'TRISTAN AND ISOLDA'
I
For those who have ears, eyes and understanding _Tristan and Isolda_
is Wagner's most perfect work, is the finest opera in the world.
Unluckily there are in the world far too many persons who are not
content to have a work of supreme art, but must needs read into it
old, stale platitudes: when they have proved it to be an exposition of
these platitudes they conceive that they have deserved the gratitude
of the people for interpreting the artist and of the artist for having
interpreted him, having made his meaning clear. As I have written
elsewhere of _Tristan_, "Wagner's consummate dramatic art, stage-craft
and knowledge of stage effect have combined to make all clear as the
day"; but the commentators have rushed in with their comments between
the stage and the audience only to obscure everything and bamboozle
people who are at least as capable as themselves of understanding the
drama. The platitudes read into _Tristan_ are of two sorts, truisms
and lying commonplaces. To take one of the latter kind, some one many
long years ago got off the pretty phrase, "love and death are one";
and poetasters and fiftieth-rate dramatists have ever since continued
to assert as a profound and original truth that love and death are
one. What on earth they understand by it, if they mean anything at
all, is much more than I can guess. But I know that love and death are
not one, that love is life, and death is death. We have had it pointed
out a thousand times that the "moral" of _Tristan_ is that these two
opposites are one; and in the latest books and articles about Wagner
the same game is kept merrily going. I can extract no such moral.
Perhaps some unfortunate essays and letters of Wagner gave the
commentators their cue and lead; for Wagner, when he put away his
music-paper and sat down to his writing-paper, often showed himself a
willing victim of catch-phrases; also many sentences of the drama can
be construed as paraphrases of this particular catch-phrase--for
example, "Nun banne das Bangen, holder Tod, sehnend verlangter
Liebestod." Such utterances as these, however, have a specific and
different meaning altogether, as will presently be seen. I can by no
means believe even Wagner capable of writing a three-act music-drama
to prove the truth of a catch-phrase or that he would have dreamed of
using such a catch-phrase as the motive of his music-drama. The
commonplaces drawn from _Tristan_ and gravely set forth as the
"meanings" of the operas are as numberless as sands on the sea-shore
and rather less valuable. That young women should not make a practice
of marrying old men, that illicit passions and intrigues may bring on
disaster, that it is madness to make love to another man's wife in a
garden, observable by all, that it is greater madness still to keep on
when a maidservant is screaming that some one is coming--these rules
of conduct are very well in their way and might commend themselves to
the denizens of Clapham; but, again, I hardly think Wagner would have
constructed a great music-drama to enunciate them. Nor did he
construct his music-drama to expound a philosophy. For a long time the
air was thick with arguments _pro_ and _con_ with regard to the amount
of Schopenhauer he had made use of in his libretto. Now, it is true
that both Tristan and Isolda indulge at times in something
approximating to the Schopenhauer terminology; but of Schopenhauer's
or any other philosophy I cannot find a trace. For that we must turn
to _Parsifal_. In _Tristan_ there are no "meanings"--none save the
very plain meaning of the drama and the meaning of the music, which is
plainer still.
It seems to me desirable in this way to clear off misunderstandings
and to indicate with precision my point of view. When Wagner wrote
_Tristan_ he wrote a tragic opera of passion and treachery and death,
and only as a tragic opera can I regard it. Every sentence in it is
accounted for by the course the drama takes; no further explanation is
called for; and I shall certainly not waste my readers' time by
picking out a few words here and there and trying to construe them
into a metaphysical exposition: there is quite enough to digest
without that. Even the longing for death which Tristan expresses as
the only cure for the woes of an impossible life arises from the
drama; Tristan no more preaches Schopenhauer than he preaches Buddhism
when he exclaims "Nun banne das Bangen, holder Tod." Wagner chose the
subject of _Tristan_ not to expound anything, but for the prosaic
reason that he wanted to raise money and the subject seemed the most
promising for the purpose. This is put beyond a doubt by a letter to
Liszt dated July 2, 1858. Everything seemed to work against him;
_Rienzi_ proved a failure when it was put on at Weimar, and nothing
could be hoped for in that quarter; the pecuniary situation was
desperate. He had received a commission from the Emperor Pedro I of
Brazil for an opera, and thought _Tristan_ a likely theme. As early as
December of 1854 he had written to Liszt mentioning it as planned in
his head; and in this letter of '58 he says, "... I saw no other way
open to me but to negotiate with Härtel, and I chose for this subject
_Tristan_, then scarcely begun, because I had nothing else. They
offered to pay me half the honorarium (two hundred louis d'or)--that
is, one hundred louis d'or--on receipt of the score of the first act,
and I made all the haste I could to complete it. That is why this poor
work was hurried on in such a business-like manner." It seems rather
comical now that the world's most magnificent, and certainly most
profound, musical tragedy should have been commenced to be sung by an
Italian company in such an out-of-the-way spot as Rio de Janeiro and
in the hope of pleasing semi-barbarian ears; and it is rather a pity
it never found its way there. One thing is certain: the press
criticisms could not have been more foolish than those that greeted
the opera when it was produced in Munich.
Exactly where Wagner got the idea from I cannot say. Of course, in
one shape or another the legend exists in every European literature;
and probably he had been familiar with it for years. Praeger's story
of Wagner getting hold of Gottfried von Strassburg's interminable
version in the summer of 1855 and conceiving the thing in a flash
might very well be true; only, unluckily for Praeger, the letter to
Liszt in the previous year shows it to be in another sense a story. By
September 1857 the poem was done, and Wagner at once set to work on
the music. He had sketched the first act by the end of the same year,
and in the early part of '59 the whole opera was complete. We have
just seen one reason for pressing forward "this poor work ... in such
a business-like manner"; but even without the pecuniary inducement I
fancy he would have composed quickly. _Tristan_ is one of those works,
like Carlyle's _French Revolution_, which one feels had either to be
written rapidly or not at all. The music seems to have welled forth in
a red-hot torrent, and his pen could not choose but fly over the
paper. None the less we are compelled to marvel at the industry, the
concentrated and continuous and patient energy of the man; for the
_Tristan_ score is as complicated as any ever written, and the mere
number of notes to be set down might well have appalled him. Handel
could write a _Messiah_ in three weeks and Mozart a _Don Giovanni_
overture in a few hours; but their scores are mere skeletons compared
with _Tristan_, a score which neither Handel nor Mozart could copy in
a much longer time than three weeks. We may hope that Wagner received
his remaining hundred louis d'or, for the Brazilian scheme came to
nothing, and he had to wait seven long years before _Tristan_ got its
first performance. But for the "kingly friend," mad Ludwig II, it
would not have been performed at all; and afterwards other theatres
found it too difficult, or the directors, with true inborn official
insolence, seemed to glory in not so much as looking at the score. We
will now look at it.
