IV
We now approach the apotheosis of Wagner’s career, Bayreuth and the Festival Theatre, a fulfillment of a dream of many years. A dance through Wagner’s correspondence and writings shows us that the idea of a theatre where his own works could be especially and ideally presented was long cherished by him. This idea seemed near its realization when Wagner came under the protection of King Ludwig, but many more years passed before the composer attained this ambition. In 1871 he determined upon the establishment of such a theatre in Bayreuth. Several circumstances contributed to this choice of location; his love of the town and its situation, the generous offers of land made to him by the town officials and the determining fact of its being within the Bavarian kingdom, where it could fittingly claim the patronage of Wagner’s royal protector. Plans for the building were made by Wagner’s old friend, Semper, and then began the weary campaign for necessary funds. Public apathy and the animosity of the press, which, expressing itself anew at this last self-assertiveness of Wagner, delayed the good cause, but May 22, 1872, Wagner’s fifty-ninth birthday, saw the laying of the cornerstone. Four more years elapsed before sufficient funds could be found to complete the theatre. Wagner in the meantime had taken up his residence at Bayreuth, where he had built a house, Villa Wahnfried. On August 13, 1876, the Festival Theatre was opened. The audience which attended this performance was indeed a flattering tribute to Wagner’s genius, for, besides those good friends and artists who now gathered to be present at the triumph of their master, the German emperor, the king of Bavaria, the emperor of Brazil, and many other royal and noble personages were there as representatives of a world at last ready to pay homage to genius. The entire four operas of the ‘Ring of the Nibelungen’ were performed in the following week and the cycle was twice repeated in August of the same season.
As has been noted, the several dramas of the ‘Ring’ belong to widely separated periods of his creative activity, and, musically considered, have independent points of regard. The poems, however, conceived as they were, beginning with Götterdämmerung, which originally bore the title of ‘Siegfried’s Death’ and led up to by the three other poems of the cycle, are united in dramatic form and feeling. The adoption of the Nibelungen mythology, as a basis for a dramatic work, dated from about the time that Lohengrin was finished. Wagner, in searching material for a historical opera, ‘Barbarossa,’ lost interest in carrying out his original scheme upon discovering the resemblance of this subject to the Nibelungen and Siegfried mythology. He says: ‘In direct connection with this I began to sketch a clear summary of the form which the old original Nibelungen myth had assumed in my mind in its immediate association with the mythological legend of the gods; a form which, though full of detail, was yet much condensed in its leading features. Thanks to this work, I was able to convert the chief part of the material itself into a musical drama. It was only by degrees, however, and after long hesitation, that I dared to enter more deeply into my plans for this work; for the thought of the practical realization of such a work on our stage literally appalled me.’
While the Ring poems constitute a drama colossal and imposing in its significance, far outreaching in conception anything that had been before created as a musical stage work, it is in many of its phases an experimental work toward the development of the ideal music drama which ‘Tristan and Isolde’ represents. Written at a time when Wagner was in the throes of a strong revolutionary upheaval and when his philosophy of art and life was seeking literary expression, we find the real dramatic essence of these poems somewhat obscured by the mass of metaphysical speculation which accompanies their development. In Siegfried alone has Wagner more closely approached his new ideal and created a work which, despite the interruption in its composition, is dramatically and musically the most coherent and most spontaneously poetic of the Ring dramas. It has been already noted that the break between the musical style of Lohengrin and that of Rheingold is even greater than that between the dramatic forms of the two works. In the six years which separated the composition of these two operas Wagner’s exuberant spontaneity of expression became tempered with reflective inventiveness, and there pervades the entire score of Rheingold a classic solidity of feeling which by the side of the lyric suavity of Lohengrin is one of almost austere ruggedness. We find from the start Wagner’s new sense of dramatic form well established and the metrical regularity of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin is now replaced with the free dramatic recitative and ‘leit-motif’ development. Of harmonic color and polyphonic richness Rheingold has less interest than have the other parts of the cycle, and one cannot but feel that after the six years of non-productiveness Wagner’s inventive powers had become somewhat enfeebled. With the opening scenes of Walküre, however, we find again a decided advance, a melodic line more graceful in its curve and the harmonic color enriched with chromatic subtleties again lends sensuous warmth to the style to which is added the classic solidity which Rheingold inaugurates. In polyphonic development Walküre marks the point where Wagner commences to employ that marvellously skillful and beautiful system of combining motives, which reached its full development in the richly woven fabric of Tristan, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal.
Wagner has told us that his studies in musical lore were made, so to speak, backward, beginning with his contemporaries and working back through the classics. The influences, as they show themselves in his works, would seem to bear out this statement, for, after the rugged strength of Beethoven’s style which Rheingold suggests, the advancing polyphonic interest, which next appears in Walküre, reaches back to an older source for its inspiration, the polyphony of Johann Sebastian Bach. While, as has been remarked, Siegfried in its entirety forms a coherent whole, the treatment of the last act clearly displays the added mastery which Wagner had gained in the writing of Tristan and of Die Meistersinger. There is a larger sweep of melody and a harmonic freedom which belongs distinctly to Wagner’s ultimate style. In Götterdämmerung we find the first manifestation of this latest phase of Wagner’s art. A harmonic scheme that is at once bolder in its use of daring dissonances and subtler in its mysterious chromatic transitions gives added color to a fabric woven almost entirely of leit-motifs in astounding variety of sequence and combination.
The inauguration of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre and the first performances there of the Nibelungen Ring certainly marked the moment of Wagner’s greatest external triumph, but it was a victory which by no means brought him peace. A heavy debt was incurred by this first season’s Bayreuth festival and it was six years later before the funds necessary to meet this deficit and to provide for a second season could be obtained. The second Bayreuth season was devoted entirely to the initial performances of Parsifal, with the composition of which Wagner had been occupied since 1877. The intervening six years had brought many adherents to the Wagner cause and financial aid to the support of the festival was more generously extended. After a series of sixteen performances it was found that the season had proved a monetary success and its repetition was planned for the following year, 1883. The history of the Festival Theatre since that date is so well known that its recitation here is unnecessary. Bayreuth and the Wagner festival stand to-day a unique fact in the history of art. As a shrine visited not only by the confessed admirers and followers of Wagner, but by a large public as well, it represents the embodiment of Wagner’s life and art, constituting a sacred temple of an art which, by virtue of its power, has forced the attention of the entire world. Bayreuth, moreover, preserving the traditions of the master himself, has served as an authentic training school to those hosts of artists whose duty it has become to carry these traditions to the various opera stages of the world.
Wagner was fated not to see the repetition of the Parsifal performances. In September, 1882, being in delicate health and feeling much the need of repose, he again journeyed to Italy. Settling in Venice, where he hired a part of the Palazzo Vendramin, he passed there the last seven months of his life in the seclusion of his family circle. On February 1, 1883, Wagner was seized with an attack of heart failure and died after a few moments’ illness. Three days later the body was borne back to Bayreuth where, after funeral ceremonies, in which a mourning world paid a belated tribute to his genius, Richard Wagner was laid to his final rest in the garden of Villa Wahnfried.