CHAPTER XLII

BAYREUTH IN 1912

In 1912 I received an invitation from Herr Siegfried Wagner to be present at the _General-Probe_ (dress rehearsal) of the Bayreuth Festival. My daughter Iris, my usual travelling companion, went with me.

There is a certain quaint charm, an individuality, about the old German towns that once upon a time, in days which are after all not so very remote, were the seats of small princely Courts and Governments. Bayreuth was a typical example of an old “Residenz.” Broad streets flanked by substantial houses, squares with fountains or statues adorning their centres, an old palace or castle—the relic of feudal times—and a more modern palace of French eighteenth-century inspiration; outside the town a “Hermitage,” with a Temple of the Sun, sham ruins and other rococo follies built of cement plastered with mosaics of coloured stone and rock-crystal or glass, in a garden with deliciously shaded, cool walks: these are the legacies of former glories, when the “high-well-born” who crowded to the palace elbowed and jostled for a bow, a smile, or a gracious word from a Markgraf or a Markgräfin with all the honour-hunger of men and women in all times and in all Courts.

Think of the bitterness and mortification of a lady left out from a garden-party at the Hermitage when there were to be private theatricals in the Roman Theatre, at which Voltaire was to be stage-manager and act with her Royal Highness in person! Think of the triumph, not untinged with spite, of her next-door neighbour who could flaunt in her face the coveted invitation card! Oh, it was a very real Court! There were chamberlains with their wands; ladies-in-waiting, maids-of-honour, privy councillors, officials of all grades, an army chiefly composed of officers. There were hoop petticoats, powder and rouge and patches, red-heeled shoes, and if there were not many diamonds we may be sure that there was plenty of paste. Just such a Court as Thackeray and Offenbach loved to make fun of, and even Frederick the Great, as we shall presently see, made the target at which to sling his ridicule.

Hauff, writing in the first years of the nineteenth century, in his sardonic “Memoiren des Satans,” whom, by the by, he represents as taking a special interest in the pigmy Courts, makes Satan ask the Wandering Jew whether there is anything more grotesque to be seen than “diese duodez Länder,” these duodecimo countries. So it was not foreigners only who laughed at the absurdities which they presented. However, _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_. All now vanished! Gone the transparencies, gone the chamberlains and the Court ladies, gone General Bourn and his staff! All shades—shades that have crossed the Styx. The metamorphosis is complete. The palaces are used as museums or public offices, the houses of the “high-well-born” are shops and places of business, the fountains, in which admiring courtiers saw the rivals of the Grandes Eaux de Versailles, play for an hour on Sundays for the benefit of honest burghers waxing fat upon their afternoon lager, as good Bavarians should, in the groves of the once exclusive Hermitage, turned by the wheel of time into a glorified beer-garden.

The memoirs of the Markgräfin Wilhelmine give a perfect, but none too attractive, picture of the little Court of Bayreuth. She was the daughter of King Frederick William of Prussia, and her mother was a Princess of Hanover, sister of George the First of England. Her life as a child and as a young lady was one long misery. Her mother hated her, and the hatred was increased by the failure of all her conspiracies to marry the girl to her first cousin, the Prince of Wales. Her father, too, had his views as to marrying her to suit his whims or interests, so that she became immeshed in a perfect network of intrigues and plots and counterplots.

Frederick William was a man of such a violent temper that one is tempted sometimes to doubt his sanity. His cruelty to his children was, even if we largely discount the Markgräfin’s story, simply incredible. His son, afterwards Frederick the Great, when a grown-up youth, beaten, cuffed, kicked, and dragged round the room by his hair; later on arrested, threatened with torture, and his best friend, Katt, beheaded before his face;—Wilhelmine struck in the face with his clenched fist and handed over to governesses who ill-used and tortured her. He was a man of no little political sagacity, and he laid the foundation upon which Frederick the Great built up the greatness of Prussia, but in his home he was a savage utterly without control. The marriage with the Prince of Wales fell through because King George very properly refused to subscribe to the King of Prussia’s conditions; the suitors favoured by the King were sent to the right-about by Wilhelmine’s own strength of character. She fought with her back to the wall, she won the day, and they were dismissed. And so it came to pass that at the age of twenty-two she, in 1731, married the hereditary Prince of Bayreuth.

The Royal Family of Prussia were anything but a happy gathering. The King and Queen were objects of terror so little tempered by any dutiful regard that, although Wilhelmine now and again makes little attempts at an expression of filial affection, too gushing to be real, they were rather hated than beloved by their children: the sisters were for ever quarrelling and plotting the one against the other, and as they grew up and married small Princes there was plenty of opportunity for the exhibition of petty jealousies and spite. Between Wilhelmine and her brother, Frederick the Great, there was some show of affection, at any rate on her side, and in the days of his dire calamities she did what she could to stand between him and the cruelty of their father; but on his side the affection was only intermittently returned; and indeed by her own showing she can hardly have been the sort of person who would arouse sympathy or attract love: clever she was, beyond a doubt—her correspondence with Voltaire testifies to that; but there was nothing soft or womanly about her character.

Her father-in-law, the Markgraf, was the object of her special hatred and of a contempt which she did not care to conceal. When the poor drunken fool was dying she was away at Potsdam with her father, and she received the intelligence with undisguised pleasure. “Les nouvelles que je reçus de Bareith furent bien satisfaisantes. Mlle. de Sonsfeld me mandait que la santé du Margrave dépérissait à vue.” He did not die until two years later, in May, 1735—a long period of waiting for a Princess who was in a hurry to be promoted to her full dignities!

