a deadly foe to your piping enthusiasm. The draining of the cup of
death, averted by the temporizing policy of the silly Brangäne, would
never have assumed the tragic proportions of Brünnhilde's terrible
oath upon the spear. The wounded love of Isolde dwindles to petulance
when brought to the side of the outraged majesty of the chaste and
glorious Valkyr wife.
Look upon the two in the last scenes of their respective tragedies.
Isolde lays her down to die of a broken heart beside her dead lover,
hymning in rapt ecstatic phrase, seeing in the vision of her own
dissolution the new light streaming from his eyes and his heart
beating in his chilled breast. It is sweet, so sweet. It is more
honeyed than the dirge of Shelley for Adonais, or the exquisitely
musical "Archete, Sikelikai, to pentheon archete, Moisai," of
Moschus over the ashes of Bion. It is love's threnody in the realms
of eternal moonlight, where the cypress shadows of a pessimistic
philosophy shelter the lemur of blank negation.
Brünnhilde, too, beholds the sunny light streaming from her hero's
dead eyes, but how her apostrophe to him rings with brave and hopeful
praise! There is no sweating sickness of the soul here, but the
proclamation of a grand personality. And then through prayer this
supreme woman passes to prophecy:
"Ye gods who guard
Our gazes for ever,
Turn not away
From my waxing distress."
And but a moment later that sublime passage:
"All things, all things
All I wot now:
All at once is made clear!
Even thy ravens
I hear rustling:
To tell the longed-for tidings
Let them return to their home.
Rest thee! Rest thee, oh god!"
And again:
"Fly home, ye ravens!
Rede it in Walhalla
What here on the Rhine ye have heard!
To Brünnhilde's rock
Go round about,
Yet Loge burns there:
Walhalla bid him revisit!
Draweth near in gloom
The Dusk of the Gods.
Thus, casting my torch,
I kindle Walhall's towers."
Ah, Isolde! How every man that has a heart can echo that marvellous
phrase with which Wagner makes Tristan breathe forth his first
and last sigh of love insatiable! Queen of the tawny locks and
stately tread, thou art first shown to us as a woman of the old
barbaric grandeur, hurling the full tide of thy passions against the
inexorable advancing prow of Fate. The gates of honor thrown down,
thou art but a woman loved and loving; and, mourning over thy lost
chastity, art ready to sink into fathomless night with Tristan. After
all, thou comest to the pale estate of chill despair and so diest,
hymning a last sad canticle of love.
Isolde is beautiful, winsome, desirable. Men love her, but she
does not dominate. Brünnhilde grows from a laughing light-elf to be
a stricken woman, and thence is raised by the might of love to the
majestic height of abstract womanhood divine. Isolde is a diminuendo;
Brünnhilde a crescendo. In her last estate she stands disclosed in
overmastering splendor, and mortal man in the honesty of his secret
heart knows that, in the presence of such womanhood as this, he is
utterly unworthy. And so we come to the end. Brünnhilde has joined
hands with Loge and the "Rheingold" prophecy of Erda is fulfilled.
The spirit of evil has become the renovator of the earth and all
things are purified by fire. And the music! What majestic development
of the Erda theme is this we hear in the Dusk of the Gods motive?
There, indeed, is a psychological development, equalled only by the
extraordinary mystic effects of the combination in Act I. of the
themes of forgetfulness and the tarnhelm, by the wonderful recitative
of the transformed Siegfried posing as Gunther, and by that highest
of all songs without words, the funeral march.
The retirement of the futile and disappearing gods forces the
purely human element to the front. The tragedy steadily waxes in
power as the feeble ones of Walhalla grow fainter and the humans take
the threads in their hands, till finally the one great, majestic
creation of the whole trilogy is seen to be Brünnhilde, the eternal
womanhood personified, the light of the world and the glory of
Walhalla.
ISOLDE'S SERVING-WOMAN
The daughter of debate,
That discord aye doth sowe.
_Verses by Queen Elizabeth in_ PERCY'S _Reliques_.
It is an inquiring age. We investigate the domestic habits of
the poet or the sandpiper with equal zest. We analyze dress and
intellectual states with the keenest delight. Upon all things we
speculate, ponder, ring the changes of scrutinizing comment. Thus
it chanced upon a day that certain learned Thebans, sitting in the
solemn conclave of educational chop-houses, fell upon disputatious
views of the profound character of Brangäne in Wagner's "Tristan und
Isolde," and there were diverse theories.
Strange it seems to the calm and unprejudiced observer that there
should be difference of opinion as to the character of Brangäne. To
be sure, the weary mind of the hardened critic never hopes to receive
highly intelligent views on such questions from casual or even
habitual opera-goers.
When this writer presumed to object to the richness of Edyth
Walker's costume as Brangäne, he was told that the woman was of
noble birth and that she was not Isolde's maid, but her companion.
Also he was told that Miss Walker's costume was approved in Vienna,
which concerned him not a jot, seeing that the authority for the
interpretation of Brangäne does not rest in Vienna, but in the poem
of Wagner.
Louise Homer's conception of Brangäne was deplored by some of the
learned Thebans in that it was not heroic. Where are Brangäne's
heroics in the drama? Marie Brema, who soared through the New World
with a contralto voice and a soprano ambition, always acted Brangäne
as if she were a sister of Isolde. She conceived the pleading of the
tirewoman in the spirit of the third act of "Die Walküre." But there
was no Wotan to kiss the godhood or the scales from her eyes.
Marianne Brandt of blessed memory smote the harp with no uncertain
hand. She knew the meaning of Brangäne in those now far-off days when
Lili Lehmann was Isolde, Albert Niemann Tristan, Robinson Kurvenal,
and Fischer King Mark. "And there were giants in those days." But it
is not a question of personal authority. It is a question of direct
examination of the poem, of the significance of the drama.
In these days no one studies a Wagnerian play solely at first hand.
Is Kundry to be explained? Then search the Scriptures. Read all the
old poems, delve among the legends, turn up the sods of centuries.
Is Parsifal to be analyzed? Plunge into the Oriental forests and
emerge with your Aryan expulsion and return formula; co-ordinate your
poetic axes; parallel column your Siegfried, your Ulysses, and your
guileless fool. Heaven be thanked, Brangäne is not a mighty heroine
of antique fable. She is but a parhelion which dwells near the sun.
We may dispose of her with little effort.
Brangäne is not heroic. There is not a line in Wagner's text to
justify such a conception of the character. Wagner's Brangäne is
a maid, a serving-woman. She is simple-minded, even innocent. In
some respects she is foolish. Her one dominating note is devotion
to her mistress. She is doglike in nature. She is Isolde's feminine
Kurvenal. But she lacks in every essential the emotional and
intellectual initiative of Tristan's esquire. She is passive. She
is necessarily thus. From the point of view of dramatic character
construction she must be so in order to afford an effective foil to
Isolde, with whom she is continually placed in contrast. In more
subtle but none the less influential opposition does she stand to
Kurvenal, the embodiment of active, working devotion to the master.
Brangäne does nothing but what she is bid, and does that wrong.
Her simple-minded innocence leads her to become what the dramatist
needs to complete his scheme, an unconscious agent of fate. Acting
wholly under the influence of devotion to her mistress, and
without sufficient wisdom to foresee the terrible consequences of
her deed, she administers to the lovers the potion which drowns
their self-control and plunges them into the sea of passion. She
does this on the unthinking impulse of the moment, solely because
she is frightened out of such wits as she has by her mistress's
determination to share with Tristan the drink of death.
Is that a heroic act? Would not a heroic nature have grasped the
significance of the moment, and, foreseeing the approaching shame,
have acquiesced in Isolde's decision? Nay, more; filled with such
devotion as that of Brangäne, raised to a divine ecstasy by innate
heroism, she would have swallowed her share of the poison and laid
her down at her lady's feet to die, as Kurvenal did at Tristan's.
But there is not a single element of the heroic in Brangäne. She is,
if anything, a coward, or at least a temporizer. The makeshift of the
moment is what appears most desirable to her. Her naïve mind, which
was so astonished to learn that the Tantris she helped to nurse was
the Tristan she had just addressed, could project itself into the
future no further than the next quarter of an hour. If that chanced
to be a bad one, no matter. Those which were to follow were all blank
for the good Brangäne.
