And first, for the sake of chronology, Verdi younger. "La Traviata"
was produced in 1853, says the learned Grove, which I have consulted
on the point, and "Aïda" not till 1871. And though Verdi was not
young, for an ordinary man, in 1871, he was very young indeed for the
composer of "Falstaff" and "Otello"; while in the "Traviata" period
one can scarcely say he was doing more than cutting his teeth, and not
his wisdom teeth. One finds it difficult to understand how ever the
thing came to be tolerated by musicians. Of course the desire to find
a counter-blast to Wagner has done much for Verdi; but while one can
understand how Dr. Stanford and others hoped to sweep away "Parsifal"
with "Otello" and "Falstaff," it is not so easy to see what on earth
they proposed to do with "Traviata." It won fame and cash for its
composer in the old days when people went to the opera for lack of the
music-hall, not yet invented; when Costa still lorded it not over
living musical London merely, but over all the deceased masters, and
without compunction added trombones to Mozart's scores, and defiled
every masterwork he touched with his unspeakable Costamongery; when
Wagner was either unheard of or regarded as a dangerous lunatic and
immoral person; and it shows every sign of having been written to
please the opera-goers of those days. Curiously, the critics of the
time, in the words of the "Daily Telegraph," saw in "the Bayreuth
master another form of Bunyan's man with the muck-rake," who "never
sought to disguise the garbage he found in the Newgate Calendar of
Mythland, or set his imagination to invent," and they were disgusted,
also like the "Daily Telegraph," by "approaching incest" in "The
Valkyrie"; yet they saw no harm whatever in the charming story of
"Traviata"--the story of a harlot who reforms to the extent of
retaining only one lover of her many, and who dies of consumption when
that one's father does his best to drive her out upon the streets
again by making her give up his son. Far from condemning the story
myself, I am glad Verdi or his employers had the courage to go boldly
to Dumas for it; only, let us be cautious how we condemn the morality
of other opera-stories while praising the immorality of this. Let us
see how Verdi has handled it. The opera is built after the same hybrid
model as Gounod's "Romeo"; it is neither frankly the old Italian
opera, existing for the sake of its songs, nor the later form in which
the songs exist for the sake of the drama, but an attempt to combine
the songs with the continuous working out of a dramatic impulse in the
modern manner. But the attempt is far less successful than in "Romeo";
and indeed it is a faint-hearted one. Whenever a song occurs, the
action is suspended, and all the actors save the lucky vocalist of the
minute are at their wits' end to know where to look, and what to do
with their hands, feet--their whole persons in fact--and the parts
they are playing. And the songs are far from being expressive of the
feeling of the situation that is supposed to call them up. The
drinking tune in the first act is lively and appropriate enough; and
not much more can be said against Violetta's song, "Ah! fors' è lui,"
than that while rather pretty its endless cadenzas are more than
rather absurd. But in the next act Alfredo sings of the dream of his
life to a pretty melody until he is interrupted by his sweetheart's
maid, who tells him that his joy is at an end, and then he howls "O
mio rimorso" to a march-tune of the rowdiest kind. Equally undramatic,
untrue, false in feeling, are the sentimental ditties sung by
Alfredo's father. The last act is best; but I must say that I have
always found it a tedious business to watch Albani die of consumption.
At the production of the piece, a soprano who must have looked quite
as healthy played Violetta, and it is recorded that, when the doctor
told how rapidly she was wasting away and announced her speedy
decease, the theatre broke into uproarious merriment. I respect Madame
Albani too highly to break into uproarious merriment at her pretence
of consumption; but no one is better pleased when the business is
over, although the music is more satisfactory here than in any other
portion of the opera. Anyone who has sat at night with a friend down
with toothache or cholera will recognise the atmosphere of the
sickroom at once. But it is not pleasant enough to atone for the rest
of the opera. For, to sum up, there is small interest in the drama,
and, on the whole, smaller beauty in the music, of "La Traviata." It
was made, as bonnets were made, to sell in the fifties; like the
bonnets sold in the fifties, it is hopelessly out of date now; and it
wants the inherent vitality that keeps the masterworks alive after the
fashion in which they were written has passed away. The younger Verdi
is not, after all, so vast an improvement on Donizetti and Bellini.
His melodies are too often sadly sentimental, and any freshness with
which he may have endowed them has long since faded. True, they
occasionally have a terseness and pungency, a sheer brute force, which
those other composers never got into their insipid tunes; while, on
the other hand, Verdi rarely shows his strength without also showing a
degree of vulgarity from which Bellini and Donizetti were for the most
part free.
"Aïda" is a different matter, though not so very different a matter.
Here we have the young Verdi--Verdi in his early prime, for he was
only fifty-eight; here also we have a story more likely to stir his
rowdy imagination, if not more susceptible of effective treatment in
the young Verdi manner. The misfortune is that the book is a very
excerebrose affair. The drama does not begin until the third act: the
two first are yawning abysms of sheer dulness. Who wants to _see_
that Radames loves Aïda, that Amneris, the king's daughter, loves
Radames, that Aïda, a slave, is the daughter of the King of the
Ethiopians, that Radames goes on a war expedition against that king,
beats him and fetches him back a prisoner, that the other king gives
Radames his daughter in marriage, that Radames, highly honoured, yet
wishes to goodness he could get out of it somehow? A master of drama
would begin in the third act, reveal the whole past in a pregnant five
minutes, and then hold us breathless while we watched to see whether
Radames would yield to social pressure, marry Amneris, and throw over
Aïda, or yield to passion, fly with Aïda, and throw over his country.
All this shows the bad influence of Scribe, who usually spent half his
books in explaining matters as simple and obvious as the reason for
eating one's breakfast. Verdi knew this as well as anyone, and used
the two first acts as opportunities for stage display. For "Aïda" was
written to please the Khedive of Egypt; and Verdi, always keenly
commercial, probably knew his man. Now, when the masters of
opera--Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Weber--got hold of a bad book, they
nearly invariably "faked" it by getting swiftly over the weak points
and dwelling on the strong; and, above all, they flooded the whole
thing with a stream of delicious melody that hypnotises one, and for
the time puts fault-finding out of the question. Not so Verdi. He
wrote to please his audience, and he knew that what one can only call
dark-skinned local colour was still fresh in spite of "L'Africaine,"
and that the vulgar would find delight in a blaze of glaring banners
and showy spectacle. So he set the two first acts as they stood,
trusting to local colour and spectacle to make them popular; and, as
we know, at the time they were popular, and the populace exalted Verdi
far above such second-rate fellows as Mozart and Beethoven. But now,
when local colour has been done to death, and when it has had a
quarter of a century to bleach out of Verdi's canvases, what remains
to interest, I do not say to touch, one? Certainly not the expression
of Radames' or Aïda's love, for here as everywhere Verdi fails to
communicate any new phase of emotion, but (precisely as he did in
"Falstaff" and "Otello") has written music which indicates that he had
some inkling of the emotion of the scene, and could write strains
calculated not to prevent the scene making its effect. That Verdi has
no well-spring of original feeling, perhaps explains why he is so poor
in the scenes with Radames, Amneris, and Aïda. (Also, perhaps, it
explains why he has fallen back in his best period upon masterpieces
of dramatic art for his librettos. It is almost outside human
possibility to add anything to "Falstaff" or "Otello"; and such
success as Verdi has made with them is the result of writing what is,
after all, only glorified incidental music--music which accompanies
the play. To class these accompaniments with the masterpieces of
original opera is surely the most startling feat of modern musical
criticism.) Moreover, the plan of writing each scene in a series of
detached numbers--for, even where song might flow naturally into song,
the two are quite detached--breaks up the interest as effectually as
it does in "Traviata"; and the songs do not themselves interest.
Verdi's music is not based, like the masters', upon the inflexions of
the human voice under stress of sincere feeling, but upon figures and
passages easily executed upon certain instruments. The great composers
strove to make instruments speak in the accent of the human voice,
while Verdi has always tried to make the voice sound like an
instrument. His roulades and cadenzas, for example, sound prettier on
the clarinet than on the voice, as one hears when he sets the one
chasing the other in "Traviata"; and if only our orchestral players
would take the trouble to play with the same expression as the stage
artists sing, we might soon be content to have a repetition (with a
difference) of the feat of the old-world conductor who, in the absence
of the hero, played the part upon the harpsichord with universal
applause. The stock patterns out of which the songs are made soon grow
old-fashioned, and are superseded by fresh ones: hence Verdi's songs
are the earliest portions of his operas to wither. There are two
powerful scenes in "Aïda"--the second of the second act, and the
final in the last act. The last is certainly terribly repulsive at the
first blush; but the weird chant of the priestesses in the
brightly-lit temple, where the workmen are closing the entrance to the
vault underneath in which we see Radames left to die, contrasts finely
with the sweet music that accompanies the declaration of Aïda that she
has hidden there to die with him; and, while guessing at the splendour
of the music Wagner might have given us here, one may still admit
Verdi to have succeeded well in a smaller way than Wagner's. But on
the whole "Aïda" is to be heard once and have done with, for save
these scenes there is little else in it to engage one. Aïda is alive,
but Amneris is a hopeless piece of machinery--something between the
stage conception of a princess and the Lady with the Camellias, any
difference in modesty being certainly not in favour of Amneris. The
music very rarely rises above commonness--that commonness which is
proclaimed in every bar of Verdi's instrumentation, and in his
shameless Salvation Army rhythms; and it is sometimes (as in the
Priest's solo with chorus in the last scene of the second act)
odiously vulgar. "Aïda" is more dramatic than "Traviata," has more of
Verdi's brusque energy, less of his sentimentality; but it has none of
the youthful freshness of his latest work. The young Verdi has already
aged--how long will the old Verdi remain young?
"THE FLYING DUTCHMAN"
Wagner took "The Flying Dutchman", "Tannhäuser," and "Lohengrin," in
three long running steps; from "Lohengrin" he made a flying leap into
the air, and, after spending some five or six years up there, he
landed safely on "The Nibelung's Ring." The leap was a prodigious one,
and you may search history in vain for its like; and still more
astounding was it if you reckon from the point where the run was
commenced. "The Flying Dutchman" was avowedly that point. "Die Feen"
is boyish folly, and "Rienzi" an attempt to out-Meyer Meyerbeer. But
in the "Dutchman" Wagner sought seriously to realise himself, to find
the mode of best expressing the best that was in him. That mode he
found in "The Rheingold" and mastered in "The Valkyrie," with its
continuous development and transmogrification of themes. And (to
discard utterly my former metaphor) after steeping oneself for several
nights in that last great river of melody, wide and deep and clear, it
is interesting to be led suddenly to its source, and see it bubbling
up with infinite energy, a good deal of frothing, and some brown mud.
Compared with "The Valkyrie," "The Flying Dutchman" is ill-contrived
and stagy. It is flecked here and there with vulgarity. It has far
less of pure beauty; it has only its moments, whereas "The Valkyrie"
gives hours of unbroken delight. "The Valkyrie" appeals to the primary
instincts of our nature--instincts and desires that will remain in us
so long as our nature is human; while for a large part of its effect
the "Dutchman" trusts to a feeling which is elusive at all times and
has no permanent hold upon us. Horror of the supernatural is not very
deeply rooted in us, after all. Modern training tends to eliminate it
altogether. In later life Goethe could not call up a single delightful
shiver. There are probably not half a dozen stories in the world from
which we can get it a second time. The unexpected plays a part in
producing it, and the same means does not produce it twice with
anything approaching the same intensity. Hence the Dutchman's phantom
ship must be more ghost-like at each representation, its blood-red
sails a bloodier red; and in the long-run, do what the stage
carpenters will, we coldly sit and compare their work with previous
ships. True, the music which accompanies its entry is always
impressively ghastly; yet, while we know this, we are acutely
conscious that our feeling is more or less a laudable make-believe--a
make-believe that requires some little effort. Then Heine's notion,
which seemed so brilliant at first, that the Dutchman could be
redeemed by the unshakable love of a woman, has now all the
disagreeable staleness of a decrepit and obvious untruth. It has no
essential verity to give it validity, it is no symbol of a fact which
is immediately and deeply felt to be a fact. The condition of
redemption is entirely arbitrary: it might as reasonably be that the
Dutchman should find a woman who would not shrink from eating his
weather-stained hat. What was it to the Dutchman's damned soul if all
the women in the world swore to love him eternally, so long as he was
unable to love one of them? The true Wandering Jew is not the unloved
man, but the man who cannot love, who is destitute of creative emotion
and cannot build up for himself a world in which to dwell, but must
needs live in hell--a world that others make, a world where he has no
place. Wagner knew this, and makes the Dutchman fall in love with
Senta; and that only leaves the drama more than ever in a muddle. One
wants a reason for his suddenly being able to love. It cannot be
because Senta promises to love him till death; for he has had hundreds
of fruitless love-affairs before, and knows that all women promise
that, and some of them mean it. Besides, the highest moment of the
drama ought either to arrive when he feels love dawning in his
loveless heart, or when he renounces his chance of salvation and sails
away to eternal torment, believing that Senta made her promise in a
passing fit of enthusiasm; and at one or other of those moments we
ought to have some sign that he is redeemed. There is no such sign.
The phantom ship falls to pieces, and the Dutchman is freed from his
curse when Senta casts herself into the waves; and the highest moment
of the whole drama is that in which the dreamy monomaniac, the modern
Jeanne d'Arc, the real heroine of the opera, wins her own salvation,
masters the world and makes it her heaven, by taking her fate in both
hands and setting out to do the thing she feels most strongly impelled
to do. If the Dutchman's salvation depends on himself, it is evidently
unnecessary for Senta to be drowned; if it depends upon her, it only
shows that Wagner, writing fifty years ago, and dazzled by the
brilliance of a new idea, could not see so clearly as can be seen
to-day that Senta was her own and not the Dutchman's saviour; and if
(as it apparently does) it depends upon both Dutchman and Senta, then,
at a performance at least, one can merely feel that something in the
drama is very much askew, without knowing precisely what.
In minor respects "The Flying Dutchman" falls considerably short of
perfection, even of reasonableness. For example, the comings and
goings of Daland are fearfully stagy. But worst of all are the
arrangements of the first act. I can go as far as most people in
accepting stage conventions. If Wagner brought on a four-eyed,
eight-horned, twenty-seven-legged monster and called it a Jabberwock,
I should not so much as ask why the legs were not all in pairs, like
the horns and eyes, so long as I saw in the animal's habits a certain
congruity, a conformity to what I would willingly regard as
Jabberwock nature. But who can pretend to believe in a ship which
comes against the rocks in a storm and anchors there while the captain
goes ashore to see whether shipwreck is imminent? That the majority of
opera-goers cannot live near the sea is self-evident, and that few of
them should ever have seen a shipwreck unavoidable; but surely anyone
who has crossed the Channel must have a vague suspicion that to place
this vessel against the rocks in a tempest is the last thing a seaman
would dream of doing, and that, if he were driven there and managed to
get ashore, he would call his men after him (if they needed calling),
and trouble neither about casting anchor nor going aboard again. The
thing is ludicrously stagy. I suppose that Wagner was too sea-sick to
observe what happened during his weeks of roughing it in the North
Sea. But the second scene is admirable. That monotonous drowsy hum of
the Spinning song is exactly what is needed to put one in the mood for
sympathising with Senta and her dreams. With the third there is an
occasional return to the bad stagecraft of Scribe; but there are also
hints of the simple directness of the later Wagner.
The music is like the stagecraft: now and then simply dramatic, now
and then stagily undramatic; sometimes rich and splendid, sometimes
threadbare and vulgar. And by this I do not mean that the
old-fashioned set pieces are of necessity bad, and the freer portions
necessarily good. Good and bad may be found in the new and the old
Wagner alike. That sailor's dance is to me as odious as anything in
Meyerbeer, and the melody which ends the love-duet is scarcely more
tolerable. On the other hand, not even in "The Valkyrie" did Wagner
write more picturesquely weird music than most of the first act. The
shrilling of the north wind, the roaring of the waves, the creaking of
cordage, the banging of booms, an uncanny sound in a dismal night at
sea,--these are suggested with wonderful vividness. At times Wagner
gives us gobbets of unassimilated Weber and Beethoven, but some
passages are as original as they are magnificent. The finest bars
in the work are those in which Senta declares her faith in her
"mission," and the Dutchman yields himself to unreasoning adoration.
Other moods came to Wagner, but never again that mood of rapturous
self-effacement. It is perhaps a young man's mood; certainly it is
identical with the ecstasy with which one contemplates a perfect piece
of art, or a life greatly lived; and here it finds splendid
expression.
"LOHENGRIN"
"Lohengrin" has been sung scores of times at Covent Garden in one
fashion or another; but I declare that we heard something resembling
the real "Lohengrin" for the first time when the late Mr. Anton Seidl
crossed the Atlantic to conduct it and other of Wagner's operas. We
had come to regard it as a pretty opera--an opera full of an
individual, strange, indefinable sweetness; but Mr. Anton Seidl came
all the way from New York city to show us how out of sweetness can
come forth strength. Mr. Seidl was a Wagner conductor of the older
type, and with some of the faults of that type; he knew little or
nothing of the improvements in the manner of interpreting Wagner's
music effected by Mottl, Levi, and that stupendous creature Siegfried
Wagner; he was a survival of the first enthusiastic reaction against
Italian ways of misdoing things; and he was, if anything, a little too
strongly inclined to go a little too far in the opposite direction to
the touch-and-go conductors. But there is so much of sweetness and
delicacy in "Lohengrin" that the whole opera, including the sweet and
delicate portions, actually gains from a forceful and manly
handling--gains so immensely that, as already said, those of us who
heard it under Mr. Seidl's direction must have felt that here, at
last, was the true "Lohengrin," the "Lohengrin" of Wagner's
imagination. It was a pleasure merely to hear the band singing out
boldly, getting the last fraction of rich tone out of each note, in
the first act; to hear the string passages valiantly attacked, and the
melodies treated with breadth, and the trumpets and trombones playing
out with all their force when need was, holding the sounds to the end
instead of letting them slink away ashamed in the accepted Italian
style. And not only were these things in themselves delightful--they
also served to make the drama doubly powerful, and the tender parts of
the music doubly tender, to show how splendid in many respects was
Wagner's art in the "Lohengrin" days, and to prove that Maurel's way
of doing the part of Telramund some years ago was, as Maurel's way of
doing things generally are, perfectly right. Maurel, it will be
remembered, stuck a red feather in his cap; and the eternally wise
critics agreed in thinking this absolutely wrong. They told him the
feather was out of place--it made him appear ridiculous, and so on.
Maurel retorted that he was playing the part of a fierce barbarian
chief who would not look, he thought, like a gilded butterfly, and
that his notion was to look as ferocious as he could. Now the odd
thing is, that though Maurel was right, we critics were in a sense
right also. As the music used to be played, a Telramund one degree
nearer to a man than the average Italian baritone seemed ludicrously
out of place; and when, in addition, the Lohengrin was a would-be
lady-killer without an inch of fight in him, Henry the Fowler a
pathetic heavy father, and Elsa a sentimental milliner, there was
something farcical about Maurel's red feather and generally militant
aspect. What we critics had not the brains to see was that the playing
of the music was wrong, and that Maurel was only wrong in trying to
play his part in the right manner when Lohengrin, Elsa, King, and
conductor were all against him in their determination to do their
parts wrong. Mr. Bispham follows in Maurel's footsteps, as he
frequently does, in a modified costume, but when for the first time
the orchestra played right he would not have seemed ridiculous had he
stuck Maurel's red feather into his helmet. The whole scene became a
different thing: we were thrown at once into the atmosphere of an
armed camp full of turbulent thieves and bandits itching for fighting,
and wildly excited with rumours of conflicts near at hand. Amidst all
this excitement, and amidst all the unruly fighters, Telramund,
strongest, fiercest, most unruly of them all, has to open the drama;
and to command our respect, to make us feel that it is he who is
making the drama move, that it is because all the barbarians are
afraid of him that the drama begins to move at all, he cannot possibly
look too ferocious and hot-blooded, too strong of limb and tempestuous
of temper. The proof that this (Seidl's) reading of the opera was the
right one, was that, in the first place, the drama immediately
interested you instead of keeping you waiting for the entry of Elsa;
and, in the second place, that the noisy, energetic playing of the
opening scene threw the music of Elsa and Lohengrin into wonderfully
beautiful relief--a relief which in the old way of doing the opera was
very much wanting. To play "Lohengrin" in the old way is to deny
Wagner the astonishing sense of dramatic effect he had from the
beginning; to play it as Seidl played it is to prove that the
conductor appreciates the perfection of artistic sense that led,
compelled, Wagner to set the miraculous vision of Lohengrin against a
background made up of such stormy scenes. Had Seidl kept his vigour
for the stormy scenes, and given us a finer tenderness in the prelude,
the love-music, and Lohengrin's account of himself, his rendering
would have been a flawless one.
And even as Seidl interpreted it, the supreme beauty of the music, the
sweetness of it as well as its strength, were manifest as they have
never been manifest before. "Lohengrin" is surely the most beautiful,
the fullest of sheer beauty, of all Wagner's operas. Some thirty or
forty years hence those of us who are lucky enough still to live in
the sweet sunlight will begin to feel that at last it is becoming
feasible to take a fair and reasonable view of Wagner's creative work;
and we shall probably differ about verdicts which the whole musical
world of to-day would agree only in rejecting. Old-school Wagnerites
and anti-Wagnerites will have gone off together into the night, and
the echo of the noise of all their feuds will have died away. No one
will venture to talk of the "teaching" of "Parsifal" or any other of
Wagner's works; the legends from which he constructed his works will
have lost their novelty. The music-drama itself will be regarded by
the Academics (if there are any left) with all the reverence due to
the established fact, and possibly it may be suffering the fierce
assault of the exponents of a newer and nobler form. Then the younger
critics will arise and take one after another of the music-dramas and
ask, What measure of beauty is there, and what dramatic strength, what
originality of emotion? and in a few minutes they will scatter
hundreds of harmless and long-cherished illusions that went to make
life interesting. In that day of wrath and tribulation may I be on the
right side, and have energy to go forward, giving up the pretence of
what I can no longer like, and boldly saying that I like what I like,
even should it happen to be unpopular. May I never fall so low as to
be talked of as a guardian of the accepted forms and laws. But even if
it should prove unavoidable to relinquish faith in Bach, in Beethoven,
in Wagner, yet it is devoutly to be hoped that it will never be
necessary to give up a belief in "Lohengrin"; for in that case my fate
is fixed--I shall be among the reactionaries, the admirers of the
thing that cannot be admired, the lovers of the unlovable. But indeed
it is incredible that "Lohengrin" should ever cease to seem
lovely--lovely in idea and in the expression of the idea. The story is
one of the finest Wagner ever set; it remains fresh, though it had
been told a hundred times before. The maiden in distress--we know her
perfectly well; the wicked sorceress who has got her into distress--we
know her quite as well; the celestial knight who rescues her--we know
him nearly as well. But the details in which "Lohengrin" differs from
all other tales of the same order are precisely those that make it the
most enchanting tale of them all. Lohengrin, knight of the Grail,
redeemer, yet with a touch of tragedy in his fate, drawn down the
river in his magic boat by the Swan from a far mysterious land, a land
of perpetual freshness and beauty, is an infinitely more poetic notion
than the commonplace angel flapping clumsily down from heaven; and
even if we feel it to be absurd that he should have to beg his wife to
take him on trust, yet, after all, he takes his wife on trust, and he
tells her at the outset that he cannot reveal the truth about himself.
