Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" Part 4

Vocal music alone, the reformers contended, can be recognized as true music, for music is essentially language and rhythm, and only in the last place tone.[22] Consequently, _right declamation_ is of its essence. On this ground they objected to mixing together high notes and low, fast movement and slow, to dividing a syllable between many notes, to repet.i.tion of words and phrases. Especially significant is the advice given by Vincentio Galilei to composers to study the expression of gifted actors.[23]

[Footnote 22: Ambros., iv, p.165.]

[Footnote 23: _Ib._., p. 170.]

It is impossible not to treat seriously a movement founded upon such arguments as these. They are in the main incontrovertible. We seem to be breathing the very atmosphere of Wagner, and it would be scarcely too much to say that the humanist movement of the Bardi salon was in its _intention_ the forerunner of the German movement dreamed of by Herder, Schiller, Jean Paul, and accomplished by Wagner, who at last succeeded in finding what the others had sought, namely, the true relations between words, music, and acting. Even the idea of concealing the orchestra originated with them. Why, then, did it not succeed? Why did the very name of Italian opera become a by-word for all that is frivolous and inartistic in dramatic art? The answer must be sought in the dictum of Dean Milman quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Art is an organic growth, and cannot be created by authority.

A drama which has been manufactured by fitting together words, action, and music in such manner as appears right to the composer, or according to models, real or fanciful, however skilful be the execution, is no drama; it lacks the breath of life; it is not a living organism, but an artificial counterfeit.

In Wagner's theoretical writings there are few things of more practical importance than the principle repeatedly insisted upon that a work of art is not a production of a gifted artist which he exhibits for his audience to criticize, and either to admire and enjoy or to reject according to their capacities, but is a mutual interaction, a conversation as it were between the artist and his public, _to which both contribute_. Nor is art a diversion to be taken up as a relaxation after the fatigue of serious work, but a labour requiring the best efforts of the hearer's faculties. Every artist worthy of the name has something new to say, something which has not been heard before, but is characteristically his own, and cannot be understood without an effort. Artist and hearer must co-operate together towards a common end. Wagner's first purpose throughout his life was to educate his public, or, to use his own phrase, prepare a soil in which his art could flourish. Whenever an attempt is made to create an art by authority, whether it be Court patronage, theoretical exposition, or any other form of authority, this important principle is forgotten.

The would-be teachers of the people scatter the seed irrespectively of the soil, and the attempt, however laudable, is ill-timed.

The subsequent history of the Italian opera has been told by Wagner himself in the entertaining pages of the first part of his _Oper und Drama_, which should be carefully read by all who wish to gain a distinct understanding of his aims. A useful supplement to Wagner's treatise will be found in a conversation which took place between him and Rossini in 1860, a "scrupulously exact" account of which has been published forty-six years after it took place from notes taken at the time in a pamphlet by E. Michotte of Brussels.[24]

[Footnote 24: Paris, _Librairie Fischbacher_, 1906.]

It would have been impossible for the opera to continue as it had begun. People would not have gone to the theatre to hear dreary recitatives, and from the very first we hear of concessions being made to the singers--i.e. to the audience. By degrees there forms itself that peculiar kind of vocal melody which we recognize to-day as distinctively Italian. Not, be it noted, melody proper, which is the very truest expression of the human soul; not the melody that was known to the great Germans, but "naked, ear-tickling, absolute melodic melody; melody which is nothing but melody; which glides into our ears--we know not why; which we sing again--we know not why; which to-day we exchange for that of yesterday, and forget to-morrow--still we know not why; which is sad when we are gay, merry when we are sorrowful, and which we yet hum--just because we know not why."

Let us not be misled by Wagner's bantering description into despising Italian melody and supposing it to be a thing utterly worthless. True, it has not the musical elevation of German melody. The little Neapolitan urchin who basks all day in the sunshine, sings, steals, and is ready to drive a knife into his companion, is not perhaps as high a type of humanity as the English public-school boy. Nevertheless he has a charm entirely his own, and his large round eyes will make you forget his sins. Woe to art and to mankind when our hearts are closed to such influences! Italian operatic melody is the expression of Southern Italian individuality, and has in its very irresponsibility a certain fascination different from that of the far n.o.bler German music.

