V
The first conception of an opera on the theme and incidents of which Parsifal is the expression dates from an early period in Wagner’s life. The figure of Christ had long presented to him a dramatic possibility, and it is from the fusion of the poetical import of his life and character with the philosophical ideas he had gleaned from his studies in Buddhism and Schopenhauer that Wagner evolved his last and most profound drama.
It is the religious color and element in Parsifal that calls forth from Wagner the latest expression of his musical genius. We find in those portions of the Parsifal score devoted to the depiction of this element a serenity and sublimity of ethereal beauty hitherto unattained by him. As we listen to the diatonic progression of the ‘Faith’ and ‘Grail’ motives, we are aware that Wagner’s genius continually sent its roots deeper into the soil of musical tradition and lore and that in seeking the truly profound and religious feeling he had sounded the depths of the art that was Palestrina’s.
The Parsifal controversy has now become a matter of history. Wagner’s idea and wish was to reserve the rights of performance of this work solely for the Bayreuth stage. This plan was undoubtedly the outcome of a sincere desire to have this last work always performed in an ideal manner and under such conditions as would not always accompany its production should it become the common property of the operatic world at large. This wish of Wagner was disrespected in 1904 by Heinrich Conried, then director of the Metropolitan Opera Company of New York, who announced a series of performances of Parsifal at that house during the season of 1903. The Wagner family made both legal and sentimental appeals in an attempt to prevent these performances, but they were unheeded and the work was first heard outside of Bayreuth on December 24, 1903. It must be said that the performance was a worthy one, as have been subsequent performances of this work on the same stage, and, apart from the sentimental regret that one must feel at this disregard of Wagner’s will, the incident was not so deplorable as it was then deemed by the more bigoted Wagnerites. By the expiration of copyright, the work became released to the repertoire of European opera houses on January 1, 1914, and simultaneous performances in every part of Europe attested the eagerness with which the general public awaited this work.
With Wagner’s musical works before us, the voluminous library of discussion and annotation which Wagner himself and writers on music have furnished us seems superfluous. Wagner’s theories of art reform need little further explanation or support than those furnished by the operas themselves; it is in the earnest study of these that we learn truly to appreciate his ‘philosophy’ of art, it is in the universal imitation of these models that we find the best evidence of their dominating influence on modern art. The Wagnerian pervasion of almost all subsequent music forms the most important chapter of modern musical history, but before we turn to the consideration of this phenomenon let us briefly summarize the achievements of Wagner in this potent reform which Walter Niemann[113] says extends not only to music, the stage, and poetry, but to modern culture in its entirety; a sweeping statement, the proving of which would lead us into divers and interesting channels of thought and discussion, but which we must here renounce as not appertaining directly to the history of music in its limited sense.
Wagner’s reformation of the opera as a stage drama, stated briefly, consisted in releasing it, as it had before been released by Gluck and by Weber, from the position which it had occupied, as a mere framework on which to build a musical structure, the words furnishing an excuse for the popularities of vocal music, the stage pictures and situations providing further entertainment. It was to this level that all opera bade fair to be brought at the time when Meyerbeer held Europe by the ears. We have in the foregoing sketch of the composer’s life shown briefly how at first Wagner, still under the spell of romanticism, effected a compromise between the libretto of the older opera form and a text which should have intrinsic value as poetry and convincing dramatic force. Then after reflective study of classic ideals we find him making the decisive break with all the conventionalities and traditions of ‘opera,’ thus evolving the music drama in which music, poetry and stage setting should combine in one unified art. Situations in such a drama are no longer created to afford musical opportunities, but text and music are joined in a unity of dramatic utterance of hitherto unattained eloquence. Then as a final step in the perfection of this conception Wagner clarifies and simplifies the action while, by means of his inspired system of tonal annotation, he provides a musical background that depicts every shade of feeling and dramatic suggestion.
