelle,
dem Pfleger göttlichster Güter,
des Erlösungsbalsams Hüter,
das heisse Sündenblut entquillt,
ewig erneut aus des Sehnens Quelle,
das, ach! keine Büssung je mir stillt!