Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

V

Of even more importance than the article A Happy Evening in the story of Wagner's development is the essay on The Overture that appeared in the Gazette Musicale in January 1841,—that is to say, a couple of months after the completion of Rienzi, and nearly six months before the commencement of the Flying Dutchman. Here he anticipates some of the æsthetic he was afterwards to expound so eloquently and so convincingly in the great article on Beethoven and elsewhere. He begins with a survey of the early history of the Overture. There had always been, apparently, a reluctance to plunging the spectator forthwith into the opera, just as in earlier times a prologue had always preceded the play. The prologue, however, had this at any rate to be said for it, that it summarised the action of the coming play, and in this and other ways prepared the spectator to listen more intelligently. The early Overture, however, could not do this, for at that time the psychological powers of music were not sufficiently developed to permit of the summarising in a few minutes of the actions and the motives of an opera. It became a conventional, not a characteristic prelude. Later on a regular "Overture form" was elaborated, but even this was psychologically impotent. What connection has the overture to the Messiah, for example, with the oratorio itself? Would it not serve equally well as prelude to a hundred others of the old oratorios or operas? Practically the only method of musical development these composers had at their service was the fugal: it was impossible for them to work out an extended musical piece by means of ever-widening circles of pure feeling.

Next came a tripartite form of overture,—an opening and closing movement in quicker time, with an intermediate section in slower time and of softer character. This gave a certain amount of opportunity for the presentation of one or two of the main moods or episodes or characters of the opera: and in the "Symphony" that introduces the Seraglio, Mozart has given us a little masterpiece in this genre. But there was a certain helplessness in the division of the "Symphony" into three sections, and in the predetermined nature of their contents: and in course of time there was evolved the operatic overture proper,—a continuous musical piece, making a sort of dramatic play with the main motives of the opera. This was the form with which Gluck and Mozart worked such wonders. Gluck's masterpiece is the overture to Iphigenia in Aulis: Mozart's, those to the Magic Flute, Figaro, and Titus. According to Wagner, Mozart's merit was that he did not attempt to express in his overture all the details of the plot, but "fastened with his poet's eye on the leading idea of the drama, divested it of all its inessentials and material accidentiæ, and set it forth as a musically transfigured creation, a passion personified in tones, and presented it to the main idea as the justificatory counterpart of this,—a something through which the idea, and even the dramatic action itself, became intelligible to the spectator's feeling." At the same time the overture became a self-contained tone-piece,—this being true even of an overture like that to Don Giovanni, which runs without any formal close into the first scene of the opera. This form of overture became the property of Cherubini and Beethoven. The former remained mostly faithful to the transmitted type, which Beethoven also used in the E major overture to Fidelio. But Beethoven in time broke through the cramping limitations of this form. His "prodigious dramatic instinct," having never found the opera into which it could pour the whole of itself, turned for an outlet to instrumental music pure and simple,—to the field in which he could "shape in his own way the drama of his desire out of pure tone-images," a drama "set free from the petty trimmings of the timorous playwright." The result of this effort was the great Leonora overture, which, "far from giving us a musical introduction to the drama, really sets that drama before us more completely and more affectingly than the ensuing broken action does. This work is no longer an overture, but itself the mightiest of dramas."[322]

Weber too is commended for making his overtures dramatic "without losing and wasting himself in a painful depiction of insignificant accessories of the plot." Even when his rich fantasy led him to incorporate more subsidiary musical motives than the form transmitted to him could conveniently carry, he always managed to preserve the dramatic unity of his conception. He invented a new form, that of the "dramatic fantasia," of which the Oberon overture is one of the finest examples. "Nevertheless," says Wagner,—and here again we see his rooted antipathy to anything in the nature of excessive detail-painting in music[323]—"it is not to be denied that the independence of purely musical production must suffer by subordination to a dramatic thought, if this thought is not seized in one broad trait consistent with the spirit of music,—for the composer who tries to depict the details of the action itself cannot develop his dramatic theme without breaking his musical work to fragments." The inevitable ending of this style of overture is the pot-pourri,—a form of which Spontini's overture to the Vestale may be said to have been the beginning. The public liked this kind of thing because it dished up for them again the most effective snatches of melody from the operas.

The summing up is that the ideal form and ideal achievement are those of the Don Giovanni and Leonora overtures. In the former no attempt is made to reproduce the course of the drama itself step by step: the drama is freshly conceived as the contest between two broad principles—the arrogance of Don Giovanni and the anger of a higher power—and "the invention, as well as the conduct," of these symbolic motives "belongs quite unmistakably to no other province than that of music." Beethoven's method in the Leonora overture, on the other hand, is "to concentrate in all its noble unity the one sublime action which, in the drama itself, is weakened and impeded by the necessity of padding it out with trivial details,—to show this action in its ideal new motion, nourished only by its inner impulses." This "ideal action" is, of course, the loving self-sacrifice of Leonora. But by reason of its very greatness and its intense dramatic quality, the Leonora overture ceases to be an overture in the proper sense of the word. It anticipates too fully the completed drama: if it is not understood by the hearer, because of his lack of knowledge of the opera, it conveys only a fragment of its real message to him: if it is wholly understood, it weakens his subsequent enjoyment of the drama itself.

