Richard Wagner, Composer of Operas

by John F. Runciman

Wagner alternated between what we may call the worldly—the sensual or animal, or love of outward show—and the magical, mystical or religious. After Die Feen, a story of magic, he went to Das Liebesverbot, a story of lust; then he went on to a drama of warring ambitions, with the outer brilliant show of armed men, gorgeous processions, conflagrations and what not in the way of spectacle. After that we have the Dutchman, strange and remote and mysterious, with some pages of passionless ecstasy as its culminating point. The reaction came, and he wrote Tannhäuser, the opera we are now to examine. It is largely based on sheer animal passion, though another reaction takes place before the end is reached. That reaction proceeds further in Lohengrin, which is sheer mysticism. Tristan is pure human passion—Tristan's soul is the antithesis of Lohengrin's. The Ring is, from beginning to end, a gorgeous spectacle, a glorification of the grandeur and loveliness of the earth, the splendour and beauty and strength of human life. Not even Wotan's renunciation takes away a jot from its note of praise of humanity—one might even say praise of the joy of living. Parsifal is a denial of the value and richness and worthiness of human life: the world is pushed away; and the hero attains perfect peace by shutting himself up in a monastery with no women to disturb him. John Willett recommended his son, when he went to London, to climb to the top of the Monument—"there are no young women up there, sir"—and Wagner evidently agreed with John Willett. Parsifal is left to pass his days in walking, with the most preposterous steps ever seen on or off the stage, in idle processions from nowhere to nowhere without any object beyond walking, in making meals off invisible food, in impressing his fellow-monks with puerile chemical and electrical experiments, and perhaps, for a change, in going out to see trees and rocks taking a constitutional. If to say this is to be flippant, well then, I am flippant. The drama of Parsifal is the least intelligent, the most pretentious to intellectuality,-the most absurd and ridiculous and mirth-provoking drama ever set to music. Or, if we must needs oblige the Wagnerites by regarding it as a lofty contribution to ethics and a philosophy, no words are strong enough to describe its infamy. At the moment these lines are penned eager controversy is going on in every European capital as to whether Parsifal can or cannot be produced this year without the permission of the Bayreuth clique; and my devout hope is that it will be given everywhere as soon as possible. Once it is seen without the quasi-religious, or rather mock-religious, character of the Bayreuth performances, the hollowness, trumpery staginess and evil tendency of the work will be only too obvious, and if Bayreuth wants a monopoly of it no one will wish to say Bayreuth nay.

The Wagner Theatre at Bayreuth

These oscillations of mood were very frequent, the changes often very abrupt, with Wagner; also he rarely worked at only one opera at a time. The Dutchman was conceived before Rienzi was finished; Tannhäuser and Lohengrin were slowly shaping themselves in his imagination while he scored the Dutchman; the Mastersingers libretto, in its first form, was drafted immediately after Tannhäuser was finished, and before Lohengrin was begun; the composition of the Ring, Tristan and the Mastersingers went on simultaneously. He did not totally exhaust one group of ideas and emotions before proceeding to another, and the result is twofold. First, the moods belonging of right to one opera often found their way for moments into another, so that the description I have given above of his various alternations is very rough, though it is in the main accurate; second, the true antipodes of one opera may not be that which stands next to it in chronological arrangement, but one which he did not complete till years afterwards. I have just digressed a little about Parsifal, because it, and not the Mastersingers, is the true contrary and complement to Tannhäuser. Parsifal is pitilessly logical, Tannhäuser wildly illogical; Parsifal preaches the gospel of renunciation, of the will to dwarf and stunt one's physical, mental and moral growth: Tannhäuser preaches nothing at all, but is an affirmation of the necessity and moral loveliness of healthy relations between the two sexes, with a totally uncalled-for and incredible falling away or repentance at the end, on the part of one who has in no way sinned—to wit, Tannhäuser; the music of Parsifal is sickly, tired, with mystical chants that make one's gorge rise in disgust; the music of Tannhäuser is strong, healthy, full of manly passion—even at its saddest it is free of the nauseating whining of Parsifal.

II

Tannhäuser, a knight and celebrated minstrel, led away by an exaggeration of healthy human desires, has left his friends and gone to live with Venus in the Hörselberg. He soon tires of her; she tries to keep him; he calls on the Virgin; the hallucinatory dream is shattered, and he is in the free open spring air. A shepherd boy plays on his pipe and chants a song to spring; a procession of old pilgrims to Rome passes; Tannhäuser, feeling his exaggeration of passions, sane enough in themselves, to be a sin, praises the Almighty for his deliverance from what seems now to him like an evil dream. Hunters' horns are presently heard from all sides; enter Tannhäuser's former friends, Walther, Wolfram, Biterolf with the rest; they try to persuade him to return to his former life with them, but in vain, until Wolfram tells him that by his singing he had won the heart of the Landgrave's daughter Elisabeth, and she has pined ever since at his unaccountable disappearance. Tannhäuser, at first incredulous, in the end joyfully agrees to go back to the Wartburg, where the Landgrave's castle can be seen, and the merry clatter of hunting horns is heard on all sides as the curtain falls. It will be seen that there is no vestige of the old stage trickery of the Dutchman here: all seems natural because all is inevitable; of songs and concerted pieces we get plenty, but they grow spontaneously out of the drama: the drama is not twisted and delayed for the sake of getting them in.

In the second act Elisabeth has heard of her knight's return; she enters the hall of song and pours forth her feelings of thankfulness; Tannhäuser comes in and begs to be favoured; there is a long love-duet; and then preparations are made for a musical tournament. The popular march is played; the hall becomes crowded; the Landgrave makes a speech—satisfying to German audiences, no doubt, because it praises German valour and music—and in announcing the subject on which the minstrels shall enlarge, he hints that perhaps Tannhäuser in his contribution will let them know in what mysterious lands he has sojourned during his long absence. The theme is, What is love, and how do we recognize it? The prize will be given by the Princess, and it shall be anything the successful singer chooses—that is, it shall be the Princess. Wolfram stands up first and praises a mild platonic attachment as being true love, and his sentiments win much applause. Tannhäuser sings passionately of the joys of burning fleshly desire, though as yet his language is a little veiled. The audience, who are the judges, make no sign; Elisabeth alone shows that in her heart she goes with Tannhäuser and not with Wolfram. Walther, in turn, tells Tannhäuser that he knows nothing of sincere love; Tannhäuser grows angry, and scoffingly tells him that if he wants cold perfection he had better worship the stars; but he, Tannhäuser, wants warm, living flesh and blood and healthy desires in the woman he loves. Biterolf calls Tannhäuser a shameless blasphemer, and challenges him to combat; Tannhäuser replies bitterly; the surrounding nobles want to silence him; his anger becomes rage, and his rage madness; Wolfram tries to calm every one, but Tannhäuser is now too far gone, and in "wildest exaltation" he chants the hymn he sang to Venus in the first act. "Only in the Venusberg can one experience the joys of true love," he shouts; the ladies rush out in terror, leaving only Elisabeth; the men attack Tannhäuser. He would be killed, but Elisabeth suddenly interposes—all stand aghast at the bare notion of her interceding for so shameless a wretch; but in the end she gets her way. "Who would not yield who heard the heavenly maid?" they sing; during a momentary stillness the voices of young pilgrims following the elder to Rome are heard; Tannhäuser is pardoned on condition of joining them and confessing to the pope and gaining his forgiveness; and, being a man of uncontrollable passions, with fits of abject depression as low as his ecstatic flights are high, he humbly acquiesces. The curtain comes down in the second act as he goes off.

The third act is, I say, quite illogical unless one accepts as a truism, as Wagner accepted it, the patent absurdity that by sacrificing him-or herself one being can save the soul of another being. But Wagner was not a German of the Romantic epoch for nothing. He believed the absurdity with a fervour now laughable, and was especially enthusiastic when the sacrificed person was a woman: woman, to his mind, was the redeemer of man: that was her métier. Senta redeems Vanderdecken; in his last work Kundry redeems Parsifal by thoughtfully dying so as to leave that unamiable idiot to lead the higher life of the monastery, as I have described it. And somehow Elisabeth is to redeem Tannhäuser—also, it appears, by dying at an appropriate moment. In the fit of depression and degradation following his mad outburst the hero goes to Rome, interviews the pope, and confesses all to him. "If you have dwelt with Venus," says the Lord's vicar, "you are for ever cursed; God will not forgive you until my staff of dry wood blossoms." At this sentence of eternal doom Tannhäuser, in the legend as Wagner found it, returned to the Hörselberg: in the story, as Wagner shaped it, he gets as near as the Wartburg on his road back to Venus. By the roadside, as in the second scene of the first act, Elisabeth is praying before the shrine where Tannhäuser had knelt to thank heaven for his deliverance; Wolfram watches near. Both await the pilgrims from Rome. These arrive—and Tannhäuser is not amongst them. "He will return no more," says Elisabeth despairingly; and she prays to the Virgin to free her from all earth's griefs. Then she wends her way up to the castle while Wolfram remains to sing his song of renunciation. Ominous sounds are heard; Tannhäuser, tattered and woe-begone, enters, tells his tale to Wolfram, and, working himself into a condition of madness as he did at the Tournament of Song—only now the madness is the madness of despair, not excessive exaltation—he calls on Venus. From the heart of the mountain she answers; the scene grows wilder and wilder; he sees Venus awaiting him; the air is filled with strange odours and stranger music. Wolfram struggles to prevent Tannhäuser going to Venus; Venus calls him clearly and more clearly; suddenly Wolfram says, "A maiden is even now making intercession for you at God's throne—Elisabeth!" "Elisabeth!" echoes Tannhäuser—stunned and astonished. The mists clear away; from behind the scenes a requiem for Elisabeth's soul is heard; Venus gives a final wail, "Woe! lost to me!" and sinks into the earth; slowly morning dawns, and a funeral train bearing Elisabeth on a bier slowly comes in. "Holy Elisabeth, pray for me," Tannhäuser cries, and, sinking down, he dies. More pilgrims enter, bearing the pope's staff, which has miraculously blossomed in token that God's mercy is greater than man's, and that Tannhäuser is pardoned; all sing a song of praise, and the opera terminates.

At the Dresden performances in 1845 this ending was cut, but that Wagner reckoned it of the utmost importance is shown by a letter written to Uhlig in 1851: "The reason for leaving out the announcement of the miracle, in the Dresden change, was quite a local one: the chorus was always bad, flat and uninteresting; also an imposing scenic effect—a splendid, gradual sunrise was wanting." Now, in the twentieth century, it is indeed hard to understand how an intellect so keen as our Richard's, a dramatic and poetic instinct almost infallible with regard to all other things, could have failed to see and feel the absurdity of Elisabeth's death being necessary to Tannhäuser's salvation. Was it the only way to get rid of the lady—a pis aller?—a last remnant of the old-fashioned technique? In the original legend Tannhäuser goes back to Venus: that would be ineffective and leave Elisabeth's future unprovided for. On the other hand, Wagner would never have selected the story for operatic treatment at all had it not instantly shaped itself in his mind as it now stands: he was, I say, obsessed by this notion of man's redemption by woman; it was part of his creed and not to be questioned. So I think that we must simply take it as it is, accepting Wagner's creed for the moment as a necessary convention. At the same time let us realize that it is an illogical development of the drama and not, as the Wagnerites comically insist, the symbol of an eternal verity. Allowing for the time occupied in mediæval days by the journey from Rome to the heart of Germany, the pope's staff must have burst into leaf and flower long, long before Elisabeth's death. While she was waiting for Tannhäuser to come in with the first band of pilgrims, the second band was already on its way with the token of his pardon. We need not be too inquisitive and wonder why Tannhäuser should be expected back with the first band when he had set out with the second, and why Elisabeth could not at least exercise a little patience and wait for the second. The point is that she does not wait, but goes home to die, and, dying, is supposed—as Wolfram explicitly states—to redeem a sinner who is already redeemed. Her sacrifice is an act of suicidal insanity due to her lacking the common sense to reflect that Tannhäuser might arrive with the second contingent; it is foolish and superfluous.