Much of the pungency of Wagner’s music, which makes it disagreeable to timid ears, is due to his progressiveness in the matter of harmony. He has gone to the furthest limit in the use of passing notes, as primarily embodied in the polyphony of Bach. He has followed the rule thus formulated by Dr. Parry:—
“Suspensions are now taken in any form and position which can in the first place be possibly prepared even by passing notes, or in the second place be possibly resolved even by causing a fresh discord, so long as the ultimate resolution into concord is feasible in an intelligible manner.”[[21]]
Many of Wagner’s harmonic progressions belong to that class which instruct rather than obey the theorists. These progressions have all been found capable of justification by analysis, and will therefore remain as part of Wagner’s contributions to the development of musical science and art. In considering these novelties, we must remember that genius is usually in advance of its day, and what sounded strange at first by reason of its novelty will in good time become part of the common diction of the art. In instrumentation, Wagner also made many innovations, and it is indisputable that he was the greatest master of the art of scoring who has ever lived. He showed a profounder insight into the individual capacity of every instrument than any composer except Berlioz, and in fecundity of combination he excelled even the gifted Frenchman. He enriched the body of tone of the modern orchestra by the employment of the tenor tuba, and emphasized the value of the neglected bass trumpet. His addition to the customary number of horn parts splendidly improved the mellow tone and solidity of the brass choir, and his use of the bass clarinet, not simply as a solo instrument, but as a re-enforcement of the organ-like bass of the woodwind department, was a stroke of genius. He further developed the expressiveness of the woodwind band by the novelty of his distribution of harmony among its members. Not only did he allot solos to them with unerring judgment, but departing from the conventional style of the classic symphonists, who used their wood instruments in pairs playing in thirds and sixths, he wrote for these instruments in a marvellously effective dispersed harmony. In writing for the strings, Wagner divided them more frequently than his predecessors had done, often making six or eight real parts among the violins alone. Altogether his instrumentation is richer in its polyphony and more solid in its body of tone than that of any other composer. He has been accused of being noisy, but power of sound is not necessarily noise. There is more noise in some of Verdi’s shrieking piccolo passages, accentuated with bass-drum thumps, than in the loudest passage that Wagner ever wrote.
Taking him by and large, as the sailors say, Wagner is the most striking figure in the history of music. Whether the future will or will not accord to him the position granted by the musical world of the present—that of the greatest genius (though not the profoundest musician) the art has produced—he will remain fixed upon the records as the most commanding intellect that ever sought to express its thought and accomplish its purposes though the medium of music. His influence upon his contemporaries has been larger than that of any other master since the science of modern music began. One has only to study the latest operas of that real genius, Verdi, to perceive how one of the most gifted musical minds of our time was forced to yield to the convincing truth of Wagner’s ideas. As for those of less original force than Verdi, they have one and all—even Mascagni, who is as purely Italian as Wagner was purely Teutonic—been swayed by his irresistible influence. Even the symphonic writers have been guided by him, and no man can ever again write an orchestral score as if Wagner had not lived. The futile controversy about his theories and his style will probably be kept alive for some years by those who persistently refuse to remodel their inflexible conceptions of what ought to be after the splendid pattern of what is. But Wagner’s theories will live, for he was the fulfillment of the prophetic words of Herder on Gluck: “The progress of the century led us to a man, who, despising the frippery of wordless tones, perceived the necessity of an intimate connection of human feeling and of the myth itself with his tones. From that imperial height on which the ordinary musician boasts that poetry serves his art he stepped down and made his tones only serve the words of feeling, the action itself. He has emulators, and perhaps some one will soon outstrip him in zeal, overthrowing the whole shop of slashed and mangled opera-jingle, and erecting an Odeon, a consistently lyric edifice, in which poetry, music, action, and decoration unite in one.”
THE ANIMATED FORGE MOVEMENT.
PANTHEON OF GERMAN MUSICIANS
(1740–1867.)
Reproduction of a painting by W. Lindenschmit.
