III
As music-dramas, then, appraised by his own standard, the deficiency of Wagner's representative works must be held to be the subordination of the dramatic element in them to a constituent part—their music—which should be accessory and contributive rather than essential and predominant. This tyranny is exercised chiefly—and, let it be cheerfully owned, to the glory of musical art—through Wagner's orchestra: that magnificent vehicle of a tone-poet who was at once its master and its slave. Yet Wagner sinned scarcely less flagrantly against his most dearly held principles in his treatment of the voice. He conceived it to be of vital importance that in the construction of the voice-parts no merely musical consideration of any kind should be permitted to interfere with the lucid utterance of the text. His singers were to employ a kind of heightened and intensified speech, necessarily musical in its intervals, but never musical at the expense of truthfully expressive declamation. Yet in some of the vocal writing in his later works he is false to this principle, for he not infrequently permits himself to be ravishingly lyrical at moments where lyricism is superfluous and distracting when it is not impertinent. Again he is too much the musician; too little the musical dramatist.
And herewith I come to a curious and interesting point. Mr. E.A. Baughan, an English critic of authority, who has written with both courage and wisdom concerning Wagnerian theories and practices, entertains singular views concerning the nature of music-drama as an art form. "There must be no false ideas of music-drama being drama," he has asserted: "it is primarily music. The drama of it is merely," he goes on, "the motive force of the whole, and technically takes the place of form in absolute music"—a sentence which, one may be permitted to observe, would contain an admirably concise statement of the truth if the word "merely" were left out. Mr. Baughan is led by this belief to take the position that whereas, in one respect Wagner was, to put it briefly, too musical, in another respect he was not musical enough. He acknowledges the fact that in Wagner's combination of music and drama, the music, so far as the orchestra is concerned, assumes an oppressive and obstructive prominence; it indulges for the most part, he holds, in a "superheated commentary" which leaves little to suggestion, which is persistently excessive and overbearing; yet at the same time Mr. Baughan holds that Wagner, in his treatment of the voice-parts, did not, as he says, "make use of the full resources of music and of the beautiful human singing-voice in duets, concerted numbers, and choruses." It is the second of these objections which, as it seems to me, contains matter for discussion. So far from being deficient in melodious effectiveness, Wagner's writing for the voice, I would hold, errs upon the other side. It would be possible to name page after page in the "Ring" and "Tristan" which is marred, from a musico-dramatic standpoint, by an excess of lyricism. It is a little difficult to understand, for example, how Wagner would have justified his admission of the duet into his carefully reasoned scheme; for if the ensemble piece—the quartette in "Rigoletto," for example—is inherently absurd from a dramatic point of view, as it incontrovertibly is, so also is the duet. Even the most liberal attitude toward the conventions of the operatic stage makes it difficult to tolerate what Mr. W.P. James describes as the spectacle of two persons inside a house and two outside, supposed to be unconscious of each other's presence, making their remarks in rhythmic and harmonic consonance. Yet is Wagner much less distant from the dramatic verities when, in the third act of "Die Meistersinger," he ranges five people in the centre of a room and causes them to soliloquise in concert, to the end of producing a quintette of ravishing musical beauty? Had he wholly freed himself from what he regarded as the musical bondage of his predecessors when he could tolerate such obvious anachronisms as the duet, the ensemble piece, and the chorus? The truth of the matter seems to be that if Wagner's music, in itself, were less wonderful and enthralling than it is, those who would fain insist upon a decent regard for dramatic consistency in the lyric-drama would not tolerate many things in the vocal writing in "Tristan," "Meistersinger," the "Ring" and "Parsifal" which are not a whit more dramatically reasonable than the absurdities which Wagner contemptuously derided in the operas of the old school. His vocal writing, far from being deficient in melodic quality, far from ignoring "the full resources of music and of the beautiful singing voice," is saturated and overflowing with musical beauty, and with almost every variety of melodic effectiveness except that which is possible to purely formal song. Mr. Baughan complains that the voice-parts have "no independent life" of their own. "In many cases," he says, "the vocal parts, if detached from the score [from the orchestral support] are without emotional meaning of any kind—the expression is absolutely incomplete." An astonishing complaint! For the same thing is necessarily true of any writing for the voice allied with modern harmony in the accompaniment. How many songs written since composers began to discover the modulatory capacities of harmony, one might ask Mr. Baughan, would have "emotional meaning," or any kind of expression or effect, if the voice part were sung without its harmonic support?
No; Wagner cannot justly be convicted of a paucity of melodic effect in his writing for the voice. He would, one must venture to believe, have come closer to realising his ideal of what a music-drama should be if, in the first place, he had been able and willing to restrain the overwhelming tide of his orchestral eloquence; and if, in the second place, he had been content to let his dramatis personæ employ, not (in accordance with Mr. Baughan's wish) a form of lyric speech richer in purely musical elements of effect, but one of more naturalistic contour, simpler, more direct, less ornately and intrusively melodic in its utterance of the text.
It would be fatuous, of course, to deny that there are passages in Wagner's later music-dramas to which one can point, by reason of their continent and transparent expression of the dramatic situation, as examples of a perfect kind of music-drama: which satisfy, not only every conceivable demand for fullness of musical utterance (for that Wagner almost always does), but those intellectual convictions as to what an ideal music-drama should be which he himself was pre-eminently instrumental in diffusing. In such passages his direct and pointedly dramatic use of the voice, and his discreet and sparing, yet deeply suggestive, treatment of the orchestral background, are of irresistible effect. How admirable, then, is his restraint! As in, for example, Waltraute's narrative in "Götterdämmerung"; the early scenes between Siegmund and Sieglinde, and Brunnhilde's announcement of the decree of death to the Volsung, in "Walküre"; and in "Tristan" the passage wherein the knight proffers to Isolde his sword; the opening of the third act; and the first sixteen measures that follow the meeting of the lovers in the second act—where the breathless, almost inarticulate ecstasy of the moment is uttered with extraordinary fidelity, only to lead into a passage wherein the pair suddenly recover their breath in time to respond to the need of battling against one of the most glorious but dramatically inflated outpourings of erotic rapture ever given to an orchestra.
But scenes of such perfect musico-dramatic adjustment are rare in Wagner. It is not likely, in view of his insuperable propensity toward musical rhetoric and his amazingly fecund eloquence, that, even if he had kept a more sternly repressive hand upon his impulse toward musical elaboration, he could have accomplished the union of drama and music in that exquisite and scrupulously balanced relationship which produces the ideal music-drama. That achievement had to wait until the materials of musical expression had attained a greater ductility and variety, and until the intellectual and æsthetic seed which Wagner sowed had ripened into a maturer harvest than was possible in his own time—it had to wait, in short, until to-day. For there are those of us who believe that the feat has at last been actually achieved—that the principles of musico-dramatic structure inimitably stated by Gluck in his preface to "Alceste" have been, for the first time, carried out with absolute fidelity to their spirit; and, moreover, with that cohesion of organism which Gluck signally failed to achieve, and with that fineness of dramatic instinct the lack of which is Wagner's prime deficiency.