Chapter III: The Artist in Practice (4)

Wagner's prolixity, again, is not the flabby dulness of a mind that is merely maundering on and on from sheer incompetence to get to grips with the essentials of an emotion, but the over-copiousness of an inexhaustibly rich brain. And if this quality of his has its occasional bad side, we do well to remember that it is accountable also for some of his most gigantic achievements in expression. Were it not for the endless inventive power and the never-failing sense of beauty in it, a work like _Tristan_, that never pauses till the last drop of bitter-sweet juice has been squeezed out of the theme, would be hardly bearable. Like Bach, Wagner could never conceive any emotion without intensifying it to the utmost. The barest hint of joy in one of Bach's texts will set him carolling like a lark; the barest hint of mortality will bedim his music with all the tears of all the universe for its dead. Wagner has the same insatiable hunger for expression. In _Tristan_ in particular every emotion is developed to its furthest limit of poignancy. The passion of love becomes almost delirium; when Tristan, in the third Act, sings of the thirst caused by his wound, our very mouths, our very bones, seem dried as if by some burning sirocco blowing from the desert; when the sick man praises Kurvenal for his devotion it is a cosmic pæan to friendship that he sings. In hundreds of other cases it is not by elaboration of speech that he makes his overwhelming effect, but by a sort of volcanic concentration. Mingled rage and grief and despair have never found such colossal expression anywhere, in any art, as in those few bars given to the frustrated and maddened Wotan after Fricka has foiled his plan for the protection of Siegmund in the fight (the _Valkyrie_, vocal score, pp. 118, 119). Pathos will never find more touching accents than those of Brynhilde in her last great scene with Wotan (_Valkyrie_, pp. 292, 293); few things in all music convey such a sense of tears as the strange salt tones of the oboe and cor anglais here. For concentrated fury there is nothing to compare with the outburst of the bound and impotent Alberich as he dismisses the Nibelungs who have witnessed his shame (the _Rhinegold_, pp. 199-201); technically this is one of the most effective crescendi in all Wagner's works. His imagination always takes fire at a single touch, a single suggestion, and there is no staying it until the fire has burnt itself completely out. In the _Siegfried Idyl_ he has only to think of the child whose coming meant so much to him, and all the fountains of human tenderness are unsealed; this is not an individual father musing over his child's cradle, but all nature crooning a song of love for its little ones. It is this intensification of every emotion he has to express that makes each of his characters, like Shakespeare's, seem the epitome of that particular phase of human nature. Tristan and Isolde are the world's most passionate and most tragic lovers: the opera is the very quintessence of the egoism of sexual love. So with a score of other characters. The last word--for our own day at any rate--in god-like majesty has been uttered in Wotan; the last word of womanly gentleness and sweetness in Eva and Gutrune; the last word of tragic womanhood in Sieglinde; the last word of superb womanhood in Brynhilde; the last word of mellow and kindly middle age in Hans Sachs; the last word of scheming feebleness in Mime; the last word of elemental savagery in the Valkyries; the last word of youthful irresponsibility in the _Meistersinger_ apprentices; the last word of human grimness in Hagen; the last word of dog-like devotion in Kurvenal. The character-drawing is endless in its variety and infallible in its touch.

