Chapter III: The Artist in Practice (1)

I--THE EARLY MISCELLANEOUS WORKS

According to Wagner's own account, he sketched tragedies in his childhood, and worked out one that was a sort of blend of _Hamlet_ and _King Lear_; and, inspired by Beethoven's _Egmont_, he soon desired to adorn this grand tragedy with music of his own. A brief study of Logier's _Method of Thorough-Bass_ did not provide him with the needed technique, though, convinced that he was born to be a musician, he wrote a sonata, a quartet and an aria in secret. In his sixteenth year he placed himself under a teacher, who, however, could do nothing with him in the excessively febrile state in which he then was. His nervous excitement culminated in a round of the usual student excesses; and having calmed down again he set himself to study composition in earnest with Weinlig, the cantor of the Thomas School. Six months' work sufficed to satisfy Weinlig that his pupil was now competent to stand on his own legs. It is at this time (1831) that he produces the compositions that are the earliest we now possess of his.

At present he has apparently no inclination towards opera. The raw works of his adolescence had all been instrumental; among them was the Overture in B flat major (1830) that was performed in the Leipzig Theatre, and in which the drum-beat every four bars ended by moving the audience to uncontrollable merriment. It is not till the summer of 1832 that he plans a first opera. _Die Hochzeit_; he writes the text, but composes no more than a fragment of the music. Meanwhile he produces, as the result of Weinlig's schooling, a number of works more or less in the conventional style. The pianoforte sonata in B flat major that was published by Breitkopf & Härtel as the composer's Op. 1 is dedicated to Weinlig, under whose eye the work was written. His teacher had evidently seen the need for curbing the exuberance of the boy's undisciplined mind. He made him write simply, in the set forms, and with regard to the clarities of the pure vocal style. For this first sonata, Wagner tells us, Weinlig induced him to take an early sonata by Pleyel as a model; the whole work was to be shaped on "strictly harmonic and thematic lines." Wagner himself never thought much of it. But if it is no more than an imitation of the current sonata style, it is an unmistakably capable imitation. Weinlig was right; he had given his pupil independence. In all these youthful works, indeed, we are struck by the unquestioning self-confidence of the manner, and by the boyish vigour that animates them. As a reward for his docility in the matter of the sonata he was allowed by Weinlig to compose a pianoforte fantasia in F sharp minor. He treated this, he says, in a more informal style. It is really a quite powerful work for a boy of eighteen. It defines a mood, and maintains it with singular persistence; it expresses something truly felt; it comes from the brooding absorption of spirit that was afterwards to produce the _Faust_ Overture. It is liberally sown with recitative passages that suggest some knowledge of Bach (the Chromatic Fantasia or the G minor Fantasia for the organ), or of Beethoven (pianoforte sonata in A flat. Op. 110, &c.). The manner and feeling of the adagio suggest the slow movement of Beethoven's fifth symphony, the later ornamentation of the main melodic idea being quite in the style of that movement. Altogether the Fantasia is by no means a work to be despised; it is the one composition of Wagner's of this period in which we catch a decided note of promise for the future.

The Polonaise in D major for four hands (1831) is more in the conventional manner, but quite interesting, and as original as we can expect from the average young composer of eighteen. The A major sonata (Op. 4, 1831) flows on in the glib, confident way that is characteristic of all his early instrumental works, and has many good points. The weakest movement is the third--a rather amateurish fugue. There is some expression in the slow movement, and a general freedom of style everywhere except in the fugue. The idiom as a whole is that of the early Beethoven, but occasionally the writing suggests a boy who knew something of Weber and of the later Beethoven, though his invention and his technique were as yet equal only to imitating the simpler models.

For its day the Symphony in C major (1832) is a very capable piece of student work; the interest slackens very considerably in the finale, but the other movements are handled with the customary young-Wagnerian vigour and confidence. In spite of the ease and the cleverness of it, however, we can rarely feel that it is anything more than a piece of competent school work, though there is undeniable thoughtfulness in the andante.

The work of the next five years varies in quality and purpose in a most puzzling way. In 1832 he writes the _King Enzio_ Overture, under the influence, as he tells us in _Mein Leben_, of Beethoven. It is plainly modelled on the dramatic overture of the _Egmont_ and _Coriolan_ type--a type that Mendelssohn, in the _Ruy Blas_ and elsewhere, afterwards cultivated, without however adding anything to it. The young Wagner has a thorough grasp of the form. The Overture is concise and well balanced; all the details are clearly seen in relation to the dominant idea. The thematic invention is good, the themes being not only expressive in themselves but capable of bearing the weight of a certain amount of dramatic development. Yet after writing this fine Overture, that really may point without presumption to Beethoven as its parent, he was capable of producing in 1836 the shapeless and frothy _Polonia_ Overture, which is the oddest mixture of a pseudo-Polish idiom and the cheap, assertive melody of _Rienzi_. Here and there it gives us a foretaste of his later power of climax-building, but on the whole it is a feeble and amorphous work. The _Rule, Britannia_ Overture (1836) is hardly any better; it is a long-winded and pointless dissertation on our patriotic song, the original tune being by far the best thing in it. The _Columbus_ Overture of the preceding year is rather better. Its style is a curious blend of Beethoven, _Rienzi_, and the Italian opera; it is oddly anticipatory of Liszt in its repetitions and its make-believe development: but the work has a sort of strength. It is evidently the outcome of a vision clearly seen, and translated into as good music as Wagner's powers at that time permitted.

Meanwhile in 1832--the same year as the _King Enzio_ Overture and the C major symphony--he had written _Seven Compositions to Goethe's Faust_--"The soldiers' song," the "Peasants under the linden," "The song of the rat," "The song of the flea," Mephistopheles' song ("Was machst du mir vor Liebchens Tür"), Margaret's song ("Meine Ruh' ist hin"), and a "melodrama" to accompany the recitation of Margaret's prayer to the Virgin.[396] Almost all of these have individuality, the least notable being Mephistopheles' song. The soldiers' song is breezy, with one or two crudities in the vocal part-writing. The "Bauern unter der Linde" is fresh and gay; the rat and flea songs are fairly humorous; it is rather curious that Wagner's rat song should begin with the full scale of D major in descending motion, while that of Berlioz commences with the same scale in ascent. Margaret's song is quite good, though it moves a little stiffly, and has neither the ardour of Schubert's setting nor the perfect mating of idea and expression that we find in that masterpiece. Wagner, indeed, developed very slowly. For a long time his genius could only move heavily: there was no swiftness in him, either of idea or of form,--no consuming heat. The melodrama is expressive, and the reiterated syncopations are effective. Wagner probably chose the melodrama form, rather than a purely lyrical setting of the words, because he felt that the former gave the dramatist in him more scope.

In 1832-33 the dramatic impulse became very strong in him. He had written the _Hochzeit_ fragment and _Die Feen_ by the end of 1833, and between 1834 and 1836 he finished the _Liebesverbot_. Already he had a technique equal to the expression of all the dramatic thinking of which he was capable at that time. How dexterous his hand had become is shown incidentally in the aria he added to Marschner's _Vampyr_ in 1833,--a very vigorous and finished piece of work. There is the same skill in the "Romance of Max" that he added to the Singspiel _Marie, Max and Michel_ (1837). There is piquancy in the scoring of the latter, and the vocal part has a rhythmic variety that we do not often find in _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_. Apparently the only non-dramatic work he wrote at this time was the _New Year Cantata_, which is one of the freshest and most pleasing works of his youth. It consists of an overture and four other movements; the chorus takes part in the second and fourth of these, but in the latter the vocal parts are merely sketched in, and the words are lacking. In the slow opening section of the overture he introduces in the violas and 'cellos, with excellent effect, the theme of the andante of his C major symphony; it is apparently intended to symbolise the sadness of the departing year. It is impossible not to be captivated by the sincerity and the transparent simplicity of this little work.

During 1838 and 1839 his time was fully taken up with his theatrical duties at Königsberg and Riga, the composition of _Rienzi_, and the working out of other dramatic ideas; so that from 1837 to 1840 what may be called the occasional compositions are few in number. With the exception of the aria for _Marie, Max and Michel_, and the _Faust_ compositions, his vocal works had so far all been settings of words of his own. Between 1837 and 1844 the texts of almost all his songs and choral works were by other people. At Riga, in 1837, he set a poem by Harald von Brackel in praise of the Czar Nicholas, for soprano or tenor solo, chorus, and orchestra. The piece is appropriately broad and massive, and imposing enough in mere volume; but it is impossible to believe that Wagner's heart was in a work of this kind.

Of much more interest is _Der Tannenbaum_, a setting of a poem by Scheuerlein (end of 1838). The song is expressive, though the effect lies more in the general colour, the harmony, and the pictorial realisation of the scene--the brooding tree, the river, and the boy are all differentiated--than in any particularly striking quality in the melody. The vocal line has more flexibility than is usual with the young Wagner. In July 1839 he entered upon his Paris adventure. For a while he eagerly pursues his fortune among the theatrical directors; then, as his hopes fail him and need gnaws at his heart, he produces a number of vocal works that he trusts may appeal to the French singers and the French public. Some of these are pot-boilers pure and simple, the writing of which must have been gall and bitterness to the young composer who had begun to realise the wonderful music there was in him. The lowest depth is touched in the vaudeville chorus, _La Descente de la Courtille_ (1840)--a frank prostitution of his genius to the most superficial French taste of the time. Almost as bad is the song, _Les adieux de Marie Stuart_. A bar or two here and there bears the signature of the true Wagner--he cannot quite keep his real self out of it; but on the whole the song is a desperate, pitiful attempt to manufacture something in the conventional French and Italian operatic idiom of the day. Wagner's tongue must have been in his cheek when he penned such passages as these:

[Music: Ex. 1]

Je n'ai désiré d'être reine que pour régner sur les Français,
que pour régner sur les Français.

To the same period and the same catchpenny mood belongs the _Aria of Orovisto_ that he wrote in the hope that Lablache would sing it in Bellini's _Norma_. It is an amusingly absurd but skilful imitation of all the tricks-of-the-trade of the Italian opera of the 'thirties.

Other works of this time are more sincere, and most of them have a decided charm. The _Albumblatt_ in E major, written for his friend Kietz, is a simple but engaging piece, with a touch or two of melodic commonplace--the occasional insertion, for example, of a triplet group in a duple-time phrase. The little work is curiously like the _Lohengrin_ of seven years later in general texture, in melodic and harmonic build, and in the peculiar white light in which it is bathed. The songs to French words, written at Paris in 1839-40, vary greatly in quality. The _Tout n'est qu'images fugitives_ never descends to the depth of banality reached in the _Marie Stuart_, but the effort to be ingratiatingly French is plainly evident. The _Dors, mon enfant_, _Mignonne_, and _Attente_ are all charming; he thinks of the French style and the French public no more than is necessary to lighten the heaviness of his native German manner, and the results are sometimes surprising, particularly in the matter of rhythm. For many years to come, as he admits in a well-known letter to Uhlig, he was obsessed by a vocal rhythm of this type:

[Music:]

--a type upon which hundreds of phrases in the _Flying Dutchman_, _Tannhäuser_, and _Lohengrin_ are constructed. The best of these French songs have a rhythmic freedom and flexibility that he rarely attained in his later operas. Look, for example, at the following delightfully elastic vocal line from _Attente_:

[Music: Ex. 2]

Cicogne, aux vieilles tours fidèle,
ô vole et monte à tire d'aile de l'église
à la citadelle, du haut clocher, du
haut clocher au grand donjon.

It has always been evident that the rhythmic sameness of the earlier operas was mainly due to the monotonously regular recurrence of accents in the German verse he wrote at that time. These French songs make it clear--as, by the way, does the aria for _Marie, Max and Michel_--that when a more varied metrical scheme was given him his music spontaneously varied with it. One cannot help feeling that in some ways it is a pity he did not meet with more success at Paris--that he was not allowed, in fact, to write some large work with the deliberate intention of appealing to the French taste by an exploitation of the styles and the formulas the Parisian public loved most. Such a work would not have represented the real Wagner, and in the end would probably have been negligible; but it would have given a much needed lightness and elasticity to his imagination, without harming him in any way. He would have benefited by such an experience as emphatically as Handel and Mozart benefited by their experiences with Italian opera. As it was, a certain slowness and ponderousness remain characteristic of Wagner to the end of his days. This inability to concentrate rapidly is instructively shown in his French setting of Heine's _Les deux Grenadiers_ (1839-40). In general expressiveness the song need not fear comparison with Schumann's: perhaps Wagner's treatment of the "Marseillaise" at the end is even better. But the work has nothing of Schumann's terseness, ease, and lyric spontaneity; the whole thing moves a little stiff-jointedly.

The Paris period is a curious one in Wagner's artistic history. He wrote some very good songs, and one or two deplorable things like the _Marie Stuart_ and _La Descente de la Courtille_; at the same time he was finishing _Rienzi_ and working at the _Flying Dutchman_, and the _Faust_ Overture assumed its first form. In April 1842 he settled at Dresden. Between then and 1848 he composed _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_, and conceived the first idea of the _Ring_ and other works. During this period he wrote no songs or pianoforte pieces: the occasional compositions are all choral works, which is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that Wagner had a good male-voice choir at his disposal. The most considerable of these works is _The Love Feast of the Apostles_ (1843). Towards the end it has a touch of the melodic commonplace that Wagner found it so hard to avoid at this time; but the earlier choral portions are impressive in their simplicity and sincerity, and the whole thing is admirably stage-managed, so to speak. The effect of the voices from on high, and of the first entry of the orchestra at the descent of the Spirit, must have been very striking in the Dresden church.

The other choral works of this period are on a smaller scale. For the unveiling of a memorial to King Friedrich August I Wagner wrote in 1843 a _Weihegruss_ for male voices and brass orchestra, to words by Otto Hohlfeld. The choral portion of this work was published in 1906; the whole version is now published in Breitkopf & Härtel's _Gesamtausgabe_, and shows how indispensable is the orchestral part--the long-held vocal notes, for example, being helped out by trumpet, trombone, and horn fanfares, and the whole thing gaining enormously in richness by the discreet occasional entries of the brass. The general style of this work, as of the _Greeting of Friedrich August the Beloved by his Faithful Subjects_ (August 1844), is that of the _Tannhäuser-Lohengrin_ epoch; some passages in the _Greeting_, indeed, are extraordinarily reminiscent of the "Hall of song" chorus. For the re-interment of Weber's remains at Dresden, in December 1844, Wagner wrote a four-part male chorus that again recalls the operatic works of this time. It is the most expressive of Wagner's works of this class, but on the whole a little disappointing; his heart was so thoroughly with Weber that one would have thought the occasion would have wrung some music of the first class out of him.

II--THE EARLIEST OPERAS

Wagner worked out the drama of his first opera, _Die Hochzeit_ ("The Wedding"), in 1833, but his sister Rosalie's antipathy to the gory and gruesome subject turned him against the work after he had written only some thirty or forty pages of the score--an Introduction, chorus and septet. The style has little individuality, though the chorus of female voices is not without charm. The septet, however, is an excellent piece of work for a boy of nineteen,--lucid, freely written, and with a certain amount of dramatic differentiation in some of the vocal parts.

