Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

by force to draw death to him,

and with his life to end his cruel torment.)

How incredibly careless is the construction here—the long, involved sentences, the parentheses, the separation of substantive and verb by several lines! It is this absence of poetic concentration that makes Parsifal a trifle langweilig at times; for no matter how expressive Wagner may make the orchestral music, he cannot quite reconcile us to the frequent flatness of the vocal writing and the difficulty we often have in getting the sense, or even the grammatical construction, of the words. That Wagner at the end of his life could put together a text like Parsifal after having made the poems of Tristan and the Ring is not in the least a proof of mental collapse, but only of the almost insuperable difficulties in the way of finding a perfect compromise between music and dramatic poetry. He was fortunate enough, in the case of Tristan, to hit upon a subject that was comparatively easy to concentrate. Two duties, it must be remembered, an operatic poem has to perform: it has to provide the composer with opportunities for emotional expression, and it has to make a story clear to the spectator. The ideal text would be that in which the action was implicit in the emotion, that is to say, one in which there was no need for any explanation, through the mouth of this or that actor, of events that were happening off the stage or that had occurred before the drama began. It is when the composer has to interrupt his purely emotional outpouring in order to allow the poet to become explanatory that he realises the difficulty of making his opera musical throughout. Even in Tristan Wagner could not wholly dispense with a certain amount of explanation, in the first act, of the events in Ireland and Cornwall that have led up to the situation in which Tristan and Isolde now find themselves. The music in consequence halts decidedly at times; all the art of the composer cannot disguise the fact that he is momentarily being held up by the exigencies of the stage poet. In the Ring, as it was first drafted, Wagner was faced with the same problem, but he solved it in another way. Siegfried's Death was to be merely the climax of a long sequence of tragic events. Without some knowledge of these events, however, the spectator would be unable to understand the final tragedy. So Wagner resorted to the device of making the characters themselves recapitulate the earlier stages of the story, in much the same way that Isolde, in the first act of Tristan, tells Brangaene—for the benefit of the audience, of course—all about the coming of Tristan to Ireland, his slaying of Morold, her nursing of the wounded Cornish hero, his wooing her as bride for King Marke, and so on. In the opening scene of Siegfried's Death the Norns tell each other—again for the benefit of the audience—how Alberich ravished the gold from the Rhine, made a ring from it, and enslaved the Nibelung race; how the ring was stolen, and Alberich himself became a thrall; how the giants built Valhalla for the gods, and, denied their promised reward, got possession of the ring that the gods had stolen from Alberich; how there was born a free hero, destined to redeem the gods from their bondage; how Siegfried slew the dragon and wakened Brynhilde from her sleep. Having made all this clear in an introductory scene, Wagner raises the curtain upon Siegfried and Brynhilde. Later, Hagen tells Gunther,—all for the sake of the audience—how Wotan begot the Volsung race; how the twin-born Volsung pair Siegmund and Sieglinde had for son the mighty hero, Siegfried, who "closed the ravenous maw" of the dragon with his "conquering sword." In the next scene Siegfried explains to the audience—viâ Hagen and Gunther—how he came into possession of the tarnhelm and the ring, whereupon Hagen describes the virtues of the former. In the third scene the Valkyries[409] fly to the solitary Brynhilde and learn of her awakening by Siegfried, and of the intervention of Wotan in the combat between Siegmund and Hunding. In the first scene of the second Act Alberich tells Hagen how he won the gold and forged the ring, and compelled Mime to make the tarnhelm for him; how the ring was ravished from him by the gods and given to the giants; how one of the latter guarded it in the form of a dragon; how Siegfried slew the latter and Mime. In the second scene of the third Act Siegfried tells the Gibichungs—the audience overhearing—how Mime tended the dying Sieglinde in the wood, saved her child, and brought him up to his own craft of smith; how he (Siegfried) forged his father's sword anew and did the dragon to death; how the bird warned him of Mime's plot against his life, told him of the powers of the ring and tarnhelm, and sent him to rouse Brynhilde from her sleep on the fire-girt rock.

Wagner must have felt the clumsiness of this method of constant explanation, and anticipated that it would impede the free flow of his music; while in any case the audience would probably still not be quite clear as to certain points. So, as all the world knows, he first of all prefixed to Siegfried's Death another drama—The Young Siegfried—designed to put the bearing of all the stages of the action beyond the possibility of misunderstanding. But again the fear haunts him that there may still be some things insufficiently accounted for; so even The Young Siegfried has to have a certain number of pages of explanation. The fact of Siegfried being there at all has to be explained by Mime, as well as the further facts of the death of Siegmund in battle and the perishing of Sieglinde in giving birth to Siegfried. In the next scene, almost the whole story of what afterwards became the Rhinegold and the Valkyrie is told afresh in the competition of questions and answers between the Wanderer and Mime. In the first scene of the third Act, we have the completion of the story of the Valkyrie given to the audience in the dialogue between the Wanderer and Erda—how the earth-goddess bore a daughter, Brynhilde, to Wotan, how she flouted the god's will, and for punishment was doomed to sleep on the fiery fell. Not content with all this, Wagner afterwards stages, in a third opera, the Valkyrie, the whole of the action that has been told and told again in Siegfried and the Götterdämmerung, from the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde down to the punishment of Brynhilde. Even here he has to find room for explanations; in the first scene of the second Act Wotan tells the audience—viâ Brynhilde—the whole story of the rape of the gold by Alberich and all the events that followed from it. Finally Wagner comes to the conclusion that the whole action, from its beginning in the depths of the Rhine, had better be put visibly upon the stage; and so the Rhinegold, the story of which has been already told more than once, is prefixed to the Valkyrie. But in spite of his having shown everything so completely that nothing remains to be explained by word of mouth, he still retains all the explanations he had inserted in the three other dramas of the tetralogy. No doubt he was aware of their superfluity, but shrank, as he might well do, from the enormous task of reconstructing the whole work yet again. He may have argued, too, that as each of the operas would have to stand by itself on the particular occasion of its performance, it would be no disadvantage to have the events of the preceding evening fully explained, even at the cost of some otherwise needless repetition.

