Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

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—a type upon which hundreds of phrases in the Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin are constructed. The best of these French songs have a rhythmic freedom and flexibility that he rarely attained in his later operas. Look, for example, at the following delightfully elastic vocal line from Attente:

Ex. 2

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Cicogne, aux vieilles tours fidèle, ô vole et monte à tire d'aile de l'église
à la citadelle, du haut clocher, du haut clocher au grand donjon.

It has always been evident that the rhythmic sameness of the earlier operas was mainly due to the monotonously regular recurrence of accents in the German verse he wrote at that time. These French songs make it clear—as, by the way, does the aria for Marie, Max and Michel—that when a more varied metrical scheme was given him his music spontaneously varied with it. One cannot help feeling that in some ways it is a pity he did not meet with more success at Paris—that he was not allowed, in fact, to write some large work with the deliberate intention of appealing to the French taste by an exploitation of the styles and the formulas the Parisian public loved most. Such a work would not have represented the real Wagner, and in the end would probably have been negligible; but it would have given a much needed lightness and elasticity to his imagination, without harming him in any way. He would have benefited by such an experience as emphatically as Handel and Mozart benefited by their experiences with Italian opera. As it was, a certain slowness and ponderousness remain characteristic of Wagner to the end of his days. This inability to concentrate rapidly is instructively shown in his French setting of Heine's Les deux Grenadiers (1839-40). In general expressiveness the song need not fear comparison with Schumann's: perhaps Wagner's treatment of the "Marseillaise" at the end is even better. But the work has nothing of Schumann's terseness, ease, and lyric spontaneity; the whole thing moves a little stiff-jointedly.

The Paris period is a curious one in Wagner's artistic history. He wrote some very good songs, and one or two deplorable things like the Marie Stuart and La Descente de la Courtille; at the same time he was finishing Rienzi and working at the Flying Dutchman, and the Faust Overture assumed its first form. In April 1842 he settled at Dresden. Between then and 1848 he composed Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, and conceived the first idea of the Ring and other works. During this period he wrote no songs or pianoforte pieces: the occasional compositions are all choral works, which is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that Wagner had a good male-voice choir at his disposal. The most considerable of these works is The Love Feast of the Apostles (1843). Towards the end it has a touch of the melodic commonplace that Wagner found it so hard to avoid at this time; but the earlier choral portions are impressive in their simplicity and sincerity, and the whole thing is admirably stage-managed, so to speak. The effect of the voices from on high, and of the first entry of the orchestra at the descent of the Spirit, must have been very striking in the Dresden church.

The other choral works of this period are on a smaller scale. For the unveiling of a memorial to King Friedrich August I Wagner wrote in 1843 a Weihegruss for male voices and brass orchestra, to words by Otto Hohlfeld. The choral portion of this work was published in 1906; the whole version is now published in Breitkopf & Härtel's Gesamtausgabe, and shows how indispensable is the orchestral part—the long-held vocal notes, for example, being helped out by trumpet, trombone, and horn fanfares, and the whole thing gaining enormously in richness by the discreet occasional entries of the brass. The general style of this work, as of the Greeting of Friedrich August the Beloved by his Faithful Subjects (August 1844), is that of the Tannhäuser-Lohengrin epoch; some passages in the Greeting, indeed, are extraordinarily reminiscent of the "Hall of song" chorus. For the re-interment of Weber's remains at Dresden, in December 1844, Wagner wrote a four-part male chorus that again recalls the operatic works of this time. It is the most expressive of Wagner's works of this class, but on the whole a little disappointing; his heart was so thoroughly with Weber that one would have thought the occasion would have wrung some music of the first class out of him.