Out of one or another of the various versions of the legend Wagner
extracted the core--the plain, direct story of the passion of a pair
of tragic lovers. Tristan and Isolda love one another with a devouring
love, and circumstances will not allow them to be united; they find a
refuge in death from an existence intolerable without love; and this
is essentially the whole story. In its older form the tale consisted
mainly of what to the modern mind are excrescences--the intrigues,
fights, adventures and what not so dear to the mediæval mind. Wagner
sheared away this mass of overgrowth; or perhaps it would be truer to
say he hewed his way to the statue within, from out of the old stuff
picked out the elements that made just the drama as it had shaped
itself in his brain. Here is the story. Tristan, nephew of King Mark
of Cornwall, had gone a-warring in Ireland and had there slain Morold,
the betrothed of Isolda; and to Isolda he sends as a present Morold's
head. He is himself wounded, and by chance it is Isolda, "a skilful
leech," who nurses him back to health. She has found in Morold's head
a splinter of a sword-blade, and finds it was broken out of Tristan's
weapon. Full of anger, she raises the sword to slay the sick man: he
opens his eyes, and "the sword dropped from my fingers"--her doom is
upon her: henceforth she loves the slayer of her lover. Though Tristan
loves her he does not ask for her, but with many protestations of
gratitude and friendship sails away to Cornwall. Next occurs one of
those things at which most of us are apt to boggle: Tristan goes home,
it would appear, only to suggest that his aged uncle should marry
Isolda the peerless beauty; Mark consents, and sends Tristan to ask
for her. Tristan afterwards confesses that ambition led him to do
this; but in any case it was very close to a deed of downright
treachery, unless the fact was that Tristan did not suspect Isolda's
love for him, or thought his station too humble. Wagner's language is
ambiguous, and probably he intended his meaning to be the same. Isolda
has no two opinions about his conduct. It had been her duty to kill
him in the first place, and her love, her destiny, Frau Minna--call it
what you will--betrayed her; and now she is betrayed by the man whose
life she saved. Had she spoken one word in her father's castle Tristan
would not have returned to Cornwall: in all likelihood his head would
have been sent as an acknowledgment of Morold's. Her fury knows no
bounds; her grief and sense of ignominious humiliation almost defy
expression; her contempt for Tristan, when she finds words for it, is
scathing. All this we learn as the opera proceeds; but we should know
the facts of the history before seeing the work the first time, else
the first act is bewildering, for matters have arrived just at this
point when the curtain rises.
II
The prelude is the only operatic prelude in the world which is an
integral, organic part of the drama; it cannot be omitted without
detriment to the drama. In several of Mozart's operas the overture, by
means of a modulation, is made to lead without a break into the first
scene; Gluck had done precisely the same thing; Wagner, in the
_Mastersingers of Nuremberg_, did the same thing. But in the cases of
Gluck and Mozart and of Wagner in the _Mastersingers_, if by chance
the parts of the overture were missing, the opera could start away and
go on merrily, and we should miss nothing but the preliminary pleasure
of hearing the overture. In the case of _Tristan_, where Wagner's art
of combining the music and drama in an indivisible whole was at its
culminating point--a point from which it gradually receded--this is
not conceivable. If the band parts of the _Tristan_ prelude were
mislaid it would be well to omit the first act altogether. What Wagner
tried to do in the _Flying Dutchman_--to make the whole opera a solid
thing from which not one bar might be subtracted without ruining the
whole effect--he achieved once, and once only, in _Tristan_.
What may seem an irrelevancy turns on this very point. There is no
necessity for reasoning about a work of art; yet there is both
pleasure and mental profit in doing so in certain instances. If there
is any necessity at all for understanding Wagner's mind and Wagner's
art, we may as well do it as thoroughly as we can. Therefore the
reader will perhaps bear with me patiently if I point out something he
has doubtless discovered for himself, namely, that _Tristan_ is
Wagner's only opera in which music and drama had birth simultaneously
in his brain. He himself, in several significant passages in his prose
writings, indicated this. He said that when, after several years
devoted to expounding his theories in essays,--mainly, he said, to
make these theories clear to himself: mainly, I think, for the
accruing cash--he began _Tristan_, he immediately found he had left
the theories far behind. That is, he constructed his dramas, without
thinking of theories or traditions, simply as a common-sense
dramatist-musician should, building up the whole edifice with two
hands at once, the dramatist's pen in one hand, the musician's in the
other. He also said that when he set down the words the music was
already (in an amorphous state--we must presume he meant) in his
brain. It was to this effect he wrote in _Opera and Drama_ the most
skilful defence ever put together by a creative artist--or rather not
so much a defence as a plea for his particular form of art, or perhaps
an explanation of the form.
This is entirely different from his procedure with the _Ring_, or
indeed any of his works, not even excepting the _Dutchman_. The
_Dutchman_, he said, grew out of Senta's ballad; but I have already
shown that this statement was a mere piece of self-deception: not the
whole of the _Dutchman_, not one-tenth of it, grows out of Senta's
ballad; Senta's ballad is not an oak-trunk with all the solos, duets,
choruses and the rest growing out as branches with leaves grow from a
trunk--it is a scaffold-pole upon which these things are tacked in an
almost unparalleled fervour of imagination. That Wagner recognized
this is plainly seen in the prose remarks he penned, in very cold
blood, in his after years, when he looked at his first really fine
work as though it had come from the hand of some other composer. Gluck
had not one-thousandth part of Wagner's sheer genius, or, born into
the nineteenth century, he might have done the thing as Wagner did it
in _Tristan_; Mozart had not one-hundredth part of Wagner's
intellectual power, or, born into the nineteenth century, he might
have done it. Wagner alone did it. _Tristan_ is a feat accomplished
once and for all; at this moment it is impossible to imagine such a
feat ever being done again. Those of us who live on for another five
hundred years may see something like it; but even then _Tristan_ will
not be old-fashioned--not older-fashioned, at any rate, than
_Antigone_ or _Hamlet_, and perhaps less old-fashioned than _Macbeth_
or _Lear_. The breath, the spirit, which is eternal life, is in it,
and it can only perish when the human race perishes.
Far too much theorising has been done about Wagner, and I would not
add my quota did I not hope that this small contribution would save
complicated explanations, now that I come to deal with the concrete,
so to say, with the very stuff of _Tristan_, the words and the music.
We are to be prepared for a drama of human passion in sharpest
conflict with a dispassionate, indifferent, even antagonistic world.
The passion is the naked elemental thing, the love of a man for a
woman and a woman for a man; and these twain, had they lived on an
island by themselves, might have been happy or unhappy, and felt the
passion fade away and no one a penny the worse. As it is, everything
seems to oppose them; shock after shock comes upon them; until in the
end they are content, feel themselves blest, to be allowed to pass out
of life. We are shown them in four clearly defined phases: first,
loving one another but the love unconfessed; second, the love admitted
and the world opposing it; third, love at its height and the world
breaking in upon it; last, love beaten in the fight and retreating to
the realms of death. Throughout the drama there is no musical theme
representing the idea of the antagonistic world. There are a dozen
love-themes and two death-themes and a great number of what in a
symphony would be called subsidiary themes. By far the most important
theme in the whole opera is that with which the prelude opens, one
made up of a couple of phrases (_a_, p. 274).
I shall not for the moment discuss the full significance of the themes
as subsequently unfolded: it suffices now to note the use they are
put to in this prelude. A continuation of this love subject presently
is announced (_b_); then the poison motive (_c_); and finally yet
another love theme. A tremendous climax is worked up: the very ecstasy
and madness of love; it dies down, and the prelude ends with a
sinister and tragic phrase (_d_), leading straight to a sea-song sung
from the masthead of a vessel, on which the curtain rises.
No melody ever sang more clearly of the sea; no melody was ever less
like a sailor's chanty. I have quoted words and tune in full (_f_).
The words set the drama a-going; out of the phrase marked (_g_) the
main body of the music of the first scene is spun. Isolda very
naturally thinks an insult is aimed at herself: it is the spark that
sets a light to the explosive material that has been accumulating in
her heart for heaven knows how long. She curses the ship, Tristan, and
every one concerned in the conspiracy that is to rob her of the man
she loves and hand her over as a slave to the old man she has never
seen. Brangaena, her maid, scared out of her wits, begs to know the
truth; Isolda screams for air, which she assuredly seems to need; the
curtains at the back of her pavilion are opened, and there, on the
stern of the vessel, stands Tristan, the enemy whom she loves. From
the masthead comes again the sailor's song. This time it does not
immediately arouse Isolda to fury; for now her purpose is set--to kill
Tristan: take her revenge and end her own life of misery. "Once
beloved, now removed, brave and bright, coward knight. Death-devoted
head, death-devoted heart," she sings, gazing at Tristan; and at the
last words we hear the tremendous death-or murder-theme (_h_), a theme
whose sinister meaning is afterwards unfolded. She sends Brangaena to
order Tristan to come into her tent. He bitterly avoids understanding
her meaning; Brangaena becomes more urgent; Kurvenal, Tristan's
servant, a faithful watch-dog, asks to be allowed to reply; Tristan
says he can. Kurvenal bellows out a song praising Tristan as the
heroic slayer of Isolda's betrothed, Morold. Brangaena precipitately
retreats and closes the curtains; Isolda and she face one another in
the tent, the second nearly prostrate with dismay, the first boiling
with wrath and shame at the insult hurled at her. She now tells
Brangaena the whole of the preceding history--her nursing of Tristan
and his monstrous treatment of her--and finishes with another curse.
Brangaena tries to soothe her; Isolda, outwardly quietened, inwardly
is planning how to carry out her purpose; Brangaena unknowingly
suggests the means. "In that casket is a love potion: drink that, you
will love your aged bridegroom and be happy once again." She opens the
casket; "not that phial," says Isolda, "the other." The poison motive
(_c_) sounds under the agitated upper strings: "the deadly draught,"
Brangaena shrieks: at this point the shouting of the sailors is heard
as they begin to shorten sail; Kurvenal enters brusquely and bellows
at Isolda the order to prepare to land. She refuses to move until
Tristan has come in to ask her pardon "for trespass black and base."
Here she begins to speak in terrible double-meanings: it is not
Tristan's discourtesy on the voyage he must apologise for, but the
more tragic occurrences leading up to his bearing her away to
Cornwall. She orders Brangaena to prepare the draught, and awaits her
victim.
She stands there outwardly composed while one of the finest passages
in the whole of the world's music betrays her inward anxiety and
suspense (_i_). It is useless to describe the scene in any detail: the
words are simple and seemingly direct; the marvellous music alone
reveals their fateful, fearful significance. Isolda asks Tristan to
sink the ancient quarrel between them--caused by the slaying of
Morold--and drink a cup together; he knows perfectly well a large part
of her meaning--that she means to poison him. Whether she herself
intends what presently occurs no one can tell: I doubt whether Wagner
knew much or cared at all. Tristan knows how great is the crime he
must make amends for: not merely Morold's death, but the winning of
Isolda's heart, the desertion, the cruel coming to claim her as his
uncle's bride; he says he will drink--only in oblivion can he find
refuge from the toils in which he has involved himself; he lifts the
cup to his lips, drinks, and as he drinks Isolda, crying "Betrayed,
even here," snatches the cup from him and drains it.
Brangaena has betrayed her: the cup contains not the poison but the
love-potion. In this stroke there is no fairy-tale or pantomime
foolery. The course the drama now pursues is determined not by a magic
draught, a harmless infusion of herbs, but by the belief of the
lovers that they have taken poison and are both doomed. Whether
Tristan had previously known Isolda to love him does not matter: he
knows it now. It has been remarked that the language is ambiguous: or
rather, Isolda in her rage may easily be supposed to go beyond the
truth when she speaks of having exchanged love-vows with Tristan. She
knows that he loves her. They have only a few minutes to live and to
love: why not speak? They stand gazing at one another in a state of
tremulous emotion, and at last rush into each other's arms. The hoarse
voices of the sailors are heard outside hailing King Mark; the ship
has reached land; Brangaena enters, and is horrified to find that
_both_ have taken the potion; the pair cling to one another; a stream
of the most passionate music in existence sweeps on: Brangaena tries
to attire Isolda in the royal cloak; Kurvenal shouts to Tristan that
the king is coming; Tristan can understand nothing--"What king?" he
asks; the deck is crowded with knights; and the curtain falls as the
lovers embrace and the trumpets announce the arrival of King Mark.
Before dealing more fully with the music of this act let me quote a
few words I wrote elsewhere on the dramatic course of the whole opera.
"The end of each act sees the lovers in a situation which is at heart
the same, though in externals different. Rapt in each other, they care
nothing about the sailors, attendants, approaching crowds, and the
rest, at the end of the first act; at the end of the second they
scarcely understand Mark's passionate affection--they only know it is
an enemy of their love; and, finally, they are glad when death frees
them from life, which means an incessant trouble and interruption to
them. The tragedy deepens and grows more intense with each successive
scene; each separates them more widely from life and all that life
means, until in the last act the divorce is complete. This is the
purpose of the drama: this _is_ the drama...." When Wagner conceived
Tristan he was as fine a master of stage-craft as has ever lived; and
certainly by very far the finest who ever wrote "words for music." The
first scene prepares us to understand clearly and to grasp firmly the
forces that are presently to be let loose and run the drama on to its
tragic dénouement; and after that, scene follows scene with absolute
inevitability.
