Part 8

Fac-simile autograph letter from Richard Wagner, written in Zurich, May 30, 1853, addressed to some musical director, and advising him to give “Tannhäuser” before producing “Lohengrin.” ]

[Illustration:

Fac-simile autograph musical manuscript written by Richard Wagner for lithographic reproduction. Opening bars of the “Song to the Evening Star,” from the full score of his “Tannhäuser” thus reproduced. The original is in the Bibliotheca Musica Regia in Dresden. ]

These words make it plain that Gluck distinctly perceived the fundamental principle of artistic truth in opera,—that the music must be considered as a means and not an end. He felt that the music should be devoted, not to the exploitation of musical possibilities, but to the faithful expression of the emotions of the characters on the stage. His reforms met with determined opposition, and some of his contemporaries complained bitterly that they were compelled to pay two florins “to be passionately excited and thrilled instead of amused.” But while Gluck made sweeping changes for the better, he failed to reach the root of all evil. He did not abolish from the operatic stage the set forms, which made the musician the superior officer of the poet, commanding the insertion of here a solo and there a duet. The continuance of these forms was conserved, too, by the splendid genius of Mozart, who breathed into them a verisimilitude which they had not before possessed. The glorious boy had no reformer’s blood in his veins, but with the instinct of spontaneous mastership he made the spirit of his music vital, even though its form was conventional. He founded no school, but he was an excuse for the continuance of old traditions by others less gifted than himself. So only twenty-six years after Gluck’s death all Europe went mad over “Ditanti palpiti,” and the name of Rossini became the watchword of the lyric stage. The opera was regarded as a parade ground for great singers, and its music was expected to be cast in the simplest melodic moulds, so that it could be hummed, strummed, whistled, or indifferently sung by the most poorly equipped amateurs. All conception of the opera as a drama employing music as a means of expression had been lost, and a man who asserted that its model had originally been and ought always to be the Greek play would have been stared at as one unsound of mind. That there were a few who were ready to raise from triviality so splendid an art form was proved by the gathering of warm and faithful adherents around the banner of reform raised by Wagner.

Like most young artists he began his career by imitating the work of the acknowledged masters of his time. As we have already seen, he had no novel ideas in the composition of “Die Feen.” He simply tried to imitate Beethoven, Weber, and Marschner. At this time the music of Beethoven was his ideal. Heinrich Dorn has testified that no young musician could possibly have known the works of the immortal symphonist more thoroughly. But Wagner soon saw very clearly that it was not in his power to adopt the Beethovenian style to the lyric drama. For models for his second work, therefore, he chose Auber and Bellini. The former’s “Massaniello” had opened his eyes to the value of action with brisk music to accompany it. The latter’s “Montecchi e Capuletti,” or rather Schroeder-Devrient’s inspiring performance of Romeo, had given him suggestions as to the dramatic possibilities of vocal melody. In his second work, “Das Liebesverbot,” he tried to effect a combination of the styles of these two masters. It must not be supposed that he was searching merely for popular applause. He was intensely in earnest even at that stage of his career, and his aim was to produce real art. He did not yet perceive the utter falsity of the prevailing system, though he was honest in his endeavor to make it tell the truth. In his autobiographical sketch he records thus the ideas raised in his mind by the Bellini performance:—

“I grew doubtful as to the choice of the proper means to bring about a great success; far though I was from attaching to Bellini a signal merit, yet the subject to which his music was set seemed to me to be more propitious and better calculated to spread the warm glow of life than the painstaking pedantry with which we Germans, as a rule, brought naught but laborious make-believe to market. The flabby lack of character of our modern Italians, equally with the frivolous levity of the latest Frenchmen, appeared to me to challenge the earnest, conscientious German to master the happily chosen and happily exploited means of his rivals, in order then to outstrip them in the production of genuine works of art.”

Artistic sincerity of purpose, then, was already the man’s moving force. The immediate impulse which led him to take the first step in the development of his own individuality was the conviction that the provincial public of the smaller German cities was incapable of forming a judgment as to the value of a new work. He, therefore, began “Rienzi” with a determination to write an opera which could be produced only at a grand opera house, and he decided not to trouble his mind as to what theatre of that rank would give him an entrance. He says:—

“I allowed naught to influence me except the single purpose to answer to my subject. I set myself no model, but gave myself entirely to the feeling which now consumed me, the feeling that I had already so far progressed that I might claim something significant from the development of my artistic powers, and expect some not insignificant result. The very notion of being consciously weak or trivial, even in a single bar, was appalling to me.”

