II
In the Second Act the scene is again the Gibichungs' hall. Siegfried and Günther are away, and Hagen watches by night; his father, Alberich, crawls up from the river and counsels him as to how to get possession of the Ring; then he disappears as dawn begins to show. The music is weird and sinister in Wagner's finest manner. Siegfried comes in and says Günther and his bride will soon arrive, and goes off with Gutruna, happy as a child; in a magnificent piece of music, largely constructed of a harsh phrase associated with Hagen, he (Hagen) calls up the clansmen and women; a pompous bit of chorus greets Günther and Brünnhilda, and then once more we are plunged into a sea of theatricality. To her amazement, Brünnhilda finds Siegfried there with his new bride, unmindful of her. In rage she denounces him and declares he has shared the joys of love with her; he denies it; but Günther is shamed, and has no doubt that Siegfried has played him false. Siegfried goes merrily off, and Günther, Hagen and Brünnhilda swear that he must die. In the music we get any amount of physical energy and dramatic emphasis; but we know this is no longer the Wagner of the Valkyrie. I pass over the Act briefly now, because I can only repeat what I have said before. Of course all the consummate skill of the master is there.
The Third Act opens by the river-side. Siegfried has wandered away from a hunting party, and is attracted by the song of the Rhinemaidens—a regular set piece in the oldest-fashioned of forms, but marvellously beautiful. The nymphs try to coax him to throw them the Ring, which he had wrested from Brünnhilda; he refuses, and they tell him that this day he must die. The other hunters come in, and Siegfried is asked to tell of his adventures, and as he does so Hagen offers him a cup of wine into which he dropped another powder; Siegfried's memory gradually returns, and to Günther's horror he relates how he first scaled the mountain, passed the fire and won Brünnhilda. He means on the first occasion, but it shames Günther once again. Hagen points in the air and asks Siegfried what he sees above him; two black ravens fly over. Siegfried turns to look at them, and Hagen instantly thrusts a spear into his back; the ravens wing their way to Valhalla to tell Wotan that the fatal hour has come. In a sublime passage Siegfried the dying hero sings of Brünnhilda, and dies. Every one save Hagen is horror-stricken; the body is picked up and carried downward through the moonlit mists over the mountain, and the gorgeous funeral march is played. This is built up on Wagner's customary plan: it tells the story of the Volsung race, now ended by the death of Siegfried.
In the second scene of the Act there is one fine passage—Brünnhilda's long address—and the rest is manufactured with dexterity and quite uninspired. The body is brought in; Hagen wishes to take the Ring, and a thrill is sent through us as the dead man's arm rises threateningly. Günther interferes, and Hagen kills him; Brünnhilda comes on and sees clearly everything; Gutruna claims Siegfried as hers—"he never was yours; he is mine," Brünnhilda replies, and (by trick of true stage-craft) Gutruna is seen to kneel down by the side of her dead brother. She is absolutely alone—even Siegfried, dead, is taken from her, and she instinctively creeps to the only thing that is in any sense hers. Brünnhilda orders the funeral fire to be built; the body is put on it and consumed: Brünnhilda mounts Grani and scatters the ashes, and with them the Ring, into the river; the waters rise, and Hagen rushes after the Ring, to be drawn down; Wotan's power went when the spear was shattered, and now that the Ring is returned to the Rhine no other power controls Loge. He flares up, and we see Valhalla on high in flames.
So ends the Dusk of the Gods and the whole gigantic cycle. A noble race has come and gone, and the world is prepared to make a fresh start. I have discussed the music as we went along, and there is nothing more to add.
CHAPTER XVIII
'PARSIFAL'; THE END; THE MAN
I
After Wagner had completed the Ring, a work which, in regard to its gigantic size and proportions, stands without a parallel in music, he was an exhausted and beaten man. Outwardly he was a highly prosperous musician—more successful from some points of view than Mendelssohn or Meyerbeer: at least he had, without means, achieved a greater triumph than they, starting with their fathers' thousands or millions, had dreamed of. No Mendelssohn, no Meyerbeer, no Rossini, would have dreamed of gaining a king, even the king of a minor bankrupt state, as his lackey—and his generous paymaster. After the first Bayreuth festival a Rossini would have retired as swiftly as such a person could with his percentage of the gross profits, leaving the guarantors to straighten the little matter of the deficit; Meyerbeer had too much of cold cunning in him to have gone on such an adventure at all; Mendelssohn would have paid up everything and shaken the dust of his Bayreuth off his feet for ever and a six-days week longer. I take these three because they are three of the most successful financial composers the world has seen; minor prophets of their order might be added. That is what they would have done: made a little money they did not need and retired from a hard conflict. Wagner was more successful than they. He never accumulated the thousands of marks or ducats or francs that they did: he did not want them, but in proportion to his needs he accumulated more; he was richer than they were, as Diogenes in his tub was richer than Alexander. Wagner's tub, it may be remarked, was a preciously comfortable one, and he made no pretence about it being anything else. He was a successful man of business; in spirit he was broken, exhausted, defeated.
Palazzo Vendramin Calergi, Venice
That is the first point to be considered; the next is a corollary. This man of dashed, broken hopes still needed the driving force of either human passions, griefs or sorrows, or of great human ideals, before he could compose ten notes. It is no desire of mine to scoff at the Schopenhauerian, Feuerbachian notions working in Wagner's brain when he planned the Ring, and wrote its finest music; in art—as in business, if it comes to that—one judges by results and results only. But we can see that it was these ridiculous ideas, as perhaps I have already pointed out, that were the postilion's whip to Wagner's Pegasus. Of some men it can be said that no one knows anything of the postilion's whip: of every artist concerning whom a fair tail of facts is available and consultable we find a very distinct whip. We may laugh at the idea of the "stories" to which Beethoven worked: who would laugh at the Fifth Symphony would not even be laughed at. And I have not the slightest hesitation in affirming that when Wagner set to work on Parsifal his most eager and greedy desire was to show the world that he desired nothing. Knowing Bayreuth a failure, fancying his whole life a failure, from a particular point of view, one idea seized hold on him—- the idea that those who did not like his music were in a pitiable condition, and compassion exhorted him to rescue them, to redeem them. He meant to heap coals of fire upon a generation that refused to recognise him as a prophet. He did it—with a double vengeance: he made the detractors come to his knees and he made a fortune out of them—them alone. For Bayreuth never became a profitable investment for Jewish money until the one great Christian drama of modern times was produced there.
Parsifal, in one form or another, had long fermented in Wagner's brain. At first it was—incongruous though the thing may seem—either Jesus of Nazareth or Wieland the Smith; then Parzival grew out of the Siegfried idea; and at length, stimulated by the attentions and help of poor Ludwig, he settled on Parsifal. These are matters not of opinion, but of historical fact. Ludwig, when not masquerading in woman's clothing, or ordering it from Paris, or appearing at private performances in one opera or another, suffered from great attacks of religion; and, unhappily for the art of music, what appealed to his diseased brain from one side appealed to Wagner's tired brain from the other side. Ludwig asked him to complete Parsifal and he did so. I doubt whether without the royal request he ever would have done so. But in doing so he, as Americans say, "struck lucky." Throughout Western Europe you have only to bawl the word "religion" and your fortune is made; in America it is the same; on the two continents innumerable fortunes have been made by bawling the word "religion." So Wagner's conviction, Ludwig's desire, and advertisement possibilities, all coincided; and thenceforth Bayreuth flourished—financially, if not artistically or morally.
I shall devote little attention to Parsifal. The plot would disgrace Wagner's memory if we did not know it to be the work of his tired-out old age. The central idea is that of Renunciation; and I will give the reader a skeleton, but a fair skeleton, of the plot, and ask him, Who renounces anything? who gains anything by renouncing? or loses anything by not renouncing? and, above all, what is any one called on to renounce?
At the Montsalvat of Lohengrin—ah! what a different Montsalvat—Amfortas, lord of the tribe of monks, has flirted with a lady, and a magician, Klingsor, has seized the sacred spear with which Christ's side was pierced and inflicted on Amfortas an incurable wound. That is the state of affairs when the curtain rises. Gurnemanz, a faithful warder, talks with sundry squires, not yet fully degraded to the order of knighthood, and tells them how through a certain wondrous woman Amfortas fell from his high estate. The wondrous woman, Kundry, disguised as a sort of Indian squaw, enters, coming, she says, from far lands; exhausted, she flings herself in a thicket to sleep—sleep—she says. Gurnemanz does not know who she is—nor, for that small matter, do I—but she comes and serves these knight-monks faithfully for whiles and then disappears; and generally, it seems, during her period of disappearance disaster falls on some treasured pearl of a saint of a knight. Enter Parsifal, "the pure fool"—Siegfried with all his bull-strength and energy shorn away. He carries a bow and arrow, and promptly shoots a Swan, one of the prides of Montsalvat. He is too stupid to understand that he has done any wrong—wrong to a helpless bird or his own nature. Gurnemanz explains in very unconvincing accents; Parsifal, the poor, "pure" fool, bursts into tears, breaks his weapons and throws them away. And now the reader must bear with me if I am both tedious and inexplicable in my explanation. At some unknown period in the past it was prophesied that only the "pure fool" taught by suffering could redeem suffering Amfortas: mankind, that is, could only be made perfect by a perfect idiot. Gurnemanz thinks he has found the required man—and he has, if only he knew it—and he takes him on the most curious promenade in the history of mankind—to the Hall of the Grail. The two men do not walk: it is the scenery that walks. "Here," says Gurnemanz, "time and space are one."
