offensiveness of "Salome" by alleging the case of Wagner's "Die
Walkuere," and the relationship that is there shown to exist between
the ill-starred Volsungs, are worse than misguided; for however
unhallowed that relationship may be, it conveys no hint of sexual
malaise. _Siegmund_ and _Sieglinde_ are superbly healthful and
untainted animals: to name their exuberant passion in the same breath
with the horrible lust of _Salome_ is stupid and absurd.
Let us not confuse the issue: The spectacle of a woman fondling
passionately a severed and reeking head and puling over its dead
lips, is not necessarily deleterious to morals, nor is it necessarily
an act of impudicity; it is merely, for those whose calling does not
happen to induce familiarity with mortuary things, horrible and
revolting. No matter how, in practice on the stage, the thing may be
ameliorated, the fact,--the situation as conceived and ordered by the
dramatist,--is inescapable. It has been said that this scene is not
really so sickening as it is alleged to be, since the stage directions
require that _Salome's_ kisses be bestowed in the obscurity of a
darkened stage. But to that it may be replied, in the first place,
that darkness does little to mitigate the horror of the scene as
conveyed by the words of _Salome_--so little, in fact, that _Herod_,
who was anything but a person of fastidious sensibilities, is overcome
with loathing and commands her despatch; and, secondly, that the stage
directions expressly declare for an illumination of the scene by a
"moonbeam" ... which "covers her with light," just before the end,
while she is at the climax of her ghastly _libido_.
Mr. Ernest Newman, a thoroughly sane and extremely able champion of
all that is best in Strauss, has said, in considering this aspect of
"Salome," that "the whole outcry against it comes from a number of too
excitable people who are not artists, and who therefore cannot
understand the attitude of the artist towards work of this kind. Human
nature," he goes on, "breaks out into a variety of forms of energy
that are not at all nice from the moral point of view--murder, for
example, or forgery, or the struggle of the ambitious politician for
power, or the desire to get rich quickly at other people's expense.
But because these things are objectionable in themselves and
dangerous to social well-being there is no reason why the artist
should not interest us in them by the genius with which he describes
them. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde was a dangerous person whom, in
real life, we should want the police to lay by the heels; but sensible
people who read the story do not bristle with indignation at Stevenson
for creating such a character; they simply enjoy the art of it. The
writing of the story did not turn Stevenson into a monster of
deception and cruelty, nor does the reading of it have that effect on
us. Things are different in art from what the same things would be in
real life, and an artist's joy in the depiction of some dreadful phase
of human nature does not necessarily mean that, as a private
individual, he is depraved, or that the spectacle of his art will make
for depravity in the audience. Now Wilde and Strauss have simply drawn
an erotic and half-deranged Oriental woman as they imagine she may
have been. They do not recommend her; they simply present her, as a
specimen of what human nature can be like in certain circumstances....
The hysterical moralists who cry out against 'Salome' ... have a
terrified, if rather incoherent, feeling that if women in general were
suddenly to become abnormally morbid, conceive perverse passions for
bishops, have these holy men decapitated when their advances were
rejected, and then start kissing the severed heads in a blind fury of
love and revenge in the middle of the drawing-room, the respectable
L40 a year householder would feel the earth rocking beneath his feet.
But women are not going to do these spicy things simply because they
saw _Salome_ on the stage do something like them, any more than men
are going to walk over the bodies of little children because they read
that Mr. Hyde did so, or murder their brothers because Hamlet's uncle
murdered his."
Now that, of course, is irresistible. But Mr. Newman's gift of
vivacious and telling statement, and his natural impatience with the
cant of those who hold briefs for a facile morality, have here led
him, as it seems to me, astray. To deny that an intimate and vital
relationship exists between the subject chosen by an artist and its
probable effect upon the public is to yield the whole case to those
who hold that this relationship, in the case of the theatre (and, of
course, the opera house), is merely casual and inconsequential: it is
to yield it to the upholder of the stage as an agent of "relaxation,"
an agent either of mere entertainment or mere sensation. It is not
unlikely that Mr. Newman would be the first to admit that, if the
prime function of art can be postulated at all, it might be conceived
to be that of enlarging the sense of life: as an agency for liberating
and mellowing the spirit: as an instrument primarily quickening and
emancipative. "The sadness of life is the joy of art," said Mr.
