Part 9
This, then, was the herculean task which this self-appointed reformer of the drama set before him; to demonstrate that the modern theatre had the power to bring itself into the same relation to the noblest ideal life of man as the Greek theatre had; and in order that this might be achieved it was necessary, in his opinion, to return to that union of the arts, which has been mentioned so often. He believed that in his day each art had done all that it could do without the aid of the other. Music unaided could go no further than it had in Beethoven’s symphonies. Indeed, even the mighty Ludwig had called in the help of poetry to complete his Ninth Symphony. Poetry could rise no higher than the wings of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller had carried her. At this point, then, must come that fusion of the arts, in which each would sacrifice something of its egotism for the sake of the splendid whole; and that whole would be the art work of the future, the drama for the people. In order fairly to appreciate Wagner’s purposes we must pause here to inquire, what people? The answer to this question lies at the root of the whole controversy which has arisen about Wagner’s works; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is the neglect to make and properly answer this inquiry which leads insufficiently informed persons to look upon Wagner as a rabid iconoclast. The people for whom he sought to rear anew the ideal drama was the German people. As Mr. Krehbiel has expressed it: “Wagner believes that the elements of the lyric drama ought to be adapted to the peculiarities, and to encourage the national feeling of the people for whom it is created.... One of Wagner’s most persistent aims was to reanimate a national art spirit in Germany. The rest of the world he omitted from his consideration.”[15] This was an inevitable result of his conviction, acquired from study of the Greek stage, that the ideal drama should be national in spirit.
We have already seen that, according to his ideas, the union of poetry, painting, music, and action in the “art work of the future” could be effected only by some sacrifice on the part of each art. Wagner plainly saw, as we must see, that the special feature which must yield to the necessary modification was _form_, or, more strictly speaking, _formality_. It was not form in the abstract that must be sacrificed, but forms in the concrete,—forms which owed their preservation to tradition, and not to any intrinsic worth or imperative demand of art. To preserve the old-fashioned operatic forms would have been to continue the dominance of music in the drama; for the poet would still have been a mere librettist, bound to provide for the aria, the duet, and the finale. To introduce a distinctive kind of versification, such as the Alexandrine, or the Spencerian stanza, would have made poetry the controlling element. The first problem set before Wagner, then, was to find subjects which would admit of the utmost freedom and unconventionality of treatment. Already in the embryonic state of his theories, the myth had forced itself upon his mind as the necessary kind of subject; and in the final working out of those theories to their end, the myth stood the test, with this important corollary, that it must be a myth embodying one of the great elementary thoughts of mankind. Turn which way he would, he found support for his belief. Did the legendary beings of the Greek stage lack the humanity and the ethical conditions necessary for great tragedy? On the contrary, as Mr. Stedman has put it:—
“The high gods of Æschylus and Sophocles for the most part sit above the thunder: but the human element pervades these dramas; the legendary demigods, heroes, _gentes_, that serve as the personages,—Hermes, Herakles, the houses of Theseus, Atreus, Jason,—all are types of human kind, repeating the Hebraic argument of transmitted tendency, virtue and crime, and the results of crime especially from generation to generation.”[16]
And when Wagner turned from the Greek drama to the philosophy of his beloved Schopenhauer, he found the same convictions forced upon him again by his teacher’s art theory. This theory is propounded in Book III. of “The World as Will and Representation.” The writer begs leave to quote a summary of it which he has made in a study of “Tristan”:—
“Divested of its robes of metaphysical terminology, it is this: When the human mind rises from the study of the location, period, causes, and tendencies of things to the undivided examination of their essence, and when, further, this consideration takes place, not through the medium of abstract thought, but in calm contemplation of the immediately present natural object, then the mind is brought face to face with eternal ideas. Art, the work of genius, repeats these eternal ideas, which are the essential and permanent things in the phenomena of the world. In other words, art endeavors to exhibit to us the eternal essence of things by means of prototypes.”[17]
[Illustration:
RICHARD WAGNER.
