That system may be termed a parallel to the delineative method employed by Berlioz and Liszt in developing the dramatic symphony and the symphonic poem. Like them, Wagner employs the leit-motif, but with a far greater consistency, a more thorough-going logic. Every situation, every character or object, every element of nature, state of feeling or mental process is accompanied by a musical phrase appropriate and peculiar to it. Thus we have motifs of fate, misfortune, storm, breeze; of Tristan, of Isolde, of Beckmesser, of Wotan; of love and of enmity, of perplexity, deep thought, and a thousand different conceptions. The Rhine, the rainbow, the ring and the sword are as definitely described as the stride of the giants, the grovelling of Mime or the Walkyries’ exuberance. So insistently is this done that the listener who has provided himself with a dictionary, as it were, of Wagner’s phrases, can understand in minute detail the comments of the orchestra, which in a manner makes him the composer’s confidant by laying bare the psychology of the drama. Such dictionaries or commentaries have been provided by annotators without number, and in some measure by Wagner himself, and labels have been applied to every theme, melody, passage or phrase that is significantly reiterated. A certain correspondence exists between motifs used in different dramas for similar purposes, such as the heroic motif of Siegfried in B flat and the one for Parsifal in the same key. Wagner goes further—in his reference to the story of Tristan, which Hans Sachs makes in the Meistersinger, we hear softly insinuating itself into the musical texture the motifs of love and death from Tristan and Isolde, and so forth.
The efficacy of the system has been thoroughly proved and for a time it seemed to the Wagnerites the ultimate development of operatic language. Wagner himself indicated that he had but made a beginning, that others would take up and develop the system after him. It has been ‘taken up’ by many disciples but it has hardly been found capable of further development upon the lines laid down by the master. Our age rejects many of his devices as obvious and even childish. But in a larger sense the method has persisted. A new sense of form characterizes the musical substance of the modern, or post-Wagnerian, opera. The leit-motif, with its manifold reiterations, modifications, variations, and combinations, has given a more intense significance to the smallest unit of the musical structure; it has made possible the Wagnerian ‘endless melody’ with its continuously sustained interest, its lack of full cadences, and its consequent restless stimulation. That style of writing is one of the essentially new things that Wagner brought, and with it came the ultimate death of the conventional operatic divisions, the concert forms within the opera. The distinction between aria and recitative is now lost forever, by a rapprochement or fusion of their two methods, rather than the discontinuance of one. Wagner’s recitative is an arioso, a free melody that has little in common with the heightened declamation of a former age, yet is vastly more eloquent. It rises to the sweep of an aria, yet never descends to vocal display, and even in its most musical moments observes the spirit of dramatic utterance. It is a wholly new type of melody that has been created, which was not at first recognized as such, for the charge of ‘no melody’ has been the first and most persistent levelled at Wagner.
Great as was the manifestation of Wagner’s dramatic genius, the fact must ever be recognized that his musical genius far overtopped it in its achievement and in its influence. It is as musical works that these dramas make their most profound impression. The growth of Wagner’s musical powers far surpassed his development as poet or dramatist. If we take the poems of Wagner’s works and make a chronologically arranged study of them, we shall see that, while there is the evolution in form and in significance that we have noted above, the advancing profundity of conception and emotional force may be largely attributed to the advance which the music makes in these respects. It may be argued that it was the progress of Wagner’s dramatic genius that prompted and inspired the march of his musical forces, and, while this may be to some extent true, it is the matured musicianship of Wagner which removes Götterdämmerung far from Rheingold in its significance and not the difference in the inspiration of the two poems, which were written during the same period.
We have spoken of the immense influence of Wagner as a phenomenon. Surely such must be called the unprecedented obsession of the musical thought of the age which he effected. In rescuing the opera from its position as a mere entertainment and by restoring to its service the nobler utterances which absolute music had begun to monopolize, Wagner’s service to the stage was incalculable. Opera in its older sense still exists and the apparition of a ‘Carmen,’ a Cavalleria rusticana, a truly dramatic Verdi, or the melodic popularities of a Massenet or Puccini attest the vitality and sincerity of expression which may be found outside of pure Wagnerism. It is, in fact, true that as we make a survey of the post-Wagner operas the actual adoption of his dramatic methods is not by any means universal, omnipresent as may be the influence of his reforms. The demand for sincerity of dramatic utterance is now everywhere strongly felt, but the music drama, as it came from the hand of Wagner, still remains the unique product of him alone whose genius was colossal enough to bring it to fruition.
More completely enthralling has been the spell of Wagner’s musical influence, but before measuring its far-reaching circle let us consider for a moment Wagner’s scores in the light of absolute music and remark upon some of their intrinsic musical content. Wagner’s principal innovations were in the department of harmonic structure. Speaking broadly, the essence of this new harmonic treatment was a free use of the chromatic element, which, radical as it was, was directly due to the influence of Beethoven’s latest style. This phase of Wagner’s composition first asserted itself, as we have before noted, in Tannhäuser and found its highest expression in ‘Tristan and Isolde.’ The chromatic features of Wagner’s melodic line are undoubtedly in a measure an outgrowth of this harmonic sense, though it would perhaps be truer to say that discoveries in either department reflected themselves in new-found effects in the other. Volumes would not suffice to enumerate even superficially the various formulæ which these chromaticisms assume, but a very general classification might divide them into two groups; the first consisting of passages of sinuous chromatic leadings in conjunct motion. One of the earliest evidences of this idiom is found in Tannhäuser:
and the full development of its possibilities are exemplified in the sensuous weavings of ‘Tristan’:
