The problems he sets on the stage are all concerned with hysteria; the
convulsiveness of his emotions, his over-excited sensitiveness, his taste
which demands ever sharper condimentation, his erraticness which he togged
out to look like principles, and, last but not least, his choice of heroes
and heroines, considered as physiological types (—a hospital ward!—): the
whole represents a morbid picture; of this there can be no doubt. _Wagner
est une névrose_. Maybe, that nothing is better known to-day, or in any
case the subject of greater study, than the Protean character of
degeneration which has disguised itself here, both as an art and as an
artist. In Wagner our medical men and physiologists have a most
interesting case, or at least a very complete one. Owing to the very fact
that nothing is more modern than this thorough morbidness, this
dilatoriness and excessive irritability of the nervous machinery, Wagner
is the _modern artist par excellence_, the Cagliostro of modernity. All
that the world most needs to-day, is combined in the most seductive manner
in his art,—the three great stimulants of exhausted people: _brutality_,
_artificiality_ and _innocence_ (idiocy).
Wagner is a great corrupter of music. With it, he found the means of
stimulating tired nerves,—and in this way he made music ill. In the art of
spurring exhausted creatures back into activity, and of recalling
half-corpses to life, the inventiveness he shows is of no mean order. He
is the master of hypnotic trickery, and he fells the strongest like
bullocks. Wagner’s _success_—his success with nerves, and therefore with
women—converted the whole world of ambitious musicians into disciples of
his secret art. And not only the ambitious, but also the _shrewd_.… Only
with morbid music can money be made to-day; our big theatres live on
Wagner.
6.
—Once more I will venture to indulge in a little levity. Let us suppose
that Wagner’s _success_ could become flesh and blood and assume a human
form; that, dressed up as a good-natured musical savant, it could move
among budding artists. How do you think it would then be likely to express
itself?—
My friends, it would say, let us exchange a word or two in private. It is
easier to compose bad music than good music. But what, if apart from this
it were also more profitable, more effective, more convincing, more
exalting, more secure, more _Wagnerian_?… _Pulchrum est paucorum hominum._
Bad enough in all conscience! We understand Latin, and perhaps we also
understand which side our bread is buttered. Beauty has its drawbacks: we
know that. Wherefore beauty then? Why not rather aim at size, at the
sublime, the gigantic, that which moves the _masses_?—And to repeat, it is
easier to be titanic than to be beautiful; we know that.…
We know the masses, we know the theatre. The best of those who assemble
there,—German youths, horned Siegfrieds and other Wagnerites, require the
sublime, the profound, and the overwhelming. This much still lies within
our power. And as for the others who assemble there,—the cultured
_crétins_, the _blasé_ pigmies, the eternally feminine, the gastrically
happy, in short the people—they also require the sublime, the profound,
the overwhelming. All these people argue in the same way. “He who
overthrows us is strong; he who elevates us is godly; he who makes us
wonder vaguely is profound.”—Let us make up our mind then, my friends in
music: we do want to overthrow them, we do want to elevate them, we do
want to make them wonder vaguely. This much still lies within our powers.
In regard to the process of making them wonder: it is here that our notion
of “style” finds its starting-point. Above all, no thoughts! Nothing is
more compromising than a thought! But the state of mind which _precedes_
thought, the labour of the thought still unborn, the promise of future
thought, the world as it was before God created it—a recrudescence of
chaos.… Chaos makes people wonder.…
In the words of the master: infinity but without melody.
In the second place, with regard to the overthrowing,—this belongs at
least in part, to physiology. Let us, in the first place, examine the
instruments. A few of them would convince even our intestines (—they
_throw open_ doors, as Handel would say), others becharm our very marrow.
The _colour of the melody is_ all-important here, _the melody itself_ is
of no importance. Let us be precise about _this_ point. To what other
purpose should we spend our strength? Let us be characteristic in tone
even to the point of foolishness! If by means of tones we allow plenty of
scope for guessing, this will be put to the credit of our intellects. Let
us irritate nerves, let us strike them dead: let us handle thunder and
lightning,—that is what overthrows.…
But what overthrows best, is _passion_.—We must try and be clear
concerning this question of passion. Nothing is cheaper than passion! All
the virtues of counterpoint may be dispensed with, there is no need to
have learnt anything,—but passion is always within our reach! Beauty is
difficult: let us beware of beauty!… And also of _melody!_ However much in
earnest we may otherwise be about the ideal, let us slander, my friends,
let us slander,—let us slander melody! Nothing is more dangerous than a
beautiful melody! Nothing is more certain to ruin taste! My friends, if
people again set about loving beautiful melodies, we are lost!…
_First principle_: melody is immoral. _Proof_: “Palestrina”.
