“But this music-strumming was quite a secondary matter: Greek, Latin, mythology and ancient history were my principal studies.” At this time he wrote some prize verses on the death of a schoolfellow. “I was then eleven years old. I promptly determined to become a poet, and sketched out tragedies on the model of the Greeks.” He also translated twelve books of the Odyssey, and learnt English in order to study Shakespeare. “I projected a grand tragedy which was almost nothing but a medley of Hamlet and King Lear. The plan was gigantic in the extreme; two-and-forty human beings died in the course of this piece, and I saw myself compelled in its working out to call the greater number back as ghosts, otherwise I should have been short of characters for my last acts.”
Being removed to the Leipzig Nikolaischule he there for the first time came into contact with Beethoven’s genius; “its impression upon me was overpowering.... Beethoven’s music to Eg-mont so much inspired me, that I determined—for all the world—not to allow my now completed tragedy to leave the stocks until provided with suchlike music. Without the slightest diffidence, I believed that I could myself write this needful music, but thought it better to first clear up a few of the general principles of thorough-bass.... But this study did not bear such rapid fruit as I had expected: its difficulties both provoked and fascinated me; I resolved to become a musician.”
Thus far we see the embryo poet-musician. In his sixteenth year the mysticism in his nature was roused by a study of E. A. Hoffmann: “I had visions by day in semi-slumber, in which the ‘Keynote,’ ‘Third,’ and ‘Dominant’ seemed to take on living form and reveal to me their mighty meaning.” These visions are curiously confirmed by the scientific phenomena of Chladni’s sand figures and the sound forms of Mrs. Watts Hughes. The fact that sound is the means through which all form is produced is a very old teaching. Pythagoras, who brought the art of music from India to Greece, taught that the Universe was evolved out of chaos by the power of sound and constructed according to the principles of musical proportion.
About this time Wagner seriously studied Counterpoint under Theodor Weinlig. In less than six months he was dismissed as perfect. “What you have made by this dry study,” he said to his youthful pupil, “we call ‘Self-dependence.’” In 1832 he composed “an opera-book of tragic contents: Die Hochzeit”; his sister disapproved of the work and he at once destroyed it, although some of the music was already written. Die Feen (The Fairies) followed in the next year and was the first of his completed operatic works. At the age of twenty-one he tells us: “I had emerged from abstract Mysticism, and I learnt a love for Matter.” The result was Das Liebesverbot founded on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, in which “free and frank physicalism” prevails over “Puritanical hypocrisy.”
This wild mood soon ceased under the pressure of petty cares; in 1836 he married the woman whose devotion helped him through so many years of bitter struggle. The following year he began his first large work, Rienzi, and became musical director at the Riga theatre. The poem was finished in 1838, and in 1839 when the music was nearly completed, Wagner embarked with his wife and his beloved big dog on board a sailing ship bound for London en route for Paris. His object was to get Rienzi performed there, but despite the influence of Meyerbeer he was doomed to disappointment and found himself stranded there in the utmost poverty. This, as we shall see from an essay later in the volume, was the turning-point in his life; but we have now to consider the next essay, the famous
ART AND REVOLUTION.
The main theme of this fine article is the relation of Art to the Universal Brotherhood of Man. It is prefaced by an introduction written in 1872 which begins with Carlyle’s trenchant words on “that universal Burning-up, as in hell-fire, of Human Shams.” Wagner goes on to explain how the essay was written “in the feverish excitement of the year 1849.” This was the revolution which cost him so many years of painful exile at Paris and Zürich. He says he was guided by an ideal which he thought of as “embodied in a Folk that should represent the incomparable might of ancient brotherhood, while I looked forward to the perfect evolution of this principle as the very essence of the associate Manhood of the Future.”
After some explanations of certain technical words which might be misunderstood, Wagner introduces us to the essay itself. He begins by saying that the essence of Modern Art is only a link in a chain of causes started by the Ancient Greeks. The Grecian spirit found its fullest expression in the god Apollo: “It was Apollo,—he who had slain the Python, the dragon of Chaos ... who was the fulfiller of the will of Zeus upon the Grecian earth; who was, in fact, the Grecian people.” Proceeding then to connect Dance and Song, as inseparable elements in early Greek Art, he says: “Thus, too, inspired by Dionysus,[[1]] the tragic poet saw this glorious god; when to all the rich elements of spontaneous art ... he joined the bond of speech, and concentrating them all into one focus, brought forth the highest conceivable form of art—the Drama.”
That this Drama was a religious teacher connected with the Mysteries is very clearly brought out, and Wagner draws a fine picture of one of those great sacred days when thirty thousand people assembled to witness “that most pregnant of all tragedies, the Prometheus; in this titanic masterpiece to see the image of themselves, to read the riddle of their own actions, and to fuse their own being and their own communion with that of their god.”
How fell this glorious Tragedy? “As the spirit of Community split itself along a thousand lives of egoistic cleavage, so was the great united work of Tragedy disintegrated into its individual factors.” For two thousand years since then Art has given way to Philosophy; but “True Art is highest freedom” and can only arise out of freedom.