V
Like the First Act, the Third begins with a storm of rain, wind, thunder and lightning; like First and Second, it opens with a display of energy before which all listeners are as leaves in the wind. As panoramic displays translated into music all the three introductions are likely enough to be misunderstood; so at the outset let us carefully bear in mind Wagner's intention at the beginning of the last Act of the Valkyrie—to show, with unequalled force and splendour, the strength of the god, soon to be shown as nothing before the strength of Brünnhilda. Brünnhilda, let us always remember, stands for human love, affection—not love in the Tristan sense—but that love of which Goldsmith sang that He "loved us into being"; the love of human being for human being so strong that not for so many thousands a year as a judge, so many pitiable hundreds a year as a magistrate, immortality as an omnipotent ruler or a Wotan, will it perpetuate or permit a wrong on a human being. To win omnipotence Wotan has inflicted wrong upon wrong—wrong upon wrong on those he had created for his purpose, on those the fine part of his nature loved. The fine part of his nature revolts and conquers him. He struggles on, shorn of nine-tenths of his strength, and it is not until the Third Act of Siegfried that he sees himself beaten and acknowledges it; but the ending of the gods, which really began with Wotan's first grasp at universal power, is first in this last Act of the Valkyrie clearly foretold. Wotan comes on clothed in thunders and lightnings to punish Brünnhilda because she fought on the side of the higher instead of the lower part of his nature—his higher self is cast from him, only (he thinks) to unite later with a force (a hero) independent of him to gain him his sovereignty.
The tempest rages and roars; the Valkyries arrive "by ones, by twos, by threes," at the Valkyries' Rock; and presently, in hotter haste than the rest, Brünnhilda comes in, bringing Sieglinda. She tells her (Brünnhilda's) sisters how she has defied Wotan, the All-father; they are scandalised, and desert her; Sieglinda feebly begs her to take no more trouble—there is nothing left to live for; Brünnhilda tells her she carries within her the seed of the highest hero of all the world; Sieglinda is filled with joy, revives, and flies to the cave in the wood where Siegfried is destined to be born. Wotan comes on with his thunders and lightnings and calls for Brünnhilda; at last she answers, and he announces her punishment: she shall be deprived of her godhood and left on the mountains to become the wife and slave of the first man that passes. The other maidens wail in protest; in anger he bids them begone; Brünnhilda, overcome with shame, sinks at his feet. The storm slowly dies away; Brünnhilda rises and pleads her cause—"Is this crime of mine so shameful?—in protecting Siegmund the Volsung I simply followed what I knew to be the dictates of your own innermost heart." At first Wotan will scarcely hear her; gradually he relents. But he cannot go back on his oath, on the sentence he has pronounced; and in the end he yields her this much—that she shall lie guarded by a wall of fire, only to be claimed by a hero who, not fearing his spear, will pass through the fire. Then he bids her an everlasting farewell; lays her to sleep in her armour, covered by her shield, her weapon by her side; calls up the fire, and casting a last sad look on her, his favourite child, goes slowly off as the curtain falls.
The drama here is of the most poignant kind; the scenic surroundings are of the sort Wagner so greatly loved—tempest amidst black pine-woods, with wild, flying clouds, the dying down of the storm, the saffron evening light melting into shadowy night, the calm deep-blue sky with the stars peeping out, then the bright flames shooting up; and the two elements, the dramatic and the pictorial, drew out of him some pages as splendid as any even he ever wrote. The opening, "the Ride of the Valkyries," is a piece of storm-music without a parallel. There is no need here for Donner with his hammer: the All-father himself is abroad in wrath and majesty, and his daughters laugh and rejoice in the riot. There is nothing uncanny in the music: we have that delight in the sheer force of the elements which we inherit from our earliest ancestors: the joy of nature fiercely at work which is echoed in our hearts from time immemorial. The shrilling of the wind, the hubbub, the calls of the Valkyries to one another, the galloping of the horses, form a picture which for splendour, wild energy and wilder beauty can never be matched.
