Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde": An Essay on the Wagnerian Drama

by George Ainslie Hight

The change which came over artistic expression from about 1600 on implied a deeper and more vital change in the conception of art itself. Till then men had believed the things they told in their art. Byzantine saints, Cynewulf's Scriptural legends, German Heldenerzählungen, Icelandic Sagas, down to the saints and angels of the pre-Raphaelites, all represented realities to the poet; he would have felt no interest in telling of things which he did not believe to be true. But henceforward we have art for its own sake; the truthfulness of the subject-matter is of no account; the sole canon of art is beauty of form; its purpose not instruction but pleasure.

I know no episode in the history of art that is more instructive than the birth of the Italian opera. It was typically a product of the Renaissance, but it came at the very end of that movement, when the freshness of its early vigour was past, when learning had declined into pedantry, and its graceful art was lost in barocco.

The period of Italian history known as the Renaissance is important because it brought forth a greater number of geniuses of the highest rank than ever existed together in any country before or since, except perhaps in the great time of Athens. But in itself it was a falsehood. It was an attempt to revive former Italian greatness, forgetting that the greatness of Italy had been exclusively military and political, whereas the modern movement was literary and artistic. It committed the blunder of confusing together under the term "classic" two very different forms of culture, the Greek and the Roman, very much as we now group Hindus, Moslems, and Chinamen together as "Orientals." All that was really great in art was Greek, but they were content to receive it through the tradition of the most inartistic nation that ever lived. Far indeed were the Renaissance humanists from the noble simplicity of Hellenic art.

The Renaissance movement in Italy was not only, like the German Reformation, anticlerical; it was atheist and immoral, at least in its later degenerate period, and it is likely that the representatives of the latest modernism who met and aired their views in the Florentine salons at the end of the sixteenth century, were inspired as much by hatred of religion, or by what is called love of freedom, as by enthusiasm for art. Hitherto the Renaissance had taken little notice of music. It was a barbarian art; how could Florentine exquisites, disciples of Machiavelli, men of the vein of Lorenzo di Medici, Leo X., and Baldassari Castiglione be expected to occupy themselves with the art of men bearing such names as Okeghem or Obrecht? Popes and Cardinals, however, had shown themselves much better connoisseurs of art than the humanists, and had brought these barbarians to Italy, had given them high appointments and become their pupils. The fact that the antipathy of the humanists to music was extended to that of their own great countrymen, to Palestrina, Vittoria, Suriano, cannot be entirely accounted for by their dislike of everything clerical, still less by want of taste. The cause lay far deeper. It was the transition from the old order to the new, from mediaeval faith to modern rationalism, from art to science.

Art and science both contemplate Nature, and seek to turn her gifts to account to better and ennoble human life. Art accepts the beautiful objects of Nature as they are, without questioning. The artist says: "Let me lead you by the hand; I have seen something new and beautiful; here it is; try to see it too, with my help, that we may both enjoy it together." But he uses no compulsion; with those who turn a deaf ear to him he is powerless. Science on the other hand tries to compel belief by irresistible processes of logic; the scientist's axiom is that if the premises be true the conclusion must follow, and he pours scorn upon all who refuse assent to his interpretations, denouncing them as ignorant, superstitious, if not wilfully blind and perverse. Mystery, according to the ancients the beginning of philosophy, has no place in science; what cannot be explained is superstitious and must be rejected as false. The source of art, as of religion, must be sought not in the ineffable, incomprehensible phenomena of nature, but in the human mind, in reason, to which all art must conform.

This was the spirit in which the founders of the nuove musiche sought to carry out their reforms; their intolerance rivals that of Lucretius or Haeckel. It is impossible to suppose that men of their highly-cultured aesthetic sense were deaf to the purely musical beauty of polyphony. They were trained in its school, and had employed it themselves most skilfully in their madrigals. It was the mystery of the mass and of its attendant music which they detested.

Another consideration must be added. Hand in hand with this rationalizing tendency, indeed only another phase of the same phenomenon, is the striving for self-assertion of the individual, which is the mark of all progress towards higher civilization. The contrapuntal mass or motet expressed the commonwealth of the Church, where the individual disappears, absorbed in the community. The nuove musiche sought to emancipate the individual, and allow him to express his own independent existence. Thus the progress of the modern musical drama presents an exact parallel to that of the Greek drama, from before Thespis onwards, except that here the change from lyric to dramatic representation was slower, because, there being no preconceived plan or model for the reformers to work by, the development was gradual and natural instead of violent.

The year 1600 marks with considerable accuracy the transition from the old order to the new. The two greatest masters of the old school had recently died, and with them their work expired. At the wedding of Henri IV. of France with Maria de' Medici in Florence, in that year, was performed the opera Euridice, the joint work of Caccini and Peri, which is the starting-point of the new music.

The details of the invention of the nuove musiche, the ideas which brought it forth, how these were nursed in the salons of Florentine noblemen, especially in that of Bardi Conte Vernio, are all well known. They did not proceed in the first instance from musicians, but from scholars, who, having read in the course of their studies about Grecian (or Roman--it was all the same to them) dramatic music, determined to add to the other accomplishments of the new order that of reviving the ancient drama with its music. They were vehement in their denunciations of the barbarous institutions of counterpoint and loudly called for a return to the only true principles of music as taught by the ancients. With this end in view they drew into their circle the most gifted musicians whom they could find, and expounded to willing and zealous ears the principles of music as embodied in the rules of Plato and Aristotle, omitting, however, to state where they found them in the works of those philosophers. The first result was the opera, or operas (for there seem to have been two, one by Caccini and one by Peri, welded into one) Euridice performed at the royal wedding. It was followed by other similar works and the series has continued in unbroken course for three centuries, through Monteverde, Carissimi, A. Scarlatti, down to our own time. The physiognomy of the early operas of the classic revival is still distinctly traceable in Rossini, Donizetti, and the early Verdi, after whom its career was suddenly cut short almost in the height of its fame by the publication of the first part of Wagner's Oper und Drama in 1851.

From the very beginning the Italian opera was what it is now, frivolous, insincere, imbecile. Its sole function was, and always has been, to help idlers of the upper classes to while away their evenings. The absurd notion of a Platonic music was rivalled by the absurdity of the composition. The inane dialogue was made up of interminable recitative, in the midst of which an occasional chorus--introduced in conformity with supposed classical practice--must have come as a most refreshing relief; for choruses they could write. It was dramatic in so far that it was provided with all the paraphernalia of the stage and that the singers walked about as they sang. Possibly, too, the performers had some initiation into modern methods of operatic acting, and would raise one arm at the word cielo, two arms at certain other words, etc.; but it would be hard to detect any living dramatic idea in those mythological heroes and heroines, Dafnes, Amors, Tirsis, Ariannas dressed up as stage shepherds and shepherdesses. The only raison d'être of the music in the minds of the fashionable audience was--then as now--to provide a stimulus for conversation and flirting, or a pleasant diversion in the intervals of their business transactions.