which, by reason of its brevity, is one of the most plastic motives in the score. But as a whole the Meistersinger lives in a different world from the Ring or Tristan. There is no great fateful principle running through it, that can be symbolised in a short orchestral figure and flashed across the picture at any desired moment, after the manner of the "Curse" or the "Hagen" motive in the Ring, or the "Death" motive in Tristan. The people in the Meistersinger carry hardly any shadows about with them. Their natures are mostly ingenuous, transparent, unsubtle: such as we see them on the stage at any given moment, such are they to themselves and others in every hour of their lives. It was natural then that they should take upon themselves more of the burden of the drama than the characters of the Ring as a whole,—for these are only instruments in the hand of a fate that is best symbolised by the ever-present orchestra—and that the instrumental voices should co-operate joyously with them, rather than dog them and lie in wait for them, as in the Ring, with symbols of reminiscence and foreboding. That the whole essence of the Meistersinger lies in its simple human characterisation and simple story-telling is shown again by Wagner's reverting in the Prelude to the pot-pourri feuilleton form of the Tannhäuser overture,—a form he never used again after 1845, except here.
5
As he proceeds with the Ring his leit-motives in general become more and more concentrated. Now and then he will employ a fairly extended theme, but never without a good psychological reason. One of the longest motives in the whole tetralogy is that of the "Volsung race." Its length is justified by the duty it has to perform: to concentrate the nobility and the suffering of that race into a chord or two would be beyond the powers of any musician; none but Wagner, indeed, could have expressed such an infinity of elevated grief within the compass of seven or eight bars. Some of the other motives are astounding in their brevity and eloquence. Not till after his work on the Rhinegold had unsealed his imagination and perfected his technique could he have hoped to hit off the wild, half-animal energy of the Valkyries in some four or five notes that are merely the expansion of a single chord, or have dared to trust to what is virtually only a series of syncopations to symbolise Alberich's work of destruction (the Vernichtungsarbeit motive). Never before could he have written anything so eloquent of death as the "Announcement of death" motive in the Valkyrie. In Siegfried, though the number of new motives is comparatively small, the same process of concentration is observable. The god-like nature and the stately gait of the Wanderer are suggested to us in three or four notes. And in the Götterdämmerung the concentration is amazing. In that stupendous work he is, in my opinion, at the very summit of his powers. He never wastes a note now: every new stroke he deals is incredibly swift, direct and telling. Absolutely sure of himself, he dispenses with a prelude—for the few bars of orchestral writing before the voices enter can hardly be called one—and trusts to the colour of a mere couple of chords to tune the audience's imagination to the atmosphere of the opening scene. One short characteristic figure suffices for the motive of Hagen, and nowhere in the whole of Wagner's or anyone else's work is a figure of two notes used so multifariously and with such far-reaching suggestion. It is evident that he now feels the harmonic instrument to be the most serviceable and flexible of all; and hundreds of his most overpowering effects in the Götterdämmerung are achieved by harmonic invention or harmonic transformation. The grisliness of the Hagen theme comes in large part—putting aside the question of orchestral colour—from the sort of dour, irreconcilable element it seems to introduce into certain chords,—though in reality the harmony has nothing essentially far-fetched in it—as in that tremendous passage near the end of the first Act of the Götterdämmerung—
Hagen!
The new themes, too, rely for a great deal of their poignancy upon some subtle and fleeting taste of sweetness or some swift suggestion of darkness and mystery in the harmony, as in the exquisite motive that is associated with the wedding of Gutrune—
or in the motive of "Magic deceit"—
while others make their effect by means of the utmost concentration of melodic meaning, like the "Blood-brotherhood" motive, or by an epigrammatic condensation of rhythm, like the "Oath of fidelity" motive, which only Wagner could have invented, and which no other composer but Beethoven would have dared to use if it had been offered to him—
Bruckmann
RICHARD WAGNER.
From the painting by H. Herkomer at Bayreuth.
It is on harmonic alteration that he chiefly relies again, in the latter stages of the Ring, to suggest the fateful gloom that is gradually closing in upon the drama; much of the tense and tragic atmosphere of the Götterdämmerung comes from this clouding of the simpler texture of the motives of the earlier operas. One of the most remarkable instances of this is his treatment of the "Servitude" motive, that is generally associated with Alberich. In the Rhinegold it appears in a variety of simple forms, such as this—
and this—
In the Götterdämmerung a sense of almost intolerable strain, of a great tragedy sweeping to its inevitable end, is conveyed by various subtilisations of the harmony, of which the following may stand as a type—
When Siegfried appears on Brynhilde's rock, disguised as Gunther, the theme of the latter is metamorphosed from—
into—
Here everything is exquisitely calculated,—the harmonic alteration, the orchestral colouring (the soft mysterious tones of trumpet and trombones), the interrupted ending, and the long fateful silence that follows.
When Alberich, in his colloquy with Hagen at the commencement of the second Act of the Götterdämmerung, looks forward to the approaching destruction of the gods, the "Valhalla" motive becomes altered from the familiar—
to—
Many other illustrations might be given of this harmonic intensification of themes.
6
It has to be admitted, however, that Wagner's use of the leit-motive presents some singularities, and is at times open to criticism. He undoubtedly introduces the motives more frequently than they are really needed; there is no necessity, for example, for the "Siegfried's horn" motive to be sounded at almost every appearance of Siegfried or every mention of his name. Debussy has made merry over this superfluity of reference, comparing it to a lunatic presenting his card to you in person. But we can easily forgive Wagner this little excess of zeal. He was doing something absolutely new for his time. He had a gigantic mass of material to unify, and this incessant recurrence of significant themes seemed to him the only way to do it. He could not foresee how familiar the operas and their motives would be to the whole musical world half a century later. In any case this peculiarity of his style can be passed over with a mere mention. Of more importance is his habit of making many of the motives so much alike that a certain amount of confusion is set up even in the minds of those who know the operas well. The "Servitude" motive, for example, is so like the opening of the Rhine Maidens' song that everyone goes astray over the two themes now and then in the first stages of his acquaintance with the Ring. Still more confusing is his habit of taking a motive that at first has only a particular meaning, and making it express a general concept, the result being that we frequently associate it with the wrong character. His mind was curiously like Bach's in this respect, that having fixed upon a figure that seemed to him an adequate symbol for an action, a person, an animal, or a material object, he would use it for all future phenomena of the same kind. But Bach's procedure is rather more logical, for his typical themes have as a rule a pictorial or semi-pictorial character, and so they can be applied without incongruity to a number of pictures of the same general order. A phrase that symbolises waves, for example, in one work may be legitimately employed to symbolise waves in another, for the theme itself is so constructed as to suggest the motion of waves: at least that is the intention. But Wagner necessarily has to find musical symbols for all kinds of things in his operas for which it is quite impossible to discover an unmistakable, self-explanatory musical equivalent. The symbol has therefore to be an arbitrary one; it has no claim to pictorial veracity, but we agree to accept it because it fulfils a useful musical purpose. The "Fire" motive conveys a real suggestion of fire; the Rhinegold prelude has certain qualities that make us willing to associate it with a mighty rolling river. But the "Ring" motive does not convey the slightest suggestion of a ring, nor has the "Gold" motive any resemblance to gold.
Wagner runs, then, a risk of being misunderstood, or not understood at all, when he takes an arbitrary symbol which we are willing to concede him in one case, and applies it to another. It would tax all the ingenuity of the thorough-going Wagnerian to justify, for instance, in the scene of the Norns in the Götterdämmerung, the employment of the "Sleep" motive that is inevitably associated in our minds with Wotan's parting from Brynhilde at the end of the Valkyrie. When Brynhilde is taking leave of Siegfried, in the second scene of the Götterdämmerung, and giving him Grane as a perpetual reminder of herself, the orchestra accompanies his words with the "Love" motive from the duet between Siegmund and Sieglinde in the first act of the Valkyrie. So profound has been the impression we have received from it there that it is impossible for us to associate it with any other pair of lovers; and we cannot help wondering what Siegmund and Sieglinde have to do with Siegfried and Brynhilde and Grane. When Hagen describes the coming of Siegfried down the Rhine, it is quite right that the orchestra should give out the typical Siegfried theme, but quite wrong, surely, that this theme should be combined with that of the Rhine Maidens from the Rhinegold. The intention presumably is that from the Rhine Maidens we are to infer the Rhine;[408] but the musical intelligence does not like having to diverge into deductive reasoning of this kind. Anyone who has learnt to associate the theme with the Rhine Maidens will naturally suppose either that they are to appear in person or that some allusion is to be made to them, neither of which things happens. The "Treaty" motive of the Rhinegold, again, has become so firmly associated in our minds with the agreement between Wotan and the giants that we involuntarily think of them when we hear it again in the orchestra during the swearing of Blood-brotherhood by Siegfried and Gunther (Götterdämmerung, vocal score, p. 92).
One of the most curious uses of the leit-motive is to be found in Siegfried (V. S. p. 35). Siegfried, pouring contempt on the idea that Mime can be his father, is telling him how he once saw the reflection of his own face in the brook:
Unlike unto thee
there did I seem:
as like as a toad
to a glittering fish.
There is excellent reason for accompanying the third line with the "Smithing" motive that so often characterises Mime; but what reason can there be for accompanying the fourth line with the "Waves" motive from the prelude to the Rhinegold? As it is not in the Rhine but in a brook that Siegmund has seen his reflection, the motive here can only be taken as symbolising not the waves of a particular and already familiar river—a procedure for which there might be some excuse—but waves in general, which is quite illegitimate. Wagner goes too far, as Bach used to go too far, in importing into the line a pictorial allusion that is not already there, and that we can only put there by an effort. For Bach also was in the habit of making his music argue, as it were, from one external fact to another. We can permit this within certain limits, but both Bach and Wagner sometimes go beyond all limits. When Bach has to set to music a stanza in which the faithful are spoken of as Christ's sheep (Beglückte Herde, Jesu Schafe, in the cantata Du Hirte Israel) he obviously aims at creating a pastoral atmosphere by the use of the oboes; and our imagination here is quite willing to accept the naïf translation of the religious idea into a pictorial image. But when Bach, possessed by the image of Jesus calling His disciples to be fishers of men (in the cantata Siehe, ich will viel Fischer aussenden), makes use of a motive of a type that he always employs to symbolise waves, we can only say, with all respect, that we had rather he did not ask us to deduce the necessity of waves from the fact that there are fish. So with this passage from Siegfried: we should be quite satisfied with the mere comparison between the toad and the fish; to lay it down with such portentous gravity that where there are fish there must necessarily be water is to reduce pictorialism to an absurdity.
There is no lack of examples of this process of illegitimate inference and illegitimate association. After Mime has answered the first of the Wanderer's three questions, the latter congratulates him in this wise (Siegfried, vocal score, p. 74):
Right well the name
of the race dost thou know:
sly, thou rascal, thou seemest!
—to the same phrase that is often used in the Rhinegold to suggest the trickiness of Loge in particular, but also, apparently, to suggest deceit in general. It accompanies, for example, Fafner's remark to Fasolt, à propos of the attempt of Wotan to evade the promised payment for Valhalla—
My trusty brother,
seest thou, fool, his deceit?
(V. S. 89, 90); and again the words in which Wotan tries to calm the apprehensions of Fricka—
Where simple strength serves,
of none ask I assistance:
but to force the hate
of foes to help me,
needs such craft and deceit
as Loge the artful employs.
(V. S. 82, 83). That is to say, a purely arbitrary musical figure is to be taken as symbolising not merely the slyness of a particular person, but slyness in the abstract—a length to which we must decline to go with Wagner.
And as with his waves and his moral qualities, so with his animals; they too are both particular and universal. When Alberich, at the urging of Loge, turns himself into a serpent (Rhinegold, p. 182), it is to the accompaniment of a motive that is itself admirably pictorial. But in Siegfried, (p. 7, etc.), and the Götterdämmerung (p. 34, etc.), the same motive is always used to characterise Fafner, after he has turned himself into a dragon. One need not enlarge upon the confusion this is bound to create.
We are willing again, to accept the "Swan" motive in Lohengrin as a purely conventional symbol; but the same motive strikes rather oddly on our ears when it is used to particularise the swan in Parsifal. If in Lohengrin it typifies that particular swan, it is obviously not right to employ it for a totally different bird in another opera; for there is nothing in the outline of the theme that can be said to bear the remotest resemblance to a swan in the way that an arpeggio theme may be said to resemble waves, or a crepitating theme to suggest fire. Again, Wagner only confuses us when he uses the motive that accompanies Kundry's ride in the first scene of Parsifal to accompany Parsifal's description of the horsemen he had once seen in the wood:
And once upon the fringe of the wood,
on glorious creatures mounted,
men all glittering went by me;
fain had I been like them:
with laughter they swept on their way.
And then I ran,
but never again I saw them;
through deserts wide I wandered,
o'er hill and dale;
oft fell the night,
then followed day: etc.
(vocal score, p. 54); afterwards to accompany Kundry's account of the death of Herzeleide:
As I rode by I saw her dying,
and, Fool, she sent thee her greeting;
(V. S. p. 57); after that, again, to accompany Kundry as she hastens to the spring in the wood to get water for the fainting Parsifal (V. S. p. 58); after that to describe the rush of Klingsor's warriors to the ramparts (V. S. p. 120); after that to accompany the thronging of the Flower Maidens to the scene (V. S. p. 156); again to give point to Parsifal's words:
And I, the fool, the coward,
to deeds of boyish wildness hither fled—
(V. S. p. 203); and to accompany—for what reason it is difficult to say—Kundry's threat that she will call the spear against Parsifal if he continues to repulse her (V. S. p. 222); and finally, as an accompaniment to her last words to Parsifal:
For fleddest thou from here,
and foundest all the ways of the world,
the one that thou seek'st,
that path thy foot shall find never;
(V. S. p. 225). No ingenuity can justify the employment of the same motive for so many different purposes. As a matter of fact, after we have once become conscious of it as accompanying Kundry's ride in the first scene of the opera, it is inevitable that we should associate it with her at each subsequent recurrence of it.
Another peculiarity of Wagner's use of the leit-motive may be noted; once or twice he gives a meaning to a theme in the later stages of the Ring that we cannot be sure of it possessing at first. The most striking instance of this is the "Reflection" motive. In Siegfried it is exclusively employed in connection with Mime, and the manner of its employment leaves no room for doubt that the commentators are right in giving it this title. The prelude to Siegfried commences with it; it is used there to suggest to us Mime pondering over the problem of the forging of the sword. It frequently recurs with the same significance in the scene that follows. It is used again all through the scene of questions and answers between the Wanderer and Mime, to suggest the dwarf putting his considering cap on after or during each of the Wanderer's posers. Yet on its first appearance in the Rhinegold (vocal score, p. 151) there is nothing whatever to indicate that the theme is to be taken as symbolical of reflection. It accompanies Mime's plaint to Wotan and Loge—
What help for me?
I must obey
the commands of my brother,
who holds me bondsman to him.
By evil craft fashioned Alberich
from the ravished Rhinegold a yellow ring: etc.
(Vocal score, p. 151.) From the words one would be a priori inclined to associate the music with Alberich rather than with Mime; and as it is not employed again in the Rhinegold, the meaning we are suddenly asked to attach to it at the opening of Siegfried seems a little far-fetched.
7
Wagner was not long in realising that however thrilling the timbre of the human voice may be, and useful as it is for making clear the course of the action and the sentiments of the characters, the orchestra is the most powerful and most resourceful of all the instruments at the disposal of the operatic composer. More and more the main current of his thinking goes into this. In the Rhinegold the orchestral texture is by no means continuous; frequently it merely punctuates or supports the vocal declamation by means of a detached chord or two, much in the way that it used to sustain the older recitative. As the Ring proceeds, pages of this kind become rarer: the orchestra thrusts itself more and more to the centre of the picture. It would be impossible to make the tissue of the Rhinegold intelligible without the voices: but the orchestral part of the Götterdämmerung would flow on with hardly a break if the vocal part were omitted; so also would large sections of Tristan and the Meistersinger. It was inevitable that under these circumstances the vocal writing should occasionally become a little perfunctory. It is frequently said that the balance between the vocal and orchestral parts is most perfectly maintained in Tristan; but the most cursory examination of the score shows that even there Wagner could not always find, or would not take the trouble to find, a vocal line of equal melodic interest with that of the orchestra, in the opening scene, for instance, it is transparently clear that the really expressive voice is the orchestra, and that the vocal parts have been inserted, sometimes rather carelessly and unskilfully, after the orchestral tissue has been completed. The vocal writing in Tristan falls into four main categories. The first is that to which I have already referred; wholly absorbed in the orchestral working out of a theme, Wagner seems to pay the minimum of attention to the vocal line, which sometimes has as little real relevance to the music as a whole as if it had been added by another person. As a specimen of this kind of writing we may cite the music to the words of Brangaene at the commencement of the opera—
Bluish strips
are stretching along the west;
swiftly the ship
sails to the shore:
if restful the sea by eve
we shall readily set foot on land.
(Vocal score, pp. 7, 8.)
To the second category belong passages in which the voice is frankly in the forefront of the picture and the orchestra is merely a background—as in the colloquy between Tristan and Brangaene (vocal score, pp. 18 ff.), or in the music to Isolde's words shortly after the beginning of the second Act—
BRANGAENE. I still hear the sound of horns.
ISOLDE.No sound of horns
were so sweet;
yon fountain's soft
murmuring current
moves so quietly hence;
if horns yet brayed
how could I hear that?
(Vocal score, pp. 90, 91.)
To the third category belong the passages in which the voice simply sings the same melody as the orchestra, as on p. 177 of the vocal score ("Thy kingdom thou art showing," etc.); and to the fourth, those in which it sings a real counterpoint to the orchestra—not a mere piece of padding like the passage I have cited from pp. 7, 8 of the score, but a vocal line of genuine melodic interest—as in a good deal of the scene of the third Act through which there runs the melancholy cor anglais melody.
Tristan, in fact, in spite of the splendour of its orchestral polyphony, by no means exhibits Wagner's symphonic powers in their full evolution. The most wonderful of his works in this respect is the Götterdämmerung, the stupendous strength of which is beyond words and almost beyond belief. The world had not seen a musical brain working at such tremendous and long-sustained pressure since the days when the B minor Mass and the "Matthew Passion" were written; and even those masterpieces have not the continuity of texture of the Götterdämmerung, nor do they show so giant a hand at its work of unification. Turn almost where you will, the course of the drama is told with absolute clearness in the orchestra itself. Yet in spite of his concentrating so largely on the orchestra, the vocal parts have an extraordinary aptness; it would be hard to find a passage in the score as perfunctory as some that might be quoted from Tristan. The voice, it is true, is often used simply as another counterpoint among those of the orchestra; but as a counterpoint it generally has a dramatic appositeness and a melodic beauty of its own.
