Richard Wagner, Composer of Operas

by John F. Runciman

V

The music of the first act is largely fierce, angry, turbulent, often bitter music, blent and merging into music expressive of fierce desire, the hunger of the man after the woman, of the woman after the man. There is one moment of sweet longing—the moment after Isolda and Tristan have drunk the fatal potion; but instantly the torrent breaks forth, and though it is in a way sweet, the sweetness is mixed with fire; the stream is as a stream of molten lava, scalding, consuming. The note of the music to the second act is utterly different; there is fire, indeed, a golden fire; there is greedy impatience and restlessness; but the fire does not scorch nor scald, the impatience is not despairing, the love is not—as it certainly is in the first act—that passion which is but one remove from deadly hate. Almost at the beginning of the first act Isolda, devoured by a longing for revenge, schemed to murder Tristan, and she does not falter in her purpose until he has taken the drink; the reaction has all the violence of a cataclysm; all is delirium; there is not a moment of happy lingering over the joy of a possible; new life; there is no time for that, no thought of it. All is burning wrath and hate and equally burning lust and greed for the possession of the beloved one's body. In the second act the anger has died out, and in the whirl of the music, though at its maddest, there is a fulness, an assured sense of coming satisfaction; and the excitement settles down into long, drawn-out, luscious, voluptuous strains as the lovers, held in each other's arms, exchange the sweet confidences usual (I suppose) on such occasions.

Musically the act may be regarded—conveniently, though roughly and crudely—as a kind of symphony, in four sections which to an extent overlap. We have section one from the first bar of the prelude to Tristan's entry; section two, the impassioned duet; three, from the hymn to night until the lovers are discovered; and four, from that point to the end. Many of the themes are worked right through, but the sections vary vastly in colour, atmosphere and feeling. The variety unified into a completely satisfying whole is astounding. Amongst the really great musicians only four possessed the organising brain in this degree—Wagner himself, Beethoven, Handel and Bach. This act is even more completely an organic whole than the first; every part performs its functions and retains its individuality, yet all the parts are co-ordinated. I have seen miraculous pieces of machinery in which each part seemed to be alive and doing its duty independent of the others; yet all working together to achieve one purpose. The score of Tristan is as marvellous—indeed, more so, for the purpose is not a mechanical one, but the expression, with rigid fidelity to truth, of the most subtle and exquisite feelings.

I have said earlier that in evolving his purely musical structures Wagner adopted one plan. He not only used the subjects of his operas for the overtures, or (as in the present case) of the preludes to the acts, but he makes them tell a story dramatically. Merely to use themes for an opera as conventional subjects to be treated in symphony form had been done; but Wagner never dreamed of adopting a form and imposing it on his material from outside; with him the form is determined by the material and the significance the material bore in his mind. This is very different from deliberately writing a symphonic poem—deliberately sitting down in cold blood and setting to work to illustrate a story. That method is antithetical to Wagner's; a symphonic poem writer is simply a setter of opera texts, one who follows with devout care the book of words put before him—with this difference, that the opera-writer must, to some extent at least, consider his words, his singers, his stage, while the composer of symphonic poems can do just as he pleases and consider no one's convenience, shortening this section or lengthening that as the musical exigencies demand, while making use of some tale or a poem as an excuse for writing in a form which in itself is unintelligible and illogical. So far as Wagner could he let music and drama grow up together; then to start with the right atmosphere he took certain themes and spun a piece of music from them, letting the themes, as I have said, unfold themselves logically and determine the form. The result is always a fine piece of music; and thousands of listeners have derived artistic enjoyment from the Mastersingers overture, the Lohengrin prelude and Tristan prelude without troubling to trace the story as it is plainly told. In the prelude to Act II here, for example, no one need seek a story, though it is obvious enough. First we have the daylight theme, peremptorily, harshly announced; then the impatience of Isolda, then her longing, then her thoughts of love and her hopes of fulfilment, and just before the curtain rises the crash which accompanies the extinction of the torch.

I have already alluded to the old-world atmosphere got at once by the horn calls and the lovely passage in which Isolda sings of the brook "laughing on" in the still night; but in this first scene, which is by comparison a mere introduction to the duet, we find a thousand beautiful things. At this period of his life Wagner was by no means so economical as he afterwards became; he squandered his pearls with prodigal hands. In a few pages are enough melodies and themes to set up a Puccini—or for that matter a Strauss or an Elgar—for life. The blending of the death-theme with one of the love-themes, when Isolda speaks of love's goddess, "the queen who grants unquailing hearts ... life and death she holds in her hands," is one of the miracles of music—stern beauty made up of defiance of fate and careless voluptuousness. In the very next melody to make its appearance, the second bar after the change to the key of A, we may note what I think is the first sign of one of the many mannerisms of Wagner's "third period," as we call it—the period extending from Tristan to the finishing of the Ring (Parsifal being as the tail to the dog, or perhaps the tin-kettle tied to the tail). It is the phrase quoted ([l]). Those five notes of the second bar were to be made to serve many purposes hereafter; and the Wagnerites will insist that this was done for a high artistic reason. Perhaps it was; but to me it seems that it is found so frequently sometimes because Wagner wanted to utter precisely the same emotion as he had employed it for earlier, and sometimes because, like all other composers, at times he found his invention flagging. In the second scene of this act of Tristan it plays a conspicuous part, and is indeed one of the most pregnant love motives of the drama—perhaps the most prolific of subsidiary themes and passages.

The big duet beats description, and its structure must only be discussed briefly. A figure which forms part of the music played while Isolda impatiently awaits Tristan is turned into the whirling accompaniment to impassioned and incoherent exclamations as they first embrace; then to the seething mass of tone is added ([l]), and gradually out of chaos and confusion emerges one clean-cut melody after another. The daylight-theme which begins the introduction is Protean in the shapes it assumes, and the emotions, now hot passion, now the gentlest tenderness, it is made to express. The ferment settles down, and we get the hymn to night and a series of melodies which are love's own voice speaking. The dreamy voluptuousness that pervades these duets comes from songs written by Wagner as studies. They were not over highly esteemed by his friends, but he had his revenge. This night in the garden—with the black night above and the black trees around, the flowers, the musical brooklet, and the voice of the caller heard at times from the roof—is the greatest thing of the kind in all music: in all the arts, I know only the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet which may be said to approach it. Melody upon melody, delicate and sweet to the ear as the perfume of night flowers and grasses to the nostrils, floats past; until at last the sheer delight of the thing seems to work up the lovers to a state of heavenly rapture, and in the final verse of the hymn to night they pray only to be removed from the dangers of returning day; and here the strains swell to an intensity of yearning for peace quite unprecedented in music. And, as we know, their prayer is immediately answered in a fashion they were hardly prepared for.

Mark's address is deeply touching; and it is odd that when attacked by Melot Tristan's accents are almost his. The sublime is again touched when Tristan asks Isolda to follow him and in her answer. Melot then stabs him, and the curtain drops to one of Mark's reproachful phrases thundering from the orchestra. This, then, is Tristan's answer to Mark's questioning—told in the music, not in the words.