Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

This is the pictorial instinct of Wagner seen in its totality. In its detail it is equally marvellous. Each scene is so bathed in its own appropriate light and colour, and strewn with its own peculiar shadows, that the music itself, apart from the scenic setting, is eloquent of the place and the hour of the action. In Wagner's music, as in Wolf's, one is conscious not only of the locality and the person and the race: one can almost tell the time of day. Music like that at the awakening of Brynhilde would go with nothing but a mountain height in blinding sunlight. Hunding is not physically darker to the eye than he is to the ear in that marvellous tuba motive that accompanies his first entry in the Valkyrie. The gait of Siegfried's music is as rapid as Mime's; but the differing stature of the two men is unmistakable from the music alone. One might multiply instances by the hundred of effects of realistic differentiation obtained not merely by orchestral colour, but by something subtly inter wrought into the very texture of the music. (The Hunding theme, for example, is "black" and sinister even on the pianoforte.) It is just this faculty of seeing everything with the most precise of painter's eyes, and then finding the infallibly right musical correlative of it, that enables Wagner to achieve such variety among pictures that are in essence the same. How many and how different woodlands there are in his music, how many degrees of sunlight, how many shades and qualities of darkness! The storm that maddens Mime after the exit of Siegfried is a very different storm from the one through which Siegmund rushes to the house of Hunding. What other man could have written two Rhine-Maidens' trios like those in the Rhinegold and the Götterdämmerung, each so liquid, so mobile, so sweet with the primal innocence of the world, and therefore so alike in many respects, yet so absolutely different?

So it comes about that without any tone-painting in the ordinary acceptation of the word, Wagner succeeds in bringing the visible universe before our eyes in a way and to an extent that no other musician has done. Of tone-painting pure and simple there is practically none in Tristan. Wagner is here concerned solely with a man and woman; yet how actual he makes every scene in which they move, and this without a single realistic stroke. In the garden scene he uses none of the conventional musical recipes—there is no obvious rustling of leaves, no sighing of the breeze, no purling of the brooks,—yet how the magic of the garden and of the hour steals through us and intoxicates us! How hot and dry the air has become in the third Act,—as dry to us as to the parched tongue of the wounded man alone on the castle walls, with the mid-day sun turning the blue sea beyond to a vibrating, blinding haze. And—to me the most wonderful of all—how sinister is the atmosphere he creates through virtually the whole of the Götterdämmerung; how, though indeed it is mostly set in the daylight, one feels that here among these Gibichungs, with gaunt, grim Hagen for weaver of the web of fate, the very earth has lost the radiant smile it had in Siegfried's forest and on Brynhilde's mountain top. The sun no longer warms, the Rhine no longer laughs and glints and gladdens. And finally, how exquisitely adapted is the melodic and harmonic idiom of Parsifal,—so smoothly flowing, so full of melting and caressing tenderness,—to that static world from which, with the purging from it of so much human passion, so much even of the ordinary physical energy of humanity too has gone. For this, as for everything else, he found the right, the only musical equivalent, without seeking for it. His visions painted themselves.

