Chapter XXIX: Act II: , night. Afterwards dawn. In general the whole piece is crammed

with lights, clouds, moonlight, darkness, magic fires, thunder, etc.

The scene represents a wood, and in the wood there is a cave. At the entrance to the cave sits a fourth actor in tights, representing another dwarf. Dawn appears. Enter the god Wotan, again with a spear and again in the guise of a wanderer. Again his sounds, together with fresh sounds of the deepest bass that can be produced. These latter indicate that the dragon is speaking. Wotan awakens the dragon. The same bass sounds are repeated, growing yet deeper and deeper. First the dragon says, “I want to sleep,” but afterwards he crawls out of the cave. The dragon is represented by two men: it is dressed in a green scaly skin, and waves a tail at one end while at the other it opens a kind of crocodile’s jaw that is fastened on and from which flames appear. The dragon (who is meant to be dreadful, and may appear so to five-year-old children) utters some words in a terribly bass voice. This is all so stupid, so like what is done in the booth at a fair, that it is surprising that people over seven years of age can witness it seriously; yet thousands of quasi-cultured people sit and attentively hear and see it, and are delighted.

Siegfried with his horn reappears, as does Mime also. In the orchestra the sounds denoting them are emitted, and they talk about whether Siegfried does or does not know fear. Mime goes away, and a scene commences which is intended to be most poetic. Siegfried, in his tights, lies down in a would-be beautiful pose and alternately keeps silent and talks to himself. He ponders, listens to the singing of birds, and desires to imitate them. For this purpose he cuts a reed with his sword and makes a pipe. The dawn grows brighter and brighter; the birds sing. Siegfried tries to imitate the birds. In the orchestra is heard the imitation of birds, alternating with sounds corresponding to the words he speaks. But Siegfried does not succeed with his pipe-playing, so he plays on his horn instead. This scene is unendurable. Of music, that is, of art serving as a means to transmit a state of mind experienced by the author, there is not even a suggestion. There is something that is absolutely unintelligible musically. In a musical sense a hope continually arises, followed by disappointment, as if a musical thought were commenced only to be broken off. If there are something like musical beginnings, these beginnings are so short, so encumbered with complications of harmony and orchestration and with effects of contrast, are so obscure and unfinished, and what is happening on the stage meanwhile is so abominably false, that it is difficult even to perceive these musical snatches, let alone to be infected by them. Above all, from the very beginning to the very end and in each note, the author’s purpose is so audible and visible that one sees and hears neither Siegfried nor the birds, but only a limited self-opinionated German of bad taste and bad style, who has a most false conception of poetry, and in the rudest and most primitive manner wishes to transmit to me these false and mistaken conceptions of his.

Everyone knows the feeling of distrust and resistance always evoked by an author’s evident predetermination. A narrator need only to say in advance, “Prepare to cry,” or “to laugh,” and you are sure neither to cry nor to laugh. But when you see that an author prescribes emotion at what is not touching but only laughable or disgusting, and when you see moreover that the author is fully assured that he has captivated you, a painfully tormenting feeling results similar to what one would feel if an old, deformed woman put on a ball-dress and smilingly coquetted before you, confident of your approbation. This impression was strengthened by the fact that around me I saw a crowd of three thousand people, who not only patiently witnessed all this absurd nonsense but even considered it their duty to be delighted with it.

I somehow managed to sit out the next scene also, in which the monster appears to the accompaniment of his bass notes intermingled with the _motiv_ of Siegfried; but after the fight with the monster, and all the roars, fires, and sword-wavings, I could stand no more of it, and escaped from the theatre with a feeling of repulsion which even now I cannot forget.

Listening to this opera, I involuntarily thought of a respected, wise, educated, country labourer--one, for instance, of those wise and truly religious men whom I know among the peasants,--and I pictured to myself the terrible perplexity such a man would be in were he to witness what I was seeing that evening.

What would he think if he knew of all the labour spent on such a performance, and saw that audience, those great ones of the earth,--old, bald-headed, grey-bearded men, whom he had been accustomed to respect--sit silent and attentive, listening to and looking at all these stupidities for five hours on end? Not to speak of an adult labourer, one can hardly imagine even a child of over seven occupying himself with such a stupid, incoherent fairy tale.

And yet an enormous audience, the cream of the cultured upper classes, sits out five hours of this insane performance, and goes away imagining that by paying tribute to this nonsense it has acquired a fresh right to esteem itself advanced and enlightened.

I speak of the Moscow public. But what is the Moscow public? It is but a hundredth part of that public which while considering itself most highly enlightened, esteems it a merit so to have lost the capacity of being infected by art that not only can it witness this stupid sham without being revolted, but can even take delight in it.

In Bayreuth, where these performances were first given, people who considered themselves finely cultured assembled from the ends of the earth, spent, say, £100 each to see this performance, and for four days running went to see and hear this nonsensical rubbish, sitting it out for six hours each day.

