Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt Volume I Part 10

Grand and perfect repose is here the chief thing. In singing the pa.s.sage, I found that I paused a little on the second and fourth part of the bar, but of course in such a manner as to be scarcely perceptible in a rhythmical sense, only as a matter of expression.

[score excerpt]

Lohengrin: Ath-mest Du nicht mit mir die suss-en. Page 39.

[score excerpt]

Dein Lie-ben muss mir hoch ent - gel - - ten.

(Here the tempo becomes a little slower.)

But enough, perhaps too much already. With all these indications, I appear mean before you. You will do it all right, perhaps better than I should. Only see that we soon meet again; I long to be with you. Or do you find me too effusive? No! Farewell, my dear, good Liszt. Write to me soon.

Yours,

RICHARD WAGNER.

ZURICH, August 16th, 1850. (Abendstern-Enge, Zurich.)

38.

At this moment, dearest friend, after having closed the letter already, I begin to feel a doubt whether you have received my last letter, which I sent you about eighteen days ago. I am uncertain because you make no mention of its contents, which were--

1. A letter from me to Zigesar.

2. One bar of music (full score), which was to be added at the end of Lohengrin's tale in Act III. (the cut which I want in this scene--omission of the second part of Lohengrin's tale--you also do not mention; I a.s.sume that you agree).

3. My asking you to send me a proof of the libretto (now too late).

If you have not received this letter, kindly let me know at once, because in that case I should like to send you the aforementioned additional bar, which might still arrive in time for the general rehearsal.

R. W.

39.

DEAR LISZT,

The bearer of this greeting is my young friend Karl Ritter, whose visit I announced to you in my last letter. His family has migrated from Russia, where they formerly lived, to Dresden; and their intention is later on to settle in Switzerland near me.

Karl has preceded them in any case, and will stay for the summer with me. He is thoroughly cultured and full of talent, and his musical gift especially is considerable. He was unable to resist the desire to hear my Lohengrin, the score of which he knows thoroughly, under your direction; and therefore he has journeyed to Weimar, to return to me after the second representation. I need scarcely ask you to be kind to him, for I know that it is your nature to be amiable. Please take him with you to the general rehearsal and see that he gets a good place at the performances, which his family from Dresden also will attend. I thank you in advance for this kindness.

I shall spend the day and evening of the 28th with my wife alone on the Righi. This little trip to the Alps, which has been made possible by your kindly care, will, I hope, benefit my bodily and mental condition, especially in these days, when I am naturally moved by many feelings. Farewell, dear friend. Write soon, and be always sure of my most devoted love.

Your

RICHARD WAGNER.

ZURICH, August 22nd, 1850.

40.

DEAREST FRIEND,

Your "Lohengrin" is a sublime work from one end to the other. The tears rose from my heart in more than one place. The whole opera being one indivisible wonder, I cannot stop to point out any particular pa.s.sage, combination, or effect. A pious ecclesiastic once underlined word for word the whole "Imitatio Christi;" in the same way I might underline your "Lohengrin" note for note. In that case, however, I should like to begin at the end; that is, at the duet between Elsa and Lohengrin in the third act, which to my thinking is the acme of the beautiful and true in art.

Our first representation was, comparatively speaking, satisfactory. Herr von B., who will see you soon, will bring you very accurate news. The second performance cannot take place before ten or twelve days. The court and the few intelligent persons in Weymar are full of sympathy and admiration for your work; and as to the public at large, they will think themselves in honour bound to admire and applaud what they cannot understand. As soon as I have a little rest I shall begin the article which will probably appear in the "Debats"; in the meantime Raff, about whom B. will speak to you, will write two notices in the journal of Brockhaus and in the "Leipzig Ill.u.s.trirte Zeitung". Uhlig will look after Brendel's paper, etc.

If you have a moment, do not forget to write to Genast, who has very warmly interested himself in the success of "Lohengrin". You may be quite a.s.sured of the fate of the masterpiece in Weymar, which is, no doubt, a little surprised at being able to produce such things. Before the end of the winter "Lohengrin" will certainly become a "draw."

When shall we have "Siegfried"? Write to me soon, and always count on your devoted friend and servant,

F. LISZT.

WEYMAR, September 2nd.

