Richard Wagner, Composer of Operas

by John F. Runciman

III

In 1842 Wagner finished first Rienzi and then the Dutchman; in April of 1845, that is to say three years later, Tannhäuser was complete, and in October of that year it was produced at Dresden. Its success or non-success with the public and those strange animals the critics does not greatly concern us to-day. Wagner's own account of the proceedings is not very trustworthy. The opera was cut and doctored to suit the singers—notably Tichatscheck; the first performance seems to have missed fire, and at the second the house was empty; at the third it was full; and, but for the intrigues of some of the musicians and scribblers, and the insanity of the management, it appears probable—one has a right to use so moderate a word—that before long it might have won in Dresden the success it presently won throughout Europe. That, I say, is not a matter for the twentieth century to worry about; but the twentieth century is bound to marvel over the obtuseness of the middle nineteenth in not recognizing the advent of the greatest power that had yet meddled with high and serious opera. (I do not mean that Wagner's was a greater musical power than Mozart's and Beethoven's. But Mozart never had a libretto to compare with Wagner's; and Fidelio, though serious enough in all conscience, is not an opera at all.) In three years, 1842-45, the growth of Wagner's strength was astounding, incredible. One sees at once how the old stage devices have departed from the libretto, and with them the fragmentary and jerky style of music; the intermittent inspiration of the Dutchman is replaced by an unchecked torrent of inspired music. All the little suggestions of Bellini and Donizetti are clean gone; the amorphous melody of the Dutchman is gone, or metamorphosed by being charged with energy, colour and meaning; every phrase has character, and communicates a very definite shade of feeling; in every phrase we feel how intense has been the inner thought and emotion, and with what terrible directness these are communicated to us. I say terrible directness because it is in Tannhäuser that we first find the godlike Wagner hurling his thunderbolts. It was Spohr who spoke of the godlike or titanic energy of the music, and this energy finds expression, not as it did in Rienzi, in noisy orchestration, big ensembles and thumping rhythms, but, in a far greater degree than in the Dutchman, in the stuff of the music itself. We find no more lumpish harmonies and basses of leaden immovability: the basses stalk about with arrogant independence, and the harmonic progressions, even when most daring and perilous, are superbly poised. The old awkwardnesses, due to the endeavour to copy and to be original at the same time, have disappeared. Wagner wrote Tannhäuser entirely to express and to please himself: he had given up the notion of being original; he was bent only on being himself.

He boasted that here, at last, was a sheer German opera. Well, that is not in itself very much. Personally, I would rather be an Englishman than a German; and few of us will be prepared to accept the view that because a work of art, or so-called work of art, happens to be by a German, it must therefore be a great work of art, or even a work of art at all. Richard never lived down the tendency, natural in one, I suppose, of a conquered tribe (the Saxons), to incorporate and identify himself with his conquerors, and he glorified everything Prussian as German, and everything German as perfect; but, even so late as 1852, I cannot imagine that he quite understood what he meant when he held forth on the subject of German art, its non-existence, and—of all things—its supremacy. He certainly felt very keenly what many members of every half-grown nation must feel—the necessity of acquiring a national conscience, artistic or other; he wanted to create an art-work which would appeal to the heart and understanding of every German, and would make the Germans feel themselves one race, an entity. Which, precisely, of the German races he would have accepted in the new brotherhood of man I cannot say. But the point is that Wagner longed to create, and in Tannhäuser thought he had created, this universal work of art; and in declaring, as he did, that he had achieved the feat, he was revealing the truth about himself. He had thrown overboard Bellini, Donizetti, even Spontini and Marschner, and by going back to his first idols, Beethoven and Weber (especially Weber), he found his natural voice and mode of expression. Paradoxically, Tannhäuser, while one of his least original compositions—owing as much to Weber as ever one composer had owed to another—is one of his most original. He spoke the matter that was in his own heart, but he freely, without self-consciousness, used the Weber idiom.

Before examining the means by which the varying atmospheres of the different scenes are got, I ask the reader to notice the way in which the rather pointless, inexpressive melody of the Dutchman appears now again, but so transformed as to be scarce recognizable. Compare the musical illustration ([o]) on page [119] with ([a]) at the end of this chapter. The type of tune is the same, but the first is commonplace and not quite worthy of the situation in which it occurs; the second has a glorious, though dignified, swing, and thoroughly expresses the words of welcome which Wolfram addresses to the errant Tannhäuser. Compare Daland's song in the Dutchman with Wolfram's description of how Elisabeth has pined, or Senta's last passages in the final scene with Elisabeth's salute to the hall of song. We feel at once how, by dropping Italian, French and mediocre German models, and writing in the way that came natural to him, Wagner at once became a composer of the first rank, from whom great expressive melodies sprang spontaneously. The noble passages in the Dutchman were drawn out of him, despite his conscious or unconscious imitation of what were considered the best models of the day, by sheer force of feeling; and I pointed out how, when the situation gave him a chance, he took it. In Tannhäuser he has become a splendid artist whose brain refused to shape the commonplace. Later on his style was to become more individual, more purely his own; but so far he had now got—and it was a very long way. The pilgrims' chorus melody, which first appears in the overture, is, to my mind, very Weberesque. It is not particularly strong—for Wagner—and hardly bears the weight of the brass with which it is afterwards thundered out; but think of it and of Rienzi's prayer! The second part, of course, is Wagner at a sublime height, but of that presently. What I wish is to give examples of how he has discarded all the involutions, convolutions, twiddles and twaddles of melody, and gone back to the simplicity and directness of Weber and Beethoven. His earlier manner and type of tune, the operatic manner of his day, had, I make no doubt, its origin in the advisability, not to say the necessity, of writing so as to please singers who could sing in the Italian style and no other. Wagner had now ceased to think of singers' whims. He had a matter to find utterance for, and he went to work in the most direct way, considering nothing but his artistic aim. We know he conceived Tannhäuser at a white heat, and in a condition of white heat wrote the words; and though he afterwards cooled down and had, he said, to "warm up" to his work again, yet he warmed up so effectually that he composed at furious speed, haunted by a terror lest he should not live to complete the opera. This fervour alone might account for his artistic development in the Tannhäuser period. It drove him to find the secret of the one true mode of expression—the law of simplicity, the unvarying rule that anything more than is needed for the expression of the thing to be expressed is bad art, and, in the long run, ineffective. With greater simplicity in the melody came the greatest possible simplicity in the harmony. There is a kind of awkwardness to be found in the music of all the pundits which almost defies analysis. The progressions are correct enough, are good enough grammar, yet the result is more disconcerting, even distressing, to the ear than a schoolboy's first efforts. Of this style of harmony the Italians were masters, and too often in his Rienzi days Wagner, thinking of his "melody" (for at that time by "melody" he meant Bellini melody), showed how little they could teach him in this respect. With the simpler "melody" went the harmony—complicated as you like when the occasion called, but never more complicated than the occasion warranted. Compare with the war-chorus and march in Rienzi the march in the second act of Tannhäuser, and the difference will be seen. This march, by the way, ought to have been signed "after C.M. von Weber."