Chapter III: The Artist in Practice (2)

But vast as the imaginative growth had been from _Rienzi_ to _Lohengrin_, it seems almost like a mere marking time in comparison with the subsequent development. Most instructive in this respect are the alterations Wagner made in his earlier works in later life. The _Flying Dutchman_ ends with the destruction of the Dutchman's ship as Senta leaps into the sea. The stage directions in the first edition run thus: "In the glow of the setting sun the glorified forms of the Dutchman and Senta are seen rising above the wreck, clasped in each other's arms, soaring heavenward"; and the final page of the opera in its original form consisted of the "Redemption" motive followed by the motive of the Dutchman, the opera ending with the latter. When Wagner revised the work some years later, he was conscious of the abruptness and inconclusiveness of this ending. His pictorial imagination saw the transfigured forms of Senta and the Dutchman more vividly, and the more luminous vision found expression in the great stroke of genius with which the opera as we now have it ends. The thundering theme of the Dutchman no longer has the last word; the fortissimo swell of the full orchestra suddenly breaks, and in a slower _tempo_ there steals out in the soft, pure tones of the wood-wind and harps the theme of "Redemption" in the form it first assumes in Senta's ballad, but with an unexpected heavenward ascent in the violins at the finish--

[Music: No. 22.]

The effect is precisely as if the clouds had parted, and the figures of the Dutchman and Senta were seen soaring aloft in their purified and transfigured form.[403]

As the first version of the _Faust_ Overture (1840) has not been published, it is impossible to compare it with the version we now have, which was made in 1855; but we may be certain that the comparison would prove as interesting as that between the earlier and the later versions of the _Flying Dutchman_ finale. But the new Venusberg music that he wrote for the Paris production of _Tannhäuser_ (1861) shows as emphatically as the altered _Flying Dutchman_ ending how immeasurably greater than all his development from _Die Feen_ to _Lohengrin_ was the development from _Lohengrin_ to _Tristan_--for it was in the _Tristan_ period that he made this wonderful addition to _Tannhäuser_, the effect of which is to make the remainder of the score seem almost cold in comparison, a pale moon against a fiery sun. Had Wagner died after _Lohengrin_ he would still have been the greatest operatic composer of his time. But the work of the later years is so stupendous in every respect, imaginative, inventive, and technical, that even _Lohengrin_ seems hardly to be the product of the same mind.

IV.--THE MATURE ARTIST

1

The years 1848 and 1849 saw the climax of a great crisis both in Wagner's life and his art; it had been developing for two or three years before, and its reverberations did not wholly die away for some years after. All his life and his work at this time were, as I have already said, simply a violent purgation of the spirit--a nightmare agony from which he woke with a cry of relief. He shakes off the theatre, and faces the world on a new footing as a man. And in silence, unknown to everybody and almost to himself, he develops into a new musician. For the moment his mind is a jumble of art, ethics, politics and sociology. But as usual his artistic instincts guide him surely in the end. After many gropings in this direction and that, he settles down to the _Ring_ drama, which he first of all plans, in 1848, in the form of a three-act opera with the title of _Siegfried's Death_. He falters a little even then, being obsessed by two other subjects, _Jesus of Nazareth_ and _Friedrich Barbarossa_; but finally he rejects them both, the greater adaptability of the Siegfried drama for music being intuitively evident to him. The next twenty-six years are to be taken up with the working out of this gigantic theme, with _Tristan_ and the _Meistersinger_ as a kind of diversion in the middle of it; then comes the quiet end with _Parsifal_. I do not propose to discuss the philosophical--or pseudo-philosophical--ideas of any of these works. It is only as a musician that Wagner will live, and to a musician the particular philosophy or philosophies that he preached in the _Ring_ and _Tristan_ and _Parsifal_ are matters of very small concern. Wagner himself was always inclined to over-estimate the importance of his own philosophising, and his vehement garrulity has betrayed both partisans and opponents into taking him too seriously as a thinker. Had he not left us his voluminous prose works and letters, indeed, we should never have suspected the hundredth part of the portentous meanings that he and his disciples read into his operatic libretti. To those who still see profound metaphysical revelations in the later works it may be well to point out that Wagner saw revelations equally inspired and inspiring in the earlier ones, which no one takes with excessive seriousness to-day on their dramatic side. The philosophising all smacks too much, for our taste, of the sentimental Germany of the mid-nineteenth century. For Wagner, Senta is "the quintessence of Woman [_das Weib überhaupt_], yet the still to-be-sought-for, the longed-for, the dreamed-of, the infinitely womanly Woman--let me out with it in one word: the _Woman of the Future_."[404] Tannhäuser was "the spirit of the whole Ghibelline race for every age, comprehended in a single, definite, infinitely moving form; but at the same time a human being right down to our own day, right into the heart of an artist full of life's longing."[405] "Lohengrin sought the woman who should have faith in him; who should not ask who he was and whence he came, but should love him as he was, and because he was what he appeared to himself to be. He sought the woman to whom he should not have to explain or justify himself, but who would _love_ him unconditionally. Therefore he had to conceal his higher nature, for only in the non-revealing of this higher--or more correctly heightened--essence could he find surety that he was not wondered at for this alone, or humbly worshipped as something incomprehensible,--whereas his longing was _not_ for wonder or adoration, but for the only thing that could redeem him from his loneliness and still his yearning--for _Love, for being loved, for being understood through Love_.... The character and the situation of this Lohengrin I now recognise with the clearest conviction as the _type of the only really tragic material, of the tragic element of our modern life_; of the same significance, indeed, for the _Present_ as was the _Antigone_, in another relation, for the life of the Greek state.... Elsa is the unconscious, the un-volitional, into which Lohengrin's conscious, volitional being yearns to be redeemed; but that yearning is itself the unconscious, un-volitional in Lohengrin, through which he feels himself akin in being to Elsa. Through the capacity of this 'unconscious consciousness' as I myself experienced it in common with Lohengrin, the nature of Woman ... became more and more intimately revealed to me ... that _true Womanhood_ that should bring to me and all the world redemption, after man's egoism, even in its noblest form, had voluntarily broken itself before her. Elsa, the Woman ... made me a full-fledged revolutionary. She was the spirit of the folk, for redemption by whom I too, as artist-man, was yearning."[406]

