Music and bad manners

Historians of operatic phenomena have observed that fashions in music change; the popular Donizetti and Bellini of one century are suffered to exist during the next only for the sake of the opportunity they afford to some brilliant songstress. New tastes arise, new styles in music. Dukas’s generally unrelished (and occasionally highly appreciated) Ariane et Barbe-Bleue may not be powerful enough to establish a place for itself in the répertoire, but its direct influence on composers and its indirect influence on auditors make this lyric drama highly important as an indication of the future of opera as a fine art. Moussorgsky’s Boris Godunow, first given in this country some forty years after its production in Russia, is another matter. That score contains a real thrill in itself, a thrill which, once felt, makes it difficult to feel the intensity of a Wagner drama again: because Wagner is becoming just a little bit old-fashioned. Lohengrin and Tannhäuser are becoming a trifle shop-worn. They do not glitter with the glory of a Don Giovanni or the invincible splendour of an Armide. There are parts of Die Walküre which are growing old. Now Wagner, in many ways the greatest figure as opera composer which the world has yet produced, could hold his place in the singing theatres for many decades to come if some proper effort were made to do justice to his dramas, the justice which in a large measure has been done to his music. This effort at present is not being made.

In the Metropolitan Opera House season of 1895-6, when Jean de Reszke first sang Tristan in German, the opportunity seemed to be opened for further breaks with what a Munich critic once dubbed “Die Bayreuther Tradition oder Der missverstandene Wagner.” For up to that time, in spite of some isolated examples, it had come to be considered, in utter misunderstanding of Wagner’s own wishes and doctrines, as a part of the technique of performing a Wagner music-drama to shriek, howl, or bark the tones, rather than to sing them. There had been, I have said, isolated examples of German singers, and artists of other nationalities singing in German, who had sung their phrases in these lyric plays, but the appearance in the Wagner rôles, in German, of a tenor whose previous appearances had been made largely in works in French and Italian which demanded the use of what is called bel canto (it means only good singing) brought about a controversy which even yet is raging in some parts of the world. Should Wagner be sung, in the manner of Jean de Reszke, or shouted in the traditional manner? Was it possible to sing the music and make the effect the Master expected? In answer it may be said that never in their history have Siegfried, Tristan und Isolde, and Lohengrin met with such success as when Jean de Reszke and his famous associates appeared in them, and it may also be said that since that time there has been a consistent effort on the part of the management of the Metropolitan Opera House (and other theatres as well) to provide artists for these dramas who could sing them, and sing them as Italian operas are sung, an effort to which opera directors have been spurred by a growing insistence on the part of the public.

It was the first break with the Bayreuth bugbear, tradition, and it might have been hoped that this tradition would be stifled in other directions, with this successful precedent in mind; but such has not been the case. As a result of this failure to follow up a beneficial lead, in spite of orchestral performances which bring out the manifold beauties of the scores and in spite of single impersonations of high rank by eminent artists, we are beginning to see the Wagner dramas falling into decline, long before the appointed time, because their treatment has been held in the hands of Cosima Wagner, who—with the best of intentions, of course—not only insists (at Bayreuth she is mistress, and her influence on singers, conductors, stage directors and scene painters throughout the world is very great) on the carrying out of Wagner’s theories, as she understands them, and even when they are only worthy of being ignored, but who also (whether rightly or wrongly) is credited with a few traditions of her own. Wagner indeed invented a new form of drama, but he did not have the time or means at his disposal to develop an adequate technique for its performance.

