Modern Musical Drift
MODERN MUSICAL DRIFT
By
W. J. Henderson
Author of "The Story of Music," "Preludes and
Studies," etc., etc.
Longmans, Green, and Co.
91 and 93 Fifth Avenue, New York
London and Bombay
1904
_Copyright, 1904_,
BY LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
_All rights reserved_
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
_TO MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE,
JAMES HUNEKER._
_Dear James_:
_Beside the ebon Styx
The brood harmonious wanders slow.
A backward gaze on earth they fix,
And ask, "Where doth dear Music go?"_
_I fancy Palestrina stares,
And good Scarlatti gasps for breath,
While Handel, with his figured airs,
Bemoans poor Music's early death._
_Old Haydn shakes his long peruke,
And Mozart wags his pendant cue,
As both record their soft rebuke:
"What is it that these moderns do?"_
_Alone in all that troubled throng
One moves with calm, unruffled brow;
For still Sebastian's voice is strong
To say, "'Twas I who taught them how."_
_So when the storms discordant brew,
You smile at me across the house;
For well you know there's nothing new,
Not even (pardon!) in your Strauss._
_Except, perhaps, a fine disguise
Of leading motives, wood and strings,
Which make a score look wondrous wise,
And seem to mean to many things._
_So weave your fancies; I'll weave mine;
And let them wander, dark or bright.
The Lords of Art have graven fine;
Perchance we both discern aright._
_W. J. H._
_August, 1904._
CONTENTS
_PARSIFALIA_ PAGE
I. A PURE FOOL IN THE NEW WORLD 1
II. ETHICS AND ÆSTHETICS 13
III. THE NATIONAL RELIGIOUS DRAMA 27
_DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN_
I. A FUTILE GOD AND A POTENT DEVIL 39
II. THE WOMAN AND THE SERPENT 55
III. BACK-WORLDS GODS AND OVER-WOMAN 69
_ISOLDE'S SERVING-WOMAN_ 85
_RICHARD STRAUSS_
I. THE HISTORICAL SURVEY 98
II. THE ÆSTHETIC VIEW 121
III. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? 139
IV. STRAUSS AND THE SONG WRITERS 156
_AUX ITALIENS_
I. ITALIAN OPERA OF TO-DAY 168
II. THE CLASSIC OF THE UNPROGRESSIVE 185
_THE ORATORIO OF TO-DAY_ 195
_Modern Musical Drift_
PARSIFALIA
I.--A PURE FOOL IN THE NEW WORLD
The Holy Grail!--I trust
We are green in heaven's eyes.
TENNYSON, _The Holy Grail_.
It was the night before Christmas. The city of Gotham was surfeited
with the vast spectacle of wealth in its annual orgy of expenditure.
Women had careered madly through the savings of a twelvemonth;
and desperate husbands, driven almost to the abyss of insanity,
had plunged blindly into the vortex of buying, and mortgaged the
labor of the next half-year. It was the merry Yule-tide, when every
self-respecting New Yorker feels that it is incumbent upon him to
assume a bank account, if he have it not, and to buy for his neighbor
Christmas gifts more expensive than the neighbor can buy for him.
On the eve of Christmas Day it seemed as if half the city had turned
to its last madness, for Wagner's "Parsifal," torn from the holy
seclusion of Baireuth by the ruthless hand of an American showman
(from Vienna), was produced at the Metropolitan Opera-House for the
first time in the New World. The fiat had gone forth that all prices
of admission were to be doubled at the box office; and it was no
secret that sidewalk venders of tickets were charging five times
the figures nominated in the bond. It had been made known that the
performance would begin at five of the clock in the afternoon, and
that after the first act there would be an intermission of nearly two
hours for rest and refreshment.
Restaurateurs in the neighborhood of the opera-house had sung their
"Laus Deo" and marked up their schedule of charges. Society had been
vainly interrogated by reporters as to how it intended to dress for a
solemn festival, split between afternoon and evening. Trumpeters had
been secured to blow selected motives to warn the faithful to their
seats, and it had been published in very large type that against the
singers engaged in the production had been launched the curse of
Wahnfried. Nothing had been neglected that might add fresh fire to
the flaming fever of extravagance.
At the appointed hour the ceremonial of the intoning of the motives
was performed, and a little later the curtains swung wide to disclose
the sylvan retreat near the Castle of Monsalvat. The deed was
accomplished. The black Alberich of the Yankee ooze had wrested from
its Baireuth bed the Rheingold of the Wagner family, and the gods of
the Wahnfried hearthstone shivered in their Dämmerung.
A vast and strange assemblage sat in bewildered silence at the
performance, and, having heard the martial pæans of much free
advertising, went away thrilled with the belief that it had assisted
at the introduction to America of the "masterpiece" of Wagner. O ye
Norse gods and little fish-maidens! There was a Wagner once--but no
matter.
What kind of impression did this drama make upon the unprejudiced
and equipoised mind? What is the real truth about this huge ragoût
of mysticism and orchestration which in the looming shadows of the
Festspielhaus is called "sacred"? The story of "Parsifal" has been
told over and over again. The themes are becomingly catalogued in the
handbooks of Wolzogen, Heinz, and Kufferath. The very boarding-school
girls smirk at one another as they hum "Der Reine Thor," and
rosy-cheeked boys can whistle the Klingsor theme. There is no need to
rehearse here either the story or the music. But let us come at once
to some conclusions drawn from a cool, dispassionate study of a dozen
performances of "Parsifal" beyond the factitious influences created
by the Baireuth exaltation.
