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WAGNER, WILHELM RICHARD (1813-1883)
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See also:WAGNER, WILHELM See also:RICHARD (1813-1883) , See also:German dramatic composer, poet and See also:essay-writer, was See also:born at See also:Leipzig on the 22nd of May 1813. In 1822 he was sent to the Kreuzschule at See also:Dresden, where he did so well that, four years later, he translated the first twelve books of the Odyssey for amusement. In 1828 he was removed to the Nicolaischule at Leipzig, where he was less successful. His first See also:music See also:master was Gottlieb See also: Wagner failed to gain a footing, and Rienzi, destined for the See also:Grand Opera, was rejected. He completed it, however, and in 1842 it was produced at Dresden, where, with Madame Schroeder See also:Devrient and Herr Tichatschek in the See also:principal parts, it achieved a success which went far to make him famous. But though in Rienzi Wagner had shown See also:energy and ambition, that See also:work was far from representing his preconceived ideal. This he now endeavoured to embody in Der fliegende Hollander, for which he designed a libretto quite See also:independent of any other treatment of the See also:legend. The piece was warmly received at Dresden on the 2nd of See also:January 1843; but its success was by no means equal to that of Rienzi. See also:Spohr, however, promptly discovered its merits, and produced it at See also:Cassel some months later, with very favourable results. On the 2nd of See also:February 1843 Wagner was formally installed as Hofkapellmeister at the Dresden theatre, and he soon set to work on a new opera. He See also:chose the legend of See also:Tannhauser, See also:collecting his materials from the See also:ancient Tannhauser-Lied, the Volksbuch, See also:Tieck's poetical Erzahlung, See also:Hoffmann's See also:story of Der Sangerkrieg, and the See also:medieval poem on Der Wartburgkrieg. This last-named legend introduces the incidental poem of " Loherangrin," and so led Wagner. to the study of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and Titurel, with See also:great results later on. But for the See also:present he confined himself to the subject in See also:hand; and on the 19th of See also:October 1845 he produced his Tannhauser, with Schroeder Devrient, Johanna Wagner,' Tichatschek and Mitterwurzer in the principal parts. Notwithstanding this powerful See also:cast, the success of the new work was not brilliant, for it carried still further the principles embodied in Der fliegende Hollander, and the See also:time was not ripe for them. But Wagner boldly fought for them, and might have prevailed earlier had he not taken See also:part in the See also:political agitations of 1849, after which his position in Dresden became untenable. In fact, after the See also:flight of the See also: The scheme for See also:building a new theatre at See also:Munich having been abandoned, there was no opera-See also:house in See also:Germany See also:fit for so See also:colossal a work. A project was therefore started for the erection of a suitable building at See also:Bayreuth (q.v.). Wagner laid the first See also: The first sixteen performances took See also:place at Bayreuth, in See also:July and August 1882, under Wagner's own directing, and fully realized all expectations. Unhappily the exertion of directing so many consecutive performances seems to have been too much for the See also:veteran master's strength, for towards the See also:close of 1882 his See also:health began to decline rapidly. He spent the autumn at See also:Venice, and was well enough on See also:Christmas See also:Eve to conduct his See also:early symphony (composed in 1833) at a private performance given at the Liceo See also:Marcello. But See also:late in the afternoon of the 13th of February 1883 his See also:friends were shocked by his sudden death from See also:heart-failure. Wagner was buried at Wahnfried in the tomb he had himself prepared, on the 18th of February; and a few days afterwards King See also:Ludwig rode to Bayreuth alone, and at dead of See also:night, to pay his last See also:tribute to the master of his world of dreams. (W. S. R.; D. F. T.) In the articles on Music and OPERA, Wagner's task in music-drama is described, and it remains here to discuss his progress in the operas themselves. This progress has perhaps no parallel in any See also:art, and certainly none in music, for even See also:Beethoven's progress was purely an increase in range and See also:power. Beethoven, we know, lost sympathy with his early works as he See also:grew older; but that was because his later works absorbed his See also:interest, not because his early works misrepresented his ideals. Wagner's earlier works have too See also:long been treated as if they represented the pure and healthy childhood of his later ideal; as if Lohengrin stood to Parsifal as See also:Haydn, See also:Mozart and early Beethoven stand to Beethoven's last quartets. But Wagner never thus represented the childhood of an ideal, though he attained the manhood of the most comprehensive ideal yet known in art. To See also:change the See also:metaphor—the ideal was always in sight, and Wagner never swerved from his path towards it; but that path began in a See also:blaze of garish false See also:lights, and it had become very tortuous before the See also:light of See also:day prevailed. Beethoven was trained in the greatest and most advanced musical tradition of his time. For all his Wagnerian impatience, his progress was no struggle from out of a squalid environment; on the contrary, one of his latest discoveries was the greatness of his master Haydn. Now Wagner's excellent teacher Weinlig did certainly, as Wagner himself testifies, See also:teach him more of See also:good music than Beethoven, Liszt saw what was wanted at once, and did it. Success was his See also:reward; and with this success he now approaches me, saying " See, we have come thus far; now create us a new work, that we may go further." Lohengrin was, in fact, produced at Weimar under Liszt's direction on the 28th of August 1850. It was a severe trial to Wagner not to hear his own work, but he knew that it was in good hands, and he responded to Liszt's See also:appeal for a new creation by studying the See also:Nibelungenlied and gradually shaping it into a gigantic tetralogy. At this time also he first began to See also:lay out the See also:plan of See also:Tristan and Isolde, and to think over the possibilities of Parsifal. During his See also:exile Wagner matured his plans and perfected his musical See also:style; but it was not until some considerable time after his return that any of the works he then meditated were placed upon the See also:stage, In 1855 he accepted an invitation to London, where he conducted the concerts of the Philharmonic Society with great success. In 1857 he completed the libretto of Tristan and Isolde at Venice, adopting the See also:Celtic legend modified by Gottfried of Strasburg's medieval version. But the music was delayed until the See also:strange incident of a See also:message from the See also:emperor of See also:Brazil encouraged Wagner to complete it in 1859. In that year Wagner visited Paris for the third time; and after much negotiation, in which he was nobly supported by the See also:Prince and Princess Metternich, Tannhduser was accepted at the Grand Opera. Magnificent preparations were made; it was rehearsed 164 times, 14 times with the full See also:orchestra; and the scenery and dresses were placed entirely under the composer's direction. More than £8000 was expended upon the venture; and the work was performed for the first time in the See also:French See also:language and with the new Venusberg music on the 13th of See also: King Ludwig of See also:Bavaria was much struck with it, and in 1864 invited Wagner, who was then at See also:Stuttgart, to come to Munich and finish his work there. Wagner accepted with rapture. The king gave him an See also:annual See also: Wagner was always an omnivorous reader, and books were then, as now, both cheaper than music and easier to read. Moreover, the higher problems of rhythmic See also:movement in the classical See also:sonata forms are far beyond the See also:scope of See also:academic teaching, which is compelled to be contented with a See also:practical plausibility of musical design; and the instrumental music which was considered the highest style of art in 183o was as far beyond Wagner's early command of such plausibility as it was obviously already becoming a See also:mere academic See also:game. Lastly, the rules of that game were useless on the stage, and Wagner soon found in See also:Meyerbeer a master of grand opera who was dazzling the world by means which merely disgusted the more serious academic musicians of the day. In Rienzi Wagner would already have been Meyerbeer's See also:rival, but that his sincerity, and his initial lack of that musical savoir faire which is See also:prior to the individual handling of ideas, put him at a disadvantage. Though Meyerbeer wrote much that is intrinsically more dull and vulgar than the overture to Rienzi, he never combined such serious efforts with a technique so like that of a military bandmaster. The step from Rienzi to Der fliegende Hollander is without parallel in the See also:history of music, and would be inexplicable if Rienzi contained nothing good and if Der fliegende Hollander did not contain many reminiscences of the decline of See also:Italian opera; but it is noticeable that in this See also:case the lapses into vulgar music have a distinct dramatic value. Though Wagner cannot as yet be confidently credited with a satiric intention in his See also:bathos, the fact remains that all the Rossinian passages are associated with the character of Daland, so as to See also:express his vulgar delight at the prospect of finding a rich son-in-See also:law in the mysterious Dutch See also:seaman. Meanwhile the See also:rest of the work (except in the prettily scored " See also:Spinning See also:Song," and other harmless and vigorous tunes) has more See also:affinity with Wagner's mature style than the bulk of its much more ambitious successors, Tannhauser and Lohengrin. The wonderful overture is more highly organized and less unequal than that of Tannhauser; and although Wagner uses less Leit-motif than See also:Weber (see OPERA, ad fin.) and divides the piece into " See also:numbers " of classical See also:size, the effect is so continuous that the divisions could hardly be guessed by See also:ear. Moreover, the work was intended to be in one See also:act, and is now so performed at Bayreuth; and, although it is very long for a one-act opera, this is certainly the only See also:form which does See also:justice to Wagner's conception.' Spohr's appreciation of Der fliegende Hollander is a remarkable point in musical history; and his See also:criticism that Wagner's style (in Tannhauser) " lacked rounded periods " shows the best effect of that style on a well-disposed contemporary mind. Of course, from Wagner's mature point of view his early style is far too much cut up by periods and full closes; and its prophetic traits are so incomparably more striking than its resemblance to any earlier art that we often feel that only the full closes stand between it and the true Wagner. But Spohr would feel Wagner's works to be an advance upon contemporary romantic opera rather than a foreshadowing of an unknown future. When we listen to the See also:free declamation of the singers at the outset of Der fliegende Hollander—a declamation which is accompanied by ' The subsequent See also:division into three acts, as given in all the published See also:editions, has been effected in the crudest way by inserting a full close in the orchestral interludes at the changes of See also:scene, and then beginning the next scene by taking up the interludes again. The true version can be recovered from the published score as follows: In act i skip from the last See also:bar but four to the gist bar of the introduction to the 2nd act; and at the end of the 2nd act skip from the last bar but five to the 8th bar of the entr'acte to the 3rd act.an orchestral and thematic texture as far removed from that of mere recitative as it is from the forms of the classical See also:aria—the repetition of a whole See also:sentence in See also:order to form a See also:firm musical close has almost as See also:quaint a ring as a Shakespearean rhymed tag would have in a prose drama of See also:Ibsen. To