Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

XVIII

There are as many contradictions between Wagner's theory and practice, indeed, as between his life and his art. Without attempting the impossible task of trying to reconcile them all, let us cast a rapid glance over the main features of his practice, which are far more important than his theory. From every side we are driven to the conclusion that the dominating force in him was the instrumental musician who was born to continue Beethoven's work in another sphere. As his powers developed, his music becomes more symphonic,[390] and he intuitively shapes his poems so as to allow the freest possible play to the symphonic succession and interweaving of themes. The characters serve to make the course of the story clear, and to give precision to the emotions that are being expressed by the orchestra. He saw in Beethoven's later works a colossal effort to make music free. Logic of some kind there must be in every piece of music. This logic depends fundamentally upon showing the inter-relation of each part of the music by the recurrence of significant themes; and broadly speaking there are only two ways of achieving this—by way of pattern or by way of poetry. At bottom all form, all logic, in music, in fiction, in drama, in architecture, in sculpture, is one in object and process; a coherent whole has to be made out of parts, and the parts have to justify their existence by showing themselves indispensable to the whole. Pattern form and poetic form embrace between them every mode of structure of which music is capable. Sometimes a piece of music leans markedly to the one or the other; but in the vast majority of cases the actual form is a union of the two, or a compromise between them. It was a compromise of this kind that Wagner detected in some of the greatest works of Beethoven; the form that had been evolved mainly with reference to pattern was being applied, with only partial success, to music the prime impulse of which was poetic—however vague this poetry might be, however incapable of expression in words. But while pattern form pure and simple tells its own story and is its own justification, poetic form needs to be explained and justified by the poetic idea that is at the root of it. Go beyond Beethoven, says Wagner, in the expression of poetic emotion, and your form will become so free that the hearer will no longer be able to see it in terms of the old pattern logic, and the music will seem to him formless and incoherent. You can only win the full freedom you need for the expression of definite as distinguished from indefinite emotion by telling the hearer the nature and the source of this emotion. As Wagner put it, poetic music in pattern form always prompts the question "Why?" The symphonic-poem writer answers with his programme: Wagner answered with the characters and the action of the programme set visibly before us on a stage. There is no such fundamental æsthetic difference between the two methods as Wagner imagined; the differences are only in detail.[391]

The curious thing is that, for all his theories, Wagner himself now and then wrote instrumental pieces that prompt a "Why?" as emphatically as anything of Beethoven's. He despised what he called the "quadrature musicians"—the composers who take refuge in phrases cut to a regulation length and pattern and worked-out in a stereotyped four-square form. Music meant little or nothing to him unless it spoke directly of humanity and to humanity. No theme must be invented for mere invention's sake, or worked-out for the mere sake of working-out; it must spring into being as the expression of an overwhelming human need or of some blinding vision, and must answer in all its changes to the changing life of the man or mood it painted. It was this inevitableness of idea and of form that he admired in Beethoven and missed in Brahms. His inability to compromise on the matter made him contemptuously sweep out of existence most of the music of his day. It was precisely in this broadening of the Beethovenian spirit and design, and the making them capable of expressing every emotion that mankind can feel, that he opened out such enormous possibilities in music.

