“A consuming glowing excitement kept my blood and nerves in a state of feverish agitation,” Wagner says, speaking of the first presentation of this “Tannhaeuser.” His fortunate change of circumstances, contact with a luxurious court, and the expectation of material success had fostered a desire for pleasure that led him in a direction counter to his real nature. There was no other way to satisfy this craving except by following as an artist the reigning fashion and the general striving after success. “If I were to condense all that is pernicious and wearisome in the making of opera-music, I should call it Meyerbeer,” he says, “inasmuch as it ignores the wants of the soul and seeks to gratify the eye and ear alone.” After all, was it the mere gratification of the senses that he really longed for? His aspirations grew in the natural soil of those life-feelings which dictate that religion and morality shall not destroy natural impulses, but sanctify them. Before his soul stood a pure, chaste, maidenly image of unapproachable and intangible holiness and loveliness. In his own words, his nature passionately and ardently embraced the outward forms of this conception whose essence was the love of all that is noble and pure. No other artist ever possessed a deeper sense of the need of our time. With this protest against the violence done our purely human nature, he places us again on a solid footing and symbolizes in art the highest accomplishment of religion—regeneration by knowledge. It is to this that we owe the regeneration of our national life. The religious element of our nature has preserved us and made us a great nation.
He confesses he had been so intensely engrossed in composing “Tannhaeuser,” that the nearer he approached the end, the more the idea possessed him that sudden death would prevent its completion. As he wrote the last note it seemed to him as though his life had been in danger till then. The “Flying Dutchman” was a protest against the purposeless wanderings of the human mind in every external department of knowledge, while “Tannhaeuser” was a bold historical protest against all that would subject the hidden sense of truth in our nature to violent interpretation and arbitrary dogmas. From this time forth his sphere became the purely human, and in this too he shows us by his powerful art that which is indispensable and eternal in human existence joined with the complete realization of the only natural way to develop all our qualities. We have come to “Lohengrin,” conceived in 1847, and completed in its instrumental parts in March, 1848. It was in truth “his child of pain.”
After the completion of “Tannhaeuser,” his native sense of humor prompted him to design a satirical play on the “Saengerkrieg auf Wartburg,” namely the “Meistersinger von Nuernberg,” of which, more further on. The painful experience of being misunderstood in all his earnest efforts as a man and as an artist, his failure to make the assistance he longed to give acceptable, drove him back with passionate vehemence into a serious frame of mind, in which condition he could well understand the Lohengrin material. Hitherto, in the mystic twilight of its mediæval presence, it had inspired him with some degree of suspicion, but he now recognized in it a romance, wherein was embodied the longing desires of pure human nature, and the imperative necessity of love, as well as its artistic meaning.
The fundamental trait of this legend, as in “Tannhaeuser” and in the flight of Odysseus from the embraces of sensualism, had already appeared in the Greek myth of Zeus and Semele. Like the God from the cloudy Olympian realms, so Lohengrin from the boundless ether to which Christian imagination had assigned Olympus, descends to the human female in the natural longing of love. There was an old tradition in the legends of the people who dwelt near the sea, to the effect that on its blue surface an unknown man of indescribable grace and beauty approaches, whose resistless charms win every heart. He disappears again, retreating with the waves, whenever it is sought to discover who he is. So also in the Scheldt region once appeared a handsome hero, drawn by a swan. He rescued a persecuted, innocent maiden, and married her, but when she asked him who he was and whence he came, he was compelled to forsake her. How does our poet interpret the legend?
Lohengrin, the son of Parcival, the royal guardian of the Holy Grail, who represents the ideal in humanity, although he was probably originally identical with the German Sun-god, who longs to rest in the arms of night—this Lohengrin seeks the wife that believes in him, who will not ask who he is and whence he came, but will love him as he is, and simply as he appears to her. He sought the wife, to whom he need not declare himself, need not justify himself, but who will love him without question. Like Zeus, he had to conceal his divine nature, for only in this way could he know that he was really loved, and not simply admired, which was all he longed for when he descended from his ethereal heights to the warm earth below. He longs to be human, to experience the warm feelings of humanity, and gain a loving heart; with these longings he descended from his blissful, lonely heights, when he heard the cry of this heart for help in the midst of mankind. The halo of his higher nature, however, betrays him. He can not but appear as miraculous. The staring of the vulgar and the rancor of the envious cloud the heart of the loving Elsa. Doubts and jealousy show that he has not been understood but simply adored, and this draws from him the confession of his divinity, after which he returns, his purpose unaccomplished, to his solitude.