I have not gone over this long familiar ground merely to tell again a thrice-told tale, but to bring into higher relief the fundamental difficulty of the musical dramatist who is working along the Wagnerian lines—the difficulty of taking up the whole of the poet's work into the being of music, when the poet, in order to leave no room for misunderstanding on the part of the audience of the reason for the visible actions and the audible sentiments of the actors, has to pad out his poem with a certain amount of matter that is explanatory of the past rather than emotional in the present. So desperate a device as the visible representation in three or four evenings of every stage of a dramatic action was obviously not to be resorted to again. It was equally impossible to reduce the story of Parsifal to the highly concentrated form into which he had managed to cast Tristan. So he had to do what it had been his first impulse to do in the Ring—elucidate the visible action of the moment by a narrative of all that had happened before the action, or that particular stage of the action, began, and trust to the orchestra to maintain the musical interest by means of the interplay of leit-motives. Hence the lumbering stage technique of the first Act of Parsifal, and the raison d'être for the endless garrulity of Gurnemanz. That venerable worthy is not a character; he is merely a walking and talking guide book; he stands outside the real drama, somewhat in the style of the compère in a revue; and the proof of his almost complete nullity is that Wagner has been utterly unable to characterise him musically. Every other character in his operas—even the minor personages, such as Kurvenal and David and Gutrune—exists for us as a definite personality, someone drawn in the round in music as effectively as a painter or sculptor could have shown him forth. But even Wagner has been unable to invent a single phrase that shall be characteristic of Gurnemanz and Gurnemanz alone. He is the one Wagnerian character who simply does not exist for musicians. As far as his music is concerned he has neither mental characteristics nor bodily form; we remember him solely for his interminable talk.

9

If Wagner failed in his struggle with the musical-dramatic form, it was the failure of a Titan in a struggle that only a Titan would have ventured upon. Form and the perfection of form are simple enough matters for the smaller musical intelligences, for whom form means merely a symmetrical mould to be filled. It is for the greater minds that the problem of form is always a torture, for their ideas are perpetually outgrowing the mould. In sheer fertility of idea Wagner was probably the greatest musician the world has ever seen. It was of the very essence of his work that there should be no repetition either of mood or of procedure. Without, indeed, making the necessarily futile attempt to decide which is per se the finer order of musical mind, the dramatic or the symphonic, it may be confidently said that to a dramatist—or at all events a dramatist like Wagner—there is permitted no such easy returning upon his own tracks, no half-mechanical manipulation of the same order of ideas time after time, as is possible to the worker in the stereotyped instrumental forms. Great as is the inventive power of a Bach, a Beethoven or a Brahms, it cannot be denied that much of their work is simply a varied exploitation of a relatively small number of formulas,—that a very small amount of thematic invention can be made to go a very long way under the guidance of an established pattern. Nor, broadly speaking, is the same intensity of imagination, or the same scope of imagination, required to invent a hundred ordinary fugal or symphonic themes as to find a hundred themes that are the veritable musical counterparts of as many human beings. The family resemblance between "subjects" that is permitted to a Bach or a Beethoven is not permitted to a Wagner: the dramatist's work must be a perpetual re-creation—and a definite, unmistakable re-creation—of the life around him in all its multiformity. In this sense Wagner is without an equal among composers; never has there been a brain so apt at limning character and suggesting the milieu in music. We can speak of the Wagnerian imagination as we can speak of the Shakespearean imagination; Wagner's is the only imagination in music that can be compared with Shakespeare's in dramatic fertility and comprehensiveness. It pours itself over the whole surface of a work, into every nook and cranny of it. It is a vast mind, infinite in its sympathies, protean in its creative power. For sheer drastic incisiveness of theme he has not his equal in all music; each vision instinctively, without an effort, finds its own inevitable utterance. In the works of his great period every motive has a physiognomy as distinct from all others as the face of any human being is distinct from all other faces. The motives are unforgettable once we have heard them. They depict their subject once for all: who to-day, enormously as the apparatus of musical expression has developed since Wagner's time, would dare to try to find better symbols than those he has invented for the tarnhelm, the fire, the Rhine, the sword, the dragon, the potion that brings oblivion to Siegfried; or for any of the men and women of the operas—for Wotan, for Siegfried, for Mime, for the "reine Thor," for Herzeleide, for Hagen, for Gutrune, for Brynhilde, and for a dozen others? To hear any of these themes to-day, after a generation or more of daily familiarity with them, is like looking at a medallion of a hundred years ago in which not a point of the outline or a single plane of the relief has been blurred, nor a single grain of its first sharp milling been lost. They are what they are because they combine in the fullest measure and in impeccable proportion the two great preservatives of all artistic work,—a luminous personal vision and consummate style.