And answered, ‘I myself am heaven and hell.’”
Overcome by his first real draught of the bitterness of life, he found that his emotional moods were clamoring for expression. With the splendid egotism of genius, he discerned the sorrow of a world in his own suffering. To dramatize this became his burning desire. The legend of the Ahasuerus of the sea, cursed by his own determination to overcome obstacles, opposed by all the powers of nature, seemed to Wagner the embodiment of his own experience; and he turned to the work of making an opera out of it, with no purpose except a complete and convincing expression of the prevailing moods of his own soul. And it was thus that he came upon the fundamental principles of the theory which set the musical world agog and raised up lions in his path. The first conviction that came to him was that of the superiority of a legendary over a historical story. He subsequently wrote of it thus:—
“In this and all succeeding plans, I turned for the selection of my material once for all from the domain of history to that of legend.... All the details necessary for the description and presentation of the conventionally historic, which a fixed and limited historical epoch demands in order to make the action clearly intelligible,—and which are therefore carried out so circumstantially by the historical novelists and dramatists of to-day,—could be here omitted. And by this means the poetry, and especially the music, were freed from the necessity of a method of treatment entirely foreign to them, and particularly impossible as far as music was concerned. The legend, in whatever nation or age it may be placed, has the advantage that it comprehends only the purely human portion of this age or nation, and presents this portion in a form peculiar to it, thoroughly concentrated, and therefore easily intelligible.... This legendary character gives a great advantage to the poetic arrangement of the subject for the reason already mentioned, that, while the simple process of the action—easily comprehensible as far as its outward relations are concerned—renders unnecessary any painstaking for the purpose of explanation of the course of the story, the greatest possible portion of the poem can be devoted to the portrayal of the inner motives of the action,—those inmost motives of the soul, which, indeed, the action points out to us as necessary, through the fact that we ourselves feel in our hearts a sympathy with them.”[[11]]
The second conviction that came to him was that of the folly of writing music at random, instead of clinging to the musical investiture of a mood once formed. This led him to the abandonment of the set forms of the established opera, and to the adoption of his own plan of making the music and poetry an artistic unit. His words in regard to this matter are worth quoting:—
“The plastic unity and simplicity of the mythical subjects allowed of the concentration of the action on certain important and decisive points, and thus enabled me to rest on fewer scenes with a perseverance sufficient to expound the motive to its ultimate dramatic consequences. The nature of the subject, therefore, could not induce me, in sketching my scenes, to consider in advance their adaptability to any particular musical form, the kind of musical treatment being in each case necessitated by these scenes themselves. It could, therefore, not enter my mind to engraft on this my musical form, growing, as it did, out of the nature of the scenes, the traditional forms of operatic music, which could not but have marred and interrupted its organic development. I therefore never thought of contemplating on principle and as a deliberate reformer the destruction of the aria, duet, and other operatic forms; but the dropping of those forms followed consistently from the nature of my subjects.”[[12]]
RICHARD WAGNER.
From a photograph from life taken in Vienna about 1875 by Fr. Luckhardt.
He found the germs of his future musical system in the ballad of Senta. In this the legend of the unhappy Hollander is told, and in its musical investiture Wagner invented two melodic themes with distinct purposes. The first was intended to illustrate the personality of the Dutchman as an embodiment of yearning for rest. The second was designed to represent the redeeming principle, the ewig weibliche, the eternal womanhood, which became the ruling ethical feature of all Wagner’s lyric works. Here are the two themes:—
