Richard Wagner Part 5

After that we have the _Dutchman_, strange and remote and mysterious, with some pages of pa.s.sionless ecstasy as its culminating point. The reaction came, and he wrote _Tannhauser_, the opera we are now to examine. It is largely based on sheer animal pa.s.sion, though another reaction takes place before the end is reached. That reaction proceeds further in _Lohengrin_, which is sheer mysticism. _Tristan_ is pure human pa.s.sion--Tristan's soul is the ant.i.thesis of Lohengrin's. The _Ring_ is, from beginning to end, a gorgeous spectacle, a glorification of the grandeur and loveliness of the earth, the splendour and beauty and strength of human life. Not even Wotan's renunciation takes away a jot from its note of praise of humanity--one might even say praise of the joy of living. _Parsifal_ is a denial of the value and richness and worthiness of human life: the world is pushed away; and the hero attains perfect peace by shutting himself up in a monastery with no women to disturb him. John Willett recommended his son, when he went to London, to climb to the top of the Monument--"there are no young women up there, sir"--and Wagner evidently agreed with John Willett. Parsifal is left to pa.s.s his days in walking, with the most preposterous steps ever seen on or off the stage, in idle processions from nowhere to nowhere without any object beyond walking, in making meals off invisible food, in impressing his fellow-monks with puerile chemical and electrical experiments, and perhaps, for a change, in going out to see trees and rocks taking a const.i.tutional. If to say this is to be flippant, well then, I am flippant. The drama of _Parsifal_ is the least intelligent, the most pretentious to intellectuality,-the most absurd and ridiculous and mirth-provoking drama ever set to music. Or, if we must needs oblige the Wagnerites by regarding it as a lofty contribution to ethics and a philosophy, no words are strong enough to describe its infamy. At the moment these lines are penned eager controversy is going on in every European capital as to whether _Parsifal_ can or cannot be produced this year without the permission of the Bayreuth clique; and my devout hope is that it will be given everywhere as soon as possible. Once it is seen without the quasi-religious, or rather mock-religious, character of the Bayreuth performances, the hollowness, trumpery staginess and evil tendency of the work will be only too obvious, and if Bayreuth wants a monopoly of it no one will wish to say Bayreuth nay.

These oscillations of mood were very frequent, the changes often very abrupt, with Wagner; also he rarely worked at only one opera at a time. The _Dutchman_ was conceived before _Rienzi_ was finished; _Tannhauser_ and _Lohengrin_ were slowly shaping themselves in his imagination while he scored the _Dutchman_; the _Mastersingers_ libretto, in its first form, was drafted immediately after _Tannhauser_ was finished, and before _Lohengrin_ was begun; the composition of the _Ring_, _Tristan_ and the _Mastersingers_ went on simultaneously. He did not totally exhaust one group of ideas and emotions before proceeding to another, and the result is twofold.

First, the moods belonging of right to one opera often found their way for moments into another, so that the description I have given above of his various alternations is very rough, though it is in the main accurate; second, the true antipodes of one opera may not be that which stands next to it in chronological arrangement, but one which he did not complete till years afterwards. I have just digressed a little about _Parsifal_, because it, and not the _Mastersingers_, is the true contrary and complement to _Tannhauser_. _Parsifal_ is pitilessly logical, _Tannhauser_ wildly illogical; _Parsifal_ preaches the gospel of renunciation, of the will to dwarf and stunt one's physical, mental and moral growth: _Tannhauser_ preaches nothing at all, but is an affirmation of the necessity and moral loveliness of healthy relations between the two s.e.xes, with a totally uncalled-for and incredible falling away or repentance at the end, on the part of one who has in no way sinned--to wit, Tannhauser; the music of _Parsifal_ is sickly, tired, with mystical chants that make one's gorge rise in disgust; the music of _Tannhauser_ is strong, healthy, full of manly pa.s.sion--even at its saddest it is free of the nauseating whining of _Parsifal_.

II

Tannhauser, a knight and celebrated minstrel, led away by an exaggeration of healthy human desires, has left his friends and gone to live with Venus in the Horselberg. He soon tires of her; she tries to keep him; he calls on the Virgin; the hallucinatory dream is shattered, and he is in the free open spring air. A shepherd boy plays on his pipe and chants a song to spring; a procession of old pilgrims to Rome pa.s.ses; Tannhauser, feeling his exaggeration of pa.s.sions, sane enough in themselves, to be a sin, praises the Almighty for his deliverance from what seems now to him like an evil dream. Hunters'

horns are presently heard from all sides; enter Tannhauser's former friends, Walther, Wolfram, Biterolf with the rest; they try to persuade him to return to his former life with them, but in vain, until Wolfram tells him that by his singing he had won the heart of the Landgrave's daughter Elisabeth, and she has pined ever since at his unaccountable disappearance. Tannhauser, at first incredulous, in the end joyfully agrees to go back to the Wartburg, where the Landgrave's castle can be seen, and the merry clatter of hunting horns is heard on all sides as the curtain falls. It will be seen that there is no vestige of the old stage trickery of the _Dutchman_ here: all seems natural because all is inevitable; of songs and concerted pieces we get plenty, but they grow spontaneously out of the drama: the drama is not twisted and delayed for the sake of getting them in.

In the second act Elisabeth has heard of her knight's return; she enters the hall of song and pours forth her feelings of thankfulness; Tannhauser comes in and begs to be favoured; there is a long love-duet; and then preparations are made for a musical tournament.