George Moore. The sadness of life, yes; and the evil and tragedy, the
terror and violence, of life: for the contemplation of these may,
through the evoking of pity, nourish and enlarge the spirit of the
beholder. But are we very greatly nourished by the contemplation of
that which must inevitably arouse disgust rather than compassion? I do
not speak of "morality" or "immorality," since there is nothing stable
in the use or understanding of these terms. But those aspects of life
which sicken the sense, which are loathsome rather than terrible--are
they fit matter for the artist?
It is a much mauled and much tortured point, and I, for one, am not
unwilling to leave the matter in the condition in which Dr. Johnson
left the subject of a future state, concerning which a certain lady
was interrogating him. "She seemed", recounts the admirable Boswell,
"desirous of knowing more, but he left the matter in obscurity."
To return, in conclusion, to Strauss the musician: Where, one ends by
wondering, is the earlier, the greater, Strauss?--the unparalleled
maker of music, the indisputable genius who gave us a sheaf of
masterpieces: who gave us "Don Quixote," "Ein Heldenleben,"
"Zarathustra," "Tod und Verklaerung." Has he passed into that desolate
region occupied in his day by Hector Berlioz, for whom a sense of the
tragic futility of talent without genius did not exist--the futility
of application, of ingenuity, of constructive resource, without that
ultimate and unpredictable flame? Is not Strauss, in such a work as
"Salome," but another Berlioz (though a Berlioz with a gleaming past)?
Is he not here as one disdainfully indifferent to the ministrations
of that "Eternal Spirit" which, in Milton's wonderful phrase, "sends
out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and
purify the lips of whom he pleases"?
A PERFECT MUSIC-DRAMA
I
Somewhat less than a century ago William Hazlitt, whose contempt for
opera as a form of art was genuine and profound, observed amiably that
the "Opera Muse" was "not a beautiful virgin, who can hope to charm by
simplicity and sensibility, but a tawdry courtesan, who, when her
paint and patches, her rings and jewels are stripped off, can excite
only disgust and ridicule." It may be conceded that matters have
improved somewhat since that receding day when Hazlitt, whose critical
forte was not urbanity, uttered this acrimonious opinion. The opera is
doubtless still, as it was in his day, ideally and exquisitely
contrived "to amuse or stimulate the intellectual languor of those
classes of society on whose support it immediately depends." Yet the
shade of Hazlitt might have been made sufficiently uncomfortable by
being confronted, half a century after his death, by the indignant and
voluble apparition of Richard Wagner. To tell the truth, though,
Wagner is scarcely the opera-maker with whose example one might
to-day most effectually rebuke the contempt of Hazlitt. While the Muse
which presided at the birth of the Wagnerian music-drama can certainly
not be conceived as "a tawdry courtesan," neither can she be conceived
as precisely virginal, persuasive by reason of her "simplicity" and
"sensibility." Wagner, for all his dramatic instinct, was, as we are
growing to see, as avid of musical effect, achieved by whatever
defiance of dramatic consistency, as was any one of the other facile
and conscienceless opera-wrights whom his doctrines contemned. The
ultimate difference between him and them, aside from any questions of
motive, principle, or method, is simply that he was a transcendent
genius who wrote music of superlative beauty and power, whereas they
were, comparatively speaking, Lilliputians.
Mr. William F. Apthorp, speaking of the condition of the Opera before
Wagner's reforms were exerted upon it, observes that it "remained
(despite the efforts of Gluck) virtually what Cesti had made it--not a
drama with auxiliary music, but a _dramma per musica_--a drama for
(the sake of) music." Now it was, of course, the passionate aim of
Wagner to write music-dramas which should be dramas with auxiliary
music, rather than dramas for the sake of music; yet it is becoming
more and more obvious that what he actually succeeded in producing,
despite himself, were dramas which we tolerate to-day only because of
their transfiguring and paramount music. In view of recent
developments in the modern lyric-drama which have resulted from both
his theories and his practice, it may not be without avail to review
certain aspects of his art in the perspective afforded by the
quarter-century which now stretches lengtheningly between ourselves
and him.
II
It is, of course, a truism to say that the corner-stone of Wagner's
doctrinal arch was that music in the opera had usurped a position of
pre-eminence to which it was not entitled, and which was not to be
tolerated in what he conceived to be the ideal music-drama. He
conceived the true function of music in its alliance with drama to be
strictly auxiliary--an aid, and nothing more than an aid, to the
enforcement, the driving home, of the play. As Mr. Apthorp has
excellently stated it, his basic principle was that "the text (what in
old-fashioned dialect was called the libretto) once written by the
poet, all other persons who have to do with the work--composer,
stage-architect, scene-painter, costumer, stage-manager, conductor and
singing actors--should aim at one thing only: the most exact, perfect,
and lifelike embodiment of the poet's thought." Wagner's chief quarrel
with the opera as he found it was with the preponderance of the
musical element in its constitution. If there is one principle that
is definite, positive, and unmistakable in his theoretical position it
is that, in the evolution of a true music-drama, the dramatist should
be the controlling, the composer an accessory, factor--like the
scene-painter and the costumer, ancillary and contributive. If it can
be shown that in the actual result of his practice this relationship
between the drama and the music is inverted--that in his music-dramas
the music is supreme, both in its artistic quality and in its effect,
while the drama is a mere framework for its splendours--it becomes
obvious that he failed (gloriously, no doubt, but still definitively)
in what he set out to achieve. It was his dearest principle that, in
Mr. Apthorp's words, "in any sort of drama, musical or otherwise, the
play's the thing." Yet what becomes of "Tristan und Isolde," of
"Meistersinger," of "Goetterdaemmerung," when this principle is tested
by their quality and effect? Would even the most incorruptible among
the Wagnerites of a quarter of a century ago, in the most exalted hour
of martyrdom, have ventured to say that in "Tristan," for example, the
play's the thing? Imagine what the second act, say, divorced from the
music, would be like; and then remember that the music of this act,
with the voice-parts given to various instruments, might, with a
little adjustment and condensation, be performed as a somewhat
raggedly constructed symphonic poem. The test is a rough and partial
one, no doubt, and it is subject to many modifications and
reservations. It is not to be disputed, of course, that here is music
which is always and everywhere transfused with dramatic emotion, and
that its form is dramatic form and not musical form; but is there
to-day a doubt in the mind of any candid student of Wagner as to the
element in this musico-dramatic compound which is paramount and
controlling?
It should be remembered that what Wagner thought he was accomplishing,
or imagined he had accomplished, is not in question. He conceived
himself to be primarily a dramatist, a dramatist using music solely
and frankly as an auxiliary, as a means of intensifying the action and
the moods of the play; and this end he pathetically imagined that he
had achieved. Yet it is becoming more and more generally recognised
and admitted, by the sincerest appreciators of his art, that as a
dramatist he was insignificant and inferior. Had any temerarious soul
assured him that his dramas would survive and endure by virtue of
their music alone, it is easy to fancy his mingled incredulity and
anger. He was not, judged by an ideal even less uncompromising than
his own, a musical dramatist at all. It is merely asserting a truth
which has already found recognition to insist that he was essentially
a dramatic symphonist, a writer of programme-music who used the drama
and its appurtenances, for the most part, as a mere stalking-horse
for his huge orchestral tone-poems. He was seduced and overwhelmed by
his own marvellous art, his irrepressible eloquence: his drama is
distorted, exaggerated, or spread to an arid thinness, to accommodate
his imperious musical imagination; he ruthlessly interrupts or
suspends the action of his plays or the dialogue of his personages in
order that he may meditate or philosophise orchestrally. He called his
operas by the proud title of "music-dramas"; yet often it is
impossible to find the drama because of the music.
It was not, as has been said before, that he fell short, but that he
went too far; he should have stopped at eloquent and pointed
intensification. Instead, he smothered his none too lucid dramas in a
welter of magnificent and inspired music--obscured them, stretched
them to intolerable lengths, filled up every possible space in them
with his wonderful tonal commentary, by which they are not, as he
thought, upborne, but grievously overweighted. Mr. James Huneker has
remarked that Wagner was the first and only Wagnerite. As a matter of
sober fact, he was one of the most formidable antagonists that
Wagnerism ever had.
It appears likely that his lyric-dramas will endure on the stage both
in spite of and because of their music. The validity and
persuasiveness of "Tristan" and the "Ring" as music-dramas, as
consistent and symmetrical embodiments of Wagner's ideals, seems less
certain than of old. But the music, _qua_ music, is of undiminished
potency--it is still, regarded as an independent entity, of almost
unlimited scope in its voicing of the moods and emotions of men and
the varied pageant of the visible world; and it will always float and
sustain his dramas and make them viable. Gorgeous and exquisite,
epical and tender, sublimely noble, and earthly as passion and
despair, it is still, at its best, unparalleled and unapproached; and,
as Pater prophesied of the poetry of Rossetti, more torches will be
lit from its flame than even enthusiasts imagine. Nothing can ever dim
the glory of Wagner the conjurer of tones. His place is securely among
the Olympians, where he sits, one likes to fancy, apart--a little
lonely and disdainful. In his music he is almost always, as Arnold
said of the greatest of the Elizabethans, "divinely strong, rich, and
attractive"; and at his finest he is incomparable. No one but a
master of transcendent genius, and the most amazingly varied powers of
expression, could have conceived and shaped such perfect yet diverse
things as those three matchless passages in which he is revealed to us
as the riant and tender humanist, the impassioned lyrist, and the
apocalyptic seer: the exquisite close of the second act of "Die
Meistersinger," where is achieved a blend of magically poetic
tenderness and comedy for which there are analogies only in certain
supreme moments in Shakespeare; the tonal celebration of the ecstatic
swoon of _Tristan_ and _Isolde_ in the midst of which the warning
voice of the watcher on the tower is borne across an orchestral flood
of ineffable and miraculous beauty; and that last passage to which
this wonderful man set his hand, the culminating moment in the
adoration of the Grail by the transfigured Parsifal--music that is as
the chanting of seraphs: in which censers are swung before celestial
altars. Of the genius who could contrive such things as these, one can
say no less than that, regarded from any aesthetic standpoint at all,
he is, as the subtle appreciator whom I have quoted said of a great
though wayward poet, "a superb god of art, so proudly heedless or
reckless that he never notices the loss of his winged sandals, and
that he is stumbling clumsily when he might well lightly be lifting
his steps against the sun-way where his eyes are set."
III
As music-dramas, then, appraised by his own standard, the deficiency
of Wagner's representative works must be held to be the subordination
of the dramatic element in them to a constituent part--their
music--which should be accessory and contributive rather than
essential and predominant. This tyranny is exercised chiefly--and, let
it be cheerfully owned, to the glory of musical art--through Wagner's
orchestra: that magnificent vehicle of a tone-poet who was at once its
master and its slave. Yet Wagner sinned scarcely less flagrantly
against his most dearly held principles in his treatment of the voice.
He conceived it to be of vital importance that in the construction of
the voice-parts no merely musical consideration of any kind should be
permitted to interfere with the lucid utterance of the text. His
singers were to employ a kind of heightened and intensified speech,
necessarily musical in its intervals, but never musical at the expense
of truthfully expressive declamation. Yet in some of the vocal writing
in his later works he is false to this principle, for he not
infrequently permits himself to be ravishingly lyrical at moments
where lyricism is superfluous and distracting when it is not
impertinent. Again he is too much the musician; too little the musical
dramatist.
And herewith I come to a curious and interesting point. Mr. E.A.
