Wagner

In the last act Siegfried, out hunting with the Gibichung tribe, finds himself alone by the riverside. The Rhine-maidens beg the ring from him; he refuses, and they tell him that this day he must die. The other hunters arrive, and Siegfried, drinking the second philtre, tells the story of how he first won Brunnhilda. That is Hagen's opportunity: to avenge Gunther he stabs Siegfried in the back. To the tremendous funeral march the body is carried over the hills. It is brought into the hall of the Gibichungs. Gunther has pangs of remorse, but Hagen, only half-human, has none; the pair fall out, and Gunther is killed. Gutruna wails, as a woman will when she loses her husband and brother within a quarter of an hour; Hagen goes to take the ring from Siegfried's finger, but the corpse raises its hand menacingly and all draw back aghast. Brunnhilda enters; all now has become clear to her, and she resolves that she, like Wotan, will renounce a loveless life—a life based on fraud and tyranny. She tells Gutruna that Siegfried has never belonged to her—is hers, Brunnhilda's; and on receiving this crushing blow, Gutruna creeps to her brother's side and lies there, miserable and hopeless. He is dead; but he was the list of her kin and only friend, and, robbed of even the memory of Siegfried, to be near his dead body seems better than nothing. Then Brunnhilda commands the funeral pyre to be built and the body of Siegfried placed on it; she chants her song in praise of love, mounts her horse Grani, and rides through the fire into the Rhine. Shouting "The ring!" Hagen dashes after her; the ring has returned to the maidens, and Loge, unchained, mounts up and Walhalla is consumed. So ends the third subsidiary drama of the Ring.

The music is the last Wagner wrote in his ripe period; when we get to Parsifal his powers were waning. In point of structure it is the same as that of Siegfried. It has less of springtime freshness than the Valkyrie, and the prevailing colour is sombre and tragic; but there are magnificent things. The Norns scene, the Journey of the Rhine, the Waltrante scene, the funeral march, and Brunnhilda's final speech, are Wagner in the full glory of his strength.

The complete Ring was given for the first time at the opening of the Bayreuth (Wagner) Theatre in 1876. The performance did not pay, and the expenses had to be covered by selling the dresses and scenery. Bayreuth was by no means in those days the fashionable summer resort it has since become. Nevertheless, the immediate effect felt throughout Europe was electric, stupendous. As a mere advertisement, it proved more effective than anything devised for pills and patent soaps. Hundreds who went to Bayreuth to pass the time, or at most in a spirit of intelligent curiosity, came away converted to the new faith; many who went to sponge remained to pay; and all preached the doctrine of Wagnerism wherever they went. Well they might. As I was an infant at the time, my recollections of the first performances and of Wagner's speech are not so vivid as those of some of my younger colleagues, who, like myself, were not there; but, according to all creditable accounts, the representations must have been a nearer approach to perfection in all respects, save the singing, than anything seen before. In one sense Wagner had attempted no revolution in stage-craft; but in another sense it was, perhaps, the best sort of revolution to secure the ablest men, and make them take care, pains, with their work. Anyhow, if tolerable operatic representations can now be seen in every country of Europe save Italy, the credit must go to Wagner, who first taught the impresarios what to aim at and how to achieve their aim, and gave the accursed star system a blow from which it is slowly dying. Carefully nursed though it is in New York and at Covent Garden, its convulsive shudders announce impending death, and already one hears the wail of those who mourn a departing order of things.

"PARSIFAL" (1882).

This disastrous and evil opera was written in Wagner's old age, under the influence of such a set of disagreeably immoral persons as has seldom if ever been gathered together in so small a town as Bayreuth. The whole drama consists in this: At Montsalvat there was a monastery, and the head became seriously ill because he had been seen with a lady. In the long-run he is saved by a young man—rightly called a "fool"—who cannot tolerate the sight of a woman. What it all means—the grotesque parody of the Last Supper, the death of the last woman in the world, the spear which has caused the Abbot's wound and then cures it—these are not matters to be entered into here. Some of the music is fine.

TO SUM UP.

Wagner died suddenly at Venice February 13, 1883, and a few days later was buried in the garden of Villa Wahnfried, Bayreuth. For a really great composer he had quite a long life, and he lived it out strenuously; and if he struggled and suffered during a great portion of it, at any rate his last years brought him peace, undisturbed by the old nightmare dread of poverty.

His activity manifested itself in three forms: the reforms he effected in the theatre and the concert-room, his own music dramas, and the prose writings, in which he both advocated the reforms and argued for his theories. The prose, I have said, is of very small account now, and, with the exception of the essays mentioned earlier, his essays and articles have only a curious interest. His theatrical reforms consisted in making the artistes sing intelligently and with care, and in demanding realistic scenery. Intelligence and pains—these are the two new elements he introduced into the theatre; and if most operatic performances to-day are not absolutely ridiculous, we owe this miraculous change to Wagner alone. The notion that anything, however slovenly and stupid, is good enough for opera was dissipated by him alone. A book of an interesting gossipy sort might be compiled to show the difference between opera representations before Bayreuth and those of a post-Bayreuth date, but there is no space for any such excursions here. At the risk of turning this sketch into something like an analytical programme, I have concentrated my attention on his operas, and have tried to show how the later Wagner—the Wagner of the Ring, the Mastersingers, and of Tristan—grew out of the earlier Wagner, who composed as everyone else did at the time. He created a new form of art, and no serious composer will ever dream of going back to the ancient form of Gluck, Mozart and Weber. From the historical point of view, it is the creation of this new form that gives him his importance. He did for opera what George Stevenson did for vehicular traffic. The music drama has driven out Italian opera as completely and irrevocably as the steam-engine drove out the stage-coach. As far as his choice of subjects, there is no reason on earth why he should be followed. The myth suited him because he happened to be the Wagner he was, but there are a hundred reasons why present-day composers should leave the myth alone. The myth gave him opportunities to display his passion, keen sympathy with picturesque nature, tremendous sense of a remote past that never existed; but other composers have other mental and artistic qualities, and for them there are fresh fields to be explored. No one need trouble about the myth unless he is prepared to show us something finer than anything in Wagner.

I have been compelled to leave out much interesting matter—Wagner's trips to London, his difficulties in getting his theatre built, the financial failure of Bayreuth at first, its success afterwards. Nor can I say much about the man. He was certainly an overwhelming personality. In his train followed such really great musicians as Liszt, von Bülow, Tansig, and others. Richter was his copyist and disciple. He crushed all originality out of Jensen, and, doubtless, others. Kings and Princes were his very humble servants. And at Bayreuth he had round him a pack of fools to do his bidding, as well as a number of intelligent mediocrities, who wrote books and printed newspapers about him, inspired by the mediocrity's ordinary ambition to become known through attaching one's self to a famous man.

The fighting is over and done; there remain to us the glorious music dramas. After more than twenty years Wagner's fame is still growing, and it seems impossible that it will ever wane or that he will not, in far-off times, be numbered with the greatest of the great. "He sleeps, or wakes, with the enduring dead."