Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

II

Wagner's famous formula was that hitherto the means in opera (the music) had been taken for the end, and the end (the drama) for the means. His own avowed object was to restore to the drama the right of pre-eminence in opera. His claim to have done so is only valid if we define music and drama in the rather limited senses he had in view when framing his theory. His proposition is correct enough if we take it to mean that music must not, as in the Italian opera, occupy the ear to the exclusion of all worth in the story and all psychological interest in the characters. In the sense that he made opera acceptable to men's heads and hearts as well as their ears, Wagner certainly did make the drama the end, and music the means. But viewed more broadly, his work was really the greatest glorification of music that the theatre had ever seen: for while he enormously increased the expressive scope of the music, he cut out of drama more than half the elements that give that word a meaning apart from music. Drama, with him, meant in the last analysis little more than the best possible text for theatre music. He would have denied this interpretation of his theories and practice, but all the same that is the upshot of them. "Word-speech," he argues, is merely the organ of the intellect, and has therefore the right of entry into music—the emotional art par excellence—only so far as it is necessary to give coherence to the rich but indeterminate flood of feeling that music pours out; and music can, and ought, only to ally herself with words that have themselves an emotional content. It was for this reason that he rejected historical and political subjects, and found the ideal "stuff" for opera in the "purely human" legends of the folk; and in A Communication to my Friends he traces in close detail the gradual growth of his perceptions in this respect. What was hidden from him, what, indeed, he persistently denies, is now evident to everyone else,—that the change in his theories and practice was due to the musician in him slowly asserting himself with greater and greater urgency, and finally demanding imperatively a form of text that would allow his gift of musical expression the utmost possible freedom. It must always be borne in mind that Wagner's theory of a unification of all the arts in the one art-work was the product of a brain that had comparatively little sympathy with, or understanding of, any art but music. This may seem a hard saying, but the proof of it is to be found in many declarations in his prose works, his letters, and Mein Leben. He could never see in painting, in the prose drama, in poetry, and in sculpture, precisely what painters, dramatists, poets, and sculptors saw there. He seriously thought that "the spoken form of play" (die Schauspielform) must "necessarily vanish in the future"; and that painters would give up their "egoistic" decorating of little canvases and be content to devote their powers to contributing, along with the poet, the musician, and the rest of the theatrical forces, to the "united art-work of the future." Clearly it was Wagner the musician who dominated all the other Wagners, and determined both the choice of subject for his operas and the manner of their treatment. "What I saw," he says in A Communication to My Friends, "I now looked at solely with the eyes of music." He is careful to add, not of the formal, cramping style of music, but of the kind that came straight from the heart and which he could pour out like a speech in a mother-tongue. That is the whole secret; the "music" he wishes to see made subordinate to "drama" is merely the music that claims to pursue an egoistic existence, bound by its own arbitrary laws alone; but though his music must be natural and unfettered by conventional formulas, and must aim at giving heightened emotional expression to the feeling suggested by the verse and the action, it is still the predominant partner in the union, and only so much of the stuff of the verbal drama will be permitted in the art-work as will give point to the vague musical emotion without hindering its full expression. Like a true musician, he saw drama from a purely musical angle.