How incredibly careless is the construction here—the long, involved sentences, the parentheses, the separation of substantive and verb by several lines! It is this absence of poetic concentration that makes Parsifal a trifle langweilig at times; for no matter how expressive Wagner may make the orchestral music, he cannot quite reconcile us to the frequent flatness of the vocal writing and the difficulty we often have in getting the sense, or even the grammatical construction, of the words. That Wagner at the end of his life could put together a text like Parsifal after having made the poems of Tristan and the Ring is not in the least a proof of mental collapse, but only of the almost insuperable difficulties in the way of finding a perfect compromise between music and dramatic poetry. He was fortunate enough, in the case of Tristan, to hit upon a subject that was comparatively easy to concentrate. Two duties, it must be remembered, an operatic poem has to perform: it has to provide the composer with opportunities for emotional expression, and it has to make a story clear to the spectator. The ideal text would be that in which the action was implicit in the emotion, that is to say, one in which there was no need for any explanation, through the mouth of this or that actor, of events that were happening off the stage or that had occurred before the drama began. It is when the composer has to interrupt his purely emotional outpouring in order to allow the poet to become explanatory that he realises the difficulty of making his opera musical throughout. Even in Tristan Wagner could not wholly dispense with a certain amount of explanation, in the first act, of the events in Ireland and Cornwall that have led up to the situation in which Tristan and Isolde now find themselves. The music in consequence halts decidedly at times; all the art of the composer cannot disguise the fact that he is momentarily being held up by the exigencies of the stage poet. In the Ring, as it was first drafted, Wagner was faced with the same problem, but he solved it in another way. Siegfried's Death was to be merely the climax of a long sequence of tragic events. Without some knowledge of these events, however, the spectator would be unable to understand the final tragedy. So Wagner resorted to the device of making the characters themselves recapitulate the earlier stages of the story, in much the same way that Isolde, in the first act of Tristan, tells Brangaene—for the benefit of the audience, of course—all about the coming of Tristan to Ireland, his slaying of Morold, her nursing of the wounded Cornish hero, his wooing her as bride for King Marke, and so on. In the opening scene of Siegfried's Death the Norns tell each other—again for the benefit of the audience—how Alberich ravished the gold from the Rhine, made a ring from it, and enslaved the Nibelung race; how the ring was stolen, and Alberich himself became a thrall; how the giants built Valhalla for the gods, and, denied their promised reward, got possession of the ring that the gods had stolen from Alberich; how there was born a free hero, destined to redeem the gods from their bondage; how Siegfried slew the dragon and wakened Brynhilde from her sleep. Having made all this clear in an introductory scene, Wagner raises the curtain upon Siegfried and Brynhilde. Later, Hagen tells Gunther,—all for the sake of the audience—how Wotan begot the Volsung race; how the twin-born Volsung pair Siegmund and Sieglinde had for son the mighty hero, Siegfried, who "closed the ravenous maw" of the dragon with his "conquering sword." In the next scene Siegfried explains to the audience—viâ Hagen and Gunther—how he came into possession of the tarnhelm and the ring, whereupon Hagen describes the virtues of the former. In the third scene the Valkyries[409] fly to the solitary Brynhilde and learn of her awakening by Siegfried, and of the intervention of Wotan in the combat between Siegmund and Hunding. In the first scene of the second Act Alberich tells Hagen how he won the gold and forged the ring, and compelled Mime to make the tarnhelm for him; how the ring was ravished from him by the gods and given to the giants; how one of the latter guarded it in the form of a dragon; how Siegfried slew the latter and Mime. In the second scene of the third Act Siegfried tells the Gibichungs—the audience overhearing—how Mime tended the dying Sieglinde in the wood, saved her child, and brought him up to his own craft of smith; how he (Siegfried) forged his father's sword anew and did the dragon to death; how the bird warned him of Mime's plot against his life, told him of the powers of the ring and tarnhelm, and sent him to rouse Brynhilde from her sleep on the fire-girt rock.
Wagner must have felt the clumsiness of this method of constant explanation, and anticipated that it would impede the free flow of his music; while in any case the audience would probably still not be quite clear as to certain points. So, as all the world knows, he first of all prefixed to Siegfried's Death another drama—The Young Siegfried—designed to put the bearing of all the stages of the action beyond the possibility of misunderstanding. But again the fear haunts him that there may still be some things insufficiently accounted for; so even The Young Siegfried has to have a certain number of pages of explanation. The fact of Siegfried being there at all has to be explained by Mime, as well as the further facts of the death of Siegmund in battle and the perishing of Sieglinde in giving birth to Siegfried. In the next scene, almost the whole story of what afterwards became the Rhinegold and the Valkyrie is told afresh in the competition of questions and answers between the Wanderer and Mime. In the first scene of the third Act, we have the completion of the story of the Valkyrie given to the audience in the dialogue between the Wanderer and Erda—how the earth-goddess bore a daughter, Brynhilde, to Wotan, how she flouted the god's will, and for punishment was doomed to sleep on the fiery fell. Not content with all this, Wagner afterwards stages, in a third opera, the Valkyrie, the whole of the action that has been told and told again in Siegfried and the Götterdämmerung, from the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde down to the punishment of Brynhilde. Even here he has to find room for explanations; in the first scene of the second Act Wotan tells the audience—viâ Brynhilde—the whole story of the rape of the gold by Alberich and all the events that followed from it. Finally Wagner comes to the conclusion that the whole action, from its beginning in the depths of the Rhine, had better be put visibly upon the stage; and so the Rhinegold, the story of which has been already told more than once, is prefixed to the Valkyrie. But in spite of his having shown everything so completely that nothing remains to be explained by word of mouth, he still retains all the explanations he had inserted in the three other dramas of the tetralogy. No doubt he was aware of their superfluity, but shrank, as he might well do, from the enormous task of reconstructing the whole work yet again. He may have argued, too, that as each of the operas would have to stand by itself on the particular occasion of its performance, it would be no disadvantage to have the events of the preceding evening fully explained, even at the cost of some otherwise needless repetition.
I have not gone over this long familiar ground merely to tell again a thrice-told tale, but to bring into higher relief the fundamental difficulty of the musical dramatist who is working along the Wagnerian lines—the difficulty of taking up the whole of the poet's work into the being of music, when the poet, in order to leave no room for misunderstanding on the part of the audience of the reason for the visible actions and the audible sentiments of the actors, has to pad out his poem with a certain amount of matter that is explanatory of the past rather than emotional in the present. So desperate a device as the visible representation in three or four evenings of every stage of a dramatic action was obviously not to be resorted to again. It was equally impossible to reduce the story of Parsifal to the highly concentrated form into which he had managed to cast Tristan. So he had to do what it had been his first impulse to do in the Ring—elucidate the visible action of the moment by a narrative of all that had happened before the action, or that particular stage of the action, began, and trust to the orchestra to maintain the musical interest by means of the interplay of leit-motives. Hence the lumbering stage technique of the first Act of Parsifal, and the raison d'être for the endless garrulity of Gurnemanz. That venerable worthy is not a character; he is merely a walking and talking guide book; he stands outside the real drama, somewhat in the style of the compère in a revue; and the proof of his almost complete nullity is that Wagner has been utterly unable to characterise him musically. Every other character in his operas—even the minor personages, such as Kurvenal and David and Gutrune—exists for us as a definite personality, someone drawn in the round in music as effectively as a painter or sculptor could have shown him forth. But even Wagner has been unable to invent a single phrase that shall be characteristic of Gurnemanz and Gurnemanz alone. He is the one Wagnerian character who simply does not exist for musicians. As far as his music is concerned he has neither mental characteristics nor bodily form; we remember him solely for his interminable talk.
9
If Wagner failed in his struggle with the musical-dramatic form, it was the failure of a Titan in a struggle that only a Titan would have ventured upon. Form and the perfection of form are simple enough matters for the smaller musical intelligences, for whom form means merely a symmetrical mould to be filled. It is for the greater minds that the problem of form is always a torture, for their ideas are perpetually outgrowing the mould. In sheer fertility of idea Wagner was probably the greatest musician the world has ever seen. It was of the very essence of his work that there should be no repetition either of mood or of procedure. Without, indeed, making the necessarily futile attempt to decide which is per se the finer order of musical mind, the dramatic or the symphonic, it may be confidently said that to a dramatist—or at all events a dramatist like Wagner—there is permitted no such easy returning upon his own tracks, no half-mechanical manipulation of the same order of ideas time after time, as is possible to the worker in the stereotyped instrumental forms. Great as is the inventive power of a Bach, a Beethoven or a Brahms, it cannot be denied that much of their work is simply a varied exploitation of a relatively small number of formulas,—that a very small amount of thematic invention can be made to go a very long way under the guidance of an established pattern. Nor, broadly speaking, is the same intensity of imagination, or the same scope of imagination, required to invent a hundred ordinary fugal or symphonic themes as to find a hundred themes that are the veritable musical counterparts of as many human beings. The family resemblance between "subjects" that is permitted to a Bach or a Beethoven is not permitted to a Wagner: the dramatist's work must be a perpetual re-creation—and a definite, unmistakable re-creation—of the life around him in all its multiformity. In this sense Wagner is without an equal among composers; never has there been a brain so apt at limning character and suggesting the milieu in music. We can speak of the Wagnerian imagination as we can speak of the Shakespearean imagination; Wagner's is the only imagination in music that can be compared with Shakespeare's in dramatic fertility and comprehensiveness. It pours itself over the whole surface of a work, into every nook and cranny of it. It is a vast mind, infinite in its sympathies, protean in its creative power. For sheer drastic incisiveness of theme he has not his equal in all music; each vision instinctively, without an effort, finds its own inevitable utterance. In the works of his great period every motive has a physiognomy as distinct from all others as the face of any human being is distinct from all other faces. The motives are unforgettable once we have heard them. They depict their subject once for all: who to-day, enormously as the apparatus of musical expression has developed since Wagner's time, would dare to try to find better symbols than those he has invented for the tarnhelm, the fire, the Rhine, the sword, the dragon, the potion that brings oblivion to Siegfried; or for any of the men and women of the operas—for Wotan, for Siegfried, for Mime, for the "reine Thor," for Herzeleide, for Hagen, for Gutrune, for Brynhilde, and for a dozen others? To hear any of these themes to-day, after a generation or more of daily familiarity with them, is like looking at a medallion of a hundred years ago in which not a point of the outline or a single plane of the relief has been blurred, nor a single grain of its first sharp milling been lost. They are what they are because they combine in the fullest measure and in impeccable proportion the two great preservatives of all artistic work,—a luminous personal vision and consummate style.
10
In the operas of his prime, every one of his characters is musically alive, down to the smallest. Tristan is not more real to us than Kurvenal, nor Walther more real than David, nor Brynhilde than Gutrune. His fiery imagination saw over the whole field of the drama with the same intensity. In this respect, as in so many others, not one of his successors can compare with him. Strauss, for instance, has always failed to give reality to any but the leading characters of his operas. His Faninal in the Rosenkavalier is decidedly not alive, nor is his Chrysothemis in Elektra. There is not a single truly characteristic phrase by which the musician can recall the former to his memory in the way that he can recall David or Kurvenal or Mime; the only piece of music by which he can recall Chrysothemis is an atrocious rag-time waltz that he would prefer to forget. Strauss's minor characters are known to us through the poem rather than the music; while Wagner's minor characters are clear-cut personalities to thousands of opera-goers who have never read the poem. And like the true dramatist, Wagner has no moral prejudices; for the time being he puts himself into the skin of each of his characters and looks at the world solely through his eyes. Nowhere is the author to be detected in the work, just as Shakespeare is nowhere to be detected in his; each of the characters sees the world from his own standpoint, and while he is talking we are for the moment bound to see the world precisely as he sees it. In any one else's hands Alberich would have been a mere conventional villain of melodrama. As Wagner draws him he is as real as Iago,—an enemy of the light and all that live in the light, but their enemy by reason of the very nature of his being, following his own instincts with perfect naturalness and perfect consistency. So it comes about that we invariably believe in Alberich and the justice of his cause when he is speaking for himself; nowhere is he a mere foil or relief to characters with whom we may have more moral sympathy. No one can fail to be moved, for instance, by his appeal to Hagen in the second Act of the Götterdämmerung—the genuine heart-hunger of this, repulsive gnome, lusting for power with all the passion and all the sincerity of his narrow soul. How vast and terrible a force of evil, again, is Hagen, but at the same time how natural, how inevitable. Even Mime is always right from Mime's point of view: the spectator can for the moment no more turn against him than against Alberich.
It is one of the mysteries of human psychology, indeed, how the mind that could be so incurably egoistic in the ordinary affairs of life, so incapable of seeing people as they really were, and not merely as they were in relation to the gratification or frustration of his own desires, should be capable of such universal sympathy in his artistic creation. The crowning wonder of Wagner's artistic psychology is his treatment of Beckmesser. We have seen what a deadly and unreasoning hatred he had for Hanslick, and that it was Hanslick he had in view in the later poetical drafts of the character. Yet in the opera, though Beckmesser is made appropriately ridiculous, he is handled almost throughout without a touch of the malice one might have expected when one knows that the character is meant as a satire upon a detested enemy. I say "almost throughout," for it has always seemed to me that there is just a shade of unnecessary harshness in Sachs's words after Beckmesser has left the house with the manuscript of Walther's song in his pocket:
Beckmesser, for all his wiles, has not hitherto struck us as being base (boshaft). We laugh at him, but we love him, as we love all the fools and rogues of pure comedy. I fancy I can detect in this passage the last angry flash of the eye and the snap of the jaw as Wagner thought of Hanslick. But apart from this little lapse it is wonderful with what detachment the composer has been able to see his personal enemy. The artist in him was too strong, too infallible, to permit of his fouling the ideal world of his art with any breath from the bitter, muddy world of real life. Mr. Bernard Shaw is of the opinion that Strauss, in Ein Heldenleben, gives "an orchestral caricature of his enemies which comes much closer home than Wagner's mediævally disguised Beckmesser." I hardly think the musical world as a whole will agree with Mr. Shaw. The "Adversaries" section of Ein Heldenleben always strikes me as a mere outburst of rather stupid bad temper: the humour is as ill-conditioned as the psychology is crude and the expression commonplace. We have long since ceased to bestow on it the compliment of even as much thin laughter as we gave it when it was quite new. It is bad art for this reason if for no other,—that the petty, snappy hero shown in this section is inconsistent with the sort of super-man who figures in the rest of the work; who can believe that the hero of the noble ending, set high above earth and all its littlenesses, is the same individual as the small bundle of wounded vanity and irritated nerves whose reply to his critics takes the form of putting out his tongue and "talking back" like a street urchin? Wagner's caricature is at once deeper, truer, kindlier, more universal and more enduring. He could be little enough in his life: in his art the gods took care that he should never be anything but magnanimity itself.
And if there has never been a brain in music that saw so deeply into the springs of character, there has never been a musical brain with such a grasp of a drama as a whole. It was the mighty, tireless synthetic engine that we meet with only some score of times, perhaps, in the whole history of human thought,—in two or three great military commanders, a few great architects, and half-a-dozen philosophers. It is becoming more and more evident each year that since his death there has been no single composer of anything like his bigness, no single composer capable of work at once so new and so coherently wrought. His was the last truly great mind to find expression in music. That statement is not at all inconsistent with the admission that modern composers have said many hundreds of things that Wagner could never have thought of: I simply mean that the brains of Strauss and Debussy or any two others put together would not equal Wagner's in range, in depth, in staying power. There has not been a musician since his time who can "think in continents" as he did. The more we study him, indeed, the more wonderful do this sweep of vision and tenacity of hold become to us. There is nothing in all other men's music comparable to Wagner's feat of keeping the vast scheme of the Ring in his head for more than a quarter of a century, and actually laying it aside completely for eleven years during that time, without relaxing his grip for a moment upon the smallest limb of the great drama. It is in virtue of this fiery and unceasing play of the imagination and this stupendous synthetic power that he takes his place among the half-dozen most comprehensive minds that have ever worked in art.
In music there are only two brains—those of Bach and Beethoven—to compare with his in breadth of span. Say what we will about the repetitions and the longueurs of the Ring, there is nothing in all music, and very little else in any other art, to compare with that wonderful work for combined scope and concentration of design. Wagner had in abundance the rarest of all artistic gifts,—the faculty, as a great critic has put it, of seeing the last line in the first, of never losing sight of the whole through all the tangle of detail. One might almost say that no other modern brain except Napoleon's and Herbert Spencer's has been able to keep all the minutiæ of a gigantic problem so unfailingly within the one sphere of vision. Wagner forgot nothing in his work: at any stage of it he could summon up at a moment's notice not only any figure he wanted, in all its natural warmth of life, but the very atmosphere that surrounded it, the very mood it induced in others. To me one of the most marvellous instances of this has always been the passage in Waltraute's recital in the third scene of the Götterdämmerung, in which, in the midst of that extraordinary picture of the frustrated Wotan brooding among the joyless gods in Valhalla, she speaks of the god remembering his favourite and banished child:
Then soft grew his look:
He remembered, Brynhilde, thee!
It is a far cry at this stage from the parting of the god and his daughter in the Valkyrie; but at the mere mention of it there wells up in Wagner, after twelve years or more, all the emotion of the wonderful union between them, and the gloomy, careworn music melts for a bar or two into a tear-compelling tenderness. Another magnificent illustration of this gift of his of looking before and after may be had in the third Act of the Meistersinger, just after the greeting of Sachs by the populace of Nuremberg. That reception is surely the most overwhelming thing of its kind the earth has ever seen or heard; it has always been a mystery to me how any merely human singer can find a voice in which to respond to it. But it is precisely here that we realise the subtlety of Wagner's conception of Sachs, the profoundly imaginative way in which he saw him, and his ever-present sense of the fundamentals of the character through apparently the most distracting vicissitudes. Any other operatic librettist and composer, after that million-throated outburst, would have set a strutting Sachs on his feet, smilingly and condescendingly accepting the homage of the multitude. Wagner makes his Sachs realise nothing but his own unworthiness and the sense of something hollow and fleeting in all this vociferation; and there is hardly an effect in all music to compare for subtlety, for poetry, for the profundity of its humanity, with the instantaneous melting of the crimson and purple strains of the folk into the quiet grey theme of Sachs' sorrow in the strings. It was the only possible outlet from what any other sincere composer would have instinctively felt to be an emotional impasse; and it was only Wagner who could have found the outlet. He is great in many ways, but in no way greater than in this faculty of keeping the burning vision of the moment always in touch with those that have passed and those that are to come; in all contemporary music there is not to be found a brain with a third of his power in this respect. In the latest operas of Strauss, strewn with fine things as they are, there is no such unity of style, no such ardour of conception, no such unrelaxing hold upon every character in every phase of it; and of course no purely orchestral work can compare with even a single opera of Wagner's for combined sweep of design and closeness of texture.
11
The clarity and unity of Wagner's vision are evident again in the pictorial element that plays so large a part in his works. He was often pictorial without intending it, and was himself probably unconscious of many of the effects of light, colour, and atmosphere that delight us in his music. Mr. Runciman has done well to insist upon the gift, exhibited as early as Die Feen, for not only visualising a scene or a character for us but giving it us in its natural tints. We have happily got past the day when old-fashioned theorists used to lay it down that "pure" music was "concerned with nothing but itself," and that whoever made it concern itself with appearances of the visible world was at the best no more than half a musician. As I have argued in an earlier chapter of this book, we cannot parcel off the human consciousness into psychology-tight bulkheads in this way. The various faculties are always crossing over into each other's territories for a moment, and coming back with spoils that they refuse to surrender for the rest of their days. The theorists have always been telling us that music cannot "paint." The composers, knowing much more about the matter than the theorists, have always gone on painting to their heart's content,—Bach, for example, being incorrigibly realistic. The three minds with the most pronounced bias towards tone-painting were probably those of Bach, Schubert (in his songs), and Wagner. But between the musician-painters there are as many differences of vision and of manner as there are between "pure" musicians or "pure" painters; and Wagner, in this regard as in every other, brought certain new elements into music, and still stands in a class by himself.
The curious thing about him is that while no other man's music gives us such an impression of being bound up at almost every point with the visible world in which we live and move, actual realism of the ordinary kind is comparatively rare with him, and it is certainly the least important factor in this impression. Now and again, of course, he does "paint" the concrete in the realistic way made familiar to us by the modern symphonic poem-writers. But this way is not at all a new way. The music of Schubert and that of Bach, as has been said, is full of realism of this order,—Schubert's spinning-wheel and Bach's serpents, to give merely two well-known instances. To this category belong Wagner's Rhine, and his fire music, and the whinnying of the Valkyries' horses. But there is really not much realism of that sort in Wagner's music. He objected to it in Berlioz and others unless there was a very good reason for it, and never employed it himself except where it complied with the dual condition of being thoroughly justified by the scene and unquestionably within the scope of musical expression. Wagner does comparatively little tone-painting of the purely realistic kind, but of course he does it always with superb certainty, profiting by a hundred years of evolution of technique since Bach, and by the gorgeous instrument that the modern orchestra places at his disposal.
A subtler sort of pictorialism,—subtler because it is unpremeditated and unconscious,—is that to which Mr. Runciman has drawn attention. No one except Hugo Wolf has ever approached Wagner in the capacity for bathing each scene, each character, in a light and an atmosphere of its own. (Wolf's achievements in this line were of course on a much smaller scale than Wagner's, but some of them are hardly less wonderful if we take into consideration the limitations of the black-and-white medium in which he worked.) This is surely one of the most baffling mysteries in music,—how the same few dozen tones and colours can be made to suggest such differently coloured aspects of the visible world, a world, we must remember, from which music is utterly cut off by the very nature of its medium. But whatever the explanation, the fact is indubitable; though it is a comparatively new thing in music, and indeed would not be possible without our modern developments of harmony, colour and technique. It is virtually unknown in pre-Wagnerian music. I do not mean that no previous composer ever gave a specially appropriate tint to a particular scene. That was frequently done; but it was done more or less by a convention, by the use of instruments having a particular association in the minds of the audience, as when the oboe or the cor anglais would be used for suggesting a pastoral scene, or the horns,—as in the beautiful passage at the commencement of the Freischütz overture—for suggesting a wood. The Wagnerian and Wolfian method to which I am now referring is something quite different from this. The term "method," indeed, is inappropriate, for it is impossible to reduce it to any rules or to trace the secret of its effect, as we can in the two other general instances I have cited. It is possible to say that the cold, bare effect of Wolf's Das verlassene Mägdlein comes from the peculiar harmonies he uses, and the pitch at which they are used,—just as the pastoral effect of the "Scène aux champs" in Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique comes from the use of the cor anglais. But the difference is this,—that you can standardise, as it were, the pastoral effects of the oboe or the cor anglais, whereas you cannot standardise the effects of Das verlassene Mägdlein. Even in the hands of a fifth-rate composer the oboe may be made to suggest a shepherd: but give Wolf's harmonies to a second-rate musician and tell him to "paint" with them as Wolf has done, and he will soon realise that the "painting" is really not separable from the music as a whole, even though we may be able to say analytically that it is due to one factor more than another. The truth is that the scene has been perceived with such intensity of vision by the composer that, unknown to him, and without any volition on his part, the vision has made its own idiom for itself, incarnated itself in lines and colours that are expressive of it and it alone.
It is this subtle faculty that is always unconsciously operative in Wagner. It first comes to light in Die Feen. It gave parts of the Flying Dutchman their strange salt tang. It makes the peculiar white light of Lohengrin. And after that opera, when Wagner had attained full command of his powers, it did astounding things for him. There is a different light, a different air, in each of the four dramas of the Ring; and this broad difference between any two of the four is maintained in spite of there being minor differences of colour between the various scenes of each of them. How mysterious and infallible this faculty is in its workings is best seen from the fact that when Wagner took up the second half of Siegfried, in 1869, after having suspended work upon it in 1857, he did what no other musician before him or since could have done—spontaneously, unconsciously reverted to the idiom of twelve years before. Between those two dates he had travelled an incredibly long path as a musician; he had written Tristan and the Meistersinger, two works with as many differences of idiom between themselves as there are between either of them and the Ring. Yet the wonderful brain could sweep itself clear of all the new impressions that had fed it during those twelve years, and, though the new acquisitions of technique of course remained, he thinks himself back in a flash to the very centre of the souls of the Ring characters and the very colour and temperature of the scenes he had parted from so long ago.
This is the pictorial instinct of Wagner seen in its totality. In its detail it is equally marvellous. Each scene is so bathed in its own appropriate light and colour, and strewn with its own peculiar shadows, that the music itself, apart from the scenic setting, is eloquent of the place and the hour of the action. In Wagner's music, as in Wolf's, one is conscious not only of the locality and the person and the race: one can almost tell the time of day. Music like that at the awakening of Brynhilde would go with nothing but a mountain height in blinding sunlight. Hunding is not physically darker to the eye than he is to the ear in that marvellous tuba motive that accompanies his first entry in the Valkyrie. The gait of Siegfried's music is as rapid as Mime's; but the differing stature of the two men is unmistakable from the music alone. One might multiply instances by the hundred of effects of realistic differentiation obtained not merely by orchestral colour, but by something subtly inter wrought into the very texture of the music. (The Hunding theme, for example, is "black" and sinister even on the pianoforte.) It is just this faculty of seeing everything with the most precise of painter's eyes, and then finding the infallibly right musical correlative of it, that enables Wagner to achieve such variety among pictures that are in essence the same. How many and how different woodlands there are in his music, how many degrees of sunlight, how many shades and qualities of darkness! The storm that maddens Mime after the exit of Siegfried is a very different storm from the one through which Siegmund rushes to the house of Hunding. What other man could have written two Rhine-Maidens' trios like those in the Rhinegold and the Götterdämmerung, each so liquid, so mobile, so sweet with the primal innocence of the world, and therefore so alike in many respects, yet so absolutely different?
So it comes about that without any tone-painting in the ordinary acceptation of the word, Wagner succeeds in bringing the visible universe before our eyes in a way and to an extent that no other musician has done. Of tone-painting pure and simple there is practically none in Tristan. Wagner is here concerned solely with a man and woman; yet how actual he makes every scene in which they move, and this without a single realistic stroke. In the garden scene he uses none of the conventional musical recipes—there is no obvious rustling of leaves, no sighing of the breeze, no purling of the brooks,—yet how the magic of the garden and of the hour steals through us and intoxicates us! How hot and dry the air has become in the third Act,—as dry to us as to the parched tongue of the wounded man alone on the castle walls, with the mid-day sun turning the blue sea beyond to a vibrating, blinding haze. And—to me the most wonderful of all—how sinister is the atmosphere he creates through virtually the whole of the Götterdämmerung; how, though indeed it is mostly set in the daylight, one feels that here among these Gibichungs, with gaunt, grim Hagen for weaver of the web of fate, the very earth has lost the radiant smile it had in Siegfried's forest and on Brynhilde's mountain top. The sun no longer warms, the Rhine no longer laughs and glints and gladdens. And finally, how exquisitely adapted is the melodic and harmonic idiom of Parsifal,—so smoothly flowing, so full of melting and caressing tenderness,—to that static world from which, with the purging from it of so much human passion, so much even of the ordinary physical energy of humanity too has gone. For this, as for everything else, he found the right, the only musical equivalent, without seeking for it. His visions painted themselves.
