Richard Wagner His Life and His Dramas / A Biographical Study of the Man and an Explanation of His Work

by W. J. Henderson

What was this man Wagner trying to do?

Broadly stated, the purpose of his life was to reform the lyric drama, to restore to it the artistic nature with which it was born, and to bring it into direct relation to the life of the German people. His ideal was the highest form of the drama, with music as the chief expository medium; and his most earnest desire, to make that drama national, both in its expression of the loftiest artistic impulses of the Teutonic people and in their recognition of that fact. The whole controversy about the works of Wagner arose from the determined opposition of those who were unwilling to see the existing order of things operatic changed. The opera, as it was when Wagner hurled his new ideas and works into the theatrical arena, was a vastly different thing from the music-drama, and the confusion in the public and critical mind, resulting from the fact that Wagner used the outward and visible signs of opera, brought about a bitter conflict. This conflict cannot end till the whole public realises that although it goes on Monday night to hear "Lucia di Lammermoor" and on Wednesday to hear "Tristan und Isolde," both employing song instead of speech, and both outwardly built on theatrical lines, it is nevertheless confronted by two radically different forms of art, working for diametrically opposite results.

That we may the better understand the matter we must shortly rehearse the story of the birth and development of the lyric drama. The opera was born at the end of the sixteenth century of an effort to reconstruct the extinct Greek drama. The projectors of the movement knew that the Greeks delivered the lines of their tragedies in an artificial manner closely resembling chanting. In their endeavours to provide something similar to this, they invented dramatic recitative. At first this recitative was employed only in the construction of monologues, but as the explorers in new musical territory gained confidence, they made wider reaches. At the close of the century "Eurydice," a drama in music, by Rinuccini and Peri, was publicly performed. The new form of play gained immediate popularity, and the progress of the lyric drama was begun.

The inventors of the new form had just ideas. Peri believed it to be the office of dramatic music to embody, intensify, and convey to the hearer the emotional content of the text. His method of accomplishing this was to imitate in music the nuances of the voice in speaking. In agitated passages he used a faster movement and irregular rhythm. In unimpassioned speech he wrote his music more smoothly. His ideas were undeniably correct, but they could not be adequately carried out with the resources of vocal music in his day. The art of solo writing was in its infancy, and the melodic and harmonic expression of dramatic emotion had just begun. Consequently Peri's music was monotonous. There was no wide difference between his delineation of sadness and his embodiment of despair. Furthermore his attempted fidelity to the inner nature of speech led him away from definite musical phraseology. His music was totally deficient in form, and it was the discernment of this weakness and the attempts of his successors to provide the remedy that led the opera out of the path of dramatic sincerity.

Monteverde, the most gifted of the early composers of opera, made remarkable essays at combining musical clearness and symmetry with dramatic expression, but his works show us that the materials of the art were as yet so embryonic as to prohibit complete success. But the instantaneous popularity of opera made it a veritable gold-field for composers, and it speedily became the California of all the adventurous spirits of music in the beginning of the seventeenth century. These writers naturally sought the shortest and easiest path to popularity, and this was soon proved to be in the provision of vocal airs of simple, clearly defined form and pretty melody. The operatic aria was thus developed and became the central sun of the operatic system.

But as solo arias could not make up the entire scheme of the opera, duets, trios, and quartettes were introduced, care being taken to conserve in them the principles of the air. It was soon found that a sharp demarcation had to be made between these set pieces and the ordinary dialogue by means of which the stories of the operas were told. So gradually an opera came to be a symmetrically arranged series of solos, duets, trios, quartettes, and other set pieces, joined by a chain of recitative. In all this development purely musical requirements had been considered. The librettist, therefore, was merely the servant of the composer, and it was his business to arrange his book with a view to a pleasing succession of pieces in the aria form, or some form very similar to it. His story had to be so constructed that it could be told in the dialogue between the set pieces, and by means of this dialogue it should lead up to situations at which the arias could be effectively, if not quite appropriately, introduced.

This was the condition of the opera in the middle of the eighteenth century at the advent of Mozart and Gluck. It should be noted that occasionally composers arose who had some sense of their obligations to dramatic art and who endeavoured to improve the æsthetic nature of the opera. Lully and Rameau in France did much along this line and established traditions which have been of lasting benefit to the lyric art of their country. But neither they nor their immediate successors discovered the radical evil of the system upon which they were working. The ground-plan of the opera was still musical. There was still no thought of first writing a dramatic poem and then setting it to music. The demands of the score formulated the plan for the libretto.

Mozart had not a drop of the reformer's blood in his veins. The incongruity of the extant form of the opera seems never to have occurred to his mind. He accepted the plan of the lyric drama as it was handed down to him by his forerunners without question, and by the sheer force of his incomparable genius succeeded in writing immortal apologies for its existence. In his hands the aria took a new meaning, and the recitative became a flexible and responsive instrument. His treatment of the carefully built ensembles, which had come to be a feature of opera, was that of a genius of the first order. So great, indeed, was this man that to-day the works of all his successors who wrote operas on the old plan become as farthing rushlights before the splendour of his glowing masterpieces. Antiquated as the style of Mozart's music is, his operas speak the accents of inspiration and come before us with the gesture of authority.

Gluck, on the other hand, without the musical genius of Mozart, had the insight of a cosmopolitan coupled with the impulses of a progressist. The external defects of the opera were patent to his sane consideration, and he sought at once for the corrective. He was a sincere, conscientious reformer; and he did not a little to cut away the growth of underbrush which had sprung up around the trunk of operatic art. But he did not discern that the twig had been bent, the tree inclined; and that the trunk itself needed to be hewn down and the growth started again from the root. He saw that there was too much difference between the recitative and the aria, and that the latter was an impediment to the progress of the drama. He perceived that the composers had catered too much to the vanity of singers and had permitted a richly ornamental style of song, antagonistic to broad dramatic expression, to become the type of operatic music. He refused to write with a constant view to helping the singer to display his voice and technic. He insisted that the business of the music was to voice the content of the text, or as he himself expressed it, "I endeavoured to reduce music to its proper function, that of seconding poetry by enforcing the expression of the sentiment and the interest of the situations without interrupting the action or weakening it by superfluous ornament." He strove to curtail the empty parade of musical devices and to restore that intimacy between text and song which had been the chief charm and the most potent argument for the existence of the "Drama per Musica" in its original form.

But Gluck failed to achieve his purpose because he retained the set musical forms which dictated the shape of the text and demanded the old-fashioned arrangement of the scenario. He did not reach that level of enlightenment from which he might have seen that the radical error of opera lay in regarding music as an end and not as a means. The stumbling-block of the lyric drama had been the aria, and to this fact Gluck was strangely blind. It may not be amiss to conjecture that, even if he had perceived the nature of this fault, he would not have known how to correct it; for the development of musical design had not advanced far enough to offer the suggestion of a better plan. Gluck saw the evil effect of the empty repetitions in the aria and expressly forbade them; but he was too wise to believe that he could proceed wholly without musical design. To have done so would have thrown him back to the era of Peri and would have resulted in chaos and a confusion of the public mind. Therefore, retaining the aria in a slightly modified form, he strove with the deepest earnestness and with admirable skill to infuse into the music of his works a genuine dramatic expressiveness. He made his arias delineative of the situations and he paid the homage of an artist to the text, instead of writing pretty tunes for their own sake. He tried to arrange the ballets, which his French public demanded, so that they should constitute part of the action of the drama and not be an interruption to it. And he made a special study of the resources of instrumental expression.