Richard Wagner Part 9

They dispute to some of Wagner's loveliest melodies. The theme (_k_) flows along as an accompaniment, and becomes more prominent when Isolda says she can no longer hear the horns; she hears the gentle plash of the brook running from the fountain--as "in still night alone it laughs on my ear"--the party of hunters must be many miles off. The signal for Tristan is the extinguishing of the torch, and the music a.s.sociated with this deed now is used again in the last act in another form. Brangaena prays her mistress not to put it out: it means death, she says, and as a sort of subsidiary death-theme this melody is afterwards used. Isolda is too completely mastered by desire to listen. When Brangaena curses herself for having changed the magic drinks she is laughed at. To music filled with pa.s.sion and of perfect beauty she says the whole business was arranged by Venus, G.o.ddess of love, and we hear yet another love-theme (_l_); then to the crash of what we must call the torch-theme, blent with the death-theme from Act I, she throws down the torch and frantic with impatience awaits her lover.

He enters, and after some delirious pages not to be described in words the pair fall to talk in Schopenhauerian terminology about the light and the dark. But the pa.s.sion never goes out of the music. On the contrary, it grows in intensity, for the madness of the meeting is nothing to the white-hot pa.s.sion we get later; and in spite of the terminology the meaning of both Tristan and Isolda is perfectly clear.

Light has been, and is, the enemy of their love; in the garish light of day Tristan, filled with daylight dreams of ambition, first made over to Mark, so to speak, his rights in Isolda; "is there a pain or a woe that does not awaken with daylight?" he asks; and now, declared lovers, they may only meet in the dark: during the day they must be distant strangers. They know whither fate is driving them: Isolda has said as much to Brangaena: "she may end it ... whatsoe'er she make me, wheresoe'er take me, hers am I wholly, so let me obey her solely."

They are embodiments of sheer pa.s.sion; love is the most selfish of pa.s.sions, and placed as they are, realising that they live only for and in that pa.s.sion, they have no thought for any one else, regarding the outer world, the world of daylight, as their foe. Isolda does not hesitate to remind Tristan of his perfidy in the days of light; and he, far from defending himself, finds it quite sufficient to remark that he had not then come under the sway of night: that is, they have no ordinary human affection for each other. If they had, neither would lead the other into such danger. Shakespeare did not, could not, make his lovers live so entirely in their pa.s.sion as this: he had no music to express himself by, and had to speak through human beings. So when Romeo says, "let me stay and die," Juliet instantly hurries him away.

Tristan and Isolda know they are wending to death, and are content.

Their feelings subside into soft languor, and then they sing the sublime hymn to night. Brangaena's voice is heard from the watch-tower, warning them of approaching danger; and they heed her not. Again she sings to them that the danger is imminent--night is departing; Tristan, resting his head on the bosom of his mistress, simply says, "Let me die thus." The catastrophe is at hand. The duet reaches its glorious climax; Brangaena gives a shriek from her tower; Kurvenal rushes in yelling "Save yourselves," but it is too late--Mark, Melot and the other huntsmen come in quickly, and--the game is up. The red dawn slowly breaks; Tristan hides Isolda with his cloak; Melot turns to Mark and says, "Did I not tell you so?"--his ruse has succeeded quite well enough. And now follows a scene which has proved a stumbling-stock to many.

The ordinary dramatist or play-monger would drop the curtain on this denouement; and undeniably it would be what is called an effective "curtain." However, effective curtains were not Wagner's business in planning _Tristan_; he had long since pa.s.sed through that stage. He could not after such a curtain--the sort of curtain that ends many an opera--have carried out the plan of _Tristan_--to show us the lovers realising their impossible situation in life and deliberately seeking death as the refuge. Tristan and Isolda care nothing for shame and disgrace: they care only for their love, and their love relentlessly drives them into their grave. Mark has a great affection for them both, and precisely on that account he is their enemy. He begins a long expostulation: "How is it that the two people dearer to him than all the world have so betrayed his trust?" It is lengthy, and must needs be so; each proof he gives them of his love only more clearly defines his real significance and relation to them. Tristan does not fear Melot: he dreads Mark's affection. He (Tristan) calls out, "Daylight phantoms! morning visions, empty and vain--away, begone!"

but Mark continues, putting in a dozen ways the same question, "Why, why have they done this?" It is not the behaviour of a barbaric king; but we must remember that Wagner's Mark is not, and is not intended to be, the legendary Mark any more than Tristan and Isolda are the legendary Tristan and Isolda: he is the personification of human affection, a thing to which they, enthralled by elemental love, are indifferent--detest, indeed, as interfering with their love. When he ends Tristan knows he has no explanation to offer--none that Mark could possibly understand: human affection and elemental human pa.s.sion are unintelligible to one another. He replies that he cannot answer Mark's "Why?" and turning to Isolda asks whether she will follow him whither he is now going--the land of eternal night. He, not Mark, plans his death. Isolda answers straightway that she will follow.

Tristan and Melot fight, but Tristan allows his treacherous foe to run the sword through him, and he falls. _Then_ we get the curtain; Tristan has done with this world and has started out for another, and the drama has taken a second step towards its goal.

This, held for long to be bad craftsmanship, is consummate, daring craftmanship. _Tristan_ is a drama of spiritual conflicts; and those who do not like that sort had better try something by the trade playwrights of to-day.

V

The music of the first act is largely fierce, angry, turbulent, often bitter music, blent and merging into music expressive of fierce desire, the hunger of the man after the woman, of the woman after the man. There is one moment of sweet longing--the moment after Isolda and Tristan have drunk the fatal potion; but instantly the torrent breaks forth, and though it is in a way sweet, the sweetness is mixed with fire; the stream is as a stream of molten lava, scalding, consuming.

The note of the music to the second act is utterly different; there is fire, indeed, a golden fire; there is greedy impatience and restlessness; but the fire does not scorch nor scald, the impatience is not despairing, the love is not--as it certainly is in the first act--that pa.s.sion which is but one remove from deadly hate. Almost at the beginning of the first act Isolda, devoured by a longing for revenge, schemed to murder Tristan, and she does not falter in her purpose until he has taken the drink; the reaction has all the violence of a cataclysm; all is delirium; there is not a moment of happy lingering over the joy of a possible; new life; there is no time for that, no thought of it. All is burning wrath and hate and equally burning l.u.s.t and greed for the possession of the beloved one's body.

In the second act the anger has died out, and in the whirl of the music, though at its maddest, there is a fulness, an a.s.sured sense of coming satisfaction; and the excitement settles down into long, drawn-out, luscious, voluptuous strains as the lovers, held in each other's arms, exchange the sweet confidences usual (I suppose) on such occasions.

Musically the act may be regarded--conveniently, though roughly and crudely--as a kind of symphony, in four sections which to an extent overlap. We have section one from the first bar of the prelude to Tristan's entry; section two, the impa.s.sioned duet; three, from the hymn to night until the lovers are discovered; and four, from that point to the end. Many of the themes are worked right through, but the sections vary vastly in colour, atmosphere and feeling. The variety unified into a completely satisfying whole is astounding. Amongst the really great musicians only four possessed the organising brain in this degree--Wagner himself, Beethoven, Handel and Bach. This act is even more completely an organic whole than the first; every part performs its functions and retains its individuality, yet all the parts are co-ordinated. I have seen miraculous pieces of machinery in which each part seemed to be alive and doing its duty independent of the others; yet all working together to achieve one purpose. The score of _Tristan_ is as marvellous--indeed, more so, for the purpose is not a mechanical one, but the expression, with rigid fidelity to truth, of the most subtle and exquisite feelings.

I have said earlier that in evolving his purely musical structures Wagner adopted one plan. He not only used the subjects of his operas for the overtures, or (as in the present case) of the preludes to the acts, but he makes them tell a story dramatically. Merely to use themes for an opera as conventional subjects to be treated in symphony form had been done; but Wagner never dreamed of adopting a form and imposing it on his material from outside; with him the form is determined by the material and the significance the material bore in his mind. This is very different from deliberately writing a symphonic poem--deliberately sitting down in cold blood and setting to work to ill.u.s.trate a story. _That_ method is ant.i.thetical to Wagner's; a symphonic poem writer is simply a setter of opera texts, one who follows with devout care the book of words put before him--with this difference, that the opera-writer must, to some extent at least, consider his words, his singers, his stage, while the composer of symphonic poems can do just as he pleases and consider no one's convenience, shortening this section or lengthening that as the musical exigencies demand, while making use of some tale or a poem as an excuse for writing in a form which in itself is unintelligible and illogical. So far as Wagner could he let music and drama grow up together; then to start with the right atmosphere he took certain themes and spun a piece of music from them, letting the themes, as I have said, unfold themselves logically and determine the form. The result is always a fine piece of music; and thousands of listeners have derived artistic enjoyment from the _Mastersingers_ overture, the _Lohengrin_ prelude and _Tristan_ prelude without troubling to trace the story as it is plainly told. In the prelude to Act II here, for example, no one need seek a story, though it is obvious enough.

First we have the daylight theme, peremptorily, harshly announced; then the impatience of Isolda, then her longing, then her thoughts of love and her hopes of fulfilment, and just before the curtain rises the crash which accompanies the extinction of the torch.

I have already alluded to the old-world atmosphere got at once by the horn calls and the lovely pa.s.sage in which Isolda sings of the brook "laughing on" in the still night; but in this first scene, which is by comparison a mere introduction to the duet, we find a thousand beautiful things. At this period of his life Wagner was by no means so economical as he afterwards became; he squandered his pearls with prodigal hands. In a few pages are enough melodies and themes to set up a Puccini--or for that matter a Strauss or an Elgar--for life. The blending of the death-theme with one of the love-themes, when Isolda speaks of love's G.o.ddess, "the queen who grants unquailing hearts ...

life and death she holds in her hands," is one of the miracles of music--stern beauty made up of defiance of fate and careless voluptuousness. In the very next melody to make its appearance, the second bar after the change to the key of A, we may note what I think is the first sign of one of the many mannerisms of Wagner's "third period," as we call it--the period extending from _Tristan_ to the finishing of the _Ring_ (_Parsifal_ being as the tail to the dog, or perhaps the tin-kettle tied to the tail). It is the phrase quoted (_l_). Those five notes of the second bar were to be made to serve many purposes hereafter; and the Wagnerites will insist that this was done for a high artistic reason. Perhaps it was; but to me it seems that it is found so frequently sometimes because Wagner wanted to utter precisely the same emotion as he had employed it for earlier, and sometimes because, like all other composers, at times he found his invention flagging. In the second scene of this act of _Tristan_ it plays a conspicuous part, and is indeed one of the most pregnant love motives of the drama--perhaps the most prolific of subsidiary themes and pa.s.sages.

The big duet beats description, and its structure must only be discussed briefly. A figure which forms part of the music played while Isolda impatiently awaits Tristan is turned into the whirling accompaniment to impa.s.sioned and incoherent exclamations as they first embrace; then to the seething ma.s.s of tone is added (_l_), and gradually out of chaos and confusion emerges one clean-cut melody after another. The daylight-theme which begins the introduction is Protean in the shapes it a.s.sumes, and the emotions, now hot pa.s.sion, now the gentlest tenderness, it is made to express. The ferment settles down, and we get the hymn to night and a series of melodies which are love's own voice speaking. The dreamy voluptuousness that pervades these duets comes from songs written by Wagner as studies.

They were not over highly esteemed by his friends, but he had his revenge. This night in the garden--with the black night above and the black trees around, the flowers, the musical brooklet, and the voice of the caller heard at times from the roof--is the greatest thing of the kind in all music: in all the arts, I know only the balcony scene in _Romeo and Juliet_ which may be said to approach it. Melody upon melody, delicate and sweet to the ear as the perfume of night flowers and gra.s.ses to the nostrils, floats past; until at last the sheer delight of the thing seems to work up the lovers to a state of heavenly rapture, and in the final verse of the hymn to night they pray only to be removed from the dangers of returning day; and here the strains swell to an intensity of yearning for peace quite unprecedented in music. And, as we know, their prayer is immediately answered in a fashion they were hardly prepared for.

Mark's address is deeply touching; and it is odd that when attacked by Melot Tristan's accents are almost his. The sublime is again touched when Tristan asks Isolda to follow him and in her answer. Melot then stabs him, and the curtain drops to one of Mark's reproachful phrases thundering from the orchestra. This, then, is Tristan's answer to Mark's questioning--told in the music, not in the words.

VI

Who first uttered that immortal piece of nonsense, Love and death are one, I cannot say. The Greek conception of Death as Eros with an inverted torch is quite different: it is a kind of _Tod als Freund_ idea; we are called out of life by an irresistible force or G.o.d, which G.o.d must be love, else he would not want us. The inverted torch is the sign that shows whither he calls us. It had a mighty fascination for many fine minds of the second-rate sort last century; and judging from the phraseology of _Tristan_ it seems to have captured Wagner. He was everlastingly bewildering himself with cheap catch-phrases which happened, through suggestion or otherwise, to stir his emotions. He took up one philosophical and political system after another, only to abandon them in turn; but they left a kind of sediment in his mind, and one never feels sure that the pellucid stream of his music-drama will not the next moment be gritty to the palate with some of this outworn stuff. The bits of Schopenhauer's broken brickbats embedded in the libretto of _Tristan_ serve their turn, though a finer and more poetical way of saying the same things might have been found. But Wagner did not find that more poetical way, so let us rejoice that through this uncouth lingo Wagner managed to get into a sort of verse the idea that night was the friend of Tristan's love and day its enemy, and that in the end everlasting night is best of all. In his letters, however, we find him playing with the love and death notion, though he must have known that love is not death, but life; that if love and death are one, then death and love are also one, and to be in love is to be in death, to be dead--which is preposterous: corpses don't love. Presently we shall see that Isolda died in a state of exaltation akin to the state of being in love; but that does not establish the thesis. Blake, for hours before he died, shouted till the ceiling rang for joy to think that he was soon to be with G.o.d: does that prove that mysticism and death are one? Mr. Chamberlain, in his exegesis of _Tristan_, will have it that Wagner composed the opera to demonstrate the truth of a very trite and ridiculous lie. The fact is, Wagner's was far more a feeling, emotional, imaginative brain than a thinking one, and in the hazy, steamy, overheated thinking part he often let idle phrases play about without himself firmly grasping their meaning or want of it. Anyhow, if he had done what Mr.

Chamberlain and many others say he did, we should have found it in the last act. Instead, there is not a word on the subject. Wagner's thinking might be misty: his dramatic instinct was supremely right and sure.

In the first act Isolda and Tristan enjoy their love only for a few minutes; the world, daylight, breaks in and separates them. In the second they revel in it for hours; the world, daylight, again separates them. In the last the world again breaks in; but Tristan has already found his refuge in death, and Isolda, obedient to her promise, follows him, and they are joined, safe from the annoyances of the "phantoms of the day," in "the impregnable fortress," the grave.

The action, as in the preceding portions of the drama, is of the simplest. On his bed of pain and sorrow Tristan lies wounded and unconscious. Kurvenal has got him away from Mark's court in Cornwall to his own castle in Brittany; and now he has been brought out into the castle yard for coolness and air. It is hot, sultry, close; the sea in the distance seems to burn; the castle is dilapidated and overgrown with weeds. Kurvenal watches by his master; from outside the saddest melody ever conceived is heard on a shepherd's pipe. Presently the shepherd looks over the wall and asks how the master fares, does he still sleep? If he awakes it will only be to die, replies Kurvenal; unless the lady leech (Isolda) comes there is no hope. A moment after Tristan comes out of his coma, wanders in his mind a little, but at last understands where he is and that Isolda will come. At that news he works himself into a condition of unbounded excitement, fancies he sees the ship bringing Isolda, but at the sound of that sad, droning pipe melody, and when Kurvenal tells him it is a signal that no ship is yet in sight, he lapses into unconsciousness again. Then he wakes up, goes over the whole history of his love for Isolda, and faints once more; once more he half awakes and as in a dream sees the ship decked with flowers speeding over the summer sea. Suddenly the shepherd strikes in with a lively tune: "Isolda is at hand," cries Kurvenal. "Hasten to bring her," shouts Tristan, and Kurvenal does so.

Tristan, left to himself, goes mad for sheer joy, staggers off his couch, tears his bandages off so that his wound bleeds afresh, and Isolda rushes in just in time to catch him in her arms, where he dies murmuring "Isolda." She laments over his body and sinks down beside it. Another alarm is given; Kurvenal barricades the gate; Mark, Melot and the rest break it down, and there is a terrible hand-to-hand fight; Kurvenal is run through with a spear, and creeps to his master's side, to die, groping for his hand. Brangaena enters, and she and Mark try to explain how she has told the whole story of the potion to Mark; how Mark has come, too late, to unite the lovers. Isolda does not listen; presently she rises to sing the matchless death-song; she sees Tristan before her, smiling, transfigured, his love envelopes her as in billows; she is his now, at last, for aye; and, exhausted, she again sinks down beside Tristan, and dies.

There is thus in _Tristan_ next to no action--no more than serves to turn spiritual forces loose and helps to interpret various spiritual states. The spectator is interested, indeed, in the _doings_ of the people on the stage only in the first act. Isolda's command to Tristan to come before her, Tristan's evasions, Kurvenal's rude answer, the rough gibing bit of sailor chorus, the episode of the two chalices --the love potion and the poison--the scene between Isolda and Tristan in which he offers her his sword and tells her to take her revenge by killing him forthwith, the drinking, the wild embraces and the arrival of the ship in port amidst the clatter of triumphant trumpets--such things might have been, and were, done by Wagner in his _Tannhauser_ days. But consider how little is done in the second act and in the third. These two portions of the music-drama are more symphonic than operatic, and it is small wonder that in the days when good folk expected to see opera when they went into an opera-house, they thought they had been diddled when they were given _Tristan_ for their money.

If anything so new and unexpected were sprung upon us to-day we should raise the same cry as was raised when _Tristan_ was given nearly half a century ago. The introduction opens with a phrase (_m_) of threefold meaning. It is clearly derived from the second phrase of the first love-theme (_a_, page 274); it is a realistic representation in music of Tristan's stertorous breathing; it expresses his delirious state of mind--chiefly, however, in the upward-drifting thirds and fourths with which it ends at each occurrence. Then comes the music a.s.sociated with his suffering and the "lady leech." The whole pa.s.sage is then repeated, and afterwards we get the shepherd's pipe (_n_). This forms the prelude, and the music of the short scene with the shepherd is practically the same. Some new matter is brought in, for dramatic rather than sheer musical purposes, as Tristan awakens; but the next subject that I need call attention to is the n.o.ble one which comes in when Kurvenal a.s.sures him he is safe in his own castle (_o_). The whole of Tristan's subsequent ravings are made up of reminiscences, more or less distorted, of various pa.s.sages out of the first and second acts, as he goes over, as in a dream, his recent life--the sight of Isolda, the scene on the ship and that in the garden. Another new theme to be noted is blazed out by the orchestra when Kurvenal tells him Isolda has been sent for. When he sinks back exhausted and no ship is in sight the shepherd's pipe keeps wandering through his brain with strange, weird, terrible effect, mixing with fragments of other themes; he gathers strength, and his despair rises to frenzy as he curses himself--"'Twas I by whom [the draught] was brewed"--to a phrase overwhelming in its intensity of expression (_p_), and again collapses.

Presently follow a few pages of perhaps the divinest music to be found in Wagner's scores, Tristan's dream of Isolda crossing the summer sea.

To an evenly pulsing gentle accompaniment we hear first the second part of a love-theme (_q_), then fragments of others, till the point of supernal, Mozartean beauty is touched at "full of grace and loving mildness." The pathos of it is almost intolerable: no one could stand the strain another second, when after the cry, "Ah, Isolda, how fair art thou," he rouses himself to anger because Kurvenal cannot see on the rolling waters what he with his inner vision sees so bright and clear. How any one could, even at a first hearing, fail to realize that the composer of this sublime pa.s.sage was by far, infinitely far, the mightiest and tenderest composer of opera music who has lived--this is a phenomenon that pa.s.ses our comprehension nowadays.

The scene where the shepherd sounds his pipe to signal the coming of the boat, and Tristan, his delight wrought up until it grows into anguish, goes mad and tears off his bandages, baffles description. It is made up of the love music of the first and second acts, the melodies being metamorphosed in marvellous fashion. At the last he sees Isolda throwing down the torch as she did in Act II, and as darkness comes over his eyes we hear the same music combined with the love-themes. There is only one thing of the kind to match Isolda's lament--Donna Anna's grief over her father's body in _Don Giovanni_.

The rest of the act is largely made up of music which has been heard before. The death-song is an extended and glorified version of the hymn to night; and the close is of sad, tragic sweetness. The lovers are joined together and at peace--but in the everlasting darkness of the grave.

Any one who has heard _Tristan_ a few times will begin to notice that, despite the endless variety of the music, it possesses an odd h.o.m.ogeneity. After hearing it fifty or a hundred times one begins to feel it to be comparable--if such a comparison could be made--to an elaborate oration delivered in one breath. The whole thing, complete in every detail, must (one thinks) have come bodily into the composer's mind in one inconceivable moment of inspiration and insight. Of course we know it was not so. A G.o.d may think a world into being in that way: a mortal requires time and unflagging energy to produce a masterpiece. We know that Wagner incorporated his own studies in his masterpiece; we can see how theme is evolved from theme. But the unity is so complete that if some sketches were to come to light showing that the last form of some of the music was in existence before the portions from which it seems to be evolved, I should not be in the least surprised, so perfect is the unity, so inevitably does every note fall into its proper place to express the feeling of the occasion. I take it that when he drafted the words he had before him a prophetic shadow of what the music was to be; and when he came to compose, the uninterrupted white heat of inspiration and enormous cerebral energy and intellectual grip of his matter, and the boundless invention which provided that matter for him, so to speak, so that he had only to pick it up ready made, enabled him to make that more or less dim, prophetic shadow a living, concrete reality. Never, from the first bar to the last, does the inspiration fail him; there is not a phrase that says less, or says it less adequately than the situation demands, than he has led us to expect.