Elsa is vastly preferable to the ordinary distressed mediæval maiden,
if only because a woman who is too weak to be worth a snap of the
fingers does move us to pity, whereas the ordinary mediæval is cut out
of pasteboard, and does not affect us at all. The King is perhaps
merely a stage figure; Ortrud is just one degree better than the
average witch of a fairy story; but Frederic, savage and powerful,
but so superstitious as to be at the mercy of his wife, is human
enough to interest us. And Wagner has managed his story perfectly
throughout, excepting at the end of the second act, where that dreary
business of Ortrud and Frederic stopping the bridal procession is a
mere reminiscence of the wretched stagecraft of Scribe, and quite
superfluous. But if there is a flaw in the drama, there cannot be said
to be one in the music. The mere fact that, save two numbers, it is
all written in common time counts for absolutely nothing against its
endless variety. Wagner never again hit upon quite so divine and pure
a theme as that of the Grail, from which the prelude is evolved; the
Swan theme at once carries one in imagination up the ever-rippling
river to that wonderful land of everlasting dawn and sacred early
morning stillness; and nothing could be more effective, as background
and relief to these, than the warlike music of the first act, and the
ghastly opening of the second act, so suggestive of horrors and the
spells of Ortrud winding round Frederic's soul. Then there is Elsa's
dream, the magical music of Lohengrin's tale, the music of the Bridal
procession in the second act, the great and tender melody first sung
by Elsa and Ortrud, and then repeated by the orchestra as Ortrud
allows Elsa to lead her into the house, the whole of the
Bridal-chamber duet, and perhaps, above all, Lohengrin's farewell. To
whatever page of the score you turn, there is perfect beauty--after
the first act not a great deal that is powerful or meant to be
powerful, but melody after melody that entrances you merely as
absolute music without poetic significance, and that seems doubly
entrancing by reason of the strange, remote feeling with which it is
charged, and its perpetual suggestion of the broad stream flowing
ceaselessly from far-away Montsalvat to the sea. "Lohengrin" is a
fairy-story imbued with seriousness and tender human emotion, and the
music is exactly adapted to it.
"TRISTAN AND ISOLDA"
Says Nietzsche (pretending to put the words into the mouth of
another), "I hate Wagner, but I no longer stand any other music"; and
though the saying is entirely senseless to those who do hate Wagner,
the feeling that prompted it may be understood by all who love him and
who stand every other music, so long as it is real music. Immediately
after listening to "Tristan and Isolda" all other operas seem away
from the point, to be concerned with the secondary issues of life, to
babble without fervour or directness of unessential matters. This does
not mean that "Tristan" is greater than "Don Giovanni" or the
"Matthew" Passion--for it is not--but that it speaks to each of us in
the most modern language of the most engrossing subject in the world,
of oneself, of one's own soul. Who can stay to listen to the sheer
loveliness of "Don Giovanni," or follow with any sympathy the farcical
doom of that hero, or who, again, can be at the pains to enter into
the obsolescent emotions and mode of expression of Bach, when Wagner
calls us to listen concerning the innermost workings of our own being,
and speaks in a tongue every word of which enters the brain like a
thing of life? For one does not have to think what Wagner means: so
direct, so penetrating, is his speech, that one becomes aware of the
meaning without thinking of the words that convey it. Nietzsche is
right when he says Wagner summarises modernism; but he forgot that
Wagner summarises it because he largely helped to create it, to make
it what it is, by this power of transferring his thought and emotion
bodily, as it were, to other minds, and that he will remain modern for
long to come, inasmuch as he moulds the thought of the successive
generations as they arise.
"Tristan and Isolda" is one of the world's half-dozen stupendous
appeals in music to the emotional side of man's nature; it stands with
the "Matthew" Passion, the Choral Symphony, and Mozart's Requiem,
rather than with "Don Giovanni," or "Fidelio," or "Tannhäuser;" like
the Requiem, the Choral Symphony, the "Matthew" Passion, there are
pages of unspeakable beauty in it; but, like them also, its main
object is not to please the ear or the eye, but to communicate an
overwhelming emotion. That emotion is the passion of love--the
elemental desire of the man for the woman, of the woman for the man;
and to the expression of this, not in one phase alone, like Gounod in
his "Faust," but in all its phases. It is a glorification of sex
attraction: nevertheless, it refutes Tannhäuser or Venus as completely
as it refutes Wolfram or Elizabeth. Tannhäuser, we know, would have it
that love was wholly of the flesh, Wolfram that it was solely of the
spirit. That there is no love which does not commence in the desiring
of the flesh, and none, not even the most spiritual, which does not
consist entirely in sex passion, that the two, spiritual and fleshly
love, are merely different phases of one and the same passion, Wagner
had learnt when he came to create "Tristan." And in "Tristan" we
commence with a fleshly love, as intense as that Tannhäuser knew; but
by reason of its own energy, its own excess, it rises to a spiritual
love as free from grossness as any dreamed of by Elizabeth or Wolfram,
and far surpassing theirs in exaltation. This change he depicted in a
way as simple as it was marvellous, so that as we watch the drama and
listen to the music we experience it within ourselves and our inner
selves are revealed to us. Nothing comes between us and the passions
expressed. Tristan and Isolda are passion in its purest integrity,
naked souls vibrating with the keenest emotion; they have no
idiosyncrasies to be sympathised with, to be allowed for; they are
generalisations, not characters, and in them we see only ourselves
reflected on the stage--ourselves as we are under the spell of
Wagner's music and of his drama. For "Tristan" seems to me the most
wonderful of Wagner's dramas, far more wonderful than "Parsifal," far
more wonderful than "Tannhäuser." There is no stroke in it that is not
inevitable, none that does not immensely and immediately tell; and,
despite its literary quality, one fancies it could not fail to make
some measure of its effect were it played without the music. Think of
the first act. The scene is the deck of the ship; the wind is fresh,
and charged with the bitterness of the salt sea; and Isolda sits
there consumed with burning anger and hate of the man she loves, whose
life she spared because she loved him, and who now rewards her by
carrying her off, almost as the spoil of war, to be the wife of his
king. It has been said that Tolstoi asserted for the first time in
"The Kreuzer Sonata" that hate and love were the same passion. But the
truth is, Wagner knew it long before Tolstoi, just as Shakespeare knew
it long before Wagner; and the whole of this first act turns on it.
Isolda sends for Tristan and tells him he has wronged her, and begs
him to drink the cup of peace with her. Tristan sees precisely what
she means, and, loving her, drinks the proffered poison as an
atonement for the wrong he has done her, and for his treachery to
himself in winning her, for ambition's sake, as King Mark's bride
instead of taking her as his own. But the moment her hatred is
satisfied Isolda finds life intolerable without it, without love; her
love a second time betrays her; and she seizes the poison and drinks
also. Then comes the masterstroke. Done with this world, with nothing
but death before them, the two confess their long-pent love; in their
exalted state passion comes over them like a flood; in the first rush
of passion, honour, shame, friendship seem mere names of illusions,
and love is the only real thing in life; and finally, the death
draught being no death draught, but a slight infusion of cantharides,
the two passionately cling to each other, vaguely wondering what all
the noise is about, while the ship reaches land and all the people
shout and the trumpets blow. What is the stagecraft of Scribe compared
with this? how else could the avowal of love be brought about with
such instant and stupendous effect? Quite as amazing is the second
act. Almost from the beginning to close on the end the lovers fondle
each other, in a garden before an old castle in the sultry summer
night; and just as their passion reaches its highest pitch, Mark
breaks in upon them. For Tristan, at least, death is imminent; and the
mere presence of death serves to begin the change from the desire of
the flesh to the ecstatic spiritual passion. That change is completed
in the next act, where we have the scene laid before Tristan's
deserted and dilapidated castle in Brittany, with the calm sea in the
distance (it should shine like burnished steel); and here Tristan lies
dying of the wound he received from Melot in the previous scene, while
a melody from the shepherd's pipe, the saddest melody ever heard,
floats melancholy and wearily through the hot, close, breathless air.
Kurvenal, his servant, has sent for Isolda to cure him as she had
cured him before; and when at last she comes Tristan grows crazy with
joy, tears the bandages from his wounds, and dies just as she enters.