His first complete opera, _Die Feen_ (The Fairies), was written during his stay at Würzburg in 1833. The story, which may be read in _Mein Leben_ or any of the biographies of Wagner, has long lost any interest it may once have possessed. In psychology and in structure alike the drama is very primitive. The magic element in it is fit only for the nursery, though it has to be observed that here we have for the first time that notion of "redemption" that plays so large a part in Wagner's thinking to the very end of his life. The construction is formal and cumbersome: the two chief lovers have as a foil two subordinate lovers, while set off against these is a third pair, who provide a sort of comic interest; the whole past, present and future are explained in recitatives; everybody of any importance has his aria or his share in a concerted piece, and each Act ends with an imposing _ensemble_. The stage apparatus is romantic to the last degree. The music, however, is decidedly interesting. The third Act, in spite of a few strokes that get home, is much inferior to the other two, for which the fact that it was written in a month may be answerable. But the first two Acts and the overture are full of striking things. There is no question as to the thorough competence of Wagner's technique at this time: everything flows with the utmost ease and clearness from his pen. The opera has indeed a poise of manner and a unity of style that we do not find in some of the more mature works of his first period. In the _Flying Dutchman_, for example, there is a good deal of almost hobbledehoy awkwardness,--a sort of cubbish clumsiness, though any discerning observer could have seen even in those days that this was a cub of a leonine breed, that would some day swallow up most of the other animals in the menagerie. There is nothing of this cubbishness, this stumbling over his own good intentions, in _The Fairies_. Such as the ideas are,--and of course they never rise to anything like the height of the best things in the _Flying Dutchman_--they are expressed without effort, in an idiom and with a technique precisely congruous with them. Aria, duet, ensemble, dramatic contrast, dramatic transition,--the young composer is equal to whatever problem may be set him. The musical style as a whole reminds us of Weber and Marschner, but there is plenty of unmistakable Wagner in it. We are constantly meeting with progressions, turns of phrase, and devices that have been made familiar to us by the later operas. How like a score of melodies in _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ is the following, for example--

[Music: No. 1.]

When he wants to work up the excitement at the entry of Arindal he does it precisely in the way he whips up our interest in the coming of the hero in the second Act of _Tristan and Isolde_--by a series of breathless reiterations of the same figure--

[Music: No. 2.] When he has joy to express, he does so by means of the same ascending, bubbling phrases that he uses in the duet between Tannhäuser and Elisabeth (vocal score, p. 157, &c.)[397]--

[Music: No. 3.]

LORA: Dahin, dahin flieht alles Leiden, und alle
ARINDAL: So viele Not im Heimatlande, &c.
MORALD: Dahin, dahin flieht alles Leiden,

And although the duet between Drolla and her lover Gernot is subcomic in intention, their manner of rushing into each other's arms is precisely that of Tristan and Isolde--

[Music: No. 4.]

DROLLA: Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! Gernot! 'tis thou,
'tis thou!

GERNOT: Drolla! Drolla! Drolla! Drolla! 'tis thou, 'tis thou,
'tis thou, 'tis thou, 'tis thou, 'tis thou, &c.

The style is frequently mature beyond the composer's actual years,--the admirable finish to the scene between Arindal and the others, for example (full score, p. 111), where the vocal themes are taken up by the orchestra and played out in a beautifully managed diminuendo; or the perfect little picture of the fairy garden at the commencement of the first Act (I question whether so imaginatively conceived and skilfully coloured a garden scene is to be found anywhere in previous or contemporary opera); or the expressive scoring of Ada's cavatina (full score, pp. 114 ff.); or the septet at the end of the first Act; or the fine management of the chorus of beaten warriors at the beginning of the second Act, with the reiterated calls in the bass horn and trumpet; or the fine _Schwung_ of the trio between Lora, Arindal and Morald (pp. 219 ff.); or the big aria of Ada in the second Act (pp. 251 ff.); or the charming theme that is used when the children are introduced. The born musical dramatist is seen in the variety of expression he can command even at this age; and one is struck by the first signs of the faculty that is so noticeable in the later Wagner,--that of always having something in reserve when a new and cumulative effect is needed. The larger the canvas to be covered, as in the final _ensembles_, the more resource does he show himself to possess. There is a good deal in _The Fairies_ that is quite boyish,--much that is conventional, many things to provoke a smile. But it is equally certain that there was not another young man in Europe capable of writing such a work at that time. The overture, which was written a few days before the last touches were put to the third Act, is excellently handled throughout; the invention never flags, the technique never fails; it is his best work of this order until we come to the overture to the _Flying Dutchman_,--finer in idea, closer in texture, and surer in touch than the _King Enzio_ Overture of 1832, and far beyond the _Columbus_, the _Polonia_, or the _Rule Britannia_. Altogether one imagines that, in spite of the old-fashioned quality of the libretto of _The Fairies_, one could listen to a stage performance of the opera with at least as much interest as to _Rienzi_. It was given for the first time in Munich under Hermann Levi in 1888, and between then and 1895 it ran to over fifty performances.

As we have seen, _Das Liebesverbot_ ("The Ban on Love") was a product of the wild days of 1834-5, when he had momentarily turned against sobriety both in life and in art. In framing his libretto he passed over everything in Shakespeare's _Measure for Measure_ that had a touch of moral gravity in it: he transports the action from Vienna to Sicily, brings the strait-laced viceroy Friedrich into the same focus as the other amorists, and makes the whole play an attack on "puritanical hypocrisy" and a laudation of "unrestrained physicalism." In the music he does his best to forget that "German style" in which, as he says, _Die Feen_ had been written, and copies to the best of his ability the more sparkling style of the lighter Italian and French opera. The work is in two Acts,--the only opera of Wagner's in this form--and in its structure follows the ordinary pattern of the day. Occasionally the spoken word takes the place of recitative.

