Richard Wagner Part 7

"I am sorry for Heine and Fischer. Poor fellows! they picture me floating along on a sea of Parisian hopes; they will be greatly and painfully undeceived. Salute and console them. When my cursed ill-humour of to-day has pa.s.sed away, I will write to Heine. To his fidelity must I present an earnest face. A thousand greetings to my dear R----s, from whom I should so much have liked to receive a line. The merchant M----, of Dresden, will bring you something from me when he returns from his great Parisian business trip; a good daguerreotype copy from an excellent portrait which my friend Rietz has taken of me here.

"What more shall I write? I am all confusion about my hasty departure. I have now only to write the verses to my _Wiland_; otherwise the whole poem is finished--German, German! How my pen flew along! This _Wiland_ will carry you all away on its wings; even your friendly Parisian hopes. If K---- does not write soon, I shall presume that he is raving too madly about Krebs. Krebs is clever--so is Michalesi--what more do you want? But K---- should restrain himself, and not give himself away so much as he does, as with me!

"Farewell! Another time you will receive a more sensible letter, with a list of misprints in my last book. If people do not comprehend me even after this work, if I am charged with improprieties, I clearly see the reason; one cannot understand my writings for the misprints. To my joy some one is playing the piano overhead; but no melody, only accompaniment, which has a charm for me, in that I can practice myself in the art of finding melodies"--

And, finally, these few bitter lines, sent after his return to Zurich--

"It is impossible for me to conduct my overture myself in Paris, for this reason, that it will not be performed there at all, as there was not proper time for rehearsal--perhaps "next year". I received this answer on the eve of my departure from Paris, and truly in a very pleasant quarter. I think I never laughed so loud and so from the bottom of my heart as on that evening and in that place."

It will be seen that Wagner never ceased to work during all this dreary time. He drafted his _Wieland the Smith_, made tentative shots at what at length grew into the _Nibelung's Ring_, and poured forth an enormous quant.i.ty of very prosy prose. Deferring a consideration of this last, let me tell briefly what his everyday life was. Through a little money from pamphlets, performing fees, etc., but mainly through the generosity of friends, he managed to live; though, as I have said, he never was quite sure about his next meal, a raven always flew in from somewhere just in the nick of time. Minna came, and her sister, and his home was made comfortable for him; he had many friends; he rapidly became recognized as many a cubit taller than any other musician in the parish. The opera and some orchestral concerts were placed under his direction; and Hans von Bulow came to serve his apprenticeship as conductor under him, very largely at the theatre.

Wagner mentions a performance of the _Flying Dutchman_, which afforded him pleasure; for though, as he himself says somewhere, the band consisted of players more accustomed to play at dances than in grand opera, and not a singer of celebrity took part, yet all were painstaking, enthusiastic and sympathetic, and a fine representation was the result. This was the work he did outside his own house; his inside occupations I have mentioned. He lived with almost clockwork punctuality. Every afternoon he walked, accompanied by his dog, amongst the mountains, and to these walks may be attributed, I think, the atmosphere and colour of the _Ring_ and its backgrounds. Wagner was as great a master as has lived of pictorial music, and the hills and ravines, the storms amongst the pines, were things he must have craved to translate into terms of his own art. After all, he found time also for a good deal of social intercourse, though the enormous quant.i.ty of work he turned out makes this difficult to believe. But Liszt visited him; Praeger undoubtedly did; Bulow, as said, was with him for some time; the Wesendoncks, his greatest pecuniary benefactors after a while, were there; Wille and his wife were there; Alexander Ritter, son of Frau Ritter, who made Wagner a regular allowance from 1851 to 1856, became his firm friend, and afterwards married one of his nieces; there were Baumgartner and Sulzer--in fact, a bare list of names would fill a few pages. We must not take Wagner's plaints in his letters too seriously; he was an overworked, nervous man of moods; like Mr. Micawber, he seems to have come home of an evening weeping and declaring himself a ruined man, and in a few hours gone to bed calculating the cost of throwing out bow windows to his house.

Throughout his life his resilience of spirit was one of his most amazing characteristics: I have no doubt that in the depth of despair he would write to Liszt swearing that he only wanted solitude; and in an hour's time he would think it might be pleasant to spend an hour with the Wesendoncks--and go. In the same way he longed earnestly for death while spending all his friends' money on baths and cures and doctors, and seeing to it that Minna provided the best of everything for his table. The pile of work remains to show his life was one of incredible industry. Between the end of 1848 and the end of 1854 he wrote at least a dozen long pamphlets, and as many more that are not so long; he wrote the words of the _Ring_ and composed and scored the _Rhinegold_, and began the music of the _Valkyrie_. Further, he revised the overture to Gluck's _Iphigenia in Aulis_, and reconstructed his own _Faust_ overture. How on earth he managed his interminable correspondence is more than I can guess. When we bear in mind the calls upon his time by his superintendence of opera and concerts, we cannot wonder that a man who did so much, and was born a weakling, was rarely quite well, and incessantly complains of his nerves. Yet these nerves, he wrote, gave him wonderful hours of insight.

There remains one thing to mention of these first Zurich years: his operas were gradually spreading through Germany, and, especially, Liszt had produced _Lohengrin_ at Weimar in 1850. It quickly became so popular that before long Wagner could complain, or boast, that he was the only German who had not heard it. His movements during these years can easily be traced. Zurich remained his headquarters, but he went hither and thither, mainly in search of health. But the chief cause of his ill-health he carried with him--his irrepressible activity of mind. Could some intelligent doctor have given him a dose to stop him thinking for not less than one month, he would, I verily believe, have enjoyed ten years of unbroken freedom from sickness. These flittings are of no great interest in themselves; he never got far until his famous expedition to London in the summer of 1855. But now it is time to take a glance at the writings of the period.

II

In the introduction I announced my intention of dealing with Wagner's prose-writings only in so far as they reveal anything of value concerning the artist. His theories have been explained and elucidated to death; hundreds of books have been written about them; never was a man so much explained; never did a man suffer more from the explanations. The day when Wagner began, not to theorise, but to publish his theorisings, was an unlucky one for him. He began with the intention, and certainly in the hope, of making himself clear to himself; as I have already remarked, he wanted to find what it was he wanted to be at and how to get there; and if, having achieved his end, he had put all his pages of reasoning in the fire, he would have done himself no ill-service. But he needed money, and in the 'forties and 'fifties there were, strangely enough, numbers of people who would pay money for such stuff. Anything dull, "philosophic" in tone, anything full of long words, longer sentences, and meanings too profound to be understood by mortal--anything of this sort was sure of a paying audience, if small, in "philosophic" Germany, no matter how fallacious were the premises, how wrong the history, how perverse the inferences.

Hundreds of people must have risen from reading Wagner's essays feeling themselves very deeply intellectual. In his first Paris days Wagner had at once flown to his prose-scribbling pen as an instrument to procure him bread; now, in Zurich, while writing and arguing mainly to free his own soul, he had an eye on the publisher and the public, for he needed bread as much as ever he had needed it; and he needed other things besides: all the luxuries he had grown accustomed to and could have done without ten years earlier. He persuaded himself of the validity of another reason why he should unload his prose-wares on the world. He had written much at times in various papers with a wholehearted wish to purify and advance art. Now he determined to be himself John the Baptist walking, in defiance of the laws of nature, miles in front of himself in the wilderness, crying out that he who was to redeem German music and the German folk was coming. He actually persuaded himself, I say, that by reading these lucubrations German audiences would prepare themselves to understand his works--as yet in process of incubation--at a first hearing! Fools we are, and slight; but surely no man was ever a bigger fool than our poor Richard when he thought that a great work of art could possibly or should be understood at the first glance, and that the feat would be easy if only one had read some theories of art beforehand. The contrary holds true: if you have seen and felt Wagner's operas, you may understand what he is talking about in his articles and pamphlets; but to read these first is merely to bewilder yourself utterly when you go to see the operas. I will dismiss, therefore, much of the prose with very brief notice, and some of it without any notice at all. It may be remarked that of all the commentaries I have waded through (and been well-nigh choked with), on the prose, there is, to my mind, only one worth reading, Mr. Ernest Newman's valuable _Study of Wagner_.

The French stories and articles are as good as anything Wagner wrote.

He had not yet fallen into the villainous German philosophic style, or was restrained by the consciousness that he must write in a lingo that could be translated into French. These pieces were written for bread and bread alone in the terrible years of starvation, 1840-41. _An End_ [of a German Musician] _in Paris_ is full of autobiography, and intensely interesting on that account; it is interesting, too, because of its display of the nave arrogance which leads Germans to believe the whole world was made for Germans. This German musician, for instance, arrives in Paris, where scores of French musicians--Berlioz amongst them--are roughing it, if not actually starving in the streets; yet he expects the French to find him employment in preference to their own countrymen, their own flesh and blood. One can overlook that, however; and the story is pathetic and beautifully written. _A Pilgrimage to Beethoven_ is, in its way, a masterpiece. It also is full of self-revelation; some of it conscious, some unconscious. _A Happy Evening_ is another charming thing; the skit on how Rossini's _Stabat Mater_ came to be composed is amusing, and is cruel with a cruelty that was justified. The other articles are of no particular value, save, perhaps, that on the overture; they are of an ephemeral character and were evidently concocted when the writer was fully aware he was writing for French readers, and if he hurt French feelings or vanity, a French editor wouldn't print, wouldn't publish, wouldn't pay.

