Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

IV

It has often been pointed out that the subjects of all Wagner's dramas were conceived by him before his fortieth year. It is equally true that virtually the whole of the æsthetic theories of his later life were immanent in him from the days of his Parisian sojourn, and needed only to be brought into clearer outline by the thought and the practice of the 'forties and 'fifties. In the essay on Beethoven (1870) he insists that it is the human character of the voice, rather than the mere sentiment the voice is used to express, that gives the choral ending of the Ninth Symphony its tremendous significance. "Thus," he says, "with even what we have just called the ordaining will that led him to this melody" (i.e. the great melody of the final movement) "we see the master steadily remaining in music,—the idea of the world:[312] for in truth it is not the meaning of the Word that engages us at this entry of the human voice, but the character of the voice itself. Nor is it the thought expressed in Schiller's verses that henceforth occupies us, but the intimate timbre of the choral song, in which we feel ourselves invited to join, and so take part as a kind of congregation in an ideal divine service, as was the case at the entry of the chorale in the 'Passions' of Bach. It is quite evident, especially with regard to the main melody, that Schiller's words have been tacked on arbitrarily (nothdürftig) and with little skill: for this melody had first of all unfolded itself in all its breadth before us as a thing in itself, given to the instruments alone, and there had filled us with a nameless feeling of joy in a paradise regained."[313]

The same idea is seen in embryo in A Pilgrimage to Beethoven. "If men are to sing, they must have words. Yet who is capable of expressing in words the poetry that should form the basis of such a union of all the elements? The poem must of necessity be something inferior (zurückstehen), for words are too weak an organ for such a task.—You will soon meet with a new composition of mine, which will remind you of what I have just been descanting upon. It is a symphony with choruses. I ask you to observe how difficult it was for me to get over the inadequacy of the poetical art that I had called in to my aid. I have fully resolved to make use of our Schiller's beautiful hymn 'To Joy'; it is in any case a noble and uplifting poem, even if far from giving voice to what, in sooth, in this connection, no verses in the world could say."[314]

Here we light upon one of the fundamental principles of the Wagnerian æsthetic. Wagner did not set words to music: the words were merely the projection of an already conceived musical emotion into the sphere of speech.[315] There is in most musicians a certain amount of correspondence and interplay between the poetic and musical factors. With some composers the musical thought, having begun and completed itself along its own lines and according to its own laws, turns half appealingly, half condescendingly, to words for a title or an elucidation, as was often the case with Schumann. With others, as with Bach and Hugo Wolf and Strauss, the word, written or implied, is the generator of the musical idea. It would be the very midsummer madness of æsthetics to attempt to decide which is the more purely "musical" of these two types of mind. Neither of them is "the" musical mind, any more than Shakespeare's or Milton's or Browning's or Blake's or Pope's or Swinburne's is "the" poetical mind. It is only the most superficial of psychologists and æstheticians who can regard any human faculty as wholly cut off from the rest. Our perceptions of sight, of taste, of touch, of hearing, are inextricably inter-blended, as is shown by our constantly expressing one set of sensations in terms of another, as when we speak of the colour of music, the height, or depth, or thickness, or clarity, or muddiness of musical tone. In every poet there is something of the painter and the musician: in every musician, something of the poet and painter: in every painter, something of the musician and poet.[316] The character of the man's work will depend upon the strength or weakness of the tinge that is given to his own special art by the relative strength or weakness of the infusion of one or more of the other arts. In composers like Bach, Wagner, Berlioz, Schubert, Wolf, and Strauss the eye is constantly transmitting very definite impression to the brain, with the result that their music readily leans to realistic suggestion: on a composer like Brahms the actualities of the visible, mobile world make comparatively little impression.[317] No one of these types is per se any better than the rest, or has any more right than his fellows to arrogate to himself the title of "pure" musician. We must just accept them all as branches of the one great tree.