12
Even the best of Wagnerians to-day become a little impatient at the occasional longueurs in his operas. Not merely does he plan them on a scale that makes it almost impossible to give some of them in their entirety under ordinary conditions, but he sometimes lapses into a prolixity that is regrettable or maddening according to the frame of mind we happen to be in at the moment. Most of his prolixity is to be accounted for by that bad text-construction to which I have drawn attention. Music, let it be said again and again, is primarily an emotional art, and the less it has to do with mere dramatic explanation the better. We can never tire of Wotan pouring out his heart in loving farewell to his child; but we can hear Wotan tell the long story of his financial and matrimonial troubles once too often. We could listen as often to Kundry's story of Herzeleide as to the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony or the "Kleine Nacht-Musik" of Mozart; but wild horses would not drag us to the theatre to listen to old Gurnemanz's too-often-told tale of Amfortas and Klingsor, and how the sacred spear was lost. Yet though the poet Wagner is generally answerable for the occasional tedious quarters-of-an-hour in the operas, the musician Wagner is not wholly free from blame. He never managed to get quite rid of the slow-footedness that was characteristic of his music from the first; to the very end he sometimes takes rather longer to drive his points home than is absolutely necessary; and in these more rapid and impatient days that goes against him sorely. He is often reproached with rhythmical monotony. There is some truth in the charge, which as a whole he himself would probably not have taken the trouble to repel. There is a passage in one of his letters in which he recognises that his music is not so rhythmical as it might be, but he holds that some lack of rhythmical variety is inseparable from an ideal of dramatic music such as his. As I have attempted to show, he relied much more on harmonic effect than on rhythm, the latter being more peculiarly the instrument of the symphonic composer, while harmonic change is more suited to depict the varying aspects of a dramatic action. But against the comparative regularity of his rhythms is to be set his sense of style. He had an intuitive knowledge of how and when to break up a melodic line that was in danger of becoming too uniform. One of the simplest illustrations of this may be seen in the Parsifal Prelude (vocal score, p. 5, lines 1 and 2); just at the moment when we are beginning to suspect that the theme of "Faith" has been repeated quite often enough and to dread the further repetition that has already got under weigh, he alters the signature from 6/4 to 9/4, and gives a new rhetorical turn to the familiar melody. In Wotan's Abschied, again, we are unconscious of the uniformity of the rhythm in phrase after phrase, so consummate is the art with which the interest is always being transferred from one part of the combined vocal and orchestral tissue to another, and so beautifully planned is not only each section in itself but what may be called the exposition and development and cadence of the whole scene. Wagner could afford to dispense with the smaller rhythmical manœuvring of individual musical phrases; he had the much greater faculty of endowing long scenes and even whole operas with a vast dramatic rhythm of their own. Hundreds of smaller composers can give this page or that of their music a rhythmic piquancy that Wagner could never have attained on the same small scale; but not one of them could achieve such a rhythm as that of the second Act of Tristan, with its slow, steady, imperceptible transition from night and its rapture to daylight and its cruel disillusioning glare.
Wagner's prolixity, again, is not the flabby dulness of a mind that is merely maundering on and on from sheer incompetence to get to grips with the essentials of an emotion, but the over-copiousness of an inexhaustibly rich brain. And if this quality of his has its occasional bad side, we do well to remember that it is accountable also for some of his most gigantic achievements in expression. Were it not for the endless inventive power and the never-failing sense of beauty in it, a work like Tristan, that never pauses till the last drop of bitter-sweet juice has been squeezed out of the theme, would be hardly bearable. Like Bach, Wagner could never conceive any emotion without intensifying it to the utmost. The barest hint of joy in one of Bach's texts will set him carolling like a lark; the barest hint of mortality will bedim his music with all the tears of all the universe for its dead. Wagner has the same insatiable hunger for expression. In Tristan in particular every emotion is developed to its furthest limit of poignancy. The passion of love becomes almost delirium; when Tristan, in the third Act, sings of the thirst caused by his wound, our very mouths, our very bones, seem dried as if by some burning sirocco blowing from the desert; when the sick man praises Kurvenal for his devotion it is a cosmic pæan to friendship that he sings. In hundreds of other cases it is not by elaboration of speech that he makes his overwhelming effect, but by a sort of volcanic concentration. Mingled rage and grief and despair have never found such colossal expression anywhere, in any art, as in those few bars given to the frustrated and maddened Wotan after Fricka has foiled his plan for the protection of Siegmund in the fight (the Valkyrie, vocal score, pp. 118, 119). Pathos will never find more touching accents than those of Brynhilde in her last great scene with Wotan (Valkyrie, pp. 292, 293); few things in all music convey such a sense of tears as the strange salt tones of the oboe and cor anglais here. For concentrated fury there is nothing to compare with the outburst of the bound and impotent Alberich as he dismisses the Nibelungs who have witnessed his shame (the Rhinegold, pp. 199-201); technically this is one of the most effective crescendi in all Wagner's works. His imagination always takes fire at a single touch, a single suggestion, and there is no staying it until the fire has burnt itself completely out. In the Siegfried Idyl he has only to think of the child whose coming meant so much to him, and all the fountains of human tenderness are unsealed; this is not an individual father musing over his child's cradle, but all nature crooning a song of love for its little ones. It is this intensification of every emotion he has to express that makes each of his characters, like Shakespeare's, seem the epitome of that particular phase of human nature. Tristan and Isolde are the world's most passionate and most tragic lovers: the opera is the very quintessence of the egoism of sexual love. So with a score of other characters. The last word—for our own day at any rate—in god-like majesty has been uttered in Wotan; the last word of womanly gentleness and sweetness in Eva and Gutrune; the last word of tragic womanhood in Sieglinde; the last word of superb womanhood in Brynhilde; the last word of mellow and kindly middle age in Hans Sachs; the last word of scheming feebleness in Mime; the last word of elemental savagery in the Valkyries; the last word of youthful irresponsibility in the Meistersinger apprentices; the last word of human grimness in Hagen; the last word of dog-like devotion in Kurvenal. The character-drawing is endless in its variety and infallible in its touch.
13
Parsifal stands in a class apart from all the other works of Wagner. Its characterisation is not individual but symbolic; Amfortas and Parsifal and Kundry and Klingsor are not men and women whom we might meet any day in the flesh, but simply types of human aspiration or failure. We have outgrown the mental world of the work; the religious symbolism of it, quâ religious symbolism, leaves many of us unimpressed; yet the basic emotional stuff of it all is enduring, and we must not allow ourselves to be set against the opera because the forms in which Wagner has embodied a durable philosophy are themselves of a time instead of all time. Evidently the symphonist in him was at this stage overpowering the dramatist. The symphonist can safely deal with types or abstractions; the dramatist can only deal with individuals. Wagner has made the blunder of trying to translate the most delicate, the most esoteric perceptions into the language of the theatre, of setting symbols upon the stage. The force of a poetic symbol lies wholly in the imagination: as soon as a dramatist or a painter tries to set it visibly before us, the free flight of the imagination is curbed by the physical obviousness, the physical limitations, of the figure that is put before the eye; the universal cannot be perceived for the particular. Wagner's root idea in Parsifal was to show us, in Kundry, a living symbol of the dual nature of woman, half-angel and half-beast, in turns sensual and repentant, the destroyer and the saviour of man. But it is precisely symbols of this kind, cutting down to the obscurest depths of human psychology, that cannot retain their vast suggestiveness after they have been narrowed down to the personality of a single actor. We no longer see the eternal and infernal womanly; it is only a German prima-donna, stout of build and heavy of movement, that we see upon the stage. So with Parsifal himself. Mr. Huneker has called him "that formidable imbecile." So might we style St. Francis of Assisi, or the Buddha, or any other of the simple wise ones of the world, if we persist in looking at them through unsympathetic and unimaginative eyes. The conception of Parsifal is fine enough in itself—an unstained soul made divinely wise by its very simplicity, its love, its pity. But a character of this kind should be left to the imagination, or to music to suggest to the imagination: it is impossible to realise it behind the footlights in the person of an actor. A Parsifal is a figure for the quiet of one's chamber, not for a crowded theatre lying the other side of the box office. Hundreds of people must have felt, as I have done for twenty years, that a good deal of Parsifal affects us more deeply at home than it ever does in the theatre, the loss of the orchestral colour being more than made up for by the gain in imaginative intensity. And the difficulty of making such a character vital and credible upon the stage is increased when he is made the centre of a quasi-religious ritual that has long ceased to have a meaning for many people.
But in spite of it all, Parsifal is a masterpiece. The story of it seems to arouse a violent antipathy in some people, who apparently regard it as an immoral work. The pleasant little game of Parsifal-baiting began with Nietzsche, who said that he despised everyone who did not regard the opera as an outrage on morals.
Like most philosophers, Nietzsche had the charming failing of imagining that the only right way for the world to go was his way. He was singularly taken with that notion of his of the super-man—a mythical and unidentifiable mammal about which we have never been able to get any definite information, either from Nietzsche or from any of his disciples. Now Nietzsche found this ideal of his in Siegfried, and he loathed Parsifal because it preached the negation of life, the denial of the Will to Power. Later writers, like Mr. Runciman and Mr. Huneker, who are not, I think, Nietzscheans, agree with him in seeing something peculiarly weak in the philosophy—to call it by that name—of Parsifal. They see in the opera not merely moral weakness but moral nastiness. I remember one of the simpler adherents of this theory telling me, in awe-stricken tones, that this "sexless" opera was the resort of a set of men who were mixed up in a German scandal of a few years ago that sent its unwholesome odour through the civilised world: and he obviously thought that this discredited Wagner's Parsifal, whereas it struck me as being very like asking us to give up having breakfast because Dr. Crippen and Charles Peace liked bacon and eggs.
Nor can any moral flabbiness, I think, be discovered in Parsifal except by people who make the mistake of thinking that the "philosophy" of any musical work matters very much. Mr. Runciman detests Parsifal and calls him a perfect idiot—that epithet being Mr. Runciman's playful intensification of Wagner's "pure [i.e. stainless] fool"—"fool" being unfortunately the only monosyllable we have in English for the translation of "Thor." But even supposing Parsifal were an idiot—which I dispute—would it greatly matter? Mr. Runciman has launched his full battery against the Siegfried of Wagner's poem—a swaggering, quarrelsome, ungrateful young noodle; but, as Mr. Runciman's own eloquent description of the opera shows, the Siegfried of Wagner's music is a vastly more interesting and sympathetic person than the Siegfried of Wagner's verse. Similarly, even if I could think, when reading the libretto, that Parsifal is an idiot, I could never think so when listening to the music. The truth is that a good many of Wagner's characters and dramatic motives seem rather foolish to us nowadays. For my part I do not know or care whether or how Parsifal is to "redeem" the world. The word redemption has no meaning for me in the sense in which Wagner and the theologians use it. I can believe that redemption is a concrete reality in the pawnbroking business; but if any one tells me that men's souls are to be bought and sold, or lost and found again, without any volition of their own, I can only say that all this conveys about as much to my intelligence as talk about a quadrilateral triangle would do. But to appreciate a work of art it is not in the least necessary to subscribe to its author's philosophical or religious opinions; a rationalist can be as deeply thrilled by the Matthew Passion as any Christian can be. The "thesis" of a work of art is the one thing in it that does not concern us as artists. Who is to decide between rival philosophies or sociologies? Personally I believe that one philosophy is just as good as another, and worse, as the Irishman would say; but if an artist chooses to set forward a character as the embodiment of some philosophy that possesses him at the moment, I am willing to listen to him so long as he can talk interestingly about it, without my wishing either to subscribe to the philosophy or to dissent from it. Mr. Runciman thinks there is something frightful in the thesis—let us call it that—of Parsifal. I do not see anything frightful in it. I do not believe in it as the only rule of life; but then I do not believe—in that sense—in Senta's "redemption" of the Dutchman, or Elisabeth's "redemption" of Tannhäuser, or that Lohengrin was right in withholding his name from Elsa and then going off in a huff when she asked for it. But all these fantastic motives, in which I have no belief, no more affect my appreciation of the operas than my disbelief in ghosts affects my appreciation of Hamlet. I do not want any of my friends to be like Parsifal, Amfortas, or Klingsor—especially Klingsor: but neither do I want any of them to be like Lohengrin or Elsa or Senta or the Flying Dutchman. A real world run on the lines of Parsifal would probably drive normal men mad in a month: but then who could live in a world in which Senta-sentimental maidens insisted on jumping into the sea to "redeem" master mariners, taking no account of the able seamen and the stokers and the stewards, who, from anything I can gather to the contrary in the text of the Flying Dutchman, all go to Davy Jones's locker in a state of pure damnation what time the captain and the girl ascend to glory? No, we had better leave alone the question of what the world would be like if we were to try to model it on Parsifal. We know very well that nothing of the sort will ever happen, just as we know that Little Red Riding Hood's wolf will not gobble up little Phyllis on her way to the High School next week, or the door of the safe fly open when the burglar says "Sesame." These be but fairy tales. We can still sleep in our beds o' nights: and we can still go to Parsifal without either having our morals corrupted or feeling that we are encouraging race suicide.
I listen to Parsifal, then—and I imagine most other people do the same—as I would to any other outpouring of a great man's spirit on a world of ideas that fascinated him for the moment, and without any more impulse to translate it all into terms of reality than when I am listening to the Flying Dutchman or Lohengrin. The opera is in no sense the work of an exhausted old man. It has been alleged that the plot is "the work of Wagner's tired-out old age." But Parsifal was sketched as early as 1857, worked out in detail in 1864 (when Wagner was only fifty-one), and turned into verse in 1877. Further, the central ideas of the drama are to be found both in the sketches of Jesus of Nazareth (1848) and The Victors (1856); while in 1855 it was Wagner's intention to bring Parsifal on the stage in the final scene of Tristan, opposing him, as a symbol of renunciation, to Tristan as a symbol of passion. At almost any time of Wagner's life, indeed, he might have written a Parsifal. All his life through he fluctuated between intense eroticism and an equally intense revulsion from the erotic. One may say, in truth, that such a man had to write a Parsifal before he died. "Il est à remarquer, mon fils," says the excellent Abbé Coignard in Anatole France's La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque, "que les plus grands saints sont des pénitents, et, comme le repentir se proportionne à la faute, c'est dans les plus grands pêcheurs que se trouve l'étoffe des plus grands saints. La matière première de la sainteté est la concupiscence, l'incontinence, toutes les impuretés de la chair et de l'esprit. Il importe seulement, après avoir amassé cette matière, de la travailler selon l'art théologique et de la modeler, pour ainsi dire, en figure de pénitence, ce qui est l'affaire de quelques années, de quelques jours et parfois d'un seul instant, comme il se voit dans le cas de la contrition parfaite."
In the great book of sex there are many chapters, and Parsifal is simply the last of them for some people. For others it is a chapter that they turn to again and again in moments of revulsion from the illusions of passion. Wagner's insight was clear enough: the Parsifals are no more denials of the Life-Force than the Tristans are; they are simply another phase of the Life-Force. When we disengage the central idea of Parsifal from its rather unskilful operatic setting, the work is simply an artist's dream of an ideally innocent world, purged of the lust, the hatred, the cruelty that deface the world we live and groan in. This is the world the music paints for us—
"Summers of the snakeless meadow, unlaborious earth and oarless sea";
and the cumbrous, old-fashioned stage framework upon which the drama is constructed means no more to me than a clumsily-drafted programme to a great symphonic poem,—it detracts no more from my musical enjoyment than that would do. The music itself, apart from a few commonplaces in the first Act, is marvellous. It is indeed an old man's music, but only in the sense that it opens windows for us upon regions of the soul to which only the old and emotionally wise have access. Swinburne somewhere speaks of Blake's face having the look of being lit up from the inside. I see a similar luminous transfiguration in the later portraits of Wagner[410]—they have the look of a man who has penetrated to the great underlying simplicities of things; and I find in the music of Parsifal the same subtle, searching simplicity, the same almost unearthly illumination. Nowhere does the great master seem to me more truly powerful than in these quiet strains, whose suggestiveness, as is the case with the last Italian songs of Hugo Wolf, is inexplicably out of proportion to the quiet economy of their tissue. To the last the wonderful brain kept growing. He makes a new musical idiom, a new texture, for Parsifal as he had done for every other of his works; above all a harmonic language of incomparable subtlety, a gliding, melting chromaticism that searches us through and through. It is from this novel chromaticism—a very different one from that of Tristan—that the harmony of César Franck has come, and all the modern harmony that builds upon Franck.