Wagner waged warfare, not against the Italian opera, not against operatic composers, but against impostors and sophists, and while trampling upon the serpent in his own path he was as little likely to remain untouched by the good-natured lovableness of the Italian as he was to slight the high intelligence, the artistic receptiveness and thoroughness of the French. On reading his works it is hard to escape the impression of a lurking fondness for Rossini on Wagner's part, even while he is making game of the whole school. Above all, Italian melody possesses one quality which is the highest of all in melody--it is eminently singable. No German, unless perhaps Handel, ever understood the human voice as did the Italians. Wagner's own words leave no doubt as to what he thought. In one of his earliest writings he utters a prayer that German composers may one day write such melody and learn such treatment of the voice as are found in Bellini's _Norma_. But, like Odysseus, he stopped his ears to the siren-song (his own expression) while at the same time learning from it and a.s.similating what was good therein. Wagner's vocal melody was largely modelled on that of the Italians. Tristan itself was conceived for Italian singers, and the part of Isolde was originally intended for Mdlle. Tietjens. He even adopted Italian mannerisms, operatic turns, trills, suspensions, cadences, and bravura tricks. We may follow how these Italicisms appearing in all their ba.n.a.lity in his earlier works become more and more expressive as his style develops.

[Music: _Rienzi_, ACT V.

Du stark-lest mich, du gabt mir ho-he Kraft]

[Music: _Tristan und Isolde_, ACT III.

Won . . . ne Kla-gend]

Cadences of the common Italian type with 6/4 chord or suspension swarm in _Tannhauser_ and _Lohengrin_. In _Tristan_ they never have the stereotyped character which they have in his earlier works.

[Music: _Lohengrin_, ACT II.

Ein Gluck da.s.s oh-ne Reu]

The finer characteristics of Italian melody, that easy tunefulness which seems to have sprung naturally and without effort out of the mechanism of the vocal organs, is above all noticeable in the music of his n.o.blest creation, Brunnhilde.

[Music: _Walkure_, ACT III. SCENE I.

O heh re-stes Wun-der]

[Music: herr - - - lich-ste Maid]

[Music: _Siegfried_ ACT III. SCENE III.

Sieg-fried-es Stern ... Sie ist mir e-wig, ist mir im-mer Erb' und Eig - en ... Ein ... er ist mir]

The flower-maidens' chorus in _Parsifal_ might be called the apotheosis of Italian song. What Wagner means by his scathing ridicule of the Italian opera and Italian melody, is not that it is worthless, but that it has no meaning. In short it is not the drama.

We recognized the radical fault of the Italian opera to be its subordination of the drama to the music. In opposition to this it has been a.s.serted that the music aids the drama by carrying on the action.

Let us examine this by the light of one example, the well-known seduction scene of Zerlina in _Don Giovanni_. The form of music as such is determined by rhythmic repet.i.tions of themes, varied or not. The scene is full of dramatic charm and has great capabilities.

Don Giovanni begins insinuatingly: "Give me your hand, Zerlina; come away with me to my castle." The timid peasant girl at first hesitates.

"No, no," she replies, "I dare not--yet how I should like to!--but what would Masetto say?" All this is in the most winning and seductive melody; it is exactly the tone in which a young n.o.bleman and a rather coquettish but entirely innocent young girl would express themselves.

The situation becomes warmer; Don Giovanni is more pressing--he puts his arm round her--he is just about to kiss her, when suddenly the scene begins over again from the beginning with "Give me your hand,"

etc., and the whole episode is rendered absurd! Up to this point we have been so transported by the interest of the scene and the appropriateness of the expression that we almost feel ourselves to be taking part in it, but the repet.i.tion checks our feelings like a douche, by the necessity felt by the composer of preserving the musical form. Had the action and the music been carried right through to the second part, Zerlina's inexpressibly tender

[Music: An-diam!]

would have been most thrilling, and the way would have been naturally prepared for the entry of Elvira just in time to save her.

Absolute or instrumental music requires the strict form which is effected by means of balanced repet.i.tions in order to supply that intellectual element without which it cannot be understood, and which in vocal music is afforded by the words. The drama needs no such restrictions and cannot endure them. Human actions are not subject to mechanical laws; they are intelligible in themselves, but cannot be measured out. Human life is a continuous whole, one action leads naturally on to another, without any break, and to attempt to range the actions of men and women under schemes of arias, cavatinas, duets, choruses, each existing for itself and sharply separated from all others, can only render them unintelligible and ridiculous.