Frederick the Great entertained a very adequate respect for the glories of a Markgraf’s Court, nor had he the consideration for his sister’s feelings which might have curbed his satire. When, shortly before the death of their father, the King of Prussia, he paid his sister a visit at Bayreuth, he seems rather to have taken pains to mortify her: “Il se fit présenter toute la Cour, et se contenta de regarder tous ceux qui la composaient d’un air moqueur, après quoi nous nous mimes à table. Il ne fit dans toute la conversation que turlupiner tout ce qu’il voyait en me répétant plus de cent fois le mot de petit prince et de petite Cour. J’étais outrée.” Poor little Court! But there was to be worse within the sacred precincts themselves than the cruellest mockery from outside. When the Princess became Markgräfin her favourite maid-of-honour was a certain Fräulein von Marwitz, of whom in 1735 she wrote: “Pour la Marwitz je l’aimais à la passion; nous n’avions rien caché l’une pour l’autre. Je n’ai jamais vu un rapport de caractère pareil au nôtre; elle ne pouvait vivre sans moi, ni moi sans elle; elle ne faisait pas un pas sans me consulter et elle était approuvée de tout le monde.” A beautiful friendship! But alas for the inconstancy of female alliances! It was not very long before the lovely Marwitz—for she was lovely—fulfilled her courtly mission by setting her cap at the Markgraf, and stealing his heart from the mistress who loved her, if indeed she ever loved anybody but herself.

As I said before, it was a very real Court. It was a centre of political intrigues; for the rivalries of Austria and Prussia kept the small capitals of Germany in a continual fever; while, apart from greater questions of policy, jealousies, ambitions, and heart-burnings worthy of Versailles and the Œil de Bœuf were directed upon petty promotions and evanescent favouritisms. As for the chief luminaries, they shed a light over their little firmament relatively not inferior to that of the Roi Soleil himself.

The last years of the Markgräfin’s chequered life were by far the happiest. Their correspondence during those years shows the revival of a complete understanding between Frederick the Great and her, and bears every witness of mutual admiration. He appreciated her undoubted talents; she sympathized with his endeavours and gloried in his success. Their affection was warmer and more real than it had been even in their childhood. She speaks of it with delight as a “retour de sentiments des personnes qu’on aime.”

Besides this natural source of a great joy there was also her intellectual friendship with Voltaire. She made his acquaintance in 1740 at Reinsberg, a country place where the great Frederick had gathered together a whole assembly of men of letters and science, whom in spare moments he refreshed with his flute. Three years later Voltaire accompanied the King to Bayreuth, where he outstayed his royal patron for a fortnight, during which he helped the Markgräfin in a whole series of entertainments and theatricals. Their correspondence, in which she delighted, lasted till her death, upon which he wrote one of the trashiest sonnets that ever appeared signed by a great name. The editor of her journal calls it a “monument immortel”!

The Markgräfin Wilhelmine was not only a woman of remarkable talent, but she was a Princess typical of the times in which she lived and of the position which she occupied. If she did not directly play a leading part in the historical events of those days, she was intimately mixed up with those who did. She left her mark upon her husband’s principality, and it will always be difficult to think of Bayreuth without remembering her as a most notable personality in its princely family.

Times have changed; but if the tinsel of a pinchbeck Court has disappeared, Bayreuth to-day is more brilliant and more famous than it was in the days when the smiles or frowns of the Markgrafen and their consorts made the Paradise or the Gehenna of their courtiers. Then the old Franconian capital could hardly have been known outside of Germany or Austria, and even there it only ranked as one of many such towns. Now the mighty genius of one man has transformed it into the Mecca of a great cult, celebrated wherever the magic power of poetry, music, and art holds sway, drawing the willing pilgrims to its shrine.

The performance of a drama at the Fest-Spiel-Haus gives the impression of something sacred, something of the nature of a religious ceremony. All the circumstances combine to give intensity to that idea. From the beginning of time, ever since the Sumerians raised the Tower of Babel, as we are now told to imitate the sacred pinnacles of the highlands from which they swept down upon the Mesopotamian plain; long before Babylon or Nineveh were cities, hills and mountains in every country have been places of worship. Mount Zion, Sinai, Carmel, Ararat, Olympus, Fuji in far Japan, a thousand peaks in a thousand lands tell the same tale. Outside the town of Bayreuth, at a distance of perhaps half a mile is a little hill, and upon this fitting site is erected the Temple of the great High Priest of Art. An avenue of horse-chestnut trees some thirty years old, that have just reached the dignity of giving a little welcome shade, leads up to it. And here on a day when one of the great masterpieces is to be played, for a full hour before the given time you may see a long stream of the faithful toiling up under broiling sun or pouring rain, careless of either, only eager to be in time when the trumpet shall sound to tell that the doors are open. Laggards there are none.

The Fest-Spiel-Haus (call it not a theatre!) is a very simple, unpretentious building: it is guiltless of all ornamentation both outside and inside: a covered verandah for shelter runs round it, but there is nothing superfluous, no pillars or gewgaws or caryatides, nothing to convey an idea of the feast of poetry that will presently be opened. Only the rapt look in the faces of the worshippers tells of expectancy and the knowledge of the joy to come. It is the expression which may be read in the features of a pious Mussulman when at eventide he kneels on his prayer-carpet and turns his face towards the holy city of his faith; it is a look that you may see in a procession of poor Russian pilgrims when they come in sight of the walls of Jerusalem.