So must it be, for in all versions of the story except that
mysterious one which Scribe unearthed for use in Auber's "Le
Philtre," and which reappears in the first act of Donizetti's
"L'Elisir d'Amore," the potion is taken by the two lovers
unwittingly. It is administered by mistake. Wagner has accentuated
his meaning as to the character of Brangäne by modifying this feature
of the legend. His Brangäne does not give the love potion by mere
mistake, but in order to save her lady's life. To enact her as a
heroic personage makes her exchange of the potions inexplicable. Yet
Wagner did not wholly abandon the notion of a mistake, for Brangäne's
error in preferring Isolde's dishonor to her death is surely a
mistake of the direst kind.
In the poem of Gottfried von Strassbourg--here let us fall into
the widening trail of the historic exploration party--Brangäne does
not give the potion at all. Neither is she a maid. She is a lady of
high position at the court of Isolde's mother and in the confidence
of the Queen. This Queen is a magician and gives the love potion to
Brangäne to administer to Isolde and King Mark as soon as they are
wed. On the voyage, Tristan, desiring wine, calls for it, and a maid
attending the Princess brings to him the phial containing the potion.
It looks like wine, and neither Tristan nor the maid suspects that
it is anything else. Isolde, too, knows naught of it. Then, says
Gottfried:--
"To Tristan first she passed the same:
He gave it to the royal dame.
Thereof she drank reluctantly,
Gave it to him, and then drank he;
That wine it was they both believed.
Then came Brangäne, who perceived
And recognized at once the glass;
She well saw what had come to pass.
Thereon she felt such dire dismay
That all her strength was giving way,
And she appeared as are the dead;
Her heart was filled with mortal dread.
She seized the baleful glass she knew,
And bore it hence away and threw
It in the wildly raging sea.
'Oh, woe!' she spoke, 'Oh, woe is me,
That in this world I e'er was born,
I wretched one! Now I am shorn
Of troth and honor which were mine.
Have pity on me, Lord divine;
Oh, that I came unto this shore
And death took me not hence before--
That with Isold my lot was e'er
This fatal enterprise to share!
Oh, woe, Isold! Woe, Tristan, too!
This draught is death to both of you.'"
This Brangäne afterward explains to these two sudden lovers what
has happened to them, and reiterates that the draught will be their
death. Tristan declares that he will die happy possessing Isolde's
love. But it is unnecessary to pursue the original legend further.
Enough has been given to show that the Brangäne of Gottfried is not
the Brangäne of Wagner.
Again we meet with one of those effective modifications of the old
stories which Wagner made in his dramas. The splendid figure of the
Queen mother's confidante bewailing her momentary unwatchfulness and
her loss of honor, ready for the sake of that betrayal of confidence
to give up her now wretched life, is a vastly different creature from
the Brangäne of Wagner, who administers the potion as the shortest
way out of an impending trouble.
Again, remember that this deed is one of pure unthinking devotion
to the mistress. The fatal drink is the visible embodiment of fate.
Appearing as it does in inanimate form, it needs an agent to convey
it to the four lips of the lovers. That agent is found in the
foolish, doting maid. Is it not a purely Wagnerian touch?
Even Swinburne, poet of far higher fancy than Wagner, did not think
of such a plan. He improves on the old legend by making Isolde
herself administer the potion in error:--
"Iseult sought and would not wake Brangwain,
Who slept as one half dead with fear and pain,
Being tender natured; so with hushed light feet
Went Iseult round her, with soft looks and sweet
Pitying her pain; so sweet a spirited thing
She was, and daughter of a kindly king.
And spying what strange bright secret charge was kept
Fair in that maid's white bosom while she slept,
She sought and drew the gold cup forth and smiled,
Marvelling, with such light wonder as a child
That hears of glad, sad life in magic lands;
And bear it back to Tristram with pure hands
Holding the love draught that should be for flame
To burn out of them fear and faith and shame."
Iseult speaks merrily of the wile of Brangwain in concealing this,
the best wine of the feast. Then they drink, and the world is made
anew. Here again the agency for the supply of the potion is error.
Wagner could not have built his tragedy on such mighty lines if he
had left that thought out. His Tristan and Isolde were standing
on the brink of a volcanic crater; something was needed to impel
them into it. That something was found in the foolish love of the
simple-minded Brangäne.