The popular march is played; the hall becomes crowded; the Landgrave makes a speech--satisfying to German audiences, no doubt, because it praises German valour and music--and in announcing the subject on which the minstrels shall enlarge, he hints that perhaps Tannhauser in his contribution will let them know in what mysterious lands he has sojourned during his long absence. The theme is, What is love, and how do we recognize it? The prize will be given by the Princess, and it shall be anything the successful singer chooses--that is, it shall be the Princess. Wolfram stands up first and praises a mild platonic attachment as being true love, and his sentiments win much applause.

Tannhauser sings pa.s.sionately of the joys of burning fleshly desire, though as yet his language is a little veiled. The audience, who are the judges, make no sign; Elisabeth alone shows that in her heart she goes with Tannhauser and not with Wolfram. Walther, in turn, tells Tannhauser that he knows nothing of sincere love; Tannhauser grows angry, and scoffingly tells him that if he wants cold perfection he had better worship the stars; but he, Tannhauser, wants warm, living flesh and blood and healthy desires in the woman he loves. Biterolf calls Tannhauser a shameless blasphemer, and challenges him to combat; Tannhauser replies bitterly; the surrounding n.o.bles want to silence him; his anger becomes rage, and his rage madness; Wolfram tries to calm every one, but Tannhauser is now too far gone, and in "wildest exaltation" he chants the hymn he sang to Venus in the first act.

"Only in the Venusberg can one experience the joys of true love," he shouts; the ladies rush out in terror, leaving only Elisabeth; the men attack Tannhauser. He would be killed, but Elisabeth suddenly interposes--all stand aghast at the bare notion of her interceding for so shameless a wretch; but in the end she gets her way. "Who would not yield who heard the heavenly maid?" they sing; during a momentary stillness the voices of young pilgrims following the elder to Rome are heard; Tannhauser is pardoned on condition of joining them and confessing to the pope and gaining his forgiveness; and, being a man of uncontrollable pa.s.sions, with fits of abject depression as low as his ecstatic flights are high, he humbly acquiesces. The curtain comes down in the second act as he goes off.

The third act is, I say, quite illogical unless one accepts as a truism, as Wagner accepted it, the patent absurdity that by sacrificing him-or herself one being can save the soul of another being. But Wagner was not a German of the Romantic epoch for nothing.

He believed the absurdity with a fervour now laughable, and was especially enthusiastic when the sacrificed person was a woman: woman, to his mind, was the redeemer of man: that was her _metier_. Senta redeems Vanderdecken; in his last work Kundry redeems Parsifal by thoughtfully dying so as to leave that unamiable idiot to lead the higher life of the monastery, as I have described it. And somehow Elisabeth is to redeem Tannhauser--also, it appears, by dying at an appropriate moment. In the fit of depression and degradation following his mad outburst the hero goes to Rome, interviews the pope, and confesses all to him. "If you have dwelt with Venus," says the Lord's vicar, "you are for ever cursed; G.o.d will not forgive you until my staff of dry wood blossoms." At this sentence of eternal doom Tannhauser, in the legend as Wagner found it, returned to the Horselberg: in the story, as Wagner shaped it, he gets as near as the Wartburg on his road back to Venus. By the roadside, as in the second scene of the first act, Elisabeth is praying before the shrine where Tannhauser had knelt to thank heaven for his deliverance; Wolfram watches near. Both await the pilgrims from Rome. These arrive--and Tannhauser is not amongst them. "He will return no more," says Elisabeth despairingly; and she prays to the Virgin to free her from all earth's griefs. Then she wends her way up to the castle while Wolfram remains to sing his song of renunciation. Ominous sounds are heard; Tannhauser, tattered and woe-begone, enters, tells his tale to Wolfram, and, working himself into a condition of madness as he did at the Tournament of Song--only now the madness is the madness of despair, not excessive exaltation--he calls on Venus. From the heart of the mountain she answers; the scene grows wilder and wilder; he sees Venus awaiting him; the air is filled with strange odours and stranger music. Wolfram struggles to prevent Tannhauser going to Venus; Venus calls him clearly and more clearly; suddenly Wolfram says, "A maiden is even now making intercession for you at G.o.d's throne--Elisabeth!" "Elisabeth!" echoes Tannhauser--stunned and astonished. The mists clear away; from behind the scenes a requiem for Elisabeth's soul is heard; Venus gives a final wail, "Woe! lost to me!" and sinks into the earth; slowly morning dawns, and a funeral train bearing Elisabeth on a bier slowly comes in. "Holy Elisabeth, pray for me," Tannhauser cries, and, sinking down, he dies. More pilgrims enter, bearing the pope's staff, which has miraculously blossomed in token that G.o.d's mercy is greater than man's, and that Tannhauser is pardoned; all sing a song of praise, and the opera terminates.

At the Dresden performances in 1845 this ending was cut, but that Wagner reckoned it of the utmost importance is shown by a letter written to Uhlig in 1851: "The reason for leaving out the announcement of the miracle, in the Dresden change, was quite a local one: the chorus was always bad, flat and uninteresting; also an imposing scenic effect--a splendid, gradual sunrise was wanting." Now, in the twentieth century, it is indeed hard to understand how an intellect so keen as our Richard's, a dramatic and poetic instinct almost infallible with regard to all other things, could have failed to see and feel the absurdity of Elisabeth's death being necessary to Tannhauser's salvation. Was it the only way to get rid of the lady--a _pis aller_?--a last remnant of the old-fashioned technique? In the original legend Tannhauser goes back to Venus: that would be ineffective and leave Elisabeth's future unprovided for. On the other hand, Wagner would never have selected the story for operatic treatment at all had it not instantly shaped itself in his mind as it now stands: he was, I say, obsessed by this notion of man's redemption by woman; it was part of his creed and not to be questioned. So I think that we must simply take it as it is, accepting Wagner's creed for the moment as a necessary convention. At the same time let us realize that it is an illogical development of the drama and not, as the Wagnerites comically insist, the symbol of an eternal verity.

