IXAFTER WAGNER—WHAT?
Few critics are prophets honored in their own musical country, and but one or two in a generation possessprévoyanceenough to predict the way the musical cat will jump. The antics of that exotic feline since the day Richard Wagner pinched its tail and bade it leap through the large and rather gaudy hoop of the music-drama, have been mystifying and extraordinary. It coquetted with Brahms, it visited Italy, and for a time took up its abode in the house of Grieg.
In a word, caprice of a deep-seated order has marked the progress of music during the past half-century. I am not speaking now of America, but of the world at large. Chopin died in 1849, Schumann in 1856; with them were buried the ideals that lit the lantern of the romantic school. It has flickered on, this sweet, phosphorescent signal of revolt, but chiefly in the music of imitators. The strong light of thetorch first firmly held by Bach and passed on by men like Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms was not the sort desired of the dreamers. For them the twilight and the strange-winged creatures bred in the twilight; the classical composers—who were romantics in their time—loved too much the luminary of day, and had few favors for melancholy and moonshine.
Then came Richard Wagner, revolutionist, genius by the grace of God, and a marvellous moulder of other men’s ideas. We are no longer alarmed by the senile warnings of the extreme right camp; as for the crazy boasts and affirmations of the musical romantics, we who know our Wagner smile at the godlike things claimed for him. He had genius and his music is genuine; but it is music for the theatre, for the glow of the footlights; rhetorical music is it, and it ever strives for effect. That this cannot be music to touch the tall stars of Bach and Beethoven we know; yet why compare the two methods when they strive for such other and various things? Wagner arrogated everything to his music-dramas; this he had to do or else be left lonely, bawling his wares to unsympathetic listeners in the market-place of art. But he did not hesitate to invade its most sacrosanct precincts to vend his musical merchandise. And we must not criticise him for this—such auctioneering in his case was absolutely necessary.
Wagner caught up into a mighty synthesis allthe loose threads of romanticism, all the widely-severed strands of opera. He studied Bach and Beethoven, and utilized the polyphony of the one, the symphonic orchestra of the other; then, knowing that opera as opera on Rossinian lines had reached its apogee, and that Mozart and Gluck contained in solution the very combinations he needed, he, like the audacious alchemist, the cunning Cagliostro that he was, made a composite that at first smacked of German and then of Italian. He ran through his Rienzi, Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser days, strenuously testing his originality the meanwhile; and when the time had arrived—in his case late in life—he calmly threw overboard old formulas and served us the Ring and the rest of his masterpieces. It was the most deliberate chase after and assumption of genius the world had ever witnessed; and, strange as it seems, the wings that carried Wagner, Icarus-wise, to the vistas of the sun showed no weaknesses, no threatened and precipitous meltings. To change the figure: We know that this conscious composer perfected his style with other men’s ideas; he beat, bruised, battered into shape a method of his own, strong, individual, and all-sufficing for his purpose. He knew that certain subjects could stand operatic treatment, and that your opera orchestra must not be a big guitar, nor yet as symphonic as Beethoven’s. With the prescience of geniushe helped himself to precisely the material he wanted. How well he knew his needs we all realize when we listen to Die Meistersinger and Tristan and Isolde.
George Bernard Shaw, in a long since vanished and brilliant essay, held that “Wagner, like most artists who have great intellectual power, was dominated in the technical work of his gigantic scores by so strong a regard for system, order, logic, symmetry, and syntax that, when in the course of time his melody and harmony become perfectly familiar to us, he will be ranked with Handel as a composer whose extreme regularity of procedure must make his work appear dry to those who cannot catch his dramatic inspiration. If Nordau, having no sense of that inspiration, had said: ‘This fellow, whom you all imagine to be the creator of a new heaven and a new earth in music out of a chaos of poetic emotion, is really an arrant pedant and formalist,’ I should have pricked up my ears and listened to him with some curiosity, knowing how good a case a really keen technical critic could make out for that view.”
Wagner was the last of the great romantics; he closed a period, did not begin one. It is the behavior of the musical cat—to resume our illustration—since Wagner’s death that is so puzzling to the prophets. The sword and the cloak, the midnight alarums and excursions sentimental, occupied for long the foreground;but music discarded adventure when adventure was reëntering the land of letters in the person of Robert Louis Stevenson,—Stevenson who wore his panache so bravely in the very presence of Émile Zola and other evangelists of the drab in fiction. A curious return to soberer ideals of form was led by Johannes Brahms. I may add that this leadership was unsought, indeed was hardly apprehended, by the composer. A more unpromising figure for a musical Messiah would have been difficult to find. Wagner, a brilliant, disputatious, magnetic man, waged a personal propaganda; Brahms, far from being the sympathetic, cultured man of the world that Wagner was, lived quietly and thought highly. His were Wordsworthian ideals; he abhorred the world, the flesh, and the devil,—this last person being incarnate for him in the marriage of music with the drama. Yet his music is alive to-day; alive with a promise and a potency that well-nigh urge me to fatidical utterance, so sane is it, so noble in contrast, so richly fruitful in treatment. A sympathetic writer he is, and also a man who deals largely in the humanities of his art. Learned beyond the dreams of Wagner, Brahms buried his counterpoint in roses, set it to blooming in the Old-World gardens of Germany; decked his science with the sweet, mad tunes of Hungary, withal remaining a Teuton, and one in the direct line of Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert.
And yet Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the infinite. A dazzling, dry light floods his mind at times, and you hear the rustling of wings,—wings of great, terrifying monsters, hippogriffs of horrid mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces with stony stare, menace your imagination. He can bring down within the compass of the octave moods that are outside the pale of mortals. He is a magician, often spectral; yet his songs have the homely lyric fervor and concision of Robert Burns. A groper after the untoward, I have been amazed at certain bars in his F sharp minor sonata, and was stirred by the moonlight tranquillity in the slow movement of the F minor sonata. He is often dull, muddy-pated, obscure, and maddeningly slow. Then lovely music wells out of the mist; you are enchanted, and cry, “Brahms, master, anoint again with thy precious chrism our thirsty eyelids!”
Brahms is an inexorable form maker. His four symphonies, his three piano sonatas, the choral works and chamber music—are they not all living testimony to his admirable management of masses? He is not a great colorist. For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and Théophile Gautier are unsought. Like Puvis de Chavannes, he is a Primitive. Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed upon an enormous rhythmic versatility and a strenuousness of ideation. Ideas—noble, profundity-embracingideas—he has. They are not in the smart, epigrammatic, flashing style of your little man. He disdains racial allusions. He is a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the geographical hints that chain Grieg to the map of Norway. Brahms’s melodies are world typical, not cabined and confined to his native soil. This largeness of utterance, lack of polish, and a disregard for the politeness of his art do not endear him to the unthinking. Yet, what a master miniaturist he is in his little piano pieces, his intermezzi! There he catches the tender sigh of childhood, or the faint intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by desire. Feminine he is as is no woman; virile, as few men. The sinister fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first rhapsodies,—true Brahmsodies,—how they pierce to the core the pessimism of our age!
He reminds me more of Browning than does Schumann. The full-pulsed humanity, the dramatic—yes, Brahms is sometimes dramatic, not theatric—modes of analysis, the relentless tracking to their ultimate lair of motives, are Browning’s; but the composer never loses his grip on the actualities of structure. A great sea is his music, and it sings about the base of that mighty mount we call Beethoven. Brahms takes us to subterrene depths; Beethoven is for the heights. Strong lungs are needed in the company of these giants.
Now comes another enigmatic tangent ofmusic, the heavenly maid. The seed planted by Berlioz and carefully husbanded by Liszt has come to a pretty and a considerable harvest. Of Liszt, whose revolutionary music the world has not yet recognized, this is not the time to write. Only volumes can do justice to his rare genius as a man, artist, and composer. I spoke of the death of Chopin and Schumann stifling the aspirations of the romantics; nothing ever dies, and by an elliptical route there has returned to us something of the fire and fury-signifying passion of these same romantics. All this we find in the music of Peter Tschaïkowsky, all this and more. Tschaïkowsky, artistically, is another descendant of Liszt and Berlioz, with a superadded Slavic color—or, shall I say flavor? Tschaïkowsky deliberately, though without malice, abandoned the old symphonic form. Ravished by what Henry James calls the “scenic idea,” though without compelling talent for the theatre, he poured into the elastic and anonymous mould of the symphonic poem passion and poetry. A poetic dramatist, he selected as typical motives Hamlet, Francesca da Rimini, Romeo and Juliet, Don Juan, Jeanne d’Arc, and Manfred; his six symphonies are romantic suites, resplendent with the pomp and color of an imagination saturated in romanticism. His fierce Cossack temperament and mingling of realistic, sensuous savagery and Malo-Russian mysticism sethim apart among composers. As musical as Wagner or Brahms, he lacks the great central, intellectual grip of these two masters. He never tested his genius with fundamental brainwork. But if we wish a picture of musical psychological life of the latter half of this century, it is to Tschaïkowsky that we must go.
Rubinstein I do not consider a factor in the musical strife. He was an ardent upholder of both camps, and, being a German-Russian and a Russian-German Jew and Lutheran, his eclecticism proved his undoing. Something of the same sort may be said of Saint-Saëns, the clever Frenchman. Grieg built his nest overlooking Norwegian fjords, and built it of bright colored bits of Schumann and Chopin. He is the bird with the one sweet, albeit monotonous note. He does not count seriously. Neither does Dvořák, of Bohemia, who, despite his intimate mastery of orchestral color, has never said anything particularly novel or profound. Smetana is his superior at every point. Eugen d’Albert treads with care the larger footprints of Brahms; and Goldmark, a very Makart in his prodigal amazements of color, has contributed a few canvases to the gallery. But Germany and Austria, with one exception, are dead. I do not count Bruckner; he patterned after Wagner too closely. Italy, with the exception of Boïto, is as bare of big young talent as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. France has Massenet, Bruneau, Saint-Saëns,César Franck, Vincent d’Indy, Fauré, Charpentier, Lalo—!
We have heard little except a string quartet of Claude Debussy’s in New York. The music to Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande is so absolutely wedded to the play, so incidental in the true sense of a much-abused word, that as absolute music it is unthinkable. Hearing it you set the composer down as lacking ear. But Richard Straussviathe music of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz has set the pace for the cacophonists. Debussy, notwithstanding his unquestionable musicianship, is obviously a “literary” composer. That is to say, his brain must first be excited by the contemplation of a dramatic situation, a beautiful bouquet of verse, a picture, a stirring episode in a novel. But why cavil whether the initial impulse for his music be the need of money or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa! A composer who can set Mallarmé’s difficult L’Après Midi, and the more recondite poems of Baudelaire, need not be daunted by criticism as to his methods of work. Take this Pelléas music for example; it is a perfect specimen of decomposition. The musical phrase is dislocated; the rhythms are decomposed, the harmonic structure is pulled to pieces, melts before our eyes—or ears; is resolved into its constituent parts. And his themes are often developed in opposition to all laws of musical syntax. In Debussy’s peculiar idiom thereseems to be no normal sequence—I say seems, for it is simply because our ears are not accustomed to the novel progressions and apparent forced conjunctions of harmonies and thematic fragments. Tonalities are vague, even violently unnatural. The introduction to the forest scene, where Golaud discovers Mélisande is of a singular sweetness. The composer has caught, without anxious preoccupation, the exact note of Maeterlinck, and he never misses the note throughout the opera. As it is impossible to divorce music and text,—Debussy seems to be Maeterlinck’s musical other self,—so it is a useless task to point out the beauties, the ugliness, the characteristic qualities of the score. In the piano partition nothing may be gleaned of its poetic fervor, its bold landscape painting, its psychologic penetration. There are some isolated spots where the orchestra soliloquizes, though few. It is the complete enveloping of Maeterlinck’s strangely beautiful play with a musical atmosphere that wins the attention. It is easy to conceive of the play apart from the music, but not of the music as a separate entity.
Debussy, then, has a musical idiom of his own. He is a stylist and an impressionist. There are purples on his palette—no blacks. If the Western world ever adopted Eastern tonalities, Claude Debussy would be the one composer who would manage its system, with its quarter-tones and split quarters. The man seems awraith from the East; his music was heard long ago in the hill temples of Borneo, was made as a symphony to welcome the head-hunters with their ghastly spoils of war! Debussy’s future should be viewed with suspicion from all the critical watch-towers.
In Belgium there are major talents such as Peter Benoit, Gilson, Edgar Tinel, Jan Blockx, Lekeu, Van der Stucken—the last named was one of the first among the young Belgians to compose tone-poems.
Charles Martin Loeffler is an Alsatian with French blood in his artistic veins. He belongs by affinity to the Belgian group. His symphonic poem is called The Death of Tintagiles after the mysterious and horrible drama of Maurice Maeterlinck—whose plays, despite their exquisite literary quality, act better than they read. Mr. Loeffler’s poem was first produced in Boston under Emil Paur’s direction, January 8, 1898. Then there were two violas d’amore employed in the obligato, perhaps symbolizing the sobbing voices of Tintagiles and Ygraine. Since that performance—when Messrs. Kneisel and Loeffler played the violas—the composer has dispensed with one of these quaint instruments, has remodelled the score and has also re-orchestrated it.
Thoroughly subjective as must ever be the highest type of the symphonic poem, The Death of Tintagiles is rather a series of shifting mood-pictures than an attempt to portray the dramatoo objectively. One feels the horrid suspense of the storm—it is a sinister night!—and what went on behind closed doors in that gloomy castle not far from the sonorous breakers on the beach. There is soul strife, but it is muted. Life here is a tragedy too deep for blood or tears, and the silence—the Loeffler orchestra can suggest hideous and profound silence when playing fortissimo—has the true Maeterlinckian quality.
And then Ygraine’s agony, as she searches for her murdered brother, Tintagiles,—“I have come up, come up high, countless steps between high, pitiless walls,”—can be poignantly felt. Those four harsh knocks, like the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, must surely indicate the tragedy embouched in hidden spaces.
The music, considered as music, is very beautiful. It easily ranks its composer among the stronger of the modern men. Loeffler is primarily a painter, and then a poet. He seldom sounds the big heroic note; he is too subtle, and a despiser of the easily compassed. His orchestral prose is rather the prose of Walter Pater than the prose of—say, Macaulay or Meyerbeer. Despising the cheap and grandiose, he has formulated a style that is sometimes “precious” in its intensity and avoidance of the phrase banal. A colorist, his tints begin where other men’s leave off; and his palette is richer than the rainbow’s. In general “tone” hehovers between the modern Russians and Richard Strauss.
In theme he is Loeffler. The Death of Tintagiles has enclosed within it much lacerating emotion, many new color perspectives, many harmonic devices, and withal a human, though somewhat sublimated human, quality which endears the music at the first hearing.
Despite its psychology, it is always music for music’s sake. There is formal structure—Loeffler’s form—and a distinct climax. The sparing use of the exotic-toned viola d’amore is most telling. The fanfares, recalling the dim triumphs of the dusty dead, are superbly effective; and the cantilena is ever touching. It is all poetic, “atmospheric” music, yet it is none the less moving and dramatic.
Here then is the present situation: Wagner preaching in his music dreams; Tschaïkowsky passionately declaiming the cumulative woes of mankind in accents most pathetically dramatic; Brahms leisurely breasting the turbid billows of this maelstrom and speaking in golden tones the doctrine of art for art’s sake; and, finally, Richard Strauss, aÜbermenschhimself, seeking with furious and rhythmic gestures to divert from the theatre the art he loves—who shall say whither all this will lead? After Wagner—music for music’s own symphonic sake, and not for impossible librettos, acting-singers, and scene-painters.
Stendhal—Henry Beyle—once wrote:—
“Romanticism is the art of presenting to people the literary works which in the actual state of their habits and beliefs are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the contrary, is the art of presenting them with that which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their grandfathers.”
That the reaction from a brutal realism, a minute photography of nasty details, would come in Parisian art was a foregone conclusion to any acute observer of the history of literature, art, and music since Goethe’s imperial mind set the fashion of things in the early years of the last century. The splendor of Théophile Gautier’s famous “gilet rouge,”—he declared that it was a pink doublet,—which graced the memorable days of the first violent representations of Ernani, was naught but a scarlet protest against the frozen classicism of Cherubini the composer, the painters Ingres and David, and the worship of writers like Boileau, Racine, and Malherbe. A wild rush toward romanticism was inevitable after the colorless elegiacs of Lamartine. And the grand old man at Weimar, in the twilight of his glorious career, summed up the whole movement of 1830 by saying:—“They all come from Châteaubriand.”
But Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Delacroix, Chopin, Alfred de Musset, George Sand, Franz Liszt, Heinrich Heine, and later, Charles Baudelaire, in fact all that brilliant coterie which was the nucleus of the artistic rebellion, strove at first independently, with little knowledge of the others’ doings. They possibly came from Châteaubriand, whose Genius of Christianity was but a return to Middle Age ideals: but Walter Scott, with his great romantic historical novels, and Lord Byron, with his glowing, passionate verse, were the true progenitors of the reaction against stiff scholasticism; and their influence even stirred phlegmatic Germany, with its Gallic lacquer, to new and bolder utterances. Heinrich Heine, an exile who spoke of himself as a “German swallow who had built a nest in the periwig of M. Voltaire,” threw himself into the fray with pen dipped in sparkling vitriol and did doughty deeds for the cause.
Frédéric Chopin, despite the limited field of a piano keyboard, was the unconscious centre of all the hazy, purple dreams, drifting ideals, and perfumed sprays of thought that to-day we call romanticism. As the hub of that vast wheel of poesy and gorgeous imaginings, he absorbed the spirit of the time and shot out radiant spokes, which lived after the whole romantic school became a faded flower, a pallid ghost of the yesteryear. Hugo flamed across the historical canvas like a painted scarlet meteor; Berlioz’s mad talent,expressed by his symbolical coloring in orchestration—color carried to insanity pitch—was a lesser musical Hugo. Delacroix, with his brush dipped in the burning sun, painted vertigoes of color and audacities of conception. All was turbulent exaggeration, all was keyed above the normal pitch of life, and in the midst the still, small voice of Chopin could be heard.
The end had come to all monstrous growths of the romantic epoch in French art—be it remembered that earlier the movement was equally as strong in Germany, beginning with Novalis, Schlegel, Tieck, Schubert, Schumann, and Jean Paul Richter; the revolution of 1848 shattered the dream of the mad republicans of art. That sphinx-like nonentity, the third Napoleon, mounted the imperial tribune, and the Cerberus of Realism barked its first hoarse bark. For a time this phantasmagoria dominated Parisian art and letters.
All this was typical of cynicism, unbelief; technical perfection was carried to heights undreamed of, and the outcome of it all was Émile Zola. French painting was realized in the miniature manner of Meissonier, or later in the marvellous brutalities of Degas. Two geniuses who attempted to stem the tide that ran so swiftly died untimely deaths: Georges Bizet, the creator of Carmen, and Henri Regnault, who painted the Moorish Execution in the Luxembourg. The last-named perished before Bougivalin 1871, done to death by a spent Prussian bullet. These two remarkable men, with possibly the addition of Fortuny, the Spanish virtuoso of arabesques in color, might have changed history if they had lived. But the fates willed it otherwise, and realism became the shibboleth.
Even that ardent young group, the Parnassians, as they called themselves, were beguiled into this quagmire of folly and half-truths. La Terre marked the lowest depths of the bog, and again a reaction began. Leconte de Lisle, Sully-Prudhomme, the graceful Banville (a belated romanticist), Coppée, Puvis de Chavannes; the impressionists, Monet, Manet, Rodin, the sculptor; the poets, René Ghil, Catulle Mendès, Verlaine, ill-fated Albert Glatigny, Anatole France, unhappy de Maupassant, and our own countrymen, Stuart Merrill and Vielé-Griffin began steering for other waters. Symbolism, Buddhism, everyismimaginable, have been at the rudder since then. Synthetic subtlety in art was the watchword of the party of new ideas, and a renaissance of the arts seemed to be at hand. For this movement, which agitated artistic Paris, the younger and fierier spirits, musicians, painters, actors, poets, and sculptors, banded, and, emulative of Richard Wagner’s Bayreuthian ideal, began the fabrication of a new art, or rather the synthesis of all arts, which seemed the wildest and most extravagantdream ever conceived by a half-dozen frenzied brains.
The history of art moves in cycles, and each cycle carries with it a residuum of the last. Richard Wagner attempted on a gigantic scale a synthesis of the arts. He wished to condense, concentrate, epitomize in his music-drama the arts of mimicry or pantomime, elocution, singing, painting, sculpture, architecture, drama, and instrumental music. He literally levied tribute on two of the senses and welded them into an ensemble, in which every shade of emotion, particularly the heroic and the tender, was depicted. But Wagner’s genius is, after all, Teutonic in its diffusiveness. He could not escape his national environment.
“Fifteen years ago,” said Paul Bourget, “poetry’s ambition was in picturesqueness and execution to rival painting. To-day it models itself on music. It is preoccupied with effects of mystery, of shadow, of the intangible. This is strikingly illustrated in the verse of Verlaine, whose poetic creed I have given you before in the ‘O la nuance, seule fiance, Le rêve au rêve et la flute au cor.’” These new men are musicians in words. They follow Wagner; above all are they descendants of Edgar Allan Poe, who has literally deflected the mighty wave of French literature into his neglected channel. Ah, if we but appreciated Poe as do our Gallic brethren! Mallarmé and Gustav Kahn produceverbal effects akin to music, with its melancholy mystery.
It is Richard Wagner who has done much of all this, preceded by Poe. Symbolism, a soft green star, is but a pin-prick in the inverted bowl of the night, but it sings like flame in thin glass. Its song is as beautiful as the twilights of Chopin’s garden, or as the wavings of the trees in Wagner’s luminous forest. Slowly but resistlessly, and despite himself,—for Wagner never bridled his tongue where the French were concerned,—this positive force conquered France, and penetrated, not alone the musical world, but to the world of letters, of moral ideas. It is nothing short of a miracle. The revolt all along the line, as manifested by the impressionists in painting, who preferred to use their eyes and see an infinity of tintings in nature, undreamed of by the painters of a generation ago; the poets and littérateurs who formed the new group called The Companions of the New Life, whose aspirations are for the ideal of morality, justice; sculptors like Marc Antokolsky and Auguste Rodin, who sought to hew great ideas from the rude rock, instead of carving lascivious prettiness,—all these new spirits, I say, but fell in with the vast revolution instituted by Richard Wagner. In the region of moral ideas Melchior de Vogüé, Ernest Lavisse, and Paul Desjardins are combating the artistic indifferentism and black despair of the school of materialists, realists,and the rest. A new idea in France germinates as in no other country on the globe, because it finds congenial soil somewhere. From an idea to a school is but a short step, hence the rapidity of the Wagner worship after it once took root.
You notice the inversion! Wagner’s music-drama primarily concerns the woman; she is the protagonist, not Tristan. Even in Act III, where this lover of lovers lies awaiting Isolde and death, it is her psychology which most concerns the composer. So I call it Isolde and Tristan—the subjugation of man by woman.
It was Wagner himself who confessed that he had thrown overboard his theories while penning this marvellous score. In it the music stifles the action. It is the very flowering of the Wagnerian genius; his best self, his fantasy, his wonderful power of making music articulate, are there. And from the tiny acorn in the prelude grows the mighty oak of the symphonic drama.
There is something primal, something of the rankness of nature, of life’s odor and hum, and life’s fierce passions in this music—music before which all other pictures of love made by poet, painter, and composer pale. It is one of the most complex scores in existence; yet it is builtupon but one musical motive. Because of its epical quality Tristan and Isolde may be compared to the works of the Greek dramatists, to the Divine Comedy, to Hamlet, and to Faust.
Its weltering symphonic mass is as the surge and thunder of tropical seas. It seems almost incomprehensible for a single human brain to have conceived and carried to fruition such a magnificent composition. In it are the pains, pleasures, and consoling philosophies of life. Hamlet and Faust are its spiritual brethren. The doubting, brooding spirit of these two dreamers are united to the pessimistic, knightly nature of Tristan. He is human, all too human; as Nietzsche phrased it—but he is also the human glorified.
