Wagner

by John F. Runciman

Now, though one would regret the loss of some of the music I have mentioned, the Rhinegold is tedious, long in proportion to the significance—musical and dramatic—of its content, and on the whole a bore. I never go to see it. The Fricka music in the second scene is as effective on the piano as in the theatre, and the last scene is as effective on a concert orchestra as in the theatre; in fact, in the theatre the device of a pasteboard rainbow, coloured to suit German taste, detracts from the effect. Only a fool would dare to say that Wagner should have done this, that or the other; but I venture to say that if he had not suffered from that very German malady, a desire to work back to the beginning of things, and to embody the result in his art, Wagner would have found a better means than a two-hour long "fore-evening" to prepare for the real drama of the Ring.

That drama opens in earnest with The Valkyrie—the story of how, in pursuing his ambitious plan, Wotan is forced to sacrifice first his own son, then his daughter Brunnhilde, who is the incarnation of all that is sweet and beautiful in his own nature. She shares, it is true, his curiously limited immortality—an immortality that may be, and finally is, curtailed—but she can suffer a punishment worse to her than extinction. The prelude opens with the roar and hoarse scream of the storm as it dashes through the forest—- the plash of the rain, the flashing of lightning and the roll of the thunder. The musical idea was obviously suggested by Schubert's "Erl-king." In each we have the same rapidly-reiterated notes in the upper part, and Wagner's bars are simply a variant of Schubert's. The curtain rises on Hunding's hut; the door is burst open, and Siegmund tumbles in exhausted, and falls before the fire. Sieglinda gives him mead, and one sees it is a case of love at first sight. Hunding enters, and, finding Siegmund to be an enemy of his, gives him until morning, and tells him that then he must fight. Sieglinda drugs her husband's night-draught, and, while he is sleeping, tells Siegmund of how, when she was abducted, and compelled against her will to marry Hunding, a gray-bearded stranger came in, with his hat drawn over one eye—Wotan had but one eye—and wearing a dark-blue cloak marked with stars, suggested by the deep-blue star-pierced sky by night. He drove a sword into the ash trunk, and, declaring that only a man strong enough to draw it out should wield it, went his way. Many have tried, and none succeeded. Siegmund at once draws it, and the pair fly. There has been some of Wagner's finest and freshest love-music, and one entrancing effect is got when a puff of wind suddenly blows the door open. The storm has ceased, and there we see the forest bathed in a spring moonlight, the raindrops on the young leaves dancing and gleaming. It is at this moment Siegmund sings the wonderful spring song.

In the next act Wotan tells Brunnhilda she must protect Siegmund in the coming fight; but Fricka seeks him out in this rocky place amongst the hills, and compels him to promise on oath that Siegmund shall die to atone for his violation of the sacred rite of marriage. Brunnhilda reenters, and then occurs a scene which has caused much debate. At enormous length Wotan recounts to her practically all we have already seen and heard before. It may be, as I have said, that Wagner wanted to make each opera comprehensible in itself, without reference to the others; it may be that his artistic sense forced him to make it clearer and ever clearer that each tragedy as it happens is Wotan's tragedy; but, in any case, I, for one, never regret when the scene is somewhat shorn. Wotan is defeated in this attempt to observe the word of the law, but break the spirit. He cannot wield the sword himself, but he made it and placed it where and so that the hero alone could take it. The hero is of the seed of his loins, and the fact that Wotan has made life bitter for him counts for nothing against that fact; and, finally, though he could not himself aid Siegmund, he ordered his daughter to do so. He wished Siegmund to act of his own free-will, and yet to do what he, Wotan, wanted. Checked by Fricka, he revokes his command to Brunnhilda, and goes off cursing fate. Siegmund and Sieglinda enter, flying before Hunding; Sieglinda faints, and at last sleeps; and then Brunnhilda steps forward from among the rocks in the gloomy half-light—a stern, imposing, indeed an awful, figure, the herald of death, seen only by warriors about to die. The Fate theme sounds from the orchestra, and another melody, out of which nearly the whole scene is woven, is heard, and then, to a simple chord—supernatural, ghostly in its effect—she calls Siegmund. She tells him he is to die and go with her to Valhalla. He pleads in vain; she (simply, be it remembered, a part of her father's will) cannot understand why he should refuse to go where his father and so many famous warriors have already gone. "So young and fair, and yet so cold and stern!" Siegmund exclaims; and at last he asks whether Sieglinda will also be there. "Siegmund will see Sieglinda no more," she replies to a quiet phrase of unspeakable pathos. Then Siegmund refuses to go with her, and he draws his sword to slay first Sieglinda, then himself. Brunnhilda is overwhelmed by the revelation of a love so devoted, and at last promises to help him. It is her own nature as is revealed to her. Night and storm come on; Hunding's horn is heard as he comes nearer and nearer; Siegmund mounts amongst the rocks to meet him; a flash of lightning reveals them in the act of fighting; Brunnhilda hovers above to strike for him, when Wotan appears in a fiery glare and smashes Siegmund's sword, so that Hunding's spear passes through him. Sieglinda has awakened to see this and collapses; Brunnhilda rapidly descends, and, gathering the fragments of the shattered sword, hurries Sieglinda off to seek shelter from Wotan's wrath. Wotan kills Hunding with a contemptuous gesture, telling him to say to Fricka that her will has been accomplished. He rests there for a moment, then goes off in flaming wrath. The tragedy has gone a step onward; he has killed his son, and now must punish Brunnhilda—put away love from himself to the end that he may enjoy a loveless empire.

