JUVENILE WORKS
With the exception of _Die Feen_, nothing composed by Wagner prior to
_Rienzi_ calls for serious attention, nor would receive any attention
whatever were not the author's name Wagner. He himself did not
distress his soul about the fate of his early works: he knew too well
their value; but when a Wagner cult came into existence these things
of small importance were acclaimed, one by one as they came to light,
as things of, at any rate, the highest promise. Not even that can
justly be claimed for them. _Die Feen_ has a certain atmosphere and a
set artistic purpose which may, in the light of his subsequent
achievements, be taken as an indication, a small hint, that the
subsequent achievements were possible. So much, but not more, may be
conceded. _Das Liebesverbot_ is known to me only from descriptions and
brief quotations, but these suffice to show that here is not the true
Wagner. Of the orchestral music--the overtures and the symphonies--I
have heard oftenest and studied most closely the C major Symphony. Let
us take it first.
Already I have referred to the absence of what, in the popular
acceptation of the word, might be called the "romantic" element in
Wagner's daily life during this period, and the symphony supports my
suggested explanation. In the letters, in accounts written by Dorn and
others, we find fire, enthusiasm, even a good deal of blatherskite and
wild vapouring, but scarcely a hint of "poetry," of the special
poetical sense, of the poet's outlook on life: and in his music he was
chiefly occupied in mastering the technical side of the craft,
assimilating, and at the same time emancipating himself from, the
lessons with Weinlig, and, absorbed in the task, simply letting
romance, poetry, imagination, fancy and the rest go hang; his
practical outward life was devoted to talking what he thought was
politics and drinking lager.
Though the symphony is worth looking at because it shows how far
Wagner had then got, the general interest in it has for thirty years
been its history. It has led to a deal of unnecessarily acrimonious
and barren dispute. Wagner's disagreeable diatribes aimed subsequently
at the Jews were, and are, in part attributed to Mendelssohn's
behaviour regarding it. It was sent to Mendelssohn; and that
industrious gentleman never referred to the subject. Wherefore we are
asked two things--to contemn the Jew and accept the symphony as a
manifestation of tremendous genius. Possibly Mendelssohn never clapped
eyes on the symphony. Had he done so, one would have expected him to
pay Wagner a superficial, insincere compliment about the score, and
imply that something might be done, etc. We have Richard's written
word for it that Mendelssohn never referred to Wagner's work. All the
same, what I believe may have been the case, and what Wagner most
certainly would not have believed to be the case, is that Mendelssohn
saw it, and saw nothing in it, and put it on one side, and totally
forgot it. The symphony was lost for long years; but some one
discovered the parts somewhere, and a score was made, and at the very
end of his life Wagner directed a private performance of it. He
dismissed it with a humorously disparaging remark, and we need have
heard no more about it, had not sundry gentlemen who refuse to accept
any Wagner save the inspired prophet of their own imaginings insisted
on having it performed in public.
I have, I say, heard it fairly often and beg to testify that it is a
miracle of dullness. The themes are not good of their sort, the sort
being, as he said, the sort that are useful for contrapuntal working.
That working is coldly mechanical, and is not distinguished either by
lightness or by sureness of touch. A dozen of Mendelssohn's pupils
could have done as well or better. In the andante their is neither
grace nor feeling: the music does not flow spontaneously, but is got
along by a clockwork tick-tick rhythm. The best stuff is in the
finale. Here we find at least sturdiness if not much character.
This criticism of his boyish work is not a disparagement of Wagner:
one might as well, indeed, disparage Shakespeare, or Beethoven, or the
sun and all the stars in heaven. The symphony tells us, as plainly as
words could tell, two things. First, that as far as craftsmanship is
concerned he fell between two stools: had his aim been lower, it would
have been also less confused, and the result would have turned out
better. That is, had he thought only of composing a well-constructed
symphony, with skilful, easy-running counterpoint, he might have
produced a more obviously clever if more superficial work. That aim
was missed by the fact that the Wagner who knew Beethoven by heart was
not at all content to achieve mere cleverness: he, too, wanted to
write a great symphony. But that ambition also was vague and robbed of
its force by his instinctive struggle to acquire a thorough technique.
So he showed himself neither a great poet-composer nor a contrapuntal
adept. The second fact so plainly stated in the symphony is that he
had not discovered what was to be the real driving force of his
invention throughout his creative career--the inspiration of a
dramatic or pictorial (not poetic) idea. The poetic idea is the
inspiration of the composer of pure, "absolute," music--the poetic
idea which is interpenetrated by the musical idea, the musical idea
that is interpenetrated by the poetic idea, the two being one and
indivisible. As this book proceeds the reader will see how, before
Wagner could shape fine music at all, he needed the
pictorial-dramatic-musical idea (if so cumbrous a phrase may be
allowed). From the very first he never succeeded in the attempt to
compose pure music of notable quality. As years went on he tried again
and again, but only such things as the _Kaisermarsch_, the
_Huldigungsmarsch_ and the _Siegfried Idyll_ are of any value, and
these, we may note, were meant to be played in a quasi-theatrical
environment. Immense crowds, flags, waving banners, uniforms,
flashing swords, snorting chargers and so on set Wagner to work on the
first as surely as the picture of the Hall of Song suggested the march
in _Tannhäuser_; the same is the case with the second; the _Siegfried
Idyll_, of course, was written for performance at the bedroom door or
window of Madame Cosima on that lady's birthday. A distinct picture
was in the composer's mind's-eye; and besides, the themes came out of
an opera already composed.
_Die Feen_--_The Fairies_--is based on a version of the child's tale
of _Beauty and the Beast_, Gozzi's _La Donna Serpente_. In Gozzi's
form a lady is changed to a serpent: the handsome and valiant prince
comes along and all ends well. Wagner had not then dreamed of the
_Nibelung's Ring_ with its menagerie of nymphs who could sing under
water, giants, dwarfs, bears, frogs, crocodiles, "wurms," dragons and
birds with the gift of articulate speech; and he would have nothing to
do with the serpent. The lady must be changed into a stone. Further,
Wagner had now got hold of the notion that haunted him for the rest of
his life--a notion he exploited for all it was worth, and a good deal
more--the notion that woman's function on the globe is to "redeem"
man. So the prince changes the lady back from a stone to a woman, and
then, like Goldsmith's dog, to gain some private ends, goes mad. The
lady is equal to the occasion: she promptly redeems him--that is,
cures him--and all ends well.
Here, at worst, we have the picture, or series of pictures, demanded
by Wagner's genius; here also is a dramatic idea of sorts. His
imagination immediately flamed. The music is not like that of the
symphony, dry and barren wood: on the contrary, it contains many
passages of rare beauty and feeling. There is little of the fairy-like
in it. To Wagner's criticism of Mendelssohn's _Midsummer Night's
Dream_ overture, that here we had not fairies but gnats, one might
retort that in his own opera we have not fairies but baby elephants at
play. But throughout there is a quality almost or quite new in music,
a feeling for light, a strange, uncanny light. It is worth noticing
this, because it is just this sense of all-pervading light which marks
off _Lohengrin_ from all preceding operas. The hint came, it goes
without saying, from Weber; but there is a vast difference between the
unearthly light of Weber and the fresh sweetness of _Lohengrin_, and
here, in his first boyish exploit, we find Wagner trying to utilise in
his own way Weber's hint.
For a boy of twenty the opera is wonderfully well planned. Whether,
had it been written by Marschner, we should take the trouble to look
at it twice is a question I contentedly leave others to solve. But, as
it is by Wagner, we do take the trouble to look at it many times, and
the main thing we learn is that from the beginning the composer could
write his best music for the theatre, while for the concert-room he
could only grind out sluggish counterpoint. In addition we may see
that it is a work of much nobler artistic aim than _Rienzi_.
Preposterous as is the idea of a woman sacrificing herself to "save"
a man, it is an idea, and it stirred the depths of young Wagner's
emotional nature. In _Rienzi_, as we shall see in a later chapter,
there is no idea of any sort; that opera did not spring from his
heart, nor, properly speaking, from his head, but simply and wholly
from a hungry desire for fame and fortune.
The clumsiness of the music is due to several causes. He modelled it,
he says, upon three composers, Beethoven, Spontini and Marschner--the
second and third being by far the more potent influences. Now,
gracefulness is not a characteristic of either of them. Then we must
consider that Wagner was not yet one-tenth fully grown, and it is the
hobbledehoy who is so heavy on his feet, not the athlete with all his
muscles completely trained: Wagner needed years of training before he
gained the sure, light touch of _Lohengrin_ and the _Mastersingers_.
His very deadly earnestness over the "lesson" of his opera and his
desire to express his feeling accurately and logically led to his
overweighting small melodies with ponderous harmonies. The
orchestration of the day was heavy. The art of Mozart had been
forgotten; Weber scored cumbrously--as was inevitable; Spontini and
Marschner scored cumbrously also, partly because they could not help
it, partly because they wanted to fill the theatre with sound. Wagner
naturally followed them. But it may be noted that the orchestration of
_The Fairies_ is not so widely different from that of the _Faust_
overture composed a short while afterwards. A sense of the contrasts
to be obtained by alternating word-wind and strings is peculiarly
his. Mozart and Beethoven had alternated them, but on the simple plan
adopted in their violin sonatas: in those sonatas the violin is given
a passage and the piano accompanies, then the same passage is given to
the piano and the violin accompanies; in all the symphonies of Mozart,
and the earlier ones of Beethoven, virtually the same plan is
followed, strings and wind standing for violin and piano. Wagner from
the first discarded this mechanical notion; wind and strings are
played off against one another, but there are none of these mechanical
alternations, one holding the bat while the other has the ball. On the
whole _The Fairies_ is very beautifully scored.