The Flying Dutchman. Change of Style.—The Flying Dutchman, however, showed Wagner in an entirely different light. With it, instead of receiving his inspiration from without, as had been the case with the preceding operas, it came from within. On his way to Paris he had made a stormy voyage of several weeks from a port on the Baltic to London. He was familiar with the myth of the Flying Dutchman, and found that the sailors on board his ship believed it implicitly. This in connection with Heine’s version of the legend, which represents the unhappy mariner as doomed to perpetual wandering on stormy seas until he finds a woman faithful unto death, made a strong impression on him, and while in Paris he wrote the poem and composed the music within seven weeks after finishing Rienzi. A more sudden metamorphosis of style is unknown in the history of music. The earlier work was an opera pure and simple, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, characterized by pomp, brilliancy, sonority. Its successor was conceived as a drama in which music served to emphasize the action and to intensify the emotional situations; instead of being master, it was servant; external effects were disregarded save only as they were in harmony with this conception. Not that the composer entirely achieved this ideal; The Flying Dutchman displays not a few lapses into operatic conventionalities, but as a whole it was a startling and radical change which puzzled and displeased the public. They had looked for something in the style of Rienzi and could make nothing of a work so contrary to the popular idea of what an opera should be. Accordingly, after a few performances, it was dropped from the repertory.
Tannhäuser.—Nothing daunted by the lack of favor shown his change of style, Wagner carried it to a still greater extent in his next opera, Tannhäuser (1845), founded on a medieval legend. The dramatic motive of this is much the same as that of The Flying Dutchman, one of which Wagner was particularly fond—the power of love to redeem and save from the consequences of sin and error. Tannhäuser brought about his head the full storm of hostile criticism which with The Flying Dutchman had only begun to lower. He was reproached for its difficulty, for its lack of pleasing melodies, for the audacious harmonies which many critics considered inexcusable dissonances. Singers objected to the broad declamation it required; they complained that it would eventually ruin their voices.
Lohengrin.—This almost general dissatisfaction, however, led to no concessions by the composer in his next opera, Lohengrin, which marked a further advance in the unpopular direction taken by its predecessors, but it interfered with its performance. Though he was conductor of the Opéra at Dresden, he could not secure permission to produce it. Baffled and discouraged in his artistic schemes, a radical in politics, he joined the insurrectionists during the revolution of 1849. The failure of the rebellion necessitated a hasty flight from Germany. He took refuge in Switzerland and remained in exile until a proclamation of amnesty in 1861 allowed him to return. In the meantime he had sent the score of Lohengrin to Liszt, then conductor of the opera at Weimar, and there it was brought out in 1850.
Lohengrin proved the turning-point in his fortunes. The romance of the subject, its dramatic treatment and undeniable beauty gradually reconciled the public to the novelty of its style. Before Wagner was relieved from his sentence of banishment it had become one of the most popular operas in Germany—he once ruefully remarked that he would soon be the only German who had not heard it.
Questions.
Who led in the changes in Italian Opera after Rossini?
Give an account of Donizetti and his work.
Give an account of Bellini and his work.
Give an account of Verdi and his earlier works.
What is the significance of Aïda in the history of Opera?