The music throughout the act is amongst Wagner's noblest and most beautiful and dramatic. Every phrase given to Fricka proclaims her queenly and overbearing, with right and power on her side, and relentless determination to use them. Then there is the Valkyries' war-whoop—well known from its use in the Valkyries' Ride. Sieglinda has tender, piteous cries. In the scene of pleading and counter-pleading between Siegmund and Brunnhilda we have Wagner at the zenith of his powers: the pleading of the man, the calm, cold majesty of the Valkyrie, awe and pathos and heroic defiance, are all there. From the technical point of view, the scene is equal to Tristan: the continuous sweep of the music, with its ever-changing colours and emotions, is almost supermasterly. The tragedy at the end is a stage rather than a musical effect, and it is made the more powerful by being delayed so long and then arriving with such terrific swiftness.

The last act opens on a high hill, where stands the Valkyries' rock, and amidst thunder, lightning, and rain we get the Ride. Brunnhilda rushes in to her sisters with Sieglinda, tells what she has done, and begs for help. All are aghast and refuse. Sieglinda herself asks no aid; Siegmund is dead, and she has nothing to live for. Brunnhilda tells her she carries within her the seed of the world's mightiest hero, and in a moment her mood changes, and she begs to be sheltered. Her ecstatic outburst is due to a mother's instinctive joy and to the hope of having someone or something to care for, and no more to be utterly forsaken and purposeless. The maidens tell her of the dark wood where the dragon hides, and Brunnhilda, chanting her hymn in praise of the love for which one surrenders all, gives her the fragments of the sword and bids her fly, awaiting with undaunted courage her own punishment. The god comes in bursting with rage, and declares that Brunnhilda shall be left on the mountain to wed the first man who finds her. The other maidens fly in horror; she alone remains to make an appeal to Wotan, as Siegmund had appealed to her. At first he is obdurate, but she begs him to spare her that frightful disgrace, and to surround her with a wall of fire through which only a great hero will dare to pass. He yields, taking her godhood, her limited immortality, away from her, putting her to sleep, calling up the fire, and swearing that only a hero who has no fear of his spear shall pass through, and so the drama ends. Wotan has definitely renounced love. The moment at which he can renounce life rather than endure life without love has not yet come. The old Adam, the biological bias, the will to live, is strong in us all.

When Liszt read the score of The Valkyrie, he wrote to Wagner that he wanted to cry, like the chorus on the miraculous arrival of Lohengrin, "Wunderschön! wunderschön!" No man can cry otherwise to-day when he hears the last act. The summit of artistic achievement seemed to be reached in the second act, but we are now carried still higher. After the Ride, with its unequalled painting of tempest amongst the rocks and pines, there comes Brunnhilda's glorious chant as she sends off Sieglinda, then her long supplication to Wotan, and finally the sleep and fire-music and Wotan's Farewell. The black storm gradually subsides, the deep-blue night comes on, and against it we see the swirling, crackling flames as the fire mounts, forming an impassable barrier that cuts off Brunnhilda from the everyday, busy world. All Brunnhilda's plaint is magnificent in its sweetness and pathos; and the sleep-music, with its caressing, lulling figure, is a thing by which a man's memory might well live for ever.

