I

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

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

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

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

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