Allowing for the time occupied in mediaeval days by the journey from Rome to the heart of Germany, the pope's staff must have burst into leaf and flower long, long before Elisabeth's death. While she was waiting for Tannhauser to come in with the first band of pilgrims, the second band was already on its way with the token of his pardon. We need not be too inquisitive and wonder why Tannhauser should be expected back with the first band when he had set out with the second, and why Elisabeth could not at least exercise a little patience and wait for the second. The point is that she does not wait, but goes home to die, and, dying, is supposed--as Wolfram explicitly states--to redeem a sinner who is already redeemed. Her sacrifice is an act of suicidal insanity due to her lacking the common sense to reflect that Tannhauser might arrive with the second contingent; it is foolish and superfluous.

This is the sole flaw in a very fine opera book. _Tannhauser_ is the n.o.blest expression in music of the glory and worth of human life. An a.s.sertion of the glory and worth of human life is bound to be, as _Tannhauser_ is, tragic; life and the value of life can only be realized when we see life in conflict with death and overcome by death. All the great tragedies are a.s.sertions of the joy of living, in the deepest sense of the phrase--in the sense in which _Samson Agonistes_ or Handel's _Samson_ are such a.s.sertions. Tannhauser suffers defeat and is glorious, like Samson in his overthrow. Even Elisabeth, a trifle mawkish though she may be, has loved life, and only at the finish, when fate (or, as she would say, heaven) decides against her, does she resign herself and renounce what cannot be hers.

This is the first of Wagner's operas the plot of which is virtually all his own; for precisely the combination of the legend of Tannhauser with the Tournament of Song makes it what it is and was--Wagner's invention. All the stale old devices of explanatory asides are gone, as are the convenient goings-off and comings-on of the _dramatis personae_ at the sweet will of the composer who wants here a duet and a trio there. The drama is self-explanatory--the librettist does not shove on a character to explain it for him; as it unfolds, the musician is given ample opportunities for all the songs or concerted pieces that the heart of composer could long for--he has not by main force and at all costs (in the way of unreasonableness) to drive opportunities into the drama.

III

In 1842 Wagner finished first _Rienzi_ and then the _Dutchman_; in April of 1845, that is to say three years later, _Tannhauser_ was complete, and in October of that year it was produced at Dresden. Its success or non-success with the public and those strange animals the critics does not greatly concern us to-day. Wagner's own account of the proceedings is not very trustworthy. The opera was cut and doctored to suit the singers--notably Tichatscheck; the first performance seems to have missed fire, and at the second the house was empty; at the third it was full; and, but for the intrigues of some of the musicians and scribblers, and the insanity of the management, it appears probable--one has a right to use so moderate a word--that before long it might have won in Dresden the success it presently won throughout Europe. That, I say, is not a matter for the twentieth century to worry about; but the twentieth century is bound to marvel over the obtuseness of the middle nineteenth in not recognizing the advent of the greatest power that had yet meddled with high and serious opera. (I do not mean that Wagner's was a greater musical power than Mozart's and Beethoven's. But Mozart never had a libretto to compare with Wagner's; and _Fidelio_, though serious enough in all conscience, is not an opera at all.) In three years, 1842-45, the growth of Wagner's strength was astounding, incredible. One sees at once how the old stage devices have departed from the libretto, and with them the fragmentary and jerky style of music; the intermittent inspiration of the _Dutchman_ is replaced by an unchecked torrent of inspired music. All the little suggestions of Bellini and Donizetti are clean gone; the amorphous melody of the _Dutchman_ is gone, or metamorphosed by being charged with energy, colour and meaning; every phrase has character, and communicates a very definite shade of feeling; in every phrase we feel how intense has been the inner thought and emotion, and with what terrible directness these are communicated to us. I say terrible directness because it is in _Tannhauser_ that we first find the G.o.dlike Wagner hurling his thunderbolts. It was Spohr who spoke of the G.o.dlike or t.i.tanic energy of the music, and this energy finds expression, not as it did in _Rienzi_, in noisy orchestration, big ensembles and thumping rhythms, but, in a far greater degree than in the _Dutchman_, in the stuff of the music itself. We find no more lumpish harmonies and ba.s.ses of leaden immovability: the ba.s.ses stalk about with arrogant independence, and the harmonic progressions, even when most daring and perilous, are superbly poised. The old awkwardnesses, due to the endeavour to copy and to be original at the same time, have disappeared. Wagner wrote _Tannhauser_ entirely to express and to please himself: he had given up the notion of being original; he was bent only on being himself.

