That there is a plaintive and unmanly weakness in all this is not to be denied. But we have to bear in mind that if Wagner had not received the assistance of his friends and been enabled to live as he wished to live and to work according to his fancies, we should not require biographies of him, and his great dramas would not have been the delight of two continents. That there was still further weakness in the metal of this man is shown by the extremities of depression into which he sank. Suicidal thoughts were no strangers to him and restlessness and discouragement were much too common. In a letter of March 30, 1853, he says to Liszt:

"What can help me? My nights are mostly sleepless, weary, and miserable. I rise from my bed to see a day before me which will bring me not one joy. Intercourse with people who torture me and from whom I withdraw to torture myself! I feel disgust at whatever I undertake. This cannot go on. I cannot bear life much longer."

Yet in spite of these pitiable feelings the artistic impulse was all potent within him. In the beginning of 1859 he wrote to his fidus Achates: "Believe me implicitly when I tell you that the only reason for my continuing to live is the irresistible impulse of creating a number of works of art which have their vital force in me. I recognise beyond all doubt that this act of creating and completing alone satisfies me and fills me with a desire of life, which otherwise I should not understand." And yoked with these ideas always went his conviction that the world owed him a gratuitous living that he might accomplish the creative functions of his genius. In October, 1855, he wrote to the amiable Franz:

And then he adds pathetically that he is better fitted to spend money than to earn it.

In such a man as Wagner the artistic traits are dominant. They rule the personality. The conviction of this man that he had in him the conception of epoch-making works, and his recognition of the fact that the world was his artistic enemy, were the moving forces of his life. Without constantly keeping this in mind, it is quite impossible to comprehend the character of Wagner. It explains at once its weakness and its strength. It accounts even for his domestic history, while it does not justify it. His first wife was a good woman, and in a way he loved her. But she was never able to become an essential part of his life, because she could not enter into his artistic thoughts and purposes. Hence she was unable to control his impulses to wander. Cosima von Bülow understood him before she went to live under the immediate influence of his mind. That they should have been drawn to one another was inevitable. He who in letters to Liszt had cried out in anguish of his need of a home and woman's care was very ready to accept them at her hands at no matter what sacrifice, and she in the same spirit was ready to give them. To her Wagner was constant in spite of the fact that temperamentally he was an inconstant man. She controlled his desires, and they needed control.

The artistic aspirations which governed his entire career made it a disappointment. Wagner died a disappointed man. That he was gratified by the production of the "Ring" at Bayreuth there need be no denial. That he enjoyed to the fullest the praises of those who seemed to comprehend his ideals is beyond doubt. But, nevertheless, he realised that he had not penetrated the public mind. He saw plainly that the applause for his works was not for their revelation of a new standpoint in operatic art, but for their purely theatrical effectiveness. The public never saw beneath the surface. He felt that he was wholly misunderstood. In a letter of 1859 to Liszt he said:

Again and again he spoke in no doubtful terms of his knowledge that the public did not understand his aims. He was delighted by every evidence of sympathy, but he suffered untold agonies of mind from the fact that "Tannhäuser," "Lohengrin," and "Die Meistersinger" were treated by the world as mere operas, and that there was no evidence that the operatic public understood his departure from the old and insincere methods of the commercial theatre. The disappointment which Wagner experienced from the failure of the world to grasp his ideals would have continued, had he lived longer. Even now only a few ardent lovers of the loftiest things in art have entered fully into the spirit of his conceptions. One has only to attend a performance of "Siegfried" before an ordinary audience of professed Wagnerites to see how far short of a complete understanding of Wagner his friends still are. Thousands of well-meaning persons regard themselves as disciples of this unique master when they have learned the contents of Hans von Wolzogen's handbooks and can identify every leading motive in each score when it is heard in the orchestra. The praise of all such people was vinegar and gall to Wagner. He felt that he was utterly misunderstood, and that was torture to his sensitive spirit.

