V
It is true that Wagner tried to demonstrate that the symphonic poem was a less perfect art-form than the music-drama, inasmuch as it left it to the imagination to supply the characters, the events, or the pictures upon which the music is founded, whereas these really ought to be shown to the eye upon the stage. But a two-fold answer can be given to Wagner. In the first place, there are dozens of passages in his own works that depend for their effect upon precisely that visualising power of the imagination the legitimacy of which he denied in the case of the symphonic poem. Is Siegfried's Rhine Journey, for example, intelligible on any other supposition than that with each change of theme in the music the hearer's imagination visualises a fresh episode in the hero's course? How do we listen to the Meistersinger Overture except just in the way we listen to a symphonic poem—the imagination calling up before it the bodily presence of each of the characters in turn? In the second place, the evidence is overwhelming that Wagner's own imagination was much more restricted in this respect than that of other people; and it was precisely this inability to trust very much to the visualising power of the imagination that made him fall into so many crude errors of realism. All his life through he was unable to see that the imagination has a much wider scope than the eye, because, not being tied down to the mere spatial dimensions of an object, it can add enormously to it out of its own store of memory and vision. Vastness is a quality inseparable from any concept of a god; but can the grandest creation of sculpture or the most heroic of stage figures ever hope to give us such a sense of the illimitable power and beauty of godhead as the imagination can supply? Whose god comes nearest to filling the earth with his presence—the invisible one of Milton or Spinoza, or the visible Wotan of Wagner? Does not the least analytical spectator of a Wagnerian opera often feel that it would have been better if the composer had insisted less on material facts upon the stage and left our imagination a freer wing? How much of the exquisite poetry of the idea of the Waldweben—the natural, untainted boy at home in nature's heart, dowered by his native innocence with the gift of understanding the song of birds—is spoiled for us by the grossly unideal presence of the average actor, by the reduction of the wayward breath and infinite soul of nature to a few yards of painted pasteboard, and by the narrowing down of all our ideas of the lyric freedom of bird-life to one poor piece of stuffed mechanism jerked at the end of a wire, and a tremulous soprano somewhere up in the wings? Who would exchange the imagination's vision of the glorious Valkyrie-flight through the storm and the cloud-wrack for the actual visible Grane, with his evident air of having been borrowed from the mews round the corner? Who that is moved by the Grail music in Parsifal has not felt his heart sink within him at the sight of the slow mechanical evolutions of the Knights in the Grail scene at Bayreuth? Who has not felt at the sight of the "property" swan that the rarefied atmosphere of Monsalvat has gone, and with it most of the remoteness, the shining whiteness, of Lohengrin? Or, not to multiply instances of this kind from the Wagnerian operas themselves, who can doubt the general proposition that the more the subject approaches the sublime the more it demands purely poetic or musical treatment, and the more lamentably it suffers by being narrowed down to a canvas or a stage? What painter could hope to suggest, even in the largest picture, the vision of the vast evil form of Lucifer, the mighty sweep of his fall, and the horror of the fiery underworld, that Milton can give us in a line or two;[413] and who, in spite of all the splendour of the music of the Ring, does not feel that the actual spectacle of gods and heroes that has been put before our eyes on the stage cannot compare in true sublimity with the picture given us in the great opening lines of Morris's Sigurd the Volsung:
"There was a dwelling of kings ere the world was waxen old;
Dukes were the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold;
Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors;
Earls' wives were the weaving-women, queens' daughters strewed its floors,
And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast
The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast.
There dwelt men merry-hearted, and in hope exceeding great
Met the good days and the evil as they went the way of fate:
There the gods were unforgotten, yea whiles they walked with men,
Though e'en in that world's beginning rose a murmur now and then
Of the midward time and the fading and the last of the latter days,
And the entering in of the terror, and the death of the People's Praise."
How the imagination fills out the ample spaces here left to it to play among—how great and god-like and noble and beautiful a world of men and women it is that the poet evokes for us!
VI
The elimination from an opera-text of everything that is not suited to musical expression is perhaps an unattainable ideal. It is only the titanic musical genius of Wagner that makes us more or less tolerant of what we may call the baser metal in the structure of his music-dramas. Since his day the problem has proved so baffling a one that composers have frankly given it up in despair. Wagner was right: the simpler the story or legend on which we found an opera,—the more it can be trusted to make its own motives and development clear,—the less non-musical matter shall we be burdened with, and the more chance we shall have of being able to keep the musical tissue on a consistently high level. The proof of this is to be found not only in Wagner's own work but in that of his successors. It is hardly possible to recall a modern opera in which, at some point or other, the composer has not tried to delude us into the belief that the music means something when it really means nothing. Take, for example, the opening scene of Elektra. The scene is dramatically necessary because it informs the spectator of the relations between Elektra and her mother, and explains the miserable servitude of the maiden in the house of her murdered father. But no man that ever lived could set such words as these to good music; and all that Strauss can do is to make a mere pretence of writing music, let the orchestra play almost anything and the voices shriek almost anything, and trust to the audience being carried blindly along, partly by the excitement of the noise, partly by the bustling stage-movement. Wagner's superior artistic sense would have seen from the outset that this part of the libretto was outside the sphere of music, and, being his own librettist, he would, in obedience to the prompting of the musician in him, have so re-shaped the opera that there would have been no need to communicate that particular piece of information to us in this particular form. The procedure of Strauss and Hofmannsthal is hardly less absurd than that of the old composers who used to set to music not only the actual words of the Bible but "Here beginneth the ... chapter of the ... book of...."
