Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

XVII

Of this he was more than half conscious himself; and it was always clear to him that as he was in the great line of instrumental succession, and that what he was doing was to extend still further the expressive range of instrumental, endlessly melodic music, it might be urged against him that the logical outcome of all his theory and his practice was not the opera but the symphonic poem or the programme symphony. But against that conclusion he always strenuously protested in advance. Something he saw there must be to make definite to the hearer the indefinite emotion of the music alone. He knew that the classical symphony was a work of composite origin, one movement of it—the Minuet or Scherzo,—still maintaining almost unchanged its dance-like character, while in the others the composer aimed more and more at emotional expression. But the musician was hampered here by the fact that the expression of emotion could not rise above a certain intensity without bursting the symphonic mould, and indeed prompting in the hearer a question as to the source of that emotion. There was, as Wagner says, "a certain fear of overstepping the bounds of musical expression, and especially of pitching the passionate, tragic tendency too high, for that would arouse feelings and expectations that would awake in the hearer the disquieting question of 'Why,'—which the musician himself could not answer satisfactorily."[387] But Wagner would not admit that this something might be a mere programme. "Not a programme, which rather provokes than silences the troublesome question of 'Why,' can therefore express the meaning of the symphony, but only the scenically-represented dramatic action itself."[388] With the liberation of musical expression from the stereotyped images set before it in the ordinary musical verse, and with the liberation of musical technique effected by the breaking down of the old operatic conventions of form, the power of music could be extended indefinitely. The poet would discover that "melodic form is capable of endlessly richer development than had previously been possible in the symphony itself, and, with a presentiment of this development, he will already project the poetical conception with perfect freedom. Thus where even the symphonist timidly reached back to the original dance-form—never daring, even for his expression, wholly to pass the boundaries that kept him in communication with this form—the poet will now cry to him: 'Throw yourself fearlessly into the full stream of the sea of music: hand in hand with me you can never lose touch with what is most comprehensible to all mankind; for through me you always stand on the ground of the dramatic action, and this action, in the moment of its representation on the stage, is the most immediately intelligible of all poems. Stretch your melody boldly out, that it may pour through the whole work like an endless flood: in it say what I leave unsaid, since only you can say it, and in silence I will utter all, since it is I who lead you by the hand."[389]

Here he is expressing only a personal bias. His own imagination was somewhat timid; it preferred the seen to the unseen, and he was consequently quite unable to take up the point of view of people to whom a thing mentally conceived is as impressive as, or even more impressive than, the same thing set bodily before their eyes. Had he had any inkling of this, he would not have brought so many animals upon the scene. The most striking instance of his inability to trust to the spectator's imagination is his vacillation over the ending of Tannhäuser. In the first version of the final scene, the last attempt of Venus to win back her old lover was shown only as a struggle in the mind of the frenzied Tannhäuser, with a red glow in the direction of the distant Hörselberg to make the cause of the madness clear. The death of Elisabeth was merely divined by the intuition of Wolfram, while the sound of far-off bells and the faint light of torches on the Wartburg gave the spectator the hint he needed for the full comprehension of the scene. Wagner was uncomfortable until he had made everything visible that had formerly been left to the imagination; Venus had to appear in person to Tannhäuser, and the bier of Elisabeth had to be carried across the stage. It would have been better, in this and in many other cases, had he reposed more faith in the imagination of his audience. But his theory and his practice were often inconsistent in this as in so many other cases. We have seen him objecting, à propos of Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet, to music that required an explanation outside itself to make it clear. But several of his own orchestral pieces are unintelligible without a verbal explanation or its equivalent. Who could make anything of the prelude to the third Act of Tannhäuser, for example, in the absence of such an explanation? It cannot even be said that the dramatic play of the motives is clear to anyone who has listened carefully to the opera, for the theme of Tannhäuser's pilgrimage, that is of such importance in the prelude, does not occur till the third Act; during the prelude to that Act the hearer who is listening to it for the first time is ignorant not merely of its meaning but of its very existence. How, again, can the audience be expected to know, the first time they hear it, that the opening theme of the prelude to the third Act of the Meistersinger symbolises Sachs's renunciation of Eva? The theme has appeared in the second Act as an orchestral counterpoint during one of the stanzas of the cobbling song. Even supposing the hearer to have any notion on that occasion that the theme is more than an ordinary counterpoint—that it has a psychological significance—how is he to know what this significance is; and how is he to read this meaning into it when he hears it at the commencement of the third Act? It all has to be made clear to him by a prose explanation, as Wagner himself recognised when he wrote his explanatory programme note upon the prelude. In the light of this and other instances that could be cited, how can Wagner consistently deny to other composers the right to call in the aid of verbal explanations for their symphonic poems or programme symphonies?