Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

The years 1848 and 1849 saw the climax of a great crisis both in Wagner's life and his art; it had been developing for two or three years before, and its reverberations did not wholly die away for some years after. All his life and his work at this time were, as I have already said, simply a violent purgation of the spirit—a nightmare agony from which he woke with a cry of relief. He shakes off the theatre, and faces the world on a new footing as a man. And in silence, unknown to everybody and almost to himself, he develops into a new musician. For the moment his mind is a jumble of art, ethics, politics and sociology. But as usual his artistic instincts guide him surely in the end. After many gropings in this direction and that, he settles down to the Ring drama, which he first of all plans, in 1848, in the form of a three-act opera with the title of Siegfried's Death. He falters a little even then, being obsessed by two other subjects, Jesus of Nazareth and Friedrich Barbarossa; but finally he rejects them both, the greater adaptability of the Siegfried drama for music being intuitively evident to him. The next twenty-six years are to be taken up with the working out of this gigantic theme, with Tristan and the Meistersinger as a kind of diversion in the middle of it; then comes the quiet end with Parsifal. I do not propose to discuss the philosophical—or pseudo-philosophical—ideas of any of these works. It is only as a musician that Wagner will live, and to a musician the particular philosophy or philosophies that he preached in the Ring and Tristan and Parsifal are matters of very small concern. Wagner himself was always inclined to over-estimate the importance of his own philosophising, and his vehement garrulity has betrayed both partisans and opponents into taking him too seriously as a thinker. Had he not left us his voluminous prose works and letters, indeed, we should never have suspected the hundredth part of the portentous meanings that he and his disciples read into his operatic libretti. To those who still see profound metaphysical revelations in the later works it may be well to point out that Wagner saw revelations equally inspired and inspiring in the earlier ones, which no one takes with excessive seriousness to-day on their dramatic side. The philosophising all smacks too much, for our taste, of the sentimental Germany of the mid-nineteenth century. For Wagner, Senta is "the quintessence of Woman [das Weib überhaupt], yet the still to-be-sought-for, the longed-for, the dreamed-of, the infinitely womanly Woman—let me out with it in one word: the Woman of the Future."[404] Tannhäuser was "the spirit of the whole Ghibelline race for every age, comprehended in a single, definite, infinitely moving form; but at the same time a human being right down to our own day, right into the heart of an artist full of life's longing."[405] "Lohengrin sought the woman who should have faith in him; who should not ask who he was and whence he came, but should love him as he was, and because he was what he appeared to himself to be. He sought the woman to whom he should not have to explain or justify himself, but who would love him unconditionally. Therefore he had to conceal his higher nature, for only in the non-revealing of this higher—or more correctly heightened—essence could he find surety that he was not wondered at for this alone, or humbly worshipped as something incomprehensible,—whereas his longing was not for wonder or adoration, but for the only thing that could redeem him from his loneliness and still his yearning—for Love, for being loved, for being understood through Love.... The character and the situation of this Lohengrin I now recognise with the clearest conviction as the type of the only really tragic material, of the tragic element of our modern life; of the same significance, indeed, for the Present as was the Antigone, in another relation, for the life of the Greek state.... Elsa is the unconscious, the un-volitional, into which Lohengrin's conscious, volitional being yearns to be redeemed; but that yearning is itself the unconscious, un-volitional in Lohengrin, through which he feels himself akin in being to Elsa. Through the capacity of this 'unconscious consciousness' as I myself experienced it in common with Lohengrin, the nature of Woman ... became more and more intimately revealed to me ... that true Womanhood that should bring to me and all the world redemption, after man's egoism, even in its noblest form, had voluntarily broken itself before her. Elsa, the Woman ... made me a full-fledged revolutionary. She was the spirit of the folk, for redemption by whom I too, as artist-man, was yearning."[406]

