The composition of Das Liebesverbot carries us from 1834 to the spring of 1836, and still the Southern fever has not abated. In 1837 he carries the same enthusiasm about with him in Königsberg and Riga; we can imagine that the more serious side of him had some difficulty in developing in such an environment as a fourth-rate operatic and theatrical troupe. While in Magdeburg he writes a short article on "Dramatic Song," in which he returns to the thesis of three years before, though with more wisdom. "Why," he asks, "cannot we Germans see that we are not the possessors of everything; why cannot we openly and freely admit that the Italian is superior to the German in Song, and the Frenchman superior to him in the light and animated treatment of operatic music? Can he not oppose to these his deeper science, his more thorough culture, and above all the happy faculty that makes it possible for him easily to make the advantages of the Italians and the French his own, whereas they will never be able to acquire ours? The Italians are singers by nature. The less richly-endowed German can hope to emulate the Italian only by hard study." Wagner rightly points out that no artist can hope to achieve full expression of himself without a technique that has become second nature to him. It was the acquirement by Mozart of this technique in his childhood that gave his mature music its incomparable ease and finish, while there was always a certain awkwardness about Weber, owing to his having begun late and learned his technique during the years when he was actually practising his art. Without perfect vocal technique, the highest kind of dramatic expression is impossible. The great Schröder-Devrient, the finest operatic artist in Germany, was at one time within an ace of giving up her career as a singer, so great was the strain on her voice through a faulty production; but she studied hard on the right Italian lines, with the result that she can now sing the most trying parts without the slightest fatigue.[299] All this is sensible enough—so sensible, indeed, that Wagner could repeat it thirty years later in his "Report upon a proposed German School of Music for Munich." But that the nimble and relatively superficial Italian music still exercised something of its old fascination upon him is shown by another article of the same year on Bellini. Here, while admitting that a good deal of Italian music is poor stuff, and that the forms and tricks of the Bellinian opera are things only too easy to imitate, he yet lauds Bellini's melody at the expense of that of the Germans, and his simplicity at the expense of their clumsy erudition. "The German connoisseur of music," he says, "listens to one of Bellini's operas with the spectacles off his tired-out eyes," giving himself wholly up for once to "delight in lovely Song";[300] he evidently feels "a deep and ardent longing for a full deep breath, to win ease of being at one stroke, to get rid of all the stew of prejudice and pedantry that has so long compelled him to be a German connoisseur of music—to become instead a man at last, glad, free, and endowed with every glorious organ for perceiving beauty of every kind, no matter in what form it reveals itself." He has been enchanted by "the limpid melody, the simple, noble, lovely Song of Bellini. It is surely no sin to confess this and to believe in it; perhaps even it would not be a sin if before we went to sleep we were to pray Heaven that some day German composers might achieve such melodies and such an art of handling song. Song, Song, and yet again Song, ye Germans!"
We see again his temporary lack of sympathy with the richer German style in a passage like the following, which reads like one of the less intelligent criticisms of his own later music:
"When we consider the boundless disorder, the medley of forms, periods and modulations of so many of the new German opera composers, by which we are prevented from enjoying many an isolated piece of beauty, we often might wish to see this ravelled skein put in order by means of that stable Italian form.[301] As a matter of fact, the instantaneous clear apprehension of a whole dramatic passion is made much easier when, along with all its connected feelings and emotions, it is cast into one lucid intelligent melody at a single stroke, than when it is muddled up with a hundred little commentaries, with this and that harmonic nuance, this and that instrumental interpolation, till in the end it is subtilised out of existence."[302]
It was his "zeal and fervour for modern Italian and French opera," in fact, that procured for him the conductorship at Riga, where the Director, Holtei, was all for the lighter and more frivolous music.[303] At Riga Wagner met his old Leipzig mentor, Heinrich Dorn, who was, he says, surprised to see his former pupil, "the eccentric Beethoven worshipper, transformed into a partisan of Bellini and Adam."[304] The reaction, however, was coming fast. At Riga he seems to have passed through one of those spiritual crises that are not uncommon with artists of his many-sided temperament. The loneliness of Riga, he says, gave him an anxious feeling of homelessness, which developed into a passionate longing to escape from the turbid whirl of theatrical life. "The levity with which in Magdeburg I had both let my musical taste degenerate and had allowed myself to take pleasure in the most frivolous theatrical society, gradually faded away under the influence of this longing."[305] A bass aria which he interpolated into Winter's Schweizerfamilie was "of a devotional character," and "bore witness to the great transformation that was taking place in my musical development."[306] In the winter of 1838 he derived much benefit from the study of Méhul's Joseph in Egypt for the theatre. "Its noble and simple style, along with the moving effect of the music, contributed not a little to the favourable turn in my taste, which had been sadly debauched by my theatrical work."[307] At the same time he grew weary of the Bohemianism that had attracted him so strongly at Magdeburg, and consequently he got more and more out of touch with the actors and the management.
His weariness of it all culminated in a secret resolve to be quit of this kind of life as soon as possible. The deliverance was to be effected by his new opera, Rienzi.[308] He deliberately planned the opera on a scale so large that he would necessarily have to seek a better stage than that of Riga for its production. Everything conspired at the time to deepen his sense of the seriousness of things, and to make him loathe himself for having so long worshipped false gods both in art and in life. Matrimonial troubles crowded thick and fast upon him, and he lost his favourite sister, Rosalie, by death. In March 1839 he was dismissed from his post at the Riga theatre. Penniless as he was, he welcomed the discharge as the first step towards his redemption. To Paris he would go, and in Paris make his fortune: of that he had no doubt.
III
The miseries of his two years and a half in Paris are known to every reader of his life. Penury, deceptions, degradations, however, could not break him either intellectually or morally. A temperament so elastic as his could never be crushed, and least of all when it was young. He himself has told us of the amazement his associates expressed at the toughness and resilience of his spirit. But the fire he passed through in those dreadful days purified him as an artist. It was not alone the failure to get Rienzi accepted at the Paris Opéra that caused him to turn away in disgust from the hollow world of make-believe around him; visions were coming to him of shining deeds to be done, of untried possibilities in music. As usual with him, an external event brought all his faculties and desires swiftly into the one focus. In the winter of 1839 he heard a number of rehearsals and a performance of the Ninth Symphony at the Conservatoire, under Habeneck. The interpretation, he says, was so perfect that "in a stroke the picture I had had of the wonderful work in the days of my youthful enthusiasm, and that had been effaced by the murderous performance of it given by the Leipzig Orchestra under the worthy Pohlenz, now rose up again before me in such clearness that it seemed as if I could grasp it with my hands. Where formerly I had seen nothing but mystic constellations and soundless magical shapes, there was now poured out, as from innumerable springs, a stream of inexhaustible and heart-compelling melody. The whole period of the degradation of my taste, which really began with my confusion as to the expression in Beethoven's later works, and had been so aggravated by my numbing association with the dreadful theatre, now fell away from me as into an abyss of shame and remorse. If this inner change had been preparing in me for some years—more particularly as a consequence of my painful experiences—it was the inexpressible effect of the Ninth Symphony, performed in a way I had hitherto had no notion of, that gave real life to my new-won old spirit; and so I compare this—for me—important event with the similarly decisive impression made on me, when I was a boy of sixteen, by the Fidelio of Schröder Devrient."[309]
The Autobiographical Sketch which he wrote for Laube's Zeitung für die elegante Welt in 1842, after his settling in Dresden, ends with these words: "As regards Paris itself I was now without prospects there for some years: so I left it in the spring of 1842. For the first time I saw the Rhine: with great tears in his eyes the poor artist swore eternal fidelity to his German fatherland." It was indeed the prodigal's return: the service that Paris did him was to make him a better German and so a better artist. Seen from a distance, Paris had once glittered before his dazzled eyes as a symbol of liberalism and freedom. Seen at too close quarters, Germany had laid itself bare to him in all its littlenesses, its stuffy provinciality. Now he saw them both from another angle. Paris was about him in all the cold brutality it can show to the stranger, the helpless, the penniless: its heart seemed to the eager young musician as hard as the stones of its streets. And he saw his native country as all exiles see theirs, with its asperities toned down, its little parochialisms hidden from view, and a certain kindly haze of idealism over all. It is with German affairs that he occupies himself as far as he can in the articles he writes at this time to keep the domestic pot boiling. The essay On German Music (1840) is very touching in its wistful little visions of tiny, cosy German towns, each with its circle of humble musicians roughly but lovingly wooing their art in their own simple, honest way. The lonely and homesick German artist has his quiet revenge upon Paris in the delightfully humorous and satirical article upon the ludicrous French perversion of Der Freischütz at the Opéra.[310] Beethoven is much in his mind: he begins the attempt to fathom the secret of Beethoven's power, to grasp the profoundly logical workings of his music, and to take his own bearings with regard to sundry æsthetic questions, such as "painting" in music, the reading of poetical ideas into purely instrumental works, the relations between vocal and instrumental music, and so on. His views upon Beethoven were far ahead of those of his contemporaries, to whom, indeed, they must have been in large part unintelligible. He was beginning to realise dimly that out of the Beethovenian melody he could himself beget a new art-work. In A Pilgrimage to Beethoven he puts his own views of opera into the mouth of his predecessor. He has apparently already conceived the idea that instrumental music had come to the end of its resources with Beethoven, that music could in the future renew its vitality only by being "fertilised by poetry," and that the ideal music drama will be continuous in tissue. "Were I to make an opera after my own heart," he makes Beethoven say, "people would run away from it: for it would have no arias, duets, trios, or any of the other stuff with which operas are patched up to-day: and what I would put in the place of these no singer would sing and no audience would listen to. They all know nothing but glittering lies, brilliant nonsense and sugared tedium. Anyone who should write a real music drama would be taken for a fool." And the old composer proceeds to outline the theory of the relation between words and music that is made so familiar to us in Wagner's later writings. "The instruments represent the primal organs of Creation and Nature: what they express can never be clearly defined and settled, for they reproduce the primal feelings themselves as they emerged from the chaos of the first creation, when probably there was not one human being to take them up into his heart. It is quite otherwise with the genius of the human voice: this represents man's heart and its definite (abgeschlossen) individual emotion. Its character is therefore restricted, but definite and clear. Now bring these two elements together, unite them! Set against the wild-wandering, illimitable primal feeling, represented by the instruments, the clear definite emotion of the human heart, represented by the voice. The incoming of this second element will smooth and soothe the conflict of the primal feelings, will turn their flood into a definite, united course: while the human heart itself, taking up into itself those primal feelings, will be infinitely strengthened and expanded, and capable of feeling clearly its earlier indefinite presage of the Highest now transformed into god-like consciousness." [311]