Was du mir bist, Kann staunend ich nur fassen,
Wenn mir sich zeigt, was ohne dich ich war.
Du bist der holde Lenz, der neu mich schmückte,
Der mir verjüngt der Zweig und Aeste Saft:
—Richard Wagner.
II
THE MUSIC
One is filled with admiration at Wagner’s deft use of thematic material in the score of Parsifal. Despite the exegetical enthusiasm of von Wolzogen, Heintz, and Kufferath, a very few motives suffice the master for his polyphonic skill in development. And they are principally in the prelude—now unhappily a familiar concert room number. I say unhappily because no composer’s music is less adapted to concert than Wagner’s. Divorced from the context of gesture, speech, scenic display, his music becomes all profile. One misses the full, rich, significant glance of the eye. Wagner is a weaver, not a form-maker. He can follow a dramatic situation, or burrow deeply into the core of morbid psychology; but let him attempt to stand alone, to write music without programme or the fever of the footlights—then he is the inferior of several men, the inferior of Liszt, Tschaïkowsky, and Richard Strauss; not to mention Beethoven, Schubert, or Chopin. I know that this opinion ill accords with the belief of many, yet I do not think it can be disputed. His preludes and overtures, containing as they do the leading motives of his dramas, are of interest only for that reason. Considered as absolute music they are not noteworthy, notwithstanding their coloring and grandiose themes. So is it with Parsifal—even more so. The work preëminently smells of the lamp. It lacks spontaneity. Its subject is extremely undramatic. Nothing happens for several hours,—nothing but discourses, philosophical and retrospective. Never has Wagner so laboriously built a book. It is a farrago of odds and ends, the very dust-bin of his philosophies, beliefs, vegetarian, anti-vivisection, and other fads. You see unfold before you a nightmare of characters and events. Without simplicity, without lucidity, without naturalness—Wagner is the great anti-naturalist among composers—this book, through which has been sieved Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Schopenhauerism, astounds one by its puerility, its vapidity. Yet because of his musical genius, Wagner is able to float this inorganic medley, and at times makes it almost credible. It is an astounding feat of the old hypnotist—for hypnotist he is in Parsifal as in no other composition. By sheer force of his musical will, this Klingsor of Bayreuth hypnotizes his hearers with two or three themes not of themselves remarkable, as Charcot controls his patients with a shining mirror.
Wagner always selected librettos that threw up a lot of dust for the erudite. His Tristan demands much delving, and with the Ring and its complementary literature we shall never finish. The plain fact in the case is this: Parsifal, despite all its wealth of legend, its misty, poetic allusiveness, its manufactured mysticism, is simple old-fashioned opera. And its verse quâ verse is very bad. The Wagnerites reject this statement as does the devil holy water. Supposing you enter the Wagner theatre, your brain cells unencumbered with the memories of Perceval, Parzival, Parsifal, Fal-Parsi, and the rest of the philological mystification, what do you see?—and remember that the ideal drama should set forth without previous knowledge or explanation its dramatic content.
You see an old-fashioned and very tedious opera—setting aside some of the music; and there is throughout an abuse of the tremolo that sounds suspiciously Italian. You see a lot of women-hating men, deceiving themselves with spears, drugs, old goblets, all manners of juggling formulas, and yet being waited upon by a woman—a poor, miserable witch. You see a silly youth treated as if he had murdered a human being because he shot a swan. You see this same dead bird borne away on a litter of twigs, to noble, impressive music like a feathered Siegfried. Surely Wagner was without a sense of the humorous; or was he parodying his own Death of Siegfried, as Ibsen parodied Ibsen in A Wild Duck? You see a theatrically imposing temple, modelled after the Duomo of Siena, wherein a maniacal King raves over an impossible wound, and performs ceremonies recalling the Roman Catholic communion service. In Act II you are transported to the familiar land of Christmas pantomime. There a bad magician seeks to destroy the castle of the noble knights, and evokes a beautiful phantom to serve his purpose. There are spells, incantations, blue lights, screaming that makes the blood run cold, and the whole bagful of tricks that Weber, Marschner, and even Mozart delighted in. Follows fast the magic garden, and the sirens with rose petals on head. The foolish boy still eludes temptation. Even the beautiful witch cannot lure him. All is fairy play, pantomimic transformations, castles that crumble, thunder-riven gardens, and the whizzing of a malignant lance. Even that old Gounod ruse, the sign of the cross, is employed, and with overpowering effect. Now what possesses a generation which knows Darwin, has read Herbert Spencer, and can follow with delight the unerring logic of events that unroll themselves in the Ibsen plays—what possesses this generation of ours to sit enthralled before all this nebulosity?