In the same year Wagner began work on the musical composition of the first of the Nibelungen cycle, Rheingold, and at the same time he conceived the poem for Tristan und Isolde, the spirit of which he says was prompted by his study of Schopenhauer, whose writings most earnestly attracted him at that time. Composition on the Ring cycle meanwhile proceeded uninterruptedly, and 1854 saw the completion of the second opera, Walküre.
In 1855 he passed four months in London as conductor of the Philharmonic, an episode in his life which he recalls with seemingly little pleasure. In the following year (1856) he had completed the second act of Siegfried, when the impulse seized him to commence work on the music of Tristan und Isolde, the text of which he had originally planned in response to an order for an opera from the emperor of Brazil. During the next two years Wagner was feverishly immersed in the composition of this work. The first act was written in Zürich, the second act during a stay in Venice in the winter of 1858, and the summer of 1859 saw the work completed in Zürich.
While the earlier operas of the Ring, Rheingold, Walküre, and a part of Siegfried, were composed before Tristan und Isolde, it is the latter opera which definitely marks the next step in the development of Wagner’s art. It is impossible to allot to any one period of Wagner’s growth the entire Nibelungen cycle. The conception and composition of the great tetralogy covered such a space of time as to embrace several phases of his development. Between the composition of Lohengrin and that of Rheingold, however, stands the widest breach in the theories and practices of Wagner’s art, for there does he break irrevocably with all that is common to the older operatic forms and adopts those methods by which he revolutionizes the operatic art in the creation of the music drama. In first putting these theories into practice we find, however, that Wagner passed again through an experimental stage where his spontaneous expression was somewhat under the bondage of conscious effort. The score of the Rheingold, while possessing the essential dramatic features of the other Ring operas and many pages of musical beauty and strength, is, it must be confessed, the least interesting of Wagner’s works. It is only when we come to Tristan und Isolde that we find Wagner employing his new methods with a freedom of inspiration which precludes self-consciousness and through which he becomes completely the instrument of his inspiration.
III
The drama of ‘Tristan and Isolde’ Wagner drew from the Celtic legend with which he made acquaintance as he pursued his studies in the Nibelungen myths. As has been noted before, Wagner attributed the mood that inspired the conception of ‘Tristan and Isolde’ to his studies of Schopenhauer, and commentators have made much of this influence in attempting to read into portions of ‘Tristan’ and the other dramas a more or less complete presentation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. But Wagner’s own writings have proved him to belong to that rather vague class of ‘artist-philosophers’ whose philosophy is more largely a matter of moods than of a dispassionate seeing of truths. The key to the situation is found in Wagner’s own remark: ‘I felt the longing to express myself in poetry. This must have been partly due to the serious mood created by Schopenhauer which was trying to find an ecstatic expression.’ Wagner’s studies had developed in him a new sense of the drama in which the unrealities of his early romanticism entirely disappeared. A classic simplicity of action, laying bare the intensity of the emotional sweep, and a pervading sense of fatalistic tragedy—this was the new aspiration of Wagner’s art.
The score of ‘Tristan and Isolde’ is one of the highest peaks of musical achievement. It is a modern classic which in spirit and form is the prototype of almost all that has followed in modern dramatic music. Wagner has in this music drama developed his ‘leit-motif’ system more fully than heretofore and the entire score is one closely woven fabric of these eloquent phrases combined with such art that Bülow, who was the first to see the score, pronounced it a marvel of logic and lucidity. In his employment of chromatic harmony Wagner here surpassed all his previous mastery. A wealth of chromatic passing notes, suspensions and appoggiaturas gives to the harmony a richness of sensuous color all its own; while the orchestral scoring attains to that freedom of polyphonic beauty, to which alone, according to Richard Strauss, modern ‘color’ owes its existence.
Wagner, on the completion of Tristan und Isolde, began to long for its performance, a longing which he was compelled to bear for eight years. During these he experienced the repetition of his past sorrows and disappointments. Again he resumed his wanderings and for the next five years we find him in many places. In September, 1859, he settled in Paris, where he spent two entire seasons. After a series of concerts in which he gave fragments of his various works, Wagner, through the mediation of Princess Metternich, obtained the promise of a hearing of Tannhäuser at the Opéra. The first performance was given on March 13th after an interminable array of difficulties had been overcome. Wagner was forced to submit to many indignities and to provide his opera with a ballet in compliance with the regulations of the Opéra. At the second performance, given on the 18th of March, occurred the memorable and shameful interruption of the performance by the members of the Jockey Club, who, prompted by a foolish and vindictive chauvinism, hooted and whistled down the singers and orchestra. The ensuing disturbance fell little short of a riot.
It was during this last residence of Wagner in Paris that he was surrounded by the circle through which his doctrines and ideas were to be infused into the spirit of French art. This circle, constituting the brilliant salon meeting weekly at Wagner’s house in the rue Newton, included Baudelaire, Champfleury, Tolstoi, Ollivier and Saint-Saëns among its regular attendants.
In 1861 Wagner, through the influence of his royal patrons in Paris, was able to return unmolested to Germany. While the success of the earlier works was now assured and they had taken a permanent place in the repertoire of nearly every opera house, the way to a fulfillment of his present aim, the production of ‘Tristan,’ seemed as remote as ever. Vain hopes were held out by Karlsruhe and Vienna, but naught came of them and Wagner was again obliged to obtain such meagre and fragmentary hearings for his works as he could obtain through the medium of the concert stage. In 1863 he made concert tours to Russia and Hungary besides conducting programs of his works in Vienna and in several German cities. These performances, while they spread Wagner’s fame, did little to assist him toward a more hopeful prospect of material welfare and thus in 1864 Wagner at the age of 51 found himself again fleeing from debts and forced to seek an asylum in the home of a friend, Dr. Wille at Mariafeld. But this season of hardship proved to be only the deepest darkness before the dawning of what was indeed a new day in Wagner’s life. While spending a few days at Stuttgart in April of that year he received a message from the king of Bavaria, Ludwig II, announcing the intention of the youthful monarch to become the protector of Wagner and summoning him to Munich. Wagner, in the closing words of his autobiography, says, ‘Thus the dangerous road along which Fate beckoned me to such great ends was not destined to be clear of troubles and anxieties of a kind unknown to me heretofore, but I was never again to feel the weight of the everyday hardship of existence under the protection of my exalted friend.’