Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

I

It would be very interesting if some enterprising interviewer in the shades could procure for us Wagner's opinion upon the course of events in music in general and the opera in particular during the thirty years that have elapsed since his death. He would probably cling with his characteristic tenacity to the views he held in his life-time; but if he were candid he would have to admit that the old problems have latterly taken on a new aspect. The theories he expounded so eagerly in his prose works and illustrated so eloquently in his music-dramas have not passed through the fire of thirty years' criticism without suffering some loss of vitality. Supposing a brain as comprehensive, as variously gifted, and as forceful as his were now to take up the problem of opera, seeing it all afresh as Wagner did, and combining, like him, all the potencies of the best instrumental and operatic music of his day into one vast synthesis, what would be the new form he would strike out—for that a new form is now a necessity is evident on a priori and a posteriori grounds. Music could no more stand still after Wagner than after Bach or Beethoven; a new humanity must find a new expression for its own reading of life. And a survey of the opera since Wagner's death leaves no room for doubt that the emotions and aspirations of the new humanity have not yet found the form most appropriate to them. Wagner has no more succeeded in making his special type of musical drama the norm for latter generations than Bach succeeded in imposing the forms of his music upon the art of the epochs that have followed him. In each case the spirit endures, but not the form. Some elements of the Wagnerian form have of course become, as far as we can judge, permanent factors in opera in general,—the use of leading themes, for example, and the system of entrusting a melodious, flowing, quasi-symphonic development to the orchestra. But not even these elements are recognised as indispensable constituents of opera everywhere: Debussy, for instance, discards both of them in the greater part of his Pelleas and Melisande. For the rest, the departures from Wagner's precepts are noticeable enough, especially as regards the poetic basis of opera. Putting aside the negligible work of his second-rate imitators, it would be hard to point to a single opera by a man of original genius that follows Wagner in his reliance upon the primitive myth as the clearest and most fundamental expression of the "purely human," or in his planning of the subject so as to reduce to a minimum the less musical matter in the text, and make the whole opera, as far as may be, a pure expression of nothing but "soul-states."