Wagner

by John F. Runciman

The establishment of a festival theatre where, humanly speaking, ideal performances of all the great operas could be given—this was long a dream of Wagner's. He knew what could be done and how to do it; he knew also that it was not done because managers, conductors, bandsmen and singers had formed careless and slovenly habits, and were blinded by prejudices and traditions surviving from the days of old Italian opera. King Ludwig helped him as far as he could, the good burghers of Bayreuth were ready to give him a site, societies were formed to rake in money; and after apparently interminable preliminary difficulties had been overcome, the business of building the house was begun. It stands high on a hill, away from the centre of Bayreuth—a great structure of red brick and timber, not an imposing piece of architecture by any means, yet not unpleasing to the eye. Inside every seat is arranged so to afford a perfect view of the stage, and the orchestra is in a pit, so as to be unseen, although the singers, wherever they may be placed, can see the conductor. The improvements Wagner made on the stage have themselves been improved on, and in this respect Bayreuth is no better than many other theatres. At the beginning Wagner secured every possible appliance, and then set to work to teach his men how to use them. And it was just in this that he reformed the opera-house: he insisted on everything being done artistically and with the utmost care. Nothing had to be slurred over; every detail had to be carried out as conscientiously as if the fate of empires depended on it. The idea was novel in operatic circles. It aroused opposition; but in the end Wagner got his way, and what was at first declared impossible, then difficult, is now done as a matter of course in all the serious opera-houses. It is in this very matter that Bayreuth has now fallen far behind other German towns, and can no longer be regarded as a serious art centre. In another respect it has departed from the original intention. That was to give model representations of all the fine operas, with the best artists obtainable. But, under the rule of the Wagner family, only Wagner's works are played; while as for the artists, Mr. Siegfried Wagner—Richard's son—often directs, although he is an inferior conductor, and petty intrigues are allowed to prevent some of the greatest singers singing there. Wagner's idea was magnificent, but it needs a Wagner to execute it. However, Bayreuth has done a great service, and now what becomes of it matters to no one.

Bayreuth was opened with performances of the Ring, that enormous music-drama which consists of three huge music-dramas and a shorter one. Now, it was the Ring more than any other of Wagner's works which led to him being misunderstood, and afforded opportunities for misrepresentation. When the libretto was published, long before the music was written, it was called a monstrosity, and one professor implored Wagner not to set it. At first sight it seems so hopelessly involved and intricate, the main dramatic idea works its way so sinuously through such a maze of subsidiary ideas, that intellectually honest and intelligent people can hardly be blamed if they are unable to see at a glance what it is all about. Yet the plot is not more complicated than that of many a novel, and the real trouble is that we won't take the pains over it that we do over a novel, or, perhaps, do not apply our intelligence in the best way. At this time of day no one, I hope, will condemn a work of art because it cannot be grasped in a glance.

There are four music-dramas, or operas (I use the terms indiscriminately, now that there is no danger of the Wagnerian opera being confused with the older forms). Wagner made each self-contained, complete and comprehensible by itself, and yet he carried the main action on from one to the next until the final catastrophe; but he did this at the cost of much repetition, whence another charge brought against the work—that of its interminable tedium. I will therefore first disentangle the main idea, which is simple. Let it be granted that Wotan is ruler of the world—not a first cause, but a god, limited in his powers, conditioned, ruling only so long as he obeys the laws inscribed in Runic characters on his spear. How he arrived in this position we do not know, any more than we know the origin of the Greek gods; indeed, in this respect and others there are parallels between the Greek and the Northern mythology. Wotan goes in fear lest the powers of the nether world usurp his domination, which he wants to make absolute. He makes a pact with the giants—the Titan forces of the earth—that be will give them Freia if they build him a castle, Valhalla, which he intends to fill with slain warriors in sufficient numbers to keep down his foes. This is his primary, essential, fatal blunder; for unless the gods eat of Freia's apples every day they must wither and their powers decay. But Wotan means to cheat the giants, and Loge, the deceitful god of fire, who is ultimately to destroy the whole of the present régime, has been sent off to find a means of doing it. It is when so much has been accomplished that Wagner raises the curtain on the first scene of the first drama. The Rhinegold is entirely devoted to an exposition of the main drama.

The gold lies in the Rhine. The Rhine maidens play about it. It is only a pretty plaything for them. The Nibelung comes and steals it. Meanwhile, far above, Wotan and his wife Fricka awake and find Valhalla built, and now Wotan has to pay the giants. They arrive; Loge has not arrived. Loge does arrive and makes his excuses—no man will give up a beautiful woman, for no matter what sum. But he tells of the Rhinegold, and the giants agree to accept it in lieu of Freia. Wotan and Loge go off and get it by a trick. But Alberick has shaped part of it into a magic ring, which gives its possessor absolute power over the whole world. When they come back to conclude the bargain with the giants, it is found necessary that Wotan should give up the ring also. He does so, after resolving on his grand idea, which will appear presently; and the gods enter Valhalla while the Rhine maidens below are heard bewailing the loss of their plaything.

The ring is cursed, and no sooner do the giants begin to share their treasure than they fall to disputing about it. Fafner kills his brother, and making off with all, buries it in a cave—"Hate Hole"—and changing himself into a dragon, by virtue of the Tarnhelm which is amongst the treasure, he settles down to guard it. At any moment now Wotan's empire may be taken from him; the ring he must gain somehow, but by the laws written on his staff he may not perpetrate such an act of injustice as taking it himself. His position is more tragic than he knows. His brilliant idea is the sword, and here is its theme, one of the most important in the work:

He will raise up a breed of heroes, let them fend for themselves in the world—even heap pains and trials upon them; and in the end a fearless hero will arise, find this sword, and of his own absolute free-will slay the dragon and take the ring. He is trying to jump out of his own shadow, as we see immediately in The Valkyrie. Siegmund, his son, the hero, takes the sword, and then commits adultery and incest with Sieglinda, his sister, the wife of Hunding. Fricka, the punisher of matrimonial crimes, compels Wotan to let Hunding slay Siegmund. This is done, though Brunnhilde, the incarnation of love, tries to save the hero. She has to be punished—the laws that bind Wotan are inexorable—and he has to put away love; in order to rule, love must have no place in his thoughts nor influence his actions. Brunnhilde is put to sleep, and a hedge of fire set blazing round her. There she must sleep until a hero arrives who has no fear of Wotan or his spear, and will pass through the fire and take her for bride.

The hero is the son of Sieglinda and Siegmund; he kills the dragon, takes the ring, shatters Wotan's spear, passes the fiery hedge, and weds Brunnhilde. The details we shall examine when we deal with the drama of Siegfried. Wotan's part is now ended; he retires to Valhalla to await the inevitable dénouement. He willingly abdicates, and wills his own destruction and the destruction of Valhalla and all that existed under his rule. If power involves the compulsion to renounce himself, to destroy all that he loves and all that makes life sweet, then he rather renounces life. So he awaits during the Dusk of the Gods, until Siegfried has been slain and the ring restored to the Rhine. His own power being broken, and the power that lay in the ring being again in the hands of the innocent Rhine-maidens, there is nothing to control Loge, who blazes up in sheets of fire, and Valhalla is consumed, while the Rhine maidens swim joyfully about in the bubbling, roaring Rhine.