In 1866 Wagner gave the score of the opera to King Ludwig, prefacing it with a stanza in which he spoke of it as a sin of his youth, for which he hoped to find pardon in his protector's grace. Apparently he always adopted this depreciatory attitude towards the work in later life. Glasenapp tells us that Wagner liked the overture to _Das Liebesverbot_ better than that to _Die Feen_, but thought the rest of _Das Liebesverbot_ "horrible," except the "Salve regina cœli."[398] A perusal of the score, however, will convince most people that he underrated the interest and the value of it. It almost invariably fails when it aims at expressing serious feeling; but the gay and humorous scenes are admirable, and the youthful gusto of the whole thing is irresistible. The general idiom may be a borrowed one, but for the most part Wagner uses it very skilfully, making at least as good a show with it as the ordinary French or Italian opera writer of the time. He has every trick of the trade at his finger-tips, every recipe for froth and foam and sparkle. He is as expert as any of them at lashing up the interest by the device of repeating a piquant figure a score of times: this, for example, from the overture--

[Music: No. 5]

It is given first of all mainly to the strings, with a little harmonic thickening in bassoons and horns. Then, as the melody goes an octave higher in the strings, it is doubled in the oboes and clarinets, with added harmonic enrichment in the wood-wind and brass. At the next repeat--an octave higher again--the melody is given out by piccolo, flutes, oboes, clarinets and violins in octaves, while trombones are added to the harmony. All the while the tone is growing louder and louder, with a crescendo roll in the tympani. One has to listen, whether one wants to or not; and it is impossible to keep the blood from tingling under the whip. The whole overture is very effective in this noisy, rather empty way; there is much use of castagnets, tambourine, triangle and cymbals. The general style of the writing may be gathered from a couple of examples--

[Music: No. 6.]

[Music: No. 7.]

either of which will serve to show the gulf that separates _Das Liebesverbot_ from _Die Feen_.

The opening scene is very animated, the chorus of the people being full of _entrain_; the whole manner is thoroughly Italian, the orchestra chattering away more or less irrelevantly, and the voices interjecting their remarks in a facile, half-melodic sort of way. How careless Wagner was with regard to deeper musical characterisation may be seen from the theme that accompanies the entry of Claudio,--one of those typical Italian operatic themes of which we can never be quite sure whether they are meant to be tragic or comic, though here it is apparently meant to be serious--

[Music: No. 8.]

Nor in any other work but this would Wagner have accompanied with so irresponsible a theme the appeal of Claudio (sentenced to death) to his friend Luzio to seek the aid of Isabella--

[Music: No. 9.]

Du kennest jenen stillen Ort, das Kloster der Elisabeth; Die &c.

The melody runs a thoroughly Italian course--

[Music: No. 10.]

O eile Freund, zu ihr dahin, o eile zu ihr dahin, sprich sie für
mich um Hülfe an, sprich sie um Hülfe für mich an.

with liberal opportunities for the tenor to poise himself on a high note and deploy his resonance--

[Music: No. 11.]

Bewege sie, dass sie verzeih', dann bau' ich ganz auf ihren Muth.
Bewege sie, dass sie verzeih',...
dann bau' ich ganz auf ihren Muth.

The chorus that follows is also quite in the Italian stage style, the excitement being worked up according to the established recipes; and of course the purely musical stream flows on without the least regard to dramatic sense, Luzio saying every other minute "I hasten, friend," but without the slightest intention of hastening till the chorus is finished. But, as almost always happens even when Wagner is trying to be least like himself, a characteristic little touch cannot be prevented from stealing in: after the voices have ceased, the long-drawn theme of Claudio sings on in the 'cellos, set against the noisy chattering of the wood-wind and brass. It makes a most effective ending to the scene.

In the third scene appears a theme that was afterwards expanded and put to splendid use in _Tannhäuser_. Here the nuns sing it behind the scenes to the words "Salve regina cœli."

[Music No. 12.]

The florid duet between the two novices, Mariana and Isabella, is thoroughly Italian. Again one sees, by comparison of this music with any of that of _Die Feen_, how determined Wagner was to write down to the comprehension of the Italian-opera public: he evidently has his eye on the singers and the audience rather than on the psychology of the characters or the atmosphere of the scene. But in the admirable duologue that follows between Luzio and Isabella, the touch is again that of the born musical dramatist. It is all irresistibly animated; the music is psychologically characteristic, the blend of passion and irresponsibility in Luzio being particularly well suggested; and there are some striking pieces of orchestral colour.

The court scene,--the mock trial in which Brighella, the viceroy's servant, poses as the judge--is carried through excellently, with an abundance of light Italian-opera humour; the roguishly knowing theme to which Brighella sings his passion for the pretty Dorella may be taken as typical--

[Music: No. 13.]

Dieses kleine Schelmenauge macht mich wahrlich ganz verwirrt.

There are one or two happy instances of the tentative employment of the leading-motive system. The theme representative of Friedrich and his law against love (No. 18 below), for example, is parodied in this way when Brighella begins to try Pontio--

[Music: No. 14.]

and when Friedrich enters and asks Brighella what has been going on, the latter replies apologetically and evasively to the accompaniment of the previous theme of the mock court, the orchestra, quite in the later Wagnerian manner, being more truthful than he--

[Music: No. 15.]

BRIGHELLA: Verzeiht, ich wollt' Euch Müh ersparen, ich hielt Gericht,
fand Widerstand &c.

Isabella's aria of intercession to Friedrich is rather poor, but the subsequent excitement is cleverly worked up, and there is some dramatic characterisation in the commanding phrases that are given to the viceroy. The finale is excellent: it has amazing fire, is full of quick resource, and, like the finales in _Die Feen_, shows how much reserve Wagner had to draw upon when an extra effort was required.

