Wagner's actual life--that is to say, the gradual evolution of the
dithyrambic dramatist in him-- was at the same time an uninterrupted
struggle with himself, a struggle which never ceased until his
evolution was complete. His fight with the opposing world was grim and
ghastly, only because it was this same world--this alluring
enemy--which he heard speaking out of his own heart, and because he
nourished a violent demon in his breast--the demon of resistance. When
the ruling idea of his life gained ascendancy over his mind--the idea
that drama is, of all arts, the one that can exercise the greatest
amount of influence over the world--it aroused the most active
emotions in his whole being. It gave him no very clear or luminous
decision, at first, as to what was to be done and desired in the
future; for the idea then appeared merely as a form of
temptation--that is to say, as the expression of his gloomy, selfish,
and insatiable will, eager for power and glory. Influence--the
greatest amount of influence--how? over whom?--these were henceforward
the questions and problems which did not cease to engage his head and
his heart. He wished to conquer and triumph as no other artist had
ever done before, and, if possible, to reach that height of tyrannical
omnipotence at one stroke for which all his instincts secretly craved.
With a jealous and cautious eye, he took stock of everything
successful, and examined with special care all that upon which this
influence might be brought to bear. With the magic sight of the
dramatist, which scans souls as easily as the most familiar book, he
scrutinised the nature of the spectator and the listener, and although
he was often perturbed by the discoveries he made, he very quickly
found means wherewith he could enthral them. These means were ever
within his reach: everything that moved him deeply he desired and
could also produce; at every stage in his career he understood just as
much of his predecessors as he himself was able to create, and he
never doubted that he would be able to do what they had done. In this
respect his nature is perhaps more presumptuous even than Goethe's,
despite the fact that the latter said of himself: "I always thought I
had mastered everything; and even had I been crowned king, I should
have regarded the honour as thoroughly deserved." Wagner's ability.
his taste and his aspirations--all of which have ever been as closely
related as key to lock--grew and attained to freedom together; but
there was a time when it was not so. What did he care about the feeble
but noble and egotistically lonely feeling which that friend of art
fosters, who, blessed with a literary and aesthetic education, takes
his stand far from the common mob! But those violent spiritual
tempests which are created by the crowd when under the influence of
certain climactic passages of dramatic song, that sudden bewildering
ecstasy of the emotions, thoroughly honest and selfless--they were but
echoes of his own experiences and sensations, and filled him with
glowing hope for the greatest possible power and effect. Thus he
recognised grand opera as the means whereby he might express his
ruling thoughts; towards it his passions impelled him; his eyes turned
in the direction of its home. The larger portion of his life, his most
daring wanderings, and his plans, studies, sojourns, and acquaintances
are only to be explained by an appeal to these passions and the
opposition of the outside world, which the poor, restless,
passionately ingenuous German artist had to face. Another artist than
he knew better how to become master of this calling, and now that it
has gradually become known by means of what ingenious artifices of all
kinds Meyerbeer succeeded in preparing and achieving every one of his
great successes, and how scrupulously the sequence of "effects" was
taken into account in the opera itself, people will begin to
understand how bitterly Wagner was mortified when his eyes were opened
to the tricks of the metier which were indispensable to a great public
success. I doubt whether there has ever been another great artist in
history who began his career with such extraordinary illusions and who
so unsuspectingly and sincerely fell in with the most revolting form
of artistic trickery. And yet the way in which he proceeded partook of
greatness and was therefore extraordinarily fruitful. For when he
perceived his error, despair made him understand the meaning of modern
success, of the modern public, and the whole prevaricating spirit of
modern art. And while becoming the critic of "effect," indications of
his own purification began to quiver through him. It seems as if from
that time forward the spirit of music spoke to him with an
unprecedented spiritual charm. As though he had just risen from a long
illness and had for the first time gone into the open, he scarcely
trusted his hand and his eye, and seemed to grope along his way. Thus
it was an almost delightful surprise to him to find that he was still
a musician and an artist, and perhaps then only for the first time.
