CHAPTER XIV

'THE NIBELUNG'S RING' AND 'THE RHINEGOLD'

I

In the case of few artists is there an account of the creation of their works worth serious consideration. In the colloquial as well as the true sense of the word they are apt to be imaginative, and such a story as Edgar Allen Poe's of the composition of the _Raven_ is not so much imaginative as imaginary. The creative artist is usually the last man in the world to give a veracious history of the genesis of his creations, for the simple reason that he does not know, and, during the later process of trying to find out, for his own private satisfaction, he is given to invent theories--or, let us say, hypotheses--which eventually he may come to believe pure fact. In music the act of creation is often done in a hypnotic state. Goethe mentions that his earlier songs were written in a state of clairvoyance. Many much more recent poets seem to have achieved their hugest popular successes whilst in a comatose state. Some, who also managed to secure a success with the public, apparently conceived and executed their mighty works in a state of hallucination--having somehow got the idea into their heads that they were poets. Handel, Mozart and Beethoven are three musicians who are known--if history may be at all believed--to have composed in a hypnotic state: Handel would sit for hours, unconscious of what went on around him; Mozart could not be trusted with a knife at dinner--when he had a dinner; Beethoven would pour cold water over his hands until the tenants beneath raised violent objections. No such tales are related of Bach, of Haydn, of Gluck, of Weber, nor of Wagner. If ever a man knew precisely what he had been doing, even if he was not self-conscious at the moment of doing it, that man was Wagner. He stands apart, therefore; apart from some of the greatest composers. His case, I take it, is analogous to that of a man who cannot remember a friend's address and thinks of it that night in a dream: how he chances to dream he cannot tell, but he knows what he has dreamt, and when.

It is worth insisting on this, partly because it is eminently characteristic of Wagner, partly because it enables us now to trace with some certainty the growth of the _Nibelung's Ring_, both drama and music, from its birth to its final execution. The history of the building-up of the drama, like the drama itself, is a mightily complicated and entangled matter. Some of it had to be related earlier in this book to account, so to say, for the way in which Wagner filled up his days; but it will be convenient to summarise it here. Let us begin with a few dates--

1848. Had studied the Nibelungen saga and sketched the plan of the whole gigantic work much as it now stands.

1850-51. Discusses _Siegfried's Death_ in letters to Uhlig and Liszt. Begins the poem in another form, which he abandons.

1852. Writes the poem for the work practically in its final form; privately printed the following year.

1853. Begins _Rhinegold_.

1854. Completes _Rhinegold_. Begins the _Valkyrie_, and sketches _Siegfried_ at the same time.

1856. Completes _Valkyrie_. Begins composition of _Siegfried_. Completes first and begins second act of _Siegfried_, and interrupts it to start work on _Tristan_.

1859. _Tristan_ completed.

1867. _Mastersingers_ completed. Composition of _Siegfried_ resumed. _Siegfried_ completed. _Dusk of the Gods_ begun. _Dusk of the Gods_ completed.

1876. The _Ring_ given at Bayreuth.

Wagner was thus occupied with the _Ring_ for fully twenty-five years. The _Rhinegold_ followed _Lohengrin_, but there was a gap of five years between them, mainly devoted to literary work (1848-53); and during that period his whole style in music underwent a vast change. In one respect the change is not so marked as that between the _Rhine__gold_ and the _Valkyrie_; in the first there is little of the passion, strength, grip and breadth of the others. While composing the _Rhinegold_ his powers were developing at a prodigious rate, and had the _Rhinegold_ been a better subject for the purpose they might have reached maturity while writing it. But there is no human element in it, and without that Wagner could not get on. We have already seen that he abandoned the idea of the _Mastersingers_ for years--until, in fact, he had created a soul for Sachs: then he went ahead and gave us a series of magnificent pictures of old Nuremberg. In the same way, though he wrote some fine music in the _Rhinegold_, in richness, splendour of colouring, it does not compare with the _Valkyrie_, where he is chiefly concerned with two human beings and a being who must be called only a demi-goddess, half-goddess and half-human. He could not compose unless he had the double inspiration, the human soul and the pictorial environment. If I had to select three of Wagner's works to live with I should take the _Valkyrie_, _Tristan_ and the _Mastersingers_. In them we find inspiration and craftmanship in absolute proportion; in the later dramas of the _Ring_ we shall see how craftsmanship outran inspiration--sometimes with results that can only be called deplorable. This matter must be reserved for discussion until we deal with the operas separately.

The labyrinthine libretto owes its defects not to the many years it took to write--for when once Wagner set to work it was done in a single breath--but to the nature of the subject and the very German way in which a German composer inevitably felt impelled to treat that subject. In