That system may be termed a parallel to the delineative method employed by Berlioz and Liszt in developing the dramatic symphony and the symphonic poem. Like them, Wagner employs the leit-motif, but with a far greater consistency, a more thorough-going logic. Every situation, every character or object, every element of nature, state of feeling or mental process is accompanied by a musical phrase appropriate and peculiar to it. Thus we have motifs of fate, misfortune, storm, breeze; of Tristan, of Isolde, of Beckmesser, of Wotan; of love and of enmity, of perplexity, deep thought, and a thousand different conceptions. The Rhine, the rainbow, the ring and the sword are as definitely described as the stride of the giants, the grovelling of Mime or the Walkyries’ exuberance. So insistently is this done that the listener who has provided himself with a dictionary, as it were, of Wagner’s phrases, can understand in minute detail the comments of the orchestra, which in a manner makes him the composer’s confidant by laying bare the psychology of the drama. Such dictionaries or commentaries have been provided by annotators without number, and in some measure by Wagner himself, and labels have been applied to every theme, melody, passage or phrase that is significantly reiterated. A certain correspondence exists between motifs used in different dramas for similar purposes, such as the heroic motif of Siegfried in B flat and the one for Parsifal in the same key. Wagner goes further—in his reference to the story of Tristan, which Hans Sachs makes in the Meistersinger, we hear softly insinuating itself into the musical texture the motifs of love and death from Tristan and Isolde, and so forth.
The efficacy of the system has been thoroughly proved and for a time it seemed to the Wagnerites the ultimate development of operatic language. Wagner himself indicated that he had but made a beginning, that others would take up and develop the system after him. It has been ‘taken up’ by many disciples but it has hardly been found capable of further development upon the lines laid down by the master. Our age rejects many of his devices as obvious and even childish. But in a larger sense the method has persisted. A new sense of form characterizes the musical substance of the modern, or post-Wagnerian, opera. The leit-motif, with its manifold reiterations, modifications, variations, and combinations, has given a more intense significance to the smallest unit of the musical structure; it has made possible the Wagnerian ‘endless melody’ with its continuously sustained interest, its lack of full cadences, and its consequent restless stimulation. That style of writing is one of the essentially new things that Wagner brought, and with it came the ultimate death of the conventional operatic divisions, the concert forms within the opera. The distinction between aria and recitative is now lost forever, by a rapprochement or fusion of their two methods, rather than the discontinuance of one. Wagner’s recitative is an arioso, a free melody that has little in common with the heightened declamation of a former age, yet is vastly more eloquent. It rises to the sweep of an aria, yet never descends to vocal display, and even in its most musical moments observes the spirit of dramatic utterance. It is a wholly new type of melody that has been created, which was not at first recognized as such, for the charge of ‘no melody’ has been the first and most persistent levelled at Wagner.
Great as was the manifestation of Wagner’s dramatic genius, the fact must ever be recognized that his musical genius far overtopped it in its achievement and in its influence. It is as musical works that these dramas make their most profound impression. The growth of Wagner’s musical powers far surpassed his development as poet or dramatist. If we take the poems of Wagner’s works and make a chronologically arranged study of them, we shall see that, while there is the evolution in form and in significance that we have noted above, the advancing profundity of conception and emotional force may be largely attributed to the advance which the music makes in these respects. It may be argued that it was the progress of Wagner’s dramatic genius that prompted and inspired the march of his musical forces, and, while this may be to some extent true, it is the matured musicianship of Wagner which removes Götterdämmerung far from Rheingold in its significance and not the difference in the inspiration of the two poems, which were written during the same period.
We have spoken of the immense influence of Wagner as a phenomenon. Surely such must be called the unprecedented obsession of the musical thought of the age which he effected. In rescuing the opera from its position as a mere entertainment and by restoring to its service the nobler utterances which absolute music had begun to monopolize, Wagner’s service to the stage was incalculable. Opera in its older sense still exists and the apparition of a ‘Carmen,’ a Cavalleria rusticana, a truly dramatic Verdi, or the melodic popularities of a Massenet or Puccini attest the vitality and sincerity of expression which may be found outside of pure Wagnerism. It is, in fact, true that as we make a survey of the post-Wagner operas the actual adoption of his dramatic methods is not by any means universal, omnipresent as may be the influence of his reforms. The demand for sincerity of dramatic utterance is now everywhere strongly felt, but the music drama, as it came from the hand of Wagner, still remains the unique product of him alone whose genius was colossal enough to bring it to fruition.