We must bear in mind how highly our poet even at that time prized this artistic wealth. To Goethe, art was “like good deeds;” Schiller hoped with its aid to unify the nation, and Wagner, especially after the discovery of such grand art-material as those myths contained, regarded it as the real fountain of health for the nation and the time. We shall soon observe that at last his art embraced our highest ideals in religion as well. Such an art, however, exists only in the heart which believes in it, and we have seen how antagonistic was the spirit of the time, particularly to this artist, who had emerged from the blissful solitude of his own creative mind and sought the sympathy of the warm human heart. He justly felt that the theme was a tragic symbol of the time, and he was therefore enabled to present Lohengrin as an entirely new artistic conception, something no poet had previously succeeded in accomplishing.
More than this he discloses to us that which his Elsa imparted to him—the nature of the feminine heart. “I could not help justifying her in the outbreak at last of jealousy and at that moment for the first time I fully comprehended the purely human nature of love,” he says. “This woman, who by passion is brought from the heights of rapturous adoration back to her real nature and reveals it in her ruin, this magnificent woman, from whom Lohengrin disappeared because his peculiar nature prevented him from understanding her, I had now discovered.” The effect of this was to clarify his vision, as we shall likewise learn. The lost arrow that he sent after this valuable treasure had been his Lohengrin, which he had to sacrifice in order to discover the track of the “true womanly” which Goethe was the first to long for ardently, and which music had revealed as it were the sound of a bell in the dark forest. This alone can explain why the masculine egoism, even in so noble a form as our idealism had hitherto assumed, was forced to yield to its influence. But this Elsa was only the unconscious spirit of the people and the perception of this must of necessity have made him, as he says, “a thorough revolutionist.” He felt that this spirit of the people was restrained by wrong conceptions of morality and false ideals. He heard its lamentations, and verily, if ever a genius served his people, then did the genius of Wagner avail him as the worker of “good deeds.” He prophetically indicated at that time what subsequently became an exquisite reality. “Only a good deed can help here,” he writes after the completion of “Lohengrin.” “A gifted and inspired man must with good fortune attain to power and influence who can elevate his inmost convictions to the dignity of law. For it is possible after all, if chance will have it so that a king will permit a competent man to have his way as well as an incompetent one. The public can only be educated through facts. So long as an immense majority is carried away by the mezza-voce of a virtuoso, its needs are readily discerned and satisfied.”
It is now our duty to record how he arrived at this remarkably independent action of the artist; we follow his notes, as they furnish the clearest testimony. Their stirring recital is touching enough for any one who can look upon the nation in the light of the history of mankind, to which has been assigned its own peculiar ideal problems.
In the meantime the revolution of 1848 had broken out. Although never really much inclined toward politics, Wagner had foreseen its necessity; but as soon as he came in contact with its various elements, he recognized only too clearly that none of the warring factions had the least conception of his own aims. Notwithstanding this, he perfected a plan for the reorganization of the stage by which alone under the circumstances the nation and the time could be strongly impressed again with the ideal in thought and art. The political rostrum showed soon enough how blunt were its arrows. And what of the Catholic syllabus and Protestant “Culturkampf” as well? Dead children born of dead mothers! Most of all it was important to create anew for that stage the ideals which would serve to elevate the time. Even while at work on “Lohengrin,” which always made him feel as if he were on an oasis in a desert waste and for which he gathered strength from the performance of the Ninth symphony in Dresden, Siegfried and Friedrich der Rothbart appeared to him. Each contained the elements which lie nearest the heart. Each was a type and model of our distinct characteristics. He recognized at once however that Friedrich I. (Barbarossa) was only the historical regeneration of Siegfried, and that the latter was in reality the youthful handsome hero to form the object and centre of a work of art and to convey to us in its fullness and beauty the purely human idea as Wagner conceived it. How he found and interpreted this Siegfried, he has told us in the pamphlet, “The Wibelungen, History from Legend” which appeared in 1850.
The delight produced by the discovery of this “actor of reality, this man in the fullness of highest and boundless power and most indisputable loveliness” revealed to him by his Elsa, only intensified for the present at least the feeling that in his best efforts and his knowledge he stood sadly alone. His longing was intense, the more so that in this actual life he could accomplish his purpose as Faust says: