ZURICH—PARIS (1849-1861).
He was now, indeed, in a pretty pickle. At Dresden he had an assured livelihood and time to write operas; and, despite his former experience of hunger and want, he threw away his position for the sake of an idea. He afterwards was wont to complain that he only wished to be kept alive in reasonable comfort, and he would in return present the world with masterpieces. Yet he was not content when he was, for a comparatively slight return in daily labour, kept comfortably alive. But, after all, what appears at first to have been an act of madness turned out anything but disastrous in the long-run. It is true that without the generous help of Liszt, Wesendonek and others he could not have lived as he did in Zurich, and, as it was, constant apprehensions of approaching poverty harassed him. The old fear of an empty belly which got into his very blood and bones in the Riga—Paris period now began to show itself in those appealing letters written to his friends when there appears to have been no necessity whatever. He had exaggerated hopes and exaggerated fears. The hopes were realized—as well as anything can be realized in this imperfect world—at Bayreuth; the fears found expression in the begging letters of which advantage was taken by every mean and cowardly spirit without the intelligence to understand his real greatness. Mendelssohn, we are reminded, wrote no such letters; but Mendelssohn, it may be remarked, was always rich, and has no such record of charitable deeds as stands to Wagner's credit. The nearest parallel to the case of Wagner is that of Beethoven in his old age. He, although perfectly well off, scared himself almost to death with his dread of poverty. Wagner's letters written about this time are well worth reading. There is no need to discuss them; they should be read and carefully weighed. Nor do I propose to spend any great space on the prose writings of the period. They are full of theories which were no sooner formulated than they had to be discarded in practice. At a time when Wagner was quite thoroughly misunderstood, the notion—perhaps naturally—became prevalent that he was simply completing a work commenced by Gluck. Now, no two men ever had more widely different aims than Wagner and Gluck. True, both wrote for the theatre, both employed singers and orchestra; and there the likenesses terminate. Gluck never sought to change the musical forms in use in opera. He retained the old recitatives, airs, concerted numbers, and choruses; not Handel himself clung more firmly to the old forms and formalities than Gluck did in Orpheus and Iphigenia. He sought, in the first place, to substitute worthy and dignified subjects for the ancient frivolities which had inspired composers since opera became popular; he wanted those subjects treated in a sufficiently dignified way, and, above all, in a reasonable way; he resolved that his music should be worthy of the drama. No concessions were to be made to the prima donna or vain tenor: the music had to be dramatically appropriate. He got magnificent results; and when the leaven of Wagnerism has ceased to work and froth and bubble in the public brain—in a word, when Wagner's music is no longer mere exciting new wine, and we are as accustomed to it as we are to the music of Beethoven—then we shall turn back to Gluck (and also to Mozart) and find them as young and fresh as ever.
Wagner's aim was totally different. First, music, he held, was played out: one must have the spoken word with it. He went to the myth for subjects, and gave plentiful reasons, which need not detain us, for the choice. Then—and here the effect of his early association with the theatre shows itself—the music was in nowise to hinder the actor; therefore all formal set numbers must be discarded and replaced by his "speech-singing" expressive recitative which should be beautiful as sheer music, and not hinder the actors from playing their parts as well as singing them. And, finally, he came to the conclusion that in his music-drama he could effect a synthesis of all the arts. Music and acting were the basis; there had to be scenery, and the scenery must form pictures, with the figures always properly placed, according to what I suppose painters would call, or refuse to call, the laws of composition. But each of the figures, or groups of figures, on the stage had also to be regarded as an entity, and as sculpture had not to be excluded from the synthesis, the poses must always be sculpturesque.
Here was a programme indeed! Very fine it seemed to his young followers; when new it seemed wholly admirable. Unfortunately, as Wagner found, the moment it was tried it proved impracticable and useless. Take sculpture, for example. Sculpture, I take it, has reached a fairly high point when the marble figure gives one the sense of life and of motion. Wagner, with his sculpturesque poses, instead of letting the living figure give us directly the impression of life and of motion, sought (always theoretically) to attain the end by an imitation of an imitation. Moreover, no moving figure ever did or can suggest sculpture—even if we wanted such a suggestion, which we don't. Even the Commandatore in Don Giovanni, with the aid of stiff gestures and plentiful whitewash, ceases to look like a statue as soon as he opens his mouth to sing. Consider, too, the notion of making, so to speak, set pictures—of dealing, that is, with his puppets and scenery in exactly the opposite spirit to that in which he wished to deal with vocal music. A realistic picture suggests Nature, and if the figures are well done they suggest human figures; a well-arranged scene does the same. There was no reason for getting indirectly, again by an imitation of an imitation, an effect that can be got directly. As for producing a series of "composed" pictures, it was practically impossible and highly undesirable. A carefully-composed picture needs time for its appreciation, and no one could, or would, try to judge or be affected by an ever-changing series of pictures. Besides, if one did try, the attention would be hopelessly withdrawn from the main things—the drama that is going forward and the music. The picture plan is still tried at Bayreuth, with disastrous results. With the most beautiful scenery it would fail; and the Wagner family appear to be colour-blind, the magic garden, for instance, in Parsifal looking like a cheap bed-hanging.