In Parsifal this tendency to make the orchestra the principal dramatic speaker goes so far that very frequently the vocal writing is thoroughly bad. Some writers have attributed this to a decline of mental power in Wagner's old age. I do not think that this is the correct explanation. I can see no general decadence of musical invention in the music of Parsifal: I am willing to believe that the peculiar emotional and intellectual world of the opera makes no appeal to many people; but the style as a whole is as admirably suited to that world as the styles of Tristan and the Meistersinger are to their respective subjects, and I for one see no failure of inspiration except in some of the choral writing in the first Act, where there is occasionally an undeniable touch of commonplace. Part of the admitted colourlessness of some of the vocal passages is to be accounted for, I think, by the utterly unmusical quality of the words. The defect is not in Wagner the musician but in Wagner the poet, who has forgotten for the moment several of the principles he had laid down in his prose works and put into successful practice in the six great operas of his prime. The text of Parsifal contains a large amount of quite unmusical matter, especially at the commencement. Many of the lines have evidently not roused the slightest interest in the composer. He knew that the orchestral part was alive, and always developing the emotional possibilities of the situation; and when he comes to an obviously impossible verbal patch,—necessary for the telling of the story, but containing no stimulus for the musician—he simply refuses to waste time or trouble upon it. Take as an example one of the very worst passages for the voice in the whole opera—the words of Parsifal just before the beginning of the transformation music in the first Act—
PARSIFAL. I hardly stir, and yet I move apace.
Granting that the words are unfit for music, it is incredible that Wagner could not have found a more interesting musical outline for them than this, if it had occurred to him to try. But I take it that he would not try, or saw no necessity for trying; his mind was wholly bent on working out his orchestral picture, which, after all, is the only thing that really matters here as in so many other places. In other passages, such as the long recital of Kundry to Parsifal commencing "I saw the babe upon its mother's breast" (vocal score, p. 187), the orchestral part is a sort of small symphonic movement in itself, in which the voice mostly sings the same melody as the orchestra. Where it does not do this in the symphonic passages the vocal writing again becomes a trifle careless, as in the Good Friday music. The self-contained completeness of the orchestral part here is conclusively shown by its perfect adaptation to the concert room; and I take it that, feeling that virtually all he had to say had been said by the orchestra, Wagner worked out the mood of the scene with complete satisfaction to himself in that medium, and then added the vocal part as best he could—sometimes quite well, sometimes by no means well. He had largely given up, indeed, thinking simultaneously in terms of both voice and orchestra, as in the best parts of Tristan, the Meistersinger and the Götterdämmerung. Those who will may put this down to a decline of his musical powers. To me it seems more probable that as a musician he came to rely more and more on his most eloquent instrument, the orchestra. It may even be that his carelessness with regard to the text of Parsifal, his inclusion of a number of episodes that he must have known were essentially foreign to his own ideal of music, can be accounted for by his belief that he could rely on the expressiveness and the continuity of the orchestral web to see him through all the inevitable difficulties. As one looks at the score of Parsifal one can readily understand his desire to try his hand at a symphony in the last years of his life.
