Wagner

by John F. Runciman

MAGDEBURG, RIGA, PARIS, 1834-1842.

The trade he had chosen was that of operatic conductor. It was not until eight years later that he made a serious début as an operatic composer. The Forbidden Love (Das Liebesverbot) is entirely unknown to me; but it may be doubted whether Wagner, with his head full of confused ideas, and as yet no definite and distinctive plan or method, could at this time produce a great work of art. He had to pass through his Rienzi period first. But two points may be remarked. Already he had determined to make his own librettos; and his early association with the theatre enabled him to judge much better than any of the libretto-makers of that or any other time as to what would prove effective on the stage. In the second place, in the music of The Fairies, we see to what an extent he had assimilated Weber; the themes are Weberesque in outline, and the whole colour—colour of harmony and orchestration—is also Weberesque. He went on planning and writing operas, but his daily bread-earning work was rehearsing his company and conducting. The experience must have been invaluable to him; but there is nothing especially remarkable to record of the period. He himself left an account of the failure of The Forbidden Love, which was produced in 1836. The company went to pieces immediately after, and he was glad to find a position at Königsberg. This, however, came to nothing, or next to nothing, owing to the director's failure, and again Wagner had to remove, this time to Riga.

The Riga period is one of the most important of his life. He had married Minna Planer, who is said to have been a very pretty woman and quite incapable of understanding her husband and his artistic aspirations; and he began, slowly and tentatively, to shape a course through life for himself. He continued to gain experience in the production of other composers' operas; he studied incessantly, and at last he hit upon the idea of writing a grand opera in the Meyerbeer style, and going to Paris with it, in the hope of getting it produced at the opera there. He was harassed by creditors; and with the daring and energy characteristic of the man whom Fate had destined to build Bayreuth, he determined to try by one bold stroke to retrieve his fortunes. He was still a young man when he went to Riga in 1837, but he was in such a feverish hurry for fame and glory, not to say money, that no obstacle was allowed to stand in his way. During the last few years he had composed a number of occasional things—which we need not stop to consider—but nothing on the sumptuous scale of Rienzi. Heroic personages, dramatic or melodramatic situations, opportunities for huge gaily-dressed crowds and scenic display—these were what the young man was after; and in the story of Rienzi he found plenty to fire an imagination always prone to flame and flare at the slightest suggestion. The libretto was written; the music was partly written; and in 1839 Wagner took one of the most momentous steps in all his stormy career—he sailed from Riga, accompanied by his wife and dog, with the intention of reaching Paris by way of London.

The voyage itself bore noteworthy artistic fruit; for within three years the roar and scream of the tempest, the smashing of heavy seas upon the ship's sides and deck, and (I dare say) the captain's curses, were to be translated into tone and take artistic shape in The Flying Dutchman. London reached in safety, Wagner stayed first near the Tower and then in Soho. He lost his dog, found it, and crossed the Channel to Boulogne. Here he met Meyerbeer, who gave him an introduction to a bankrupt theatre, the Renaissance, in Paris. In Paris he met many well-known people, amongst them Heine, who clasped his hands and looked heavenwards when he heard of a penniless German coming to such a city to seek his fortune, with nothing save an unfinished opera and an introduction from Meyerbeer. The late Sir Charles Hallé met him at this time, and left some amusing reminiscences in his Autobiography. Heine's view of the situation was speedily justified. Not by any efforts could Rienzi be unloaded upon an opera director, and Wagner began to experience the bitterness of poverty. To earn a bare living, he thought himself lucky to be entrusted with the making of transcriptions of popular airs and the writing of articles for the press.

