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

by W. J. Henderson

"Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here; And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty! Make my thick blood, Stop up th' access and passage to remorse; That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my purpose, nor keep peace between Th' affect and it!"

Telramund, "infirm of purpose," like Macbeth, is swayed and mastered by the superior force of his wife's indomitable will and insatiable ambition. Fate follows his footsteps as relentlessly as it does those of the Thane of Cawdor, and when he falls a victim to vaulting ambition, which overleaps itself, he falls a victim of Nemesis.

The last act places before us several salient features of the original material. Elsa, not after years of married bliss, but on the bridal night, asks the fatal question. Here Wagner shows a deep appreciation of the poetic possibilities of the theme, undoubtedly suggested to him by the resemblance of the situation to that of Zeus and Semele in classic fable. Elsa never could have grasped the essential nature of this sacred messenger, and so Wagner cuts the knot by ending the marriage at its very outset, before the final surrender of the heroine's womanhood. Lohengrin was never hers; she was never his. Frederic's last attempt follows the utterance of the question, and then before the assembled court, on the river bank where first he appeared, Lohengrin tells the marvellous, thrilling tale of Monsalvat, the Holy Grail and his origin, opening to us for a few moments the cathedral vistas of Wagner's "Te Deum,"—"Parsifal." Ortrud prematurely triumphs and announces that the swan is the missing brother: she herself placed the chain about his neck. Lohengrin calls upon God, and the spell is broken. The rightful heir of Brabant is restored to his sister's arms, and the Swan-Knight floats away in his shallop, this time drawn by a dove, the messenger of heaven. The reader will have no difficulty now in recognising the sources of these incidents, except, perhaps, in the death of Telramund, which was suggested to Wagner, as was the idea of robbing Lohengrin of his saintly power by wounding him, by passages in "Der Jüngere Titurel." The narrative of Lohengrin is suggested by Wolfram's "Parzival."

One more note must be made before we pass to a brief examination of the music of Wagner's most popular work. There is a strange resemblance between some of the fundamental features of the story of "Lohengrin" and those of "Der Fliegende Holländer." Senta and Elsa are both dream-haunted maidens. Both dream of lovers. About each of the lovers there is something mystic or supernatural. Each of the lovers is to come to the maiden from the water. In each case the maiden is called upon to submit to a certain ordeal, and her failure is to result in the return of the lover to the element from which he came. And in one element of the story the fact is similar, but the relations of the personages changed. In one a maiden is to save the lover; in the other, the lover comes as a champion and saviour. Is it not possible that the origin of the two legends is the same, the story of Skeaf, the mysterious king of the Angles, who drifted to their shores in a rudderless shallop when a babe, and grew to be a good and great monarch? When he died, they laid his body in the shallop and the little vessel floated away into the unknown, whence it came.

II.—The Music

And now let us look at the music of this opera, music which is usually listened to with complacent admiration for its mellifluous melody, but too seldom considered in respect of its dramatic significance. "Lohengrin" is musically far in advance of "Tannhäuser." True, there is not in this opera any piece of writing so puissant in its revelation of a human heart as the narrative of the returned pilgrim, but the score in its entirety is more closely knit, more coherent in style, more certain in its characterisations, more dramatic in its development of emotional climaxes and its explication of the scenes. In "Lohengrin" we find the grasp of his material much firmer in Wagner's hands. The organism is higher; the unity of word, action, and tone nearer to that for which the author constantly sought.

"Tannhäuser" is a hybrid. Old forms jostle the new; thin melodic strophes in conventional song-patterns lower the potency of some scenes to the level of Italian opera. But in "Lohengrin" the song form disappears forever from the Wagnerian scheme. The music is the utterance of speech; the melody, the spontaneous embodiment of feeling. There is no longer any recitative. There is only musical dialogue. And the leitmotiv, temporarily laid aside in the composition of "Tannhäuser," returns with wider and deeper and more varied meaning. We are at the culmination of the transition period of Wagner's genius, standing at the outer gates of "Tristan" and "Die Meistersinger."

Wagner himself recognised the nature and the limits of the advance made in this opera. He declares in the "Communication" that he was here seeking to free himself from the tyranny of the final cadence—that which tells the ear of the completion of a melodic form—and to make the music the outgrowth of the speech. But he saw in later years that he was still under the domination of melodic fashion in "Lohengrin"; and it is precisely his subservience to this fashion, with which the easy-going public from long use has become familiar, that makes "Lohengrin" the favourite of opera-goers the world over. We find the most potent evidences of the domination of the closing cadence in Elsa's narrative, in the duet of Ortrud and Telramund in the second act, and in the passages of the duet in the chamber scene. On the other hand, there is a close approach in the score of "Lohengrin" to the endless melody of the later dramas, and we are not surprised by the recollection that the Nibelungen trilogy was the next work to which Wagner turned.

The prelude to "Lohengrin" may be described as an instrumental representation of the vision of the Holy Grail. The motive on which it is built is that which throughout the opera typifies the sacredness of Lohengrin and his identity as a messenger of the Grail.