Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/338

Rh 314 W A G N E K in the principal parts, it achieved an immense success, and undoubtedly laid the foundation of the great composer s fame. Though, in completing Rienzi, Wagner had put forth all the strength he then possessed, that work was far from representing his preconceived ideal. This he now en deavoured to embody in Der Fliegende Hollander, for which, as before, he composed both the libretto and the music. In this fine work we find the first sign of his determination to sacrifice all considerations of traditional form and symmetrical construction to the dramatic exigencies of the story. It is true, this great principle was but very faintly announced in the new work, and in an evidently tentative form ; but the success of the experi ment was incontestable, though it took some time to convince the world of the fact. The piece was warmly received at Dresden, January 2, 1843 ; but its success was by no means equal to that of Rienzi. Spohr, however, promptly discovered its merits, and produced it at Cassel some months later, with very favourable results. Wagner was now fairly launched upon his arduous career. On February 2, 1843, he was formally installed as hofkapellmeister at the Dresden theatre, and he cele brated the event by at once beginning the composition of a new opera. For the subject of this he selected the legend of Tannhauser, collecting his materials from the ancient &quot; Tannhauser-Lied,&quot; 1 the Volksbuch, Tieck s poetical Erzahhing, Hoffmann s story of Der Sdngerkrieg, and the mediaeval poem on Der Wartburgkrieg. This last-named legend introduces the incidental poem of &quot; Loherangrin,&quot; and led to the study of Wolfram von Eschenbach s Parzival und Titurel, with strange effect upon Wagner s subsequent inspirations. But for the present he confined himself to the subject in hand; and on October 19, 1845, he produced his Tannhauser, with Madame Schroeder Devrient, Fraulein Johanna Wagner, 2 Herr Tichatschek, and Herr Mittervvurzer in the principal parts. Notwith standing this powerful cast, the success of the new work was not brilliant, for it carried still farther the principles embodied in Der Fliegende Hollander, and these principles were not yet understood either by the public or the critics. But Wagner boldly fought for them, and would probably have gained the victory much sooner than he did had he not taken a fatally prominent part in the political agitations of 1849, after which his position in Dresden became un tenable. In fact, after the flight of the king, and the subsequent suppression of the riots by troops sent from Berlin, a formal act of accusation was drawn up against him, and he had barely time to escape to Weimar, where Liszt was at that moment engaged in preparing Tannhauser for performance at the court theatre, before the storm burst upon him with a violence that seriously alarmed both his friends and himself. Without the loss of a moment Liszt procured a passport, and escorted his guest as far as Eisenach. Wagner pro ceeded in all haste to Paris, and thence to Zurich, where, with few interruptions, he lived in strict retirement until the autumn of 1859. And it was during this period that most of his literary productions including Oper und Drama, Ueber das Dirigiren, Das Judenthum in der Alusik, and other like works were given to the world. We have spoken of Wagner s incidental study of the legends of &quot;Loherangrin&quot; and &quot; Parzival &quot; during the time that he was preparing the libretto of Tannhauser. After the production of that opera he again recurred to the subject, chose Lohengrin as the title for his next opera, and elaborated the conception with his usual minute and affectionate care, carrying out his new principles somewhat 1 Preserved in Uhland s Alte hoch- u. niedcr-dcutsche Volksliedcr. 2 The composer s niece. farther than he had hitherto ventured to do. He had com pleted the work before he fled from Dresden, but could not get it produced. Hoping against hope, he took the score with him to Paris, and, as he himself tells us, &quot; when ill, miserable, and despairing, I sat brooding over my fate, my eye fell on the score of my Lohengrin, which I had totally forgotten. Suddenly I felt something like compassion that the music should never sound from off the death-pale paper. Two words I wrote to Liszt; his answer was the news that preparations were being made for the performance of the work, on the grandest scale that the limited means of Weimar would permit. Everything that care and acces sories could do was done to make the design of the piece understood. Liszt saw what was wanted at once, and did it. Success was his reward ; and with this success he now approaches me, saying, Behold we have come thus far ; now create us a new work, that we may go farther .&quot; Lohengrin was, in fact, produced at Weimar, under Liszt s direction, on August 28, 1850. It was a severe trial to Wagner not to be permitted to hear his own work, but he knew that all that could be done for it was done, and he responded to Liszt s appeal for a new creation by meditating upon his famous tetralogy, Der Ring des Xibelungen, the four divisions of which Das Rheingold, Die Walkiire, Siegfried, and G otter dammemng though each as long as an ordinary opera, are in reality but parts of one colossal whole. At this time, also, he first began to lay out the plan of Tristan und Isolde, and to think over the possibilities of Parsifal. It is in these later works, and in Die Heistcrsincjcr von Niirriberg, the first sketch for which had been made at Dresden in 1845, that the genius of Wagner reaches its culminating point; and it is in these only that his great plan for the reformation of the musical drama is fully and honestly carried out. In order to understand this plan, we must first inquire what kind of reformation was needed. What were the abuses that demanded redress? What were the causes that had led to the decline of the opera from a higher state of perfection than that which it exhibited in the middle of the 19th century if, indeed, it ever did exhibit a higher state of perfection than that ? What, in short, had been the history of the musical drama during the two centuries and a half that had elapsed between its first invention and its arrival at the condition in which Wagner found it when he first began to compose for the stage ? The story is a very simple one, and may be told in a very few words; but it was not without an immensity of deep thought and earnest consideration that Wagner was able to grapple with the gigantic practical difficulties with which the case was sur rounded. The possibility of constructing a musical drama on reasonable principles was first seriously discussed during the closing years of the 16th century, at certain reunions of literary and artistic dilettanti, who were accustomed to meet periodically at the palazzo of Giovanni Bardi, Conte di Vernio, in Florence. The principal members of the little society were Ottavio Einuccini the poet, Vincenzo Galilei the father of the great astronomer, Giulio Caccini, Jacopo Peri, Pietro Strozzi, and the Coute di Vernio himself. All these earnest savants were deeply embued with the principles of the Renaissance, and regarded the traditions of classical antiquity with a reverence which led them to hold the greatest creations of modern art in undisguised contempt. The music of Palestrina and the great composers of the contrapuntal schools they utterly de spised ; and their one idea was to revive the system of declamation peculiar to Greek tragedy, and by means of that to produce a form of drama which could be consistently sung throughout as the trilogies of j-Esc.hylus and Sophocles were sung by the Greeks. So far their aim was identical with Wagner s. The difference lay in the means by which this aim was to be attained. Wagner himself tells us that, while occupied upon Lohengrin, he looked upon his work as &quot;an experiment towards determining whether or not opera was possible.&quot; And in other places he speaks of the question whether or not the modern spirit can produce a theatre that shall stand in relation to modern culture as the theatre of Athens stood in relation to the culture of ancient Greece. He believed that this might be accomplished by reforming the opera from the stand point of P)cethoven s music. The friends of the Conte di Vernio had hoped to accomplish it by restoring the actual music of the Greek drama. But this was impossible. For Greek music was based upon a system of tonality which, even in the time of Galilei, had been obsolete for centuries. The Greek scales and ours differ so widely in their radical construction that no vocalist accustomed