CHAPTER V

THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA AND ITS ANTECEDENTS

We have already seen that the drama is distinguished from all other forms of art by its essential quality of directly enacting the things to be communicated instead of merely describing them. Since only human things can fitly be so enacted by human beings, dramatic art is generally identical with human art; it is the art of representing the actions of men and women--or of deities conceived as idealized human beings--in such a way as to reveal the motives by which they are impelled, their characters. The adjective "dramatic" may, however, be understood in two ways, according as our interest is centred in the actions themselves, their contrasts and conflicts, or in the motives or _characters_ of the persons engaged. In the former case the drama will endeavour to represent decisive and exciting actions pa.s.sing in rapid succession before the eyes. This may be called the spectacular drama, and its greatest master is Schiller. When Goethe is described as "the least dramatic of all great poets" it is in this sense that the word is used. Goethe often hankered after spectacular effects, but was never very successful in producing them.

But if we consider the essence of a dramatic conception to lie in the conflict of opposing motives, not necessarily discharging themselves as action, but subdued, and the more impressive because kept under restraint within the soul of the actor, we shall rank Goethe amongst the very foremost of dramatic poets. Examples of what I will call the moral drama are all Goethe's maturer plays, such as _Ta.s.so_ and _Iphigenie_. To this cla.s.s also belong Lessing's _Nathan der Weise_ and the representative French plays of the cla.s.sic epoch.

They are, generally speaking, bad stage plays, but are extremely interesting to read, and gain in interest the more they are studied.

In the works of the greatest of all dramatists, such as Sophokles and Shakespeare, the spectacular and moral elements are so closely united as to be inseparable. In the Attic drama the more striking spectacular events had, for technical reasons, to be kept out of sight. Ajax piercing himself with his sword, Oedipus tearing out his own eyes, are, like the thunderstorm in _Lear_, the outcome of terrific internal motives bursting all confines with the force of an irresistible torrent. Our interest is centred, not in the actions themselves, but in the motives which produced them, in the characters.

Wagner, with his conscientious habit of accounting to himself for everything that he did, found his artistic level more slowly than do most poets. When the stylistic crudities of his earlier productions had been overcome, he began the work of his maturer life with _Rheingold_, the most spectacular drama ever written. _Walkure_ and _Siegfried_ were continued in the same vein, and it is very significant that he broke off the composition and laid the work aside just at the monstrous dragon-fight. It is no strained conjecture that as the difficulties of his gigantic subject acc.u.mulated he at last realized the practical impossibility of what he had undertaken. To bring the whole story of the fall of the ancient Germanic G.o.ds into a spectacular drama on the scale of the _Ring_ was beyond even his mighty powers, and in _Die Walkure_ he is like a man trying to break away from the path which he has laid down for himself, to get rid of the c.u.mbersome spectacular element and let the action develop itself naturally from within. With all its unrivalled beauties the _Ring_ as a _drama_ is a monstrosity. It turns upon motives which are not apparent from the actions and have to be explained in dreary and most undramatic length.

Its very foundation is wrong; its central figure, the prime author of the new and more blessed world which is to follow, is the offspring of an incestuous union for which there is no occasion whatever. The myth itself has sometimes been held responsible, and it has been a.s.serted that Wagner had to reproduce the tradition as he received it. Nothing of the kind is true; Wagner has altered the entire story, taking, leaving, or altering just as he pleased. In the _Volsunga_ paraphrase of Eddic lays, upon which the story of the _Ring_ is founded, the child of the unnatural union is not Sigurd, not the golden hero "whom every child loved," but the savage outlaw Sinfjotli, half wolf, half robber, one of the most terrible creations of mythology. To conceive such a union as bringing forth a hero whom we are expected to regard as the very type of human n.o.bility and guilelessness is an artistic blunder which we can only explain by supposing that Wagner found his material unmanageable. He was struggling with impossibilities and gave up the attempt.

From this he turned to _Tristan_, rushing at once to the opposite extreme. The absence of clear and decisive action in _Tristan_ is as remarkable as the excess of action in the _Ring_. Persuaded that the motives and characters of men must be known before their actions can be understood, and that these can only be revealed in music, he has given us in _Tristan_ music such as no mortal ear ever heard before or since; but action there is little or none. He scarcely deigns to tell even the most vital incidents of the story.

