Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

X

Wagner was the most many-sided of musicians, as a glance at the titles of his prose works will show. He benefited greatly by his versatility: no one can doubt that his music is all the richer for the stimuli his nature received from so many quarters. But if he gained something by it, it is probable that the world lost as much. There are few of us who would not give three-fourths of the prose works for another opera from his pen; and he would have had time to write half a dozen if he had abstained from all this prose. But the prose was a necessity to him; it was a needed purgation of the intellect, without which the emotion could not function fully and freely. The most striking illustration of this is Opera and Drama. Wagner had already poured out his ideas upon man and art at great length in Art and Revolution and the Art-Work of the Future. His mind was now brooding upon the great dramatic subject that was to occupy the bulk of his thinking for the next twenty years or more of his life. It was only for the realisation of this dream that he now clung to existence. Yet the dæmon within him drove him to postpone the composition of this poem until he had produced yet another huge theoretical treatise. The reasons for this were two-fold. In the first place he had a despairing sense of the futility of bringing so new and vast a work into being until he had educated the artistic public of that day to comprehend his novel aims and style. In the second place, he felt an imperative need of coming to an understanding with himself. He probably saw the whole plan and technique of Siegfried's Death[345] more or less vaguely—too vaguely for him to be willing to trust himself all at once on that huge uncharted sea. It would clarify his own ideas, as well as prepare the public, if he were to draw out the ground plan, as it were, of the music drama of the future. This he accordingly did in Opera and Drama. "My literary works," he wrote to Roeckel, "were testimonies to my want of freedom as an artist; it was dire compulsion alone that wrung them from me."[346]

Opera and Drama was written in the winter of 1850-1. As it is the most thorough and the most comprehensive statement that Wagner has given us of his theory of drama and music, it will be as well to summarise its arguments and conclusions for the reader.

I. Until the present time, men have indeed felt that the opera was a monument of the corruption of artistic taste, but criticism has not fully fathomed the matter: and it therefore becomes the task of the creative artist to practise criticism, in order at once to "annihilate error and uplift criticism." The writer of an article on modern opera in Brockhaus' Lexicon[347] has pointed out the defects of this form of art, showing its artificialities and conventions; but when he comes to the practical problem, "How is all this to be remedied?" he can only regret that Mendelssohn's too early death should have "prevented the solution of the riddle." But this is still proceeding on the wrong track. Had Mendelssohn any musical gift which Mozart, for example, did not possess? Could anything, from the standpoint of music, be more perfect than each individual number of Don Giovanni? Plainly the critic cannot wish for better music than this. It is evident, then, that what he wants in opera is the power and force of drama. But he is blind enough still to expect this from the musician; that is, wanting a house built for him, he applies, not to the architect, but to the upholsterer. And by the very failure of the critic's effort to solve the problem in this way, there is driven home the conclusion that this way the problem is really insoluble. Yet the true solution, so far from being difficult of attainment, simply stares one in the face; and the formula for it is that—

"The error in the art-genre of Opera consists in the fact that a Means of Expression (Music) has been made the object, while the Object of Expression (the Drama) has been made a means."

The truth of this formula can be attested by an appeal to the history of the opera. It arose, not from the folk-plays of the Middle Ages, in which there were the rudiments of a natural co-operation of music and drama, but at the luxurious courts of Italy, where the aristocrats engaged singers to entertain them with arias, that is, with "folk-tunes stripped of their naïveté and natural truth," embroidered on a story whose only raison d'être was the occasional advent of these arias.[348] Music, in fact, was the all-in-all of opera, as is clearly shown by the old-time domination of the singer: while all the poet had to do was to stand as little as possible in the way of the musician. The great merit of Metastasio,[349] according to the standard of the practice of his own day, was that he almost effaced his own art in favour of music—"never embarrassed the musician in the least, never advanced any unusual claim upon him from the dramatic standpoint." Nor has the situation changed, in its main features, down even to the present day. It still is held to be necessary for the poet to shape his material according to the necessities of the musician from first to last. The whole aim of the opera is simply music, the dramatic story being only utilised to serve music as a means for its own display. The anomaly has finally become so fundamental a part of men's lives that they no longer realise that it is an anomaly: and accordingly they still have hopes of erecting the genuine drama on the basis of absolute music—that is, of achieving the impossible. The object of Opera and Drama is to prove that great artistic results can follow from the collaboration of music with dramatic poetry, while from the unnatural position which music bears towards opera in our present system nothing but sterility can result.

Let us, then, in the first place, consider "Opera and the Nature of Music."

Music has been betrayed into a position where she has lost sight of her own limitations; although in herself she is simply an "organ of expression," she has fallen into "the error of desiring to define with perfect clearness the thing to be expressed." The musical basis of the opera was the aria, that is, the folk-song deprived of its own original words, and adapted at once to the vanity of the singer and the luxurious tastes of the world of rank. Aria and dance-tune, with an admixture of recitative, made up an opera, into the musical domain of which the poet was only allowed to enter in order to supply a little narrative cohesion. The significance of the so-called reformation of Gluck has been greatly exaggerated. All he did was to curtail the arrogant pretensions of the singer, while leaving the texture and plan of opera untouched. His was a revolt of the composer fighting merely for his own hand, not for the ends of drama: and every means by which he increased the power of music in opera was necessarily a further shackle on the limbs of the poet. Méhul, Cherubini and Spontini in their turn broadened the old musical forms of opera, and made the musical expression more consonant with that of the words, but did nothing for opera except from the standpoint of music. The poet may now have had to provide a slightly better and firmer groundwork for the musician, but it was to the musician, and to him alone, that he still owed his existence in opera. People failed to see that the source of regenerative power could be nowhere but in the drama: and the trouble was that music tried by itself to perform the functions of drama, to be a "content" instead of mere "expression."

Mozart, again, was so entirely a musician that his work throws the clearest light on the relations of musician and poet; and we find him unable to write at his best where the poem was flat and meaningless. He could not write music for Tito like that of Don Giovanni, or for Cosi fan tutte like that of Figaro. He, the most absolute of all musicians, would long ago have solved the operatic problem had he met the proper poet. This poet he was never fortunate enough to meet: all his "poets" did was to give him a medley of arias, duets, and ensembles to set to music. But the flood of beauty and expression which Mozart poured into opera was too great for that narrow bed; the stream overflowed into wider and freer channels, until it became a mighty sea in the symphonies of Beethoven.

The aria was a degeneration of the folk-song, in which poetry and music had been spontaneously one. The operatic aria was the music of the folk-song, arbitrarily wrested from the words, and made to serve the indolent pleasure of the man of luxury. In course of time people forgot that a word-stave should by rights go with the melody. It was Rossini who took this artificial flower, drenched it with manufactured perfume, and gave it the semblance of life. Rossini saw that the life-blood of ordinary opera was melody—"naked, ear-tickling, absolute-melodic melody." Spontini erred in imagining the "dramatic tendency" to be the essence of opera: the real essence, as Rossini showed, and as the future history of opera proves, was simply absolute melody.

Earnest composers, however, while by no means denying the claims of melody, held that Rossini's melody was cheap and superficial, and endeavoured to derive theirs more directly from the fountains of expression of the Folk. This was the course taken by Weber, who gave opera-aria the deep and genuine feeling of the folk-song; though the flower, thus torn from its native meadow, could not thrive in the salons of modern luxury and artificiality. And Weber, no less than Rossini, made his melody the main factor of opera, though of course it was far worthier and more honest than the melody of the Italian composer. Weber directed and constrained the poet of Der Freischütz as emphatically as Rossini did the poet of Tancredi. And Weber's failure proves afresh the assertion that instead of the drama being taken up into the being of music, music must be taken up into the drama.

Weber's success in harking back to the Folk was envied by the composers of other nationalities, and a number of operas were produced which tried to proceed on similar lines—such as Masaniello and William Tell. The Folk, in fact, was exploited, but its real inspiration could not, from the very nature of the case, be embodied in opera. In the epic and the drama the Folk celebrated the deeds of the Hero, and in true drama the action and the character are recognised as necessary; but under the influence of the modern State, dramatic characters lose their personality and become mere masks. This was particularly the case in opera, where the folk-song has degenerated into the aria, and the Folk itself has become the Mass, the Chorus. "Historic" opera became the fashion, and even Religion was dragged upon the stage, as in the operas of Meyerbeer. But the outlandishness thus imported into opera led in its turn to worse degeneration: and the "historic" mania became "hysteric" mania—in other words, Neo-romanticism.

Up to this time, every influence that had shaped the course of opera had come from the domain of absolute music alone. After Rossini, operatic melody was varied by the introduction of instrumental melody. People had not perceived that instrumental music was also unfruitful, by reason of its not expressing the purely-human in the form of definite, individual feelings.

"That the expression of an absolutely definite and clearly-understandable individual Content was in truth impossible in this language that was capable only of generalised emotional expression, could not be demonstrated until the coming of that instrumental composer in whom the longing to express such a Content became the burning, consuming motive-force of all artistic conception."

It was the function of Beethoven to show what music can do if it confines itself to its true sphere, that of expression. In his later works, Beethoven, having his mind filled with a definite content, burst the bounds of many of the old absolute forms, and stammered through tentative new ones. Future symphonists followed him from this point, without seeing what it was in Beethoven that made him act in this way; they consequently misapplied his forms, copying the externals only. Hence the vogue of programme music, of which the great representative is Berlioz. Then there came an influx of the wealth of instrumental music (developed independently of vocal music) into operatic melody. This is modern characteristic, of which Meyerbeer, the cosmopolitan Jew, is the great exploiter, and which differs from that of Gluck and Mozart in that the poet is infinitely more degraded, and absolute melody more exalted. This held good even in Paris, where the poet had hitherto always had some rights; but now Meyerbeer forced Scribe, his librettist, to run wherever he chose to drive him. The secret of his music is "Effect without Cause." Yet even Meyerbeer wrote fine music where he allowed the poet to guide him—as in parts of the great love-scene in the fourth act of Les Huguenots.

To sum up, then, Music has tried to be the drama, and the attempt has ended in impotence. The only salvation for it lies in sensible co-operation with the poet. This may be seen by a glance at the nature of our present music. The most perfect expression of the inner being of music is melody; it is to harmony and rhythm what the external side of the organism is to the internal. Now the Folk's melodies were a revelation of the nature of things. Christianity, however, with its anxiety to lay bare the soul, found itself face to face not with life but death; and the Folk-song, the indivorcible union of poetry and music, almost died out. In the ages of human mechanism the longing of things was to produce the real man, which man "was really none other than Melody, i.e. the moment of most definite, most convincing manifestation of Music's actual, living organism." The struggle of Beethoven's great works is the struggle of mechanism to become a man, an organism, uttering itself in melody. Thus while other composers merely took melody, ready-made, from the mouth of the Folk, and applied it to their own purposes, Beethoven's melody was the spontaneous effort of Music's inner organism to find expression. But it is only in the verbal outburst of the Ninth Symphony that Beethoven brings melody to true life; music was sterile until fertilised by the poet. The error had always been that operatic melody, coming as it did from the Folk-song, ran on certain rhythmical and structural lines, beyond which the musician could not stray; so that melody had no chance to be born spontaneously out of poetry, for the poet had simply to adapt his words to the one invariable musical scaffolding. "Every musical organism is by its nature a womanly; it is merely a bearer, not a begetter; the begetting force lies outside it, and without fecundation by this force it cannot bear." In the Choral Symphony Beethoven had to call in the poet to fertilise absolute music; and the folly of the latter is seen in its attempts not only to bear but also to beget. "Music is a woman," whose nature is to surrender in love. Who now is to be the Man to whom this surrender is to be made? Let us look at the Poet.