The ordinary "abstract" composer's mind must have been a pure puzzle to a man like him, who could not understand how modern music could have any raison d'être apart from something definitely poetic or pictorial to be expressed. To invent a theme for its own abstract sake, to pare and shape it till it was "workable," and then to weave it along with others of the same kind into a pattern of which the main lines were predetermined for him by tradition—this was something he could not imagine himself doing, and that he scoffed at when he found the Conservatoire musician engaged in it. "I simply cannot compose at all," he said once, "when nothing occurs to me."[392] He must always have a definite subject, which was to determine the nature, of the theme and control the whole course of the development. Looking back through the music of the generation that has followed him, we can see how penetrating his vision was in all questions of expression and form. Beethoven's innovations, he points out, were mostly in the field of rhythmic distribution, not that of harmonic modulation. Rhythmic changes of all kinds come naturally within the scope of the ordinary symphonic movement, which is in essence an ideal dance; but startling melodic or harmonic changes, or attempted subtleties of form, generally prompt that awkward question "Why?" and leave it unanswered. Take, for example, the efforts that have been made in our own day to unify the four-movement sonata form by the carrying over of themes from one movement to another, as in César Franck's violin and pianoforte sonata. Attach a poetic significance to a theme, and its recurrence in another movement explains itself; but in a piece of ostensibly abstract music the recurrence simply puzzles us. No satisfactory answer can be given—except in terms of a programme—to the question why a theme that has apparently served its purpose should be resuscitated by the composer at a later stage, in preference to the invention of a fresh theme. For every effect the composer makes, the logician in us insists upon knowing the cause. Hence the soundness of Wagner's advice to the modern composer—Do not consciously aim at harmonic and instrumental effects, but wait till there is a sufficient cause for them.[393] His own practice was a model of restraint: not one modulation, not one subtilisation of the harmony, not one addition to the orchestral weight without a thoroughly good reason, rooted in the nature of the idea itself. "In the instrumental prelude to the Rhinegold, for instance," he says, "it was impossible for me to quit the fundamental note, for there was no reason whatever for changing it. A great part of the not unanimated theme that follows between Alberich and the Rhine Maidens permitted of modulation only to the most closely related keys, since passion still expresses itself here in its most primitive naïveté."[394] The rule he would enforce upon pupils is this, "Never leave a key so long as what you have to say can still be said in it." And only when the emotion becomes more complex must the harmony be coloured more subtly to correspond. This, he lays it down, constitutes the great difference between the symphonic and the dramatic development of themes. In the former the effect is meant to be kaleidoscopic; and a real master can work wonders in the arabesque-like combination and transformation of simple material. But do what he will he cannot venture upon the variety of the dramatic composer, for if he goes beyond a certain point of audacity or singularity he ceases to be intelligible in terms of pure music. "Neither a mere play of counterpoint, nor the most fanciful devices of figuration or harmonic invention, either could or should transform a theme so characteristically and give it so many and so varied expressions—and yet keep it always recognisable—as true dramatic art can do quite naturally." Proof of this can be had by pursuing the simple theme of the Rhine Maidens—

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Rhinegold! Rhinegold!

"through all the changing passions of the four-part drama, down to Hagen's watch song in the first Act of the Götterdämmerung, where it appears in a form that, to me at any rate, is simply unthinkable as the theme of a symphonic movement, albeit it still has its raison d'être in the laws of harmony and thematism, though only in their application to the drama. But to try to apply what is thus made possible to the symphony itself must necessarily lead to the complete ruin of the latter; for there it would be merely a deliberate 'effect,' while in the other case it has a motive."[395] And he ends with the theory that symphonic music and dramatic music are two quite different modes of expression, and that only errors of practice and of judgment can come from the attempt to blend them. This dictum the musicians of a later day can accept only with reservations. We admit that he did well to draw a line of sharp distinction between the older symphonic moods and forms and those of musical drama. But he overlooked the fact that the basic distinction was not between symphony and drama, but between purely abstract music of all kinds and purely poetic music of all kinds. There are procedures open to the latter that are still not open to the former—virtually as many procedures, indeed, as are open to opera itself. For the principle of the symphonic poem is at bottom the same as that of the musical drama—to follow in music the vicissitudes of a poetic idea; and given a knowledge on our part of this idea, whether it be communicated to us by a stage action or by a prose or poetic explanation, the composer is at liberty to indulge in as many audacities of melody, of harmony, of modulation as may be justified by the nature of his subject. Wagner, as I have tried to show, was prevented from applying his own principles to purely instrumental poetic music by his inability to follow the "moments" of an action that was merely suggested to him, instead of being realised in a theatre. But there is no reason why we should fail to draw the conclusion that is obviously implicit in Wagner's own argument as to the relations of music and poetic suggestion. The strange thing is that every now and then he himself made an excursion into the fields he attempted to close to others. His Faust Overture, for example, is a pure symphonic poem, the full meaning of which only becomes apparent to us when we know the poetic subject. The opening tuba theme is of a type that a composer would hesitate to use for the opening "subject" of a symphony; it receives both its explanation and its justification solely from our knowledge that it depicts the world-weary Faust. The case of the Siegfried Idyl is still more instructive. That exquisite piece of music puzzles us once or twice by the apparent abruptness of its transitions. We might have guessed, from our knowledge of Wagner's precepts and practice, that he is following a quasi-poetic scheme of his own, and that the music does not always tell a coherent story to us because he has seen fit to keep this scheme from us. We now know for certain, on the testimony of Glasenapp, that this is so. Here we have another instance of flat contradiction between Wagner's theory and his practice. But had he reflected that a knowledge of the poetic basis of the Siegfried Idyl is necessary to us if we are to see the same coherence in the music that he saw, he would have been bound to admit that the communication of the poetic basis of any symphonic poem will justify the composer writing in a style that would be unsuitable to abstract music—a style differing very little in its fundamentals from that of the Wagnerian stage. No middle course is possible: whatever justifies the Wagnerian music drama justifies also Till Eulenspiegel and the L'Après-midi d'un Faune—not for Wagner perhaps, but certainly for us.