We are all familiar with the Bayreuth version of Wotan in Die Walküre which makes of that tragic father-figure a boisterous, silly old scold (so good an artist as Carl Braun, whose Hagen portrait is a masterpiece, has followed this tradition literally); we all know too well the waking Brünnhilde who salutes the sun in the last act of Siegfried with gestures seemingly derived from the exercises of a Swedish turnverein, following the harp arpeggios as best she may; we remember how Wotan, seizing the sword from the dead Fasolt’s hand, brandishes it to the tune of the sword motiv, indicating the coming of the hero, Siegfried, as the gods walk over the rainbow bridge to Walhalla at the end of Das Rheingold; we smile over the tame horse which some chorus man, looking the while like a truck driver who is not good to animals, holds for Brünnhilde while she sings her final lament in Götterdämmerung; we laugh aloud when he assists her to lead the unfiery steed, who walks as leisurely as a well-fed horse would towards oats, into the burning pyre; we can still see the picture of the three Rhine maidens, bobbing up and down jerkily behind a bit of gauze, reminiscent of visions of mermaids at the Eden Musée; we all have seen Tristan and Isolde, drunk with the love potion, swimming (there is no other word to describe this effect) towards each other; and no perfect Wagnerite can have forgotten the gods and the giants standing about in the fourth scene of Das Rheingold for all the world as if they were the protagonists of a fantastic minstrel show. (At a performance of Parsifal in Chicago Vernon Stiles discovered while he was on the stage that his suspenders, which held his tights in place, had snapped. For a time he pressed his hands against his groin; this method proving ineffectual, he finished the scene with his hands behind his back, pressed firmly against his waist-line. As he left the stage, at the conclusion of the act, breathing a sigh of relief, he met Loomis Taylor, the stage director. “Did you think my new gesture was due to nervousness?” he asked. “No,” answered Taylor, “I thought it was Bayreuth tradition!”)

These are a few of the Bayreuth precepts which are followed. There are others. There are indeed many others. We all know the tendency of conductors who have been tried at Bayreuth, or who have come under the influence of Cosima Wagner, to drag out the tempi to an exasperating degree. I have heard performances of Lohengrin which were dragged by the conductor some thirty minutes beyond the ordinary time. (Again the Master is held responsible for this tradition, but though all composers like to have their own music last in performance as long as possible, the tradition, perhaps, is just as authentic as the story that Richard Strauss, when conducting Tristan und Isolde at the Prinz-Regenten-Theatre in Munich, saved twenty minutes on the ordinary time it takes to perform the work in order to return as soon as possible to an interrupted game of Skat.)

But it is not tradition alone that is killing the Wagner dramas. In many instances and in most singing theatres silly traditions are aided in their work of destruction by another factor in hasty production. I am referring to the frequent liberties which have been taken with the intentions of the author. For, when expediency is concerned, no account is taken of tradition, and, curiously enough, expediency breaks with those traditions which can least stand being tampered with. The changes, in other words, have not been made for the sake of improvement, but through carelessness, or to save time or money, or for some other cognate reason. An example of this sort of thing is the custom of giving the Ring dramas as a cycle in a period extending over four weeks, one drama a week. It is also customary at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York to entrust the rôle of Brünnhilde, or of Siegfried, to a different interpreter in each drama, so that the Brünnhilde who wakes in Siegfried is not at all the Brünnhilde who goes to sleep in Die Walküre. Then, although Brünnhilde exploits a horse in Götterdämmerung, she possesses none in Die Walküre; none of the other valkyries has a horse; Fricka’s goats have been taken away from her, and she walks to the mountain-top holding her skirts from under her feet for all the world as a lady of fashion might as she ascended from a garden into a ballroom. At the Metropolitan Opera House, and at other theatres where I have seen the dramas, the decorations of the scenes of Brünnhilde’s falling asleep and of her awakening are quite different.

Naturally, ingenious explanations have been devised to fit these cases. For instance, one is told that animals are never at home on the stage. This explanation suffices perhaps for the animals which do not appear, but how about those which do? The vague phrase, “the exigencies of the répertoire,” is mentioned as the reason for the extension of the cycle over several weeks, that and the further excuse that the system permits people from nearby towns to make weekly visits to the metropolis. Of course, Wagner intended that each of the Ring dramas should follow its predecessor on succeeding days in a festival week. If the Ring were so given in New York every season with due preparation, careful staging, and the best obtainable cast, the occasions would draw audiences from all over America, as the festivals at Bayreuth and Munich do indeed draw audiences from all over the world. Ingenuous is the word which best describes the explanation for the change in Brünnhildes; one is told that the out-of-town subscribers to the series prefer to hear as many singers as possible. They wish to “compare” Brünnhildes, so to speak. Perhaps the real reason for divergence from common sense is the difficulty the director of the opera house would have with certain sopranos if one were allowed the full set of performances. As for the change in the setting of Brünnhilde’s rock it is pure expediency, nothing else. In Die Walküre, in which, between acts, there is plenty of time to change the scenery, a heavy built promontory of rocks is required for the valkyrie brood to stand on. In Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, where the scenery must be shifted in short order, this particular setting is utilized only for duets. The heavier elements of the setting are no longer needed, and are dispensed with.