From a family group, photographed shortly before his death. ]
Of course, Wagner could not find prototypes embodying “the eternal essence of things” in the small and shallow stories to which the librettists of the majority of the popular operas of his time had turned. He must seek for material which had its roots in the great heart of the people; which was not the fancy of a single mind, but the formulation of a people’s ideal. To the myth, then, he turned, impelled by his own reasoning, by the arguments of divine philosophy, as he read them, and by the equally eloquent example of revered antiquity. And, indeed, we must all admit that the true myth is the individualization of an abstract ideal, and if we accept the Wagnerian theory, that abstract ideal should be embodied in the personages of the drama, we must also accept the myth. Even if we refuse to believe that ideals, or even types, should be the actors in a drama, we shall probably have no hesitation in admitting that for _musical exposition_ only the broad, elementary emotions of humanity are well suited; and these are always found most freely and powerfully displayed in the great world-thoughts of mythology. Thus Wagner’s Tristan and his Isolde are plainly intended to be embodiments of the elementary man and woman, standing in primeval barbarian grandeur at gaze one upon the other, and overwhelmed by the tragic power of mastering passion. The history of the Tristan legend, which has found its way in different forms into the literature of several languages, is proof that the world has so regarded it. For six hundred years poets have accepted Tristan and Isolde as the most convincing representatives of the mastery and the misery of love. In this they stand sharply distinguished from the hero and heroine of Wagner’s comedy, “Die Meistersinger.” Walther and Eva, moving in a story whose design is to touch the manners of a time with the gentle reproof of satire, are not the embodiments of elementary thoughts, but are circumscribed by the manifest environments of locality and period. But Tristan and Siegfried are the unfettered, unconventioned man of all times and places; while Brünnhilde and Isolde are visible forms of the highest of Wagner’s ideals, the eternal womanhood. It is a significant fact that this master, in the first works produced after he had abandoned the old style,—“The Flying Dutchman,” and “Tannhäuser,”—dealt with these eternal types, while in “Lohengrin” he confined himself within comparatively narrower limits, returning to his first position when he had fully formulated the theories whose promptings rose within him as only vague, artistic instincts in his early works. And having cleared his theories from all doubts in his own mind, he emphasized the humanity of his mythical characters by some of his finest touches.
“The northern Scalds created tremendous myths. The spirit of their poems was colossal. Passions and sweetness stood side by side and were delineated with master strokes. Lofty sentiment and heroic deed were darkened by unspeakable crime and black tragedy. The German bards denuded these old poems of their glory and made their personages small. The heroes and heroines of the Sagas were enormous unrealities; those of the Nibelungen Lied were almost pretentious nonentities. Wagner seized upon every trait of character and every incident that was most human and made masterly use of it. It is the ease with which we recognize in the people of ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ primeval human types that makes us receptive of their influence and movable by their greatness.”[18]
Having found his people, the next object of the poet-composer was to select a flexible and yielding form for their utterance. He must find a form of verse which could be organically united with music, which would suggest a rhythmical basis for the melody, yet not control its construction. The various forms of modern versification, founded on the rhetorical accent of words, offered him no advantages, but, on the contrary, placed difficulties in the path of his movement. Rhyme, for instance, has no value whatever for the composer, unless he constructs the phrases and sections of his melody with the same number of feet and the same metrical pauses as are found in the verse; and this method, of course, gives the mere formalism of the poetry the government of the process of composition. On the other hand, blank verse is bound to find the same treatment in music as prose does. Wagner, therefore, turned to the metrical basis of all Teutonic poetry, namely, the alliterative line, as it is found in the “Eddas.” The peculiarity of this line is the emphasizing of its rhythm by the employment of similar sounds at the beginning of the accented syllables. A fair specimen of it is the opening of Siegmund’s love song in “Die Walküre”:—
“Winterstürme wichen Dem Wonnemond; In milden Lichte Leuchtet der Lenz; Auf linden Lüften, Leicht und lieblich, Wunder webend Er sich wiegt.”
[Illustration:
RICHARD WAGNER AT BAYREUTH.—By G. Papperitz. ]
A clause such as “Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond” readily suggests to the ear the position of musical accents which will be identical with those of the verse, but which leave the composer wholly free in his melodic treatment of _lines_. A single glance will demonstrate to the reader that the above words can be placed in lines three or four times as long without making the slightest change in the rhythmical effect produced by the alliteration.
We now come to Wagner’s musical method, the nature of which has already been briefly indicated in the account of the birth in his mind of his new ideas. In his search after a modern substitute for the sustained intonation of the Greek drama, he had before him for study the dramatic recitative of Peri and the dramatic _arioso_ style of Gluck. The former was wholly unavailable. Years of use had fastened upon it a collection of traditional phrases, familiar to the ear of every one who goes often to hear opera or oratorio. These traditional phrases, hopelessly inflexible, made dramatic recitative a thing of conventionalities, and unconventionality was the only hope for Wagner’s system. The Gluck _arioso_ style was equally unsuited to his purpose, because, as we have been obliged to note before, it preserved the formalities of the old-fashioned opera,—those very formalities which Wagner felt that he must abandon if he would secure his compact union of the arts tributary to the stage. He needed a style of composition which would permit the music to flow freely from the words and which would impose no obligation on the composer to repeat certain words or lines in order that certain passages of music might be rounded out to a pretty close as in the old-fashioned aria. He was in search of lyric expressiveness freed from lyric conventionality. He therefore decided that each act of any one of his music-dramas must consist of one unbroken stream of melody. In other words, as long as there were persons or scenes before the audience, there must be a musical exposition of their moods, and that exposition must be unbroken and apparently unartificial in form, just as a train of moods is.