Can any one say that he has understood the events connected with Morold and Tristan's first visit to Ireland and the splinter of the sword from the play itself without an independent explanation? Or that Tristan's reasons for carrying off Isolde are clear to him from Marke's account? Without these incidents the whole story is unintelligible, but with Wagner in his then mood they counted for nothing in the flood of emotional material. It was in _Die Meistersinger_ that Wagner found the final equation between impulse and action, and the public has again judged rightly in placing that work first among all his dramatic compositions. But the musician and the philosopher will always turn to _Tristan_.

There are four princ.i.p.al epochs in which the drama has been a flourishing reality in Europe. They are: 1. In Athens in the fifth century B.C. 2. In Elizabethan England. 3. In Spain in the seventeenth century. 4. In France under Louis XIV.

Of the influence of the Elizabethan drama upon the Wagnerian drama it is difficult to speak to any good purpose. Shakespeare is the common heritage of all German dramatists, Wagner as well as others, and it is not too much to say that the enthusiasm for Shakespeare which began towards the end of the eighteenth century was the stimulus which roused the German nation to create a drama of its own. It is enough for the present if we note that the Elizabethan drama is characteristically human and popular. True, the Elizabethans revel in courts and high society, as do the populace; they represent kings and rulers as they are beheld from outside, and there is always a "Sampson" or "Gregory," or "Citizen" or "Merchant" ready as a chorus to express with great shrewdness his opinion of the doings of his betters.

For an opposite reason we may pa.s.s over very shortly the French cla.s.sical drama, namely, because it does not seem to have weighed with Wagner at all. Corneille, Racine, and their contemporaries are little mentioned in his writings; certainly he shows no enthusiasm for their art. Yet the influence of the French stage was by no means a negligible quant.i.ty in the development of the German drama.

It was Lessing who in the trenchant prose of his _Hamburger Dramaturgie_ first revolted against the French domination, the strength of which may be judged from the list there given of works performed in the Hamburg theatre from April to July 1767. Of the fifty-two plays there enumerated, fifteen were German, thirty-five French, and two from other languages--only one being English. In itself the French influence was not altogether for evil; what was bad was the unlimited sway of a foreign art. The French sense for elegance of form is far more acute than that of either Germans or Englishmen, but with the Louis Quatorze dramatists it had degenerated into pedantry. The "Unities," rightly understood, are a very important feature of every drama. Aristotle has treated this much vexed question with his customary h.e.l.lenic moderation. Inner unity is an indispensable qualification of every work of art; dramatic unity is technically called Unity of Action, that is, the mind must be able to receive the work as a whole, and it must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Only nature is at once varied and eternal. Out of this _may_ proceed the Unities of Time and Place, but so far from being obligatory they were not even always observed in the Greek tragic drama itself, where they seem specially called for by the presence of the chorus and where the fact that a dramatic performance was always a compet.i.tion made some restrictions binding upon all compet.i.tors necessary. Aristotle's only rule about time is that the length must be such that it can be easily comprehended (_Poet._, vii. 1450_b_), and he adds in a general way that in his day tragedy generally tried as far as possible to keep within one revolution of the sun, or thereabouts (_Ib._, v. 1449_b_).

Of the third Unity, that of Place, he says nothing at all.

Aristotle's eminently practical generalizations of the features of the drama as it existed in Athens in his day were exalted by the French dramatists of the seventeenth century into rigid inviolable laws, and a dramatist would in a doubtful case think it necessary to demonstrate to his public in a special discourse that he had not been guilty of any breach of the law in this respect! The authority of the supreme law-giver was incontestable; the only question was how to interpret his enactments. Does, for example, "one revolution of the sun" mean twelve hours or twenty-four? This and other such weighty matters were subjects of warm controversy. Lessing's mind was critical rather than creative; he, too, was an enthusiastic student of Aristotle, and read with far truer artistic intelligence than Corneille. The criticism of his _Hamburgische Dramaturgie_ cleared the way for the great creative poets of the end of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. It was a period of experiment, both in subject-matter and in form. The latter hovers between that of cla.s.sic tradition and the licence of Shakespeare, while the subjects are generally taken from foreign history or from Greek mythology; only occasionally, as in _Gotz von Berlichingen_ and _Wallenstein_, from German history. The entire dramatic movement of this period is an endeavour to find a workable compromise between the cla.s.sic and the Elizabethan drama, an endeavour which attained a fair measure of success a little later in the superb cla.s.sic tragedies of Grillparzer.