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II. When Lessing tries to mark out the boundaries of poetry and painting in the Laocöon, he has in his eye merely descriptive, literary poetry, not "the dramatic art-work brought immediately into view by physical performance." Now the literary poem is an artificial art, appealing to the imagination instead of to the senses. All the egoistically severed arts, indeed, appeal only to the force of imagination. They "merely suggest; an actual presentation would be possible to them only if they could address themselves to the totality of man's artistic receptivity, communicate with his entire perceptive organism, instead of merely his faculty of imagination; for the real art-work only comes into being when it passes from imagination into actuality, i.e. physical presentation." There should be no arts, there should be one veritable Art. It is an error to look upon Drama as merely a branch of literature; although it is true that our drama is no more true Drama than a single musical instrument is an orchestra.

The modern drama has a two-fold origin—in Romance, and in the Greek drama; the flower of the former being Shakespeare—of the latter, Racine. Our dramatic literature hovers undecidedly between these two extremes. The romance was not the portrayal of the complete man; this only became possible in drama, which actualised life, presented it visibly to the senses. Shakespeare "condensed the narrative romance into the drama"—made it, that is, suitable for stage representation. The great characteristic of his art was that human actions did not come before us merely in descriptive poetry, but by the actors addressing themselves directly to the actual eye, and the poet had to narrow down the diversity of the old Folk-stage to suit the scenic and other demands of the theatre. The action and the characters had to be made more definite, more individual, more circumstantial, in order to give the spectators the impression of an artistic whole. The appeal, in short, was no longer to fancy but to sense, the only domain left to fancy being the imagining the scene itself—for the stage-craft of those days fell short of actually representing reality. This mixture of fancy and sense-presentation in the drama was the source of endless future confusion in dramatic art; the giving-up to fancy of the representation of the scene left an open door in drama through which romance and history might pass in and out at pleasure.

In the French drama, outward unity of scene determined the whole structure of the play, diminishing the part played by action, and increasing the function of "mere delivery of speeches." For the same reason, the French dramatists could not choose for representation the romance, with its bewildering multiplicity of incident; they had to fall back on the already condensed plots which they found in Greek mythology. Instead of dealing with his own people's life, then, as Shakespeare had tried to do, the French tragedian merely imitated the finished Greek drama. This unnatural, artificial world was reproduced in French opera, and most saliently in the French opera of Gluck.

"Opera was thus the premature bloom on an unripe fruit grown from an unnatural,[350] artificial soil. The outer form, with which the Italian and French drama began, must be attained by the new drama by organic evolution from within, on the path of the Shakespearean drama; then first will ripen, also, the natural fruit of musical drama."

German dramatic art found itself between the Shakespearean play on the one side and the scenic Southern opera on the other—between the appeal to hearing, aided slightly by fancy in the representation of the scene, and the appeal to the eye alone. There were two final courses open: either, as Tieck suggested, to act Shakespeare with no more scenery than was employed in Shakespeare's own theatre, or to represent each change of scene in the plays—that is, employ the gigantic apparatus of scenic opera.

The result to the modern poet was perplexity and disillusion. The play was neither literature—as it was when men merely read it, allowing their imagination to represent the scene—nor actual, visualised drama. Hence the poet either wrote plays simply to be read, not acted, or, if he wrote for the stage, he employed the reflective type of drama, the modern origin of which may be traced to the pseudo-antique drama, constructed according to Aristotle's rules of unity. These results and tendencies are exhibited in Goethe and Schiller. Goethe, after various experiments, found his full expression in Faust, which makes no pretence of stage-representation, and is therefore really neither romance nor drama. Faust is "the point of separation between the mediæval romance ... and the real dramatic matter of the future." Schiller was always perplexed by the contradiction between history and drama. The whole dilemma is this. On the one side are romance and history, with all their multiplicity of character and action: on the other is the ideal dramatic form, presenting a simple, definite action and real moving characters visibly to the eye; and a compromise has to be effected between these two. The plain truth is "that we have no drama, and can have no drama; that our literary-drama is as far removed from the genuine drama as the pianoforte from the symphonic song of human voices; that in the modern drama we can arrive at the production of poetry only by the most calculated devices of literary mechanism, just as on the pianoforte we only arrive at the production of music by means of the most complicated devices of technical mechanism—that is to say, a soulless poetry, a toneless music." With this drama true music can have nothing to do.

