Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

VI

The elimination from an opera-text of everything that is not suited to musical expression is perhaps an unattainable ideal. It is only the titanic musical genius of Wagner that makes us more or less tolerant of what we may call the baser metal in the structure of his music-dramas. Since his day the problem has proved so baffling a one that composers have frankly given it up in despair. Wagner was right: the simpler the story or legend on which we found an opera,—the more it can be trusted to make its own motives and development clear,—the less non-musical matter shall we be burdened with, and the more chance we shall have of being able to keep the musical tissue on a consistently high level. The proof of this is to be found not only in Wagner's own work but in that of his successors. It is hardly possible to recall a modern opera in which, at some point or other, the composer has not tried to delude us into the belief that the music means something when it really means nothing. Take, for example, the opening scene of Elektra. The scene is dramatically necessary because it informs the spectator of the relations between Elektra and her mother, and explains the miserable servitude of the maiden in the house of her murdered father. But no man that ever lived could set such words as these to good music; and all that Strauss can do is to make a mere pretence of writing music, let the orchestra play almost anything and the voices shriek almost anything, and trust to the audience being carried blindly along, partly by the excitement of the noise, partly by the bustling stage-movement. Wagner's superior artistic sense would have seen from the outset that this part of the libretto was outside the sphere of music, and, being his own librettist, he would, in obedience to the prompting of the musician in him, have so re-shaped the opera that there would have been no need to communicate that particular piece of information to us in this particular form. The procedure of Strauss and Hofmannsthal is hardly less absurd than that of the old composers who used to set to music not only the actual words of the Bible but "Here beginneth the ... chapter of the ... book of...."

How much of the merest putty, again, is left visible in the libretti of Puccini, Charpentier, and others—passages that are essential if the story is to be made clear to the spectator, but absolutely defying musical treatment. There is scarcely a single opera of which the music gives one the impression of pure necessity from first to last; every now and then our teeth are set on edge by some pieces of grit left by the bad cooks in an otherwise good dish. The handling of passages of this kind has become the most stereotyped of formulæ; the characters talk rather than sing, while the orchestra keeps the ear interested by playing pretty tunes on its own account, much as a nurse tells a child fairy tales to keep it quiet during the misery of the bath. Only the easy-going attitude towards all questions of form that is bred in us by theatrical art could possibly blind us for a moment to the helplessness and ineptitude of a method of this kind. Debussy evades the difficulty in another way. He starts with a text that is already a complete, self-sufficing work of art, capable, without the assistance of music, of holding an audience interested in it by virtue of its own dramatic life and its fine literary quality. He is thus, to begin with, in a far stronger position than that of nineteen opera composers out of twenty, whose texts have no artistic quality of their own, and have to receive the whole breath of their life from the music. Having the good fortune to be working upon a libretto that is itself moving and beautiful, Debussy can frequently afford to leave it to speak for itself, his own contribution to it being sometimes no more than a momentary heightening of the force of the words by means of a poignant harmony or a suggestive touch of colour. I hope I shall not be held to be insensitive to the peculiar charm of Debussy's Pelleas and Melisande, or to the rare musical invention of the more continuous portions of it, if I say that a good deal of the opera could have been written by a much less gifted man. Now that the novelty of it has passed off, it is seen to be not at all a difficult matter to subtilise a stage effect by the addition of a poignant chord here and there. Pelleas and Melisande is an extremely beautiful work, but it will probably have no posterity,—because, while the more musical portions of it depend less for their effect on any essential novelty of form than upon the very individual quality of Debussy's imagination, the style of the other—the merely atmospheric—portions is so easy to imitate that it is within the scope of dozens of composers with only a quarter of Debussy's genius. Debussy, then, has not, any more than his contemporaries, solved the problem of weaving the combined vocal and orchestral tissue of the opera into a continuous and homogeneous whole; for a great part of the time he simply evades the problem. Pelleas and Melisande is a tour de force that will probably never be repeated; it depended for its success on the concurrence of a number of factors that are hardly likely to be met with in combination again.