Wagner therefore returns to the overture to Don Giovanni as the ideal, because here "the leading thought of the drama is worked out in a purely musical, not a dramatic, form." In this way the musician "most surely attains the general artistic aim of the overture, which is simply an ideal prologue, transporting us into that higher sphere in which to prepare our mind for the drama." The musical conception of the main idea of the drama can still be distinctly worked out and brought to a definite close; in fact "the overture should form a musical art-work complete in itself." No better model could be had than Gluck's overture to Iphigenia in Aulis. In a word, though the overture must not attempt to reproduce stage by stage all the episodes of the story, it can suggest in its own way the dramatic contest of two main principles by a contest between two symbolic musical ideas: only the working-out of these musical ideas must follow from the nature of the themes themselves. But it must be always borne in mind—and the frequency with which Wagner returns to this point shows the importance he attached to it—that "the working-out must always take its rise from the purely musical significance of the themes: never should it take account of the course of events in the drama itself, for this would at once destroy the sole effective character of a piece of music."

As I have already pointed out, this and one or two of the other articles of the Paris time are interesting because they show us the mature æsthetics of the 'sixties and 'seventies trying to find expression in the young Wagner of 1840. To most of the principles here laid down he remained faithful, as we shall see, to the end of his days. But it is interesting also to note that though theoretically he always remained constant to the guiding principles he here lays down for the overture, his practice by no means always conformed to them. His ideal overture, as we have just seen, was one of the type of that to Don Giovanni or that to Iphigenia in Aulis—i.e. one that either made no use at all of thematic material from the opera itself, or the minimum use of it, the dramatic conflict of the stage action being fought out ideally, as it were, in the overture, in the persons of two symbolic musical themes. "In this conception of the overture," he says, "the highest task would be to reproduce the characteristic idea of the drama by means pure and simple (mit den eigentlichen Mitteln) of self-subsistent (selbstständigen) music, and to conduct it to a conclusion which should correspond, by anticipation, with the solution of the problem in the scenic play."

It is difficult to square his practice in some of his own overtures with the theoretical principles he here lays down. Not one of his overtures corresponds with the form he so greatly admired in the overtures to Don Giovanni and Iphigenia in Aulis,—a re-presentation of the coming dramatic conflict in terms of a musical piece that made no drafts at all, or practically none, upon the thematic material of the opera itself. The brief Prelude to Lohengrin comes under no suspicion of being a pot-pourri of motives from the opera; but then it achieves its concision and its singular air of detachment from anything in the nature of mere story-telling in music by failing to do just what Mozart and Gluck are commended for doing—summing up the ensuing dramatic conflict by the opposition of two main musical moods and their final resolution. The Lohengrin Prelude tells us nothing of any dramatic contest,—not even that which rages in the heart of Elsa. It shows us only Lohengrin, the representative of the Grail, coming to earth and leaving it again. There is no hint of the reason for his return to Monsalvat: there is no hint even that his stay on earth has been in any degree troubled by enemies or evil. Beautiful as it is, therefore, and eloquently as it sings of Lohengrin himself, the Prelude is not in the full sense of the word a real prelude to the drama. On the other hand, when Wagner does make his overture a genuine introduction to, and instrumental summary of, the opera, he inevitably approaches the pot-pourri. It is true that his fine sense of form mostly saves him from attempting to reproduce in the overture all the dramatic or thematic motives of the opera. In the Flying Dutchman overture, for example, there is no reference to Erik: so far as the overture itself is concerned, no such person might have ever come into the lives of Senta and the Dutchman. There is no mention of Daland, and no reference to the spinning scene—the latter a musical motive that, it is safe to say, none of the French or Italian writers of overtures, or perhaps even Weber himself, would have had the heart to set aside. On the whole the Flying Dutchman overture is concerned simply with the Dutchman, his curse and his grief, with Senta, and with the sea that forms the imaginative background to their drama: [324] and though of course the overture is entirely built up of thematic material derived from the opera, this is all so freshly and imaginatively treated, and made into so coherent and organic a piece of instrumental music, that, though the overture is by no means of the type of those to Don Giovanni and Iphigenia in Aulis, which Wagner praised as models, nothing could be further removed from the old-style pot-pourri. The overtures to Tannhäuser and the Meistersinger, however, must frankly be called pot-pourris,—though pot-pourris of genius. In the Tannhäuser overture we are given not merely an instrumental symbol of the drama, but the drama itself compressed into a sort of feuilleton. The ground covered is so vast, and the expression so intense, that at the end of the overture we are inclined to ask ourselves whether it has not, like the great Leonora overture, made a good deal of the ensuing drama almost superfluous, a mere padding out or watering down of the emotions and the spiritual oppositions set before us with such drastic power in the overture itself. One is inclined to say that an overture lasting nearly a quarter of an hour is not so much the door to a mansion as a cottage in itself. A work like the Tannhäuser overture has its justification as a kind of symphonic poem for the concert room; it has little justification as a prelude to a drama in the theatre.