Old Spohr, when he heard _Tannhauser_, though his ears rebelled against the unaccustomed discords, spoke about the Olympian inspiration and energy he felt in the work; and this criticism--and very just and fine criticism it was: as just and fine as it was unexpected from an old-world musician such as Spohr--is equally applicable to _Tristan_. In its power and perfection it seems the handiwork of one of the G.o.ds. The very truth of every phrase, and the fulness of utterance with which every phrase expresses the emotion of the moment, has given rise to a common delusion or absurdity: that in the Wagnerian opera every phrase is evolved or developed out of the previous one. If Wagner ever thought of adopting such an insane procedure he would have been puzzled to know how and where to start.

He might, perhaps, have evolved the first from the last, and thus got a perfect rounded whole--a serpent with its tail in its mouth. As a matter of prosaic, or poetical, fact, Wagner, in all his work, incessantly introduces fresh matter, and dozens of themes appear, are worked out, and disappear entirely.

Now, when all this overgrowth of rubbishy comment is being swept away, and those who contemned Wagner are disappearing with those who battened on him and his memory, _Tristan and Isolda_ remains, a world-masterpiece, the most powerful, beautiful, sweet and tender embodiment to be found in any art of elemental human love in all its splendour, loveliness, fearfulness, terror and utter selfishness.

Thousands of years hence, when Europe has sunk under the waves and fresh continents have arisen, perhaps a stray copy by hazard preserved in the Fiji Islands will come to light, will be deciphered by pundits, and a new race will see in it a primitive but consummate work of art, and the pundits will argue themselves black in the face about the name of the composer, whether he was Wagner or another man of the same name. In the meantime millions of our epoch will have understood it, loved it, and seen in it a thousand times more than we see in it to-day, and many thousand times more than I could say in the preceding pages.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

VII

By way of a footnote to this chapter I may be allowed to add a few words about the smaller characters. All that Wagner took from the old legends was the suggestion for the two lovers who sinned and perished for their sin. Crudely or coa.r.s.ely, gentlemanly (as in Tennyson), refined and spiritualized, that idea is the central idea of every form of the tale. To these two people Wagner added Brangaena and Kurvenal, and, taking only the name of King Mark, he created a new personage, unlike any of the older versions of the man, necessary for the exposition of his idea. Brangaena is the most difficult part to sing and act, and it is also the most grateful to the actress. She has not a phrase that is not beautiful, from her first dozen bars to her last recitative. Kurvenal has his song in the first act and scarcely appears again until the last, when all his music is of an unspeakable pathos. His phrase to Tristan, "The wounds from which you languish here all shall end their anguish," is as touching in its rough, uncouth way as a hound licking the hand of its dead master. That is all Kurvenal is--a faithful human dog done in artistic form; and it requires a very great artist to interpret it. David Bispham's impersonation remains in my memory as the greatest I have seen. Mark's reproaches in the second act, and his utter grief in the third, are also very hard to render. In fact, only fine opera singers can take any of these parts without coming to grief. The invisible sailor must be able to sing beautifully; the shepherd must both act and sing with no little skill.

CHAPTER XII

'THE MASTERSINGERS OF NUREMBERG'

I

The next period of Wagner's life, from the date of finishing _Tristan_, 1859, till King Ludwig sent for him, 1864, was stormy. The struggles and endless disappointments made of him the somewhat hard and embittered Wagner of later years. The constant battles, the few victories and the many disappointments must be related in my next chapter, as it is simpler and easier for the author, if not the reader, to consider the _Mastersingers of Nuremberg_ immediately after _Tristan_. A few facts may be mentioned now to enable us to place the second opera in its true chronological order. The _Nibelung's Ring_ was still in abeyance; _Tristan_ finished, Wagner, in search of means of subsistence--the patience and indeed the means of his friends fast giving out--undertook a series of concert trips, going to Brussels, Paris, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Marienfeld, Leipzig and Vienna. In 1861 his last hopes of a Paris success with _Tannhauser_ were extinguished; his concerts up till then had resulted only in an increasing burden of debt; his domestic existence was unendurable; things were as bad as bad could be. So he sat down and wrote his only comedy. It was not a simple case of "tasks in hours of insight willed can be through hours of gloom fulfilled." The _Mastersingers_ had been sketched, as we know, in 1845; but the new work was a change, in that he created the character of Hans Sachs afresh, and the opera became an entirely different thing. He himself gave an account of the joy with which he worked at it, incidentally proving the truth of his a.s.sertion that he was a "wholly [creative] artist." He was not built to be happy in the outer world, but in his world of art he was content; in the outer world he might have an hour of felicity and months of misery, but given a chance of settling down for a while to his operas he at once became and remained cheerful. Fate did not will that in the case of the _Mastersingers_ his contentment should endure any length of time.

No sooner was his text written than he had to set out on his travels again, hunting his daily food from land to land. It was not until 1862 that he began the music; not until 1867 did he get it finished, and in the interval many things tragic and other, had occurred. These, I say, will occupy us presently.

In the sixteenth century there flourished in Nuremberg, as in many another city, a guild of minstrels--at once poets and musicians. The name of Hans Sachs is familiar to us all, but not his verse; and as for his music, it has gone down the winds. After composing _Tannhauser_, Wagner thought of doing what Germans call a comic pendant to that tragedy; though what there is in the _Mastersingers_ that hangs from _Tannhauser_ I beg the reader not to ask me. There is this similarity: the central scene of each is a minstrel-contest; there is this dissimilarity: one opera is tragic in spirit and the other comic in spirit. Beyond this there is no connection, whether of resemblance or of contrast, between the two. The plan was not developed in 1845, the obvious real reason being that Wagner felt the want of a great central figure, Sachs being originally not more than a benevolent heavy father. When he had created a soul for this Sachs he went ahead and wrote the poem.

All that it is necessary to know of the plot may be briefly told in a skeleton form. One of the mastersingers, Pogner, dissatisfied with the prizes usually given at the compet.i.tions, has decided to grant his daughter Eva in marriage to the winner of the next. There are cases on record where such an offer has had the effect of reducing the number of entries--as when in a later age Matheson and Handel would not compete for the position of organist because one of the conditions was that the successful man must marry the retiring organist's daughter.

There is no cup of joy without its drop of bitterness, but Handel and Matheson evidently thought the bitter outdid the sweet. In the _Mastersingers_, however, the lady is all that is attractive, and goodly sport is expected. Hans Sachs himself, though past middle-age, loves her, and might well hope to win; Beckmesser, another master of the guild, means to do his best; and a young knight, Walther von Stolzing, has just become infatuated with her and she with him. He cannot strive in the contest, however, not being a master; and when he submits to a trial the guild rejects him with scorn. Things have arrived at this point at the end of the first Act. In the next, Walther and Eva, desperate, resolve to fly under cover of darkness; Sachs overhears them planning and sings a curious sort of warning-song, letting them know that he is on the look-out and will prevent the elopement; Beckmesser comes to serenade Eva, and David, an apprentice, thinks he has come after _his_ (David's) sweetheart and falls to fisticuffs with him; there is a street row, amidst which Eva escapes into her father's house, while Sachs pulls Walther into his.

In the third Act Eva, who has already told Sachs quite plainly enough that if only a master may win her, and Walther cannot become a master, she prefers him to any other, practically repeats her hint. But Walther has composed another song and Sachs has devised a scheme: if Walther sings his song he is certain to be the victor, and Sachs has determined that by hook or by crook he must sing it. Beckmesser grabs the song, under the impression it is by Sachs; Sachs, without committing himself, tells him to make use of it at the contest if he can. The people gather to watch and hear and judge; Beckmesser makes a muddle of the song and is laughed off the scene; then Sachs pleads Walther's case, and he is allowed, though not a master, to sing. He triumphs, and by one stroke is admitted to the guild and wins the prize. Virtually the play ends here. Sachs' winding-up address can only be dealt with in connection with the music.

II

The personality, the soul, of Sachs, its conflict with itself, its victory over itself and renunciation--undoubtedly Wagner felt this to be the centre of the action of the play, and undoubtedly without it he could never have gained the impulse to write the drama at all. It gives the note of seriousness, even sadness, without which all humour is the crackling of thorns under the pot, without which the play would be farce with a trite love adventure thrown in. We may grant that, and then ask ourselves whence came the impulse to work the thing up into one of the longest of Wagner's operas. The impulse was the vision of old Nuremberg--a vision as indissolubly blent with music as was the vision of the river and the swan with the music of _Lohengrin_. One may say truly that once the germ of the dramatic action was in Wagner's brain he needed the musico-pictorial inspiration of the scenic environment and atmosphere before the thing took final shape and he could compose the music. He says explicitly this was so in the case of the _Dutchman_; in _Tannhauser_ it is perhaps a little less obviously the case. But even in that second of the great operas we need only read his directions for the right performing of it to see of what importance to him were the different scenes--the hot, steaming cave of Venus, the fresh spring morning by the roadside, the great hall of song--about which he was very particular--the autumn woods in the last act. In his letters to Uhlig this comes out very plainly: for instance, he gives as his reason for cutting down the finale of the last act that it was impossible at Dresden to get a glorious sunrise, with which the work should end. I have already laid sufficient stress on the true source of _Lohengrin_; in _Tristan_ adequate and appropriate scenery is absolutely demanded to sustain the atmosphere; and here, in the _Mastersingers_, music and a series of pictures go together, and the pictures seem to inspire the music--or rather, music and pictures are parts of the first inner vision.

Mediaeval Nuremberg, with its thousand gable-ends, its fragrant lime-trees and gardens, its ancient customs, its processions of the guilds and crafts, its watchman with his horn and lantern, calling the hour, its freshness and quaint loveliness by day and its sweetness on soft summer nights--it is these Wagner employed all his superb musico-pictorial art to depict; they are the background to the purely human element of the play, and at the same time they help to express that element. If the _Mastersingers_ was a little less successful as a work of art we should still have to regard it as an amazing _tour de force_. The opera is far too great for that term--one at once of praise and of reproach. The music is full of the spirit of a past world; but the feeling of that world is not got by the use of artificially archaic phrases or harmonies. Kothner's reading of the rules of correct minstrelsy is one of the exceptions, and the night-watchman's crying of the hour is another; but these, as Lamb said of Coleridge's philosophic preaching, are "only his fun." The melodies are often quite Weberesque in contour; the harmonies are either plain work-a-day ones or modern--so modern that no one had used them before. Nor it is by the sadness of the music alone that he gains his end: some of the merriest scenes belong, by reason of the music, to mediaeval times. By his art, the intensity of his feeling for those times, and the fidelity with which he could express every shade of feeling, he conjures up this vision out of the dead and dusty past, makes the dead and dusty past live again, takes us clean into it and keeps us there a whole evening without for a moment letting the spell be broken. It is significant that the very t.i.tle he gave his work is a peremptory warning to us of what to expect: it is not _Hans Sachs_, nor _Walther von Stolzing_, nor even the _Mastersinger_, etc., but in the plural form, the _Mastersingers of Nuremberg_. This is not to cast doubt on Wagner's sincerity when he declared that he only got the creative impulse to go on with his work when he had conceived Sachs as Sachs now stands: it is only to say that his extraordinary sense of colour, atmosphere, and his historical sense, led him to do much more than he thought he was doing and perhaps realized he had done.

The overture as plainly as the t.i.tle of the opera proclaims the composer's purpose: it sums up the solid and pompous old burghers, the impudent apprentices, the love of Walther and Eva, and says nothing about Sachs. As an afterthought, in fact, Sachs is left for the prelude to the third act. As a piece of music, detachable from the opera, and by no means an integral part of it as is the case with the _Tristan_ prelude, the overture transcends every other work of Wagner's. As a contrapuntal feat it remains, with some of Bach's organ fugues and Bach's and Handel's choruses, a veritable miracle of musical art--not of ingenuity alone, for each separate fibre in the musical web has character and combines with the other fibres to produce an ensemble of overwhelming strength and beauty. The energy of the thing is almost superabundant; the gorgeous colouring is dazzling; and every minutest fibre of it lives. The first theme is another landmark in musical history. The harmonisation is extraordinary, not only for its gigantic strength, but for the free employment of chromatics that do not weaken it: in fact, chromatic harmony is so employed throughout the _Mastersingers_ that it sounds diatonic.

Throughout _Tristan_ and in the Venusberg music of _Tannhauser_ chromatic harmony is put into the service of pa.s.sion; but here we have music that is as solid, equable, serene as a Handel eight-part chorus.

With consummate skill the stream of music is, so to say, led on to the theme that always accompanies the mastersingers, as distinguished from the citizens, of Nuremberg; next Walther's song is extemporised upon (no other phrase serves) for a couple of minutes--the most pa.s.sionate page in the opera--and after that come the apprentices. We shall presently observe that Wagner in this opera made light-hearted fun of the pundits, and as if to show them that he had a right to do so he played with the devices that to them were a very serious business indeed. What to them was an end--I mean all the tricks of counterpoint--was to him a means to expression: more expressive music was never dreamed of in a musician's imagination, and at the same time he accomplished with ease part-writing that the most skilful contrapuntists could only perform by labouring long at expressionless, stale old themes first contrived before the Flood to "work well," as the phrase goes. The apprentices' music, then, is an instance: Wagner takes the solid burghers' theme and writes it in notes one-quarter the length, so that it sounds four times as fast. The effect is unexpectedly droll, the music skips about in the most irresponsible way, and (when one knows what it is meant for) depicts the gambols of the herd of young rascals who come on the scene in the first act. This contrivance, called "diminution," is resorted to again presently when the mastersingers' theme, in notes of half the length, is used as an accompaniment to a combination of Walther's song and the burghers'