8
It is open to doubt, indeed, whether Wagner ever attained the homogeneity of form that was his ideal. His most homogeneous work is probably Lohengrin; after his developing imagination and technique had made him dissatisfied with the style of that opera, and pointed him on to more difficult achievements, he does indeed paint pictures of magnificent scope and exquisite fineness of detail, but he hardly attains the perfect balance of all the factors and the perfect consistency of style that make Lohengrin flow so smoothly. The reason, I think, is that while he was urged on to this reform and that by the logical quality of his mind, he was never quite logical enough—which is only another way of saying that even the greatest minds cannot create a new form of their own in art. All they can do is to add something to the structure they have inherited from their predecessors, and pass the transformed product on to their successors as something to be transformed still further. An ideal like that of Wagner—to create an art form that should be musical through and through, a continuous, endlessly varied web of melody,—is realisable in instrumental music pure and simple, but hardly in connection with the stage. Concentrate the dramatic action as he would, so as to provide the musician with a framework that should be musical in every fibre, the poet was still compelled to retain a certain amount of non-musical matter in order to tell his story clearly to the audience. The concision of Tristan is wonderful; but even in the first Act of Tristan there are verse-passages the pedestrian quality of which the composer has not been able to disguise. The style of all his later works fluctuates in character because he is divided between a desire to keep the actors in the forefront and the necessity for relegating them to the background in order to give the orchestra an absolutely free course. We feel with Wagner, as we do with certain others of the most fertile minds in art—with Goethe, with Leonardo, with Hokusai—that one human life-time was too pitifully short for the realisation of everything of which the great brain was capable; that the body broke down while the mind was still capable of adding to its store of knowledge and feeling. All Wagner's greatest works, regarded from the standpoint of the twentieth century, are hardly more than magnificent attempts to find a compromise between drama and music. At times the compromise worked admirably; at others there is perceptible friction. His dilemma was the one that has confronted every composer of opera since the day when opera was invented. Poetry and music are not the loving sisters that the fancy of the literary man would make them out to be; they are rival goddesses, very jealous and intolerant of each other. The poet, in proportion as his work is genuine, faultless poetry, has no need of the musician. Music is cruel, ravenous, selfish, overbearing with poetry; it deprives it, for its own ends, of almost everything that makes it poetry, altering its verbal values, disregarding its rhymes, substituting another rhythm for that of the poet. It has no need of anything but the poetic idea, and to get at that kernel it ruthlessly tears away all the delicacies of tissue that enclose it. Wagner himself, however much he might theorise about poetry, was never a poet; he was simply a versifier who wrote words for music, sometimes admirably adapted for this purpose, sometimes exceedingly ill adapted. In Tristan, which he himself regarded as the one of all his poems that was best suited for music, what he writes is generally not poetry at all. Who would give that title to lines that scorn all grace of rhythm, all variety of cadence, all the magic that comes of the perfect fusion of speech and expression: lines like those of the final page, for example:
Heller schallend
mich umwallend,
sind es Wellen
sanfter Lüfte?
Sind es Wogen
wonniger Düfte?
Wie sie schwellen
mich umrauschen,
soll ich atmen,
soll ich lauschen?
Soll ich schlürfen,
untertauchen?
Süss in Düften
mich verhauchen?
In dem wogenden Schwall,
in dem tönenden Schall,
in des Welt-Atems
wehendem All,—
ertrinken,—
versinken,—
unbewusst,—
höchste Lust!
or those at the meeting of Tristan and Isolde in the second Act—
TRISTAN. Isolde! Geliebte!
ISOLDE. Tristan! Geliebter!
Bist du mein?
TRISTAN. Hab' ich dich wieder?
ISOLDE. Darf ich dich fassen?
TRISTAN. Kann ich mir trauen?
ISOLDE. Endlich! Endlich!
TRISTAN. An meine Brust!
ISOLDE. Fühl' ich dich wirklich?
TRISTAN.Seh' ich dich selber?
ISOLDE. Dies deine Augen?
TRISTAN. Dies dein Mund?
ISOLDE. Hier deine Hand?
TRISTAN. Hier dein Herz?
ISOLDE. Bin ich's? Bist du's?
Halt' ich dich fest?
TRISTAN. Bin ich's? Bist du's?
Ist es kein Trug?
BOTH. Ist es kein Traum?
O Wonne der Seele,
o süsse, hehrste,
kühnste, schönste,
seligste Lust!
TRISTAN. Ohne Gleiche!
ISOLDE. Überreiche!
TRISTAN. Überselig!
ISOLDE. Ewig!
If this telegraphic style, as Emil Ludwig calls it, is poetry, then we shall have to give that word a meaning it has never yet had.
But if the Tristan order of verse is not poetry, it is magnificently adapted to the needs of the symphonic musician. It is unobtrusive; it is pliant; it serves to préciser the musical emotion without fettering the orchestral composer either melodically or rhythmically. Compare now with the previous extracts one or two from Parsifal—