13

_Parsifal_ stands in a class apart from all the other works of Wagner. Its characterisation is not individual but symbolic; Amfortas and Parsifal and Kundry and Klingsor are not men and women whom we might meet any day in the flesh, but simply types of human aspiration or failure. We have outgrown the mental world of the work; the religious symbolism of it, _quâ_ religious symbolism, leaves many of us unimpressed; yet the basic emotional stuff of it all is enduring, and we must not allow ourselves to be set against the opera because the forms in which Wagner has embodied a durable philosophy are themselves of a time instead of all time. Evidently the symphonist in him was at this stage overpowering the dramatist. The symphonist can safely deal with types or abstractions; the dramatist can only deal with individuals. Wagner has made the blunder of trying to translate the most delicate, the most esoteric perceptions into the language of the theatre, of setting symbols upon the stage. The force of a poetic symbol lies wholly in the imagination: as soon as a dramatist or a painter tries to set it visibly before us, the free flight of the imagination is curbed by the physical obviousness, the physical limitations, of the figure that is put before the eye; the universal cannot be perceived for the particular. Wagner's root idea in _Parsifal_ was to show us, in Kundry, a living symbol of the dual nature of woman, half-angel and half-beast, in turns sensual and repentant, the destroyer and the saviour of man. But it is precisely symbols of this kind, cutting down to the obscurest depths of human psychology, that cannot retain their vast suggestiveness after they have been narrowed down to the personality of a single actor. We no longer see the eternal and infernal womanly; it is only a German prima-donna, stout of build and heavy of movement, that we see upon the stage. So with Parsifal himself. Mr. Huneker has called him "that formidable imbecile." So might we style St. Francis of Assisi, or the Buddha, or any other of the simple wise ones of the world, if we persist in looking at them through unsympathetic and unimaginative eyes. The conception of Parsifal is fine enough in itself--an unstained soul made divinely wise by its very simplicity, its love, its pity. But a character of this kind should be left to the imagination, or to music to suggest to the imagination: it is impossible to realise it behind the footlights in the person of an actor. A Parsifal is a figure for the quiet of one's chamber, not for a crowded theatre lying the other side of the box office. Hundreds of people must have felt, as I have done for twenty years, that a good deal of _Parsifal_ affects us more deeply at home than it ever does in the theatre, the loss of the orchestral colour being more than made up for by the gain in imaginative intensity. And the difficulty of making such a character vital and credible upon the stage is increased when he is made the centre of a quasi-religious ritual that has long ceased to have a meaning for many people.

But in spite of it all, _Parsifal_ is a masterpiece. The story of it seems to arouse a violent antipathy in some people, who apparently regard it as an immoral work. The pleasant little game of _Parsifal_-baiting began with Nietzsche, who said that he despised everyone who did not regard the opera as an outrage on morals.

Like most philosophers, Nietzsche had the charming failing of imagining that the only right way for the world to go was his way. He was singularly taken with that notion of his of the super-man--a mythical and unidentifiable mammal about which we have never been able to get any definite information, either from Nietzsche or from any of his disciples. Now Nietzsche found this ideal of his in Siegfried, and he loathed _Parsifal_ because it preached the negation of life, the denial of the Will to Power. Later writers, like Mr. Runciman and Mr. Huneker, who are not, I think, Nietzscheans, agree with him in seeing something peculiarly weak in the philosophy--to call it by that name--of _Parsifal_. They see in the opera not merely moral weakness but moral nastiness. I remember one of the simpler adherents of this theory telling me, in awe-stricken tones, that this "sexless" opera was the resort of a set of men who were mixed up in a German scandal of a few years ago that sent its unwholesome odour through the civilised world: and he obviously thought that this discredited Wagner's _Parsifal_, whereas it struck me as being very like asking us to give up having breakfast because Dr. Crippen and Charles Peace liked bacon and eggs.

