Wagner as Man & Artist - Ernest Newman

Dass mit Zwang ich halte, was dir nicht haftet.
That by force I hold what denies thee homage.

Wer bist du, sag', die so schön und ernst mir erscheint?
Who art thou, say, who dost stand so beauteous and stern?

It was therefore, as usual, the musician in him controlling the poet, although he always strenuously denied this, and indeed his complaint against the old-time opera was that the poet was held in servitude to the musician. In each case the poet was the serf, but the terms of slavery were different. In the older opera he had to work within the limits of a set scheme that gave him little or no scope for character-drawing or for the natural evolution of a great dramatic action. In the Wagnerian opera the poet was indeed allowed to make his portion of the work worthy and consistent, but he was permitted no further scope than was consistent with the necessities of the music. If it be true that Wagner restored the poet to liberty by making the drama the end and the music the means, it was only in the sense that he first of all made the drama of the dimensions and the pattern that music required. Beyond these dimensions, away from that pattern, it could not be allowed to go.

That the musician in Wagner ruled the poet is plain enough to us now, but it was always denied by Wagner himself. In the Communication to my Friends, that elucidates so gratefully for us so many dark passages in Opera and Drama, he is persistently blind to the fact that is obvious enough to everyone else. As far as Rienzi, he tells us, he had taken his operatic subjects from ready-made stories, while with the Flying Dutchman he struck out a new path, framing his own libretto out of the simple unpolished outlines of a folk-saga. "Henceforward," he goes on to say, "with regard to all my dramatic works I was in the first instance Poet, and only in the complete working out of the poem did I become once more Musician. Only," he rather naïvely continues, "I was a poet who was conscious in advance of the power of musical expression for the working out of his poems."[368] Quite so: when a subject took possession of him he would see it all in terms of musical expression and development; and unconsciously the poem would be so planned as to provide the needful framework, and no more, for the musical emotion. Later on, after arguing that music is the emotional expression per se, but that it can only ally itself with words that contain the possibility of emotion, he once more lets us see that it was the musician in him that determined his choice of subject and the manner of its treatment. "What I perceived, I now looked at solely with the eyes of music [nur aus dem Geiste der Musik]; though not," he rightly points out, "that music whose formal rules might still have embarrassed my expression, but the music that was complete within me, and in which I could express myself as in a mother tongue."[369] Granting that the musical world from the centre of which he wished to pour himself out upon poetry was not that of the stereotyped operatic composer, the fact remains that it was from the centre of music itself that the outpouring was to come. And we may further grant that "it was precisely by the facility of musical expression" he had acquired that "he became a poet." What had happened in the interval between Rienzi and the Flying Dutchman, and still more in the interval between the Flying Dutchman and the Ring, was that his musical sense had so enormously expanded that it was now capable of weaving a continuous emotional tissue of its own,—a tissue, however, that required the framework of poetry to make it definite. He was right; it was of the musician in him that the poet was born. And it was the musician insisting on the dramatic "stuff" being reduced to its pure essentials that led him to reject the wide-spreading romance and history, and to seize upon the myth, in which a human content was presented in the simplest possible form.