He was unhappy, too, because he could not get his works properly performed. Perhaps he never experienced deep delight at any representation except the first of "Tristan und Isolde," in which the splendid work of Schnorr filled him with joy. But his "Lohengrin" and his "Tannhäuser" were never given to his satisfaction, for there were absolutely no singers who united the ability to declaim the recitative and to deliver the plentiful cantilena also. Not only was there a lack of singers, but there were no stage managers who understood him, and so all over Germany his works were performed in a spirit foreign to their poetic content, and the master was misrepresented to a public which would have found it almost impossible to comprehend him in the most favourable conditions. Mr. Dannreuther says: "The composer of 'Tristan' confronted by the Intendant of some Hoftheater, fresh from a performance of Herr von Flotow's 'Martha'! A comic picture, but unfortunately a typical one, implying untold suffering on Wagner's part."

Wagner was under medium size, but had the appearance of being somewhat taller than he really was. In 1849 the police description of him ran thus: "Wagner is 37 to 38 years old, of middle height, has brown hair, wears glasses; open forehead; eyebrows brown; eyes grey-blue; nose and mouth well proportioned; chin round. Particulars: in speaking and moving he is hasty." Animation marked all his ways, and at times he revelled in the wildest spirits. Periods of deep depression occurred to him, but his nervous energy seldom deserted him.

The study of his personality will always bring one back to the same point. He was entirely dominated by his artistic nature and ambition. His life can be understood only by an analysis of his motives based on this premise. Wagner, the man, was the creature of Wagner, the dreamer of "Siegfried." There has never been a clearer instance of the mastery of genius. He was unceasingly driven by it from boyhood to the grave. It made him selfish, intolerant, dogmatic, dictatorial. But it achieved its ends. The grave at Wahnfried contains only ashes. All that was vital in Richard Wagner lives still in the dramas and the prose works. The forces which were in the man are just as active now as they were when he laughed and stormed in the villa at Bayreuth.

PART II
THE ARTISTIC AIMS OF WAGNER

CHAPTER I
THE LYRIC DRAMA AS HE FOUND IT

What was this man Wagner trying to do?

Broadly stated, the purpose of his life was to reform the lyric drama, to restore to it the artistic nature with which it was born, and to bring it into direct relation to the life of the German people. His ideal was the highest form of the drama, with music as the chief expository medium; and his most earnest desire, to make that drama national, both in its expression of the loftiest artistic impulses of the Teutonic people and in their recognition of that fact. The whole controversy about the works of Wagner arose from the determined opposition of those who were unwilling to see the existing order of things operatic changed. The opera, as it was when Wagner hurled his new ideas and works into the theatrical arena, was a vastly different thing from the music-drama, and the confusion in the public and critical mind, resulting from the fact that Wagner used the outward and visible signs of opera, brought about a bitter conflict. This conflict cannot end till the whole public realises that although it goes on Monday night to hear "Lucia di Lammermoor" and on Wednesday to hear "Tristan und Isolde," both employing song instead of speech, and both outwardly built on theatrical lines, it is nevertheless confronted by two radically different forms of art, working for diametrically opposite results.

That we may the better understand the matter we must shortly rehearse the story of the birth and development of the lyric drama. The opera was born at the end of the sixteenth century of an effort to reconstruct the extinct Greek drama. The projectors of the movement knew that the Greeks delivered the lines of their tragedies in an artificial manner closely resembling chanting. In their endeavours to provide something similar to this, they invented dramatic recitative. At first this recitative was employed only in the construction of monologues, but as the explorers in new musical territory gained confidence, they made wider reaches. At the close of the century "Eurydice," a drama in music, by Rinuccini and Peri, was publicly performed. The new form of play gained immediate popularity, and the progress of the lyric drama was begun.