It is no paradox to say that though Wagner was irresistibly impelled to express himself in the form of opera he was by nature an instrumental composer of the line of Bach and Beethoven. It is the orchestra that always bears the main burden of expression in his later works. His ideal was a stream of endless melody in the orchestra, to the moods of which the words give a definiteness unattainable by music alone. And so, just as he did not "set words to music" in the ordinary way, so he did not set poetic ideas to music in the ordinary way. No man was ever more prompt to interpret great musical works in terms of poetry or life, as anyone may see by reading his elucidations of the Beethoven symphonies or the great C sharp minor quartet. But it is important to remember, if we are not to misunderstand him utterly, that he never supposed that the music was developed consciously out of any such poetic scheme as our fantasy may read into it. The music grew out of the spirit of music, and only rouses a poetic vision in us because it is the generalised expression of many particular visions of the kind. This conception of music was rooted in him from his earliest days of maturity, as we may see from the article A Happy Evening, which he wrote in Paris in 1841. The narrator of the story is discussing with a friend—evidently intended for Wagner himself—a concert at which they have just heard performances of Mozart's Symphony in E flat and Beethoven's in A. The question arises as to what it is that Beethoven has expressed. The friend, who is designated R., objects energetically to an arbitrary romance being foisted upon the symphony:

"It is unfortunate that so many people give themselves useless trouble to confuse musical speech with poetical speech, and to make one of them supplement or replace the other where, in their limited view, this is incomplete. It remains true once for all that music begins where speech leaves off. Nothing is more intolerable than the preposterous pictures and stories that people imagine to be at the basis of those instrumental works. What quality of mind and feeling is displayed when the hearer of a Beethoven symphony can only keep his interest in it alive by imagining that the musical flood is the reproduction of the plot of some romance? These people in consequence often grumble at the great master when some unexpected stroke disturbs the even tenour of the little tale they have foisted on the work: they reproach the composer with unclearness and disconnectedness, and lament his lack of coherency. Oh the ninnies!"

R. is afterwards careful to explain that he has no objection to each hearer associating the music, as he hears it, with any moods or episodes he likes out of his own experience. All he objects to is the audience having the terms of the poetic association dictated to them by the musical journalists. "I should like to tear the hair from their silly heads when they stuff this stupid nonsense into honest people, and so rob them of all the ingenuousness with which they would have otherwise have given themselves up to hearing Beethoven's symphony. Instead of abandoning themselves to their natural feelings, the poor deluded people of full heart but feeble head think themselves obliged to follow the course of some village wedding, a thing of which they probably know nothing at first hand, and in place of which they would certainly have been much more likely to imagine something quite different, something from the circle of their own experience.... I hold that no one stereotyped interpretation is admissible. Definitely as the purely musical edifice stands complete and rounded in the artistic proportions of a Beethoven symphony, perfect and indivisible as it appears to the higher sense, just so is it impossible to reduce the effects of the work on the human heart to one authoritative symbol. This is more or less the case with the creations of the other arts: how diversely will one and the same picture, one and the same drama, affect diverse individuals, and even the same individual at different times! And yet how much more definitely and positively the painter or the poet must draw his figures than the instrumental composer, who is not bound, like them, to model his form by the appearances of the everyday world, but who has at his disposal an immeasurable realm in a super-terrestrial kingdom, and to whose hand is given the most spiritual of substances—tone! But it is degrading to this high office of the musician to force him to make him fit his inspiration to the appearances of the everyday world; and still more would the instrumental composer deny his mission, or expose his own weakness, who should try to carry the restricted proportions of merely worldly things into the realm of his own art."[318]

"In instrumental music," he said in later life, "I am a Réactionnaire, a conservative. I dislike everything that requires a verbal explanation beyond the actual sounds."[319] In the light of this declaration, and of the æsthetic doctrines he expounds in the article On Franz Liszt's Symphonic Poems and elsewhere, it is interesting to see him setting forth the same doctrine of music as early as 1840. In A Happy Evening R. lays it down that he rejects all tone-painting, except when it is used in jest or to reproduce purely musical phenomena.[320] He further dissents from his friend's theory that whereas Mozart's symphonies came from nothing but a purely inward musical source, Beethoven may have "first of all conceived and worked out the plan of a symphony according to a certain philosophical idea, before he left it to his imagination to invent the musical themes." The friend adduces the Eroica Symphony in support of this contention. "You know that it was at first intended that this symphony should bear the title 'Bonaparte.' Can you deny, then, that Beethoven was inspired to this gigantic work, and the plan of it decided, by an idea outside the realm of music?"