But why did people go, and why do they still go to these performances, and why do they admire them? The question naturally presents itself: How is the success of Wagner’s works to be explained?

That success I explain to myself in this way: thanks to his exceptional position in having at his disposal the resources of a king, Wagner was able to command all the methods for counterfeiting art which have been developed by long usage, and employing these methods with great ability he produced a model work of counterfeit art. The reason why I have selected his work for my illustration is, that in no other counterfeit of art known to me are all the methods by which art is counterfeited--viz., borrowings, imitations, dramatic effects, and interest--so ably and powerfully united.

From the subject borrowed from antiquity, to the clouds and the risings of the sun and moon, Wagner in this work has made use of all that is considered poetic. We have here the sleeping beauty, and nymphs, and subterranean fires, and dwarfs, and battles, and swords, and love, and incest, and a monster, and singing-birds: the whole arsenal of the poetic is brought into action.

Moreover everything is imitative: the decorations are imitated and the costumes are imitated. All is just as, according to the data supplied by archæology, they would have been in antiquity. The very sounds are imitative, for Wagner, who was not destitute of musical talent, invented just such sounds as imitate the strokes of a hammer, the hissing of molten iron, the singing of birds, etc.

Furthermore, in this work everything is in the highest degree striking in its effects and in its peculiarities: its monsters, its magic fires, and its scenes under water; the darkness in which the audience sit, the invisibility of the orchestra, and the hitherto unemployed combinations of harmony.

And besides, it is all interesting. The interest lies not only in the question who will kill whom, and who will marry whom, and who is whose son, and what will happen next?--the interest lies also in the relation of the music to the text. The rolling waves of the Rhine--now how is that to be expressed in music? An evil dwarf appears--how is the music to express an evil dwarf?--and how is it to express the sensuality of this dwarf? How will bravery, fire, or apples, be expressed in music? How are the _leit-motivs_ of the people speaking to be interwoven with the _leit-motivs_ of the people and objects about whom they speak? And the music has a further interest. It diverges from all formerly accepted laws, and most unexpected and totally new modulations crop up (as is not only possible but even easy in music having no inner law of its being); the dissonances are new, and are allowed in a new way--and this, too, is interesting.

And it is this poeticality, imitativeness, effectfulness, and interestingness which, thanks to the peculiarities of Wagner’s talent and to the advantageous position in which he was placed, are in these productions carried to the highest pitch of perfection, which so act on the spectator, hypnotising him as one would be hypnotised who should listen for several consecutive hours to maniacal ravings pronounced with great oratorical power.

People say, “You cannot judge without having seen Wagner performed at Bayreuth: in the dark, where the orchestra is out of sight concealed under the stage, and where the performance is brought to the highest perfection.” And this just proves that we have here no question of art, but one of hypnotism. It is just what the spiritualists say. To convince you of the reality of their apparitions they usually say, “You cannot judge; you must try it, be present at several séances,” that is, come and sit silent in the dark for hours together in the same room with semi-sane people and repeat this some ten times over, and you shall see all that we see.

Yes, naturally! Only place yourself in such conditions, and you may see what you will. But this can be still more quickly attained by getting drunk or smoking opium. It is the same when listening to an opera of Wagner’s. Sit in the dark for four days in company with people who are not quite normal, and through the auditory nerves subject your brain to the strongest action of the sounds best adapted to excite it, and you will no doubt be reduced to an abnormal condition and be enchanted by absurdities. But to attain this end you do not even need four days; the five hours during which one “day” is enacted, as in Moscow, are quite enough. Nor are five hours needed; even one hour is enough for people who have no clear conception of what art should be, and who have concluded in advance that what they are going to see is excellent, and that indifference or dissatisfaction with this work will serve as a proof of their inferiority and lack of culture.

I observed the audience present at this representation. The people who led the whole audience and gave the tone to it were those who had previously been hypnotized and who again succumbed to the hypnotic influence to which they were accustomed. These hypnotized people, being in an abnormal condition, were perfectly enraptured. Moreover all the art critics, who lack the capacity to be infected by art and therefore always especially prize works like Wagner’s opera where it is all an affair of the intellect, also with much profundity expressed their approval of a work affording such ample material for ratiocination. And following these two groups went that large city crowd (indifferent to art, with their capacity to be infected by it perverted and partly atrophied), headed by the princes, millionaires, and art patrons, who, like sorry harriers, keep close to those who most loudly and decidedly express their opinion.

“Oh yes, certainly! What poetry! Marvellous! Especially the birds!” “Yes, yes! I am quite vanquished!” exclaim these people, repeating in various tones what they have just heard from men whose opinion appears to them authoritative.

If some people do feel insulted by the absurdity and spuriousness of the whole thing, they are timidly silent, as sober men are timid and silent when surrounded by tipsy people.

And thus, thanks to the masterly skill with which it counterfeits art while having nothing in common with it, a meaningless, coarse, spurious production finds acceptance all over the world, costs millions of roubles to produce, and assists more and more to pervert the taste of people of the upper classes and their conception of art.