In saying, as we may truly say, that Wagner made music pictorial, it
should be remembered that there is nothing new in the aim, only in the
continuity of its success. Haydn, in his "Creation," evoked landscapes,
giving them precision by an almost mechanical imitation of cuckoo and
nightingale. Trees had rustled and water flowed in the music of every
composer. But with Wagner it may be said that the landscape of his music
moves before our eyes as clearly as the moving scenery with which he
does but accentuate it; and it is always there, not a decor, but a
world, the natural world in the midst of which his people of the drama
live their passionate life, and a world in sympathy with all their
passion. And in his audible representation of natural sounds and natural
sights he does, consummately, what others have only tried, more or less
well, to do. When, in the past at least, the critics objected to the
realism of his imitative effects, they forgot that all other composers,
at one time or another, had tried to be just as imitative, but had not
succeeded so well in their imitations. Wagner, in his painting, is the
Turner of music. He brings us nature, heroically exalted, full of fiery
splendour, but nature as if caught in a mirror, not arranged, subdued,
composed, for the frame of a picture. He is afraid of no realism,
however mean, because he has confidence in nature as it is, apprehended
with all the clairvoyance of emotion.
Between the abyss of the music, out of which the world rises up with all
its voices, and the rocks and clouds, in which the scenery carries us
onward to the last horizon of the world, gods and men act out the brief
human tragedy, as if on a narrow island in the midst of a great sea. A
few steps this way or that will plunge them into darkness; the darkness
awaits them, however they succeed or fail, whether they live nobly or
ignobly, in the interval; but the interval absorbs them, as if it were
to be eternity, and we see them rejoicing and suffering with an
abandonment to the moment which intensifies the pathos of what we know
is futile. Love, in Wagner, is so ecstatic and so terrible, because it
must compass all its anguish and delight into an immortal moment, before
which there is only a great darkness, and only a great darkness
afterwards. Sorrow is so lofty and so consoling because it is no less
conscious of its passing hour.
And meanwhile action is not everything, as it is for other makers of
drama; is but one among many modes of the expression of life. Those long
narratives, which some find so tedious, so undramatic, are part of
Wagner's protest against the frequently false emphasis of action. In
Wagner anticipation and memory are seen to be often equally intense with
the instant of realisation. Siegfried is living with at least as
powerful and significant a life when he lies under the trees listening
to the song of the birds as when he is killing the dragon. And it is for
this that the "motives," which are after all only the materialising of
memory, were created by Wagner. These motives, by which the true action
of the drama expresses itself, are a symbol of the inner life, of its
preponderance over outward event, and, in their guidance of the music,
their indication of the real current of interest, have a spiritualising
effect upon both music and action, instead of, as was once thought,
materialising both.
Wagner's aim at expressing the soul of things is still further helped by
his system of continuous, unresolved melody. The melody which
circumscribes itself like Giotto's _O_ is almost as tangible a thing as
a statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air,
flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying
poise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to wood
and wind, is more than a mere heightening of speech: it partakes of the
nature of thought, but it is more than thought; it is the whole
expression of the subconscious life, saying more of himself than any
person of the drama has ever found in his own soul.
It is here that Wagner unites with the greatest dramatists, and
distinguishes himself from the contemporary heresy of Ibsen, whose only
too probable people speak a language exactly on the level of their desks
and their shop-counters. Except in the "Meistersinger," all Wagner's
personages are heroic, and for the most part those supreme sublimations
of humanity, the people of legend, Tannhauser, Tristan, Siegfried,
Parsifal, have at once all that is in humanity and more than is hi
humanity. Their place in a national legend permits them, without
disturbing our critical sense of the probability of things, a superhuman
passion; for they are ideals, this of chivalry, that of love, this of
the bravery, that of the purity, of youth. Yet Wagner employs infinite
devices to give them more and more of verisimilitude; modulating song,
for instance, into a kind of chant which we can almost take for actual
speech. It is thus the more interesting to note the point to which
realism conducts him, the limit at which it stops, his conception of a
spiritual reality which begins where realism leaves off.
And, in his treatment of scenery also, we have to observe the admirable
dexterity of his compromises. The supernatural is accepted frankly with
almost the childish popular belief in a dragon rolling a loathly bulk
painfully, and breathing smoke. But note that the dragon, when it is
thrown back into the pit, falls without sound; note that the combats are
without the ghastly and foolish modern tricks of blood and disfigurement;
note how the crowds pose as in a good picture, with slow gestures, and
without intrusive individual pantomime. As I have said in speaking of
"Parsifal," there is one rhythm throughout; music, action, speech, all
obey it. When Brünnhilde awakens after her long sleep, the music is an
immense thanksgiving for light, and all her being finds expression in a
great embracing movement towards the delight of day. Siegfried stands
silent for I know not what space of time; and it is in silence always,
with a wave-like or flame-like music surging about them, crying out of
the depths for them, that all the lovers in Wagner love at first sight.
Tristan, when he has drunk the potion; Siegmund, when Sieglinde gives
him to drink; Siegfried, when Brünnhilde awakens to the world and to
him: it is always in the silence of rapture that love is given and
returned. And the gesture, subdued into a gravity almost sorrowful (as
if love and the thought of death came always together, the thought of
the only ending of a mortal eternity), renders the inmost meaning of the
music as no Italian gesture, which is the vehemence of first thoughts
and the excitement of the senses, could ever render it. That slow
rhythm, which in Wagner is like the rhythm of the world flowing onwards
from its first breathing out of chaos, as we hear it in the opening
notes of the "Ring," seems to broaden outwards like ripples on an
infinite sea, throughout the whole work of Wagner.
And now turn from this elemental music, in which the sense of all human
things is expressed with the dignity of the elements themselves, to all
other operatic music, in which, however noble the music as music (think
of Gluck, of Mozart, of Beethoven!), it is for the most part fettered to
a little accidental comedy or tragedy, in which two lovers are jealous,
or someone is wrongly imprisoned, or a libertine seduces a few women.
Here music is like a god speaking the language of savages, and lowering
his supreme intellect to the level of their speech. The melodious voice
remains, but the divine meaning has gone out of the words. Only in
Wagner does God speak to men in his own language.