In their appreciations of other men’s writings professed critics, especially when their desire is to praise, are often led into metaphysical analyses in which subtleties are discovered at which no one could be more astonished than the authors to whom they are ascribed. When Pope was attacked by Crousaz for the heterodox opinions put forth in the “Essay on Man,” Bishop Warburton, who, by the by, had previously himself fallen foul of the poet for the same reason, took up the cudgels for him, professing to have discovered certain hidden meanings which had previously escaped him. Pope in his gratitude wrote: “You understand my work better than I do myself.” We almost feel that there is just a little tinge of perhaps unconscious satire in his gratitude.

Much has in this same analytical way been read into Wagner’s work by his admirers and disciples. Yet there was no need for it, for the Tone-Poet has himself told us of the motives and ideas which were at work in his brain when he gradually gave birth to his great inventive conception, the Tone-Drama.[49] But even when Wagner himself becomes his own interpreter we prefer the work to the interpretation; for that is apt to be as cryptic to the average reader as St. Peter found the epistles of “our beloved brother Paul”—“in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.”

A great work of art, as it seems to me, needs no interpreter. If a poem, a picture, or a musical composition fails to touch me, then I think that there must be something lacking, either in my power of apprehension, or in the work of art itself. In neither case will the interpreter be able to fill the gap. If my senses or my understanding are hard, he cannot soften them. If the work is faulty, all the preaching in the world will not make it right. The true test of a work of art is its power of appeal. The master is the man who can make his fellow-men thrill with pleasure or shiver with horror; if he needs a third person to explain his meaning, then he is no true artist, and his work is for the scrap-heap. Wagner was essentially above all men of his time the one master who could stir the feelings of those whom he addressed, the one man who could make his own art an article of faith in others. To split hairs as to the why and the wherefore of his power, to read into his work metaphysical intentions, appears to me to be unnecessary and trivial, and therefore almost a sacrilege. If by all the analyses and verbiage with which he has been plastered you could educate other Wagners there would be some justification for them; but you cannot make Wagners, and his imitators have been without exception wretched failures.

On the other hand, the relation of the mental processes by which he arrived at his great invention of the Tone-Drama is a psychological study of absorbing interest, and a story of profound significance in the history of art. Most of the commentators are long and wearisome beyond words—especially is this the case with some of the lesser Germans. Would they but lay to heart old Hesiod’s warning, νήπιοι οὔδ’ ἴσασιν πλέον ἥμισυ πάντος. Children! and they know now how much better the half than the whole.

Richard Wagner was but six months old when his father, Friedrich, died. He was a registrar of police in Leipzig, a man of a culture far above the ordinary level of his humble official position. By the law he won his bread, but his heart was in the theatre, and it was owing to him that his friend, Ludwig Geyer, painter and actor, who had himself been educated for the law, definitely adopted the stage as his profession, in which he attained a great success. A few months after Friedrich’s death, this Geyer, a good and worthy man, married the widow and devoted himself with all a parent’s affectionate care to little Richard, who knew no other father, and loved him dearly. But the tender relationship did not last long. Before Richard was nine years old Frau Geyer was again left a widow. “She was a good wife and mother,” we are told, “and her son idolized her. The memory of her love supported him in all the storms of his life, and he was talking of her on the evening before his death.”

After Geyer’s loss she seems to have been the centre of a small literary, artistic, and theatrical coterie which met at her house, and in these surroundings Richard Wagner’s childhood budded and bloomed. For him in his earliest days the theatre was everything—always the theatre. He was the constant companion and playmate of his stepfather, who carried the child with him even to rehearsals. Indeed, the whole family was bitten by the stage-craze. His eldest brother, brought up to be a doctor, threw away pills and potions and lancet, and became an actor; his three sisters followed the same bent: what wonder that this child, full of imagination and poetic fancy, brought up in the glare of the footlights, should catch the contagious fever which was burning up all those near and dear to him? Even in the next generation the flame was still blazing. The voice and acting of his niece Johanna is yet a glorious memory among the very oldest opera-goers, and his son Siegfried, an architect by profession, has found his true vocation in the direction of the Bayreuth theatre, and is known as himself a composer of operas.

The dramatic impulse was vibrating in every fibre of Richard’s nature. By the time he was sixteen he had completed a tragedy suggested partly by _King Lear_, partly by _Hamlet_, inspired wholly by heredity. And here was laid the foundation of that dramatic art which was destined to bring a new revelation to the world. He was a Poet—above all things a Poet; but it was borne in upon him that the message of the Poet must be incomplete as a language speaking to the soul unless it were united to the mystery of another power; that power was music, and of music he knew nothing, or no more than what enabled him to play the piano by ear.