Spohr the frequency of these incidents must have produced the impression that Wagner was perpetually beginning arias and breaking them off at once. With all its defects, Der fliegende Hollander is the most masterly and the least unequal of Wagner's early works. As drama it stood immeasurably above any opera since See also:Cherubini's Medee. As a complete See also:fusion between dramatic and musical movement, its very crudities point to its immense advance towards the See also:solution of the problem, propounded chaotically at the beginning of the 17th See also:century by See also:Monteverde, and solved in a See also:simple form by See also:Gluck. And as the twofold musical and dramatic achievement of one mind, it already places Wagner beyond parallel in the history of art. Tannhauser is on a grander scale, but its musical See also:execution is disappointing. The weakest passages in Der fliegende Hollander are not so helpless as the original recitatives of See also:Venus in the first act; or Tannhauser's song, which was too far involved in the whole scheme to be ousted by the mature " New Venusberg music " with which Wagner fifteen years later got rid both of the end of the overture and what he called his " Palais-Royal " Venus. It is really very difficult to understand See also:Schumann's impression that the musical technique of Tannhauser shows a remarkable improvement. Not until the third act does the great Wagner arbitrate in the struggle between amateurishness and theatricality in the music, though at all points his See also:epoch-making stagecraft asserts itself with a force that tempts us to treat the whole work as if it were on the Wagnerian See also:plane of Tannhauser's See also:account of his See also:pilgrimage in the third act. But the history of See also:mid-19thcentury music is unintelligible until we See also:face the fact that, when the See also:anti-Wagnerian storm was already at its height, Wagner was still fighting for the recognition of music which was most definite just where it realized with ultra-Meyerbeerian brilliance all that Wagner had already begun to detest. No contemporary, unaided by See also:personal knowledge, could be expected to See also:trust in Wagner's purity of ideal on the strength of Tannhauser, which actually achieved popularity by such coarse methods of See also:climax as the revivalistic end of the overture, by such maudlin pathos as 0 du mein holder Abendstern, and by the amiably childish grand-opera skill with which See also:half the See also:action is achieved by processions and a considerable fraction of the music is represented by fanfares. These features established the work in a position which it will always maintain by its unprecedented dramatic qualities and by the See also:glory reflected from Wagner's later achievements; but we shall not appreciate the marvel of its nobler features if we continue at this time of day to regard the bulk of the music as worthy of a great composer. After even the finest things in Tannhauser, the Vorspiel to Lohengrin comes as a See also:revelation, with its quiet solemnity and breadth of design, its ethereal purity of See also:tone-See also:colour, and its complete emancipation from earlier operatic forms. The suspense and climax in the first act is so intense, and the whole drama is so well designed, that we must have a very vivid See also:idea of the later Wagner before we can see how far the quality of musical thought still falls See also:short of his ideals. The elaborate choral See also:writing sometimes rises to almost Hellenic regions of dramatic art; and there is no crudeness in the passages that carry on the story quietly in reaction from the climaxes—a test far too severe for Tannhauser and rather severe for even the mature works of Gluck and Weber. The orchestration is already almost classically Wagnerian; though there remains an excessive amount of tremolo, besides a few lapses into comic violence, as in the yelpings which accompany Ortrud's rage in the night-scene in the second act. But the mere tone-See also:colours of that scene are enough to make a casual listener imagine that he is dealing with the true Wagner: the variety of tone never fails, and depends on no immoderate See also:paraphernalia; for, far-reaching as are the results of the systematic increase of the classical pairs of See also:wind-See also:instruments to See also:groups of three, this is a very modest reform compared to the banausic " extra attractions " of every new production of Meyerbeer's. But there is another See also:side to the picture. With the growing certainty of See also:touch a stiffness of movement appears which gradually disturbs the listener who can appreciate freedom, whether in the classical forms which Wagner has now abolished, or in the majestic flow of Wagner's later style. Full closes and repeated sentences no longer confuse the issue, but in their See also:absence we begin to See also:notice the incessant squareness of the ostensibly free rhythms. The immense amount of pageantry, though (as in Tannhauser) good in dramatic See also:motive and executed with splendid stage-See also:craft, goes far to stultify Wagner's already vigorous attitude of protest against grand-opera methods; by way of preparation for the ethereally poetic end he gives us a disinfected present from Meyerbeer at the beginning of the last scene, where mounted trumpeters career See also:round the stage in full blast for three long minutes; and the prelude to the third act is an outburst of sheer gratuitous vulgarity. Again, the anti-Wagnerians were entirely justified in penetrating below the splendidly simple and original orchestration of the night-scene between Ortrud and Telramund, and pointing out how feebly its music drifts among a dozen vague keys by means of the diminished 7th; a See also:device which teachers have tried to See also:weed out of every high-flown exercise since that otiose chord was first discovered in the 17th century. The mature Wagner would not have carried out twenty bars in his flattest scenes with so little musical invention. We must not forget that these boyish demerits belong to the work of a See also:man of See also:thirty-five whose claims and aspirations already purported to See also:dwarf the whole See also:record of the See also:classics. And the defects are in all respects See also:commonplace; they have no resemblance to that uncanny discomfort which often warns the See also:wise critic that he is dealing with an immortal. The crowning complication in the effect of Der fliegende Hollander, Tannhauser and Lohengrin on the musical thought of the rgth century was that the unprecedented fusion of their musical with their dramatic contents revealed some of the meaning of serious music to ears that had been See also:deaf to the classics. Wagnerism was henceforth proclaimed out of the mouths of babes and sucklings; learned musicians felt that it had an unfair See also:advantage; and by the time Wagner's popularity began to thrive as a persecuted See also:heresy he had See also:left it in the See also:lurch. Wagner had hardly finished the score of Lohengrin before he was at work upon the poem of Der Ring des Nibelungen. And with this he suddenly became a mature artist. On a superficial view this is a See also:paradox, for there are many more violations of pronability and much graver faults of structure in the later works than in the earlier. Every critic could recognize the structural merits of the earlier plays, for their operatic conventionalities and abruptness of motive are always intelligible as stage devices. See also:Jealousy might prompt a doubt whether these plays were within the scope of " legitimate " music; but they were obviously stories of exceptional musical and romantic beauty, presented with See also:literary resources unprecedented in operatic libretti. Now the later dramas are often notoriously awkward and redundant; while the removal of those convenient operatic devices which symbolize situations instead of developing them, does not readily appear to be compensated for by any See also:superior See also:artistic resource. But there is a higher point of view than that of story-telling. In the development of characters and intellectual ideas Wagner's later works show a power before which his earlier stagecraft shrinks into insignificance. It would not have sufficed even to indicate his later ideas. To handle these so successfully that we can discriminate defects from qualities at all, is See also:proof of the technique of a master, even though the faults extend to whole categories of literature. The faults make See also:analysis exceptionally difficult, for they are no longer commonplace; indeed, the gravest dangers of See also:modern Wagnerism arise from the fact that there is hardly any non-musical aspect in which Wagner's later work is not important enough to produce a school of essentially non-musical critics who have no notion how far Wagner's mature music transcends the rest of his thought, tier how often it rises where his See also:philosophy falls. Thus theprominent school of criticism which appraised Wagner in the 19th century by his approximation to See also:Darwin and See also:Herbert See also:Spencer, appraises him in the aoth by his approximation to See also:Bernard See also:Shaw; with the absurd result that Gotterdammerung is ruled out as a reactionary failure. It is true that its only conceivable moral is flatly the opposite of that " redemption by love " which Wagner strenuously preaches in a passage at the end which remained unset because he considered it already expressed by the music. Indeed, though Wagner's later treatment of love is perhaps the See also:main source of his present popularity it seldom rises to his loftiest regions except where it is thwarted. The love that is disguised in the deadly See also:feud between Isolde and Tristan, before the drinking of the fatal potion, rises even above the music; the love-See also:duet in the second act depends for its greatness on its introduction, before the lovers have met, and its wonderful slow movement (shortly before the See also:catastrophe) where they are almost silent and leave everything to the music: the intervening twenty minutes is an exhausting storm in which the words are the sophisticated See also:rhetoric of a 19th-century novel of See also:passion, translated into terribly turgid See also:verse and set to music that is more interesting as an intellectual ferment than effective as a representation of emotions which previous dramatists have wisely left to the See also:imagination. But so long as we treat Wagner like a prose philosopher, a librettist, a poet, a mere musician, or anything short of the complex and many-sided artist he really is, we shall find insuperable obstacles to under-See also:standing or enjoying his works. A true work of art is incomparably greater than the sum of its ideas; apart from the fact that, if its ideas are innumerable and various, prose philosophers are See also:apt to complain that it has none. And every additional idea that does not merely derange an art enlarges it as it were by a new See also:dimension in space. Wagner added all the arts to each other, and in one of them he attained so consummate a mastery that we can confidently turn to it when his words and doctrines fail us. Even when we treat him merely as a dramatist our enjoyment of his later works gains enormously if we take them as organic wholes, and not as mere plots dressed up in verse and action. It matters little that Parsifal requires two nameless attendant characters in a long opening scene, for the See also:sole purpose of telling the antecedents of the story, when a situation is thereby revealed which for subtlety and power has hardly a parallel since See also:Greek tragedy. The vast myth of the Ring is related in full several times in each of the three main dramas, with ruthless disregard for the otherwise magnificent dramatic effect of the whole; hosts of original dramatic and ethical ideas, with which Wagner's See also:brain was even more fertile than his voluminous prose works would indicate, assert them-selves at all points, only to be thwarted by repeated attempts to allegorize the philosophy of See also:Schopenhauer; all efforts to read a consistent scheme, ethical or philosophical, into the result are doomed to failure; but all this matters little, so long as we have Wagner's unfailing later resources in those higher dramatic verities which present to us emotions and actions, human and divine, as things essentially complex and conflicting, inevitable as natural See