III
During Wagner's five years of theorising after quitting Dresden in
1849 he had thought of subjects and written parts of the _Ring_.
Tristan is the greatest work he completed. A reservoir full of music
must have accumulated in his brain; and he seems now to have opened
the sluices. Never did a more fiery impetuous stream flow from any
composer: never was there, in a word, more inspired music. The
profusion of the material is wonderful, and even more wonderful is the
concentrated quality of that material. In the _Ring_ and
_Parsifal_--as in _Lohengrin_ and _Tannhäuser_--there are _longueurs_;
in _Tristan_ there are none: not a bar can be cut; there is not a bar
that does not hold us. In a paradoxical mood, or irritated, by being
obstinately, wilfully, stupidly regarded as one of the trade setters
of opera-texts, Wagner declared to Bülow that "one thing is certain, I
am not a musician." This has been interpreted as meaning, "I am no
musician," whereas, of course, he meant he was very much more than a
musician: which, in a sense, he was. He was not a greater genius than
Mozart and Beethoven, who had nothing of the dramatist in them, nor
than Shakespeare, who was not, technically at least, a musician; but
he was something different from both species of men--a dramatist who
could not get the drama out of himself without the aid of music, and a
musician who could not beat out his music without the aid of drama.
Music and drama had simultaneous birth in the case of _Tristan_, and
it is difficult to describe and criticise them separately. There is no
other way of doing it, however, and as the drama is the structural
foundation I have dealt with it first; but the music is of not less
importance.
Many readers will remember how, not so very many years ago, a common
criticism of Wagner's music was that it possessed no melody. Happily
at this time of day there is no need to try to disprove this; for when
we hear the first act of _Tristan_ the first thing to strike us must
surely be its richness in melody. It teems with tunes--it is an
unbroken tune from the first note of the prelude to the last chord of
the act. At times we feel the terrific energy as something that might
easily grow wearying to the nerves, and then comes a long song, such
as Brangaena's remonstrance to Isolda, which is a sheer delight to the
ear and prepares us for the next dramatic outburst. That is the first
thing to strike us; the next is the perfect skill with which the sound
and feeling, the very breath, of the sea are kept ever present. The
body of the music is made up of music growing out of the passage in
the sailor-song (_g_); this goes through a hundred transformations,
and is put to a hundred uses as the action progresses; and the swing
and lilt of it never fail to conjure up a vision of smooth rollers and
the sea-wind filling the sail and driving the ship fast towards
Cornwall. It takes one shape when Brangaena tells Isolda that they
will land before evening; and in nearly the same shape it returns when
Brangaena goes to bid Tristan enter her mistress's presence; in the
meantime lengthy passages have been woven from it during Isolda's
first angry outburst; in one form or another it is worked again and
again, always conveying just the feeling of the moment, yet never
losing its original colour. Wagner's mastery of the art of pictorial
suggestion, while faithfully and logically expressing, explaining and
enforcing the actors' emotion, is here at its supremest height. In the
_Ring_ he often wrote purely pictorial music for a few pages with
simple, almost speaking, parts for the singers, trusting, as he well
could, to the stage situation explaining itself and making its own
effect. But the burning passion with which _Tristan_ is filled
necessitated another mode of treatment, a mode which Wagner alone
amongst musicians had the art and strength to employ. Other
composers, notably Weber and Mendelssohn, had given the world grand
scenic music; but where they left off Wagner began. Their picture is
an end in itself: Wagner's are settings for the dramatic action.
There are not many leitmotivs in _Tristan_, and they are used for
ideas and passions--never for personages. Tristan, Isolda, Mark,
Brangaena and Kurvenal have none of them a representative theme. Each
act has its own themes--a multitude of them--each carried through the
act in which it appears, and nowhere else employed; only (_a_) and
(_h_) appear throughout the opera. Some small use is made of (_c_),
but once the poisoning episode is done with the subject ceases to have
any significance. That marked (_h_) is of great importance. Its effect
is terrible when Isolda is enticing, or compelling, Tristan to drink
the cup. The sailors break in with their "Yo, heave ho!" and Tristan,
bewildered, asks, "Where are we?" Isolda, with sinister purpose,
replies, "Near to the end!" The intense originality, due to their
being closely allied to the dramatic meaning, of all the themes should
be noted: only one, the second part of the love-theme (_a_), suggests
any other music. It is reminiscent of the introduction of Beethoven's
Sonata "Pathétique," and, after all, the phrase was not new when
Beethoven employed it.
IV
We have seen in this first act, if not the birth of love, at any rate
the avowal. The scene is laid on the sea, fresh, breezy, salt,
bracing, suggestive of infinite energy and possibilities. We are now
to witness it in its ripeness: not by any means a healthy ripeness,
but ecstatic to the point of frenzy, burning to the point of madness,
tumultuous, unbridled passion and lust; and, as these violent delights
have violent ends, ending in tragedy. When the curtain rises the
picture is in exquisite contrast with that presented in the first act.
Well did Wagner know the value of the scenic environment; he always
got it just and true and, from the artistic point of view, in sympathy
with the prevailing emotion. The demands on the scene-painters and
stage-machinists are nothing in _Tristan_ compared with those made in
the _Ring_ and _Parsifal_; but when the directions are complied with,
as I understand they occasionally are (I have seen them carried out
once), nothing more gorgeously effective can be dreamed of. Instead of
the morning air of Act I we have a warm summer night in a luxuriant
garden; on the left is a castle with steps leading up to the door, and
a burning torch makes the dark night darker; trees at the back and on
the right are massed black against the dark sky; in the centre under a
tree there is a seat for the convenience of the lovers. At the very
first glance we are taken into the atmosphere for a great
love-scene--the most magnificent love-scene ever conceived; and also
we are carried ages back--back to a time that never existed. This
old, world-old feeling, this sense of the past, is present to some
degree in the first act; but here the music makes it of overwhelming
power, and just as in the first act the sea is always present, so here
the sense of a remote period is never allowed to leave us.
When the first chord of the brief, passionate introduction was first
heard in a theatre nearly half a century ago, it sent a shudder
through every professional class-room in every conservatoire in
Europe, and the theme is perhaps the most important in the act (_j_);
and the cutting, almost raucous chord lets us know at once that big
doings are at hand. Another theme follows--one of impatience and sick
anxiety: it is that which is played again when Isolda, hardly able to
contain herself while waiting for Tristan, wildly waves her
handkerchief, beckoning to him. Another and most lovely melody is
heard (_k_); and then some of the love-music which is played when he
does come and rushes to her arms. This leads straight to the rising of
the curtain, and Brangaena is seen on the steps by the torch, keeping
watch and listening to the horns of a hunting party; the sounds are
growing fainter in the distance.
Isolda enters, and Brangaena vainly tries to dissuade her from meeting
Tristan. This night hunt, she swears, is a scheme of Melot's for the
betrayal of Tristan, his foe. Isolda laughs. Melot is Tristan's
friend, and the night hunt was arranged that the lovers might meet.
They dispute to some of Wagner's loveliest melodies. The theme (_k_)
flows along as an accompaniment, and becomes more prominent when
Isolda says she can no longer hear the horns; she hears the gentle
plash of the brook running from the fountain--as "in still night alone
it laughs on my ear"--the party of hunters must be many miles off. The
signal for Tristan is the extinguishing of the torch, and the music
associated with this deed now is used again in the last act in another
form. Brangaena prays her mistress not to put it out: it means death,
she says, and as a sort of subsidiary death-theme this melody is
afterwards used. Isolda is too completely mastered by desire to
listen. When Brangaena curses herself for having changed the magic
drinks she is laughed at. To music filled with passion and of perfect
beauty she says the whole business was arranged by Venus, goddess of
love, and we hear yet another love-theme (_l_); then to the crash of
what we must call the torch-theme, blent with the death-theme from Act
I, she throws down the torch and frantic with impatience awaits her
lover.
He enters, and after some delirious pages not to be described in words
the pair fall to talk in Schopenhauerian terminology about the light
and the dark. But the passion never goes out of the music. On the
contrary, it grows in intensity, for the madness of the meeting is
nothing to the white-hot passion we get later; and in spite of the
terminology the meaning of both Tristan and Isolda is perfectly clear.
Light has been, and is, the enemy of their love; in the garish light
of day Tristan, filled with daylight dreams of ambition, first made
over to Mark, so to speak, his rights in Isolda; "is there a pain or a
woe that does not awaken with daylight?" he asks; and now, declared
lovers, they may only meet in the dark: during the day they must be
distant strangers. They know whither fate is driving them: Isolda has
said as much to Brangaena: "she may end it ... whatsoe'er she make me,
wheresoe'er take me, hers am I wholly, so let me obey her solely."
They are embodiments of sheer passion; love is the most selfish of
passions, and placed as they are, realising that they live only for
and in that passion, they have no thought for any one else, regarding
the outer world, the world of daylight, as their foe. Isolda does not
hesitate to remind Tristan of his perfidy in the days of light; and
he, far from defending himself, finds it quite sufficient to remark
that he had not then come under the sway of night: that is, they have
no ordinary human affection for each other. If they had, neither would
lead the other into such danger. Shakespeare did not, could not, make
his lovers live so entirely in their passion as this: he had no music
to express himself by, and had to speak through human beings. So when
Romeo says, "let me stay and die," Juliet instantly hurries him away.
Tristan and Isolda know they are wending to death, and are content.
Their feelings subside into soft languor, and then they sing the
sublime hymn to night. Brangaena's voice is heard from the
watch-tower, warning them of approaching danger; and they heed her
not. Again she sings to them that the danger is imminent--night is
departing; Tristan, resting his head on the bosom of his mistress,
simply says, "Let me die thus." The catastrophe is at hand. The duet
reaches its glorious climax; Brangaena gives a shriek from her tower;
Kurvenal rushes in yelling "Save yourselves," but it is too
late--Mark, Melot and the other huntsmen come in quickly, and--the
game is up. The red dawn slowly breaks; Tristan hides Isolda with his
cloak; Melot turns to Mark and says, "Did I not tell you so?"--his
ruse has succeeded quite well enough. And now follows a scene which
has proved a stumbling-stock to many.
The ordinary dramatist or play-monger would drop the curtain on this
dénouement; and undeniably it would be what is called an effective
"curtain." However, effective curtains were not Wagner's business in
planning _Tristan_; he had long since passed through that stage. He
could not after such a curtain--the sort of curtain that ends many an
opera--have carried out the plan of _Tristan_--to show us the lovers
realising their impossible situation in life and deliberately seeking
death as the refuge. Tristan and Isolda care nothing for shame and
disgrace: they care only for their love, and their love relentlessly
drives them into their grave. Mark has a great affection for them
both, and precisely on that account he is their enemy. He begins a
long expostulation: "How is it that the two people dearer to him than
all the world have so betrayed his trust?" It is lengthy, and must
needs be so; each proof he gives them of his love only more clearly
defines his real significance and relation to them. Tristan does not
fear Melot: he dreads Mark's affection. He (Tristan) calls out,
"Daylight phantoms! morning visions, empty and vain--away, begone!"
but Mark continues, putting in a dozen ways the same question, "Why,
why have they done this?" It is not the behaviour of a barbaric king;
but we must remember that Wagner's Mark is not, and is not intended to
be, the legendary Mark any more than Tristan and Isolda are the
legendary Tristan and Isolda: he is the personification of human
affection, a thing to which they, enthralled by elemental love, are
indifferent--detest, indeed, as interfering with their love. When he
ends Tristan knows he has no explanation to offer--none that Mark
could possibly understand: human affection and elemental human passion
are unintelligible to one another. He replies that he cannot answer
Mark's "Why?" and turning to Isolda asks whether she will follow him
whither he is now going--the land of eternal night. He, not Mark,
plans his death. Isolda answers straightway that she will follow.
Tristan and Melot fight, but Tristan allows his treacherous foe to run
the sword through him, and he falls. _Then_ we get the curtain;
Tristan has done with this world and has started out for another, and
the drama has taken a second step towards its goal.
This, held for long to be bad craftsmanship, is consummate, daring
craftmanship. _Tristan_ is a drama of spiritual conflicts; and those
who do not like that sort had better try something by the trade
playwrights of to-day.
V
The music of the first act is largely fierce, angry, turbulent, often
bitter music, blent and merging into music expressive of fierce
desire, the hunger of the man after the woman, of the woman after the
man. There is one moment of sweet longing--the moment after Isolda and
Tristan have drunk the fatal potion; but instantly the torrent breaks
forth, and though it is in a way sweet, the sweetness is mixed with
fire; the stream is as a stream of molten lava, scalding, consuming.
The note of the music to the second act is utterly different; there is
fire, indeed, a golden fire; there is greedy impatience and
restlessness; but the fire does not scorch nor scald, the impatience
is not despairing, the love is not--as it certainly is in the first
act--that passion which is but one remove from deadly hate. Almost at
the beginning of the first act Isolda, devoured by a longing for
revenge, schemed to murder Tristan, and she does not falter in her
purpose until he has taken the drink; the reaction has all the
violence of a cataclysm; all is delirium; there is not a moment of
happy lingering over the joy of a possible; new life; there is no time
for that, no thought of it. All is burning wrath and hate and equally
burning lust and greed for the possession of the beloved one's body.
