Part 8

The scenery for the Wagner dramas, in all the theatres where I have seen and heard them, has been built (and a great deal of it in recent years from new designs) with a seemingly absolute ignorance or determined evasion of the fact that there are artists who are now working in the theatre. In making this statement I can speak personally of performances I have seen at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York; the Auditorium, Chicago; Covent Garden Theatre, London; La Scala, Milan; the Opéra, Paris; and the Prinz-Regenten-Theatre in Munich. Are there theatres where the Wagner dramas are better given? I do not think so. Compare the scenery of _Götterdämmerung_ at the Metropolitan Opera House with that of _Boris Godunow_, and you will see how little care is being taken of Wagner’s ideals. In the one case the flimsiest sort of badly painted and badly lighted canvas, mingled indiscriminately with plastic objects, boughs, branches, etc., placed next to painted boughs and branches, an effect calculated to throw the falsity of the whole scene into relief; in the other case, an example of a scene-painter’s art wrought to give the highest effect to the drama it decorates. Take the decoration of the hall of the Gibichs in which long scenes are enacted in both the first and last acts of _Götterdämmerung_. The Gibichs are a savage, warlike, sinister, primitive race. Now it is not necessary that the setting in itself be strong, but it must suggest strength to the spectator. There is no need to bring stone blocks or wood blocks on the stage; the artist may work in black velvet if he wishes (it was of this material that Professor Roller contrived a dungeon cell in _Fidelio_ which seemed to be built of stone ten feet thick). It will be admitted, I think, by any one who has seen the setting in question that it is wholly inadequate to express the meaning of the drama. The scenes could be sung with a certain effect in a Christian Science temple, but no one will deny, I should say, that the effect of the music may be greatly heightened by proper attention to the stage decoration and the movement of the characters in relation to the lighting and decoration. (I have used the Metropolitan Opera House, in this instance, as a convenient illustration; but the scenery there is no worse, on the whole, than it is in many of the other theatres named.)

The secret at the bottom of the whole matter is that the directors of the singing theatres wish to save themselves trouble. They will spend neither money nor energy in righting this wrong. It is easier to trust to tradition on the one hand and expediency on the other than it would be to engage an expert (one not concerned with what had been done, but one concerned with what to do) to produce the works. _Carmen_ was losing its popularity in this country when Emma Calvé, who had broken all the rules made for the part by Galli-Marié, enchanted opera-goers with her fantastic conception of the gipsy girl. Bizet’s work had dropped out of the répertoire again when Mme. Bressler-Gianoli arrived and carried it triumphantly through nearly a score of performances during the first season of Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House. Geraldine Farrar and Toscanini resuscitated the Spanish jade a third time. An Olive Fremstad or a Lilli Lehmann or a Milka Ternina can perform a like office for _Götterdämmerung_ or _Tristan und Isolde_; but it is to a new producer, an Adolphe Appia or a Gordon Craig, that the theatre director must look for the final salvation of Wagner, through the complete realization of his own ideals. It must be obvious to any one that the more completely the meaning of his plays is exposed by the decoration, the lighting and the action, the greater the effect.

Adolphe Appia wrote a book called “Die Musik und die Inscenierung,” which was published in German in 1899. (An earlier work, “La mise-en-scène du drame Wagnerien,” appeared in Paris in 1893.) Since then his career has been strangely obscure for one whose effect on artists working at stage decoration has been greater than that of any other single man. In the second edition of his book, “On the Art of the Theatre,” Gordon Craig, in a footnote, speaks thus of Appia: “Appia, _the foremost stage decorator of Europe_ (the italics are mine) is not dead. I was told that he was no more with us, so, in the first edition of this book, I included him among the shades. I first saw three examples of his work in 1908, and I wrote a friend asking, ‘Where is Appia and how can we meet?’ My friend replied, ‘Poor Appia died some years ago.’ This winter (1912) I saw some of Appia’s designs in a portfolio belonging to Prince Wolkonsky. They were divine; and I was told that the designer was still living.”

Loomis Taylor, who, during the season of 1914-15, staged the Wagner operas at the Metropolitan Opera House (and it was not his fault that the staging was not improved; there is no stage director now working who has more belief in and knowledge of the artists of the theatre than Loomis Taylor) has written me, in response to a query, the following regarding Appia: “Adolphe Appia, I think, is a French-Swiss; he is a young man. The title of the book which made him famous, in its German translation, is ‘Die Musik und die Inscenierung.’ It was translated from the French by Princess Cantacuzène.... Five years ago I was told by Mrs. Houston Stewart Chamberlain that Appia was slowly but surely starving to death in some picturesque surroundings in Switzerland. I then tried to get various people in Germany interested in him, also proposing him to Hagemann as scenic artist for Mannheim. Two years later, before his starving process had reached its conclusion, I heard of him as collaborator with Jaques-Dalcroze at his temple of rhythm on the banks of the Elbe, outside of Dresden, where, I think, up to the outbreak of the war, Appia was doing very good work, but what has become of him since I do not know.

“His book is very valuable; his suggestions go beyond the possibilities of the average Hof theatre, while in Bayreuth they have a similar effect to a drop of water upon a stone, sun-burned by the rays of Cosima’s traditions. By being one of the first--if not _the_ first--to put in writing the inconsistency of using painted perspective scenery and painted shadows with human beings on the stage, Appia became the fighter for plastic scenery. His sketch of the _Walküren_ rock is the most beautiful scenic conception of Act III, _Die Walküre_, I know of or could imagine. To my knowledge no theatre has ever produced anything in conformity with Appia’s sketches.”

In a letter to me Hiram Kelly Moderwell, whose book, “The Theatre of To-day,” is the best exposition yet published of the aims and results of the artists who are working in the theatre, writes as follows in regard to Appia: “Appia is now with Dalcroze at Hellerau and I believe has designed and perhaps produced all the things that have been done there in the last year or two. Previous to that I am almost certain he had done no actual stage work. Nobody else would give him free rein. But, as you know, he thought everything out carefully as though he were doing the actual practical stage work.... By this time he has hit his ‘third manner.’ It’s all cubes and parallelograms. It sounds like hell on paper but Maurice Browne told me it is very fine stuff. Browne says it is as much greater than Craig as Craig is greater than anybody else. All the recent Hellerau plays are in this third manner. They are lighted by Salzmann, indirect and diffused lighting, but not in the Fortuny style. I imagine the Hellerau stuff is rather too precious to go on the ordinary stage.”

Mr. Moderwell’s description of Appia’s book is so completely illuminating that I feel I cannot do better than to quote the entire passage from “The Theatre of To-day”: “Before his (Gordon Craig’s) influence was felt, however, Adolphe Appia, probably the most powerful theorist of the new movement, had written his remarkable book, ‘Die Musik und die Inscenierung.’ In this, as an artist, he attempted to deduce from the content of the Wagner music dramas the proper stage settings for them. His conclusions anticipated much of the best work of recent years and his theories have been put into practice in more or less modified form on a great many stages--not so much (if at all) for the Wagner dramas themselves, which are under a rigid tradition (the ‘what the Master wished’ myth), but for operas and the more lyric plays where the producer has artistic ability and a free hand in applying it.

“Appia started with the principle that the setting should make the actor the all-important fact on the stage. He saw the realistic impossibility of the realistic setting, and destructively analyzed the current modes of lighting and perspective effects. But, unlike the members of the more conventional modern school, he insisted that the stage is a three-dimension space and must be handled so as to make its depth living. He felt a contradiction between the living actor and the dead setting. He wished to bind them into one whole--the drama. How was this to be done?

“Appia’s answer to this question is his chief claim to greatness--genius almost. His answer was--‘By means of the lighting.’ He saw the deadliness of the contemporary methods of lighting, and previsaged with a sort of inspiration the possibilities of new methods which have since become common. This was at a time when he had at his disposal none of the modern lighting systems. His foreseeing of modern practice by means of rigid Teutonic logic in the service of the artist’s intuition makes him one of the two or three foremost theorists of the modern movement.

“The lighting, for Appia, is the spiritual core, the soul of the drama. The whole action should be contained in it, somewhat as we feel the physical body of a friend to be contained in his personality. Appia’s second great principle is closely connected with this. While the setting is obviously inanimate, the actor must in every way be emphasized and made living. And this can be accomplished, he says, only by a wise use of lighting, since it is the lights and shadows on a human body which reveal to our eyes the fact that the body is ‘plastic’--that is, a flexible body of three dimensions. Appia would make the setting suggest only the atmosphere, not the reality of the thing it stands for, and would soften and beautify it with the lights. The actor he would throw constantly into prominence while keeping him always a part of the scene. All the elements and all the action of the drama he would bind together by the lights and shadows.

