Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

It is evident throughout that his theory is the product of his own æsthetic bias. He can express himself only in terms of poetry and music on the stage; it is therefore illegitimate for any other artist to adopt any other medium of expression. Poetry without music, music without poetry, cannot satisfy him; therefore no one else has any right to be satisfied with either of these arts separately. The truth is that he was utterly insensitive to the peculiar qualities in each of the separate arts that constitute its special charm for those who practise it exclusively. When he was in Milan in 1859 he suddenly realised, he tells us, that he was "no good as a judge of pictures, because the subject, when once it had made a clear and sympathetic appeal to me, at once and completely decided me."[343] The confession is quite superfluous. It is writ large over all his prose works that he had nothing of the painter's delight in painting, or any real understanding of its æsthetic effect. He seems to have been equally blind or deaf to the peculiar appeal of the other arts. If it were not so, he would hardly have laid it down, in all seriousness, that "literature poetry," as the "mere organ of the intellect," should be dissolved, self-abrogated, into the "unified art-work of the future," or that architecture decays when it passes from the service of the State and religion into the service of the "egoistic individual," or that sculpture too has become a merely "egoistic" art, only to be "redeemed" by being taken up into the "united art-work,"[344] or that painting too must seek a similar "redemption." His notions that the landscape painter will find his impulses satisfied in the painting of scenery or a background for the living man of drama, and that the gestures of the mime will amply compensate us for the cessation of sculpture, are indeed not to be taken seriously; they are possible only to a man without the least understanding of the plastic arts. It is of course quite untrue that in such a union of the arts as he suggests "the highest faculty of each is unfolded to the fullest." Even in the Wagnerian opera none of the contributing arts receives anything like its full unfolding except music. The truth is that Wagner had still not rid his artistic ideas of their political encumbrances. He was poor, and unable to realise himself in the world as it was then. He naturally supposed there must be something fundamentally wrong with a world of that kind, and he looked forward to a speedy dissolution of it, and the rising of a new civilisation from its ashes. He saw the rich buying pictures and sculptures and building houses for themselves, and the ordinary people reading poetry or prose, instead of them all flocking to the opera. People had a reprehensible passion for being what he called "units," each of them enjoying his own art in his own way. "True" art, therefore, would be possible only in a society in which the unit had lost consciousness of himself in the community. The communal art, the art enjoyed by great masses of people in the same place and at the same time, is the drama. The "units" who could not quite stifle their liking for painting and sculpture must therefore be satisfied with so much of these as could be given them in the theatre. It was a very logical and symmetrical piece of pleading: the only defect in it was that it left just one thing out of account—human nature.

His political speculations have the triple disadvantage that they are rarely true in themselves, they are too obviously the product merely of the circumstances of Wagner's own time and place, and they have no practical bearing upon art. The angry idealist overshoots his mark when he tells us that our modern States are the most unnatural associations of men, inasmuch as they arose solely out of a "mere external caprice, i.e. dynastic family interests," and that "they yoke together once for all a certain number of men for an aim that either never corresponded to a need they had in common, or, owing to the changes wrought by time, is certainly no longer common to them now." Even if it were true it would be without any practical significance either for politics or art,—for politics, because there is no one art that can be said to possess the imagination of a complex modern State, no one "need" for the satisfaction of which it is possible to induce all the citizens to labour: and for art, because art's business is to display to us the endless beauty and interest of things, not to argue us into the adoption of this or that view of this infinite, incomprehensible world. Too much of Wagner's political theorising is the mere outcome of affairs as they happened to be in Germany at the latter end of the first half of the nineteenth century. He idealised the "Folk" because that unfixable abstraction was the natural antithesis of the rich governing class whom he held in abhorrence. It is right that the artist should have his dreams of life as well as of art, and if he chooses to find his ideal in an abstraction no one can say him nay. But when he proceeds to endow that abstraction with all the impossible virtues under the sun, when he tells us that "the artist of the future" will be, not the poet, the actor, the musician or the plastician, but the "Folk,"—"to whom alone we owe all Art itself,"—we can only decline to keep company with him until he shall be able to use words with some meaning in them. There is, in fact, a sort of nonsense prose as there is a nonsense verse. Wagner's dithyrambs upon the Folk—and upon many another topic—are simply the prose counterpart of Lear and Carroll.