But to make the actors sing without cessation would fatigue both them and the audience; and, moreover, it would be untrue to nature, since men and women do not frame every thought and emotion in words. Hence Wagner conceived the idea of allotting the voicing of the ceaseless melody to the orchestra, while the personages of the drama should utter their words in a form of lyric recitative based on the broader principles of Peri, as expressed in his preface to “Eurydice,” but freed from acquired conventions and modified according to the promptings of Wagner’s own musical genius. Naturally, then, the question arose in the composer’s mind, “What form is my melody to have?” For he knew as well as Schumann did that music demands first of all things form. Now, the basis of musical form is the repetition of melodic phrases. There is no form, and therefore no coherence, no sense, in music consisting of disjointed phrases, each of which is heard once and never again. Yet to repeat them in any of the old-fashioned ways would have been to load himself down with some one of the set forms which he was trying to escape. Consequently this formidable problem was before him: How was he to make his endless melody intelligible to the auditor, to give it a palpable significance, to convey through it to the hearer the emotional moods of his personages, and yet impose upon it musical form, based upon repetition, but free from the artificiality of the older formulas? He found the solution in the suggestion which had come to him when he invented the two principal themes of Senta’s ballad in “The Flying Dutchman.” The solution of the problem was the perfection of this system of representative themes, each designed to stand for a particular person, thought, mood, or action, and to be repeated by the orchestra or vocalist whenever its subject had significance, though not necessarily presence, in the scene before the audience.
How are these representative themes obtained? Does Wagner construct a melody arbitrarily according to his fancy, and label it the “Siegfried” motive, the “Brünnhilde” motive? A moment’s reflection will suffice to convince the reader that such a system would be worse than puerile. It would not be in any sense as good as the method of Donizetti, who could at least give a pathetic color to the aria of his moribund tenor. Wagner’s high purpose was to make an indissoluble organic union between the poem and the music, and this purpose forbade all arbitrary or haphazard procedure in the construction of a _leit motif_. Music has a certain power of emotional expression; therefore Wagner’s endeavor was to invent themes representative of characteristic traits or emotional tendencies of his personages. In some cases when he required a musical representation of an inanimate object, he invented a theme which would suggest the object by suggesting emotions associated with it. Another class of themes is descriptive of externals, and belongs to what has been well called scenic music. The last class is the smallest, for, as a rule, Wagner’s scenic music serves its purpose but once. When it is intended for only one hearing, it is simply descriptive music, freely composed. When intended for more than one hearing, it has a deeper significance. Let us make a closer examination of the master’s processes in the construction of these leading motives, and that we may be logical, let us begin with the lowest order, the scenic.
[Illustration:
RICHARD WAGNER, IN 1877.
After a portrait by Herkomer, etched by himself. ]
The central and the most picturesque character of “The Rheingold” is Loge, the god of fire. In this prologue of the tetralogy he appears as the evil counsellor of Wotan, and while his character is indicated in many striking ways, his entrance is heralded by a purely scenic bit of music known as the magic fire music.
[Illustration: [Music]]
This music is intended solely to represent the flickering, ascending fire. It reappears with most picturesque effect at the close of “Die Walküre,” when Wotan, having put Brünnhilde to sleep upon her rock, summons the fire from the earth to keep her couch inaccessible to all save the yet unborn hero who shall know no fear.[19] Examples of the free descriptive or scenic music, composed without leading motives, may be found in “Tristan” (the sailors’ music, and the shepherd’s piping), in “Siegfried” (the familiar “Waldweben”), and in “Parsifal” (the dance of the flower maidens). Of the class of music a step higher in respect of significance,—that in which an inanimate object is represented by an appeal to the emotions associated with it,—the most brilliant example is the sword motive. The sword of Siegmund, which is to be welded anew by Siegfried and used by him in wresting the Rhine treasure from the grasp of the giant Fafner, is one of the most potent agents in the advancement of the action of the tetralogy. It is always indicated musically by this bold, martial theme, whose brilliant challenge rings with the pride of combat:—
[Illustration: [Music]]
It is a notable evidence of the depth of Wagner’s artistic purpose that he first uses this motive in “Das Rheingold,” before the sword has been fashioned, when only the idea of creating the race of Siegmund has dawned in Wotan’s mind. Another motive of this kind is that which represents the tarn helm, the magic cap whose possessor can make himself invisible or change his appearance. The motive is so uncertain in its tonality—a quality obtained by the use of the empty fifth—that it adequately depicts the mysterious nature of the tarn helm.
[Illustration: [Music]]
But the most beautiful and significant development of this remarkable musical system is to be found in the construction of those motives which are designed to illustrate the emotions and dramatic principles of the plays. Of these there are some which have also a scenic aspect and at first will seem to the new hearer of Wagner’s works to belong wholly to the external class. The most easily comprehended is that commonly described as the smithy motive. The Nibelungs were dwarfs, dwellers in the hollows of the earth, and workers in precious metals. They were a crushed, tyrannized race, and after one of their number, Alberich, had obtained power over the worldly possession of a ring of Rhine gold, they became the most abject of slaves. Two things appeal to us in the contemplation of this race: first, ceaseless labor at the smithy; second, the bitterness of spirit caused by the drudgery. Wagner invented for the theme representative of this race the smithy motive, founded on a rhythm imitative of the beating of hammers.
[Illustration:
A HUMOROUS COMPOSITION ADDRESSED TO LOUIS KRAFT.
The host of Hotel de Prusse, in Leipsic. ]
[Illustration: [Music]]
It seems at first as if this theme could picture for us only that beating. But in the second act Alberich’s brother, Mime, who has been plotting to get the Rhine treasure for himself, is slain by Siegfried. Then Alberich, who is concealed in the forest and witnesses the scene, laughs aloud in bitter scorn of his fallen foe; and his laugh consists of that Nibelung theme sung fortissimo. Then we perceive that the theme fully embodies both of the characteristics of the dwarfs, of which the second is the product of the first. To rise a step higher, in the first act of “Die Walküre,” when Siegmund and Sieglinde, the only living members of the race of Volsungs, are gazing into one another’s eyes and learning to sympathize with one another’s sorrows, the orchestra, always revealing to us the most secret feelings of the actors, plays this passage:—
[Illustration: [Music]]
The bass phrase is the motive of the Volsung race, and its melancholy character is intended to remind us that this is a race of tragic heroes whose heritage is woe. The treble phrase is the motive of sympathy. It is, therefore, written in thirds, the closest and most elementary of those harmonic agreements called consonances, and it is, in melody as well as harmony, expressive of sympathy. In the second act of the drama of “Siegfried,” when the young hero lies under the tree in the forest and wonders what manner of being his mother was, the orchestra reminds us that he is a Volsung by intoning the motive in this form:—
[Illustration: [Music]]
And again when Siegfried in “Die Götterdämmerung” has sobbed forth his last words and lies dead among Gunther’s appalled vassals, the basses of the orchestra once more wail out this sad motive, accentuated by muttered beats of the kettle drums. Thus we see that this motive is always heard when the two thoughts—Volsung race and its woe—are especially significant in the drama. We learn that it refers to these two things by the text with which it is associated, and we then find that it intensifies for us the feeling of that text.
[Illustration:
UNFINISHED BUST OF RICHARD WAGNER.
Last work of Lorenz Gedon, in possession of Friedrich Schön, of Worms. ]
The association with the text is, of course, the key-note of Wagner’s _leit motif_ system. There can be no successful refutation of the assertion that a few of the leading themes of the Bayreuth music-dramas are arbitrary in their formation. There are themes which are intended to represent purely intellectual processes, and this is something that music cannot do. But we need never be at a loss as to Wagner’s intent. No lecturer nor handbook is necessary as a guide through the music of these works when the hearer has once grasped the idea that every _leit motif_ is associated with the words or the acts which explain its design, and this, too, almost invariably on its first appearance. All that the hearer needs to know is the text. It was not a part of Wagner’s theory that his listeners should commit to memory a string of titles of motives, such as the “Love Renunciation Motive,” the “Hero Idea,” the “Love Thrills,” the “Decree of Fate.” Many of these titles have been invented by the handbook makers, who, in their eagerness to explain Wagner to the world, have done much to persuade the world that he is incomprehensible. The student of Wagner needs no translation of the music, except the text. Wagner did not believe, as many have asserted, that music was capable of definite expression as words are. On the contrary, in his prose works, he again and again declared that music was incapable of telling a story, that it demanded the assistance of text, and that the two must be joined in such close wedlock that they would operate upon the mind and emotions of the hearer as a single indivisible force. Therefore the student of these works needs only to make himself master of the poems, and then to note carefully the music that accompanies every sentiment or deed. In the Nibelung tetralogy, the music of “Rheingold” is the foundation of all that follows, and it must be known first. As each new motive appears in that work, it is explained. Two or three illustrations will suffice. In the first scene, the three Rhine-maidens sing this:—
[Illustration:
Rhinegold, Rhinegold, lustrous delight, Thou laughest in radiance rare. ]