The three years' stay in Paris did Wagner no particular harm that I have been able to trace beyond implanting in him that deadly fear of being hard up which haunted him all his life thenceforward, and is an offensive and yet pathetic feature of his letters to all his friends. On the other hand, he heard opera performances on a scale outside and beyond his past experience; he heard Habenek direct the Choral Symphony at the Conservatoire, and learnt much, not only about that mighty work—which he must already have known by heart—but also of the art of conducting; he finished Rienzi and sent it off to Dresden, where it was accepted; and he planned and completed The Flying Dutchman, which was accepted for production at Berlin. He had also written the Faust Overture in its first form. And probably also he had acquired that almost fatal fluency of the pen which was to make so many enemies for him afterwards, and yet to lead to the realization of his life's dream in Bayreuth. A bare list of the names of the friends and opponents he gained at this time would take up more space than is available in so brief a study as this, and I must pass over many interesting incidents. The most important is that connected with The Flying Dutchman libretto. Wagner submitted his sketches to the opera, where they were placed at the disposal of another composer, and he was offered (I think) £20 or nothing for them. He took the £20, and then, his artistic conscience happily triumphing over his commercial conscience, he used the money to live upon until he had completed his own opera on the same subject. The French Dutchman (music by Dietsch) was produced. It failed and is forgotten. How Wagner's fared all the world knows.

Rienzi was now getting ready at Dresden, and thither Wagner went in April, 1842. The opera was produced in October, with enormous success, and the name of Wagner became famous throughout Germany. Nowadays so much of the music appears so very cheap and tawdry that it is only after a severe mental struggle one can understand the enthusiasm the work aroused. We must put away all thought of the later Wagner; we must forget that when Rienzi was produced the Dutchman had already been some time finished. We must remember the sort of music the Dresden public had suffered under: dull, workmanlike operas, without an original touch, without the breath of life in them—in a word, kapellmeister music. The pomp and outward show of that remarkable heavy-weight Spontini must have come as a relief after the Dresden opera-goer's ordinary fare; but Spontini, though he lays on his colours with a barbarian regal hand, never sparkles; he is altogether lacking in vivacity, elasticity; he had no gift for gracious or piquant melody. Of the operas of Marschner much the same must be said; in them we find the tricks of the Romantics without the best Romantics' sense of beauty, all the horrors of Weber without Weber's passion. Black woods, supernatural fireworks by night, enchantments, vampires, guns that went off by themselves—all this jugglery was fast being done to death, and what at first had been a nerve-shaking novelty was becoming a mere tedium. In opera The Castle of Otranto was played out. Into this region of inspissated gloom Richard burst with Rienzi, the brilliant, the fearless, the tragic hero; all was blazing light and colour; it sparkled; if the champagne of it was of an inferior quality—often, indeed, poor goose-berry—yet it bubbled and frothed gaily. Besides, there were great sweeping tunes—such as the hackneyed prayer—and plenty of really dainty, if very Weberesque, melodies. All that Meyerbeer had to teach was there, and the stolid Dresdener gazed with delight on the brilliance of the latest Parisian musical fashions. So Wagner gained his first success, and deserved it. It was not the Paris success he had dreamed of a few years before, when fame, money and all worldly things desirable were to be his. But it meant bread-and-butter without drudging for the publishers or the press; it meant the means of living while he wrote masterpieces which were to set half the world against him and eventually make him immeasurably the greatest musical figure of his time. He was appointed Court kapellmeister, and there he remained until 1849. Before proceeding to this next period of seven years we must consider The Flying Dutchman.

This is his first music drama. He called it a romantic opera; but here for the first time the drama grows out of an idea and the music out of the drama. The thing suggested itself to him during that stormy trip to London: the roaring waves, the whistling of the salt winds, the loneliness of the bitter North Sea—these set his imagination aworking on the old legend of the mariner doomed to sail the ocean until the Day of Judgment. In this there was colour and atmosphere enough, but no drama. The dramatic idea he took from Heine's sentimental version. In this the Dutchman's lot is softened and mitigated by a possibility of salvation. He can go ashore once in seven years, and if he can find a maiden who will love him and be faithful unto death he will be released from the necessity to wander. That is to say, his chances of redemption depend upon constancy of some unknown young lady. All the Dutchman has to do is to find her, make himself agreeable, and trust to luck. A more childish notion never occurred to an intellectual man, nor a more selfish one. The lady might have done nothing wrong; she was to be punished for loving not wisely but too well; and there is nothing in the old legend or in the Wagner-Heine form of it to show the Dutchman to have been a deserving person. Yet, on the other hand, Wagner, with still vivid memories of the agonies he had endured during his voyage, may have thought the punishment excessive for a momentary loss of temper in trying circumstances and a passing swear-word; and the girl was to find the fullest joy her nature was capable of in sacrificing herself. But there is no fundamental verity inherent in the idea: the Dutchman's salvation might as well depend on a throw of dice; and all this early nineteenth-century romantic sentimentalism, with one of its main notions—that a woman cannot be better occupied than in "saving" a man—this, grafted on to the stern, relentless old story, makes a compound that is always unreal and sometimes ludicrous. But it gave Wagner three opportunities: of painting the stormy sea, of depicting the hopeless misery of the Dutchman Vanderdecken, and of expressing in music woman's most passionate and unselfish love.

No one need be afraid of "not understanding" the Dutchman. The story is simplicity itself. Wagner knew the theatre and every stagey device by heart, and in none of his dramas is there anything half so hard to follow as the plots, say, of Rigoletto and Aïda and most Italian operas. Nor, again, does the music present any difficulty. In spite of the use of the leit-motif which I shall discuss presently, the separate numbers are as clean cut as those of any Mozart opera. He joins his different items, it is true, but it is impossible to avoid knowing where one leaves off and the next begins. The play opens with the raging tempest on a rocky coast; the ship of one Daland is driven there, and Daland goes ashore to see if there is any likelihood of the storm ceasing—a proceeding at which any land-lubber, not to mention experienced tars, might well laugh. Finding himself far from his port and no probability of the wind and sea falling immediately, he goes on board again to take a little rest, and descends to his cabin, leaving a sailor as watchman, to see, I suppose, that the vessel does not batter itself to pieces on the cliffs. The watchman sings himself to sleep with a most beautiful ballad. The sky darkens, the sea boils more furiously than ever, and the phantom ship arrives. With a prodigious uproar her anchor takes ground—another evidence of Wagner's seamanship—and Vanderdecken comes ashore in his turn. His seven years are up; now he has another chance of finding the faithful maiden. The opening of this scene is as fine as anything Wagner ever wrote; the later portions are fine, too, but quite old-fashioned. The storm ceases, and Vanderdecken having expressed his hopes and fears, Daland comes on deck, enters into conversation with the stranger, and in a few minutes it is arranged that the two shall go together, and if the Dutchman can win Senta's heart, she shall be his.

Now, it will be noted here that the whole thing is ridiculously stagey and artificial. In spite of the new ideas fermenting in Wagner's brain, he had not yet got away from the stage-trickiness of Scribe. Unreality and artificiality face you at every step. The music is a different matter. No one, not even Mendelssohn in his Hebrides overture, has ever given us the sea, the noise and colour of it, its violence and ruthlessness, as Wagner has here. It is the sea that pervades the whole of the act; but imposed on its ceaseless sound there are very splendid things—some worn a little threadbare by now, but many still fresh. In the next act the prima donna has her opportunity. Senta, the heroine, sits at her spinning-wheel amidst a number of maidens. After a conventional spinning chorus, Senta sings the ballad of the Flying Dutchman, whose picture hangs on the wall, and ends up with an ecstatic appeal to Heaven, Fate—everyone in general and no one in particular—to give her the chance of saving him. Daland and Vanderdecken enter, and the drama begins to approach its climax. The spinning chorus is pretty; but nothing in the act—nor, in fact, in the whole opera—matches the glorious passage where Senta takes her fate in both hands and avows her resolution to follow the Dutchman to death or whatever else may befall.

The essence of the last act may be given in a few words. It begins as if Wagner had felt that he had not made sufficient use of the uncanny effects to be got out of the phantom ship, and we get a long string of choruses not necessary to the drama. At the last Vanderdecken, he, too, rises to the full height of his character, and, determining that he will not sacrifice Senta, renounces her and goes on board his boat to sail off. But Senta throws herself into the water after him; the phantom vessel falls to pieces, and the glorified forms of the two are seen mounting towards the sky. But Vanderdecken's sudden resolve has the air of an afterthought, and counts for little beside the fact that throughout the drama the sacrifice of Senta has been insisted on as the price of his redemption. It is the Senta theme, also, that is played as the pair mount.