This finishes the metamorphosis begun in the second act: after some
other incidents, Isolda, rapt in her spiritual love, sings the
death-song and dies over Tristan's body. What is the libretto of
"Otello" or of "Falstaff" compared with this libretto? From beginning
to end there is not a line, not an incident, in excess. Anyone who is
wearied by King Mark's long address when he comes on the guilty pair,
has failed to catch the drift of the whole opera--failed to see that
two souls like Tristan and Isolda, wholly swayed by love, must find
Mark's grief wholly unintelligible, and have no power of explaining
themselves to those not possessed with a passion like theirs, or of
bringing themselves into touch with the workaday world of daylight,
and that all Mark's most moving appeal means to them is that this
world, where such annoyances occur, is not the land in which they fain
would dwell. They live wholly for their illusion, and if it is
forbidden to them in life they will seek death; nothing--not honour,
shame, the affection of Mark, the faithfulness of Kurvenal, least of
all, life--is to be considered in comparison with their love; their
love is the love that is all in all. It is entirely selfish: Mark is
as much their enemy as Melot, his affection more to be dreaded than
the sword of Melot.
Perhaps I have given the drama some of the credit that should go to
the music; and at least there is not a dramatic situation which the
music does not immeasurably increase in power. But indeed the two are
inseparable. The music creates the mood and holds the spectator to it
so that the true significance of the dramatic situation cannot fail
to be felt; while the dramatic situation makes the highest, most
extravagant flights of the music quite intelligible, reasonable. It
cannot be said that the music exists for the sake of the drama any
more than the drama exists for the music: the drama lies in the music,
the music is latent in the drama. But to the music the wild atmosphere
of the beginning of the first act is certainly due; and though I have
said that possibly "Tristan" might bear playing without the music, it
must be admitted that it is hard to think of the fifth scene without
that tremendous entrance passage--that passage so tremendous that even
Jean de Reszke dare hardly face it. To the music also the passion and
fervent heat of the second act are due, and the thunderous atmosphere,
the sense of impending fate, in the last, and the miraculous sweetness
and intensity of Tristan's death-music, and the sublime pathos of
Isolda's lament. Since Mozart wrote those creeping chromatic chords in
the scene following the death of the Commendatore in "Don Giovanni,"
nothing so solemn and still, so full of the pathetic majesty of death,
as the passage following the words "with Tristan true to perish" has
been written. This is perhaps Wagner's greatest piece of music; and
certainly his loveliest is Tristan's description of the ship sailing
over the ocean with Isolda, where the gently swaying figure of the
horns, taken from one of the love-themes, and the delicious melody
given to the voice, go to make an effect of richness and tenderness
which can never be forgotten. The opening of the huge duet is as a
blaze of fire which cannot be subdued; and when at last it does
subside and a quieter mood prevails we get a long series of voluptuous
tunes the like of which were never heard before, and will not be heard
again, one thinks, for a thousand years to come. And in the strangest
contrast to these is the earlier part of the third act, where the very
depths of the human spirit are revealed, where we are taken into the
darkness and stand with Tristan before the gates of death. But indeed
all the music of "Tristan" is miraculous in its sweetness, splendour,
and strength; and yet one scarcely thinks of these qualities at the
moment, so entirely do they seem to be hidden by its poignant
expressiveness. As I have said, it seems to enter the mind as emotion
rather than as music, so penetrating is it, so instantaneous in its
appeal. There never was music poured out at so white a white heat; it
is music written in the most modern, most pungent, and raciest
vernacular, with utter impatience of style, of writing merely in an
approved manner. It is beyond criticism. It is possible to love it as
I do; it is possible to hate it as Nietzsche did; but while this
century lasts, it will be impossible to appreciate it sufficiently to
wish to criticise it and yet preserve one's critical judgment with
steadiness enough to do it.
"SIEGFRIED"
In all Wagner's music-plays there is shown an astonishing
appreciation of the value and effect of scenery and of all the changes
of weather and of skies and waters, not only as a background to his
drama but as a means of making that drama clearer, of getting
completer and intenser expression of the emotions for which the
persons in the drama stand. The device is not so largely used in
"Tristan" as in the other music-plays, yet the drama is enormously
assisted by it. In the "Ring" it is used to such an extent that the
first thing that must strike everyone is the series of gorgeously
coloured pictures afforded by each of the four plays. For instance, no
one can ever forget the opening of "The Valkyrie"--the inside of
Hunding's house built round the tree, the half-dead fire flickering,
while we listen to the steady roar of the night wind as the tempest
rushes angrily through the forest--nor the scene that follows, when
through the open door we see all the splendours of the fresh spring
moonlight gleaming on the green leaves still dripping with cold
raindrops. The terror and excitement of the second act are vastly
increased by the storm of thunder and lightning that rages while
Siegmund and Hunding fight. A great part of the effect of the third
act is due to the storm that howls and shrieks at the beginning and
gradually subsides, giving way to the soft translucent twilight, that
in turn gives way to the clear spring night with the dark blue sky
through which the yellow flames presently shoot, cutting off
Brünnhilde from the busy world. The same pictorial device is used
throughout "Siegfried" with results just as magnificent in their way;
though the way is a very different one. The drama of "The Valkyrie" is
tragedy--chiefly Wotan's tragedy (the relinquishing first of Siegmund,
and his hope in Siegmund, then of Brünnhilde)--but incidentally the
tragedy of Siegmund's life and his death, of Siegmund's loneliness and
of Brünnhilde's downfall; and at least one of the scenic effects--the
fire at the end--was thrown in to relieve the pervading gloom, and in
obedience to Wagner's acute sense of the wild beauty of the old
legend, rather than to illustrate and assist the drama. It is sheer
spectacle, but how magnificent compared with that older type of
spectacle which chiefly consisted of brass bands and ladies
insufficiently clothed! "Siegfried," on the other hand, contains no
tragedy save the destruction of a little vermin. It is the most
glorious assertion ever made of the joy and splendour and infinite
beauty to be found in life by those who possess the courage to go
through it in their own way, and have the overflowing vitality and
strength to create their own world as they go. Siegfried is the
embodiment of the divine energy that makes life worth living; and in
the scenery, as in the tale and the music of the opera, nothing is
left out that could help to give us a vivid and lasting impression of
the beauty, freshness, strangeness, and endless interest of life. Take
the first scene--the cave with the dull red forge--fires smouldering
in the black darkness, and the tools of the smith's trade scattered
about, and, seen through the mouth of the cave, all the blazing
colours of the sunlit forest; or again the second--the darkness, then
the dawn and the sunrise, and lastly the full glory of the summer day
near Fafner's hole in a mysterious haunted corner of the forest; or
the third--a far-away nook in the hills, where the spirit of the earth
slumbers everlastingly; or the final scene--the calm morning on
Brünnhilde's fell, the flames fallen, and all things transfigured and
made remote by the enchantment of lingering mists,--these scenes form
a background for the dramatic action such as no composer dreamed of
before, nor will dream of again until we cease to dwell in dusty stone
cities and learn once again to know nature and her greatest moods as
our forefathers knew them. Had Wagner not lived in Switzerland and
gone his daily walks amongst the mountains, the "Ring" might have been
written; but certainly it would have been written very differently,
and probably not half so well.
I have so often insisted on the pictorial power of Wagner's music,
that, save for one quality of the pictures in the "Ring," and
especially in "Siegfried," it would be unnecessary to say more about
it now. That quality is their old-world atmosphere, their power of
filling us with a sense of the old time before us. When the fire plays
round Brünnhilde's fell--Hinde Fell, Morris calls it--lighting the icy
tops of the farthest hills, or when Mime and Alberich squabble in the
dark of early morning at the mouth of Fafner's hole, or again when the
Wanderer comes in and scarifies Mime out of his wits, we are taken
back to the remotest and dimmest past, to the beginnings of time, to a
time that never existed save in the imagination of our forebears. This
may be partly the result of our unconscious perception of the fact
that these things never happen nowadays, and partly the result of our
having been familiar with the story of Brünnhilde and the gods since
earliest boyhood; but it is in the main due to Wagner's intense
historical sense, his sense of the past, and to his unapproached power
of expressing in music any feeling or combination of feelings he
experienced. So cunningly do music and scenery work together that we
credit the one with what the other has done; but, wonderful though the
pictures of "Siegfried" are, there cannot be a doubt that the
atmosphere we discover in them reaches us through the ear from the
orchestra. Besides giving us a series of singularly apposite and
significant pictures, Wagner has reproduced the very breath and colour
of the old sagas; he has re-created the atmosphere of a time that
never was; and it is this remote atmosphere which lends to
"Siegfried" and all the "Ring" a great part of their enchantment.