This seems all very remote from us now; one wonders how any one, even Wagner himself, could ever have taken these operatic puppets with such appalling seriousness. The _Ring_ stands a little nearer to us; but no longer can we follow Wagner in his philosophising even there. For Wagner Siegfried was "the human being in the most natural and gayest fulness of his physical manifestation.... It was Elsa who had taught me to discover this man: to me he was the male-embodied [_der männlich-verkörperte_] spirit of the eternal and only involuntarily creative force [_Geist der ewig und einzig zeugenden Unwillkür_], of the doer of true deeds, of Man in the fulness of his most native strength and his most undoubted love-worthiness."[407] We can hardly regard Siegfried in that light to-day. As we meet with him in the libretto he is, as Mr. Runciman says, rather an objectionable young person; we cannot quite reconcile ourselves to his ingratitude and his super-athletic fatuousness; he reminds us too much of Anatole France's description of the burly, bullet-headed general in _Les Dieux ont Soif_--the sparrow's brain in the ox's skull. As we see him on the stage he is, under the best conditions, slightly ridiculous, a sort of overgrown Boy Scout. It is only in his music that he is so magnificently alive, so sure of our sympathy. Sensible musicians, indeed, do not trouble very much in these days about the metaphysics or the esoteric implications of the Wagnerian dramas. Wotan must stand or fall by his own dramatic grandeur and by the quality of the music that is given to him to sing, not by the degree of success with which he illustrates a particular theory of the Will. _Tristan_ is none the better for all its Schopenhauerisms, natural or acquired; we may be thankful that it is none the worse for them.

Wagner's philosophical stock, indeed, was never a very large one. The "problems" of his operas are generally problems of his own personality and circumstances. His art, like his life, is all unconscious egoism. _His_ problems are always to be the world's problems, _his_ needs the world's needs. Women obsessed him in art as in life: they kindled fiery passion in man, or they "redeemed" him from passion, or they set a sorrow's crown of sorrows on his head by failing to redeem him. Passion, redemption, renunciation--these are the three dominant motives of Wagner's work; and wherever we look in that work we find himself. Indulgence--revulsion; hope--frustration; passion--renunciation; these are the antitheses that are constantly confronting us. In the _Flying Dutchman_, Vanderdecken-Wagner is redeemed by the woman who loves and trusts him unto death. Tannhäuser-Wagner fluctuates between the temptress and the saint. Lohengrin-Wagner seeks in vain the woman who shall love him unquestioningly. Wieland the Smith, the hero of a libretto he sketched in 1849, is again Wagner, lamed by life, but healed at last by another "redeeming" woman. Wotan-Wagner, finding the world going another way than his, wills his own destruction and that of the world. Tristan-Wagner finds love insatiable, and death the only end of all our loving. Sachs-Wagner renounces love. Parsifal-Wagner finds salvation in flight from sensual love. Always there is this oscillation between desire and the slaying of desire, between hope for the world and despair for the world. In 1848, in an hour of physical and mental joy in life, he conceives a blithe and exuberant Siegfried, the super-man of the future, striding joyously and victoriously through life. But the revulsion comes almost in a moment. He realises his solitariness as man and artist. "I was irresistibly driven to write something that should communicate this grievous consciousness of mine in an intelligible form to the life of the present. Just as with my _Siegfried_ the strength of my yearning had borne me to the primal fount of the eternal purely-human; so now, when I found this yearning could never be stilled by modern life, and realised once again that redemption was to be had only in flight from this life, in escaping from its claims upon me by self-destruction, I came to the primal fount of every modern rendering of this situation--to the Man _Jesus of Nazareth_." Like Jesus, confronted with the materialism of the world, he longs for death, and reads a similar longing into all humanity.

So the oscillation goes on to the very end of his days. There is no need, no reason, to discuss the "philosophy" of such a mind. He is no philosopher: he is simply a tortured human soul and a magnificent musical instrument. All that concerns us to-day is the quality of the music that was wrung from the instrument under the torture.

