III
The drama of ‘Tristan and Isolde’ Wagner drew from the Celtic legend with which he made acquaintance as he pursued his studies in the Nibelungen myths. As has been noted before, Wagner attributed the mood that inspired the conception of ‘Tristan and Isolde’ to his studies of Schopenhauer, and commentators have made much of this influence in attempting to read into portions of ‘Tristan’ and the other dramas a more or less complete presentation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. But Wagner’s own writings have proved him to belong to that rather vague class of ‘artist-philosophers’ whose philosophy is more largely a matter of moods than of a dispassionate seeing of truths. The key to the situation is found in Wagner’s own remark: ‘I felt the longing to express myself in poetry. This must have been partly due to the serious mood created by Schopenhauer which was trying to find an ecstatic expression.’ Wagner’s studies had developed in him a new sense of the drama in which the unrealities of his early romanticism entirely disappeared. A classic simplicity of action, laying bare the intensity of the emotional sweep, and a pervading sense of fatalistic tragedy—this was the new aspiration of Wagner’s art.
The score of ‘Tristan and Isolde’ is one of the highest peaks of musical achievement. It is a modern classic which in spirit and form is the prototype of almost all that has followed in modern dramatic music. Wagner has in this music drama developed his ‘leit-motif’ system more fully than heretofore and the entire score is one closely woven fabric of these eloquent phrases combined with such art that Bülow, who was the first to see the score, pronounced it a marvel of logic and lucidity. In his employment of chromatic harmony Wagner here surpassed all his previous mastery. A wealth of chromatic passing notes, suspensions and appoggiaturas gives to the harmony a richness of sensuous color all its own; while the orchestral scoring attains to that freedom of polyphonic beauty, to which alone, according to Richard Strauss, modern ‘color’ owes its existence.
Wagner, on the completion of Tristan und Isolde, began to long for its performance, a longing which he was compelled to bear for eight years. During these he experienced the repetition of his past sorrows and disappointments. Again he resumed his wanderings and for the next five years we find him in many places. In September, 1859, he settled in Paris, where he spent two entire seasons. After a series of concerts in which he gave fragments of his various works, Wagner, through the mediation of Princess Metternich, obtained the promise of a hearing of Tannhäuser at the Opéra. The first performance was given on March 13th after an interminable array of difficulties had been overcome. Wagner was forced to submit to many indignities and to provide his opera with a ballet in compliance with the regulations of the Opéra. At the second performance, given on the 18th of March, occurred the memorable and shameful interruption of the performance by the members of the Jockey Club, who, prompted by a foolish and vindictive chauvinism, hooted and whistled down the singers and orchestra. The ensuing disturbance fell little short of a riot.
It was during this last residence of Wagner in Paris that he was surrounded by the circle through which his doctrines and ideas were to be infused into the spirit of French art. This circle, constituting the brilliant salon meeting weekly at Wagner’s house in the rue Newton, included Baudelaire, Champfleury, Tolstoi, Ollivier and Saint-Saëns among its regular attendants.
In 1861 Wagner, through the influence of his royal patrons in Paris, was able to return unmolested to Germany. While the success of the earlier works was now assured and they had taken a permanent place in the repertoire of nearly every opera house, the way to a fulfillment of his present aim, the production of ‘Tristan,’ seemed as remote as ever. Vain hopes were held out by Karlsruhe and Vienna, but naught came of them and Wagner was again obliged to obtain such meagre and fragmentary hearings for his works as he could obtain through the medium of the concert stage. In 1863 he made concert tours to Russia and Hungary besides conducting programs of his works in Vienna and in several German cities. These performances, while they spread Wagner’s fame, did little to assist him toward a more hopeful prospect of material welfare and thus in 1864 Wagner at the age of 51 found himself again fleeing from debts and forced to seek an asylum in the home of a friend, Dr. Wille at Mariafeld. But this season of hardship proved to be only the deepest darkness before the dawning of what was indeed a new day in Wagner’s life. While spending a few days at Stuttgart in April of that year he received a message from the king of Bavaria, Ludwig II, announcing the intention of the youthful monarch to become the protector of Wagner and summoning him to Munich. Wagner, in the closing words of his autobiography, says, ‘Thus the dangerous road along which Fate beckoned me to such great ends was not destined to be clear of troubles and anxieties of a kind unknown to me heretofore, but I was never again to feel the weight of the everyday hardship of existence under the protection of my exalted friend.’