Fancy what it might have been, this long exposition of sheer
Schopenhauerism in three dramas and a fore-play! imagine what Parry or
Stanford or Mackenzie would have made of it! And then think of what
the "Ring" actually is, and especially of the splendour and weirdness
of some parts the "dulness" of which moves dull people to dull
grumbling. For example, a great many persons share Mime's wish for the
Wanderer to go off almost as soon as he comes on, "else no Wanderer
can he be called." They tell us that this scene breaks the action,
neglecting the trifling fact that were it omitted the remainder of the
act would be inconsequent nonsense, only worthy to rank with the
librettos of English musical critics, and that the truth happens to be
that nearly the whole of the subsequent drama grows out of it. In
itself it is a scene of peculiar power, charged to overflowing with
the essence of the Scandinavian legends. The notion of the god,
"one-eyed and seeming ancient," wandering by night through the wild
woods, clad in his dark blue robe, calling in here and there and
creating consternation in the circle gathered round the hearth, is one
of the most poetic to be found in the Northern mythology; and the
music which Wagner has set to his entry and his conversation cannot be
matched for unearthliness unless you turn to the Statue music in "Don
Giovanni," where you find unearthliness of a very different sort. The
scene with Erda in the mountains is even more wonderful, so laden is
the music with the Scandinavian emotional sense of the impenetrable
mystery of things. The scene between Mime and Alberich, or Alberich
and the Wanderer, gives us the old horror of the creeping maleficent
things that crawled by night about the brooks and rock-holes. It is
true this last will bear cutting a little; for Wagner being a German,
but having, what is uncommon in the German, an acute sense of balance
of form, always tried to get balance by lengthening parts which were
already long enough, in preference to cutting parts that were already
too long. Hence much padding, which a later generation will ruthlessly
amputate.
All these things are the accessories, the environment, of the
principal figure; and their presence is justified by their beauty,
significance, and interest, and also by their being necessary for the
development of the larger drama of the whole "Ring." But in following
"Siegfried" that larger drama cannot altogether be kept in mind: it is
the hero that counts first, and everything else is accessory merely to
him. That Wagner, in spite of his preoccupation with the tragedy of
Wotan, should have accomplished this, proves how wonderful and how
true an artist he was. Siegfried is the incarnation, as I have said,
of the divine energy which enables one to make the world rich with
things that delight the soul; he is Wagner's healthiest, sanest,
perhaps most beautiful creation; he is certainly the only male in all
Wagner's dramas who is never in any danger of becoming for ever so
brief a moment a bore, whose view of life is always so fresh and novel
and at the same time so essentially human that he interests us both in
himself and in the world we see through his eyes. Never had an actor
such opportunities as here. The entry with the bear exhibits the
animal strength and spirits of the man, and the inquiries about his
parents, his purely human feeling; his temper with Mime the
unsophisticated boy's petulant intolerance of the mean and ugly; the
forging of the sword the coming power and determination of manhood.
The killing of the dragon is unavoidably rather ridiculous; but the
scene with the bird is fascinating by its naturalness and simplicity
as well as its tenderness and sheer sweetness. Finally, after the
scene with the Wanderer, the scene of the awakening of Brünnhilde
affords an opportunity for love-making, and it is love-making of so
unusual a sort that one does not feel it to be an anti-climax after
all the big things that have gone before. In fact, not even Tristan
has things quite so much to himself, nor is given the opportunity of
expressing so many phases of emotion and character. And the music
Siegfried has to sing is the richest, most copious stream of melody
ever given to one artist; in any one scene there is melody enough to
have made the fortune of Verdi or any other Italian composer who
wrote tunes for the tenor and prima donna; not even Mozart could have
poured out a greater wealth of tune--tune everlastingly varying with
the mood of the drama. Every scene provides a heap of smaller tunes,
and then there are such big ones as the Forge song, Siegfried's
meditation in the forest and the conversation with the bird, and the
awakening of Brünnhilde--every one absolutely new and tremulous with
intense life.
"THE DUSK OF THE GODS"
Quite a fierce little controversy raged a little while ago in the
columns of the "Daily Chronicle," and all about the "meaning" of "The
Dusk of the Gods" and the behaviour of Brünnhilde. Mr. Shaw played
Devil's Advocate for Wagner, declaring "The Dusk of the Gods" to be
irrelevant and operatic (as if that mattered); and Mr. Ashton Ellis
and Mr. Edward Baughan, two mad Wagnerians, rushed in to protect
Wagner from Mr. Shaw (as if he needed protection). In reading the
various letters, my soul was moved to admiration and reverent awe by
the ingenuity displayed by the various correspondents in their
endeavours to make the easy difficult, the perfectly plain crooked.
Wagner took enormous pains to make Brünnhilde a living character--that
is to say, to show us her inmost soul so vividly that we know why she
did anything or everything without even thinking about it; he set her
on the stage, where we see her in the flesh behaving precisely as any
woman--of her period--would behave. And then these excellent gentlemen
come along and tell us that because Wagner at one time or another
thought of handling her story, and the story of Wotan and Siegfried,
in this or that way, therefore Wagner "meant" this or that, and failed
or succeeded, or changed his original plan or held fast to it. All
these things have nothing to do with the drama that is played on the
stage: by that alone, and by none of his earlier ideas, is Wagner to
be judged: he is to be judged by the effect and conviction of the
finished play. Now, it seems to me that in the finished play
Brünnhilde is neither "a glorious woman "--_i.e._ an Adelphi
melodramatic heroine--nor "a deceitful, vindictive woman"--_i.e._ an
Adelphi melodramatic villainess. Also, while considered by itself "The
Dusk of the Gods" is interesting mainly on account of the music,
considered in association, as Wagner wished, and as one must--for,
after all, it is but the final act of a stupendous drama, and it is
unfair and foolish to consider any one act of a drama alone--with the
other minor dramas of the greater drama, "The Nibelung's Ring," it is
dramatically not only interesting, absorbing, but absolutely
indispensable, true, inevitable. It is true enough that the "Ring"
suffered somewhat through the fact that Wagner took nearly a quarter
of a century to carry out his plan, and during this period his views
on life changed greatly; yet nevertheless "The Dusk of the Gods"
stands as the noble--in fact, the only possible--conclusion to a story
which is, on the whole, splendidly told.
When seeing "The Valkyrie," one thinks of Sieglinde or Siegmund or
Brünnhilde; when listening to "Siegfried," one thinks of Siegfried and
Brünnhilde and no others; but when one thinks of the complete "Ring,"
the person of the drama most forcibly forced before the eye of the
imagination, the person to whom one realises that sympathy is chiefly
due, is Wotan. Wotan, not Siegfried or Siegmund, is the hero of the
"Ring." His tragedy--if it is indeed a tragedy to emerge from the
battle in the highest sense of the word triumphant--includes the
tragedy of Siegfried and Siegmund, Sieglinde and Brünnhilde--in fact,
the tragedy of all the smaller characters of the play. "The
Rheingold," in spite of its glorious music, is entirely
superfluous--dramatically, at all events, it is superfluous--but
there, anyhow, the problem which we could easily understand without it
is stated. Wotan, who has been placed at the head of affairs by the
three blind fates, has caught the general disease of wishing to gain
the power to make others do his will. So anxious is he for that
authority that he not only makes a bargain for it with the powers of
stupidity--the giants, the brute forces of nature--which bargain is
afterwards and could never be anything but his ruin, but also he
stoops to a base subterfuge to gain it, and with the help of Loge,
fire, the final destroyer, he does gain it. So determined was Wagner
to make his point clear, that even in "The Rheingold," the superfluous
drama, he made it several times superfluously. He was not content to
let his point make itself--the humanitarian, the preacher of all that
makes for the highest humanity, was too strong in him for that: it was
a little too strong even for the artist in him: he must needs make the
powers of darkness lay a curse on power over one's fellow-beings, the
Ring standing as the emblem of that power. While Wotan takes the
power, his deepest wisdom, which is to say, his intuition--represented
by the spirit of the earth, Erda--rises against him and tells him he
is committing the fatal mistake, and he yields to the extent of
letting the giants have the supreme power. But he thinks, just as you
and I, reader, might think, that by some quaint unthinkable device he
can evade the tremendous consequence of his own act; and, instead of
at once looking at the consequence boldly and saying he will face it,
he elaborates a plan by which no one will suffer anything, while he,
Wotan, will gain the lordship of creation. From this moment his fate
becomes tragic. The complete man, full of rich humanity--for whom
Wotan stands--cannot exist, necessarily ceases to exist, if he is
compelled to deny the better part of himself, as Peter denied Jesus of
Nazareth. And in consequence of his own act Wotan has immediately to
deny the better part of himself, to make war on his own son Siegmund,
and then on his own daughter Brünnhilde: he destroys the first and
puts away from him for ever Brünnhilde, who is incarnate love. The
grand tragic moment of the whole cycle is the laying to sleep of
Brünnhilde. Wotan knows that life without love is no life, and he is
compelled to part from love by the very bargain which enables him to
rule. Rather than live such a life, he deliberately, solemnly wills
his own death; and a great part of "Siegfried" and the whole of "The
Dusk of the Gods" are devoted to showing how his death, and the death
of all the gods, comes about through Wotan's first act. In "Siegfried"
and "The Dusk of the Gods" there is no tragedy--how can there be any
tragedy in the fate of the man who faithfully follows the impulse that
makes for his highest and widest satisfaction, for the fullest
exercise of his beneficent energies, for the man who says I will do
this or that because I know and feel it is the best I can do? "The
Dusk of the Gods" is Wotan's most splendid triumph; he deliberately
yields place to a new dynasty, because he knows that to keep
possession of the throne will mean the continual suppression of all
that is best in him, as he has had already to suppress it.
Incidentally there are many tragedies in the "Ring." The murder of
Siegmund by Hunding, aided by Wotan, before Sieglinde's eyes; the
hideous incident of Siegfried winning his own wife to be the wife of
his friend Gunther; the stabbing of Siegfried by Hagen; Brünnhilde's
telling Gutrune that she, Gutrune, was never the wife of
Siegfried,--all these are terrible enough tragedies. Brünnhilde's is
the most terrible of them all, though she too takes her fate into her
hands, and by willing the right thing, and doing it, goes victorious
out of life. What there is difficult to understand about her, why she
should be accused of deceit and have her conduct explained, I can
hardly guess. In "The Valkyrie" she is a goddess; but when she offends
Wotan by disobeying him and walking clean through all the
Commandments, he is bound, for the maintenance of his power, to punish
her. So he takes away her godhead, and she is thenceforth simply a
woman. Siegfried treats her treacherously--as she necessarily
thinks--and she very naturally takes vengeance on him. Mr. Shaw speaks
as though he wished her to be a bread-and-butter miss; but a woman of
Brünnhilde's type, a daughter of the high gods, could scarcely be
that.
In short, "The Dusk of the Gods" seems to me perfectly clear, and in
no more need of explanation than "The Valkyrie" or "Siegfried." Of
course there are a thousand loose ends in the "Ring," as there are in
life itself; but to count them and find out what they all mean would
occupy one for an eternity. To throw away "The Dusk of the Gods"
because one cannot understand the loose ends, is ridiculous; instead
of wishing there were fewer of them, I wish Wagner had been more
careless, less German, and left more. It was through his endeavours to
get unity, to show the close relation of each incident to every other
incident, that he nearly came to utter grief. The drama was so
gigantic, to secure sympathy for Wotan it was so necessary to secure
sympathy for the minor characters whose story helps to make up Wotan's
story, that Wagner seemed perpetually afraid that the real, main
drama would be forgotten. And it is true that the story of Siegmund
and Sieglinde, or of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, absorbs one for a time
so completely that one forgets all about Wotan and his woes. So Wagner
came near to spoiling one of the most tremendous achievements of the
human mind, by shoving old Wotan on to the stage again and again to
recapitulate his troubles. But of these interruptions "The Dusk of the
Gods" has none. The story proceeds swiftly, inevitably to the end;
from the first bar to the last, the music is as splendid as any Wagner
ever wrote. It is the fitting conclusion to the vision of life
presented in the "Ring": it is a funeral chant, mournful, sombre, but
triumphant. The seed has been sown, the crop has grown and ripened and
been harvested, and now the thing is over: a chill wind pipes over the
empty stubble-land where late the yellow corn stood and the labourers
laboured: there is nothing more: "ripeness is all" that life offers or
means.
"PARSIFAL"
"Parsifal" is an immoral work. One cannot for a moment suppose that
Wagner, who had written "Tristan" and "Siegfried," meant to preach
downright immorality, or that he meant "Parsifal" to stand as anything
more than the expression of a momentary mood, the mood of the
exhausted, the effete man, the mood which follows the mood of
"Tristan" as certainly as night follows day. Nevertheless, in so far
as "Parsifal" says anything to us, in so far as it brings, in
Nonconformist cant, "a message," it is immoral and vicious, just as in
so far as "Siegfried" carries a message it is entirely moral,
healthful, and sane. It is useless to quibble about this, seeking to
explain away plain things: the truth remains that "Siegfried" is a
glorification of one view of life, "Parsifal" of its direct opposite
and flat contradiction; and anyone who accepts the one view must needs
loathe the other as sinful. To me the "Siegfried" view of life
commends itself; and I unhesitatingly assert the sinfulness of the
"Parsifal" view. The two operas invite comparison; for at the outset
their heroes seem to be the same man. Siegfried and Parsifal are both
untaught fools; each has his understanding partly enlightened by
hearing of his mother's sufferings and death (compare Wordsworth's "A
deep distress hath humanised my soul"); each has his education
completed by a woman's kiss. All this may seem very profound to the
German mind; but to me it is crude, a somewhat too obvious allegory,
partly superficial, partly untrue, a survival of windy sentimental
mid-century German metaphysics, like the Wagner-Heine form of "The
Flying Dutchman" story, and the Wagner form of the "Tannhäuser" story.
However, I am willing to believe that Siegfried, when he kisses
Brünnhilde on Hinde Fell, and Parsifal, when Kundry kisses him in
Klingsor's magic garden, has each his full faculties set in action for
the first time. And then? And then Siegfried, with his fund of health
and vitality, sees that the world is glorious, and joyfully presses
forward more vigorously than ever on the road that lies before him,
never hesitating for a moment to live out his life to the full; while
Parsifal, lacking health and vitality--probably his father suffered
from rickets--sees that the grief and suffering of the world outweigh
and outnumber its joys, and not only renounces life, but is so
overcome with pity for all sufferers as to regard it as his mission to
heal and console them. And having healed and consoled one, he
deliberately turns from the green world, with its trees and flowers,
its dawn and sunset, its winds and waters, and shuts himself in a
monkery which has a back garden, a pond and some ducks. There is only
one deadly sin--to deny life, as Nietzsche says: carefully to pull up
all the weeds in one's garden, but to plant there neither flower nor
tree--and this is what "Parsifal" glorifies and advocates.
Now, far be it from me to go hunting a moral tendency in a work of
art, and to praise or blame the art as I chance to like or dislike the
tendency. I am in a state of perfect preparedness to see beauty in a
picture, even if the subject is to me repulsive. But in the case of a
picture it is possible to say, "Yes, very pretty," and pass on. In the
case of a story, a play, or a music-drama, you cannot. You are tied to
your seat for one or two or three mortal hours; and however perfect
may be the art with which music-drama or play or story is set before
you, if the subject revolts or bores you, you soon sicken of the whole
business. And in the highest kind of story, play, or music-drama,
subject and treatment merge inseparably one in the other, substance
and form are one; for the idea is all in all, and the complete idea
cannot be perceived apart from the dress which makes it visible.
Besides, in the Wagnerian music-drama, it is intended that beauty of
idea and of arrangement of ideas shall be as of great importance as
beauty of ornament. Wagner certainly intended "Parsifal" to be such a
music-drama; and indeed the idea is only too clearly visible. The main
idea of the "Ring" is so much obscured by the subsidiary ideas twined
about it that very few people know that the real hero is Wotan, and
the central drama Wotan's tragedy, that Siegmund and Sieglinde,
Siegfried and Brünnhilde, and their loves--all the romance and
loveliness that enchant us--are merely accessory. But in "Parsifal"
there is nothing superfluous, no rich and lovely embroidery on the
dress of the idea to divert us from the idea itself--the idea is as
nearly nude as our limited senses and our modern respectability
permit. And the idea being what it is, it follows that the play, after
the drama once commences, is not only immoral, but also dispiriting
and boring, and, to my thinking, inconsequential and pointless. The
first act, the exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent: never
were the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in
more masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was
merely a hypochondriac, a stage Schopenhauer, imagining all manner of
wounds and evils where no evils or wounds existed, had he made
Parsifal a Siegfried, and sent him out into the world to learn this,
and brought him back to break up the monastery, to set Amfortas and
the knights to some useful labour, and to tell them that the sacred
spear, like Wotan's spear, had power only to hurt those who feared it,
then we might have had an adequate working-out of so noble a
beginning. Instead of this, Kundry kisses Parsifal, Parsifal squeals,
and we see him in a moment to be only an Amfortas who has had the luck
not to stumble; and he, the poor fool who is filled with so vast a
pity because he sees (what are called) good and evil in entirely wrong
proportion--as, in fact, a hypochondriac sees them--he, Parsifal,
this thin-blooded inheritor of rickets and an exhausted physical
frame, is called the Redeemer, and becomes head of the Brotherhood of
the Grail. Beside this inconsequence, all other inconsequences seem as
nothing. One might ask, for instance, how, seeing that no man can save
his brother's soul, Parsifal saves the soul of Amfortas? This is a
fallacy that held Wagner all his life. We find it in "The Flying
Dutchman"; it is avoided in "Tannhäuser"--for, thank the gods,
Tannhäuser is _not_ saved by that uninteresting young person
Elizabeth; it plays a large part in the "Ring"; it is the culmination
of the drama of "Parsifal." Had Wagner thought more of Goethe and less
of the Frankfort creature who formulated his hypo-chondriacal
nightmares, and called the result a philosophy, he might have learnt
that no mentally sick man ever yet was cured save by the welling-up of
a flood of emotional energy in his own soul. He might also have seen
that Parsifal is as much the spirit that denies as Mephistopheles. But
these points, and many others, may go as, comparatively, nothings. The
first act of "Parsifal" is unsurpassable, the second is an
anti-climax, and the third, excepting the repentance of Kundry, which
is pathetic, and strikes one as true, a more saddening anti-climax.
There is one last thing to say before passing to the music, and this
is that "Parsifal" is commonly treated with respect as a Christian
drama--a superior "Sign of the Cross." I happen, oddly enough, to
know the four Gospels exceedingly well; and I find nothing of
"Parsifal" in them. It is much nearer to Buddhism in spirit, in
colour: it is a kind of Germanised metaphysical Buddhism.
Schopenhauer, not Christ, is the hero; and Schopenhauer was only a
decrepit Mephistopheles bereft of his humour and inverted creative
energy.
After hearing the whole opera twice, with all the supposed advantages
of the stage, the main thing borne in upon me is that the stage and
actors and accessories, far from increasing the effect of the music,
actually weaken it excepting in the first act. In that act there is
not a word or a note to alter. The story compels one's interest, and
the music is rich, tender, and charged with a noble passion. Even the
killing of the duck--it is supposed to be a swan, but it is really a
duck--is saved from becoming ludicrous by the deep sincerity of the
music of Gurnemanz's expostulations. The music, too, with the
magnificent trombone and trumpet calls and deep clangour of cathedral
bells, prevents one thinking too much of the absurdity of the trees,
mountains, and lake walking off the stage to make the change to the
second scene. On reflection, this panorama seems wholly meaningless
and thoroughly vulgar; and even in the theatre one wonders vaguely
what it is all about--for Gurnemanz's explanation about time and space
being one is sheer metaphysical shoddy, a mere humbugging of an
essentially uncultured German audience; but one does not mind it, so
full is the accompaniment of mystical life and of colour, of a sense
of impending great things. The whole cathedral scene--I would even
include the caterwaulings of Amfortas--is sincere, impressive, and
filled with a reasonable degree of mysticism. There is no falling off
in the second act until after the enchanting waltz and Kundry's
wondrously tender recital of the woes suffered by Parsifal's mother
(here the melody compares in loveliness with the corresponding portion
of "Siegfried"); indeed, the passion and energy go on increasing until
Parsifal receives Kundry's kiss, and then at once they disappear.
Between this point and the end of the act there is scarcely a fine
passage. Every phrase is insincere, not because Wagner wished to be
insincere, but because he tried to express dramatically a state of
mind which is essentially undramatic. Parsifal is supposed to
transcend almost at one bound the will to live, to rise above all
animal needs and desires; and though no human being can transcend the
will to live, any more than he can jump away from his shadow--for the
phrase means, and can only mean, that the will to live transcends the
will to live--yet I am informed, and can well believe, that those who
imagine they have accomplished the feat reach a state of perfect
ecstasy. Wagner knew this; he knew also that ecstasy, as what can only
be called a static emotion, could not be expressed through the medium
that serves to express only flowing currents of emotion; he himself
had pointed out, that for the communication of ecstatic feeling, only
polyphonic, non-climatic, rhythmless music of the Palestrina kind
served; and yet, by one of the hugest mistakes ever made in art, he
sought to express precisely that emotion in Parsifal's declamatory
phrases. The thing cannot be done; it has not been done; all
Parsifal's bawling, even with the help of the words, avails nothing;
and the curtain drops at the end of the second act, leaving one
convinced that the drama has untimely ended, has got into a
cul-de-sac. And in a cul-de-sac it remains. There is much glorious
music in the last act; the "Good Friday music" is divine; the last
scene is gorgeously led up to; and the music of it, considered only as
music, is unsurpassable. But heard at the end of a drama so
gigantically planned as "Parsifal," it is unsatisfying and
disappointing. It is to me as if the "Ring" had closed on the music of
Neid-höhle with the squabblings of Alberich and Mime. The powers that
make for evil and destruction have won; one knows that Parsifal is
eternally damned; he has listened and succumbed, even as Wagner
himself did, to the eastern sirens' song of the ease and delight of a
life of slothful renunciation, self-abnegation, and devotion to
"duty." The music of the last scene sings that song in tones of
infinite sweetness; but it cannot satisfy you; you turn from the
enchanted hall, with its holy cup and spear and dove, its mystic
voices in the heights, its heavy, depressing, incense-laden
atmosphere; and you hasten into the night, where the winds blow fresh
through the black trees, and the stars shine calmly in the deep sky,
just as though no "Parsifal" had been written.
"Parsifal" does not imply that Wagner in his old age went back on all
he had thought and felt before. Born in a time when the secret of
living had not been rediscovered, when folk still thought the victory,
and not the battle, the main thing in life, he always sought a creed
to put on as a coat-of-mail to protect him from the nasty knocks of
fate. Nowadays we do not care greatly for the victory, and we go out
to fight with a light heart, commencing where Wagner and all the
pessimists ended. Wagner wanted the victory, and also, lest he should
not gain it, he wanted something to save him from despair. That
something he found in pessimism. In his younger days--indeed until
near the last--he forgot all about it in his hours of inspiration, and
worked for no end, but for the sheer joy of working. But towards the
end of his life, when his inspiration came seldomer and with less
power, he worked more and more for the victory, and became wholly
pessimistic, throwing away his weapons, and hiding behind
self-renunciation as behind a shield. He won a victory more brilliant
than ever Napoleon or Wellington or Moltke won; and in the eyes of
all men he seemed a great general. But life had terrified him; he had
trembled before Wotan's--or Christ's--spear; in his heart of hearts he
knew himself a beaten man; and he wrote "Parsifal."