2

The most astounding fact in all Wagner's career was probably the writing of _Siegfried's Death_ in 1848. That drama is practically identical with the present _Götterdämmerung_; and we can only stand amazed at the audacity of the conception, the imaginative power the work displays, the artistic growth it reveals since _Lohengrin_ was written, and the total breach it indicates with the whole of the operatic art of his time. But _Siegfried's Death_ was impossible in the idiom of _Lohengrin_; and Wagner must have known this intuitively. This is no doubt the real reason for his writing no music for six years, from the completion of _Lohengrin_ in August 1847 to the commencement of work on the _Rhinegold_ at the end of 1853. His artistic instincts always led him infallibly, no matter what confusion might reign in the rest of his thinking. He conceives the idea of the _Meistersinger_, for instance, in 1845, just after finishing _Tannhäuser_. But a wise and kindly fate intervenes and turns him aside from the project. He was not ripe for the _Meistersinger_, either poetically or musically, as we can see not only by a comparison of his later musical style with that of _Tannhäuser_, but by comparing the sketch of the drama that he wrote in 1845 with the revised drafts of 1861. It was his original intention, again, to introduce Parsifal into the third Act of _Tristan_; but his purely artistic instincts were too sound to permit him to adhere to that plan. How unripe he was in 1848 for a setting of _Siegfried's Death_ hardly needs demonstration now. The swift and infallibly telling strokes with which he has drawn Hagen and Gutrune in the _Götterdämmerung_, for example, were utterly beyond him then; it took twenty years' evolution before he could attain to that luminousness and penetration of vision, that rapidity and certainty of touch. So much, again, of the tragic atmosphere in which the _Götterdämmerung_ is enveloped comes from the subtle harmonic idiom that Wagner had evolved by that time, that it is hard to imagine the extent of his probable failure had he persisted in setting the text to music in 1848. The lyrical style of _Lohengrin_, the leisurely spun tissue of that lovely work, were neither drastic enough, close enough, nor elastic enough for _Siegfried's Death_. And of this he must have had a dim consciousness.

So he puts the musical part of his task on one side for six years, broods continually over the subject, finds it growing within him, and at last shapes it into not one opera but four. When he begins work upon the music of the _Rhinegold_ he is a new being. His imagination has developed to an extent that is without a parallel in the case of any other musician. The characters and the _milieu_ of the _Rhinegold_ are themselves evidence of the audacious sweep of his vision: he undertakes to re-create in music gods and men and giants, creatures of the waters and creatures of the bowels of the earth; the music has to flood the scene now with water, now with fire, with the murky vapours of the underworld and the serene air of the heights over against Valhalla. Never before had any composer dreamed of an opera so rich in all varieties of emotion, of action, of atmosphere. The practice he had in the _Rhinegold_ developed his powers still further: in the _Valkyrie_ the painting grows surer and surer, the imagination sweeps on to conceptions beyond anything that any musician before him would have thought possible: in _Siegfried_ there is an absolute exultation of style; the music seems to dance and cry aloud out of pure joy in its own strength and beauty. His melody has already become terser and more suggestive in the _Rhinegold_, and has lost much of its earlier rhythmic formality. His harmonic range, while narrow enough compared with that of _Tristan_ and the _Götterdämmerung_, has yet developed greatly. He dares anything in pursuit of his ideal of finding in his music the full and perfect counterpart of the characters and the scenes; that endless E flat chord at the commencement of the _Rhinegold_ prelude is an innovation the audacity of which we can hardly estimate to-day.

It has been objected that the melody of the _Rhinegold_ is on the miniature side, and that the score has little of the grand surge and sweep of the later operas. It may be so, but the style of the music seems admirably suited to the broad and simple outlines of this drama and the relatively simple psychology of the beings who take part in it,--beings who are now taking only the first step along the path that is to lead them all into such tragic complications. But in any case Wagner was obeying a sound instinct when he abandoned the broader style of _Lohengrin_ in favour of the seemingly shorter-breathed style of the _Rhinegold_. It was the consequence of his intuition that his new dramatic ideas demanded a new musical form; we have to remember that everything he says on this topic in _Opera and Drama_ is the outcome of his reflection upon _Siegfried's Death_ and the best manner of its setting. The older forms of opera being inapplicable here, he had to devise a new method of unifying his vast design. He found the solution of his problem in an application to opera of the symphonic web-weaving of Beethoven; but for this he needed short and extremely plastic motives. That as yet he cannot weave these motives, and the episodical matter between them, into so continuous a tissue as that of the later works is only natural; to expect him to have done so would be as unreasonable as to expect the texture of Beethoven's second symphony to be as closely woven as that of his fifth. But Wagner knew he had a wonderful new instrument in his grasp, and he did well to learn the full use of it by cautious practice.

3

The leit-motive, of course, is not Wagner's invention. Other operatic composers had tentatively handled the device before him; and in his own day Schumann had seen the possibilities of such a method being applied to the song. In his _Frühlingsfahrt_, for example, the joyous major melody that accompanies the bright youths on their first setting out in life changes to the clouded minor as the poet tells of the ruin that came upon one of them; and everyone knows the sadly expressive effect of the winding up of the _Woman's Life and Love_ cycle with a reminiscence of the melody of the opening song. The device of reminiscence in poetic or dramatic music is indeed so obviously a natural one that we can only wonder that the pre-Wagnerian composers did not make more use of it. But Wagner did more than employ it as a sort of index or label; he turned it into the seminal principle of musical form for perhaps three-fourths of the music of our time. He made it not merely a dramatic but a symphonic-dramatic instrument. He had experimented with the device from his youth, but until now without perceiving its symphonic possibilities. We have seen him carrying forward a significant theme from one scene to another in _Das Liebesverbot_. In _Rienzi_ there is very little real use of the leit-motive. He will adopt a characteristic orchestral figure for a person or a situation at the commencement of a scene or "number," and play with it all through that particular set piece; but it is very rarely that he will remind us of a previous situation by importing the theme that symbolises it into a later situation. He does this, for example, with the "Oath" motive, which first accompanies Rienzi's story of his own vow to avenge his murdered brother (vocal score, pp. 77, 78), and is afterwards employed to accompany Colonna's threat of vengeance if Rienzi dooms him and his fellow conspirators to death (p. 266), Rienzi's rejection of Adriano's plea for mercy (p. 337), and finally Adriano's own resolve to be avenged upon Rienzi (p. 416). In the _Flying Dutchman_ the tissue is largely unified by typical themes, which, however, are as a rule merely repeated without substantial modification, though now and then a motive is melodically transformed to suggest a psychological variation, as when the "Redemption" theme from Senta's ballad--

[Music: No. 23.]

afterwards becomes the motive of "Love unto death"--

[Music: No. 24.]

