Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

It is difficult to square his practice in some of his own overtures with the theoretical principles he here lays down. Not one of his overtures corresponds with the form he so greatly admired in the overtures to Don Giovanni and Iphigenia in Aulis,—a re-presentation of the coming dramatic conflict in terms of a musical piece that made no drafts at all, or practically none, upon the thematic material of the opera itself. The brief Prelude to Lohengrin comes under no suspicion of being a pot-pourri of motives from the opera; but then it achieves its concision and its singular air of detachment from anything in the nature of mere story-telling in music by failing to do just what Mozart and Gluck are commended for doing—summing up the ensuing dramatic conflict by the opposition of two main musical moods and their final resolution. The Lohengrin Prelude tells us nothing of any dramatic contest,—not even that which rages in the heart of Elsa. It shows us only Lohengrin, the representative of the Grail, coming to earth and leaving it again. There is no hint of the reason for his return to Monsalvat: there is no hint even that his stay on earth has been in any degree troubled by enemies or evil. Beautiful as it is, therefore, and eloquently as it sings of Lohengrin himself, the Prelude is not in the full sense of the word a real prelude to the drama. On the other hand, when Wagner does make his overture a genuine introduction to, and instrumental summary of, the opera, he inevitably approaches the pot-pourri. It is true that his fine sense of form mostly saves him from attempting to reproduce in the overture all the dramatic or thematic motives of the opera. In the Flying Dutchman overture, for example, there is no reference to Erik: so far as the overture itself is concerned, no such person might have ever come into the lives of Senta and the Dutchman. There is no mention of Daland, and no reference to the spinning scene—the latter a musical motive that, it is safe to say, none of the French or Italian writers of overtures, or perhaps even Weber himself, would have had the heart to set aside. On the whole the Flying Dutchman overture is concerned simply with the Dutchman, his curse and his grief, with Senta, and with the sea that forms the imaginative background to their drama: [324] and though of course the overture is entirely built up of thematic material derived from the opera, this is all so freshly and imaginatively treated, and made into so coherent and organic a piece of instrumental music, that, though the overture is by no means of the type of those to Don Giovanni and Iphigenia in Aulis, which Wagner praised as models, nothing could be further removed from the old-style pot-pourri. The overtures to Tannhäuser and the Meistersinger, however, must frankly be called pot-pourris,—though pot-pourris of genius. In the Tannhäuser overture we are given not merely an instrumental symbol of the drama, but the drama itself compressed into a sort of feuilleton. The ground covered is so vast, and the expression so intense, that at the end of the overture we are inclined to ask ourselves whether it has not, like the great Leonora overture, made a good deal of the ensuing drama almost superfluous, a mere padding out or watering down of the emotions and the spiritual oppositions set before us with such drastic power in the overture itself. One is inclined to say that an overture lasting nearly a quarter of an hour is not so much the door to a mansion as a cottage in itself. A work like the Tannhäuser overture has its justification as a kind of symphonic poem for the concert room; it has little justification as a prelude to a drama in the theatre.

In any case a piece of prolonged story-telling of this kind is not what Wagner had in his mind when he wrote the article on The Overture: it is not too much to say, indeed, that it is the very type of musical introduction he expressly wished to bar. It is true that he advises the composer who wishes to make his overture "reproduce the characteristic idea of the drama by means pure and simple of self-subsistent music, and to conduct it to a conclusion which shall correspond, by anticipation, with the solution of the problem in the scenic play," to give the introductory instrumental piece some thematic connection with the opera. But not, be it observed, by utilising long stretches of this material, as is done in the Tannhäuser overture. Wagner's advice to the composer is "to introduce into the characteristic motives of his overture certain melismic or rhythmic features that are of importance in the dramatic action itself—not features, however, strewn accidentally among the action, but such as play a decisively weighty part in it, characteristics that determine, as it were, the orientation of a human action on a specific terrain, and so give an individual stamp to the overture. These features must of course be purely musical in their nature, i.e. such motives from the world of tone as have a relation to human life. I would cite as excellent examples the trombone blasts of the Priests in the Magic Flute, the trumpet signal in the Leonora, and the call of the magic horn in Oberon. These musical motives from the opera, employed in advance in the overture, serve, when introduced there at the decisive moment, as veritable points of contact of the dramatic with the musical motion, and effect a happy individualisation of the tone-piece, which is intended to be a mood-defining introduction to a particular dramatic subject."[325] The ideal overture that Wagner had in his mind at this time was evidently something very different from the one he subsequently wrote for Tannhäuser: but the discrepancy between his theory and his practice is still more strikingly shown by a sentence that appears in the French version of the article but not in the German. In the French, the passage quoted above, commencing with the words "these features must of course be purely musical in their nature," was prefaced by the following: "But one should never forget that they [i.e. "the melismic or rhythmical features" from the opera that were to be interwoven into the tissue of the overture] should be entirely musical in their source, and not borrow their significance from the words that accompany them in the opera. The composer would in this case commit the error of sacrificing both himself and the independence of his art to the intervention of an alien art. These elements, I say, must be in their nature purely musical, and I would cite as examples," &c.

It is at once evident that this bars out whole passages such as the Pilgrims' Chorus, The Sirens' Chorus, and Tannhäuser's Hymn to Venus, and, in the Meistersinger overture, such passages as Sachs's final address, the phrases in which the populace jeer at Beckmesser, &c. Strictly speaking, indeed, neither of these overtures can be made to square with Wagner's theoretical principles. The question of the overture was one of those on which he never attained to complete consistency. In Tristan, as in Lohengrin, he devotes himself simply to working out in a broad form one great emotional motive of the drama. The overtures to Tannhäuser and the Meistersinger, and, in a lesser degree, that to the Flying Dutchman, are a mixture of the pot-pourri and the symphonic poem. The Prelude to Parsifal is again a sort of pot-pourri, though here, of course, there is no attempt at story-telling in detail, the Prelude setting before us, as Wagner himself said, the three motives of "Love, Faith and Hope," and showing, as it were, the emotional outcome of them. To the Rhinegold there is no overture, or even a Prelude in the formal sense of that word: the long-drawn chord of E flat is merely the oral counterpart of the visible sensation given the spectator by the Rhine. Similarly the preludial bars to the Valkyrie only paint the storm in which Siegmund is flying from his enemies.

Even the greatest men and the boldest revolutionaries are fettered in their thinking by the age in which they live. Only in this way can we account for Wagner's failure to see that the true solution of the problem of the overture was to abolish the overture. It had never any real æsthetic justification. As he himself points out, it had its origin simply in the fact that at one stage of the development of opera the composer saw the necessity of keeping the audience occupied in some way for a few minutes before it would be safe to raise the curtain on the play. It is one more of the many illustrations that may be cited of what may be called the dead hand in art,—the survival in a new art of some method of procedure that had its origin under quite other conditions. Pottery, for instance, continued for long to be decorated with lines that were merely imitations in clay—unnecessary imitations—of the designs and colours of the interlaced osiers out of which the primitive vessel was made. The symphony developed out of the custom of stringing certain dance movements into a suite: and in spite of the clearly recognised fact that there is no logical justification either in art or in life for casting the modern symphony into this arbitrary four-movement form, composers still weakly adhere to it. Wagner was fond of pointing out, again, how Beethoven's congenital inability to break away from the sonata form of his day led to a clash between this form and the purely dramatic, onward-urging impulse of the great Leonora overture. It is little wonder, therefore, that Wagner was so far the slave of his epoch that it never occurred to him, and least of all in 1841, to question the necessity of having any overture at all. The freer thought of the present day has been able either to reduce the overture to a few bars of prelude, simply attuning the mind of the spectator to the coming scene, as in Debussy's Pelleas and Melisande, or to dispense altogether with an instrumental introduction, as in Salome and Elektra.

VI

After the Paris articles of 1841 Wagner wrote little or nothing upon the æsthetics of his art for some ten years. For a time, indeed, he wrote practically no prose of any kind. He left Paris for Dresden in April 1842. At the end of that year he wrote his Autobiographical Sketch for Laube's Zeitung für die elegante Welt. His pen was then silent until 1844, in which year we have the Account of the bringing home of Weber's remains from London to Dresden, and the Speech at Weber's Grave. To 1846 belongs the programme he wrote for the performance of Beethoven's choral symphony on Palm Sunday at Dresden.[326] No doubt his duties at the Dresden Opera, which he seems to have fulfilled with great thoroughness and conscientiousness, left him little time for anything else but these and the composition of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. When he at length took up the pen again it was not to expound a system of musical æsthetics but to preach a social evangel, and to come to the first grips with the new dramatic ideas that had been slowly maturing in him. In May 1848 he submits to the Minister his Project for the Organisation of a German National Theatre for the Kingdom of Saxony. In September he sketches two operatic poems, Siegfried's Death and Friedrich Barbarossa, the former of which he works out in detail by November. Early in January the religious drama Jesus of Nazareth is sketched. In the summer of 1848 he writes the essay on the Wibelungen.

During these years his discontent with the social and political conditions of the times had been slowly rising. Though it would be unfair to Wagner to attribute this discontent solely to the miserable circumstances of his own life, it is certain that his poverty, his debts and his disappointments had a good deal to do with making him a rebel against the established order of things. Mr. H. S. Chamberlain holds that Wagner was already a "revolutionist against the artistic world of the present" in Paris in 1840. It is quite possible, for Wagner was even poorer in Paris at that time than he was a few years later in Dresden. Gustav Levy agrees with Mr. Chamberlain, but even his own sympathetic summary of the case unconsciously makes it clear that Wagner's personal experiences and circumstances had something to do with making a revolutionary of him. "Beginning of November (1847), Wagner returns (from Berlin)[327] in a state of discouragement. The incessant difficulties in the way of winning appreciation for his works, and his consequently ever-increasing financial embarrassments, as well as the persistent enmity of the press, the lack of support he received from Meyerbeer, and the refusal of Lüttichau[328] to take up his reform of the Opera, bring on an illness: he thinks of suicide. Everything in him presses powerfully towards the spiritual revolution, to the freeing of art from the fetters of un-German feeling and conventional, deeply-rooted ignorance (Unverstand)."[329]