Baughan, an English critic of authority, who has written with both
courage and wisdom concerning Wagnerian theories and practices,
entertains singular views concerning the nature of music-drama as an
art form. "There must be no false ideas of music-drama being drama,"
he has asserted: "it is primarily music. The drama of it is merely,"
he goes on, "the motive force of the whole, and technically takes the
place of form in absolute music"--a sentence which, one may be
permitted to observe, would contain an admirably concise statement of
the truth if the word "merely" were left out. Mr. Baughan is led by
this belief to take the position that whereas, in one respect Wagner
was, to put it briefly, too musical, in another respect he was not
musical enough. He acknowledges the fact that in Wagner's combination
of music and drama, the music, so far as the orchestra is concerned,
assumes an oppressive and obstructive prominence; it indulges for the
most part, he holds, in a "superheated commentary" which leaves little
to suggestion, which is persistently excessive and overbearing; yet at
the same time Mr. Baughan holds that Wagner, in his treatment of the
voice-parts, did not, as he says, "make use of the full resources of
music and of the beautiful human singing-voice in duets, concerted
numbers, and choruses." It is the second of these objections which, as
it seems to me, contains matter for discussion. So far from being
deficient in melodious effectiveness, Wagner's writing for the voice,
I would hold, errs upon the other side. It would be possible to name
page after page in the "Ring" and "Tristan" which is marred, from a
musico-dramatic standpoint, by an excess of lyricism. It is a little
difficult to understand, for example, how Wagner would have justified
his admission of the duet into his carefully reasoned scheme; for if
the ensemble piece--the quartette in "Rigoletto," for example--is
inherently absurd from a dramatic point of view, as it incontrovertibly
is, so also is the duet. Even the most liberal attitude toward the
conventions of the operatic stage makes it difficult to tolerate what
Mr. W.P. James describes as the spectacle of two persons inside a
house and two outside, supposed to be unconscious of each other's
presence, making their remarks in rhythmic and harmonic consonance.
Yet is Wagner much less distant from the dramatic verities when, in
the third act of "Die Meistersinger," he ranges five people in the
centre of a room and causes them to soliloquise in concert, to the end
of producing a quintette of ravishing musical beauty? Had he wholly
freed himself from what he regarded as the musical bondage of his
predecessors when he could tolerate such obvious anachronisms as the
duet, the ensemble piece, and the chorus? The truth of the matter
seems to be that if Wagner's music, in itself, were less wonderful
and enthralling than it is, those who would fain insist upon a decent
regard for dramatic consistency in the lyric-drama would not tolerate
many things in the vocal writing in "Tristan," "Meistersinger," the
"Ring" and "Parsifal" which are not a whit more dramatically
reasonable than the absurdities which Wagner contemptuously derided in
the operas of the old school. His vocal writing, far from being
deficient in melodic quality, far from ignoring "the full resources of
music and of the beautiful singing voice," is saturated and
overflowing with musical beauty, and with almost every variety of
melodic effectiveness except that which is possible to purely formal
song. Mr. Baughan complains that the voice-parts have "no independent
life" of their own. "In many cases," he says, "the vocal parts, if
detached from the score [from the orchestral support] are without
emotional meaning of any kind--the expression is absolutely
incomplete." An astonishing complaint! For the same thing is
necessarily true of any writing for the voice allied with modern
harmony in the accompaniment. How many songs written since composers
began to discover the modulatory capacities of harmony, one might ask
Mr. Baughan, would have "emotional meaning," or any kind of expression
or effect, if the voice part were sung without its harmonic support?
No; Wagner cannot justly be convicted of a paucity of melodic effect
in his writing for the voice. He would, one must venture to believe,
have come closer to realising his ideal of what a music-drama should
be if, in the first place, he had been able and willing to restrain
the overwhelming tide of his orchestral eloquence; and if, in the
second place, he had been content to let his _dramatis personae_
employ, not (in accordance with Mr. Baughan's wish) a form of lyric
speech richer in purely musical elements of effect, but one of more
naturalistic contour, simpler, more direct, less ornately and
intrusively melodic in its utterance of the text.