It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music-mad
strangers that was rolling down upon Bayreuth. It had been long since
we had seen such multitudes of excited and struggling people. It took a
good half-hour to pack them and pair them into the train—and it was the
longest train we have yet seen in Europe. Nuremberg had been witnessing
this sort of experience a couple of times a day for about two weeks. It
gives one an impressive sense of the magnitude of this biennial
pilgrimage. For a pilgrimage is what it is. The devotees come from the
very ends of the earth to worship their prophet in his own Kaaba in his
own Mecca.
If you are living in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or anywhere
else in America, and you conclude, by the middle of May, that you would
like to attend the Bayreuth opera two months and a half later, you must
use the cable and get about it immediately or you will get no seats,
and you must cable for lodgings, too. Then if you are lucky you will
get seats in the last row and lodgings in the fringe of the town. If
you stop to write you will get nothing. There were plenty of people in
Nuremberg when we passed through who had come on pilgrimage without
first securing seats and lodgings. They had found neither in Bayreuth;
they had walked Bayreuth streets a while in sorrow, then had gone to
Nuremberg and found neither beds nor standing room, and had walked
those quaint streets all night, waiting for the hotels to open and
empty their guests into the trains, and so make room for these, their
defeated brethren and sisters in the faith. They had endured from
thirty to forty hours’ railroading on the continent of Europe—with all
which that implies of worry, fatigue, and financial impoverishment—and
all they had got and all they were to get for it was handiness and
accuracy in kicking themselves, acquired by practice in the back
streets of the two towns when other people were in bed; for back they
must go over that unspeakable journey with their pious mission
unfulfilled. These humiliated outcasts had the frowsy and unbrushed and
apologetic look of wet cats, and their eyes were glazed with
drowsiness, their bodies were adroop from crown to sole, and all
kind-hearted people refrained from asking them if they had been to
Bayreuth and failed to connect, as knowing they would lie.
We reached here (Bayreuth) about mid-afternoon of a rainy Saturday. We
were of the wise, and had secured lodgings and opera seats months in
advance.
I am not a musical critic, and did not come here to write essays about
the operas and deliver judgment upon their merits. The little children
of Bayreuth could do that with a finer sympathy and a broader
intelligence than I. I only care to bring four or five pilgrims to the
operas, pilgrims able to appreciate them and enjoy them. What I write
about the performance to put in my odd time would be offered to the
public as merely a cat’s view of a king, and not of didactic value.
Next day, which was Sunday, we left for the opera-house—that is to say,
the Wagner temple—a little after the middle of the afternoon. The great
building stands all by itself, grand and lonely, on a high ground
outside the town. We were warned that if we arrived after four o’clock
we should be obliged to pay two dollars and a half apiece extra by way
of fine. We saved that; and it may be remarked here that this is the
only opportunity that Europe offers of saving money. There was a big
crowd in the grounds about the building, and the ladies’ dresses took
the sun with fine effect. I do not mean to intimate that the ladies
were in full dress, for that was not so. The dresses were pretty, but
neither sex was in evening dress.
The interior of the building is simple—severely so; but there is no
occasion for color and decoration, since the people sit in the dark.
The auditorium has the shape of a keystone, with the stage at the
narrow end. There is an aisle on each side, but no aisle in the body of
the house. Each row of seats extends in an unbroken curve from one side
of the house to the other. There are seven entrance doors on each side
of the theater and four at the butt, eighteen doors to admit and emit
1,650 persons. The number of the particular door by which you are to
enter the house or leave it is printed on your ticket, and you can use
no door but that one. Thus, crowding and confusion are impossible. Not
so many as a hundred people use any one door. This is better than
having the usual (and useless) elaborate fireproof arrangements. It is
the model theater of the world. It can be emptied while the second hand
of a watch makes its circuit. It would be entirely safe, even if it
were built of lucifer matches.
If your seat is near the center of a row and you enter late you must
work your way along a rank of about twenty-five ladies and gentlemen to
get to it. Yet this causes no trouble, for everybody stands up until
all the seats are full, and the filling is accomplished in a very few
minutes. Then all sit down, and you have a solid mass of fifteen
hundred heads, making a steep cellar-door slant from the rear of the
house down to the stage.
All the lights were turned low, so low that the congregation sat in a
deep and solemn gloom. The funereal rustling of dresses and the low
buzz of conversation began to die swiftly down, and presently not the
ghost of a sound was left. This profound and increasingly impressive
stillness endured for some time—the best preparation for music,
spectacle, or speech conceivable. I should think our show people would
have invented or imported that simple and impressive device for
securing and solidifying the attention of an audience long ago; instead
of which they continue to this day to open a performance against a
deadly competition in the form of noise, confusion, and a scattered
interest.
Finally, out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich notes rose
upon the stillness, and from his grave the dead magician began to weave
his spells about his disciples and steep their souls in his
enchantments. There was something strangely impressive in the fancy
which kept intruding itself that the composer was conscious in his
grave of what was going on here, and that these divine sounds were the
clothing of thoughts which were at this moment passing through his
brain, and not recognized and familiar ones which had issued from it at
some former time.
The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark house with
the curtain down. It was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway
thereafter, of course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that
nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to
the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts. I wish I could see a
Wagner opera done in pantomime once. Then one would have the lovely
orchestration unvexed to listen to and bathe his spirit in, and the
bewildering beautiful scenery to intoxicate his eyes with, and the dumb
acting couldn’t mar these pleasures, because there isn’t often anything
in the Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as
acting; as a rule all you would see would be a couple of silent people,
one of them standing still, the other catching flies. Of course I do
not really mean that he would be catching flies; I only mean that the
usual operatic gestures which consist in reaching first one hand out
into the air and then the other might suggest the sport I speak of if
the operator attended strictly to business and uttered no sound.
This present opera was “Parsifal.” Madame Wagner does not permit its
representation anywhere but in Bayreuth. The first act of the three
occupied two hours, and I enjoyed that in spite of the singing.
I trust that I know as well as anybody that singing is one of the most
entrancing and bewitching and moving and eloquent of all the vehicles
invented by man for the conveying of feeling; but it seems to me that
the chief virtue in song is melody, air, tune, rhythm, or what you
please to call it, and that when this feature is absent what remains is
a picture with the color left out. I was not able to detect in the
vocal parts of “Parsifal” anything that might with confidence be called
rhythm or tune or melody; one person performed at a time—and a long
time, too—often in a noble, and always in a high-toned, voice; but he
only pulled out long notes, then some short ones, then another long
one, then a sharp, quick, peremptory bark or two—and so on and so on;
and when he was done you saw that the information which he had conveyed
had not compensated for the disturbance. Not always, but pretty often.
If two of them would but put in a duet occasionally and blend the
voices; but no, they don’t do that. The great master, who knew so well
how to make a hundred instruments rejoice in unison and pour out their
souls in mingled and melodious tides of delicious sound, deals only in
barren solos when he puts in the vocal parts. It may be that he was
deep, and only added the singing to his operas for the sake of the
contrast it would make with the music. Singing! It does seem the wrong
name to apply to it. Strictly described, it is a practicing of
difficult and unpleasant intervals, mainly. An ignorant person gets
tired of listening to gymnastic intervals in the long run, no matter
how pleasant they may be. In “Parsifal” there is a hermit named
Gurnemanz who stands on the stage in one spot and practices by the
hour, while first one and then another character of the cast endures
what he can of it and then retires to die.
During the evening there was an intermission of three-quarters of an
hour after the first act and one an hour long after the second. In both
instances the theater was totally emptied. People who had previously
engaged tables in the one sole eating-house were able to put in their
time very satisfactorily; the other thousand went hungry. The opera was
concluded at ten in the evening or a little later. When we reached home
we had been gone more than seven hours. Seven hours at five dollars a
ticket is almost too much for the money.
While browsing about the front yard among the crowd between the acts I
encountered twelve or fifteen friends from different parts of America,
and those of them who were most familiar with Wagner said that
“Parsifal” seldom pleased at first, but that after one had heard it
several times it was almost sure to become a favorite. It seemed
impossible, but it was true, for the statement came from people whose
word was not to be doubted.
And I gathered some further information. On the ground I found part of
a German musical magazine, and in it a letter written by Uhlic
thirty-three years ago, in which he defends the scorned and abused
Wagner against people like me, who found fault with the comprehensive
absence of what our kind regards as singing. Uhlic says Wagner despised
“_jene plapperude music_,” and therefore “runs, trills, and _Schnorkel
_are discarded by him.” I don’t know what a _Schnorkel _is, but now
that I know it has been left out of these operas I never have missed so
much in my life. And Uhlic further says that Wagner’s song is true:
that it is “simply emphasized intoned speech.” That certainly describes
it—in “Parsifal” and some of the other operas; and if I understand
Uhlic’s elaborate German he apologizes for the beautiful airs in
“Tannhauser.” Very well; now that Wagner and I understand each other,
perhaps we shall get along better, and I shall stop calling Waggner, on
the American plan, and thereafter call him Waggner as per German
custom, for I feel entirely friendly now. The minute we get reconciled
to a person, how willing we are to throw aside little needless
punctilios and pronounce his name right!
Of course I came home wondering why people should come from all corners
of America to hear these operas, when we have lately had a season or
two of them in New York with these same singers in the several parts,
and possibly this same orchestra. I resolved to think that out at all
hazards.
TUESDAY.—Yesterday they played the only operatic favorite I have ever
had—an opera which has always driven me mad with ignorant delight
whenever I have heard it—“Tannhauser.” I heard it first when I was a
youth; I heard it last in the last German season in New York. I was
busy yesterday and I did not intend to go, knowing I should have
another “Tannhauser” opportunity in a few days; but after five o’clock
I found myself free and walked out to the opera-house and arrived about
the beginning of the second act. My opera ticket admitted me to the
grounds in front, past the policeman and the chain, and I thought I
would take a rest on a bench for an hour and two and wait for the third
act.
In a moment or so the first bugles blew, and the multitude began to
crumble apart and melt into the theater. I will explain that this
bugle-call is one of the pretty features here. You see, the theater is
empty, and hundreds of the audience are a good way off in the
feeding-house; the first bugle-call is blown about a quarter of an hour
before time for the curtain to rise. This company of buglers, in
uniform, march out with military step and send out over the landscape a
few bars of the theme of the approaching act, piercing the distances
with the gracious notes; then they march to the other entrance and
repeat. Presently they do this over again. Yesterday only about two
hundred people were still left in front of the house when the second
call was blown; in another half-minute they would have been in the
house, but then a thing happened which delayed them—the only solitary
thing in this world which could be relied on with certainty to
accomplish this, I suppose—an imperial princess appeared in the balcony
above them. They stopped dead in their tracks and began to gaze in a
stupor of gratitude and satisfaction. The lady presently saw that she
must disappear or the doors would be closed upon these worshipers, so
she returned to her box. This daughter-in-law of an emperor was pretty;
she had a kind face; she was without airs; she is known to be full of
common human sympathies. There are many kinds of princesses, but this
kind is the most harmful of all, for wherever they go they reconcile
people to monarchy and set back the clock of progress. The valuable
princes, the desirable princes, are the czars and their sort. By their
mere dumb presence in the world they cover with derision every argument
that can be invented in favor of royalty by the most ingenious casuist.
In his time the husband of this princess was valuable. He led a
degraded life, he ended it with his own hand in circumstances and
surroundings of a hideous sort, and was buried like a god.
In the opera-house there is a long loft back of the audience, a kind of
open gallery, in which princes are displayed. It is sacred to them; it
is the holy of holies. As soon as the filling of the house is about
complete the standing multitude turn and fix their eyes upon the
princely layout and gaze mutely and longingly and adoringly and
regretfully like sinners looking into heaven. They become rapt,
unconscious, steeped in worship. There is no spectacle anywhere that is
more pathetic than this. It is worth crossing many oceans to see. It is
somehow not the same gaze that people rivet upon a Victor Hugo, or
Niagara, or the bones of the mastodon, or the guillotine of the
Revolution, or the great pyramid, or distant Vesuvius smoking in the
sky, or any man long celebrated to you by his genius and achievements,
or thing long celebrated to you by the praises of books and
pictures—no, that gaze is only the gaze of intense curiosity, interest,
wonder, engaged in drinking delicious deep draughts that taste good all
the way down and appease and satisfy the thirst of a lifetime. Satisfy
it—that is the word. Hugo and the mastodon will still have a degree of
intense interest thereafter when encountered, but never anything
approaching the ecstasy of that first view. The interest of a prince is
different. It may be envy, it may be worship, doubtless it is a mixture
of both—and it does not satisfy its thirst with one view, or even
noticeably diminish it. Perhaps the essence of the thing is the value
which men attach to a valuable something which has come by luck and not
been earned. A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to you
than the ninety-and-nine which you had to work for, and money won at
faro or in stocks snuggles into your heart in the same way. A prince
picks up grandeur, power, and a permanent holiday and gratis support by
a pure accident, the accident of birth, and he stands always before the
grieved eye of poverty and obscurity a monumental representative of
luck. And then—supremest value of all-his is the only high fortune on
the earth which is secure. The commercial millionaire may become a
beggar; the illustrious statesman can make a vital mistake and be
dropped and forgotten; the illustrious general can lose a decisive
battle and with it the consideration of men; but once a prince always a
prince—that is to say, an imitation god, and neither hard fortune nor
an infamous character nor an addled brain nor the speech of an ass can
undeify him. By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the
most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether
deserved or undeserved. It follows without doubt or question, then,
that the most desirable position possible is that of a prince. And I
think it also follows that the so-called usurpations with which history
is littered are the most excusable misdemeanors which men have
committed. To usurp a usurpation—that is all it amounts to, isn’t it?