The next production of any importance is his autobiographical sketch, and of this nothing need be said. So much of it as seemed to me needful has been utilized in this book. The account of the bringing home of Weber's remains to Dresden from London has a perennial interest. We know how Wagner idolized his mighty predecessor, and can imagine the ardour with which he threw himself into this work.

Seemingly insuperable obstacles, most of them placed in the way through the native stupidity and perversity of German and English officialdom, had to be overridden, and Wagner triumphed. The speech delivered on the occasion of the re-interment is characteristic--exceptionally so even for Wagner of this period, 1844--in its a.s.sertion of the Germanity of Weber and Weber's music; and his deep joy that at last the German musician's bones should repose in German earth. This topic of Germanism haunted Wagner for years, and I may have a little to say about it later. The account of the 1846 rendering of the Choral Symphony is the most masterly exposition of the right and the wrong way of playing orchestral music to be found in any language. Wagner's method was, after all, very simple: the conductor had to understand and feel the music aright, and then pains, pains, never-ending pains must be expended on coaxing, persuading, bullying or in some other way getting the band to reproduce precisely what he felt.

We now reach the ma.s.s of theatrical and philosophical writings on opera, drama, and, indeed, art generally. I need do nothing more than give the fundamental basis of them all, the one point which he argues in a thousand ways through them all. Wagner would have it, then, that just about the time he came into the world, or a little later, all--nothing less than all--the arts had gone as far as they could separately, each alone. Art in ancient days, before there were _arts_, was a fusion of music, dancing, poetry, statuary and painting--the old drama. That each form of art might develop its full possibilities, they separated and each went its own way. Wagner was mainly concerned with music and with drama (poetic drama). Music reached its apogee with Beethoven. Regardless of the fact that after Beethoven had introduced words in the Choral Symphony, he went on composing music of unequalled depth and splendour without words, Wagner insisted that he felt the impossibility of doing more without words. We hear, said Wagner, all these sounds going on, this stream of melody, and it is very delightful to the ear; but unfortunately the highly organized brain of modern man steps in and insists on knowing what is the matter. What is the meaning of it all? asks the inquisitive intellect.

Words are necessary to satisfy the intellect. On the other hand, poetic drama, in its endeavour to express pure feeling, could go no further than Goethe and Schiller without becoming mere gush--a sort of music that was not music. Wherefore music must be added. But this combination of music and poetry was insufficient; we must have the thing in visible form before the eye--the acted music-drama. Then the actors must understand statuesque poses and get into them; they must understand painting and contrive to form themselves, together with the scenic background and accessories, into pictures. So once again we should have the perfect fusion of all the arts, and live happily ever after.

To me there is almost more lunacy in this than in Wagner's political tenets. It is a pack of fallacies. Here is my answer--

(i) As to an Art which was a perfect fusion of all the arts, it was never done and never at any time attempted.

(ii) The finest music yet created has no words to it: the meaning is perfectly clear without words.

(iii) The highest poetic drama needs no music. Without verging on gush, it affords expression to the deepest and most intense feeling.

(iv) Fine poetry has been written in the dramatic form, though it will not bear acting and was not intended to be acted. But we may cheerfully concede that genuine drama ought to be acted.

(v) The function of scenery is to suggest atmosphere and nothing more.

It cannot be a picture; it can only be an imitation of a picture.

(vi) An actor who tried to look like a statue going through a variety of poses would only make the audience laugh; or we should think he had been taken ill.

At every point Wagner's reasoning goes to the ground. His basic facts are no facts, and his reasoning is absurd. All the essays on music and on drama and on the music-drama are as much an expression of himself as his music-dramas. I have in earlier chapters gone so far as even to labour the point that he could not get on in music without the aid of drama; and as he could never look beyond himself nor imagine that what he could not do--_i.e._ compose pure music--some one else--_e.g._ Schumann or Brahms--could do, he went out with absolute confidence to persuade the world that he was right and all others were wrong. To those who may be interested in the study of Wagner, the mighty creative artist, as a cerebral curiosity, I commend Mr. Newman's book aforementioned. Mr. Newman points out that Wagner was so magnificently self-centred that he attributed all opposition to "misunderstanding."