His intransigent attitude towards programme music is all the stranger in view of the fact that he persistently read concrete meanings or events into the music that moved him. Everyone knows his interpretation of certain of Beethoven's symphonies and the C sharp minor quartet. He read quasi-pictures and even words into certain of Bach's fugues; for the seventeenth fugue and the twenty-fourth prelude he had half a mind to write appropriate words. He ought to have seen that if instrumental music could thus suggest concrete associations, similar associations could also suggest music to correspond with them, and that the logical and inevitable outcome of this alliance between music and poetic suggestion is programme music. It is interesting to learn, however, that in his last days he often talked of writing a symphony. He had, he says, no lack of ideas; his difficulty was to stop inventing. His symphony would have been in one movement only; "the finales are the awkward things [Klippe]; I will steer clear of them; I will keep to one-movement symphonies." Nor would he base them on the old system of theme-contrast. Beethoven had exhausted the possibilities of that form. His own style would be that of an endless melodic web—the principle, indeed, that we can see at work in all the operas of his maturity. "Only," he added, "no drama"; evidently his prejudice against story music apart from the stage persisted to the end. The projected symphonies would apparently have been on the lines of the Siegfried Idyl and the larger pianoforte works such as the Albumblatt for Betty Schott (1875), the Albumblatt for the Princess Metternich (1861), the Album Sonata for Frau Wesendonck (1853), and the Ankunft bei den schwarzen Schwänen (1861). If so, we should probably be compelled to pass the same criticism upon the symphonies as we do upon these works—that in spite of their unquestionable beauty we are sometimes at a loss to see the same coherence in them that they must have had for him. In the lengthy Album Sonata for Frau Wesendonck, for example, we feel that he is all the while following the outlines of some unavowed poetic theme, slackening and tightening the expression, lightening and darkening it, hurrying and pausing, in conformity with the demands of that. A musical picture of this kind, that disdains formal development of the pattern order, and simply weaves its tissue out of moods, is much more difficult on a large scale than on a small one. The trouble begins when a transition has to be made from one mood to another. In his last days Wagner was capable of wonderful quasi-symphonic meditations on a given theme; nothing could surpass for pure beauty or for continuity of invention the long orchestral passage that accompanies Kundry's account of Parsifal's mother (vocal score, p. 187 ff.). We feel that Wagner could have indeed worked marvels in this way to the end: but, as he himself once said in a letter to Frau Wesendonck, the art of composition is really the art of transition; and one fears that his symphonic transitions would have failed to make their reasons clear to us. The astounding tissue of the Götterdämmerung teems with transitions of the most abrupt kind; but they are all intelligible because the physiognomies of the leit-motives are familiar to us, and every allusion is instantaneously clear. Their logic is only partly in themselves, and partly in the poetic ideas of which they are the symbols. It seems probable that his symphonies would have been Siegfried Idyls on a larger scale, possessing every virtue but that of inevitable continuity.