Technically, this Ride is a miracle built up of many of the conventional figurations of the older music. There is the continuous shake, handed on from instrument to instrument, the slashing figure of the upper strings, the kind of basso ostinato, conventionally indicating the galloping of horses, and the chief melody, a mere bugle-call, altered by a change of rhythm into a thing of superb strength. The only part of the music that ever so remotely suggests extravagance is the Valkyrie's call; and it, after all, is only a jodel put to sublime uses. Out of these commonplace elements, elements that one might almost call prosaic, Wagner wrought his picture of storm, with its terror, power, joyous laughter of the storm's daughters—storm as it must have seemed to the first poets of our race. The counterpoint is not so obviously wonderful as in Tristan and the Mastersingers, but only a contrapuntist equal to Bach and Handel could have written such counterpoint. We may gain a clearer idea of what this means if we compare, not to the disadvantage of one or the other, this Ride with Berlioz's "Ride to the Abyss." At first sight, Berlioz seems the more daring. He trusts to a persistent rhythm and to orchestral effects. There is no inner structure—the separate parts, or batteries of parts, have no individuality: nothing of the sort is attempted or indeed wanted. The horses gallop on like mad things: their pace cannot be checked; themes, properly speaking, there are none—we hear the screeches of fearsome wild-fowl, the excitement and the noise increase, until at last the catastrophe is reached, and the final climax is the terrible gibberish-chant of all the devils in hell. Regarded as sheer music, the thing gets as far by the twentieth bar as ever it gets. The piece is as near to pure colour in music as can be attained. Why, Wagner with his counterpoint seems old-fashioned and formal by comparison! The four constituents, the wild laughter of the shakes of the wood-wind, the slashing figure of the strings, the galloping figure of the bass, the Ride theme—had these been used by any one save Wagner the result would have been unendurably wooden. But Wagner had unlimited harmonic resources at his disposal; and he had the determination and the gift to achieve perfect truth in his delineation of a storm. Delineation, I say, for here we have drawing as well as colour. Of colour there is plenty: notice, for example, the use of the brass against the descending chromatics; but the colour is mainly harmonic. In a sense Wagner was not an innovator: so long as the methods of his mighty predecessors served him he sought no others—effects, whether of orchestration or of melody, were to him simply means: never for a second was he beguiled into regarding them as ends; and every musician knows that plenty of them came at his call, more readily and spontaneously than in the case of any of the later musicians.
It is worth looking at the plan of this Ride—which is, be it remembered, only the prelude to the gigantic drama which is to follow. After the ritornello the main theme is announced, with a long break between the first and second strains; and again a break before it is continued. Then it sounds out in all its glory, terse, closely gripped section to section, until the Valkyries' call is heard; purely pictorial passages follow; the theme is played with, even as Mozart and Beethoven played with their themes, and at the last the whole force of the orchestra is employed, and his object is attained—he has given us a picture of storm such as was never done before, and he has done what was necessary for the subsequent drama—made us feel the tremendous might of the god of storms. A few of my readers may know Handel's "Horse and his Rider" chorus—how he piles mass on mass of tone until in the end we seem to see a whole irresistible sea rushing over Pharaoh and his host. Wagner does a thing perfectly analogous; but as I have remarked with regard to Weber and Mendelssohn and their picturesque music, where Handel, having painted his tremendous picture, had achieved his end and was satisfied and left off, is just the point where Wagner begins what to him is much the more important thing, the drama. The omnipotent master of Valhalla comes on apace: the storm is a mere indication of what is coming.
A word must be said, too, about the words for such scenes as this. Words had to be found, as in the first song of the Rhinemaidens, and it is hard to see what else Wagner could have done than what he has done. Like reversed Lohengrins they tell one another their name and station at great length. This may be a vestige of the older stage-craft: certainly there is none of it in the two great dramas that followed the Valkyrie. It is not for even the minor personages of a Wagner drama to come down to the footlights and take the audience into their confidence. But, as I say, words were indispensable, and Wagner found the best he could—I suppose. The defect is a tiny one; none the less it is a defect.
With the final crash of the Ride a new element is introduced. The godlike rejoicing in sheer strength disappears, and an agitated theme sounds out—if, indeed, we may call it a theme—and then we get a lull after all the hurly-burly. Brünnhilda and Sieglinda come in; Brünnhilda tells of her disobedience, and like a flock of wild-fowl disturbed the other Valkyries squeak and gibber in disgust and horror. The music here is perhaps the most operatic part of the opera—Brünnhilda begging first one and then another to aid her; one after another refusing in very conventional phrases. The scene is indispensable, and the music is, so to speak, coldly adequate: music has no tones to express primness. With the voice of Sieglinda the music at once begins to live in Wagner's own curious fashion. She has nothing left in life, wishes to cause sorrow to no one, wishes only to be left alone to die. Wagner well knew when the drama could make its effect almost unaided—when, in fact, to write deliberately pathetic music in the older style would be to overdo things. Sieglinda's phrases are simple, many of them exquisite, most of them designed to be sung parlando, rather spoken than really sung. Bathos is avoided: the deepest depths of genuine pathos are touched. In fact the technique of the scene is that of parts, only parts, of the previous act. But with Brünnhilda's announcement to Sieglinda we get the great lyrical Wagner, we get the germ of the magnificent harangue of the last act of the Dusk of the Gods, and we get the mightiest of the Siegfried themes. With the entrance of Wotan the music which concludes the Second Act recurs: the All-powerful clothed in wrath and flame; then comes his denunciation of Brünnhilda, another specimen of the lyrical Wagner. Even more characteristic of Wagner is the dying down of the storm. We can see the setting sun and the departing storm-clouds in the music, and with these we are made to feel the abating wrath of the god. And then comes the noblest piece of recitative in all music. The words in which Brünnhilda appeals to her father have already been (roughly) quoted: to give an idea of the musical phrases would require too many pages of this book. The Sleep theme enters as Wotan sees a way to the great compromise—the compromise foredoomed to bring him to ruin. He will put Brünnhilda to sleep to await the hero; but he will hedge her in with fire so that the hero shall be a true one. With the indescribable finesse, subtlety, of his own particular art, Wagner lets us feel how Brünnhilda, in begging to be protected in this (rather unusual) way, is reading only her own father's thought: he seems for a long time to contend, but at last yields. The music steadily increases in force and passion, and at each stage where one would think the composer could strike no harder he immediately does it. More and more of the divine fury pours into the music, until the climax is reached in the bars preceding the Farewell.
In the meantime we have had the wonderful Eternal Love theme—not sexual love, but the mystic force that created the worlds and holds them in their courses: in all Wagner there is no nobler and sweeter passage than that in which Brünnhilda first sings it. The vivid musical description of the crackling flames which are to surround her is another of an unequalled series of marvels. The Farewell I have already compared with that at the end of Lohengrin: the voice part is at times in Wagner's own style of song-recitative, but a great deal of it is sheer simple melody. No master has excelled, or perhaps matched, Wagner in the art of expressing the most profound and poignant pathos without ever a suspicion of letting it lapse into bathos; and this he does by—what at first it may seem ridiculous to say of so opulent and luxurious a genius as Wagner's—by his instinctive artistic austerity. The word is not too strong to be applied to the resolute simplicity which enabled him to write such melodies as those of which I am now speaking and the Farewell in Lohengrin: the temptation to let himself go, to wallow in sadness and to wring our bowels must have been almost too tremendous to be resisted by the man who within a year or so planned Tristan. In art, harrowing our feelings never pays, and his self-repression has its exceeding great reward: we could not feel more with Wotan's desolating grief—one stroke more and we should rebel: we should know that our most sacred feelings were being exploited—that an endeavour was being made to gain our applause for a work of art by an illegitimate appeal at one particular moment to those feelings. I have dwelt a little on this because we all know Tristan and its author, and though there is little self-repression in that work—where it is not required—and physically there was little but self-indulgence in its author's nature, it is well to realise that the artist rose immeasurably superior to the man. It must have come to us all at one time or another with something of a shock to find that the voluptuous Wagner of Tannhäuser could be as austere as Milton. Austerity is not barrenness—not the barrenness that would result from imitating the austerity of the old church composers with their hundred rules and regulations: the harmony is as free as could be wished; at the needful moment the melodies pass without hesitation from key to key; but when we have long known them and learnt to understand them we find them at heart to be idealised folk-tunes—simple and indescribably pathetic, as the situation demands.
