III. WAGNER AND AFTER
Then came the second great operatic reform,—that of Wagner,—which was supposed to free us from the old absurdities and make of opera a reasonable and congruous thing. This, Wagner’s operas, at the outset, bade fair to be. In “Der Fliegende Holländer,” “Tannhäuser,” and “Lohengrin” there is a reasonable correspondence between the action and the music; we can listen and look without too great disruption of our faculties. Wagner’s librettos are, with one exception, based on mythological stories or ideas. His personages are eternal types—Lohengrin of purity and heroism, Wotan of power by fiat, Brunhilde (greatest of them all) of heroic and noble womanhood. He adopted the old device by means of which certain salient qualities in his characters—such as Siegfried’s youth and fearlessness, Wotan’s majesty, and so forth—were defined by short phrases of music called leit-motifs; he made his orchestra eloquent of the movement of his drama, instead of employing it as a “huge guitar”; he eliminated the set musical piece, which was bound to delay the action; he kept his music always moving onward by avoiding the so-called “authentic cadence,” which in all the older music perpetually cries a halt.
But by all these means Wagner imposed on his listener a constant strain of attention: leit-motifs recurring, developing, and disintegrating, every note significant, a huge and eloquent orchestra, a voice singing phrases which are not parts of a complete melody then and there being evolved,—as in an opera by Verdi,—but which are related to something first heard perhaps half an hour before in a preceding act (or a week before in another drama): we have all this to strain every possibility of our appreciative faculty, and at the same time he asks us to watch an actual combat between a hero and a dragon, or to observe another between two heroes half in the clouds with a God resplendent stretching out a holy spear to end the duel as he wills it, while a Valkyrie hovers above on her flying steed. Or he sets his drama under water, with Undines swimming about and a gnome clambering the slippery rocks to filch a jewel in exchange for his soul. Yes, even this, and more; for he asks us to witness the end of the world—the waters rising, the very heavens aflame—when our heart is so torn by the stupendous inner tragedy of Brunhilde’s immolation that the end of the world seems utterly and completely irrevelant and impertinent.
After all, we are human. We cannot be men and women and, at the same time, children. We should like to crouch down in our seat in the opera house and forget everything save the noble, splendid, and beautiful music, seeing only just so much action as would accord with our state of inner exaltation. An opera must be objective or subjective; it cannot be both at the same time. The perfection of “Don Giovanni” is due to the exact equality between the amount and intensity of the action and of the musical expression—or, in other words, to the complete union of matter and manner, of form and style. The “Ring” cycle is objective and subjective; it is the extreme of stage mechanism (and more), and, at the same time, everything that is imaginatively profound and moving. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Wagner in those great music-dramas lost sight of the balance between means and ends, and the proportion between action and thought. His own theories, and the magnitude of his subject, led him to forget the natural limitations which are imposed upon a work of art by the very nature of those beings for whom it was created. The “Ring” dramas should be both acted and witnessed by gods and goddesses for whom time and space do not exist, and who are not limited by a precarious nervous system. No one can be insensitive to the great beauty of certain portions of these gigantic music-dramas,—every one recognizes Wagner’s genius as it shows itself, for example, in either of the great scenes between Siegfried and Brunhilde,—but the intricate and well-nigh impossible stage mechanism and the excursions into the written drama constitute serious defects. (For the scene between Wotan and Fricka in “Das Rheingold” and similar passages in the succeeding dramas are essentially scenes to be read rather than acted.)
One would suppose that Wagner had made impossible any repetition of the old operatic incongruities. Quite the contrary is the case. One of the latest Italian operas is, if anything, more absurd than any of its predecessors. What could be more grotesque than an opera whose scene is in a mining camp in the West, whose characters include a gambler, a sheriff, a woman of the camp, and so forth, whose language is perforce very much in the vernacular, whose plot hinges on a game of cards,—an “Outcast-of-Poker-Flat” opera,—and this translated, for the benefit of the composer, into Italian and produced in that language? “I’m dead gone on you, Minnie,” says Rance; “Ti voglio bene, Minnie,” sings his Italian counterpart.
“Rigoletto” does entrance us by the beauty and the sincerity of its melodies; it is what it pretends to be; it deals with emotions which we can share because they derive ultimately from great human issues. The Count, Magdalina, Rigoletto, and Gilda are all types; we know them well in literature—in poetry, novel, and drama; they are valid. We accept the strained convention of the scene as being inevitable at that point in the development of the opera. But after Wagner’s reforms, and the influence they exerted on Verdi himself, the greatest of the Italians, it would seem incredible that any composer could lapse into a “Girl of the Golden West.”
Nearly all Puccini’s operas are a reversion to type. The old-fashioned lurid melodrama appears again, blood-red as usual; as in “La Tosca,” which leaves almost nothing to the imagination—one specially wishes that it did in certain scenes. “Local color,” so-called, appears again in all its arid deception—as in the Japanese effects in the music of “Madame Butterfly”; again we hear the specious melody pretending to be real, with its octaves in the orchestra to give it a sham intensity. It is the old operatic world all over again. When we compare any tragic scene in Puccini’s operas with the last act of Verdi’s “Otello,” we realize the vast difference between the two. It is true that Puccini gives us beautiful lyric moments—as when Mimi, in “La Bohème,” tells Rudolph who she is; it is true, also, that we ought not to cavil because Puccini is not as great a composer as Verdi. Our comparison is not for the purpose of decrying one at the expense of the other, but to point out that the greater opera is not called for by the public and the lesser is; that we get “La Bohème,” “Madame Butterfly,” and “La Tosca” twenty times to “Otello’s” once, and that we thereby lose all sense of operatic values.
The most trumpeted operatic composer of to-day is the worst of operatic sinners. Nothing could be more debasing to music and to drama than the method Strauss employs in “Electra.” In its original form “Electra” is a play of profound significance, whose art, philosophy, and ethics are a natural expression of Greek life and thought. It contains ideas and it presents actions which, while totally alien to us, we accept as belonging to that life and thought. In the original, or in any good translation, its simplicity and its elemental grandeur are calculated to move us deeply, for we achieve a historical perspective and see the meaning and significance of the catastrophe which it presents. This great story our modern composer proceeds to treat pathologically. Nothing is sacred to him. He invests every passion, every fearful deed with a personal and immediate significance which entirely destroys its artistic and its historical sense. The real “Electra” is an impersonal, typical, national, and religious drama; Hofmannsthal and Strauss have made it into a seething caldron of riotous, unbridled passion.
The lead given by Strauss in “Salome,” “Electra,” and, in different form or type, in “Der Rosenkavallier” has been quickly followed. “The Jewels of the Madonna” is an “Electra” of the boulevard, in which the worst sort of passion and the worst sort of sacrilege are flaunted openly in the name of drama. It belongs in the “Grand Guignol.” Let any reasonable person read the librettos of current operas and form an opinion, not of their morals,—for there is only one opinion about that,—but of their claims on the attention of any serious-minded person.
I refer to the moral status of these stories only because many of them stress the abnormal and lack a sense of proportion. Art seeks the truth wherever it be, but the truth is the whole truth and not a segment of it. A novel may represent almost any phase of life, but it must keep a sense of proportion. Dostoïevsky pushes the abnormal to the extreme limit, but on the other hand he is “a brother to his villains” and he gives us plenty of redeeming types. The hero in “The Idiot” is a predominating and overbalancing character. The object of all great literature is to present the truth in terms of beauty. “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” is as moral as “Emma.” But the further one gets from a deliberate form of artistic expression like the novel, the less latitude one has in this respect. An episode in a novel of Dostoïevsky would be an impossible subject for a picture. So opera, which focuses itself for us in the stage frame and within a limited time, must somehow preserve for itself this truthfulness and fidelity to life as it is. “The Jewels of the Madonna” might serve as an episode in a novel of Dostoïevsky, or of Balzac; as an opera libretto it is a monstrosity.