Chapter 8

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

“I sent my soul through the Invisible,

Some letter of that after-life to spell;

And by and by my soul returned to me,

And answered, ‘I myself am heaven and hell.’”

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

Wagner’s first law, as formulated succinctly by W. F. Apthorp in a magazine article, is: “That the text—what in old-fashioned dialect was called the libretto—once written by the poet, all other persons who have to do with the work—composer, stage architect, scene painter, costumer, stage manager, conductor, and singing actors—should aim at one thing only: the most exact, perfect, and lifelike embodiment of the poet’s thought.” So far as the composition of the music is concerned, this is precisely what Peri and Gluck believed. But Peri had to invent dramatic recitative; and standing, as it were, just on the hither side of chaos, he could not be expected to produce at once a perfected art world. The materials of operatic art were in process of making; the first builder had not the wherewith to rear a musical cathedral. Gluck erred in preserving the cut-and-dried operatic forms which made it impossible for him to achieve his sincere design,—“to reduce music to its proper function, that of seconding poetry by enforcing the expression of the sentiment and the interest of the situations, without interrupting the action, or weakening it by superfluous ornament.” It was comparatively easy to get rid of the “superfluous ornament”; but the methodical distribution of the old forms was found to interrupt the action. It remained for Wagner to see that these forms were unavailable for the composer who aimed at the complete embodiment of the poet’s thought; and it remained for him also to discern that the ideal lyric drama demanded an ideal harmony among its various elements. In other words, the perfected Wagnerian theory of the lyric drama contemplates the compact union of poetry, music, painting, action, and all the other factors of dramatic illusion on a basis of common interdependence, so binding that it shall be impossible to say that one is more important than another, so perfect that no separation can be made without a loss of vital force.

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

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

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

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

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

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 wasform, 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]

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 formusical expositiononly 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 wichenDem Wonnemond;In milden LichteLeuchtet der Lenz;Auf linden Lüften,Leicht und lieblich,Wunder webendEr sich wiegt.”

“Winterstürme wichen

Dem Wonnemond;

In milden Lichte

Leuchtet der Lenz;

Auf linden Lüften,

Leicht und lieblich,

Wunder webend

Er sich wiegt.”

Siegfried. Richard Wagner. H. Levi. Richter. Betz. Niemann. v. Schukowsky. Fr. v. Lenbach. Cosima. Materna. Fr. Brandt. Liszt. Gräfin Sch. Gräfin U. Scaria. Fr. Fischer.RICHARD WAGNER AT BAYREUTH.—By G. Papperitz.

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 oflines. 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 dramaticariosostyle 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 Gluckariosostyle 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 aleit 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.

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.

[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:—

[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.

[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.

A HUMOROUS COMPOSITION ADDRESSED TO LOUIS KRAFT.The host of Hotel de Prusse, in Leipsic.

[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:—

[Music]

The bass phrase is the motive of the Volsung race, and its melancholy character is intended to remind us that this isa 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:—

[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.

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’sleit motifsystem. 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 everyleit motifis 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:—

Rhinegold, Rhinegold, lustrous delight,Thou laughest in radiance rare.

When Siegfried, having slain the dragon, comes out of the cave, that music is heard in the orchestra. Does any one need a handbook to tell him that it refers to the hero’s being now the master of the Rhine gold? Again, after telling Alberich that he who can make a ring out of the Rhine gold will have unlimited power, one of the girls sings this:—

But he who passion’s power forswears,And from delights of love forbears,But he the magic commandeth the prize to mould to a ring.

Here the text fully identifies the music as the motive of renunciation, and as such we recognize this melody when Wotan in the last scene of “Die Walküre” parts from his best beloved daughter, Brünnhilde. This first identification of a theme enables the composer to attain some of his finest effects, for he makes some motives have an air of prophecy. For instance, two motives are especially connected with Siegfried, and one of them refers to his being a great hero. This motive is first heard in the last scene of “Die Walküre” before Siegfried is born, and before Brünnhilde knows that he is to be her lover. Yet it is Brünnhilde who voices it in foretelling his birth to Sieglinde:—

The highest hero of worlds hid’st thou,O wife, in sheltering shrine.

Thenceforward we know that melody to be the theme of Siegfried, the hero. Immediately following this is introduced a theme which appears again in the full voicing of the orchestra after Brünnhilde has restored the Rhine gold to its rightful owners and immolated herself on Siegfried’s funeral pyre at the end of the last drama of the series. If we wonder at its meaning there, we refer to its first appearance in “Die Walküre,” and find that Sieglinde utters it as a proclamation of the divine womanhood of Brünnhilde:—

Oh, marvelous sayings,Maiden divine.

Another example will show how a representative theme may be modified, according to the development of the person whom it represents, without losing its identity. The theme which has special reference to Siegfried’s buoyancy of spirit, the producer of youthful enthusiasm, is intoned by the hero on his horn thus:—

[Music]

In “Die Götterdämmerung,” when Siegfried has become a fully developed man, this melody is modified so as to signify his mature heroism. It is then proclaimed by the orchestra thus:—

[Music]

As the writer has had occasion to say elsewhere, “The alteration to which the music is subjected is one of rhythm. Themotifchanges from six-eight to common rhythm. The effect produced is one of those which are founded upon the nature of music. A six-eight rhythm is light and tripping; a four-beat rhythm is firm and solid.” This alteration of the representative theme, then, “develops the character of the melody along the same lines as Siegfried’s character has developed,—from lightness and ebulliency to firmness and solidity.” These examples should be sufficient to give the reader a tolerable comprehension of the manner in which Wagner worked out his new operatic form. It seems necessary now only to lay special stress upon the suggestion already offered, that the listener at the performance of a Wagner music-drama does not treat either himself or the composer fairly when he busies his mind wholly with the identification of the themes as they present themselves successively to his hearing. The proper effort is to get at the organic connection between action or thought and the music, to read each by the light of the other, and to see whether it is not possible to penetrate by means of the two into the spirit of the drama. If the hearer accomplishes this, he will have at least the right to say that he has approached the consideration of this art work of Wagner’s in a spirit of fairness; and though he may not know the title of a single theme, he will have a far better understanding of their meaning than they who have committed to memory some one of the thematic handbooks.