Arrived there, we are confronted by a scene much more Oriental than anything we know of mediæval Christianity: a sort of mosque with a huge dome, a circular set of Lockhart's Cocoa-rooms tables and benches; at the back a mysterious catafalque. The pure fool is pushed aside; Amfortas is carried in; he screams in agony of spirit; and then the service begins. It is a sheer burlesque of the Lord's Supper. When the last chords of the mysterious choir in the dome have died away, Gurnemanz asks Parsifal what he comprehends of it all. "Nothing," Parsifal replies, and is immediately turned out of doors.
The origin of the guileless fool has already been indicated: this—as it seems to us to-day—idiotic notion of the eighteenth century started Wagner on the notion that if a modern child, with all the developed brain of a modern child, could suddenly be transplanted into a state of nature, all would be well with the world. What could possibly happen? But it is silly to ask the question: the whole juvenile population of the earth would have to be so transplanted, and they would have to find a new earth to live on—at least an earth not frequented by modern men and women.
In the next Act we are taken to Klingsor's magic castle. Klingsor calls up Kundry and changes his castle into an enchanted garden full of flower-maidens; Parsifal comes in, and, though curious about the maidens, does not know what they would be at; he angrily drives them off; Kundry calls him. She tells him of the death of his mother who had loved him so dearly; he again weeps and learns the meaning of compassion; Kundry kisses him, and he learns the meaning of sex and temptation. In horror he casts her from him; Klingsor throws the spear at him—the sacred Spear with which Christ's side was wounded, stolen by Klingsor from Montsalvat—it remains suspended above his head; he seizes and waves it, and at once garden, flower-maidens and all are reduced to withered stalks and leaves. Parsifal returns, an "enlightened" fool, and by touching the wound of Amfortas, cures him, becoming himself head of the order.
The whole affair is a spectacle which I must say is disgusting to healthy minds. The insinuations are frightful. Consider, reader, seriously for a moment: Parsifal—Siegfried grown to manhood—knows and cares nothing about womankind. As soon as he knows what a woman is he revolts, learns through that knowledge and by his acquaintance with suffering—acquaintance, I say, because he himself has never suffered—that there are two cures for all the woes of humanity. Discard women and pity the men. The thing is absurd, and suggests that the mighty genius was on the verge of imbecility. But the desire to please mad Ludwig accounts for it all in a very undesirable fashion.
Of the music it is not necessary to say more than that some of it is fine. For the most part it lacks virility, though there are passages of marvellous loveliness. The flower-maidens' waltz shows what Wagner could do in that way; the Good Friday music, dating back to the Lohengrin days, is sweet and fresh. But the quasi-religious music has no charms for me.
Of course the prelude is in its way, but only in its way, a beautiful thing. One almost hears the beating of angels' wings; the remnant of old church melody, fitted into the most modern of modern rhythms, sings out; the old Tannhäuser and Rienzi Dresden Amen comes out pompously if not very effectively. On the whole a splendid tour de force is accomplished. But as soon as the singers are introduced we feel the lack of the inspiration of former days; the writing is not vocal writing at all; it is simply notes chosen at will or at random to fit in with the chord sequences that were constantly shaping themselves in Wagner's brain—not sequences that sprang, as he himself would have expressed it, from "the feeling." The woes of Amfortas are described by the orchestra with a coldness that would have surprised or stunned Wagner in his Tristan days: had Meyerbeer done it no paper would have carried his hot words. When Parsifal shoots the Swan, Gurnemanz has two or three moments of true emotion: the rest ought to be silence and is rubbish. The parody of the Lord's Supper is deplorable: we have already heard enough of the music in the prelude without having to go through it again. Klingsor's magic music is mere theatricalism; about Kundry's account of Parsifal's mother I remain in some doubt: it is certainly beautiful, but to those of us who know the corresponding scene in Siegfried it is rather beggarly. Parsifal's denunciation of Kundry after she has kissed him has not a word of the old truthful Wagner in it: Wagner had written so magnificently about the ecstatic state of Palestrina and such of the other church composers as he knew, that he must, absolutely must, have realised that his Parsifal stuff was essentially untrue. Theatrically, the end of the Second Act sounds true; but it will not bear rehearing. The opening of the Third Act, again, is false; and the ending of the whole business is tawdry stuff such as Meyerbeer might have been proud to sign. Technically, the old man retained his hand; but to compare this decrepit stuff with the music of the Valkyrie would be preposterous, and I have no wish to write more about it.