The inventors of the new form had just ideas. Peri believed it to be the office of dramatic music to embody, intensify, and convey to the hearer the emotional content of the text. His method of accomplishing this was to imitate in music the nuances of the voice in speaking. In agitated passages he used a faster movement and irregular rhythm. In unimpassioned speech he wrote his music more smoothly. His ideas were undeniably correct, but they could not be adequately carried out with the resources of vocal music in his day. The art of solo writing was in its infancy, and the melodic and harmonic expression of dramatic emotion had just begun. Consequently Peri's music was monotonous. There was no wide difference between his delineation of sadness and his embodiment of despair. Furthermore his attempted fidelity to the inner nature of speech led him away from definite musical phraseology. His music was totally deficient in form, and it was the discernment of this weakness and the attempts of his successors to provide the remedy that led the opera out of the path of dramatic sincerity.

Monteverde, the most gifted of the early composers of opera, made remarkable essays at combining musical clearness and symmetry with dramatic expression, but his works show us that the materials of the art were as yet so embryonic as to prohibit complete success. But the instantaneous popularity of opera made it a veritable gold-field for composers, and it speedily became the California of all the adventurous spirits of music in the beginning of the seventeenth century. These writers naturally sought the shortest and easiest path to popularity, and this was soon proved to be in the provision of vocal airs of simple, clearly defined form and pretty melody. The operatic aria was thus developed and became the central sun of the operatic system.

But as solo arias could not make up the entire scheme of the opera, duets, trios, and quartettes were introduced, care being taken to conserve in them the principles of the air. It was soon found that a sharp demarcation had to be made between these set pieces and the ordinary dialogue by means of which the stories of the operas were told. So gradually an opera came to be a symmetrically arranged series of solos, duets, trios, quartettes, and other set pieces, joined by a chain of recitative. In all this development purely musical requirements had been considered. The librettist, therefore, was merely the servant of the composer, and it was his business to arrange his book with a view to a pleasing succession of pieces in the aria form, or some form very similar to it. His story had to be so constructed that it could be told in the dialogue between the set pieces, and by means of this dialogue it should lead up to situations at which the arias could be effectively, if not quite appropriately, introduced.

This was the condition of the opera in the middle of the eighteenth century at the advent of Mozart and Gluck. It should be noted that occasionally composers arose who had some sense of their obligations to dramatic art and who endeavoured to improve the æsthetic nature of the opera. Lully and Rameau in France did much along this line and established traditions which have been of lasting benefit to the lyric art of their country. But neither they nor their immediate successors discovered the radical evil of the system upon which they were working. The ground-plan of the opera was still musical. There was still no thought of first writing a dramatic poem and then setting it to music. The demands of the score formulated the plan for the libretto.

Mozart had not a drop of the reformer's blood in his veins. The incongruity of the extant form of the opera seems never to have occurred to his mind. He accepted the plan of the lyric drama as it was handed down to him by his forerunners without question, and by the sheer force of his incomparable genius succeeded in writing immortal apologies for its existence. In his hands the aria took a new meaning, and the recitative became a flexible and responsive instrument. His treatment of the carefully built ensembles, which had come to be a feature of opera, was that of a genius of the first order. So great, indeed, was this man that to-day the works of all his successors who wrote operas on the old plan become as farthing rushlights before the splendour of his glowing masterpieces. Antiquated as the style of Mozart's music is, his operas speak the accents of inspiration and come before us with the gesture of authority.

Gluck, on the other hand, without the musical genius of Mozart, had the insight of a cosmopolitan coupled with the impulses of a progressist. The external defects of the opera were patent to his sane consideration, and he sought at once for the corrective. He was a sincere, conscientious reformer; and he did not a little to cut away the growth of underbrush which had sprung up around the trunk of operatic art. But he did not discern that the twig had been bent, the tree inclined; and that the trunk itself needed to be hewn down and the growth started again from the root. He saw that there was too much difference between the recitative and the aria, and that the latter was an impediment to the progress of the drama. He perceived that the composers had catered too much to the vanity of singers and had permitted a richly ornamental style of song, antagonistic to broad dramatic expression, to become the type of operatic music. He refused to write with a constant view to helping the singer to display his voice and technic. He insisted that the business of the music was to voice the content of the text, or as he himself expressed it, "I endeavoured to reduce music to its proper function, that of seconding poetry by enforcing the expression of the sentiment and the interest of the situations without interrupting the action or weakening it by superfluous ornament." He strove to curtail the empty parade of musical devices and to restore that intimacy between text and song which had been the chief charm and the most potent argument for the existence of the "Drama per Musica" in its original form.