_Application_: “Parsifal.” The absence of melody is in itself
sanctifying.…
And this is the definition of passion. Passion—or the acrobatic feats of
ugliness on the tight-rope of enharmonic—My friends, let us dare to be
ugly! Wagner dared it! Let us heave the mud of the most repulsive
harmonies undauntedly before us. We must not even spare our hands! Only
thus, shall we become _natural_.…
And now a last word of advice. Perhaps it covers everything—_Let us be
idealists!_—If not the cleverest, it is at least the wisest thing we can
do. In order to elevate men we ourselves must be exalted. Let us wander in
the clouds, let us harangue eternity, let us be careful to group great
symbols all around us! _Sursum! Bumbum!_—there is no better advice. The
“heaving breast” shall be our argument, “beautiful feelings” our
advocates. Virtue still carries its point against counterpoint. “How could
he who improves us, help being better than we?” man has ever thought thus.
Let us therefore improve mankind!—in this way we shall become good (in
this way we shall even become “classics”—Schiller became a “classic”). The
straining after the base excitement of the senses, after so-called beauty,
shattered the nerves of the Italians: let us remain German! Even Mozart’s
relation to music—Wagner spoke this word of comfort to us—was at bottom
frivolous.…
Never let us acknowledge that music “may be a recreation,” that it may
“enliven,” that it may “give pleasure.” _Never let us give pleasure!_—we
shall be lost if people once again think of music hedonistically.… That
belongs to the bad eighteenth century.… On the other hand, nothing would
be more advisable (between ourselves) than a dose of—_cant, sit venia
verbo_. This imparts dignity.—And let us take care to select the precise
moment when it would be fitting to have black looks, to sigh openly, to
sigh devoutly, to flaunt grand Christian sympathy before their eyes. “Man
is corrupt who will save him? _what will save him?_” Do not let us reply.
We must be on our guard. We must control our ambition, which would bid us
found new religions. But no one must doubt that it is _we_ who save him,
that in _our_ music alone salvation is to be found.… (See Wagner’s essay,
“Religion and Art.”)
7.
Enough! Enough! I fear that, beneath all my merry jests, you are beginning
to recognise the sinister truth only too clearly—the picture of the
decline of art, of the decline of the artist. The latter, which is a
decline of character, might perhaps be defined provisionally in the
following manner: the musician is now becoming an actor, his art is
developing ever more and more into a talent for _telling lies_. In a
certain chapter of my principal work which bears the title “Concerning the
Physiology of Art,”(9) I shall have an opportunity of showing more
thoroughly how this transformation of art as a whole into histrionics is
just as much a sign of physiological degeneration (or more precisely a
form of hysteria), as any other individual corruption, and infirmity
peculiar to the art which Wagner inaugurated: for instance the
restlessness of its optics, which makes it necessary to change one’s
attitude to it every second. They understand nothing of Wagner who see in
him but a sport of nature, an arbitrary mood, a chapter of accidents. He
was not the “defective,” “ill-fated,” “contradictory” genius that people
have declared him to be. Wagner was something _complete_, he was a typical
_décadent_, in whom every sign of “free will” was lacking, in whom every
feature was necessary. If there is anything at all of interest in Wagner,
it is the consistency with which a critical physiological condition may
convert itself, step by step, conclusion after conclusion, into a method,
a form of procedure, a reform of all principles, a crisis in taste.
At this point I shall only stop to consider the question of _style_. How
is _decadence_ in _literature_ characterised? By the fact that in it life
no longer animates the whole. Words become predominant and leap right out
of the sentence to which they belong, the sentences themselves trespass
beyond their bounds, and obscure the sense of the whole page, and the page
in its turn gains in vigour at the cost of the whole,—the whole is no
longer a whole. But this is the formula for every decadent style: there is
always anarchy among the atoms, disaggregation of the will,—in moral
terms: “freedom of the individual,”—extended into a political theory
“_equal_ rights for all.” Life, equal vitality, all the vibration and
exuberance of life, driven back into the smallest structure, and the
remainder left almost lifeless. Everywhere paralysis, distress, and
numbness, or hostility and chaos both striking one with ever increasing
force the higher the forms of organisation are into which one ascends. The
whole no longer lives at all: it is composed, reckoned up, artificial, a
fictitious thing.
In Wagner’s case the first thing we notice is an hallucination, not of
tones, but of attitudes. Only after he has the latter does he begin to
seek the semiotics of tone for them. If we wish to admire him, we should
observe him at work here: how he separates and distinguishes, how he
arrives at small unities, and how he galvanises them, accentuates them,
and brings them into pre-eminence. But in this way he exhausts his
strength the rest is worthless. How paltry, awkward, and amateurish is his
manner of “developing,” his attempt at combining incompatible parts. His
manner in this respect reminds one of two people who even in other ways
are not unlike him in style—the brothers Goncourt; one almost feels
compassion for so much impotence. That Wagner disguised his inability to
create organic forms, under the cloak of a principle, that he should have
constructed a “dramatic style” out of what we should call the total
inability to create any style whatsoever, is quite in keeping with that
daring habit, which stuck to him throughout his life, of setting up a
principle wherever capacity failed him. (In this respect he was very
different from old Kant, who rejoiced in another form of daring, _i.e._:
whenever a principle failed him, he endowed man with a “capacity” which
took its place…) Once more let it be said that Wagner is really only
worthy of admiration and love by virtue of his inventiveness in small
things, in his elaboration of details,—here one is quite justified in
proclaiming him a master of the first rank, as our greatest musical
_miniaturist_ who compresses an infinity of meaning and sweetness into the
smallest space. His wealth of colour, of chiaroscuro, of the mystery of a
dying light, so pampers our senses that afterwards almost every other
musician strikes us as being too robust. If people would believe me, they
would not form the highest idea of Wagner from that which pleases them in
him to-day. All that was only devised for convincing the masses, and
people like ourselves recoil from it just as one would recoil from too
garish a fresco. What concern have we with the irritating brutality of the
overture to the “Tannhauser”? Or with the Walkyrie Circus? Whatever has
become popular in Wagner’s art, including that which has become so outside
the theatre, is in bad taste and spoils taste. The “Tannhauser” March
seems to me to savour of the Philistine; the overture to the “Flying
Dutchman” is much ado about nothing; the prelude to “Lohengrin” was the
first, only too insidious, only too successful example of how one can
hypnotise with music (—I dislike all music which aspires to nothing higher
than to convince the nerves). But apart from the Wagner who paints
frescoes and practises magnetism, there is yet another Wagner who hoards
small treasures: our greatest melancholic in music, full of side glances,
loving speeches, and words of comfort, in which no one ever forestalled
him,—the tone-master of melancholy and drowsy happiness.… A lexicon of
Wagner’s most intimate phrases—a host of short fragments of from five to
fifteen bars each, of music which _nobody knows_.… Wagner had the virtue
of _décadents_,—pity.…
8.
—“Very good! But how can this _décadent_ spoil one’s taste if perchance
one is not a musician, if perchance one is not oneself a
_décadent_?”—Conversely! How can one _help_ it! _Just_ you try it!—You
know not what Wagner is: quite a great actor! Does a more profound, a more
_ponderous_ influence exist on the stage? Just look at these
youthlets,—all benumbed, pale, breathless! They are Wagnerites: they know
nothing about music,—and yet Wagner gets the mastery of them. Wagner’s art
presses with the weight of a hundred atmospheres: do but submit, there is
nothing else to do.… Wagner the actor is a tyrant, his pathos flings all
taste, all resistance, to the winds.
—Who else has this persuasive power in his attitudes, who else sees
attitudes so clearly before anything else! This holding-of-its-breath in
Wagnerian pathos, this disinclination to have done with an intense
feeling, this terrifying habit of dwelling on a situation in which every
instant almost chokes one.——
Was Wagner a musician at all? In any case he was something else to _a much
greater degree_—that is to say, an incomparable _histrio_, the greatest
mime, the most astounding theatrical genius that the Germans have ever
had, our _scenic artist par excellence_. He belongs to some other sphere
than the history of music, with whose really great and genuine figure he
must not be confounded. Wagner _and_ Beethoven—this is blasphemy—and above
all it does not do justice even to Wagner.… As a musician he was no more
than what he was as a man, he _became_ a musician, he _became_ a poet,
because the tyrant in him, his actor’s genius, drove him to be both.
Nothing is known concerning Wagner, so long as his dominating instinct has
not been divined.
Wagner was _not_ instinctively a musician. And this he proved by the way
in which he abandoned all laws and rules, or, in more precise terms, all
style in music, in order to make what he wanted with it, _i.e._, a
rhetorical medium for the stage, a medium of expression, a means of
accentuating an attitude, a vehicle of suggestion and of the
psychologically picturesque. In this department Wagner may well stand as
an inventor and an innovator of the first order—_he increased the powers
of speech __ of music to an incalculable degree_—he is the Victor Hugo of
music as language, provided always we allow that under certain
circumstances music may be something which is not music, but
speech—instrument—_ancilla dramaturgica_. Wagner’s music, _not_ in the
tender care of theatrical taste, which is very tolerant, is simply bad
music, perhaps the worst that has ever been composed. When a musician can
no longer count up to three, he becomes “dramatic,” he becomes
“Wagnerian”.…
Wagner almost discovered the magic which can be wrought even now by means
of music which is both incoherent and _elementary_. His consciousness of
this attains to huge proportions, as does also his instinct to dispense
entirely with higher law and _style_. The elementary factors—sound,
movement, colour, in short, the whole sensuousness of music—suffice.
Wagner never calculates as a musician with a musician’s conscience, all he
strains after is effect, nothing more than effect. And he knows what he
has to make an effect upon!—In this he is as unhesitating as Schiller was,
as any theatrical man must be; he has also the latter’s contempt for the
world which he brings to its knees before him. A man is an actor when he
is ahead of mankind in his possession of this one view, that everything
which has to strike people as true, must not be true. This rule was
formulated by Talma: it contains the whole psychology of the actor, it
also contains—and this we need not doubt—all his morality. Wagner’s music
is never true.
—But it is supposed to be so: and thus everything is as it should be. As
long as we are young, and Wagnerites into the bargain, we regard Wagner as
rich, even as the model of a prodigal giver, even as a great landlord in
the realm of sound. We admire him in very much the same way as young
Frenchmen admire Victor Hugo—that is to say, for his “royal liberality.”
Later on we admire the one as well as the other for the opposite reason:
as masters and paragons in economy, as _prudent_ amphitryons. Nobody can
equal them in the art of providing a princely board with such a modest
outlay.—The Wagnerite, with his credulous stomach, is even sated with the
fare which his master conjures up before him. But we others who, in books
as in music, desire above all to find _substance_, and who are scarcely
satisfied with the mere representation of a banquet, are much worse off.
In plain English, Wagner does not give us enough to masticate. His
recitative—very little meat, more bones, and plenty of broth—I christened
“_alla genovese_”: I had no intention of flattering the Genoese with this
remark, but rather the _older recitativo_, the _recitativo secco_. And as
to Wagnerian _leitmotif_, I fear I lack the necessary culinary
understanding for it. If hard pressed, I might say that I regard it
perhaps as an ideal toothpick, as an opportunity of ridding one’s self of
what remains of one’s meal. Wagner’s “arias” are still left over. But now
I shall hold my tongue.
9.
Even in his general sketch of the action, Wagner is above all an actor.
The first thing that occurs to him is a scene which is certain to produce
a strong effect, a real _actio_,(10) with a basso-relievo of attitudes; an
_overwhelming_ scene, this he now proceeds to elaborate more deeply, and
out of it he draws his characters. The whole of what remains to be done
follows of itself, fully in keeping with a technical economy which has no
reason to be subtle. It is not Corneille’s public that Wagner has to
consider, it is merely the nineteenth century. Concerning the “actual
requirements of the stage” Wagner would have about the same opinion as any
other actor of to-day, a series of powerful scenes, each stronger than the
one that preceded it,—and, in between, all kinds of _clever_ nonsense. His
first concern is to guarantee the effect of his work; he begins with the
third act, he _approves_ his work according to the quality of its final
effect. Guided by this sort of understanding of the stage, there is not
much danger of one’s creating a drama unawares. Drama demands _inexorable_
logic: but what did Wagner care about logic? Again I say, it was not
Corneille’s public that he had to consider; but merely Germans! Everybody
knows the technical difficulties before which the dramatist often has to
summon all his strength and frequently to sweat his blood: the difficulty
of making the _plot_ seem necessary and the unravelment as well, so that
both are conceivable only in a certain way, and so that each may give the
impression of freedom (the principle of the smallest expenditure of
energy). Now the very last thing that Wagner does is to sweat blood over
the plot; and on this and the unravelment he certainly spends the smallest
possible amount of energy. Let anybody put one of Wagner’s “plots” under
the microscope, and I wager that he will be forced to laugh. Nothing is
more enlivening than the dilemma in “Tristan,” unless it be that in the
“Mastersingers.” Wagner is _no_ dramatist; let nobody be deceived on this
point. All he did was to love the word “drama”—he always loved fine words.
Nevertheless, in his writings the word “drama” is merely a
misunderstanding (—_and_ a piece of shrewdness: Wagner always affected
superiority in regard to the word “opera”—), just as the word “spirit” is
a misunderstanding in the New Testament.—He was not enough of a
psychologist for drama; he instinctively avoided a psychological plot—but
how?—by always putting idiosyncrasy in its place.… Very modern—eh? Very
Parisian! very decadent!… Incidentally, the _plots_ that Wagner knows how
to unravel with the help of dramatic inventions, are of quite another
kind. For example, let us suppose that Wagner requires a female voice. A
whole act without a woman’s voice would be impossible! But in this
particular instance not one of the heroines happens to be free. What does
Wagner do? He emancipates the oldest woman on earth, Erda. “Step up, aged
grandmamma! You have got to sing!” And Erda sings. Wagner’s end has been
achieved. Thereupon he immediately dismisses the old lady. “Why on earth
did you come? Off with you! Kindly go to sleep again!” In short, a scene
full of mythological awe, before which the Wagnerite _wonders_ all kinds
of things.…
—“But the substance of Wagner’s texts! their mythical substance, their
eternal substance”—Question: how is this substance, this eternal substance
tested? The chemical analyst replies: Translate Wagner into the real, into
the modern,—let us be even more cruel, and say into the bourgeois! And
what will then become of him?—Between ourselves, I have tried the
experiment. Nothing is more entertaining, nothing more worthy of being
recommended to a picnic-party, than to discuss Wagner dressed in a more
modern garb: for instance Parsifal, as a candidate in divinity, with a
public-school education (—the latter, quite indispensable _for pure_
foolishness). What _surprises_ await one! Would you believe it, that
Wagner’s heroines one and all, once they have been divested of the heroic
husks, are almost indistinguishable from Mdme. Bovary!—just as one can
conceive conversely, of Flaubert’s being _well able_ to transform all his
heroines into Scandinavian or Carthaginian women, and then to offer them
to Wagner in this mythologised form as a libretto. Indeed, generally
speaking, Wagner does not seem to have become interested in any other
problems than those which engross the little Parisian decadents of to-day.
Always five paces away from the hospital! All very modern problems, all
problems which are at home _in big cities!_ do not doubt it!… Have you
noticed (it is in keeping with this association of ideas) that Wagner’s
heroines never have any children?—They _cannot_ have them.… The despair
with which Wagner tackled the problem of arranging in some way for
Siegfried’s birth, betrays how modern his feelings on this point actually
were.—Siegfried “emancipated woman”—but not with any hope of
offspring.—And now here is a fact which leaves us speechless: Parsifal is
Lohengrin’s father! How ever did he do it?—Ought one at this juncture to
remember that “chastity works miracles”?…
_Wagnerus dixit princeps in castitate auctoritas._
10.
And now just a word _en passant_ concerning Wagner’s writings: they are
among other things a school of _shrewdness_. The system of procedures of
which Wagner disposes, might be applied to a hundred other cases,—he that
hath ears to hear let him hear. Perhaps I may lay claim to some public
acknowledgment, if I put three of the most valuable of these procedures
into a precise form.
Everything that Wagner _cannot_ do is bad.
Wagner could do much more than he does; but his strong principles prevent
him.
Everything that Wagner _can_ do, no one will ever be able to do after him,
no one has ever done before him, and no one must ever do after him. Wagner
is godly.
These three propositions are the quintessence of Wagner’s writings;—the
rest is merely—“literature”.