"Parsifal" is the child of Wagner's artistic decrepitude. It is a
decrescendo in inspiration, a ritardando in invention. More than any
other drama of Wagner does it rely upon the dazzling of the eye to
dull the keenness of the musical ear. It is a most imposing pageant
set to unimposing music. Wagner fired heaven once with the immolation
of Brünnhilde. It was not to be done again. The light on the Holy
Grail is white and cold.
The entire machinery of the familiar Wagnerian drama is here; but
the scene painter, the stage manager, the mechanician, and the
electrician bravely hold up the hands of the musician. Cast any aged
rags of scenery on the stage; let the lights be as dim and flickering
as the dying fancies of Adrian; let the actors be of the breed of
the subsidized provincial German theatre, and yet the last act of
"Tristan und Isolde" will peal its eloquence into the heart and blast
the soul with the lightnings of genius. Give the first act of "Die
Walküre," most hackneyed of all great acts, the tottering timbers of
battered scenes, a moonlight of such Prussian blue as never was on
sea or land, and still the might and power of its pulsating passion
will conquer.
But strip "Parsifal" of its scenic and mechanic glories, and you
will lay bare the skeleton of a system with only a few shreds of the
flesh left upon it. The poem of "Parsifal" is almost utterly devoid
of those great basic elements which make human life dramatic for men
and women. Nowhere in it do we see, as in Wagner's other works, the
primeval man and woman at gaze upon each other in the naked barbaric
splendor of desire. Instead of the one passion which makes plays, we
are asked to consider the suffering of a man who is as remote from
our common sympathies as his figure is from our eyes when it lies
recumbent in the seat behind the altar of the Grail.
Amfortas is held up as typical of the sufferings of humanity under
the curse of carnal sin. Tannhäuser is more eloquent than a thousand
of him. We see Tannhäuser in the grip of the temptress; of the sin
of Amfortas we hear talk, talk, talk; while the sufferer himself is
carried about upon a litter,--a charnel-house sight,--making his
unending moan to the patient stars.
The hero of the story, young Parsifal, comes before us looking like
young Siegfried and wearing a musical tag of similar style. In
the last act he is bearded and armored, again like Siegfried, and
his theme is exfoliated in an umbrageous harmony of trumpets and
trombones. But what a tenuous echo he is, after all! Siegfried blazes
with all the glory of manhood: he has hot blood in his veins; and he
carves his way through fire and the wrath of a god to the mountain of
his heart's desire.
Parsifal loves no woman. He cannot, for he is the embodiment of
ascetic, or at least monastic, denial. The one emotion which he
submits for our hearts is pity, a most excellent emotion and admitted
to be akin to love. A highly respected sister-in-law of love it may
be; but love is love, and spins the big round world down the grooves
of time.
As an ethical basis of this drama, we are asked to accept a
philosophy of pity, founded on the ethics of Arthur Schopenhauer and
amplified by the adoption of certain of the teachings of Buddha.
Instead of those beautiful doctrines of redemption through the
love and self-sacrifice of woman, so eloquently preached in some
of Wagner's other dramas, we are besought to look upon woman as a
temptress, and renunciation of love as the highway to heaven.
As the exemplar of the claim of pity, we are presented with
the picture of the wounded Amfortas, who is a lay figure of
incomprehensible personality. He is shown in the first act, and the
pity doctrine is further preached in the pother made over the killing
of the swan (such a big, fat, able-bodied swan!). As the master of
evil we behold Klingsor, who comes before us in the first scene of
the second act with more paraphernalia of slate-green walls, blue
smoke, and exclamatory incantations than Faust ever had in his salad
days at the Paris Grand Opera.
Kundry, the only woman in the play, is an ill-made muddle of
inhumanity, who never commands a single instant of sympathy. She
strives by service to atone for her sins, which are committed under
the spell of Klingsor. She has neither love nor passion. Gurnemanz,
the aged knight, is a wearisome talker. He tells the story of his
life or any one else's life to whomsoever will listen. The audience
cannot escape.
With the exception of Klingsor and his "flower-girls"--a charming
euphemism--these puppets are shown to us in the first scene, in which
the necessary explanations are made in long-winded speeches, mostly
by Gurnemanz, seated on a rock and reciting like weary Wotan in Act
II. of "Die Walküre." When this doddering graphophone comes to lead
Parsifal to the castle of the Grail, Wagner sorts over his old plans
and specifications and selects Siegfried's Rhine Journey.
But this time it is a sedate and pious progress finishing with bells
and chorals. Nevertheless, it is one of the fine spots in the work.
When the bells are in tune, it is imposing. The scenery changes in an
ingenious and effective panorama.
Then comes the crown of the act and the noblest scene in the
work,--the unveiling of the Grail and the ceremony of the Last
Supper. This is not the time for a discussion of the propriety of
putting such matters on the stage. Suffice it to say, that here
Wagner has accomplished one of the most triumphant demonstrations of
the effectiveness of his organic union of the arts tributary to the
drama. Music, text, action, scenic form and color, all work together
in an irresistibly potent symphony of symbolism, which no reverent
man can hear and see without emotion. It makes "Parsifal" almost
persuasive.