Nor can any moral flabbiness, I think, be discovered in _Parsifal_ except by people who make the mistake of thinking that the "philosophy" of any musical work matters very much. Mr. Runciman detests Parsifal and calls him a perfect idiot--that epithet being Mr. Runciman's playful intensification of Wagner's "pure [i.e. stainless] fool"--"fool" being unfortunately the only monosyllable we have in English for the translation of "Thor." But even supposing Parsifal were an idiot--which I dispute--would it greatly matter? Mr. Runciman has launched his full battery against the Siegfried of Wagner's poem--a swaggering, quarrelsome, ungrateful young noodle; but, as Mr. Runciman's own eloquent description of the opera shows, the Siegfried of Wagner's music is a vastly more interesting and sympathetic person than the Siegfried of Wagner's verse. Similarly, even if I could think, when reading the libretto, that Parsifal is an idiot, I could never think so when listening to the music. The truth is that a good many of Wagner's characters and dramatic motives seem rather foolish to us nowadays. For my part I do not know or care whether or how Parsifal is to "redeem" the world. The word redemption has no meaning for me in the sense in which Wagner and the theologians use it. I can believe that redemption is a concrete reality in the pawnbroking business; but if any one tells me that men's souls are to be bought and sold, or lost and found again, without any volition of their own, I can only say that all this conveys about as much to my intelligence as talk about a quadrilateral triangle would do. But to appreciate a work of art it is not in the least necessary to subscribe to its author's philosophical or religious opinions; a rationalist can be as deeply thrilled by the _Matthew Passion_ as any Christian can be. The "thesis" of a work of art is the one thing in it that does not concern us as artists. Who is to decide between rival philosophies or sociologies? Personally I believe that one philosophy is just as good as another, and worse, as the Irishman would say; but if an artist chooses to set forward a character as the embodiment of some philosophy that possesses him at the moment, I am willing to listen to him so long as he can talk interestingly about it, without my wishing either to subscribe to the philosophy or to dissent from it. Mr. Runciman thinks there is something frightful in the thesis--let us call it that--of _Parsifal_. I do not see anything frightful in it. I do not believe in it as the only rule of life; but then I do not believe--in _that_ sense--in Senta's "redemption" of the Dutchman, or Elisabeth's "redemption" of Tannhäuser, or that Lohengrin was right in withholding his name from Elsa and then going off in a huff when she asked for it. But all these fantastic motives, in which I have no belief, no more affect my appreciation of the operas than my disbelief in ghosts affects my appreciation of _Hamlet_. I do not want any of my friends to be like Parsifal, Amfortas, or Klingsor--especially Klingsor: but neither do I want any of them to be like Lohengrin or Elsa or Senta or the Flying Dutchman. A real world run on the lines of _Parsifal_ would probably drive normal men mad in a month: but then who could live in a world in which Senta-sentimental maidens insisted on jumping into the sea to "redeem" master mariners, taking no account of the able seamen and the stokers and the stewards, who, from anything I can gather to the contrary in the text of the _Flying Dutchman_, all go to Davy Jones's locker in a state of pure damnation what time the captain and the girl ascend to glory? No, we had better leave alone the question of what the world would be like if we were to try to model it on _Parsifal_. We know very well that nothing of the sort will ever happen, just as we know that Little Red Riding Hood's wolf will not gobble up little Phyllis on her way to the High School next week, or the door of the safe fly open when the burglar says "Sesame." These be but fairy tales. We can still sleep in our beds o' nights: and we can still go to _Parsifal_ without either having our morals corrupted or feeling that we are encouraging race suicide.

I listen to _Parsifal_, then--and I imagine most other people do the same--as I would to any other outpouring of a great man's spirit on a world of ideas that fascinated him for the moment, and without any more impulse to translate it all into terms of reality than when I am listening to the _Flying Dutchman_ or _Lohengrin_. The opera is in no sense the work of an exhausted old man. It has been alleged that the plot is "the work of Wagner's tired-out old age." But _Parsifal_ was sketched as early as 1857, worked out in detail in 1864 (when Wagner was only fifty-one), and turned into verse in 1877. Further, the central ideas of the drama are to be found both in the sketches of _Jesus of Nazareth_ (1848) and _The Victors_ (1856); while in 1855 it was Wagner's intention to bring Parsifal on the stage in the final scene of _Tristan_, opposing him, as a symbol of renunciation, to Tristan as a symbol of passion. At almost any time of Wagner's life, indeed, he might have written a _Parsifal_. All his life through he fluctuated between intense eroticism and an equally intense revulsion from the erotic. One may say, in truth, that such a man _had_ to write a _Parsifal_ before he died. "Il est à remarquer, mon fils," says the excellent Abbé Coignard in Anatole France's _La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque_, "que les plus grands saints sont des pénitents, et, comme le repentir se proportionne à la faute, c'est dans les plus grands pêcheurs que se trouve l'étoffe des plus grands saints. La matière première de la sainteté est la concupiscence, l'incontinence, toutes les impuretés de la chair et de l'esprit. Il importe seulement, après avoir amassé cette matière, de la travailler selon l'art théologique et de la modeler, pour ainsi dire, en figure de pénitence, ce qui est l'affaire de quelques années, de quelques jours et parfois d'un seul instant, comme il se voit dans le cas de la contrition parfaite."