also:laws, incalculable as natural phenomena. Wagner's choice of subjects had from the outset shown an imagination far above that of any earlier librettist; yet he had begun with stories which could attract See also:ordinary minds, as he dismally realized when the libretto of Der fliegende Hollander so pleased the Parisian See also:wire-pullers that it was promptly set to music by one of their friends. But with Der Ring des Nibelungen Wagner devoted himself to a story which any ordinary dramatist would find as unwieldy as, for instance, most of Shakespeare's subjects; a. story in which ordinary canons of taste and See also:probability were violated as they are in real life and in great art. Wagner's first See also:inspiration was for an opera (Siegfried's See also:Tod, projected in 1848) on the death of Germany's mythical See also:hero; but he found that the story needed a preliminary drama to convey its antecedents. This preliminary drama soon proved to need another to explain it, which again finally needed a short introductory drama. Thus the plan of the Ring was sketched in See also:reverse order; and it has been remarked that Gotterdammerung 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 See also:affection for work on which he had spent pains, and partly to a dim notion that (like See also:Browning's method in The Ring and the See also: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 See also: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 Hollander, at the point where Senta's See also:father enters with the Dutchman, and Senta (who is already in an advanced See also:state of Schwdrmerei over the legend of the Flying Dutchman) stands rooted to the spot, comparing the living Dutchman with his portrait which hangs over the See also:door. The conflict between her passionate See also: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 See also: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 See also: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 Tannhduser and Lohengrin Wagner's intellectual power develops far more rapidly in the drama than in the music. The Sdngerkrieg, with its disastrous conflict between the sincere but unnatural See also:asceticism of the orthodox See also:Minnesingers and the irrepressible human passion of Tannhauser, is a conception the vitality of which would reduce Tannhauser's repentance to the level of See also:Robert le Diable, were it not that the music of the Sangerkrieg 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 Maul, while the music of Tannhauser's pilgrimage ranks with the Vorspiel to Lohengrin as a wonderful foreshadowing of Wagner's mature style. Again, the appeal to " See also:God's See also:judgment " in the trial by' See also:battle in Lohengrin is a subject of which no earlier librettist could have made more than a plausible See also: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 See also:gloss or See also:apology brings before us the king, a See also:model of royal See also:fair-mindedness and good-nature, acquiescing in Telramund's monstrous claim to accuse Elsa without See also:evidence, simply because it is a hard and self-evident fact that the persons of the drama live in an See also:age in which such claims seemed See also:reason-able. 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 See also: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 See also: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 See also:protection to a man who attempts such colossal reforms. This See also: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 See also:system of culture of later Wagnerian discipleship has revenged him in a speciallysacerdotal type of tradition, which makes progress even in the study of his works impossible except through revolt. Such are the penalties exacted by the See also: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 See also:threshold. With Mozart there is no temptation to do so. But with Wagner, just as there are See also: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 See also: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 See also:meticulous adherence to the archaic See also:alliteration of the Nibelungenlied is not allied with any sense of beauty in verbal sound or verse-See also: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 See also:amateur author; and, where dramatic situations are not only poetical but (as in the first act of Die Walkure 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 See also:anticlimax, retrospective moods, subtleties of emotion and crowning musical thoughts See also: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 See also:fine poetry even before the music was written. But, as a See also: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 See also:note with the music. That sort of See also:correspondence Wagner leaves to his imitators; and his views on " Leit-motifhunting," 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 See also:singer and orchestra will not be a mere heightened resource of dramatic declamation. All that See also:kind of pre-established See also: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 See also:gnomes, with beauty, See also:nobility and love in the wrong, and the forces of destruction and hate set free by See also: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 See also:sake than he would think of associating a theme with Wotan's See also: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 See also:Rhine-daughters have been teasing the Nibelung Alberich, and are rejoicing in the light of the Rhine-See also:gold which shines at the See also:top of a See also:rock as the See also:sun strikes it through the See also:water. Alberich does not think much of the gold if its only use is for these water-See also:children's See also:games. But one of the Rhine-daughters tells him that " he who could make the gold into a ring would become master of the world," and to these words the so-called Ring-motif is first sung (see See also:MELODY, Example r 7). The Rhine-daughter sings it in a childlike, indolently graceful way which well expresses the kind of See also:toy the ring or the world itself would be to her. One of her sisters bids her be careful, but they reassure them-selves with the thought that the Rhine-gold is safe, since no one can win it who does not renounce love. Alberich broods over what he hears, and already the theme changes its character as he thinks of such mastery of the world as he might gain by it (MELODY, Ex. 12). He curses love and grasps the gold. The theme of world-mastery grows dark with the darkness of the Nibelung's mind. The See also:waters of the Rhine change into See also:black mists which grow See also:grey and thin, while the now sinister theme becomes softer and smoother. Then it breaks gently forth in a See also:noble, swinging rhythm and massively soft brazen tones, as Wotan awakes on a See also:mountain height and gazes upon Walhalla, his newly finished See also:palace which he has bid the giants build, so that from it he may rule the world (MELODY, Ex. 13). The theme thus shows no trivial connexion with a stage-See also:property, mechanic-ally important in the See also:plot; but it represents the See also:desire for power, and what that desire means to each different type of mind. The gods, as the giants plaintively admit, " rule by beauty"; hence the " Walhalla-motif." What it becomes in the mind of the Nibelung is grimly evident when Alberich uses his ring in Nibelheim. The Rhine-daughters' exultant cry of " Rhine-gold " is there tortured in an extremely remote modulation at the end of a very sinister transformation of the theme; and the orchestration, with its lurid but smothered See also:brass instruments, its penetrating See also:low See also:reed tones and its weird See also:drum-See also:roll beaten on a suspended cymbal, is more See also:awe-inspiring than anything dreamed of by the cleverest of those composers who do not create intellectual causes for their effects. A famous and typical instance of Wagner's use of Leitmotif in tragic irony is the passage where See also:Hagen gives Siegfried friendly welcome, to the melody of the curse which Alberich pronounced on the ring and all who approached it. The more subtle examples are inexhaustible in variety and resource; and perhaps the climax of subtlety is the almost entire absence of Leitmotif in the first scene of the third act of Gotterddmmcrung, when Siegfried throws away his last See also:chance of averting his See also:doom. The Rhine-daughters appear to him, and ask him to give them the ring that is on his See also:finger. Siegfried refuses. They laugh at his stinginess and disappear. Siegfried is piqued, and calls them back to offer them the ring. Unfortunately they tell him of its curse, and prophesy death to him if he keeps it. This arouses his spirit of See also:contradiction; and he tells them that they might have won it from him by coaxing, but never by threats, and that he values his life no more than the stone he tosses away as he speaks to them. In spite of the necessary allusions to the ominous theme of the curse, which would give any less great composer ample excuse for succumbing to the listener's sense of impending doom, Wagner's music speaks to us through the See also:child-minds of the Rhine-daughters and terrifies us with the ruthless See also:calm of Nature. Almost as subtle, and much more directly impressive, is the pathos of the death of Siegfried, which is heightened by an unprecedented appeal to a sense of musical form on the scale of the entire tetralogy. Siegfried's whole character and career is, indeed, annihilated in the clumsy progress towards this See also:con-summation; but Shakespeare might have condoned worse plots for the sake of so noble a result; and indeed Wagner's awkwardness arises mainly from fear of committing oversights. Hagen, the Nibelung's son, has managed to make Siegfried unwittingly drink a love-potion with Gutrune, which causes him to forget his own See also:bride, Brunnhilde. Siegfried is then persuaded to transform himself by his magic Tarnhelm into the likeness of his See also:host, Gutrune's See also:brother See also:Gunther, in order to bring Brunnhilde (whose name is now quite new to him) from her See also:fire-encircled rock, so that Gunther may have her for his bride and Siegfried may wed Gutrune. This is achieved; and Brunnhilde's horror and bewilderment at See also:meeting Siegfried again as a stranger in his own shape creates a situation which Siegfried cannot understand, and which Hagen pretends to construe as damning evidence that Siegfried has betrayed Gunther's See also:honour as well as Brunnhilde's. Hagen, Gunther and Brunnhilde therefore agree that Siegfried must die. In order to spare Gutrune's feelings it is arranged that his death shall appear as an See also:accident in a See also:hunting party. While the hunting party is resting Siegfried tells stories of his boyhood, thus recalling the antecedents of this drama with a charming freshness and sense of dramatic and musical repose. When he comes to the point where his memory has been clouded by Hagen's spells, Hagen restores his memory with another magic potion. Siegfried calmly continues to tell how he found Brunnhilde asleep on the fiery mountain. Hagen affects to construe this as a See also:confession of See also:guilt, and slays him as if in righteous wrath. The dying Siegfried calls on Brunnhilde to awaken, and asks " Who hath locked thee again in See also:sleep?" He believes that he is once more with Brunnhilde on the See also:Valkyries' mountain height; and the harmonies of her awakening move in untroubled splendour till the light of life fades with the light of day and the slain hero is carried to the Gibichung's hall through the moonlit mists, while the music of love and death tells in terrible See also:triumph more of his story than he ever knew. The See also:bare conception of such art as this shows how perfect is the unity between the different elements in Wagner's later music-drama. If the music of Tristan is more polyphonic than that of Lohengrin, it is because it is hardly figurative to See also:call its drama polyphonic also. Compare the mere See also:fairy-See also:tale See also:mystery of Lohengrin's command that Elsa shall never ask to know his name, with the profound See also:fatalism of Isolde's love-potion. Apart from the gain in tragic force resulting from Wagner's masterly development of the character of Brangaene, the raw material of the story was already suggestive of that astounding See also:combination of the