This exposition of Wagner’s theories will have failed to achieve its purpose if the reader does not now clearly perceive that its fundamental postulate is that the opera is adramain which music is merely the chief vehicle of expression. This ruling idea led Wagner not only to abandon the old formulæ, but to do many things which would, perhaps, be inexpedient to attempt in absolute music. The great Bayreuth master has been severely censured, by those who cling to the belief that music should always be pretty, for having written many harsh progressions and for having indulged in remarkable boldness in his harmonies. These so-called sins of the master must find their justification in the fact that he was not aiming at purely musical beauty. The whole purpose of his work was “exact and lifelike embodiment of the poet’s thought.” When the emotion of an actor was harsh, the music had to be harsh. When the emotions were grand and beautiful, the music had to be of a similar character. It is for these reasons that we find the snarling anger of Alberich and Mime, the bitter hatred of Ortrud, the fury of Isolde, voiced in music which is not pretty, but which is truthful. But on the other hand, when Wagner has to express the sorrows of the Volsungs, the fierce and sudden passion of Siegmund and Sieglinde, the awful revulsion of feeling in the death of Siegfried, or the highest elevation of woman’s love in the last moments of Isolde, he rises to a sublime height of melody, an overwhelming dignity of harmony, and an irresistible eloquence of instrumentation not equalled by any other composer. As Louis Ehlert, not a Wagnerite, has well said: “Wagner’s music always impresses us with the idea that we are in the presence of genius. It may at times be ugly, obtrusive, and noisy; but it is never silly and insignificant.”[20]

Much of the pungency of Wagner’s music, which makes it disagreeable to timid ears, is due to his progressiveness in the matter of harmony. He has gone to the furthest limit in the use of passing notes, as primarily embodied in the polyphony of Bach. He has followed the rule thus formulated by Dr. Parry:—

“Suspensions are now taken in any form and position which can in the first place be possibly prepared even by passing notes, or in the second place be possibly resolved even by causing a fresh discord, so long as the ultimate resolution into concord is feasible in an intelligible manner.”[21]

Many of Wagner’s harmonic progressions belong to that class which instruct rather than obey the theorists. These progressions have all been found capable of justification by analysis, and will therefore remain as part of Wagner’s contributions to the development of musical science and art. In considering these novelties, we must remember that genius is usually in advance of its day, and what sounded strange at first by reason of its novelty will in good time become part of the common diction of the art. In instrumentation, Wagner also made many innovations, and it is indisputable that he was the greatest master of the art of scoring who has ever lived. He showed a profounder insight into the individual capacity of every instrument than any composer except Berlioz, and in fecundity of combination he excelled even the gifted Frenchman. He enriched the body of tone of the modern orchestra by the employment of the tenor tuba, and emphasized the value of the neglected bass trumpet. His addition to the customary number of horn parts splendidly improved the mellow tone and solidity of the brass choir, and his use of the bass clarinet, not simply as a solo instrument, but as a re-enforcement of the organ-like bass of the woodwind department, was a stroke of genius. He further developed the expressiveness of the woodwind band by the novelty of his distribution of harmony among its members. Not only did he allot solos to them with unerring judgment, but departing from the conventional style of the classic symphonists, who used their wood instruments in pairs playing in thirds and sixths, he wrote for these instruments in a marvellously effective dispersed harmony. In writing for the strings, Wagner divided them more frequently than his predecessors had done, often making six or eight real parts among the violins alone. Altogether his instrumentation is richer in its polyphony and more solid in its body of tone than that of any other composer. He has been accused of being noisy, but power of sound is not necessarily noise. There is more noise in some of Verdi’s shrieking piccolo passages, accentuated with bass-drum thumps, than in the loudest passage that Wagner ever wrote.

Taking him by and large, as the sailors say, Wagner is the most striking figure in the history of music. Whether the future will or will not accord to him the position granted by the musical world of the present—that of the greatest genius (though not the profoundest musician) the art has produced—he will remain fixed upon the records as the most commanding intellect that ever sought to express its thought and accomplish its purposes though the medium of music. His influence upon his contemporaries has been larger than that of any other master since the science of modern music began. One has only to study the latest operas of that real genius, Verdi, to perceive how one of the most gifted musical minds of our time was forced to yield to the convincing truth of Wagner’s ideas. As for those of less original force than Verdi, they have one and all—even Mascagni, who is as purely Italian as Wagner was purely Teutonic—been swayed by his irresistible influence. Even the symphonic writers have been guided by him, and no man can ever again write an orchestral score as if Wagner had not lived. The futile controversy about his theories and his style will probably be kept alive for some years by those who persistently refuse to remodel their inflexible conceptions of what ought to be after the splendid pattern of what is. But Wagner’s theories will live, for he was the fulfillment of the prophetic words of Herder on Gluck: “The progress of the century led us to a man, who, despising the frippery of wordless tones, perceived the necessity of an intimate connection of human feeling and of the myth itself with his tones. From that imperial height on which the ordinary musician boasts that poetry serves his art he stepped down and made his tones only serve the words of feeling, the action itself. He has emulators, and perhaps some one will soon outstrip him in zeal, overthrowing the whole shop of slashed and mangled opera-jingle, and erecting an Odeon, a consistently lyric edifice, in which poetry, music, action, and decoration unite in one.”

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