In _Tannhäuser_ there is a good deal of recurrent material--the Bacchanale and the Pilgrims' Chorus, for instance--but the leit-motive can hardly be said to be used at all in the later sense. _Lohengrin_ is strewn with leit-motives that are marvels of characterisation; but here too they recur in their original form time after time. For the most part they merely label the character: they do not change as he changes, nor do they spread themselves over the score with the persistence of the motives of the later works.

4

The leit-motive in the _Ring_ is quite another matter. Most of the motives in the earlier operas were vocal in origin, and their relatively great length--which makes them as a rule unsuitable for a flexible symphonic treatment--is the direct consequence of the length of Wagner's poetic lines at that time. In _Rienzi_, for example, the motive of Rienzi's prayer, the "Sancto spirito cavaliere" motive, the "Freedom" motive, the motive of the "Messengers of Peace," and others, are all of this type. In the _Flying Dutchman_ the motive of "Longing for death," the two "Redemption" motives, the "Daland" motive, the "Festivity" motive, the "Rejoicing" motive, the "Longing for redemption" motive, and several others, are all vocal melodies in the first place; of the same kind are the motives of "Repentance," of "Love's magic," of "Love's renunciation" and others in _Tannhäuser_; and in _Lohengrin_, the "Grail" motive, the "Farewell" motive, the "Elsa's prayer" motive, the "Knight of the Grail" motive, the "Warning" motive, the "Doubt" motive, and others. All of these are fully developed, self-existent melodies, not germ-figures destined for the weaving of a quasi-symphonic web. And though some of the less important motives in the early operas are short, they were not made so with any intention of using them plastically. The first things that strike us in connection with the motives of the _Ring_ are their general shortness, their very plastic nature, and the sense they convey of not having been conceived primarily in a vocal form. It is true that some of them _are_ vocal in origin, but that fact does not stare us so aggressively in the face as it does in the previous works; while the lines of the _Ring_ are themselves so short that even when a phrase is modelled on one or two of them it never spreads itself out so extensively as the typical phrases of the _Flying Dutchman_, _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ do. This at first sight seems to imply that the poetic form of the _Ring_ exercised a powerful influence on the musical form. It is permissible for us to-day to invert that proposition. Wagner, writing in 1851, maintained that he had discarded the older form of verse, with its long lines and its terminal rhymes, because of his conviction that this was too conventional a garment to throw over the sturdy limbs of Siegfried, the untutored child of nature, and that he was therefore led to adapt the _Stabreim_ of the Folk. Consistently with the theory I have already advanced in these pages, I prefer to believe--guided, as of course Wagner himself could not be guided at that time, by the evidence of the function the music performs in his later works--that the new orchestral musician that was coming to birth within him felt the necessity of shorter and more plastic germ-themes, and instinctively urged the poet to cast _his_ material into a form that would place no obstacle in the musician's way. But explain it as we will, the fact remains that now he is coming to maturity his leit-motives are on the whole both more concentrated and more purely instrumental than they had been hitherto; as I have said, even when they come to us in the first place from the mouths of the characters, they assume quite naturally the quality of instrumental themes in the subsequent course of the opera, whereas a purely orchestral rendering of the themes of _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ can never disguise their vocal origin. It is comparatively rarely that the _Ring_ motives extend beyond two bars, or at the most three. The "Servitude" motive is virtually only one bar in length; so are the "Rhine Maidens' song," the "Smithing" motive, and the "Reflection" motive; the "Waves" motive, the "Ring" motive, the "Valhalla" motive, the "Might of youth " motive, the "Twilight" motive, the "Norns" motive, the "Dusk of the gods" motive, are all comprised within a couple of bars; several others run to three bars, and only one or two run to four.

In this respect, as in some others, the _Meistersinger_ stands in a class apart from the other works of Wagner's maturity. It is the most purely vocal of all his later works, in the sense that while the orchestral tissue is superbly full and unceasing in its flow, the voice parts have an independence that is rare in the later Wagner. The style is in a way almost a reversion to that of _Lohengrin_, allowance being made, of course, for the more symphonic nature of the orchestral portion, and the more continuous nature of the whole. The _Meistersinger_ is full of "set" pieces--arias, duets, trios, a quintet, choruses, _ensembles_, and so on. The necessity for all these lay in the nature of the subject; and Wagner, at that time at the very height of his powers, has so cunningly mortised all the components of the opera that not a join is observable anywhere. A superficial glance at a table of the _Meistersinger_ motives would be enough to convince us, without any knowledge of the opera, that a great many of the themes have had a vocal origin, either solo or choral. Others owe their length to the fact that Wagner is painting masses rather than individuals; only a fairly extended theme could depict, for instance, the sturdy, pompous old Meistersingers and their stately processions. Where he is not following a vocal line or painting with broad sweeps of the brush, and is free to invent motives for purely orchestral use, he generally throws them into the same concise form as those of the _Ring_--the "Wooing" motive, for example--

