Wagner, settled in Munich under the affectionate patronage of the king, found himself in a position which seemed to him the attainment of all his desires. He was to be absolutely free to create as his own will dictated, and, having completed his works, was to superintend their production under ideal conditions. During the first summer spent with the king at Lake Starnberg he wrote the Huldigungsmarsch and an essay entitled ‘State and Religion,’ and on his return to Munich in the autumn he summoned Bülow, Cornelius, and others of his lieutenants to assist him in preparing the performances of ‘Tristan.’ These were given in the following June and July with Bülow conducting and Ludwig Schnorr as Tristan. Many of Wagner’s friends drew together at Munich for these performances and the event took on an aspect which forecasted the spirit of the Wagner festivals of a later day. Shortly after these first performances of ‘Tristan’ there arose in Munich a wave of popular suspicion against Wagner, which, fed by political and clerical intrigue, soon reached a point where the king was obliged to implore Wagner for his own safety’s sake to leave Bavaria. Wagner again sought the refuge of his years of exile, and, thanks to the king’s bountiful patronage, he was able to install himself comfortably in the house at Triebschen on the shores of Lake Lucerne, which was to be his home for the six years that were to elapse before he took up his final residence at Bayreuth. It was here that Wagner found again ample leisure to finish a work the conception of which dates from his early days at Dresden when he had found the material for the libretto in Gervinus’ ‘History of German Literature’ and at the composition of which he had been occupied since 1861. This was his comic opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
While the musical material of Die Meistersinger is such as to place it easily in a class with ‘Tristan’ as a stage work, it offers certain unique features which place it in a class by itself. The work is usually designated as Wagner’s only ‘comic’ opera, but the designation comic here implies the absence of the tragic more than an all-pervading spirit of humor. The comic element in this opera is contrasted with a strong vein of romantic tenderness and the earnest beauty of its allegorical significance. In Die Meistersinger Wagner restores to the action some of the more popular features of the opera; the chorus and ensemble are again introduced with musical and pictorial effectiveness, but these externals of stage interest are made only incidental in a drama which is as admirably well-knit and as subtly conceived as are any of Wagner’s later works, and it is with rare art that Wagner has combined these differing elements. The most convincing feature of the work as a drama lies in the marvellously conceived allegory and the satirical force with which it is drawn. So naturally do the story and scene lend themselves to this treatment that, with no disagreeable sense of self-obtrusion, Wagner here convincingly presents his plea for a true and natural art as opposed to that of a conventional pedantry. The shaft of good-humored derision that he thrusts against the critics is the most effective retort to their jibes, while the words of art philosophy which he puts into the mouth of Hans Sachs are indeed the best index he has furnished us of his artistic creed.
In the music, no less than in the libretto, of Die Meistersinger Wagner has successfully welded into a cohesive unit several diffusive elements. The glowing intensity of his ‘Tristan’ style is beautifully blended with a rich and varied fund of musical characterization, which includes imitations of the archaic, literally reproduced, as in the chorales, or parodied, as in Köthner’s exposition of the mastersingers’ musical requirements. The harmonic treatment is less persistently chromatic than that of ‘Tristan’ owing to the bolder diatonic nature of much of its thematic material, a difference which, however, cannot be said to lessen in any degree the wonderful glow of color which Wagner had first employed in Tristan und Isolde. Polyphonically considered, Die Meistersinger stands as the first work in which Wagner brought to an ultimate point his system of theme and motive combinations. The two earlier operas of the Ring contained the experiments of this system and in ‘Tristan’ the polyphony is one more of extraneous ornamentation and variation of figure than of the thematic combination by which Wagner is enabled so marvellously to suggest simultaneous dramatic and psychological aspects.
Die Meistersinger had its first performance at Munich on June 21, 1868, and the excellence of this first performance was due to the zealous labors of those who at that time constituted Wagner’s able body of helpers, Hans von Bülow, Hans Richter, and Karl Tausig. In the following year, at the instigation of the king, Rheingold and Walküre were produced at Munich, but failed to make an impression because of the inadequacy of their preparation.
Wagner in the meantime was living in quiet retirement at Triebschen working at the completion of the ‘Nibelungen Ring.’ From this date commences Wagner’s friendship with Friedrich Nietzsche, a friendship which unfortunately turned to indifference on the part of Wagner, and to distrust and animosity on the part of Nietzsche.
On August 25, 1870, Wagner married Cosima von Bülow, in which union he found the happiness which had been denied to him through the long years of his unhappy first marriage. A son, Siegfried, was born in the following year, an event which Wagner celebrated by the composition of the ‘Siegfried Idyl.’
