(In maddest tumult, by sin defiled,

my blood back on itself

doth turn and rage within me;

to the world where sin is lord

in frenzied fear is it surging;

again it forces the door,

in torrents it poureth forth,

here through the spear-wound, alike to His,

and dealt me by the self-same deadly spear

that once the Redeemer pierced with pain,

and, tears of blood outpouring,

the Holy One wept for the shame of man,

in pity's god-like yearning,--

and from this my wound, the Grail's own chosen,

the holy relics' guardian,

of redemption's balm the warder,

the sinful fiery flood wells forth,

ever renewed from the fount of longing

that, ah! never penance more may still!)

So hofft sein sündenreu'ger Hüter,

da er nicht sterben kann,

wann je er ihn erschaut,

sein Ende zu erzwingen,

und mit dem Leben seine Qual zu enden.

(Thus hopes its sin-repentant guardian,

since he can perish not

while on it he doth gaze,

by force to draw death to him,

and with his life to end his cruel torment.)

How incredibly careless is the construction here--the long, involved

sentences, the parentheses, the separation of substantive and verb by

several lines! It is this absence of poetic concentration that makes

_Parsifal_ a trifle _langweilig_ at times; for no matter how expressive

Wagner may make the orchestral music, he cannot quite reconcile us to

the frequent flatness of the vocal writing and the difficulty we often

have in getting the sense, or even the grammatical construction, of

the words. That Wagner at the end of his life could put together a

text like _Parsifal_ after having made the poems of _Tristan_ and the

_Ring_ is not in the least a proof of mental collapse, but only of

the almost insuperable difficulties in the way of finding a perfect

compromise between music and dramatic poetry. He was fortunate enough,

in the case of _Tristan_, to hit upon a subject that was comparatively

easy to concentrate. Two duties, it must be remembered, an operatic

poem has to perform: it has to provide the composer with opportunities

for emotional expression, and it has to make a story clear to the

spectator. The ideal text would be that in which the action was

implicit in the emotion, that is to say, one in which there was no need

for any explanation, through the mouth of this or that actor, of events

that were happening off the stage or that had occurred before the drama

began. It is when the composer has to interrupt his purely emotional

outpouring in order to allow the poet to become explanatory that he

realises the difficulty of making his opera musical throughout. Even

in _Tristan_ Wagner could not wholly dispense with a certain amount of

explanation, in the first act, of the events in Ireland and Cornwall

that have led up to the situation in which Tristan and Isolde now find

themselves. The music in consequence halts decidedly at times; all the

art of the composer cannot disguise the fact that he is momentarily

being held up by the exigencies of the stage poet. In the _Ring_, as

it was first drafted, Wagner was faced with the same problem, but he

solved it in another way. _Siegfried's Death_ was to be merely the

climax of a long sequence of tragic events. Without some knowledge of

these events, however, the spectator would be unable to understand

the final tragedy. So Wagner resorted to the device of making the

characters themselves recapitulate the earlier stages of the story, in

much the same way that Isolde, in the first act of _Tristan_, tells

Brangaene--for the benefit of the audience, of course--all about the

coming of Tristan to Ireland, his slaying of Morold, her nursing of

the wounded Cornish hero, his wooing her as bride for King Marke,

and so on. In the opening scene of _Siegfried's Death_ the Norns

tell each other--again for the benefit of the audience--how Alberich

ravished the gold from the Rhine, made a ring from it, and enslaved the

Nibelung race; how the ring was stolen, and Alberich himself became a

thrall; how the giants built Valhalla for the gods, and, denied their

promised reward, got possession of the ring that the gods had stolen

from Alberich; how there was born a free hero, destined to redeem the

gods from _their_ bondage; how Siegfried slew the dragon and wakened

Brynhilde from her sleep. Having made all this clear in an introductory

scene, Wagner raises the curtain upon Siegfried and Brynhilde. Later,

Hagen tells Gunther,--all for the sake of the audience--how Wotan begot

the Volsung race; how the twin-born Volsung pair Siegmund and Sieglinde

had for son the mighty hero, Siegfried, who "closed the ravenous maw"

of the dragon with his "conquering sword." In the next scene Siegfried

explains to the audience--_viâ_ Hagen and Gunther--how he came into

possession of the tarnhelm and the ring, whereupon Hagen describes the

virtues of the former. In the third scene the Valkyries[409] fly to

the solitary Brynhilde and learn of her awakening by Siegfried, and of

the intervention of Wotan in the combat between Siegmund and Hunding.

In the first scene of the second Act Alberich tells Hagen how he won

the gold and forged the ring, and compelled Mime to make the tarnhelm

for him; how the ring was ravished from him by the gods and given to

the giants; how one of the latter guarded it in the form of a dragon;

how Siegfried slew the latter and Mime. In the second scene of the

third Act Siegfried tells the Gibichungs--the audience overhearing--how

Mime tended the dying Sieglinde in the wood, saved her child, and

brought him up to his own craft of smith; how he (Siegfried) forged his

father's sword anew and did the dragon to death; how the bird warned

him of Mime's plot against his life, told him of the powers of the ring

and tarnhelm, and sent him to rouse Brynhilde from her sleep on the

fire-girt rock.

Wagner must have felt the clumsiness of this method of constant

explanation, and anticipated that it would impede the free flow of

his music; while in any case the audience would probably still not

be quite clear as to certain points. So, as all the world knows, he

first of all prefixed to _Siegfried's Death_ another drama--_The Young

Siegfried_--designed to put the bearing of all the stages of the action

beyond the possibility of misunderstanding. But again the fear haunts

him that there may still be some things insufficiently accounted

for; so even _The Young Siegfried_ has to have a certain number of

pages of explanation. The fact of Siegfried being there at all has to

be explained by Mime, as well as the further facts of the death of

Siegmund in battle and the perishing of Sieglinde in giving birth to

Siegfried. In the next scene, almost the whole story of what afterwards

became the _Rhinegold_ and the _Valkyrie_ is told afresh in the

competition of questions and answers between the Wanderer and Mime. In

the first scene of the third Act, we have the completion of the story

of the _Valkyrie_ given to the audience in the dialogue between the

Wanderer and Erda--how the earth-goddess bore a daughter, Brynhilde, to

Wotan, how she flouted the god's will, and for punishment was doomed to

sleep on the fiery fell. Not content with all this, Wagner afterwards

stages, in a third opera, the _Valkyrie_, the whole of the action that

has been told and told again in _Siegfried_ and the _Götterdämmerung_,

from the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde down to the punishment of

Brynhilde. Even here he has to find room for explanations; in the first

scene of the second Act Wotan tells the audience--_viâ_ Brynhilde--the

whole story of the rape of the gold by Alberich and all the events

that followed from it. Finally Wagner comes to the conclusion that

the whole action, from its beginning in the depths of the Rhine, had

better be put visibly upon the stage; and so the _Rhinegold_, the story

of which has been already told more than once, is prefixed to the

_Valkyrie_. But in spite of his having shown everything so completely

that nothing remains to be explained by word of mouth, he still retains

all the explanations he had inserted in the three other dramas of the

tetralogy. No doubt he was aware of their superfluity, but shrank,

as he might well do, from the enormous task of reconstructing the

whole work yet again. He may have argued, too, that as each of the

operas would have to stand by itself on the particular occasion of its

performance, it would be no disadvantage to have the events of the

preceding evening fully explained, even at the cost of some otherwise

needless repetition.

I have not gone over this long familiar ground merely to tell again

a thrice-told tale, but to bring into higher relief the fundamental

difficulty of the musical dramatist who is working along the Wagnerian

lines--the difficulty of taking up the whole of the poet's work into

the being of music, when the poet, in order to leave no room for

misunderstanding on the part of the audience of the reason for the

visible actions and the audible sentiments of the actors, has to pad

out his poem with a certain amount of matter that is explanatory of

the past rather than emotional in the present. So desperate a device

as the visible representation in three or four evenings of every

stage of a dramatic action was obviously not to be resorted to again.

It was equally impossible to reduce the story of _Parsifal_ to the

highly concentrated form into which he had managed to cast _Tristan_.

So he had to do what it had been his first impulse to do in the

_Ring_--elucidate the visible action of the moment by a narrative of

all that had happened before the action, or that particular stage of

the action, began, and trust to the orchestra to maintain the musical

interest by means of the interplay of leit-motives. Hence the lumbering

stage technique of the first Act of _Parsifal_, and the _raison d'être_

for the endless garrulity of Gurnemanz. That venerable worthy is not

a character; he is merely a walking and talking guide book; he stands

outside the real drama, somewhat in the style of the _compère_ in a

revue; and the proof of his almost complete nullity is that Wagner

has been utterly unable to characterise him musically. Every other

character in his operas--even the minor personages, such as Kurvenal

and David and Gutrune--exists for us as a definite personality,

someone drawn in the round in music as effectively as a painter or

sculptor could have shown him forth. But even Wagner has been unable to

invent a single phrase that shall be characteristic of Gurnemanz and

Gurnemanz alone. He is the one Wagnerian character who simply does not

exist for musicians. As far as his music is concerned he has neither

mental characteristics nor bodily form; we remember him solely for his

interminable talk.

9

If Wagner failed in his struggle with the musical-dramatic form,

it was the failure of a Titan in a struggle that only a Titan would

have ventured upon. Form and the perfection of form are simple enough

matters for the smaller musical intelligences, for whom form means

merely a symmetrical mould to be filled. It is for the greater minds

that the problem of form is always a torture, for their ideas are

perpetually outgrowing the mould. In sheer fertility of idea Wagner was

probably the greatest musician the world has ever seen. It was of the

very essence of his work that there should be no repetition either of

mood or of procedure. Without, indeed, making the necessarily futile

attempt to decide which is _per se_ the finer order of musical mind,

the dramatic or the symphonic, it may be confidently said that to a

dramatist--or at all events a dramatist like Wagner--there is permitted

no such easy returning upon his own tracks, no half-mechanical

manipulation of the same order of ideas time after time, as is possible

to the worker in the stereotyped instrumental forms. Great as is the

inventive power of a Bach, a Beethoven or a Brahms, it cannot be

denied that much of their work is simply a varied exploitation of a

relatively small number of formulas,--that a very small amount of

thematic invention can be made to go a very long way under the guidance

of an established pattern. Nor, broadly speaking, is the same intensity

of imagination, or the same scope of imagination, required to invent

a hundred ordinary fugal or symphonic themes as to find a hundred

themes that are the veritable musical counterparts of as many human

beings. The family resemblance between "subjects" that is permitted to

a Bach or a Beethoven is not permitted to a Wagner: the dramatist's

work must be a perpetual re-creation--and a definite, unmistakable

re-creation--of the life around him in all its multiformity. In this

sense Wagner is without an equal among composers; never has there

been a brain so apt at limning character and suggesting the _milieu_

in music. We can speak of the Wagnerian imagination as we can speak

of the Shakespearean imagination; Wagner's is the only imagination in

music that can be compared with Shakespeare's in dramatic fertility

and comprehensiveness. It pours itself over the whole surface of a

work, into every nook and cranny of it. It is a vast mind, infinite

in its sympathies, protean in its creative power. For sheer drastic

incisiveness of theme he has not his equal in all music; each vision

instinctively, without an effort, finds its own inevitable utterance.

In the works of his great period every motive has a physiognomy as

distinct from all others as the face of any human being is distinct

from all other faces. The motives are unforgettable once we have heard

them. They depict their subject once for all: who to-day, enormously as

the apparatus of musical expression has developed since Wagner's time,

would dare to try to find better symbols than those he has invented for

the tarnhelm, the fire, the Rhine, the sword, the dragon, the potion

that brings oblivion to Siegfried; or for any of the men and women of

the operas--for Wotan, for Siegfried, for Mime, for the "reine Thor,"

for Herzeleide, for Hagen, for Gutrune, for Brynhilde, and for a dozen

others? To hear any of these themes to-day, after a generation or more

of daily familiarity with them, is like looking at a medallion of a

hundred years ago in which not a point of the outline or a single

plane of the relief has been blurred, nor a single grain of its first

sharp milling been lost. They are what they are because they combine

in the fullest measure and in impeccable proportion the two great

preservatives of all artistic work,--a luminous personal vision and

consummate style.

10

In the operas of his prime, every one of his characters is musically

alive, down to the smallest. Tristan is not more real to us than

Kurvenal, nor Walther more real than David, nor Brynhilde than Gutrune.

His fiery imagination saw over the whole field of the drama with

the same intensity. In this respect, as in so many others, not one

of his successors can compare with him. Strauss, for instance, has

always failed to give reality to any but the leading characters of his

operas. His Faninal in the _Rosenkavalier_ is decidedly not alive,

nor is his Chrysothemis in _Elektra_. There is not a single truly

characteristic phrase by which the musician can recall the former to

his memory in the way that he can recall David or Kurvenal or Mime;

the only piece of music by which he can recall Chrysothemis is an

atrocious rag-time waltz that he would prefer to forget. Strauss's

minor characters are known to us through the poem rather than the

music; while Wagner's minor characters are clear-cut personalities to

thousands of opera-goers who have never read the poem. And like the

true dramatist, Wagner has no moral prejudices; for the time being he

puts himself into the skin of each of his characters and looks at the

world solely through his eyes. Nowhere is the author to be detected in

the work, just as Shakespeare is nowhere to be detected in his; each

of the characters sees the world from his own standpoint, and while he

is talking we are for the moment bound to see the world precisely as

he sees it. In any one else's hands Alberich would have been a mere

conventional villain of melodrama. As Wagner draws him he is as real

as Iago,--an enemy of the light and all that live in the light, but

their enemy by reason of the very nature of his being, following his

own instincts with perfect naturalness and perfect consistency. So it

comes about that we invariably believe in Alberich and the justice of

his cause when he is speaking for himself; nowhere is he a mere foil

or relief to characters with whom we may have more moral sympathy. No

one can fail to be moved, for instance, by his appeal to Hagen in the

second Act of the _Götterdämmerung_--the genuine heart-hunger of this,

repulsive gnome, lusting for power with all the passion and all the

sincerity of his narrow soul. How vast and terrible a force of evil,

again, is Hagen, but at the same time how natural, how inevitable. Even

Mime is always right from Mime's point of view: the spectator can for

the moment no more turn against him than against Alberich.

It is one of the mysteries of human psychology, indeed, how the mind

that could be so incurably egoistic in the ordinary affairs of life,

so incapable of seeing people as they really were, and not merely as

they were in relation to the gratification or frustration of his own

desires, should be capable of such universal sympathy in his artistic

creation. The crowning wonder of Wagner's artistic psychology is his

treatment of Beckmesser. We have seen what a deadly and unreasoning

hatred he had for Hanslick, and that it was Hanslick he had in view in

the later poetical drafts of the character. Yet in the opera, though

Beckmesser is made appropriately ridiculous, he is handled almost

throughout without a touch of the malice one might have expected when

one knows that the character is meant as a satire upon a detested

enemy. I say "almost throughout," for it has always seemed to me that

there is just a shade of unnecessary harshness in Sachs's words after

Beckmesser has left the house with the manuscript of Walther's song in

his pocket:

A heart more base I never have known,

Ere long he'll be paid for his spite:

Though men cast reason down from its throne

They cannot deny it quite:

Some day the net is spread before them:

In it they fall, and we triumph o'er them.

Beckmesser, for all his wiles, has not hitherto struck us as being

base (_boshaft_). We laugh at him, but we love him, as we love all the

fools and rogues of pure comedy. I fancy I can detect in this passage

the last angry flash of the eye and the snap of the jaw as Wagner

thought of Hanslick. But apart from this little lapse it is wonderful

with what detachment the composer has been able to see his personal

enemy. The artist in him was too strong, too infallible, to permit of

his fouling the ideal world of his art with any breath from the bitter,

muddy world of real life. Mr. Bernard Shaw is of the opinion that

Strauss, in _Ein Heldenleben_, gives "an orchestral caricature of his

enemies which comes much closer home than Wagner's mediævally disguised

Beckmesser." I hardly think the musical world as a whole will agree

with Mr. Shaw. The "Adversaries" section of _Ein Heldenleben_ always

strikes me as a mere outburst of rather stupid bad temper: the humour

is as ill-conditioned as the psychology is crude and the expression

commonplace. We have long since ceased to bestow on it the compliment

of even as much thin laughter as we gave it when it was quite new. It

is bad art for this reason if for no other,--that the petty, snappy

hero shown in this section is inconsistent with the sort of super-man

who figures in the rest of the work; who can believe that the hero of

the noble ending, set high above earth and all its littlenesses, is the

same individual as the small bundle of wounded vanity and irritated

nerves whose reply to his critics takes the form of putting out his

tongue and "talking back" like a street urchin? Wagner's caricature is

at once deeper, truer, kindlier, more universal and more enduring. He

could be little enough in his life: in his art the gods took care that

he should never be anything but magnanimity itself.

And if there has never been a brain in music that saw so deeply into

the springs of character, there has never been a musical brain with

such a grasp of a drama as a whole. It was the mighty, tireless

synthetic engine that we meet with only some score of times, perhaps,

in the whole history of human thought,--in two or three great military

commanders, a few great architects, and half-a-dozen philosophers. It

is becoming more and more evident each year that since his death there

has been no single composer of anything like his bigness, no single

composer capable of work at once so new and so coherently wrought.

His was the last truly great mind to find expression in music. That

statement is not at all inconsistent with the admission that modern

composers have said many hundreds of things that Wagner could never

have thought of: I simply mean that the brains of Strauss and Debussy

or any two others put together would not equal Wagner's in range, in

depth, in staying power. There has not been a musician since his time

who can "think in continents" as he did. The more we study him, indeed,

the more wonderful do this sweep of vision and tenacity of hold become

to us. There is nothing in all other men's music comparable to Wagner's

feat of keeping the vast scheme of the _Ring_ in his head for more

than a quarter of a century, and actually laying it aside completely

for eleven years during that time, without relaxing his grip for a

moment upon the smallest limb of the great drama. It is in virtue of

this fiery and unceasing play of the imagination and this stupendous

synthetic power that he takes his place among the half-dozen most

comprehensive minds that have ever worked in art.

In music there are only two brains--those of Bach and Beethoven--to

compare with his in breadth of span. Say what we will about the

repetitions and the _longueurs_ of the _Ring_, there is nothing in all

music, and very little else in any other art, to compare with that

wonderful work for combined scope and concentration of design. Wagner

had in abundance the rarest of all artistic gifts,--the faculty, as a

great critic has put it, of seeing the last line in the first, of never

losing sight of the whole through all the tangle of detail. One might

almost say that no other modern brain except Napoleon's and Herbert

Spencer's has been able to keep all the minutiæ of a gigantic problem

so unfailingly within the one sphere of vision. Wagner forgot nothing

in his work: at any stage of it he could summon up at a moment's notice

not only any figure he wanted, in all its natural warmth of life, but

the very atmosphere that surrounded it, the very mood it induced in

others. To me one of the most marvellous instances of this has always

been the passage in Waltraute's recital in the third scene of the

_Götterdämmerung_, in which, in the midst of that extraordinary picture

of the frustrated Wotan brooding among the joyless gods in Valhalla,

she speaks of the god remembering his favourite and banished child:

Then soft grew his look:

He remembered, Brynhilde, thee!

It is a far cry at this stage from the parting of the god and his

daughter in the _Valkyrie_; but at the mere mention of it there wells

up in Wagner, after twelve years or more, all the emotion of the

wonderful union between them, and the gloomy, careworn music melts for

a bar or two into a tear-compelling tenderness. Another magnificent

illustration of this gift of his of looking before and after may be

had in the third Act of the _Meistersinger_, just after the greeting

of Sachs by the populace of Nuremberg. That reception is surely the

most overwhelming thing of its kind the earth has ever seen or heard;

it has always been a mystery to me how any merely human singer can

find a voice in which to respond to it. But it is precisely here

that we realise the subtlety of Wagner's conception of Sachs, the

profoundly imaginative way in which he saw him, and his ever-present

sense of the fundamentals of the character through apparently the most

distracting vicissitudes. Any other operatic librettist and composer,

after that million-throated outburst, would have set a strutting Sachs

on his feet, smilingly and condescendingly accepting the homage of

the multitude. Wagner makes _his_ Sachs realise nothing but his own

unworthiness and the sense of something hollow and fleeting in all this

vociferation; and there is hardly an effect in all music to compare

for subtlety, for poetry, for the profundity of its humanity, with the

instantaneous melting of the crimson and purple strains of the folk

into the quiet grey theme of Sachs' sorrow in the strings. It was the

only possible outlet from what any other sincere composer would have

instinctively felt to be an emotional impasse; and it was only Wagner

who could have found the outlet. He is great in many ways, but in no

way greater than in this faculty of keeping the burning vision of the

moment always in touch with those that have passed and those that are

to come; in all contemporary music there is not to be found a brain

with a third of his power in this respect. In the latest operas of

Strauss, strewn with fine things as they are, there is no such unity of

style, no such ardour of conception, no such unrelaxing hold upon every

character in every phase of it; and of course no purely orchestral work

can compare with even a single opera of Wagner's for combined sweep of

design and closeness of texture.

11

The clarity and unity of Wagner's vision are evident again in the

pictorial element that plays so large a part in his works. He was often

pictorial without intending it, and was himself probably unconscious

of many of the effects of light, colour, and atmosphere that delight

us in his music. Mr. Runciman has done well to insist upon the gift,

exhibited as early as _Die Feen_, for not only visualising a scene

or a character for us but giving it us in its natural tints. We have

happily got past the day when old-fashioned theorists used to lay it

down that "pure" music was "concerned with nothing but itself," and

that whoever made it concern itself with appearances of the visible

world was at the best no more than half a musician. As I have argued

in an earlier chapter of this book, we cannot parcel off the human

consciousness into psychology-tight bulkheads in this way. The various

faculties are always crossing over into each other's territories for a

moment, and coming back with spoils that they refuse to surrender for

the rest of their days. The theorists have always been telling us that

music cannot "paint." The composers, knowing much more about the matter

than the theorists, have always gone on painting to their heart's

content,--Bach, for example, being incorrigibly realistic. The three

minds with the most pronounced bias towards tone-painting were probably

those of Bach, Schubert (in his songs), and Wagner. But between the

musician-painters there are as many differences of vision and of manner

as there are between "pure" musicians or "pure" painters; and Wagner,

in this regard as in every other, brought certain new elements into

music, and still stands in a class by himself.

The curious thing about him is that while no other man's music gives

us such an impression of being bound up at almost every point with the

visible world in which we live and move, actual realism of the ordinary

kind is comparatively rare with him, and it is certainly the least

important factor in this impression. Now and again, of course, he does

"paint" the concrete in the realistic way made familiar to us by the

modern symphonic poem-writers. But this way is not at all a new way.

The music of Schubert and that of Bach, as has been said, is full of

realism of this order,--Schubert's spinning-wheel and Bach's serpents,

to give merely two well-known instances. To this category belong

Wagner's Rhine, and his fire music, and the whinnying of the Valkyries'

horses. But there is really not much realism of that sort in Wagner's

music. He objected to it in Berlioz and others unless there was a very

good reason for it, and never employed it himself except where it

complied with the dual condition of being thoroughly justified by the

scene and unquestionably within the scope of musical expression. Wagner

does comparatively little tone-painting of the purely realistic kind,

but of course he does it always with superb certainty, profiting by a

hundred years of evolution of technique since Bach, and by the gorgeous

instrument that the modern orchestra places at his disposal.

A subtler sort of pictorialism,--subtler because it is unpremeditated

and unconscious,--is that to which Mr. Runciman has drawn attention.

No one except Hugo Wolf has ever approached Wagner in the capacity for

bathing each scene, each character, in a light and an atmosphere of

its own. (Wolf's achievements in this line were of course on a much

smaller scale than Wagner's, but some of them are hardly less wonderful

if we take into consideration the limitations of the black-and-white

medium in which he worked.) This is surely one of the most baffling

mysteries in music,--how the same few dozen tones and colours can

be made to suggest such differently coloured aspects of the visible

world, a world, we must remember, from which music is utterly cut off

by the very nature of its medium. But whatever the explanation, the

fact is indubitable; though it is a comparatively new thing in music,

and indeed would not be possible without our modern developments of

harmony, colour and technique. It is virtually unknown in pre-Wagnerian

music. I do not mean that no previous composer ever gave a specially

appropriate tint to a particular scene. That was frequently done; but

it was done more or less by a convention, by the use of instruments

having a particular association in the minds of the audience, as when

the oboe or the cor anglais would be used for suggesting a pastoral

scene, or the horns,--as in the beautiful passage at the commencement

of the _Freischütz_ overture--for suggesting a wood. The Wagnerian and

Wolfian method to which I am now referring is something quite different

from this. The term "method," indeed, is inappropriate, for it is

impossible to reduce it to any rules or to trace the secret of its

effect, as we can in the two other general instances I have cited. It

is possible to say that the cold, bare effect of Wolf's _Das verlassene

Mägdlein_ comes from the peculiar harmonies he uses, and the pitch at

which they are used,--just as the pastoral effect of the "Scène aux

champs" in Berlioz's _Symphonie fantastique_ comes from the use of the

cor anglais. But the difference is this,--that you can standardise, as

it were, the pastoral effects of the oboe or the cor anglais, whereas

you cannot standardise the effects of _Das verlassene Mägdlein_. Even

in the hands of a fifth-rate composer the oboe may be made to suggest a

shepherd: but give Wolf's harmonies to a second-rate musician and tell

him to "paint" with them as Wolf has done, and he will soon realise

that the "painting" is really not separable from _the music as a

whole_, even though we may be able to say analytically that it is due

to one factor more than another. The truth is that the scene has been

perceived with such intensity of vision by the composer that, unknown

to him, and without any volition on his part, the vision has made its

own idiom for itself, incarnated itself in lines and colours that are

expressive of it and it alone.

It is this subtle faculty that is always unconsciously operative in

Wagner. It first comes to light in _Die Feen_. It gave parts of the

_Flying Dutchman_ their strange salt tang. It makes the peculiar white

light of _Lohengrin_. And after that opera, when Wagner had attained

full command of his powers, it did astounding things for him. There

is a different light, a different air, in each of the four dramas of

the _Ring_; and this broad difference between any two of the four is

maintained in spite of there being minor differences of colour between

the various scenes of each of them. How mysterious and infallible this

faculty is in its workings is best seen from the fact that when Wagner

took up the second half of _Siegfried_, in 1869, after having suspended

work upon it in 1857, he did what no other musician before him or since

could have done--spontaneously, unconsciously reverted to the idiom

of twelve years before. Between those two dates he had travelled an

incredibly long path as a musician; he had written _Tristan_ and the

_Meistersinger_, two works with as many differences of idiom between

themselves as there are between either of them and the _Ring_. Yet the

wonderful brain could sweep itself clear of all the new impressions

that had fed it during those twelve years, and, though the new

acquisitions of technique of course remained, he thinks himself back in

a flash to the very centre of the souls of the _Ring_ characters and

the very colour and temperature of the scenes he had parted from so

long ago.

This is the pictorial instinct of Wagner seen in its totality. In its

detail it is equally marvellous. Each scene is so bathed in its own

appropriate light and colour, and strewn with its own peculiar shadows,

that the music itself, apart from the scenic setting, is eloquent of

the place and the hour of the action. In Wagner's music, as in Wolf's,

one is conscious not only of the locality and the person and the race:

one can almost tell the time of day. Music like that at the awakening

of Brynhilde would go with nothing but a mountain height in blinding

sunlight. Hunding is not physically darker to the eye than he is to

the ear in that marvellous tuba motive that accompanies his first

entry in the _Valkyrie_. The gait of Siegfried's music is as rapid as

Mime's; but the differing stature of the two men is unmistakable from

the music alone. One might multiply instances by the hundred of effects

of realistic differentiation obtained not merely by orchestral colour,

but by something subtly inter wrought into the very texture of the

music. (The Hunding theme, for example, is "black" and sinister even

on the pianoforte.) It is just this faculty of seeing everything with

the most precise of painter's eyes, and then finding the infallibly

right musical correlative of it, that enables Wagner to achieve such

variety among pictures that are in essence the same. How many and

how different woodlands there are in his music, how many degrees of

sunlight, how many shades and qualities of darkness! The storm that

maddens Mime after the exit of Siegfried is a very different storm from

the one through which Siegmund rushes to the house of Hunding. What

other man could have written _two_ Rhine-Maidens' trios like those in

the _Rhinegold_ and the _Götterdämmerung_, each so liquid, so mobile,

so sweet with the primal innocence of the world, and therefore so alike

in many respects, yet so absolutely different?

So it comes about that without any tone-painting in the ordinary

acceptation of the word, Wagner succeeds in bringing the visible

universe before our eyes in a way and to an extent that no other

musician has done. Of tone-painting pure and simple there is

practically none in _Tristan_. Wagner is here concerned solely with

a man and woman; yet how actual he makes every scene in which they

move, and this without a single realistic stroke. In the garden

scene he uses none of the conventional musical recipes--there is no

obvious rustling of leaves, no sighing of the breeze, no purling of

the brooks,--yet how the magic of the garden and of the hour steals

through us and intoxicates us! How hot and dry the air has become in

the third Act,--as dry to us as to the parched tongue of the wounded

man alone on the castle walls, with the mid-day sun turning the blue

sea beyond to a vibrating, blinding haze. And--to me the most wonderful

of all--how sinister is the atmosphere he creates through virtually the

whole of the _Götterdämmerung_; how, though indeed it is mostly set in

the daylight, one feels that here among these Gibichungs, with gaunt,

grim Hagen for weaver of the web of fate, the very earth has lost the

radiant smile it had in Siegfried's forest and on Brynhilde's mountain

top. The sun no longer warms, the Rhine no longer laughs and glints

and gladdens. And finally, how exquisitely adapted is the melodic and

harmonic idiom of _Parsifal_,--so smoothly flowing, so full of melting

and caressing tenderness,--to that static world from which, with the

purging from it of so much human passion, so much even of the ordinary

physical energy of humanity too has gone. For this, as for everything

else, he found the right, the only musical equivalent, without seeking

for it. His visions painted themselves.

12

Even the best of Wagnerians to-day become a little impatient at the

occasional _longueurs_ in his operas. Not merely does he plan them on

a scale that makes it almost impossible to give some of them in their

entirety under ordinary conditions, but he sometimes lapses into a

prolixity that is regrettable or maddening according to the frame of

mind we happen to be in at the moment. Most of his prolixity is to

be accounted for by that bad text-construction to which I have drawn

attention. Music, let it be said again and again, is primarily an

emotional art, and the less it has to do with mere dramatic explanation

the better. We can never tire of Wotan pouring out his heart in loving

farewell to his child; but we can hear Wotan tell the long story of

his financial and matrimonial troubles once too often. We could listen

as often to Kundry's story of Herzeleide as to the slow movement of

the Ninth Symphony or the "Kleine Nacht-Musik" of Mozart; but wild

horses would not drag us to the theatre to listen to old Gurnemanz's

too-often-told tale of Amfortas and Klingsor, and how the sacred spear

was lost. Yet though the poet Wagner is generally answerable for the

occasional tedious quarters-of-an-hour in the operas, the musician

Wagner is not wholly free from blame. He never managed to get quite rid

of the slow-footedness that was characteristic of his music from the

first; to the very end he sometimes takes rather longer to drive his

points home than is absolutely necessary; and in these more rapid and

impatient days that goes against him sorely. He is often reproached

with rhythmical monotony. There is some truth in the charge, which as

a whole he himself would probably not have taken the trouble to repel.

There is a passage in one of his letters in which he recognises that

his music is not so rhythmical as it might be, but he holds that some

lack of rhythmical variety is inseparable from an ideal of dramatic

music such as his. As I have attempted to show, he relied much more on

harmonic effect than on rhythm, the latter being more peculiarly the

instrument of the symphonic composer, while harmonic change is more

suited to depict the varying aspects of a dramatic action. But against

the comparative regularity of his rhythms is to be set his sense of

style. He had an intuitive knowledge of how and when to break up a

melodic line that was in danger of becoming too uniform. One of the

simplest illustrations of this may be seen in the _Parsifal_ Prelude

(vocal score, p. 5, lines 1 and 2); just at the moment when we are

beginning to suspect that the theme of "Faith" has been repeated quite

often enough and to dread the further repetition that has already got

under weigh, he alters the signature from 6/4 to 9/4, and gives a new

rhetorical turn to the familiar melody. In Wotan's _Abschied_, again,

we are unconscious of the uniformity of the rhythm in phrase after

phrase, so consummate is the art with which the interest is always

being transferred from one part of the combined vocal and orchestral

tissue to another, and so beautifully planned is not only each section

in itself but what may be called the exposition and development and

cadence of the whole scene. Wagner could afford to dispense with the

smaller rhythmical manœuvring of individual musical phrases; he had the

much greater faculty of endowing long scenes and even whole operas with

a vast dramatic rhythm of their own. Hundreds of smaller composers can

give this page or that of their music a rhythmic piquancy that Wagner

could never have attained on the same small scale; but not one of them

could achieve such a rhythm as that of the second Act of _Tristan_,

with its slow, steady, imperceptible transition from night and its

rapture to daylight and its cruel disillusioning glare.

Wagner's prolixity, again, is not the flabby dulness of a mind

that is merely maundering on and on from sheer incompetence to get

to grips with the essentials of an emotion, but the over-copiousness

of an inexhaustibly rich brain. And if this quality of his has its

occasional bad side, we do well to remember that it is accountable

also for some of his most gigantic achievements in expression. Were

it not for the endless inventive power and the never-failing sense of

beauty in it, a work like _Tristan_, that never pauses till the last

drop of bitter-sweet juice has been squeezed out of the theme, would

be hardly bearable. Like Bach, Wagner could never conceive any emotion

without intensifying it to the utmost. The barest hint of joy in one

of Bach's texts will set him carolling like a lark; the barest hint of

mortality will bedim his music with all the tears of all the universe

for its dead. Wagner has the same insatiable hunger for expression.

In _Tristan_ in particular every emotion is developed to its furthest

limit of poignancy. The passion of love becomes almost delirium; when

Tristan, in the third Act, sings of the thirst caused by his wound, our

very mouths, our very bones, seem dried as if by some burning sirocco

blowing from the desert; when the sick man praises Kurvenal for his

devotion it is a cosmic pæan to friendship that he sings. In hundreds

of other cases it is not by elaboration of speech that he makes his

overwhelming effect, but by a sort of volcanic concentration. Mingled

rage and grief and despair have never found such colossal expression

anywhere, in any art, as in those few bars given to the frustrated and

maddened Wotan after Fricka has foiled his plan for the protection of

Siegmund in the fight (the _Valkyrie_, vocal score, pp. 118, 119).

Pathos will never find more touching accents than those of Brynhilde

in her last great scene with Wotan (_Valkyrie_, pp. 292, 293); few

things in all music convey such a sense of tears as the strange salt

tones of the oboe and cor anglais here. For concentrated fury there

is nothing to compare with the outburst of the bound and impotent

Alberich as he dismisses the Nibelungs who have witnessed his shame

(the _Rhinegold_, pp. 199-201); technically this is one of the most

effective crescendi in all Wagner's works. His imagination always takes

fire at a single touch, a single suggestion, and there is no staying

it until the fire has burnt itself completely out. In the _Siegfried

Idyl_ he has only to think of the child whose coming meant so much to

him, and all the fountains of human tenderness are unsealed; this is

not an individual father musing over his child's cradle, but all nature

crooning a song of love for its little ones. It is this intensification

of every emotion he has to express that makes each of his characters,

like Shakespeare's, seem the epitome of that particular phase of human

nature. Tristan and Isolde are the world's most passionate and most

tragic lovers: the opera is the very quintessence of the egoism of

sexual love. So with a score of other characters. The last word--for

our own day at any rate--in god-like majesty has been uttered in Wotan;

the last word of womanly gentleness and sweetness in Eva and Gutrune;

the last word of tragic womanhood in Sieglinde; the last word of superb

womanhood in Brynhilde; the last word of mellow and kindly middle

age in Hans Sachs; the last word of scheming feebleness in Mime; the

last word of elemental savagery in the Valkyries; the last word of

youthful irresponsibility in the _Meistersinger_ apprentices; the last

word of human grimness in Hagen; the last word of dog-like devotion

in Kurvenal. The character-drawing is endless in its variety and

infallible in its touch.

13

_Parsifal_ stands in a class apart from all the other works of

Wagner. Its characterisation is not individual but symbolic; Amfortas

and Parsifal and Kundry and Klingsor are not men and women whom we

might meet any day in the flesh, but simply types of human aspiration

or failure. We have outgrown the mental world of the work; the

religious symbolism of it, _quâ_ religious symbolism, leaves many of

us unimpressed; yet the basic emotional stuff of it all is enduring,

and we must not allow ourselves to be set against the opera because

the forms in which Wagner has embodied a durable philosophy are

themselves of a time instead of all time. Evidently the symphonist

in him was at this stage overpowering the dramatist. The symphonist

can safely deal with types or abstractions; the dramatist can only

deal with individuals. Wagner has made the blunder of trying to

translate the most delicate, the most esoteric perceptions into the

language of the theatre, of setting symbols upon the stage. The

force of a poetic symbol lies wholly in the imagination: as soon as

a dramatist or a painter tries to set it visibly before us, the free

flight of the imagination is curbed by the physical obviousness, the

physical limitations, of the figure that is put before the eye; the

universal cannot be perceived for the particular. Wagner's root idea

in _Parsifal_ was to show us, in Kundry, a living symbol of the dual

nature of woman, half-angel and half-beast, in turns sensual and

repentant, the destroyer and the saviour of man. But it is precisely

symbols of this kind, cutting down to the obscurest depths of human

psychology, that cannot retain their vast suggestiveness after they

have been narrowed down to the personality of a single actor. We no

longer see the eternal and infernal womanly; it is only a German

prima-donna, stout of build and heavy of movement, that we see upon

the stage. So with Parsifal himself. Mr. Huneker has called him "that

formidable imbecile." So might we style St. Francis of Assisi, or

the Buddha, or any other of the simple wise ones of the world, if we

persist in looking at them through unsympathetic and unimaginative

eyes. The conception of Parsifal is fine enough in itself--an unstained

soul made divinely wise by its very simplicity, its love, its pity.

But a character of this kind should be left to the imagination, or to

music to suggest to the imagination: it is impossible to realise it

behind the footlights in the person of an actor. A Parsifal is a figure

for the quiet of one's chamber, not for a crowded theatre lying the

other side of the box office. Hundreds of people must have felt, as

I have done for twenty years, that a good deal of _Parsifal_ affects

us more deeply at home than it ever does in the theatre, the loss

of the orchestral colour being more than made up for by the gain in

imaginative intensity. And the difficulty of making such a character

vital and credible upon the stage is increased when he is made the

centre of a quasi-religious ritual that has long ceased to have a

meaning for many people.