He boasted that here, at last, was a sheer German opera. Well, that is not in itself very much. Personally, I would rather be an Englishman than a German; and few of us will be prepared to accept the view that because a work of art, or so-called work of art, happens to be by a German, it must therefore be a great work of art, or even a work of art at all. Richard never lived down the tendency, natural in one, I suppose, of a conquered tribe (the Saxons), to incorporate and identify himself with his conquerors, and he glorified everything Prussian as German, and everything German as perfect; but, even so late as 1852, I cannot imagine that he quite understood what he meant when he held forth on the subject of German art, its non-existence, and--of all things--its supremacy. He certainly felt very keenly what many members of every half-grown nation must feel--the necessity of acquiring a national conscience, artistic or other; he wanted to create an art-work which would appeal to the heart and understanding of every German, and would make the Germans feel themselves one race, an ent.i.ty. Which, precisely, of the German races he would have accepted in the new brotherhood of man I cannot say. But the point is that Wagner longed to create, and in _Tannhauser_ thought he had created, this universal work of art; and in declaring, as he did, that he had achieved the feat, he was revealing the truth about himself. He had thrown overboard Bellini, Donizetti, even Spontini and Marschner, and by going back to his first idols, Beethoven and Weber (especially Weber), he found his natural voice and mode of expression.

Paradoxically, _Tannhauser_, while one of his least original compositions--owing as much to Weber as ever one composer had owed to another--is one of his most original. He spoke the matter that was in his own heart, but he freely, without self-consciousness, used the Weber idiom.

Before examining the means by which the varying atmospheres of the different scenes are got, I ask the reader to notice the way in which the rather pointless, inexpressive melody of the _Dutchman_ appears now again, but so transformed as to be scarce recognizable. Compare the musical ill.u.s.tration (_o_) on page 119 with (_a_) at the end of this chapter. The type of tune is the same, but the first is commonplace and not quite worthy of the situation in which it occurs; the second has a glorious, though dignified, swing, and thoroughly expresses the words of welcome which Wolfram addresses to the errant Tannhauser. Compare Daland's song in the _Dutchman_ with Wolfram's description of how Elisabeth has pined, or Senta's last pa.s.sages in the final scene with Elisabeth's salute to the hall of song. We feel at once how, by dropping Italian, French and mediocre German models, and writing in the way that came natural to him, Wagner at once became a composer of the first rank, from whom great expressive melodies sprang spontaneously. The n.o.ble pa.s.sages in the _Dutchman_ were drawn out of him, despite his conscious or unconscious imitation of what were considered the best models of the day, by sheer force of feeling; and I pointed out how, when the situation gave him a chance, he took it. In _Tannhauser_ he has become a splendid artist whose brain refused to shape the commonplace. Later on his style was to become more individual, more purely his own; but so far he had now got--and it was a very long way. The pilgrims' chorus melody, which first appears in the overture, is, to my mind, very Weberesque. It is not particularly strong--for Wagner--and hardly bears the weight of the bra.s.s with which it is afterwards thundered out; but think of it and of Rienzi's prayer! The second part, of course, is Wagner at a sublime height, but of that presently. What I wish is to give examples of how he has discarded all the involutions, convolutions, twiddles and twaddles of melody, and gone back to the simplicity and directness of Weber and Beethoven. His earlier manner and type of tune, the operatic manner of his day, had, I make no doubt, its origin in the advisability, not to say the necessity, of writing so as to please singers who could sing in the Italian style and no other. Wagner had now ceased to think of singers' whims. He had a matter to find utterance for, and he went to work in the most direct way, considering nothing but his artistic aim. We know he conceived _Tannhauser_ at a white heat, and in a condition of white heat wrote the words; and though he afterwards cooled down and had, he said, to "warm up" to his work again, yet he warmed up so effectually that he composed at furious speed, haunted by a terror lest he should not live to complete the opera. This fervour alone might account for his artistic development in the _Tannhauser_ period. It drove him to find the secret of the one true mode of expression--the law of simplicity, the unvarying rule that anything more than is needed for the expression of the thing to be expressed is bad art, and, in the long run, ineffective. With greater simplicity in the melody came the greatest possible simplicity in the harmony. There is a kind of awkwardness to be found in the music of all the pundits which almost defies a.n.a.lysis.

The progressions are correct enough, are good enough grammar, yet the result is more disconcerting, even distressing, to the ear than a schoolboy's first efforts. Of this style of harmony the Italians were masters, and too often in his _Rienzi_ days Wagner, thinking of his "melody" (for at that time by "melody" he meant Bellini melody), showed how little they could teach him in this respect. With the simpler "melody" went the harmony--complicated as you like when the occasion called, but never more complicated than the occasion warranted. Compare with the war-chorus and march in _Rienzi_ the march in the second act of _Tannhauser_, and the difference will be seen.

This march, by the way, ought to have been signed "after C.M. von Weber."

IV

_Tannhauser_ was written in an epoch of long or big works of every description. Think of the length of the novels of Thackeray and d.i.c.kens; think of the interminable _Ring and the Book_! Our immediate ancestors were a long-enduring, often long-suffering, generation.

Perhaps they liked good value for their money. If so, Richard gave them what they wanted. He himself must have felt he had done so in _Tannhauser_, for fond though he was of his own music, he allowed it to be cut freely. Even as it stands, the finale of the second act is preposterous: the ripe and perfect artist who planned _Tristan_ would never have done such a thing. But with regard to the finales--and they are all too long--it certainly appears that Wagner deliberately made use of crowds of people and ma.s.ses of tone to carry through and emphasize his dramatic purpose. In the first act every one is rejoiced to have Tannhauser amongst them, and Tannhauser himself has much to say on finding himself free of the Horselberg nightmare, and in familiar, homely, human scenes once more. The anger of the n.o.bles in the second, Elisabeth's grief and intercession for her lover, her self-abas.e.m.e.nt--it is part of the drama to make us feel these things and time is required. The finale of the last act I give up altogether.