More completely enthralling has been the spell of Wagner’s musical influence, but before measuring its far-reaching circle let us consider for a moment Wagner’s scores in the light of absolute music and remark upon some of their intrinsic musical content. Wagner’s principal innovations were in the department of harmonic structure. Speaking broadly, the essence of this new harmonic treatment was a free use of the chromatic element, which, radical as it was, was directly due to the influence of Beethoven’s latest style. This phase of Wagner’s composition first asserted itself, as we have before noted, in Tannhäuser and found its highest expression in ‘Tristan and Isolde.’ The chromatic features of Wagner’s melodic line are undoubtedly in a measure an outgrowth of this harmonic sense, though it would perhaps be truer to say that discoveries in either department reflected themselves in new-found effects in the other. Volumes would not suffice to enumerate even superficially the various formulæ which these chromaticisms assume, but a very general classification might divide them into two groups; the first consisting of passages of sinuous chromatic leadings in conjunct motion. One of the earliest evidences of this idiom is found in Tannhäuser:
and the full development of its possibilities are exemplified in the sensuous weavings of ‘Tristan’:
The second type of harmonic formula is one in which remotely related triads follow each other in chromatic order with an enharmonic relationship. The following passage from Lohengrin is an early example of this type:
and its ultimate development may be seen in the following passage from the Walküre:
The latter passage contains (at *) another striking feature of Wagner’s harmonic scheme, namely the strong and biting chromatic suspensions which fell on the ears of his generation with much the same effect as must have had those earlier suspensions on the age of Monteverdi. Wagner’s scores are replete with the most varied and beautiful examples of these moments of harmonic strife. In these three features, together with an exceedingly varied use of the chord of the ninth, lie many of the principles upon which Wagner built his harmonic scheme, though it would be folly to assert that any such superficial survey could give an adequate conception of a system that was so varied in its idiom and so intricate in its processes. It must be added that, although, as we have stated, chromaticism was the salient feature of Wagner’s harmony, his fine sense of balance and contrast prevented him from employing harmonies heavily scented to a point of stifling thickness; he interspersed them wisely with a strong vein of diatonic solidity, the materials of which he handled with the mastery of Beethoven. We have already cited the diatonic purity of certain of the Parsifal motives and we need only remind the reader of the leading Meistersinger themes as a further proof of Wagner’s solid sense of tonality.
In rhythmical structure Wagner’s music possesses its most conventional feature. We find little of the skillful juggling of motive and phrase which was Beethoven’s and which Brahms employed with such bewildering mastery. Wagner in his earliest work uses a particularly straightforward rhythmical formula; common time is most prevalent and the phrases are simple in their rhythmical structure, an occasional syncopation being the only deviation from a regular following of the beat and its equal divisions. The rhythmical development of his later style is also comparatively simple in its following; rhythmical excitement is largely in the restless figuration which the strings weave round the harmonic body. These figures are usually well defined groups of the regular beat divisions with an occasional syncopation and no disturbance of the regular pulse of the measure. An examination of the violin parts of ‘Tristan’ or the Meistersinger will reveal the gamut of Wagner’s rhythmical sense. Summing up we may say that Wagner’s methods, radical as they appear, are built on the solid foundation of his predecessors and, now that in our view of his art we are able to employ some sense of perspective, we may readily perceive it to assume naturally its place as a step after Beethoven and Schubert in harmonic development.
It is with hypnotic power that these methods and their effects have possessed the musical consciousness of the succeeding generation and, becoming the very essence of modernity, insinuated themselves into the pages of all modern music. The one other personality in modern German music that assumes any proportions beside the overshadowing figure of the Bayreuth master is Johannes Brahms. As it would seem necessary for the detractors of any cause or movement to find an opposing force that they may pit against the object of their disfavor, so did the anti-Wagnerites, headed by Hanslick,[114] gather round the unconcerned Brahms with their war-cries against Wagner. Much time and patience have been lost over the Brahms-Wagner controversy and surely to no end. So opposed are the ideals and methods of these two leaders of modern musical thought that comparisons become indeed stupidly odious. To the reflective classicist of intellectual proclivities Brahms will remain the model, while Wagner rests, on the other hand, the guide of those beguiled by sensuous color and dramatic freedom. That the two are not irreconcilable in the same mind may be seen in the fact that Richard Strauss showed a strong Brahms influence in his earlier works, and then, without total reincarnation, became a close follower of Wagner, whose style has formed the basis on which the most representative living German has built his imposing structures. It is, indeed, Richard Strauss who has shown us the further possibilities of the Wagner idiom. Though he has been guided by Liszt in certain externals of form and design, the polyphonic orchestral texture and harmonic richness of Strauss’ later style, individual as they are, remain the distinct derivative of Richard Wagner’s art. The failure of Strauss in his first opera, Guntram, may be attributed to the dangerous experiment of which we have spoken—that of a too servile emulation of Wagner’s methods. In attempting to create his own libretto and in following too closely the lines of Wagner, he there became little more than a mere imitator, a charge which, however, cannot be brought against him as the composer of Salomé and Rosenkavalier.
In Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel we find perhaps the next most prominent manifestation of the Wagnerian influence. Humperdinck met Wagner during the master’s last years and was one of those who assisted at the first Parsifal performances. While his indebtedness to Wagner for harmonic, melodic, and orchestral treatment is great, Humperdinck has, by the employment of the naïve materials of folk-song, infused a strong and freshly individual spirit into this charming work, which by its fairy-tale subject became the prototype of a considerable following of fairy operas.
To complete the catalogue of German operatic composers who are followers of Wagner would be to make it inclusive of every name and work that has attained any place in the operatic repertoire of modern times.
In no less degree is his despotic hand felt in the realm of absolute music. It was through the concert stage that Wagner won much of his first recognition and it followed naturally that symphonic music must soon have felt the influence of his genius. Anton Bruckner was an early convert and, as a confessed disciple, attempted to demonstrate in his symphonies how the dramatic warmth of Wagner’s style could be confined within the symphony’s restricting line; a step which opened up to those who did not follow Brahms and the classic romanticists a path which has since been well trodden.
Outside of Germany the spread of Wagner’s works and the progress of his influence forms an interesting chapter in history. We have seen Wagner resident in Paris at several periods of his life; on the occasion of his first two French sojourns his acquaintance was largely with the older men, such as Berlioz, Halévy, Auber, and others, but during his final stay in Paris, in 1861, Wagner came into contact with some of the younger generation, Saint-Saëns and Gounod among others. It was perhaps natural in a France, which still looked to Germany for its musical education, that these two youthful and enthusiastic composers should champion the cause of Wagner and become imbued with his influence, an influence which showed itself strongly in their subsequent work. While neither of these men made any attempt at remodelling the operatic form after Wagner’s ideas, their music soon showed his influence, though denied by them as it was on several occasions. More open in his discipleship of Wagner and a too close imitator of his methods was Ernest Reyer, whose Sigurd comes from the same source as Wagner’s ‘Ring’—the Nibelungen myths. Bizet is often unjustly accused of Wagnerian tendencies; though he was undoubtedly an earnest student and admirer of Wagner’s works and has, in Carmen, made some slight use of a leading motive system, his music, in its strongly national flavor, has remained peculiarly free from Wagner’s influence. Massenet, on the other hand, with his less vital style, has in several instances succumbed to Wagner’s influence, and in Esclarmonde there occurs a motive so like one of the Meistersinger motives that on the production of the work Massenet was called by a critic ‘Mlle. Wagner.’ Stronger still becomes the Wagner vein in French music as we come down to our own day. Charpentier’s ‘Louise,’ despite its distinctive color and feeling, leans very heavily on Wagner in its harmonic and orchestral treatment. As a reactionary influence against this encroaching tide of Wagnerism was the quiet rise of the new nationalistic French school which César Franck was evolving through his sober post-Beethoven classicism. That Franck himself was an admirer of Wagner we learn from Vincent d’Indy,[115] who tells us that it was the habit of his master to place himself in the mood for composition by starting his working hours in playing with great enthusiasm the prelude of Die Meistersinger. César Franck numbered among his pupils a great many of those who to-day form the circle of representative French composers. These writers all show the forming hand of their master and faithfully follow in his efforts to preserve a noble, national art. There has, however, crept into many of their pages the haunting and unmistakable voice of the Bayreuth master. Vincent d’Indy, one of the early champions of Wagner and one who, with the two conductors, Lamoureux and Colonne, did much to win a place for Wagner’s music in both opera house and concert room of Paris, is strongly Wagnerian in many of his moments and the failure of his dramatic work is generally attributed to his over-zealous following of Wagner. The strongest check to Wagnerism in France and elsewhere is the new France that asserts itself in the voice of him whom many claim to be the first original thinker in music since Wagner—Claude Debussy. The founder of French impressionism, himself at one time an ardent Wagnerite, tells us that his awakening appreciation of the charm of Russian music turned him from following in Wagner’s step. Whatever may have been its source the distinctive and insinuatingly contagious style of Debussy has undoubtedly been the first potent influence toward a reaction against Wagnerism.
A brief word may be added as to the Wagner influence as we find it in the other European nations. Of conspicuous names those of Grieg and Tschaikowsky fall easily into our list of Wagner followers. Undeniably national and individual as both have been, each had his Wagner enthusiasm. Into the works of the former there crept so much of Wagner that Hanslick wittily called him ‘Wagner in sealskins,’ while Tschaikowsky, continually sounding his anti-Wagnerian sentiments, is at times an unconscious imitator. From England there has come in recent years in the work of one whom Strauss called ‘the first English progressive,’ Edward Elgar, a voice which in its most eloquent moments echoes that of Wagner. But perhaps the most significant proof of the far-reaching influence of Wagner’s art is the readiness with which it was welcomed by Italy. As early as 1869 Wagner found his first Italian champion in Boïto and to him was due the early production of Wagner’s works at Bologna. Wagner’s influence on Italian composers has been largely in the respect of dramatic reform rather than actual musical expression; the accusations of Wagnerism which greeted the appearance of Verdi’s Aïda were as groundless as the same cry against Carmen. In Aïda Verdi forsook the superficial form of opera text that had been that of his earlier works and adopted a form more sincerely dramatic. This was, of course, under the direct influence of Wagner’s reform as was the more serious vein of the musical setting to this and Verdi’s two last operas, ‘Othello’ and ‘Falstaff’; but in musical idiom Verdi remained distinctively free from Wagner’s influence.
With this brief survey in mind the deduction as to the lasting value of Wagner’s theories and practices may be easily drawn. Wagner, the composer, has set his indelible mark upon the dramatic music of his age and that of a succeeding age, and, becoming a classic, he remains the inevitable model of modern musical thought. Wagner as dramatist constitutes a somewhat less forceful influence. Despite the inestimable value of his dramatic reform and its widespread influence on operatic art Wagner’s music dramas must remain the unique work of their author and so peculiarly the product of his universal genius that general imitation of them is at once prohibited by the fact that the world will not soon again see a man thus generously endowed.
Added proof of the enormous interest which has attached itself to Wagner and his works is found in the large and constantly increasing mass of Wagner literature, more voluminous than that heretofore devoted to any musician. The ten volumes which comprise Wagner’s own collected writings,[116] contain much of vital interest, as well as a mass of unimportant items. Besides the poems of the operas, beginning with Rienzi, we find all of those essays to which reference has been already made, in which he advances his æsthetic and philosophic principles. There is besides these a quantity of exceedingly interesting autobiographical and reminiscent articles and many valuable pages of hints as to the interpretation of his own and of other works. Of greater interest to the general reader is the two-volume autobiography.[117] This work covers Wagner’s life from childhood to the year 1864, the year in which he met King Ludwig. Dictated to his wife and left in trust to her for publication at a stated time after his death, the book was eagerly awaited and attracted wide attention on its appearance in 1911. In its intense subjectivity, it gives us a vivid and intimate picture of Wagner’s artistic life, and in its narration of external events several episodes of his life, which had before been matters of more or less mystery, are explained. The publication of this autobiography was the signal for a last and faint raising of the voice of detraction against Wagner’s character in its egotistical isolation. The unrelenting attitude of aggressiveness that he adopted was only the natural attendant upon his genius and its forceful expression. To him who reads aright this record of Wagner’s life must come the realization that self-protection often forced upon him these external attitudes of a selfish nature, and that his supreme confidence in his own power to accomplish his great ideals warranted him in overcoming in any way all obstacles which retarded the accomplishment.
B. L.
FOOTNOTES:
[107] ‘My Life,’ Vol. I.
[108] Kietz, the painter, E. G. Anders and Lehrs, philologists, were the most intimate of these friends.
[109] The pamphlet which Wagner wrote and caused to be circulated publicly in explanation of the symphony is found in Vol. VIII of his collected works (English edition).
[110] ‘Prose Writings,’ Vol. I.
[111] Ibid., Vol. II.
[112] Ibid., Vol. III.
[113] Die Musik seit Richard Wagner, Berlin, 1914.
[114] Eduard Hanslick, celebrated critic, Brahms champion and anti-Wagnerite, b. Prague, 1825; d. Vienna, 1904.
[115] ‘César Franck,’ Paris, 1912.
[116] ‘The Prose Writings of Richard Wagner’ (8 vols.), translated by W. Ashton Ellis, London, 1899.
[117] Mein Leben, 1913 (Eng. tr.: ‘My Life,’ 1913).
CHAPTER XII
NEO-ROMANTICISM: JOHANNES BRAHMS AND CÉSAR FRANCK
The antecedents of Brahms—The life and personality of Brahms—The idiosyncrasies of his music in rhythm, melody, and harmony as expressions of his character—His works for pianoforte, for voice, and for orchestra; the historical position of Brahms—Franck’s place in the romantic movement—His life, personality, and the characteristics of his style; his works as the expression of religious mysticism.