Page:EB1911 - Volume 28.djvu/256

Rh shows traces of the fact that Wagner had begun his scheme in the days when French grand opera, with its ballets and pageantry, still influenced him. There is little doubt that some redundant narratives in the Ring were of earlier conception than the four complete dramas, and that their survival is due partly to Wagner's natural affection for work on which he had spent pains, and partly to a dim notion that (like Browning's method in The Ring and the Book) they might serve to reveal the story afresh in the light of each character. Be this as it may, we may confidently date the purification of Wagner's music at the moment when he set to work on a story which carried him finally away from that world of stereotyped operatic passions into which he had already breathed so much disturbing life.

The disturbing life already appears in Der fliegende Holländer, at the point where Senta's father enters with the Dutchman, and Senta (who is already in an advanced state of Schwärmerei over the legend of the Flying Dutchman) stands rooted to the spot, comparing the living Dutchman with his portrait which hangs over the door. The conflict between her passionate fascination and her disgust at her father's vulgarity is finely realized both in music and drama; but, if we are able to appreciate it, then the operatic convention by which Senta avows her passion becomes crude. Ethical and operatic points of view are similarly confused when it is asserted that the Flying Dutchman can be saved by a faithful woman, though it appears from the relations between Senta and Erik that so long as the woman is faithful to the Dutchman it does not matter that she jilts some one else. Erik would not have been a sufficiently pathetic operatic tenor if his claim on Senta had been less complete. In Tannhäuser and Lohengrin Wagner's intellectual power develops far more rapidly in the drama than in the music. The Sängerkrieg, with its disastrous conflict between the sincere but unnatural asceticism of the orthodox Minnesingers and the irrepressible human passion of Tannhäuser, is a conception the vitality of which would reduce Tannhäuser's repentance to the level of Robert le Diable, were it not that the music of the Sängerkrieg has no structural power, and little distinction beyond a certain poetic value in the tones of violas which had long ago been fully exploited by Mozart and Méhul, while the music of Tannhäuser's pilgrimage ranks with the Vorspiel to Lohengrin as a wonderful foreshadowing of Wagner's mature style. Again, the appeal to “God's judgment” in the trial by battle in Lohengrin is a subject of which no earlier librettist could have made more than a plausible mess—which is the best that can be said for the music as music. But as dramatist Wagner compels our respect for the power that without gloss or apology brings before us the king, a model of royal fair-mindedness and good-nature, acquiescing in Telramund's monstrous claim to accuse Elsa without evidence, simply because it is a hard and self-evident fact that the persons of the drama live in an age in which such claims seemed reasonable. Telramund, again, is no ordinary operatic villain; there is genuine tragedy in his moral ruin; and even the melodramatic Ortrud is a much more life-like intrigante than might be inferred from Wagner's hyperbolical stage-directions, which almost always show his manner at its worst.

In Lohengrin we take leave of the early music that obscured Wagner's ideals, and in the Ring we come to the music which transcends all other aspects of Wagnerism. Had Wagner been a man of more urbane literary intellect he might have been less ambitious of expressing a world-philosophy in music-drama; and it is just conceivable that the result might have been a less intermittent dramatic movement in his later works, and a balance of ethical ideas at once more subtle and more orthodox. But it is much more likely that Wagner would then have found his artistic difficulties too formidable to let the ideas descend to us from Walhalla and the Hall of the Grail at all. More than a modicum of rusticity is needed as a protection to a man who attempts such colossal reforms. This necessity had its consequences in the disquieting inequalities of Wagner's early work, and the undeniable egotism that embittered his fiery nature throughout his life; while the cut-and-dried system of culture of later Wagnerian discipleship has revenged him in a specially

sacerdotal type of tradition, which makes progress even in the study of his works impossible except through revolt. Such are the penalties exacted by the irony of fate for the world's persecution of its prophets.

Genuinely dramatic music, even if it seem as purely musical as Mozart's, must always be approached through its drama; and Wagner's masterpieces demand that we shall use this approach; but, as with Mozart, we must not stop on the threshold. With Mozart there is no temptation to do so. But with Wagner, just as there are people who have never tried to follow a sonata but who have been awakened by his music-dramas to a sense of the possibilities of serious music, so there are lovers of music who avow that they owe to Wagner their appreciation of poetry. But people whose love of literature is more independent find it hard to take Wagner's poetry and prose seriously, unless they have already measured him by his music. He effected no reform in literature; his meticulous adherence to the archaic alliteration of the Nibelungenlied is not allied with any sense of beauty in verbal sound or verse-rhythm; and his ways of expressing emotion in language consist chiefly in the piling-up of superlatives. Yet he was too full of dramatic inspiration to remain perpetually victimized by the conscientious affectations of the amateur author; and, where dramatic situations are not only poetical but (as in the first act of Die Walküre and the Waldweben scene in Siegfried) too elemental for strained language, Wagner is often supremely eloquent simply because he has no occasion to try to write poetry. Sometimes, too, when a great dramatic climax has given place to a lyrical anticlimax, retrospective moods, subtleties of emotion and crowning musical thoughts press in upon Wagner's mind with a closeness that determines every word; and thus not only is the whole third act of Tristan, as Wagner said when he was working at it, of “overwhelming tragic power,” but Isolde's dying utterances (which occupy the last five minutes and are, of course, totally without action or dramatic tension) were not unlike fine poetry even before the music was written. But, as a rule, Wagner's poetic diction must simply be tolerated by the critic who would submit himself to Wagner's ideas.

If we wish to know what Wagner means, we must fight our way through his drama to his music; and we must not expect to find that each phrase in the mouth of the actor corresponds word for note with the music. That sort of correspondence Wagner leaves to his imitators; and his views on “Leit-motif-hunting,” as expressed in his prose writings and conversation, are contemptuously tolerant. We shall indeed find that his orchestra interprets the dramatic situations which his poetry roughly outlines. But we shall also find that, even if we could conceive the poetry to be a perfect expression of all that can be given in words and actions, the orchestra will express something greater; it will not run parallel with the poetry; the Leitmotif system will not be a collection of labels; the musical expression of singer and orchestra will not be a mere heightened resource of dramatic declamation. All that kind of pre-established harmony Wagner left behind him the moment he deserted the heroes and villains of romantic opera for the visionary and true tragedy of gods and demi-gods, giants and gnomes, with beauty, nobility and love in the wrong, and the forces of destruction and hate set free by blind justice.

Let us illustrate Wagner's mature use of Leitmotif by the theme which happens to be associated with Alberich's ring. The fact that this theme is commonly called the “Ring-motif” is a glaring instance of what Wagner has had to endure from his friends. Important as the ring is throughout the tetralogy, Wagner would no more think of associating a theme with it for its own sake than he would think of associating a theme with Wotan's hat. Why should a Ring-motif be transformed into the theme representing Walhalla? Are we to guess that the connexion of ideas is that Wotan had eventually to pay for Walhalla by the ring? But if we attend to the circumstances under which this theme arises, its purport and development become deep and natural. The Rhine-daughters have been teasing the Nibelung Alberich, and are rejoicing in the light of the Rhine-gold which shines at