Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

II

That the articles praising the Italians at the expense of the Germans were the products of more than the mere impression of Schröder-Devrient's singing and acting—that they came from the depths of a real change in his intellectual and emotional nature—is shown by the length of time he remained at the same standpoint.

The text of Das Liebesverbot was written in a mood of fiery youthful protest against what he held to be the cramping puritanism of the moralists. He deliberately transforms Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. "Young Europe and Ardinghello, helped by the strange antipathy I had conceived towards classical operatic music, gave me the keynote for my conception, which was especially directed against puritanical hypocrisy, and consequently led to the bold glorification of unfettered sensualism (freien Sinnlichkeit). I took care to understand the serious Shakespearean subject only in this sense; I saw only the gloomy strait-laced viceroy, himself burning with love for the beautiful novice, who, while she implores him to pardon her brother condemned to death for illicit love, kindles a ruinous fire in the rigid Puritan's breast by the lovely warmth of her own human emotion. The fact that these powerful motives are so richly developed by Shakespeare only in order that in the end they may be all the more seriously weighed in the scales of justice, did not concern me in the least; all I had in mind was to expose the sinfulness of hypocrisy and the unnaturalness of harsh moral judgments."[298] He adds that he was probably influenced by Auber's Masaniello and the Sicilian Vespers.

The composition of Das Liebesverbot carries us from 1834 to the spring of 1836, and still the Southern fever has not abated. In 1837 he carries the same enthusiasm about with him in Königsberg and Riga; we can imagine that the more serious side of him had some difficulty in developing in such an environment as a fourth-rate operatic and theatrical troupe. While in Magdeburg he writes a short article on "Dramatic Song," in which he returns to the thesis of three years before, though with more wisdom. "Why," he asks, "cannot we Germans see that we are not the possessors of everything; why cannot we openly and freely admit that the Italian is superior to the German in Song, and the Frenchman superior to him in the light and animated treatment of operatic music? Can he not oppose to these his deeper science, his more thorough culture, and above all the happy faculty that makes it possible for him easily to make the advantages of the Italians and the French his own, whereas they will never be able to acquire ours? The Italians are singers by nature. The less richly-endowed German can hope to emulate the Italian only by hard study." Wagner rightly points out that no artist can hope to achieve full expression of himself without a technique that has become second nature to him. It was the acquirement by Mozart of this technique in his childhood that gave his mature music its incomparable ease and finish, while there was always a certain awkwardness about Weber, owing to his having begun late and learned his technique during the years when he was actually practising his art. Without perfect vocal technique, the highest kind of dramatic expression is impossible. The great Schröder-Devrient, the finest operatic artist in Germany, was at one time within an ace of giving up her career as a singer, so great was the strain on her voice through a faulty production; but she studied hard on the right Italian lines, with the result that she can now sing the most trying parts without the slightest fatigue.[299] All this is sensible enough—so sensible, indeed, that Wagner could repeat it thirty years later in his "Report upon a proposed German School of Music for Munich." But that the nimble and relatively superficial Italian music still exercised something of its old fascination upon him is shown by another article of the same year on Bellini. Here, while admitting that a good deal of Italian music is poor stuff, and that the forms and tricks of the Bellinian opera are things only too easy to imitate, he yet lauds Bellini's melody at the expense of that of the Germans, and his simplicity at the expense of their clumsy erudition. "The German connoisseur of music," he says, "listens to one of Bellini's operas with the spectacles off his tired-out eyes," giving himself wholly up for once to "delight in lovely Song";[300] he evidently feels "a deep and ardent longing for a full deep breath, to win ease of being at one stroke, to get rid of all the stew of prejudice and pedantry that has so long compelled him to be a German connoisseur of music—to become instead a man at last, glad, free, and endowed with every glorious organ for perceiving beauty of every kind, no matter in what form it reveals itself." He has been enchanted by "the limpid melody, the simple, noble, lovely Song of Bellini. It is surely no sin to confess this and to believe in it; perhaps even it would not be a sin if before we went to sleep we were to pray Heaven that some day German composers might achieve such melodies and such an art of handling song. Song, Song, and yet again Song, ye Germans!"

We see again his temporary lack of sympathy with the richer German style in a passage like the following, which reads like one of the less intelligent criticisms of his own later music:

"When we consider the boundless disorder, the medley of forms, periods and modulations of so many of the new German opera composers, by which we are prevented from enjoying many an isolated piece of beauty, we often might wish to see this ravelled skein put in order by means of that stable Italian form.[301] As a matter of fact, the instantaneous clear apprehension of a whole dramatic passion is made much easier when, along with all its connected feelings and emotions, it is cast into one lucid intelligent melody at a single stroke, than when it is muddled up with a hundred little commentaries, with this and that harmonic nuance, this and that instrumental interpolation, till in the end it is subtilised out of existence."[302]

It was his "zeal and fervour for modern Italian and French opera," in fact, that procured for him the conductorship at Riga, where the Director, Holtei, was all for the lighter and more frivolous music.[303] At Riga Wagner met his old Leipzig mentor, Heinrich Dorn, who was, he says, surprised to see his former pupil, "the eccentric Beethoven worshipper, transformed into a partisan of Bellini and Adam."[304] The reaction, however, was coming fast. At Riga he seems to have passed through one of those spiritual crises that are not uncommon with artists of his many-sided temperament. The loneliness of Riga, he says, gave him an anxious feeling of homelessness, which developed into a passionate longing to escape from the turbid whirl of theatrical life. "The levity with which in Magdeburg I had both let my musical taste degenerate and had allowed myself to take pleasure in the most frivolous theatrical society, gradually faded away under the influence of this longing."[305] A bass aria which he interpolated into Winter's Schweizerfamilie was "of a devotional character," and "bore witness to the great transformation that was taking place in my musical development."[306] In the winter of 1838 he derived much benefit from the study of Méhul's Joseph in Egypt for the theatre. "Its noble and simple style, along with the moving effect of the music, contributed not a little to the favourable turn in my taste, which had been sadly debauched by my theatrical work."[307] At the same time he grew weary of the Bohemianism that had attracted him so strongly at Magdeburg, and consequently he got more and more out of touch with the actors and the management.

His weariness of it all culminated in a secret resolve to be quit of this kind of life as soon as possible. The deliverance was to be effected by his new opera, Rienzi.[308] He deliberately planned the opera on a scale so large that he would necessarily have to seek a better stage than that of Riga for its production. Everything conspired at the time to deepen his sense of the seriousness of things, and to make him loathe himself for having so long worshipped false gods both in art and in life. Matrimonial troubles crowded thick and fast upon him, and he lost his favourite sister, Rosalie, by death. In March 1839 he was dismissed from his post at the Riga theatre. Penniless as he was, he welcomed the discharge as the first step towards his redemption. To Paris he would go, and in Paris make his fortune: of that he had no doubt.