To the third category belong the passages in which the voice simply sings the same melody as the orchestra, as on p. 177 of the vocal score ("Thy kingdom thou art showing," etc.); and to the fourth, those in which it sings a real counterpoint to the orchestra—not a mere piece of padding like the passage I have cited from pp. 7, 8 of the score, but a vocal line of genuine melodic interest—as in a good deal of the scene of the third Act through which there runs the melancholy cor anglais melody.
Tristan, in fact, in spite of the splendour of its orchestral polyphony, by no means exhibits Wagner's symphonic powers in their full evolution. The most wonderful of his works in this respect is the Götterdämmerung, the stupendous strength of which is beyond words and almost beyond belief. The world had not seen a musical brain working at such tremendous and long-sustained pressure since the days when the B minor Mass and the "Matthew Passion" were written; and even those masterpieces have not the continuity of texture of the Götterdämmerung, nor do they show so giant a hand at its work of unification. Turn almost where you will, the course of the drama is told with absolute clearness in the orchestra itself. Yet in spite of his concentrating so largely on the orchestra, the vocal parts have an extraordinary aptness; it would be hard to find a passage in the score as perfunctory as some that might be quoted from Tristan. The voice, it is true, is often used simply as another counterpoint among those of the orchestra; but as a counterpoint it generally has a dramatic appositeness and a melodic beauty of its own.
In Parsifal this tendency to make the orchestra the principal dramatic speaker goes so far that very frequently the vocal writing is thoroughly bad. Some writers have attributed this to a decline of mental power in Wagner's old age. I do not think that this is the correct explanation. I can see no general decadence of musical invention in the music of Parsifal: I am willing to believe that the peculiar emotional and intellectual world of the opera makes no appeal to many people; but the style as a whole is as admirably suited to that world as the styles of Tristan and the Meistersinger are to their respective subjects, and I for one see no failure of inspiration except in some of the choral writing in the first Act, where there is occasionally an undeniable touch of commonplace. Part of the admitted colourlessness of some of the vocal passages is to be accounted for, I think, by the utterly unmusical quality of the words. The defect is not in Wagner the musician but in Wagner the poet, who has forgotten for the moment several of the principles he had laid down in his prose works and put into successful practice in the six great operas of his prime. The text of Parsifal contains a large amount of quite unmusical matter, especially at the commencement. Many of the lines have evidently not roused the slightest interest in the composer. He knew that the orchestral part was alive, and always developing the emotional possibilities of the situation; and when he comes to an obviously impossible verbal patch,—necessary for the telling of the story, but containing no stimulus for the musician—he simply refuses to waste time or trouble upon it. Take as an example one of the very worst passages for the voice in the whole opera—the words of Parsifal just before the beginning of the transformation music in the first Act—
No. 37.
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PARSIFAL. I hardly stir, and yet I move apace.
Granting that the words are unfit for music, it is incredible that Wagner could not have found a more interesting musical outline for them than this, if it had occurred to him to try. But I take it that he would not try, or saw no necessity for trying; his mind was wholly bent on working out his orchestral picture, which, after all, is the only thing that really matters here as in so many other places. In other passages, such as the long recital of Kundry to Parsifal commencing "I saw the babe upon its mother's breast" (vocal score, p. 187), the orchestral part is a sort of small symphonic movement in itself, in which the voice mostly sings the same melody as the orchestra. Where it does not do this in the symphonic passages the vocal writing again becomes a trifle careless, as in the Good Friday music. The self-contained completeness of the orchestral part here is conclusively shown by its perfect adaptation to the concert room; and I take it that, feeling that virtually all he had to say had been said by the orchestra, Wagner worked out the mood of the scene with complete satisfaction to himself in that medium, and then added the vocal part as best he could—sometimes quite well, sometimes by no means well. He had largely given up, indeed, thinking simultaneously in terms of both voice and orchestra, as in the best parts of Tristan, the Meistersinger and the Götterdämmerung. Those who will may put this down to a decline of his musical powers. To me it seems more probable that as a musician he came to rely more and more on his most eloquent instrument, the orchestra. It may even be that his carelessness with regard to the text of Parsifal, his inclusion of a number of episodes that he must have known were essentially foreign to his own ideal of music, can be accounted for by his belief that he could rely on the expressiveness and the continuity of the orchestral web to see him through all the inevitable difficulties. As one looks at the score of Parsifal one can readily understand his desire to try his hand at a symphony in the last years of his life.