But in spite of it all, _Parsifal_ is a masterpiece. The story

of it seems to arouse a violent antipathy in some people, who

apparently regard it as an immoral work. The pleasant little game of

_Parsifal_-baiting began with Nietzsche, who said that he despised

everyone who did not regard the opera as an outrage on morals.

Like most philosophers, Nietzsche had the charming failing of

imagining that the only right way for the world to go was his way.

He was singularly taken with that notion of his of the super-man--a

mythical and unidentifiable mammal about which we have never been able

to get any definite information, either from Nietzsche or from any of

his disciples. Now Nietzsche found this ideal of his in Siegfried,

and he loathed _Parsifal_ because it preached the negation of life,

the denial of the Will to Power. Later writers, like Mr. Runciman and

Mr. Huneker, who are not, I think, Nietzscheans, agree with him in

seeing something peculiarly weak in the philosophy--to call it by that

name--of _Parsifal_. They see in the opera not merely moral weakness

but moral nastiness. I remember one of the simpler adherents of this

theory telling me, in awe-stricken tones, that this "sexless" opera was

the resort of a set of men who were mixed up in a German scandal of a

few years ago that sent its unwholesome odour through the civilised

world: and he obviously thought that this discredited Wagner's

_Parsifal_, whereas it struck me as being very like asking us to give

up having breakfast because Dr. Crippen and Charles Peace liked bacon

and eggs.

Nor can any moral flabbiness, I think, be discovered in _Parsifal_

except by people who make the mistake of thinking that the

"philosophy" of any musical work matters very much. Mr. Runciman

detests Parsifal and calls him a perfect idiot--that epithet being Mr.

Runciman's playful intensification of Wagner's "pure [i.e. stainless]

fool"--"fool" being unfortunately the only monosyllable we have in

English for the translation of "Thor." But even supposing Parsifal

were an idiot--which I dispute--would it greatly matter? Mr. Runciman

has launched his full battery against the Siegfried of Wagner's

poem--a swaggering, quarrelsome, ungrateful young noodle; but, as Mr.

Runciman's own eloquent description of the opera shows, the Siegfried

of Wagner's music is a vastly more interesting and sympathetic person

than the Siegfried of Wagner's verse. Similarly, even if I could think,

when reading the libretto, that Parsifal is an idiot, I could never

think so when listening to the music. The truth is that a good many

of Wagner's characters and dramatic motives seem rather foolish to us

nowadays. For my part I do not know or care whether or how Parsifal is

to "redeem" the world. The word redemption has no meaning for me in the

sense in which Wagner and the theologians use it. I can believe that

redemption is a concrete reality in the pawnbroking business; but if

any one tells me that men's souls are to be bought and sold, or lost

and found again, without any volition of their own, I can only say

that all this conveys about as much to my intelligence as talk about a

quadrilateral triangle would do. But to appreciate a work of art it is

not in the least necessary to subscribe to its author's philosophical

or religious opinions; a rationalist can be as deeply thrilled by the

_Matthew Passion_ as any Christian can be. The "thesis" of a work of

art is the one thing in it that does not concern us as artists. Who

is to decide between rival philosophies or sociologies? Personally I

believe that one philosophy is just as good as another, and worse,

as the Irishman would say; but if an artist chooses to set forward

a character as the embodiment of some philosophy that possesses him

at the moment, I am willing to listen to him so long as he can talk

interestingly about it, without my wishing either to subscribe to

the philosophy or to dissent from it. Mr. Runciman thinks there is

something frightful in the thesis--let us call it that--of _Parsifal_.

I do not see anything frightful in it. I do not believe in it as the

only rule of life; but then I do not believe--in _that_ sense--in

Senta's "redemption" of the Dutchman, or Elisabeth's "redemption"

of Tannhäuser, or that Lohengrin was right in withholding his name

from Elsa and then going off in a huff when she asked for it. But all

these fantastic motives, in which I have no belief, no more affect

my appreciation of the operas than my disbelief in ghosts affects my

appreciation of _Hamlet_. I do not want any of my friends to be like

Parsifal, Amfortas, or Klingsor--especially Klingsor: but neither do I

want any of them to be like Lohengrin or Elsa or Senta or the Flying

Dutchman. A real world run on the lines of _Parsifal_ would probably

drive normal men mad in a month: but then who could live in a world

in which Senta-sentimental maidens insisted on jumping into the sea

to "redeem" master mariners, taking no account of the able seamen and

the stokers and the stewards, who, from anything I can gather to the

contrary in the text of the _Flying Dutchman_, all go to Davy Jones's

locker in a state of pure damnation what time the captain and the girl

ascend to glory? No, we had better leave alone the question of what

the world would be like if we were to try to model it on _Parsifal_.

We know very well that nothing of the sort will ever happen, just as

we know that Little Red Riding Hood's wolf will not gobble up little

Phyllis on her way to the High School next week, or the door of the

safe fly open when the burglar says "Sesame." These be but fairy tales.

We can still sleep in our beds o' nights: and we can still go to

_Parsifal_ without either having our morals corrupted or feeling that

we are encouraging race suicide.

I listen to _Parsifal_, then--and I imagine most other people do the

same--as I would to any other outpouring of a great man's spirit on

a world of ideas that fascinated him for the moment, and without any

more impulse to translate it all into terms of reality than when I am

listening to the _Flying Dutchman_ or _Lohengrin_. The opera is in

no sense the work of an exhausted old man. It has been alleged that

the plot is "the work of Wagner's tired-out old age." But _Parsifal_

was sketched as early as 1857, worked out in detail in 1864 (when

Wagner was only fifty-one), and turned into verse in 1877. Further,

the central ideas of the drama are to be found both in the sketches

of _Jesus of Nazareth_ (1848) and _The Victors_ (1856); while in 1855

it was Wagner's intention to bring Parsifal on the stage in the final

scene of _Tristan_, opposing him, as a symbol of renunciation, to

Tristan as a symbol of passion. At almost any time of Wagner's life,

indeed, he might have written a _Parsifal_. All his life through he

fluctuated between intense eroticism and an equally intense revulsion

from the erotic. One may say, in truth, that such a man _had_ to write

a _Parsifal_ before he died. "Il est à remarquer, mon fils," says the

excellent Abbé Coignard in Anatole France's _La Rôtisserie de la Reine

Pédauque_, "que les plus grands saints sont des pénitents, et, comme

le repentir se proportionne à la faute, c'est dans les plus grands

pêcheurs que se trouve l'étoffe des plus grands saints. La matière

première de la sainteté est la concupiscence, l'incontinence, toutes

les impuretés de la chair et de l'esprit. Il importe seulement, après

avoir amassé cette matière, de la travailler selon l'art théologique

et de la modeler, pour ainsi dire, en figure de pénitence, ce qui est

l'affaire de quelques années, de quelques jours et parfois d'un seul

instant, comme il se voit dans le cas de la contrition parfaite."

In the great book of sex there are many chapters, and _Parsifal_ is

simply the last of them for some people. For others it is a chapter

that they turn to again and again in moments of revulsion from the

illusions of passion. Wagner's insight was clear enough: the Parsifals

are no more denials of the Life-Force than the Tristans are; they are

simply another phase of the Life-Force. When we disengage the central

idea of _Parsifal_ from its rather unskilful operatic setting, the work

is simply an artist's dream of an ideally innocent world, purged of the

lust, the hatred, the cruelty that deface the world we live and groan

in. This is the world the _music_ paints for us--

"Summers of the snakeless meadow, unlaborious earth and oarless sea";

and the cumbrous, old-fashioned stage framework upon which the drama

is constructed means no more to me than a clumsily-drafted programme to

a great symphonic poem,--it detracts no more from my musical enjoyment

than that would do. The music itself, apart from a few commonplaces

in the first Act, is marvellous. It is indeed an old man's music,

but only in the sense that it opens windows for us upon regions of

the soul to which only the old and emotionally wise have access.

Swinburne somewhere speaks of Blake's face having the look of being

lit up from the inside. I see a similar luminous transfiguration in

the later portraits of Wagner[410]--they have the look of a man who

has penetrated to the great underlying simplicities of things; and I

find in the music of _Parsifal_ the same subtle, searching simplicity,

the same almost unearthly illumination. Nowhere does the great master

seem to me more truly powerful than in these quiet strains, whose

suggestiveness, as is the case with the last Italian songs of Hugo

Wolf, is inexplicably out of proportion to the quiet economy of their

tissue. To the last the wonderful brain kept growing. He makes a

new musical idiom, a new texture, for _Parsifal_ as he had done for

every other of his works; above all a harmonic language of incomparable

subtlety, a gliding, melting chromaticism that searches us through and

through. It is from this novel chromaticism--a very different one from

that of _Tristan_--that the harmony of César Franck has come, and all

the modern harmony that builds upon Franck.

[Illustration: WAGNER: THE LAST PHOTOGRAPH.]

14

Wagner saw his own work as a transmutation and amplification of the

speech of Beethoven--infinitely changeful, but controlled in every bar

by a never-sleeping sense of the organic unity of the whole; but it is

clear to us now that many features in his work derive from Bach, or

are a re-discovery of certain principles of form that Bach affected.

It is from Bach, rather than from Beethoven, that such things as the

_Tristan_ Prelude come, with their incessant evolution of new life out

of a single thematic germ, and their adoption of a conical form of

slow ascent to a climax and descent from it, in place of the square

symphonic form of return and re-start. In Bach, again, will be found

the basis both of Wagner's realism and of the Wagnerian system of

allusive "motives." The towering greatness of Wagner is nowhere more

strikingly shown than in the failure of all his successors to handle

his form--or, indeed, any other--with anything like the same power,

freedom and consistency; both the opera and symphonic music are waiting

for someone big enough to build afresh upon the foundations Wagner has

laid, and with the materials he has left. At present the most that any

of his successors can do is to fit a few of the more manageable of the

stones together, with a deplorable quantity of waste and confusion all

around and in between. _Salome_ and the _Rosenkavalier_ may be taken as

instructive examples. There is not a living man big enough to occupy

more than a room or two at a time of the vast house that Wagner reared

about him. It is true that in certain details--in the furnishing and

decoration of one or two of the rooms, let us say--modern music has

gone beyond him. Strauss's orchestration has an eloquence--not merely

a colour, but a soul and a voice--of which Wagner probably never

suspected the possibility. Strauss, Wolf, and others have shaken off

the rhythmic fetters that sometimes hampered the movement both of

Wagner's poetry and of his music. Wolf and Strauss have shown us the

possibilities of what may be called a prose style in music--a more

continuous and less formal style than that of verse, with the rhythmic

joints and pivots more skilfully concealed. Superb examples of it are

to be found in the later scene between Octavian and the Princess in

the first Act of the _Rosenkavalier_, and in the great trio in the

third Act. Wagner, it is safe to say, would have flatly pronounced it

impossible to make rhythmic music of a piece of frank prose like the

latter, in which there is not a suspicion of a pretext for any of the

staple rhythmic formulas.

But though the Wagnerian apparatus has been improved upon at these

and other points--Strauss, for example, has subtilised the employment

of the leit-motive--no one has been great enough to manipulate the

apparatus as a whole with anything like Wagner's power, scope and

freedom, and opera is still waiting for its new redeemer. Even an

anti-Wagnerian work like _Pelleas and Melisande_ is, in a sense, a

tribute to the Titan: the very sharpness and thoroughness of its

recoil from everything that hints at Wagner is an admission of the

impossibility of continuing his work on its own lines. And after all,

_Pelleas and Melisande_ is only a beautiful and wonderful _tour de

force_--a sort of glorified musical mule, without pride of ancestry

or hope of posterity. Its idiom is too small for the expression of

great things; we might as well try to build a city out of nothing but

mother-of-pearl and opals.

Like Bach and like Beethoven, Wagner closes a period, and exhausts a

form. And as with Bach and Beethoven to-day, it is indirectly rather

than directly that his best influence is being exerted; there is no

room for imitation of him, but his speech and his vision are eternal

stimuli to our imaginations. It is inevitable that in some quarters a

reaction should have set in against his music and his influence. He has

been too overpowering a force. His music has been performed with such

fatal frequency that the merest amateur can hardly remain unconscious

of the weak points in it; and for a whole generation he made all but

the very strongest minds among composers a mere shadow and echo of

himself. Music, as was only to be expected, has now gone beyond him in

certain respects, and the erstwhile anarch is now one of the greatest

of the forces that conservatism claims for its own. The French and some

of the Russians have revolted against what is less a Wagnerian than a

German domination of all European music. A number of our very newest

young men are delightfully contemptuous of him: every puny whipster now

raises his little hand to deal the reeling colossus another blow. But

the colossus will easily right himself. There are moments when one is

tempted to say that he and Bach and Beethoven have expressed between

them almost all that is essentially original and great in the music of

the last two centuries. When a composer is so mighty of body as this,

he can well afford to lose a drop or two of blood on his pilgrimage

through the ages.

"In music, as in nature," says Vincent d'Indy, "there are mountains

and valleys; there are artists of genius who raise their art to such

heights that the herd of second-rank creators, unable to breathe in

these altitudes, is forced to descend again to more temperate levels

(which, however, are often sown with charming flowers), until the

eruption of a new genius heaves up a new mountain peak.