contrasted themes of love and death, the musical execution of which involves a See also:harmonic range almost as far beyond that of its own day as the ordinary harmonic range of the loth century is beyond that of the 76th. In his next work, Die Meistersinger, Wagner ingeniously made poetry and drama out of an explicit manifesto to musical critics, and proved the See also:depth of his music by developing its everyday resources and so showing that its vitality does not depend on that extreme emotional force that makes Tristan and Isolde almost unbearably poignant. Few things are finer in music or literature than the end of the second act of Die Meistersinger, from the point where Sachs's apprentice begins the riot, to the moment when the watchman, frightened at the silence of the moonlit streets so soon after he has heard all that See also:noise, announces eleven o'See also:clock and bids the folk pray for protection against evil See also:spirits, while the orchestra tells us of the dreams of See also:Walther and Eva and ends by putting poetry even into the pedantic ineptitudes of the malicious Beckmesser. Die Meistersinger is perhaps Wagner's most nearly perfect work of art; and it is a striking proof of its purity and greatness that, while the whole work is in the happiest comic vein, no one ever thinks of it as in any way slighter than Wagner's tragic works. The overwhelming love-tragedy of Tristan and Isolde is hardly less- perfect, though the simplicity of its action exposes its longueurs to greater notoriety than those which may be found in Die Meistersinger. These two works interrupted the execution of the Ring and formed the stepping-stones to Parsifal, a work which may perhaps be said to See also:mark a further advance in that subtlety of poetic conception which, as we have seen, gave the determining impulse to Wagner's true musical style. But in music he had no more to learn, and Parsifal, while the most See also:solemn and concentrated of all Wagner's dramas, is musically not always unsuggestive of old age. Its harmonic style is, except in the Grail- music, even more abstruse than in Tristan; and the intense quiet of the action is far removed from the forces which in that tumultuous tragedy carry the listener through every difficulty. Again, while the Eucharistic features in Parsifal attract some listeners, the material effect of their presentation on the stage has been known to repel others who are beyond suspicion of See also:prejudice. But the greatness of the art is, like its subject, worlds away from material impressions; and a wide consensus regards Wagner's last work as his loftiest, both in music and poetry. Certainly no poet would venture to despise Wagner's imaginative conception of Kundry. In his letters to his friend Mathilde Wesendonck, it appears that while he was composing Tristan he already had the inspiration of working out the See also:identification of Kundry, the messenger of the Grail, with the temptress who, under the spell of Klingsor, seduces the knights of the Grail; and he had, moreover, thought out the impressively obscure See also:suggestion that she was Herodias, condemned like the wandering See also:Jew to live till the Saviour's second coming. The quiet expression of these startling ideas is more remarkable than their See also:adoption; for smaller artists live on still more startling ideas; but most remarkable of all is the presentation of Parsifal, both in his foolishness and in the widsom which comes to him through pity. The See also:chief excuse for doubting whether Wagner's last work is really his greatest is that most of its dramatic subtleties are beyond musical expression, since they do not See also:lead to definite conflicts and blendings of emotion. Where the orchestra shows that Parsifal is becoming half-conscious of his quest while Kundry is beguiling him with memories of his See also:mother,—and also during the two changes of scene to the Hall of the Grail, where the orchestra mingles the agony of Amfortas and the sorrow of the knights with the tolling of the great bells, the polyphony is almost as dramatic as in Tristan; while the prelude and the Charfreitagszauber are among the clearest examples of the See also:sublime since Beethoven. But else-where there are few passages in which the extremely recondite harmonic style can be with certainty traced to anything but See also:habit. This style originated, indeed, in a long experience of the profoundest dramatic impulses; but as a habit it does not seem, like the greatest things in art, the one inevitable treatment of the matter in hand. But, whatever our doubts, we may safely regard Parsifal as a work which, like Beethoven's last fugues, invites attack rather from those critics who demand what flatters their own vanity than from those who wish to be inspired by what they could never have foreseen for themselves.
In Wagner's harmonic style we encounter the entire problem of modern musical texture. Wagner effected vast changes in almost every See also:branch of his all-embracing art, from theatre-building and stage-See also:lighting to the musical declamation of words. Most of his reforms have since been intelligently carried out as normal principles in more arts than one; but, shocking as the statement may seem to loth-century orthodoxy, Wagnerian harmony is a universe as yet unexplored, except by the few composers who are so independent of its bewildering effect on the See also:generation that grew up with it, that they can use Wagner's resources as discreetly as he used them himself. The last two examples at the end of the See also:article on HARMONY show almost all that is new in Wagner's harmonic principles. The See also:peculiar art therein is that while the discords owe their intelligibility and softness to the smooth melodic lines by which in " resolving " they prove themselves but transient See also:rainbow-hues on or below the surtace, they owe their strangeness to the intense vividness with which at the moment of impact they suggest a mysteriously remote See also:foreign See also: It was so early recognized as characteristic of See also:Chopin that a magnificent example may be seen at the end of Schumann's little tone-portrait of him in the Carnaval: a very advanced Wagnerian passage on another principle constitutes the bulk of the development in the first movement of Beethoven's sonata See also:Les Adieux; while even in the " See also:Golden Age " of music, and within the limits of pure diatonic See also:concord, the unexpectedness of many of See also:Palestrina'schords is hardly less Wagnerian than the perfect smoothness of the melodic lines which combine to produce them. Wagnerian harmony is, then, neither a side-issue nor a progress per saltum, but a leading current in the stream of musical See also:evolution. That stream is sure sooner or later to carry with it every reality that has been reached by side-issues and leaps; and of such things we have important cases in the works of See also:Strauss and See also:Debussy. Strauss makes a steadily increasing use of avowedly irrational discords, in order to produce an emotionally apt See also:physical sensation. Debussy has this in See also:common with Strauss, that he too regards harmonies as pure physical sensations; but he differs from Strauss firstly in systematically refusing to regard them as anything else, and secondly in his extreme sensibility to harshness. We have seen (in the articles on HARMONY and Music) how harmonic music originated in just this habit of regarding combinations of sound as mere sensations, and how for centuries the habit opposed itself to the intellectual principles of contrapuntal harmony. These intellectual principles are, of course, not without their own ground in physical sensation; but it is evident that Debussy appeals beyond them to a more See also:primitive See also:instinct; and on it he bases an almost perfectly coherent system of which the laws are, like those of r 2th-century music, precisely the opposite of those of classical harmony. The only illogical point in his system is that the beauty of his dreamlike chords depends not only on his artful choice of a timbre that minimizes their harshness, but also on the fact that they enter the ear with the meaning they have acquired through centuries of harmonic evolution on classical lines. There is a See also:special See also:pleasure in the subsidence of that meaning beneath a soothing sensation; but a system based thereon cannot be universal. Its phenomena are, however, perfectly real, and can be observed wherever artistic conditions make the tone of a See also:mass of harmony more important than the interior threads of its texture. This is of See also:constant occurrence in classical See also:pianoforte music, in which thick chords are subjected to polyphonic laws only in their top and bottom notes, while the inner notes make a solid mass of sound in which numerous consecutive fifths and octaves are not only harmless but essential to the balance of tone. In Debussy's art the top and bottom are also involved in the antipolyphonic laws of such masses of sound, thus making these laws See also:paramount. The irrational discords of Strauss are also real phenomena in musical See also:aesthetics. They are an See also:extension of the principle on which gongs and See also:cymbals and all instruments without notes of determinate See also:pitch are employed in otherwise polyphonic music. But it is important to realize that both these types of modern harmony are radically non-Wagnerian. Haydn uses a true Straussian discord in The Seasons, in order to imitate the chirping of a See also:cricket; but the harshest See also:realism in Gotterddmmerung (the discord produced by the horns of Hagen and his churls in the mustering-scene in the second act) has a harmonic See also:logic which would have convinced See also:Corelli. And of Debussy's antipolyphonic art there is less in Wagner than in Beethoven. The present See also:influence of Wagnerian harmony is, then, somewhat indefinite, since the most important real phenomena of later music indicate a revolt both from it and from earlier classical methods. It has had, however, a marked effect on weaker musical individualities. Musical public See also:opinion now puts an extraordinary pressure on the See also:young composer, urging him at all See also:costs to abandon " out-of-date " styles however stimulating they may be to his invention. It is no exaggeration to say that a parallel See also:condition in literature would be produced by a strong public opinion to the effect that any See also:English style was hopelessly out of date unless it consisted exclusively of the most difficult types of phrase to be found in the works of Browning and See also:Meredith. The brilliant success of See also:Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel, in which Wagnerian technique is applied to the diatonic style of nursery songs with a humorous accuracy undreamed of by Wagner's imitators, points a moral which would have charmed Wagner himself; but until the revival of some rudiments of musical common sense becomes widespread, there is little prospect of the influence of Wagner's harmonic style being productive of anything better than nonsense. The very sense of dramatic fitness has temporarily vanished from public musical opinion, together with the sense of musical form, in consequence of another prevalent habit, that of presenting shapeless. extracts from Wagner's operas as orchestral pieces without voices or textbooks or any hint that such adjuncts are desirable. But this vandalism, which Wagner condoned with a very See also:bad See also:grace, now happily begins to give way to the practice of presenting long scenes or entire acts, with the singers, on the See also:concert-See also:platform. This has the merit of bringing the real Wagner to ears which may have no other means of See also:hearing him, and it fosters no delusion as to what is missing in such a presentation. The guidance of Hans Richter has given us a sure See also:bulwark against the misrepresentation of Wagner; and so there is See also:hope that Wagner may yet be saved from such an oblivion in fetish-See also:worship as has lost See also:Handel to us for so long. As with Shakespeare and Beethoven, the day will never come when we can measure the influence of so vast a mind upon the history of art. Smaller artists can make history; the greatest absorb it into that daylight which is its final cause. Additional information and CommentsThere are no comments yet for this article.
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