Nor can I understand why Elisabeth's prayer should be so long drawn out. Elisabeth has "nothing to do with the case." However, Wagner thought she had; so we can only be thankful when she finishes, and after Wolfram's song the action recommences with the entry of Tannhauser. The opera is planned on a huge scale, and in such works _longueurs_ are apt to occur.

The overture foretells the drama that is to ensue, but not consecutively as in the _Dutchman_. We have the pilgrims' hymn, the second section of which is one of those things of which one can truly say that only Richard Wagner could have penned them. The accent of grief is intensely pa.s.sionate, yet it remains solemn, sublime. Then the Baccha.n.a.l music and Tannhauser's chant in praise of Venus are heard; but all the tumult dies down, and the pilgrims end the piece not as it began, but triumphantly. We have here, as I have said, the great Wagner, working confidently and with ease on a vast scale. The curtain rises; and if we could not see the scene the music would tell us of the billows of hot rose mist, and the dancers working themselves up to frenzy. There is a hush, and the sweetest song ever sung by sirens is heard, full of languor and soft seductiveness. When Tannhauser starts up declaring he has heard the village chime in his dreams, it is as if a breath of cool air, laden with the fragrance of wild flowers, blew into that hot, steaming cavern. Music of unimaginable beauty and freshness sings of the pleasant earth--the green spring, the nightingale. When Venus coaxes him, he responds with one of the world's greatest songs--the hymn to Venus. Her "Geliebter, komm" is another piece of magic. The very essence of sensuality is in it, and never was sin made to seem so lovely. One great theme follows another. "Hin zu den kalten Menschen flieh'" is almost Schubertian in its spontaneity. The music never flags; there are scarcely any of the old formulas--not even, for example, to express Venus's anger; the fund of melody seems inexhaustible. Three main points may be observed.

First, the dramatic propriety of every phrase is perfect--the music wanted for each successive situation fitly to express the emotion of the situation is infallibly forthcoming; the music invariably reveals the inwardness of the situation. Second, in spite of following the drama, move by move, so to speak, the continuity of the musical flow is absolute; phrase seems to grow out of phrase (the drama being true and the music always exactly expressive of the essence of the drama, this follows as night the day); and partly by reason of this, and partly owing to the simplicity of the themes and tunes, the total effect is one of stately breadth. Third, the wealth of invention, the constructive power, and the command of technical devices, place Wagner in the first rank of sheer musicians. True, he could not write a symphony such as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven wrote; but neither could they have written a music-drama; the music-drama was his form, the symphony theirs.

In the next scene we have music of a different sort. A shepherd-boy pipes and sings one of those songs which, for freshness and purity, seem unapproachable--the watchman's song in the first act of the _Dutchman_ is another example. The piping goes on while the elder pilgrims chant a sort of marching tune as they pa.s.s--part of it is the second section of the great hymn already described--the boy shouts "Good luck!" after them, and Tannhauser, in an ecstasy of relief and restfulness after the unceasing whirl of l.u.s.t and fleshly delights from which he has found deliverance, pours forth his soul in a wonderful phrase. It is repeated afterwards when Tannhauser very guardedly tells Elisabeth of the wonder of his deliverance; and indeed it is expressive of a mood that became more and more characteristic of Wagner as he grew older, as though he got momentary glimpses of some blessed isle of rest where peace and relief from all earthly troubles could be found. A few years later we find him writing to Liszt of his longing for death as an escape; and though his appet.i.te remained good, and he seemed bent on having the best of everything on his table, we can well believe that, overstrung by nature, in constant poor health, and making stupendous demands on his nervous energy (like his own Tannhauser), doing everything too much, he had moments--nay, days--of reaction and feelings which he expressed quite sincerely in his letters. This brief pa.s.sage touches the sublime. The hunters enter, and from the moment Wolfram begins his really beautiful song about Elisabeth, it remains on Wagner's highest level. The finale is a set piece, of course, and is in free and joyous contrast to the lurid heat and sensual abandonment of the first scene. While the trees wave in the wind and the sun shines, the men shout merrily, and the huntsmen blow away at their horns--and Tannhauser has returned to his former healthy life.

In the second act we have Elisabeth's greeting to the hall of song, very charming; a duet with Tannhauser, very fine in parts, but not a true love-duet; the popular march; and then the tournament. Now, Wolfram's bid for favour seems to me both too literal and too long. He does what undoubtedly the minstrels of old did--freely declaims his verses, occasionally tw.a.n.ging his harp. He grows indeed almost fervent in his praise of the quiet life, of adoring your beloved at a safe distance and never disturbing her (nor yourself) with a word about human pa.s.sion; but, for my humble part, I beg to say I always share Tannhauser's impatience and am glad when it is over. As soon as Tannhauser gets up the mighty spirit of Wagner begins to work. With a dramatic abruptness that startles one, a fragment of a Venusberg theme shoots up; then a few chords, and Tannhauser begins praise of the thing he understands by love. His strains are impa.s.sioned--too much so for another of the troubadours, Walther, who follows somewhat in Wolfram's manner, but with much more energy. Again there is, as it were, a glimpse of the Venusberg fire in the orchestra, and Tannhauser sings another song, more intense, again, in pa.s.sion than his first, and ending with an aggressively fierce declaration of his creed.