Man, conceiving the external world, is impelled to reproduce his conceptions in art in a mode that shall be intelligible to others. This has only once been done thoroughly—in the expression of the Greek world-view in the Greek drama. The material of this drama was the myth—the Folk's mode of condensation of the phenomena of life—"the poem of a life-view in common." The Christian myth was concerned with death where the Greek had been concerned with life. It could therefore be painted or described, but not represented in drama. The Germanic myth, like the Greek, was in its essence a religious intuition, a life-view in common; but Christianity laid hold of it and dispersed it into fragments of fable and legend—the Romance of the Middle Ages. What the artist had to do was to find Man under all this débris. Now whereas the drama selects an action from a mass of actions, and limits the surroundings to just so much as will illuminate and justify this action, the romance has to enter circumstantially and at great length into the surrounding circumstances, in order to make the action and the character artistically convincing. The drama goes from within outwards, the romance from without inwards: the drama lays bare the organism of mankind, the romance shows us merely the mechanism of history; the art-procedure in drama is organic, in romance merely mechanical; the drama gives us the man, the romance the citizen; the drama exhibits the fullness of human nature, the romance the penury of the State. In the evolution that has gone on since the Middle Ages, Burgher-society has come uppermost; but it offers nothing to romance but unloveliness. Everything in life is being disintegrated past the capacity of art to reunite it; the poet's art has turned to politics, and until we have no more politics the poet cannot come to light again. As Napoleon said, the rôle of Fate in the ancient world is filled in the modern by politics; and this is what we shall have to comprehend before we can discover the true content and form of drama.

Now the myth is true for all time, and its content forever inexhaustible. Understanding it well, we see in it "an intelligible picture of the whole history of mankind, from the beginnings of society to the necessary downfall of the State." The political State lives on the vices of society; salvation and art are only to be found in the free, purely-human individual. The essence of the State is caprice, of the free individual, necessity. It is then essential for us to annul the State and create afresh the free individual. The poet who tried to portray this individual found that he was face to face with him only as he had been shaped by the State; he could not then portray him, but only imagine him; could only represent him to thought, not to feeling. Our drama, in consequence, has been forced to make its appeal to the understanding instead of the feeling. Out of the mass of man's modern surroundings the poet has to reconstruct the individual, and present him to feeling, to sense, instead of to understanding. But this the poet cannot do; he can only address the understanding, and that through the organ of understanding "abstract and conditioned word-speech." "The course to be taken by the drama of the future will be a return from understanding to feeling, in so far as we advance from the mentally-conceived individuality to an actual individuality." By the annihilation of the State, society will realise its purely-human essence, and determine the free individual. And it is only in the most perfect art-work, the drama, that the poet's insight into life can find complete expression, because this drama will address not the understanding, but the feeling, through the senses. It will present the poet's view of life physically to the eye; it will be a true emotionalisation of the intellect. It must present things to us in such a manner that we cannot help realising their necessity. This can only be done by avoiding the by-paths of the intellect, and by appealing directly to the feeling. The action, then, must be so chosen as to make this appeal instinctively. Now an historic action, or one "which can only be justified from the standpoint of the State," is only representable to the understanding, not to the feeling; that is, by its very multiplicity and lack of warmth it cannot be seized definitely and quickly by the senses, but needs the combining function of thought. The true dramatic "action" must be seen at once to be the essential centre of the periphery of circumstance. Man and nature, as cognised by the understanding, are split up into fragments; it is the feeling that grasps the organic unity of things, and it is from this point outwards that the true drama must work. In other words, it must be generated from the myth.

