Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

IV

Apart from theory, we have only to look at a few concrete instances of both types of art to see that the ideal symphonic poem is the unalloyed quintessence of opera, and that the average opera is merely a symphonic poem puffed out to three Acts, and made rather loose of tissue in the process. What could be easier than to make a three-act opera of Ein Heldenleben,—and what more futile? Apart from the Adversaries, there are only two characters in Ein Heldenleben, and we cannot fill up a whole theatrical evening with two characters alone. To have made an opera of it Strauss would have had to get a librettist to surround the only two persons who really matter with a number of minor persons who do not matter in the least; and after spending three or four hours in the theatre we should come away with precisely the same fundamental impression as Ein Heldenleben gives us in the concert-room in about forty minutes,—that a hero has passed through sundry spiritual crises and developments, and at last, after much battling and much error, attained to a super-earthly resignation. This is the ring; everything else we should see and hear in the theatre would only be so much alloy, pleasurable or tiresome. Who does not feel, again, that all the essential emotions of the story of Francesca da Rimini are given us in Tchaikovski's tone-poem? Who wants to see the merely historical and topographical details that would be inevitable in an opera on the subject? Who wants to see the furniture of the house of Malatesta, and the ladies and gentlemen moving about among it? Who wants to see and hear Giovanni? He interests us only as a fragment of the force of fate that drives Paolo and Francesca to love and death; surely we are content to accept his existence as assumed in the great central tragedy, without having him put before us in the flesh to sing a lot of words that do not matter? Who does not feel that Strauss has given us the quintessence of Macbeth in his symphonic poem, and that no opera on that subject could hope to express the spiritual tragedy of Macbeth so swiftly and so drastically? Or, to look at the matter from the other side, take the case of Strauss's Salome. Does anything really count there but the train of moods in Salome's soul, and is not all this expressed fully and incomparably in the great final scene,—with perhaps a little assistance from the music of the impassioned monologue of Salome to Jochanaan in the earlier part? What is all the rest of the opera but a mere recital or representation of a story the details of which everyone in the theatre already knows quite well? How Herod was married to Herodias, the mother of Salome, how Herod gave a banquet and became enamoured of his step-daughter, how one Jochanaan, a Jewish prophet, had been imprisoned by order of Herod, how Salome conceived an unholy passion for Jochanaan, how she danced for Herod and won as her reward the head of Jochanaan on a charger—who needs to go to the theatre to be told all this: who takes more than the most languid interest in the telling of it? Music has next to no concern with most of it, because it is of a quality that prevents music attaining to its full emotional incandescence; and it is only when it is playing with ease and ardour round a subject fit to call out the best there is in it that music is really worth writing. If anyone doubts that it is only the final scene and the monologue of Salome that count for anything in the opera, let him ask himself how many people would stay away from the theatre or the concert-room because only these portions were being given, and how many people would go to the theatre if it were known that these portions were to be omitted. Or again, does the whole opera of Tannhäuser tell us very much that is not already told us in the Overture? I am not alleging, of course, that there is not a great deal of very interesting music in the opera. The question is whether the essence of the struggle in Tannhäuser's soul between spiritual and physical love is not fully given us in the Overture, and whether, had this alone been written, we should have felt any more need for an opera upon the subject than we do for an opera on the subject of Ein Heldenleben. What is the opera of Fidelio, Wagner himself asked, but a mere lengthy watering down of the dramatic motives that have been painted so finely for us in the great Leonora No. 3 Overture? May we not say as much of Tannhäuser? Is not a great deal of this also a mere padding-out of the subject to comply with the exigencies of a whole evening in the theatre?