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Even the best of Wagnerians to-day become a little impatient at the occasional longueurs in his operas. Not merely does he plan them on a scale that makes it almost impossible to give some of them in their entirety under ordinary conditions, but he sometimes lapses into a prolixity that is regrettable or maddening according to the frame of mind we happen to be in at the moment. Most of his prolixity is to be accounted for by that bad text-construction to which I have drawn attention. Music, let it be said again and again, is primarily an emotional art, and the less it has to do with mere dramatic explanation the better. We can never tire of Wotan pouring out his heart in loving farewell to his child; but we can hear Wotan tell the long story of his financial and matrimonial troubles once too often. We could listen as often to Kundry's story of Herzeleide as to the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony or the "Kleine Nacht-Musik" of Mozart; but wild horses would not drag us to the theatre to listen to old Gurnemanz's too-often-told tale of Amfortas and Klingsor, and how the sacred spear was lost. Yet though the poet Wagner is generally answerable for the occasional tedious quarters-of-an-hour in the operas, the musician Wagner is not wholly free from blame. He never managed to get quite rid of the slow-footedness that was characteristic of his music from the first; to the very end he sometimes takes rather longer to drive his points home than is absolutely necessary; and in these more rapid and impatient days that goes against him sorely. He is often reproached with rhythmical monotony. There is some truth in the charge, which as a whole he himself would probably not have taken the trouble to repel. There is a passage in one of his letters in which he recognises that his music is not so rhythmical as it might be, but he holds that some lack of rhythmical variety is inseparable from an ideal of dramatic music such as his. As I have attempted to show, he relied much more on harmonic effect than on rhythm, the latter being more peculiarly the instrument of the symphonic composer, while harmonic change is more suited to depict the varying aspects of a dramatic action. But against the comparative regularity of his rhythms is to be set his sense of style. He had an intuitive knowledge of how and when to break up a melodic line that was in danger of becoming too uniform. One of the simplest illustrations of this may be seen in the Parsifal Prelude (vocal score, p. 5, lines 1 and 2); just at the moment when we are beginning to suspect that the theme of "Faith" has been repeated quite often enough and to dread the further repetition that has already got under weigh, he alters the signature from 6/4 to 9/4, and gives a new rhetorical turn to the familiar melody. In Wotan's Abschied, again, we are unconscious of the uniformity of the rhythm in phrase after phrase, so consummate is the art with which the interest is always being transferred from one part of the combined vocal and orchestral tissue to another, and so beautifully planned is not only each section in itself but what may be called the exposition and development and cadence of the whole scene. Wagner could afford to dispense with the smaller rhythmical manœuvring of individual musical phrases; he had the much greater faculty of endowing long scenes and even whole operas with a vast dramatic rhythm of their own. Hundreds of smaller composers can give this page or that of their music a rhythmic piquancy that Wagner could never have attained on the same small scale; but not one of them could achieve such a rhythm as that of the second Act of Tristan, with its slow, steady, imperceptible transition from night and its rapture to daylight and its cruel disillusioning glare.

Wagner's prolixity, again, is not the flabby dulness of a mind that is merely maundering on and on from sheer incompetence to get to grips with the essentials of an emotion, but the over-copiousness of an inexhaustibly rich brain. And if this quality of his has its occasional bad side, we do well to remember that it is accountable also for some of his most gigantic achievements in expression. Were it not for the endless inventive power and the never-failing sense of beauty in it, a work like Tristan, that never pauses till the last drop of bitter-sweet juice has been squeezed out of the theme, would be hardly bearable. Like Bach, Wagner could never conceive any emotion without intensifying it to the utmost. The barest hint of joy in one of Bach's texts will set him carolling like a lark; the barest hint of mortality will bedim his music with all the tears of all the universe for its dead. Wagner has the same insatiable hunger for expression. In Tristan in particular every emotion is developed to its furthest limit of poignancy. The passion of love becomes almost delirium; when Tristan, in the third Act, sings of the thirst caused by his wound, our very mouths, our very bones, seem dried as if by some burning sirocco blowing from the desert; when the sick man praises Kurvenal for his devotion it is a cosmic pæan to friendship that he sings. In hundreds of other cases it is not by elaboration of speech that he makes his overwhelming effect, but by a sort of volcanic concentration. Mingled rage and grief and despair have never found such colossal expression anywhere, in any art, as in those few bars given to the frustrated and maddened Wotan after Fricka has foiled his plan for the protection of Siegmund in the fight (the Valkyrie, vocal score, pp. 118, 119). Pathos will never find more touching accents than those of Brynhilde in her last great scene with Wotan (Valkyrie, pp. 292, 293); few things in all music convey such a sense of tears as the strange salt tones of the oboe and cor anglais here. For concentrated fury there is nothing to compare with the outburst of the bound and impotent Alberich as he dismisses the Nibelungs who have witnessed his shame (the Rhinegold, pp. 199-201); technically this is one of the most effective crescendi in all Wagner's works. His imagination always takes fire at a single touch, a single suggestion, and there is no staying it until the fire has burnt itself completely out. In the Siegfried Idyl he has only to think of the child whose coming meant so much to him, and all the fountains of human tenderness are unsealed; this is not an individual father musing over his child's cradle, but all nature crooning a song of love for its little ones. It is this intensification of every emotion he has to express that makes each of his characters, like Shakespeare's, seem the epitome of that particular phase of human nature. Tristan and Isolde are the world's most passionate and most tragic lovers: the opera is the very quintessence of the egoism of sexual love. So with a score of other characters. The last word—for our own day at any rate—in god-like majesty has been uttered in Wotan; the last word of womanly gentleness and sweetness in Eva and Gutrune; the last word of tragic womanhood in Sieglinde; the last word of superb womanhood in Brynhilde; the last word of mellow and kindly middle age in Hans Sachs; the last word of scheming feebleness in Mime; the last word of elemental savagery in the Valkyries; the last word of youthful irresponsibility in the Meistersinger apprentices; the last word of human grimness in Hagen; the last word of dog-like devotion in Kurvenal. The character-drawing is endless in its variety and infallible in its touch.

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Parsifal stands in a class apart from all the other works of Wagner. Its characterisation is not individual but symbolic; Amfortas and Parsifal and Kundry and Klingsor are not men and women whom we might meet any day in the flesh, but simply types of human aspiration or failure. We have outgrown the mental world of the work; the religious symbolism of it, quâ religious symbolism, leaves many of us unimpressed; yet the basic emotional stuff of it all is enduring, and we must not allow ourselves to be set against the opera because the forms in which Wagner has embodied a durable philosophy are themselves of a time instead of all time. Evidently the symphonist in him was at this stage overpowering the dramatist. The symphonist can safely deal with types or abstractions; the dramatist can only deal with individuals. Wagner has made the blunder of trying to translate the most delicate, the most esoteric perceptions into the language of the theatre, of setting symbols upon the stage. The force of a poetic symbol lies wholly in the imagination: as soon as a dramatist or a painter tries to set it visibly before us, the free flight of the imagination is curbed by the physical obviousness, the physical limitations, of the figure that is put before the eye; the universal cannot be perceived for the particular. Wagner's root idea in Parsifal was to show us, in Kundry, a living symbol of the dual nature of woman, half-angel and half-beast, in turns sensual and repentant, the destroyer and the saviour of man. But it is precisely symbols of this kind, cutting down to the obscurest depths of human psychology, that cannot retain their vast suggestiveness after they have been narrowed down to the personality of a single actor. We no longer see the eternal and infernal womanly; it is only a German prima-donna, stout of build and heavy of movement, that we see upon the stage. So with Parsifal himself. Mr. Huneker has called him "that formidable imbecile." So might we style St. Francis of Assisi, or the Buddha, or any other of the simple wise ones of the world, if we persist in looking at them through unsympathetic and unimaginative eyes. The conception of Parsifal is fine enough in itself—an unstained soul made divinely wise by its very simplicity, its love, its pity. But a character of this kind should be left to the imagination, or to music to suggest to the imagination: it is impossible to realise it behind the footlights in the person of an actor. A Parsifal is a figure for the quiet of one's chamber, not for a crowded theatre lying the other side of the box office. Hundreds of people must have felt, as I have done for twenty years, that a good deal of Parsifal affects us more deeply at home than it ever does in the theatre, the loss of the orchestral colour being more than made up for by the gain in imaginative intensity. And the difficulty of making such a character vital and credible upon the stage is increased when he is made the centre of a quasi-religious ritual that has long ceased to have a meaning for many people.

But in spite of it all, Parsifal is a masterpiece. The story of it seems to arouse a violent antipathy in some people, who apparently regard it as an immoral work. The pleasant little game of Parsifal-baiting began with Nietzsche, who said that he despised everyone who did not regard the opera as an outrage on morals.