Up to a certain point the intellect can work in the selection of material, and express itself through its own organ, word-speech; but for the full realisation of the action and the motives to the feeling, the organ of feeling—tone-speech—has to be called in. "Tone-speech is the beginning and end of word-speech, as the feeling is beginning and end of the understanding, as myth is beginning and end of history, as lyric is beginning and end of poetry." The lyric "holds within itself all the germs of the essential art of poetry, which in the end can only be the justification of the lyric; and the work that accomplishes this justification is nothing but the highest human art-work, the complete drama."

The primal organ of utterance of the inner man is tone-speech, the fundamental nature of which may be seen by removing the consonants from our word-speech. The latter is the result of the addition of prefixes and suffixes to the open sound, as distinguishing and delimiting signs of objects. In this way speech-roots were formed from the primal melody of tone-speech. In alliteration, or Stabreim, speech, by combining these roots according to similarity and kinship, "made equally plain to the feeling both the impression of the object and its corresponding expression, through an increased strengthening of that expression"; showed, that is, the unity in multiplicity of the object. Stabreim's similarity of syllabic sounds brings a collective image to the feeling. The Stabreim and the word-verse were fundamentally conditioned by that melody which is the expression of primal human feeling, because the breathing-conditions of man's organism determined the duration and segmentation of the utterance. When poetry developed along the line of the understanding instead of that of the feeling, word-speech became dissociated from its sister, tone-speech; and having lost the instinctive sense of this bond, it tried to find "another bond of union with the melodic breathing-pauses." This was done in the end-rhyme, which was the sign that the natural bond of tone-speech and word-speech in the Stabreim had been forgotten. This line of degeneration ended in "the dreary turmoil of prose"; and the separation from the feeling was complete. We now go upon convention instead of upon conviction. We cannot properly express our emotions in our present language, for it allows us to speak only to the understanding, not to the feeling; which is why the feeling "has tried to escape from absolute intellectual-speech into absolute tone-speech—our music of to-day."

The poet, then, cannot realise his aim in modern speech, because he cannot speak directly to the feeling. Yet he must not simply work out his drama on the lines of the understanding, and then try to add expression to it by means of music. This was the error of opera. The emotional expression itself must also be governed by the poetical aim. "A tone-speech to be struck-into from the outset is therefore the organ of expression by means of which the poet must make himself intelligible by turning from the understanding to the feeling, and for this purpose he has to take his stand upon a soil on which he can have intercourse with feeling alone." We must go back, in fact, to the primal melodic faculty, to which is given the expression of the purely-human; the drama must utter itself in a form that shall be the marriage of understanding and feeling, of word-speech and tone-speech.

III. Until now the poet has tried in two ways to attune the organ of the understanding—word-speech—to an emotional expression which would find its way to the feeling; through rhyme and through melody. It was a mistake to try to import the rhythms of Greek verse into modern poetry, for these rhythms were conditioned by the gestures of the dance, and the dislocation of the speaking-accents was atoned for by melody. Our modern languages not being adapted to this ruling into longs and shorts, Greek prosody is impossible for us. Our iambic verse, for example, hobbles along mechanically, "putting grievous constraint upon the live accent of speech for the sake of this monotonous rhythm." "Longs" become "shorts," and "shorts" become "longs," simply to get the requisite number of feet into the line. On the other hand, where, as among the Romanic peoples, this kind of rhythm is not in vogue, the end-rhyme has been imported into poetry, and has become indispensable. The whole line is built up with reference to this end-rhyme, as the up-stroke to the down-stroke. The result is that the attention of the ear is only momentarily won, and the poet does not reach the feeling, for all he does is to make understanding speak to understanding.

We have seen that word-speech and melody have travelled along divergent lines of development, and now neither can be properly applied to the other. Even where, as in Gluck's music, the composer tries to find a bond of union in the speaking-accent of the word-speech, his selection of this mere rhetorical accent leads to a disintegration of the rest of the line as poetry; it becomes dissolved into prose, and the melody itself becomes merely musical prose. The usual course is for the melody to do what it likes with the verse; to dislocate its rhythm, ignore its accents, and drown its end-rhyme, according to its own pleasure. The poet ought really "so to employ the speaking accent as the only determinative 'moment' for his verse, that in its symmetrical return it should clearly define a wholesome rhythm, as necessary to the verse itself as to the melody." Instead of this, we find on the one hand that many of Goethe's verses are declared too beautiful to be set to music, while on the other hand Mendelssohn writes Songs without Words.

