Chapter II: The Artist in Theory (1)

I

For a great revolutionary, Wagner was curiously long in coming to consciousness of himself. The record of his youth and early manhood is one of constant fluctuation between one ideal or influence and another. The most remarkable feature of him in these days, indeed, is his mental malleability. In his later years he is the centre of a solar system of his own; everything else in his orbit is a mere planet that must revolve around him or be cast out. In his younger days, on the contrary, he is extraordinarily sensitive to the changing currents of men and circumstances. One of the earliest writers to influence him was E. T. A. Hoffmann, under whose sway he fell apparently as early as 1827. It was about the same time that he first heard, at a Gewandhaus concert, some of Beethoven's music. During the early 'thirties he was deeply absorbed in Beethoven, especially in the Ninth Symphony--a work which, he tells us, was at that time regarded in Leipzig as the raving of a semi-madman. Wagner's knowledge of it was at first derived solely from copying the score; it was without having heard a performance of the work that he made in 1830 the two-hands pianoforte arrangement of it which he vainly tried to induce Schott to publish. His own Overture in D minor (1831), his _King Enzio_ Overture and his Symphony in C major (1832) were, as he admits, all inspired by Beethoven, the first of them being more particularly influenced by the _Coriolan_ Overture. He heard the Ninth Symphony for the first time at a Gewandhaus concert in the winter of 1831-2; the performance, under Pohlenz, seems to have been a very unintelligent one, and it left Wagner in considerable doubt as to the value of the work. "There arose in me," he says, "the mortifying doubt whether I had really understood this strange piece of music[289] or not. For a long time I gave up racking my brains about it, and unaffectedly turned my attention to a clearer and less disturbing sort of music."[290]

Weber's _Freischütz_ had also powerfully affected the boy's imagination; no doubt Weber struck him even then as a musician peculiarly German. In his own _Die Feen_ (1833), he tells us, he tried to write "in German style."[291] Nevertheless, in spite of all these influences, he turned for a while against German music, which he criticises with some frankness in an article on _Die deutsche Oper_,[292] published anonymously in the _Zeitung für die elegante Welt_ in June 1834. The Germans have no German opera, he says, for the same reason that they have no national drama. "We are too intellectual and much too learned to be able to create warm human figures." Mozart could do this in the Italian melodic style; but with their contempt for that style the modern Germans have got further from the path that Mozart opened out for dramatic music. "Weber did not understand how to handle song; Spohr is hardly any better"; yet it is through Song that a man expresses himself musically. Here the Italians have the advantage over the Germans. It is true that the Italians have abused the organ of late--"yet I shall never forget the impression that a Bellini opera lately made on me, after I had become heartily sick of the eternally allegorising orchestral bustle, and a simple and noble Song made its appearance again." Weber was too purely lyrical, and Spohr is too elegiac, for the drama. Weber's best work is consequently the romantic _Der Freischütz_; as for _Euryanthe_, "what paltry refinements of declamation, what a finiking use of this instrument or that for bringing out the expression of some word or other!" His style is not broad enough; it dissipates itself in mincing details. His _ensembles_ are almost without life. And as the audience do not understand a note of it, they console themselves by calling it amazingly _learned_, and respecting it accordingly. "O this fatal learnedness," he cries, "this source of all the evils that afflict us Germans!" In Bach's time music was regarded only from the learned side. The forms were then limited, but the composers full of learning. Now the forms are freer, but the composers have less learning, though they make a pretence of it. The public also wants to appear learned, affects to despise the simple, and is ashamed to admit that it enjoys a lively French opera. We must not be hypocritical, but must admit there is a good deal that is good in both French and Italian opera; we must throw over a lot of our affected science, and become natural men. No real German opera composer has appeared for some time, because no one has known how to "gain the voice of the people"--no one has grasped life in its real truth and warmth. We must find a form suited to the needs of our own days. "We must seize upon the epoch, and honestly try to perfect its new forms; and he will be the master who writes neither Italian nor French--nor even German."

The youthful essayist repeats a good deal of this, with additions, in an article entitled _Pasticcio_, published in the _Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_ in November of the same year, under the pseudonym of "Canto Spianato."[293] He is greatly concerned at the deplorable fact that there are hardly a couple of dozen well-trained singers in Germany. "Nowadays one hardly ever hears a really beautiful and technically perfect _trillo_; very rarely flawless mordents; very seldom a rounded _coloratura_, a genuine unaffected, soul-moving _portamento_, a perfect equalisation of the registers, and absolute maintenance of the intonation through all the various nuances of crescendo and diminuendo. Most singers, as soon as they attempt the noble art of _portamento_, get out of tune; and the public, accustomed to imperfect execution, overlooks the defects of the singer if only he is a capable actor and knows the routine of the stage."

