Famous composers and their works, Vol. 3

by Unknown

These two themes being designed to represent certain ideas, it was inevitable that the composer should use them whenever those ideas recurred. As he tells us himself in the essay quoted above:—

“I had merely to develop, according to their respective tendencies, the various thematic germs comprised in the ballad, to have, as a matter of course, the principal mental moods in definite thematic shapes before me. When a mental mood returned, its thematic expression also, as a matter of course, was repeated, since it would have been arbitrary and capricious to have sought another motive so long as the object was an intelligible representation of the subject, and not a conglomeration of operatic pieces.”

We have now traced the origin of the three elementary principles out of which Wagner elaborated his system: First, the dramatic advantage of mythological or legendary subjects; second, the “intelligible representation of the subject”; and third, the use of the representative theme, “typical phrase” or leit motif. In “The Flying Dutchman” we find his system in its embryonic state, but the perfected system, as displayed in “Tristan” and “The Ring,” is only a logical outcome of these first thoughts, intensified, as it were, by his realization that the whole thing was simply a modernization of the practice of the greatest Greek dramatists. This realization caused him to question whether, through the medium of an art founded on his theories, the modern stage could not acquire a national importance and influence, such as the Greek theatre possessed. It will undoubtedly be easier for the reader now to take a comprehensive survey of the full-blown Wagnerian system than to try to follow its growth through the transitional stage of “Tannhäuser” and “Lohengrin.”

Wagner’s first law, as formulated succinctly by W. F. Apthorp in a magazine article, is: “That the text—what in old-fashioned dialect was called the libretto—once written by the poet, all other persons who have to do with the work—composer, stage architect, scene painter, costumer, stage manager, conductor, and singing actors—should aim at one thing only: the most exact, perfect, and lifelike embodiment of the poet’s thought.” So far as the composition of the music is concerned, this is precisely what Peri and Gluck believed. But Peri had to invent dramatic recitative; and standing, as it were, just on the hither side of chaos, he could not be expected to produce at once a perfected art world. The materials of operatic art were in process of making; the first builder had not the wherewith to rear a musical cathedral. Gluck erred in preserving the cut-and-dried operatic forms which made it impossible for him to achieve his sincere design,—“to reduce music to its proper function, that of seconding poetry by enforcing the expression of the sentiment and the interest of the situations, without interrupting the action, or weakening it by superfluous ornament.” It was comparatively easy to get rid of the “superfluous ornament”; but the methodical distribution of the old forms was found to interrupt the action. It remained for Wagner to see that these forms were unavailable for the composer who aimed at the complete embodiment of the poet’s thought; and it remained for him also to discern that the ideal lyric drama demanded an ideal harmony among its various elements. In other words, the perfected Wagnerian theory of the lyric drama contemplates the compact union of poetry, music, painting, action, and all the other factors of dramatic illusion on a basis of common interdependence, so binding that it shall be impossible to say that one is more important than another, so perfect that no separation can be made without a loss of vital force.

Wagner discerned in the theatre the source of such art influence as reached the great mass of the people. Looking upon its managers and its public as they actually appeared before his eyes, he saw the theatre in the hands of those to whom art was nothing and gain everything, while the public, jaded and sated, ceaselessly clamored for new sensations. Continued attempts of the money-seeking managers to satisfy this public demand, which was in its very nature insatiable, had led to a condition of opera in which the music had no organic connection with the text, the pageantry and ballets no logical relation to the pictorial ensemble. Turning his gaze backward to the home of true art, Greece, he saw a drama in which poetry, action, and music were indissolubly united.

“Thus,” he says, “we can by no means recognize in our theatrical art the genuine drama; that one, indivisible, supreme creation of the mind of man. Our theatre merely offers the convenient locale for the tempting exhibition of the heterogeneous wares of art manufacture. How incapable is our stage to gather up each branch of art in its highest and most perfect expression—the drama—it shows at once in its division into the two opposing classes, play and opera; whereby the idealizing influence of music is forbidden to the play, and the opera is forestalled of the living heart and lofty purpose of actual drama. Thus on the one hand the spoken play can never, with but few exceptions, lift itself up to the ideal flight of poetry; but, for very reason of the poverty of its means of utterance,—to say nothing of the demoralizing influence of our public life,—must fall from height to depth, from the warm atmosphere of passion to the cold element of intrigue. On the other hand the opera becomes a chaos of sensuous impressions jostling one another without rhyme or reason, from which each one may choose at will what pleases best his fancy; here the alluring movements of a dancer, there the bravura passage of a singer; here the dazzling effect of a triumph of the scene painter, there the astounding efforts of a Vulcan of the orchestra....”