“With the most minute care each detail of lighting, each position of each character, in Appia’s productions is studied out so that the dramatic meaning shall always be evident. Hence any setting of his contains vastly more thought than is visible at a glance. It is designed to serve for every exigency of the scene--so that a character here shall be in full light at a certain point, while talking directly to a character who must be quite in the dark, or that the light shall just touch the fringe of one character’s robe as she dies, or that the action shall all take place unimpeded, and so on. At the same time, needless to say, Appia’s stage pictures are of the highest artistic beauty.”[1]

In Appia’s design for the third act of _Die Walküre_, so enthusiastically praised by Loomis Taylor, the rock of the valkyries juts like a huge promontory of black across the front of the scene, silhouetted against a clouded sky. So all the figures of the valkyries stand high on the rock and are entirely silhouetted, while Sieglinde below in front of the rock in the blackness, is hidden from the rage of the approaching Wotan. Any one who has seen this scene as it is ordinarily staged, without any reference to beauty or reason, will appreciate even this meagre description of an artist’s intention, which has not yet been carried out in any theatre with which I have acquaintance.

Appia’s design for the first scene of _Parsifal_ discloses a group of boughless, straight-stemmed pines, towering to heaven like the cathedral group at Vallombrosa. Overhead the dense foliage hides the forest paths from the sun. Light comes in through the centre at the back, where there is a vista of plains across to the mountains, on which one may imagine the castle of the Grail. He places a dynamic and dramatic value on light which it is highly important to understand in estimating his work. For example, his lighting of the second act of _Tristan und Isolde_ culminates in a _pitch-dark_ stage during the singing of the love-duet. This artist has designed the scenery for all the _Ring_ and has indicated throughout what the lighting and action shall be.

I do not know that Gordon Craig has turned his attention to any particular Wagner drama, although he has made suggestions for several of them, but he could, if he would, devise a mode of stage decoration which would make the plays and their action as appealing in their beauty as the music and the singing often now are. In his book, “On the Art of the Theatre,” he has been explicit in his descriptions of his designs for _Macbeth_, and the rugged strength and symbolism of his settings and ideas for that tragedy proclaim perhaps his best right to be a leader in the reformation of the Wagner dramas, although, even then, it must be confessed that Craig is derived in many instances from Appia, whom Craig himself hails as the foremost stage decorator of Europe to-day.

Read Gordon Craig on _Macbeth_ and you will get an idea of how an artist would go to work on _Tristan und Isolde_ or _Götterdämmerung_. “I see two things, I see a lofty and steep rock, and I see the moist cloud which envelops the head of this rock. That is to say, a place for fierce and warlike men to inhabit, a place for phantoms to nest in. Ultimately this moisture will destroy the rock; ultimately these spirits will destroy the men. Now then, you are quick in your question as to what actually to create for the eye. I answer as swiftly--place there a rock! Let it mount high. Swiftly I tell you, convey the idea of a mist which hangs at the head of this rock. Now, have I departed at all for one-eighth of an inch from the vision which I saw in the mind’s eye?

“But you ask me what form this rock shall take and what colour? What are the lines which are the lofty lines, and which are to be seen in any lofty cliff? Go to them, glance but a moment at them; now quickly set them down on your paper; _the lines and their direction_, never mind the cliff. Do not be afraid to let them go high; they cannot go high enough; and remember that on a sheet of paper which is but two inches square you can make a line which seems to tower miles in the air, and you can do the same on your stage, for it is all a matter of proportion and has nothing to do with actuality.

“You ask about the colours? What are the colours which Shakespeare has indicated for us? Do not first look at Nature, but look at the play of the poet. Two, one for the rock, the man; one for the mist, the spirit. Now, quickly, take and accept this statement from me. Touch not a single other colour, but only these two colours through your whole progress of designing your scenes and your costumes, yet forget not that each colour contains many variations. If you are timid for a moment and mistrust yourself or what I tell, when the scene is finished you will not see with your eye the effect you have seen with your mind’s eye when looking at the picture which Shakespeare has indicated.”

The producers of the Wagner music dramas do not seem to have heard of Adolphe Appia. Gordon Craig is a myth to them. Reinhardt does not exist. Have they ever seen the name of Stanislawsky? Do they know where his theatre is? Would they consider it sensible to spend three years in mounting _Hamlet_? Is the name of Fokine known to them? of Bakst? N. Roerich, Nathalie Gontcharova, Alexandre Benois, Theodore Federowsky?... One could go on naming the artists of the theatre. (Recently there have been evidences of an art movement in the theatre in America. Joseph Urban, first in Boston with the Boston Opera Company, and later in New York with various theatrical enterprises, may be mentioned as an important figure in this movement. His settings for _Monna Vanna_ were particularly beautiful and he really seems to have revolutionized the staging of _revues_ and similar light musical pieces. Robert Jones has done some very good work. I think he was responsible for the imaginative staging [in Gordon Craig’s manner, to be sure] of the inner scenes in the Shakespeare mask, _Caliban_. But I would give the Washington Square Players credit for the most successful experiments which have been made in New York. In every instance they have attempted to suit the staging to the mood of the drama, and have usually succeeded admirably, at slight expense. They have developed a good deal of previously untried talent in this direction. Lee Simonson, in particular, has achieved distinctive results. I have seldom seen better work of its kind on the stage than his settings for _The Magical City_, _Pierre Patelin_, and _The Seagull_. At the Metropolitan Opera House no account seems to be taken of this art movement, although during the season of 1915-16 in _The Taming of the Shrew_ an attempt was made to emulate the very worst that has been done in modern Germany.)

For several years the Russian Ballet, under the direction of Serge de Diaghilew, has been presenting operas and ballets in the European capitals, notably in London and Paris for long seasons each summer (the Ballet has been seen in America since this article was written). A number of artists and a number of stage directors have been working together in staging these works, which, as a whole, may be conceded to be the most completely satisfying productions which have been made on the stage during the progress of this new movement in the theatre. One or two of the German productions, or Gordon Craig’s _Hamlet_ in Stanislawsky’s theatre, may have surpassed them in the sterner qualities of beauty, the serious truth of their art, but none has surpassed them in brilliancy, in barbaric splendour, or in their almost complete solution of the problems of mingling people with painted scenery. The Russians have solved these problems by a skilful (and passionately liberal) use of colour and light. The painted surfaces are mostly flat, to be sure, and crudely painted, but the tones of the canvas are so divinely contrived to mingle with the tones of the costumes that the effect of an animated picture is arrived at with seemingly very little pother. This method of staging is not, in most instances, it must be admitted, adapted to the requirements of the Wagner dramas. Bakst, I imagine, would find it difficult to cramp his talents in the field of Wagnerism, though he should turn out a very pretty edition of _Das Rheingold_. Roerich, on the other hand, who designed the scenery and costumes for _Prince Igor_ as it was presented in Paris and London in the summer of 1914, would find no difficulty in staging _Götterdämmerung_. The problem is the same: to convey an impression of barbarism and strength. One scene I remember in Borodine’s opera in which an open window, exposing only a clear stretch of sky--the rectangular opening occupied half of the wall at the back of the room--was made to act the drama. A few red lights skilfully played on the curtain representing the sky made it seem as if in truth a city were burning and I thought how a similar simple contrivance might make a more imaginative final scene for _Götterdämmerung_.

It is, however, in their handling of mechanical problems that the Russians could assist the new producer of the Wagner dramas to his greatest advantage. In Rimsky-Korsakow’s opera, _The Golden Cock_, for instance, the bird of the title has several appearances to make. Now there was no attempt made, in the Russians’ stage version of this work, to have this bird jiggle along a supposedly invisible wire, in reality quite visible, flapping his artificial wings and wiggling his insecure feet, as in the usual productions of _Siegfried_. Instead the bird was built solid like a bronze cock for a drawing-room table; he did not flap his wings; his feet were motionless; when the action of the drama demanded his presence he was let down on a wire; there was no pretence of a lack of machinery. The effect, however, was vastly more imaginative and diverting than that in _Siegfried_, because it was more simple. In like manner King Dodon, in the same opera, mounted a wooden horse on wheels to go to the wars, and the animals he captured were also made of wood, studded with brilliant beads. In Richard Strauss’s ballet, _The Legend of Joseph_, the figure of the guardian angel was not let down on a wire from the flies as he might have been in a Drury Lane pantomime; the naïve nature of the work was preserved by his nonchalant entrance across the _loggia_ and down a flight of steps, exactly the entrance of all the human characters of the ballet. I do not mean to suggest that these particular expedients would fit into the Wagner dramas so well as they do into works of a widely different nature. They should, however, indicate to stage directors the possibility of finding a method to suit the case in each instance. And I do assert, without hope or fear of contradiction, that Brünnhilde with a wooden horse would challenge less laughter than she does with the sorry nags which are put at her disposal and which Siegfried later takes down the river with him. It is only down the river that one can sell such horses. As for the bird, there are bird trainers whose business it is to teach pigeons to fly from pillar to post in the music halls; their services might be contracted for to make that passage in _Siegfried_ a little less distracting. The difficulties connected with this particular mechanical episode (and a hundred others) might be avoided by a different lighting of the scene. If the tree-tops of the forest were submerged in the deepest shadows, as well they might be, the flight of the bird on a wire might be accomplished with some sort of illusion. But why should one see the bird at all? One hears it constantly as it warbles advice to the hero.