FOOTNOTES:
[289] He seems to be referring more particularly to the fourth movement.
[290] Mein Leben, p. 73.
[291] Mein Leben, p. 94.
[292] G.S., xii. 1 ff.
[293] G.S., xii. 5 ff.
[294] Pasticcio, in G.S., xii. 5 ff.
[295] Mr. Dannreuther, in his article on Wagner in Grove's Dictionary of Music (v. 391), thinks that the young enthusiast for Beethoven perceived the weakness of Bellini's music clearly enough, yet the impression Mme. Devrient made upon him was powerful and artistic. The first statement hardly squares with all the facts as we now know them.
[296] I.e. as to why the poorer opera had impressed him more than the better one.
[297] Mein Leben, p. 102.
[298] Mein Leben, p. 104.
[299] See the article on Der dramatische Gesang, in G.S., xii. 15.
[300] The German "Gesang" is perhaps best translated here and elsewhere by this general term.
[301] I.e. the conventional forms of Italian opera.
[302] See the article Bellini, ein Wort zu seiner Zeit, in G.S., xii. 19. It must be remembered that this article, which was published anonymously, was intended to stimulate the interest of the Riga public in Bellini's Norma, which opera Wagner had selected for his benefit in December 1837. It is possible, therefore, that the impecunious young musician may have said a trifle more than he really thought. It is significant that Wagner omitted all these articles—Die deutsche Oper, Pasticcio, Der dramatische Gesang, and Bellini—from the collected edition of his works.
[303] Mein Leben, p. 174.
[304] Mein Leben, p. 175.
[305] Mein Leben, p. 175.
[306] Mein Leben, p. 175.
[307] Mein Leben, p. 179.
[308] He had put aside his comic opera Die glückliche Bärenfamilie, as the performing of this "Musik à la Adam" would only have still further tightened his connection with the frivolous theatrical world about him.
[309] Mein Leben, pp. 210, 211.
[310] Le Freischütz, in G.S., i. 220 ff.
[311] Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven, G.S., i. 90 ff.
[312] The reader may be reminded that Wagner has been expounding the Schopenhauerian theory of music as the idea of the world.
[313] Beethoven, in G.S., ix. 101.
[314] G.S., i. in. 111.
[315] This explains why he was so unapt at setting anyone's poetry but his own.
[316] On this point see Albert Schweitzer's J. S. Bach (Eng. trans.), chap. xx.
[317] And of course the quality of the mixture of these factors may vary in different works of the same composer.
[318] Ein glücklicher Abend, in G.S., i. 143, 144.
[319] See Mr. E. Dannreuther's article on Wagner in the new edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, v. 414.
[320] Like all musicians of that time, Wagner had no suspicion of the enormous amount of tone-painting there is in Bach.
[321] Ein glücklicher Abend, in G.S., i. 147, 148.
[322] He expresses the same idea nearly thirty years later in his essay on Beethoven. "What is the dramatic action of the Leonora opera-text but an almost disagreeable watering down of the drama we have lived through in the overture,—as it were a tedious explanatory commentary by Gervinus on a scene by Shakespeare?" Beethoven, in G.S., ix. 105.
[323] This was the explanation of his dislike for much of Berlioz's music. See his remarks on Berlioz in the article On Liszt's Symphonic Poems (G.S., v. 193, 194), and a similar passage in the conversation quoted by Mr. Dannreuther (Grove's Dictionary, v. 414): "The middle of Berlioz's touching scène d'amour in his Romeo and Juliet is meant by him to reproduce in musical phrases the lines about the lark and the nightingale in Shakespeare's balcony scene, but it does nothing of the sort—it is not intelligible as music."
[324] The only other element introduced is the song of the Norwegian sailors from the last Act, which, however good in itself, is perhaps a superfluity in the overture,—a slight concession to that passion for reproducing the details of the drama that Wagner reprobated in others. The true symbolic conflict of the governing desires and principles of the opera can and should be all suggested in the music of Senta and the Dutchman.
[325] Loc. cit., i. 204, 205.
[326] The "Report" that accompanies this programme in the Prose Works is an extract from the (at that time) unpublished Mein Leben.
[327] He had gone there to produce Rienzi, and to try to arrange for a performance of Lohengrin. Rienzi was a failure.
[328] The Intendant of the Dresden Opera.
[329] Gustav Levy, Richard Wagners Lebensgang in tabellarischer Darstellung, p. 32.
[330] Liszt writes thus in June or July 1849, i.e. a month or six weeks after Wagner's flight from Dresden. "Forgive me if I suggest that you should manage so that you are not of necessity brought into enmity with things and men who bar your road to success and glory. A truce therefore to political commonplaces, socialistic balderdash, and personal hatreds. On the other hand, good courage, strong patience, and plenty of fire, which will not be difficult for you with the volcanoes you have in your brain." Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, i. 24.
[331] Die Königliche Kapelle betreffend, in G.S., xii. 149 ff. No notice was taken of the Report by the authorities for a year; then they refused to act upon it.
[332] The essay—Entwurf zur Organisation eines Deutschen National-Theaters für das Konigreich Sachsen, in G.S., ii. 233 ff.—must be read in full. "My plan," he says, "was not merely to rescue the theatre, but at the same time to conduct it, under the shelter and inspection of the State, to a noble significance and efficacy." His main thesis was that "the Theatre should have no other purpose than the ennoblement of taste and manners." See Wagner's own account of the affair in Mein Leben, pp. 444 ff.
[333] See Mein Leben, pp. 434 ff.
[334] G.S., xii. 238 ff.
[335] G.S., xii. 243 ff.
[336] In the Entwurf zur Organisation eines Deutschen National-Theaters für das Konigreich Sachsen (G.S., ii. 248) he speaks of "demanding the fullest and most active interest of the whole nation in an artistic establishment that, conjointly with all the other arts, has for its object the ennobling of taste and manners." He does not develop the idea, however.
[337] See the important letter of September 1850, in the Uhlig correspondence.
[338] Mein Leben, p. 546.
[339] Mein Leben, pp. 566 ff.
[340] See the passionate and almost hysterical passage commencing "Not ye wise ones, therefore, are the inventors, but the Folk, for Need drove the Folk to invention." Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, in G.S., iii. 53.
[341] G.S., iii. 60.
[342] Had he been a trifle less Teutonic, less given to the national failing of imagining that a new truth has been established when all that has happened is that a new word has been manufactured or a mystic meaning perceived in an old one, he might have reflected that in other languages there is no etymological connection between art and the capacity for "canning."
[343] Mein Leben, pp. 691, 692.
[344] He plainly knew nothing of the sculpture of the Middle Ages, and regarded all modern sculpture as an imitation of the antique.
[345] This was the first form of the drama that ultimately became the Ring. It virtually corresponded with the present Twilight of the Gods. He afterwards saw the necessity of setting visibly before the audience a good deal that was only implied or narrated in Siegfried's Death. Accordingly a prefatory drama was written and called Young Siegfried. The same process was twice repeated, the Valkyrie and Rhinegold being added in turn. Young Siegfried was then entitled Siegfried, and Siegfried's Death became The Twilight of the Gods.
[346] Letter of 12th September 1852, in Briefe an Röckel, p. 10.
[347] See Wagner's further account of this article in Mein Leben, p. 545.
[348] This and other statements as to the genesis of opera are not historically correct.
[349] The most admired of libretto writers of the eighteenth century.
[350] The latest edition of the Gesammelte Schriften (which contains more than one regrettable error), has "auf natürlichem, künstlichem Boden gewachsen," instead of unnatürlichem as in the earlier editions. See G.S., iv. 15.
[351] I borrow Mr. Edwin Evans's alliterative rendering of these three lines,—"Life's delight is love"; "True love doth lighten loss"; "For 'tis from woe she weaves her wonders." See his translation of Opera and Drama, ii. 520 ff.
[352] I.e., in modern phrase, the "leading-motives."
[353] G.S., iii. 267.
[354] G.S., iii. 269.
[355] G.S., iv. 65, 66.
[356] G.S., iv. 2.
[357] "But if I wish to show that plastic art, being only an artificial art, one abstracted from real art, must cease entirely in the future; if consequently to this plastic art—painting and sculpture—that to-day claims to be the principal art, I utterly deny a life in the future, you will admit that this should not and could not be done with two strokes of the pen." (Letter of 12th January 1850; Briefe an Uhlig, &c., p. 26.)
[358] Letter 14 to Uhlig (undated), in Briefe, p. 46. Mr. Shedlock, in his admirable English version of these letters, translates "art-egoistic" (künstlerisch-egoistischen) in the second sentence as "artificial egoistic," having apparently read "künstlerisch" as "künstlich."
[359] Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde, in G.S., iv. 315. He is discussing the reasons that led him to give up the idea of a play on the subject of Friedrich Barbarossa.
[360] "In modern speech, poetical creation is impossible; that is to say, a poetic purpose cannot be realised in it, but only suggested" (sondern eben nur als solche ausgesprochen werden). Opera and Drama, in G.S., iv. 98. There are many other passages of the same tenour.
[361] G.S., iii. 178 ff.
[362] Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt, i. 324.
[363] G.S., iv. 128, 129.
[364] In the scene of the Contest of Song in the second Act of Tannhäuser, he says, "my real object was, if possible, to compel the hearer, for the first time in the history of opera, to take an interest in a poetic idea, and to follow it up in all its necessary developments." Mein Leben, p. 364.
[365] Letter of 8th September 1850; Briefwechsel, i. 75.
[366] Much of his laborious insistence on the proper relation between word and tone was due to the disregard of any coincidence between verbal and musical accents in most of the German opera texts and translations of his time, and to the bad enunciation of so many of the singers. He was still complaining of this latter—"the chaotic vocal style of our singers"—in 1879. See Über das Opern-Dichten und Komponieren im Besonderen, in G.S., x. 166.
[367] Letter 21 (beginning of February 1851), p. 80.
[368] Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde, in G.S., iv. 316.
[369] G.S., iv. 318, 319.
[370] It must always be remembered that the Beethoven of whom Wagner speaks is the Beethoven of the later symphonies, sonatas, and quartets.
[371] Letter 57 (15th February 1852) in Briefe an Uhlig, p. 160. It was his complaint against Mendelssohn's conducting of the Beethoven symphonies that it brought out "merely their purely musical side," not their poetical content. Not understanding the spirit of them, Mendelssohn kept to the letter. His inability to understand the inner meaning of the music caused him to fall into the grossest errors of tempo. He took the first movement of the Ninth Symphony, for example, so fast that "the whole thing became the direct opposite of what it really is" (Letter 56 to Uhlig, 15th February 1852, p. 162).
[372] Letter 56 to Uhlig, 15th February 1852, p. 157.
[373] Letter 55 to Uhlig (15th February, 1852), pp. 158, 159.
[374] Opera and Drama, in G.S., iii. 278. The whole of this section should be read carefully.
[375] Opera and Drama, in G.S., iv. 3.
[376] Opera and Drama, in G.S., iv. 173.
[377] This term, it must be remembered, is not Wagner's own. It has come into such general use, however, and is so thoroughly expressive, that it is better to employ it than to adopt Wagner's rather circumlocuitous way of expressing the same thing.
[378] The reader who is unable to follow Wagner's exposition in Opera and Drama should turn to A Communication to my Friends, in which practically the same ground is covered, but in a much more luminous style.
[379] E. T. A. Hoffmann before him had been very enthusiastic over Beethoven, and no doubt Wagner had been stimulated by Hoffmann in this as in so many other matters. See in particular Hoffmann's Fantasiestücke.
[380] On Franz Liszt's Symphonic Poems, in G.S., v. 187.
[381] On Franz Liszt's Symphonic Poems, in G.S., v. 109.
[382] It has recently been re-published with an introduction and notes by Dr. Eugen Schmitz. (Verlag Dr. Heinrich Lewy, Munich.)
[383] Zukunftsmusik, in G.S., vii. 97.
[384] Zukunftsmusik, in G.S., vii. 127, 128.
[385] Guido Adler, Richard Wagner: Vorlesungen gehalten an der Universität zu Wien, pp. 3 ff.
[386] This is a broadly true statement of the historical facts, though it has to be remembered that the theory that the first Florentine reformers aimed at a recitative-like delivery of a dramatic idea is only one of the errors of the popular historian. Their earliest attempts were more in the arioso form. See Hugo Riemann's Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, ii. 2, chap. xxiii.
[387] Zukunftsmusik, in G.S., vii, 128.
[388] Ibid., vii, 129.
[389] Zukunftsmusik, in G.S., vii. 129.
[390] I do not mean, of course, that it has anything to do with the symphony in the formal sense, but that the orchestra weaves a continuous tissue of its own, instead of merely accompanying the voices as in the earlier operas.
[391] See Appendix B.
[392] On Operatic Poetry and Composition, in G.S., x. 172.
[393] On the Application of Music to the Drama, in G.S., x. 186.
[394] Ibid., x. 186, 187.