But Alphonse Daudet and music! His son, Léon, tells us much in his filial memoirs. “His ear,” says this pious and admirable biographer, “had a delicacy and correctness most exquisite. Thence came his passion for music, which was made an aid and assistance to his labors. He sits at his table in his working room. My mother is at the piano in the next room, and the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, or Schubert follows, one after the other, and excites or calms the imagination of the writer. ‘Music is another planet.’ ‘I adore all music, the commonest as well as the loftiest.’ But no man could analyze and understand better the masters of harmony, no man lauded the genius of Wagner in more splendid terms or more brilliant images: ‘The conquest by Wagner and the philosophers.’”
Daudet often came home with wet eyes after a concert, and we are told that his voice was delicate and penetrating when he hummed the tunes of Provence. His intimate musical friends were Raoul Pugno, the pianist, Bizet, and Massenet. In later years Hahn, the “little Hahn,” a composer of songs, often visited him, and he dearly loved the mad music of the Hungarian gypsy orchestras. We all recall his fondness for the pastoral pipe, and Valmafour, that thrice unhappy Valmafour urged in the pursuit of a hopeless fantastic love by an avaricious sister! I have often wondered who sat for the portrait of De Potter in Sapho. It was possibly a composite of Gounod, Bizet, and Massenet, though the figure of the love-stricken composer seems to fit Gounod better than the others—Gounod at the epoch of Georgiana Weldon.
That Daudet’s ear for verbal harmonies was of the finest there can be no doubt, after reading this: “It seems that the phrase, as Châteaubriand uses it, has preserved the rhythm and movement of the sea; the rush of his crises comes from the farthest line of the horizon; their return is broad, quiet, majestic. Another example of sensitiveness to the period in writing, Gustave Flaubert, is the only one presenting, in the same degree as Châteaubriand, that verbal wealth which gives a sensuous satisfaction to one’s mind when reading.”
Of Wagner he said:—
Wagner was a phenomenon in this century just as he will be one in the time to come, and no one is more fruitful than he in remarks of every sort.... He was a man belonging to another age. Nevertheless, he found a way to our nerves and our brains far more easily than one would have thought. If imagination has representatives, he was one of the giants. A Northern imagination, it is true, on which all the beauties and faults of the North have left their impress. He insists, he insists with violence and tenacity, he insists so pitilessly! He is afraid that we haven’t understood. That language of motives which he has imagined, and of which he makes such magnificent use, has the fault of leaving us very often with an impression of weariness.... Still, it was absolutely necessary for him to invent that system of motives.... His characters seem clothed in sound.... In Richard Wagner the imagination is so representative and violent that it saturates his work to overflowing with all the sounds of nature and leaves a limited space for the episodes. The passion between Tristan and Isolde plunges into the tumult of the ocean which overwhelms it; then it appears on the surface, then it plunges under again. One invincible power raises the waves and the souls by a single movement. In the poem, water, fire, the woods, the blossoming and mystic meadow, the holy spot become the more powerful characters. In this paganism of to-day all nature has become divine.
Wagner’s pantheism has never been sufficiently realized. For me his dramas deal with the elemental forces, rather than with men and women. Daudet evidently recognized this fact. Wagner was a pagan. The romancer says: “Your generation is accustomed to these splendors, this torrent of heroism and life, but you cannot present to your fancy the impression which that music exercised on men of my age.... There is everything in Wagner.... Turning his face toward Gayety he wrote the Meistersinger; turning toward Pain, Love, Death, the Mutter of Goethe, he wrote Tristan und Isolde. He made use of the entire human pianoforte, and the entire superhuman pianoforte. Cries, tears, the distortion of despair, the trickling of water over rocks, the sough of the wind in the trees, frightful remorse, the song of the shepherd and the trumpets of war—his tremendous imagination is always at white heat, and always ready.”
Daudet wisely refuses to discuss Wagner’s methods:—
Let his methods remain in the dark like his orchestra.... That imagination of his, feverish and excessive, has not only renovated music, but has also overwhelmed poetry and philosophy. Although theories disquiet me, still I feel them trembling in Wagner behind each one of his heroes. The gods talk of their destiny and of the conflict of that destiny with the destiny of men; they talk of ancient Fate in a way that is sometimes obscure, but with a rush and a go that make one forget to question them. It is the famous wall of the Légende des Siècles, crowded with the tubas and the trumpets of Sachs, tumultuous and glittering in their mass.
It is quite possible that Wagner desired to have characters of a size suited to their surroundings, and that one would feel uncomfortable while considering ordinary men who should be victims of the Ocean of Tristan or of the Forest of Siegfried. What difference does it make? He succeeds in moving us with these superterrestrial passions. In Tristan humanity plays a larger part. These are our own wounds which are bleeding in the flesh of the lovers, wounds that the sacred spear, which the hero brings back with him, shall never heal.
It will be seen that these are the utterances of a man who has pondered music as well as felt it deeply. He knew Wagner, and was a welcome visitor at Wahnfried. “Daudet pleases me much,” Wagner once said. The openly expressed admiration of this cultured Frenchman must have flattered the composer greatly. Because Daudet admired Wagner, his perception of Beethoven’s greatness was not blurred. He puts the case succinctly: “It were better to say that the masterpiece by Beethoven being more concentrated and closely woven makes a total impression upon you in a much shorter time than does a drama with its necessary stops and changes of scenery and delays for explanation.” This in answer to his son Léon, who had asserted that the emotions aroused by a Beethoven symphony include “a deeper and rarer quality” than those evoked by the Ring.