Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

And if for nothing else Das Liebesverbot would be interesting for its use of the leit-motive. There was virtually none of it in Die Feen.

III.—THE OPERAS OF THE SECOND PERIOD

Rienzi will always be something of a puzzle to the student. Wagner's own accounts of it in later years show that he too was a little uncertain as to the reasons for its obvious defects. He had tired of his life among little theatrical people in minor provincial towns, so he deliberately planned Rienzi on an elephantine scale in order that it might be impossible except in one of the larger opera houses. He had "grand opera" in his mind throughout, he tells us; he intended not merely to imitate the showiest works of this genre but to surpass them in prodigality. Yet to suppose, he adds, that this was all that was in his mind would be to do him an injustice. He was "really inspired" by the subject, and especially by the character of Rienzi. First and foremost he had Rienzi in view, grand opera being only a secondary consideration; yet grand opera was "only the spectacles through which he saw the subject." He always saw it, he goes on to say, on its own merits, and never aimed consciously at merely musical effects; yet he could never see the material except in terms of the merely musical effects,—the arias, choruses, finales, processions, and so on,—of grand opera. "Thus on the one hand I was always influenced by my subject in working out the details of the work, while on the other hand I governed my subject entirely in accordance with the 'grand opera' form that was in my mind." It is pretty evident that he found it as difficult to come to any settled conclusion with regard to Rienzi as we do. There is truth in the view that many of the banalities of it are due to his having the Paris opera and the Paris public in view. But we have only to study the score in conjunction with those of Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot to see that many of these same banalities are the logical outcome of his cast of mind and his musical attainments at that epoch, and would certainly have appeared in his music even if the idea of Paris had never occurred to him.

To put it familiarly, the youthful Wagner had been obviously shaping for some years for a bad attack of musical measles; he had to get it out of his system, and Rienzi was the illness that enabled him to do so. To me it is the least satisfactory of all his works—far less enjoyable than Die Feen or Das Liebesverbot. One can forgive the eager young-mannishness of these very youthful works: but at twenty-six or twenty-seven one expects a composer to show more indubitable signs of originality. The commonplace of Rienzi is different from that of the preceding operas; it is almost an offensive commonplace; the outlines of the objectionable phrases have all been thickened and the body of them puffed out till they positively irritate us by their grossness and fatuousness. It is astounding how few phrases there are in all these six hundred pages[399] that really seize upon us: we could easily count them all on the fingers of one hand. On its harmonic side the opera gives us a strange impression of pretentious poverty. All through Rienzi Wagner's mind seems to be struggling to fight its way through vapour and murk to the light. His dramatic intentions are evident enough, but he can rarely realise them. It is in vain that he exploits all the formulas for dramatic expression as they were understood at that time—diminished sevenths for horror, syncopations for agitation, and all the rest of it; in vain that he languishes or threatens, warbles unctuously or declaims aggressively, lets loose his noisy orchestra and piles up massive choral effects; they all fail to move us because there is hardly ever any bite in the phrases themselves. The obvious faults of the work are due not so much to technical inexperience or limitations of vocabulary as to a sheer failure of the imagination; with the possible exception of Rienzi himself, not one of the characters has been seen with vividness enough to wring a really characteristic musical symbol out of the composer. No one lives except Rienzi; and he, as far as his music is concerned, is little more than half alive. Any critically-minded contemporary friend of Wagner's who happened to know all his work up to that time might have been pardoned for thinking, on the basis of Rienzi, that the composer was deteriorating, that on the whole his imagination had hardly grown at all during the past couple of years, and that none of the earlier defects of style had been corrected, while half a dozen new ones had been added—an intolerable prolixity, a tendency to rely on elephantine effects to the neglect of finely wrought detail, and to trust to stage mechanism to eke out the weaknesses of his musical invention. The only improvement on the earlier Wagner that the friend would have been able to observe in Rienzi would be that in spite of all its absurdities and infelicities, its commonness and elephantiasis, there is a new strength in the work. It is a strength clumsily used; the youthful hobbledehoy's limbs have hardened without his acquiring much more command over them than he had before, the boyish voice has gained in volume without much improvement in quality: but the general signs of muscular growth are unmistakable. Crude as the overture is, no one can deny its rampant, horse-power vigour. But the final convincing proof that though Wagner's voice was abnormally energetic in Rienzi his imagination was virtually at a standstill is the fact that the opera has no colour, no atmosphere of its own. Every other work of Wagner has. In Die Feen, as Mr. Runciman acutely points out, there is a strange new feeling for light; in the Flying Dutchman we are always conscious of the sea, in Tannhäuser of a world of sensuous heat set over against a world of moral coolness and rather anæmic aspiration, in Lohengrin of the gleaming river and the tenuous air of Monsalvat. Rienzi conveys no pictorial or atmospheric suggestions of any kind.

