After this he develops steadily and rapidly until a fresh check is given him, it being borne in upon him that neither his imagination nor his technique is equal to the creation of the new world that he feels stirring vaguely within him. But for a time all goes well. The Flying Dutchman had been finished in the winter of 1841. Tannhäuser was fully ready by April 1845, and Lohengrin by March 1848—just after he had completed his thirty-fifth year. In these seven years he exhausted all the possibilities of the style he had made his own; after Lohengrin he instinctively feels that he is at the end of the one path and the beginning of a new one, though where this is to lead him he has as yet no inkling. Both the later operas represent a gradual clarification and intensification of the style he had tentatively used in the Flying Dutchman. The breach with the older opera is even yet not complete; disguise the conventional features of it as he will, they are still recognisable; aria and duet and ensemble are still there, though they merge almost imperceptibly into each other. But if Tannhäuser and Lohengrin are in large part still the old opera, they are the old opera transfigured. The musical web spreads itself more and more broadly over the whole poetic material. Recitative virtually disappears; the text still retains a number of non-emotional moments for which no really lyrical equivalent can be found, but what would have been recitative naked and unashamed in Rienzi is now almost fully-clothed song—the address of the Landgrave to the Knights in the Hall of Song scene is an excellent illustration. The choral writing attains an unaccustomed breadth and sonority, and at the same time the chorus becomes a more efficient psychological instrument. The harmonic tissue becomes fuller. The melodic line becomes more and more expressive and sensitive. The orchestration begins to give a distinctive colour to both personages and scenes. A very ardent and penetrating imagination, the imagination of the born dramatist, seeing all his characters as creatures of flesh and blood, is now playing upon the material offered to the musician by the poet. Each scene suggests by its colouring its own indoor or outdoor setting, the hour of the day, the time of the year; yet each opera as a whole has a different light and is set in a different atmosphere from the others. The Wagner of this period reaches the supreme height of his powers in Lohengrin; and as one watches that diaphanous and finely-spun melodic web unfold itself, one is almost tempted for the moment to regret that the dæmon within him drove him on so relentlessly to another style. No one, of course, can be anything but thankful that Wagner evolved the splendid symphonic-operatic style of the second half of his life—the most serviceable operatic instrument that any musician has yet hit upon. But the more purely lyrical style of Lohengrin is so exquisitely satisfying in itself that one would have been grateful had he turned back to it for a moment in later days, when his melodic invention was in its fullest glory. The main burden of the expression, in the later work, shifts more and more to the side of the orchestra. In Lohengrin the voice is still the statue and the orchestra the pedestal. The whole work is the product of that equipoise of all the faculties that is often observable in composers at the end of their second period, a serenity resting upon their music that it never wins again in the more troubled after-years, when the soul is more at war with itself, and the lips can hardly find language for the pregnant images that crowd to them.
But vast as the imaginative growth had been from Rienzi to Lohengrin, it seems almost like a mere marking time in comparison with the subsequent development. Most instructive in this respect are the alterations Wagner made in his earlier works in later life. The Flying Dutchman ends with the destruction of the Dutchman's ship as Senta leaps into the sea. The stage directions in the first edition run thus: "In the glow of the setting sun the glorified forms of the Dutchman and Senta are seen rising above the wreck, clasped in each other's arms, soaring heavenward"; and the final page of the opera in its original form consisted of the "Redemption" motive followed by the motive of the Dutchman, the opera ending with the latter. When Wagner revised the work some years later, he was conscious of the abruptness and inconclusiveness of this ending. His pictorial imagination saw the transfigured forms of Senta and the Dutchman more vividly, and the more luminous vision found expression in the great stroke of genius with which the opera as we now have it ends. The thundering theme of the Dutchman no longer has the last word; the fortissimo swell of the full orchestra suddenly breaks, and in a slower tempo there steals out in the soft, pure tones of the wood-wind and harps the theme of "Redemption" in the form it first assumes in Senta's ballad, but with an unexpected heavenward ascent in the violins at the finish—
No. 22.
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The effect is precisely as if the clouds had parted, and the figures of the Dutchman and Senta were seen soaring aloft in their purified and transfigured form.[403]
As the first version of the Faust Overture (1840) has not been published, it is impossible to compare it with the version we now have, which was made in 1855; but we may be certain that the comparison would prove as interesting as that between the earlier and the later versions of the Flying Dutchman finale. But the new Venusberg music that he wrote for the Paris production of Tannhäuser (1861) shows as emphatically as the altered Flying Dutchman ending how immeasurably greater than all his development from Die Feen to Lohengrin was the development from Lohengrin to Tristan—for it was in the Tristan period that he made this wonderful addition to Tannhäuser, the effect of which is to make the remainder of the score seem almost cold in comparison, a pale moon against a fiery sun. Had Wagner died after Lohengrin he would still have been the greatest operatic composer of his time. But the work of the later years is so stupendous in every respect, imaginative, inventive, and technical, that even Lohengrin seems hardly to be the product of the same mind.