RICHARD WAGNER—Portrait by Franz von Lenbach
The Ring of the Nibelung
THE MUSIC DRAMA
Monograph Number One in The Mentor Reading Course
Music drama, as Mr. Finck says, is quite different from Opera. In Wagner’s early years opera, for the most part, was a weak, vapid thing dramatically, the plot foolish and flat, the music a string of songs, duets, quartets, and choruses connected by dull recitative. The music was showy, and of a kind to display the skill of the singer rather than the composer. And prima donnas at times in their vanity would embellish this most florid music with additional vocal flourishes.
Richard Wagner composed operas before he perfected his Music Drama, but in several of these operas—The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin—he gave plain intimations of the principles which he developed later in what he called “The Art Work of the Future.” Instinctively he reached out toward his ultimate object in art before he had fully formulated his ideas; and the composers whom he admired were those who had made music a means of true, dramatic expression—Gluck, Mozart and Weber, in opera, and Schubert in song. All of them made music the expression of the composer’s intentions as against the vanity of the singer. Mozart defeated the despotic methods of prima donnas in some cases by making his arias so difficult technically that the singers could not add any embellishments of their own. But, while insisting on the claims of the composer, none of these great musicians thought of allowing the drama to determine the form and style of the music. That is an essential principle in the Music Drama. The music does not simply accompany the drama—it is itself the very expression of the drama. The Rhine music, 135 bars, opening Rheingold, is not simply an appropriate accompaniment to the flow of the river. It is the river translated into musical form—so much so that if played in a concert room apart from the scene of the murky Rhine depths, in which the Rhine Maidens are circling, it would have no meaning. And while a great deal of Wagner’s music lends itself readily to concert production, and is popular as such, the interest in it is a combined music and dramatic one.
The Music Drama is not a single art. It is a manifold art, combining the arts of poetry, painting, sculpture, and music. Wagner contended that the arts strayed away and fell backward after the days of the glory of Greek Drama, because each art tried to develop and perfect itself separately in its own way. Wagner asserted that the way to the true, full, perfected art work was to reunite these arts in the Music Drama. This theory he set forth in many writings, and finally expressed in his compositions. His Music Drama, therefore, gives full expression for the poet in the text of the play, for the painter in the scenic effects, for the sculptor in the statuesque groups on the stage, and for the composer in the musical expression which completes the combination.
And none of these contributors, not even the composer, dominates or controls the others—not even accompanies them. The elements of the Music Drama are more closely interwoven than that. The contributing arts are amalgamated in one single complete art.