This, the tragedy of Siegmund and Sieglinda and the punishment of Brunnhilda, is the first of the subsidiary dramas; the second, the finding of Brunnhilda by Siegfried, must now be considered. We hear the clinking of Mime's hammer, and the curtain rises on his home in a cave. All is dark within save for the smouldering smithy fire; but facing it is the hole in the rock which is the entrance, and through it we see the green summer forest. Mime is a malignant dwarf, in whose care Sieglinda, dying in childbirth, has left Siegfried. Years have passed, springs and summers and winters have come and gone; but Nature goes on in her imperturbable way, and Brunnhilda still lies wrapt in slumber on the mountain heights, the subject of awe-struck whispers amongst passing tribes. Mime tries in vain to piece the sherds of the sword together; Siegfried always smashes the new-made weapon at a single blow. The Wanderer, in his blue cloak, enters: it is Wotan, the heart-broken god, going wearily about the world awaiting what may happen. Again we hear the whole history of the Ring, but this time it is wrought into, and becomes an essential part of, the drama. Mime wagers his head that he will answer three questions put to him by the Wanderer, and having triumphed twice, is posed by the third: "Who will make a useful sword of these bits?" The Wanderer laughs at him, tells him it will be he who knows not fear; and he leaves Mime's head to this hero. He goes off, while fantastic lights dance without through the forest, until Mime is in an agony of fear. But on this scene depends the whole subsequent action. Mime tries to frighten Siegfried, and finds it impossible. He wants the Nibelung's ring to rule the world: Siegfried is the only man to get it; and after he has got it, Mime will avert the Wanderer's prophesied disaster by poisoning him. He tells the history of Sieglinda also, and Siegfried knows he is the hero. He will have no patching of the sword: that sword was Wotan's and subject to his will; he grinds it to powder, and makes one of his own, with which he will face either man or god. In the making of it he sings the glorious Sword-song; and when it is made he tests it by splitting the anvil with it. Here the first act ends. There are two Siegfried themes to notice; the first, the Hero, has been heard before:

In case I have too much insisted on the storm, passion, and fire in The Valkyrie, it may be pointed out that these play little part in Siegfried. Here we have first the calm summer morning, and if the scene with the Wanderer is filled with that sense of the remote past, and the Wanderer's exit uncanny, spectral—a very nightmare—much of the other music, such as the bit where Siegfried describes himself looking into the brook, and all the tale of Sieglinda, is tender and delicate; the fresh morning wind blows continuously. The same is true of the second act. After the beginning at Hate Hole, the slaying of the dragon—which is always comic—and the squabble of Alberich and Mime, we have scarcely anything but sustained beauty to the end. Having accidentally tasted the dragon's blood, Siegfried knows exactly what Mime means when he comes coaxingly to persuade him to drink the cup of poison; so he passes the sword through him. Then follows the scene where Siegfried lies in the sun and hears the wind murmuring in the trees, and then listens to the bird as it sings of Brunnhilda asleep far away on the mountains, and goes off to find her—all admirably painted in the freshest tints. The last act opens in the mountains. It is dawn, and gray scud is flying; the Wanderer summons Erda and learning nothing from her, tells her, virtually, his determination to struggle no more, but to await the end. Siegfried arrives; the Wanderer bars his way to try him; but Siegfried has no fear of the spear, and the sword was made by his own hands; so the spear is shattered, and he goes on his way. He passes through the fire, which immediately subsides.

The scenery changes to that of the last of The Valkyrie, save that (generally) someone has erected a wall behind Brunnhilda. It is a calm summer afternoon; far away other hills are seen sleeping in the sun; Grani, Brunnhilda's horse, grazes quietly at one side; Brunnhilda, covered by her shield, her spear by her side, slumbers on. Siegfried enters, and after many doubts, wakes her with a kiss. At first she fiercely revolts against the new tyranny, the most terrible consequence of her crime; but she yields in the end, and the drama ends with a love-duet of a curious kind—not so much loving and passionate as heroic and triumphant, with a most elaborate cadenza, as if Wagner had said to himself, "Here's an end to all theories!"