Still, n.o.ble as were its achievements in this direction, the German nation had higher aims. As it gained in self-consciousness and conceived its own artistic ideals it could not but feel itself worthy to bring forth an art characteristically its own. Till now the only indigenous German art had been instrumental music, and the stupendous achievements of a Bach, a Haydn, a Beethoven must have helped to bring home to the Germans the artistic capabilities latent within them.

The decisive step in German art was taken by Richard Wagner, whose appearance is like a world-catastrophe. In one vast flood, comparable only to the tide of his overwhelming music, all that was trivial and experimental was swept away. What was strong enough to swim in the tide was invigorated and strengthened; Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Grillparzer, Weber, Mozart, Beethoven, and their compeers are both better performed and better understood now than they were before Wagner's appearance, but all the second-rate has perished. The days of experimenting have pa.s.sed; the danger now threatening German art is not from abroad, but is within itself, from those of its own body who, just when the only hope lies in sobriety and self-restraint, are goading it on the career of intoxication.

There remain the h.e.l.lenic and the Spanish dramas. Wagner's true spiritual progenitors were Sophokles and Calderon. Different as are the creations of two such widely separated epochs in their external physiognomy, they possess one vital characteristic in common. In both man is the instrument of higher powers; whether they be, as in the one case, Zeus or Ate, or, as in the other, Honour or Christian faith, matters little. These are the real actors, impersonated in flesh and blood in the heroes.

An Englishman who, like myself, is ignorant of the Spanish language and people can never hope to understand, still less to expound, their literature. The Spanish drama is largely dependent upon subtleties of metre and diction which cannot be reproduced in translations, and it is inspired by motives very different from our own. Our watchwords are "self-interest," "freedom," "progress"; those natural to the Spaniard are "honour" and "Catholic Christianity." No great people has been so uniformly true to the traditions of its nationality as the Spanish.

Alone among the nations Spain has refused to a.s.similate the rationalist formulas fashionable in other countries; she has preferred to relinquish her foremost place in the European commonwealth rather than her ideals. To us the policy of Philip II appears as perverse as the notions of honour and Christianity appear extravagant in Spanish dramas; the reason is that we are not Spaniards, and we read their history through the spectacles of rationalist historians. But if we once concede their fundamental notions as they understand them, we must acknowledge that Spanish history and Spanish art proceed directly out of them more logically, more naturally, than in those nations which are continually being drawn aside, now this way, now the other, by the political notions and pa.s.sing philosophies of the day.

Wagner made his first acquaintance with the Spanish drama in the winter of 1857-58, when engaged on the composition of _Tristan_, and at once seized its character with the sympathetic insight of genius. His remarks in a letter to Liszt written at this time[25] are so noteworthy, and bear so directly upon the work with which we are concerned, that I will add a translation of a portion of the letter:

I am almost inclined to place Calderon by himself and above all others. Through him, too, I have learned to understand the Spanish character. Unprecedented, unrivalled in its blossom, it developed so rapidly that its material body soon perished, and it ended in negation of the world. The refined, deeply pa.s.sionate consciousness of the nation finds expression in the notion of _honour_, wherein its n.o.blest and at the same time its most terrible elements unite to a second religion. Extremes of selfish desire and of sacrifice both seek to be satisfied. The nature of the "world"

could not possibly find sharper, more dazzling, more dominating, and at the same time more destructive, more terrible expression. The poet in his most vigorous presentations has taken for his subject the conflict of this _honour_ with the deep human feeling of _sympathy_ (_Mitgefuhl_). The actions are dictated by "honour," and are therefore acknowledged and approved by the world, while the outraged sympathy takes refuge in a profound melancholy, the more telling and sublime for being scarcely expressed, and revealing the world in all its terrible nullity. Such is the wondrous and imposing experience which Calderon presents to us in magic creative charm. No poet of the world is his equal in this respect. The Catholic religion intervenes as a mediator, and nowhere has it attained greater significance than here, where the opposition between the world and sympathy is pregnant, sharp, and plastic, as in no other nation. How significant too is the fact that nearly all the great Spanish poets in the latter half of their lives retired into the Church, and that then, after complete ideal subjugation of life they could depict that very life with certainty, purity, warmth, and clearness, as they never could before when actively engaged in it. Their most graceful, most whimsical creations are from the time of their clerical retirement. Beside this paramount phenomenon all other national literature seems insignificant.