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

by George Ainslie Hight

would have been most thrilling, and the way would have been naturally prepared for the entry of Elvira just in time to save her.

Absolute or instrumental music requires the strict form which is effected by means of balanced repetitions in order to supply that intellectual element without which it cannot be understood, and which in vocal music is afforded by the words. The drama needs no such restrictions and cannot endure them. Human actions are not subject to mechanical laws; they are intelligible in themselves, but cannot be measured out. Human life is a continuous whole, one action leads naturally on to another, without any break, and to attempt to range the actions of men and women under schemes of arias, cavatinas, duets, choruses, each existing for itself and sharply separated from all others, can only render them unintelligible and ridiculous.

[CHAPTER V]

THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA AND ITS ANTECEDENTS

We have already seen that the drama is distinguished from all other forms of art by its essential quality of directly enacting the things to be communicated instead of merely describing them. Since only human things can fitly be so enacted by human beings, dramatic art is generally identical with human art; it is the art of representing the actions of men and women--or of deities conceived as idealized human beings--in such a way as to reveal the motives by which they are impelled, their characters. The adjective "dramatic" may, however, be understood in two ways, according as our interest is centred in the actions themselves, their contrasts and conflicts, or in the motives or characters of the persons engaged. In the former case the drama will endeavour to represent decisive and exciting actions passing in rapid succession before the eyes. This may be called the spectacular drama, and its greatest master is Schiller. When Goethe is described as "the least dramatic of all great poets" it is in this sense that the word is used. Goethe often hankered after spectacular effects, but was never very successful in producing them.

But if we consider the essence of a dramatic conception to lie in the conflict of opposing motives, not necessarily discharging themselves as action, but subdued, and the more impressive because kept under restraint within the soul of the actor, we shall rank Goethe amongst the very foremost of dramatic poets. Examples of what I will call the moral drama are all Goethe's maturer plays, such as Tasso and Iphigenie. To this class also belong Lessing's Nathan der Weise and the representative French plays of the classic epoch. They are, generally speaking, bad stage plays, but are extremely interesting to read, and gain in interest the more they are studied. In the works of the greatest of all dramatists, such as Sophokles and Shakespeare, the spectacular and moral elements are so closely united as to be inseparable. In the Attic drama the more striking spectacular events had, for technical reasons, to be kept out of sight. Ajax piercing himself with his sword, Oedipus tearing out his own eyes, are, like the thunderstorm in Lear, the outcome of terrific internal motives bursting all confines with the force of an irresistible torrent. Our interest is centred, not in the actions themselves, but in the motives which produced them, in the characters.

Wagner, with his conscientious habit of accounting to himself for everything that he did, found his artistic level more slowly than do most poets. When the stylistic crudities of his earlier productions had been overcome, he began the work of his maturer life with Rheingold, the most spectacular drama ever written. Walküre and Siegfried were continued in the same vein, and it is very significant that he broke off the composition and laid the work aside just at the monstrous dragon-fight. It is no strained conjecture that as the difficulties of his gigantic subject accumulated he at last realized the practical impossibility of what he had undertaken. To bring the whole story of the fall of the ancient Germanic gods into a spectacular drama on the scale of the Ring was beyond even his mighty powers, and in Die Walküre he is like a man trying to break away from the path which he has laid down for himself, to get rid of the cumbersome spectacular element and let the action develop itself naturally from within. With all its unrivalled beauties the Ring as a drama is a monstrosity. It turns upon motives which are not apparent from the actions and have to be explained in dreary and most undramatic length. Its very foundation is wrong; its central figure, the prime author of the new and more blessed world which is to follow, is the offspring of an incestuous union for which there is no occasion whatever. The myth itself has sometimes been held responsible, and it has been asserted that Wagner had to reproduce the tradition as he received it. Nothing of the kind is true; Wagner has altered the entire story, taking, leaving, or altering just as he pleased. In the Völsunga paraphrase of Eddic lays, upon which the story of the Ring is founded, the child of the unnatural union is not Sigurd, not the golden hero "whom every child loved," but the savage outlaw Sinfjötli, half wolf, half robber, one of the most terrible creations of mythology. To conceive such a union as bringing forth a hero whom we are expected to regard as the very type of human nobility and guilelessness is an artistic blunder which we can only explain by supposing that Wagner found his material unmanageable. He was struggling with impossibilities and gave up the attempt.

From this he turned to Tristan, rushing at once to the opposite extreme. The absence of clear and decisive action in Tristan is as remarkable as the excess of action in the Ring. Persuaded that the motives and characters of men must be known before their actions can be understood, and that these can only be revealed in music, he has given us in Tristan music such as no mortal ear ever heard before or since; but action there is little or none. He scarcely deigns to tell even the most vital incidents of the story. Can any one say that he has understood the events connected with Morold and Tristan's first visit to Ireland and the splinter of the sword from the play itself without an independent explanation? Or that Tristan's reasons for carrying off Isolde are clear to him from Marke's account? Without these incidents the whole story is unintelligible, but with Wagner in his then mood they counted for nothing in the flood of emotional material. It was in Die Meistersinger that Wagner found the final equation between impulse and action, and the public has again judged rightly in placing that work first among all his dramatic compositions. But the musician and the philosopher will always turn to Tristan.

There are four principal epochs in which the drama has been a flourishing reality in Europe. They are: 1. In Athens in the fifth century B.C. 2. In Elizabethan England. 3. In Spain in the seventeenth century. 4. In France under Louis XIV.