Famous composers and their works, Vol. 3

by Unknown

We now come to Wagner’s musical method, the nature of which has already been briefly indicated in the account of the birth in his mind of his new ideas. In his search after a modern substitute for the sustained intonation of the Greek drama, he had before him for study the dramatic recitative of Peri and the dramatic arioso style of Gluck. The former was wholly unavailable. Years of use had fastened upon it a collection of traditional phrases, familiar to the ear of every one who goes often to hear opera or oratorio. These traditional phrases, hopelessly inflexible, made dramatic recitative a thing of conventionalities, and unconventionality was the only hope for Wagner’s system. The Gluck arioso style was equally unsuited to his purpose, because, as we have been obliged to note before, it preserved the formalities of the old-fashioned opera,—those very formalities which Wagner felt that he must abandon if he would secure his compact union of the arts tributary to the stage. He needed a style of composition which would permit the music to flow freely from the words and which would impose no obligation on the composer to repeat certain words or lines in order that certain passages of music might be rounded out to a pretty close as in the old-fashioned aria. He was in search of lyric expressiveness freed from lyric conventionality. He therefore decided that each act of any one of his music-dramas must consist of one unbroken stream of melody. In other words, as long as there were persons or scenes before the audience, there must be a musical exposition of their moods, and that exposition must be unbroken and apparently unartificial in form, just as a train of moods is.

But to make the actors sing without cessation would fatigue both them and the audience; and, moreover, it would be untrue to nature, since men and women do not frame every thought and emotion in words. Hence Wagner conceived the idea of allotting the voicing of the ceaseless melody to the orchestra, while the personages of the drama should utter their words in a form of lyric recitative based on the broader principles of Peri, as expressed in his preface to “Eurydice,” but freed from acquired conventions and modified according to the promptings of Wagner’s own musical genius. Naturally, then, the question arose in the composer’s mind, “What form is my melody to have?” For he knew as well as Schumann did that music demands first of all things form. Now, the basis of musical form is the repetition of melodic phrases. There is no form, and therefore no coherence, no sense, in music consisting of disjointed phrases, each of which is heard once and never again. Yet to repeat them in any of the old-fashioned ways would have been to load himself down with some one of the set forms which he was trying to escape. Consequently this formidable problem was before him: How was he to make his endless melody intelligible to the auditor, to give it a palpable significance, to convey through it to the hearer the emotional moods of his personages, and yet impose upon it musical form, based upon repetition, but free from the artificiality of the older formulas? He found the solution in the suggestion which had come to him when he invented the two principal themes of Senta’s ballad in “The Flying Dutchman.” The solution of the problem was the perfection of this system of representative themes, each designed to stand for a particular person, thought, mood, or action, and to be repeated by the orchestra or vocalist whenever its subject had significance, though not necessarily presence, in the scene before the audience.

How are these representative themes obtained? Does Wagner construct a melody arbitrarily according to his fancy, and label it the “Siegfried” motive, the “Brünnhilde” motive? A moment’s reflection will suffice to convince the reader that such a system would be worse than puerile. It would not be in any sense as good as the method of Donizetti, who could at least give a pathetic color to the aria of his moribund tenor. Wagner’s high purpose was to make an indissoluble organic union between the poem and the music, and this purpose forbade all arbitrary or haphazard procedure in the construction of a leit motif. Music has a certain power of emotional expression; therefore Wagner’s endeavor was to invent themes representative of characteristic traits or emotional tendencies of his personages. In some cases when he required a musical representation of an inanimate object, he invented a theme which would suggest the object by suggesting emotions associated with it. Another class of themes is descriptive of externals, and belongs to what has been well called scenic music. The last class is the smallest, for, as a rule, Wagner’s scenic music serves its purpose but once. When it is intended for only one hearing, it is simply descriptive music, freely composed. When intended for more than one hearing, it has a deeper significance. Let us make a closer examination of the master’s processes in the construction of these leading motives, and that we may be logical, let us begin with the lowest order, the scenic.

RICHARD WAGNER, IN 1877.
After a portrait by Herkomer, etched by himself.

The central and the most picturesque character of “The Rheingold” is Loge, the god of fire. In this prologue of the tetralogy he appears as the evil counsellor of Wotan, and while his character is indicated in many striking ways, his entrance is heralded by a purely scenic bit of music known as the magic fire music.

This music is intended solely to represent the flickering, ascending fire. It reappears with most picturesque effect at the close of “Die Walküre,” when Wotan, having put Brünnhilde to sleep upon her rock, summons the fire from the earth to keep her couch inaccessible to all save the yet unborn hero who shall know no fear.[^[19]] Examples of the free descriptive or scenic music, composed without leading motives, may be found in “Tristan” (the sailors’ music, and the shepherd’s piping), in “Siegfried” (the familiar “Waldweben”), and in “Parsifal” (the dance of the flower maidens). Of the class of music a step higher in respect of significance,—that in which an inanimate object is represented by an appeal to the emotions associated with it,—the most brilliant example is the sword motive. The sword of Siegmund, which is to be welded anew by Siegfried and used by him in wresting the Rhine treasure from the grasp of the giant Fafner, is one of the most potent agents in the advancement of the action of the tetralogy. It is always indicated musically by this bold, martial theme, whose brilliant challenge rings with the pride of combat:—

It is a notable evidence of the depth of Wagner’s artistic purpose that he first uses this motive in “Das Rheingold,” before the sword has been fashioned, when only the idea of creating the race of Siegmund has dawned in Wotan’s mind. Another motive of this kind is that which represents the tarn helm, the magic cap whose possessor can make himself invisible or change his appearance. The motive is so uncertain in its tonality—a quality obtained by the use of the empty fifth—that it adequately depicts the mysterious nature of the tarn helm.