Nor do our German composers know how to write for the voice; they are like bunglers who presume to orchestrate without having studied the peculiarities of the clarinet, say, as distinct from those of the pianoforte. "Most of our modern German vocal composers appear to regard the voice as merely a part of the instrumental mass, and misapprehend the true nature of Song. Our worthy opera-composers," in fact, "must take lessons in the good Italian cantabile style, taking care to steer clear of its modern excrescences, and, with their superior artistic capacity, give us something good in a good style. Then will vocal art bloom anew; then some day will a man come who in this good style shall re-establish on the stage the broken unity of Poetry and Song." He argues with portentous seriousness for ornate as well as simple Song; and ends with a claim that poetry is the only basis of opera,--poetry, of which words and tones are merely the expression. "The majority of our operas are merely a string of musical numbers without any psychological connection; our singers have been degraded into musical-boxes, set to a certain number of tunes, brought on to the stage, and started by a wave of the conductor's baton." Once more he lays it down that "he will be the master who writes neither Italian nor French--nor even German," and concludes thus: "But would you inspire, purify, and train yourselves by models, would you create living shapes in music, then combine, for example, Gluck's masterly declamation and dramatic power with Mozart's varied art of melody, _ensemble_ and orchestration, and you will produce dramatic works that will satisfy the strictest criticism."[294]

This enthusiasm for the Italian style was largely due to the overwhelming impression made on Wagner by the great singer and actress Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, whom he heard as Romeo in Bellini's _Montecchi e Capuleti_ in March 1834.[295] Her performance, however, magical as it must have been, would not have affected him so deeply had he not already been brought by other influences to a turning in the road. What these influences were he has himself told us in _Mein Leben_. Heinse's _Ardinghello_ and Laube's _Young Europe_ had inflamed the imagination of most of the young men of the day. Wagner was caught up by and carried along in a current of generous enthusiasm for a supposedly new spirit in art and literature; the older men were mercilessly ridiculed as pedants, and a newer and more sprightly art was to hustle the ponderous old one off the stage. Wagner's boyish life had been, in spite of an occasional wildness, one of almost morbid seriousness, culminating in what he calls "pathetic mysticism." The truth seems to have been that he was moving about in intellectual worlds too subtle for his spirit then to realise; he was mysteriously drawn to the greatest things in Beethoven and Weber, but when brought into actual contact with them he had to admit that they spoke a language he could hardly understand. The magnetic personality of Schröder-Devrient dissipated the clouds that had formed around him. He could hardly have been so much his own dupe as his confessions would lead us to believe. He knew that the performance of Weber's _Euryanthe_ he had recently heard was as superlatively bad as the performance of Bellini's opera was superlatively good; and he would have been a much worse reasoner than we know him to have been, had he not been able to see that from these facts no valid conclusion could be drawn as to the worth of the two works. We may reasonably assume that his volatile nature was ripe for another change of front--there were plenty more of a similar kind even in his mature life--and that these outer experiences only marked the moment of the turning. He as good as admits this, indeed, in _Mein Leben_. He was disposed, he says, to take as lightly as possible the problem[296] that had arisen before him, and to show his determination to get rid of all prejudice by writing the article on _Euryanthe_ in which he "simply jeered" at that work. "Just as I had passed in my student-time through my 'Flegeljahr,' I now boldly entered upon a similar development in my artistic taste."[297]

II

That the articles praising the Italians at the expense of the Germans were the products of more than the mere impression of Schröder-Devrient's singing and acting--that they came from the depths of a real change in his intellectual and emotional nature--is shown by the length of time he remained at the same standpoint.

The text of _Das Liebesverbot_ was written in a mood of fiery youthful protest against what he held to be the cramping puritanism of the moralists. He deliberately transforms Shakespeare's _Measure for Measure_. "_Young Europe_ and _Ardinghello_, helped by the strange antipathy I had conceived towards classical operatic music, gave me the keynote for my conception, which was especially directed against puritanical hypocrisy, and consequently led to the bold glorification of unfettered sensualism (_freien Sinnlichkeit_). I took care to understand the serious Shakespearean subject only in this sense; I saw only the gloomy strait-laced viceroy, himself burning with love for the beautiful novice, who, while she implores him to pardon her brother condemned to death for illicit love, kindles a ruinous fire in the rigid Puritan's breast by the lovely warmth of her own human emotion. The fact that these powerful motives are so richly developed by Shakespeare only in order that in the end they may be all the more seriously weighed in the scales of justice, did not concern me in the least; all I had in mind was to expose the sinfulness of hypocrisy and the unnaturalness of harsh moral judgments."[298] He adds that he was probably influenced by Auber's _Masaniello_ and the _Sicilian Vespers_.

The composition of _Das Liebesverbot_ carries us from 1834 to the spring of 1836, and still the Southern fever has not abated. In 1837 he carries the same enthusiasm about with him in Königsberg and Riga; we can imagine that the more serious side of him had some difficulty in developing in such an environment as a fourth-rate operatic and theatrical troupe. While in Magdeburg he writes a short article on "Dramatic Song," in which he returns to the thesis of three years before, though with more wisdom. "Why," he asks, "cannot we Germans see that we are not the possessors of everything; why cannot we openly and freely admit that the Italian is superior to the German in Song, and the Frenchman superior to him in the light and animated treatment of operatic music? Can he not oppose to these his deeper science, his more thorough culture, and above all the happy faculty that makes it possible for him easily to make the advantages of the Italians and the French his own, whereas they will never be able to acquire ours? The Italians are singers by nature. The less richly-endowed German can hope to emulate the Italian only by hard study." Wagner rightly points out that no artist can hope to achieve full expression of himself without a technique that has become second nature to him. It was the acquirement by Mozart of this technique in his childhood that gave his mature music its incomparable ease and finish, while there was always a certain awkwardness about Weber, owing to his having begun late and learned his technique during the years when he was actually practising his art. Without perfect vocal technique, the highest kind of dramatic expression is impossible. The great Schröder-Devrient, the finest operatic artist in Germany, was at one time within an ace of giving up her career as a singer, so great was the strain on her voice through a faulty production; but she studied hard on the right Italian lines, with the result that she can now sing the most trying parts without the slightest fatigue.[299] All this is sensible enough--so sensible, indeed, that Wagner could repeat it thirty years later in his "Report upon a proposed German School of Music for Munich." But that the nimble and relatively superficial Italian music still exercised something of its old fascination upon him is shown by another article of the same year on Bellini. Here, while admitting that a good deal of Italian music is poor stuff, and that the forms and tricks of the Bellinian opera are things only too easy to imitate, he yet lauds Bellini's melody at the expense of that of the Germans, and his simplicity at the expense of their clumsy erudition. "The German connoisseur of music," he says, "listens to one of Bellini's operas with the spectacles off his tired-out eyes," giving himself wholly up for once to "delight in lovely Song";[300] he evidently feels "a deep and ardent longing for a full deep breath, to win ease of being at one stroke, to get rid of all the stew of prejudice and pedantry that has so long compelled him to be a German connoisseur of music--to become instead a man at last, glad, free, and endowed with every glorious organ for perceiving beauty of every kind, no matter in what form it reveals itself." He has been enchanted by "the limpid melody, the simple, noble, lovely Song of Bellini. It is surely no sin to confess this and to believe in it; perhaps even it would not be a sin if before we went to sleep we were to pray Heaven that some day German composers might achieve such melodies and such an art of handling song. Song, Song, and yet again Song, ye Germans!"

We see again his temporary lack of sympathy with the richer German style in a passage like the following, which reads like one of the less intelligent criticisms of his own later music:

"When we consider the boundless disorder, the medley of forms, periods and modulations of so many of the new German opera composers, by which we are prevented from enjoying many an isolated piece of beauty, we often might wish to see this ravelled skein put in order by means of that stable Italian form.[301] As a matter of fact, the instantaneous clear apprehension of a whole dramatic passion is made much easier when, along with all its connected feelings and emotions, it is cast into one lucid intelligent melody at a single stroke, than when it is muddled up with a hundred little commentaries, with this and that harmonic nuance, this and that instrumental interpolation, till in the end it is subtilised out of existence."[302]

It was his "zeal and fervour for modern Italian and French opera," in fact, that procured for him the conductorship at Riga, where the Director, Holtei, was all for the lighter and more frivolous music.[303] At Riga Wagner met his old Leipzig mentor, Heinrich Dorn, who was, he says, surprised to see his former pupil, "the eccentric Beethoven worshipper, transformed into a partisan of Bellini and Adam."[304] The reaction, however, was coming fast. At Riga he seems to have passed through one of those spiritual crises that are not uncommon with artists of his many-sided temperament. The loneliness of Riga, he says, gave him an anxious feeling of homelessness, which developed into a passionate longing to escape from the turbid whirl of theatrical life. "The levity with which in Magdeburg I had both let my musical taste degenerate and had allowed myself to take pleasure in the most frivolous theatrical society, gradually faded away under the influence of this longing."[305] A bass aria which he interpolated into Winter's _Schweizerfamilie_ was "of a devotional character," and "bore witness to the great transformation that was taking place in my musical development."[306] In the winter of 1838 he derived much benefit from the study of Méhul's _Joseph in Egypt_ for the theatre. "Its noble and simple style, along with the moving effect of the music, contributed not a little to the favourable turn in my taste, which had been sadly debauched by my theatrical work."[307] At the same time he grew weary of the Bohemianism that had attracted him so strongly at Magdeburg, and consequently he got more and more out of touch with the actors and the management.

His weariness of it all culminated in a secret resolve to be quit of this kind of life as soon as possible. The deliverance was to be effected by his new opera, _Rienzi_.[308] He deliberately planned the opera on a scale so large that he would necessarily have to seek a better stage than that of Riga for its production. Everything conspired at the time to deepen his sense of the seriousness of things, and to make him loathe himself for having so long worshipped false gods both in art and in life. Matrimonial troubles crowded thick and fast upon him, and he lost his favourite sister, Rosalie, by death. In March 1839 he was dismissed from his post at the Riga theatre. Penniless as he was, he welcomed the discharge as the first step towards his redemption. To Paris he would go, and in Paris make his fortune: of that he had no doubt.

III

The miseries of his two years and a half in Paris are known to every reader of his life. Penury, deceptions, degradations, however, could not break him either intellectually or morally. A temperament so elastic as his could never be crushed, and least of all when it was young. He himself has told us of the amazement his associates expressed at the toughness and resilience of his spirit. But the fire he passed through in those dreadful days purified him as an artist. It was not alone the failure to get _Rienzi_ accepted at the Paris Opéra that caused him to turn away in disgust from the hollow world of make-believe around him; visions were coming to him of shining deeds to be done, of untried possibilities in music. As usual with him, an external event brought all his faculties and desires swiftly into the one focus. In the winter of 1839 he heard a number of rehearsals and a performance of the Ninth Symphony at the Conservatoire, under Habeneck. The interpretation, he says, was so perfect that "in a stroke the picture I had had of the wonderful work in the days of my youthful enthusiasm, and that had been effaced by the murderous performance of it given by the Leipzig Orchestra under the worthy Pohlenz, now rose up again before me in such clearness that it seemed as if I could grasp it with my hands. Where formerly I had seen nothing but mystic constellations and soundless magical shapes, there was now poured out, as from innumerable springs, a stream of inexhaustible and heart-compelling melody. The whole period of the degradation of my taste, which really began with my confusion as to the expression in Beethoven's later works, and had been so aggravated by my numbing association with the dreadful theatre, now fell away from me as into an abyss of shame and remorse. If this inner change had been preparing in me for some years--more particularly as a consequence of my painful experiences--it was the inexpressible effect of the Ninth Symphony, performed in a way I had hitherto had no notion of, that gave real life to my new-won old spirit; and so I compare this--for me--important event with the similarly decisive impression made on me, when I was a boy of sixteen, by the Fidelio of Schröder Devrient."[309]

The _Autobiographical Sketch_ which he wrote for Laube's _Zeitung für die elegante Welt_ in 1842, after his settling in Dresden, ends with these words: "As regards Paris itself I was now without prospects there for some years: so I left it in the spring of 1842. For the first time I saw the Rhine: with great tears in his eyes the poor artist swore eternal fidelity to his German fatherland." It was indeed the prodigal's return: the service that Paris did him was to make him a better German and so a better artist. Seen from a distance, Paris had once glittered before his dazzled eyes as a symbol of liberalism and freedom. Seen at too close quarters, Germany had laid itself bare to him in all its littlenesses, its stuffy provinciality. Now he saw them both from another angle. Paris was about him in all the cold brutality it can show to the stranger, the helpless, the penniless: its heart seemed to the eager young musician as hard as the stones of its streets. And he saw his native country as all exiles see theirs, with its asperities toned down, its little parochialisms hidden from view, and a certain kindly haze of idealism over all. It is with German affairs that he occupies himself as far as he can in the articles he writes at this time to keep the domestic pot boiling. The essay _On German Music_ (1840) is very touching in its wistful little visions of tiny, cosy German towns, each with its circle of humble musicians roughly but lovingly wooing their art in their own simple, honest way. The lonely and homesick German artist has his quiet revenge upon Paris in the delightfully humorous and satirical article upon the ludicrous French perversion of _Der Freischütz_ at the Opéra.[310] Beethoven is much in his mind: he begins the attempt to fathom the secret of Beethoven's power, to grasp the profoundly logical workings of his music, and to take his own bearings with regard to sundry æsthetic questions, such as "painting" in music, the reading of poetical ideas into purely instrumental works, the relations between vocal and instrumental music, and so on. His views upon Beethoven were far ahead of those of his contemporaries, to whom, indeed, they must have been in large part unintelligible. He was beginning to realise dimly that out of the Beethovenian melody he could himself beget a new art-work. In _A Pilgrimage to Beethoven_ he puts his own views of opera into the mouth of his predecessor. He has apparently already conceived the idea that instrumental music had come to the end of its resources with Beethoven, that music could in the future renew its vitality only by being "fertilised by poetry," and that the ideal music drama will be continuous in tissue. "Were I to make an opera after my own heart," he makes Beethoven say, "people would run away from it: for it would have no arias, duets, trios, or any of the other stuff with which operas are patched up to-day: and what I would put in the place of these no singer would sing and no audience would listen to. They all know nothing but glittering lies, brilliant nonsense and sugared tedium. Anyone who should write a real music drama would be taken for a fool." And the old composer proceeds to outline the theory of the relation between words and music that is made so familiar to us in Wagner's later writings. "The instruments represent the primal organs of Creation and Nature: what they express can never be clearly defined and settled, for they reproduce the primal feelings themselves as they emerged from the chaos of the first creation, when probably there was not one human being to take them up into his heart. It is quite otherwise with the genius of the human voice: this represents man's heart and its definite (_abgeschlossen_) individual emotion. Its character is therefore restricted, but definite and clear. Now bring these two elements together, unite them! Set against the wild-wandering, illimitable primal feeling, represented by the instruments, the clear definite emotion of the human heart, represented by the voice. The incoming of this second element will smooth and soothe the conflict of the primal feelings, will turn their flood into a definite, united course: while the human heart itself, taking up into itself those primal feelings, will be infinitely strengthened and expanded, and capable of feeling clearly its earlier indefinite presage of the Highest now transformed into god-like consciousness."[311]