In the opening scene of the second Act,--the garden of the prison in which Claudio is awaiting death--we have another employment of the leit-motive, the oboe giving out softly the theme to which Claudio had previously urged Luzio to implore the help of Isabella, but now with appropriately altered harmonies--

[Music: No. 16.]

The orchestral prelude to the scene is expressive, Wagner putting off his Italian mask for the moment and speaking in his natural voice: the sense of gloom and impending tragedy is very well conveyed--

[Music: No. 17.]

But the strains in which Claudio addresses Isabella are again conventional: it was not easy at this time for Wagner to find original accents for grief and passion. He is best all through in scenes of humour, of comedy, of raillery. There is a charming, sunny trio later between Luzio, Isabella and Dorella; the whole of this scene, in fact, is one of the happiest in the opera. Friedrich's soliloquy in his room has a good deal of strength in it, an impressive effect being made by the frequent recurrence in the orchestra of the motive that symbolises the sternness of the attitude he has taken up towards the people's pleasures--

[Music: No. 18.]

When he utters the words

"Doch als mir Isabella die Erdenliebe erschloss,
Da schmolz das Eis in tausend Liebesthränen."

("But when Isabella revealed earthly love to me, the ice was melted into a thousand tears of love"), the orchestra completes his thought with a reminiscence of the theme of Isabella's enchantment of him in the court (see No. 7, from the overture)--

[Music: No. 19.]

O war Dein Herz denn stets verschlossen, drang Liebe nie in Deine
Brust?

The finale to the second Act is as admirably animated as its predecessor; Luzio's carnival song, the dance, and the chorus have a truly southern warmth in them; and there is a lively quartet between Isabella, Dorella, Luzio and Brighella.

Altogether _Das Liebesverbot_, like _Die Feen_, is a work upon which Wagnerian criticism will always look with an affectionate eye. If it contains much that Wagner did right to decline to take seriously in later life, there is also much in it that is eloquent of the coming dramatist in music,--a surprising quickness of apprehension, a faculty for big picture-building, and above all an irresistible ardour. Like all Wagner's music of this time, the score anticipates many of the mannerisms of the later operas. It is unusually generous with the typical Wagnerian "turn"; at one point what must be a rather comic effect in performance is made by a series of these turns being executed in octaves by piccolo, flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, violins and 'cellos--

[Music: No. 20.]

The later Wagnerian method of accumulating excitement, which we have seen anticipated in _Die Feen_, is employed also in _Das Liebesverbot_, as in the following passage, which, like the one previously quoted, gives us a decided foretaste of the meeting of Tristan and Isolde--

[Music: No. 21.]

And if for nothing else _Das Liebesverbot_ would be interesting for its use of the leit-motive. There was virtually none of it in _Die Feen_.

III.--THE OPERAS OF THE SECOND PERIOD

_Rienzi_ will always be something of a puzzle to the student. Wagner's own accounts of it in later years show that he too was a little uncertain as to the reasons for its obvious defects. He had tired of his life among little theatrical people in minor provincial towns, so he deliberately planned _Rienzi_ on an elephantine scale in order that it might be impossible except in one of the larger opera houses. He had "grand opera" in his mind throughout, he tells us; he intended not merely to imitate the showiest works of this _genre_ but to surpass them in prodigality. Yet to suppose, he adds, that this was all that was in his mind would be to do him an injustice. He was "really inspired" by the subject, and especially by the character of Rienzi. First and foremost he had _Rienzi_ in view, grand opera being only a secondary consideration; yet grand opera was "only the spectacles through which he saw the subject." He always saw it, he goes on to say, on its own merits, and never aimed consciously at merely musical effects; yet he could never see the material except in terms of the merely musical effects,--the arias, choruses, finales, processions, and so on,--of grand opera. "Thus on the one hand I was always influenced by my subject in working out the details of the work, while on the other hand I governed my subject entirely in accordance with the 'grand opera' form that was in my mind." It is pretty evident that he found it as difficult to come to any settled conclusion with regard to _Rienzi_ as we do. There is truth in the view that many of the banalities of it are due to his having the Paris opera and the Paris public in view. But we have only to study the score in conjunction with those of _Die Feen_ and _Das Liebesverbot_ to see that many of these same banalities are the logical outcome of his cast of mind and his musical attainments at that epoch, and would certainly have appeared in his music even if the idea of Paris had never occurred to him.

