They are giving a cycle of Mozart operas at Munich, at the Hof-Theater,
to follow the Wagner operas at the Prinz-Regenten-Theatre; and I stayed,
on my way to Salzburg, to hear "Die Zauberflöte." It was perfectly
given, with a small, choice orchestra under Herr Zumpe, and with every
part except the tenor's admirably sung and acted. Herr Julius Zarest,
from Hanover, was particularly good as Papageno; the Eva of "Die
Meistersinger" made an equally good Pamina. And it was staged under Herr
von Possart's direction, as suitably and as successfully, in its
different way, as the Wagner opera had been. The sombre Egyptian scenes
of this odd story, with its menagerie and its pantomime transformation,
were turned into a thrilling spectacle, and by means of nothing but a
little canvas and paint and limelight. It could have cost very little,
compared with an English Shakespeare revival, let us say; but how
infinitely more spectacular, in the good sense, it was! Every effect was
significant, perfectly in its place, doing just what it had to do, and
without thrusting itself forward for separate admiration. German art of
to-day is all decorative, and it is at its best when it is applied to
the scenery of the stage. Its fault, in serious painting, is that it is
too theatrical, it is too anxious to be full of too many qualities
besides the qualities of good painting. It is too emphatic, it is meant
for artificial light. If Franz Stuck would paint for the stage, instead
of using his vigorous brush to paint nature without distinction and
nightmares without imagination on easel-canvases, he would do, perhaps
rather better, just what these scene-painters do, with so much skill and
taste. They have the sense of effective decoration; and German art, at
present, is almost wholly limited to that sense.
I listened, with the full consent of my eyes, to the lovely music, which
played round the story like light transfiguring a masquerade; and now,
by a lucky chance, I can brood over it here in Salzburg, where Mozart
was born, where he lived, where the house in which he wrote the opera is
to be seen, a little garden-house brought over from Vienna and set down
where it should always have been, high up among the pinewoods of the
Capuzinerberg. I find myself wondering how much Mozart took to himself,
how much went to his making, in this exquisite place, set in a hollow of
great hills, from which, if you look down upon it, it has the air of a
little toy town out of a Noah's Ark, set square in a clean, trim,
perfectly flat map of meadows, with its flat roofs, packed close
together on each side of a long, winding river, which trails across the
whole breadth of the plain. From the midst of the town you look up
everywhere at heights; rocks covered with pine-trees, beyond them hills
hooded with white clouds, great soft walls of darkness, on which the
mist is like the bloom of a plum; and, right above you, the castle, on
its steep rock swathed in trees, with its grey walls and turrets, like
the castle which one has imagined for all the knights of all the
romances. All this, no doubt, entered into the soul of Mozart, and had
its meaning for him; but where I seem actually to see him, where I can
fancy him walking most often, and hearing more sounds than elsewhere
come to him through his eyes and his senses, in the Mirabell-Garten,
which lies behind the palace built by an Archbishop of Salzburg in the
seventeenth century, and which is laid out in the conventional French
fashion, with a harmony that I find in few other gardens. I have never
walked in a garden which seemed to keep itself so reticently within its
own severe and gracious limits. The trees themselves seem to grow
naturally into the pattern of this garden, with its formal alleys, in
which the birds fly in and out of the trellised roofs, its square-cut
bushes, its low stone balustrades, its tall urns out of which droop
trails of pink and green, its round flower-beds, each of a single
colour, set at regular intervals on the grass, its tiny fountain
dripping faintly into a green and brown pool; the long, sad lines of
the Archbishop's Palace, off which the brown paint is peeling; the whole
sad charm, dainty melancholy, formal beauty, and autumnal air of it. It
was in the Mirabell-Garten that I seemed nearest to Mozart.
The music of Mozart, as one hears it in "Die Zauberflöte," is music
without desire, music content with beauty, and to be itself. It has the
firm outlines of Dürer or of Botticelli, with the same constraint within
a fixed form, if one compares it with the Titian-like freedom and
splendour of Wagner. In hearing Mozart I saw Botticelli's "Spring"; in
hearing Wagner I had seen the Titian "Scourging of Christ." Mozart has
what Coventry Patmore called "a glittering peace": to Patmore that
quality distinguished supreme art, and, indeed, the art of Mozart is, in
its kind, supreme. It has an adorable purity of form, and it has no need
to look outside those limits which it has found or fixed for itself.
Mozart cares little, as a rule, for what he has to express; but he
cares infinitely for the way in which he expresses everything, and,
through the mere emotional power of the notes themselves, he conveys to
us all that he cares to convey: awe, for instance, in those solemn
scenes of the priests of Isis. He is a magician, who plays with his
magic, and can be gay, out of mere pleasant idleness, fooling with
Papagenus as Shakespeare fools in "Twelfth-Night." "Die Zauberflöte" is
really a very fine kind of pantomime, to which music lends itself in the
spirit of the thing, yet without condescending to be grotesque. The duet
of Papagenus and Papagena is absolutely comic, but it is as lovely as a
duet of two birds, of less flaming feather. As the lovers ascend through
fires and floods, only the piping of the magic flute is heard in the
orchestra: imagine Wagner threading it into the web of a great
orchestral pattern! For Mozart it was enough, and for his art, it was
enough. He gives you harmony which does not need to mean anything
outside itself, in order to be supremely beautiful; and he gives you
beauty with a certain exquisite formality, not caring to go beyond the
lines which contain that reticent, sufficient charm of the
Mirabell-Garten.