No. 36.
[PDF] [[MusicXML]] [[audio/mpeg]]
Many other illustrations might be given of this harmonic intensification of themes.
6
It has to be admitted, however, that Wagner's use of the leit-motive presents some singularities, and is at times open to criticism. He undoubtedly introduces the motives more frequently than they are really needed; there is no necessity, for example, for the "Siegfried's horn" motive to be sounded at almost every appearance of Siegfried or every mention of his name. Debussy has made merry over this superfluity of reference, comparing it to a lunatic presenting his card to you in person. But we can easily forgive Wagner this little excess of zeal. He was doing something absolutely new for his time. He had a gigantic mass of material to unify, and this incessant recurrence of significant themes seemed to him the only way to do it. He could not foresee how familiar the operas and their motives would be to the whole musical world half a century later. In any case this peculiarity of his style can be passed over with a mere mention. Of more importance is his habit of making many of the motives so much alike that a certain amount of confusion is set up even in the minds of those who know the operas well. The "Servitude" motive, for example, is so like the opening of the Rhine Maidens' song that everyone goes astray over the two themes now and then in the first stages of his acquaintance with the Ring. Still more confusing is his habit of taking a motive that at first has only a particular meaning, and making it express a general concept, the result being that we frequently associate it with the wrong character. His mind was curiously like Bach's in this respect, that having fixed upon a figure that seemed to him an adequate symbol for an action, a person, an animal, or a material object, he would use it for all future phenomena of the same kind. But Bach's procedure is rather more logical, for his typical themes have as a rule a pictorial or semi-pictorial character, and so they can be applied without incongruity to a number of pictures of the same general order. A phrase that symbolises waves, for example, in one work may be legitimately employed to symbolise waves in another, for the theme itself is so constructed as to suggest the motion of waves: at least that is the intention. But Wagner necessarily has to find musical symbols for all kinds of things in his operas for which it is quite impossible to discover an unmistakable, self-explanatory musical equivalent. The symbol has therefore to be an arbitrary one; it has no claim to pictorial veracity, but we agree to accept it because it fulfils a useful musical purpose. The "Fire" motive conveys a real suggestion of fire; the Rhinegold prelude has certain qualities that make us willing to associate it with a mighty rolling river. But the "Ring" motive does not convey the slightest suggestion of a ring, nor has the "Gold" motive any resemblance to gold.
Wagner runs, then, a risk of being misunderstood, or not understood at all, when he takes an arbitrary symbol which we are willing to concede him in one case, and applies it to another. It would tax all the ingenuity of the thorough-going Wagnerian to justify, for instance, in the scene of the Norns in the Götterdämmerung, the employment of the "Sleep" motive that is inevitably associated in our minds with Wotan's parting from Brynhilde at the end of the Valkyrie. When Brynhilde is taking leave of Siegfried, in the second scene of the Götterdämmerung, and giving him Grane as a perpetual reminder of herself, the orchestra accompanies his words with the "Love" motive from the duet between Siegmund and Sieglinde in the first act of the Valkyrie. So profound has been the impression we have received from it there that it is impossible for us to associate it with any other pair of lovers; and we cannot help wondering what Siegmund and Sieglinde have to do with Siegfried and Brynhilde and Grane. When Hagen describes the coming of Siegfried down the Rhine, it is quite right that the orchestra should give out the typical Siegfried theme, but quite wrong, surely, that this theme should be combined with that of the Rhine Maidens from the Rhinegold. The intention presumably is that from the Rhine Maidens we are to infer the Rhine;[408] but the musical intelligence does not like having to diverge into deductive reasoning of this kind. Anyone who has learnt to associate the theme with the Rhine Maidens will naturally suppose either that they are to appear in person or that some allusion is to be made to them, neither of which things happens. The "Treaty" motive of the Rhinegold, again, has become so firmly associated in our minds with the agreement between Wotan and the giants that we involuntarily think of them when we hear it again in the orchestra during the swearing of Blood-brotherhood by Siegfried and Gunther (Götterdämmerung, vocal score, p. 92).
One of the most curious uses of the leit-motive is to be found in Siegfried (V. S. p. 35). Siegfried, pouring contempt on the idea that Mime can be his father, is telling him how he once saw the reflection of his own face in the brook:
Unlike unto thee
there did I seem:
as like as a toad
to a glittering fish.
There is excellent reason for accompanying the third line with the "Smithing" motive that so often characterises Mime; but what reason can there be for accompanying the fourth line with the "Waves" motive from the prelude to the Rhinegold? As it is not in the Rhine but in a brook that Siegmund has seen his reflection, the motive here can only be taken as symbolising not the waves of a particular and already familiar river—a procedure for which there might be some excuse—but waves in general, which is quite illegitimate. Wagner goes too far, as Bach used to go too far, in importing into the line a pictorial allusion that is not already there, and that we can only put there by an effort. For Bach also was in the habit of making his music argue, as it were, from one external fact to another. We can permit this within certain limits, but both Bach and Wagner sometimes go beyond all limits. When Bach has to set to music a stanza in which the faithful are spoken of as Christ's sheep (Beglückte Herde, Jesu Schafe, in the cantata Du Hirte Israel) he obviously aims at creating a pastoral atmosphere by the use of the oboes; and our imagination here is quite willing to accept the naïf translation of the religious idea into a pictorial image. But when Bach, possessed by the image of Jesus calling His disciples to be fishers of men (in the cantata Siehe, ich will viel Fischer aussenden), makes use of a motive of a type that he always employs to symbolise waves, we can only say, with all respect, that we had rather he did not ask us to deduce the necessity of waves from the fact that there are fish. So with this passage from Siegfried: we should be quite satisfied with the mere comparison between the toad and the fish; to lay it down with such portentous gravity that where there are fish there must necessarily be water is to reduce pictorialism to an absurdity.