Every subsequent stage in Wagner's development may be distinguished
thus, that the two fundamental powers of his nature drew ever more
closely together: the aversion of the one to the other lessened, the
higher self no longer condescended to serve its more violent and baser
brother; it loved him and felt compelled to serve him. The tenderest
and purest thing is ultimately--that is to say, at the highest stage
of its evolution-- always associated with the mightiest; the storming
instincts pursue their course as before, but along different roads, in
the direction of the higher self; and this in its turn descends to
earth and finds its likeness in everything earthly. If it were
possible, on this principle, to speak of the final aims and
unravelments of that evolution, and to remain intelligible, it might
also be possible to discover the graphic terms with which to describe
the long interval preceding that last development; but I doubt whether
the first achievement is possible at all, and do not therefore attempt
the second. The limits of the interval separating the preceding and
the subsequent ages will be described historically in two sentences:
Wagner was the revolutionist of society; Wagner recognised the only
artistic element that ever existed hitherto--the poetry of the people.
The ruling idea which in a new form and mightier than it had ever
been, obsessed Wagner, after he had overcome his share of despair and
repentance, led him to both conclusions. Influence, the greatest
possible amount of influence to be exercised by means of the stage!
--but over whom? He shuddered when he thought of those whom he had,
until then, sought to influence. His experience led him to realise the
utterly ignoble position which art and the artist adorn; how a callous
and hard-hearted community that calls itself the good, but which is
really the evil, reckons art and the artist among its slavish retinue,
and keeps them both in order to minister to its need of deception.
Modern art is a luxury; he saw this, and understood that it must stand
or fall with the luxurious society of which it forms but a part. This
society had but one idea, to use its power as hard-heartedly and as
craftily as possible in order to render the impotent--the people--ever
more and more serviceable, base and unpopular, and to rear the modern
workman out of them. It also robbed them of the greatest and purest
things which their deepest needs led them to create, and through which
they meekly expressed the genuine and unique art within their soul:
their myths, songs, dances, and their discoveries in the department of
language, in order to distil therefrom a voluptuous antidote against
the fatigue and boredom of its existence-- modern art. How this
society came into being, how it learned to draw new strength for
itself from the seemingly antagonistic spheres of power, and how, for
instance, decaying Christianity allowed itself to be used, under the
cover of half measures and subterfuges, as a shield against the masses
and as a support of this society and its possessions, and finally how
science and men of learning pliantly consented to become its
drudges--all this Wagner traced through the ages, only to be convulsed
with loathing at the end of his researches. Through his compassion for
the people, he became a revolutionist. From that time forward he loved
them and longed for them, as he longed for his art; for, alas! in them
alone, in this fast disappearing, scarcely recognisable body,
artificially held aloof, he now saw the only spectators and listeners
worthy and fit for the power of his masterpieces, as he pictured them.
Thus his thoughts concentrated themselves upon the question, How do
the people come into being? How are they resuscitated?
He always found but one answer: if a large number of people were
afflicted with the sorrow that afflicted him, that number would
constitute the people, he said to himself. And where the same sorrow
leads to the same impulses and desires, similar satisfaction would
necessarily be sought, and the same pleasure found in this
satisfaction. If he inquired into what it was that most consoled him
and revived his spirits in his sorrow, what it was that succeeded best
in counteracting his affliction, it was with joyful certainty that he
discovered this force only in music and myth, the latter of which he
had already recognised as the people's creation and their language of
distress. It seemed to him that the origin of music must be similar,
though perhaps more mysterious. In both of these elements he steeped
and healed his soul; they constituted his most urgent need:--in this
way he was able to ascertain how like his sorrow was to that of the
people, when they came into being, and how they must arise anew if
many Wagners are going to appear. What part did myth and music play in
modern society, wherever they had not been actually sacrificed to it?
