Richard Wagner Part 10

music. There is a good deal of _tour de force_ about this, but the result justifies the means: the superb melody swings over the ponderous ba.s.s, both melody and ba.s.s singing out clear and strong amidst an animated, bustling and whirling sea of merry tunes.

Composers generally left the composition of the overture till last--as it were doing the thing only because an overture had to be written--but Wagner knew the importance of his work and must have composed this one very early; for in 1862, five years earlier than the completion of the opera and six before the first representation, he directed a performance of it in the Gewandhaus at Leipzig. He never was a favourite in that stodgy city, the headquarters of musical Judea, and the audience is said to have been scanty. In fact, he himself said that, although he gave concerts only to gain money, he never made any profits until he went to Russia. The audience, if small, was enthusiastic. But, without entertaining any delusions about persecution and the deliberate ignoring of his work, it is easy to see that such music as this could not possibly be understood at once.

Though this overture is clarity itself to our ears, it is terribly complicated, and the style was absolutely new. I doubt whether the players quite knew, as our players know now, what they were doing; for here was something quite alien from the patchwork of four-bar measures which const.i.tuted the ordinary symphonic novelty at that time. There was no "form"--no statement of first and second subject, no working-out section measured off with compa.s.s and ruler, no recapitulation and coda; and mid-nineteenth century ears and brains were utterly baffled. The thematic luxuriance, the richness of the part-weaving, the blazing brilliance of the colouring--these were a mere vexation; and the volcanic energy was quickly found exhausting.

Worst of all, even in those days there were Wagnerites. Chief amongst them was Wagner. A Wagnerite is a person who devotes his days and his nights to raising a stone wall of misunderstanding between the composer's music and the ears of the audience; and at this game Wagner was an adept. The generation rising up to-day finds it hard to see what an earlier generation found to carp at in Wagner's music; in fifty years' time the war between Wagnerites and anti-Wagnerites will be inexplicable, and the story of it may not improbably be regarded as grossly exaggerated, if not a pure myth. Men of my generation know very well it was an ugly and stupid reality; we know also it was brought about by the Wagnerites. Not Wagner's "discords," his "lack of melody," his "formlessness" and so on hindered an almost instantaneous appreciation of his music, but the "explanations" of the music. Things easy to grasp, many things as old as the eternal hills, were "explained" as being terribly difficult, and the world was told of the "revolution" Wagner had brought about in music. No wonder many good folks were distrustful; no wonder many would not listen to it, believing the Wagnerites' claim that their master had rejected all the rules observed by previous composers. Wagner's own account of this overture is enough to turn a man's hair grey and to break a woman's heart. Had he only written a good deal less prose--or none at all!

The opera is entirely a praise of pure, true song, and is the longest song in existence. Nearly all the characters are supposed to be singers; in the first act are two beautiful pieces of song; in the second a fine song saves the young lovers from making fools of themselves and a bad song provokes a street riot; the opera winds up with the presentation of the prize to the composer of a song. If there must be a hero in the opera that song is the hero. We hear s.n.a.t.c.hes of it from time to time, and at the last it comes out in all its glory with a choral accompaniment. There are interludes, of course--Wagner knew better than to cloy our ears with sweetness too long sustained; but the whole work must be regarded as one great song, of which the clear-cut songs interspersed are parts. Even in the 'sixties, when nothing later than _Lohengrin_ was known, the charge was brought against the composer that his music was unvocal and could not be sung --the _Mastersingers_ was his answer. The overture leads into the first piece of song, the chorale that forms a vital part of the musical texture as the opera proceeds. We see part of the inside of a church and Walther making signs to Eva, who is clearly not attending to her devotions. Most readers are aware that in Germany it was the custom for the organist to play short interludes between the lines of hymn-tunes--a preposterous trick, but one which Bach put to a splendid use; and here Wagner transfers these interludes to the orchestra and makes them serve as a voice for Walther's feelings on seeing Eva for a second time: on the first occasion, the day before, they had fallen in love with each other. The next real song-music begins to flow with the entry of the singers' guild; but meantime there has been some music of the sort we have noticed as forming a large part of _Tristan_.

Recitative--often broken sentences and mere e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns--merges imperceptibly into pa.s.sionate melody, and this in its turn gives way to recitative, the whole thing being held together by the fairly continuous flow of the orchestral accompaniment. The apparatus, in a word, is precisely the same as in _Tristan_. In this first scene Walther pleads his suit with Eva and her maidservant Magdalena; then we have the apprentices, amongst them Magdalena's sweetheart David, to some rollicking choruses and to their own music--the burghers' music played four times as fast; and next David instructs Walther in the rules to be observed if he wishes to compose a master-song and to be admitted to the guild. Here Wagner indulges in positively uproarious satire of the pseudo-cla.s.sicism and the school harmony, counterpoint and "composition" of the nineteenth century; and the music is not less ludicrous than the words. It is a parody of the very kind of music Wagner wrote in his _Rienzi_ days, with sneers at the Jewish composers of psalms. Walther, in wrath, disgust and despair, cries out that he wants to learn how to sing, not to cobble boots.

The entry of the masters is a scene that only Wagner could have executed. A stream of Mozartian melody ripples on as the men shake hands and go through the conventional business of the gathering of people on the stage: what in the operas of the day--a dozen instances might be mentioned--is wearisome stodge is here turned into a thing of surpa.s.sing beauty. These shifting shadows of the old world become for the moment alive; yet we see them as though across the centuries through the magical web of music. The steady swaying motion of the accompaniment--and, of course, the whole charm lies in the accompaniment--has a curious resemblance to the duet of the Don and Zerlina in the first act of _Don Giovanni_, though Mozart's score is simplicity itself compared with this. This use of a kind of rocking figure led many younger musicians astray; and I make a comparison between their use of it and Wagner's with no intention of being odious to any one, but to show exactly where Wagner's superiority lay. Take a composer of very fine genius, Anton Dvorak, and look at a beautiful number (beautiful in a primitive, almost savage way) in his _Stabat Mater_, the _Eia, mater_. The theme of this (_a_, page 318) is a descendant, with several of Wagner's subjects, and three or four at least of Sir Edward Elgar's, of the opening of Handel's "Ev'ry valley." Dvorak's form of it is quite original, but he never gets any further: he cannot develop his subject. He adds an echoing, antiphonal phrase; but even with this help he gets no further. At a first hearing of this really very sincere and for moments entrancing work one hopes for the best at the end of the first dozen bars; but better is not to be. The theme becomes an accompanying figure to some not very engaging choral pa.s.sages: in the invention of the theme the whole force seems to have gone out of the man: he has no power of achieving a climax save by the addition of instruments: a growing climax to him means nothing more than growing noise, and the grand climax is only the noisiest pa.s.sage of all. The one figure is repeated over and over again, always with more instruments, until at last the complete battery of the modern orchestra is hard at it, and Dvorak's resources are at an end. Now look at our mighty Wagner. He takes the simplest of figures (_b_), plays with it, with seeming carelessness, for a while, then adds what is, technically, a counterpoint to it; he develops that counterpoint, adds melody on melody--always keeping his figure going, that the thing may be held together--until, after a rich and ever broadening and deepening tide of music, he gets his climax at the predetermined dramatic moment; and the climax does not consist of noise, but is in the stuff of the music. Development, real development, is not mere juggling with musical subjects, but continuous invention of melodies, and the driving-force behind it is the ceaseless craving of the spirit to express itself fully.

Even more striking than this instance is the treatment of a figure heard first when Pogner announces to the a.s.sembled mastersingers his intention of giving his daughter Eva as the prize in next day's contest. "To-morrow is Midsummer Day," he sings, and this figure (_c_) sounds from the orchestra. It is made up of two distinct sections.

That formed by the first two bars is used largely as an accompaniment, but it continually comes round to the third and fourth bars, and counterpoints are added until at last we are far away from the beginning, though, as in the example discussed above, the figure welds all together into a coherent whole for the intellect to grasp apart from the appeal the music makes to "the feeling." This "feeling" of Wagner's was absolutely right, it was infallible; and in consequence we find a curious state of affairs is promptly established. The rich, joyous strain of music, lull of the feeling of summer, immediately becomes what was, so to say, at the back of Wagner's mind--the sense of a spring not known to ordinary mortals, the everlasting spring of Montsalvat, a spring full of promise and just as full of regrets, the spring Tennyson sings of--

Is it regret for buried time That keenlier in sweet April wakes?

The enchanting flood of music wells up from the orchestra, and the vocal writing for Pogner is in Wagner's most lordly manner: there is not a hint of the mechanical "faking" which characterises similar pa.s.sages in the _Ring_. If it was necessary to think that one part was written before another one would be apt to say the voice part was done first; yet when one pays attention to the orchestral part, with its intricate contrapuntal weaving and interweaving of themes, that seems impossible, and one realizes that the two must have been conceived simultaneously. The interweaving becomes ever more marvellous as the speech proceeds, the burgher theme in a varied form being added, until at last, with the acclamations of the masters, it culminates in a pa.s.sage at once dramatically true, supremely beautiful and as elaborate in its texture as any Bach fugue. We used to hear much of the necessity for ambitious young composers to devote years to the study of text-book counterpoint--indeed, the failure of many youthful gentlemen to achieve anything on the grand scale has often been attributed to their lack of diligence, their want of patience with professorial instruction: yet here we have music which, from the scientific point of view, is as perfect as any in the world, composed by a daring soul who had no more than six months' teaching. It may be remarked in pa.s.sing that Spohr, in his nave way a good enough fugue-writer, never received any instruction at all: in point of effectiveness his fugues beat anything coming from the Jada.s.sohn and Hauptmann pupils.

With the re-entry of Walther and his proposal as a member of the guild by Pogner, we get another of these great phrases, half-theme, half-accompanying figure, and then Walther's spring song. He describes how, sitting by the hearth in winter, he first learnt the art of minstrelsy from reading "das alte Buch" of the greatest of minstrels, Walther von der Vogelweide; then when the winter had pa.s.sed he heard the birds in the green trees singing the selfsame song. Thematically this is much richer than the spring-song in, for instance, the _Valkyrie_, and for the best of reasons--that in the _Valkyrie_ is incidental, part of a long duet woven from quite other material, while that in the _Mastersingers_ is itself the material of a large portion of the opera. The tune of the first stanza in the _Valkyrie_ is only referred to once again throughout the work; and by far the most expressive part is made out of a love-theme previously heard. In the _Mastersingers_ song there is subject-matter enough to make a whole opera. From this point it is impossible to quote themes--they are far too long. In this respect a writer on music is at a disadvantage with a writer on literature; the latter can cite long pa.s.sages to establish a case or ill.u.s.trate his meaning; the unfortunate musical writer must refer his readers to scores, and it is inconvenient to sit amidst a pile of these--and Wagner's are the longest and weightiest in existence--and dive now here, now there, to follow the author without danger of mistaking him. The most important pa.s.sage in Walther's song begins at bar 13 (counting from the beginning of the nine-eight measure); and it is developed in as masterly a fashion as any of the earlier subjects, only now the style is symphonic, in the Viennese way, as the others were contrapuntal. The whole thing is full of the yearning spirit of spring; and, not at all strangely, bears a marked family likeness to Siegfried's song about his mother in the _Ring_.