I have tried to trace as clearly as possible this main story as it pursues its course through the tangle of subsidiary stories. In dealing with a drama so richly stored with material, where every rift is loaded with ore, much has necessarily to be left untouched; in such a sketch as this one cannot do more than indicate the broad masses. There is no philosophic idea, no exposition of a philosophy. Wagner was no philosopher, though he found in Schopenhauer's Will to Live, and its Renunciation, material which he could use for poetic and dramatic purposes. The "lessons" which many ingenious persons find here are not lessons at all, but the ground-facts on which the drama is based. That the power of gold—signified by the ring—carries with it the curse of gold is not a thing to be inferred from the drama; it is assumed as the starting-point of the drama. That a man cannot by many subterfuges hold power in this world without incidentally committing acts which revolt the better part of his nature—this, again, is no lesson, but a fact taken for granted. I will not waste space on the thousand odd "meanings," "lessons" and so on found by the enthusiastic in Wagner. His ideas were at once the substance and the inspiration of his music-dramas; but he never dreamed of writing copybook headings. He had in language to make his characters talk about these ideas for two reasons, each sufficient in itself. First, excepting in melodrama and rough-and-tumble farces, the audience must know the motives actuating the personages of the drama—their situation, their emotions, ambitions, fears and what not. Without that all drama would be an incomprehensible jabbering and gesticulating of mummers, fit only to be put on the London stage at the present moment. Second, if Wagner spread himself in the expression of certain things where an ordinary dramatist would have dealt with them more briefly, it must be remembered that he was writing words to set to music. An animadversion on the length of the speeches would be perfectly just if the drama were meant to be spoken; as the drama is meant to be sung, it is irrelevant and silly. Now, it is idle to say, in answer to all this, that Wagner proves the truth of his premisses by the deductions he draws in the drama, as in Euclid a proposition is stated to be a truth and then proved to be a truth. In Wagner nothing is proved. Accept his premisses, and you understand the subsequent drama; wait for the premisses to be proved true, and there is no drama for you to understand—no drama, but a series of incoherent, unrelated and inconsequent incidents. Finally, we all know that when a man tumbles over a high precipice he is killed. Suppose that in a melodrama the villain tumbled and is killed. Would some wise commentator write, "The master here proves the wickedness of villainy, and shows conclusively how it always meets with its just punishment, for the villain tumbles over a precipice and is, if we mistake not, killed. It is true the same fate unfortunately overtakes the hero, but the circumstances and the moral are different. The villain met his just reward; an unlucky accident befell the hero. Underlying this is the profounder truth that when men—and we will even say women—fall off high places, they get killed or seriously hurt"? This is on a par with the "truths" and "morals" found in the Ring.

Throughout the Ring Wagner fairly let himself go in the matter of gorgeous, riotous colour in depicting Nature—the earth, the waters, clouds, and the working of the elements. He had ampler opportunities than any of his previous works afforded. He had not, as before, to place his characters in a scene, to arrange a background for them. Many of the characters are the elements typified—the water-nymphs, the giants, Donner, Loge, Erda. Wotan himself rides on the tempest, surrounded with fearful lightnings; the Valkyrie maidens ride through the air on supernatural horses amidst thunder and wind and rain. The whole action takes place in the open air, or in the bowels of the earth, or the depths of the Rhine; mountain and storm-lashed woods, dismal caverns and chasms, the broad river, are always before us. Two scenes take place under a man-made roof: in the first act of The Valkyrie we have Hunding's rough hut, built round an ash-tree, which penetrates the top, and its branches sway and dash together above the actors' heads; in the Dusk of the Gods there is Gunther's hall, completely open on one side. Undefiled Nature, healthy and wild and sweet, is always present, and always in sympathy with the character of every scene. Besides being magically picturesque, the music is also continuously in a high degree dramatic, and it has yet another quality: it is charged with a sense of a strange, remote past—a past that never existed. No archaic chords or progressions occur, but by a series of miraculous touches the atmosphere of a far-away past is kept before us. To save coming back to this again, I will mention such instances as the Rhine-maidens' wail, heard far down in the valley as the gods march triumphantly to Valhalla; the passage in which Siegmund recounts how on coming home one day he found the house in ashes, his sister and father gone, and only a wolf-skin lying on the ground; the Fate theme, and the haunting song of the Rhine-maidens in the last act of the Dusk of the Gods.