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

by W. J. Henderson

"The sea in its turn became the soil of Life; yet no longer the landlocked sea of the Grecian world, but the great ocean that engirdles the earth. The fetters of the older world were broken; the longing of Ulysses, back to home and hearth and wedded wife, after feeding on the sufferings of the 'never-dying Jew' until it became a yearning for Death, had mounted to the craving for a new, an unknown home, invisible as yet, but dimly boded. This vast-spread feature fronts us in the mythos of the 'Flying Dutchman,' that seaman's poem of the world-historical age of journeys of discovery. Here we light upon a remarkable mixture, a blend, effected by the spirit of the Folk, of the character of Ulysses with that of the Wandering Jew. The Hollandic mariner, in punishment for his temerity, is condemned by the Devil (here obviously the element of Flood and Storm) to do battle with the unresting waves to all eternity. Like Ahasuerus, he yearns for his sufferings to be ended by Death; the Dutchman, however, may gain this redemption, denied to the undying Jew, at the hands of—a Woman who, of very love, shall sacrifice herself for him. The yearning for death thus spurs him on to seek this Woman; but she is no longer the home-tending Penelope of Ulysses, as courted in the days of old, but the quintessence of Womankind; and yet the still unmanifest, the longed-for, the dreamt-of, the infinitely womanly Woman—let me out with it in one word: the Woman of the Future."

With this broad, poetic view of his subject-matter Wagner set out to write a text book which should be a real drama and not a mere libretto. "From here," he says, "begins my career as poet, and my farewell to the mere concoctor of opera texts." In this drama are embodied the fundamental ideas of the entire Wagnerian system. Here they appear to us in their first stage of development, incomplete, unformed, and scarcely recognised by their own creator. The value of the mythologic matter, however, already forced itself upon the mind, and the conviction of its suitability to musical embodiment, because freed from hampering accessories, came to him at this period of his career. I have already quoted his words as to the employment of myths as subjects for music dramas. I may be pardoned for quoting here a passage from my introductory essay in the Schirmer vocal score of the drama:

"Wagner divined clearly the necessity of subordinating mere pictorial movement to the play of emotion, and it will easily be discerned that the three acts of 'The Flying Dutchman' reduce themselves to a few broad emotional episodes. In the first our attention is centred upon the longing of the Dutchman, and in the second upon the love of Senta. In the third we have the inevitable and hopeless struggle of the passion of Erik against Senta's love. All music not designed to embody these broad emotional states is scenic, such as the storm music and choruses of the sailors and the women. Furthermore the student will do well to note that the chief personages of the story are types. Van der Decken is typical of the man struggling under the burden of his own follies, while Senta is the embodiment of the woman-soul, which, according to Goethe, 'leadeth us ever upward and on.'"

In the structure of this drama the reader will find that Wagner did not abandon the old operatic forms. He employed duets, solos, choruses, etc., as an opera composer would. He did not use the leitmotiv system, but only hit upon its fundamental idea. He did not use the staff-rhyme. In fact we find in this work only a perfectly sincere attempt to make a good play and to express its feelings in music. He says himself of this work:

"In it there is so much as yet inchoate, the joinery of the situations is for the most part so imperfect, the verse and diction so often bare of individual stamp, that our modern playwrights—who construct everything according to a prescribed formula, and, boastful of their formal aptitude, start out to glean that matter which shall best lend itself to handling in the lessened form—will be the first to count my denomination of this as a 'poem' a piece of impudence that calls for strenuous castigation. My dread of such prospective punishment would weigh less with me than my own scruples as to the poetical form of the 'Dutchman,' were it my intention to pose therewith as a fixed and finished entity; on the contrary I find a private relish in here showing my friends myself in the process of 'becoming.' The form of the 'Flying Dutchman,' however, as that of all my later poems, down even to the minutiæ of their musical setting, was dictated to me by the subject-matter alone, insomuch as that had become absorbed into a definite colouring of my life, and in so far as I had gained by practice and experience on my own adopted path any general aptitude for artistic construction."

In the "Autobiographic Sketch" he tells us how, after disposing of the first sketch to Pillet, he set to work to compose his own music.

"I had now to work post-haste to clothe my own subject with German verses. In order to set about its composition I required to hire a pianoforte; for, after nine months' interruption of all musical production, I had to try to surround myself with the needful preliminary of a musical atmosphere. As soon as the piano had arrived, my heart beat fast for very fear; I dreaded to discover that I had ceased to be a musician. I began first with the 'Sailors' Chorus' and the 'Spinning Song'; everything sped along as though on wings, and I shouted for joy as I felt within me that I was still a musician."

This statement affords sufficient evidence that nothing revolutionary was in Wagner's mind when he sat down to compose "Der Fliegende Holländer." No vision of the polyphonic web of "Tristan und Isolde" rose in his brain; no conception of an operatic score in which every melodic idea should have a direct message. He began with two purely lyric numbers, and it was not till he reached the ballad of Senta in the second act that the first principles of the leitmotiv system dawned upon him, and then only in such shape as they had occurred to others before him. The ballad as a whole is a purely lyric number, written in a plain song form; but in it occur the two principal typical themes of the drama. The first is that designed to represent the Dutchman as a wanderer without rest: