'LOHENGRIN'
I
_Lohengrin_ was first drafted in 1845--for Wagner during this period
allowed no grass to grow under his feet. He was a member of a coterie
that met at Angell's restaurant, and there on November 17 he read the
complete libretto to his friends and acquaintances. Schumann was
amongst them, and he bluntly asserted that such a libretto could not
be set. Others were more favourable, but many were doubtful. However,
that made little difference to Richard. He knew his own strength and
trusted his instinct; and however much he was urged to alter the
_dénouement_, he stuck to his guns and his libretto.
In point of structure the libretto of _Lohengrin_ closely resembles
that of its predecessor. There are even fewer set pieces, there are
more fragmentary speeches. The drama is so contrived as to let in the
set pieces naturally: of the old forced operatic business of sending
out or bringing in characters as seems advisable there is not a sign.
The story is on the whole simpler than that of _Tannhäuser_. Lohengrin
is son of Parsifal, head of the mystic Montsalvat monastery where the
Holy Grail is kept; where the monks never seem precisely to die; and
where, without marriage and even without women, children are somehow
born to the favoured ones. He comes in a magic boat drawn by a swan
to aid Elsa against Telramund and his wife, who falsely accuse her of
having murdered her brother; he fights for her and overcomes the
accusers, first exacting a promise that she will never ask him his
name nor where he comes from. She promises, yielding herself
unconditionally to him; and so ends Act One. Next Ortrud, wife of
Telramund, gets Elsa's ear, begging for mercy, and contrives to poison
the girl's mind with doubts regarding Lohengrin; and when later the
wedding procession is nearing the church, Telramund himself accuses
Lohengrin before the king and all the crowd of sorcery and witchcraft.
Nothing happens at the moment; Telramund is pushed on one side, and
the procession goes its way. But in the next act, when Lohengrin and
Elsa are left alone she can no longer restrain her curiosity nor
conceal her fears: in spite of his warnings she questions him. At the
moment Telramund and other nobles rush in to assassinate him; he kills
Telramund, orders the other nobles to bear the body into the judgment
hall, and tells Elsa he must leave her. In the next scene he reveals
himself, and the swan returns to take him away. Ortrud mocks him and
tells how she, after all, has triumphed, for she changed Elsa's
brother into a swan; Lohengrin kneels and prays; the swan disappears
and the missing brother springs up; a dove descends and is attached by
Lohengrin to the boat, and he goes back to Montsalvat.
Now I would ask the reader if this story is reasonable, if any
"meaning" or moral can be read into it. On the face of it Lohengrin's
conditions are preposterous. Yet he is bound by the laws of the magic
domain he comes from; he trusts Elsa and does battle on her behalf
without any proof of her innocence; and she has no patience to wait
for him to explain matters. On the other hand, he hears her prayer in
a magical way, and comes drawn in a magic boat; and she has a perfect
right to assume that he would not have fought for her if he had not
known by his arts that she was innocent. It was just over this
_dénouement_, this forsaking of Elsa because of her inquisitiveness,
that many of Wagner's friends boggled; and nothing that he then or
afterwards wrote in defence of it seems to me worth a moment's serious
consideration. Mr. Ernest Newman suggests that perhaps Wagner was
using the savage's notion that in giving up your name you are placing
yourself in some one's power; but there is not a hint of that in the
drama. The thing to me is simply a fairy story. We must accept
Lohengrin and the conditions in which he lives, moves and has his
being. He is not his own master: somewhere far away he has an
all-powerful over-lord who, for no useful purpose to be comprehended
by mortal, sent him to rescue Elsa under these conditions. And I say
that, far from having a meaning, a "purpose," _Lohengrin_ is pure
romance, as innocent of moral ideas as any genuine mediæval romance.
Wagner's "explanations," like Bishop Berkeley's, take a great deal of
explaining; and though Glasenapp, Wolzogen and the rest have covered
many reams of paper in doing it, we are not an inch nearer to
perceiving a grain of sense in the whole affair. There is only one
part of it which can be, in one sense, explained--Wagner's intense
acrimony in his treatment of the female puppet Elsa. Even in 1845 he
had grown restive under the insults and stupidity of court officials
and the Press, and doubtless he had threatened often enough to quit
for ever the degraded German theatre. He never could see that the
German theatre had never been any better than it then was, but on the
contrary, a great deal worse; he never realized that it was on the
up-grade, and that he was to be instrumental in elevating it. He was
like a mechanic called in (by destiny) to repair a rickety machine,
who because it won't go when he "wills" it, kicks it to pieces. The
Reissigers and the rest were simply parts of the machine that were out
of order: time and patience were required to eliminate them and put in
sound working parts. Wagner could not understand this any more than he
could understand why all German (or rather, Saxon) mankind should not
at once be perfect, think alike and form the ideal State. So, as he
could not kick the Dresden Court Opera to pieces, he long meditated
quitting it--so much he explicitly affirmed afterwards--and he must
have worried Minna sadly. She understood neither his qualities nor his
defects, his ideals nor the short-sighted impatience which rendered it
impossible for him ever to attain them: she saw only too clearly that
at any moment he might kick over the traces, and that the starvation
and misery of the Paris episode would have to be faced again. We can
readily picture him coming in raging after a conflict at the theatre
with official imbecility, and Minna, instead of sympathizing,
counselling him to be wise and temporize. His exasperation grew, and
only the events of 1849 prevented a rupture--so much seems
certain--and he vented his spleen by making Elsa a stupid, shallow,
faithless creature who feels no gratitude towards the hero who saved
her from being burnt, but by maddening female pertinacity,
wrong-headedness and wilfulness destroys her own and his happiness. As
the reader will perceive later, I by no means defend Wagner in this
domestic squabbling, but something must be said for him; I don't say,
either, that he created Elsa to express his views about his wife, but
I do say that his feelings account for the excess of his rancour
against his own creation. So pitiable a specimen of feminine
inquisitiveness, bad temper and ungenerosity has never been put on the
stage as the heroine of a grand opera. Possibly Lohengrin saw this;
and, neglecting his recent marriage-vow, he went back to Montsalvat,
where, as we know, there were no women. All this would have to be said
in the course of this book; and I say it now because it helps us to
understand a defect in the art of a beautiful opera.
A beautiful opera _Lohengrin_ certainly is--the most beautiful of all
Wagner's operas. The story of it is a fairy story, as I have said, and
superficially a very ordinary sort of fairy story. We have the
distressed maiden in the hands of persecutors, the knightly hero who
rescues her, the maiden's faithlessness, and the contemptuous
departure of the hero. But Wagner has clothed the whole of this
work-a-day mediæval legend in a wondrous atmosphere of mystical
beauty, and that beauty springs from the thought of the river.
II
It is necessary to discuss as briefly as may be the leitmotiv, because
with _Lohengrin_ Wagner first began to use it with serious purpose. In
the _Dutchman_ two themes may be rightly described as leitmotivs; in
_Tannhäuser_ not one theme may be rightly so described. While in
_Lohengrin_ Wagner showed himself as much as ever the inspired
musician, he made for the first time use of the leitmotiv for dramatic
as well as musical ends. There we find three leitmotivs: one intended
by the power of association of ideas to evoke on the instant the
vision of Montsalvat and the Grail; a second to recall the thought and
emotion of Lohengrin the man; the third to remind us of the conditions
which Lohengrin imposes on Elsa before he is willing to fight for her.
The first (_a_, p. 191) is perhaps the most lovely thing Wagner
invented; the third (_d_)--not second--is a thing any one might have
concocted, though not a thing that any one I ever heard of could use
as Wagner uses it; the second (_c_) is by way of being a study for the
best of the _Parsifal_ themes. It must be remarked, in passing, that
the study is much more finely used than when his powers, largely
exhausted by a tedious struggle with the world, had got into a state
of decrepitude.
The leitmotiv (_a_) is of a serene beauty. I must cut out of it a
little bit (_b_) which colours the opera and gives it atmosphere from
the beginning far more than the complete theme. It is this, more than
anything else, which gives _Lohengrin_ the vividness of reality
combined with the vanishing loveliness of a sweet dream. The idea of
the swan, symbolizing the broad, shining river flowing from afar-off
mysterious lands to the eternal sea, is given us in this phrase, as
delicate and as firm, as unmistakable, as ever painter drew with his
brush. Here we have, not indeed Montsalvat the domain of monks, but
the land of ever-enduring dawn--a land that other poets have dreamed
of, a land where hope could be subsisted on. From beginning to end
Lohengrin, the man on the stage, moves in the atmosphere of this
strange, dreamy, fresh and silent land: if he did not, no one would
tolerate for a moment his behaviour. It is the magic charm that
reconciles him to us; it is this that makes us feel how he is
conditioned, chained, cribbed, cabined and confined. In obedience to
inexorable law he comes down the river, drawn by the swan; in
obedience to the same inexorable law he is drawn away, as helplessly
as a needle drawn by a magnet.
The prelude opens with a series of chords, ascending, all on A. Handel
might have done this: none of the Viennese composers could, or perhaps
I should rather say, would, have done it. Beethoven got as near to the
naked truth as ever composer did in dealing with the emotions of
humanity; Mozart, too, worked his miracles; Weber, non-Viennese
though he was, gave us weird, fantastic pictures of fairy adventures
in the darkness of grim woods, but nothing more. It was left for
Wagner to give us in a few bars a picture, such as no painter could
have painted, of the blue heavens on an almost unimaginably fine day.
The blue sky, the thin, clear air, the sunlight, are all given us in
the first few bars. It is far from my wish to intrude my personal
history into these pages, but I wish to give a convincing example of
an episode of a sort familiar to all those who have experimented with
Wagner's music. A relative of mine, who had spent many of his earlier
years in travelling the southern Atlantic and the Pacific in sailing
vessels, heard me play on the piano, as an illustration of some
argument I was foolish enough to advance, these opening bars of the
_Lohengrin_ prelude. He immediately said, "That takes me back into the
Trades"--the sweet days of perfect peace in southern climes, where the
sky was blue for day after day and week after week, where the wind
sang cheerfully without change for weeks on end, where a delicious sun
made all men (no matter what the feeling was on those foul old ships)
feel good-natured and good-hearted. That is to say, my relative at
once felt the magical truthfulness of Wagner's touch: the sweet, clear
air, the sunlight; and that is the atmosphere Wagner wanted to
establish at the beginning of this most magical of operas. Out of the
blue sky comes the Montsalvat (not necessarily the Grail) motive; it
descends with ever-gathering fulness, through key after key, until at
last it culminates in a tremendous climax for the brass: then comes a
wondrous cadence, falling slowly, as a mountain stream falls over
slabs of smooth-worn mountain rock, until we get back to the original
atmosphere. The Montsalvat vision has faded away into the blue whence
it came. Wagner afterwards achieved some marvellous things, but none
more marvellous than this.
The curtain rises: there is a rum-tum-tum by the orchestra. We are at
once in the discord of a turbulent armed camp: the fury of Telramund
against those who are not convinced of his evidently prejudiced view
that Elsa holds the lands he wishes to hold, is made to resound in the
orchestra as not the most expert Italian composer could make it
resound by the voices. When Elsa enters to defend herself the music
changes its character utterly; it is the embodiment of the sweetness
of young feminine kindly nature; and it is odd that Wagner, when
writing this music, which he fancied was the most German ever written,
should have gone so far as, in some of its finest parts, to steal bits
of the Austrian hymn, composed, as we may remember, by not even an
Austrian, but a Croatian, pure Slav, composer. Elsa's account of her
dream is not dramatic as Wagner, by the time he wrote his next work,
would have understood the term--in shape it is an Italian aria, and
everything is at a standstill until it is finished--yet it occurs
fittingly, and prepares us by ethereal music for the music of a
gentleman who is very unethereal. In form the whole scene is as near
as may be a regular Italian opera scene. King Henry the Fowler and his
nobles show mighty patience in sitting or standing it out to the end.
The business of a champion for Elsa being called for, the moments of
suspense, the prayers of Elsa and her attendant maidens, the fiery
impatience of Telramund and the premature triumph of Ortrud are all
done with Wagner's consummate skill in writing purely theatrical
music; and when the swan and the hero are sighted the excitement is
worked up with the same skill to a glorious triumph, and we hear the
Lohengrin, "as hero," theme in its full splendour. Then comes the
fighting music, which, like all fighting music, is mediocre stuff, and
the gorgeous set piece, the finale. This last is quite old-fashioned
opera, but it is not forced in: it happens inevitably. The themes are
mainly new, but the Lohengrin heroic theme is worked in triumphantly.
Technically there is no advance or change in _Lohengrin_: the
counterpoint and interweaving of themes of _Tristan_ and the
_Mastersingers_ were to come a few years later. Indeed, there is less
of Wagner the contrapuntal virtuoso in _Lohengrin_ than in
_Tannhäuser_.
III
In the music, as in the drama, the second act presents a total
contrast to the first. The music of the first is throughout full of
sunlight. At times it may be strident, violent, rather tumultuous; but
sweetness is the prevailing note, and as soon as Elsa comes on we have
the sheer loveliness of first her answers to the king, and then of
her vision; then comes Lohengrin, bringing with him the breath of the
land of eternal dawn, and of the shining river down which he was drawn
by the swan; then after the (rather theatrical) prayer, a few moments
of noise while the fighting is being arranged and carried out; then,
so to speak, the glorious midday sunshine of the finale. The second
act opens with two sinister phrases heard in the darkness (_e_ and
_f_)--Ortrud is planning vengeance, and the theme of Lohengrin's
warning and threat to Elsa is presently heard; that warning gives her
the hint as to the way of achieving vengeance. Ortrud and Telramund,
outcast, crouch there in the night; Ortrud deeply scheming, Frederick,
poor dupe, madly fuming, while the lights blaze at the palace windows,
and the trumpets sound out as the feast proceeds within. He rages, and
a theme (_f_) quoted is abruptly transformed into (_g_) as he bitterly
casts upon Ortrud the blame for their downfall. The vocal parts are
neither recitative nor true song; the orchestral tide is developed in
much the same symphonic style as in _Tannhäuser_. We are still no
nearer to the perfect blending of the orchestral stream and the vocal
parts that we get in _Tristan_ and in the _Mastersingers_. The style
is not homogeneous: the stream is broken by theatrical exclamations
and snatches of recitative that not only break the flow, but differ in
character from the rest. But the elasticity of motion is a great
advance on _Tannhäuser_: Wagner was coming to his own, and much of
_Tannhäuser_ strikes one as cumbrous and heavy in comparison. That
sinister atmosphere of mystery is never lost; the gloom and the
wretched crouching figures, the fierce anger and Ortrud's alternate
cajoling and threatening may be said, without exaggeration, to sound
from the orchestra with as powerful an effect on the imagination as
the sights and sounds on the stage. Most magnificent is the descending
chromatic passage that accompanies Ortrud as she casts her spell again
over Frederick. It resembles closely an Erda theme of the _Ring_--as
is quite natural, for one chromatic scale cannot but resemble another.
The significance of the resemblance is that the strange harmonies are
also much alike, and the central idea is the same in the two cases:
the idea of old Mother Earth, her everlasting stillness in strange
places, her never-ceasing internal workings, her mysterious power. In
the _Ring_ there is nothing baneful in the conception: it is Nature at
work in her sleep amongst the silent hills: mysterious, indeed, but
doing no evil. Here it is the earth as conceived by the mediæval mind,
the earth to which the coming of the White Christ had banished all the
gods of the older world, there to become the malevolent, malignant
divinities of the new world, and believed in as such by the first
adherents of the new religion. Frederick was a Christian, mediæval
style, and he implicitly believes that Ortrud can call up wicked
spirits, and by their aid weave enchantments when the God of the East
is not looking. The same may be said of the king, and indeed all the
characters in _Lohengrin_: again I say the opera is a fairy drama in
which these things must be assumed and accepted. That wondrous
passage must have sounded doubly wonderful in the ears of two
generations back; blent with that second sinister Ortrud theme, it
accomplishes as much in a dozen or so bars as Weber could accomplish
in as many pages. That Ortrud theme seems to wind round Frederick's
soul until at last he is wholly in his wife's grip; and the scene ends
with an invocation to "ye Powers that rule our earthly lot"--the
malignant gods of the underworld. We, knowing the kind of music Wagner
had in his mind when he wrote the libretto of _Lohengrin_, can easily
understand Schumann's dismay when this scene was read to him: nothing
of the sort had been composed before.
Suddenly Elsa appears on the balcony, and the character of the music
changes at once: all now is sweetness and light. Her serenade (to
herself) is a simple and very lovely thing, making full half of its
effect through its contrast with the harshness, agitation and gloom of
all that has gone before. There is a master-touch when Ortrud calls
softly, "Elsa": by one stroke, an abrupt strange chord, the whole
atmosphere is for the moment altered: the dreariness of the call is
unforgetable. There are many hints of Ortrud's purpose given out more
and more plainly till the climax is reached in her invocation to
Wotan, chief of the malignant divinities. (It is strange to think that
when he wrote this Wagner must already have had the other and more
celebrated Wotan in his thoughts.) Much of Elsa's melody is of a very
Weberesque quality--and is none the worse for it: far better that than
the touches of Bellini, Marschner and Spontini that abound in the
earlier operas. One or two other points may be noted. At the words
"Rest thee with me" we get a tune which might have grown out of one
previously heard and one in the bedroom scene--not only does the tune
resemble the others closely, but the rhythm of the phrases Elsa
addresses to Ortrud is the same as that of the phrases with which
Lohengrin seems to caress Elsa. There is, of course, no "significance"
in the sense in which the word is used by the Wagnerians. The short
duet following contains a divine melody, but Ortrud's "aside" is a
fairly lengthy one--forty bars--and is a bit of conventionalism which
Wagner soon discarded. The melody is played again as Elsa leads her
enemy into the house; Frederick returns to curse Ortrud and Lohengrin
in the same breath; all the sweetness goes out of the music as Elsa
disappears from view, and the scene closes as it opened, in gloom.
As daylight breaks Wagner indulges in one of the effects he was fond
of at this period. The reveille is sounded from a turret, and an
answering call comes from a distance; and the two parties trumpet it
in alternation until every one is awakened. It is a quasi-musical
effect only: there is no invention: the trumpet chords serve the
purpose and nothing more. He never reverted to this rather bald method
of filling up time while his people are being got on the stage:
compare this passage with, for instance, Hagen's call in _The Dusk of
the Gods_. The latter is rich and full of picturesque music: it means
something and is, in fact, an effective piece in a concert-room. Or
take the watchman with his cow-horn in the _Mastersingers_; the music
is redolent of the old world; it impresses the imagination more than
an entry in Pepys--"the watchman calling two of the morning and a
thick snow falling." In the _Lohengrin_ days his method still requires
these _longueurs_, these dry patches: later his mastery over his
material enabled him to deal his theatrical and his musical stroke at
the same time. As knights and retainers flock in, a long and elaborate
chorus is sung--a musical, not a dramatic, chorus, almost as much in
the _Rienzi_ manner as in the manner of _Tannhäuser_. It is curious to
observe how cautious and tentative Wagner was at this stage of his
growth. He was still groping, seeing only very dimly the destination
he would reach by the way he was taking. _Lohengrin_, had he followed
the plan he would certainly have adopted ten years later, would have
been terser, more closely dramatic, and would have made only a short
opera; there would have been fewer set numbers and a much smaller
quantity of the magnificent music. The whole idea, I have already
said, is not a dramatic one, but a musical one; and the advance on the
_Dutchman_ lies in the skill with which the musical opportunities seem
to grow out of the drama and are not pressed into it. In this respect
it is hardly an advance on _Tannhäuser_; indeed three of the great
ensembles have not an adequate dramatic motive. That at the end of the
first act, splendid music though it is, is a quite operatic finale, so
conventional that only when rendered in the conventional operatic
manner does it sound and appear impressive. It becomes, when done in
this manner, a kind of dance, for towards the finish all the crowd
should form in long lines and go twining about in a ballet figure. In
this opening chorus of knights and retainers in the Second Act (scene
ii) the musical inspiration is intense; but words are repeated as
irrationally as in a Handel oratorio chorus; and the same is the case
in the bridal procession music. Wagner still had a hankering after
imposing spectacle and brilliant choral writing. That bridal
procession and chorus are, of course, supremely beautiful music: music
and spectacle were aimed at and achieved, not music and drama, in the
later Wagnerian sense.
The scene of the interruption of the procession first by Ortrud and
then by Frederick has always seemed to me superfluous as well as
stagey. The whole thing is pure melodrama of the kind that used to be
popular until a very few years ago; and the music is as melodramatic
as the two incidents. The scene is far too long, and is thus rendered
doubly nonsensical. Only a few minutes before, the Herald has
announced the King's decree: any one harbouring either of the
offenders "will share his [it ought to be their] doom with life and
limb." Yet the offenders themselves are allowed to break up an orderly
procession and to hurl angry diatribes at the very people they have
been banned for seeking to injure. For many minutes Ortrud, encouraged
by a furious orchestra, pours forth a stream of insult directed at
Lohengrin and Elsa: she is not immediately seized and carried off to
be tortured: the bystanders utter a few exclamations, and leave Elsa
to reply for herself. When the king and Lohengrin enter they content
themselves with gentle remonstrances: even Frederick draws from them
only dignified if somewhat scornful protests. There has been some
other rather futile business: a few conspirators planning to support
Frederick in attacking not only Lohengrin, but the king. The flower of
a loyal army look on at all this and go on their way, leaving
Frederick free to make an attempt on Lohengrin's life in the third
Act. Again I emphasise a point because it reveals exactly how far
Wagner's art had got at this period. Well might he feel it necessary,
before proceeding to other masterpieces, to discover where he stood,
what was his ideal, and how he might attain it. For, observe, he
wanted to depict in music an imperious, ambitious, unscrupulous and
wicked woman with a temper that in the end is her own undoing; he felt
the necessity of contrasting her with Elsa, sweet, gentle and
lamentably weak--Elsa, who is strong, or, rather, pertinacious, only
once, and at the wrong time; and, third, he felt that his act would
terminate rather tamely with a mere wedding-march. The result is this
noisy melodramatic scene, with its melodramatic music. It could not be
otherwise. Music cannot express anger--at best it can only suggest. By
anger I mean human anger--the god's wrath of a Wotan is a different
matter. Brünnhilda knows Wotan to be angry by the raging storm that
marks his path through the heavens, by the lightnings and thunders;
and we have all enough of our primitive ancestors in us to feel in
some degree as they felt--indeed, plenty of people to-day see in a
storm a manifestation of the wrath of the Almighty. Human anger has
never been put into music. Why, Ortrud alternates her rantings (mere
recitative) with beautiful phrases of the same pattern as those sung
by Elsa! The music for the orchestra is turbulent rather than
forcible; it is incoherent in the old-fashioned way: essentially--in
spite of a free use of discords--it is as old-fashioned as anything in
_Don Giovanni_. Frederick and Lohengrin have hot words, and Telramund
is supposed to be a hotheaded idiot and Lohengrin a spotless, handsome
hero; and lo! with due regard for the respective ranges of their
voices, they might sing each other's music and no harm done. When the
chorus enters a very imposing piece of music is wrought, largely out
of the Ortrud insinuating theme (_f_); but it is not dramatic music.
The ending with the resumption of the procession is one of Wagner's
noblest things. It is not in the customary sense of the phrase an
operatic finale, but a perfectly satisfying piece of music that
prepares us for a pause during which we can take breath before the
action of the drama is taken up again in the third Act.
IV
In that act we have the central idea of the opera--the poetic and the
musical idea--clearly, definitely set forth--the idea of Montsalvat,
far away up the rippling river on which the white swan
floated--Montsalvat, the land of eternal dawn, where all things
remained for ever young, and the flowers and the corn grew always and
never faded nor fell to the sickle. It is the land Mignon aspired
to--"Oh let me for ever then remain young"--the impossible dream of
poets and millions of men and women who were not poets: Nirvana, with
a difference; that realm in which, tired with the struggles and fights
in the devious ways of this dark world, they should after death awake
refreshed in a serene light and pure air, thereafter to dwell for ever
in a state of untroubled blessedness, where all earth's puzzles solve
themselves, and life is seen to be complete. As Senta's ballad is the
germ of the _Dutchman_, so is Lohengrin's narrative, "In fernem Land,"
the germ of this more beautiful opera. It plays a more important part
in _Lohengrin_ than does the ballad in the _Dutchman_. Without
exaggeration, the life, colour and emotion of the narrative wash
backwards and forwards over the _Lohengrin_ score, relieving scenes
that might be tedious and worrying--like those Ortrud scenes I have
just described--and making the beautiful pages still more beautiful.
The land of dawn, fresh and pure, the limpid river: these, the essence
of _Lohengrin_ and the pervading atmosphere, proceed from the
narrative.
But much has to be got through before this point is reached. First, we
have the gorgeous prelude--the most brilliant Wagner wrote, and the
last he was to write that has no thematic connection with any portion
of the opera. Here we have no summary of the act, no hint of impending
disaster and tragedy, but simply a joyous, rattling preliminary to the
procession that escorts Lohengrin and Elsa to the bridal chamber. It
starts off with immense spirit, the music leaping straight up,
hesitating a moment on a cross-accent, then a noisy shake reaching its
highest note, and after a clash of the cymbals sliding off into the
more regular rhythm, broken slightly by occasional syncopations, in
which the piece as a whole is conceived. The melody in the bass that
follows, and the more tender strains of a middle section, are familiar
to every one nowadays--in fact, so familiar that we are likely to
overlook the intense originality of the whole thing. When we remember
the course the drama has now to take, the tragic beauty of its close,
we can perceive how exactly right Wagner's feeling was when he left
the plan he adopted throughout the _Dutchman_ and _Tannhäuser_--the
plan either of summing up or foreshadowing the ensuing scenes, or of
making the prelude part of the first scene. Of course the music at the
beginning of Act II is rather in the nature of an introduction than of
a distinct prelude; but Act III is not prefaced by so much as that.
Rather, it suggests that since Elsa and Lohengrin entered the church
all has been rejoicing, and that we catch only the tail-end of the
feast as the party comes on the stage.
The wedding chorus I pass over as rather trivial; and it contains
between the middle section and the repetition the eight most trivial
bars Wagner put to paper--I do not except the weakest portions of
_Rienzi_. The opening of the great love scene--the most curious love
scene in the world--is pure deliciousness. Nothing of the passion,
flaming hot and terrible, of _Tristan_ is here; only a sense of sheer
delight and happiness. Melody after melody--of a very Weberesque
pattern, of course, but sweet, voluptuous--is poured forth; and a
graver tone comes into the music only when Elsa begins timidly to lead
up to the questionings of Lohengrin which are her aim. She hints at
what she wants, and Lohengrin gives her, to a very pretty tune, an
answer that can merely be called sublimely fatuous. Drawing her to the
window, he bids her breathe in the odours from the flowers in the
moonlit garden beneath. "But," he blandly adds, "don't ask whence
their sweet scent comes, or you will its wondrous charm destroy." The
song is, I say, a pretty one; indeed, it is so pretty that but for the
enchantment of each successive phrase no one could stand the monotony
of so long a series of four-bar phrases. Of that fault in _Lohengrin_
I shall have more to say presently. More dramatic, living, and less
mechanical stuff follows at once: Elsa is not to be put off in that
way, and in agitated strains to an agitated but not spasmodic
accompaniment she presses on towards disaster. Lohengrin's warning
sounds out, sinister; Lohengrin pleads, always stupidly, but to music
of growing intensity and grip; the measures are no longer cut to a
pattern, not incoherent as they are in the squabbles of the second
Act; and at last a passage of Wagner at his theatrical best is
reached when he solemnly warns her again--"Greatest of trusts, Elsa, I
have shown thee." To another most lovely theme he tries again to
soothe her: she will not listen, and the Ortrud theme begins to writhe
in the orchestra, and we know that Elsa's soul is fast bound in the
spell of suspicion which Ortrud put upon her. She gets nearer and
nearer to the fatal question, and suddenly in the impotent rage of a
fretful woman who cannot get her way--a woman driven mad by baseless
jealousy--in fancy she sees the swan coming to lead Lohengrin away
from her; with mournful and dreary effect a fragment of the swan theme
sounds from the orchestra. This simple touch is weird to a degree
never dreamed of by all the purveyors of operatic horrors; it is
unearthly, uncanny, in its wild beauty. The climax is immensely
powerful, but very simple, and, above all, sheer art of the theatre.
There is a crash as Frederick rushes in to be instantly killed; a bass
passage tears down the scale to the depths; and the horns sustain two
pianissimo chords, two notes in each; then silence, broken only by
soft drum-beats to make the silence felt. Elsa has fainted, and as she
revives we hear a bit of the duet--Lohengrin's tenderness as he tends
her, and a fleeting dream of Elsa's, perhaps, seem to blend in it. All
is finished.
To compare this duet with that in _Tristan_ would be profitless but
for one reason. Wagner had not yet reached that perfect mastery of his
art which enabled him, so to speak, to fuse the dramatic and the
musical inspiration. We saw how in the _Dutchman_ the music rose to
its full height and splendour when the drama was sincere and true; in
_Tristan_ drama and music are inseparable. In _Lohengrin_, where the
inspiration is, if not wholly, at any rate mainly, musical, the drama
seems at times to be somewhat of a hindrance. I have mentioned the
fine dramatic or stage touches; but the finest things occur when the
pair, singly or together, are singing music that would be as effective
on a concert platform as on the stage. The art, that is, is far away
from the art of the _Tristan_ duet. At many points the situation is
saved by Wagner's stage dexterity: only when the music is almost as
completely self-moulded as in a symphony, or any other form of
"absolute" music, is it at its best. For practical purposes with
Wagner the songs are "absolute" music: the words were his own, and he
could alter them to suit the musical exigency.
V
The opening of the next scene is spectacular, and the music is not
striking--for Wagner, though Marschner or Spontini might have owned it
with pride. The entry of the nobles bringing Frederick's corpse, the
entry also of Elsa, "like Niobe, all tears," are theatrically
powerful. Elsa's entry is a particularly beautiful example of what I
have previously called Wagner's dramatict use of the leitmotiv. There
are twenty bars of accompaniment, and in that space we have three
motives, so arranged that those who knew their significance, but had
never seen the earlier portions of the opera, might easily read the
whole of Elsa's sad history. As she is led in, stricken down and
miserable, the warning theme is heard; then that winding, insidious
theme associated with Ortrud; and last, four bars of the music heard
in the first act when she stands helpless before the king and has
nothing wherewith to answer her accusers: she is as miserable now as
she was then, and the cause of it Lohengrin's edict and her defiance
of it under Ortrud's influence. The device I have always maintained to
be a naïve one; but it may be used to a sublime end, as in the _Dusk
of the Gods_ funeral procession, or as here, to emphasize Elsa's
situation, and to remind us at once of her being the authoress of her
own destruction. This is followed by acclamations as Lohengrin enters,
and nothing further of note occurs until he declares that, for reasons
which he cannot give, he will not go forth to fight the foe with the
Brabantians; and this declaration is set to the same passage, or part
of it, in which he has lately warned Elsa not to question him (p.
175). The meaning of the words and the dramatic significance of this
musical phrase are beyond my understanding. If Lohengrin did not mean
to tell his secret the musical phrase might imply that he had no
intention of letting them ask for it. But he has come there with no
other intention than that of revealing everything--and, in a word, the
whole business is incomprehensible because there is nothing to be
comprehended--because it is sheer nonsense. How Wagner, even supposing
he had originally some other idea for the ending of the work, could
let so flat a contradiction of his final plan stand--this also is
more than I can understand; for in later years he saw his opera
performed. And at that I must leave the matter. Lohengrin presently
proceeds to disclose his secret in that wondrous "In fernem
Land"--surely the most superb thing of its sort ever written. The
vocal part is--as I have already pointed out, this is often the case
in Wagner--something between pure song and recitative; and here it is
of a quality he himself rarely matched--not even in _Tristan_.
Technically, it is a piece of descriptive music for instruments; but
the words which give it significance and point are set to phrases
themselves so beautiful, pathetic and inevitable that one feels that
the vocal part and the orchestral were begotten simultaneously in that
marvellous brain. In other chapters I will point to passages,
especially in the _Ring_, where quite obviously the voice part has
been laboriously worked in with instrumental music already conceived
in its final form; but that was in Wagner's later years, when the free
inspiration, enthusiasm and energy of his _Tristan_ and _Lohengrin_
and _Mastersingers_ days had for ever departed. There is an accent of
passionate grief in Lohengrin's words to Elsa, and of remorse in
Elsa's wailings; but the most touching thing in this final scene is
the song in which he hands her his sword, horn and ring, to be given
to her brother should he return. The note of regret, especially in the
poignant "leb' wohl," reminds one irresistibly of Wotan's farewell to
Brünnhilda. The latter is broader, richer, vaster,--and yet the tender
simplicity of this is inexpressibly touching. After that the opera
proceeds to its conclusion in what one may call a normal manner: there
is nothing, anyhow, in the music that requires analysis.
VI
_Lohengrin_ cannot be called Wagner's greatest achievement, but it is
a "fine," if not a "first careless rapture" whose freshness he never
quite recaptured. Yet, in a way, it is the most mannered of his works.
I know of no opera where one phrase, one harmony or set of harmonies,
or one violin figure is made to serve so many and such widely
different purposes; and not since the early seventeen hundreds had the
perfect cadence been so hard worked. Only two numbers are in other
than four-four time--the prayer and the wedding song. The melodies on
page upon page consist of regular four-bar lengths, commonly
terminating in a full close. We can admit all this--indeed, we must
admit it all--and then we are only bound the more to admire the vast
amount of variety Wagner got in spite of all the obstacles self-placed
in his way. His fondness for the diminished seventh, constantly
exploited throughout, was perhaps a fondness for his own adopted
child--for no one had ever properly employed it before: to him and to
every one at the time his use of it was new. Many points in his
prolonged passages which are simply arpeggios of the chord of the
diminished seventh must have seemed novel in the eighteen-forties,
though we hardly notice them now. The four-bar lengths send the
music along with a swing very different from the jerkiness of
contemporary opera music. The cadence is used only to attain, so to
speak, a fresh jumping-off place: there is no moment of real rest:
simultaneously with the attainment of a point of rest the new impulse
is felt, and away the thing flies again. But what compensates for all
these defects--and defects they are--is the perpetual presence of the
Montsalvat music: we are never long without hearing some of it. The
Montsalvat music is the source of the charm and fascination of the
opera, and its purity and freshness seem likely for ever to keep the
opera sweet.
[Illustration]