Then take, again, the set forms. Wagner eliminated the double bars and full stops, even as Beethoven had done, to an extent, in the "Heroic" Symphony, where theme leads into theme without a break; but his music is full of form, and also of forms, and the more he wrote the more careless he became about keeping up an appearance of continuity when vital continuity there was none. Wagner's forms were vaster than those of his predecessors; but for all that they are there.
Wagner's essays are worth reading by those who have the time and the physical and mental strength, if only because they reveal a man thinking on wrong lines while he is doing on right ones; but they are terribly long-winded, and many weary pages are devoted to demonstrations of the obvious or the actually fallacious. Mr. W. Ashton Ellis has given many years of a valuable life to translating them into something which is not English and not German. For the ordinary music-lover I believe the above summary will be sufficient to enable him to understand Wagner's aims at this period, and we shall presently see how far he was able to attain them, and to what extent they refused to be, and could not be, attained. The most valuable of his writings are those on conducting and on Beethoven. The latter has some bumptious and comical allusions to "world conquerors," the Germans suffering badly at the time from an attack of swelled head, subsequent to their defeat of the unhappy, unprepared French.
At Zurich Wagner was occupied with a multiplicity of other pamphlets, with conducting concerts, with his librettos, and so on. Hans von Bülow came to him as a pupil, and proved a devoted friend, afterwards letting him take his wife, Cosima, of whom he, Bülow, it is true, stood in no particular need. Wagner had sent the score of Lohengrin to Liszt, and it was produced at Weimar in 1850. It presently went from opera-house to opera-house, and everywhere triumphed, so that a few years later Wagner could complain that he was probably the only German who had not heard it. In 1853 he published the words of The Nibelung's Ring, which aroused the premature ire of those who did not know how he intended to treat it musically.
I may here say that my ear is not sufficiently attuned nor my mind accustomed to the subtleties of German for me to offer any judgment on the prosody of Wagner's librettos. So far as I can understand them, they are uncouth enough. On the other hand, dramatically they are admirably constructed; and when we compare the words with the completed musical setting we can see how the drama was, so to speak, always latent; the words are as an invisible writing, on which the music is poured like a liquid, and out starts the drama, unmistakable and irresistible.
In 1855 Wagner went to London to conduct a season of the Philharmonic Society. That body invited him on the recommendation of Sainton, the violinist, and the season was one of its most successful. The feuds that arose, and the newspaper and other squabblings, have small interest for us now; but it is certain that the finer spirits appreciated, or partly appreciated, him, and Royalty flattered him. Into this period comes the Paris performance of Tannhäuser, which was a disgraceful failure—I mean disgraceful to the Parisians, and especially to their Jockey Club, which resolutely went to work to prevent the music being heard by cat-calls and shoutings. The event was not of any great artistic importance—indeed, it is hardly worth calling an event; it was only one more sin on the soul of a musically benighted people.
Wagner's prospects were still of the poorest; he was still living mainly on charity; but in 1859 he had finished Tristan, and much of the Ring was sketched or actually written. He was amnestied and free to return to Germany, and he could do little good there. Tristan was accepted at Vienna, but the production was put off. He was busy on the Mastersingers—busy with all manner of impracticable dreams, and could not earn a livelihood. His concert tours brought him little or no profit; in Paris a series of concerts cost him 10,000 francs, and where on earth he found the money I do not pretend to know. He was fifty-one years of age; his fortunes seemed at their very worst, the outlook was of the blackest, when of a sudden all was changed. King Ludwig of Bavaria sent for him, and promised to help him in every possible way. He had many rebuffs to face, but from this time (1864) his ultimate victory was assured.
