Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

XII

One is sometimes amazed, in reading Opera and Drama, at the persistence with which Wagner pursues the obvious, hunting it down, as Oscar Wilde said of James Payn, with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective. He is almost as elaborately absurd over his vowels and consonants as M. Jourdain. The explanation is to be sought partly in the tendency to long-windedness, the passion for pursuing every idea to the death, that was always characteristic of him,—it derived ultimately from the inexorably logical nature of his mind,—and partly from the fact that he had a very stupid public and a very stupid set of artists to educate. Opera and Drama has been made both more lucid and somewhat obvious for us to-day by Wagner's own operas. If there is less need to-day to labour certain points as he does, it is because they are now such universally accepted truths that it is hard for us to imagine a time when people needed to have them driven into them at the point of a pen. Here and there his letters give us an inkling of the difficulties with which he had to contend. Few people in the middle of the nineteenth century, apparently, had any idea of real drama in opera.[364] Even the singers,—with the exception of a born genius here and there like Schröder-Devrient,—had little notion that their parts consisted of anything but so many words to be sung as brilliantly as possible. In one of his letters to Liszt, Wagner describes his horror at seeing, in the Dresden opera house, the Tannhäuser, in the "Hall of Song" scene, shouting his declaration of unholy love for Venus straight into the face of the chaste Elisabeth!—and this in spite of the composer having taken particular care to have all directions copied in full in the separate vocal parts. "What result was possible but that the public should be confused and not know in the least what to make of it? Indeed, I discovered in Dresden that the public became acquainted with the dramatic contents of the opera only by reading the text-book; that is, they only came to understand the performance by abstracting their minds from the actual performance and filling-in from their own imagination."[365] And as he hints, if these things could be done in a first-class opera house like Dresden, what hair-raising horrors must go on in the smaller theatres?

A good deal of Opera and Drama, then, took its rise in the immediate circumstances of the German operatic life of the early nineteenth century, and has no particular validity for the world in general to-day.[366] Other portions of it relate only or mainly to the Ring. For all his insistence on the necessity of alliterative verse (Stabreim), he virtually discarded it when he had finished with the Ring. The Meistersingers is written throughout in rhymed verse. In Tristan he employs in turn alliteration, rhyme, and unrhymed verse; Parsifal fluctuates between a sort of vers libre that is often as near as possible to prose, and a rhymed stanza-form for the more pronouncedly lyric portions. Opera and Drama, in fact, was in large part the reduction to theory of the principles of structures that were slowly taking shape within him as he pondered on the Siegfried legend. As with all great artistic creators, each subject was seen so vividly, took such complete possession of him, that it unconsciously made for itself its own inevitable form. He himself knew that it was in the Ring that the theories of Opera and Drama had their origin. "Even now," he writes to Uhlig, "must I learn that I should not have discovered the most important conditions for the conformation of the drama of the future had I not, as artist, lighted quite unconsciously upon them in my Siegfried."[367] And working backwards, as it were, from the completed work as we have it now, it is easy enough to see how the subject led him of itself to a new theory of opera. He had a gigantic saga to condense into the dimensions of a normal stage action; the most drastic economy of words was therefore necessary. As the burden of the emotional expression was to be undertaken by the music, the purely verbal portion would have to be reduced to the barest essentials consistent with making the conduct of the drama and the motives of the characters clear. And as every word had to be vital to the drama, and the musical phrase was to fit the verbal phrase as if the two had been predestined for each other from the beginning of time, each line, short as it might be, had to be packed with accents as salient as those of the music itself. This condition seemed to be most perfectly fulfilled in Stabreim, because there the vowel or consonant that gave definition to the word was thrown into the highest possible relief at the very moment of the incidence of the musical accent. The following quotations from the Valkyrie will make this clear:

A

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Die Betrog'ne lass auch zertreten.
Let them trample on the betrayed one.

B

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Dass mit Zwang ich halte, was dir nicht haftet.
That by force I hold what denies thee homage.

C

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Wer bist du, sag', die so schön und ernst mir erscheint?
Who art thou, say, who dost stand so beauteous and stern?

It was therefore, as usual, the musician in him controlling the poet, although he always strenuously denied this, and indeed his complaint against the old-time opera was that the poet was held in servitude to the musician. In each case the poet was the serf, but the terms of slavery were different. In the older opera he had to work within the limits of a set scheme that gave him little or no scope for character-drawing or for the natural evolution of a great dramatic action. In the Wagnerian opera the poet was indeed allowed to make his portion of the work worthy and consistent, but he was permitted no further scope than was consistent with the necessities of the music. If it be true that Wagner restored the poet to liberty by making the drama the end and the music the means, it was only in the sense that he first of all made the drama of the dimensions and the pattern that music required. Beyond these dimensions, away from that pattern, it could not be allowed to go.

That the musician in Wagner ruled the poet is plain enough to us now, but it was always denied by Wagner himself. In the Communication to my Friends, that elucidates so gratefully for us so many dark passages in Opera and Drama, he is persistently blind to the fact that is obvious enough to everyone else. As far as Rienzi, he tells us, he had taken his operatic subjects from ready-made stories, while with the Flying Dutchman he struck out a new path, framing his own libretto out of the simple unpolished outlines of a folk-saga. "Henceforward," he goes on to say, "with regard to all my dramatic works I was in the first instance Poet, and only in the complete working out of the poem did I become once more Musician. Only," he rather naïvely continues, "I was a poet who was conscious in advance of the power of musical expression for the working out of his poems."[368] Quite so: when a subject took possession of him he would see it all in terms of musical expression and development; and unconsciously the poem would be so planned as to provide the needful framework, and no more, for the musical emotion. Later on, after arguing that music is the emotional expression per se, but that it can only ally itself with words that contain the possibility of emotion, he once more lets us see that it was the musician in him that determined his choice of subject and the manner of its treatment. "What I perceived, I now looked at solely with the eyes of music [nur aus dem Geiste der Musik]; though not," he rightly points out, "that music whose formal rules might still have embarrassed my expression, but the music that was complete within me, and in which I could express myself as in a mother tongue."[369] Granting that the musical world from the centre of which he wished to pour himself out upon poetry was not that of the stereotyped operatic composer, the fact remains that it was from the centre of music itself that the outpouring was to come. And we may further grant that "it was precisely by the facility of musical expression" he had acquired that "he became a poet." What had happened in the interval between Rienzi and the Flying Dutchman, and still more in the interval between the Flying Dutchman and the Ring, was that his musical sense had so enormously expanded that it was now capable of weaving a continuous emotional tissue of its own,—a tissue, however, that required the framework of poetry to make it definite. He was right; it was of the musician in him that the poet was born. And it was the musician insisting on the dramatic "stuff" being reduced to its pure essentials that led him to reject the wide-spreading romance and history, and to seize upon the myth, in which a human content was presented in the simplest possible form.