Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

APPENDIX B
WAGNER AND SUPER-WAGNER

[This appendix is a slight expansion of an article that originally appeared in the Musical Times for February 1913. One or two points in it have already been dwelt upon in the foregoing pages, but I have ventured to reprint the article here, even at the cost of a little repetition, because in this form it presents concisely and compactly the argument as to the possibility of a further development from Wagner's own principles.]

I

It would be very interesting if some enterprising interviewer in the shades could procure for us Wagner's opinion upon the course of events in music in general and the opera in particular during the thirty years that have elapsed since his death. He would probably cling with his characteristic tenacity to the views he held in his life-time; but if he were candid he would have to admit that the old problems have latterly taken on a new aspect. The theories he expounded so eagerly in his prose works and illustrated so eloquently in his music-dramas have not passed through the fire of thirty years' criticism without suffering some loss of vitality. Supposing a brain as comprehensive, as variously gifted, and as forceful as his were now to take up the problem of opera, seeing it all afresh as Wagner did, and combining, like him, all the potencies of the best instrumental and operatic music of his day into one vast synthesis, what would be the new form he would strike out—for that a new form is now a necessity is evident on a priori and a posteriori grounds. Music could no more stand still after Wagner than after Bach or Beethoven; a new humanity must find a new expression for its own reading of life. And a survey of the opera since Wagner's death leaves no room for doubt that the emotions and aspirations of the new humanity have not yet found the form most appropriate to them. Wagner has no more succeeded in making his special type of musical drama the norm for latter generations than Bach succeeded in imposing the forms of his music upon the art of the epochs that have followed him. In each case the spirit endures, but not the form. Some elements of the Wagnerian form have of course become, as far as we can judge, permanent factors in opera in general,—the use of leading themes, for example, and the system of entrusting a melodious, flowing, quasi-symphonic development to the orchestra. But not even these elements are recognised as indispensable constituents of opera everywhere: Debussy, for instance, discards both of them in the greater part of his Pelleas and Melisande. For the rest, the departures from Wagner's precepts are noticeable enough, especially as regards the poetic basis of opera. Putting aside the negligible work of his second-rate imitators, it would be hard to point to a single opera by a man of original genius that follows Wagner in his reliance upon the primitive myth as the clearest and most fundamental expression of the "purely human," or in his planning of the subject so as to reduce to a minimum the less musical matter in the text, and make the whole opera, as far as may be, a pure expression of nothing but "soul-states."

II

Wagner's famous formula was that hitherto the means in opera (the music) had been taken for the end, and the end (the drama) for the means. His own avowed object was to restore to the drama the right of pre-eminence in opera. His claim to have done so is only valid if we define music and drama in the rather limited senses he had in view when framing his theory. His proposition is correct enough if we take it to mean that music must not, as in the Italian opera, occupy the ear to the exclusion of all worth in the story and all psychological interest in the characters. In the sense that he made opera acceptable to men's heads and hearts as well as their ears, Wagner certainly did make the drama the end, and music the means. But viewed more broadly, his work was really the greatest glorification of music that the theatre had ever seen: for while he enormously increased the expressive scope of the music, he cut out of drama more than half the elements that give that word a meaning apart from music. Drama, with him, meant in the last analysis little more than the best possible text for theatre music. He would have denied this interpretation of his theories and practice, but all the same that is the upshot of them. "Word-speech," he argues, is merely the organ of the intellect, and has therefore the right of entry into music—the emotional art par excellence—only so far as it is necessary to give coherence to the rich but indeterminate flood of feeling that music pours out; and music can, and ought, only to ally herself with words that have themselves an emotional content. It was for this reason that he rejected historical and political subjects, and found the ideal "stuff" for opera in the "purely human" legends of the folk; and in A Communication to my Friends he traces in close detail the gradual growth of his perceptions in this respect. What was hidden from him, what, indeed, he persistently denies, is now evident to everyone else,—that the change in his theories and practice was due to the musician in him slowly asserting himself with greater and greater urgency, and finally demanding imperatively a form of text that would allow his gift of musical expression the utmost possible freedom. It must always be borne in mind that Wagner's theory of a unification of all the arts in the one art-work was the product of a brain that had comparatively little sympathy with, or understanding of, any art but music. This may seem a hard saying, but the proof of it is to be found in many declarations in his prose works, his letters, and Mein Leben. He could never see in painting, in the prose drama, in poetry, and in sculpture, precisely what painters, dramatists, poets, and sculptors saw there. He seriously thought that "the spoken form of play" (die Schauspielform) must "necessarily vanish in the future"; and that painters would give up their "egoistic" decorating of little canvases and be content to devote their powers to contributing, along with the poet, the musician, and the rest of the theatrical forces, to the "united art-work of the future." Clearly it was Wagner the musician who dominated all the other Wagners, and determined both the choice of subject for his operas and the manner of their treatment. "What I saw," he says in A Communication to My Friends, "I now looked at solely with the eyes of music." He is careful to add, not of the formal, cramping style of music, but of the kind that came straight from the heart and which he could pour out like a speech in a mother-tongue. That is the whole secret; the "music" he wishes to see made subordinate to "drama" is merely the music that claims to pursue an egoistic existence, bound by its own arbitrary laws alone; but though his music must be natural and unfettered by conventional formulas, and must aim at giving heightened emotional expression to the feeling suggested by the verse and the action, it is still the predominant partner in the union, and only so much of the stuff of the verbal drama will be permitted in the art-work as will give point to the vague musical emotion without hindering its full expression. Like a true musician, he saw drama from a purely musical angle.