X

Wagner was the most many-sided of musicians, as a glance at the titles of his prose works will show. He benefited greatly by his versatility: no one can doubt that his music is all the richer for the stimuli his nature received from so many quarters. But if he gained something by it, it is probable that the world lost as much. There are few of us who would not give three-fourths of the prose works for another opera from his pen; and he would have had time to write half a dozen if he had abstained from all this prose. But the prose was a necessity to him; it was a needed purgation of the intellect, without which the emotion could not function fully and freely. The most striking illustration of this is Opera and Drama. Wagner had already poured out his ideas upon man and art at great length in Art and Revolution and the Art-Work of the Future. His mind was now brooding upon the great dramatic subject that was to occupy the bulk of his thinking for the next twenty years or more of his life. It was only for the realisation of this dream that he now clung to existence. Yet the dæmon within him drove him to postpone the composition of this poem until he had produced yet another huge theoretical treatise. The reasons for this were two-fold. In the first place he had a despairing sense of the futility of bringing so new and vast a work into being until he had educated the artistic public of that day to comprehend his novel aims and style. In the second place, he felt an imperative need of coming to an understanding with himself. He probably saw the whole plan and technique of Siegfried's Death[345] more or less vaguely—too vaguely for him to be willing to trust himself all at once on that huge uncharted sea. It would clarify his own ideas, as well as prepare the public, if he were to draw out the ground plan, as it were, of the music drama of the future. This he accordingly did in Opera and Drama. "My literary works," he wrote to Roeckel, "were testimonies to my want of freedom as an artist; it was dire compulsion alone that wrung them from me."[346]

Opera and Drama was written in the winter of 1850-1. As it is the most thorough and the most comprehensive statement that Wagner has given us of his theory of drama and music, it will be as well to summarise its arguments and conclusions for the reader.

I. Until the present time, men have indeed felt that the opera was a monument of the corruption of artistic taste, but criticism has not fully fathomed the matter: and it therefore becomes the task of the creative artist to practise criticism, in order at once to "annihilate error and uplift criticism." The writer of an article on modern opera in Brockhaus' Lexicon[347] has pointed out the defects of this form of art, showing its artificialities and conventions; but when he comes to the practical problem, "How is all this to be remedied?" he can only regret that Mendelssohn's too early death should have "prevented the solution of the riddle." But this is still proceeding on the wrong track. Had Mendelssohn any musical gift which Mozart, for example, did not possess? Could anything, from the standpoint of music, be more perfect than each individual number of Don Giovanni? Plainly the critic cannot wish for better music than this. It is evident, then, that what he wants in opera is the power and force of drama. But he is blind enough still to expect this from the musician; that is, wanting a house built for him, he applies, not to the architect, but to the upholsterer. And by the very failure of the critic's effort to solve the problem in this way, there is driven home the conclusion that this way the problem is really insoluble. Yet the true solution, so far from being difficult of attainment, simply stares one in the face; and the formula for it is that—

"The error in the art-genre of Opera consists in the fact that a Means of Expression (Music) has been made the object, while the Object of Expression (the Drama) has been made a means."

The truth of this formula can be attested by an appeal to the history of the opera. It arose, not from the folk-plays of the Middle Ages, in which there were the rudiments of a natural co-operation of music and drama, but at the luxurious courts of Italy, where the aristocrats engaged singers to entertain them with arias, that is, with "folk-tunes stripped of their naïveté and natural truth," embroidered on a story whose only raison d'être was the occasional advent of these arias.[348] Music, in fact, was the all-in-all of opera, as is clearly shown by the old-time domination of the singer: while all the poet had to do was to stand as little as possible in the way of the musician. The great merit of Metastasio,[349] according to the standard of the practice of his own day, was that he almost effaced his own art in favour of music—"never embarrassed the musician in the least, never advanced any unusual claim upon him from the dramatic standpoint." Nor has the situation changed, in its main features, down even to the present day. It still is held to be necessary for the poet to shape his material according to the necessities of the musician from first to last. The whole aim of the opera is simply music, the dramatic story being only utilised to serve music as a means for its own display. The anomaly has finally become so fundamental a part of men's lives that they no longer realise that it is an anomaly: and accordingly they still have hopes of erecting the genuine drama on the basis of absolute music—that is, of achieving the impossible. The object of Opera and Drama is to prove that great artistic results can follow from the collaboration of music with dramatic poetry, while from the unnatural position which music bears towards opera in our present system nothing but sterility can result.

Let us, then, in the first place, consider "Opera and the Nature of Music."