I do not say that there may not be a decadent side in Wagner, revealing super-sensitiveness or even hysteria and other modern nervous affections. And if this side was lacking he would not be representative of his time, and that is what every great artist ought to be. But there is certainly something more in him than decadence; and if women and young men cannot see anything beyond it, it only proves their inability to get outside themselves. A long time ago Wagner himself complained to Liszt that neither the public nor artists knew how to listen to or understand any side of his music but the effeminate side: "They do not grasp its strength," he said. "My supposed successes," he also tells us, "are founded on misunderstanding. My public reputation isn't worth a walnut-shell." And it is true he has been applauded, patronised, and monopolised for a quarter of a century by all the decadents of art and literature. Scarcely anyone has seen in him a vigorous musician and a classic writer, or has recognised him as Beethoven's direct successor, the inheritor of his heroic and pastoral genius, of his epic inspirations and battlefield rhythms, of his Napoleonic phrases and atmosphere of stirring trumpet-calls.
Nowhere is Wagner nearer to Beethoven than in Siegfried. In Die Walküre certain characters, certain phrases of Wotan, of Brünnhilde, and, especially, of Siegmund, bear a close relationship to Beethoven's symphonies and sonatas. I can never play the recitative con espressione e semplice of the seventeenth sonata for the piano (Op. 31, No. 2) without being reminded of the forests of Die Walküreand the fugitive hero. But in Siegfried I find, not only a likeness to Beethoven in details, but the same spirit running through the work—both the poem and the music. I cannot help thinking that Beethoven would perhaps have disliked Tristan, but would have loved Siegfried; for the latter is a perfect incarnation of the spirit of old Germany, virginal and gross, sincere and malicious, full of humour and sentiment, of deep feeling, of dreams of bloody and joyous battles, of the shade of great oak-trees and the song of birds.
In my opinion, Siegfried, in spirit and in form, stands alone in Wagner's work. It breathes perfect health and happiness, and it overflows with gladness. Only Die Meistersinger rivals it in merriment, though even there one does not find such a nice balance of poetry and music.
And Siegfried rouses one's admiration the more when one thinks that it was the offspring of sickness and suffering. The time at which Wagner wrote it was one of the saddest in his life. It often happens so in art. One goes astray in trying to interpret an artist's life by his work, for it is exceptional to find one a counterpart of the other. It is more likely that an artist's work will express the opposite of his life—the things that he did not experience. The object of art is to fill up what is missing in the artist's experience: "Art begins where life leaves off," said Wagner. A man of action is rarely pleased with stimulating works of art. Borgia and Sforza patronised Leonardo. The strong, full-blooded men of the seventeenth century; the apoplectic court at Versailles (where Fagon's lancet played so necessary a part); the generals and ministers who harassed the Protestants and burned the Palatinate—all these loved pastorales. Napoleon wept at a reading of Paul et Virginie, and delighted in the pallid music of Paesiello. A man wearied by an over-active life seeks repose in art; a man who lives a narrow, commonplace life seeks energy in art. A great artist writes a gay work when he is sad, and a sad work when he is gay, almost in spite of himself. Beethoven's symphony To Joy is the offspring of his misery; and Wagner's Meistersinger was composed immediately after the failure of Tannhäuser in Paris. People try to find in Tristan the trace of some love-story of Wagner's, but Wagner himself says: "As in all my life I have never truly tasted the happiness of love, I will raise a monument to a beautiful dream of it: I have the idea of Tristan und Isolde in my head." And so it was with his creation of the happy and heedless Siegfried.
The first ideas of Siegfried were contemporary with the Revolution of 1848, which Wagner took part in with the same enthusiasm he put into everything else. His recognised biographer, Herr Houston Stewart Chamberlain—who, with M. Henri Lichtenberger, has succeeded best in unravelling Wagner's complex soul, though he is not without certain prejudices—has been at great pains to prove that Wagner was always a patriot and a German monarchist. Well, he may have been so later on, but it was not, I think, the last phase of his evolution. His actions speak for themselves. On 14 June, 1848, in a famous speech to the National Democratic Association, Wagner violently attacked the organisation of society itself, and demanded both the abolition of money and the extinction of what was left of the aristocracy. In Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849) he showed that beyond the "local nationalism" were signs of a "supernational universalism." And all this was not merely talk, for he risked his life for his ideas. Herr Chamberlain himself quotes the account of a witness who saw him, in May, 1849, distributing revolutionary pamphlets to the troops who were besieging Dresden. It was a miracle that he was not arrested and shot. We know that after Dresden was taken a warrant was out against him, and he fled to Switzerland, with a passport on which was a borrowed name. If it be true that Wagner later declared that he had been "involved in error and led away by his feelings" it matters little to the history of that time. Errors and enthusiasms are an integral part of life, and one must not ignore them in a man's biography under the pretext that he regretted them twenty or thirty years later, for they have, nevertheless, helped to guide his actions and impressed his imagination. It was out of the Revolution itself that Siegfried directly sprang.
In 1848, Wagner was not yet thinking of aTetralogy, but of an heroic opera in three acts called Siegfried's Tod, in which the fatal power of gold was to be symbolised in the treasure of the Niebelungen; and Siegfried was to represent "a socialist redeemer come down to earth to abolish the reign of Capital." As the rough draft developed, Wagner went up the stream of his hero's life. He dreamed of his childhood, of his conquest of the treasure, of the awakening of Brünnhilde; and in 1851 he wrote the poem of Der Junge Siegfried. Siegfried and Brünnhilde represent the humanity of the future, the new era that should be realised when the earth was set free from the yoke of gold. Then Wagner went farther back still, to the sources of the legend itself, and Wotan appeared, the symbol of our time, a man such as you or I—in contrast to Siegfried, man as he ought to be, and one day will be. On this subject Wagner says, in a letter to Roeckel: "Look well at Wotan; he is the unmistakable likeness of ourselves, and the sum of the present-day spirit, while Siegfried is the man we wait and wish for—the future man whom we cannot create, but who will create himself by our annihilation—the most perfect man I can imagine." Finally Wagner conceived the Twilight of the Gods, the fall of the Valhalla—our present system of society—and the birth of a regenerated humanity. Wagner wrote to Uhlig in 1851 that the complete work was to be played after the great Revolution.
The opera public would probably be very astonished to learn that in Siegfried they applaud a revolutionary work, expressly directed by Wagner against this detested Capital, whose downfall would have been so dear to him. And he never doubted that he was expressing grief in all these pages of shining joy.
Wagner went to Zurich after a stay in Paris, where he felt "so much distrust for the artistic world and horror for the restraint that he was forced to put upon himself" that he was seized with a nervous malady which nearly killed him. He returned to work at Der Junge Siegfried, and he says it brought him great joy.