Wagner has told us that his studies in musical lore were made, so to speak, backward, beginning with his contemporaries and working back through the classics. The influences, as they show themselves in his works, would seem to bear out this statement, for, after the rugged strength of Beethoven’s style which Rheingold suggests, the advancing polyphonic interest, which next appears in Walküre, reaches back to an older source for its inspiration, the polyphony of Johann Sebastian Bach. While, as has been remarked, Siegfried in its entirety forms a coherent whole, the treatment of the last act clearly displays the added mastery which Wagner had gained in the writing of Tristan and of Die Meistersinger. There is a larger sweep of melody and a harmonic freedom which belongs distinctly to Wagner’s ultimate style. In Götterdämmerung we find the first manifestation of this latest phase of Wagner’s art. A harmonic scheme that is at once bolder in its use of daring dissonances and subtler in its mysterious chromatic transitions gives added color to a fabric woven almost entirely of leit-motifs in astounding variety of sequence and combination.
The inauguration of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre and the first performances there of the Nibelungen Ring certainly marked the moment of Wagner’s greatest external triumph, but it was a victory which by no means brought him peace. A heavy debt was incurred by this first season’s Bayreuth festival and it was six years later before the funds necessary to meet this deficit and to provide for a second season could be obtained. The second Bayreuth season was devoted entirely to the initial performances of Parsifal, with the composition of which Wagner had been occupied since 1877. The intervening six years had brought many adherents to the Wagner cause and financial aid to the support of the festival was more generously extended. After a series of sixteen performances it was found that the season had proved a monetary success and its repetition was planned for the following year, 1883. The history of the Festival Theatre since that date is so well known that its recitation here is unnecessary. Bayreuth and the Wagner festival stand to-day a unique fact in the history of art. As a shrine visited not only by the confessed admirers and followers of Wagner, but by a large public as well, it represents the embodiment of Wagner’s life and art, constituting a sacred temple of an art which, by virtue of its power, has forced the attention of the entire world. Bayreuth, moreover, preserving the traditions of the master himself, has served as an authentic training school to those hosts of artists whose duty it has become to carry these traditions to the various opera stages of the world.
Wagner was fated not to see the repetition of the Parsifal performances. In September, 1882, being in delicate health and feeling much the need of repose, he again journeyed to Italy. Settling in Venice, where he hired a part of the Palazzo Vendramin, he passed there the last seven months of his life in the seclusion of his family circle. On February 1, 1883, Wagner was seized with an attack of heart failure and died after a few moments’ illness. Three days later the body was borne back to Bayreuth where, after funeral ceremonies, in which a mourning world paid a belated tribute to his genius, Richard Wagner was laid to his final rest in the garden of Villa Wahnfried.
V
The first conception of an opera on the theme and incidents of which Parsifal is the expression dates from an early period in Wagner’s life. The figure of Christ had long presented to him a dramatic possibility, and it is from the fusion of the poetical import of his life and character with the philosophical ideas he had gleaned from his studies in Buddhism and Schopenhauer that Wagner evolved his last and most profound drama.
It is the religious color and element in Parsifal that calls forth from Wagner the latest expression of his musical genius. We find in those portions of the Parsifal score devoted to the depiction of this element a serenity and sublimity of ethereal beauty hitherto unattained by him. As we listen to the diatonic progression of the ‘Faith’ and ‘Grail’ motives, we are aware that Wagner’s genius continually sent its roots deeper into the soil of musical tradition and lore and that in seeking the truly profound and religious feeling he had sounded the depths of the art that was Palestrina’s.
The Parsifal controversy has now become a matter of history. Wagner’s idea and wish was to reserve the rights of performance of this work solely for the Bayreuth stage. This plan was undoubtedly the outcome of a sincere desire to have this last work always performed in an ideal manner and under such conditions as would not always accompany its production should it become the common property of the operatic world at large. This wish of Wagner was disrespected in 1904 by Heinrich Conried, then director of the Metropolitan Opera Company of New York, who announced a series of performances of Parsifal at that house during the season of 1903. The Wagner family made both legal and sentimental appeals in an attempt to prevent these performances, but they were unheeded and the work was first heard outside of Bayreuth on December 24, 1903. It must be said that the performance was a worthy one, as have been subsequent performances of this work on the same stage, and, apart from the sentimental regret that one must feel at this disregard of Wagner’s will, the incident was not so deplorable as it was then deemed by the more bigoted Wagnerites. By the expiration of copyright, the work became released to the repertoire of European opera houses on January 1, 1914, and simultaneous performances in every part of Europe attested the eagerness with which the general public awaited this work.
With Wagner’s musical works before us, the voluminous library of discussion and annotation which Wagner himself and writers on music have furnished us seems superfluous. Wagner’s theories of art reform need little further explanation or support than those furnished by the operas themselves; it is in the earnest study of these that we learn truly to appreciate his ‘philosophy’ of art, it is in the universal imitation of these models that we find the best evidence of their dominating influence on modern art. The Wagnerian pervasion of almost all subsequent music forms the most important chapter of modern musical history, but before we turn to the consideration of this phenomenon let us briefly summarize the achievements of Wagner in this potent reform which Walter Niemann[113] says extends not only to music, the stage, and poetry, but to modern culture in its entirety; a sweeping statement, the proving of which would lead us into divers and interesting channels of thought and discussion, but which we must here renounce as not appertaining directly to the history of music in its limited sense.
Wagner’s reformation of the opera as a stage drama, stated briefly, consisted in releasing it, as it had before been released by Gluck and by Weber, from the position which it had occupied, as a mere framework on which to build a musical structure, the words furnishing an excuse for the popularities of vocal music, the stage pictures and situations providing further entertainment. It was to this level that all opera bade fair to be brought at the time when Meyerbeer held Europe by the ears. We have in the foregoing sketch of the composer’s life shown briefly how at first Wagner, still under the spell of romanticism, effected a compromise between the libretto of the older opera form and a text which should have intrinsic value as poetry and convincing dramatic force. Then after reflective study of classic ideals we find him making the decisive break with all the conventionalities and traditions of ‘opera,’ thus evolving the music drama in which music, poetry and stage setting should combine in one unified art. Situations in such a drama are no longer created to afford musical opportunities, but text and music are joined in a unity of dramatic utterance of hitherto unattained eloquence. Then as a final step in the perfection of this conception Wagner clarifies and simplifies the action while, by means of his inspired system of tonal annotation, he provides a musical background that depicts every shade of feeling and dramatic suggestion.