In any case a piece of prolonged story-telling of this kind is not what Wagner had in his mind when he wrote the article on The Overture: it is not too much to say, indeed, that it is the very type of musical introduction he expressly wished to bar. It is true that he advises the composer who wishes to make his overture "reproduce the characteristic idea of the drama by means pure and simple of self-subsistent music, and to conduct it to a conclusion which shall correspond, by anticipation, with the solution of the problem in the scenic play," to give the introductory instrumental piece some thematic connection with the opera. But not, be it observed, by utilising long stretches of this material, as is done in the Tannhäuser overture. Wagner's advice to the composer is "to introduce into the characteristic motives of his overture certain melismic or rhythmic features that are of importance in the dramatic action itself—not features, however, strewn accidentally among the action, but such as play a decisively weighty part in it, characteristics that determine, as it were, the orientation of a human action on a specific terrain, and so give an individual stamp to the overture. These features must of course be purely musical in their nature, i.e. such motives from the world of tone as have a relation to human life. I would cite as excellent examples the trombone blasts of the Priests in the Magic Flute, the trumpet signal in the Leonora, and the call of the magic horn in Oberon. These musical motives from the opera, employed in advance in the overture, serve, when introduced there at the decisive moment, as veritable points of contact of the dramatic with the musical motion, and effect a happy individualisation of the tone-piece, which is intended to be a mood-defining introduction to a particular dramatic subject."[325] The ideal overture that Wagner had in his mind at this time was evidently something very different from the one he subsequently wrote for Tannhäuser: but the discrepancy between his theory and his practice is still more strikingly shown by a sentence that appears in the French version of the article but not in the German. In the French, the passage quoted above, commencing with the words "these features must of course be purely musical in their nature," was prefaced by the following: "But one should never forget that they [i.e. "the melismic or rhythmical features" from the opera that were to be interwoven into the tissue of the overture] should be entirely musical in their source, and not borrow their significance from the words that accompany them in the opera. The composer would in this case commit the error of sacrificing both himself and the independence of his art to the intervention of an alien art. These elements, I say, must be in their nature purely musical, and I would cite as examples," &c.

It is at once evident that this bars out whole passages such as the Pilgrims' Chorus, The Sirens' Chorus, and Tannhäuser's Hymn to Venus, and, in the Meistersinger overture, such passages as Sachs's final address, the phrases in which the populace jeer at Beckmesser, &c. Strictly speaking, indeed, neither of these overtures can be made to square with Wagner's theoretical principles. The question of the overture was one of those on which he never attained to complete consistency. In Tristan, as in Lohengrin, he devotes himself simply to working out in a broad form one great emotional motive of the drama. The overtures to Tannhäuser and the Meistersinger, and, in a lesser degree, that to the Flying Dutchman, are a mixture of the pot-pourri and the symphonic poem. The Prelude to Parsifal is again a sort of pot-pourri, though here, of course, there is no attempt at story-telling in detail, the Prelude setting before us, as Wagner himself said, the three motives of "Love, Faith and Hope," and showing, as it were, the emotional outcome of them. To the Rhinegold there is no overture, or even a Prelude in the formal sense of that word: the long-drawn chord of E flat is merely the oral counterpart of the visible sensation given the spectator by the Rhine. Similarly the preludial bars to the Valkyrie only paint the storm in which Siegmund is flying from his enemies.

Even the greatest men and the boldest revolutionaries are fettered in their thinking by the age in which they live. Only in this way can we account for Wagner's failure to see that the true solution of the problem of the overture was to abolish the overture. It had never any real æsthetic justification. As he himself points out, it had its origin simply in the fact that at one stage of the development of opera the composer saw the necessity of keeping the audience occupied in some way for a few minutes before it would be safe to raise the curtain on the play. It is one more of the many illustrations that may be cited of what may be called the dead hand in art,—the survival in a new art of some method of procedure that had its origin under quite other conditions. Pottery, for instance, continued for long to be decorated with lines that were merely imitations in clay—unnecessary imitations—of the designs and colours of the interlaced osiers out of which the primitive vessel was made. The symphony developed out of the custom of stringing certain dance movements into a suite: and in spite of the clearly recognised fact that there is no logical justification either in art or in life for casting the modern symphony into this arbitrary four-movement form, composers still weakly adhere to it. Wagner was fond of pointing out, again, how Beethoven's congenital inability to break away from the sonata form of his day led to a clash between this form and the purely dramatic, onward-urging impulse of the great Leonora overture. It is little wonder, therefore, that Wagner was so far the slave of his epoch that it never occurred to him, and least of all in 1841, to question the necessity of having any overture at all. The freer thought of the present day has been able either to reduce the overture to a few bars of prelude, simply attuning the mind of the spectator to the coming scene, as in Debussy's Pelleas and Melisande, or to dispense altogether with an instrumental introduction, as in Salome and Elektra.