BAYREUTH IN 1897
To Bayreuth again, through dirty, dusty, nasty-smelling, unromantic Germany, along the banks of that shabby—genteel river known as the Rhine, watching at every railway station the wondrously bulky haus-fraus who stir such deep emotions in the sentimental German heart; noting how the disease of militarism has eaten so deeply into German life that each railway official is a mere steam-engine, supplied by the State with fuel in case he should some day be needed; eating the badly and dirtily cooked German food,—how familiar it all seems when one does it a second time! One week in Bayreuth was the length of my stay in 1896; yet I seem to have spent a great part of my younger days here. The theatre is my familiar friend in whom I never trust; the ditch called the river has many associations, pleasant and other; I go up past the theatre into the wood as to a favourite haunt of old time; I lunch under the trees and watch the caterpillars drop into my soup as though that were the commonest thing in the world; I wander into the theatre and feel more at home than ever I do at Covent Garden; I listen to the bad—but it is not yet time for detailed criticism. All I mean is, that the novelty of Bayreuth, like the novelty of any other small lifeless German town, disappears on a second visit; that though the charm of the wood, of the trumpet calls at the theatre, of the greasy German food, and the primitive German sanitary arrangements, remains, it is a charm that has already worn very thin, and needs the carefullest of handling to preserve. Whether, without some especial inducement, the average mortal can survive Bayreuth a third time, is, to me, hardly a question. As for my poor self, it suits me admirably—certainly I could stand Bayreuth half a dozen times. I like the life—the way in which the hours of the day revolve round the evening performance, the real idleness, passivity, combined with an appearance of energy and activity; I like to get warm by climbing the hill and then to sit down and cool myself by drinking lager from a huge pot with a pewter lid, dreamily speculating the while on the possibility of my ever growing as fat as the average German; I like to sit in a café with my friends till three in the morning, discussing with fiery enthusiasm unimportant details of the performance we have lately endured; I like being hungry six times a day. All these trifles please me, and please others. But the majority of the crowd of visitors are not pleased by them; and what can they do in Bayreuth after the freshness of novelty is worn off? They go to Villa Wahnfried and look for a few seconds at the spot where Wagner is buried—as I heard it said, like a cat in a back garden; they look for a few seconds at the church; they lunch; they buy and partly read the English papers; and then? Inevitably the intelligent reader will say, the opera in the evening. And I, who have been to the opera in the evening, gasp and remark, Really!
Lest this ejaculation be entirely misinterpreted by the irreverent, let it be said at once that the performances are not, on the whole, very bad. But I wish to consider whether they are of a quality and distinction sufficient to drag one all the way from England, and to compensate those who find the day dull for the dulness of the day, whether they are what Bayreuth claims them to be—the best operatic representations in the world, the best that could possibly be given at the present time. The circular sent out by amiable Mr. Schulz-Curtius states that, "while not guaranteeing any particular artists, the aim of Bayreuth will be to secure the best artists procurable" (or words to that effect). Is this genuinely the aim of Bayreuth, and does Bayreuth come near enough to the mark to make some thousands of English people think they have spent their time, money, and energy well in coming here? For my part I say Yes: even were the representations a good deal poorer, they form, as I have said, a centre for the day; I rise in the morning with them before me, and make all my arrangements—my lunches, discussions, and lagers—so as to reach the theatre at four o'clock; they save me from a life without an object, and add a zest to everything I do; they correspond to the trifling errand which renders a ten-mile walk in the country an enjoyment. But those who come here for nothing but the theatre, who do not feel the charm of the Bayreuth life, will, I am much afraid, answer No. Had I no friends here, or did I not enjoy their company and conversation, if my stomach refused lager and I could not smoke ten-pfennig German cigars, if I were not violently hungry every two hours, I am very much afraid I should answer No. The working of the scenic arrangements is, of course, as perfect as ever. Of course there are one or two mistakes,—stage machinists, after all, are built of peccable clay,—but these occur so seldom that one can sit with a feeling of security that is not possible at Covent Garden. In "The Valkyrie" the fire does not flare up ten minutes late; the coming of evening does not suggest an unexpected total eclipse of the sun; the thing that the score indicates is done, and not, as generally happens at Covent Garden, the reverse thing. The