41.

DEAR FRIEND,

I can no longer delay writing to you, although I should have preferred to wait for another letter from you, so as to answer any possible questions of yours. As far as I can at present form an opinion of the character of the "Lohengrin" performance at Weimar from the accounts that have reached me, there is one thing that stands forth in the surest and most indubitable manner, viz., your unprecedented efforts and sacrifices in favour of my work, your touching love for me, and your marvelous faculty of making the impossible possible. I can see after the event quite clearly what a gigantic task you have undertaken and performed.

How can I ever reward you? I should scarcely have anything to communicate to you beyond these exclamations of grat.i.tude if I had not discovered in Herr von Zigesar's letter (received the day before yesterday, together with the honorarium) a certain disappointment--the disappointment involuntarily expressed by one who does not see his warmest zeal for a beloved cause crowned by the desired success, and who therefore a.s.sumes a certain pensive and doubtful att.i.tude. Zigesar is doubtful whether the success of my opera is certain; he professes the warmest desire to work for that certainty with all his might, but appears to hesitate as to the best means for the purpose. Knowing that your zeal in the same cause is more active and energetic than that of any one else, I must turn to you alone in considering the means which may bring about our common desire.

So much is certain: that the performance has caused fatigue by the length of its duration. I confess I was horrorstruck when I heard that the opera had lasted until close upon eleven at night.

When I had finished the opera, I timed it exactly, and according to my calculation the first act would last not much over an hour, the second an hour and a quarter, the third again a little more than an hour, so that, counting the entr'actes, I calculated the duration of the opera from six o'clock to a quarter to ten at the latest. I should have been doubtful whether you had taken the tempi according to my calculation if musical friends, well acquainted with the opera, had not a.s.sured me particularly that you had taken the tempi throughout as they knew them from me, and now and then rather a little quicker than slower. I must therefore a.s.sume that the dragging took place where you, as conductor, lost your immediate power, viz., in the recitatives. I have been a.s.sured that the recitatives were not attacked by the singers as I had performed them to my friends at the piano. Allow me to explain myself a little more particularly, and forgive my mistake of not having done so before.

Owing to the deplorable fact that at our German theatres scarcely anything but operas translated from a foreign language is given, our dramatic singers have been most thoroughly demoralized. The translations of French and Italian operas are generally made by blunderers, or at least scarcely ever by people who would be able to effect between the music and the translation a similar concordance to that which existed in the original version, as, for example, I tried to do in the most important parts of Gluck's "Iphigenia". The result has been in the course of time that the singers got into the way of neglecting altogether the connection between word and tone, of p.r.o.nouncing an unimportant syllable to an accentuated note of the melody, and of putting the important word to a weak part of the bar. In this way they gradually became accustomed to the most absolute nonsense, to such an extent that it was frequently quite indifferent whether they p.r.o.nounced at all or not. It is most amusing to hear German critics boast that only Germans understand dramatic music, while experience teaches that every bad Italian singer in the worst Italian opera declaims more naturally and expressively than the best Germans can do. The recitative has fared worst; in it singers have become accustomed to see only a certain conventional sequence of tonal phrases, which they can pull about and draw out according to their sweet will. When in opera the recitative commences, it means to them, "The Lord be praised, here is an end to that cursed tempo, which off and on compels us to a kind of rational rendering; we can now float about in all directions, dwell on any note we like until the prompter has supplied us with the next phrase; the conductor has now no power over us, and we can take revenge for his pretensions by commanding him to give us the beat when it suits us," etc. Although perhaps not all singers are conscious of this privilege of their genius, they, as a rule, involuntarily adopt this free-and-easy method, which confirms them in a certain natural laziness and flabbiness. A composer writing for German singers has therefore to take every care in opposing an artistic necessity to this lazy thoughtlessness. Nowhere in the score of my "Lohengrin" have I written above a vocal phrase the word "recitative;" the singers ought not to know that there are any recitatives in it; on the other hand, I have been intent upon weighing and indicating the verbal emphasis of speech so surely and so distinctly that the singers need only sing the notes, exactly according to their value in the given tempo, in order to get purely by that means the declamatory expression. I therefore request the singers particularly to sing all declamatory pa.s.sages in my operas at first in strict tempo, as they are written. By p.r.o.nouncing them throughout vividly and distinctly much is gained. If, proceeding from this basis with reasonable liberty and accelerating rather than holding back, they manage to obliterate the painful effect of the tempo altogether, and produce an emotional and poetic mode of speech, then all is gained.