This seems all very remote from us now; one wonders how any one, even Wagner himself, could ever have taken these operatic puppets with such appalling seriousness. The Ring stands a little nearer to us; but no longer can we follow Wagner in his philosophising even there. For Wagner Siegfried was "the human being in the most natural and gayest fulness of his physical manifestation.... It was Elsa who had taught me to discover this man: to me he was the male-embodied [der männlich-verkörperte] spirit of the eternal and only involuntarily creative force [Geist der ewig und einzig zeugenden Unwillkür], of the doer of true deeds, of Man in the fulness of his most native strength and his most undoubted love-worthiness."[407] We can hardly regard Siegfried in that light to-day. As we meet with him in the libretto he is, as Mr. Runciman says, rather an objectionable young person; we cannot quite reconcile ourselves to his ingratitude and his super-athletic fatuousness; he reminds us too much of Anatole France's description of the burly, bullet-headed general in Les Dieux ont Soif—the sparrow's brain in the ox's skull. As we see him on the stage he is, under the best conditions, slightly ridiculous, a sort of overgrown Boy Scout. It is only in his music that he is so magnificently alive, so sure of our sympathy. Sensible musicians, indeed, do not trouble very much in these days about the metaphysics or the esoteric implications of the Wagnerian dramas. Wotan must stand or fall by his own dramatic grandeur and by the quality of the music that is given to him to sing, not by the degree of success with which he illustrates a particular theory of the Will. Tristan is none the better for all its Schopenhauerisms, natural or acquired; we may be thankful that it is none the worse for them.

Wagner's philosophical stock, indeed, was never a very large one. The "problems" of his operas are generally problems of his own personality and circumstances. His art, like his life, is all unconscious egoism. His problems are always to be the world's problems, his needs the world's needs. Women obsessed him in art as in life: they kindled fiery passion in man, or they "redeemed" him from passion, or they set a sorrow's crown of sorrows on his head by failing to redeem him. Passion, redemption, renunciation—these are the three dominant motives of Wagner's work; and wherever we look in that work we find himself. Indulgence—revulsion; hope—frustration; passion—renunciation; these are the antitheses that are constantly confronting us. In the Flying Dutchman, Vanderdecken-Wagner is redeemed by the woman who loves and trusts him unto death. Tannhäuser-Wagner fluctuates between the temptress and the saint. Lohengrin-Wagner seeks in vain the woman who shall love him unquestioningly. Wieland the Smith, the hero of a libretto he sketched in 1849, is again Wagner, lamed by life, but healed at last by another "redeeming" woman. Wotan-Wagner, finding the world going another way than his, wills his own destruction and that of the world. Tristan-Wagner finds love insatiable, and death the only end of all our loving. Sachs-Wagner renounces love. Parsifal-Wagner finds salvation in flight from sensual love. Always there is this oscillation between desire and the slaying of desire, between hope for the world and despair for the world. In 1848, in an hour of physical and mental joy in life, he conceives a blithe and exuberant Siegfried, the super-man of the future, striding joyously and victoriously through life. But the revulsion comes almost in a moment. He realises his solitariness as man and artist. "I was irresistibly driven to write something that should communicate this grievous consciousness of mine in an intelligible form to the life of the present. Just as with my Siegfried the strength of my yearning had borne me to the primal fount of the eternal purely-human; so now, when I found this yearning could never be stilled by modern life, and realised once again that redemption was to be had only in flight from this life, in escaping from its claims upon me by self-destruction, I came to the primal fount of every modern rendering of this situation—to the Man Jesus of Nazareth." Like Jesus, confronted with the materialism of the world, he longs for death, and reads a similar longing into all humanity.

So the oscillation goes on to the very end of his days. There is no need, no reason, to discuss the "philosophy" of such a mind. He is no philosopher: he is simply a tortured human soul and a magnificent musical instrument. All that concerns us to-day is the quality of the music that was wrung from the instrument under the torture.

2

The most astounding fact in all Wagner's career was probably the writing of Siegfried's Death in 1848. That drama is practically identical with the present Götterdämmerung; and we can only stand amazed at the audacity of the conception, the imaginative power the work displays, the artistic growth it reveals since Lohengrin was written, and the total breach it indicates with the whole of the operatic art of his time. But Siegfried's Death was impossible in the idiom of Lohengrin; and Wagner must have known this intuitively. This is no doubt the real reason for his writing no music for six years, from the completion of Lohengrin in August 1847 to the commencement of work on the Rhinegold at the end of 1853. His artistic instincts always led him infallibly, no matter what confusion might reign in the rest of his thinking. He conceives the idea of the Meistersinger, for instance, in 1845, just after finishing Tannhäuser. But a wise and kindly fate intervenes and turns him aside from the project. He was not ripe for the Meistersinger, either poetically or musically, as we can see not only by a comparison of his later musical style with that of Tannhäuser, but by comparing the sketch of the drama that he wrote in 1845 with the revised drafts of 1861. It was his original intention, again, to introduce Parsifal into the third Act of Tristan; but his purely artistic instincts were too sound to permit him to adhere to that plan. How unripe he was in 1848 for a setting of Siegfried's Death hardly needs demonstration now. The swift and infallibly telling strokes with which he has drawn Hagen and Gutrune in the Götterdämmerung, for example, were utterly beyond him then; it took twenty years' evolution before he could attain to that luminousness and penetration of vision, that rapidity and certainty of touch. So much, again, of the tragic atmosphere in which the Götterdämmerung is enveloped comes from the subtle harmonic idiom that Wagner had evolved by that time, that it is hard to imagine the extent of his probable failure had he persisted in setting the text to music in 1848. The lyrical style of Lohengrin, the leisurely spun tissue of that lovely work, were neither drastic enough, close enough, nor elastic enough for Siegfried's Death. And of this he must have had a dim consciousness.

So he puts the musical part of his task on one side for six years, broods continually over the subject, finds it growing within him, and at last shapes it into not one opera but four. When he begins work upon the music of the Rhinegold he is a new being. His imagination has developed to an extent that is without a parallel in the case of any other musician. The characters and the milieu of the Rhinegold are themselves evidence of the audacious sweep of his vision: he undertakes to re-create in music gods and men and giants, creatures of the waters and creatures of the bowels of the earth; the music has to flood the scene now with water, now with fire, with the murky vapours of the underworld and the serene air of the heights over against Valhalla. Never before had any composer dreamed of an opera so rich in all varieties of emotion, of action, of atmosphere. The practice he had in the Rhinegold developed his powers still further: in the Valkyrie the painting grows surer and surer, the imagination sweeps on to conceptions beyond anything that any musician before him would have thought possible: in Siegfried there is an absolute exultation of style; the music seems to dance and cry aloud out of pure joy in its own strength and beauty. His melody has already become terser and more suggestive in the Rhinegold, and has lost much of its earlier rhythmic formality. His harmonic range, while narrow enough compared with that of Tristan and the Götterdämmerung, has yet developed greatly. He dares anything in pursuit of his ideal of finding in his music the full and perfect counterpart of the characters and the scenes; that endless E flat chord at the commencement of the Rhinegold prelude is an innovation the audacity of which we can hardly estimate to-day.

It has been objected that the melody of the Rhinegold is on the miniature side, and that the score has little of the grand surge and sweep of the later operas. It may be so, but the style of the music seems admirably suited to the broad and simple outlines of this drama and the relatively simple psychology of the beings who take part in it,—beings who are now taking only the first step along the path that is to lead them all into such tragic complications. But in any case Wagner was obeying a sound instinct when he abandoned the broader style of Lohengrin in favour of the seemingly shorter-breathed style of the Rhinegold. It was the consequence of his intuition that his new dramatic ideas demanded a new musical form; we have to remember that everything he says on this topic in Opera and Drama is the outcome of his reflection upon Siegfried's Death and the best manner of its setting. The older forms of opera being inapplicable here, he had to devise a new method of unifying his vast design. He found the solution of his problem in an application to opera of the symphonic web-weaving of Beethoven; but for this he needed short and extremely plastic motives. That as yet he cannot weave these motives, and the episodical matter between them, into so continuous a tissue as that of the later works is only natural; to expect him to have done so would be as unreasonable as to expect the texture of Beethoven's second symphony to be as closely woven as that of his fifth. But Wagner knew he had a wonderful new instrument in his grasp, and he did well to learn the full use of it by cautious practice.