Wagner never wrote words fraught with greater significance. To sit down with a determination to not be weak or trivial in a single bar, and to be always faithful to his subject, and yet to construct his opera on the prevailing models, was for a man of Wagner’s intellectual power and artistic temperament to discover the radical defects of the opera of his day. He could not follow his models without being consciously weak or trivial at times. An examination of the libretto of “Rienzi” shows that while there is carelessness in the poetry, the dramatic construction is excellent. No better opera libretto dates from the time of its production. But it was constructed, as Wagner confessed, to enable him “to display the principal forms of grand opera, such as introductions, finales, choruses, arias, duets, trios, etc., with all possible splendor.” Consequently, while there is much in the music that is noble, dignified, and characteristic of Wagner, there is more that is weak, trivial, and imitative. “Rienzi” is a very good opera of the old sort, and the dramatic force of its book, together with the excellence of much of its music, has kept it favorably before the public. But it lacks artistic coherency, because its fundamental principle is false; and Wagner knew it before he had completed the work. The writer of this article does not believe that this master, as some of his warmest admirers have asserted, began “Rienzi” with a deliberate intention of catering to a depraved public taste for the sake of success. Wagner earnestly craved success at that time; he needed money, and he yearned for public recognition; but his own words show that he was deluded into supposing that artistic work could be done on the lines of the popular opera of his day. It required the writing of “Rienzi” to bring to his mind the convictions, which were put to test in “The Flying Dutchman,” after he had abandoned the hope of pecuniary success. This is not the place for a discussion of the relative importance of objectivity and subjectivity in art; but it is certain that “The Flying Dutchman” is the result of an overwhelming desire for self-expression. Wagner at this period of his mental growth could have cried with Omar Khayyám:—

“I sent my soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that after-life to spell; And by and by my soul returned to me, And answered, ‘I myself am heaven and hell.’”

Overcome by his first real draught of the bitterness of life, he found that his emotional moods were clamoring for expression. With the splendid egotism of genius, he discerned the sorrow of a world in his own suffering. To dramatize this became his burning desire. The legend of the Ahasuerus of the sea, cursed by his own determination to overcome obstacles, opposed by all the powers of nature, seemed to Wagner the embodiment of his own experience; and he turned to the work of making an opera out of it, with no purpose except a complete and convincing expression of the prevailing moods of his own soul. And it was thus that he came upon the fundamental principles of the theory which set the musical world agog and raised up lions in his path. The first conviction that came to him was that of the superiority of a legendary over a historical story. He subsequently wrote of it thus:—

“In this and all succeeding plans, I turned for the selection of my material once for all from the domain of history to that of legend.... All the details necessary for the description and presentation of the conventionally historic, which a fixed and limited historical epoch demands in order to make the action clearly intelligible,—and which are therefore carried out so circumstantially by the historical novelists and dramatists of to-day,—could be here omitted. And by this means the poetry, and especially the music, were freed from the necessity of a method of treatment entirely foreign to them, and particularly impossible as far as music was concerned. The legend, in whatever nation or age it may be placed, has the advantage that it comprehends only the purely _human_ portion of this age or nation, and presents this portion in a form peculiar to it, thoroughly concentrated, and therefore easily intelligible.... This legendary character gives a great advantage to the poetic arrangement of the subject for the reason already mentioned, that, while the simple process of the action—easily comprehensible as far as its outward relations are concerned—renders unnecessary any painstaking for the purpose of explanation of the course of the story, the greatest possible portion of the poem can be devoted to the portrayal of the inner _motives_ of the action,—those inmost motives of the soul, which, indeed, the action points out to us as necessary, through the fact that we ourselves feel in our hearts a sympathy with them.”[11]

The second conviction that came to him was that of the folly of writing music at random, instead of clinging to the musical investiture of a mood once formed. This led him to the abandonment of the set forms of the established opera, and to the adoption of his own plan of making the music and poetry an artistic unit. His words in regard to this matter are worth quoting:—