An instance of Wagner's subtle feeling is the passage where Wotan "kisses away" Brünnhilda's godhood and lays her to sleep, as one with the rocks and stones of mother earth, Erda, whose music accompanies the act. Wotan, like Alberich, has renounced love; so just previously we have heard the corresponding passage from the Rhinegold. We have the lulling Sleep theme, and then comes the Fire-music, a thing unmatched—and, so far as I know, never attempted—in all music. The mighty Spear strikes the ground to the mighty Spear theme; the earth seems to shiver as the fire comes up; then the flames mount, yellow against the deep blue sky; the Loge music sparkles in the orchestra, the strings sustain a continuous whizz and roar, and over it all, and at times in it or under it, swings that lulling Sleep theme. If it is not too futile a word to use, the Siegfried "heroic" theme, as Wotan uses it in commanding the fire (Loge) that only the noblest hero ever born shall pass to Brünnhilda, is the most pompous form in which it appears throughout the Ring; but the situation warrants it, demands it. Amidst the roar of the fire and with the divine lulling phrase, fragments of the Farewell are heard; and twice, as Wotan looks back on his daughter, we hear the Fate theme—the Scandinavian sense that this tragedy mysteriously had to be: the mighty god and lord of the universe himself knows and feels that the things preordained must happen. He goes slowly off; the central tragedy is virtually accomplished; to the end the fire blazes and sparkles, and the curtain descends on a soft chord. The revolving seasons will pass; strange events will happen in the outer world of men; Brünnhilda will sleep there, the guarding fire seen from afar by awe-stricken warrior tribes.
The spring freshness of the music, its vivid pictorial quality, the intense human feeling expressed, its profound sense of the past and the mystery of things, the godlike power, place it hardly second, if indeed second, to Tristan. There are love-duets in music which may be compared with those in Tristan: there is nothing with which the music of the Valkyrie may be compared. The grandeur of Handel's picture-painting in Israel in Egypt is a different quality altogether. Handel is unapproachable; but he worked with a different aim, in a different way, and in a different material. Wagner's music is beautiful and sublime, and he blent the human element with the others in a fashion no other musician has attempted.
CHAPTER XVI
'SIEGFRIED'
I
In a letter to Liszt Wagner says he would not have undertaken the toil of completing so gigantic a work as the Ring but for his love of Siegfried, his ideal of manhood. It is as well, from one point of view, that his love of his ideal was so intense, for in consequence we have the Ring; but from another point of view it is not so well, for the youth Siegfried is the least lovable, perhaps the most inane and detestable character to be found in any form of drama. He is a combination of impudence, stupidity and sheer animal strength—mere bone and sinew; his courage comes from his stupidity. The courage and strength and impudence carry him through to his one victory; then his stupidity leads him straight to destruction. He possesses not one fine trait: he is as weak in will and intellect as he is strong in muscle. In the 'fifties and 'sixties not only Germans but men of all other nationalities seem to have vainly imagined they had solved all the problems of this very difficult world by assuming and proclaiming that might is right. Bismarck acted on this belief; our own Carlyle, Tennyson and Ruskin preached it; and Wagner, being a feeble creature physically, fell naturally, inevitably, a victim to the old delusion, and set to work to glorify the strong man. There is a further explanation. I need not do more than refer to an idea which took definite form during the eighteenth century, that as many of the defects and problems of modern life spring from the very conditions under which our civilisation alone is possible, a return to a state of nature, without government, clothes, or even houses to live in, would be a return to the garden of Eden before the Fall. We see this notion working in Wagner's mind continually in the prose writings, and in his last opera we see Parsifal, the "pure fool," "redeeming" an over-civilised world. To glorify the idiot absolute in this fashion was to out-Rousseau Rousseau—though Wagner would have scorned the suggestion. In Siegfried he goes by no means so far; but he goes quite far enough. Siegfried is no idiot; but he certainly is an unamiable, truculent savage. He has been reared by a dwarf and cripple, Mime, and the first we see of him is on his entry with a wild bear in leash, which beast he drives at his terrified foster-father. The justification is that he feels instinctively that Mime is bad, low and cunning—and it does not justify him: Mime, with an ulterior purpose, it is true, has saved him from death by starvation in his infancy, and nurtured him, and the least Siegfried could do was to leave the abject creature in peace. It is true also that he is mending Siegfried's sword—but this is to anticipate. I cannot accept Siegfried as a specimen of the highest heroic humanity. The boldness of a man who because of his dull wits cannot realise danger is of no use in this world under any imaginable conditions. Siegfried knows no fear. There is a story of two officers conversing during a battle. One asked, "Are you afraid?" Reply: "If you were as afraid as I am you would run away." One, the tale assumes, had a finely organised brain, the other brute force and insensibility. Which is the nearer approach to an ideal of noble manhood? Wagner's Siegfried answers, brute ferocity. Judged by his own standard how would Wagner himself stand?—as splendidly organised a brain as that possessed by any man born into the nineteenth or any other century?