In the great book of sex there are many chapters, and _Parsifal_ is simply the last of them for some people. For others it is a chapter that they turn to again and again in moments of revulsion from the illusions of passion. Wagner's insight was clear enough: the Parsifals are no more denials of the Life-Force than the Tristans are; they are simply another phase of the Life-Force. When we disengage the central idea of _Parsifal_ from its rather unskilful operatic setting, the work is simply an artist's dream of an ideally innocent world, purged of the lust, the hatred, the cruelty that deface the world we live and groan in. This is the world the _music_ paints for us--

"Summers of the snakeless meadow, unlaborious earth and oarless sea";

and the cumbrous, old-fashioned stage framework upon which the drama is constructed means no more to me than a clumsily-drafted programme to a great symphonic poem,--it detracts no more from my musical enjoyment than that would do. The music itself, apart from a few commonplaces in the first Act, is marvellous. It is indeed an old man's music, but only in the sense that it opens windows for us upon regions of the soul to which only the old and emotionally wise have access. Swinburne somewhere speaks of Blake's face having the look of being lit up from the inside. I see a similar luminous transfiguration in the later portraits of Wagner[410]--they have the look of a man who has penetrated to the great underlying simplicities of things; and I find in the music of _Parsifal_ the same subtle, searching simplicity, the same almost unearthly illumination. Nowhere does the great master seem to me more truly powerful than in these quiet strains, whose suggestiveness, as is the case with the last Italian songs of Hugo Wolf, is inexplicably out of proportion to the quiet economy of their tissue. To the last the wonderful brain kept growing. He makes a new musical idiom, a new texture, for _Parsifal_ as he had done for every other of his works; above all a harmonic language of incomparable subtlety, a gliding, melting chromaticism that searches us through and through. It is from this novel chromaticism--a very different one from that of _Tristan_--that the harmony of César Franck has come, and all the modern harmony that builds upon Franck.

14

Wagner saw his own work as a transmutation and amplification of the speech of Beethoven--infinitely changeful, but controlled in every bar by a never-sleeping sense of the organic unity of the whole; but it is clear to us now that many features in his work derive from Bach, or are a re-discovery of certain principles of form that Bach affected. It is from Bach, rather than from Beethoven, that such things as the _Tristan_ Prelude come, with their incessant evolution of new life out of a single thematic germ, and their adoption of a conical form of slow ascent to a climax and descent from it, in place of the square symphonic form of return and re-start. In Bach, again, will be found the basis both of Wagner's realism and of the Wagnerian system of allusive "motives." The towering greatness of Wagner is nowhere more strikingly shown than in the failure of all his successors to handle his form--or, indeed, any other--with anything like the same power, freedom and consistency; both the opera and symphonic music are waiting for someone big enough to build afresh upon the foundations Wagner has laid, and with the materials he has left. At present the most that any of his successors can do is to fit a few of the more manageable of the stones together, with a deplorable quantity of waste and confusion all around and in between. _Salome_ and the _Rosenkavalier_ may be taken as instructive examples. There is not a living man big enough to occupy more than a room or two at a time of the vast house that Wagner reared about him. It is true that in certain details--in the furnishing and decoration of one or two of the rooms, let us say--modern music has gone beyond him. Strauss's orchestration has an eloquence--not merely a colour, but a soul and a voice--of which Wagner probably never suspected the possibility. Strauss, Wolf, and others have shaken off the rhythmic fetters that sometimes hampered the movement both of Wagner's poetry and of his music. Wolf and Strauss have shown us the possibilities of what may be called a prose style in music--a more continuous and less formal style than that of verse, with the rhythmic joints and pivots more skilfully concealed. Superb examples of it are to be found in the later scene between Octavian and the Princess in the first Act of the _Rosenkavalier_, and in the great trio in the third Act. Wagner, it is safe to say, would have flatly pronounced it impossible to make rhythmic music of a piece of frank prose like the latter, in which there is not a suspicion of a pretext for any of the staple rhythmic formulas.

But though the Wagnerian apparatus has been improved upon at these and other points--Strauss, for example, has subtilised the employment of the leit-motive--no one has been great enough to manipulate the apparatus as a whole with anything like Wagner's power, scope and freedom, and opera is still waiting for its new redeemer. Even an anti-Wagnerian work like _Pelleas and Melisande_ is, in a sense, a tribute to the Titan: the very sharpness and thoroughness of its recoil from everything that hints at Wagner is an admission of the impossibility of continuing his work on its own lines. And after all, _Pelleas and Melisande_ is only a beautiful and wonderful _tour de force_--a sort of glorified musical mule, without pride of ancestry or hope of posterity. Its idiom is too small for the expression of great things; we might as well try to build a city out of nothing but mother-of-pearl and opals.

Like Bach and like Beethoven, Wagner closes a period, and exhausts a form. And as with Bach and Beethoven to-day, it is indirectly rather than directly that his best influence is being exerted; there is no room for imitation of him, but his speech and his vision are eternal stimuli to our imaginations. It is inevitable that in some quarters a reaction should have set in against his music and his influence. He has been too overpowering a force. His music has been performed with such fatal frequency that the merest amateur can hardly remain unconscious of the weak points in it; and for a whole generation he made all but the very strongest minds among composers a mere shadow and echo of himself. Music, as was only to be expected, has now gone beyond him in certain respects, and the erstwhile anarch is now one of the greatest of the forces that conservatism claims for its own. The French and some of the Russians have revolted against what is less a Wagnerian than a German domination of all European music. A number of our very newest young men are delightfully contemptuous of him: every puny whipster now raises his little hand to deal the reeling colossus another blow. But the colossus will easily right himself. There are moments when one is tempted to say that he and Bach and Beethoven have expressed between them almost all that is essentially original and great in the music of the last two centuries. When a composer is so mighty of body as this, he can well afford to lose a drop or two of blood on his pilgrimage through the ages.

"In music, as in nature," says Vincent d'Indy, "there are mountains and valleys; there are artists of genius who raise their art to such heights that the herd of second-rank creators, unable to breathe in these altitudes, is forced to descend again to more temperate levels (which, however, are often sown with charming flowers), until the eruption of a new genius heaves up a new mountain peak.

"Such were Bach, Haydn, Beethoven and César Franck in the symphonic order; and in the dramatic order, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Rameau, Gluck and Wagner. At the present moment we are descending the slope created by the Wagnerian upheaval, and we are hastening gently towards the hopeful presage of a new summit. But all our drama--even that of the composers who most energetically deny the imputation--comes from the spring which rises at the feet of the titanic Wagner.

"Richard Wagner still casts his great shadow over all our musico-dramatic production. But it is certain that the latent work that is going on in the souls of creative artists is to favour the ascent towards a distant height, of which we cannot yet foresee either the glaciers or the precipices."