A prince is not to us what he is to a European, of course. We have not
been taught to regard him as a god, and so one good look at him is
likely to so nearly appease our curiosity as to make him an object of
no greater interest the next time. We want a fresh one. But it is not
so with the European. I am quite sure of it. The same old one will
answer; he never stales. Eighteen years ago I was in London and I
called at an Englishman’s house on a bleak and foggy and dismal
December afternoon to visit his wife and married daughter by
appointment. I waited half an hour and then they arrived, frozen. They
explained that they had been delayed by an unlooked-for circumstance:
while passing in the neighborhood of Marlborough House they saw a crowd
gathering and were told that the Prince of Wales was about to drive
out, so they stopped to get a sight of him. They had waited half an
hour on the sidewalk, freezing with the crowd, but were disappointed at
last—the Prince had changed his mind. I said, with a good deal of
surprise, “Is it possible that you two have lived in London all your
lives and have never seen the Prince of Wales?”
Apparently it was their turn to be surprised, for they exclaimed: “What
an idea! Why, we have seen him hundreds of times.”
They had seen him hundreds of times, yet they had waited half an hour
in the gloom and the bitter cold, in the midst of a jam of patients
from the same asylum, on the chance of seeing him again. It was a
stupefying statement, but one is obliged to believe the English, even
when they say a thing like that. I fumbled around for a remark, and got
out this one:
“I can’t understand it at all. If I had never seen General Grant I
doubt if I would do that even to get a sight of him.” With a slight
emphasis on the last word.
Their blank faces showed that they wondered where the parallel came in.
Then they said, blankly: “Of course not. He is only a President.”
It is doubtless a fact that a prince is a permanent interest, an
interest not subject to deterioration. The general who was never
defeated, the general who never held a council of war, the only general
who ever commanded a connected battle-front twelve hundred miles long,
the smith who welded together the broken parts of a great republic and
re-established it where it is quite likely to outlast all the
monarchies present and to come, was really a person of no serious
consequence to these people. To them, with their training, my General
was only a man, after all, while their Prince was clearly much more
than that—a being of a wholly unsimilar construction and constitution,
and being of no more blood and kinship with men than are the serene
eternal lights of the firmament with the poor dull tallow candles of
commerce that sputter and die and leave nothing behind but a pinch of
ashes and a stink.
I saw the last act of “Tannhauser.” I sat in the gloom and the deep
stillness, waiting—one minute, two minutes, I do not know exactly how
long—then the soft music of the hidden orchestra began to breathe its
rich, long sighs out from under the distant stage, and by and by the
drop-curtain parted in the middle and was drawn softly aside,
disclosing the twilighted wood and a wayside shrine, with a white-robed
girl praying and a man standing near. Presently that noble chorus of
men’s voices was heard approaching, and from that moment until the
closing of the curtain it was music, just music—music to make one drunk
with pleasure, music to make one take scrip and staff and beg his way
round the globe to hear it.
To such as are intending to come here in the Wagner season next year I
wish to say, bring your dinner-pail with you. If you do, you will never
cease to be thankful. If you do not, you will find it a hard fight to
save yourself from famishing in Bayreuth. Bayreuth is merely a large
village, and has no very large hotels or eating-houses. The principal
inns are the Golden Anchor and the Sun. At either of these places you
can get an excellent meal—no, I mean you can go there and see other
people get it. There is no charge for this. The town is littered with
restaurants, but they are small and bad, and they are overdriven with
custom. You must secure a table hours beforehand, and often when you
arrive you will find somebody occupying it. We have had this
experience. We have had a daily scramble for life; and when I say we, I
include shoals of people. I have the impression that the only people
who do not have to scramble are the veterans—the disciples who have
been here before and know the ropes. I think they arrive about a week
before the first opera, and engage all the tables for the season. My
tribe had tried all kinds of places—some outside of the town, a mile or
two—and have captured only nibblings and odds and ends, never in any
instance a complete and satisfying meal. Digestible? No, the reverse.
These odds and ends are going to serve as souvenirs of Bayreuth, and in
that regard their value is not to be overestimated. Photographs fade,
bric-a-brac gets lost, busts of Wagner get broken, but once you absorb
a Bayreuth-restaurant meal it is your possession and your property
until the time comes to embalm the rest of you. Some of these pilgrims
here become, in effect, cabinets; cabinets of souvenirs of Bayreuth. It
is believed among scientists that you could examine the crop of a dead
Bayreuth pilgrim anywhere in the earth and tell where he came from. But
I like this ballast. I think a “Hermitage” scrap-up at eight in the
evening, when all the famine-breeders have been there and laid in their
mementoes and gone, is the quietest thing you can lay on your keelson
except gravel.