III

But granting the premisses implicit in Wagner's theory,—that music is an art of intensely emotional expression, that it can only ally itself with poetry and drama on the condition that these allow themselves to be bent to its will, and that the ideal "stuff" for an opera is that which contains the minimum of matter that music cannot take up into itself and endow with its own loftier and warmer life,—it surely becomes evident that the theory cannot be allowed to end there. In a long article on programme music in my Musical Studies (1905), I have argued that the strictly logical conclusion of Wagner's own theory is not the music-drama but the symphonic poem. He himself admitted that the more we can refine away from the music-drama all the non-musical matter,—the matter that is required merely to make the nature of the characters and the thread of the story intelligible to an audience sitting on the other side of the footlights—the nearer we shall approach the ideal. It was for this reason that he was dissatisfied with his earlier works, and so proud—justifiably proud—of Tristan, where, as he said, he "immersed himself in the depths of soul-events pure and simple, and from out this innermost centre of the world fearlessly fashioned its outward form. A glance at the volumen of this poem will show you at once that the copious detail which an historical poet has to employ in order to make the outer connections of his plot evident, to the detriment of a clear exposition of its inner motives, I now trusted myself to apply to these latter alone. Life and death, the whole significance and existence of the external world, here turn on nothing but the inner movements of the soul." There is a touch of exaggeration in the claim, but in the main it holds good; Tristan comes nearer to being all music and nothing else but music than any other work of Wagner. I suggested that in the symphonic poem, rightly planned and rightly worked out, we had the nearest possible approach to this ideal, and I availed myself of a simile Browning uses in The Ring and the Book—that of the jeweller who finds it advantageous to mix a certain amount of alloy with the gold while he is working at the ring, but afterwards burns it out with a spirt of acid, leaving simply the circlet of pure gold. The practice of the composer of the symphonic poem seems to me to be analogous to this: he uses the poetic alloy in the conceptual stage of his work to give coherence to the tissue of it, but leaves none of the alloy visible in the completed work itself; to vary the simile, he uses poetry as his scaffolding, but as his scaffolding only. The trouble with opera—viewed from an ideal standpoint—is that it too often shows the scaffolding projecting at a score of points through the finished building. Even in Tristan—especially the earlier scenes—we are too conscious at times of verbal matter that all the genius of the musician has not been able to fuse into music. We accept it, but we are not convinced of the absolute necessity of it.

IV

Apart from theory, we have only to look at a few concrete instances of both types of art to see that the ideal symphonic poem is the unalloyed quintessence of opera, and that the average opera is merely a symphonic poem puffed out to three Acts, and made rather loose of tissue in the process. What could be easier than to make a three-act opera of Ein Heldenleben,—and what more futile? Apart from the Adversaries, there are only two characters in Ein Heldenleben, and we cannot fill up a whole theatrical evening with two characters alone. To have made an opera of it Strauss would have had to get a librettist to surround the only two persons who really matter with a number of minor persons who do not matter in the least; and after spending three or four hours in the theatre we should come away with precisely the same fundamental impression as Ein Heldenleben gives us in the concert-room in about forty minutes,—that a hero has passed through sundry spiritual crises and developments, and at last, after much battling and much error, attained to a super-earthly resignation. This is the ring; everything else we should see and hear in the theatre would only be so much alloy, pleasurable or tiresome. Who does not feel, again, that all the essential emotions of the story of Francesca da Rimini are given us in Tchaikovski's tone-poem? Who wants to see the merely historical and topographical details that would be inevitable in an opera on the subject? Who wants to see the furniture of the house of Malatesta, and the ladies and gentlemen moving about among it? Who wants to see and hear Giovanni? He interests us only as a fragment of the force of fate that drives Paolo and Francesca to love and death; surely we are content to accept his existence as assumed in the great central tragedy, without having him put before us in the flesh to sing a lot of words that do not matter? Who does not feel that Strauss has given us the quintessence of Macbeth in his symphonic poem, and that no opera on that subject could hope to express the spiritual tragedy of Macbeth so swiftly and so drastically? Or, to look at the matter from the other side, take the case of Strauss's Salome. Does anything really count there but the train of moods in Salome's soul, and is not all this expressed fully and incomparably in the great final scene,—with perhaps a little assistance from the music of the impassioned monologue of Salome to Jochanaan in the earlier part? What is all the rest of the opera but a mere recital or representation of a story the details of which everyone in the theatre already knows quite well? How Herod was married to Herodias, the mother of Salome, how Herod gave a banquet and became enamoured of his step-daughter, how one Jochanaan, a Jewish prophet, had been imprisoned by order of Herod, how Salome conceived an unholy passion for Jochanaan, how she danced for Herod and won as her reward the head of Jochanaan on a charger—who needs to go to the theatre to be told all this: who takes more than the most languid interest in the telling of it? Music has next to no concern with most of it, because it is of a quality that prevents music attaining to its full emotional incandescence; and it is only when it is playing with ease and ardour round a subject fit to call out the best there is in it that music is really worth writing. If anyone doubts that it is only the final scene and the monologue of Salome that count for anything in the opera, let him ask himself how many people would stay away from the theatre or the concert-room because only these portions were being given, and how many people would go to the theatre if it were known that these portions were to be omitted. Or again, does the whole opera of Tannhäuser tell us very much that is not already told us in the Overture? I am not alleging, of course, that there is not a great deal of very interesting music in the opera. The question is whether the essence of the struggle in Tannhäuser's soul between spiritual and physical love is not fully given us in the Overture, and whether, had this alone been written, we should have felt any more need for an opera upon the subject than we do for an opera on the subject of Ein Heldenleben. What is the opera of Fidelio, Wagner himself asked, but a mere lengthy watering down of the dramatic motives that have been painted so finely for us in the great Leonora No. 3 Overture? May we not say as much of Tannhäuser? Is not a great deal of this also a mere padding-out of the subject to comply with the exigencies of a whole evening in the theatre?