“The public art of the Greeks, which reached its zenith in their tragedy, was the expression of the deepest and the noblest principles of the people’s consciousness; with us the deepest and noblest principle of man’s consciousness is the direct opposite of this, namely, the denunciation of our public art. To the Greeks the production of a tragedy was a religious festival, where the gods bestirred themselves upon the stage and bestowed on men their wisdom; our evil conscience has so lowered the theatre in public estimation that it is the duty of the police to prevent the stage from meddling in the slightest with religion; a circumstance as characteristic of our religion as of our art. Within the ample boundaries of the Grecian amphitheatre the whole populace was wont to witness the performances: in our superior theatres loll only the affluent classes. The Greeks sought the instruments of their art in the products of the highest associate culture: we seek ours in the deepest social barbarism. The education of the Greek, from his earliest youth, made himself the subject of his own artistic treatment and artistic enjoyment in body as in spirit: our foolish education, fashioned for the most part to fit us merely for future industrial gain, gives us a ridiculous, and withal arrogant, satisfaction with our own unfitness for art, and forces us to seek the subjects of any kind of artistic amusement outside ourselves.”[^[13]]

Making due allowance for the heated utterance of one to whom the questions at issue had such grave personal importance as to prevent judicial calmness of speech, we cannot fail to perceive that Wagner had penetrated to the essence of the difference between the stage of Greece and that of Europe in his day. The compact union of the arts tributary to the stage had been at once the outcome and the embodiment of that intensely national art-feeling which he contrasted so bitterly with the modern European lack of art-feeling, as he saw it. With the downfall of the Athenian, state tragedy fell also, and “art became less and less the expression of the public conscience.” In Wagner’s mind this downfall resembled that of the tower of Babel, with its subsequent dispersion of the tribes. The dramatic union of arts was dismembered. Poetry, painting, music, rhetoric, all separated, and each went its own way in pursuit of its own ends. No one who has reviewed the history of the fine arts in the Middle Ages can fail to have observed how blindly they seemed to grope their way toward the gates of truth until the guiding light of the Renaissance, with its new revelation of the classic antiquity, was turned upon Italy by the scholars driven out of Constantinople by the fall of Rome’s Eastern Empire. Wagner has reviewed the dissevered condition of the arts and their employment as means, and not ends, in a few terse sentences in the essay already quoted; and then he says:—

“Each one of these dissevered arts, nursed and luxuriously tended for the entertainment of the rich, has filled the world to overflowing with its products; in each great minds have brought forth marvels; but the one true art has not been born again, either in or since the Renaissance. The perfect art work, the great united utterance of a free and lovely public life, the Drama, Tragedy,—howsoever great the poets who have here and there indited tragedies,—is not yet born again; for the reason that it cannot be reborn, but must be born anew.”[^[14]]

This, then, was the herculean task which this self-appointed reformer of the drama set before him; to demonstrate that the modern theatre had the power to bring itself into the same relation to the noblest ideal life of man as the Greek theatre had; and in order that this might be achieved it was necessary, in his opinion, to return to that union of the arts, which has been mentioned so often. He believed that in his day each art had done all that it could do without the aid of the other. Music unaided could go no further than it had in Beethoven’s symphonies. Indeed, even the mighty Ludwig had called in the help of poetry to complete his Ninth Symphony. Poetry could rise no higher than the wings of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller had carried her. At this point, then, must come that fusion of the arts, in which each would sacrifice something of its egotism for the sake of the splendid whole; and that whole would be the art work of the future, the drama for the people. In order fairly to appreciate Wagner’s purposes we must pause here to inquire, what people? The answer to this question lies at the root of the whole controversy which has arisen about Wagner’s works; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is the neglect to make and properly answer this inquiry which leads insufficiently informed persons to look upon Wagner as a rabid iconoclast. The people for whom he sought to rear anew the ideal drama was the German people. As Mr. Krehbiel has expressed it: “Wagner believes that the elements of the lyric drama ought to be adapted to the peculiarities, and to encourage the national feeling of the people for whom it is created.... One of Wagner’s most persistent aims was to reanimate a national art spirit in Germany. The rest of the world he omitted from his consideration.”[^[15]] This was an inevitable result of his conviction, acquired from study of the Greek stage, that the ideal drama should be national in spirit.