Dingelstedt's sympathetic and clever notice of the performance of my "Lohengrin" has impressed me very much. He owns that previously he had known nothing by me, and chiefly attributes to this circ.u.mstance a certain puzzled feeling which the first performance of "Lohengrin" has produced in him. That puzzled feeling he transfers to the character of the work itself, speaking of numberless intentions crossing each other, with which he supplies me, but never guessing, as far as I can see, the only intention which guided me--I mean the simple and bare intention of the drama. He speaks of the impression which flutes, violins, kettledrums, and trumpets made on him, but nowhere of the dramatic representatives in whose stead, as he puts it, those instruments spoke. From this I conclude that at the performance the purely musical execution preponderated, that the orchestra-- as connoisseurs have also told me--was excellent, and that friend Liszt, together with all that immediately depended on him, was the real hero of the performance. If we consider honestly and unselfishly the essence of music, we must own that it is in large measure a means to an end, that end being in rational opera the drama, which is most emphatically placed in the hands of the representatives on the stage. That these representatives disappeared for Dingelstedt, that in their stead he only heard the utterance of orchestral instruments, grieves me, for I see that, as regards fire and expression, the singers remained behind the support of the orchestra. I own that a singer supported by the orchestra in such a manner as is here the case must be of the very highest and best quality, and I fully believe that such singers could not easily be found in Weimar, and in Germany generally. But what is really the essential and princ.i.p.al thing here? Is it voice only? Surely not. It is life and fire, and in addition to that earnest endeavour and a strong and powerful will. In Dresden I made the experience with our best singers that, although they had the most laudable intentions and the greatest love for their tasks, they were unable to master a certain flabby laziness, which in our actual artistic muddle appears to be the characteristic trait of all our operatic heroes. I there caused all the remarks in the score of "Tannhauser" to be inserted in the parts of the singers with the utmost accuracy--I mean the remarks which had reference to the meaning of the situation and the dramatic action. At the performance I perceived with dismay that all these had remained unnoticed, and I had to see--imagine my horror!--for example, that my Tannhauser in the contest of the singers shouted the hymn of Venus--

"Wer dich mit Gluth in seine Arme geschlossen, Was Liebe ist, weiss der, nur der allein!"

at Elizabeth, the chastest of virgins, before a whole a.s.sembly of people. The only possible result could be that the public was, to say the least, confounded, and did not know what to make of it.

Indeed, I heard at Dresden that the public became acquainted with the dramatic meaning of the opera only by reading the book in extenso; in other words, they understood the performance by disregarding the visible performance and making additions from their own imagination. Are your singers at Weimar more advanced than our famous people of Dresden? I think not. Probably they also will, in the first instance, be satisfied with getting over the difficulty of hitting the notes and committing their parts to memory, and on the stage they will at best take notice only of what the stage-manager tells them in the most general way.

Genast, however, was always one of those artists who do not rely upon the stage-manager for the comprehension of their parts; he who has heard him and seen him knows so much. Being now a stage- manager himself, he probably thinks it unnecessary to play for the singers the schoolmaster, whom he, as a singer, never wanted.

In this, however, he is mistaken; the present generation has run wild from its birth. I also can understand too well that, in his friendly zeal for my work, he remained entirely on the proper standpoint of the stage-manager, who arranges things in a general way, and justly leaves it to the individual actors to find out for themselves what concerns them only. In spite of this, I ask him now to interfere even there, where the power and the natural activity of the stage-manager ceases; let him be the trustee of infant actors. At the rehearsal of my "Tannhauser" in Weimar I had occasion to point out the neglect of some scenic indications on the part of individual singers. Elizabeth, for example, during the postlude of the duet with Tannhauser in the second act, has to justify the re-entry of the tender theme in the clarinet in slower tempo by looking--as is indicated in the score--after Tannhauser in the court of the castle and by beckoning to him. By neglecting this and merely standing in front, waiting for the conclusion of the music, she naturally produces an unbearable feeling of tedium. Every bar of dramatic music is justified only by the fact that it explains something in the action or in the character of the actor. That reminiscence of the clarinet theme is not there for its own sake as a purely musical effect, which Elizabeth might have to accompany by her action, but the beckoned greeting of Elizabeth is the chief thing I had in my eye, and that reminiscence I selected in order to accompany suitably this action of Elizabeth. The relations of music and action must therefore be deplorably perverted where, as in this instance, the princ.i.p.al thing--i.e., the dramatic motive--is left out, while the lesser thing--i.e., the accompaniment of that motive--alone remains. Of the performance of "Lohengrin" one fact has been related to me which, although it may appear of little consequence, must serve me to show how important, nay decisive, for a proper understanding such individual cases may be.

When I conceived and wrote the second act, it had not escaped me how important it would be for the proper mood of the spectator to show that Elsa's contentment at the last words of Lohengrin is not really complete and genuine; the public should feel that Elsa violently forces herself to conquer her doubt, and we should in reality fear that, having once indulged in brooding over Lohengrin, she will finally succ.u.mb and ask the prohibited question. In the production of this general feeling of fear lies the only necessity for a third act in which that fear is realized; without it the opera should end here, for the chief problem would not only have been mooted, but satisfactorily solved. In order to produce this feeling very distinctly and tangibly, I invented the following dramatic point: Elsa is led by Lohengrin up the steps on the minster; on the topmost step she looks downwards with timid apprehension; her eye involuntarily seeks Frederick, of whom she is still thinking; at that moment her glance falls on Ortrud, who stands below, and raises her hand in a threatening manner. At this moment I introduce in the orchestra in F minor ff. the warning of Lohengrin, the significance of which has by this time been distinctly impressed upon us, and which, accompanied by Ortrud's impressive gesture, here indicates with absolute certainty, "Whatever happens, you will disobey the command in spite of all." Elsa then turns away in terror, and only when the king, after this interruption, once more proceeds towards the entrance of the minster with the bridal pair, does the curtain drop. What a pity then that that dramatic point was not made on the stage, and that the curtain dropped before the entry of the reminiscence in F minor! This not unimportant mistake was, no doubt, caused by the probably accidental neglect of a remark in the full score which, according to my previous wish, should, like similar other remarks, have been extracted for the benefit of the actors. I must fear that several other things have also remained unnoticed and unexecuted, and nothing confirms me so much in this fear as the account of Dingelstedt, who, in spite of his unmistakable goodwill, has evidently not taken in my opera because of the music.

Dearest Liszt, was I right when in the preface of my "Kunstwerk der Zukunft" I wrote that not the individual, but the community alone, could create genuine works of art? You have done the impossible, but, believe me, all must nowadays do the impossible in order to achieve what is really possible. What delights me more than all is to hear that you have not lost courage, and are going to try everything in order to support the opera, in spite of a certain disappointment around you, and even to put it on its legs. To a.s.sist you in this most laudable zeal I give you the following advice: Let Genast, whom I cordially thank for his friendship, before the resumption of "Lohengrin", call the whole personnel to a reading rehearsal; let the singers read their parts in connection, distinctly and expressively, from the printed libretto, in which there are unfortunately many misprints. Let Genast take the score, and from the remarks therein inserted explain to the singers the meaning of the situations and their connection with the music bar by bar. The devil must be in it if the matter could not then be put right, provided the intentions of the actors are good. Once more, let Genast go beyond his position as stage-manager, which, no doubt, he fills as well as any one, and let him become the guardian of the infants and the neglected.

By these words I by no means wish to express a definite doubt as to your singers in general or their achievements in this particular case. The fact that in a purely musical sense they took such care of their parts that you ventured with them upon the performance of this enormously difficult, because unfamiliar music is an excellent testimony in their favour. In the above I asked them for something which perhaps they have never been asked for before. I hope Genast will find it worth his while to explain this most specially to them, and that he will succeed in making them do justice to my demand. In that case he may boast of having been the chief partic.i.p.ant in a revolution which will lift our theatrical routine out of its grooves.