IV
We now approach the apotheosis of Wagner’s career, Bayreuth and the Festival Theatre, a fulfillment of a dream of many years. A dance through Wagner’s correspondence and writings shows us that the idea of a theatre where his own works could be especially and ideally presented was long cherished by him. This idea seemed near its realization when Wagner came under the protection of King Ludwig, but many more years passed before the composer attained this ambition. In 1871 he determined upon the establishment of such a theatre in Bayreuth. Several circumstances contributed to this choice of location; his love of the town and its situation, the generous offers of land made to him by the town officials and the determining fact of its being within the Bavarian kingdom, where it could fittingly claim the patronage of Wagner’s royal protector. Plans for the building were made by Wagner’s old friend, Semper, and then began the weary campaign for necessary funds. Public apathy and the animosity of the press, which, expressing itself anew at this last self-assertiveness of Wagner, delayed the good cause, but May 22, 1872, Wagner’s fifty-ninth birthday, saw the laying of the cornerstone. Four more years elapsed before sufficient funds could be found to complete the theatre. Wagner in the meantime had taken up his residence at Bayreuth, where he had built a house, Villa Wahnfried. On August 13, 1876, the Festival Theatre was opened. The audience which attended this performance was indeed a flattering tribute to Wagner’s genius, for, besides those good friends and artists who now gathered to be present at the triumph of their master, the German emperor, the king of Bavaria, the emperor of Brazil, and many other royal and noble personages were there as representatives of a world at last ready to pay homage to genius. The entire four operas of the ‘Ring of the Nibelungen’ were performed in the following week and the cycle was twice repeated in August of the same season.
As has been noted, the several dramas of the ‘Ring’ belong to widely separated periods of his creative activity, and, musically considered, have independent points of regard. The poems, however, conceived as they were, beginning with Götterdämmerung, which originally bore the title of ‘Siegfried’s Death’ and led up to by the three other poems of the cycle, are united in dramatic form and feeling. The adoption of the Nibelungen mythology, as a basis for a dramatic work, dated from about the time that Lohengrin was finished. Wagner, in searching material for a historical opera, ‘Barbarossa,’ lost interest in carrying out his original scheme upon discovering the resemblance of this subject to the Nibelungen and Siegfried mythology. He says: ‘In direct connection with this I began to sketch a clear summary of the form which the old original Nibelungen myth had assumed in my mind in its immediate association with the mythological legend of the gods; a form which, though full of detail, was yet much condensed in its leading features. Thanks to this work, I was able to convert the chief part of the material itself into a musical drama. It was only by degrees, however, and after long hesitation, that I dared to enter more deeply into my plans for this work; for the thought of the practical realization of such a work on our stage literally appalled me.’
While the Ring poems constitute a drama colossal and imposing in its significance, far outreaching in conception anything that had been before created as a musical stage work, it is in many of its phases an experimental work toward the development of the ideal music drama which ‘Tristan and Isolde’ represents. Written at a time when Wagner was in the throes of a strong revolutionary upheaval and when his philosophy of art and life was seeking literary expression, we find the real dramatic essence of these poems somewhat obscured by the mass of metaphysical speculation which accompanies their development. In Siegfried alone has Wagner more closely approached his new ideal and created a work which, despite the interruption in its composition, is dramatically and musically the most coherent and most spontaneously poetic of the Ring dramas. It has been already noted that the break between the musical style of Lohengrin and that of Rheingold is even greater than that between the dramatic forms of the two works. In the six years which separated the composition of these two operas Wagner’s exuberant spontaneity of expression became tempered with reflective inventiveness, and there pervades the entire score of Rheingold a classic solidity of feeling which by the side of the lyric suavity of Lohengrin is one of almost austere ruggedness. We find from the start Wagner’s new sense of dramatic form well established and the metrical regularity of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin is now replaced with the free dramatic recitative and ‘leit-motif’ development. Of harmonic color and polyphonic richness Rheingold has less interest than have the other parts of the cycle, and one cannot but feel that after the six years of non-productiveness Wagner’s inventive powers had become somewhat enfeebled. With the opening scenes of Walküre, however, we find again a decided advance, a melodic line more graceful in its curve and the harmonic color enriched with chromatic subtleties again lends sensuous warmth to the style to which is added the classic solidity which Rheingold inaugurates. In polyphonic development Walküre marks the point where Wagner commences to employ that marvellously skillful and beautiful system of combining motives, which reached its full development in the richly woven fabric of Tristan, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal.