Richard Wagner Part 12

With the entry of the Giants the music makes, so to say, a fresh start. The old themes are welded to or interwoven with new material, and a perfect symphonic whole results, one that can be listened to with delight without stage accessories. I do not mean that music intended for the theatre should stand the test of playing away from the theatre, but that here Wagner, while writing strictly and immensely effective theatre music, has got such a grip of his art that he can combine the two things, dramatic truth, and symphonic beauty and cohesion. The flood sweeps on, undisturbed in its flow by the entry of the other deities, or by the introduction of themes full of significance in the light of their after development. But another fact must not go unnoticed. There is in the _Rhinegold_ little of the spring freshness of the _Valkyrie_. The melody a.s.sociated with Freia's apples is supremely beautiful; but it is a mere short phrase, several times repeated, and the ma.s.s of music in which it is embedded smells more of the study and the lamp than of the mountains and the woods. The Froh theme, too, is a trifle flat: it does not effervesce or sparkle: the "dewy splendour" of the _Valkyrie_ music is not on it.

This is not to be hypercritical: it is to compare, as one must, a great achievement with an achievement in all respects very much, immeasurably, greater. Had we only the _Rhinegold_, with all its plentiful lack of inspiration and its theatricality, it would rank very high; but Wagner himself in the _Valkyrie_ set the standard by which inevitably it must be judged.

When Wotan and Loge descend to the Nibelung's cave to steal the treasure Wagner frankly lets himself loose. Here we have the hobgoblins of the Teutonic imagination and the rude, boisterous, humorous Wotan of the Scandinavian imagination--the Odin who tried to drink the sea dry and laughed to find he could not. As the once-celebrated Sir Augustus Harris declared, "This is pantomime."

Perhaps the scene is unduly protracted, but the music goes on merrily enough. The renewed altercation with the Giants calls for little remark. When, however, the Giants demand the Ring and Wotan calls up Erda, the wisdom of the earth, a pa.s.sage occurs which, though more or less of an irrelevant interpolation, gives Wagner a chance of putting forth his strength. Erda rises to most mysterious music, counsels Wotan to surrender the Ring, and sinks down again to her sleep; and one forgets the irrelevancy in the thrill of this vision of the Mother Earth, the spirit that sleeps amongst the everlasting hills. Finally the composer gets his great chance, and shows that, like Handel and his own Donner, he "could strike like a thunderbolt." The G.o.ds are all disheartened; mists have gathered; Donner--our old friend Thor--raises his hammer and smashes something; there is a flash of lightning and a peal of thunder; the mists and clouds clear away; and we see there the rainbow bridge over which the G.o.ds wend on their way to Valhalla. We have Wagner the sublime pictorial musician. The Rainbow motive is perhaps not very graphic in itself, but it serves as a basis for a delicious pa.s.sage--evening calm and sunset after storm--comparable only with a parallel pa.s.sage in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. The storm itself is Wagner in the plenitude of his power. It is short: it is not "worked up": in a few strokes, brief and telling as Donner's own hammer-strokes, the whole thing is done. Then the Valhalla music, glorified by a gorgeous accompaniment, is heard again, only interrupted by the wail of the Rhinemaidens below, sorrowing for the loss of their pretty, harmless toy. Wotan hears the cry, and pa.s.ses on to feast in his castle. Grim care goes with him; but he has the consoling idea of the free hero and the irresistible sword. So ends the _Rhinegold_--Fricka content to have both Wotan and Freia; the other G.o.ds not much concerned about anything; Wotan full of apprehensions and also of determination--determination to rule without paying the price of rulership.

V

I have attempted nothing more than a broad and rough description of the _Rhinegold_. The opera was planned as a prelude, and suffers from the defects of the plan, as well as from the fact that it was written before Wagner's new method was ripe. He wrote to Liszt that the music came up "like wild," or, as an irreverent critic once observed, like mould on a pot of jam; and the second description is truer than the speaker thought. The _Rhinegold_ has aged faster than any other of the great works. Alongside of the sublime we find the petty; after phrases as sweet and fresh as raindrops on young spring leaves we find stodgy, "made," music; the atmosphere is not preserved. But gigantic possibilities are opened out. The Rhine music is afterwards used to splendid ends; the Spear motive, which makes its first appearance in rather a trivial form--it might be a quotation from Weber or Spohr--becomes later one of the crowning glories of the _Ring_; the Fire music--the Loge theme--comes out at once in its full magnificence. It is fair criticism to say that had Wagner written the opera again after finishing the _Valkyrie_ he might have wrought up his material into a perfect work of art. A mere mortal, even the greatest mortal, could hardly be expected to attempt the task, and the _Rhinegold_ is a little less than perfect. Moreover, it is superfluous. We can follow the _Valkyrie_, _Siegfried_ and the _Dusk of the G.o.ds_ quite well without it. Still, it is a part of Wagner's scheme, and for many a long year will be enjoyed for its power and beauty, a power and beauty that seem small only in comparison with the greater operas.