We shall have to deal with speech as we dealt with action and the content of the drama. Just as we took away from the action all that was extraneous and accidental; just as we took away from the content all that savoured of the State or of history, in order to reach simply the purely-human; so we must "cut away from the verbal expression all that springs from and answers to these disfigurements of the purely-human and emotionally necessary," so that only the purely-human core shall remain. Thus we shall arrive "at the natural basis of rhythm in the spoken verse, as revealed in the liftings and lowerings of the accent," which in turn can only find full expression when intensified into musical rhythm. The strong and weak accents must correspond to the "good" and "bad" halves of the musical bar. We must reach back through the understanding and its organ to "the sensuous substance of our roots of speech"; we must breathe the breath of life into the defunct organism of speech. This breath is music. The roots of words were brought into being by the Folk's primal emotional stress; the essence of these roots is the open vowel sound, which finds its fullest sensuous uplifting in music; while the function of the consonants is to determine the general expression to a particular one. The Stabreim indicates to the feeling the unity of sensation underlying the roots—shows their emotional kinship. It appeals, as it were, to the "eye" of hearing, while the vowel is addressed to the "ear" of hearing. And as a man only reveals himself fully to us by addressing both eye and ear at once, so "the communicating-organ of the inner man only completely convinces our hearing when it addresses itself with equal persuasiveness to both 'eye and ear' of this hearing. But this is possible only in word-tone-speech. Poet and musician have hitherto each addressed no more than half the man: the poet turned towards this hearing's eye alone, the musician only to its ear." The musician will take the vowel-sounds of the poet, and display their fundamental kinship by giving them their full emotional value by means of musical tone. Here then the word-poet ends, and the tone-poet begins. The melody of the musician is "the redemption of the endlessly-conditioned poetic thought into a deep-felt consciousness of the highest emotional freedom." This was the melody that rose from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to the light of day.

When Beethoven wrote the simple melody with which he accompanies the "Freude, schöner Götterfunken," he was writing as an absolute musician. This melody "did not arise out of the poem of Schiller, but rather was invented outside the word-verse and merely spread above it." But in the "Seid umschlungen, Millionen," and the "Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?" he obeys the dictates of the poetic aim, and the broadening of the key-kinship leads the feeling back to the purely-human.

The kinship of feeling which the poet can only approximately express by Stabreim, the musician can bring to full expression by key-modulation. Take, for example, the line "Liebe giebt Lust zum Leben." The one emotion being expressed throughout, the musician would keep in one key. When setting "Die Liebe bringt Lust und Leid," however, the change of feeling at the end of the line would be expressed by a modulation; while if this line were followed by "Doch in ihr Weh auch webt sie Wonnen,"[351] at the webt a modulation would be effected back into the original key. It is from this poetico-musical "period" that the true art-work, the perfected drama, must take its rise.

Melody is the horizontal surface of harmony; and in harmony "the ear ... obtains an entire fulfilling—and thus a satisfying—of its capacity for sensuous impression, and consequently can devote itself with the necessary composure to the apt emotional expression of the melody." But harmony in absolute music has existed solely for and in itself: whereas the melody ought to be conditioned by the speaking-verse, and the concurrent harmony be used for making this obvious to the feeling.

In the drama of the future there must be no characters whose only function is to swell the harmonic volume of sound; there must only be such characters as are essential in themselves to the plot. The chorus, then, "as hitherto employed in opera, ... will have to disappear from our drama." Neither the chorus nor the main characters "are to be used by the poet as a musical symphonic tone-body for making the underlying harmonic conditions of the melody perceptible." The musician, however, possesses an organ which can make plain the harmony and characterise the melody in a far superior way to that of the vocal mass. This organ is the orchestra, which is an immense aid in the realisation of the poetic aim. Until now the error has consisted in writing absolute melody in opera—melody, that is, which was conditioned by the orchestra itself, not by the word-verse, and which was therefore only "vocal" melody in the sense that it was given to the voice. It ought really to come from "an announcement of the purely emotional content of the verse, through a dissolution of the vowel into the musical tone"; the verse melody in this way becoming the mediator and bond of union between word-speech and tone-speech, the offspring of the marriage of poetry and music.

The great value of the orchestra is its power of uttering the unspeakable, i.e. that which is unutterable through the organ of the understanding. It may do this in three ways—by its organic alliance with gesture, by bringing up the remembrance of an emotion, when the singer is not giving voice to it, and by giving a foreboding of moods as yet unspoken.

All the constituents of drama have now been enumerated. It only remains to consider how they are to be knit together into a single form corresponding to the single substance. Just as the poet obtained his action by compressing all the motives into an easily comprehended content, so, for the realisation of this action, must he proceed with the composition on the same principles. The expression, like the action, must be free from the accidental, the contingent, the superfluous.

We approach the drama in a mood of expectancy, that is ministered to by the orchestra in its quality of a producer of foreboding—although this preliminary utterance of the orchestra must by no means be interpreted to mean the ordinary "overture." This expectancy is afterwards satisfied by the word-speech of the performer, lifted into the higher emotional sphere of tone-speech. The unity of content in the drama must be made evident in a unity of artistic expression; that is, the expression "must convey to the feeling the most comprehensive aim of the poetic understanding." Wherever the word-speech approaches the language of ordinary life—the organ of understanding—the orchestra must keep the expression still on the higher plane, by means of its faculty of conveying foreboding or remembrance. Yet it must assume this function not through the mere caprice of the musician, but in obedience only to the poet's aim. Unity of content and unity of expression must go hand in hand. These melodic moments of the orchestra will take their rise only from the weightiest motives of the drama, which are the pillars of the edifice. In this way a binding principle of musical form may be obtained which springs directly from the poetic aim, and far surpasses the arbitrary, merely musical form of the old opera, which was loose, uncentralised, and inorganic.

Finally let us ask, "Has the poet to restrict himself in presence of the musician, and the musician in presence of the poet?" The answer is that they ought not to restrict each other, but raise each other to higher potency, in order thus to generate the true drama. If both the poet's aim and the musician's expression are visible, the necessary inspiration of each by each has not been effected. We must not be reminded of either aim or expression, "but the content must instinctively take possession of us as a human action fully justified to our feeling." In every moment of the musician's expression the poetic aim must be contained; and this poetic aim must always find complete realisation in the musician's expression. Whereas Voltaire said, "When a thing is too silly to be said, one sings it," we now may say "What is not worth being sung is not worth the poet's pains to tell."

There is no need to assume that poet and musician must necessarily be one person. Only in the present egoistic relations of these two—who are types of the egoism of the modern State—does it seem necessary for one man to become the unit of creation.

Three nations—the Italian, French and German—have contributed to the evolution of opera; but the German language alone "still coheres directly and unmistakably with its roots," and therefore is alone adapted for the new art-work. But the practice of singing operas with German words merely translated from the French or Italian, and therefore not coinciding in meaning and accent with the music, has mis educated and demoralised German singers. In the new drama, the melody will always be conditioned by the word-verse, and singers must learn to render it intelligently, bringing out not merely the melodic sequence but the verbal sense of the melody. And gesture must be employed with intelligent understanding, in order to make the orchestral moments of foreboding and remembrance[352] in their turn intelligible. But the primary condition for this new drama is a new public, that shall look at it seriously, as at an organism; a public that wants an art-work, not a mere evening's distraction. We are less fortunate than the older artists, whose audience, whatever its social faults may have been, had at least delicacy and high breeding; whereas we are ruled by the vulgar and ignorant Philistine, the characteristic product of our commercial civilisation. Yet even under the débris of modern life the artist can see the primal source of things, can reach to the human being, to whom the future belongs.