But Gluck failed to achieve his purpose because he retained the set musical forms which dictated the shape of the text and demanded the old-fashioned arrangement of the scenario. He did not reach that level of enlightenment from which he might have seen that the radical error of opera lay in regarding music as an end and not as a means. The stumbling-block of the lyric drama had been the aria, and to this fact Gluck was strangely blind. It may not be amiss to conjecture that, even if he had perceived the nature of this fault, he would not have known how to correct it; for the development of musical design had not advanced far enough to offer the suggestion of a better plan. Gluck saw the evil effect of the empty repetitions in the aria and expressly forbade them; but he was too wise to believe that he could proceed wholly without musical design. To have done so would have thrown him back to the era of Peri and would have resulted in chaos and a confusion of the public mind. Therefore, retaining the aria in a slightly modified form, he strove with the deepest earnestness and with admirable skill to infuse into the music of his works a genuine dramatic expressiveness. He made his arias delineative of the situations and he paid the homage of an artist to the text, instead of writing pretty tunes for their own sake. He tried to arrange the ballets, which his French public demanded, so that they should constitute part of the action of the drama and not be an interruption to it. And he made a special study of the resources of instrumental expression.

His public at first fought him with stubborn determination, but he conquered it in the end. Yet his influence on the operatic stage was not permanently felt outside of France. The impetus given to Italian opera by the easily attained popularity of the aria writers and the bent imparted to it by their style remained. The applause of the unthinking, who constitute the vast majority of theatre-goers in all countries, is much more readily obtained by the agile delivery of a brilliant air with a simple dance rhythm as its basis than by a seriously conceived dramatic piece, which demands that the auditor shall bring both intelligence and sensibility into the presence of the singer. The Italian writers sought for this easy applause, and the famous Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini, who were the princes of the Italian stage when Wagner was born, wrote wholly for the pleasure of the ear. The Italian opera was in its entirety a musical product, making but the shallowest pretence at representation of the thought of the text, and scorning real dramatic sincerity. The old forms prevailed and the librettist was but a purveyor to the composer.

In France some outward pretence of adhering to the long-established dramatic principles of the French lyric drama remained, but here the musical dictator of the day was Meyerbeer, a man who sought popular applause as ardently as any Italian, but who adopted a slightly different plan of gaining it. Whereas the Italian appealed to his public chiefly by musical sweet-meats, Meyerbeer deftly aimed at a combination of showy musical effects with all the resources of theatricalism. He brought to its perfection the ground-plan of the French grand opera, in which a striking succession of scenes is one of the most potent elements of attractiveness. Here the librettist must not only provide for the usual alternation of solos with duets, trios or quartettes, and ensembles, but must also plan the story of his book so that a simple cottage or moonlight love scene shall be followed by a grand pageant or a glittering ballet. One has only to recall the progress of the scenes in "L'Africaine" or "Les Huguenots" to see how the Meyerbeerian plan is worked out, and to realise how it has dominated the modern opera in such creations as Gounod's "Faust" and Verdi's "Aida."

The theatricalism of the ground-plan infused itself into the music with Meyerbeer. He was always planning for the immediate theatrical effect, never thinking of the deep dramatic truthfulness which might be imparted to music. For this reason his music is hollow and the bones of it rattle. Occasionally he is carried away by a really noble dramatic situation and writes greatly, as in the final duet of "Les Huguenots." But the problem of Meyerbeer was precisely the same as that of Rossini, namely, how best to tickle quickly the fancy of the great unthinking masses and to fill the theatre. Thus Wagner found the opera established on a purely commercial basis, with art degraded to the dust. It was this which filled him with disgust, and against which he fought throughout his life. It is not to be denied that in the beginning he tried to reach the public by the same means as Meyerbeer. He tried to serve both art and Mammon, but he speedily discovered that real success could not be thus gained. He learned in writing "Rienzi" that he was following the wrong path. In entering upon this path, however, he was certainly led astray partly by the victories of Weber.