colours of the scenery are likewise as intolerably German as ever—the greens coarse and rank, the yellows bilious, the blues tinged with a sickly green, the reds as violent as the dress of the average German frau. On the other hand, many of the effects are wonderful—the mountain gorge where Wotan calls up Erda, Mime's cave, the depths of the Rhine, the burning of the hall of the Gibichungs. But the most astounding and lovely effects in the setting of the drama will not avail for long without true, finished, and beautiful art in the singing and acting; and, with a few exceptions, the singers do not give us anything approaching true, finished, and beautiful art. The exceptions are Van Rooy, Brema, Gulbranson, Brema, and Schumann-Heink. Van Rooy has a noble voice, admirably suited to Wotan, and he both sings and acts the part with a majesty and pathos beyond anything dreamed of by any other Wotan I have heard. He appears to have been the success of the Festival; and certainly so strong and exquisite an artist deserves all the success he can gain in Bayreuth. Brema's Fricka is noble and full of charm; Schumann-Heink sings the music of Erda with some sense of its mystery and of Waltraute in "Siegfried" with considerable passion; and Gulbranson has vastly improved her impersonation of Brünnhilde since last year. She is still unmistakably a student, but no one can doubt that she will develop into a really grand artist if she avoids ruining her fine voice by continually using it in a wrong way. Her Brünnhilde is just now very beautiful and intensely pathetic, but it owes less to her art than her personality. She does not interpret Brünnhilde—rather she uses the part as a vehicle for her private emotions; to an inordinate degree she reads into it her real or imaginary experience; and she has not learnt the trick of turning her feelings into the proper channels provided, so to say, by the part—of so directing them that Gulbranson disappears behind Brünnhilde. Still, it is a great thing to find an artist of such force and passion and at the same time such rare delicacy; and I expect to come here in 1899 and hear an almost perfect rendering of Brünnhilde. As for the rest of the singers, the less said about most of them the better. They have no voices worth the mentioning; the little they do possess they have no notion of using rightly; and their acting is of the most rudimentary sort. We hear so much of the fine acting which is supposed to cover the vocal sins of Bayreuth that it cannot be insisted on too strongly that the acting here is not fine. I can easily imagine how Wagner, endeavouring to get his new notion into the heads of the stupid singers who are still permitted to ruin his music because they are now veterans, would fume and rage at the Italian "business"—the laying of the left hand on the heart and of the right on the pit of the stomach—with which incompetent actors always fill up their idle intervals, and how he would beg them, in Wotan's name, rather to do nothing than do that. But to take the first bungling representation of the "Ring" as an ideal to be approached as closely as possible, to insist on competent actors and actresses standing doing nothing when some movement is urgently called for, is to deny to Wagner all the advantages of the new acting which modern stage singers have learnt from his music. The first act of "The Valkyrie," for example, will be absurd so long as Sieglinde, Hunding, and Siegmund are made to stand in solemn silence, as beginners who cannot hear the prompter's voice, until Sieglinde has mixed Hunding's draught. And some of the gestures and postures in which the singers are compelled to indulge are as foolish as the foolishest Italian acting. Who can help laughing at the calisthenics of Wotan and Brünnhilde at the end of "The Valkyrie," or at Wotan's massage treatment of Brünnhilde in the second act? The Bayreuth acting is as entirely conventional as Italian acting, and scarce a whit more artistic and sane. Even the fine artists are hampered by it; and the lesser ones are enabled to make themselves and whole music-dramas eminently ridiculous. On the whole, perhaps, acting and singing were at their best in "Siegfried." In "The Rheingold" some of the smaller parts—such as Miss Weed's Freia—were handsomely done; the Mime was also excellent; but I cannot quite reconcile myself to Friedrichs' Alberich. "The Dusk of the Gods" was marred by Burgstaller, and "The Valkyrie" by the two apparently octogenarian lovers. That is Bayreuth's way. It promises us the best singers procurable, and gives us Vogl and Sucher, who undoubtedly were delightful in their parts twenty years ago; and it would be shocked to learn that its good faith is questioned so far as lady artists are concerned. Whether it is fair to question it is another matter. In Germany feminine beauty is reckoned by hundredweights. No lady of under eighteen stones is admired; but one who is heavier than that, instead of staying at home and looking after her grandchildren, is put into a white dress and called Sieglinde, or into a brown robe and called Kundry; and a German audience accepts her as a revelation of ideal loveliness through the perfection of human form.
The Germans are devoid of a sense of colour, they are devoid of a sense of beauty in vocal tone, and I am at last drawing near to the conclusion that they have no sense of beauty in instrumental tone. Throughout this cycle the tone of many of the instruments has been execrable; many of them have rarely been even in approximate tune. The truth is that the players do not play well unless a master-hand controls them; and a master-hand in the orchestra has been urgently wanted. Instead of a master-hand we have had to put up with Master Siegfried Wagner's hand (he now uses the right), and in the worst moments we have wished there was no hand at all, and in the best we have longed passionately for another. I do not propose to discuss his conducting in detail. Under him the band has played with steady, unrelenting slovenliness and inaccuracy; the music has been robbed of its rhythm, life, and colour; and many of the finest numbers—as, for example, the Valkyrie's Ride, the prelude to the third act of "Siegfried," the march in "The Dusk of the Gods"—have been deliberately massacred. One cannot criticise such conducting: it does not rise near enough to competence to be worthy of criticism. But one has a right to ask why this young man, who should be serving an apprenticeship in some obscure opera-house, is palmed off on the public as "the best artist procurable"? He scarcely seems to possess ordinary intelligence. I had the honour of being inadvertently presented to him, and he asked me, should I write anything about Bayreuth, to say that he objected very much to the Englishmen who came in knickerbockers—in bicycle costume. When I mildly suggested that if they came without knickerbockers or the customary alternative he would have better reason to complain, he asserted that he and his family had a great respect for the theatre, and it shocked them to find so many Englishmen who did not respect it. I mention this because it shows clearly the spirit in which Bayreuth is now being worked. The Wagner family are not shocked when Wagner's music is caricatured by an octogenarian tenor or a twenty-stone prima donna; they are shocked when in very hot weather a few people wear the costume in which they suffer least discomfort. So the place is becoming a mere fashionable resort, that would cause Wagner all the pangs of Amfortas could he come here again. The women seem to change their dresses for every act of the opera; the prices of lodgings, food, and drinks are rapidly rising to the Monte Carlo standard; a clergyman has been imported to preach on Sunday to the English visitors; one sees twenty or thirty fashionable divorce cases in process of incubation; and Siegfried Wagner conducts. With infinite labour Wagner built this magnificent theatre, the most perfect machine in the world for the reproduction of great art-works; and Mrs. Wagner has given it as a toy to her darling son that he may amuse himself by playing with it. And, like a baby when it gets a toy, Siegfried Wagner is breaking it to pieces to see what there is inside. Unless it is taken from him until he has spent a few years in learning to play upon instead of with it, Bayreuth will quickly be deserted. Already it is in decadence. I shall always come to Bayreuth, for reasons already given; but fashions change, and the people who come here because it is the fashion will not be long in finding other resorts; and those who want only to see the music-plays adequately performed will have learnt that this is not the place for them. With one voice the ablest German, French, and Dutch critics are crying against the present state of things; and it is certainly the duty of every English lover of Wagner to refuse to take tickets for the performances that are to be conducted by Wagner's son. Bayreuth promises us the best artists. Whether some of the singers are or are not the best artists is largely a matter of taste. But that Siegfried Wagner is the best conductor procurable in Germany is too preposterous a proposition to be considered for a moment. He may be some day; but that day is far off.
As for the representation of "Parsifal," I should not trouble to discuss it had not Mr. Chamberlain's book on Wagner lately come my way. It shows me that the old game is being pursued as busily as ever. Since Wagner's death the world has been carefully and persistently taught that only Bayreuth can do justice to "Parsifal"; and since the world believes anything if it is said often enough, it has come to think it sheer blasphemy to dream of giving "Parsifal" elsewhere than at Bayreuth. "Parsifal" is not an opera—it is a sacred revelation; and just as the seed of Aaron alone could serve as priests in the sacred rites of the temple at Jerusalem, so only the seed of Wagner can serve as priests—that is to say, as chief directing priests—when "Parsifal" is played. Thus declare the naive dwellers in Villa Wahnfried, modestly forgetting the missing link in the chain of argument which should prove them alone to be the people qualified to perform "Parsifal"; and I regret to observe the support they receive from a number of Englishmen and Scotchmen, who are grown more German than the Germans, and just as religiously forget to make any reference to this missing link of proof. But these Germanised Scotchmen and Englishmen work hard for Bayreuth: now they whisper in awestruck tones of the beauty and significance of "Parsifal"; now they howl at the unhappy writers in the daily and weekly Press who dare to find little significance and less beauty in the Bayreuth representation; and, to do them bare justice, until lately they have been fairly successful in persuading the world to think with them. Verily, they have their reward—they partake of afternoon tea at Villa Wahnfried; they enjoy the honour of bowing low to the second Mrs. Wagner; Wagner's legal descendants cordially take them by the hand. And they go away refreshed, and again spread the report of the artistic and moral and religious supremacy of Bayreuth; and the world listens and goes up joyfully to Bayreuth to be taxed—one pound sterling per head per "Parsifal" representation. The performances over, the world comes away mightily edified, having seen nothing with its own eyes, heard nothing with its own ears, having understood nothing at all;—having, in fact, so totally miscomprehended everything as to think "Parsifal" a Christian drama; having been too deaf to realise that the singers were frequently out of the key, and too blind to observe that the scenery in the second act resembled a cheap cretonne, and that many of the flower-maidens were at least eight feet in circumference. On the way home the world whiles away the long railway journey by reading metaphysical disquisitions on "Parsifal' and the Ideal Woman," "'Parsifal' and the Thing-in-Itself," "The Swan in 'Parsifal' and its Relation to the Higher Vegetarianism." It knows the name of every leit-motif, and can nearly pronounce the German for it; it can refer to the Essay on Beethoven apropos of Kundry's scream (or yawn) in the second act; it can chat learnedly of Klingsor, in pathetic ignorance of his real offence, and explain why Amfortas has his wound on the right side, although the libretto distinctly states it to be situated on the left. It is a fact that this year a lady was heard to ask why Parsifal quarrelled with his wife in the second act. (I might mention that an admirer of "Parsifal" asked me who the dark man was in the first act of "The Valkyrie," and whether Sieglinde or Brünnhilde was burnt in the last.) The which is eminently amusing, and conjures up before one a vision of Richard, not wailing, like the youth in Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound," for the faith he kindled, but gazing patiently, rather wearily, with a kindly ironical smile, on the world he conquered, on the world that adores him because it fails to understand him.
Happily, it is not my business to reform the world; and writing in October, when so many of the idealists who felt with Parsifal in his remorse about the duck-shooting episode are applying the lesson by wantonly slaughtering every harmless creature they can hit, it would be superfluous to point out in any detail how very wrong and absurd is the world's estimate of the Bayreuth performance. In fact, were it my object to assist in the destruction of Bayreuth, no better plan could be found than that of approving cordially of everything Bayreuth does. For it is fast driving away all sincere lovers of Wagner; it lives now on fashionable ladies, betting men, and bishops: when the fashion changes and these depart, the Bayreuth festivals will come to an end. Bayreuth is only an affectation; not one pilgrim in a hundred understands the "Ring" or "Parsifal"; not one in a thousand is really impressed by anything deeper than the mere novelty of the business. Visitors go and are moved by the shooting of the duck (the libretto calls it a swan, but the management chooses to use a duck); they talk of Wagner's love of animals and of how they love animals themselves; they go straight from Bayreuth to Scotland and show their love in true sportsmanlike fashion by treating animals, birds, and fishes with a degree of cruelty so appalling as to disgust every right-thinking and right-feeling man and woman; and they tell you that the stag likes to be disembowelled, the bird to have its wings shattered, the fish to be torn to pieces in its agonised struggle for life. Or, having been moved by the consequences of sin, they straightway go and prepare cases for the divorce courts; having appreciated the purity and peace of monastery life and a daily communion service, they return without hesitation or sense of inconsistency to their favourite modes of gambling; having revelled in the most lovely music in the world, they proceed to listen nightly to the ugliest and silliest music in the world. Their appreciation of Bayreuth is a sham; they would cheerfully go elsewhere—say to Homburg—if Bayreuth were shut up; and before long they will go to Homburg or elsewhere, whether Bayreuth is shut up or not.
A NOTE ON BRAHMS
It is not an exaggeration to say that probably there are not a dozen musicians in Europe who have formed any precise and final opinion as to where Brahms should be placed. One gets to know him very slowly. His appearance and manner (so to speak), so extremely dignified, are very much in his favour; but when one tries to get to terms of intimacy with him he has a fatal trick of repelling one by that "austerity" or chilliness of which we have heard so much. And the worst of it is that too frequently a sharp suspicion strikes one that there is little behind that austere manner—that his reticence does not so much imply matter held in reserve as an absence of matter. I do not mean by this that Brahms was a paradoxical fool who was clever enough to hold his tongue lest he was found out, nor even that he purposely veiled his lack of meaning. On the contrary, a composer who wished more devoutly to be sincere never put pen to paper. But he had not the intellect of an antelope; and he took up in all honesty a rôle for which he had only the slightest qualification. The true Brahms, the Brahms who does not deceive himself, is the Brahms you find in many of the songs, in some of the piano and chamber music, in the smaller movements of his symphonies, and in certain passages of his overtures; and I have no hesitation whatever in asserting (though the opinion is subject to revision) that his songs are much the most satisfactory things he did. Here, unweighted by a heavy sense of a mission, he either revels in making beautiful—though never supremely beautiful—tunes for their own sake, or he actually expresses with beauty and considerable fidelity certain definite emotions. Had he written nothing but such small things—songs, piano pieces, Allegrettos like that in the D symphony—his position might be a degree lower in the estimation of dull Academics who don't count, but he would be accepted at something like his true value by the whole world, and the whole world would be the better for oftener hearing many lovely things. But merely to be a singer of wonderful songs was not sufficient for Brahms: he wanted to be a great poet, a new Beethoven. It was a legitimate ambition. The kind of music Brahms really loved was the kind of which Beethoven's is the most splendid example; and he wanted to create more of the same kind. He doubtless thought he could; in his early days Robert Schumann predicted that he would; and in his later days his intimate friend Hanslick and a small herd of followers asserted that he did. He was run as the prophet of the classical school with all the force of all who hated Wagner and had not brains enough to understand either Brahms' or Wagner's music; he became the god of all the musical dullards in Europe; and it is small wonder that he took himself with immense seriousness. A little more intelligence, ever so little more, would have shown him that, despite the noise of those who perhaps admired him less than they dreaded Wagner, he was not the man they said he was. He had not a great matter to utter; what he had he could not utter in the classical form; yet he tried to write in classical form. If ever a musician was born a happy, careless romanticist, that musician was Brahms—he was even a romanticist in the narrower sense, inasmuch as he was fond rather of the gloomy, mysterious, and dismal than of sunlight and the blue sky; and whenever his imagination warmed he straightway began breaking the bonds in which he had endeavoured to work. But that miserable article of Schumann—deplorable gush that has been tolerated, nay, admired, only because it is Schumann's—the evil influence of the pseudo-classicism of Mendelssohn and his followers, the preposterous over-praise of Hanslick,—these things drove Brahms into the mistake never made by the really able men. Wilkes denied that he ever was a Wilksite; Wagner certainly never was a Wagnerite; there are people who ask whether Christ was ever a Christian. But Brahms became more and more a devoted Brahmsite; he accepted himself as the guardian of the great classical tradition (which never existed); and he wrote more and more dull music. It is idle to tell me he is austere when my inner consciousness tells me he is merely barren, and idler to ask me feel beauty when my ears report no beauty to me. He had no original emotion or thought: whenever his music is good it will be found that he has derived the emotion from a poem, or else that there is no emotion but only very fine decorative work. In most of his bigger works—the symphonies, the German Requiem, the Serious songs he wrote in his later days—he sacrificed the beauty he might have attained to the expression of emotions he never felt; he assumed the pose and manner of a master telling us great things, and talked like a pompous duffer. An exception must be made: one emotion Brahms had felt and did communicate. It was his tragedy that he had no original emotion, no rich inner life, but lived through the days on the merely prosaic plane; and he seems to have felt that this was his tragedy. Anyhow, the one original emotion he brought into music is a curious mournful dissatisfaction with life and with death. The only piece of his I know in which the feeling is intolerably poignant, seems to cut like a knife, is his setting of that sad song of Goethe's about the evening wind dashing the vine leaves and the raindrops against the window pane; and in this song, as also in the movement in one of the quartets evolved from the song, the mournfulness becomes absolutely pitiable despair. Brahms was not cast in the big mould, and he spent a good deal of his later time in pitying himself. It is curious that one of his last works was the batch of Serious songs, which consist of dismal meditations on the darkness and dirt of the grave and feebly-felt hopes that there is something better on the other side. That does not strike one as in the vein of the big men.