The mechanical devices demanded by Wagner are generally complied with in a stupidly clumsy manner. The first scene of Das Rheingold is usually managed with some effect now, although the swimming of the Rhine maidens, who are dressed in absurd long floating green nightgowns, is carried through very badly and seemingly without an idea that such things have been done a thousand times better in other theatres; the changes of scene in Das Rheingold are accomplished in such a manner that one fears the escaping steam is damaging the gauze curtains; the worm and the toad are silly contrivances; the effect of the rainbow is never properly conveyed; the ride of the valkyries is frankly evaded by most stage managers; the bird in Siegfried flies like a sickly crow; the final scene in Götterdämmerung would bring a laugh from a Bowery audience: some flat scenery flaps over, a number of chorus ladies fall on their knees, there is much bulging about of a canvas sea, and a few red lights appear in the sky; the transformation scenes in Parsifal are carried out with as little fidelity to symbolism, or truth, or beauty; and the throwing of the lance in Parsifal is always seemingly a wire trick rather than a magical one.

The scenery for the Wagner dramas, in all the theatres where I have seen and heard them, has been built (and a great deal of it in recent years from new designs) with a seemingly absolute ignorance or determined evasion of the fact that there are artists who are now working in the theatre. In making this statement I can speak personally of performances I have seen at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York; the Auditorium, Chicago; Covent Garden Theatre, London; La Scala, Milan; the Opéra, Paris; and the Prinz-Regenten-Theatre in Munich. Are there theatres where the Wagner dramas are better given? I do not think so. Compare the scenery of Götterdämmerung at the Metropolitan Opera House with that of Boris Godunow, and you will see how little care is being taken of Wagner’s ideals. In the one case the flimsiest sort of badly painted and badly lighted canvas, mingled indiscriminately with plastic objects, boughs, branches, etc., placed next to painted boughs and branches, an effect calculated to throw the falsity of the whole scene into relief; in the other case, an example of a scene-painter’s art wrought to give the highest effect to the drama it decorates. Take the decoration of the hall of the Gibichs in which long scenes are enacted in both the first and last acts of Götterdämmerung. The Gibichs are a savage, warlike, sinister, primitive race. Now it is not necessary that the setting in itself be strong, but it must suggest strength to the spectator. There is no need to bring stone blocks or wood blocks on the stage; the artist may work in black velvet if he wishes (it was of this material that Professor Roller contrived a dungeon cell in Fidelio which seemed to be built of stone ten feet thick). It will be admitted, I think, by any one who has seen the setting in question that it is wholly inadequate to express the meaning of the drama. The scenes could be sung with a certain effect in a Christian Science temple, but no one will deny, I should say, that the effect of the music may be greatly heightened by proper attention to the stage decoration and the movement of the characters in relation to the lighting and decoration. (I have used the Metropolitan Opera House, in this instance, as a convenient illustration; but the scenery there is no worse, on the whole, than it is in many of the other theatres named.)

The secret at the bottom of the whole matter is that the directors of the singing theatres wish to save themselves trouble. They will spend neither money nor energy in righting this wrong. It is easier to trust to tradition on the one hand and expediency on the other than it would be to engage an expert (one not concerned with what had been done, but one concerned with what to do) to produce the works. Carmen was losing its popularity in this country when Emma Calvé, who had broken all the rules made for the part by Galli-Marié, enchanted opera-goers with her fantastic conception of the gipsy girl. Bizet’s work had dropped out of the répertoire again when Mme. Bressler-Gianoli arrived and carried it triumphantly through nearly a score of performances during the first season of Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House. Geraldine Farrar and Toscanini resuscitated the Spanish jade a third time. An Olive Fremstad or a Lilli Lehmann or a Milka Ternina can perform a like office for Götterdämmerung or Tristan und Isolde; but it is to a new producer, an Adolphe Appia or a Gordon Craig, that the theatre director must look for the final salvation of Wagner, through the complete realization of his own ideals. It must be obvious to any one that the more completely the meaning of his plays is exposed by the decoration, the lighting and the action, the greater the effect.

Adolphe Appia wrote a book called “Die Musik und die Inscenierung,” which was published in German in 1899. (An earlier work, “La mise-en-scène du drame Wagnerien,” appeared in Paris in 1893.) Since then his career has been strangely obscure for one whose effect on artists working at stage decoration has been greater than that of any other single man. In the second edition of his book, “On the Art of the Theatre,” Gordon Craig, in a footnote, speaks thus of Appia: “Appia, the foremost stage decorator of Europe (the italics are mine) is not dead. I was told that he was no more with us, so, in the first edition of this book, I included him among the shades. I first saw three examples of his work in 1908, and I wrote a friend asking, ‘Where is Appia and how can we meet?’ My friend replied, ‘Poor Appia died some years ago.’ This winter (1912) I saw some of Appia’s designs in a portfolio belonging to Prince Wolkonsky. They were divine; and I was told that the designer was still living.”

Loomis Taylor, who, during the season of 1914-15, staged the Wagner operas at the Metropolitan Opera House (and it was not his fault that the staging was not improved; there is no stage director now working who has more belief in and knowledge of the artists of the theatre than Loomis Taylor) has written me, in response to a query, the following regarding Appia: “Adolphe Appia, I think, is a French-Swiss; he is a young man. The title of the book which made him famous, in its German translation, is ‘Die Musik und die Inscenierung.’ It was translated from the French by Princess Cantacuzène.... Five years ago I was told by Mrs. Houston Stewart Chamberlain that Appia was slowly but surely starving to death in some picturesque surroundings in Switzerland. I then tried to get various people in Germany interested in him, also proposing him to Hagemann as scenic artist for Mannheim. Two years later, before his starving process had reached its conclusion, I heard of him as collaborator with Jaques-Dalcroze at his temple of rhythm on the banks of the Elbe, outside of Dresden, where, I think, up to the outbreak of the war, Appia was doing very good work, but what has become of him since I do not know.

“His book is very valuable; his suggestions go beyond the possibilities of the average Hof theatre, while in Bayreuth they have a similar effect to a drop of water upon a stone, sun-burned by the rays of Cosima’s traditions. By being one of the first—if not the first—to put in writing the inconsistency of using painted perspective scenery and painted shadows with human beings on the stage, Appia became the fighter for plastic scenery. His sketch of the Walküren rock is the most beautiful scenic conception of Act III, Die Walküre, I know of or could imagine. To my knowledge no theatre has ever produced anything in conformity with Appia’s sketches.”

In a letter to me Hiram Kelly Moderwell, whose book, “The Theatre of To-day,” is the best exposition yet published of the aims and results of the artists who are working in the theatre, writes as follows in regard to Appia: “Appia is now with Dalcroze at Hellerau and I believe has designed and perhaps produced all the things that have been done there in the last year or two. Previous to that I am almost certain he had done no actual stage work. Nobody else would give him free rein. But, as you know, he thought everything out carefully as though he were doing the actual practical stage work.... By this time he has hit his ‘third manner.’ It’s all cubes and parallelograms. It sounds like hell on paper but Maurice Browne told me it is very fine stuff. Browne says it is as much greater than Craig as Craig is greater than anybody else. All the recent Hellerau plays are in this third manner. They are lighted by Salzmann, indirect and diffused lighting, but not in the Fortuny style. I imagine the Hellerau stuff is rather too precious to go on the ordinary stage.”

Mr. Moderwell’s description of Appia’s book is so completely illuminating that I feel I cannot do better than to quote the entire passage from “The Theatre of To-day”: “Before his (Gordon Craig’s) influence was felt, however, Adolphe Appia, probably the most powerful theorist of the new movement, had written his remarkable book, ‘Die Musik und die Inscenierung.’ In this, as an artist, he attempted to deduce from the content of the Wagner music dramas the proper stage settings for them. His conclusions anticipated much of the best work of recent years and his theories have been put into practice in more or less modified form on a great many stages—not so much (if at all) for the Wagner dramas themselves, which are under a rigid tradition (the ‘what the Master wished’ myth), but for operas and the more lyric plays where the producer has artistic ability and a free hand in applying it.

“Appia started with the principle that the setting should make the actor the all-important fact on the stage. He saw the realistic impossibility of the realistic setting, and destructively analyzed the current modes of lighting and perspective effects. But, unlike the members of the more conventional modern school, he insisted that the stage is a three-dimension space and must be handled so as to make its depth living. He felt a contradiction between the living actor and the dead setting. He wished to bind them into one whole—the drama. How was this to be done?

“Appia’s answer to this question is his chief claim to greatness—genius almost. His answer was—‘By means of the lighting.’ He saw the deadliness of the contemporary methods of lighting, and previsaged with a sort of inspiration the possibilities of new methods which have since become common. This was at a time when he had at his disposal none of the modern lighting systems. His foreseeing of modern practice by means of rigid Teutonic logic in the service of the artist’s intuition makes him one of the two or three foremost theorists of the modern movement.

“The lighting, for Appia, is the spiritual core, the soul of the drama. The whole action should be contained in it, somewhat as we feel the physical body of a friend to be contained in his personality. Appia’s second great principle is closely connected with this. While the setting is obviously inanimate, the actor must in every way be emphasized and made living. And this can be accomplished, he says, only by a wise use of lighting, since it is the lights and shadows on a human body which reveal to our eyes the fact that the body is ‘plastic’—that is, a flexible body of three dimensions. Appia would make the setting suggest only the atmosphere, not the reality of the thing it stands for, and would soften and beautify it with the lights. The actor he would throw constantly into prominence while keeping him always a part of the scene. All the elements and all the action of the drama he would bind together by the lights and shadows.

“With the most minute care each detail of lighting, each position of each character, in Appia’s productions is studied out so that the dramatic meaning shall always be evident. Hence any setting of his contains vastly more thought than is visible at a glance. It is designed to serve for every exigency of the scene—so that a character here shall be in full light at a certain point, while talking directly to a character who must be quite in the dark, or that the light shall just touch the fringe of one character’s robe as she dies, or that the action shall all take place unimpeded, and so on. At the same time, needless to say, Appia’s stage pictures are of the highest artistic beauty.”[1]

In Appia’s design for the third act of Die Walküre, so enthusiastically praised by Loomis Taylor, the rock of the valkyries juts like a huge promontory of black across the front of the scene, silhouetted against a clouded sky. So all the figures of the valkyries stand high on the rock and are entirely silhouetted, while Sieglinde below in front of the rock in the blackness, is hidden from the rage of the approaching Wotan. Any one who has seen this scene as it is ordinarily staged, without any reference to beauty or reason, will appreciate even this meagre description of an artist’s intention, which has not yet been carried out in any theatre with which I have acquaintance.

Appia’s design for the first scene of Parsifal discloses a group of boughless, straight-stemmed pines, towering to heaven like the cathedral group at Vallombrosa. Overhead the dense foliage hides the forest paths from the sun. Light comes in through the centre at the back, where there is a vista of plains across to the mountains, on which one may imagine the castle of the Grail. He places a dynamic and dramatic value on light which it is highly important to understand in estimating his work. For example, his lighting of the second act of Tristan und Isolde culminates in a pitch-dark stage during the singing of the love-duet. This artist has designed the scenery for all the Ring and has indicated throughout what the lighting and action shall be.

I do not know that Gordon Craig has turned his attention to any particular Wagner drama, although he has made suggestions for several of them, but he could, if he would, devise a mode of stage decoration which would make the plays and their action as appealing in their beauty as the music and the singing often now are. In his book, “On the Art of the Theatre,” he has been explicit in his descriptions of his designs for Macbeth, and the rugged strength and symbolism of his settings and ideas for that tragedy proclaim perhaps his best right to be a leader in the reformation of the Wagner dramas, although, even then, it must be confessed that Craig is derived in many instances from Appia, whom Craig himself hails as the foremost stage decorator of Europe to-day.

Read Gordon Craig on Macbeth and you will get an idea of how an artist would go to work on Tristan und Isolde or Götterdämmerung. “I see two things, I see a lofty and steep rock, and I see the moist cloud which envelops the head of this rock. That is to say, a place for fierce and warlike men to inhabit, a place for phantoms to nest in. Ultimately this moisture will destroy the rock; ultimately these spirits will destroy the men. Now then, you are quick in your question as to what actually to create for the eye. I answer as swiftly—place there a rock! Let it mount high. Swiftly I tell you, convey the idea of a mist which hangs at the head of this rock. Now, have I departed at all for one-eighth of an inch from the vision which I saw in the mind’s eye?

“But you ask me what form this rock shall take and what colour? What are the lines which are the lofty lines, and which are to be seen in any lofty cliff? Go to them, glance but a moment at them; now quickly set them down on your paper; the lines and their direction, never mind the cliff. Do not be afraid to let them go high; they cannot go high enough; and remember that on a sheet of paper which is but two inches square you can make a line which seems to tower miles in the air, and you can do the same on your stage, for it is all a matter of proportion and has nothing to do with actuality.

“You ask about the colours? What are the colours which Shakespeare has indicated for us? Do not first look at Nature, but look at the play of the poet. Two, one for the rock, the man; one for the mist, the spirit. Now, quickly, take and accept this statement from me. Touch not a single other colour, but only these two colours through your whole progress of designing your scenes and your costumes, yet forget not that each colour contains many variations. If you are timid for a moment and mistrust yourself or what I tell, when the scene is finished you will not see with your eye the effect you have seen with your mind’s eye when looking at the picture which Shakespeare has indicated.”

The producers of the Wagner music dramas do not seem to have heard of Adolphe Appia. Gordon Craig is a myth to them. Reinhardt does not exist. Have they ever seen the name of Stanislawsky? Do they know where his theatre is? Would they consider it sensible to spend three years in mounting Hamlet? Is the name of Fokine known to them? of Bakst? N. Roerich, Nathalie Gontcharova, Alexandre Benois, Theodore Federowsky?... One could go on naming the artists of the theatre. (Recently there have been evidences of an art movement in the theatre in America. Joseph Urban, first in Boston with the Boston Opera Company, and later in New York with various theatrical enterprises, may be mentioned as an important figure in this movement. His settings for Monna Vanna were particularly beautiful and he really seems to have revolutionized the staging of revues and similar light musical pieces. Robert Jones has done some very good work. I think he was responsible for the imaginative staging [in Gordon Craig’s manner, to be sure] of the inner scenes in the Shakespeare mask, Caliban. But I would give the Washington Square Players credit for the most successful experiments which have been made in New York. In every instance they have attempted to suit the staging to the mood of the drama, and have usually succeeded admirably, at slight expense. They have developed a good deal of previously untried talent in this direction. Lee Simonson, in particular, has achieved distinctive results. I have seldom seen better work of its kind on the stage than his settings for The Magical City, Pierre Patelin, and The Seagull. At the Metropolitan Opera House no account seems to be taken of this art movement, although during the season of 1915-16 in The Taming of the Shrew an attempt was made to emulate the very worst that has been done in modern Germany.)

For several years the Russian Ballet, under the direction of Serge de Diaghilew, has been presenting operas and ballets in the European capitals, notably in London and Paris for long seasons each summer (the Ballet has been seen in America since this article was written). A number of artists and a number of stage directors have been working together in staging these works, which, as a whole, may be conceded to be the most completely satisfying productions which have been made on the stage during the progress of this new movement in the theatre. One or two of the German productions, or Gordon Craig’s Hamlet in Stanislawsky’s theatre, may have surpassed them in the sterner qualities of beauty, the serious truth of their art, but none has surpassed them in brilliancy, in barbaric splendour, or in their almost complete solution of the problems of mingling people with painted scenery. The Russians have solved these problems by a skilful (and passionately liberal) use of colour and light. The painted surfaces are mostly flat, to be sure, and crudely painted, but the tones of the canvas are so divinely contrived to mingle with the tones of the costumes that the effect of an animated picture is arrived at with seemingly very little pother. This method of staging is not, in most instances, it must be admitted, adapted to the requirements of the Wagner dramas. Bakst, I imagine, would find it difficult to cramp his talents in the field of Wagnerism, though he should turn out a very pretty edition of Das Rheingold. Roerich, on the other hand, who designed the scenery and costumes for Prince Igor as it was presented in Paris and London in the summer of 1914, would find no difficulty in staging Götterdämmerung. The problem is the same: to convey an impression of barbarism and strength. One scene I remember in Borodine’s opera in which an open window, exposing only a clear stretch of sky—the rectangular opening occupied half of the wall at the back of the room—was made to act the drama. A few red lights skilfully played on the curtain representing the sky made it seem as if in truth a city were burning and I thought how a similar simple contrivance might make a more imaginative final scene for Götterdämmerung.

It is, however, in their handling of mechanical problems that the Russians could assist the new producer of the Wagner dramas to his greatest advantage. In Rimsky-Korsakow’s opera, The Golden Cock, for instance, the bird of the title has several appearances to make. Now there was no attempt made, in the Russians’ stage version of this work, to have this bird jiggle along a supposedly invisible wire, in reality quite visible, flapping his artificial wings and wiggling his insecure feet, as in the usual productions of Siegfried. Instead the bird was built solid like a bronze cock for a drawing-room table; he did not flap his wings; his feet were motionless; when the action of the drama demanded his presence he was let down on a wire; there was no pretence of a lack of machinery. The effect, however, was vastly more imaginative and diverting than that in Siegfried, because it was more simple. In like manner King Dodon, in the same opera, mounted a wooden horse on wheels to go to the wars, and the animals he captured were also made of wood, studded with brilliant beads. In Richard Strauss’s ballet, The Legend of Joseph, the figure of the guardian angel was not let down on a wire from the flies as he might have been in a Drury Lane pantomime; the naïve nature of the work was preserved by his nonchalant entrance across the loggia and down a flight of steps, exactly the entrance of all the human characters of the ballet. I do not mean to suggest that these particular expedients would fit into the Wagner dramas so well as they do into works of a widely different nature. They should, however, indicate to stage directors the possibility of finding a method to suit the case in each instance. And I do assert, without hope or fear of contradiction, that Brünnhilde with a wooden horse would challenge less laughter than she does with the sorry nags which are put at her disposal and which Siegfried later takes down the river with him. It is only down the river that one can sell such horses. As for the bird, there are bird trainers whose business it is to teach pigeons to fly from pillar to post in the music halls; their services might be contracted for to make that passage in Siegfried a little less distracting. The difficulties connected with this particular mechanical episode (and a hundred others) might be avoided by a different lighting of the scene. If the tree-tops of the forest were submerged in the deepest shadows, as well they might be, the flight of the bird on a wire might be accomplished with some sort of illusion. But why should one see the bird at all? One hears it constantly as it warbles advice to the hero.

The new Wagner producer must possess many qualities if he wishes to place these works on a plane where they may continue to challenge the admiration of the world. Wagner himself was more concerned with his ideals than he was with their practical solution. Besides, it must be admitted that taste in stage art and improvements in stage mechanism have made great strides in the last decade. The plaster wall, for instance, which has replaced in many foreign theatres the flapping, swaying, wrinkled, painted canvas sky cyclorama (still in use at the Metropolitan Opera House; a vast sum was paid for it a few years ago) is a new invention and one which, when appropriately lighted, perfectly counterfeits the appearance of the sky in its different moods. (So far as I know the only theatre in New York with this apparatus is the Neighborhood Playhouse on Grand Street.) In Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s “Richard Wagner,” published in 1897, I find the following:

“Wagner foresaw that in the new drama the whole principle of the stage scenery must undergo a complete alteration but did not particularize in detail. The Meister says that ‘music resolves the rigid immovable groundwork of the scenery into a liquid, yielding, ethereal surface, capable of receiving impressions’; but to prevent a painful conflict between what is seen and what is heard, the stage picture, too, must be relieved from the curse of rigidity which now rests upon it. The only way of doing this is by managing the light in a manner which its importance deserves, that its office may no longer be confined to illuminating painted walls.... I am convinced that the next great advance in the drama will be of this nature, in the art of the eye, and not in music.” (The passage quoted further refers to Appia’s first book, published in French. Chamberlain was a close friend of Appia and “Die Musik und die Inscenierung” is dedicated to him.)

It must also be understood that Wagner in some instances, when the right medium of his expression was clear to him, made concessions to what he considered the unintelligence of the public. Wotan’s waving of the sword is a case in point. The motiv without the object he did not think would carry out the effect he intended to convey, although the absurdity of Wotan’s founding his new humanity on the power of the degenerate giants must have been apparent to him. Sometimes the Master changed his mind. Paris would have none of Tannhäuser without a ballet and so Wagner rewrote the first act and now the Paris version of the opera is the accepted one. In any case it must be apparent that what Wagner wanted was a fusion of the arts, and a completely artistic one. So that if any one can think of a better way of presenting his dramas than one based on the very halting staging which he himself devised (with the limited means at his command) as perhaps the best possible to exploit his ideals, that person should be hailed as Wagner’s friend. It must be seen, at any current presentation of his dramas, that his way, or Cosima’s, is not the best way. The single performances which have made the deepest impression on the public have deviated the farthest from tradition. Olive Fremstad’s Isolde was far from traditional. Her very costume of deep green was a flaunt in the face of Wagner’s conventionally white robed heroine. In the first act, after taking the love potion, she did not indulge in any of the swimming movements usually employed by sopranos to pass the time away until the occasion came to sing again. She stood as a woman dazed, passing her hands futilely before her eyes, and it was to be noted that in some instances her action had its supplement in the action of the tenor who was singing with her, although, in other instances, he would continue to swim in the most highly approved Bayreuth fashion. But Olive Fremstad, artist that she was, could not completely divorce herself from tradition; in some cases she held to it against her judgment. The stage directions for the second act of Parsifal, for example, require Kundry to lie on her couch, tempting the hero, for a very long time. Great as Fremstad’s Kundry was, it might have been improved if she had allowed herself to move more freely along the lines that her artistic conscience dictated. Her Elsa was a beautiful example of the moulding of the traditional playing of a rôle into a picturesque, imaginative figure, a feat similar to that which Mary Garden accomplished in her delineation of Marguerite in Faust. Mme. Fremstad always sang Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung throughout with the fire of genius. This was surely some wild creature, a figure of Greek tragedy, a Norse Elektra. The superb effect she wrought, at her first performance in the rôle, with the scene of the spear, was never tarnished in subsequent performances. The thrill was always there.

In face of acting and singing like that one can afford to ignore Wagner’s theory about the wedding of the arts. A Fremstad or a Lehmann can carry a Wagner drama to a triumphant conclusion with few, if any, accessories, but great singing artists are rare; nor does a performance of this kind meet the requirements of the Wagner ideal, in which the picture, the word, and the tone shall all be a part of the drama (Wort-Tondrama). Wagner invented a new form of stage art but only in a small measure did he succeed in perfecting a method for its successful presentation. The artist-producer must arise to repair this deficiency, to become the dominating force in future performances, to see that the scenes are painted in accordance with the principles of beauty and dramatic fitness, to see that they are lighted to express the secrets of the drama, as Appia says they should be, to see that the action is sympathetic with the decoration, and that the decoration never encumbers the action, that the lighting assists both. There never has been a production of the Ring which has in any sense realized its true possibilities, the ideal of Wagner.

June 24, 1915.