To him it was incomprehensible that any one should say, "Yes, I perfectly understand your argument; but I beg leave not to agree with you." Any one who said that at once aroused his suspicions; such an one, thought Wagner, cannot possibly be sincere. Hence the hot denunciations of all and sundry who differed from him; hence the nightmare phantom of an organized body of "persecutors." Had he not been blinded by his wrath, and looked a little closer, he might have seen that the persecutors, far from being an organized body or confederacy, were fighting angrily, bitterly, amongst themselves. Many of them had this in common: they could not understand and did not like Wagner's music. That is different from the "wilful misunderstanding"

Wagner moaned about. These musicians could not help themselves; as Sancho Panza remarks, "Man is as G.o.d made him, and generally a good deal worse."

The essay which provoked the widest and fiercest hostility, especially amongst the Jews, was the _Judaism in Music_. Wagner started from two premises, (i) That the Jews, being alien in thought and feeling, could not express themselves in _our (i.e._ German) art; and (2) that had they thought and felt like Germans, they would have succeeded no better; for music--that is, song--is idealized speech, and the gurglings and bubblings which do duty for speech with the Jews cannot be idealized into anything beautiful. The answer is that very great music has been written by Jews; that music was an English, a Flemish and an Italian art before the Germans knew anything about it; that if music must be idealized German speech, with its guttural chokings, the less we have of it the better. The Jews paid little attention to Wagner's arguments, but objected to his "personalities." Now, the reader must have observed that of all people practical jokers are those who can least tolerate a practical joke played at their own expense, and that those whose staple of conversation is banter or "chaff" become irascible the moment they are flicked with their own whip. For years Wagner had been the victim of unprovoked personal attacks in the Jew-controlled press, and some of the worst of these can be traced to Jew scribblers. Yet on the publication of _Judaism in Music_ in the _Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik_, a wail went up from these journalistic descendants of Elijah; and several prominent Jew musicians signed and presented to the authorities of the Leipzig conservatoire of music a pet.i.tion praying that Brendel (the editor who published the essay) might be dismissed from his post in the conservatoire. These underhand tactics put the Jews out of court.

Nevertheless, Wagner's essay was a bad mistake. It is bad science, bad history, bad argument; it did no person, no cause, any good, and it worked a very great deal of harm.

Wagner was at his best when writing about music or about musicians he had known. A paper on Spontini, belonging to this period (Spontini died in 1851), has a pleasant, generous note; and the account of the pompous old gentleman's visit to Dresden a few years previous is amusingly lifelike. The _Communication to my Friends_, a trifle egotistical, is still full of interest. The article on musical criticism is not so good as it might have been. Wagner had the utmost contempt for the ordinary press criticism of the day: with that sort of thing, he wrote Uhlig, one could not tempt the cat from behind the stove. He knew what criticism should not be, but when he came to what it should be his view was warped by the obsession that pure music had reached its boundaries, and the future of music was involved with the future of the music-drama. When his prejudices were not aroused, he himself was the greatest critic who has lived: his programmes of the Choral and Eroica Symphonies are masterpieces in their kind; and his a.n.a.lysis of the _Iphigenia in Aulis_ overture can never be surpa.s.sed.

Stage-managers have found his directions for the performing of _Tannhauser_, _Lohengrin_ and the _Dutchman_ invaluable; they are also sometimes read by conductors, and should be read by singers. They show how in composing his operas Wagner meant every note he put to paper: the most minute fibres of the musical growth are alive, a living part of the organism.

III

"I shall probably never come back to Germany." So wrote Wagner from Paris on March 2, 1855, to his friend Wilhelm Fischer, stage-manager and chorus-master at the Dresden opera. Wagner was then on his way to London to direct a series of Philharmonic concerts. "It was a great piece of folly for me to come to London...." So wrote Wagner from London to Fischer a little--perhaps a month--later. It was, says Mr.

J.S. Shedlock in his admirable translation of the _Letters to Dresden Friends_, "an unfortunate visit." But was it? and, if so, in what sense? "The public of the Philharmonic concerts is very favourably disposed towards me." "The orchestra has taken a great liking to me, and the public approves of me." And as a matter of fact Wagner had no reason to be dissatisfied with the visit, nor has Mr. Shedlock for calling it "unfortunate." The whole situation is summed up in another communication to Fischer, dated London, June 15, 1855--

"... The false reports about my quarrel with the directors of the Philharmonic Society here and my consequent departure from London are based upon the following incident--

"When I went into the cloak-room after the fourth concert, I there met several friends, whom I made acquainted with my extreme annoyance and ill-humour that I should ever have consented to conduct concerts of such a kind, as it was not at all in my line. These endless programmes, with their ma.s.s of instrumental and vocal pieces, wearied me and tormented my aesthetic sense; I was forced to see that the power of established custom rendered it impossible to bring about any reduction or change whatever; I therefore nourished a feeling of disquietude, which had more to do with the fact that I had again embarked on a thing of the sort--much less with the conditions here themselves, which I really knew beforehand--but least of all with my public, which always received me with friendliness and approbation, often indeed with great warmth.

"On the other hand, the abuse of the London critics was a matter of perfect indifference to me, for their hostility only proved to all the world that I had not bribed them, while it gave me, on the contrary, much satisfaction to watch how they always left the door open, so that had I made the least approach they would have turned to different pitch; but naturally I thought of nothing of the kind....

"On that evening I was really in a furious rage, that after the A minor Symphony I should have had to conduct a miserable vocal piece and a trivial overture of Onslow's; and, as is my way, in deepest dudgeon I told my friends aloud that I had that day conducted for the last time; that on the morrow I should send in my resignation, and journey home. By chance a concert-singer, R---- (a German-Jew youth) was present; he caught up my words and conveyed them all hot to a newspaper reporter. Ever since then rumours have been flying about in the German papers, which have misled even you. I need scarcely tell you that the representations of my friends, who escorted me home, succeeded in making me withdraw the hasty resolution conceived at a moment of despondency.

"Since then we have had the _Tannhauser_ overture at the fifth concert; it was very well played, received by the public in a quite friendly manner, but not yet properly understood.

"All the more pleased was I, therefore, when the Queen, who had promised (which is a rare event, and does not happen every year) to attend the seventh concert, ordered a repet.i.tion of the overture. Now, if in itself it was extremely gratifying that the Queen should pay no regard to my highly compromised political position (which had been dragged to light with great malignity by the _Times_), and without hesitation a.s.sist at a public performance under my direction, then her further behaviour towards me afforded me at last an affecting compensation for all the contrarieties and vulgar animosities which I had here endured.

"She and Prince Albert, who both sat immediately facing the orchestra, applauded after the _Tannhauser_ overture--with which the first part concluded--with graciousness, almost amounting to a challenge, so that the public broke out into lively and prolonged applause. During the interval the Queen summoned me to the _salon_, and received me before her court with the cordial words, 'I am delighted to make your acquaintance; your composition has enraptured me!'

"In a long conversation, in which Prince Albert also took part, she further inquired about my other works, and asked if it would not be possible to have my operas translated into Italian, so that she might be able to hear them, too, in London? I was naturally obliged to give a negative answer, and, moreover, to explain that my visit was only a flying one, as conducting for a concert society--the only thing open to me here--was not at all my affair. At the end of the concert the Queen and the Prince applauded me again most courteously.

"I relate this to you because it will afford you pleasure; and I willingly allow you to make further use of this information, as I see how much mistake and malice touching myself and my stay in London has to be set right or defeated.

"The last concert is on the 25th, and I leave on the 26th, so as to resume in my quiet retreat my sadly interrupted work."

Wagner was well paid for his work; he was well received in society; the band liked him and the audiences liked him--the one cause of all his grumbling was the character of the bulk of the music he had to conduct. One might expect even a Wagner to prefer conducting a few pieces of tedious stuff, even to put up with poor antediluvian Onslow, rather than to return to his daily task of writing begging letters to his friends from Zurich. Still, these are matters of taste, and each to his own.

To those who only know the Philharmonic to-day, in its more or less repentant and reformed state, it may not seem odd that Wagner should have conducted its concerts. But to those who remember it from, say, twenty-five years ago to quite recent times, a certain incongruity is apparent. Wagner, the sincere, fiery artist, the man devoted to, swallowed up by, his art; the man who journeyed, with his wife and a dog, all the way from Russia to Paris with his bare travelling expenses in his pocket; who had been through a b.l.o.o.d.y revolution, and was now a political refugee; who had written part of the _Ring_ and had _Tristan_ "already planned in his head"; a conductor whose ideal was nothing lower than perfection--this gentleman came from Zurich to conduct a society whose membership was compact of trim and prim mediocrity, and whose directors were mostly duffers. Can we wonder that both sides were disappointed? These amiable directors never quite recovered from the honour of having Mendelssohn to conduct for them; and they undoubtedly looked upon Wagner as scarcely a next-best. The days of oratorio had by no means finished yet; oratorio was the thing; an instrumental concert was very well for a change once in a while, provided there were plenty of Italian opera airs to sugar the nasty pill; Haydn was the last word in symphony, the homage paid to Beethoven being the merest lip-worship. The Philharmonic was certainly no place for Wagner; yet, it must be insisted, there was no real reason for grumbling on either side. Wagner got his money; the society had one of the best seasons on its record.