But he felt his vocation. Listen to what he says of those early days. “Whilst I was finishing my great Tragedy I for the first time became acquainted with Beethoven’s music at the concerts of the Gewandhaus at Leipzig; its impression upon me was all-powerful; with Mozart, too, I made friends, especially through his _Requiem_. Beethoven’s incidental music for _Egmont_ inspired me so that for nothing in the world would I let my finished Tragedy leave the stocks until it should be furnished with similar music. Without a moment’s hesitation I felt confident that I could myself write this all-important music, but still thought well first to furnish myself with a few chief rules of thorough-bass. In order to achieve this as far as possible, I obtained a week’s loan of Logier’s ‘Methode des General-basses,’ and worked at it zealously. But the study did not bear fruit so quickly as I had thought. Its difficulties charmed and riveted me; I determined to become a musician.” And this, remember, was a boy of sixteen. Icarus himself, harnessing the horses of the Sun, was not more audacious. But Wagner was not to share the fate of Icarus.

I remember how once when a lady consulted Lord Leighton about her boy, who showed a great talent for painting, his answer was: “Let him have the education of a gentleman in the first place, then, if he should still have an inclination for art, let him specialize.” The story of Wagner shows the wisdom of those words. His biographer tells us how greatly Wagner profited by his classical education, and he points out what an untold advantage this gave him over the other great musical writers, such as Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck. Had Mozart, for instance, as he suggests, been kept at school instead of being trotted out as an infant phenomenon at Courts and in the palaces of great nobles, would he have allied the genius of his music to such piteous libretti as those with which he had to be satisfied? Is it not possible that in him, as in Wagner, the poet might have been united with the composer?

In Wagner, as we have seen, the poet came first, then the musician: the education of the gentleman was the dominant influence. During his school and college life he showed such a predilection for language that his masters thought that he would become a great philological professor. They missed the point that it was language in the singular, not in the plural, that fascinated him: he had not the gift of tongues, nor did he take any special interest in comparative philology, but the power of expression, the poet’s power, inspired his music, in the same way that his music gave birth to his poetry. The two wedded made him unique. Without his classical education, which opened out to him Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, and drove him to learn English in order that he might enjoy Shakespeare untranslated, the two could never have grown to the noble stature which they assumed; possibly they might never have been born.

To dwell upon the wretchedness, the poverty, the hunger, the crushed hopes of many years, to recall the miseries of a union with a wife who, full of good intentions as she was, neither understood him nor believed in the ultimate victory of his mighty genius—to think of Wagner, “the most German of all artists,” banished from the Fatherland which he loved so passionately, eating such bitter bread of sorrow that one cannot at this distance of time read the story without emotion—all this is only so far necessary to an understanding of Bayreuth as it shows the indomitable courage of the hero.

That he should have lived through the tragic days of Paris and Zurich is little short of miraculous. Happily better times were in store for him. He was able to come back to Germany. Poor Minna Planer, from whom he had been separated for many years, died in 1866. Death severed a tie that must have been intolerable to both. Marriage must be a vengeance of devils or a reward of the gods. Wagner tasted both, for in his second marriage he found all the comfort, the agreement, and the faith in him which had been lacking in the first.

Minna Planer, the actress wife, had been nothing but a hindrance, a millstone round the eager man’s neck. To be the helpmeet of a prophet, a seer, a man of genius, a woman must above all things believe in her husband, in his power to dominate men, in the magnetism of his will. What would Mohammed have been without the faith of Khadijah, who trusted him when even his own relations cried “Fool” and “Madman”? Prince Siddartha deserted his wife and her babe to wander into the wilderness in search of wisdom, but sweet Yasodhara bore him no grudge, for she had faith in his mission, and when at last he became Buddha she joined the company of believers and followed his teaching. This is the sort of trust that it was not in the nature of Minna to give. Her commonplace soul could not understand his impatience of the bonds of convention, or the wild flights of his soaring imagination. How he must have fretted under the galling restraint! How the sword must have strained to leap from the scabbard!

Happily the last years of his life were blessed by the loving care and sympathy of Cosima, the daughter of his best friend, Franz Liszt—a wife rare among women, whose soul and heart were in unison with his own—and cheered by watching the growth of children whom he adored, reared in the home which he had made beautiful for their joy. But this is no attempt to give even the thinnest outline of the Master’s life. For a biography and for a complete study of his work the curious must go to the fountain head.

From such study we may learn much. We hear wild talk about Wagner’s “operas”: it would be well that we should arrive at some understanding as to how far he may be said to have composed “operas” at all—that is to say, “operas” in the old accepted sense of the word. Probably the best way of facing the problem will be to take refuge in a compromise.

The Master’s life has been divided into two equal halves—the first lasting from his birth in 1813 to 1848, the year of those political troubles in which he became so unhappily involved; the second from 1848 to his death in 1883. His creative activity began when he was yet a child—we have seen how when he was but sixteen years old he had completed his “great tragedy,” which taught him that music was essential to drama, that the language of the senses must find its complement in the language of the soul, that music alone can appeal to the fancy and the imagination as poetry does to the reason.

This of course at once throws down the gauntlet to argument: no poet that ever lived has been gifted with the musical faculty as was Richard Wagner, yet who can assert that Shakespeare, Dante, that great prose poet Cervantes, were not kings over the fancy and imagination of mankind? Can they be said to be incomplete because their works were not wedded to music? Still this was the principle which was the guiding beacon of the Wagnerian inspiration, and from that he never steered aside. The arguments of enthusiasm are sometimes hard to follow. We are warned that we must not look upon Wagner “as a poet and a musician as if he were in some monstrous way gifted with two extraordinary talents, but that the yearning for music in the deepest and most hidden depths underlies the poetical impulse, and that music which then pours forth from the poetry like perfume from the leaves and flowers of trees, is in very truth the informing though unseen sap of this tree.”

Here, we are told, is the key to the understanding of this poet. And yet we have seen that the boy was first of all a poet, and that it was the poetic faculty which called forth the musical faculty! I find it difficult to reconcile the two ideas. Apart from the merits of his work, the great gulf which separates him from all other composers lies in the fact that whereas before him there have been great poets and great musicians—Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Gluck, and others—it was in Wagner that for the first time the genius of music and the genius of poetry were united. But it was not until he had discovered his power in poetry that his power in music was revealed to him. This seems to me unanswerable. But there is further evidence to be brought forward in the shape of his own _Frederick Barbarossa_. Here was a work which, when he had completed it, he found to be unsuited to music: it failed to inspire him and so it remained unwedded. That teaches us much in regard to the relationship between poetry and music in Wagner—not all poetry was to be expressed in music. We must return to this question later.

The works of the first half of Wagner’s life were operas in the strict sense of the word. That they differed from all existing operas is certain, but that was no more than would be expected from their genesis and their author. So do Rossini’s operas differ from Mozart’s,—the whole Italian school from the German. _Die Feen_ and _Das Liebesverbot_, founded on Shakespeare’s _Measure for Measure_; _Rienzi_ and _The Flying Dutchman_, _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ (surely the most entrancing of all romantic operas), _Siegfried’s Death_, can have no other title; and—apart from _Barbarossa_, which had no claim to it—they make up the sum of the theatrical work executed before 1848. Wagner, writing for the stage, found the model in existence and adopted it. Even the strictest of his disciples admit this. Indeed how can they deny what he himself asserted?

Those were hard times. But music which had come at the Poet’s call furnished him a scanty means of life as Kapellmeister. Then came 1848 and banishment, days of still greater stress and need, and misery indescribable, when only the dreariest drudgery of a music-seller’s hack kept body and soul together. Yet those were the days when he threw off the last shackles of conventionality and gave to the world the newly born idea of the Tone-Drama. That was the time when he first found himself and opened the wings of his mighty genius, soaring into regions which no man before him had dared or indeed been able to attempt.

The unsuitability to music of his _Barbarossa_ had opened out a new conviction in the Tone-Poet’s mind. Music and poetry must go hand in hand; the idea of writing music to another man’s verse—that is to say, to command—was intolerable to him; but that the union should be happy the subject must be fitting; it must be “the purely human freed from all conventionality.” Again: “When I with full consciousness and of my own free will gave up Frederick [Barbarossa], I had entered upon a new and decisive period of my development as artist and as man, the period when my conscious artistic will set out upon an entirely new path made with unconscious necessity, a path upon which I am now starting as artist and man to meet a new world.” Upon this his greatest critic says: “The works which followed, created upon this foundation and freed from the Ghost of Opera, reveal this _new world_.”

Wagner recognizes the dual nature of man. There is the outer man and the inner man. The perfect drama appeals to both. But music is the language of the inner man, which has for its special duty the expression of feelings and sensibilities—indeed, it can represent nothing else.

No man that ever lived was so fitted both by nature and by experience to appreciate the true functions of the drama as Richard Wagner—he was born a poet, he was cradled in the theatre, his classical education, “the education of a gentleman,” as Leighton put it, opened out to him the masterpieces of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. When under the spell of a distinctly felt want he took to music, behold! that was his birthright also—he was the child of the Muses. His long apprenticeship as Kapellmeister—conductor of the orchestra—in the Opera House at Dresden made him familiar with the operatic works of the great masters. But it taught him a great lesson: it showed him what was the true value of music, what was its relation to the sister art of poetry, and he, poet and musician as he was, learnt how to give the highest dignity to both. Their union was his task, and in 1848 he had come to the realization of the significance of that task, for he felt in the fullest degree the fetters in which the masters who preceded him had worked. He perceived that their noblest inspirations were only to be found in the expression of feelings: where they failed was when they attempted to describe facts.

“Music,” said Schopenhauer, “never expresses a manifestation, but only the inner essence of all manifestations.” The key to Wagner’s music is to be found in the following propositions which he himself lays down as fundamental:

“1. Feelings and sensibilities alone are what is to be expressed in the language of music. It expresses in the fullness of perfection the inner feeling of the purely human language set free from that language of words which has become the special organ of the understanding.

“2. That which is impossible of expression in the absolute language of music is the exact definition of the subject of feeling and sensibility in which these reach a true reality.

“3. The widening and extension of the musical expression consists in the winning of the power to indicate that which is individual and special with clear distinctness, and

“4. The language of music can only attain this in its marriage with the language of words.

“5. This marriage can only be successful when the language of music is at once joined to so much of the language of words as is in harmonious relation to itself; the union must go forward exactly in the direction where the language of words has itself already manifested an imperious necessity for true sensuous expression of feeling.

“6. This is defined only according to the inner meaning of that which is to be expressed, so far as this grows from a matter of understanding to a matter of feeling—an inner meaning which can only be grasped by the understanding remains only expressible by the language of words, but the more it extends to a movement of feeling the more explicitly it needs a means of expression with which the language of music alone can furnish it. (Conclusion from these premises.) Here then is clearly defined that which the word-and-tone poet has to express: it is the purely human set free from all conventionality (from all that which is formal and historical).”

Such are the principles upon which the second half of Wagner’s work, that which was carried out after 1848, is based; at least such is Wagner’s own setting forth of those principles. How far these views, so confidently laid down as artistic canon law, are justified by his own creations and by those of others is a question capable of being debated. Wagner’s own work is not uniformly in consonance with them. If the historical and the formal are to be shut out from the realm of music as unfitting, how can we account for so grand a conception as _Rienzi_, a work at least as historical and formal as the discarded _Barbarossa_? If nothing conventional is to be portrayed, what is to be said of the _Meistersinger_, one of the greatest of all Tone-Dramas, though it is throughout a picture of medieval middle-class life in Germany? Divest it of the poet’s inspiration and of the magic charm of music and it sinks at once into the commonplace from which genius has lifted it.

As a matter of fact there is no phase of man’s life and man’s activity so prosaic that “das rein-menschliche,” the purely human or ideal, is not in some shape or other contained in it. To amplify Schopenhauer’s dictum, music cannot describe a cathedral with its apse, its nave, its clerestory, its towers; but it can and does describe the spirit of piety which raised that monument of faith; and it is conceivable that a great tone-poet, such as Beethoven, should even describe in music the act of building it. Wagner himself described the forging of the sword by the Dwarf. He could not in the language of music have portrayed the sword when forged. The question is to find the ideal wherever it may be hidden. Wagner found it in _Rienzi_ and in the _Meistersinger_: he failed to find it in _Barbarossa_. Here surely is one of those arbitrary contradictions with which we occasionally meet in men of transcendent genius. It is only the smooth man of average brains that is uniformly consistent.

The triumph of the ideal is revealed in the _Ring des Nibelungen_, which is wholly Fairy Tale, and in _Parsifal_, which is wholly Worship. In these as poet and as musician Wagner reaches his highest achievement—poetry and music are united in an indissoluble wedlock; the senses are enthralled, and the world bows before the great wizard.

If we turn for a moment to the dramatic composition of other composers we shall see how entirely they are at their best when their works are inspired by the ideal, “das rein-menschliche.” That is where the great oratorios derive their glory. They are the musical expression of the loftiest thoughts of which man’s soul is capable; that is why such a masterpiece as the opening recitative of Handel’s _Messiah_ cries directly to the soul—no one who once heard Sims Reeves deliver the great message of comfort could ever forget it. To go to the opposite pole of music, the brightest comic opera that ever was produced was surely Rossini’s _Barbiere_. I am old enough to have heard it sung by the greatest cast that could be imagined—Bosio as Rosina, Mario Almaviva, the grand old Lablache as Dottor Bartolo, Ronconi the barber, Tagliafico Don Basilio. Rendered by such incomparable singers and actors, the whole opera sparkled from the first bar to the finale.

But what took one out of one’s self was Don Basilio’s _La Calunnia_, a piece of almost Wagnerian declamation. Calumny is “purely human,” indeed a human monopoly, for animals do not traduce one another, and as Tagliafico, a great artist, told the tale, the effect was electric. The trivial and commonplace but quite delightful prettiness of the rest was forgotten in the presence of a great dramatic effect. It would be easy to multiply instances, but these two suffice to show the overwhelming power of music to express the ideal.

A main difference between Wagner’s Tone-Drama and what we have known as “opera” lies in the union of the Tone-Poem with the Word-Poem as two sisters of equal rank, each prepared as the occasion requires it to give precedence to the other. In the so-called opera the music is everything; the book may be, and often is, the merest balderdash, void of all literary or poetic worth. In what Wagner calls “the art work of the future,” the music, as he himself puts it, “has to take up a quite different position; it is only where the music is the predominant partner that it may unfold itself to its full breadth; but, on the other hand, wherever dramatic speech is the most important, there the music must absolutely subordinate itself to it. But it so happens that music has the capability, without being altogether silent, of so imperceptibly effacing itself before language that is teeming with thought, as to make it appear that that alone is of importance and yet to continue giving it support.” It must be evident that this perfect accord between the poem and the music is one of the secrets of the incomparable dignity of Wagner’s work. The recognition of the equal value of both precludes the infusion of anything mean or trivial into either. Here again we may bring into comparison the oratorio, in which the music is wedded to the glorious language of the Bible.

Probably one reason why it was so long before Wagner achieved anything like general success outside of Germany lay in the misuse of the word “opera,” and also in the fact that his dramas were brought out in theatres intimately associated with works of less lofty aspirations. Smart ladies, mounted in diamonds, and white-waistcoated dandies, had been accustomed to listen entranced to lovely, if somewhat sugary, melodies threaded like pearls on strings of recitative, during which conversation and flirtation were not only permitted but expected. They came to hear Wagner looking for the same musical diet, and were disappointed. They expected to hear Wotan grind out barrel-organ tunes, or Brünnhilde declare with many trills that she is “vergine vezzosa.” The dignified declamation of Wagner’s heroes and heroines was lost upon them. Philistia was bored and showed it. At first they did not realize the fact that a work like the _Ring des Nibelungen_ is one comprehensive whole, of which one part separated from the rest tells no tale. They know better now; yet even to-day people go into raptures over one portion of the _Ring_ without hearing what has gone before or what is to follow. They believe that they have heard a Wagner “opera.” The great tragedy of Wotan is missed. _Lohengrin_, with its romantic and beautiful poem, took the fancy of the English public much more readily. _Tristan_ too became a favourite; but I have often wondered whether the _Meistersinger_, in spite of the noble character of the poet-shoemaker Hans Sachs, has ever quite appealed to nine-tenths of the Covent Garden audience.