This master had in his "Der Freischütz" produced in 1821 a work which not only was essentially German, but which abandoned much of the outward appearance of opera. He announced his position by the definition of opera as "an art work complete in itself, in which all the parts and contributions of the related and utilised arts meet and disappear in each other, and, in a manner, form a new world by their own destruction." It was his belief that a libretto should not be made simply as a framework for the old-fashioned sequence of tunes, but should have an organic union with the music, and he said, "It is the first and most sacred duty of song to be truthful with the utmost fidelity possible in declamation." He had no respect for the established forms, but held that the form of the music should be prescribed by the poem. Nevertheless one finds that in its outward aspects the Weber opera, by reason of its employment of the German folk-song style, treads a path not remote from that of the aria. For Weber did not discover any principle of musical design which would enable him to free himself from some restraint by the cyclical song form. Spoken dialogue takes the place of recitative in his works, but the vocal numbers, introduced in much the same way as in the older works, are of the song family, and in spite of an immensely widened and deepened expression, the dominance of a purely musical pattern is not escaped.

Such was the condition of operatic art and such the natural attitude of the public toward it when Richard Wagner began to look beyond the narrow boundaries of his small estate and dream of fame as an artist. The burning desire of the Königsberg and Riga period was, as he has expressed it in the "Communication to My Friends," "to extricate myself from the petty commerce of the German stage, and straightway try my luck in Paris." But it was only the puny huckstering of the little theatres which offended him. He had yet to learn that the commercial element was just as conspicuously present in more pretentious undertakings. He fell in love with Bulwer's "Rienzi," and at once saw in it material for an opera.

In trying to make this opera he learned that the impulse of a true art work must come not from without, but from within; that an opera which might be truly called a lyric drama could not be created out of the desire of some one to set the tempting portions of a lyric book to tuneful music, but only out of the demand of a great drama for the musical form of speech. In writing the book of "Rienzi" he thought only of producing an effective opera libretto, and to this end he followed the Meyerbeerian ground-plan. His goal was the Paris Grand Opéra, and a grand opera was what he wrote. The materials of the story he saw "in no other light than that of a five-act opera, with five brilliant finales, and filled with hymns, processions, and the musical clash of arms." But even while fashioning this material for purely theatrical effect, he sought to make contributions toward real art, and it was the impossibility of combining the Meyerbeerian make-believe with the fruit of his artistic nature that showed him how far he was astray from the path leading to substantial and permanent success. Nevertheless he would no doubt have struggled on to force himself to travel the highway toward the Grand Opéra, had he not found the gates locked against him. It was in his despair that he at last resolved to write that which was in him and take no thought of external success. And it was of this first travail of freed genius that were brought to birth the fundamental tenets of his dramatic creed, previously cherished only in the secret womb of his mind.

CHAPTER II
THE REFORMS OF WAGNER

We may now approach the study in detail of Wagner's artistic aims. I have already said that his purpose was to restore artistic truth, dramatic sincerity, to the opera, and to bring it into some relation to the life of the German people. Recapitulated with more particulars, then, the reforms at which he aimed were these:

(1)—The music had come to be the end instead of a means of expression, and consequently musical forms dominated. Wagner strove to confine music to its proper function of expression. He desired to prevent its being regarded as the object of the lyric drama, but wished it to take its legitimate place as one of the factors in the composition of such a play. His labour in this direction included the disuse of the set musical forms.

(2)—He sought to make a complete organic union of the elements of the drama employed in opera, a union in which each part should be essential and all should work together for a common end, namely the embodiment of the poet's thought.

(3)—He endeavoured to make the "libretto" a consistent drama, but always suitable to the emotional expressiveness of music.

(4)—He aimed to bring the lyric drama out of the slough of mere commercialism, and give it a direct relation to and influence upon the intellectual and æsthetic life of the people.

We have seen that when he set out to free himself from the petty commercialism of the German theatre, Wagner fondly dreamed that with a "grand opera" produced on the stage of the Grand Opéra of Paris, he would emancipate himself. But in writing that work and labouring for its production, he learned two vital facts, namely, that artistic success could not be attained on the lines of the typical grand opera and that from petty commercialism he had only approached that of a larger field. He saw on every hand the theatre in the hands of mere speculators, who sought not art, but money, and who were ready to sink all artistic principles in order that they might appeal to the debased tastes of "the stolid German Philistine or the bored Parisian roué." When he turned his eyes backward along the path of history, he saw that it had been thus for centuries. In the end he came to the conclusion that only in the relation of the Greek drama to the Greek people could he find that Arcadian perfection for which he sought. And so he asked himself whether it was not possible to rise once again to the lofty level of the Greek tragedy and thus bring the theatre into relation to the heart and mind of the people. In his conception of the lyric drama he believed that he saw the means of doing this.

The student of his artistic work will find his ideas set forth in three of his literary compositions, "Art and Revolution," "The Art Work of the Future," and "Opera and Drama." In "Art and Revolution" he studied the theatre of Æschylus and Sophocles and examined the reasons for its decline. In the devotion of Greek religion to the ideals of beauty Wagner found the explanation of the Grecian fidelity to the true principles of all art and of the final union of the arts of poetry, music, and mimetics in the Greek drama. He saw the highest period of this drama coincident with the supremacy of Athens. With the decline of the Athenian state came the decline of the Greek drama, and "the mad laughter of Aristophanes." The spirit of community, he says, split into a thousand lines of egotism, and the union of the arts which made the drama also was dissolved.

Then came the era of philosophy, which was inimical to art, and the dawn of Christianity was still less favourable to it. The old Greek freedom in the contemplation of nature and untrammelled worship of beauty for its own sake could not live under the reign of Christian teaching. With the changes in public thought resultant on the new teachings of Christianity and philosophy, art assumed a new relation to the national life, and in Wagner's opinion a social revolution alone would be the instrument to restore it to its pristine standing. With his social views we need not now concern ourselves. The point for us to bear in mind is that, like the founders of opera, he went back to the Greek drama for his first principles and in it found a union of the arts of poetry, music, and action. This union suggested to him, as it had to Peri and his friends, the laws on which must stand the modern play in music.

From this point he starts in his "Art Work of the Future." He finds that after the dissolution of the old union of the arts, each sought its own development on independent lines and that each had at times sunk to the level of a mere amusement. Various unsuccessful attempts had been made to reunite these arts, but their independence had increased constantly till in Wagner's day each had touched the uttermost limits of its development and could not possibly go further. It was necessary, therefore, that each should sacrifice some measure of its independence in order to unite with the others in an artistic entity. This in Wagner's mind was a musical drama, in which poetry, painting, music, and acting should unite in an organic whole.

Having in this essay laid down the fundamental demands for his ideal lyric drama, he made in "Opera and Drama" an exhaustive study of this form of art. The first part of the work is devoted to a critical sketch of the development of opera. The text is that which we have already noted, that the means of expression, music, had been taken for the end, while the real object, the drama, had been made subsidiary to the production of pretty music in set forms. With this as his theme, Wagner examined the works of the various operatic masters and adduced evidence to establish his position. It was this part of his book which caused the bitterest comment at the time of publication.

The second part of the work is given to a study of the spoken drama, and it shows that Wagner was a close student of the works of the leading English, French, and German dramatists. It is in this survey that he indicates the special nature of the difficulties placed in the way of dramatic treatment by historical subjects, which he himself found impracticable for operas. He notes how Schiller laboured unsuccessfully to give clearness and form to the mass of historical details which he introduced into his "Wallenstein," while Shakespeare rested upon the firm ground of the auditor's imagination and painted in broad lines. Here the author propounds his own theory that for an ideal drama a mythical subject is the best, because it admits of a centralisation of the poet's thought upon the characters and emotions of the personages and rids him of the limitations of historical colour, or conventions of time or place.