But the opera was only a reculer pour mieux sauter. He needed a text that should be more purely musical in its essence than this; and when he found it, in the Flying Dutchman—the idea of which came to him shortly after he had commenced work on Rienzi—his genius took its first decisive leap forward. For some years he had been strangely undecided as to a suitable subject for an opera. He had experimented, and was still to experiment, in several fields. In 1836 he had turned König's novel Die hohe Braut into a libretto, making quite a good romantic opera in four acts out of it.[400] (It was afterwards set by Joseph Kittl, in 1853, under the title of Bianca und Giuseppe, oder die Franzosen vor Nizza.) In 1837 he made a comic opera out of a story in the Arabian Nights, entitling it Die glückliche Bärenfamilie, oder Männerlist grösser als Frauenlist ("The Happy Bear Family, or Woman outwitted by Man"). This is a delightfully vivacious little libretto, which might well be set by some modern composer. Wagner wrote some fragments of the music for it, but quickly became disgusted with the style, and turned his back on the piece. In Paris in 1841 he made a preliminary prose sketch for a libretto on a gloomy and rather striking subject of Hoffmann's, Die Bergwerke zu Falun ("The Mines of Falun"), which one is sorry he did not set to music, for it has colour and a certain individuality: he would probably have made more of it than he did of Rienzi. But perhaps he felt that the sombre vein he would have had to pursue in Die Bergwerke zu Falun had been worked out to the full extent of which he was capable in the Flying Dutchman. In the same winter of 1842 he made a first sketch of Die Sarazenin ("The Saracen Woman"), expanding it in Dresden two years later.[401]

It was after all a sound instinct, no doubt, that made him concentrate on the Flying Dutchman and let the other schemes drop, for the Flying Dutchman gave him just what Rienzi did not—a concentrated dramatic theme, and one with a very individual atmosphere. Had his dramatic and musical technique been more advanced than they were at that time he would probably have condensed the story still further. He saw clearly enough that the whole essence of the legend—or at any rate the whole of the musical essence of it—lay in the Dutchman and Senta, and that all the rest was mere scaffolding or trimming. "I condensed the material into a single Act, being chiefly moved to do this by the subject itself, since in this way I could compress it into the simple dramatic interaction of the principal characters, and ignore the musical accessories that had now become repellent to me."[402] But his musical faculties, which developed with a strange slowness, were still lagging a good deal behind his dramatic perceptions; and the result is that to us to-day there seem to be a good many superfluous "musical accessories" in the Flying Dutchman, owing to the fact that Wagner has not been able to give real musical life to such characters as Daland and Erik. He himself has described for us very lucidly in A Communication to My Friends the diverging impulses in him that gave the Flying Dutchman its present only partly satisfactory form. He was wholly possessed by his subject, saw that it was necessary to allow it to dictate its own musical form and method of treatment, and honestly thought that he had let it do so; but the traditional operatic form was more potent within him than he imagined at the time. As in Rienzi, aria, duet, trio and the other established forms somehow "found their way into" the opera without his consciously willing them.

Still the structure of the Flying Dutchman is a great advance on that of Rienzi: what was really happening was that the musician in Wagner was beginning to see that the whole drama must be musical drama, the poet not being allowed to insert anything that was inconsistent with the spirit of music. He himself persisted in putting it the other way,—that the poet in him gradually took over the guidance of the musician. But we can see now that he misread his own evolution. The poet in him undoubtedly outgrew, bit by bit, the musical forms that had become stereotyped in the opera of the day; but the poet's growth only became possible when the musician, beginning to feel his own strength, gave the poet more and more imperative orders to shape his "stuff" in a form that would afford the musician the freest course. Wagner in later years insisted that after he had elaborated Senta's ballad in the second Act, he found that he had unconsciously hit upon the thematic kernel of the whole, and that this thematic idea then spread itself naturally over the whole drama like a network. That is not true if we take his words literally, for of course a good deal of the thematic material of the Flying Dutchman has no affiliation with Senta's ballad. But in the broad sense, and with regard more to his intentions than his achievements, we can see that he was right. The whole drama really emanates from Senta; the Dutchman himself, as Mr. Runciman puts it, is merely Senta's opportunity personified; the remaining characters are only there to make the before and after of the central episode clear. With more experience and a surer technique he could have cut away more of the excrescences of the libretto and concentrated the action still further, making it yet more purely musical, as he did with Tristan. But for the day he did marvellously well. With the Flying Dutchman was born the modern musical drama.

There is no mistaking the intensity and certainty of his vision now. He no longer describes his characters from the outside: they are within him, making their own language and using him as their unconscious instrument. The portrait painter and the pictorial artist in him are both coming to maturity. The Dutchman and Senta are both drawn completely in the round; we feel, for the first time with any of Wagner's characters, that we might meet them any day and that they would be solid to the touch. Even Daland and Erik, though not as real as the other two—for Wagner had not yet the art of breathing life into every one of his subordinate characters—have a certain substantiality. And roaring and whistling and surging round them all is the sea,—not so much the mere background of the drama as the element that has given it birth. Stylistically and technically the new work is leagues beyond Rienzi. There is still something of the old melodic mannerism—which, indeed, he was not to lose for many years yet—but in many of the melodies there is a new leap, a new swing, a new articulation; harmonically the work is richer; it often attains a rhythmic freedom beyond anything that Wagner had been capable of before; he is learning to concentrate his expression, and to beat out pregnant little figures that limn a character or depict a natural force once for all; there is a new psychological as well as a musical logic, binding the whole scheme together and working up from the beginning to the end in one steady crescendo. Wherever the score is tested, it shows something not to be met with hitherto either in Wagner's previous work or in that of his contemporaries. His imagination is at last unlocked.