IV

It has often been pointed out that the subjects of all Wagner's dramas were conceived by him before his fortieth year. It is equally true that virtually the whole of the æsthetic theories of his later life were immanent in him from the days of his Parisian sojourn, and needed only to be brought into clearer outline by the thought and the practice of the 'forties and 'fifties. In the essay on _Beethoven_ (1870) he insists that it is the human character of the voice, rather than the mere sentiment the voice is used to express, that gives the choral ending of the Ninth Symphony its tremendous significance. "Thus," he says, "with even what we have just called the ordaining will that led him to this melody" (_i.e._ the great melody of the final movement) "we see the master steadily remaining in music,--the idea of the world:[312] for in truth it is not the meaning of the Word that engages us at this entry of the human voice, but the character of the voice itself. Nor is it the thought expressed in Schiller's verses that henceforth occupies us, but the intimate timbre of the choral song, in which we feel ourselves invited to join, and so take part as a kind of congregation in an ideal divine service, as was the case at the entry of the chorale in the 'Passions' of Bach. It is quite evident, especially with regard to the main melody, that Schiller's words have been tacked on arbitrarily (_nothdürftig_) and with little skill: for this melody had first of all unfolded itself in all its breadth before us as a thing in itself, given to the instruments alone, and there had filled us with a nameless feeling of joy in a paradise regained."[313]

The same idea is seen in embryo in _A Pilgrimage to Beethoven_. "If men are to sing, they must have words. Yet who is capable of expressing in words the poetry that should form the basis of such a union of all the elements? The poem must of necessity be something inferior (_zurückstehen_), for words are too weak an organ for such a task.--You will soon meet with a new composition of mine, which will remind you of what I have just been descanting upon. It is a symphony with choruses. I ask you to observe how difficult it was for me to get over the inadequacy of the poetical art that I had called in to my aid. I have fully resolved to make use of our Schiller's beautiful hymn 'To Joy'; it is in any case a noble and uplifting poem, even if far from giving voice to what, in sooth, in this connection, no verses in the world could say."[314]

Here we light upon one of the fundamental principles of the Wagnerian æsthetic. Wagner did not set words to music: the words were merely the projection of an already conceived musical emotion into the sphere of speech.[315] There is in most musicians a certain amount of correspondence and interplay between the poetic and musical factors. With some composers the musical thought, having begun and completed itself along its own lines and according to its own laws, turns half appealingly, half condescendingly, to words for a title or an elucidation, as was often the case with Schumann. With others, as with Bach and Hugo Wolf and Strauss, the word, written or implied, is the generator of the musical idea. It would be the very midsummer madness of æsthetics to attempt to decide which is the more purely "musical" of these two types of mind. Neither of them is "the" musical mind, any more than Shakespeare's or Milton's or Browning's or Blake's or Pope's or Swinburne's is "the" poetical mind. It is only the most superficial of psychologists and æstheticians who can regard any human faculty as wholly cut off from the rest. Our perceptions of sight, of taste, of touch, of hearing, are inextricably inter-blended, as is shown by our constantly expressing one set of sensations in terms of another, as when we speak of the colour of music, the height, or depth, or thickness, or clarity, or muddiness of musical tone. In every poet there is something of the painter and the musician: in every musician, something of the poet and painter: in every painter, something of the musician and poet.[316] The character of the man's work will depend upon the strength or weakness of the tinge that is given to his own special art by the relative strength or weakness of the infusion of one or more of the other arts. In composers like Bach, Wagner, Berlioz, Schubert, Wolf, and Strauss the eye is constantly transmitting very definite impression to the brain, with the result that their music readily leans to realistic suggestion: on a composer like Brahms the actualities of the visible, mobile world make comparatively little impression.[317] No one of these types is _per se_ any better than the rest, or has any more right than his fellows to arrogate to himself the title of "pure" musician. We must just accept them all as branches of the one great tree.

It is no paradox to say that though Wagner was irresistibly impelled to express himself in the form of opera he was by nature an instrumental composer of the line of Bach and Beethoven. It is the orchestra that always bears the main burden of expression in his later works. His ideal was a stream of endless melody in the orchestra, to the moods of which the words give a definiteness unattainable by music alone. And so, just as he did not "set words to music" in the ordinary way, so he did not set poetic ideas to music in the ordinary way. No man was ever more prompt to interpret great musical works in terms of poetry or life, as anyone may see by reading his elucidations of the Beethoven symphonies or the great C sharp minor quartet. But it is important to remember, if we are not to misunderstand him utterly, that he never supposed that the music was developed consciously out of any such poetic scheme as our fantasy may read into it. The music grew out of the spirit of music, and only rouses a poetic vision in us because it is the generalised expression of many particular visions of the kind. This conception of music was rooted in him from his earliest days of maturity, as we may see from the article _A Happy Evening_, which he wrote in Paris in 1841. The narrator of the story is discussing with a friend--evidently intended for Wagner himself--a concert at which they have just heard performances of Mozart's Symphony in E flat and Beethoven's in A. The question arises as to what it is that Beethoven has expressed. The friend, who is designated R., objects energetically to an arbitrary romance being foisted upon the symphony:

"It is unfortunate that so many people give themselves useless trouble to confuse musical speech with poetical speech, and to make one of them supplement or replace the other where, in their limited view, this is incomplete. It remains true once for all that music begins where speech leaves off. Nothing is more intolerable than the preposterous pictures and stories that people imagine to be at the basis of those instrumental works. What quality of mind and feeling is displayed when the hearer of a Beethoven symphony can only keep his interest in it alive by imagining that the musical flood is the reproduction of the plot of some romance? These people in consequence often grumble at the great master when some unexpected stroke disturbs the even tenour of the little tale they have foisted on the work: they reproach the composer with unclearness and disconnectedness, and lament his lack of coherency. Oh the ninnies!"

R. is afterwards careful to explain that he has no objection to each hearer associating the music, as he hears it, with any moods or episodes he likes out of his own experience. All he objects to is the audience having the terms of the poetic association dictated to them by the musical journalists. "I should like to tear the hair from their silly heads when they stuff this stupid nonsense into honest people, and so rob them of all the ingenuousness with which they would have otherwise have given themselves up to hearing Beethoven's symphony. Instead of abandoning themselves to their natural feelings, the poor deluded people of full heart but feeble head think themselves obliged to follow the course of some village wedding, a thing of which they probably know nothing at first hand, and in place of which they would certainly have been much more likely to imagine something quite different, something from the circle of their own experience.... I hold that no one stereotyped interpretation is admissible. Definitely as the purely musical edifice stands complete and rounded in the artistic proportions of a Beethoven symphony, perfect and indivisible as it appears to the higher sense, just so is it impossible to reduce the effects of the work on the human heart to one authoritative symbol. This is more or less the case with the creations of the other arts: how diversely will one and the same picture, one and the same drama, affect diverse individuals, and even the same individual at different times! And yet how much more definitely and positively the painter or the poet must draw his figures than the instrumental composer, who is not bound, like them, to model his form by the appearances of the everyday world, but who has at his disposal an immeasurable realm in a super-terrestrial kingdom, and to whose hand is given the most spiritual of substances--tone! But it is degrading to this high office of the musician to force him to make him fit his inspiration to the appearances of the everyday world; and still more would the instrumental composer deny his mission, or expose his own weakness, who should try to carry the restricted proportions of merely worldly things into the realm of his own art."[318]

"In instrumental music," he said in later life, "I am a _Réactionnaire_, a conservative. I dislike everything that requires a verbal explanation beyond the actual sounds."[319] In the light of this declaration, and of the æsthetic doctrines he expounds in the article _On Franz Liszt's Symphonic Poems_ and elsewhere, it is interesting to see him setting forth the same doctrine of music as early as 1840. In _A Happy Evening_ R. lays it down that he rejects all tone-painting, except when it is used in jest or to reproduce purely musical phenomena.[320] He further dissents from his friend's theory that whereas Mozart's symphonies came from nothing but a purely inward musical source, Beethoven may have "first of all conceived and worked out the plan of a symphony according to a certain philosophical idea, before he left it to his imagination to invent the musical themes." The friend adduces the _Eroica_ Symphony in support of this contention. "You know that it was at first intended that this symphony should bear the title 'Bonaparte.' Can you deny, then, that Beethoven was inspired to this gigantic work, and the plan of it decided, by an idea outside the realm of music?"

R. sweeps his friend off his feet with the vehemence of his reply. The _Eroica_ Symphony, he contends, is not a translation into music of the petty details of Napoleon's first Italian campaign. Nowhere does the work suggest that the composer has had his eye on any special episode in the general's career. No realistic explanation of this kind can be made to square with the Funeral March, the Scherzo with the hunting horns, or the Finale with its soft, emotional Andante. "Where is the bridge of Lodi, where the battle of Arcola, where the march to Leoben, where the victory under the Pyramids, where the 18th Brumaire? Are these not incidents which no composer of our day would have passed by had he been writing a biographical symphony on Bonaparte?" Then R. gives his own theory of the genesis of such a work as the _Eroica_. What stimulates the musician to composition in the first place is a purely musical mood: it may have come from either an inner or an outer experience, but it is wholly musical in essence and in its manner of expression. "But the grand passions and enduring emotions that dominate the current of our feelings and ideas for months or for half a year, it is these that urge the musician to those ampler, more comprehensive concepts to which we owe, among others, the origin of a _Sinfonia eroica_. These great moods, as deep suffering of soul or mighty exaltation, may derive from outer events, for we are human beings and our fate is ruled by external circumstances: but when they impel the musician to production these great moods have already turned to music within him, so that in the moment of creative inspiration it is no longer the outer events that guide and govern the composition, but the musical emotion that this event has generated." We may imagine that the republican Beethoven's emotional nature had been fired by the career and character of Napoleon. "He was no general,--he was a musician: and in his own domain he saw the spirit in which he could accomplish the equivalent of what Bonaparte had accomplished on the plains of Italy." The product of this passionate yearning for self-realisation was the _Eroica_ Symphony, "and as he knew well to whom he owed the impulse to this gigantic work, he inscribed the name of Bonaparte on the title-page. Yet not a single feature of the development of the symphony can be said to have an immediate outer connection with the fate of the hero."[321]