In the second act the anger has died out, and in the whirl of the
music, though at its maddest, there is a fulness, an assured sense of
coming satisfaction; and the excitement settles down into long,
drawn-out, luscious, voluptuous strains as the lovers, held in each
other's arms, exchange the sweet confidences usual (I suppose) on such
occasions.
Musically the act may be regarded--conveniently, though roughly and
crudely--as a kind of symphony, in four sections which to an extent
overlap. We have section one from the first bar of the prelude to
Tristan's entry; section two, the impassioned duet; three, from the
hymn to night until the lovers are discovered; and four, from that
point to the end. Many of the themes are worked right through, but the
sections vary vastly in colour, atmosphere and feeling. The variety
unified into a completely satisfying whole is astounding. Amongst the
really great musicians only four possessed the organising brain in
this degree--Wagner himself, Beethoven, Handel and Bach. This act is
even more completely an organic whole than the first; every part
performs its functions and retains its individuality, yet all the
parts are co-ordinated. I have seen miraculous pieces of machinery in
which each part seemed to be alive and doing its duty independent of
the others; yet all working together to achieve one purpose. The score
of _Tristan_ is as marvellous--indeed, more so, for the purpose is not
a mechanical one, but the expression, with rigid fidelity to truth, of
the most subtle and exquisite feelings.
I have said earlier that in evolving his purely musical structures
Wagner adopted one plan. He not only used the subjects of his operas
for the overtures, or (as in the present case) of the preludes to the
acts, but he makes them tell a story dramatically. Merely to use
themes for an opera as conventional subjects to be treated in symphony
form had been done; but Wagner never dreamed of adopting a form and
imposing it on his material from outside; with him the form is
determined by the material and the significance the material bore in
his mind. This is very different from deliberately writing a symphonic
poem--deliberately sitting down in cold blood and setting to work to
illustrate a story. _That_ method is antithetical to Wagner's; a
symphonic poem writer is simply a setter of opera texts, one who
follows with devout care the book of words put before him--with this
difference, that the opera-writer must, to some extent at least,
consider his words, his singers, his stage, while the composer of
symphonic poems can do just as he pleases and consider no one's
convenience, shortening this section or lengthening that as the
musical exigencies demand, while making use of some tale or a poem as
an excuse for writing in a form which in itself is unintelligible and
illogical. So far as Wagner could he let music and drama grow up
together; then to start with the right atmosphere he took certain
themes and spun a piece of music from them, letting the themes, as I
have said, unfold themselves logically and determine the form. The
result is always a fine piece of music; and thousands of listeners
have derived artistic enjoyment from the _Mastersingers_ overture,
the _Lohengrin_ prelude and _Tristan_ prelude without troubling to
trace the story as it is plainly told. In the prelude to Act II here,
for example, no one need seek a story, though it is obvious enough.
First we have the daylight theme, peremptorily, harshly announced;
then the impatience of Isolda, then her longing, then her thoughts of
love and her hopes of fulfilment, and just before the curtain rises
the crash which accompanies the extinction of the torch.
I have already alluded to the old-world atmosphere got at once by the
horn calls and the lovely passage in which Isolda sings of the brook
"laughing on" in the still night; but in this first scene, which is by
comparison a mere introduction to the duet, we find a thousand
beautiful things. At this period of his life Wagner was by no means so
economical as he afterwards became; he squandered his pearls with
prodigal hands. In a few pages are enough melodies and themes to set
up a Puccini--or for that matter a Strauss or an Elgar--for life. The
blending of the death-theme with one of the love-themes, when Isolda
speaks of love's goddess, "the queen who grants unquailing hearts ...
life and death she holds in her hands," is one of the miracles of
music--stern beauty made up of defiance of fate and careless
voluptuousness. In the very next melody to make its appearance, the
second bar after the change to the key of A, we may note what I think
is the first sign of one of the many mannerisms of Wagner's "third
period," as we call it--the period extending from _Tristan_ to the
finishing of the _Ring_ (_Parsifal_ being as the tail to the dog, or
perhaps the tin-kettle tied to the tail). It is the phrase quoted
(_l_). Those five notes of the second bar were to be made to serve
many purposes hereafter; and the Wagnerites will insist that this was
done for a high artistic reason. Perhaps it was; but to me it seems
that it is found so frequently sometimes because Wagner wanted to
utter precisely the same emotion as he had employed it for earlier,
and sometimes because, like all other composers, at times he found his
invention flagging. In the second scene of this act of _Tristan_ it
plays a conspicuous part, and is indeed one of the most pregnant love
motives of the drama--perhaps the most prolific of subsidiary themes
and passages.
The big duet beats description, and its structure must only be
discussed briefly. A figure which forms part of the music played while
Isolda impatiently awaits Tristan is turned into the whirling
accompaniment to impassioned and incoherent exclamations as they first
embrace; then to the seething mass of tone is added (_l_), and
gradually out of chaos and confusion emerges one clean-cut melody
after another. The daylight-theme which begins the introduction is
Protean in the shapes it assumes, and the emotions, now hot passion,
now the gentlest tenderness, it is made to express. The ferment
settles down, and we get the hymn to night and a series of melodies
which are love's own voice speaking. The dreamy voluptuousness that
pervades these duets comes from songs written by Wagner as studies.
They were not over highly esteemed by his friends, but he had his
revenge. This night in the garden--with the black night above and the
black trees around, the flowers, the musical brooklet, and the voice
of the caller heard at times from the roof--is the greatest thing of
the kind in all music: in all the arts, I know only the balcony scene
in _Romeo and Juliet_ which may be said to approach it. Melody upon
melody, delicate and sweet to the ear as the perfume of night flowers
and grasses to the nostrils, floats past; until at last the sheer
delight of the thing seems to work up the lovers to a state of
heavenly rapture, and in the final verse of the hymn to night they
pray only to be removed from the dangers of returning day; and here
the strains swell to an intensity of yearning for peace quite
unprecedented in music. And, as we know, their prayer is immediately
answered in a fashion they were hardly prepared for.
Mark's address is deeply touching; and it is odd that when attacked by
Melot Tristan's accents are almost his. The sublime is again touched
when Tristan asks Isolda to follow him and in her answer. Melot then
stabs him, and the curtain drops to one of Mark's reproachful phrases
thundering from the orchestra. This, then, is Tristan's answer to
Mark's questioning--told in the music, not in the words.
VI
Who first uttered that immortal piece of nonsense, Love and death are
one, I cannot say. The Greek conception of Death as Eros with an
inverted torch is quite different: it is a kind of _Tod als Freund_
idea; we are called out of life by an irresistible force or god, which
god must be love, else he would not want us. The inverted torch is the
sign that shows whither he calls us. It had a mighty fascination for
many fine minds of the second-rate sort last century; and judging from
the phraseology of _Tristan_ it seems to have captured Wagner. He was
everlastingly bewildering himself with cheap catch-phrases which
happened, through suggestion or otherwise, to stir his emotions. He
took up one philosophical and political system after another, only to
abandon them in turn; but they left a kind of sediment in his mind,
and one never feels sure that the pellucid stream of his music-drama
will not the next moment be gritty to the palate with some of this
outworn stuff. The bits of Schopenhauer's broken brickbats embedded in
the libretto of _Tristan_ serve their turn, though a finer and more
poetical way of saying the same things might have been found. But
Wagner did not find that more poetical way, so let us rejoice that
through this uncouth lingo Wagner managed to get into a sort of verse
the idea that night was the friend of Tristan's love and day its
enemy, and that in the end everlasting night is best of all. In his
letters, however, we find him playing with the love and death notion,
though he must have known that love is not death, but life; that if
love and death are one, then death and love are also one, and to be in
love is to be in death, to be dead--which is preposterous: corpses
don't love. Presently we shall see that Isolda died in a state of
exaltation akin to the state of being in love; but that does not
establish the thesis. Blake, for hours before he died, shouted till
the ceiling rang for joy to think that he was soon to be with God:
does that prove that mysticism and death are one? Mr. Chamberlain, in
his exegesis of _Tristan_, will have it that Wagner composed the opera
to demonstrate the truth of a very trite and ridiculous lie. The fact
is, Wagner's was far more a feeling, emotional, imaginative brain than
a thinking one, and in the hazy, steamy, overheated thinking part he
often let idle phrases play about without himself firmly grasping
their meaning or want of it. Anyhow, if he had done what Mr.
Chamberlain and many others say he did, we should have found it in the
last act. Instead, there is not a word on the subject. Wagner's
thinking might be misty: his dramatic instinct was supremely right and
sure.
In the first act Isolda and Tristan enjoy their love only for a few
minutes; the world, daylight, breaks in and separates them. In the
second they revel in it for hours; the world, daylight, again
separates them. In the last the world again breaks in; but Tristan has
already found his refuge in death, and Isolda, obedient to her
promise, follows him, and they are joined, safe from the annoyances of
the "phantoms of the day," in "the impregnable fortress," the grave.
The action, as in the preceding portions of the drama, is of the
simplest. On his bed of pain and sorrow Tristan lies wounded and
unconscious. Kurvenal has got him away from Mark's court in Cornwall
to his own castle in Brittany; and now he has been brought out into
the castle yard for coolness and air. It is hot, sultry, close; the
sea in the distance seems to burn; the castle is dilapidated and
overgrown with weeds. Kurvenal watches by his master; from outside the
saddest melody ever conceived is heard on a shepherd's pipe. Presently
the shepherd looks over the wall and asks how the master fares, does
he still sleep? If he awakes it will only be to die, replies Kurvenal;
unless the lady leech (Isolda) comes there is no hope. A moment after
Tristan comes out of his coma, wanders in his mind a little, but at
last understands where he is and that Isolda will come. At that news
he works himself into a condition of unbounded excitement, fancies he
sees the ship bringing Isolda, but at the sound of that sad, droning
pipe melody, and when Kurvenal tells him it is a signal that no ship
is yet in sight, he lapses into unconsciousness again. Then he wakes
up, goes over the whole history of his love for Isolda, and faints
once more; once more he half awakes and as in a dream sees the ship
decked with flowers speeding over the summer sea. Suddenly the
shepherd strikes in with a lively tune: "Isolda is at hand," cries
Kurvenal. "Hasten to bring her," shouts Tristan, and Kurvenal does so.
Tristan, left to himself, goes mad for sheer joy, staggers off his
couch, tears his bandages off so that his wound bleeds afresh, and
Isolda rushes in just in time to catch him in her arms, where he dies
murmuring "Isolda." She laments over his body and sinks down beside
it. Another alarm is given; Kurvenal barricades the gate; Mark, Melot
and the rest break it down, and there is a terrible hand-to-hand
fight; Kurvenal is run through with a spear, and creeps to his
master's side, to die, groping for his hand. Brangaena enters, and she
and Mark try to explain how she has told the whole story of the potion
to Mark; how Mark has come, too late, to unite the lovers. Isolda does
not listen; presently she rises to sing the matchless death-song; she
sees Tristan before her, smiling, transfigured, his love envelopes her
as in billows; she is his now, at last, for aye; and, exhausted, she
again sinks down beside Tristan, and dies.
There is thus in _Tristan_ next to no action--no more than serves to
turn spiritual forces loose and helps to interpret various spiritual
states. The spectator is interested, indeed, in the _doings_ of the
people on the stage only in the first act. Isolda's command to Tristan
to come before her, Tristan's evasions, Kurvenal's rude answer, the
rough gibing bit of sailor chorus, the episode of the two chalices
--the love potion and the poison--the scene between Isolda and Tristan
in which he offers her his sword and tells her to take her revenge by
killing him forthwith, the drinking, the wild embraces and the arrival
of the ship in port amidst the clatter of triumphant trumpets--such
things might have been, and were, done by Wagner in his _Tannhäuser_
days. But consider how little is done in the second act and in the
third. These two portions of the music-drama are more symphonic than
operatic, and it is small wonder that in the days when good folk
expected to see opera when they went into an opera-house, they thought
they had been diddled when they were given _Tristan_ for their money.
If anything so new and unexpected were sprung upon us to-day we should
raise the same cry as was raised when _Tristan_ was given nearly half
a century ago. The introduction opens with a phrase (_m_) of threefold
meaning. It is clearly derived from the second phrase of the first
love-theme (_a_, page 274); it is a realistic representation in music
of Tristan's stertorous breathing; it expresses his delirious state of
mind--chiefly, however, in the upward-drifting thirds and fourths with
which it ends at each occurrence. Then comes the music associated with
his suffering and the "lady leech." The whole passage is then
repeated, and afterwards we get the shepherd's pipe (_n_). This forms
the prelude, and the music of the short scene with the shepherd is
practically the same. Some new matter is brought in, for dramatic
rather than sheer musical purposes, as Tristan awakens; but the next
subject that I need call attention to is the noble one which comes in
when Kurvenal assures him he is safe in his own castle (_o_). The
whole of Tristan's subsequent ravings are made up of reminiscences,
more or less distorted, of various passages out of the first and
second acts, as he goes over, as in a dream, his recent life--the
sight of Isolda, the scene on the ship and that in the garden. Another
new theme to be noted is blazed out by the orchestra when Kurvenal
tells him Isolda has been sent for. When he sinks back exhausted and
no ship is in sight the shepherd's pipe keeps wandering through his
brain with strange, weird, terrible effect, mixing with fragments of
other themes; he gathers strength, and his despair rises to frenzy as
he curses himself--"'Twas I by whom [the draught] was brewed"--to a
phrase overwhelming in its intensity of expression (_p_), and again
collapses.