His work, in truth, will flower afresh some day in some great composer who will sum up in himself, as Wagner did, all the finest impulses of the music of his day,--who will have absorbed the essential, durable part of the spirit of his predecessors, and who will have at his command an idiom, a vocabulary and a technique competent to express every variety of human emotion. But we may hazard the conjecture that the new flowering will be in instrumental music rather than in the opera. It seems to be a law of musical evolution that at the end of a period of crisis the seminal force that has exhausted itself in one _genre_ passes over to, and finds a new life in, a wholly different _genre_. Beethoven left no real successors in the classical symphony,--for great as Schumann and Brahms are, they are in this field no more than epigones of Beethoven. It is in the Wagnerian opera that the new expressive, half-poetic power of Beethoven's music finds its further logical development. All the opera writers that have followed in Wagner's tracks--Strauss included--are to Wagner simply what Brahms was to Beethoven. As Beethoven fertilised not the symphony but the music-drama, so Wagner has fertilised not the music-drama but poetic instrumental music,--the innumerable symphonic poems and programme symphonies of the last fifty years. The idea of the new form may have been Liszt's as much as Wagner's, or even more; but Liszt's music was not rich enough to do the full work of fertilisation. Now, apparently, we are nearing the end of a period of transition. Already there are signs that the formal programme was little more than a crutch for poetic music in the days of its hesitating growth. Composers are beginning to master the art of suggesting the dramatic inner conflicts of the soul without needing to rely on any outer apparatus of suggestion. We are probably developing towards a form of symphonic music that shall be to the art of its own day what the Beethoven symphony of the middle period was to the art of his time,--a musical drama-without-words, and perfectly lucid without words. When the new instrumental music has assimilated all the finest spirit and mastered the full harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary and the best technique of the new day, some future Wagner will perhaps turn the mighty stream into a fresh dramatic channel, the nature of which it is almost impossible to anticipate. So the great series of cross-cycles will no doubt go on and on, into a day when dramatic music shall no more resemble Wagner's than Wagner's music resembles that of Palestrina. In that distant day he may be no more to mankind than Monteverdi is to us; but music will still be something different from what it would have been had he never been born; and of only some half-dozen composers in the whole history of the art can that be said.

FOOTNOTES:

[396] Three years before this Berlioz had written _Eight Scenes from Goethe's Faust_--the germ of his _Damnation of Faust_.

[397] All references to the operas are to the new editions of Breitkopf and Härtel.

[398] Glasenapp, vi. 187.

[399] The opera should be studied in Breitkopf and Härtel's new edition. Former editions have been printed from the curtailed score that was generally used for performances. The Breitkopf edition reproduces the original manuscript.

[400] In _Mein Leben_ he speaks of it being in five acts, but in the form in which we have it, it has only four.

[401] Accounts of most of these experiments will be found in _Mein Leben_ and elsewhere. The libretti and sketches are printed in the new eleventh volume of the _G.S._

[402] _Mein Leben_, p. 220. Wagner always intended that the _Flying Dutchman_ should be given in one Act. It was played in this way for the first time at Bayreuth in 1901. The necessary skips in the ordinary three-act score are indicated in Breitkopf's edition, pp. 76 and 180.

[403] The overture has been altered to correspond with the altered ending of the opera. Our concert audiences need to remember that the electrifying effect of this wood-wind entry in the overture is an after-thought on Wagner's part. At some time or other he added to the score the following stage directions at the point in the final scene where the passage just quoted enters: "A dazzling glory illumines the group in the background; Senta raises the Dutchman, presses him to her breast, and points him towards heaven with hand and glance." This note is given in the Fürstner score, but not in that of Breitkopf and Härtel.

[404] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 266.

[405] _Ibid._, iv. 272.

[406] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 295, 297, 298, 301, 302.

[407] _Ibid._, iv. 328.

[408] It is possible, of course, for any Wagnerian commentator to give another reason for the introduction of the motive here; but the mere fact that more than one explanation can be given is itself a proof that Wagner has miscalculated.

[409] In the _Götterdämmerung_ Wagner sends only one Valkyrie, Waltraute.

[410] The anti-Wagnerians take a malicious delight in pointing to the old-age portrait of Wagner by Renoir (it is reproduced in Emil Ludwig's recent diatribe _Wagner, oder die Entzauberten_). This shows us a rather flabby and senile face, with a pronounced relaxation of the mouth. But Renoir was an impressionist, and inclined to take the usual impressionist's liberty with his subject. Moreover, the portrait is the product of no more than half-an-hour's sitting, given much against Wagner's will one afternoon after he had tired himself with talking to this new visitor, who saw him on that occasion for the first and, I think, the last time in his life. To ask us to believe that this slap-dash thing is the only veracious portrait of Wagner is making too great a demand on our credulity.