Wagner, settled in Munich under the affectionate patronage of the king, found himself in a position which seemed to him the attainment of all his desires. He was to be absolutely free to create as his own will dictated, and, having completed his works, was to superintend their production under ideal conditions. During the first summer spent with the king at Lake Starnberg he wrote the Huldigungsmarsch and an essay entitled ‘State and Religion,’ and on his return to Munich in the autumn he summoned Bülow, Cornelius, and others of his lieutenants to assist him in preparing the performances of ‘Tristan.’ These were given in the following June and July with Bülow conducting and Ludwig Schnorr as Tristan. Many of Wagner’s friends drew together at Munich for these performances and the event took on an aspect which forecasted the spirit of the Wagner festivals of a later day. Shortly after these first performances of ‘Tristan’ there arose in Munich a wave of popular suspicion against Wagner, which, fed by political and clerical intrigue, soon reached a point where the king was obliged to implore Wagner for his own safety’s sake to leave Bavaria. Wagner again sought the refuge of his years of exile, and, thanks to the king’s bountiful patronage, he was able to install himself comfortably in the house at Triebschen on the shores of Lake Lucerne, which was to be his home for the six years that were to elapse before he took up his final residence at Bayreuth. It was here that Wagner found again ample leisure to finish a work the conception of which dates from his early days at Dresden when he had found the material for the libretto in Gervinus’ ‘History of German Literature’ and at the composition of which he had been occupied since 1861. This was his comic opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
While the musical material of Die Meistersinger is such as to place it easily in a class with ‘Tristan’ as a stage work, it offers certain unique features which place it in a class by itself. The work is usually designated as Wagner’s only ‘comic’ opera, but the designation comic here implies the absence of the tragic more than an all-pervading spirit of humor. The comic element in this opera is contrasted with a strong vein of romantic tenderness and the earnest beauty of its allegorical significance. In Die Meistersinger Wagner restores to the action some of the more popular features of the opera; the chorus and ensemble are again introduced with musical and pictorial effectiveness, but these externals of stage interest are made only incidental in a drama which is as admirably well-knit and as subtly conceived as are any of Wagner’s later works, and it is with rare art that Wagner has combined these differing elements. The most convincing feature of the work as a drama lies in the marvellously conceived allegory and the satirical force with which it is drawn. So naturally do the story and scene lend themselves to this treatment that, with no disagreeable sense of self-obtrusion, Wagner here convincingly presents his plea for a true and natural art as opposed to that of a conventional pedantry. The shaft of good-humored derision that he thrusts against the critics is the most effective retort to their jibes, while the words of art philosophy which he puts into the mouth of Hans Sachs are indeed the best index he has furnished us of his artistic creed.
In the music, no less than in the libretto, of Die Meistersinger Wagner has successfully welded into a cohesive unit several diffusive elements. The glowing intensity of his ‘Tristan’ style is beautifully blended with a rich and varied fund of musical characterization, which includes imitations of the archaic, literally reproduced, as in the chorales, or parodied, as in Köthner’s exposition of the mastersingers’ musical requirements. The harmonic treatment is less persistently chromatic than that of ‘Tristan’ owing to the bolder diatonic nature of much of its thematic material, a difference which, however, cannot be said to lessen in any degree the wonderful glow of color which Wagner had first employed in Tristan und Isolde. Polyphonically considered, Die Meistersinger stands as the first work in which Wagner brought to an ultimate point his system of theme and motive combinations. The two earlier operas of the Ring contained the experiments of this system and in ‘Tristan’ the polyphony is one more of extraneous ornamentation and variation of figure than of the thematic combination by which Wagner is enabled so marvellously to suggest simultaneous dramatic and psychological aspects.
Die Meistersinger had its first performance at Munich on June 21, 1868, and the excellence of this first performance was due to the zealous labors of those who at that time constituted Wagner’s able body of helpers, Hans von Bülow, Hans Richter, and Karl Tausig. In the following year, at the instigation of the king, Rheingold and Walküre were produced at Munich, but failed to make an impression because of the inadequacy of their preparation.
Wagner in the meantime was living in quiet retirement at Triebschen working at the completion of the ‘Nibelungen Ring.’ From this date commences Wagner’s friendship with Friedrich Nietzsche, a friendship which unfortunately turned to indifference on the part of Wagner, and to distrust and animosity on the part of Nietzsche.
On August 25, 1870, Wagner married Cosima von Bülow, in which union he found the happiness which had been denied to him through the long years of his unhappy first marriage. A son, Siegfried, was born in the following year, an event which Wagner celebrated by the composition of the ‘Siegfried Idyl.’