This is the kernel of the second part of "Opera and Drama." In the third part he examines the materials of the poetic drama. He studies the technical resources of rhythm and rhyme and endeavours to show how far they can be utilised by the dramatist. From this he advances to an examination of the type of verse best suited to the purpose of the lyric drama, and here we are made acquainted with the theory of his own verse. He discourses on the functions of melody and harmony in the expression of the feelings of a drama and expounds his ideas as to the powers and uses of the orchestra. Finally he shows how he believes that the development of a drama should lead to periods of emotional exaltation, or, technically, emotional "situations," in which the expressiveness of melody would be employed with all its resources to enforce the poet's thought. The principal tenet of this part of the book is that the music must grow inevitably out of the emotional character of the scene, and that its technical potencies must be employed in proportion to their fitness for specific kinds of expression.

It is in his studies of the spoken historical drama and his expression of his ideas as to the proper materials for the lyric story that we must find the formation of Wagner's fundamental theory that the myth offered the best subject-matter for the musical dramatist. The details of movement and accessories required in a historical drama are in the way of the necessary process of focussing the music on the grand emotions of the play. The simplification of the story, so that its central situations are emotional and not merely theatric, is impossible when historic truth is preserved. But all mythology is the embodiment of primary world-thoughts. It is the poetry of peoples, and he who looks below the surface will find in it the whole heart of a nation. And thus the personages of mythologic story became world-types. They are embodiments of racial or national ideals. They are free, unconventional, elemental. Wagner came to discern in their qualities the requisites for heroes and heroines of the lyric drama. And from the philosophy of Schopenhauer, of which he was a student, he drew encouragement and support.

According to Schopenhauer it is the work of Art to represent for us the eternal essence of things by means of prototypes. The human mind should rise above the conditions of time and place, cause and tendency, and thus come to the contemplation of eternal ideas. This contemplation is the privilege and the duty of Art. Where, then, was Wagner to find eternal ideas suitable for dramatic treatment except in their personifications in mythology? Certainly they were not to be found in librettos of the "Semiramide" or "Sonnambula" variety. Again turning his eyes to the Greek theatre, he found that Æschylus and Sophocles had used the great myths of their people, and that by doing so they had brought their theatre into direct relation with the national life and thought. Why, then, could not he, by using the myths of the Teutonic races, create genuine works of art and reknit the bond between the stage and the national heart? This was the splendid vision which dwelt in his mind in the days of poverty and struggle. It was this which stayed his hand when easy offers of pecuniary success were almost within his grasp. It was this hope which led him forever away from the "pomp and circumstance" of the historical opera, and brought forth works whose kinship to "Rienzi" is so difficult to trace.

The myth, then, became the subject-matter on which he reared his poetic structure. As he has summarised his thoughts on this topic for us in "A Communication to My Friends" it may be well to quote his words:

With the idea of founding a national drama on the great mythological thoughts of his people, and keeping constantly in mind the conviction that his business was not the mere telling of a story in verse and music, but the presentation to the minds of his auditors of the underlying emotions of the drama, he quickly realised that the set forms of the old opera were of no use to him. He could not construct a libretto with the regularly recurring duets, trios, and ensembles, if he meant to be true to dramatic art. To abandon these established patterns, however, meant to throw over both the poetic and musical fashions of the older lyric writers. If his people were not to sing arias and duets, but to speak a convincing dialogue, with speech raised to a higher power by the use of music instead of blank verse, as in the spoken drama, he must find new types, both poetic and musical. But with Wagner it must be constantly borne in mind that the dramatic speech is not text first and music afterward, but is both at once. His conception of the talk of his dramas was that of words made vocal in the musical sense by their own inner demand for emotional symbolism. In other words the music must be the direct and inevitable outgrowth of the poetry and the two must be joined in a perfect organic union.

It became necessary, therefore, that he should cast about for some new musical form for the foundation of his drama, for there cannot be music without form. The new pattern did not develop itself immediately in his mind. The first principle of it occurred to him when he was writing "Der Fliegende Holländer." This first principle was that the musical expression of a particular mood, having been found, should be retained. "When a mental mood returned," he says, "its thematic expression also, as a matter of course, was repeated, since it would have been arbitrary and capricious to have sought another motive so long as the object was an intelligible representation of the subject and not a conglomeration of operatic pieces." This at once disposed of the aria, which was a completed musical piece. Wagner conceived the music to be inseparable from the speech and therefore to be completed only at the end of the drama. The melody had thus to become endless, a melody made up of many thematic ideas, all worked up wholly for the purpose of mood painting, and built into a grand form dictated and justified solely by the emotional scheme of the play. With this conviction he steered a happy course between mere formalism and chaotic formlessness. He avoided the set patterns of the older school and escaped the dictation by the verse of the musical shape and figure, yet he also weathered the shoals of musical incoherency. For the identification of the thematic ideas with the poetic thoughts enabled him to make on perfectly logical and natural grounds those melodic repetitions without which music is devoid of form.

Every student of music knows that a melody is constructed of certain phrases which have identifiable rhythmic and melodic shape. The identity of any tune is established by the repetition of these phrases in a regular order. When the repetitions are arranged on a plan similar to that of a verse of poetry, as in the case of such a tune as "Home, Sweet Home," the form of the music becomes that known as the song form, which lies at the basis of nearly every musical composition not strictly contrapuntal. Any music in which certain melodic shapes, known as figures, are not preserved and repeated, in which each phrase once heard is not heard again, is absolutely chaotic and does not convey to the human mind the conception of design, and hence also not of melody. Wagner, in striving to avoid the musical domination of the older forms, had to see to it that he did not fall into this kind of chaos. He had to devise a larger and less confining form, but he had to have a form nevertheless.

But as soon as he had conceived the idea of preserving throughout his drama the first thematic expression of any mental mood or idea, he had the solution of his problem in his hands. For now the musical repetitions were bound to become numerous and to acquire from the text a direct and unmistakable significance which they could not possibly have by themselves. And the criticism to which this form might be open, if it were used as a purely musical one, at once falls to the ground when it is remembered that the object is not musical alone, but also dramatic, or musico-textual. The organic union of the word and the tone makes the assistance given by the text in explaining the meaning (sometimes arbitrary) of the music entirely defensible, and indeed thoroughly commendable.

CHAPTER III
THE MUSICAL SYSTEM

In its details this Wagnerian system of musico-textual speech divides itself into music constructed of leading motives, or themes with a specified meaning, and music of the picture, or purely scenic music, such as that of the sailors in the first scene of "Tristan und Isolde," or the "Waldweben" of "Siegfried." And again the sung parts of the score divide themselves into ordinary speech, or quasi-recitative, and the speech of the high emotional situation, which is either intensely declamatory or extraordinarily melodious, according to the nature of the mood which has been reached.[30] A further feature of the scheme, which must not be overlooked, is that the repetitions of the thematic ideas are given chiefly to the orchestra, which thus becomes not a mere accompaniment, but a most potent explicator of the drama. This treatment of the orchestra makes it the creator of a musical atmosphere which surrounds the actors in the drama. Even when one has no acquaintance whatever with the specified meanings of the "leading motive" ("leading" should read "guiding"), the dramatic influence of the musical background is such that he is brought into a complete emotional accord with the action on the stage. Thus the orchestra becomes a most potent factor in demonstrating and making effective Wagner's tenet that "In the drama we must become knowers through the Feeling. The Understanding tells us 'So is it,' only when the Feeling has told us, 'So must it be.'" It was with thoughts of this in his mind that Wagner wrote on Sept. 9, 1850, to Herr Von Zigesar: