Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" Part 7

[Footnote 32: Wagner, _Ges. Schr_., iii. 341; iv. 387.]

All our musical sense revolts against the dictum that music cannot under any circ.u.mstances express a general feeling. Take, for example, Agatha's outburst on seeing the approach of her lover Max in the second act of _Der Freischutz_:

[Music: All' mei - ne Pul - se schla-gen, und das Herz wallt un - ge - stum, Suss ent - - zuckt ent - ge - - - gen ihm,.... etc.]

Would it be possible to hear this pa.s.sage and not feel the melody as a direct and most vivid expression of joy?--joy, that is, in the abstract, but not a definite joy at some given event--that is told by the words and scenery? Whatever share words and gesture may contribute is as nothing compared with that exultant and rapturous outburst of melody. Wherever there is any character-drawing in Italian opera, it is in the music, not in the words, as, for example, in the more dramatic portions of Elvira's music in _Don Giovanni_. The frequent movement in octaves imparts a n.o.bility and dignity to her expression which are altogether absent in the words.

The paraphrase of the words of the air from Gluck's _Orphee_ is amusing enough as a _jeu d' esprit_, but surely cannot be taken seriously. Hanslick seems to have misapprehended the music; it does not express grief, and is not intended to. The _words_ express the desolation of Orpheus at the loss of his beloved, but the _Stimmung_ of the melody is one of calm resignation. It is the serene self-restraint with which Gluck loves to imbue his cla.s.sic heroes and heroines, and which is equally appropriate to joy and grief. Grillparzer, whose authority both as a dramatist and as a sensitive lover of music is rightly esteemed very highly, has declared that it would be possible to take any one of Mozart's _arias_, and set words of quite different meaning to them. This may be true of many of Mozart's _arias_, which were often composed more with regard to the organ of a particular singer than to the text before him, but is a.s.suredly not true of his great dramatic scenes and finales.

Whatever value such speculations may possess vanishes before the unconscious instinct of the creating artist. It is well known that German dramatists and poets have from the beginning felt keenly the need of musical expression. If the need was less felt by English dramatists of our great period the reason is that it required the development of music in the hands of the great German masters before its power could be fully known. Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Hoffmann, Richter, and a host of others all sighed for the aid of music.[33]

Kleist declared music to be the root of all the other arts. Their dream could not be realized until the right form of the drama which could unite with music had been found. It was at last found by Wagner after repeated trial and failure. He determined the form as that in which the characters act out of their own inner impulses. The historical drama shows men as torn hither and thither by external political considerations. The action is impelled by wheels within wheels of intrigue and complex psychological mechanism. For such subjects the romance, with its almost unlimited powers of expatiation, is the proper vehicle, but they are unfitted for music; they necessitate wearisome explanations of complicated motives altogether foreign to the direct emotional character of musical drama. The musical character is the one who is entirely himself, and whose motives are therefore clear from the first; such subjects are to be found above all in the mythologies of imaginative and poetically gifted peoples. That does not of course mean that other subjects are excluded, for there is no domain of life which may not offer the same conditions, provided only that the characters have a strong and well-marked individuality. When once this principle was discovered the musical drama became a reality. Wagner uses for this form of drama the term _reinmenschlich_--purely human--an expression which was in keeping with the humanitarian views prevalent at the time when he wrote, but not free from objection and apt to be misunderstood in our day.

[Footnote 33: Many utterances of German poets to this effect will be found reproduced in Chamberlain's _Richard Wagner_.]

If the drama longed for the means of expressing its own inmost nature, no less did music seek for a nearer approach to objectivity and to the conditions of human existence. If it is true that music is the root of all the arts, then it must also be the root of human life, and must seek to reveal itself in life and in the drama which is the mirror of life. The desire for human expression is already, as we have seen, very clearly discernible in the symphonies and sonatas of Beethoven, but it is since his time that the most remarkable development has taken place. The programme music of Berlioz, Liszt, and other composers has rightly been condemned by many critics, but the mistake was in the manner of the composition rather than in the intention, which was natural, indeed inevitable. Wagner's a.s.sertion that with Beethoven "the last symphony has been written"--rationally understood, of course, as meaning that nothing beyond is possible on instrumental lines--is quite true. There was nothing left but for music to take form in things of human interest. Only the composers, perhaps as much from want of an adequate dramatic form as from want of skill, failed to attain their end. While evidently striving to follow out Beethoven's hint, _mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei_, their powers failed, and they produced more _Malerei_ than _Empfindung_. The reader may consider by the light of these remarks the pa.s.sage in Liszt's _Faust_ symphony in the slow movement, where Gretchen is represented as plucking a daisy, repeating, "He loves me, he loves me not," etc. The composer has depicted the scene with wonderful skill and exquisite poetic feeling, but the essence of Goethe's scene, which lies entirely in its unconscious innocence, is gone in this highly wrought artificial presentation. It is the difference between nature and art, between the nave, pure-minded maiden and the actress painted and decorated for the stage.