The second act opens with the exhibition of Klingsor, as already
noted. He is as unreal as the purple light which illumines Kundry
when he summons her from the trapdoor in the stage. She rises like
Mother Erda in "Siegfried," Act III., but, oh, so different! Away
with such cheap and paltry claptrap as this scene! Poor Wagner, he
had to write it to explain himself; and in "Parsifal" he needed a lot
of explanation. Not all the Ellises nor Wolzogens in the world could
blot out the Drury Lane stain of this one scene. Even the exclamatory
"Ha, ha!" of the time-dishonored stage villain is not spared us.
The second scene of the act is the magic garden of flower-maidens,
Venusberg, No. 2. No. 1 is much better, both dramatically and
musically. This one is "Tannhäuser" and water, and very poor water
at that. Yet it is the scene which will please the populace most,
when the flower-girls are pretty and graceful, for their music is
languorous and suggestive of Leo Delibes raised to the seventh power.
But there is nothing human in this whole scene. Kundry, unlike
Venus, does not love the man she tempts. Venus is at the heart a
passionate, despairing woman. Kundry is the deputed and bewitched
instrument of a Wahnfried Cagliostro. Her deed is that of a woman of
the pavement; her extenuation the pitiful and transparent fact that
she plies her trade in a trance and under an irresistible spell. We
see her put in the trance; we see her come out of it. Before and
after it she is a rough and revolting yokel with tangled black locks
and a gunny bag for her garb. In the trance she is transformed by the
power of the magician to a beautiful blonde in a diaphanous décolleté
gown.
The symbolism of the whole scene is weak and tottering. The logic of
the enlightenment of Parsifal by the long-drawn kiss with wind and
string accompaniment (see "Siegfried," Act III.) is beyond finite
conception. The symbolism of the waking of a sleeping Valkyr maiden
by the first kiss of love is something that even the most hardened
society woman might understand; but the employment of a courtesan's
salute to enlighten a pure fool by pity is a device which swings
futile between heaven and earth.
The last act is a flat desert of tedium, with oases of musical
verdure. Gurnemanz has more opportunities to lecture on Amfortas,
Good Friday, and similar topics, but even with the aid of Wagner's
own musical illustrations he is uninteresting. The foot-washing
episode is a pitiable and shocking plagiarism from the life of
Christ. The central figure, with its beard, its long hair, and its
light-tinted robe, is so like the Good Shepherd of the paintings that
it suggests an automaton replica. And this is all so inessential. It
is dragged in to give the thing a sacred atmosphere.
The really beautiful places in the first scene of the last act are
the splendid proclamation of the Grail theme after the baptism of
Parsifal--one of the few bursts of power which recall the Wagner of
"Die Walküre"--and the ineffably lovely peacefulness of the Good
Friday music. This indeed is an inspired page in the score; but it
was written twenty-five years before the drama was produced.
The final scene is a weak and diluted repetition of the second scene
of the first act. This time Parsifal unveils the Grail. The music
is necessarily built of the same materials. It does not achieve its
effect. Neither is the pictorial impression as deep. We have seen
it all before. The gorgeous, pealing brass passage at the second
entrance to the Grail hall is the most muscular thing in the whole
act, but it stands by itself. It seems to have no logical place in
the musical scheme.
The score of this drama is mostly a long, faint echo of Wagner's
greatest works. Siegfried vainly strives to animate this Parsifalian
puppet of renunciation with the blood of the Volsung woe. Cloudlike
shreds of "Tristan und Isolde" struggle to float sunset tints across
this pallid sky. All is copying, futile, without inspiration,
without newness,--a hotch-potch of the old marketable materials made
over with much constructive skill, but with commercial thrift and
inartistic insincerity. There is hardly a note of honest æsthetic
conviction in the whole thing. One is inclined to think that Wagner
did not believe in it himself.
These, then, are the conclusions gathered from performances in
a common opera-house of Wagner's religious, symbolical, ethical,
philosophical, and highly gilded summary of his artistic creed. When
this work is played in Baireuth, where churchly airs are assumed
and the people robe their spirits in sackcloth and ashes, the
impression is different. But now that "Parsifal" has come out into
the light of morning and faced the cold glare of the work-day world,
it must be measured by the artistic standards which are applied to
Wagner's other dramas. Weighed in the balance with "Tristan und
Isolde" or any of the "Ring" works, except perhaps "Rheingold," to
which it is artistically not a stranger, it must be found wanting.
Beside "Tannhäuser," which treats the same subject, it is a mass of
glittering artificialities. Wagner was wise in wishing that this
drama should be preserved for home consumption.
II.--ETHICS AND ÆSTHETICS
The cut nails of machine divinity may be driven in, but they
won't clinch.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES,
_The Professor at the Breakfast Table_, Ch. IV.
There was no question that Gotham--wicked, wayward Gotham--was much
stirred up by this production. It was generally accepted as a kind
of religious ceremony, as to which no right-minded gentleman should
deliver himself of critical comment. Yet there were some picturesque
exceptions to the general state. A few ministers of the Gospel sprang
to the pulpit or the interviewer, and descanted in glowing terms on
the outrageous irreligion of the thing, or rather on the sacrilege of
the representation by "painted actors" of incidents in the life of
Christ. Of course these gentlemen had not taken the trouble to study
the work in the original, and some of them showed conclusively that
they were utterly ignorant of it.
But this chanced to be one of those cases in which the pulpit is not
immune. The ignorance of the reverend utterers of sweeping statements
was blithely exposed by some of the men whose business it has been
for many years to study the works of Wagner. Let us, then, in all
justice and humility, with due observance of the Grail adorers on the
one side and the objecting pulpit orators on the other, ask ourselves
how much of real Christianity is disclosed in "Parsifal." How much
more of German mystic philosophy, of mediævalism, of the teachings of
Siddartha, and lastly of pure paganism? What is this work, after all,
but a summary of the blind gropings of the imaginative Wagner after a
philosophy beyond his reach?
Why all this pother about the sacrilege of putting the Holy Grail on
the stage? Was there ever a Holy Grail? Is the green glass chalice
which now reposes peacefully in Genoa a holy vessel? Did the blood of
Christ ever sanctify it? Did Joseph of Arimathea catch the precious
drops in it; and was it really the vessel used at the Last Supper of
Jesus and his apostles?
The ceremony of the Last Supper is unquestionably represented in a
crude manner in Wagner's drama, where it is mixed with a pictorial
representation of the legendary tale that the Christians may make
objection with good ground. The place which the communion occupies in
the ceremonies of the Church is such that to see it made part of a
public theatrical performance, no matter how solemn, or how artistic,
or how honest in its purpose to treat holy things reverentially, must
be repugnant to every Christian mind.
As to this, nothing more need be said. Of the effect of the
representation on an audience there can be no doubt. It is impressive
in the highest degree. The emotions caused by the unveiling scene are
a tribute to the power of theatrical art. But let it be thoroughly
understood that the stage picture and the music are the most
influential elements. Taking that scene as a point of suggestion,
let us ask ourselves how much of real Christianity there is in
"Parsifal." Let us examine the ethics of the drama and probe its
philosophy.
The doctrine of enlightenment by pity, preached so insistently in
this drama, has no relation to Christianity. The religion of Jesus
Christ knows of but one enlightenment, that by faith. It is "he that
believeth," not he that pitieth. The enlightenment of faith enables
the Christian to conceive God. But what do we find in "Parsifal"?
A man has committed a mortal sin, in that he has fallen from that
state of personal chastity in which the servants of the Holy Grail
are required to live. The outward and visible sign of his fall is
an immediate physical (with accompanying spiritual) punishment,
inflicted by the impious hand of the Tempter himself.
Here Wagner follows the story as told by Chrétien des Troyes, and
not the version of Wolfram von Eschenbach. Chrétien made the spear
that with which Longinus pierced the side of the Saviour. Wolfram
made it simply a poisoned lance. Wagner accepted the sacred spear,
because he was always an eager searcher after ethical significance,
even when there was less virtue in it than there is in this one. The
wound of the sacred lance is more than physical; it is a mortal hurt
of the soul. Wagner tells us that for such a wound there can be but
one cure, a touch of the selfsame lance in the hands of one who has
successfully withstood the temptation to which the sufferer fell a
victim.
Very well. There is absolutely no authority for such a conclusion.
It is a bit of mediæval religious mysticism, an adaptation of the
fabulous miracles. Wagner, however, has a right to manufacture
miracles for a fabulous story. He has as much right to do it in
the tale of the Holy Grail as he had in the matter of Hagen's
wonder-working beverages in "Götterdämmerung."
But when he tells us that the reason for Parsifal's action is
enlightenment by pity, he goes still farther away from the dogmas
and doctrines of Christianity and moves through the philosophy of
Arthur Schopenhauer toward the religion of the Buddha. It is a grave
error to relegate to a secondary place the influence of Schopenhauer
on Wagner and to credit the poet-composer with a direct entry into
the teachings of the Gautama. We must bear in mind continually that
Wagner got from Schopenhauer two great doctrines, one artistic, and
the other ethical.
Schopenhauer propounded as the basis of his æsthetic system the
theorem that it is the business of art to represent to us the eternal
essence of things by means of prototypes. The conditions of time
and place, cause and tendency, must be cleared away, and the naked
Eternal Idea underneath disclosed. The discernment and revelation of
this Idea are the duty and privilege of art.
Wagner, then, sought to set forth his personages and their actions
as symbolical. They were to be visual embodiments of Eternal Ideas.
Amfortas is the sinner in the agony of his punishment. Parsifal
is the savior, the pure one who can redeem; Klingsor is the evil
one, and Kundry the unwilling slave of his power. If here we find
ourselves involved in some contradictions, let us be patient.
Wagner's logic is that of a poet and a musician. It will not stand
the test of the metaphysician.
But to resume. The ethical doctrine which the composer obtained from
Schopenhauer was more significant in its results. Schopenhauer's
philosophic system need not be set forth here. Suffice it to say that
ethically its only possible outcome was negative. The world is so bad
that the chief end of man should be to get out of it.
To reach the state of mind in which that end is the chief object,
one must rid himself of all desire and yearn to arrive at a complete
negation of the will to live. Recall "Tristan und Isolde." The first
step toward the negation of the will to live is perfect sympathy with
suffering. Then comes asceticism, which leads directly away from life
toward a condition of abstraction.