[Music: No. 25.]

which, by reason of its brevity, is one of the most plastic motives in the score. But as a whole the _Meistersinger_ lives in a different world from the _Ring_ or _Tristan_. There is no great fateful principle running through it, that can be symbolised in a short orchestral figure and flashed across the picture at any desired moment, after the manner of the "Curse" or the "Hagen" motive in the _Ring_, or the "Death" motive in _Tristan_. The people in the _Meistersinger_ carry hardly any shadows about with them. Their natures are mostly ingenuous, transparent, unsubtle: such as we see them on the stage at any given moment, such are they to themselves and others in every hour of their lives. It was natural then that they should take upon themselves more of the burden of the drama than the characters of the _Ring_ as a whole,--for these are only instruments in the hand of a fate that is best symbolised by the ever-present orchestra--and that the instrumental voices should co-operate joyously with them, rather than dog them and lie in wait for them, as in the _Ring_, with symbols of reminiscence and foreboding. That the whole essence of the _Meistersinger_ lies in its simple human characterisation and simple story-telling is shown again by Wagner's reverting in the Prelude to the _pot-pourri_ feuilleton form of the _Tannhäuser_ overture,--a form he never used again after 1845, except here.

5

As he proceeds with the _Ring_ his leit-motives in general become more and more concentrated. Now and then he will employ a fairly extended theme, but never without a good psychological reason. One of the longest motives in the whole tetralogy is that of the "Volsung race." Its length is justified by the duty it has to perform: to concentrate the nobility and the suffering of that race into a chord or two would be beyond the powers of any musician; none but Wagner, indeed, could have expressed such an infinity of elevated grief within the compass of seven or eight bars. Some of the other motives are astounding in their brevity and eloquence. Not till after his work on the _Rhinegold_ had unsealed his imagination and perfected his technique could he have hoped to hit off the wild, half-animal energy of the Valkyries in some four or five notes that are merely the expansion of a single chord, or have dared to trust to what is virtually only a series of syncopations to symbolise Alberich's work of destruction (the _Vernichtungsarbeit_ motive). Never before could he have written anything so eloquent of death as the "Announcement of death" motive in the _Valkyrie_. In _Siegfried_, though the number of new motives is comparatively small, the same process of concentration is observable. The god-like nature and the stately gait of the Wanderer are suggested to us in three or four notes. And in the _Götterdämmerung_ the concentration is amazing. In that stupendous work he is, in my opinion, at the very summit of his powers. He never wastes a note now: every new stroke he deals is incredibly swift, direct and telling. Absolutely sure of himself, he dispenses with a prelude--for the few bars of orchestral writing before the voices enter can hardly be called one--and trusts to the colour of a mere couple of chords to tune the audience's imagination to the atmosphere of the opening scene. One short characteristic figure suffices for the motive of Hagen, and nowhere in the whole of Wagner's or anyone else's work is a figure of two notes used so multifariously and with such far-reaching suggestion. It is evident that he now feels the harmonic instrument to be the most serviceable and flexible of all; and hundreds of his most overpowering effects in the _Götterdämmerung_ are achieved by harmonic invention or harmonic transformation. The grisliness of the Hagen theme comes in large part--putting aside the question of orchestral colour--from the sort of dour, irreconcilable element it seems to introduce into certain chords,--though in reality the harmony has nothing essentially far-fetched in it--as in that tremendous passage near the end of the first Act of the _Götterdämmerung_--

[Music: No. 26.]

Hagen!

The new themes, too, rely for a great deal of their poignancy upon some subtle and fleeting taste of sweetness or some swift suggestion of darkness and mystery in the harmony, as in the exquisite motive that is associated with the wedding of Gutrune--

[Music: No. 27.]

or in the motive of "Magic deceit"--

[Music: No. 28.]

while others make their effect by means of the utmost concentration of melodic meaning, like the "Blood-brotherhood" motive, or by an epigrammatic condensation of rhythm, like the "Oath of fidelity" motive, which only Wagner could have invented, and which no other composer but Beethoven would have dared to use if it had been offered to him--

[Music: No. 29.]

_Bruckmann_

It is on harmonic alteration that he chiefly relies again, in the latter stages of the _Ring_, to suggest the fateful gloom that is gradually closing in upon the drama; much of the tense and tragic atmosphere of the _Götterdämmerung_ comes from this clouding of the simpler texture of the motives of the earlier operas. One of the most remarkable instances of this is his treatment of the "Servitude" motive, that is generally associated with Alberich. In the _Rhinegold_ it appears in a variety of simple forms, such as this--

[Music: No. 30.]

and this--

[Music: No. 31.]

In the _Götterdämmerung_ a sense of almost intolerable strain, of a great tragedy sweeping to its inevitable end, is conveyed by various subtilisations of the harmony, of which the following may stand as a type--

[Music: No. 32.]

When Siegfried appears on Brynhilde's rock, disguised as Gunther, the theme of the latter is metamorphosed from--

[Music: No. 33.]

into--

[Music: No. 34.]

Here everything is exquisitely calculated,--the harmonic alteration, the orchestral colouring (the soft mysterious tones of trumpet and trombones), the interrupted ending, and the long fateful silence that follows.