To put it familiarly, the youthful Wagner had been obviously shaping for some years for a bad attack of musical measles; he had to get it out of his system, and _Rienzi_ was the illness that enabled him to do so. To me it is the least satisfactory of all his works--far less enjoyable than _Die Feen_ or _Das Liebesverbot_. One can forgive the eager young-mannishness of these very youthful works: but at twenty-six or twenty-seven one expects a composer to show more indubitable signs of originality. The commonplace of _Rienzi_ is different from that of the preceding operas; it is almost an offensive commonplace; the outlines of the objectionable phrases have all been thickened and the body of them puffed out till they positively irritate us by their grossness and fatuousness. It is astounding how few phrases there are in all these six hundred pages[399] that really seize upon us: we could easily count them all on the fingers of one hand. On its harmonic side the opera gives us a strange impression of pretentious poverty. All through _Rienzi_ Wagner's mind seems to be struggling to fight its way through vapour and murk to the light. His dramatic intentions are evident enough, but he can rarely realise them. It is in vain that he exploits all the formulas for dramatic expression as they were understood at that time--diminished sevenths for horror, syncopations for agitation, and all the rest of it; in vain that he languishes or threatens, warbles unctuously or declaims aggressively, lets loose his noisy orchestra and piles up massive choral effects; they all fail to move us because there is hardly ever any bite in the phrases themselves. The obvious faults of the work are due not so much to technical inexperience or limitations of vocabulary as to a sheer failure of the imagination; with the possible exception of Rienzi himself, not one of the characters has been seen with vividness enough to wring a really characteristic musical symbol out of the composer. No one lives except Rienzi; and he, as far as his music is concerned, is little more than half alive. Any critically-minded contemporary friend of Wagner's who happened to know all his work up to that time might have been pardoned for thinking, on the basis of _Rienzi_, that the composer was deteriorating, that on the whole his imagination had hardly grown at all during the past couple of years, and that none of the earlier defects of style had been corrected, while half a dozen new ones had been added--an intolerable prolixity, a tendency to rely on elephantine effects to the neglect of finely wrought detail, and to trust to stage mechanism to eke out the weaknesses of his musical invention. The only improvement on the earlier Wagner that the friend would have been able to observe in _Rienzi_ would be that in spite of all its absurdities and infelicities, its commonness and elephantiasis, there is a new strength in the work. It is a strength clumsily used; the youthful hobbledehoy's limbs have hardened without his acquiring much more command over them than he had before, the boyish voice has gained in volume without much improvement in quality: but the general signs of muscular growth are unmistakable. Crude as the overture is, no one can deny its rampant, horse-power vigour. But the final convincing proof that though Wagner's voice was abnormally energetic in _Rienzi_ his imagination was virtually at a standstill is the fact that the opera has no colour, no atmosphere of its own. Every other work of Wagner has. In _Die Feen_, as Mr. Runciman acutely points out, there is a strange new feeling for light; in the _Flying Dutchman_ we are always conscious of the sea, in _Tannhäuser_ of a world of sensuous heat set over against a world of moral coolness and rather anæmic aspiration, in _Lohengrin_ of the gleaming river and the tenuous air of Monsalvat. _Rienzi_ conveys no pictorial or atmospheric suggestions of any kind.

But the opera was only a _reculer pour mieux sauter_. He needed a text that should be more purely musical in its essence than this; and when he found it, in the _Flying Dutchman_--the idea of which came to him shortly after he had commenced work on _Rienzi_--his genius took its first decisive leap forward. For some years he had been strangely undecided as to a suitable subject for an opera. He had experimented, and was still to experiment, in several fields. In 1836 he had turned König's novel _Die hohe Braut_ into a libretto, making quite a good romantic opera in four acts out of it.[400] (It was afterwards set by Joseph Kittl, in 1853, under the title of _Bianca und Giuseppe, oder die Franzosen vor Nizza_.) In 1837 he made a comic opera out of a story in the _Arabian Nights_, entitling it _Die glückliche Bärenfamilie, oder Männerlist grösser als Frauenlist_ ("The Happy Bear Family, or Woman outwitted by Man"). This is a delightfully vivacious little libretto, which might well be set by some modern composer. Wagner wrote some fragments of the music for it, but quickly became disgusted with the style, and turned his back on the piece. In Paris in 1841 he made a preliminary prose sketch for a libretto on a gloomy and rather striking subject of Hoffmann's, _Die Bergwerke zu Falun_ ("The Mines of Falun"), which one is sorry he did not set to music, for it has colour and a certain individuality: he would probably have made more of it than he did of _Rienzi_. But perhaps he felt that the sombre vein he would have had to pursue in _Die Bergwerke zu Falun_ had been worked out to the full extent of which he was capable in the _Flying Dutchman_. In the same winter of 1842 he made a first sketch of _Die Sarazenin_ ("The Saracen Woman"), expanding it in Dresden two years later.[401]

It was after all a sound instinct, no doubt, that made him concentrate on the _Flying Dutchman_ and let the other schemes drop, for the _Flying Dutchman_ gave him just what _Rienzi_ did not--a concentrated dramatic theme, and one with a very individual atmosphere. Had his dramatic and musical technique been more advanced than they were at that time he would probably have condensed the story still further. He saw clearly enough that the whole essence of the legend--or at any rate the whole of the musical essence of it--lay in the Dutchman and Senta, and that all the rest was mere scaffolding or trimming. "I condensed the material into a single Act, being chiefly moved to do this by the subject itself, since in this way I could compress it into the simple dramatic interaction of the principal characters, and ignore the musical accessories that had now become repellent to me."[402] But his musical faculties, which developed with a strange slowness, were still lagging a good deal behind his dramatic perceptions; and the result is that to us to-day there seem to be a good many superfluous "musical accessories" in the _Flying Dutchman_, owing to the fact that Wagner has not been able to give real musical life to such characters as Daland and Erik. He himself has described for us very lucidly in _A Communication to My Friends_ the diverging impulses in him that gave the _Flying Dutchman_ its present only partly satisfactory form. He was wholly possessed by his subject, saw that it was necessary to allow it to dictate its own musical form and method of treatment, and honestly thought that he had let it do so; but the traditional operatic form was more potent within him than he imagined at the time. As in _Rienzi_, aria, duet, trio and the other established forms somehow "found their way into" the opera without his consciously willing them.

Still the structure of the _Flying Dutchman_ is a great advance on that of _Rienzi_: what was really happening was that the musician in Wagner was beginning to see that the whole drama must be _musical_ drama, the poet not being allowed to insert anything that was inconsistent with the spirit of music. He himself persisted in putting it the other way,--that the poet in him gradually took over the guidance of the musician. But we can see now that he misread his own evolution. The poet in him undoubtedly outgrew, bit by bit, the musical forms that had become stereotyped in the opera of the day; but the poet's growth only became possible when the musician, beginning to feel his own strength, gave the poet more and more imperative orders to shape his "stuff" in a form that would afford the musician the freest course. Wagner in later years insisted that after he had elaborated Senta's ballad in the second Act, he found that he had unconsciously hit upon the thematic kernel of the whole, and that this thematic idea then spread itself naturally over the whole drama like a network. That is not true if we take his words literally, for of course a good deal of the thematic material of the _Flying Dutchman_ has no affiliation with Senta's ballad. But in the broad sense, and with regard more to his intentions than his achievements, we can see that he was right. The whole drama really emanates from Senta; the Dutchman himself, as Mr. Runciman puts it, is merely Senta's opportunity personified; the remaining characters are only there to make the before and after of the central episode clear. With more experience and a surer technique he could have cut away more of the excrescences of the libretto and concentrated the action still further, making it yet more purely musical, as he did with _Tristan_. But for the day he did marvellously well. With the _Flying Dutchman_ was born the modern musical drama.

There is no mistaking the intensity and certainty of his vision now. He no longer describes his characters from the outside: they are within him, making their own language and using him as their unconscious instrument. The portrait painter and the pictorial artist in him are both coming to maturity. The Dutchman and Senta are both drawn completely in the round; we feel, for the first time with any of Wagner's characters, that we might meet them any day and that they would be solid to the touch. Even Daland and Erik, though not as real as the other two--for Wagner had not yet the art of breathing life into every one of his subordinate characters--have a certain substantiality. And roaring and whistling and surging round them all is the sea,--not so much the mere background of the drama as the element that has given it birth. Stylistically and technically the new work is leagues beyond _Rienzi_. There is still something of the old melodic mannerism--which, indeed, he was not to lose for many years yet--but in many of the melodies there is a new leap, a new swing, a new articulation; harmonically the work is richer; it often attains a rhythmic freedom beyond anything that Wagner had been capable of before; he is learning to concentrate his expression, and to beat out pregnant little figures that limn a character or depict a natural force once for all; there is a new psychological as well as a musical logic, binding the whole scheme together and working up from the beginning to the end in one steady crescendo. Wherever the score is tested, it shows something not to be met with hitherto either in Wagner's previous work or in that of his contemporaries. His imagination is at last unlocked.

After this he develops steadily and rapidly until a fresh check is given him, it being borne in upon him that neither his imagination nor his technique is equal to the creation of the new world that he feels stirring vaguely within him. But for a time all goes well. The _Flying Dutchman_ had been finished in the winter of 1841. _Tannhäuser_ was fully ready by April 1845, and _Lohengrin_ by March 1848--just after he had completed his thirty-fifth year. In these seven years he exhausted all the possibilities of the style he had made his own; after _Lohengrin_ he instinctively feels that he is at the end of the one path and the beginning of a new one, though where this is to lead him he has as yet no inkling. Both the later operas represent a gradual clarification and intensification of the style he had tentatively used in the _Flying Dutchman_. The breach with the older opera is even yet not complete; disguise the conventional features of it as he will, they are still recognisable; aria and duet and _ensemble_ are still there, though they merge almost imperceptibly into each other. But if _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ are in large part still the old opera, they are the old opera transfigured. The musical web spreads itself more and more broadly over the whole poetic material. Recitative virtually disappears; the text still retains a number of non-emotional moments for which no really lyrical equivalent can be found, but what would have been recitative naked and unashamed in _Rienzi_ is now almost fully-clothed song--the address of the Landgrave to the Knights in the Hall of Song scene is an excellent illustration. The choral writing attains an unaccustomed breadth and sonority, and at the same time the chorus becomes a more efficient psychological instrument. The harmonic tissue becomes fuller. The melodic line becomes more and more expressive and sensitive. The orchestration begins to give a distinctive colour to both personages and scenes. A very ardent and penetrating imagination, the imagination of the born dramatist, seeing all his characters as creatures of flesh and blood, is now playing upon the material offered to the musician by the poet. Each scene suggests by its colouring its own indoor or outdoor setting, the hour of the day, the time of the year; yet each opera as a whole has a different light and is set in a different atmosphere from the others. The Wagner of this period reaches the supreme height of his powers in _Lohengrin_; and as one watches that diaphanous and finely-spun melodic web unfold itself, one is almost tempted for the moment to regret that the dæmon within him drove him on so relentlessly to another style. No one, of course, can be anything but thankful that Wagner evolved the splendid symphonic-operatic style of the second half of his life--the most serviceable operatic instrument that any musician has yet hit upon. But the more purely lyrical style of _Lohengrin_ is so exquisitely satisfying in itself that one would have been grateful had he turned back to it for a moment in later days, when his melodic invention was in its fullest glory. The main burden of the expression, in the later work, shifts more and more to the side of the orchestra. In _Lohengrin_ the voice is still the statue and the orchestra the pedestal. The whole work is the product of that equipoise of all the faculties that is often observable in composers at the end of their second period, a serenity resting upon their music that it never wins again in the more troubled after-years, when the soul is more at war with itself, and the lips can hardly find language for the pregnant images that crowd to them.