How much of the merest putty, again, is left visible in the libretti of Puccini, Charpentier, and others—passages that are essential if the story is to be made clear to the spectator, but absolutely defying musical treatment. There is scarcely a single opera of which the music gives one the impression of pure necessity from first to last; every now and then our teeth are set on edge by some pieces of grit left by the bad cooks in an otherwise good dish. The handling of passages of this kind has become the most stereotyped of formulæ; the characters talk rather than sing, while the orchestra keeps the ear interested by playing pretty tunes on its own account, much as a nurse tells a child fairy tales to keep it quiet during the misery of the bath. Only the easy-going attitude towards all questions of form that is bred in us by theatrical art could possibly blind us for a moment to the helplessness and ineptitude of a method of this kind. Debussy evades the difficulty in another way. He starts with a text that is already a complete, self-sufficing work of art, capable, without the assistance of music, of holding an audience interested in it by virtue of its own dramatic life and its fine literary quality. He is thus, to begin with, in a far stronger position than that of nineteen opera composers out of twenty, whose texts have no artistic quality of their own, and have to receive the whole breath of their life from the music. Having the good fortune to be working upon a libretto that is itself moving and beautiful, Debussy can frequently afford to leave it to speak for itself, his own contribution to it being sometimes no more than a momentary heightening of the force of the words by means of a poignant harmony or a suggestive touch of colour. I hope I shall not be held to be insensitive to the peculiar charm of Debussy's Pelleas and Melisande, or to the rare musical invention of the more continuous portions of it, if I say that a good deal of the opera could have been written by a much less gifted man. Now that the novelty of it has passed off, it is seen to be not at all a difficult matter to subtilise a stage effect by the addition of a poignant chord here and there. Pelleas and Melisande is an extremely beautiful work, but it will probably have no posterity,—because, while the more musical portions of it depend less for their effect on any essential novelty of form than upon the very individual quality of Debussy's imagination, the style of the other—the merely atmospheric—portions is so easy to imitate that it is within the scope of dozens of composers with only a quarter of Debussy's genius. Debussy, then, has not, any more than his contemporaries, solved the problem of weaving the combined vocal and orchestral tissue of the opera into a continuous and homogeneous whole; for a great part of the time he simply evades the problem. Pelleas and Melisande is a tour de force that will probably never be repeated; it depended for its success on the concurrence of a number of factors that are hardly likely to be met with in combination again.
VII
To recapitulate, then, for a moment: Wagner's theory of the ideal music-drama is sound enough, but neither he nor any of his successors has been able to realise the theory in practice. In every combination of music with the other arts it must of necessity play the leading rôle, because of the greater expansiveness and superior warmth of its expression.[414] As Wagner saw, it will tolerate no text but one that is thoroughly musical in essence—that is to say, one that is so purely emotional throughout that at no time can we feel that in order to associate with it music has had to descend from its ideal sphere. It is in the process of making the action clear to the spectator that opera generally has to admit certain elements that drag music down from its high estate. We have therefore at present two chief forms of the association of poetry and music—the opera, in which actual characters, using actual words, are shown to us in the actuality of the stage, and the symphonic poem, in which we are given not the characters but the emotions of the characters, and not the scene but an imaginative suggestion of the scene, while the general nature of the subject is communicated to us by means of a printed explanation or a title. This necessity of putting the hearer en rapport with the story by a device that stands outside the music seems to many people an ineradicable flaw in the symphonic poem; a work of art, they say, should be self-contained, and opera, with all its admitted faults, has the virtue of being its own explanation. I do not think, however, that this matter is so simple as it looks.
Closer analysis will show first of all that many apparently self-contained musical works are as greatly in need of verbal expression as a symphonic poem, and secondly, that in the full sense of the term hardly any opera or drama can be said to be wholly self-explanatory, inasmuch as, at every hearing of it except the first, we witness the unfolding of the earlier stages of the action with a knowledge of the later stages, and are thus as effectually adding something from an outside source to the visual and auditory impressions of the moment as when we follow a symphonic poem with the story in our minds that we have just read in the programme book. What real difference, for example, is there between the frame of mind in which we listen to the Tannhäuser Overture and that in which we listen to Ein Heldenleben? In each case we are conscious that the music is not self-existent and self-explanatory, but depends for its full intelligibility on our knowledge of the characters and incidents upon which it is based. We get this knowledge in the case of Ein Heldenleben from a book; in the case of the Tannhäuser Overture we get it from our experience of the opera on the stage.[415] What essential difference is there between the two cases? In each of them we have to rely upon experience outside the work itself in order to grasp the full meaning of it. The Tannhäuser Overture and other works of that class are, in fact, artistic solecisms. No one, surely, will contend that at the first performance of Tannhäuser the Overture conveyed its poetic meaning to the audience any more clearly than a performance of Ein Heldenleben would do without a literary explanation of its contents. The Overture does not explain the opera, but is explained by it, and it is consequently absurd to play it first. It only happens to come first because the old practice of having an orchestral introduction to an opera was unthinkingly retained long after the character of the introduction had so altered that there was no longer any sense in its use. The purpose of the Overture originally was simply to play the audience into their seats. We see it performing this function in an overture like that to the Messiah: the music has nothing to do with the oratorio, and any one of a hundred other orchestral introductions would do just as well. But when opera composers began to make the overture a summary of the opera itself, they entered upon a course that ultimately made it an absurdity. In so far as the overture sums up the opera, and therefore depends for its intelligibility on a knowledge of the opera, it ought logically to be played not at the commencement of the evening, but at the end. Modern composers have instinctively recognised the truth of all this, and the operatic overture is now virtually abolished; there is none, for instance, to Salome, Elektra, or Pelleas and Melisande.