When Alberich, in his colloquy with Hagen at the commencement of the second Act of the _Götterdämmerung_, looks forward to the approaching destruction of the gods, the "Valhalla" motive becomes altered from the familiar--

[Music: No. 35.]

to--

[Music: No. 36.]

Many other illustrations might be given of this harmonic intensification of themes.

6

It has to be admitted, however, that Wagner's use of the leit-motive presents some singularities, and is at times open to criticism. He undoubtedly introduces the motives more frequently than they are really needed; there is no necessity, for example, for the "Siegfried's horn" motive to be sounded at almost every appearance of Siegfried or every mention of his name. Debussy has made merry over this superfluity of reference, comparing it to a lunatic presenting his card to you in person. But we can easily forgive Wagner this little excess of zeal. He was doing something absolutely new for his time. He had a gigantic mass of material to unify, and this incessant recurrence of significant themes seemed to him the only way to do it. He could not foresee how familiar the operas and their motives would be to the whole musical world half a century later. In any case this peculiarity of his style can be passed over with a mere mention. Of more importance is his habit of making many of the motives so much alike that a certain amount of confusion is set up even in the minds of those who know the operas well. The "Servitude" motive, for example, is so like the opening of the Rhine Maidens' song that everyone goes astray over the two themes now and then in the first stages of his acquaintance with the _Ring_. Still more confusing is his habit of taking a motive that at first has only a particular meaning, and making it express a general concept, the result being that we frequently associate it with the wrong character. His mind was curiously like Bach's in this respect, that having fixed upon a figure that seemed to him an adequate symbol for an action, a person, an animal, or a material object, he would use it for all future phenomena of the same kind. But Bach's procedure is rather more logical, for his typical themes have as a rule a pictorial or semi-pictorial character, and so they can be applied without incongruity to a number of pictures of the same general order. A phrase that symbolises waves, for example, in one work may be legitimately employed to symbolise waves in another, for the theme itself is so constructed as to suggest the motion of waves: at least that is the intention. But Wagner necessarily has to find musical symbols for all kinds of things in his operas for which it is quite impossible to discover an unmistakable, self-explanatory musical equivalent. The symbol has therefore to be an arbitrary one; it has no claim to pictorial veracity, but we agree to accept it because it fulfils a useful musical purpose. The "Fire" motive conveys a real suggestion of fire; the _Rhinegold_ prelude has certain qualities that make us willing to associate it with a mighty rolling river. But the "Ring" motive does not convey the slightest suggestion of a ring, nor has the "Gold" motive any resemblance to gold.

Wagner runs, then, a risk of being misunderstood, or not understood at all, when he takes an arbitrary symbol which we are willing to concede him in one case, and applies it to another. It would tax all the ingenuity of the thorough-going Wagnerian to justify, for instance, in the scene of the Norns in the _Götterdämmerung_, the employment of the "Sleep" motive that is inevitably associated in our minds with Wotan's parting from Brynhilde at the end of the _Valkyrie_. When Brynhilde is taking leave of Siegfried, in the second scene of the _Götterdämmerung_, and giving him Grane as a perpetual reminder of herself, the orchestra accompanies his words with the "Love" motive from the duet between Siegmund and Sieglinde in the first act of the _Valkyrie_. So profound has been the impression we have received from it there that it is impossible for us to associate it with any other pair of lovers; and we cannot help wondering what Siegmund and Sieglinde have to do with Siegfried and Brynhilde and Grane. When Hagen describes the coming of Siegfried down the Rhine, it is quite right that the orchestra should give out the typical Siegfried theme, but quite wrong, surely, that this theme should be combined with that of the Rhine Maidens from the _Rhinegold_. The intention presumably is that from the Rhine Maidens we are to infer the Rhine;[408] but the musical intelligence does not like having to diverge into deductive reasoning of this kind. Anyone who has learnt to associate the theme with the Rhine Maidens will naturally suppose either that they are to appear in person or that some allusion is to be made to them, neither of which things happens. The "Treaty" motive of the _Rhinegold_, again, has become so firmly associated in our minds with the agreement between Wotan and the giants that we involuntarily think of them when we hear it again in the orchestra during the swearing of Blood-brotherhood by Siegfried and Gunther (_Götterdämmerung_, vocal score, p. 92).

One of the most curious uses of the leit-motive is to be found in _Siegfried_ (V. S. p. 35). Siegfried, pouring contempt on the idea that Mime can be his father, is telling him how he once saw the reflection of his own face in the brook:

Unlike unto thee
there did I seem:
as like as a toad
to a glittering fish.

There is excellent reason for accompanying the third line with the "Smithing" motive that so often characterises Mime; but what reason can there be for accompanying the fourth line with the "Waves" motive from the prelude to the _Rhinegold_? As it is not in the Rhine but in a brook that Siegmund has seen his reflection, the motive here can only be taken as symbolising not the waves of a particular and already familiar river--a procedure for which there might be some excuse--but waves in general, which is quite illegitimate. Wagner goes too far, as Bach used to go too far, in importing into the line a pictorial allusion that is not already there, and that we can only put there by an effort. For Bach also was in the habit of making his music argue, as it were, from one external fact to another. We can permit this within certain limits, but both Bach and Wagner sometimes go beyond all limits. When Bach has to set to music a stanza in which the faithful are spoken of as Christ's sheep (_Beglückte Herde, Jesu Schafe_, in the cantata _Du Hirte Israel_) he obviously aims at creating a pastoral atmosphere by the use of the oboes; and our imagination here is quite willing to accept the naïf translation of the religious idea into a pictorial image. But when Bach, possessed by the image of Jesus calling His disciples to be fishers of men (in the cantata _Siehe, ich will viel Fischer aussenden_), makes use of a motive of a type that he always employs to symbolise waves, we can only say, with all respect, that we had rather he did not ask us to deduce the necessity of waves from the fact that there are fish. So with this passage from _Siegfried_: we should be quite satisfied with the mere comparison between the toad and the fish; to lay it down with such portentous gravity that where there are fish there must necessarily be water is to reduce pictorialism to an absurdity.