"Such were Bach, Haydn, Beethoven and César Franck in the symphonic

order; and in the dramatic order, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Rameau, Gluck

and Wagner. At the present moment we are descending the slope created

by the Wagnerian upheaval, and we are hastening gently towards the

hopeful presage of a new summit. But all our drama--even that of the

composers who most energetically deny the imputation--comes from the

spring which rises at the feet of the titanic Wagner.

"Richard Wagner still casts his great shadow over all our

musico-dramatic production. But it is certain that the latent work that

is going on in the souls of creative artists is to favour the ascent

towards a distant height, of which we cannot yet foresee either the

glaciers or the precipices."

His work, in truth, will flower afresh some day in some great

composer who will sum up in himself, as Wagner did, all the finest

impulses of the music of his day,--who will have absorbed the

essential, durable part of the spirit of his predecessors, and who will

have at his command an idiom, a vocabulary and a technique competent

to express every variety of human emotion. But we may hazard the

conjecture that the new flowering will be in instrumental music rather

than in the opera. It seems to be a law of musical evolution that at

the end of a period of crisis the seminal force that has exhausted

itself in one _genre_ passes over to, and finds a new life in, a

wholly different _genre_. Beethoven left no real successors in the

classical symphony,--for great as Schumann and Brahms are, they are in

this field no more than epigones of Beethoven. It is in the Wagnerian

opera that the new expressive, half-poetic power of Beethoven's music

finds its further logical development. All the opera writers that have

followed in Wagner's tracks--Strauss included--are to Wagner simply

what Brahms was to Beethoven. As Beethoven fertilised not the symphony

but the music-drama, so Wagner has fertilised not the music-drama

but poetic instrumental music,--the innumerable symphonic poems and

programme symphonies of the last fifty years. The idea of the new form

may have been Liszt's as much as Wagner's, or even more; but Liszt's

music was not rich enough to do the full work of fertilisation. Now,

apparently, we are nearing the end of a period of transition. Already

there are signs that the formal programme was little more than a crutch

for poetic music in the days of its hesitating growth. Composers

are beginning to master the art of suggesting the dramatic inner

conflicts of the soul without needing to rely on any outer apparatus

of suggestion. We are probably developing towards a form of symphonic

music that shall be to the art of its own day what the Beethoven

symphony of the middle period was to the art of his time,--a musical

drama-without-words, and perfectly lucid without words. When the new

instrumental music has assimilated all the finest spirit and mastered

the full harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary and the best technique of the

new day, some future Wagner will perhaps turn the mighty stream into a

fresh dramatic channel, the nature of which it is almost impossible to

anticipate. So the great series of cross-cycles will no doubt go on and

on, into a day when dramatic music shall no more resemble Wagner's than

Wagner's music resembles that of Palestrina. In that distant day he may

be no more to mankind than Monteverdi is to us; but music will still

be something different from what it would have been had he never been

born; and of only some half-dozen composers in the whole history of the

art can that be said.

FOOTNOTES:

[396] Three years before this Berlioz had written _Eight Scenes from

Goethe's Faust_--the germ of his _Damnation of Faust_.

[397] All references to the operas are to the new editions of Breitkopf

and Härtel.

[398] Glasenapp, vi. 187.

[399] The opera should be studied in Breitkopf and Härtel's new

edition. Former editions have been printed from the curtailed score

that was generally used for performances. The Breitkopf edition

reproduces the original manuscript.

[400] In _Mein Leben_ he speaks of it being in five acts, but in the

form in which we have it, it has only four.

[401] Accounts of most of these experiments will be found in _Mein

Leben_ and elsewhere. The libretti and sketches are printed in the new

eleventh volume of the _G.S._

[402] _Mein Leben_, p. 220. Wagner always intended that the _Flying

Dutchman_ should be given in one Act. It was played in this way for the

first time at Bayreuth in 1901. The necessary skips in the ordinary

three-act score are indicated in Breitkopf's edition, pp. 76 and 180.

[403] The overture has been altered to correspond with the altered

ending of the opera. Our concert audiences need to remember that the

electrifying effect of this wood-wind entry in the overture is an

after-thought on Wagner's part. At some time or other he added to the

score the following stage directions at the point in the final scene

where the passage just quoted enters: "A dazzling glory illumines the

group in the background; Senta raises the Dutchman, presses him to her

breast, and points him towards heaven with hand and glance." This note

is given in the Fürstner score, but not in that of Breitkopf and Härtel.

[404] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 266.

[405] _Ibid._, iv. 272.

[406] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 295, 297,

298, 301, 302.

[407] _Ibid._, iv. 328.

[408] It is possible, of course, for any Wagnerian commentator to give

another reason for the introduction of the motive here; but the mere

fact that more than one explanation can be given is itself a proof that

Wagner has miscalculated.

[409] In the _Götterdämmerung_ Wagner sends only one Valkyrie,

Waltraute.

[410] The anti-Wagnerians take a malicious delight in pointing to the

old-age portrait of Wagner by Renoir (it is reproduced in Emil Ludwig's

recent diatribe _Wagner, oder die Entzauberten_). This shows us a

rather flabby and senile face, with a pronounced relaxation of the

mouth. But Renoir was an impressionist, and inclined to take the usual

impressionist's liberty with his subject. Moreover, the portrait is

the product of no more than half-an-hour's sitting, given much against

Wagner's will one afternoon after he had tired himself with talking

to this new visitor, who saw him on that occasion for the first and,

I think, the last time in his life. To ask us to believe that this

slap-dash thing is the only veracious portrait of Wagner is making too

great a demand on our credulity.

APPENDIX A

THE RACIAL ORIGIN OF WAGNER

Wagner's Autobiography has thrown a good deal of light on certain

obscure episodes in his career, but it has signally failed to satisfy

the world's curiosity on perhaps the most interesting point of all--the

question as to who was Wagner's father. Was it the Leipzig police

actuary, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wagner, or the actor, painter, poet,

singer, dramatist and what not, Ludwig Heinrich Christian Geyer, who

married Frau Wagner some nine months after the decease of her first

husband? Under normal circumstances the question would have little or

no interest except for the sort of people who dearly love a scandal,

even if it be a century and a quarter old. What gives the question

its piquancy to-day is the fact that Geyer was a Jew--or at least has

always been held to have been one. Now Wagner hated Jews all his life

with an insensate hatred, and to have it proved that the composer

himself was a Jew on his father's side would give a malicious pleasure

to many people to whom Wagner's whole character is a trifle repugnant.

Moreover Wagner was always insisting on the specially German quality

of his life's work; and again it would be amusing if it should turn

out that the greatest "national" art-work of modern Germany was the

creation of a Jew. As might be expected, those who have a bone to pick

with Wagner on any subject under the sun are delighted to point at this

supposed bar-sinister in his escutcheon. Wagner did not like Brahms,

and so he accused poor Johannes of being a Jew. It was therefore

natural that the out-and-out Brahms partisans should hail with glee

any opportunity of making a retort in kind upon Wagner. This is

attempted by Sir Charles Stanford in a preface to a volume of Brahms's

compositions recently issued by Messrs. T. C. & E. C. Jack. He affirms

afresh--what we all knew quite well--that Brahms was of the purest

Teutonic blood; and, in his opinion, "the humour of the situation

reaches its climax when it is discovered that the very man who attacked

any music or musician of Jewish connection was himself tarred with the

brush with which he had been endeavouring to orientalise his blue-eyed,

fair-haired, and high-instepped German contemporary." So confident,

it will be seen, is this statement of the Hebraic origin of Wagner

that any plain man, unversed in these matters, who happens to read

Sir Charles Stanford's preface, will naturally assume that Wagner's

Hebraism is as universally admitted as the death of Queen Anne. Yet Sir

Charles offers no evidence as to Wagner being a Jew; he simply tells us

that the fact has been "discovered."

[Illustration: LUDWIG GEYER.]

Where and when, we may ask, was this "discovery" made? We know that

there has long been tittle-tattle current to the effect that Wagner's

real father was not the police official whose name he bears, but the

brilliant actor, musician, painter and dramatist, who came to the

rescue of Wagner's mother in the early days of her widowhood, and

married her some nine months afterwards. For the last generation or

two a certain number of people have been going about the world shaking

their heads mysteriously and darkly hinting at what they could tell

if their lips were not sealed. The root of the legend is a notorious

remark of Nietzsche's. That philosopher had seen one of the privately

printed copies of the Autobiography about 1870, and his query in the

postscript to _Der Fall Wagner_, "was Wagner a German at all?" and his

point-blank statement that "his father was an actor of the name of

Geyer," were supposed to have their justification in the Autobiography.

It was confidently asserted that when _that_ appeared the truth would

be made known to all the world in Wagner's own confession. Well, the

Autobiography _has_ appeared, and what Wagner says there is that

Friedrich Wagner was his father. There is not the shadow of a hint in

the book that Geyer was anything more than a friend of the family.

(Mr. James Huneker, who discusses the subject in an essay in his

book _The Pathos of Distance_ (1913) thinks he sees such a hint, and

a pretty broad one, in one passage that he quotes; but the wish, I

imagine, is father to the thought: few people would care to put the

construction upon it that he does.) Mr. Huneker as good as asserts

that the commencement of the Autobiography has been tampered with. The

reputation of Villa Wahnfried in editorial matters is certainly not

of the best; but after the express assurance that has been given the

world that the Autobiography has been printed just as Wagner left it,

something more than mere suspicion is required to bolster up a charge

of such atrocious bad faith. Mr. Huneker tells us that "the late Felix

Mottl [the conductor], in the presence of several well-known musical

critics of New York City, declared in 1904 that he had read the above

statement" (_i.e._ "I am the son of Ludwig Geyer"). That is a little

staggering: but again one prefers to think that Mottl or someone else

was mistaken, rather than that Cosima and Siegfried Wagner have been

guilty of an incredible piece of literary dishonesty. As for Mr.

Huneker's further "fact"--that there are portraits of Wagner's mother

and of Geyer at Wahnfried, and none of Friedrich Wagner--that is easily

accounted for; no portrait of the latter has ever been traced, with

the exception of a small pastel, while Geyer was an artist and fond of

painting himself.

Sir Charles Stanford attempts to support his very dubious thesis

by some show of musical argument. He alleges that the most marked

characteristic in such little Jewish music as still exists is the

continual repetition of short phrases--a method, he says, which

Mendelssohn "uses to the verge of monotony" in his later works, and

which is visible again in Wagner's employment of leading motives.

Note, to begin with, the restriction of the use of this method to

Mendelssohn's _later_ works. Being a Jew, Mendelssohn surely would

have betrayed this characteristic in the work of his whole life, if

it really be a characteristic rooted in the Hebrew nature. It looks

as though the ingenuous argument were that there is no Jew like an

old Jew. But it is of even less applicability to Wagner than to

Mendelssohn. It is true that in the _Ring_ Wagner worked to a great

extent upon short leading motives; but the employment of these was

due to the special problems of structure which he was then engaged in

working out. Sir Charles Stanford, with his extensive knowledge of

Wagner's music, must know that the short phrase is not a characteristic

of Wagner's style as a whole. The phrases in _Rienzi_, the _Flying

Dutchman_, _Tannhäuser_, _Lohengrin_, the youthful Symphony, the _Faust

Overture_, and half-a-dozen other works, are as long-breathed as any of

Brahms's. Moreover Sir Charles Stanford admits that in at least half of

his work Wagner was a typical Teuton. He speaks of Brahms's melodies

as being "long, developed, diatonic, and replete with a quality which

may, for lack of a better term, be called 'swing.'" We get precisely

the same qualities in the _Meistersinger_. Sir Charles Stanford can

hardly be serious when he lays it down that Wagner was a typical Teuton

when he wrote the _Meistersinger_, and a typical Jew when he wrote the

_Ring_. But further, _is_ the short thematic phrase a characteristic

of the Hebrew composer? Will Sir Charles be good enough to illustrate

this point for us from the work of Jewish composers like Mabler and Max

Bruch? If, indeed, we are to attribute Hebraic ancestry to a composer

on the strength merely or mainly of a certain shortness of melodic

breath, there are dozens of composers who would have difficulty in

repelling the imputation. Was there ever a composer who habitually

worked upon such short phrases as Grieg, for example? Is there anything

to equal for brevity some of the themes with which Beethoven worked

such wonders? And what precisely _is_ a short phrase? Will some one

provide us with a sort of inch-rule and table of measurements, by the

application of which we shall be able to say precisely where musical

Judaism ends and Gentilism begins?

These are surely very flimsy foundations on which to erect a theory

that Wagner was a Jew. It is, of course, not impossible: nothing is

impossible in this world. One of the rumours afloat is that Wagner

himself, in private, spoke of Geyer as being his father. Again proof

or disproof is impossible; though Mrs. Burrell gives a facsimile

of a letter from Wagner of the 23rd October 1872 (sending Feustel

a certificate of baptism), in which he goes out of his way to call

himself "Polizei-Amts-Actuarius-Sohn" (Police-actuary's son).

Another branch of the argument is that Wagner was typically Jewish

in appearance. I question whether that theory would ever have gained

currency except for the back-stairs gossip with regard to his supposed

paternity. It has long been a puzzle to the present writer to discover

what there is particularly Jewish in Wagner's face. It is true that

his nose was large and to some extent aquiline; but it is certainly

not the nose that we are accustomed to regard as typically Jewish.

The portraits of Geyer that we possess do not show a physiognomy that

anybody would call peculiarly Hebraic. On the other hand, Wagner's

mother had a nose not only very prominent and curved like Wagner's, but

suggesting a Jewish origin far more than either his or Geyer's. For

the rest there is nothing whatever in Wagner's face that could lead

anyone to think he was a Jew. Let us take Sir Charles Stanford's own

test. He remarks that "no one who had known Brahms, especially in his

later years, when the Jewish type, if it exists in the blood, is most

accentuated, could fail to see that in face, in complexion, in hair and

in gait he was a pure Teuton, without a trace of Eastern relationship

or characteristics." Let us admit, for the sake of argument, that it

is in a man's later years that Jewish characteristics in the blood

show themselves most markedly in the face. Now Wagner, so far from

looking more Jewish in his maturity and old age, looked decidedly less

Jewish. In some of the later full-faced portraits, indeed, the face

bears an extraordinary resemblance to that of Mr. Asquith. Some people

would call it a very English face. And what of the other members of

the Wagner family? We have portraits of his uncle Adolf (1774-1835)

and his brother Albert (the latter was born fourteen years before

Wagner, and long before Geyer comes into the story). But these faces

are unmistakably of the same general cast as Wagner's: that of Albert,

indeed, is almost exactly the face of Wagner, but without the genius.

The bust of Adolf Wagner shows a nose, forehead, and other features

very like those of Richard. The chin is not so pronounced, but the two

faces are incontestably of the same type. According to Frau Rose, the

daughter of Carl Friedrich Wagner's friend, Gustav Zocher, Wagner's

father "was small and slightly crooked, but had a fine face." "I

have often thought," says Mrs. Burrell, to whom Frau Rose made this

communication, "in looking at Wagner, that he had a narrow escape of

deformity; he was not in the least deformed, yet the immense head was

poised on the shoulders at the angle peculiar to hunchbacks." The

mother also was tiny and eccentric, with "an electric disposition." No

judge and jury would say on this evidence that there was any reason

whatever to doubt the German paternity of Wagner and assume the Jewish.

There are one or two facts, however, that must be taken into

consideration on the other side. Why should Geyer, a struggling artist,

be so willing to assume the burden of the widow Wagner and her seven

young children? A man of the highest character and the warmest heart

he certainly was: are these sufficient explanation of his chivalrous

conduct? We have letters of his to Frau Wagner during the weeks that

immediately followed the husband's death. The tone of them is warm, but

friendly and sympathetic rather than loving. He generally addresses

her simply as "Friend," or "Dear Friend." His goodness of heart is

shown by such remarks as that _à propos_ of the recovery of the little

Albert from illness: "I have indeed felt sincerely with you in your

terrible experience, for if Albert were my own son he could not be

nearer to my heart." There is not a line in the letters that shows

any more affection for Richard than for Albert; the latter, indeed,

is mentioned the more frequently. Yet some suspicion clusters round a

fact that cannot be discovered from the ordinary biographies of Wagner.

The date of the marriage of Johanna Wagner and Geyer is not generally

known; it cannot be found, for example, in Glasenapp's big official

life of Wagner; while in other biographies the date is variously given

as from one month to two or three years after Carl Friedrich's death.

The marriage is now known to have taken place in August 1814--on

the 14th according to Otto Bournot, on the 28th according to Mrs.

Burrell;[411] and a daughter, Cäcilie, was born to them on the 26th

February 1815,--_i.e._ six months later. This fact must necessarily

count somewhat in our estimate of the nature of the earlier relations

between Geyer and Frau Wagner.

On the whole the weight of external evidence is against the theory

that Geyer was Wagner's father: the facial resemblances between

Richard, his brother Albert, his sister Ottilie (born 14th March 1811),

and his uncle Adolf, and Frau Rose's testimony as to the size and

appearance of the police actuary, Carl Friedrich, make it more than

probable that the last was the composer's father. But the explicit

statements of Nietzsche and Mottl cannot be disregarded. The question

of their veracity, however, could very easily be settled. There must

be more than a dozen of the early copies of _Mein Leben_ in existence.

Mrs. Burrell, who seems to have spent a life-time and a fortune in

accumulating Wagner letters and documents,[412] actually managed to

buy a copy of this privately printed edition. One gathers that she

knew Wagner and Cosima, and had evidently small liking for the latter.

She appears to have been horrified by the picture Wagner gives of

himself and his friends, and at the many evasions, suppressions and

distortions of the truth in the work. "This unmentionable book," she

calls it in one place. She doubts whether Wagner wrote it, and hints

that it has really been pieced together--presumably by Cosima: "To

the well-informed and candid mind the book cannot fail to give the

impression of being written up after conversations; the exact words are

not remembered, and the writer unconsciously imparts another stamp to

the language; it is not the German of a German," which is an obvious

side-blow at the Franco-Hungarian-Jewish Cosima. "The easily proved

inaccuracies are legion...." "The unmistakable purpose of the book is

to ruin the reputation of everyone connected with Wagner.... I maintain

that Wagner consented under pressure to the book being put together,

that he yielded to the temptation of allowing everyone else's character

to be blackened in order to make his own great fault [apparently

his conduct towards von Bülow] pale before the iniquities, real or

invented, of others.... The poet who wrote the pure and impassioned

poems of which Senta and Elsa are the heroines could never have

conceived so flat and prosaic a plan of revenge upon everyone that had

ever annoyed or thwarted him, yes, and worse still, upon many who had

benefited and befriended him." She concludes that "Richard Wagner is

not responsible for the book."

These remarks are interesting as showing the disgust felt by one

who knew something of Wagner at the many basenesses perpetrated in

_Mein Leben_--a disgust that thousands of readers have felt since the

publication of the book. There may be something in Mrs. Burrell's

theory as to how the work was put together; but Wagner undoubtedly

assumed full responsibility for it, as is shown by the letter of his to

the printer, Bonfantini, Basel (1st July 1870), of which Mrs. Burrell

gives a facsimile: he is having fifteen copies printed "dans le seul

but d'éviter la perte possible du seul manuscrit, et de les remettre

entre les mains d'amis fidèles et [conscientieux?] qui les doivent

garder pour un avenir lointain" ("with the object simply of guarding

against the possible loss of the sole manuscript, and of placing

the copies in the hands of faithful and [conscientious?] friends,

who should keep them for a distant future"). But Mrs. Burrell is

generally right in her facts, and there may be something more than mere

conjecture in her hint that the book, so far as its actual composition

is concerned, is Cosima's work at least as much as Wagner's. This would

account, among other things, for the tone of enmity or contempt towards

almost everyone who had come into his life before herself. But the

point with which we are most closely concerned here is not how _Mein

Leben_ came to be written, but what it contains on the first page. The

copies that Nietzsche and Mottl saw belonged to the same imprint as

Mrs. Burrell's copy. This last must still be in existence somewhere.

If the possessor would allow an inspection of it, it could be settled

once for all whether the first page opens with the words "I am the son

of Ludwig Geyer," or "My father, Friedrich Wagner...." If Mottl was

speaking the truth, there is an end of the matter--except that our

last remaining shred of respect for the editorial probity of Wahnfried

will be gone. If Mottl was deceiving himself and others, we can only

fall back on a balance of the evidence I have tried to marshal in the

preceding pages.

A touch of unconscious humour has been given to the situation by a

recent book of Otto Bournot, _Ludwig Heinrich Christian_ [strange name

this for a Jew!] _Geyer, der Stiefvater Richard Wagners_. Bournot has

delved with Teutonic thoroughness into the records of the Geyer family,

has traced it back to 1700, in which year one Benjamin Geyer was a

"town musician" in Eisleben, and has established the piquant facts that

all the Geyers were of the evangelical faith, that most of them were

Protestant church organists, and that all of them married maidens of

unimpeachable German extraction. It makes one smile to find how many

of these alleged Jews had "Christian" as one of their forenames, as

Wagner's putative father had. Even, therefore, if it should be proved

at some time or other that Geyer was Richard Wagner's real father, this

can only bring with it the admission that the amount of Jewish blood in

the composer's veins must have been negligibly small. At the worst he

was much more of a German than, say, a semi-Dutchman like Beethoven;

much more German than the present English royal family is English; and

Bournot is therefore justified in holding that in the last resort the

question of Wagner's paternity cannot affect the "national" quality of

the work of Bayreuth.

FOOTNOTES:

[411] Mrs. Burrell tells us that the Saxon law forbade a woman to marry

again until ten months after the death of her husband. This apparently

means "in the tenth month" for only nine full months had elapsed

between 22nd November 1813 and the 28th August 1814.

[412] She compiled a biography of him covering the years 1813-1834,

which was published in sumptuous form in 1898, after her death. Only

one hundred copies were printed, or rather engraved. The book may be

seen in the British Museum.

APPENDIX B

WAGNER AND SUPER-WAGNER

[This appendix is a slight expansion of an article that originally

appeared in the _Musical Times_ for February 1913. One or two points

in it have already been dwelt upon in the foregoing pages, but I have

ventured to reprint the article here, even at the cost of a little

repetition, because in this form it presents concisely and compactly

the argument as to the possibility of a further development from

Wagner's own principles.]

I

It would be very interesting if some enterprising interviewer in the

shades could procure for us Wagner's opinion upon the course of events

in music in general and the opera in particular during the thirty years

that have elapsed since his death. He would probably cling with his

characteristic tenacity to the views he held in his life-time; but

if he were candid he would have to admit that the old problems have

latterly taken on a new aspect. The theories he expounded so eagerly

in his prose works and illustrated so eloquently in his music-dramas

have not passed through the fire of thirty years' criticism without

suffering some loss of vitality. Supposing a brain as comprehensive,

as variously gifted, and as forceful as his were now to take up the

problem of opera, seeing it all afresh as Wagner did, and combining,

like him, all the potencies of the best instrumental and operatic

music of his day into one vast synthesis, what would be the new form

he would strike out--for that a new form is now a necessity is evident

on _a priori_ and _a posteriori_ grounds. Music could no more stand

still after Wagner than after Bach or Beethoven; a new humanity must

find a new expression for its own reading of life. And a survey of

the opera since Wagner's death leaves no room for doubt that the

emotions and aspirations of the new humanity have not yet found the

form most appropriate to them. Wagner has no more succeeded in making

his special type of musical drama the norm for latter generations than

Bach succeeded in imposing the forms of _his_ music upon the art of the

epochs that have followed him. In each case the spirit endures, but not

the form. Some elements of the Wagnerian form have of course become, as

far as we can judge, permanent factors in opera in general,--the use of

leading themes, for example, and the system of entrusting a melodious,

flowing, quasi-symphonic development to the orchestra. But not even

these elements are recognised as indispensable constituents of opera

everywhere: Debussy, for instance, discards both of them in the greater

part of his _Pelleas and Melisande_. For the rest, the departures

from Wagner's precepts are noticeable enough, especially as regards

the poetic basis of opera. Putting aside the negligible work of his

second-rate imitators, it would be hard to point to a single opera by

a man of original genius that follows Wagner in his reliance upon the

primitive myth as the clearest and most fundamental expression of the

"purely human," or in his planning of the subject so as to reduce to a

minimum the less musical matter in the text, and make the whole opera,

as far as may be, a pure expression of nothing but "soul-states."

II

Wagner's famous formula was that hitherto the means in opera (the

music) had been taken for the end, and the end (the drama) for the

means. His own avowed object was to restore to the drama the right of

pre-eminence in opera. His claim to have done so is only valid if we

define music and drama in the rather limited senses he had in view when

framing his theory. His proposition is correct enough if we take it to

mean that music must not, as in the Italian opera, occupy the ear to

the exclusion of all worth in the story and all psychological interest

in the characters. In the sense that he made opera acceptable to men's

heads and hearts as well as their ears, Wagner certainly did make the

drama the end, and music the means. But viewed more broadly, his work

was really the greatest glorification of music that the theatre had

ever seen: for while he enormously increased the expressive scope of

the music, he cut out of drama more than half the elements that give

that word a meaning apart from music. Drama, with him, meant in the

last analysis little more than the best possible text for theatre

music. He would have denied this interpretation of his theories and

practice, but all the same that is the upshot of them. "Word-speech,"

he argues, is merely the organ of the intellect, and has therefore the

right of entry into music--the emotional art _par excellence_--only so

far as it is necessary to give coherence to the rich but indeterminate

flood of feeling that music pours out; and music can, and ought, only

to ally herself with words that have themselves an emotional content.

It was for this reason that he rejected historical and political

subjects, and found the ideal "stuff" for opera in the "purely human"

legends of the folk; and in _A Communication to my Friends_ he traces

in close detail the gradual growth of his perceptions in this respect.

What was hidden from him, what, indeed, he persistently denies, is now

evident to everyone else,--that the change in his theories and practice

was due to the musician in him slowly asserting himself with greater

and greater urgency, and finally demanding imperatively a form of text

that would allow his gift of musical expression the utmost possible

freedom. It must always be borne in mind that Wagner's theory of a

unification of all the arts in the one art-work was the product of a

brain that had comparatively little sympathy with, or understanding of,

any art but music. This may seem a hard saying, but the proof of it is

to be found in many declarations in his prose works, his letters, and

_Mein Leben_. He could never see in painting, in the prose drama, in

poetry, and in sculpture, precisely what painters, dramatists, poets,

and sculptors saw there. He seriously thought that "the spoken form of

play" (_die Schauspielform_) must "necessarily vanish in the future";

and that painters would give up their "egoistic" decorating of little

canvases and be content to devote their powers to contributing, along

with the poet, the musician, and the rest of the theatrical forces, to

the "united art-work of the future." Clearly it was Wagner the musician

who dominated all the other Wagners, and determined both the choice of

subject for his operas and the manner of their treatment. "What I saw,"

he says in _A Communication to My Friends_, "I now looked at solely

with the eyes of music." He is careful to add, not of the formal,

cramping style of music, but of the kind that came straight from the

heart and which he could pour out like a speech in a mother-tongue.

That is the whole secret; the "music" he wishes to see made subordinate

to "drama" is merely the music that claims to pursue an egoistic

existence, bound by its own arbitrary laws alone; but though _his_

music must be natural and unfettered by conventional formulas, and must

aim at giving heightened emotional expression to the feeling suggested

by the verse and the action, it is still the predominant partner in

the union, and only so much of the stuff of the verbal drama will be

permitted in the art-work as will give point to the vague musical

emotion without hindering its full expression. Like a true musician, he

saw drama from a purely musical angle.

III

But granting the premisses implicit in Wagner's theory,--that music is

an art of intensely emotional expression, that it can only ally itself

with poetry and drama on the condition that these allow themselves to

be bent to its will, and that the ideal "stuff" for an opera is that

which contains the minimum of matter that music cannot take up into

itself and endow with its own loftier and warmer life,--it surely

becomes evident that the theory cannot be allowed to end there. In a

long article on programme music in my _Musical Studies_ (1905), I have

argued that the strictly logical conclusion of Wagner's own theory is

not the music-drama but the symphonic poem. He himself admitted that

the more we can refine away from the music-drama all the non-musical

matter,--the matter that is required merely to make the nature of the

characters and the thread of the story intelligible to an audience

sitting on the other side of the footlights--the nearer we shall

approach the ideal. It was for this reason that he was dissatisfied

with his earlier works, and so proud--justifiably proud--of _Tristan_,

where, as he said, he "immersed himself in the depths of soul-events

pure and simple, and from out this innermost centre of the world

fearlessly fashioned its outward form. A glance at the volumen of this

poem will show you at once that the copious detail which an historical

poet has to employ in order to make the outer connections of his plot

evident, to the detriment of a clear exposition of its inner motives,

I now trusted myself to apply to these latter alone. Life and death,

the whole significance and existence of the external world, here turn

on nothing but the inner movements of the soul." There is a touch of

exaggeration in the claim, but in the main it holds good; _Tristan_

comes nearer to being _all music and nothing else but music_ than any

other work of Wagner. I suggested that in the symphonic poem, rightly

planned and rightly worked out, we had the nearest possible approach

to this ideal, and I availed myself of a simile Browning uses in _The

Ring and the Book_--that of the jeweller who finds it advantageous to

mix a certain amount of alloy with the gold while he is working at

the ring, but afterwards burns it out with a spirt of acid, leaving

simply the circlet of pure gold. The practice of the composer of the

symphonic poem seems to me to be analogous to this: he uses the poetic

alloy in the conceptual stage of his work to give coherence to the

tissue of it, but leaves none of the alloy visible in the completed

work itself; to vary the simile, he uses poetry as his scaffolding,

but as his scaffolding only. The trouble with opera--viewed from

an ideal standpoint--is that it too often shows the scaffolding

projecting at a score of points through the finished building. Even

in _Tristan_--especially the earlier scenes--we are too conscious at

times of verbal matter that all the genius of the musician has not been

able to fuse into music. We accept it, but we are not convinced of the

absolute necessity of it.

IV

Apart from theory, we have only to look at a few concrete instances

of both types of art to see that the ideal symphonic poem is the

unalloyed quintessence of opera, and that the average opera is merely

a symphonic poem puffed out to three Acts, and made rather loose of

tissue in the process. What could be easier than to make a three-act

opera of _Ein Heldenleben_,--and what more futile? Apart from the

Adversaries, there are only two characters in _Ein Heldenleben_, and

we cannot fill up a whole theatrical evening with two characters

alone. To have made an opera of it Strauss would have had to get a

librettist to surround the only two persons who really matter with

a number of minor persons who do not matter in the least; and after

spending three or four hours in the theatre we should come away with

precisely the same fundamental impression as _Ein Heldenleben_ gives

us in the concert-room in about forty minutes,--that a hero has passed

through sundry spiritual crises and developments, and at last, after

much battling and much error, attained to a super-earthly resignation.

This is the ring; everything else we should see and hear in the theatre

would only be so much alloy, pleasurable or tiresome. Who does not

feel, again, that all the essential emotions of the story of Francesca

da Rimini are given us in Tchaikovski's tone-poem? Who wants to see the

merely historical and topographical details that would be inevitable in

an opera on the subject? Who wants to see the furniture of the house

of Malatesta, and the ladies and gentlemen moving about among it? Who

wants to see and hear Giovanni? He interests us only as a fragment of

the force of fate that drives Paolo and Francesca to love and death;

surely we are content to accept his existence as assumed in the great

central tragedy, without having him put before us in the flesh to sing

a lot of words that do not matter? Who does not feel that Strauss has

given us the quintessence of _Macbeth_ in his symphonic poem, and

that no opera on that subject could hope to express the spiritual

tragedy of Macbeth so swiftly and so drastically? Or, to look at the

matter from the other side, take the case of Strauss's _Salome_. Does

anything really count there but the train of moods in Salome's soul,

and is not all this expressed fully and incomparably in the great

final scene,--with perhaps a little assistance from the music of the

impassioned monologue of Salome to Jochanaan in the earlier part? What

is all the rest of the opera but a mere recital or representation of a

story the details of which everyone in the theatre already knows quite

well? How Herod was married to Herodias, the mother of Salome, how

Herod gave a banquet and became enamoured of his step-daughter, how one

Jochanaan, a Jewish prophet, had been imprisoned by order of Herod, how

Salome conceived an unholy passion for Jochanaan, how she danced for

Herod and won as her reward the head of Jochanaan on a charger--who

needs to go to the theatre to be told all this: who takes more than

the most languid interest in the telling of it? Music has next to no

concern with most of it, because it is of a quality that prevents music

attaining to its full emotional incandescence; and it is only when

it is playing with ease and ardour round a subject fit to call out

the best there is in it that music is really worth writing. If anyone

doubts that it is only the final scene and the monologue of _Salome_

that count for anything in the opera, let him ask himself how many

people would stay away from the theatre or the concert-room because

_only_ these portions were being given, and how many people would go to

the theatre if it were known that these portions were to be omitted.

Or again, does the whole opera of _Tannhäuser_ tell us very much that

is not already told us in the Overture? I am not alleging, of course,

that there is not a great deal of very interesting music in the opera.

The question is whether the essence of the struggle in Tannhäuser's

soul between spiritual and physical love is not fully given us in the

Overture, and whether, had this alone been written, we should have felt

any more need for an opera upon the subject than we do for an opera

on the subject of _Ein Heldenleben_. What is the opera of _Fidelio_,

Wagner himself asked, but a mere lengthy watering down of the dramatic

motives that have been painted so finely for us in the great _Leonora

No. 3_ Overture? May we not say as much of _Tannhäuser_? Is not a great

deal of this also a mere padding-out of the subject to comply with the

exigencies of a whole evening in the theatre?

V

It is true that Wagner tried to demonstrate that the symphonic poem

was a less perfect art-form than the music-drama, inasmuch as it left

it to the imagination to supply the characters, the events, or the

pictures upon which the music is founded, whereas these really ought to

be shown to the eye upon the stage. But a two-fold answer can be given

to Wagner. In the first place, there are dozens of passages in his own

works that depend for their effect upon precisely that visualising

power of the imagination the legitimacy of which he denied in the case

of the symphonic poem. Is Siegfried's Rhine Journey, for example,

intelligible on any other supposition than that with each change of

theme in the music the hearer's imagination visualises a fresh episode

in the hero's course? How do we listen to the _Meistersinger_ Overture

except just in the way we listen to a symphonic poem--the imagination

calling up before it the bodily presence of each of the characters in

turn? In the second place, the evidence is overwhelming that Wagner's

own imagination was much more restricted in this respect than that of

other people; and it was precisely this inability to trust very much

to the visualising power of the imagination that made him fall into so

many crude errors of realism. All his life through he was unable to see

that the imagination has a much wider scope than the eye, because, not

being tied down to the mere spatial dimensions of an object, it can add

enormously to it out of its own store of memory and vision. Vastness is

a quality inseparable from any concept of a god; but can the grandest

creation of sculpture or the most heroic of stage figures ever hope to

give us such a sense of the illimitable power and beauty of godhead

as the imagination can supply? Whose god comes nearest to filling the

earth with his presence--the invisible one of Milton or Spinoza, or

the visible Wotan of Wagner? Does not the least analytical spectator

of a Wagnerian opera often feel that it would have been better if the

composer had insisted less on material facts upon the stage and left

our imagination a freer wing? How much of the exquisite poetry of the

idea of the _Waldweben_--the natural, untainted boy at home in nature's

heart, dowered by his native innocence with the gift of understanding

the song of birds--is spoiled for us by the grossly unideal presence

of the average actor, by the reduction of the wayward breath and

infinite soul of nature to a few yards of painted pasteboard, and by

the narrowing down of all our ideas of the lyric freedom of bird-life

to one poor piece of stuffed mechanism jerked at the end of a wire,

and a tremulous soprano somewhere up in the wings? Who would exchange

the imagination's vision of the glorious Valkyrie-flight through the

storm and the cloud-wrack for the actual visible Grane, with his

evident air of having been borrowed from the mews round the corner?

Who that is moved by the Grail music in _Parsifal_ has not felt his

heart sink within him at the sight of the slow mechanical evolutions

of the Knights in the Grail scene at Bayreuth? Who has not felt at the

sight of the "property" swan that the rarefied atmosphere of Monsalvat

has gone, and with it most of the remoteness, the shining whiteness,

of Lohengrin? Or, not to multiply instances of this kind from the

Wagnerian operas themselves, who can doubt the general proposition that

the more the subject approaches the sublime the more it demands purely

poetic or musical treatment, and the more lamentably it suffers by

being narrowed down to a canvas or a stage? What painter could hope to

suggest, even in the largest picture, the vision of the vast evil form

of Lucifer, the mighty sweep of his fall, and the horror of the fiery

underworld, that Milton can give us in a line or two;[413] and who, in

spite of all the splendour of the music of the _Ring_, does not feel

that the actual _spectacle_ of gods and heroes that has been put before

our eyes on the stage cannot compare in true sublimity with the picture

given us in the great opening lines of Morris's _Sigurd the Volsung_:

"There was a dwelling of kings ere the world was waxen old; Dukes were

the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold; Earls

were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors; Earls'

wives were the weaving-women, queens' daughters strewed its floors,

And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast

The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast. There

dwelt men merry-hearted, and in hope exceeding great Met the good

days and the evil as they went the way of fate: There the gods were

unforgotten, yea whiles they walked with men, Though e'en in that

world's beginning rose a murmur now and then Of the midward time and

the fading and the last of the latter days, And the entering in of the

terror, and the death of the People's Praise."

How the imagination fills out the ample spaces here left to it to play

among--how great and god-like and noble and beautiful a world of men

and women it is that the poet evokes for us!

VI

The elimination from an opera-text of everything that is not suited

to musical expression is perhaps an unattainable ideal. It is only

the titanic _musical_ genius of Wagner that makes us more or less

tolerant of what we may call the baser metal in the structure of his

music-dramas. Since his day the problem has proved so baffling a one

that composers have frankly given it up in despair. Wagner was right:

the simpler the story or legend on which we found an opera,--the more

it can be trusted to make its own motives and development clear,--the

less non-musical matter shall we be burdened with, and the more

chance we shall have of being able to keep the musical tissue on a

consistently high level. The proof of this is to be found not only

in Wagner's own work but in that of his successors. It is hardly

possible to recall a modern opera in which, at some point or other,

the composer has not tried to delude us into the belief that the music

means something when it really means nothing. Take, for example, the

opening scene of _Elektra_. The scene is _dramatically_ necessary

because it informs the spectator of the relations between Elektra and

her mother, and explains the miserable servitude of the maiden in the

house of her murdered father. But no man that ever lived could set such

words as these to good music; and all that Strauss can do is to make a

mere pretence of writing music, let the orchestra play almost anything

and the voices shriek almost anything, and trust to the audience

being carried blindly along, partly by the excitement of the noise,

partly by the bustling stage-movement. Wagner's superior artistic

sense would have seen from the outset that this part of the libretto

was outside the sphere of music, and, being his own librettist, he

would, in obedience to the prompting of the musician in him, have so

re-shaped the opera that there would have been no need to communicate

that particular piece of information to us in this particular form. The

procedure of Strauss and Hofmannsthal is hardly less absurd than that

of the old composers who used to set to music not only the actual words

of the Bible but "Here beginneth the ... chapter of the ... book of...."

How much of the merest putty, again, is left visible in the libretti

of Puccini, Charpentier, and others--passages that are essential if

the story is to be made clear to the spectator, but absolutely defying

musical treatment. There is scarcely a single opera of which the music

gives one the impression of pure necessity from first to last; every

now and then our teeth are set on edge by some pieces of grit left by

the bad cooks in an otherwise good dish. The handling of passages of

this kind has become the most stereotyped of formulæ; the characters

talk rather than sing, while the orchestra keeps the ear interested

by playing pretty tunes on its own account, much as a nurse tells a

child fairy tales to keep it quiet during the misery of the bath. Only

the easy-going attitude towards all questions of form that is bred

in us by theatrical art could possibly blind us for a moment to the

helplessness and ineptitude of a method of this kind. Debussy evades

the difficulty in another way. He starts with a text that is already a

complete, self-sufficing work of art, capable, without the assistance

of music, of holding an audience interested in it by virtue of its

own dramatic life and its fine literary quality. He is thus, to begin

with, in a far stronger position than that of nineteen opera composers

out of twenty, whose texts have no artistic quality of their own, and

have to receive the whole breath of their life from the music. Having

the good fortune to be working upon a libretto that is itself moving

and beautiful, Debussy can frequently afford to leave it to speak for

itself, his own contribution to it being sometimes no more than a

momentary heightening of the force of the words by means of a poignant

harmony or a suggestive touch of colour. I hope I shall not be held

to be insensitive to the peculiar charm of Debussy's _Pelleas and

Melisande_, or to the rare musical invention of the more continuous

portions of it, if I say that a good deal of the opera could have been

written by a much less gifted man. Now that the novelty of it has

passed off, it is seen to be not at all a difficult matter to subtilise

a stage effect by the addition of a poignant chord here and there.

_Pelleas and Melisande_ is an extremely beautiful work, but it will

probably have no posterity,--because, while the more musical portions

of it depend less for their effect on any essential novelty of form

than upon the very individual quality of Debussy's imagination, the

style of the other--the merely atmospheric--portions is so easy to

imitate that it is within the scope of dozens of composers with only a

quarter of Debussy's genius. Debussy, then, has not, any more than his

contemporaries, solved the problem of weaving the combined vocal and

orchestral tissue of the opera into a continuous and homogeneous whole;

for a great part of the time he simply evades the problem. _Pelleas and

Melisande_ is a _tour de force_ that will probably never be repeated;

it depended for its success on the concurrence of a number of factors

that are hardly likely to be met with in combination again.

VII

To recapitulate, then, for a moment: Wagner's theory of the ideal

music-drama is sound enough, but neither he nor any of his successors

has been able to realise the theory in practice. In every combination

of music with the other arts it must of necessity play the leading

rôle, because of the greater expansiveness and superior warmth of

its expression.[414] As Wagner saw, it will tolerate no text but one

that is thoroughly musical in essence--that is to say, one that is so

purely emotional throughout that at no time can we feel that in order

to associate with it music has had to descend from its ideal sphere.

It is in the process of making the action clear to the spectator that

opera generally has to admit certain elements that drag music down from

its high estate. We have therefore at present two chief forms of the

association of poetry and music--the opera, in which actual characters,

using actual words, are shown to us in the actuality of the stage,

and the symphonic poem, in which we are given not the characters but

the emotions of the characters, and not the scene but an imaginative

suggestion of the scene, while the general nature of the subject is

communicated to us by means of a printed explanation or a title. This

necessity of putting the hearer _en rapport_ with the story by a device

that stands outside the music seems to many people an ineradicable

flaw in the symphonic poem; a work of art, they say, should be

self-contained, and opera, with all its admitted faults, has the virtue

of being its own explanation. I do not think, however, that this matter

is so simple as it looks.

Closer analysis will show first of all that many apparently

self-contained musical works are as greatly in need of verbal

expression as a symphonic poem, and secondly, that in the full sense

of the term hardly any opera or drama can be said to be wholly

self-explanatory, inasmuch as, at every hearing of it except the

first, we witness the unfolding of the earlier stages of the action

with a knowledge of the later stages, and are thus as effectually

adding something from an outside source to the visual and auditory

impressions of the moment as when we follow a symphonic poem with

the story in our minds that we have just read in the programme book.

What real difference, for example, is there between the frame of mind

in which we listen to the _Tannhäuser_ Overture and that in which we

listen to _Ein Heldenleben_? In each case we are conscious that the

music is not self-existent and self-explanatory, but depends for its

full intelligibility on our knowledge of the characters and incidents

upon which it is based. We get this knowledge in the case of _Ein

Heldenleben_ from a book; in the case of the _Tannhäuser_ Overture

we get it from our experience of the opera on the stage.[415] What

essential difference is there between the two cases? In each of them

we have to rely upon experience outside the work itself in order to

grasp the full meaning of it. The _Tannhäuser_ Overture and other

works of that class are, in fact, artistic solecisms. No one, surely,

will contend that at the _first_ performance of _Tannhäuser_ the

Overture conveyed its poetic meaning to the audience any more clearly

than a performance of _Ein Heldenleben_ would do without a literary

explanation of its contents. The Overture does not explain the opera,

but is explained by it, and it is consequently absurd to play it first.

It only happens to come first because the old practice of having an

orchestral introduction to an opera was unthinkingly retained long

after the character of the introduction had so altered that there

was no longer any sense in its use. The purpose of the Overture

originally was simply to play the audience into their seats. We see it

performing this function in an overture like that to the _Messiah_: the

music has nothing to do with the oratorio, and any one of a hundred

other orchestral introductions would do just as well. But when opera

composers began to make the overture a summary of the opera itself,

they entered upon a course that ultimately made it an absurdity. In so

far as the overture sums up the opera, and therefore depends for its

intelligibility on a knowledge of the opera, it ought logically to be

played not at the commencement of the evening, but at the end. Modern

composers have instinctively recognised the truth of all this, and

the operatic overture is now virtually abolished; there is none, for

instance, to _Salome_, _Elektra_, or _Pelleas and Melisande_.

All the overtures, then, that epitomise the opera with which they

are connected are in the same category as the symphonic poem; for

an understanding of the literary basis of them we have to go to a

source outside themselves. The theory that a piece of music is bad

music unless it is "self-sufficing" and "self-explanatory" is a mere

nightmare of the arm-chair æsthetician. There are thousands of pages

in Bach that only yield up their full secret to us when we get some

outside light upon the sequence of poetic ideas in his mind at the

time of writing. This is the case with many of the chorale preludes,

for example. But Bach's music is often rich in a kind of allusive

symbolism greatly resembling Wagner's use of the leading motive,

though it is bolder than that, inasmuch as the musical symbol has not

been made familiar to us by a previous definite use of it in the same

work of art. In the _Christmas Oratorio_ Bach sets the words of a

chorale addressed to the infant Jesus to the music of another chorale

that was already associated in the minds of the congregation with the

Passion--thus in a flash bringing the death of the Saviour into the

same mental picture as the birth.[416] The chorale fantasia which the

blind old man dictated to his pupil Altnikol a few days before his

death united the music of the hymn "In our hour of direst need," with

the words of "I come before thy throne." And who can forget the effect,

comparable to some of the most thrilling of those that Wagner makes

with his leading motives, of the trumpet pealing out with the melody

of "Great God, what do I see and hear! The end of things created" in

the midst of the bass recitative describing the terrors of the Day of

Judgment (in the cantata _Wachet, betet_). Bach anticipated, as he did

most things in modern music, the Wagnerian use of the leading motive,

the function of which is to suggest to the hearer's imagination another

idea simultaneously with the one the music is explicitly expressing.

I think Bach would have smiled at anyone who chose to object that his

chorale in the _Christmas Oratorio_ was not self-sufficing, inasmuch as

it depended for its affecting double meaning upon knowledge that the

hearer had gathered elsewhere. He would probably have been satisfied

with the unshakable fact that the hearer _had_ this knowledge, and that

it was therefore quite safe to rely on his making use of it. Surely

the composer of the symphonic poem and allied forms is also justified

in trusting occasionally to his auditors' outside knowledge of the

subject of his work. Is there anything less legitimate in Strauss's

trusting to our imagination to summon up at performance the scenes and

the figures of _Don Quixote_, than there is in Wagner's trusting to it,

during the _Tannhäuser_ or _Meistersinger_ Overture, to summon up the

scenes and figures of the opera? I have already pointed out that in his

music-dramas Wagner is continually asking us, by means of recurrent

leading motives, to visualise more than is actually set before us on

the stage--thus flying in the face of his own theoretical arguments.

It only needs to be added that he also relied, at times, as much as

the writer of symphonic poems does, upon the hearer's or spectator's

knowing more about the course of the drama than has been revealed to

him in the drama itself. How do we know, for example, that the "Sword"

motive in the final scene of the _Rhinegold_ is a "Sword" motive at

all? How do we know the train of thought running through Wotan's mind

at this point as he looks into the future? Simply by antedating the

information we have gained from the later dramas of the _Ring_. At

the time the "Sword" motive is first heard there has never been the

slightest suggestion of the sword that is to help to lift the curse

from the gods; not only Siegfried but Siegfried's parents are as yet

unborn. Again, the phrase that _Tannhäuser_ sings to the words "Ha,

jetzt erkenne ich sie wieder, die schöne Welt der ich entrückt" in

the first Act of the opera is explained only by the association of it

with Elisabeth and the Hall of Song in the second Act. Anyone with a

knowledge of the Wagnerian operas can multiply these instances for

himself.

Does not everything, in fact, point to the impossibility of our

listening to any performance of a drama or opera, _except the first

one_, with a mind that is absolutely a clean slate? Are we not always

drawing consciously or unconsciously upon our store of acquired

knowledge of the work, and blending this with the visual or auditory

impressions of the moment? Do we not all know, long before it happens,

that the screen will fall down at a certain climactic point in the

_School for Scandal_ and show us Lady Teazle hiding behind it? Is not

our appreciation of all the dialogue of this scene whetted by our

knowledge--gained from "outside" sources--of what is going to happen

at the end of it? The instructed spectator or reader invariably keeps

looking ahead, his interest or delight in what is occurring at the

moment being intensified by what may be called anticipatory memory. It

is only at the first time of reading _Tom Jones_ that we can be in the

slightest doubt as to who is the hero's mother. The ever-present clue

to the solution of the mystery does not spoil our pleasure, however,

in the second and subsequent readings; nay, it rather adds to it, for

it makes us conscious of a number of cunning strokes of construction

that we had not noticed at the first reading. At the second and every

subsequent performance of Mr. John Galsworthy's _The Pigeon_ a thrill

of horror goes through us at the exit of Mrs. Megan in the second Act,

for we know--what we did not know at the first performance--that she

means to throw herself into the river; and for this reason the second

performance necessarily makes a profounder effect on us than the first.

I take it, then, that an exaggerated importance can be attached to the

principle of art being "self-sufficing" and "self-explanatory" at the

first time of hearing or seeing; the subject is a far more complex one

than the amateur æstheticians have imagined. They had only to turn to

the Greek drama to see a form of art in which deliberate advantage was

taken by every author of the fact that the audience had an "outside"

knowledge of the characters and events of the play. The Greek drama,

broadly speaking, did not rely, as ours does, on the effect of a slow

unfolding of a complicated plot--the main art of which consists in

first of all giving the audience something to hunt for and then finding

it for them. The Greek drama was based on a myth or a legend every

detail of which was known to every member of the audience. _At a first

performance_, therefore, the audience would be in precisely the same

position as a modern audience is when it reads in its programme-book

the analysis of a new symphonic poem that is about to be performed. And

this knowledge, so far from diminishing the audience's enjoyment of the

drama, actually intensified it, and permitted to the author an amount

of subtle psychological allusion that can only be compared with the

effects of the leading motive in modern opera. When Clytemnestra, for

instance, in Æschylus's drama, greets Agamemnon with falsely-fawning

words, the thrill that ran through the Athenian audience came not

from any feeling of foreboding inspired by the visible situation or

the actual words, but from its _outside_ knowledge that all this was

feigning, and that the hounds of death were already hot on the track of

the unsuspecting king. Wagner would have flashed the same light upon

Clytemnestra's words by means of an orchestral motive. An Athenian,

again, at the first performance of the _Œdipus Rex_, must have known

the whole of the story from the beginning. There could be for him none

of the cumulative surprise at the slow unravelling of the web that we

feel at a first reading of the tragedy; rather did he accompany the

first blind steps of Œdipus with a pity born of the knowledge--the

_outside_ knowledge--of the doom the gods had woven for him.

VIII