V

Of even more importance than the article _A Happy Evening_ in the story of Wagner's development is the essay on _The Overture_ that appeared in the _Gazette Musicale_ in January 1841,--that is to say, a couple of months after the completion of _Rienzi_, and nearly six months before the commencement of the _Flying Dutchman_. Here he anticipates some of the æsthetic he was afterwards to expound so eloquently and so convincingly in the great article on Beethoven and elsewhere. He begins with a survey of the early history of the Overture. There had always been, apparently, a reluctance to plunging the spectator forthwith into the opera, just as in earlier times a prologue had always preceded the play. The prologue, however, had this at any rate to be said for it, that it summarised the action of the coming play, and in this and other ways prepared the spectator to listen more intelligently. The early Overture, however, could not do this, for at that time the psychological powers of music were not sufficiently developed to permit of the summarising in a few minutes of the actions and the motives of an opera. It became a conventional, not a characteristic prelude. Later on a regular "Overture form" was elaborated, but even this was psychologically impotent. What connection has the overture to the _Messiah_, for example, with the oratorio itself? Would it not serve equally well as prelude to a hundred others of the old oratorios or operas? Practically the only method of musical development these composers had at their service was the fugal: it was impossible for them to work out an extended musical piece by means of ever-widening circles of pure feeling.

Next came a tripartite form of overture,--an opening and closing movement in quicker time, with an intermediate section in slower time and of softer character. This gave a certain amount of opportunity for the presentation of one or two of the main moods or episodes or characters of the opera: and in the "Symphony" that introduces the _Seraglio_, Mozart has given us a little masterpiece in this _genre_. But there was a certain helplessness in the division of the "Symphony" into three sections, and in the predetermined nature of their contents: and in course of time there was evolved the operatic overture proper,--a continuous musical piece, making a sort of dramatic play with the main motives of the opera. This was the form with which Gluck and Mozart worked such wonders. Gluck's masterpiece is the overture to _Iphigenia in Aulis_: Mozart's, those to the _Magic Flute_, _Figaro_, and _Titus_. According to Wagner, Mozart's merit was that he did not attempt to express in his overture all the details of the plot, but "fastened with his poet's eye on the leading idea of the drama, divested it of all its inessentials and material accidentiæ, and set it forth as a musically transfigured creation, a passion personified in tones, and presented it to the main idea as the justificatory counterpart of this,--a something through which the idea, and even the dramatic action itself, became intelligible to the spectator's feeling." At the same time the overture became a self-contained tone-piece,--this being true even of an overture like that to _Don Giovanni_, which runs without any formal close into the first scene of the opera. This form of overture became the property of Cherubini and Beethoven. The former remained mostly faithful to the transmitted type, which Beethoven also used in the E major overture to _Fidelio_. But Beethoven in time broke through the cramping limitations of this form. His "prodigious dramatic instinct," having never found the opera into which it could pour the whole of itself, turned for an outlet to instrumental music pure and simple,--to the field in which he could "shape in his own way the drama of his desire out of pure tone-images," a drama "set free from the petty trimmings of the timorous playwright." The result of this effort was the great _Leonora_ overture, which, "far from giving us a musical introduction to the drama, really sets that drama before us more completely and more affectingly than the ensuing broken action does. This work is no longer an overture, but itself the mightiest of dramas."[322]

Weber too is commended for making his overtures dramatic "without losing and wasting himself in a painful depiction of insignificant accessories of the plot." Even when his rich fantasy led him to incorporate more subsidiary musical motives than the form transmitted to him could conveniently carry, he always managed to preserve the dramatic unity of his conception. He invented a new form, that of the "dramatic fantasia," of which the _Oberon_ overture is one of the finest examples. "Nevertheless," says Wagner,--and here again we see his rooted antipathy to anything in the nature of excessive detail-painting in music[323]--"it is not to be denied that the independence of purely musical production must suffer by subordination to a dramatic thought, if this thought is not seized in one broad trait consistent with the spirit of music,--for the composer who tries to depict the details of the action itself cannot develop his dramatic theme without breaking his musical work to fragments." The inevitable ending of this style of overture is the _pot-pourri_,--a form of which Spontini's overture to the _Vestale_ may be said to have been the beginning. The public liked this kind of thing because it dished up for them again the most effective snatches of melody from the operas.

The summing up is that the ideal form and ideal achievement are those of the _Don Giovanni_ and _Leonora_ overtures. In the former no attempt is made to reproduce the course of the drama itself step by step: the drama is freshly conceived as the contest between two broad principles--the arrogance of Don Giovanni and the anger of a higher power--and "the invention, as well as the conduct," of these symbolic motives "belongs quite unmistakably to no other province than that of music." Beethoven's method in the _Leonora_ overture, on the other hand, is "to concentrate in all its noble unity the _one_ sublime action which, in the drama itself, is weakened and impeded by the necessity of padding it out with trivial details,--to show this action in its ideal new motion, nourished only by its inner impulses." This "ideal action" is, of course, the loving self-sacrifice of Leonora. But by reason of its very greatness and its intense dramatic quality, the _Leonora_ overture ceases to be an _overture_ in the proper sense of the word. It anticipates too fully the completed drama: if it is not understood by the hearer, because of his lack of knowledge of the opera, it conveys only a fragment of its real message to him: if it is wholly understood, it weakens his subsequent enjoyment of the drama itself.