There is no lack of examples of this process of illegitimate inference and illegitimate association. After Mime has answered the first of the Wanderer's three questions, the latter congratulates him in this wise (_Siegfried_, vocal score, p. 74):

Right well the name
of the race dost thou know:
sly, thou rascal, thou seemest!

--to the same phrase that is often used in the _Rhinegold_ to suggest the trickiness of Loge in particular, but also, apparently, to suggest deceit in general. It accompanies, for example, Fafner's remark to Fasolt, _à propos_ of the attempt of Wotan to evade the promised payment for Valhalla--

My trusty brother,
seest thou, fool, his deceit?

(V. S. 89, 90); and again the words in which Wotan tries to calm the apprehensions of Fricka--

Where simple strength serves,
of none ask I assistance:
but to force the hate
of foes to help me,
needs such craft and deceit
as Loge the artful employs.

(V. S. 82, 83). That is to say, a purely arbitrary musical figure is to be taken as symbolising not merely the slyness of a particular person, but slyness in the abstract--a length to which we must decline to go with Wagner.

And as with his waves and his moral qualities, so with his animals; they too are both particular and universal. When Alberich, at the urging of Loge, turns himself into a serpent (_Rhinegold_, p. 182), it is to the accompaniment of a motive that is itself admirably pictorial. But in _Siegfried_, (p. 7, etc.), and the _Götterdämmerung_ (p. 34, etc.), the same motive is always used to characterise Fafner, after he has turned himself into a dragon. One need not enlarge upon the confusion this is bound to create.

We are willing again, to accept the "Swan" motive in _Lohengrin_ as a purely conventional symbol; but the same motive strikes rather oddly on our ears when it is used to particularise the swan in _Parsifal_. If in _Lohengrin_ it typifies that particular swan, it is obviously not right to employ it for a totally different bird in another opera; for there is nothing in the outline of the theme that can be said to bear the remotest resemblance to a swan in the way that an arpeggio theme may be said to resemble waves, or a crepitating theme to suggest fire. Again, Wagner only confuses us when he uses the motive that accompanies Kundry's ride in the first scene of _Parsifal_ to accompany Parsifal's description of the horsemen he had once seen in the wood:

And once upon the fringe of the wood,
on glorious creatures mounted,
men all glittering went by me;
fain had I been like them:
with laughter they swept on their way.
And then I ran,
but never again I saw them;
through deserts wide I wandered,
o'er hill and dale;
oft fell the night,
then followed day: etc.

(vocal score, p. 54); afterwards to accompany Kundry's account of the death of Herzeleide:

As I rode by I saw her dying,
and, Fool, she sent thee her greeting;

(V. S. p. 57); after that, again, to accompany Kundry as she hastens to the spring in the wood to get water for the fainting Parsifal (V. S. p. 58); after that to describe the rush of Klingsor's warriors to the ramparts (V. S. p. 120); after that to accompany the thronging of the Flower Maidens to the scene (V. S. p. 156); again to give point to Parsifal's words:

And I, the fool, the coward,
to deeds of boyish wildness hither fled--

(V. S. p. 203); and to accompany--for what reason it is difficult to say--Kundry's threat that she will call the spear against Parsifal if he continues to repulse her (V. S. p. 222); and finally, as an accompaniment to her last words to Parsifal:

For fleddest thou from here,
and foundest all the ways of the world,
the one that thou seek'st,
that path thy foot shall find never;

(V. S. p. 225). No ingenuity can justify the employment of the same motive for so many different purposes. As a matter of fact, after we have once become conscious of it as accompanying Kundry's ride in the first scene of the opera, it is inevitable that we should associate it with her at each subsequent recurrence of it.

Another peculiarity of Wagner's use of the leit-motive may be noted; once or twice he gives a meaning to a theme in the later stages of the _Ring_ that we cannot be sure of it possessing at first. The most striking instance of this is the "Reflection" motive. In _Siegfried_ it is exclusively employed in connection with Mime, and the manner of its employment leaves no room for doubt that the commentators are right in giving it this title. The prelude to _Siegfried_ commences with it; it is used there to suggest to us Mime pondering over the problem of the forging of the sword. It frequently recurs with the same significance in the scene that follows. It is used again all through the scene of questions and answers between the Wanderer and Mime, to suggest the dwarf putting his considering cap on after or during each of the Wanderer's posers. Yet on its first appearance in the _Rhinegold_ (vocal score, p. 151) there is nothing whatever to indicate that the theme is to be taken as symbolical of reflection. It accompanies Mime's plaint to Wotan and Loge--

What help for me?
I must obey
the commands of my brother,
who holds me bondsman to him.

* * * * *

By evil craft fashioned Alberich
from the ravished Rhinegold a yellow ring: etc.