Biterolf challenges him; the Venusberg music boils up once more--we almost see the vision that is about to break on Tannhauser's inner sight; he sings more pa.s.sionately still the joys of a human love; Wolfram again contends, giving us this time a really glorious song, and the storm breaks: the Venusberg is before Tannhauser's eyes; the violins sweep to their highest register, and remain there boiling and dancing in a kind of divine fury; and in mad exaltation he chants his hymn to Venus. Then the commotion occurs as I have described.

Let us consider this scene a moment. For theatrical effect, in the best sense, it is in most respects one of the greatest Wagner wrote.

There is the pomp of the entry of the knights and ladies, and afterwards of the minstrels; the Landgrave's music is effective, which is more than can be said for that usually allotted to the heavy father in an opera; the business of arranging the order in which the compet.i.tors shall stand up is accompanied by fragments of the graceful march--or, rather, processional--to which the minstrels had entered, and these come as a welcome preparation of the ear for the essential part of the scene. Wolfram's first effort, I say, I can hardly tolerate, considered as a piece of composition; yet, shortened, it would be admirably in place. From the moment Tannhauser begins all is perfect. Tannhauser's music grows in intensity, and Wagner is careful not to give us a setback by allowing the other singers to throw Wolfram-ian cold douches over us; on the contrary, they get excited, too; and the orchestra is let loose with them by degrees, until in the last outburst it is blazing and crackling as though it had gone as completely mad as Tannhauser himself. The whole thing, with the reservation I have made, must be admitted to be consummately managed from the composer's as well as from the dramatist's point of view.

What follows needs little discussion. Wagner knew quite well how to represent a row on the stage without pa.s.sing beyond the limits of what is music. Here we have ample energy, but nothing demanding closer notice until Elisabeth's interposition. Then at once we get stuff on a high level. The culmination is reached in a series of melodies hardly to be matched for pathetic beauty; the orchestra seems to throb with emotion--a device which Wagner often employed extensively in the _Ring_--the chorus join in, and a wondrous effect is obtained. The ensemble is the last piece of this description Wagner was destined to write. It is pure emotion, and not dramatic--that is, not theatrical--and its warrant is that the drama at the moment is nothing but a drama of emotions in conflict. The only musical-and-dramatic effect now occurs where the voices of the young pilgrims are heard: it is electrical.

Wagner gave a t.i.tle to the prelude of Act III, "Tannhauser's Pilgrimage," and it differs only in that from his other preludes and overtures. To those who know what is to follow it tells a story more or less distinctly, while those who hear it for the first time must feel the atmosphere and emotion, and thus be prepared for the drama.

It is built up of the pilgrims' marching song and one of Elisabeth's melodies and a most expressive theme which depicts Tannhauser painfully getting over the weary miles, with a sad heart, to seek the pope's pardon; then comes in the Dresden Amen--the significance of which will appear presently--then a crash followed by a mournful phrase (taken entire from Beethoven), and some recitative-like pa.s.sages leading direct to the rising of the curtain. As music it is a splendid thing, and, as I have said, it tells its tale plainly, when one knows the tale. Almost immediately we hear the pilgrims' hymn of rejoicing, with which the overture begins--the hymn of those whose sins have been taken away. The pilgrims pa.s.s; Tannhauser is not amongst them, and Wagner there gives Elisabeth a phrase which makes one think that he had Schroder-Devrient in his mind when he wrote the part. That gifted lady used--Berlioz said abused--the device of occasionally speaking, not singing, a few words; and here, where Elisabeth, in despair, says, "Er kehret nicht zuruck," Wagner gives her notes that can be either spoken or sung, and certainly are most effective when spoken. The part, by the way, was not "created" by the Schroder-Devrient, but by Johanna Wagner, the daughter of that brother Albert who had given him his first post in a theatre. I have nothing further to say about the Prayer, nor about the "Star of Eve" song. As night gathers over the autumn scene and Tannhauser enters, the music at once leaps to life. Not that we have not heard some very lovely things, notably a quotation in the orchestra from one of Wolfram's compet.i.tion songs; the star shines out, and Wolfram, his harp now silent, sits gazing dreamily up in the direction Elisabeth has taken homeward to die. But now we get a renewal of the furious energy of the tournament scene. As Tannhauser declares his intention of returning to Venus, the music crackles and roars for a moment; then it subsides to broken phrases of utter despair as he describes his journey to Rome.

The Dresden Amen accompanies him at first with ethereal effect, and afterwards with the utmost grandeur, as he tells how he knelt before the Rood to pray--in a few bars every aspect of St. Peter's is brought to our minds, and the atmosphere and colour. Wagner himself never surpa.s.sed the declamatory pa.s.sage of the pope's curse. Bach and Mozart knew how to write recitative, but they rarely attempted to fill it with anything approaching the intensity of meaning with which this terrible recitative is filled. Then, again, the music boils, and with unearthly effects the themes from the Horselberg scene sound out, now from behind the scenes, now from the orchestra; the thing grows madder and more mad, until suddenly Wolfram perceives the bier bearing Elisabeth being carried down. "Elisabeth!" he cries, and a requiem is heard from behind the scenes. As a stage effect I know only one thing to match it. In _Hamlet_ the hero has been philosophizing to his heart's content, when a funeral procession approaches--

_Hamlet_: What, the fair Ophelia?

_Queen_: Sweets to the sweet, farewell....

Every one knows the magic of that stroke: the abrupt change of key, the instant disappearance of bitterness, and the introduction of pathos and pure beauty; so here the Venusberg music disappears like a flame that is blown out. "Elisabeth!" Tannhauser echoes, and the chorus chants solemnly "Der Seele Heil," etc. "Henry, thou art redeemed," cries Wolfram; and then we have the final scene, the entry of the young penitents with the pope's staff. The final chorus is effective enough, though it suggests the audience getting up and looking for their hats.

As a whole, the music of _Tannhauser_ is characterized by intense energy, the greatest definiteness, and richness and gorgeousness of colouring. Inviting as must have been the opportunities offered in the opening scene of indulging in a riot of voluptuous colour, the definiteness is never lost. Through the whirling, dancing-mad accompaniment runs a fibre of strong, clean-cut, sinewy melody. The picture is drawn with firm strokes as well as painted with a full brush. Or perhaps the better a.n.a.logy would be to describe each scene as an architecturally constructed fabric; and each is also so constructed as to lead inevitably into the next. Hence, as already pointed out, the artistic restraint and breadth in scenes where, with such heat of pa.s.sion at work, we might fear spasmodic jerkiness.

When _Tannhauser_ was published, Wagner sent the score to Schumann, and Mendelssohn also saw it. The comment of the latter was characteristic: he liked a canon entry in the finale of the second act; and indeed it was too much to hope that the successful purveyor of oratorios should like or in the least understand so mighty, fresh and pa.s.sionate an opera. He did not understand Beethoven, and virtually admitted as much without realizing how completely he had committed himself. Moreover, opera was a form of art with which he had no real sympathy. It is true his friend Devrient tells us that he was anxious to write one, and would have done so had not his fastidious taste prevented him ever finding a libretto to his liking--which is equivalent to saying a man would have painted a fine picture could he only have secured a good subject. In some respects Schumann was even more antipathetic. Wagner, all who knew him declare, never ceased talking; Schumann was a silent man--sometimes in a cafe a friend might speak to him: Schumann would turn his back to the friend and his face to the wall, and continue to imbibe lager. Wagner would talk for an hour, and, getting no response, go away; he would afterwards declare Schumann an "impossible" man, out of whom not a word could be got; while Schumann would declare he could not tolerate Wagner, "his tongue never stops." Schumann had no dramatic instinct, and no comprehension for opera; in _Genoveva_--as, in fact, in his so-called dramatic cantatas--he failed utterly: he went straight through the words, setting them to music _pur et simple_, taking no thought for dramatic propriety. The score of _Tannhauser_ simply puzzled him; he saw in it only the music _pur et simple_, considered as which it was, of course, very bad. It was not bad in all the ways he thought, however. His remark about the clumsy orchestration long ago returned to roost. For the rest, when he saw the opera performed he changed part of his mind, and wrote admitting that much which he did not like on paper seemed in place when the work was sung, and some of it "moved me much." Some time afterwards he played some of his music to Wagner, who found it muddled, as if the sustaining pedal was held down all the time--and I have no doubt it was. Another gentleman who saw the score was Hanslick, then a young man looking around for some one to attach himself to--a peripatetic barnacle. Later, he found Brahms, as all the world soon found out, and revised his early notions of the greater musician. But at first he was all enthusiasm and gush, and wrote articles "explaining" _Tannhauser_. However, his views are of no importance to-day. Liszt, generous soul, had the opera played at Weimar at the earliest possible moment.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER IX

'LOHENGRIN'

I

_Lohengrin_ was first drafted in 1845--for Wagner during this period allowed no gra.s.s to grow under his feet. He was a member of a coterie that met at Angell's restaurant, and there on November 17 he read the complete libretto to his friends and acquaintances. Schumann was amongst them, and he bluntly a.s.serted that such a libretto could not be set. Others were more favourable, but many were doubtful. However, that made little difference to Richard. He knew his own strength and trusted his instinct; and however much he was urged to alter the _denouement_, he stuck to his guns and his libretto.

In point of structure the libretto of _Lohengrin_ closely resembles that of its predecessor. There are even fewer set pieces, there are more fragmentary speeches. The drama is so contrived as to let in the set pieces naturally: of the old forced operatic business of sending out or bringing in characters as seems advisable there is not a sign.

The story is on the whole simpler than that of _Tannhauser_. Lohengrin is son of Parsifal, head of the mystic Montsalvat monastery where the Holy Grail is kept; where the monks never seem precisely to die; and where, without marriage and even without women, children are somehow born to the favoured ones. He comes in a magic boat drawn by a swan to aid Elsa against Telramund and his wife, who falsely accuse her of having murdered her brother; he fights for her and overcomes the accusers, first exacting a promise that she will never ask him his name nor where he comes from. She promises, yielding herself unconditionally to him; and so ends Act One. Next Ortrud, wife of Telramund, gets Elsa's ear, begging for mercy, and contrives to poison the girl's mind with doubts regarding Lohengrin; and when later the wedding procession is nearing the church, Telramund himself accuses Lohengrin before the king and all the crowd of sorcery and witchcraft.

Nothing happens at the moment; Telramund is pushed on one side, and the procession goes its way. But in the next act, when Lohengrin and Elsa are left alone she can no longer restrain her curiosity nor conceal her fears: in spite of his warnings she questions him. At the moment Telramund and other n.o.bles rush in to a.s.sa.s.sinate him; he kills Telramund, orders the other n.o.bles to bear the body into the judgment hall, and tells Elsa he must leave her. In the next scene he reveals himself, and the swan returns to take him away. Ortrud mocks him and tells how she, after all, has triumphed, for she changed Elsa's brother into a swan; Lohengrin kneels and prays; the swan disappears and the missing brother springs up; a dove descends and is attached by Lohengrin to the boat, and he goes back to Montsalvat.