He has grafted upon his mediæval soul the modern spirit, which we are pleased to believe Schopenhauer typified in his profoundly pessimistic philosophy. But this spirit is as old as Himalaya’s hills. Saka-Munyi sang of the pains of love centuries ago; and the bliss-stricken pair, Tristan and Isolde, dive down to death, groping as they sink, for the problems of life, love, and mortality. Death and Love is the eternal dualism chanted by Wagner in this drama. And has the theme ever been chanted so enthrallingly?
No one of Wagner’s works enchains the imagination as does this glowing picture of love and despair. From the first beautiful prelude to Isolde’s exquisite death-song—one of thosesongs the world will not willingly let perish—we are as in a hypnotic trance. The action is psychologic rather than theatric. We are permitted to view two burning souls; we analyze, rejoice and suffer in their psychical adventures. This is not the drama of romantic wooing and the clash of swords; all conventions of music and drama are set aside, are denied. There is a love philter, but it is not the philter which arouses the fatal love; the love is implicit in the lovers before the curtain lifts.
We are given a night scene of magical beauty—yet how different from the usual banal operatic assignation. In an old-time, Old-World forest a man and a woman have revealed their souls; sobbing in the distance is the soft horn music of the kingly hunt. Now it is love against the world, the relentless instinct that mocks at conventional gyves. Was ever such an enchanting romance sung? The very moonlight seems melodious. After the storm and stress of the first act this scene recalls Heine’s This is the Fairy Wood of Old. Wagner’s philosophy should concern us but little; his music is his metaphysic; its beauty and dramatic significance are worth tomes of his theories. There is the superb web and woof of this tonal tapestry, the most eloquent orchestra that ever stormed or sighed; there is every accent and nuance of human speech, faithfully reproduced; and above all there hovers the imagination of the poet-composer.These thematic nuggets, these motives of love and death, which paint the lives of his men and women—are they not wonderfully conceived, wonderfully developed? Berlioz it was who confessed that the prelude to this music-drama proved ever an enigma to him. Wagner’s melodic curves of intensity mirror the soul’s perturbations. He is poet of passion, a master of thrilling tones, a magician who everywhere finds willing thralls.
And the music—how it searches the nerves. How it throws into the background, because of its intensity, all the love lays ever penned by mortal composer! How it appeals to the intellect with its exalted realism! This music is not for those who admire the pink prettiness of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet. It is music that would have been loved by that “fierce and splendid old man,” Walter Savage Landor, by Shelley, by Byron and Walt Whitman—the latter once confessed to me his love for Wagner; “it makes my old bones sweeter,” he said—but it would not have been admired by Wordsworth or Tennyson. Swinburne adores Wagner almost as much as he adores the sea, and he sings the praise of both with an absence of reserve that recalls themotof Vauvenargues: “To praise moderately is always a sign of mediocrity.”
Yet in Tristan and Isolde are the seeds of the morbid, the hysterical, and the sublimely erotic—hall marks of most great modern works ofart. And there is, too, theKatharsisof Aristotle, the purification by pity and terror. This dominating tragic principle places the drama within the category of the classic.
Ernest Newman, in his Study of Wagner, an epoch-making work in musical criticism, puts the question in its exact bearings. Wagner is a greatmusical-dramatist—his dramas alone could not stand on their legs, so otiose are they. His poetry,quâpoetry, is second-rate; but as “words for music,” words that fly well in the wind of his inspiration, they are unique. This composer was harassed all his life long by the word “drama.” He believed that a perfect union of music and drama could be effected—vain dream—and wasted much valuable time and good white paper trying to prove his thesis. To the end his musical ruled his dramatic instincts; he was always the composer. Tristan and Isolde is the most signal instance of this. Its Greek-like severity of form in the book, its paucity of incident, were so many barriers removed for the poet-composer who, hampered by the awful weight of material in the Ring, had to write ineffectual music at times.