Wagner therefore returns to the overture to _Don Giovanni_ as the ideal, because here "the leading thought of the drama is worked out in a purely musical, not a dramatic, form." In this way the musician "most surely attains the general artistic aim of the overture, which is simply an ideal prologue, transporting us into that higher sphere in which to prepare our mind for the drama." The musical conception of the main idea of the drama can still be distinctly worked out and brought to a definite close; in fact "the overture should form a musical art-work complete in itself." No better model could be had than Gluck's overture to _Iphigenia in Aulis_. In a word, though the overture must not attempt to reproduce stage by stage all the episodes of the story, it can suggest in its own way the dramatic contest of two main principles by a contest between two symbolic musical ideas: only the working-out of these musical ideas must follow from the nature of the themes themselves. But it must be always borne in mind--and the frequency with which Wagner returns to this point shows the importance he attached to it--that "the working-out must always take its rise from the purely musical significance of the themes: never should it take account of the course of events in the drama itself, for this would at once destroy the sole effective character of a piece of music."

As I have already pointed out, this and one or two of the other articles of the Paris time are interesting because they show us the mature æsthetics of the 'sixties and 'seventies trying to find expression in the young Wagner of 1840. To most of the principles here laid down he remained faithful, as we shall see, to the end of his days. But it is interesting also to note that though theoretically he always remained constant to the guiding principles he here lays down for the overture, his practice by no means always conformed to them. His ideal overture, as we have just seen, was one of the type of that to _Don Giovanni_ or that to _Iphigenia in Aulis_--_i.e._ one that either made no use at all of thematic material from the opera itself, or the minimum use of it, the dramatic conflict of the stage action being fought out ideally, as it were, in the overture, in the persons of two symbolic musical themes. "In this conception of the overture," he says, "the highest task would be to reproduce the characteristic idea of the drama by means pure and simple (_mit den eigentlichen Mitteln_) of self-subsistent (_selbstständigen_) music, and to conduct it to a conclusion which should correspond, by anticipation, with the solution of the problem in the scenic play."

It is difficult to square his practice in some of his own overtures with the theoretical principles he here lays down. Not one of his overtures corresponds with the form he so greatly admired in the overtures to _Don Giovanni_ and _Iphigenia in Aulis_,--a re-presentation of the coming dramatic conflict in terms of a musical piece that made no drafts at all, or practically none, upon the thematic material of the opera itself. The brief Prelude to _Lohengrin_ comes under no suspicion of being a _pot-pourri_ of motives from the opera; but then it achieves its concision and its singular air of detachment from anything in the nature of mere story-telling in music by failing to do just what Mozart and Gluck are commended for doing--summing up the ensuing dramatic conflict by the opposition of two main musical moods and their final resolution. The _Lohengrin_ Prelude tells us nothing of any dramatic contest,--not even that which rages in the heart of Elsa. It shows us only Lohengrin, the representative of the Grail, coming to earth and leaving it again. There is no hint of the reason for his return to Monsalvat: there is no hint even that his stay on earth has been in any degree troubled by enemies or evil. Beautiful as it is, therefore, and eloquently as it sings of Lohengrin himself, the Prelude is not in the full sense of the word a real prelude to the drama. On the other hand, when Wagner _does_ make his overture a genuine introduction to, and instrumental summary of, the opera, he inevitably approaches the _pot-pourri_. It is true that his fine sense of form mostly saves him from attempting to reproduce in the overture _all_ the dramatic or thematic motives of the opera. In the _Flying Dutchman_ overture, for example, there is no reference to Erik: so far as the overture itself is concerned, no such person might have ever come into the lives of Senta and the Dutchman. There is no mention of Daland, and no reference to the spinning scene--the latter a musical motive that, it is safe to say, none of the French or Italian writers of overtures, or perhaps even Weber himself, would have had the heart to set aside. On the whole the _Flying Dutchman_ overture is concerned simply with the Dutchman, his curse and his grief, with Senta, and with the sea that forms the imaginative background to their drama:[324] and though of course the overture is entirely built up of thematic material derived from the opera, this is all so freshly and imaginatively treated, and made into so coherent and organic a piece of instrumental music, that, though the overture is by no means of the type of those to _Don Giovanni_ and _Iphigenia in Aulis_, which Wagner praised as models, nothing could be further removed from the old-style _pot-pourri_. The overtures to _Tannhäuser_ and the _Meistersinger_, however, must frankly be called _pot-pourris_,--though _pot-pourris_ of genius. In the _Tannhäuser_ overture we are given not merely an instrumental symbol of the drama, but the drama itself compressed into a sort of feuilleton. The ground covered is so vast, and the expression so intense, that at the end of the overture we are inclined to ask ourselves whether it has not, like the great _Leonora_ overture, made a good deal of the ensuing drama almost superfluous, a mere padding out or watering down of the emotions and the spiritual oppositions set before us with such drastic power in the overture itself. One is inclined to say that an overture lasting nearly a quarter of an hour is not so much the door to a mansion as a cottage in itself. A work like the _Tannhäuser_ overture has its justification as a kind of symphonic poem for the concert room; it has little justification as a prelude to a drama in the theatre.