But at any rate Wagner has become the fashion, and it is now essential to good breeding and a reputation for culture that he should be received as The great master—always, be it understood, of “opera.” Yet for the reasons at which I have hinted I rather doubt the sincerity of the adoration which is expressed. Dr. Johnson once said, “No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures”; had Dr. Johnson seen the tiaras and the white waistcoats displaying their nobility in the boxes and stalls of Covent Garden he might have seen fit to modify his opinion.

At Bayreuth things are very different: the sincerity of the audience is almost as striking as the beauty of the performance. A drama given in the Fest-Spiel house is no mere theatrical entertainment; it is more like a religious ceremony. The people standing outside the building, like a congregation in some country churchyard waiting for service to begin, are very quiet, speaking little, and that little in hushed voices, tuning themselves to the diapason of the solemn feast which is in store for them. When the doors are opened they troop in silently, and reverently take their places. There is no chatter; if speech be needed it is in a whisper. The audience—worshippers would be a better word—sit in rapt contemplation, waiting for the ceremony to begin.

After a while subdued and solemn strains from the hidden orchestra creep into the theatre—the opening notes of the _Rheingold_. The performance of the _Ring des Nibelungen_ has begun. The house is darkened, and will have no more light than what is sent to it from the stage. Slowly, very slowly, the curtain is drawn aside, and through a dim mist faintly we see the Rhine-maidens swimming in the sacred stream. So perfect is the illusion that we seem to be looking into the very depths of the river from some fairy vantage-ground. The poetry of music, language, motion (dancing was one of those elements of the ancient Greek drama of which Wagner recognized the value), all combine to make that perfect appeal to sight and hearing and the senses of the soul which is the essence of the Tone-Drama.

There is no dropping of the curtain at the end of the first act—clouds of steam roll up lazily in the foreground, and are met by falling mists of gauze and network—the stage grows dimmer and more dim, until all is hidden. Slowly and mysteriously the clouds fade away, and the second

## scene is revealed. Beautiful as are the first two scenes, I think that

the Cave of the Dwarfs is even more captivating. The great rocks on the right of the stage run back into the mystery of space; the trickling of water gleaming here and there amid the mosses gives a most realistic effect—just what may be seen in some natural Alpine cavern. On the left is the glowing forge of the gnomes, which looks as if the whole stage must presently blaze into flames. The horrors of this miniature hell, with the appearance of the laidly worm and the little crooked dwarfs rushing about intent upon some weird business, leave the impression of a Satan’s Sabbath. It is a scenic effect beyond all anticipation, difficult to realize. Wagner was a great magician, and could transport his people whither he listed—for, mark you! it is all his doing—his the conception, his the execution. The book, the music, the scenery, the stage-management, all the invention of that one brain. What a power he wielded!

You must journey to Bayreuth to feel its full force. There the master mind, the singers, the orchestra, and last, not least, the audience, are all in sympathy, and it is the creation of this sympathy which shows how great Wagner was.

The religious feeling which runs through the performance, the reverence with which it is received, are enhanced by the abstention from anything like applause. The nearest approach to it is something approaching to a sob of relief which follows upon such supreme moments as the fall of the curtain upon the flames of Valhalla (in the _Götterdämmerung_); but that sob says more than all the ridiculous calls before the curtain with which we destroy any illusion that may have been created by the finest efforts of our actors. Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Ophelia, Othello and Desdemona called to life again to grin a fatuous good-night to the audience! _Proh pudor!_ Let the players go to Bayreuth and learn what is due, if not to the dignity of their own art, at any rate to the genius of the poet whose interpreters they are.

Wagner felt music as the revelation of the language of another world—a language of which Beethoven, Mozart, Bach were the teachers. We have seen how the music of _Egmont_ appealed to him as a boy. With what force he used that language to appeal to the deepest feelings of those to whom he specially addressed himself will best be recognized by those who may have the privilege of attending the _General-Probe_, the dress rehearsal of one of the festivals.

Here are no tourists, no sham amateurs travelling to the little Franconian town because it is “the thing” to do, and as though the pilgrimage conferred a degree in culture. The guests are all invited from the very flower of Germany’s intellect—men who have earned honour in the most varied careers, women who are famous in many branches of work. These are the worshippers who flock to the shrine of the Cult, these the minds that the great poet holds in the thraldom of his genius. With the silence of conviction they accept his preaching: the Early Christians meeting in the Catacombs could hardly have been more reverent or more reserved.

In any sketch of Bayreuth, however flimsy, a word must be said about Wahnfried, the home of Wagner’s happiest days, the house where those who were nearest and dearest to him must almost feel as if they were still under the guardianship of that mighty soul: so filled is the place with memories of his presence that even strangers seem to be held by the spell of his spirit hovering over the trees that he loved, the garden that he laid out with such care and such consummate simplicity.

There is nothing ambitious, nothing pretentious here. It is just a plain, dignified gentleman’s home, _entre cour et jardin_; the court surrounded on three sides by shady alleys, an avenue of horse-chestnuts leading to a little forecourt in which the central ornament is a bust of King Louis of Bavaria, after Liszt, Wagner’s greatest friend, and certainly a powerful protector, who would have done so much more for him had he been able. Over the doorway is a sgraffito, “Wotan the Wanderer”; no other decoration save only in great letters the famous inscription, “Hier we mein Wähnen Frieden fand WAHNFRIED sei dieses Haus von mir benannt.” “Here where my wild dreams peace attained WAHNFRIED [Dreams-Peace] be this house by me named.” A poor jingle of a translation, but perhaps the original is not to be rendered in another tongue. But what a tinge of melancholy lies in it! A long day of struggles and misery, an evening of peace and happiness, and then suddenly at Venice—the Night!

Few people will deny that in a man’s home much of himself will be found reflected. I am not now speaking of those houses built to a pattern, even if it be a fanciful one, and adorned and furnished by some famous decorator: in these the reflection is that not of a mind, but of a firm, and there is a brotherly or at farthest a cousinly likeness between all those that are the work of the same partners: the difference is mainly one of pounds, shillings, and pence: even the books in the library look as if they had been ordered by the yard. The piano is placed for looks, not for sound. The pictures are chosen by the fashionable dealer of the day.

The house of a man of character and distinction bears the impress of his own imagination. Especially is this the case when he himself has built it. In Wahnfried everything speaks to you of Wagner. The design was his: the admirably proportioned rooms were planned and measured by him: every detail was thought out with strenuous care and loving foresight. The library, it has been said, “bears eloquent testimony to the universality of Wagner’s genius.” The works of art, the knick-knacks, all tell their story. There are several quite admirable portraits by Lenbach, pictures that will live; one portrait especially of Frau Wagner is a masterpiece that will not be denied.

But a likeness of Schopenhauer, painted by Lenbach after the philosopher’s death, has a story that is worth repeating. When Schopenhauer died, Wagner, who had the greatest admiration for him, begged Lenbach to paint a portrait of him. “But I never saw him,” said the artist, and declared that it was impossible. Now it so happened that a certain photographer, in cleaning out his drawers, came upon a photograph of Schopenhauer, the existence of which he had quite forgotten. Wagner, who had secured it, showed it to Lenbach and asked him whether that would not help him. The painter looked at it, and exclaimed, “Why that is my little old man!” and then told the tale of how one day walking in the street he had met a curiously comic little old man fidgeting about hither and thither from one shop-window to another, and had been so struck by the grotesqueness of the little creature that he followed him about, making mental notes of him, for the whole afternoon. So he was delighted to undertake the portrait, and by the help of the photograph, supplementing his own memory, produced what must be reckoned a famous work of art.

At the back of the house is the garden. Here too the all-embracing genius of the master found room for play. He laid it out with exquisite and delicate taste. A lawn with flowers leads to a little shady wood, and that again opens on to the public gardens of the town. In front of the wood, or rather in a recess screened and shaded by it, is a bust of the master facing the house. It marks his grave. He lies in the home which he loved, in the place where he found Peace.

It was in this sacred grove that I had the honour of being received by the gracious lady of Wahnfried. She is now, alas! able to see very few people, but she made an exception in my favour, and I had half an hour’s delightful conversation with her. In appearance I thought her little altered from what I remember her in 1877, when she came with her husband for the great concerts at the Albert Hall, and when those who had not the privilege of speaking with her were fascinated by her beautiful presence. Though she is not strong, the years have touched her lightly—a little more snow in the hair, the features a little more marked, reminding one more than ever of her great father, Franz Liszt—but she has retained all the grace, all the charm, all the magic of sympathy, all the keenness of thought for which she has been world-famous. Indeed, the world owes her no small meed of gratitude for the zeal and brilliant talent with which after the master’s death she threw herself into the work of keeping alive the great performances of the Fest-Spiel-Haus.

There was a moment of financial difficulty when the fate of Bayreuth trembled in the balance; she has swept away all doubt, and her enthusiasm has been so infectious that the little Franconian town has become one of the centres of the world’s culture: all its past is forgotten, even Jean Paul is hardly remembered, so all-absorbing is the Wagnerian aura. Royal personages, the princes in the several realms of art, science, letters, and politics, men and women famous in all the walks of life, have made these celebrations their trysting-place, and people who elsewhere grumble at the highest extravagance of luxury are content to put up with the simplest of fare and the humblest accommodation if only they may be allowed to lay their tribute on the high altar of genius.

A gathering at Wahnfried is something to remember; it is a goodly company, a cosmopolitan galaxy of talent. Failing health prevents the great hostess from welcoming her guests in person, but she is well represented by her children, Siegfried Wagner and his sister, round whom are assembled all the most distinguished of the visitors to the town. It is a company in which a man must needs feel very humble. For here every one has achieved something in the world. Here is a recognized authority as antiquary and historian; there the great physician who watched over Prince Bismarck’s latest years: famous musicians, learned professors, a few notable soldiers, are much to the front: one lady is translating into German an American philosophical work; other ladies are engaged in various branches of art; some are successful actresses, others well-known and cherished singers; here are painters who have achieved fame, younger men who are climbing that same giddy ladder; of literary men there is no lack. The conversation is brilliant; it is only interrupted now and then by such music as would compel even the Philistines to hold their peace. It would be strange indeed if in the home of Richard Wagner obedience were not given to the old Italian warning, “Il più grande omaggio alla musica è il silenzio.”

##