Throughout the deliberations of the masters the music remains at a high level: there are no _longueurs_; dry recitative and barren attempts to treat prose poetically alike are absent. Kothner's delivery of the rules of the art are good-natured fun; Wagner, with his parody of eighteenth-century mannerisms, laughing at the wiseacres who wished to tie down modern musicians to the procedure of their forbears. Walther's trial song, with its gorgeous instrumentation, and the rush of the winds of March through budding woods, is even finer than the first; and it contains pa.s.sages which are employed with exquisite effect in the next Act. There occurs a deal of what can only be called musical horseplay as Beckmesser, the pedant type, hidden behind a curtain, marks Walther's "mistakes"; then comes the only phrase (_d_) in the opera which can be said to be definitely a.s.sociated with Hans Sachs. It stands first for Sachs' honest longing for the _new_; and afterwards it is made to express the longing in his soul for other things. With the consummate craftsmanship Wagner possessed at this period he adds to the score the utterance of the masters'

disapproval, of Sachs' approval, of Beckmesser's pedantic maliciousness, of the riotous fooling of the apprentices, until we have them all hard at work united in accompanying Walther's song in what is nothing more nor less than a grand operatic finale. The thing is justified theatrically, so to speak, rather than truly dramatically; for though the masters manifest dissatisfaction by their e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns, and the 'prentices, seeing the way the wind blows, get out of hand, and chant their scoffing song in the most uproarious fashion, Walther, inspired by a sense that he is right and a determination not to be put down, continues his song to the end. Then he proudly quits the room and the rest follow in confusion, leaving Sachs for a moment to show his vexation; then the curtain drops.

III

The music of this Act is of the highest order of beauty and never falls to the level of mere prettiness; from the first note to the last it is vigorous, st.u.r.dy. The combination of strength with delicacy and gentleness is extraordinary: one feels that the reserve of this strength behind it all must be unlimited. The orchestration is like the music: it is always exactly appropriate to the music. One characteristic of the themes should be noted: with the solitary exception of that expressive of the deep longing in the heart of Sachs (_d_) all are singable. Even the burgher motive can be sung and is sung. When we consider the other operas we perceive that this is by no means always the case. The _Dutchman's_ motive is not so much sung as jodelled by Senta; the Montsalvat music is rather orchestral than vocal; all the motives in _Tristan_ are either orchestral or declamatory. In saying this I do not at all underrate the other operas: simply I wish to point out the very marked difference in the quality of the music. The _Mastersingers_ is a long song, and the first act the first verse of it. Such a profusion of melodies has never been scattered over one act of an opera--not songs simply pleasing to the ear, but const.i.tuting subjects surcharged with feeling and capable of unfolding, as the opera goes on, into fresh forms of the rarest beauty and splendour. We cannot lay our finger on a superfluous bar, not one that can be cut without badly injuring the whole work. This criticism applies to the other two acts. As new material is introduced it is all singable; though harmonious effects are freely used they are all there to enforce the melody. The swan, or river, phrase in _Lohengrin_ is, of course, purely an effect of harmony; but in this glorification of song Wagner seemed determined to trust entirely to song and use his harmonic resources and devices--which were inexhaustible--another day. Only once does he resort to them: in the third act when Walther tells Sachs he has had a lovely dream, by a single unexpected chord he gets the dream atmosphere he wanted. At the same time the harmonies throughout are freer, more daring, than they are even in _Tristan_. They are managed with consummate mastery, the sharp collisions of the many winding voices of the orchestra occurring infallibly in precisely the right place. As I have said, not Bach himself managed a score of many parts with finer mastery, nor gives one a more satisfying sense of complete security; not Bach, nor Handel, nor Mozart was a greater contrapuntist; instructively, instinctively, he knew the way his stream of music was going, and so mighty a craftsman had he grown that to achieve new harmonies and harmonic progressions by the interweaving of many melodies, each individual and expressive, seems almost like child's-play to him. But the old saying, easy reading means hard writing, is true in the case of the _Mastersingers_. We have only to glance at Wagner's letters to see the labour all his later works cost him, and his incessant complaints about the state of his nerves are significant. The writing of the _Mastersingers_ was spread over six years. It does not matter whether it was written easily or with difficulty--the marvel is that it was written at all.

IV

The first act is the song of spring, the second one of a beauteous summer night. The night slowly falls, and lights are seen at the windows of the gabled houses. The apprentices put up the shutters of the shops and bar the doors. We have old Nuremberg before our eyes; by Sachs' door is the inevitable elder-tree, by Pogner's the just as inevitable lime; and as surely as Schumann caught the scent of flowers from a piece of Chopin's, do we catch the fragrance of those trees in Wagner's music. The 'prentices, hard at work, merrily chant "Midsummer's Eve" ("Johannestag"--not a precise translation), and banter David concerning that very serious matter, his courtship of Magdalena, the accompaniment being spun largely from the midsummer theme of the first act. The atmosphere, sweet, clear, redolent of the old world, and seeming to sparkle with excitement about the coming joys of the morrow, is first created by a prelude scarce thirty bars long. Through more than half of this section we get shakes and arpeggios on one (technical) discord (_e_), with s.n.a.t.c.hes of the midsummer theme, and the exhilaration of the eve of a holiday given to us in this very simplest of ways shows the miracle worker in his happiest mood. Like the opening of the _Rhinegold_, this brief prelude is an exemplification of Wagner's advice to young composers--never travel out of the key you are in if you can say in it what you have to say. The instrumentation is delicate, almost ethereal--in fact, the whole thing would be ethereal, or, at least, fairy-like, but for the note of gaiety, jollity, struck in the apprentices' tunes. But presently played-out fugue subjects are heard, and we know it is Beckmesser or no one. Dramatically the scene is of the lightest, but Wagner seizes the opportunity to paint a musical picture of Nuremberg as Pogner holds forth on the festivities arranged for the morrow; never did he give us anything more delightful than this picture of a mediaeval city, anything more beautifully or more fully charged with the sense of the past. They go in, and shortly Sachs comes out; he tells David to arrange his tools and get away to bed, and sits down, intending to work outside. The hammering motive (_f_) sounds out vigorously for a couple of minutes; but Sachs is already dreaming of Walther's song, and presently we get a phrase of it in a shape of superb beauty--the fifty times distilled essence of spring is in it--then another bit of it is taken and used as an accompaniment with most enchanting effect: one feels the cool night breeze touching Sachs' cheek, and, as in the introduction, one scents the aroma of lime and elder--

"The elder scent floats round me; so mild, so rich it falls, Its sweetness weighs upon me; words from my heart it calls...."

With its gently rocking motion and the tremolando in the ba.s.s it is as beautiful in its way as the opening scene, already discussed, of the second Act of _Tristan_--the picture of the brook running through the darkness from the fountain in King Mark's castle garden. Sachs abruptly ceases, and sets to work; and the hammering phrase is heard again, now combined with the beginning of another subject, liker than ever to Siegfried's great song--the very harmonies as well as the general rhythm are the same--and this subject is developed before long into the Cobbler's song. But "and still that strain I hear"; and he stops and dreams again over Walther's song. "Springtime's behest, within his breast, on heart and voice there was laid," he sings; and to music compact of sheer loveliness he praises the song, terminating with a pa.s.sage which I take to be nine bars of vocal writing as fine as can be found in the whole of music--"The bird who sang this morn."

Eva steals out from her father's door, and at once the dramatic motive of the action deepens. We have had up to now the joy and beauty of the night, the aroma of the trees, and all the warmth of Sachs' artist's heart as he dwells on Walther's song of spring: now the human element comes in and is reflected in the music. Eva wants to know whether there is any hope for Walther or any chance of help from Sachs, and she tries to find out without fully disclosing the secret of her love.

Her wistful longing is expressed in two perfect melodies, one new, the other shaped from a fragment of Walther's first song; these two are gone over again and again, always varied and growing more intense in expressiveness, until Eva's secret is no secret from the audience, though Sachs himself is supposed not to be at first quite sure about it. When he satisfies himself the orchestra at once sings the phrase (_d_), and its full significance is brought out. The real Hans Sachs, we are told, when getting on in years wooed and won quite a young girl, and the union turned out satisfactorily. That, obviously, was too tame a matter to be set forth in a long opera--every one would have yawned before the finish of the first Act; and, as it has been pointed out, the main change made from the original sketch of the libretto to the libretto of the actual opera lies in this: that Wagner created a soul for _his_ Sachs. Sachs loves Eva, too, with a blending of benevolent fatherly affection and s.e.xual love; but for the haphazard appearance of Walther he would certainly have gained her for his wife; for she would have infinitely preferred him to Beckmesser, a pedant, a bad artist, and, to speak colloquially, a mean and disastrous cad. In the trial scene he has already half divined Walther's object, and the theme (_d_) in its application hints not only at his longing to grasp "the new" in Walther's song, but also his longing to possess Eva, with a sting of bitterness as he resolves to renounce her in favour of the younger suitor. Towards the end of the opera, when Sachs brings the young pair together he says (to music quoted from _Tristan_) he would not play the part of King Mark and thus invite his Isolda to find a Tristan. I ask the reader to compare this phrase with one form of the first love-theme in _Tristan_ (_g_).

The essential notes are the same; but as a melody is made to sound another and different thing by varying the harmonies, there is in the Sachs phrase a touch of sadness, nearly hopelessness, but no hint of it in the _Tristan_ form. The true meaning is not obvious when it first occurs: Sachs seems simply to be the appreciator of true art and to be standing up for the true artist Walther against the barren pedant Beckmesser.

And I beg leave here to make a digression. I have spoken of Wagner's obsession by the notion that he could by his union of drama, music, pictorial art, etc., make his work clear enough to be understood at a first performance: in his letters he referred to a plan for giving the _Ring_ only once and then burning the theatre and the score--he did not add the composer and the artists. Unfortunately this view has been taken as a tenable one by good critics, and it has been argued seriously that such a phrase as (_d_) is meaningless, because its significance becomes apparent only in the second act. No great work of art can be seen at one glance--least of all Wagner's. If a painter puts before us a picture, say, of Perseus and Andromeda, we know at any rate what it is about; and there is no difficulty in understanding a Madonna. But, with the exception of the _Dutchman_, Wagner reshaped all his subjects so that, for instance, an acquaintance with the Nibelung legends is rather a hindrance than a help to a swift understanding of the _Ring_. At first his King Mark is a puzzle to those who know the Arthurian legends; and in the same way, if the Sachs of history is confounded with Wagner's Sachs, we are at once utterly at sea. But a knowledge of Wagner's Sachs can scarcely be acquired from the words alone: more is told us in the music than in the words; and before we can grasp the drama as well as Wagner's use of phrases we must hear the opera many, many times. I deny that this is an illegitimate mode of appeal to an audience; I deny that the indispensability of knowing an opera thoroughly before you judge it is to imply that it is less than a very great work of art; I affirm that the n.o.bler, profounder, more beautiful a work of art, the more necessary it is to be able to look at every pa.s.sage with a full consciousness of all that is to come after, as well as of what has gone before. Wagner himself was compact of contradictions, and so, while trying to create his operas in such fashion that a single performance would suffice to reveal their splendour, he took the precaution to write detailed explanations which might serve the same purpose as many previous performances; and he also wrote explanations of Beethoven's symphonies.

Throughout this long scene the tender stream of melody flows on, never lapsing into anything approaching prettiness or feebleness, flooding us with an overwhelming sense of a far-away past, while full utterance is found for Eva's anxiety, then her despair, and her wish, timidly spoken, to give herself to Sachs rather than to be won by Beckmesser.

A scene of such length, constructed on such a plan, could have been carried through by no other composer than Wagner--the sweetness, variety and dramatic strength and truth are Wagner at his ripest and best. After Eva's heart has been opened to us he takes up (_d_), and though Sachs is a little grumpy--the effort to resign Eva inevitably though insensibly showing itself--we learn all about him and share his secret, too, in a very short while. Then Magdalena calls Eva and tells her Beckmesser intends to serenade her, and goes in to take her place at the window; and then comes the only love-duet in the opera.

Walther appears; and Eva chants a melody that is surely first cousin to one of the greatest in _Euryanthe_. As we get on we find it harder to give any adequate idea of the enchantment of the thing. The gentle evening wind makes its voice heard, low, soft; and Walther, scorning the masters who compose and sing only by rule--and, by the way, what would Wagner have done in the days when a musician had to play and sing before he could be understood or ever heard as a composer?--works himself up to a state of tumultuous indignation; then a strange noise is heard in the distance, the watchman's cow-horn. A minute's silence, and next one of the sweetest melodies in all music--expressive of the love of Walther and Eva, but also full of that feeling for the remote past; then the entrance of the watchman, with his warning to the folk to look after their lights and fires: it is ten o'clock (late hours) in our city, and disaster must be kept off at all costs. Sachs has heard the talk between Eva and Walther and determined to ward off disaster in one shape at any rate: he places a light so that they cannot get away without being seen; they are furious, desperate, but that loveliest of melodies flows on until Beckmesser comes in to perform his serenade. From this point Wagner, without ever ceasing to be the consummate artist or allowing the old-world atmosphere to weaken its hold on our senses, lets himself go like a schoolboy out for a holiday. He begins his splendid song, a parable: Eve was well enough off in the Garden of Eden, but when she took a wrong step the Lord sent a shoemaker to save her. The words are in the very spirit of the Middle Ages: a materialistic, nave, literal handling of spiritual things; but the most devout of believers can find no cause of offence.

The song opens, as I have mentioned, in the rhythm (4-4 instead of 3-4) of the Sword scene, the harmonies being practically the same. The tune is one of Wagner's finest: indeed, if we did not know what he could do, if we could not hear the opera once in a while, we should refuse to believe that such dignity and beauty of utterance could be kept up alongside of the grave old cobbler's humorous bedevilment.

Beckmesser wants to serenade Eva--mistaking Magdalena at the window in Eva's dress for that lady; Sachs insists on finishing Beckmesser's new shoes for the contest of the morrow, and revenges himself for the insult inflicted upon Walther in the morning by striking one blow for every mistake. Before this is arranged there is a long altercation, and as the heat of the men's temper dies down that sweet love melody of the old world creeps in again; but then the farce commences.

Beckmesser's song is almost outrageous caricature; the parody of the academics of Wagner's day who made no mistakes from the academic point of view, and yet could write nothing that sounded right, is excruciatingly funny; then David, under the impression that the chief of the academics is serenading Magdalena, comes out, goes in to fetch a stick, comes out again armed, and sets to work with it upon Beckmesser; the good burghers have been annoyed by Beckmesser's caterwauling and Sachs' hammering; out they come to keep their streets in order; and the tumult begins in serious earnest. Every one hits at every one else, as Irishmen hit, it is said, at Donnybrook Fair; Beckmesser is sadly injured; Sachs kicks David indoors, Eva and Magdalena are got in to Pogner's; Sachs gets Walther in with him also; the row dies down. No one save Sachs and David knows how it started; no one knows why it ends. It is--allowing for the lapse of four centuries--rather like a cab accident in London or any other great city: ladies in night attire look out of windows, and, seeing their husbands engaged in deadly warfare, in the very spirit of Miss Miggs begin to empty pails of cold water over the combatants indiscriminately. Apparently this cools the ardour of everybody. One by one the crowd makes for shelter; the watchman's horn is heard a few streets away; and when he arrives with his lantern and stick a few minutes later the alley and platz are deserted. The moon shines out on the lovely scene; the old man chants his call--it is eleven of the night; all the world should be in bed; all the lights and fires should be out; he goes off, leaving us the wondrous picture of old Nuremberg sleeping in the heart of old Germany; and the curtain slowly falls. A very ineffective "curtain" it was in the eyes of most opera-goers in the 'sixties, and is in the eyes of the ordinary play-goer of to-day; but, for all that, one of the most superb to be found in the whole of the dramatic works of the world.

It is, I have just said, difficult to a.n.a.lyse the music of such a scene as this, and only one or two points may be noted now. I have referred again to the consummate mastery of technique manifested throughout the opera, and here there is no falling off from this mastery. Throughout we have that atmosphere of bygone generations, and also a combination, curious when looked into, of homeliness with n.o.bility. Sachs' song is merrily trolled out, but underneath its joviality we feel the greatness of the man--a man so great in character that no suits of shining armour, no heralds and no waving banners are needed to make him impressive: he remains, even while he works at his last and sings a sort of club-dinner song, the simple cobbler-poet, great by reason of his sincerity and his artist-soul.

The street scrimmage is the most realistic thing of the sort ever attempted, not to say achieved. It is customary to describe the music as a fugue, and, if that is so, no more unfugue-like fugue was ever penned. It begins with a parody of a fugue, the answer being announced before the subject--that is, what purports to be the answer occurs a fifth instead of a fourth below; then what purports to be the subject is re-announced one tone above its first statement, and answered, as before, a fifth below. Then the melody of Beckmesser's grotesque is brought in and treated contrapuntally, with what theorists call free imitation in the accompaniment. Fugue, real or tonal, there is none.

V

This midsummer night's orgy over, we next have midsummer day. The curtain rises; the early morning sun shines through the windows of Sachs' house; Sachs sits there, a book on his knees, but dreaming, not reading. But before the rising of the curtain there is a prelude to tell us of his musings. When we know the opera this piece is easy enough to follow. He thinks over the events of the past night, and pa.s.ses through thought into dream, getting clean away from earth into a serener air--and coming slowly back to earth again. Structurally this piece is on the same plan as others of the preludes--that of the third act of _Tannhauser_, for example. It is nonsense to say the piece is meaningless because it cannot be fully grasped at a first hearing: I have already spoken of the fallacy involved in that contention--the fallacy that a work of art should be completely comprehensible at a first hearing. It is equally nonsensical to decry the "literary" method of composition: that method was the method of at least two others of the great composers, Haydn and Beethoven, who "worked to a story." In fact, all these unreasonable reasoners who tell us these fine incontrovertible pieces of absurdity place themselves on the same level as the pundits who pointed out that because Wagner used the piano when composing, therefore he could not compose--forgetting Haydn's explicit statement that he always composed at the piano; forgetting how Mozart spent hours and days at the piano in doing the creative work of a new opera; forgetting that Beethoven used the piano even when he could no longer hear it (see Schindler's or Ries' account of the composition of the "Appa.s.sionata" sonata). As a mere piece of music, a succession of tones and combinations of tones, the rare quality of this prelude cannot but be felt; and though we may not at once grasp its full significance, no one can miss the sequence of the emotions expressed--the grave reflection of the opening, the hymn-like succeeding pa.s.sage, the gradual mounting of the music into a beauteous, calm morning air, some realm of ecstatic peace far above the clouds, the gradual return to the mood of the opening.

When we do know what it is all about the expression of the different stages of feeling is felt to be more precise--that is all.

The prelude prepares for Sachs' monologue, a profound thing, and one moreover entirely new--had Shakespeare been a musician he might have done something like it. Then David the Irresponsible enters, and we get some more of Wagner's exquisite fooling; next we have Walther with his "dream," out of which the Prize-song is made. This is a long scene--perhaps a little too long--for Wagner seems to have been determined that if the audience did not feel the beauty of his melody it should not be for want of hearing it often enough. As Walther sings Sachs takes it down in tablature, calling out to him what sections are next required. Sachs then declares that this is indeed a master-song, and will win Walther the prize he so much desires; he and Walther go off to attire themselves for the contest, and Beckmesser limps in. In dumb show he describes his aches and pains and shows how he is thinking of his thrashing of the night before; and what he does not say the orchestra says very plainly for him. There is far too much of it--for English tastes, at any rate--before he is alarmed by discovering the still wet ma.n.u.script in Sachs' handwriting. He s.n.a.t.c.hes it up and conceals it; Sachs comes back dressed for the great ceremony, and there is a row--Beckmesser querulous, bitterly angry and suspicious, on the one hand, Sachs quietly scornful on the other. Let me point out that this scene is another example of Wagner's stage craftsmanship at its best. There is nothing conventional in the way Sachs and Walther are got off to give Beckmesser his chance: what more natural than that they should go to prepare themselves? Nor is the finding of the ma.n.u.script one of those things that give people who don't like opera cause to blaspheme: Sachs simply left it on the table to dry until he returned for it. Compare this scene with that in Verdi's _Falstaff_, where that fat hero, hiding behind a screen, must be supposed not to hear an elaborate ensemble number sung by the other characters--an instance which one might presume to be intended to make the "aside" so ridiculous that no one would ever dare to use it again.

Wagner, for the time, at any rate, had ceased to make demands on the credulity of his audiences or their meek acceptance of a preposterous convention. The business is kept up too long, as I have just confessed; and this is perhaps explained by Wagner's evident desire to make fun of the men who for years had called him a charlatan, a bad musician, and generally done their best to prevent him earning his living. Still, it is a small blot on a big opera. The music for such incidents cannot be of the highest beauty; here we have one of the cases of a _tour de force_. But even its inferiority is made to serve a purpose; it serves as a foil for that which accompanies the entry of Eva and her conversation with Sachs. Beckmesser has gone away joyfully with the ma.n.u.script, fully believing he has got possession of a song by Sachs--who has told him he can do what he likes with it--and revealing the fact that, despite all his boasting, in his heart he knows the cobbler to be immeasurably his superior. In music hardly to be matched for sensuous beauty Eva's trembling perturbation and hopes and fears are exquisitely suggested; then with the arrival of Walther, and also of Magdalena and David, we get a little more fooling, followed by one of Wagner's loveliest and most amazing feats, the quintet. If only for one reason it is amazing. Only a few years before the notes were set down, and certainly only a year or two before the thing was planned in the libretto, he had vehemently declared, in essays and letters, that never again would he compose anything in the operatic style: he was for ever done with opera; henceforth music-drama alone would occupy him. And lo! here, at the very first opportunity, we find him not merely writing a grand opera finale to his first act--which he could justify; a rough-and-tumble finale to his second act--which he could justify; but a set concerto piece in the middle of his third act--which according to his own theories at any rate, he could not justify! He might well avow that when he came to compose _Tristan_ he discovered he had gone far beyond his theories. The justification for the quintet is its beauty and the fact that it finds expression for the feeling of the moment. All the same, I have heard it encored more than once; and an encore in the middle of the act of a Wagner music-drama, or even music-comedy, is almost inconceivable.

VI

The two pairs, Walther and Eva, and David and Magdalena, having been joined together, and David having been freed from his 'prentice servitude by a hearty box on the ear, the quintet having been sung and (as just remarked) sometimes encored, Wagner gathers himself together for a gigantic scene as characteristic of his genius as anything he conceived: no one, indeed, but Wagner could have done or would have thought of attempting such a scene. He has shown us the masters of Nuremberg in conclave, the apprentices romping and joking, the crowd in the street losing its head; and how he gives us a picture of the town on a fete-day, with the trade-guilds marching to the singing-contest. The tailors, the shoemakers, the bakers and the butchers all file past, chanting the merits of their various callings, finally gathering on the meadow outside the town to await the arrival of the chief burghers. It is a picture, not a dramatic scene, and to judge only from the text might suggest the _Rienzi_ way of planning things. It is not, however, a spectacle in the sense in which we apply that word to some of the _Rienzi_ scenes; there is nothing pompous about it, no recourse is made to gorgeous costumes. The artisans march past in their holiday clothes, each guild bearing its banner; the banners wave in the bright sunlight, and there is plenty of colour as well as of bustle and gaiety; but all is homely in style--there is not a n.o.ble person in the crowd--and the thing is carried through by the vividly imagined music, the energy and sparkle of it, the positive splendour of the orchestration. The various guild-choruses are full of humour, the many ridiculous things being saved from lapsing into mere horseplay and nonsense by the endless series of beautiful tunes. This part of the business ends with a waltz which shows that Wagner might, had he chosen, have been the finest writer of dance-music in Europe, and driven the Strausses and the rest from the field.

The signal is given of the masters' approach, and as Sachs comes on the whole crowd presses to greet him with a setting of his own song to Martin Luther. The transition from the jollity of the dancing to the solemnity, nay, sublimity, of this chorus is managed with perfect deftness: there is no incongruity. It is this song that pa.s.sed through Sachs' brain when we found him absorbed in meditation at the beginning of the act. The poem--written by the historical Sachs--is itself beautiful, and Wagner has made it immortal; only he at his ripest and best could combine in an opera-chorus such strength with such sweetness, combine the directness of a part-song with the free play of parts, with never a touch of formalism. It must be held to be one of the most superb things in an opera which is as nearly perfect as ever opera is likely to be.

This over, we are gradually prepared for the ridiculous and preposterous again. Beckmesser is to make his bid for Eva's hand with what he supposes to be a song by Sachs; and to an accompaniment of music which, lively and graceful enough, is purposely of no very distinctive character. The preparations are made. By the time he mounts the heap of turf to address his audience we are ready for him.

Of course he makes a fine a.s.s of himself. He has not had time to memorise the poem of the song, and with extravagant fun Wagner makes him change the poetical and serious words into words of most ludicrous significance. Walther's melody he has not got hold of at all, and in a state of intense nervousness tries to fit the words to the burlesque tune of his previous night's serenade. The accents all fall in the wrong place; and as he stumbles miserably along the crowd begins to t.i.tter. Wagner of course was parodying and satirising the pedants of his own day, especially the composers of psalms who could not set a straightforward Bible sentence without making nonsense of it. Readers acquainted with the ordinary musical setting of a portion of the Church of England service, or the average organist's anthem, will know what I mean: the average organist seems to consider it a point of artistry, if not indeed of honour, to accentuate the words so as to leave the meaning as little intelligible as possible; and in many cases--I have some before me now--he contrives to make them nonsensical. It was this sort of thing, perpetrated by the very men who denied him any musical gift, that Wagner held up to derision in Beckmesser's song. The t.i.ttering swells into a roar, and at last Beckmesser, cursing Sachs for a deceiver and false friend, flies. With that, fooling ends. To music of a rare sweet gravity Sachs invites the "volk" to hearken to the song when given by the man who composed it.

Walther steps up and sings; as he goes on the people again make themselves heard, but to praise, not to deride; towards the finish their voices form a choral accompaniment, and we have the counterpart to the finale of the first act. Walther wins the day and Eva; and, slightly against his will, he is made a Master. There is an address from Sachs, in which he exhorts Walther and all present not to despise art, but to honour it as being (for this is what his speech amounts to) the heart's blood of national life. Preachments are not usually stimulating, but this one is mercifully brief, and is accompanied by fine, melodious strains. With its contrapuntal weaving it leads to the final chorus, and also it puts Sachs back again into the position from which the importance of Walther's song has thrust him: it is a last reminder that the opera is a glorification of song, and that the masters have a sacred trust--to guard song pedantry and commercialism.

The work closes with a grand chorus made up of familiar music, a glorious blaze and riot of orchestral and choral colour.

VII

The second section of this chapter contains what I have to say by way of summing up. Let me repeat that the _Mastersingers_ is notable for the endless flow of beautiful melodies, neither broken and sc.r.a.ppy nor, on the other hand, approaching monotony: there is infinite variety combined with magnificent breadth; for the n.o.bility hidden under homeliness--a characteristic most marked in Sachs' music; for miraculous colouring now pitched in a low and tender key, now blazing as in the last finale; for the picture of Nuremberg in the old time, and for the vigour and fun with which the old life is depicted. It is Wagner's one cheerful opera, and from some points of view, perhaps, his most perfect; nowhere else did he try to keep on a high and even level of pure song for so long; it does not strain our nerves, and will bear hearing perhaps more frequently than anything else he wrote.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XIII

KING LUDWIG

In resuming Wagner's biography we may conveniently take it up after the completion of _Tristan_ in August, 1859. I summarised the events leading up to his beginning on the _Mastersingers_; but it is necessary to go over some of the ground in a little more detail to show in what a terrible plight Wagner had been landed when King Ludwig II of Bavaria sent for him. He was bankrupt financially, in health and in hope. Like the nose of his boyish hero, everything turned to dust the moment he touched it. Concerts in Paris nearly brought utter ruin--would have brought utter ruin had not a woman friend and admirer come to the rescue. He gained no money by his concert tour until, as he said, he got to St. Petersburg, and there the amount cannot have been stupendous. He laboured with brain, heart and hand to give the world masterpieces; the world responded by not responding at all--by taking absolutely no notice. In Paris he made many valuable friends, but they were useless to him for the realisation of his projects. They might help him from moment to moment, and did help him to remain alive and to avert calamities: a secure and peaceful living they could not guarantee him: they could not a.s.sist him in getting his works properly performed, or performed at all. I have already discussed the mistaken policy, on his part, of writing so much about himself, and the futility of his German friends taking up the pen on his behalf.

The friends meant well, and there was nothing else they could do; but at the time their efforts resulted in nothing. He published the words of the _Mastersingers_ and of the _Ring_, and the consequence was only that a professor publicly implored him not to set such a monstrosity as the second to music. It is hard to say who did him the greatest amount of harm--his French friends, his German friends, or his enemies on either side of wherever the frontier was in those far-off days.

Whatever was done for him, whatever he did for himself, whatever was done against him, it seemed all one: he walked steadily on into the thickest of grimy fogs. By romping over Europe like any itinerant conductor of this day, he might earn an uncertain livelihood: as for any prospect of getting on with his _Mastersingers_, his _Ring_ and a score of other plans bubbling in his head, that was a receding prospect indeed: every year, every month, made the prospect still more remote. His music was either misunderstood or disliked: certainly the man's writings and the writings of his friends resulted in _him_ being disliked. When he settled in Vienna after the triumphs of his earlier operas he speedily discovered this sad truth, but did not discover the reason why. His life had been a long tragedy, and with this collapse of his Vienna hopes he seemed to touch the lowest depths.

So he got away from Vienna, and one day had a visitor. This gentleman said, in effect, that King Ludwig II had just ascended the throne, and would be glad of a call. Instantly the grimy fog cleared away; all was splendid sunshine: in that sunshine Richard was henceforth to bask and the fruits of his genius were to ripen. He went to Munich, and there were prompt results. In 1865 _Tristan_ was (at last) produced; he was enabled to make a new start on the _Mastersingers_, which was eventually produced in Munich in 1868. But in Munich, as elsewhere, the inevitable occurred. Wagner suddenly became the "favourite," quite as in mediaeval times, of a not very popular king, one of a line noted for mental and moral deficiency; and, without consulting any of the powers that had ruled for a long time in Bavaria, in his mad enthusiasm he set about "reforming" everything. Apparently he wanted within twenty-four hours to set up a Saxon Utopia in the midst of a people who hated the Saxons. He wanted to establish a new opera-house, where perfect artists were to give perfect performances for audiences that did not pretend to be perfect. As such performances could not possibly pay, the audiences, besides putting down the price of admittance, had, as taxpayers, to make good the deficits. King Ludwig was supposed to do it; but where on earth was Ludwig's money to come from if not out of the taxpayers' pockets? Then there was to be founded a genuine school of music--an excellent scheme, but one, again, which could not possibly be profitable, or for some time earn enough to cover its expenses. Who was to pay?--of course King Ludwig: that is, the taxpayers. And Wagner was not only known (with absolute certainty) to wish to divert from the pockets of "placemen" funds they had learnt to consider their perquisites, with a view of turning Munich into a musical paradise on earth: it seemed to many that he was gaining such an ascendancy over the feeble mind and will of the king that shortly he would be dictator of the country. That view was not well-founded: Wagner, dreamer though he was, had a strong practical vein in his character: if he saw that one of his dreams could be realised he realised it at the first opportunity; if he saw it could not be realised he explained it in an article and left others to make the first effort at realisation. The man who created Bayreuth was not the man to imagine altogether vainly that he could, per favour of a king, whom he must have known to be utterly weak, turn some millions of citizens and villagers into an Utopian nation of art-lovers and so on. But hatred surrounded him everywhere; the machinery of the state came early to a standstill, and, finally, the king had to ask him to withdraw for a longer or shorter while.

This is the plain truth of an affair concerning which there has been an immense amount of lying on both sides. The scandals about the personal relations of the king and Wagner I leave to the vampires; as for the gentry who will have it that Wagner was "persecuted" out of Munich by Jews, Christians, journalists and bank-managers, I leave them to anybody who likes to take them up. That Wagner had to quit Munich was a sad thing in his life--a very sorrow's crown of sorrow; and it was a bad thing for German music. It put back the clock many years. But, sad though it was for Wagner, in the long run it proved good for him. He would have composed little more in such a city--a city so misgoverned and misguided as Munich: his days would have been filled with bitterness, his nerves would have been quickly shattered by intrigues. He was now amply provided for; a villa--the celebrated "Triebschen"--was taken for him on the sh.o.r.es of Lucerne, and here he settled and remained for some years. Here he finished the _Ring_ and planned Bayreuth.

Another thing which contributed to his unpopularity was his relations with his own and another man's wife. Hans von Bulow, his pupil, had married Liszt's daughter Cosima: that lady became infatuated with Wagner, and Wagner with her, and they virtually eloped together.

Minna's cause was eagerly taken up by musicians, operatic people generally, and journalists, though none of them cared a rap about Minna. The most scandalous stories were circulated, and Wagner came to be thought not only a charlatan cadger living on the State funds, but one who used those funds to satisfy his carnal and other appet.i.tes.

His silk dressing-gowns, his gorgeous apartments, his sybarite feastings, were the common talk of the newspapers: while he was slaving, as the saying goes, twenty-six hours out of twenty-four, the common fancy was taught to picture him as taking his ease in unheard-of luxury.