"Mr. Dean has very distinct ideas how this part should be played."
"Mr. Dean," answered the manager, laughing, "would not go to Bayreuth
three years ago because they played 'Tannhäuser.' But one evening he
took the score down to read the new music, and to his surprise he found
that it was the old that interested him. Mr. Dean is always making
discoveries; he discovers all my singers after he has heard them."
"And Mr. Hermann Goetze discovers his singers before _he_ has heard
them," cried Ulick.
Mr. Hermann Goetze looked for a moment as if he were going to get angry,
but remembering that Dean was critic to an important weekly, he laughed
and put his handkerchief to his jaw, and Evelyn went up the stage to
meet the Landgrave--her father--and she sang a duet with him. As soon as
it was concluded, the introduction to the march brought the first
courtiers and pages on the stage, and with the first strains of the
march the assembly, which had been invited to witness the competitions,
was seated in the circular benches ranged round the throne of the
Landgrave and his daughter.
Having consulted with his stage manager and superintended some
alterations in the stage arrangements, Mr. Hermann Goetze, whose
toothache seemed a little better again, left the stage, and coming into
the box where Ulick was sitting, he sat beside him and affected some
interest in his opinion regarding the grouping, for it had occurred to
him that if Evelyn should take a fancy to this young man nothing was
more likely than that she should ask to have his opera produced. With
the plot and some of the music he was already vaguely acquainted; and
he had gathered, in a general way, that Ulick Dean was considered to be
a man of talent. The British public might demand a new opera, and there
had been some talk of Celtic genius in the newspapers lately. Dean's
"Grania" might make an admirable diversion in the Wagnerian
repertoire--only it must not be too anti-Wagnerian. Mr. Goetze prided
himself on being in the movement. Now, if Evelyn Innes would sing the
title _rôle_, "Grania" was the very thing he wanted. And in such a frame
of mind, he listened to Ulick Dean. He was glad that "Grania" was based
on a legend; Wagner had shown that an opera could not be written except
on a legendary basis. The Irish legends were just the thing the public
was prepared to take an interest in. But there was one thing he
feared--that there were no motives.
"Tell me more about the music? It is not like the opera you showed me a
year or two ago in which instead of motives certain instruments
introduce the characters? There is nothing Gregorian about this new
work, is there?"
"Nothing," Ulick answered, smiling contemptuously--nothing recognisable
to uneducated ears."
"Plenty of chromatic writing?"
"Yes, I think I can assure you that there is plenty of modulation, some
unresolved dissonances. I suppose that that is what you want. Alas,
there are not many motives."
"Ah!"
Ulick waited to be asked if he could not introduce some. But at that
moment Tannhäuser's avowal of the joys he had experienced with Venus in
Mount Horsel had shocked the Landgrave's pious court. The dames and the
wives of the burgesses had hastened away, leaving their husbands to
avenge the affront offered to their modesty. The knights drew their
swords; it was the moment when Elizabeth runs down the steps of the
throne and demands mercy from her father for the man she loves. The idea
of this scene was very dear to Ulick, and his whole attention was fixed
on Evelyn.
He was only attracted by essential ideas, and the mysterious expectancy
of the virgin awaiting the approach of the man she loves was surely the
essential spirit of life--the ultimate meaning of things. The comedy of
existence, the habit of life worn in different ages of the world had no
interest for him; it was the essential that he sought and wished to put
upon the stage--the striving and yearning, and then the inevitable
acceptation of the burden of life; in other words, the entrance into the
life of resignation. That was what he sought in his own operas, and from
this ideal he had never wavered; all other art but this essential art
was indifferent to him. It was no longer the beautiful writing of
Wagner's later works that attracted him; he deemed this one to be,
perhaps, the finest, being the sincerest, and "Parsifal" the worst,
being the most hypocritical. Elizabeth was the essential penitent, she
who does penance not for herself, she has committed no sin, but the
sublime penitent who does penance for the sins of others. Not for a
moment could he admit the penitence of Kundry. In her there was merely
the external aspect. "Parsifal" was to Ulick a revolting hypocrisy, and
Kundry the blot on Wagner's life. In the first act she is a sort of wild
witch, not very explicit to any intelligence that probes below the
surface. In the second, she is a courtesan with black diamonds. In the
third, she wears the coarse habit of a penitent, and her waist is tied
with a cord; but her repentance goes no further than these exterior
signs. She says no word, and Ulick could not accept the descriptive
music as sufficient explanation of her repentance, even if it were
sincere, which it was not, and he spoke derisively of the amorous cries
to be heard at every moment in the orchestra, while she is dragging
herself to Parsifal's feet. Elizabeth's prayer was to him a perfect
expression of a penitent soul. Kundry, he pointed out, had no such
prayer, and he derisively sang the cries of amorous desire. The
character of Parsifal he could admit even less than the character of
Kundry. As he would say in discussion, "If I am to discuss an artistic
question, I must go to the very heart of it. Now, if we ask ourselves
what Siegfried did, the answer is, that he forged the sword, killed the
dragon and released Brunnhilde. But if, in like manner, we ask ourselves
what Parsifal did, is not the answer, that he killed a swan and refused
a kiss and with many morbid, suggestive and disagreeable remarks? These
are the facts," he would say; "confute them who may, explain them who
can!" And if it were urged, as it often was, that in Parsifal Wagner
desired the very opposite to what he had in Siegfried, the Parsifal is
opposed to Siegfried as Hamlet is opposed to Othello, Ulick eagerly
accepted the challenge, and like one sure of his adversary's life, began
the attack.
Wagner had been all his life dreaming of an opera with a subjective
hero. Christ first and then Buddha had suggested themselves as likely
subjects. He had gone so far as to make sketches for both heroes, but
both subjects had been rejected as unpractical, and he had fallen back
on a pretty mediæval myth, and had shot into a pretty mediæval myth all
the material he had accumulated for the other dramas, whose heroes were
veritable heroes, men who had accomplished great things, men who had
preached great doctrines and whose lives were symbols of their
doctrines. The result of pouring this old wine into the new bottle was
to burst the bottle.
In neither Christ nor Buddha did the question of sex arise, and that was
the reason that Wagner eventually rejected both. He was as full of
sex--mysterious, sub-conscious sex--as Rossetti himself. In Christ's
life there is the Magdalen, but how naturally harmonious, how implicit
in the idea, are their relations, how concentric; but how excentric
(using the word in its grammatical sense) are the relations of Parsifal
to Kundry.... A redeemer is chaste, but he does not speak of his
chastity nor does he think of it; he passes the question by. The figure
of Christ is so noble, that whether God or man or both, it seems to us
in harmony that the Magdalen should bathe his feet and wipe them with
her hair, but the introduction of the same incident into "Parsifal"
revolts. As Parsifal merely killed a swan and refused to be kissed--the
other preached a doctrine in which beauty and wisdom touch the highest
point, and his life was an exemplification of his doctrine of
non-resistance--"Take ye and eat, for this is my body, and this is my
blood."
In "Parsifal" there was only the second act which he could admire
without enormous reservations. The writing in the chorus of the "Flower
Maidens" was, of course, irresistible--little cries, meaningless by
themselves, but, when brought together, they created an enchanted
garden, marvellous and seductive. But it was the duet that followed that
compelled his admiration. Music hardly ever more than a recitative,
hardly ever breaking into an air, and yet so beautiful! There the notes
merely served to lift the words, to impregnate them with more terrible
and subtle meaning; and the subdued harmonies enfolded them in an
atmosphere, a sensual mood; and in this music we sink into depths of
soul and float upon sullen and mysterious tides of life--those which
roll beneath the phase of life which we call existence. But the vulgarly
vaunted Good Friday music did not deceive him; at the second or third
time of hearing he had perceived its insincerity. It was very beautiful
music, but in such a situation sincerity was essential. The airs of this
mock redeemer were truly unbearable, and the abjection of Kundry before
this stuffed Christ revolted him. But the obtusely religious could not
fail to be moved; the appeal of the chaste kiss, with little sexual
cries all the while in the orchestra, could not but stir the vulgar
heart to infinite delight, and the art was so dexterously beautiful that
the intelligent were deceived. The artiste and the vulgarian held each
other's hands for the first time; they gasped a mutual wonder at their
own perception and their unsuspected nobility of soul. "Parsifal," he
declared, with true Celtic love of exaggeration, "to be the oiliest
flattery ever poured down the open throat of a liquorish humanity."
As he spoke such sentences his face would light up with malicious
humour, and he was so interested in the subject he discussed that his
listener was forced to follow him. It was only in such moments of
artistic discussion that his real soul floated up to the surface, and
he, as it were, achieved himself. He knew, too, how to play with his
listener, to wheedle and beguile him, for after a particularly
aggressive phrase he would drop into a minor key, and his criticism
would suddenly become serious and illuminative. To him "Parsifal" was a
fresco, a decoration painted by a man whose true genius it was to reveal
the most intimate secrets of the soul, to tell the enigmatic soul of
longing as Leonardo da Vinci had done. But he had been led from the true
path of his genius into the false one of a rivalry with Veronese. Only
where Wagner is confiding a soul's secret is he interesting, and in
"Tannhäuser," in this first flower of his dramatic and musical genius,
he had perhaps told the story of his own soul more truly, more sincerely
than elsewhere. To do that was the highest art. Sooner or later the
sublimest imaginations pale before the simple telling of a personal
truth, for the most personal truth is likewise the most universal.
"Tannhäuser" is the story of humanity, for what is the human story if it
isn't the pursuit of an ideal?
And this essential and primal truth Evelyn revealed to him and the very
spirit and sense of maidenhood, the centre and receptacle of life, the
mysterious secret of things, the awful moment when the whisper of the
will to live is heard in matter, the will which there is no denying, the
surrender of matter, the awaking of consciousness in things. And united
to the eternal idea of generation, he perceived the congenital idea
which in remotest time seems to have sprung from it--that life is sin
and must be atoned for by prayer. Evelyn's interpretation revealed his
deepest ideas to himself, and at last he seemed to stand at the heart of
life.
Suddenly his rapture was broken through; the singer had stopped the
orchestra.
"You have cut some of the music, I see," she said, addressing the
conductor.
"Only the usual cut, Miss Innes."
"About twenty pages, I should think."
The conductor counted them.
"Eighteen."
"Miss Innes, that cut has been accepted everywhere--Munich, Berlin,
Wiesbaden--everywhere except Bayreuth."
"But, Mr. Hermann Goetze, my agreement with you is that the operas I
sing in are to be performed in their entirety."
"In their entirety; that is to say, well--taken literally, I
suppose--that the phrase 'In their entirety' could be held to mean
without cuts; but surely, regarding this particular cut--I may say that
I spoke to Sir Owen about it, and he agreed with me that it was
impossible to get people into the theatre in London before half-past
seven."
"But, Mr. Hermann Goetze, your agreement is with me, not with Sir Owen
Asher."
"Quite so, Miss Innes, but--"
"If people don't care sufficiently for art to dine half-an-hour
earlier, they had better stay away."
"But you see, Miss Innes, you're not in the first act; there are the
other artistes to consider. The 'Venusberg' will be sung to empty
benches if you insist."
It seemed for a moment as if Mr. Hermann Goetze was going to have his
way; and Ulick, while praying that she might remain firm, recognised how
adroitly Hermann Goetze had contrived to place her in a false position
regarding her fellow artistes.
"I am quite willing to throw up the part; I can only sing the opera as
it is written."
The conductor suggested a less decisive cut to Evelyn, and Mr. Hermann
Goetze walked up and down the stage, overtaken by toothache. His agony
was so complete that Evelyn's harshness yielded. She went to him, and,
her hand laid commiseratingly on his arm, she begged him to go at once
to the dentist.
Then some of the musicians said that they could hardly read the music,
so effectually had they scratched it out.
"If the musicians cannot play the music, we had better go home," said
Evelyn.
"But the opera is announced for to-morrow night," Mr. Hermann Goetze
replied dolefully.
Mr. Wheeler suggested that they might go on with the rehearsal; the cut
could be discussed afterwards. Groups formed, everyone had a different
opinion. At last the conductor took up his stick and cried, "Number 105,
please."
"They are going back," thought Ulick; "she held her ground capitally.
She has more strength of character than I thought. But Hermann Goetze
has upset her; she won't be able to sing."
And it was as he expected; she could not recapture her lost inspiration;
mood, Ulick could see, was the foundation and the keystone of her art.
"No," she said, "I sang it horribly, I am all out of sorts, I don't feel
what I am singing, and when the mood is not upon me, I am atrocious.
What annoyed me was his attributing such selfishness to me, and such
vulgar selfishness, too--"
"However, you had your way about the cut."
"Yes, they'll have to sing the whole of the finale. But I am sorry about
his tooth; I know that it is dreadful pain."
Ulick told an amusing story how he had once called on Hermann Goetze to
ask if he had read the book of his opera.
"He'd just gone into an adjoining room to fetch a clothes-brush--he had
taken off his coat to brush it--but the moment he saw me, he whipped out
his handkerchief and said that he must go to the dentist."
"And when I asked him to engage Helbrun to sing Brangäne, and give her
eighty pounds a week if she wouldn't sing it for less, he whipped out
his handkerchief as you say, and asked me if I knew a dentist."
"The idea of Wagner without cuts always brings on a violent attack," and
Ulick imitated so well the expression of agony that had come into the
manager's face that Evelyn exploded with laughter. She begged Ulick to
desist.
"I shan't be able to sing at all. But I have not told you of my make up.
I don't look at all pretty; the ugly curls I wear come from an old
German print, and the staid, modest gown. But it is very provoking; I
was singing well till that fiend began to argue. Don't make me laugh
again."
He became very grave.
"I can only think of the joy you gave me."
His praise brightened her face, and she listened.
"I cannot tell you now what I feel; perhaps I shall never find words to
express what I feel about your Elizabeth. I shall be writing about it
next week, and shall have to try."
"Do tell me now. You liked it better than my Margaret?"
Ulick shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and they looked in each
other's eyes, and could hardly speak, so extraordinary was their
recognition of each other; it was so intense that they could hardly help
laughing, so strange it seemed that they should never have met before,
or should have been separated for such a long time. It really seemed to
them as if they had known each other from all eternity.
"How can you act Elizabeth, she is so different from what you are?"
"Is she?"
Her pale blue eyes seemed to open a little wider, and she looked at him
searchingly. He could not keep back the words that rose to his tongue.
"You mean that your dead life now lives in Elizabeth."
"Yes, I suppose that that is it."
They asked each other whether any part of one's nature is ever really
dead.
A few moments after the pilgrims were heard singing, and Evelyn would
have to go on the stage. She pressed her hands against her forehead,
ridding herself by an effort of will of her present individuality. The
strenuous chant of the pilgrims grew louder, the procession approached,
and as it passed across the stage Elizabeth sought for Tannhäuser, but
he was not among them. So her last earthly hope has perished, and she
throws herself on her knees at the foot of the wayside cross. And it was
the anguish of her soul that called forth that high note, a G repeated
three times; and it seemed to Ulick that she seemed to throw herself
upon that note, that reiterated note, as if she would reach God's ears
with it and force him to listen to her. In the religious, almost
Gregorian, strain her voice was pure as a little child, but when she
spoke of her renunciation and the music grew more chromatic, her voice
filled with colour--her sex appeared in it; and when the music returned
to the peace of the religious strain, her voice grew blanched and faded
like a nun's voice. Henceforth her life will be lived beyond this world,
and as she walked up the stage, the flutes and clarionets seemed to lead
her straight to God; they seemed to depict a narrow, shining path,
shining and ascending till it disappeared amid the light of the stars.
"Well," she said, "did I sing it to your satisfaction?"
"You're an astonishing artiste."
"No, that's just what I am not. I go on the stage and act; I couldn't
tell you how I do it; I am conscious of no rule."
"And the music?"
"The music the same. I have often been told that I might act
Shakespeare, but without music I could not express myself. Words without
music would seem barren; I never try to sing, I try to express myself.
But you'll see, my father won't think much of my singing. He'll compare
me to mother, and always to my disadvantage. I cannot phrase like her."
"But you can; your phrasing is perfection. It is the very emotion--"
"Father won't think so; if he only thought well of my singing he would
forgive me."
"How unaffected you are; in hearing you speak one hears your very soul."
"Do you? But tell me, is he very incensed? Shall I meet a face of
stone?"
"He is incensed, no doubt, but he must forgive you. But every day's
delay will make it more difficult."
"I know, I know."
"You cannot go to-morrow?"
"Why not?"
"To-morrow you sing this opera. Go on Saturday; you'll be sure to find
him on Saturday afternoon. He has a rehearsal in the morning and will be
at home about four in the afternoon."
As they walked through the scenery she said, "You'll come to see me,"
and she reminded him of his promise to go through the Isolde music with
her.
"Mind, you have promised," she said as she got into her carriage.
"You'll not forget Saturday afternoon," he said as he shook hands.
She nodded and put up her umbrella, for it was beginning to rain.