(Vocal score, p. 151.) From the words one would be _a priori_ inclined to associate the music with Alberich rather than with Mime; and as it is not employed again in the _Rhinegold_, the meaning we are suddenly asked to attach to it at the opening of _Siegfried_ seems a little far-fetched.

7

Wagner was not long in realising that however thrilling the timbre of the human voice may be, and useful as it is for making clear the course of the action and the sentiments of the characters, the orchestra is the most powerful and most resourceful of all the instruments at the disposal of the operatic composer. More and more the main current of his thinking goes into this. In the _Rhinegold_ the orchestral texture is by no means continuous; frequently it merely punctuates or supports the vocal declamation by means of a detached chord or two, much in the way that it used to sustain the older recitative. As the _Ring_ proceeds, pages of this kind become rarer: the orchestra thrusts itself more and more to the centre of the picture. It would be impossible to make the tissue of the _Rhinegold_ intelligible without the voices: but the orchestral part of the _Götterdämmerung_ would flow on with hardly a break if the vocal part were omitted; so also would large sections of _Tristan_ and the _Meistersinger_. It was inevitable that under these circumstances the vocal writing should occasionally become a little perfunctory. It is frequently said that the balance between the vocal and orchestral parts is most perfectly maintained in _Tristan_; but the most cursory examination of the score shows that even there Wagner could not always find, or would not take the trouble to find, a vocal line of equal melodic interest with that of the orchestra, in the opening scene, for instance, it is transparently clear that the really expressive voice is the orchestra, and that the vocal parts have been inserted, sometimes rather carelessly and unskilfully, after the orchestral tissue has been completed. The vocal writing in _Tristan_ falls into four main categories. The first is that to which I have already referred; wholly absorbed in the orchestral working out of a theme, Wagner seems to pay the minimum of attention to the vocal line, which sometimes has as little real relevance to the music as a whole as if it had been added by another person. As a specimen of this kind of writing we may cite the music to the words of Brangaene at the commencement of the opera--

Bluish strips
are stretching along the west;
swiftly the ship
sails to the shore:
if restful the sea by eve
we shall readily set foot on land.

(Vocal score, pp. 7, 8.)

To the second category belong passages in which the voice is frankly in the forefront of the picture and the orchestra is merely a background--as in the colloquy between Tristan and Brangaene (vocal score, pp. 18 ff.), or in the music to Isolde's words shortly after the beginning of the second Act--

BRANGAENE. I still hear the sound of horns.
ISOLDE. No sound of horns
were so sweet;
yon fountain's soft
murmuring current
moves so quietly hence;
if horns yet brayed
how could I hear that?

(Vocal score, pp. 90, 91.)

To the third category belong the passages in which the voice simply sings the same melody as the orchestra, as on p. 177 of the vocal score ("Thy kingdom thou art showing," etc.); and to the fourth, those in which it sings a real counterpoint to the orchestra--not a mere piece of padding like the passage I have cited from pp. 7, 8 of the score, but a vocal line of genuine melodic interest--as in a good deal of the scene of the third Act through which there runs the melancholy cor anglais melody.

_Tristan_, in fact, in spite of the splendour of its orchestral polyphony, by no means exhibits Wagner's symphonic powers in their full evolution. The most wonderful of his works in this respect is the _Götterdämmerung_, the stupendous strength of which is beyond words and almost beyond belief. The world had not seen a musical brain working at such tremendous and long-sustained pressure since the days when the B minor Mass and the "Matthew Passion" were written; and even those masterpieces have not the continuity of texture of the _Götterdämmerung_, nor do they show so giant a hand at its work of unification. Turn almost where you will, the course of the drama is told with absolute clearness in the orchestra itself. Yet in spite of his concentrating so largely on the orchestra, the vocal parts have an extraordinary aptness; it would be hard to find a passage in the score as perfunctory as some that might be quoted from _Tristan_. The voice, it is true, is often used simply as another counterpoint among those of the orchestra; but as a counterpoint it generally has a dramatic appositeness and a melodic beauty of its own.

In _Parsifal_ this tendency to make the orchestra the principal dramatic speaker goes so far that very frequently the vocal writing is thoroughly bad. Some writers have attributed this to a decline of mental power in Wagner's old age. I do not think that this is the correct explanation. I can see no general decadence of musical invention in the music of _Parsifal_: I am willing to believe that the peculiar emotional and intellectual world of the opera makes no appeal to many people; but the style as a whole is as admirably suited to that world as the styles of _Tristan_ and the _Meistersinger_ are to their respective subjects, and I for one see no failure of inspiration except in some of the choral writing in the first Act, where there is occasionally an undeniable touch of commonplace. Part of the admitted colourlessness of some of the vocal passages is to be accounted for, I think, by the utterly unmusical quality of the words. The defect is not in Wagner the musician but in Wagner the poet, who has forgotten for the moment several of the principles he had laid down in his prose works and put into successful practice in the six great operas of his prime. The text of _Parsifal_ contains a large amount of quite unmusical matter, especially at the commencement. Many of the lines have evidently not roused the slightest interest in the composer. He knew that the orchestral part was alive, and always developing the emotional possibilities of the situation; and when he comes to an obviously impossible verbal patch,--necessary for the telling of the story, but containing no stimulus for the musician--he simply refuses to waste time or trouble upon it. Take as an example one of the very worst passages for the voice in the whole opera--the words of Parsifal just before the beginning of the transformation music in the first Act--

[Music: No. 37.]

PARSIFAL.

I hardly stir, and yet I move apace.