THURSDAY.—They keep two teams of singers in stock for the chief roles,
and one of these is composed of the most renowned artists in the world,
with Materna and Alvary in the lead. I suppose a double team is
necessary; doubtless a single team would die of exhaustion in a week,
for all the plays last from four in the afternoon till ten at night.
Nearly all the labor falls upon the half-dozen head singers, and
apparently they are required to furnish all the noise they can for the
money. If they feel a soft, whispery, mysterious feeling they are
required to open out and let the public know it. Operas are given only
on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with three days of
ostensible rest per week, and two teams to do the four operas; but the
ostensible rest is devoted largely to rehearsing. It is said that the
off days are devoted to rehearsing from some time in the morning till
ten at night. Are there two orchestras also? It is quite likely, since
there are one hundred and ten names in the orchestra list.
Yesterday the opera was “Tristan and Isolde.” I have seen all sorts of
audiences—at theaters, operas, concerts, lectures, sermons,
funerals—but none which was twin to the Wagner audience of Bayreuth for
fixed and reverential attention. Absolute attention and petrified
retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning
of it. You detect no movement in the solid mass of heads and shoulders.
You seem to sit with the dead in the gloom of a tomb. You know that
they are being stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are
times when they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their
approbation, and times when tears are running down their faces, and it
would be a relief to free their pent emotions in sobs or screams; yet
you hear not one utterance till the curtain swings together and the
closing strains have slowly faded out and died; then the dead rise with
one impulse and shake the building with their applause. Every seat is
full in the first act; there is not a vacant one in the last. If a man
would be conspicuous, let him come here and retire from the house in
the midst of an act. It would make him celebrated.
This audience reminds me of nothing I have ever seen and of nothing I
have read about except the city in the Arabian tale where all the
inhabitants have been turned to brass and the traveler finds them after
centuries mute, motionless, and still retaining the attitudes which
they last knew in life. Here the Wagner audience dress as they please,
and sit in the dark and worship in silence. At the Metropolitan in New
York they sit in a glare, and wear their showiest harness; they hum
airs, they squeak fans, they titter, and they gabble all the time. In
some of the boxes the conversation and laughter are so loud as to
divide the attention of the house with the stage. In large measure the
Metropolitan is a show-case for rich fashionables who are not trained
in Wagnerian music and have no reverence for it, but who like to
promote art and show their clothes.
Can that be an agreeable atmosphere to persons in whom this music
produces a sort of divine ecstasy and to whom its creator is a very
deity, his stage a temple, the works of his brain and hands consecrated
things, and the partaking of them with eye and ear a sacred solemnity?
Manifestly, no. Then, perhaps the temporary expatriation, the tedious
traversing of seas and continents, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth stands
explained. These devotees would worship in an atmosphere of devotion.
It is only here that they can find it without fleck or blemish or any
worldly pollution. In this remote village there are no sights to see,
there is no newspaper to intrude the worries of the distant world,
there is nothing going on, it is always Sunday. The pilgrim wends to
his temple out of town, sits out his moving service, returns to his bed
with his heart and soul and his body exhausted by long hours of
tremendous emotion, and he is in no fit condition to do anything but to
lie torpid and slowly gather back life and strength for the next
service. This opera of “Tristan and Isolde” last night broke the hearts
of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some who have
heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I
feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person
in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man
where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the
learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.
But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one
of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen
anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine
and real as this devotion.
FRIDAY.—Yesterday’s opera was “Parsifal” again. The others went and
they show marked advance in appreciation; but I went hunting for relics
and reminders of the Margravine Wilhelmina, she of the imperishable
“Memoirs.” I am properly grateful to her for her (unconscious) satire
upon monarchy and nobility, and therefore nothing which her hand
touched or her eye looked upon is indifferent to me. I am her pilgrim;
the rest of this multitude here are Wagner’s.
TUESDAY.—I have seen my last two operas; my season is ended, and we
cross over into Bohemia this afternoon. I was supposing that my musical
regeneration was accomplished and perfected, because I enjoyed both of
these operas, singing and all, and, moreover, one of them was
“Parsifal,” but the experts have disenchanted me. They say:
“Singing! That wasn’t singing; that was the wailing, screeching of
third-rate obscurities, palmed off on us in the interest of economy.”
Well, I ought to have recognized the sign—the old, sure sign that has
never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it
means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has
saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many
a chromo. However, my base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; I
was the only man out of thirty-two hundred who got his money back on
those two operas.