They shared very much the same fate, a fact which only tends to prove
their close relationship: myth had been sadly debased and usurped by
idle tales and stories; completely divested of its earnest and sacred
virility, it was transformed into the plaything and pleasing bauble of
children and women of the afflicted people. Music had kept itself
alive among the poor, the simple, and the isolated; the German
musician had not succeeded in adapting himself to the luxurious
traffic of the arts; he himself had become a fairy tale full Of
monsters and mysteries, full of the most touching omens and
auguries--a helpless questioner, something bewitched and in need of
rescue. Here the artist distinctly heard the command that concerned
him alone--to recast myth and make it virile, to break the spell lying
over music and to make music speak: he felt his strength for drama
liberated at one stroke, and the foundation of his sway established
over the hitherto undiscovered province lying between myth and music.
His new masterpiece, which included all the most powerful, effective,
and entrancing forces that he knew, he now laid before men with this
great and painfully cutting question: "Where are ye all who suffer and
think as I do? Where is that number of souls that I wish to see become
a people, that ye may share the same joys and comforts with me? In
your joy ye will reveal your misery to me." These were his questions
in Tannhauser and Lohengrin, in these operas he looked about him for
his equals --the anchorite yearned for the number.
But what were his feelings withal? Nobody answered him. Nobody had
understood his question. Not that everybody remained silent: on the
contrary, answers were given to thousands of questions which he had
never put; people gossipped about the new masterpieces as though they
had only been composed for the express purpose of supplying subjects
for conversation. The whole mania of aesthetic scribbling and small
talk overtook the Germans like a pestilence, and ith that lack of
modesty which characterises both German scholars and German
journalists, people began measuring, and generally meddling with,
these masterpieces, as well as with the person of the artist. Wagner
tried to help the comprehension of his question by writing about it;
but this only led to fresh confusion and more uproar, --for a musician
who writes and thinks was, at that time, a thing unknown. The cry
arose: "He is a theorist who wishes to remould art with his
far-fetched notions--stone him!" Wagner was stunned: his question was
not understood, his need not felt; his masterpieces seemed a message
addressed only to the deaf and blind; his people-- an hallucination.
He staggered and vacillated. The feasibility of a complete upheaval of
all things then suggested itself to him, and he no longer shrank from
the thought: possibly, beyond this revolution and dissolution, there
might be a chance of a new hope; on the other hand, there might not.
But, in any case, would not complete annihilation be better than the
wretched existing state of affairs? Not very long afterwards, he was a
political exile in dire distress.
And then only, with this terrible change in his environment and in his
soul, there begins that period of the great man's life over which as a
golden reflection there is stretched the splendour of highest mastery.
Now at last the genius of dithyrambic drama doffs its last disguise.
He is isolated; the age seems empty to him; he ceases to hope; and his
all-embracing glance descend once more into the deep, and finds the
bottom, there he sees suffering in the nature of things, and
henceforward, having become more impersonal, he accepts his portion of
sorrow more calmly. The desire for great power which was but the
inheritance of earlier conditions is now directed wholly into the
channel of creative art; through his art he now speaks only to
himself, and no longer to a public or to a people, and strives to lend
this intimate conversation all the distinction and other qualities in
keeping with such a mighty dialogue. During the preceding period
things had been different with his art; then he had concerned himself,
too, albeit with refinement and subtlety, with immediate effects: that
artistic production was also meant as a question, and it ought to have
called forth an immediate reply. And how often did Wagner not try to
make his meaning clearer to those he questioned! In view of their
inexperience in having questions put to them, he tried to meet them
half way and to conform with older artistic notions and means of
expression. When he feared that arguments couched in his own terms
would only meet with failure, he had tried to persuade and to put his
question in a language half strange to himself though familiar to his
listeners. Now there was nothing to induce him to continue this
indulgence: all he desired now was to come to terms with himself, to
think of the nature of the world in dramatic actions, and to
philosophise in music; what desires he still possessed turned in the
direction of the latest philosophical views. He who is worthy of
knowing what took place in him at that time or what questions were
thrashed out in the darkest holy of holies in his soul--and not many
are worthy of knowing all this--must hear, observe, and experience
Tristan and Isolde, the real opus metaphysicum of all art, a work upon
which rests the broken look of a dying man with his insatiable and
sweet craving for the secrets of night and death, far away from life
which throws a horribly spectral morning light, sharply, upon all that
is evil, delusive, and sundering: moreover, a drama austere in the
severity of its form, overpowering in its simple grandeur, and in
harmony with the secret of which it treats--lying dead in the midst of
life, being one in two. And yet there is something still more
wonderful than this work, and that is the artist himself, the man who,
shortly after he had accomplished it, was able to create a picture of
life so full of clashing colours as the Meistersingers of Nurnberg,
and who in both of these compositions seems merely to have refreshed
and equipped himself for the task of completing at his ease that
gigantic edifice in four parts which he had long ago planned and
begun--the ultimate result of all his meditations and poetical flights
for over twenty years, his Bayreuth masterpiece, the Ring of the
Nibelung! He who marvels at the rapid succession of the two operas,
Tristan and the Meistersingers, has failed to understand one important
side of the life and nature of all great Germans: he does not know the
peculiar soil out of which that essentially German gaiety, which
characterised Luther, Beethoven, and Wagner, can grow, the gaiety
which other nations quite fail to understand and which even seems to
be missing in the Germans of to-day--that clear golden and thoroughly
fermented mixture of simplicity, deeply discriminating love,
observation, and roguishness which Wagner has dispensed, as the most
precious of drinks, to all those who have suffered deeply through
life, but who nevertheless return to it with the smile of
convalescents. And, as he also turned upon the world the eyes of one
reconciled, he was more filled with rage and disgust than with sorrow,
and more prone to renounce the love of power than to shrink in awe
from it. As he thus silently furthered his greatest work and gradually
laid score upon score, something happened which caused him to stop and
listen: friends were coming, a kind of subterranean movement of many
souls approached with a message for him--it was still far from being
the people that constituted this movement and which wished to bear him
news, but it may have been the nucleus and first living source of a
really human community which would reach perfection in some age still
remote. For the present they only brought him the warrant that his
great work could be entrusted to the care and charge of faithful men,
men who would watch and be worthy to watch over this most magnificent
of all legacies to posterity. In the love of friends his outlook began
to glow with brighter colours; his noblest care--the care that his
work should be accomplished and should find a refuge before the
evening of his life--was not his only preoccupation. something
occurred which he could only understand as a symbol: it was as much as
a new comfort and a new token of happiness to him. A great German war
caused him to open his eyes, and he observed that those very Germans
whom he considered so thoroughly degenerate and so inferior to the
high standard of real Teutonism, of which he had formed an ideal both
from self-knowledge and the conscientious study of other great Germans
in history; he observed that those very Germans were, in the midst of
terrible circumstances, exhibiting two virtues of the highest
order--simple bravery and prudence; and with his heart bounding with
delight he conceived the hope that he might not be the last German,
and that some day a greater power would perhaps stand by his works
than that devoted yet meagre one consisting of his little band of
friends--a power able to guard it during that long period preceding
its future glory, as the masterpiece of this future. Perhaps it was
not possible to steel this belief permanently against doubt, more
particularly when it sought to rise to hopes of immediate results:
suffice it that he derived a tremendous spur from his environment,
which constantly reminded him of a lofty duty ever to be fulfilled.
His work would not have been complete had he handed it to the world
only in the form of silent manuscript. He must make known to the world
what it could not guess in regard to his productions, what was his
alone to reveal--the new style for the execution and presentation of
his works, so that he might set that example which nobody else could
set, and thus establish a tradition of style, not on paper, not by
means of signs, but through impressions made upon the very souls of
men. This duty had become all the more pressing with him, seeing that
precisely in regard to the style of their execution his other works
had meanwhile succumbed to the most insufferable and absurd of fates:
they were famous and admired, yet no one manifested the slightest sign
of indignation when they were mishandled. For, strange to say, whereas
he renounced ever more and more the hope of success among his
contemporaries, owing to his all too thorough knowledge of them, and
disclaimed all desire for power, both "success" and "power" came to
him, or at least everybody told him so. It was in vain that he made
repeated attempts to expose, with the utmost clearness, how worthless
and humiliating such successes were to him: people were so unused to
seeing an artist able to differentiate at all between the effects of
his works that even his most solemn protests were never entirely
trusted. Once he had perceived the relationship existing between our
system of theatres and their success, and the men of his time, his
soul ceased to be attracted by the stage at all. He had no further
concern with aesthetic ecstasies and the exultation of excited crowds,
and he must even have felt angry to see his art being gulped down
indiscriminately by the yawning abyss of boredom and the insatiable
love of distraction. How flat and pointless every effect proved under
these circumstances-- more especially as it was much more a case of
having to minister to one quite insatiable than of cloying the hunger
of a starving man-- Wagner began to perceive from the following
repeated experience: everybody, even the performers and promoters,
regarded his art as nothing more nor less than any other kind of
stage-music, and quite in keeping with the repulsive style of
traditional opera; thanks to the efforts of cultivated conductors, his
works were even cut and hacked about, until, after they had been
bereft of all their spirit, they were held to be nearer the
professional singer's plane. But when people tried to follow Wagner's
instructions to the letter, they proceeded so clumsily and timidly
that they were not incapable of representing the midnight riot in the
second act of the Meistersingers by a group of ballet-dancers. They
seemed to do all this, however, in perfectly good faith--without the
smallest evil intention. Wagner's devoted efforts to show, by means of
his own example, the correct and complete way of performing his works,
and his attempts at training individual singers in the new style, were
foiled time after time, owing only to the thoughtlessness and iron
tradition that ruled all around him. Moreover, he was always induced
to concern himself with that class of theatricals which he most
thoroughly loathed. Had not even Goethe, m his time, once grown tired
of attending the rehearsals of his Iphigenia? "I suffer unspeakably,"
he explained, "when I have to tumble about Wlth these spectres, which
never seem to act as they should." Meanwhile Wagner's "success" in the
kind of drama which he most disliked steadily increased; so much so,
indeed, that the largest theatres began to subsist almost entirely
upon the receipts which Wagner's art, in the guise of operas, brought
into them. This growing passion on the part of the theatre-going
public bewildered even some of Wagner's friends; but this man who had
endured so much, had still to endure the bitterest pain of all--he had
to see his friends intoxicated with his "successes" and "triumphs"
everywhere where his highest ideal was openly belied and shattered. It
seemed almost as though a people otherwise earnest and reflecting had
decided to maintain an attitude of systematic levity only towards its
most serious artist, and to make him the privileged recipient of all
the vulgarity, thoughtlessness, clumsiness, and malice of which the
German nature is capable. When, therefore, during the German War, a
current of greater magnanimity and freedom seemed to run through every
one, Wagner remembered the duty to which he had pledged himself,
namely, to rescue his greatest work from those successes and affronts
which were so largely due to misunderstandings, and to present it in
his most personal rhythm as an example for all times. Thus he
conceived the idea of Bayreuth. In the wake of that current of better
feeling already referred to, he expected to notice an enhanced sense
of duty even among those with whom he wished to entrust his most
precious possession. Out of this two-fold duty, that event took shape
which, like a glow of strange sunlight, will illumine the few years
that lie behind and before us, and was designed to bless that distant
and problematic future which to our time and to the men of our time
can be little more than a riddle or a horror, but which to the fevv
who are allowed to assist in its realisation is a foretaste of coming
joy, a foretaste of love in a higher sphere, through which they know
themselves to be blessed, blessing and fruitful, far beyond their span
of years; and which to Wagner himself is but a cloud of distress,
care, meditation, and grief, a fresh passionate outbreak of
antagonistic elements, but all bathed in the starlight of selfless
fidelity, and changed by this light into indescribable joy.
It scarcely need be said that it is the breath of tragedy that fills
the lungs of the world. And every one whose innermost soul has a
presentiment of this, every one unto whom the yoke of tragic deception
concerning the aim of life, the distortion and shattering of
intentions, renunciation and purification through love, are not
unknown things, must be conscious of a vague reminiscence of Wagner's
own heroic life, in the masterpieces with which the great man now
presents us. We shall feel as though Siegfried from some place far
away were relating his deeds to us: the most blissful of touching
recollections are always draped in the deep mourning of waning summer,
when all nature lies still in the sable twilight.