Presently follow a few pages of perhaps the divinest music to be found
in Wagner's scores, Tristan's dream of Isolda crossing the summer sea.
To an evenly pulsing gentle accompaniment we hear first the second
part of a love-theme (_q_), then fragments of others, till the point
of supernal, Mozartean beauty is touched at "full of grace and loving
mildness." The pathos of it is almost intolerable: no one could stand
the strain another second, when after the cry, "Ah, Isolda, how fair
art thou," he rouses himself to anger because Kurvenal cannot see on
the rolling waters what he with his inner vision sees so bright and
clear. How any one could, even at a first hearing, fail to realize
that the composer of this sublime passage was by far, infinitely far,
the mightiest and tenderest composer of opera music who has
lived--this is a phenomenon that passes our comprehension nowadays.
The scene where the shepherd sounds his pipe to signal the coming of
the boat, and Tristan, his delight wrought up until it grows into
anguish, goes mad and tears off his bandages, baffles description. It
is made up of the love music of the first and second acts, the
melodies being metamorphosed in marvellous fashion. At the last he
sees Isolda throwing down the torch as she did in Act II, and as
darkness comes over his eyes we hear the same music combined with the
love-themes. There is only one thing of the kind to match Isolda's
lament--Donna Anna's grief over her father's body in _Don Giovanni_.
The rest of the act is largely made up of music which has been heard
before. The death-song is an extended and glorified version of the
hymn to night; and the close is of sad, tragic sweetness. The lovers
are joined together and at peace--but in the everlasting darkness of
the grave.
Any one who has heard _Tristan_ a few times will begin to notice that,
despite the endless variety of the music, it possesses an odd
homogeneity. After hearing it fifty or a hundred times one begins to
feel it to be comparable--if such a comparison could be made--to an
elaborate oration delivered in one breath. The whole thing, complete
in every detail, must (one thinks) have come bodily into the
composer's mind in one inconceivable moment of inspiration and
insight. Of course we know it was not so. A god may think a world into
being in that way: a mortal requires time and unflagging energy to
produce a masterpiece. We know that Wagner incorporated his own
studies in his masterpiece; we can see how theme is evolved from
theme. But the unity is so complete that if some sketches were to come
to light showing that the last form of some of the music was in
existence before the portions from which it seems to be evolved, I
should not be in the least surprised, so perfect is the unity, so
inevitably does every note fall into its proper place to express the
feeling of the occasion. I take it that when he drafted the words he
had before him a prophetic shadow of what the music was to be; and
when he came to compose, the uninterrupted white heat of inspiration
and enormous cerebral energy and intellectual grip of his matter, and
the boundless invention which provided that matter for him, so to
speak, so that he had only to pick it up ready made, enabled him to
make that more or less dim, prophetic shadow a living, concrete
reality. Never, from the first bar to the last, does the inspiration
fail him; there is not a phrase that says less, or says it less
adequately than the situation demands, than he has led us to expect.
Old Spohr, when he heard _Tannhäuser_, though his ears rebelled
against the unaccustomed discords, spoke about the Olympian
inspiration and energy he felt in the work; and this criticism--and
very just and fine criticism it was: as just and fine as it was
unexpected from an old-world musician such as Spohr--is equally
applicable to _Tristan_. In its power and perfection it seems the
handiwork of one of the gods. The very truth of every phrase, and the
fulness of utterance with which every phrase expresses the emotion of
the moment, has given rise to a common delusion or absurdity: that in
the Wagnerian opera every phrase is evolved or developed out of the
previous one. If Wagner ever thought of adopting such an insane
procedure he would have been puzzled to know how and where to start.
He might, perhaps, have evolved the first from the last, and thus got
a perfect rounded whole--a serpent with its tail in its mouth. As a
matter of prosaic, or poetical, fact, Wagner, in all his work,
incessantly introduces fresh matter, and dozens of themes appear, are
worked out, and disappear entirely.
Now, when all this overgrowth of rubbishy comment is being swept away,
and those who contemned Wagner are disappearing with those who
battened on him and his memory, _Tristan and Isolda_ remains, a
world-masterpiece, the most powerful, beautiful, sweet and tender
embodiment to be found in any art of elemental human love in all its
splendour, loveliness, fearfulness, terror and utter selfishness.
Thousands of years hence, when Europe has sunk under the waves and
fresh continents have arisen, perhaps a stray copy by hazard preserved
in the Fiji Islands will come to light, will be deciphered by pundits,
and a new race will see in it a primitive but consummate work of art,
and the pundits will argue themselves black in the face about the name
of the composer, whether he was Wagner or another man of the same
name. In the meantime millions of our epoch will have understood it,
loved it, and seen in it a thousand times more than we see in it
to-day, and many thousand times more than I could say in the preceding
pages.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
VII
By way of a footnote to this chapter I may be allowed to add a few
words about the smaller characters. All that Wagner took from the old
legends was the suggestion for the two lovers who sinned and perished
for their sin. Crudely or coarsely, gentlemanly (as in Tennyson),
refined and spiritualized, that idea is the central idea of every form
of the tale. To these two people Wagner added Brangaena and Kurvenal,
and, taking only the name of King Mark, he created a new personage,
unlike any of the older versions of the man, necessary for the
exposition of his idea. Brangaena is the most difficult part to sing
and act, and it is also the most grateful to the actress. She has not
a phrase that is not beautiful, from her first dozen bars to her last
recitative. Kurvenal has his song in the first act and scarcely
appears again until the last, when all his music is of an unspeakable
pathos. His phrase to Tristan, "The wounds from which you languish
here all shall end their anguish," is as touching in its rough,
uncouth way as a hound licking the hand of its dead master. That is
all Kurvenal is--a faithful human dog done in artistic form; and it
requires a very great artist to interpret it. David Bispham's
impersonation remains in my memory as the greatest I have seen. Mark's
reproaches in the second act, and his utter grief in the third, are
also very hard to render. In fact, only fine opera singers can take
any of these parts without coming to grief. The invisible sailor must
be able to sing beautifully; the shepherd must both act and sing with
no little skill.