Newman thinks that the last scene of Act II of Isolde and Tristan is an anti-climax. From a theatric viewpoint, yes; but not so if Wagner the composer be considered. If he had dropped the curtain on the infatuated pair—as he does in Act I of Die Walküre—a wholeskein of the moving story would have been missing. The action is pulled up with a jerk by Melot’s entrance; yet what follows is worth a volume of plays with the conventional thrilling “curtain.” Think of the drama without Marke’s speech, without that compassion and love which Isolde and Tristan exhibit, oblivious to all about them! Besides, the scene needs a quieter, withal more tragic, note than the endings of Acts I and III. Suppose that the King, Tristan’s uncle, had been like that other monarch sung of by Heinrich Heine:—
Oh, there’s a king, a grim old king, with beard both long and gray.The king is old. The queen is young. Her face is fresh as May.And there’s a lad, a laughing lad, so blithe and debonair,The queen herself has chosen him, her silken train to bear.How runs the tale, that good grave tale the peasant women tell?“So both of them were put to death, for loving over well.”
Oh, there’s a king, a grim old king, with beard both long and gray.The king is old. The queen is young. Her face is fresh as May.And there’s a lad, a laughing lad, so blithe and debonair,The queen herself has chosen him, her silken train to bear.How runs the tale, that good grave tale the peasant women tell?“So both of them were put to death, for loving over well.”
Oh, there’s a king, a grim old king, with beard both long and gray.The king is old. The queen is young. Her face is fresh as May.And there’s a lad, a laughing lad, so blithe and debonair,The queen herself has chosen him, her silken train to bear.How runs the tale, that good grave tale the peasant women tell?“So both of them were put to death, for loving over well.”
Oh, there’s a king, a grim old king, with beard both long and gray.
The king is old. The queen is young. Her face is fresh as May.
And there’s a lad, a laughing lad, so blithe and debonair,
The queen herself has chosen him, her silken train to bear.
How runs the tale, that good grave tale the peasant women tell?
“So both of them were put to death, for loving over well.”
There has been so much discussion over the so-called slowtempiof Bayreuth that it is time to shatter the little legend with stern facts. A well-known conductor who has presided at Bayreuth relates that when an old man Richard Wagner would occasionally take up the baton and conduct Parsifal or Tristan at a rehearsal. His admiration for his own music—an admiration that was starved during his exile—manifested itself in a tendency to draggingtempi.The venerable composer retarded each bar as if to squeeze from it the last lingering drop of sweetness. This trait was noticed and copied by the younger generation of conductors. The elder group, Richter, Levi, and Seidl had and have the true tradition. The later one simply means that Wagner’s pulse beat was older and slower. To slavishly imitate this is but a sign of the humor-breeding snobbery now so rife at Wahnfried. The music itself is the best refutation of such folly.
Wagner lets Love beckon Death to its side, and together Love and Death, inseparable companions from time’s infancy, close the drama, the king sadly gazing at the meeting of the great clear sky and sea, while Brangaene, near by, is bruised and bent with immitigable grief.
What a picture, what a tale, what music!
“The world will find a wholesome reaction in the study of music from its spiritual side, its inner life. In the laws of tonality the most musical and the least musical will have a common ground of interest. By study of tone, character, or mental effects, we are led to realize that the marvellous intuition of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle was correct, that music is the basis of all human development.” This, by an author unknown to me, is a prophecy of the track that music must take if it is to ascend. Intellectual music, music that does not appeal merely to the feverish nerves of this generation, is what weneed; and by intellectual music I do not mean too complex or abstract music, abstract in the sense of lacking human interest. Is there no mean between the brawls and lusts of Mascagni’s peasant folk and the often abstruse delving of Brahms? Surely to think high means to hear plainly—or else Wordsworth is mistaken. We fret, fumble, and analyze too much in our arts. Why cannot we have the Athenian gladness and simplicity of Mozart, with the added richness of Richard Strauss? Must knowledge ever bring with it pain and weariness of life? Is there no fruit in this Armida garden that is without ashes? Why cannot we accept music without striving to extort from it metaphysical meanings? There is Mozart’s G minor symphony—in its sunny measures is sanity. To perdition with preachers and pedagogues! Open the casements of your soul; flood it with music, and sing with Shelley:—
Music when soft voices dieVibrates in the memory.
Music when soft voices dieVibrates in the memory.
Music when soft voices dieVibrates in the memory.
Music when soft voices die
Vibrates in the memory.