Here the thought touches the monasticism of the early Church and
avows a kinship with the Buddhistic doctrine. Withdrawal from the
world and safety by absorption into the universal unconsciousness
were the Buddhist's hope of peace. But neither Gautama nor
Schopenhauer had any definite, positive reason for this. Here the
early monk, who was looking out for the salvation of his own precious
soul and letting other people's souls take care of themselves, came
nearer to the ideals of Wagner as set forth in "Parsifal."
No, Schopenhauer did not teach Wagner the doctrine of "enlightenment
by pity," for with Schopenhauer pity was not enlightenment, but the
beginning of a personal abstraction. A man was sorry for others
because they were in the world, the very worst place a man could
inhabit. His sensuous nature made him like the things he found here
(such as flower-maidens, for example); and his duty was to mortify
the flesh, get rid of all his mortal appetites, live in asceticism,
and die as soon as possible. Wagner was fond of grafting his own
ideas on the philosophical systems of bigger men than himself. So
he invented this doctrine of enlightenment. How he worked out his
psychologic plan we shall see presently.
No doubt Wagner had his eye on Buddhism when he wrote "Parsifal."
It is history that he once contemplated a Buddhistic drama, called
"The Victors," in which he was to preach the doctrine of fleshly
renunciation and salvation through the mortification of desire. But
he abandoned the scheme. The story was Eastern, and he did some
delving in Oriental literature.
How the "Four Sublime Verities" of Gautama, the founder of the
Buddhistic religion, must have appealed to him! These were, first,
that pain exists; second, that the cause of pain is desire or
attachment; third, that pain can be ended by Nirvana; and fourth, how
to attain Nirvana.
The way to Nirvana is hard, much harder than the path to the
Christian Heaven, for the man must walk it without aid. There is no
vicarious sacrifice in the religion of Siddartha. You must walk the
wine-press alone, and drink of the dregs of life. All the best of the
Ten Commandments are found in the precepts of this religion. Added to
them are minor commands looking to complete abstraction.
For example, a Bhikshu (an order of monk) is forbidden to look at
or converse with a woman lest emotion should disturb the serene
indifference of his soul. He must not even save his mother if she is
drowning, except with a long stick reached toward her.
"To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock," seems to have been
the chief business of the founder. Thus is he always represented
cross-legged and contemplative, with eyes downcast, "cleaving with
the thunderbolt of science the mountain of ignorance," and perceiving
the illusory nature of all things. So he comes at last to that state
in which he breaks the bonds binding him to existence and enters into
the complete Nirvana.
In this religion pity is pre-eminent, for it is sympathy with
suffering. But it does not confine itself to human beings. Animals
are also to share our sympathies, and here we meet with the
foundation of Wagner's idea in "Parsifal" of the sacredness of the
life of dumb creatures in the realms of the Holy Grail. But now let
us see how Wagner works out his jumble of religious and philosophic
doctrines.
Parsifal is a pure fool. Weigh that, first of all. He knows nothing;
yet when he enters the flower-garden he compliments the women on
their beauty, and fails to understand what they want of him. O wise
young judge! this pure fool, who does not know what is the matter
with Amfortas, and therefore has no desire to aid him, must be
enlightened by pity. So Wagner sets Kundry to work to tell him the
story of his mother's sufferings, and she ends the narration by
printing a long kiss upon his lips. Wagner was fond of long kisses
set to music, and he used one in "Siegfried" as an awakener.
Now what happens? This salacious kiss of an unchaste woman, imprinted
on the lips of a youth who was, according to Wagner's delineation
of him, as innocent as a child of eight or ten, instantly opens
up to him the entire experience of Amfortas, and fills him with
pity and horror! That is, indeed, a miracle. And to make the
thing psychologically more absurd, Wagner shows us this "pure
fool" battling madly with the simultaneous working of these two
emotions. What has become of the enlightenment by pity? Plainly
the enlightenment comes first and the pity afterward! Furthermore,
Parsifal prays to the Redeemer for forgiveness for his failure to
understand the scene in the hall of the Grail. But, as H. E. Krehbiel
pertinently asked in an article in the "New York Tribune," what could
the boy have done when he had not yet got the sacred spear from
Klingsor?
What a hold, then, the Buddhistic ideas, toward which Wagner was
led by Schopenhauer, had taken upon him! The religion of the crucial
scene of the drama is not Christian at all. The outward and visible
signs of the scene are purely pagan, but the underlying philosophy
is Buddhistic. It is the final issue of the dreams which this master
visionary had in his mind when he planned "The Victors." The only
remnant of Christian story in this act is the reminiscence of the
drama which Wagner once planned relating to the Saviour.
In his "Jesus of Nazareth" he intended to show Mary of Magdala in
love with the Divine One. Wagner was no fool. Nor was he a madman, as
Nordau has tried to show. But he was first, last, and all the time a
theatrical thinker. His imagination dwelt in the show-house, and all
was grist that came to his mill. If he had thought the meditations of
the Creator good material for a music drama, he would have laid his
artistic hands upon the eternal throne itself.
