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

by W. J. Henderson

We may now approach the study in detail of Wagner's artistic aims. I have already said that his purpose was to restore artistic truth, dramatic sincerity, to the opera, and to bring it into some relation to the life of the German people. Recapitulated with more particulars, then, the reforms at which he aimed were these:

(1)—The music had come to be the end instead of a means of expression, and consequently musical forms dominated. Wagner strove to confine music to its proper function of expression. He desired to prevent its being regarded as the object of the lyric drama, but wished it to take its legitimate place as one of the factors in the composition of such a play. His labour in this direction included the disuse of the set musical forms.

(2)—He sought to make a complete organic union of the elements of the drama employed in opera, a union in which each part should be essential and all should work together for a common end, namely the embodiment of the poet's thought.

(3)—He endeavoured to make the "libretto" a consistent drama, but always suitable to the emotional expressiveness of music.

(4)—He aimed to bring the lyric drama out of the slough of mere commercialism, and give it a direct relation to and influence upon the intellectual and æsthetic life of the people.

We have seen that when he set out to free himself from the petty commercialism of the German theatre, Wagner fondly dreamed that with a "grand opera" produced on the stage of the Grand Opéra of Paris, he would emancipate himself. But in writing that work and labouring for its production, he learned two vital facts, namely, that artistic success could not be attained on the lines of the typical grand opera and that from petty commercialism he had only approached that of a larger field. He saw on every hand the theatre in the hands of mere speculators, who sought not art, but money, and who were ready to sink all artistic principles in order that they might appeal to the debased tastes of "the stolid German Philistine or the bored Parisian roué." When he turned his eyes backward along the path of history, he saw that it had been thus for centuries. In the end he came to the conclusion that only in the relation of the Greek drama to the Greek people could he find that Arcadian perfection for which he sought. And so he asked himself whether it was not possible to rise once again to the lofty level of the Greek tragedy and thus bring the theatre into relation to the heart and mind of the people. In his conception of the lyric drama he believed that he saw the means of doing this.

The student of his artistic work will find his ideas set forth in three of his literary compositions, "Art and Revolution," "The Art Work of the Future," and "Opera and Drama." In "Art and Revolution" he studied the theatre of Æschylus and Sophocles and examined the reasons for its decline. In the devotion of Greek religion to the ideals of beauty Wagner found the explanation of the Grecian fidelity to the true principles of all art and of the final union of the arts of poetry, music, and mimetics in the Greek drama. He saw the highest period of this drama coincident with the supremacy of Athens. With the decline of the Athenian state came the decline of the Greek drama, and "the mad laughter of Aristophanes." The spirit of community, he says, split into a thousand lines of egotism, and the union of the arts which made the drama also was dissolved.

Then came the era of philosophy, which was inimical to art, and the dawn of Christianity was still less favourable to it. The old Greek freedom in the contemplation of nature and untrammelled worship of beauty for its own sake could not live under the reign of Christian teaching. With the changes in public thought resultant on the new teachings of Christianity and philosophy, art assumed a new relation to the national life, and in Wagner's opinion a social revolution alone would be the instrument to restore it to its pristine standing. With his social views we need not now concern ourselves. The point for us to bear in mind is that, like the founders of opera, he went back to the Greek drama for his first principles and in it found a union of the arts of poetry, music, and action. This union suggested to him, as it had to Peri and his friends, the laws on which must stand the modern play in music.

From this point he starts in his "Art Work of the Future." He finds that after the dissolution of the old union of the arts, each sought its own development on independent lines and that each had at times sunk to the level of a mere amusement. Various unsuccessful attempts had been made to reunite these arts, but their independence had increased constantly till in Wagner's day each had touched the uttermost limits of its development and could not possibly go further. It was necessary, therefore, that each should sacrifice some measure of its independence in order to unite with the others in an artistic entity. This in Wagner's mind was a musical drama, in which poetry, painting, music, and acting should unite in an organic whole.