It is a pity that he who might have been the most valuable witness in the matter should prove at every point to be the least trustworthy.

Ferdinand Praeger had known Wagner in his university days. They seem to have been barely acquainted; but the moment Praeger found Wagner was coming he scented advertis.e.m.e.nt for himself, as is usual with his kind--the kind being the foreign professor settled in London. He will have it that he arranged the whole business; but the terrible truth is that he seems to have done no more than make his compatriot comfortable in our dreary city. Certainly he did that, and Wagner repaid it by inviting him to stay in Zurich, and the visit came off duly. Sainton, who was by way of being a noted violinist, was head and front of the offending from the directors' point of view--perhaps in Wagner's view likewise. The directors were, to speak as the vulgar, in a mortal stew. There was a small audience for orchestral functions in those days, and Dr. Wylde, a worthy academic gentleman of no musical distinction whatever, had started a rival series of concerts, and had in this year, 1855, engaged no less a personage than Berlioz to conduct. A rival was looked for; and since the directors knew little or nothing of continental doings, as soon as Sainton told them one Richard Wagner was their man, they agreed that negotiations should be opened. Wagner came; and the visit ought to be interesting to English musicians, for at Portland Terrace he scored part of the _Valkyrie_.

Moreover, he met Berlioz at dinner; but never those twain could meet in other than a formal way. Neither liked the other; neither liked the other's music; their rivalry in London mattered not two sous to the one or one pfennig to the other, but they were both disappointed men seeking appreciation and approbation on the continent. Wagner had tried in Paris and Berlioz had tried in Germany. Wagner worked stubbornly the whole time, and was mightily glad to get back to Zurich in July. The episode is of small importance in Wagner's life; but the att.i.tude of the Press naturally filled him with disgust. He said if he had paid the critics he would have received "favourable notices," and when I reflect on the smallness of the critics' official salaries and the splendour in which some of them lived I cannot but think he was right: the money necessary to keep up big establishments had to be found somewhere--where?

During the next few years Wagner went many journeys, again mainly in search of "cures," but never got far. He worked unceasingly at the _Ring_, with the wildest plans in his head regarding performances. How wild some of these must have seemed at the time may be judged from the following paragraphs taken from a letter to Uhlig (Dec. 12, 1851).

This is, of course, earlier than the period we are now dealing with; but he never departed from the idea, and it eventually took shape at Bayreuth, a quarter of a century later. Here is the letter--

"For the moment, I can only tell you a little about the intended completion of the great dramatic poem which I have now in hand. Just reflect that before I wrote the poem, _Siegfried's Death_, I sketched out the whole myth in all its gigantic sequence, and that poem was the attempt--which, with regard to our theatre, appeared possible to me--to give one chief catastrophe of the myth, together with an indication of that sequence.

"Now, when I set to work to write out the music in full, still keeping our modern theatre firmly in mind, I felt how incomplete the proposed undertaking would be; the vast train of events, which first gives to the characters their immense and striking significance, would be presented to the mind merely by means of epic narrative.

"So to make _Siegfried's Death_ possible, I wrote _Young Siegfried_; but the more the whole took shape, the more did I perceive, while developing the scenes and music of _Young Siegfried_, that I had only increased the necessity for a clearer presentation of the whole story to the senses. I now see that, in order to become intelligible on the stage, I must work out the whole myth in plastic style. It was not this consideration alone which impelled me to my new plan, but especially the overpowering impressiveness of the subject-matter which I thus acquire for presentation, and which supplies me with a wealth of material for artistic fashioning which it would be a sin to leave unused. Think of the contents of the narrative of Brunnhilde, in the last scene of _Young Siegfried_; the fate of Siegmund and Sieglind; the struggle of Wotan with his desire and with custom (Fricka); the n.o.ble defiance of the Walkure; the tragic anger of Wotan in punishing this defiance.