CHAPTER XV

'THE VALKYRIE'

I

The _Rhinegold_ suffers from a plethora of undeveloped themes, some of which are treated at length as the _Ring_ proceeds. Of all announced only two remain unchanged, the Valhalla and the Fire themes. The first, I have just remarked, is not susceptible of development, and is only slightly varied throughout the _Ring_; the second does not demand development, but is varied much as Beethoven varied his melodies in his last pianoforte sonatas. The most important of those that are metamorphosed is the Spear motive. The Spear is the symbol at once of Wotan's sovereignty and of his bondage. On its shaft, the world ash-tree stem, are graven the mystic laws by virtue of which he rules; did he break these laws his power would be gone from him. The essence of the laws lies in the sanct.i.ty of compacts, and so we first hear its representative theme when the Giants come to claim Freia as payment for the building of the Burg: it makes its appearance quietly, un.o.btrusively, almost apologetically, and might be, as I have said, a fragment from Spohr or Weber. Its treatment in a simple s.n.a.t.c.h of two-part canon, one part following the other at half-a-bar's distance, seems like a mild gibe at those who only live for and by conventions.

When it reappears in the Second Act of the _Valkyrie_ it is altogether a different thing: here we have Wotan the ruler determined at all costs to rule and using to the full the power the Spear confers on him. Like many of the greatest musical subjects, it is simple beyond the daring of the minor composers, merely an unbroken scale descending in heavy, emphatic steps to the lower octaves: it is authority personified, will that brooks no opposition. This motive, the Valhalla motive and the fire motive are the princ.i.p.al ones carried into the _Valkyrie_ from the _Rhinegold_; and an immense amount of new musical matter is introduced. We see no more of the inferior deities: we hear the stroke of Donner's hammer in a storm _Lied_, and Loge appears as consuming flame in the last act; but, excepting Wotan, only Fricka is seen again in human shape. The stage is now occupied by human beings, raised up, it is true, by Wotan himself, and by some other mysterious beings, also raised up by Wotan, one of whom, _the_ Valkyrie, Brunnhilda, is condemned in the final scene to become human.

Two dramas, the huge encircling tragedy of Wotan in conflict with his wife Fricka, the G.o.ddess of laws and covenants, especially the covenant of marriage, and the subsidiary tragedy of Siegmund and Sieglinda, are combined in perfect proportions in the _Valkyrie_. The story at first sounds a little complicated; but the reader, bearing in mind what has already been said of Wotan's Master-idea, can have no difficulty whatever in following it. The Master-idea, we know, is to raise up a hero who, acting freely, independent of and ever defying the G.o.ds, will wrest the Ring from Fafner. Wotan, then, has descended from his Valhalla, and, taking an earthly wife, begotten two children, Siegmund and Sieglinda, who know themselves to be of the tribe of the Volsungs. These he deserts. Sieglinda is taken captive and made the loveless wife of Hunding; Siegmund, alone in the world, wanders. .h.i.ther and thither, meeting ill-luck everywhere--ill-luck prepared by his father. At last, in attempting to rescue a maiden from some raiders, he is forced to fly. As he runs through the depths of an unknown forest a storm breaks upon him, and he takes shelter, utterly exhausted, in the house of Hunding. At this point the curtain rises.

The scene is the inside of Hunding's dwelling, built round a great ash-tree; on the right the fire burns on the hearth. The steady roar of the storm outside is heard, broken by shocks as the wind buffets the trees and the house and by the plashing of the rain. The room is empty; presently the door is roughly dashed open from outside and Siegmund staggers in. "Whatever this house may be, I must rest here,"

he says, and throws himself on the hearth. (We must bear in mind that the hearth was sacred: if my enemy took refuge on mine I might starve him out, but so long as he stayed there I might not hurt him.) Sieglinda enters; the two do not recognise one another; he calls for water; she brings him mead. Presently they fall to talking; and it is seen that the inevitable must happen. Hunding enters abruptly; they sit down to supper; Siegmund discloses his ident.i.ty, so far as he knows it--all but his name; Hunding recognises the very man he has been chasing, and gives him shelter for the night, but warns him that in the morning he, without a weapon, must fight. He calls for his night-draught, sends Sieglinda into the sleeping-room, and follows her. She glances repeatedly from Siegmund to a spot on the ash-trunk; but he does not take her meaning.

There follows a strange and beautiful scene. Siegmund lies down to rest; the fire glimmers fitfully, then blazes up, revealing at the point on the trunk at which Sieglinda had gazed a shining sword-hilt, the blade embedded in the trunk. Still Siegmund does not understand, and the fire dies down; he is beginning to slumber when Sieglinda enters and calls him. He starts up; she has put a sleeping-powder in Hunding's cup, and they are safe; and thus begins the greatest love-duet, next to the _Tristan_, in the world. Sieglinda tells how when she, full of grief, was wedded to Hunding, a grey old man, with one eye, clad in a blue cloak, came in uninvited, drove the sword Nothung into the ash-tree, and said that it should belong to the hero strong enough to draw it out. From all parts warriors came, but none could move it. Sieglinda feels that the appointed man has come; Siegmund grasps the weapon and triumphantly pulls it out. Then they reveal their names, and recognise one another as brother and sister, and the Act ends.

This is the first step towards Wotan's discomfiture. The significance of the Sword theme in the _Rhinegold_ at the moment when he has the Master-idea will now be apparent. The sword was so endowed by Wotan that only a fearless hero could use it; therefore, when Siegmund draws it from the wood, Wotan, watching from Valhalla, knows he has succeeded in raising up the hero he needed. Siegmund had been tested by all manner of misfortune; no harder life could have been his; Wotan had never aided him, but thrown disasters in his path; and had he failed or succ.u.mbed Wotan's device would have failed. But freely, independently, with no help from the G.o.d, he had come through all, and now his own strength enabled him to take the sword to--to what?--to work Wotan's will! That is, in creating Siegmund, even in testing him, in preparing for him a weapon that none could stand against, Wotan, far from successfully accomplishing his purpose, was accomplishing his ruin. Disillusionment comes swiftly. The first deed of his hero is to break two of the most sacred laws of heaven--laws binding on Wotan until he gets the Ring--for he carries off another man's wife, who is, moreover, his own sister. The punishment for that is matter for the next Act. At the end of the first we have seen that Wotan's Master-idea is a delusion. He might as well go and kill Fafner himself and take the Ring as breed a hero to do it for him with the aid of a magic sword. If he did so it would be by virtue of the power conferred on him by the runes on the Spear; and by those runes--those laws--Siegmund must be, and is, promptly judged and punished.

II

Before the rising of the curtain we have the first and one of the greatest of the ear-pictures of the _Valkyrie_. There is no preamble; at once the strings begin in repeated quavers to sustain (virtually) a long D, while the ba.s.ses start off with a figure many times repeated--a figure which is simply a bold variant of the ba.s.s figure in Schubert's _Erl-king_. So, for that matter, is the long D. Schubert drew a fine picture of storm in black wood; but he was limited by the form he wrote in and the instruments he wrote for. The energy, superhuman energy, of the thing is amazing: the storm throbs in the forest: one feels the pulse of the storm-G.o.d; the _sforzando_ shocks and shrieks add to the terrific wildness of the scene. Pitilessly, ever higher and higher, the wind shrieks, always to that beating ba.s.s, until, amid the clatter and screaming, we hear Donner, exulting in his mad strength and swinging his mighty hammer as he rides. The lightning crackles vividly in the orchestra, the thunder rolls, crashes and growls, and the thunder-G.o.d can almost be heard betaking himself off to continue his riot afar. Then a labouring, panting and struggling phrase--scarcely a theme--is heard as the storm slightly lulls; the curtain rises and we see Hunding's dwelling, and Siegmund bursts in.

The music of the earlier portion of the first scene is not of the same intrinsic quality, nor need it be. We have the setting before our eyes, and the stupendous power of what has just been heard leaves in our minds a vivid impression of what is going on out of doors.

Sieglinda comes in, surprised to find a stranger there at all, especially on so wild a night; Siegmund asks for water; she brings it; finding he is likely to fetch trouble on her head, he is for going.

But there is sympathy between them, and various Volsung motives and phrases of the rarest beauty and expressiveness tell us why; and she tells him to wait. "Hunding I will await here," says Siegmund. It is in this scene that a pa.s.sage occurs like one which I have referred to in the chapter on the _Dutchman_--the phrase is marked (_f_) on p.

118. The _Dutchman_ phrase is longer and at the same time less poignant; here it is brief and extraordinarily expressive; there it is not developed, nor, after some repet.i.tions, heard again; here it is made the most of musically and appears so late as in the _Dusk of the G.o.ds_. But the situations are a.n.a.logous. Senta gazes, rapt, on Vanderdecken; Sieglinda and Siegmund look on one another and pa.s.sion begins to dawn. This is worth noting as showing that Wagner used the leitmotiv spontaneously, so to speak, and not always as the result of deliberate calculation. Like all the other composers, he had his mannerisms: having invented a melody to find utterance for a feeling or set of feelings, when similar feelings had to be expressed again it was natural to him to use again the first melody, or something very like it. No composer, not even Beethoven, was more resolutely bent on writing _truthful_ music; and having once found the music to express certain shades of feeling, he was like a writer who, having said something as well as he can say it, prefers repeating himself to trying to achieve a superficial appearance of variety. Wagner, I think, repeated himself quite unconsciously very often: when the repet.i.tion is conscious of course we have at once the genuine leitmotiv; but it is the maddest of errors to see in every resemblance between phrases the deliberate employment of the leitmotiv.

The pair have drunk mead together and stand looking at one another; the storm has died away; and from the orchestra come pa.s.sages of wondrous delicacy, tenderness and freshness, scored by a perfect master. Suddenly the clanking of a horse's hoofs is heard; "Hunding!"

exclaims Sieglinda; the door is again thrown open and the black, ferocious barbarian stalks in. His theme is, figuratively, as black, gloomy, sinister and forbidding as himself; and the heavy, sullen tones of the battery of tubas which announces it intensify its effectiveness a hundredfold. Hunding is no villain of the piece, but a simple, surly chief of a tribe of savage fighters, and Wagner's music exactly describes him. Save for Siegmund's recital of his woes, the remainder of the scene remains sullen and gloomy; Siegmund, however, has some touching pa.s.sages, and notably a phrase of unearthly strangeness when he tells how he came back to his hut and found his father gone, only a wolf-skin lying there; and a bit of the Valhalla motive in the orchestra thrills one with its suggestiveness. One is carried into the dimmest recess of a forest where man has never been, far back in a period so old that it is ridiculous to call it ancient.

Throughout the music is in Wagner's grandest manner; the vocal writing is perfect; and though there are plenty of theatrical strokes, they are done in a n.o.bler way than the mere opera way of _Tannhauser_ and _Lohengrin_. In a word, the music is big: the breadth and sweep are enormous: the greatest Wagner has arrived, the Wagner who has gone far beyond the hesitations and littlenesses even of the _Rhinegold_.

Hunding is characterised more clearly and with more decisive strokes than Hagen in the last opera of the _Ring_, partly because there is more genuine inspiration in the _Valkyrie_, partly, perhaps, because Hunding is a much simpler personage.

That strange scene where Siegmund lies on the hearth again, and, realising his desperate situation, calls on his father the Volsung for aid, is musically and dramatically splendid in its colour and force.

As he thinks of Sieglinda a feeling of spring again comes into the music; thus is strengthened the beautiful music she is given; then comes the avowal of love, and the flying open of the door. Outside, the trees are seen in the moonlight, the dripping green leaves glistening; and Siegmund sings a spring-song never to be beaten for freshness (though, as I have pointed out, not equal in musical significance to Walther's song in the _Mastersingers_); there comes the magnificent scene of the plucking out of the Sword; the recognition of the two as brother and sister; and the final impa.s.sioned outburst which ends the scene as with a blaze of fire.

This Act will ever be accounted one of Wagner's most magnificent and fully inspired. The superb vocal writing, the beauty and sheer strength of the orchestral parts, the gorgeous colouring, and the human pa.s.sion blent with the sense of the green yet fiery spring, all go to make up a thing unique in opera. A tide of life rushes through it all; and the man's technical accomplishment was so fine and complete that he found immediate incisive expression for every shade of emotion, or complex blend of emotions, and every sensation. The jealous, savage ferocity of Hunding is there; Siegmund's and Sieglinda's despair, hope and final burst of ecstatic joy; and at the same time we seem to smell the fresh, wet earth and leaves and to see the sparkling moonlight.

III

The Second Act opens in a wild and rocky place amongst the mountains.

Siegmund and Sieglinda have fled; Hunding is in hot pursuit; and now Wotan stands, the mighty war-G.o.d, brandishing his spear, and calling his daughter Brunnhilda, the Valkyrie, to favour and aid Siegmund. She joyfully a.s.sents and goes off, and Wotan exults. He persists in deceiving himself: Brunnhilda, his own daughter, was created to execute his purposes: the Runes make him accountable for her actions, just as he is now for Siegmund's and in the later operas for Siegfried's. As in the _Rhinegold_, Fricka instantly bids him remember what and _how_ he is. As the G.o.ddess of covenants, laws, she wants vengeance wreaked on Siegmund and Sieglinda: they have broken the most sacred of all covenants in the eyes of a woman, the marriage covenant.

Vainly Wotan pleads that the Valkyrie works unaided: she presses him, until at last he swears a sacred oath on his spear that Siegmund shall die. Brunnhilda comes in, whooping her war-call, but her voice drops at the sight of Fricka. Fricka, who thoroughly despises all the Valkyrie maidens as being born out of true wedlock, tells her to take her orders from Wotan, and goes off triumphant. Wotan, deeply despondent, terrifies Brunnhilda with his grief; she casts down her spear and shield and kneels before him, imploring him to tell the cause.

Then follows a scene that is, and always will be, a stumbling-block: Wotan seeks to explain his position in quasi-Schopenhauerian terminology and at immense length. We know all about it: it has been explained amply in the _Rhinegold_ and in the scene we have just witnessed, and now he must needs go over the ground again--with dreary and soporific effect. Brunnhilda, as love incarnate, pleads for the man and woman whose only crime in her eyes is that they love (for laws are things pure love cannot understand). Wotan cannot but be obdurate; he p.r.o.nounces sentence on Siegmund and goes off in a storming rage.

Sadly Brunnhilda, comprehending nothing of the compulsion Wotan is subject to--for how should love know aught of greed for power?--picks up her weapons ("How heavy they have grown!" she says) and prepares to warn Siegmund he must die. (No warrior could look upon a Valkyrie save in the hour of his death; therefore no living being had ever seen one.) As sounds of the approaching steps of panting people are heard she retires amongst the rocks; Siegmund and Sieglinda stagger in, the woman fainting. She has sinned and is overwhelmed with terror; he cannot comfort her; she faints, then sleeps--the Valkyrie having thrown a spell on her. Siegmund bends over her; slowly Brunnhilda advances and calls, "Siegmund! I come to call thee hence"; he raises his head, sees her, and knows his fate. This is the final crushing blow; the Volsung had always deserted him; but he had found the magic sword and thought the promised help would not fail him in his worst need. (Truly the G.o.ds treat us as toys to be broken at pleasure!) He refuses to go, and speaks blasphemy of the high G.o.ds; Brunnhilda is horrified: here she is going to take him to Valhalla to feast on delights for ever--and he scorns her. He ridicules Valhalla and Wotan and the serving-maidens: he wonders who the Valkyrie is, so beautiful and cold and stern. The scene is one of the fullest dramatic intensity: at last Siegmund asks whether, if he goes to Valhalla, he will find his wife there. "Siegmund will see Sieglinda no more," is the answer: Siegmund for the moment is crushed, but again rebels, and takes his sword to kill first Sieglinda and then himself. Brunnhilda is overcome with admiration: _this_, at any rate, this love she can understand; she tells him to prepare to fight Hunding and she will help him.

The next scene is unmatched, even in Wagner, for its terror and the swiftness with which the climax comes on. Clouds gather; Hunding's horn is heard and his voice; Siegmund leaves Sieglinda and goes off cheerfully and confidently to meet his foe. Thicker gather the clouds; thunder peals and lightnings flash; the antagonists are heard calling as they seek each other in the darkness; Sieglinda speaks in her dreams; as she awakes, Hunding and Siegmund are seen in the dim light high up amongst the rocks; Brunnhilda encourages Siegmund, guarding him with her spear; he is about to strike Hunding down; there is an angry red glare, and Wotan shatters the sword with his spear; Hunding runs his spear through Siegmund; Sieglinda shrieks and falls insensible to the ground. Slowly the red light fades; "Go, tell Fricka I have sent you," Wotan says bitterly, and at his nod Hunding falls dead; Brunnhilda has run round, picked up the shards of the Sword, and, gathering Sieglinda in her arms, rushed away. There is a moment of suspense; the tragedy is accomplished; and now Wotan must punish Brunnhilda for disobeying his commands; and amidst thunders and lightnings, in flaming wrath, he rides off, and the curtain falls.

The drama of Siegmund and Sieglinda is ended; the second inner drama, that of Wotan and Brunnhilda, is begun. Love, the best part of Wotan's nature, has risen against him in his endeavour to rule; she cannot prevent him destroying the creatures he has made, but she can defy him. That sort of rule would be intolerable, so love shall be put away from him and he will still rule. And, love being discarded, there is no reason why he should not still get the Ring, by fair or foul means, and reign--loveless indeed, but in no fear of Fafner or the Nibelung, black Alberich.

IV

As a musical structure the Second Act divides more easily and clearly than the first into sections: the sections, indeed, are boldly defined. First there is a prelude formed of the scene in which Wotan, rejoicing in the coming combat, directs Brunnhilda to see to it that Hunding is slain; and this is followed by what may be regarded as the main first movement--the dispute between Wotan and Fricka, terminating in his taking the oath; then comes his monologue, addressed, of course, to Brunnhilda ("In talking to thee it is with myself I seem to speak," to transcribe approximately what he says); Brunnhilda's warning to Siegmund follows, and then the finale, the catastrophic climax with Siegmund's death.

The prelude opens with the same fiery impetuosity as that to the First Act. It is largely made up of what in the guide-books used to be called the "Flight motive"--as though a serious composer would or could invent a motive of Running away!--and as the opening bar may be taken as a variation of the Sword theme, and the thing ends with what we learn to be a tune a.s.sociated with the Valkyries, a really fertile and picturesque mind may see in it a musical account of Siegmund flying with the Sword and pursued, for good or evil, by the Valkyrie.

What we really feel in it is the harshness of the opening discords, the agitation, the power, all forming a fitting prelude to what we see when the curtain rises, the barren rocks, and Wotan, exultant, calling Brunnhilda. His phrases have, indeed, a glorious vigour, as have Brunnhilda's in her answer. Her war-whoop plays an important part in the Third Act. Fricka's music is royally imperious at first: such declamation had never been thought of in the world before; but there is rare beauty of an austere kind--the beauty of holiness--afterwards, as she momentarily drops her dignity and pleads her cause. She gains the day and departs, and after Wotan's tedious meditation comes the most magnificent music of all. We hear the Fate theme--a strange phrase that seems to question destiny without ever getting an answer--and a subject taken bodily from Mendelssohn and made into a new thing filled with a curious blending of wistful and tender pity, mystery and power. It gives us a glimpse into the very heart of Brunnhilda, obeying her father because she must, and revolting against the task. Siegmund's declamation is a fine example of Wagner's finest vocal writing at this period--the style which I have referred to as something between recitative and true song. That is, it remains metrical without the slightest tendency to fall into regular four-bar measure, or any other regular measure; yet it decidedly is not recitative. But as the prevailing mood becomes more exalted, so does the music become more lyrical, and the ending of the dialogue, when Brunnhilda's emotion swamps every other consideration than rescuing the lovers, is sheer song. The orchestral part is symphonic throughout, with a few dramatic pauses. One of the most wonderful of these is at Brunnhilda's reply: "Siegmund will see Sieglinda no more."

There is no wailing, no sadness, in the accompaniment--only simple chords; and the simple voice-phrase, evidently intended to be half-spoken, makes an effect of overwhelming pathos. Of a different order is Siegmund's refusal to go to Valhalla: it verges on the melodramatic, and the emotion expressed justifies the means. It may be remarked that though the instrumental writing is symphonic, there is none of the contrapuntal intricacy of _Tristan_: the pictorial requirement warranted a freer use of chords in the accompanying parts, both--if a paradoxical phrase may be pardoned--for the abstract colour of the chords and for the instrumental tone colour which the use of chords permitted. Wagner never ceases to make us feel that the drama pa.s.ses amidst the wild mountains and woods: the drama is poignant enough in all conscience, and the scenery is an aid to it. We have the purely pictorial Wagner with the gathering storm--the voices calling amongst the clouds. The sinister growling of the approaching thunder is heard, and, still more sinister, the harsh notes of Hunding's horn; the orchestra rages louder and louder, Sieglinda mutters in her dream, the Valkyrie's call is heard encouraging Siegmund, the crash as the Sword is splintered, and then an awful silence. The action has been long delayed, but the catastrophe arrives with appalling swiftness at the end, and the music is equal to the opportunity. It is not wholly theatre music: that pa.s.sage in the ba.s.s, galloping up and down the scale against a _tremolando_ accompaniment, is in itself fine music; even Hunding's rough cow-horn makes a musical effect. When Wotan's fury breaks forth and he rides off in G.o.dlike wrath--even here the music is glorious, taken simply as music. Had all the _Ring_ been done with the superb mastery of this and the preceding Act, we should have an art creation to be set above every other art achievement in the world--above anything done by aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare.

V

Like the First Act, the Third begins with a storm of rain, wind, thunder and lightning; like First and Second, it opens with a display of energy before which all listeners are as leaves in the wind. As panoramic displays translated into music all the three introductions are likely enough to be misunderstood; so at the outset let us carefully bear in mind Wagner's intention at the beginning of the last Act of the _Valkyrie_--to show, with unequalled force and splendour, the strength of the G.o.d, soon to be shown as nothing before the strength of Brunnhilda. Brunnhilda, let us always remember, stands for human love, affection--not love in the _Tristan_ sense--but that love of which Goldsmith sang that He "loved us into being"; the love of human being for human being so strong that not for so many thousands a year as a judge, so many pitiable hundreds a year as a magistrate, immortality as an omnipotent ruler or a Wotan, will it perpetuate or permit a wrong on a human being. To win omnipotence Wotan has inflicted wrong upon wrong--wrong upon wrong on those he had created for his purpose, on those the fine part of his nature loved. The fine part of his nature revolts and conquers him. He struggles on, shorn of nine-tenths of his strength, and it is not until the Third Act of _Siegfried_ that he sees himself beaten and acknowledges it; but the ending of the G.o.ds, which really began with Wotan's first grasp at universal power, is first in this last Act of the _Valkyrie_ clearly foretold. Wotan comes on clothed in thunders and lightnings to punish Brunnhilda because she fought on the side of the higher instead of the lower part of his nature--his higher self is cast from him, only (he thinks) to unite later with a force (a hero) independent of him to gain him his sovereignty.

The tempest rages and roars; the Valkyries arrive "by ones, by twos, by threes," at the Valkyries' Rock; and presently, in hotter haste than the rest, Brunnhilda comes in, bringing Sieglinda. She tells her (Brunnhilda's) sisters how she has defied Wotan, the All-father; they are scandalised, and desert her; Sieglinda feebly begs her to take no more trouble--there is nothing left to live for; Brunnhilda tells her she carries within her the seed of the highest hero of all the world; Sieglinda is filled with joy, revives, and flies to the cave in the wood where Siegfried is destined to be born. Wotan comes on with his thunders and lightnings and calls for Brunnhilda; at last she answers, and he announces her punishment: she shall be deprived of her G.o.dhood and left on the mountains to become the wife and slave of the first man that pa.s.ses. The other maidens wail in protest; in anger he bids them begone; Brunnhilda, overcome with shame, sinks at his feet. The storm slowly dies away; Brunnhilda rises and pleads her cause--"Is this crime of mine so shameful?--in protecting Siegmund the Volsung I simply followed what I knew to be the dictates of your own innermost heart." At first Wotan will scarcely hear her; gradually he relents.

But he cannot go back on his oath, on the sentence he has p.r.o.nounced; and in the end he yields her this much--that she shall lie guarded by a wall of fire, only to be claimed by a hero who, not fearing his spear, will pa.s.s through the fire. Then he bids her an everlasting farewell; lays her to sleep in her armour, covered by her shield, her weapon by her side; calls up the fire, and casting a last sad look on her, his favourite child, goes slowly off as the curtain falls.

The drama here is of the most poignant kind; the scenic surroundings are of the sort Wagner so greatly loved--tempest amidst black pine-woods, with wild, flying clouds, the dying down of the storm, the saffron evening light melting into shadowy night, the calm deep-blue sky with the stars peeping out, then the bright flames shooting up; and the two elements, the dramatic and the pictorial, drew out of him some pages as splendid as any even he ever wrote. The opening, "the Ride of the Valkyries," is a piece of storm-music without a parallel. There is no need here for Donner with his hammer: the All-father himself is abroad in wrath and majesty, and his daughters laugh and rejoice in the riot. There is nothing uncanny in the music: we have that delight in the sheer force of the elements which we inherit from our earliest ancestors: the joy of nature fiercely at work which is echoed in our hearts from time immemorial.

The shrilling of the wind, the hubbub, the calls of the Valkyries to one another, the galloping of the horses, form a picture which for splendour, wild energy and wilder beauty can never be matched.

Technically, this Ride is a miracle built up of many of the conventional figurations of the older music. There is the continuous shake, handed on from instrument to instrument, the slashing figure of the upper strings, the kind of ba.s.so ostinato, conventionally indicating the galloping of horses, and the chief melody, a mere bugle-call, altered by a change of rhythm into a thing of superb strength. The only part of the music that ever so remotely suggests extravagance is the Valkyrie's call; and it, after all, is only a jodel put to sublime uses. Out of these commonplace elements, elements that one might almost call prosaic, Wagner wrought his picture of storm, with its terror, power, joyous laughter of the storm's daughters--storm as it must have seemed to the first poets of our race. The counterpoint is not so obviously wonderful as in _Tristan_ and the _Mastersingers_, but only a contrapuntist equal to Bach and Handel could have written such counterpoint. We may gain a clearer idea of what this means if we compare, not to the disadvantage of one or the other, this Ride with Berlioz's "Ride to the Abyss." At first sight, Berlioz seems the more daring. He trusts to a persistent rhythm and to orchestral effects. There is no inner structure--the separate parts, or batteries of parts, have no individuality: nothing of the sort is attempted or indeed wanted. The horses gallop on like mad things: their pace cannot be checked; themes, properly speaking, there are none--we hear the screeches of fearsome wild-fowl, the excitement and the noise increase, until at last the catastrophe is reached, and the final climax is the terrible gibberish-chant of all the devils in h.e.l.l. Regarded as sheer music, the thing gets as far by the twentieth bar as ever it gets. The piece is as near to pure colour in music as can be attained. Why, Wagner with his counterpoint seems old-fashioned and formal by comparison! The four const.i.tuents, the wild laughter of the shakes of the wood-wind, the slashing figure of the strings, the galloping figure of the ba.s.s, the Ride theme--had these been used by any one save Wagner the result would have been unendurably wooden. But Wagner had unlimited harmonic resources at his disposal; and he had the determination and the gift to achieve perfect truth in his delineation of a storm. Delineation, I say, for here we have drawing as well as colour. Of colour there is plenty: notice, for example, the use of the bra.s.s against the descending chromatics; but the colour is mainly harmonic. In a sense Wagner was not an innovator: so long as the methods of his mighty predecessors served him he sought no others--effects, whether of orchestration or of melody, were to him simply means: never for a second was he beguiled into regarding them as ends; and every musician knows that plenty of them came at his call, more readily and spontaneously than in the case of any of the later musicians.

It is worth looking at the plan of this Ride--which is, be it remembered, only the prelude to the gigantic drama which is to follow.

After the ritornello the main theme is announced, with a long break between the first and second strains; and again a break before it is continued. Then it sounds out in all its glory, terse, closely gripped section to section, until the Valkyries' call is heard; purely pictorial pa.s.sages follow; the theme is played with, even as Mozart and Beethoven played with their themes, and at the last the whole force of the orchestra is employed, and his object is attained--he has given us a picture of storm such as was never done before, and he has done what was necessary for the subsequent drama--made us feel the tremendous might of the G.o.d of storms. A few of my readers may know Handel's "Horse and his Rider" chorus--how he piles ma.s.s on ma.s.s of tone until in the end we seem to see a whole irresistible sea rushing over Pharaoh and his host. Wagner does a thing perfectly a.n.a.logous; but as I have remarked with regard to Weber and Mendelssohn and their picturesque music, where Handel, having painted his tremendous picture, had achieved his end and was satisfied and left off, is just the point where Wagner begins what to him is much the more important thing, the drama. The omnipotent master of Valhalla comes on apace: the storm is a mere indication of what is coming.

A word must be said, too, about the words for such scenes as this.

Words had to be found, as in the first song of the Rhinemaidens, and it is hard to see what else Wagner could have done than what he has done. Like reversed Lohengrins they tell one another their name and station at great length. This may be a vestige of the older stage-craft: certainly there is none of it in the two great dramas that followed the _Valkyrie_. It is not for even the minor personages of a Wagner drama to come down to the footlights and take the audience into their confidence. But, as I say, words were indispensable, and Wagner found the best he could--I suppose. The defect is a tiny one; none the less it is a defect.

With the final crash of the Ride a new element is introduced. The G.o.dlike rejoicing in sheer strength disappears, and an agitated theme sounds out--if, indeed, we may call it a theme--and then we get a lull after all the hurly-burly. Brunnhilda and Sieglinda come in; Brunnhilda tells of her disobedience, and like a flock of wild-fowl disturbed the other Valkyries squeak and gibber in disgust and horror. The music here is perhaps the most operatic part of the opera--Brunnhilda begging first one and then another to aid her; one after another refusing in very conventional phrases. The scene is indispensable, and the music is, so to speak, coldly adequate: music has no tones to express primness. With the voice of Sieglinda the music at once begins to live in Wagner's own curious fashion. She has nothing left in life, wishes to cause sorrow to no one, wishes only to be left alone to die. Wagner well knew when the drama could make its effect almost unaided--when, in fact, to write deliberately pathetic music in the older style would be to overdo things. Sieglinda's phrases are simple, many of them exquisite, most of them designed to be sung parlando, rather spoken than really sung. Bathos is avoided: the deepest depths of genuine pathos are touched. In fact the technique of the scene is that of parts, only parts, of the previous act. But with Brunnhilda's announcement to Sieglinda we get the great lyrical Wagner, we get the germ of the magnificent harangue of the last act of the _Dusk of the G.o.ds_, and we get the mightiest of the Siegfried themes. With the entrance of Wotan the music which concludes the Second Act recurs: the All-powerful clothed in wrath and flame; then comes his denunciation of Brunnhilda, another specimen of the lyrical Wagner. Even more characteristic of Wagner is the dying down of the storm. We can _see_ the setting sun and the departing storm-clouds in the music, and with these we are made to feel the abating wrath of the G.o.d. And then comes the n.o.blest piece of recitative in all music. The words in which Brunnhilda appeals to her father have already been (roughly) quoted: to give an idea of the musical phrases would require too many pages of this book. The Sleep theme enters as Wotan sees a way to the great compromise--the compromise foredoomed to bring him to ruin. He will put Brunnhilda to sleep to await the hero; but he will hedge her in with fire so that the hero shall be a true one. With the indescribable finesse, subtlety, of his own particular art, Wagner lets us feel how Brunnhilda, in begging to be protected in this (rather unusual) way, is reading only her own father's thought: he seems for a long time to contend, but at last yields. The music steadily increases in force and pa.s.sion, and at each stage where one would think the composer could strike no harder he immediately does it. More and more of the divine fury pours into the music, until the climax is reached in the bars preceding the Farewell.

In the meantime we have had the wonderful Eternal Love theme--not s.e.xual love, but the mystic force that created the worlds and holds them in their courses: in all Wagner there is no n.o.bler and sweeter pa.s.sage than that in which Brunnhilda first sings it. The vivid musical description of the crackling flames which are to surround her is another of an unequalled series of marvels. The Farewell I have already compared with that at the end of _Lohengrin_: the voice part is at times in Wagner's own style of song-recitative, but a great deal of it is sheer simple melody. No master has excelled, or perhaps matched, Wagner in the art of expressing the most profound and poignant pathos without ever a suspicion of letting it lapse into bathos; and this he does by--what at first it may seem ridiculous to say of so opulent and luxurious a genius as Wagner's--by his instinctive artistic austerity. The word is not too strong to be applied to the resolute simplicity which enabled him to write such melodies as those of which I am now speaking and the Farewell in _Lohengrin_: the temptation to let himself go, to wallow in sadness and to wring our bowels must have been almost too tremendous to be resisted by the man who within a year or so planned _Tristan_. In art, harrowing our feelings never pays, and his self-repression has its exceeding great reward: we could not feel more with Wotan's desolating grief--one stroke more and we should rebel: we should know that our most sacred feelings were being exploited--that an endeavour was being made to gain our applause for a work of art by an illegitimate appeal at one particular moment to those feelings. I have dwelt a little on this because we all know _Tristan_ and its author, and though there is little self-repression in that work--where it is not required--and physically there was little but self-indulgence in its author's nature, it is well to realise that the artist rose immeasurably superior to the man. It must have come to us all at one time or another with something of a shock to find that the voluptuous Wagner of _Tannhauser_ could be as austere as Milton. Austerity is not barrenness--not the barrenness that would result from imitating the austerity of the old church composers with their hundred rules and regulations: the harmony is as free as could be wished; at the needful moment the melodies pa.s.s without hesitation from key to key; but when we have long known them and learnt to understand them we find them at heart to be idealised folk-tunes--simple and indescribably pathetic, as the situation demands.