“The plastic unity and simplicity of the mythical subjects allowed of the concentration of the action on certain important and decisive points, and thus enabled me to rest on fewer scenes with a perseverance sufficient to expound the motive to its ultimate dramatic consequences. The nature of the subject, therefore, could not induce me, in sketching my scenes, to consider in advance their adaptability to any particular musical form, the kind of musical treatment being in each case necessitated by these scenes themselves. It could, therefore, not enter my mind to engraft on this my musical form, growing, as it did, out of the nature of the scenes, the traditional forms of operatic music, which could not but have marred and interrupted its organic development. I therefore never thought of contemplating on principle and as a deliberate reformer the destruction of the aria, duet, and other operatic forms; but the dropping of those forms followed consistently from the nature of my subjects.”[12]

[Illustration:

RICHARD WAGNER.

From a photograph from life taken in Vienna about 1875 by Fr. Luckhardt. ]

He found the germs of his future musical system in the ballad of Senta. In this the legend of the unhappy Hollander is told, and in its musical investiture Wagner invented two melodic themes with distinct purposes. The first was intended to illustrate the personality of the Dutchman as an embodiment of yearning for rest. The second was designed to represent the redeeming principle, the _ewig weibliche_, the eternal womanhood, which became the ruling ethical feature of all Wagner’s lyric works. Here are the two themes:—

[Illustration: [Music]]

[Illustration: [Music]]

These two themes being designed to represent certain ideas, it was inevitable that the composer should use them whenever those ideas recurred. As he tells us himself in the essay quoted above:—

“I had merely to develop, according to their respective tendencies, the various thematic germs comprised in the ballad, to have, as a matter of course, the principal mental moods in definite thematic shapes before me. When a mental mood returned, its thematic expression also, as a matter of course, was repeated, since it would have been arbitrary and capricious to have sought another _motive_ so long as the object was an intelligible representation of the subject, and not a conglomeration of operatic pieces.”

We have now traced the origin of the three elementary principles out of which Wagner elaborated his system: First, the dramatic advantage of mythological or legendary subjects; second, the “intelligible representation of the subject”; and third, the use of the representative theme, “typical phrase” or _leit motif_. In “The Flying Dutchman” we find his system in its embryonic state, but the perfected system, as displayed in “Tristan” and “The Ring,” is only a logical outcome of these first thoughts, intensified, as it were, by his realization that the whole thing was simply a modernization of the practice of the greatest Greek dramatists. This realization caused him to question whether, through the medium of an art founded on his theories, the modern stage could not acquire a national importance and influence, such as the Greek theatre possessed. It will undoubtedly be easier for the reader now to take a comprehensive survey of the full-blown Wagnerian system than to try to follow its growth through the transitional stage of “Tannhäuser” and “Lohengrin.”

Wagner’s first law, as formulated succinctly by W. F. Apthorp in a magazine article, is: “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.” So far as the composition of the music is concerned, this is precisely what Peri and Gluck believed. But Peri had to invent dramatic recitative; and standing, as it were, just on the hither side of chaos, he could not be expected to produce at once a perfected art world. The materials of operatic art were in process of making; the first builder had not the wherewith to rear a musical cathedral. Gluck erred in preserving the cut-and-dried operatic forms which made it impossible for him to achieve his sincere design,—“to reduce music to its proper function, that of seconding poetry by enforcing the expression of the sentiment and the interest of the situations, without interrupting the

## action, or weakening it by superfluous ornament.” It was comparatively

easy to get rid of the “superfluous ornament”; but the methodical distribution of the old forms was found to interrupt the action. It remained for Wagner to see that these forms were unavailable for the composer who aimed at the complete embodiment of the poet’s thought; and it remained for him also to discern that the ideal lyric drama demanded an ideal harmony among its various elements. In other words, the perfected Wagnerian theory of the lyric drama contemplates the compact union of poetry, music, painting, action, and all the other factors of dramatic illusion on a basis of common interdependence, so binding that it shall be impossible to say that one is more important than another, so perfect that no separation can be made without a loss of vital force.

Wagner discerned in the theatre the source of such art influence as reached the great mass of the people. Looking upon its managers and its public as they actually appeared before his eyes, he saw the theatre in the hands of those to whom art was nothing and gain everything, while the public, jaded and sated, ceaselessly clamored for new sensations. Continued attempts of the money-seeking managers to satisfy this public demand, which was in its very nature insatiable, had led to a condition of opera in which the music had no organic connection with the text, the pageantry and ballets no logical relation to the pictorial ensemble. Turning his gaze backward to the home of true art, Greece, he saw a drama in which poetry, action, and music were indissolubly united.

“Thus,” he says, “we can by no means recognize in our theatrical art the genuine drama; that one, indivisible, supreme creation of the mind of man. Our theatre merely offers the convenient _locale_ for the tempting exhibition of the heterogeneous wares of art manufacture. How incapable is our stage to gather up each branch of art in its highest and most perfect expression—the drama—it shows at once in its division into the two opposing classes, play and opera; whereby the idealizing influence of music is forbidden to the play, and the opera is forestalled of the living heart and lofty purpose of actual drama. Thus on the one hand the spoken play can never, with but few exceptions, lift itself up to the ideal flight of poetry; but, for very reason of the poverty of its means of utterance,—to say nothing of the demoralizing influence of our public life,—must fall from height to depth, from the warm atmosphere of passion to the cold element of intrigue. On the other hand the opera becomes a chaos of sensuous impressions jostling one another without rhyme or reason, from which each one may choose at will what pleases best his fancy; here the alluring movements of a dancer, there the _bravura_ passage of a singer; here the dazzling effect of a triumph of the scene painter, there the astounding efforts of a Vulcan of the orchestra....”

“The public art of the Greeks, which reached its zenith in their tragedy, was the expression of the deepest and the noblest principles of the people’s consciousness; with _us_ the deepest and noblest principle of man’s consciousness is the direct opposite of this, namely, the denunciation of our public art. To the Greeks the production of a tragedy was a religious festival, where the gods bestirred themselves upon the stage and bestowed on men their wisdom; _our_ evil conscience has so lowered the theatre in public estimation that it is the duty of the police to prevent the stage from meddling in the slightest with religion; a circumstance as characteristic of our religion as of our art. Within the ample boundaries of the Grecian amphitheatre the whole populace was wont to witness the performances: in our superior theatres loll only the affluent classes. The Greeks sought the instruments of their art in the products of the highest associate culture: we seek ours in the deepest social barbarism. The education of the Greek, from his earliest youth, made himself the subject of his own artistic treatment and artistic enjoyment in body as in spirit: our foolish education, fashioned for the most part to fit us merely for future industrial gain, gives us a ridiculous, and withal arrogant, satisfaction with our own unfitness for art, and forces us to seek the subjects of any kind of artistic amusement outside ourselves.”[13]

Making due allowance for the heated utterance of one to whom the questions at issue had such grave personal importance as to prevent judicial calmness of speech, we cannot fail to perceive that Wagner had penetrated to the essence of the difference between the stage of Greece and that of Europe in his day. The compact union of the arts tributary to the stage had been at once the outcome and the embodiment of that intensely national art-feeling which he contrasted so bitterly with the modern European lack of art-feeling, as he saw it. With the downfall of the Athenian, state tragedy fell also, and “art became less and less the expression of the public conscience.” In Wagner’s mind this downfall resembled that of the tower of Babel, with its subsequent dispersion of the tribes. The dramatic union of arts was dismembered. Poetry, painting, music, rhetoric, all separated, and each went its own way in pursuit of its own ends. No one who has reviewed the history of the fine arts in the Middle Ages can fail to have observed how blindly they seemed to grope their way toward the gates of truth until the guiding light of the Renaissance, with its new revelation of the classic antiquity, was turned upon Italy by the scholars driven out of Constantinople by the fall of Rome’s Eastern Empire. Wagner has reviewed the dissevered condition of the arts and their employment as means, and not ends, in a few terse sentences in the essay already quoted; and then he says:—

“Each one of these dissevered arts, nursed and luxuriously tended for the entertainment of the rich, has filled the world to overflowing with its products; in each great minds have brought forth marvels; but the one true art has not been born again, either in or since the Renaissance. The perfect art work, the great united utterance of a free and lovely public life, the _Drama_, _Tragedy_,—howsoever great the poets who have here and there indited tragedies,—is not yet born again; for the reason that it cannot be reborn, but must be born anew.”[14]