The first act of Wagner's tragedy tells all that is to be told of
the serving-woman. She stands disclosed at the very outset as a
sublimated comprimaria. She is the titanic Alice to this mighty
Lucia, marching to her marriage with one man when she loves another.
To this Alice this Lucia tells how she learned to love in days now
buried in the sweet and unforgotten past. The comprimaria of the old
Italian opera walked about with the prima donna and gave her cues.
This new comprimaria follows the same lines, but in how different a
manner! Wagner was indeed the regenerator of the lyric drama. Verdi
knew it. His Emilia would have been an old-fashioned comprimaria had
he written "Otello" in his "Traviata" days.
First, this maid, alarmed at Isolde's passionate prayer that the
ship and all in it may be destroyed ere they reach Mark's land,
asks what has caused her mistress to be so downcast throughout the
voyage. Then she is amazed to learn that Tantris is Tristan, and that
her mistress does not wish to be led by him to the couch of Mark.
She even offers some cheap, prosaic, and senseless worldly counsel.
"If Tristan is under any obligation to you, how can he discharge it
better than by making you Mark's queen? Even if he himself did the
wooing for his uncle, why should you object? He's a gentleman of rank
and reputation." This innocent maid does not even catch the tragic
meaning of Isolde's
"Ungeminnt
Den hehrsten Mann
Stets mir nah' zu sehen--
Wie konnt' ich die Qual bestehen?"
"Unloved by the lordliest man, yet always near him, how could I bear
that anguish?" This "heroic" Brangäne applies this speech to King
Mark and reminds Isolde of the casket of enchanted drinks provided
by her mother. When Isolde proclaims that the drink of death is
that which she will use, the situation is entirely beyond the
comprehension of the maid. She cries: "The drink, for whom? Tristan?
Oh, horror!"
The score is significantly barren of explicit stage directions about
the substitution of the potion of love for that of death. But there
is no question as to what ought to be done. Wagner on more than one
occasion fell into the error of leaving too much to the imagination
of the public. It is absolutely essential to the understanding of
"Tristan und Isolde" by an audience that Brangäne should with the
greatest possible clearness exhibit the exchange of the drinks. She
should show convincingly, by facial expression and gesture, the
sudden formation of the idea of the substitution, and she should
be particular to force the act of exchange upon the attention of
the audience. Otherwise the subsequent actions of the two lovers
are inexplicable to many, for the common experience of the theatre
teaches that the points of a drama must be not merely indicated, but
driven home; and the whole tragedy of "Tristan und Isolde" rests upon
the love potion.
The potion once swallowed, Brangäne, who, "confused and shuddering,"
has been leaning over the ship's rail, turns and bursts out with a
cry: "Woe, woe! Unpreventable endless trouble instead of brief death!"
This wise and heroic Brangäne, seeing the bride of Mark in the arms
of Tristan, and knowing that they are the victims of her temporizing
policy, bewails what she has done and suddenly discovers that death
would have been better. The English translations do not bring this
passage out clearly, yet it is of vital importance in explaining the
character of Isolde's maid.
In the second act Brangäne is shown to us the victim of her own
ceaseless terrors. Day and night she cowers under the shadow of
the impending axe. Her mind being stimulated by her fears for her
mistress and her own remorse, she plays the spy and tracks the
traitor Melot to his lair.
But all in vain. The barriers are burned away. The blood of Isolde
is become as lava in her veins. She knows naught in all the world
but the mad delirium of passion. Isolde will extinguish the torch.
Brangäne pleads, and cries: "Oh that I had not once been faithless
and false to my mistress's will! If I had only remained dumb and
blind, _thy_ work had been death! Now, as it is, thy shame, thy most
shameful trouble, _my_ work,--thus must I, blameworthy, know it."
Not very heroic that! Brangäne wishes she had kept out of the whole
affair. Then the death of Tristan and Isolde would have been the
latter's act. Now this poor maid feels that her policy of temporizing
has caused all the trouble and brought her beloved mistress into a
shameful position. That is practically all of Brangäne.
One little speech in the third act shows that she is still
reproaching herself for her weakness. She has gone to the King and
atoned for her "blind guilt," as she calls it, by explaining to him
the cause of the loss of honor by Tristan and Isolde.
In the entire text of Wagner there is nothing to indicate that he
intended Brangäne to be regarded as anything but a simple-minded
serving-woman, deeply attached to her mistress, acting in the matter
of the potions on a blind and instantaneous impulse to save her
mistress from death and murder. She is naïve in thought, superficial
in reasoning, straightforward in emotion, and altogether transparent
as crystal. Kurvenal's devotion to Tristan is essentially a masculine
devotion, ready to face death, deploring dishonor, but not forsaking
even in the face of shame. Kurvenal serves with heart and life.
Brangäne serves with heart and subterfuge.
A vast amount of ill-informed feminine twitter is accepted as
learned comment on such characters as Brangäne. All that is necessary
to a full understanding of this or any other Wagnerian personage is
a careful examination of the text and music. The text should always
be the original German, for the libretto translators have played
havoc with it. Brangäne's most significant wail, "Unpreventable
endless trouble instead of quick death," is usually translated in a
misleading manner.
RICHARD STRAUSS
I. THE HISTORICAL SURVEY
Theorbos, violins, French horns, guitars,
Leave in my wounded ears inflicted scars.
CHARLES LAMB to _Clara N._
For some seasons the orchestral compositions of Richard Strauss have
been the exciting features of the leading orchestral concerts. They
have fairly set the musical _cognoscenti_ by the ears. The strenuous
German artist is yet a young man, and what he may achieve in an
uncertain future is a fruitful subject for critical speculation.
What he has already done is to stir up the musical world as it has
not been stirred since Richard Wagner proclaimed his regenerative
theories of the musical drama. Strauss has turned the technic of
orchestral composition topsy-turvy, and has made orchestras sing new
songs. He has in certain ways discredited Beethoven and the prophets,
and has shrunk the orchestral wonders of Berlioz and Wagner to the
dimensions of a Sunday afternoon band concert. He has caused the
critical heathen to rage and the long-haired people to imagine vain
things. In fine, the simple question now frankly discussed in the
sacred circles of the inner brotherhood is just this: "Is Richard
Strauss a heaven-born genius, or is he merely crazy?"
Usually when musical composers have ventured out of the beaten
path, just found by the critics after much thorny wandering through
the jungle of error, the cry has been that they were going astray.
The poor critics have never been able to understand how any genius
could depart from the beaten path without being lost in the woods,
as they themselves generally are. In nine cases out of ten the
composer who does so depart is lost, and hence the critic's calling
is not altogether one of sorrow. The prophet who has ninety per
cent of "I told you so" in his retrospective views is not wholly a
subject for commiseration. But there is that tenth man, who is always
an explorer, and who always sets to cutting new paths through the
forest. The critic says, "You're going to get lost," and he replies,
"I may lose you, but not myself." After a time he comes out of the
forest into a new and beautiful land, and the critic, limping slowly
and painfully after him, murmurs, "You were right: it is good for us
to be here."
And so the music critics, who long ago reduced their comments on
Beethoven and Weber and Schubert and Schumann to an exact science,
and who have made it possible for any old reader to predict precisely
what will be said on the morning after a purely classical concert,
have fallen over the music of Strauss into a confusion like unto
that of the army of Pharaoh suddenly overtaken by the waters of
the Red Sea. It was about twelve years ago that this music began
to echo through the concert-rooms of America. Strauss had begun to
write early in life, but his first works were imitative of the older
masters. The real Richard Strauss began to reveal himself in 1887,
when he produced "Macbeth," the first of his series of symphonic
poems. The others are Don Juan (1888), Death and Apotheosis (1889),
Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (1895), Thus Spake Zarathustra
(1896), Don Quixote (1897), and A Hero's Life (1898). The "Symphonia
Domestica," which is really a tone poem, was produced at Carnegie
Hall, New York, March 21, 1904.
What has Strauss done in these works to "so get the start of the
majestic world"? He has asked us to listen to orchestral compositions
made with wide deviations from the established outlines, with a
new melodic idiom, with a harmony which frequently affects the ear
precisely as lemon juice affects the palate, with instrumental
combinations of overpowering sonority and harshness, and, above all,
with attempts at a detailed definiteness of expression which demand
the closest application of the hearer's powers of analysis.