Now I would ask the reader if this story is reasonable, if any "meaning" or moral can be read into it. On the face of it Lohengrin's conditions are preposterous. Yet he is bound by the laws of the magic domain he comes from; he trusts Elsa and does battle on her behalf without any proof of her innocence; and she has no patience to wait for him to explain matters. On the other hand, he hears her prayer in a magical way, and comes drawn in a magic boat; and she has a perfect right to a.s.sume that he would not have fought for her if he had not known by his arts that she was innocent. It was just over this _denouement_, this forsaking of Elsa because of her inquisitiveness, that many of Wagner's friends boggled; and nothing that he then or afterwards wrote in defence of it seems to me worth a moment's serious consideration. Mr. Ernest Newman suggests that perhaps Wagner was using the savage's notion that in giving up your name you are placing yourself in some one's power; but there is not a hint of that in the drama. The thing to me is simply a fairy story. We must accept Lohengrin and the conditions in which he lives, moves and has his being. He is not his own master: somewhere far away he has an all-powerful over-lord who, for no useful purpose to be comprehended by mortal, sent him to rescue Elsa under these conditions. And I say that, far from having a meaning, a "purpose," _Lohengrin_ is pure romance, as innocent of moral ideas as any genuine mediaeval romance.

Wagner's "explanations," like Bishop Berkeley's, take a great deal of explaining; and though Glasenapp, Wolzogen and the rest have covered many reams of paper in doing it, we are not an inch nearer to perceiving a grain of sense in the whole affair. There is only one part of it which can be, in one sense, explained--Wagner's intense acrimony in his treatment of the female puppet Elsa. Even in 1845 he had grown restive under the insults and stupidity of court officials and the Press, and doubtless he had threatened often enough to quit for ever the degraded German theatre. He never could see that the German theatre had never been any better than it then was, but on the contrary, a great deal worse; he never realized that it was on the up-grade, and that he was to be instrumental in elevating it. He was like a mechanic called in (by destiny) to repair a rickety machine, who because it won't go when he "wills" it, kicks it to pieces. The Reissigers and the rest were simply parts of the machine that were out of order: time and patience were required to eliminate them and put in sound working parts. Wagner could not understand this any more than he could understand why all German (or rather, Saxon) mankind should not at once be perfect, think alike and form the ideal State. So, as he could not kick the Dresden Court Opera to pieces, he long meditated quitting it--so much he explicitly affirmed afterwards--and he must have worried Minna sadly. She understood neither his qualities nor his defects, his ideals nor the short-sighted impatience which rendered it impossible for him ever to attain them: she saw only too clearly that at any moment he might kick over the traces, and that the starvation and misery of the Paris episode would have to be faced again. We can readily picture him coming in raging after a conflict at the theatre with official imbecility, and Minna, instead of sympathizing, counselling him to be wise and temporize. His exasperation grew, and only the events of 1849 prevented a rupture--so much seems certain--and he vented his spleen by making Elsa a stupid, shallow, faithless creature who feels no grat.i.tude towards the hero who saved her from being burnt, but by maddening female pertinacity, wrong-headedness and wilfulness destroys her own and his happiness. As the reader will perceive later, I by no means defend Wagner in this domestic squabbling, but something must be said for him; I don't say, either, that he created Elsa to express his views about his wife, but I do say that his feelings account for the excess of his rancour against his own creation. So pitiable a specimen of feminine inquisitiveness, bad temper and ungenerosity has never been put on the stage as the heroine of a grand opera. Possibly Lohengrin saw this; and, neglecting his recent marriage-vow, he went back to Montsalvat, where, as we know, there were no women. All this would have to be said in the course of this book; and I say it now because it helps us to understand a defect in the art of a beautiful opera.

A beautiful opera _Lohengrin_ certainly is--the most beautiful of all Wagner's operas. The story of it is a fairy story, as I have said, and superficially a very ordinary sort of fairy story. We have the distressed maiden in the hands of persecutors, the knightly hero who rescues her, the maiden's faithlessness, and the contemptuous departure of the hero. But Wagner has clothed the whole of this work-a-day mediaeval legend in a wondrous atmosphere of mystical beauty, and that beauty springs from the thought of the river.

II

It is necessary to discuss as briefly as may be the leitmotiv, because with _Lohengrin_ Wagner first began to use it with serious purpose. In the _Dutchman_ two themes may be rightly described as leitmotivs; in _Tannhauser_ not one theme may be rightly so described. While in _Lohengrin_ Wagner showed himself as much as ever the inspired musician, he made for the first time use of the leitmotiv for dramatic as well as musical ends. There we find three leitmotivs: one intended by the power of a.s.sociation of ideas to evoke on the instant the vision of Montsalvat and the Grail; a second to recall the thought and emotion of Lohengrin the man; the third to remind us of the conditions which Lohengrin imposes on Elsa before he is willing to fight for her.

The first (_a_, p. 191) is perhaps the most lovely thing Wagner invented; the third (_d_)--not second--is a thing any one might have concocted, though not a thing that any one I ever heard of could use as Wagner uses it; the second (_c_) is by way of being a study for the best of the _Parsifal_ themes. It must be remarked, in pa.s.sing, that the study is much more finely used than when his powers, largely exhausted by a tedious struggle with the world, had got into a state of decrepitude.