Thus, he shrank not from grafting spectacular show, Schopenhauerian
ethics, and Buddhistic dogmas on the legend of the Holy Grail. As
a matter of absolute fact, the Christian elements in this drama
are almost wholly spectacular and in the nature of accessories. If
ministers of the Gospel desire to be shocked by "Parsifal,"--and
they have reason to be, if they look for it in the right place,--let
them consider the place which the Holy Grail and the ceremony of the
communion occupy in this play.
They are merely stage devices to heighten the picture of the
suffering of Amfortas, and to impress upon our minds the vital need
of the enlightenment of the pure fool. The processional of the Grail
is spectacle pure and simple. The eating of the Last Supper is
spectacle pure and simple. It has absolutely nothing to do with the
story of the drama.
The unveiling of the Grail is necessary because it shows how Amfortas
is made to suffer agony. But it is no assistance to such Christian
ethics as there are in this muddle. If Amfortas has an incurable
wound, which is merely the outward symbol of conscience, he ought not
to need the sight of the Grail to make him feel worse. The thought of
his unworthiness to be a member of the chaste brotherhood should be
enough.
The foot-washing incident is theatricalism of the crassest kind. Can
any one show that it has a direct connection with the development
of the story? The argument in its favor is that it shows Kundry
as a penitent, and establishes her in relations of atonement with
Parsifal. Quite unnecessary, for the significance of the second act
is that Parsifal, having resisted her tempting, is spiritually her
master and also her redeemer. The act of absolution is made possible
by his triumph over the flesh. He could have baptized her and bidden
her trust in the Lord without offering us a portrait of the Saviour
as represented in the seventh chapter of St. Luke:--
"And behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when
she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house,
brought an alabaster box of ointment,
"And stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to
wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs
of her head, and kissed his feet and anointed them with the
ointment."
Wagner brings on the tears after the foot-washing, so that he can
show us how Kundry was released from the curse of laughter. Or was
the curse imposed solely that this theatrical picture might be
introduced?
The sacred spear has some connection with the story, but the weapon
is not an important feature of Christianity. There is even room for
doubt as to whether there ever was a sacred spear at all. The wound
certainly existed; but who can vouch for the preservation of the
spear as an object of reverence? So let us for the present dismiss
the profound religious basis of Richard Wagner's "Parsifal." Buddha
and Arthur Schopenhauer taught the dramatist more essentials than the
Holy Bible did. The foundations of the drama rest on the philosophy
of negation. The Christianity is merely ornamental, spectacular, and
delusive.
III.--THE NATIONAL RELIGIOUS DRAMA
I shall lay down a type of theological orthodoxy to which all
the divine legends in our city must conform.
PLATO, _Republic_ (_Grote's abstract_).
"Parsifal" is the supreme test of the outcome of Wagner's theory
that the modern theatre ought to bear the same relation to the life
of the people as the theatre of the Greeks did. All students of the
master's writings know that he preached this especially in those
years when his system had attained definite and detailed form in
his mind. In the Greek theatre he saw an art influence far-reaching
and mighty,--an influence which dominated because it dramatized the
artistic and religious ideals of a people. That he failed to discern
the identity of religion and art in the symbolical embodiments named
gods by the imaginative Greeks is another story.
Furthermore, he objected strenuously and rightly to any criticism of
his philosophic and artistic system based on the study of his early
works, which were written before his system was fully developed. In
the "Communication to My Friends" he says:--
"Certain critics who pretend to judge my art doings as a
connected whole have set about their task with this same
uncritical heedlessness and lack of feeling. Views on the
nature of art that I have proclaimed from a standpoint which
it took me years of evolution step by step to gain, they
seize on for the standard of their verdict, and point them
back upon those very compositions from which I started on the
natural path of evolution that led me to this standpoint.
"When for instance--not from the standpoint of abstract
æsthetics, but from that of practical artistic experience--I
denote the _Christian principle as hostile to or incapable of
art_, these critics point me out the contradiction in which
I stand toward my earlier dramatic works, which undoubtedly
are filled with a certain tincture of this principle so
inextricably blended with our modern evolution."
Excellent. The italics are not Wagner's. Let us, then, avoid falling
into the error of chaining Wagner to the beautiful Christianity
idealized by dramatic art, which he, unwise youth that he was, poured
into his "Tannhäuser," and confine ourselves to the full-fledged
"Parsifal," in which we are not, as he tells us, to regard the
Christianity as a vital art principle, but as one opposed to true
art. What does the man mean?
One thing is clear. Wagner did endeavor to theatricalize religions
and to parody in his feeble modern manner the theatre of the Greeks.
But if he failed (and who can doubt that he did after studying the
bloodless philosophy of the last product of his genius?), it was
because he was trying to do with calculating forethought what the
Greek did spontaneously, and because his religion supplied him
plentifully and unconsciously with the Schopenhauerian materials of
art; namely, Eternal Ideas represented by means of prototypes.
How came Wagner to fail in his puerile attempt to make a drama
out of a supposed incident in the life of Christ? Misled by the
similarity of his conception of the Saviour of mankind as a pure
human being resisting the seductions of a temptress in the person
of Mary Magdalen to his Tannhäuser battling with carnal passion
typified by Venus, or his Parsifal, remaining innocent through sheer
guilelessness, he set out to thrust into the glare of the footlights
the personality of Jesus. And then he found that the personality
was not merely human, nor the poetic embodiment of an idea, even an
Eternal Idea, but an everlasting miracle and mystery, a divinity
beyond the reach of his trap-doors, purple lights, and tenor tubas.
The story of Christ is tremendously dramatic, but it has eluded
every attempt at theatrical treatment. The thing done at Oberammergau
is not drama, but an old-fashioned mystery play. It is a moving
panorama. Pinero, Belasco, or even Ibsen would shrink from an attempt
to dramatize for the ordinary theatre the story of the Saviour. But
Wagner, blinded by his own ambition to make a show of all things,
to seize upon every suggestion of religion as material for music,
thought for a time that he could turn the Son of Man into a mime.
What a different art work was that of the Greek dramatist! How much
more direct and thornless was the path by which he reached the
theatrical representation of his gods and goddesses and the dramatic
relation of the fables in which they were the actors! With his stylus
in hand he sat at gaze upon a world of personated ideas, of symbols
in action. All was poetic and imaginative. All was the creation of
the human mind speculating upon the operation of unseen forces and
subtle passions. There was no almighty revelation to baffle him. The
infinite did not come and stand before him in an incomprehensible
mortalization of itself. What he had of the world beyond the skies
was the dreaming of his own kind.
What were Zeus and Hermes, Aphrodite and Hera, Artemis and Apollo,
Pallas and Poseidon, but personifications of ideas, those eternal
types which even the nugatory speculation of Schopenhauer postulated
as the materials of true art? When the Greek tragic dramatist was
not utilizing the gods, he employed the people of the mythologic
tales. When Phrynicus, in 511 B. C., wrote a tragedy on the capture
of Miletus, melting an audience to tears with the pathos of a
well-known contemporary event, he was fined a thousand drachmæ for
his ill-chosen subject.
When Wagner delved in the pagan mythology of the Northmen, he fell
upon metal like that of the Greeks. Nearly every personage in the
burg of Wallhal has a companion on Olympus. In the Eddas Wagner found
eternal types created by the human imagination by the same processes
as those of the Greeks. Hence the splendid humanity of his Wotan, his
Brünnhilde, his Fricka.
What had the Greek? The entire Grecian religion grew out of the
worship of the powers of nature. It recognized one power as the head
of all, Zeus, the god of heaven and light. "And God said, Let there
be light, and there was light." The Greek's notion of the beginning
of all things was the same as the Hebrew's. With Zeus abode in the
clear expanse of ether Hera, representing the eternal feminine
element in the divinity. The other gods were partly representatives
of the attributes of Zeus himself,--as Athene, knowledge, sprung
from his head; Apollo, beauty and purity; Hermes, who brings up the
treasures of fruitfulness from the depths of the earth; and Cora, the
child, now lost and now recovered by Hera, typifying the winter and
the summer. Poseidon and Hephæstus represented the elements, water
and fire. But why go farther with this catalogue? It is known to
every school-boy.
Together with these symbols the Greek dramatist had Hercules and
Prometheus, Paris and Orestes, Jason and Medea, and other earth-born
mythologic personages, the Siegfrieds and Gunthers and Sieglindes of
their mythologic world, demigods and heroes all, acting in fables of
wondrous poetic power, built on imaginative developments of ideals.
The Greek world knew these tales. The dramatist of the Æschylean
age was situated as Weber was when he put "Der Freischütz" before
Germany. He utilized the fairy tales of the people, and offering them
in a novel form made them eloquent with a new glory.
Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were the masters of the Greek
tragedy; and their plays all deal with either mythologic or
legendary stories and personages. The ideas preached in the ethics
of their dramas were those of Greek morality. The gods and goddesses
introduced or referred to were the embodiments of Greek ideals.
Though the populace was not so able a doctrinaire as to know that
there was in truth but one deity, Zeus, of whom all the others were
but aids and expressions, it had the enormous advantage of intimate
acquaintance with the poetic attributes of the galaxy of gods. It was
a public ripe for its religious drama.
Now, when Richard Wagner set out to build up a modern theatre which
should have the same relation to the life of the people as the
theatre of the Greeks had to theirs, he started on the right path.
He took the legendary materials to be found in German literature. He
wrote with unerring judgment when he created his operatic version
of "The Flying Dutchman." The pity of it is that he did not compose
this work when he was at the period of the maturity of his genius.
We should have had something almost as splendid as "Tristan und
Isolde," for while the story is not so suggestive as the old legend
treated by Gottfried von Strassbourg, it is not far behind it. At any
rate, it is purely Teutonic in its character, though in its origin
it is Greek. For, of course, Vanderdecken is but a modern replica of
Ulysses. The Germans knew the story, for Heine had made it theirs.
Wagner wrote wisely and well in this drama.
In "Tannhäuser" again he found his materials in the vast
treasure-house of German literature and legend. Possibly this story
was known to fewer Germans than "The Flying Dutchman," but its
character was sympathetic to them and there was no mistaking the
force of its moral lesson. Yet the religious doctrines of this drama
are not essentially those of the Christian Church; they are those
of religion and morality in general. The idea of salvation through
love of a pure woman is the Goethean doctrine of the eternal womanly
leading us upward. It was not original with Wagner, but it was
beloved by him.
In "Lohengrin" we come nearer to the mystical thoughts of such a work
as "Parsifal," yet here humanity operates in the natural desire of
Elsa to reach into the secrets of her husband's heart and life, and
still more powerfully in the vengeful character of the sexless and
inexorable Ortrud.
In both of these splendid dramas of Wagner's genius we are
confronted at every step with the normal working of human passions,
and love throbs through both of them. In "Parsifal" we have no single
pulse of love. In "Parsifal" salvation is brought by ignorance and
miracle. In "Tannhäuser" it comes triumphantly through suffering,
repentance, and prayer. In "Parsifal" the sufferings of Amfortas are
relieved by the purity of another man. In "Tannhäuser" the misery
of the hero is assuaged by his own repentance and the holy love of
Elizabeth. The religion of "Tannhäuser" is human; that of "Parsifal"
is ceremonial, panoramic, abstract.
"Parsifal" is a dramatization of ceremonials. In the first and
third acts we behold the pageant of religious rites; in the second
the diorama of bacchanalian orgies. Externals are thrust upon us
constantly; the depths are hidden under a veil of scenic pretence
and musical delusion. The bulk of the music of the work is external
and descriptive. Little, indeed, is there of the tonal embodiment of
subjective ideas. Compare the three acts of "Parsifal" with the three
great emotional episodes of "Tristan und Isolde." What a stupendous
development the latter work shows of the tragedy of fatal passion!
In its first act the operation of a magical agency breaks down the
hitherto safe bonds of restraint and plunges two typical human beings
into the very vortex of flaming love. In the second act they rush
together and forget honor. The stroke of retribution falls; fate
deals her deadly blow. In the third act remorse, agony, death, and
the salvation of suffering souls by negation.
There is a drama which preaches no religious doctrine, which has no
dogma save the Buddhistic one of release from suffering by death, yet
which stands in closer relation to the life of the people than all of
Wagner's religious dramas, because it deals with world-thoughts.
When Wagner worked with the purely mythical and legendary tales of
the German people, he built dramas of national character and power.
When he undertook to turn into theatrical pageants the teachings of
Christianity, he failed utterly. The Greek succeeded because his
religion was one of symbols, of deifications of the powers of nature,
with its literature developed from tales of the fabulous doings of
gods and goddesses, tales embodying in imaginative form fundamental
facts of nature.
When Wagner sought his inspiration in the mythology of the North,
which was developed in precisely the same manner as the Greek
mythology, he found material of poetic and suggestive kind. But when,
by dramatizing Christian doctrine and history, he tried to bring
his national theatre into such relation to the life of the people
as the Greek dramatists brought theirs, he failed, for the simple
reason that at this point his entire theory as to the suitability of
mythical and legendary material to the use of the dramatist broke
down.
There is nothing mythological in the teachings of the Christian
religion, nor in the acts of its Founder or apostles. These
things stand apart from mythology and are differentiated from it
absolutely. They are not and could not have been the product of
human imagination, symbolizing human experience and speculation.
The profoundest philosophers of antiquity never hit upon the basic
doctrines of Christianity.
Beautiful as the teachings of Socrates are, they are essentially
human. The Sermon on the Mount sets up a system of ethics never
dreamed of by Aristotle or Plato. Only Buddha ever approached
Christ, and the outcome of the Hindu's entire system was not eternal
salvation and glory, but endless silence and the negation of death.
From this Wagner could not escape, even in his "Parsifal," for
Kundry, in the final scene, dies of what? Of a Buddhistic ethical
idea!
Wagner's greatest works are unquestionably those in which the
fundamental myths or legends were symbolical of human passions, of
the worldwide experience of mankind. "Tannhäuser," "Die Walküre,"
"Siegfried," "Götterdämmerung," and "Tristan und Isolde" are Wagner's
masterpieces of serious drama, not the saccharine "Lohengrin," nor
the tinselled ritual, "Parsifal." Are not those, with the matchless
comedy of manners, "Die Meistersinger," enough for one mind to have
created? Why should we believe it incumbent upon us to uphold all
that Wagner did?
We can say of him as Prentice said of Napoleon, "Grand, gloomy, and
peculiar, he sat a sceptred hermit, wrapped in the solitude of his
own originality." Taking him by and large, as the sailors say, he
was the most striking figure in musical history. Why discredit him
by trying to show that "Parsifal," the feeble child of his artistic
senility, was filled with the vigor of his young Volsung or the
radiant power of his immortal song of love insatiate?
DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN
I.--A FUTILE GOD AND A POTENT DEVIL
The will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs.
MILTON, _Paradise Lost_, Bk. I.
With every year the festival of the four dramas is celebrated in the
metropolis of the New World. Parsifalian orgies are new, and the wine
of the holy cup offers a novel intoxication to restless spirits ever
seeking fresh excitements. But your good, honest, old Wagnerite goes
yearly to gape in awestruck silence at the majesty of the "wildered"
Wotan, and to bask in the sunshine of Siegfried's radiant youth.
Whistle your Last Supper motive, you Monsalvationer, if you will, as
you crunch your lobster salad after the celebration, but we old-time
Wagnerites, who have hunted with the pack since first the "flight"
theme pulsated across the world, we shall trot home murmuring the
slumber motive and lay us down to pleasant dreams with a final sigh
of Fafner's "Lass't mich schlafen."