There are few persons, I believe, who on hearing an instrumental composition do not feel a desire to form a mental picture of its contents, so to speak, to objectivate it in their minds. Aestheticians tell us that we are wrong, and we are apt to laugh at each other's pictures, but we all do it. Beethoven, as we know from his friend Schindler and his pupil Ries, often, if not always, had some object before him when composing his instrumental works. The fact that the same music suggests different interpretations to different minds will not disturb us if we remember that music does not and never can _depict_ or _describe_ its object: for that we have the arts of poetry and painting. What music can give is the emotional mood which it calls forth, and which may be common to many objects very different in their external character. A "stormy" movement may be referred to a storm of winds and waves, or to a storm of human pa.s.sions, and so might suggest a battle, a shipwreck, a revolution, a violent emotion of love or hatred, or a play of Shakespeare. But the aversion which we naturally feel to the labelling of sonatas and symphonies with t.i.tles is in my opinion justifiable,[34] because here we recognize an attempt to stereotype one particular interpretation, instead of leaving the mind of each hearer free to form his own.

[Footnote 34: The latest and most atrocious outrage on good taste in this respect is the labelling of Beethoven's great B flat sonata as "_the Hammerklavier_." All musicians of finer feeling should unite to kill this absurd name.]

A musical composition is a vessel into which many wines can be poured.

It cannot in itself express either any material object or any definite feeling which involves such an object. No music can alone, without a suggestion from elsewhere, express a person, a place, or love or fear or a battle or "a calm sea and prosperous voyage," or any similar thing. But it has a marvellous power of receiving suggestions which are offered to it, by words or otherwise, of carrying them on and, by means of its own forces of movement and proportion, intensifying their expression to, a degree inconceivable without its aid. Mathematics present an exact a.n.a.logy to music, and are to science what music is to art. Both are ideal forms which in one sense only attain complete individuality when they are pure, but in another sense have no meaning until they are applied to some object of nature. A mathematical formula is only true so long as it remains an ideal in the mind; but its existence has no other purpose than to state a law for material phenomena, when it at once loses its essential qualities as a mathematical formula, certainty and accuracy. In this way we may understand simultaneously the supremacy of absolute music and the truth for which Wagner contends, that music can never be anything but expression.

Dr. Hanslick's dictum that music has no other means for its expression than movement and symbolism cannot be admitted. It can express through a.s.sociation. All the senses have in some degree the faculty of recalling in the mind impressions with which they have once been a.s.sociated. Who has never had the memory of his home or of some place familiar to his childhood recalled by the scent of a flower or a plant? No sense possesses this power in anything like the same degree as that of hearing, especially when the connection has been established through a musical strain. It is on this principle that Wagner mainly relies in his dramatic musical motives. In itself the connection is in the first instance artificial. A musical strain of a striking individual character is brought into connection with some idea of the drama, it may be a person or a scene or an incident, in short, anything which may serve as a dramatic motive, and thenceforward whenever the musical strain is heard, the idea with which it has been a.s.sociated will be called up in the mind of the hearer. All the resources of modern music are then at the disposal of the composer for exhibiting his motive in the most varied lights, intensifying, varying, contrasting, or combining with other motives, as the dramatic situation requires.

It often happens that the musical strain is heard before its a.s.sociation with an idea of the drama has been established, as, for example, in the instrumental prelude. The idea then seems to hover in the music as a vague _presentiment_ (_Ahnung_) of something that is to come. A superb example of this occurs at the end of _Die Walkure_. Wotan has laid his daughter to rest, and surrounded her with a barrier of fire. "Let none cross this fire who dreads my spear," he cries, and at once the threat is answered by a defiant blast from the trombones uttering a strain which has not yet taken definite form, but which we learn from the sequel is the theme proper to Siegfried the hero, who is destined to bring to an end the power of the G.o.d.

Or the motive may reappear after it has served its purpose on the stage; it is then a _reminiscence_ of past events. No finer example of this could be found than in the music of Isolde's swan-song, the so-called _Liebestod_, which is built up out of the motives of the life into a symphonic structure of almost unparalleled force and truth.

CHAPTER X

SOME REMARKS ON THE MUSICAL DICTION OF _TRISTAN UND ISOLDE_

Before beginning the detailed consideration of our work, I wish to say a few words on some features of the music. As I am writing for the general reader and not for the musician, I shall endeavour to express myself in generally understood terms, and avoid technical details.

Each of Wagner's works presents a distinct and strongly defined musical physiognomy marking it off from all the others. The music of each is cast in its own mould and is at once recognizable from that of the rest. The most characteristic features of the music of _Tristan und Isolde_ are its concentrated _intensity_ and the ineffable _sweetness_ of its melody. The number of musical-dramatic motives employed is very small, but they are insisted upon and emphasized by a musical working out unparalleled in the other works. In _Rheingold_, for example, some twelve or fifteen motives--if we count only those of well-marked contours, and which are used in definite dramatic a.s.sociation--can be distinguished; whereas in the whole of _Tristan_ there are of such _Leitmotive_ in the narrowest sense not more than three or four. The treatment is also very different. The _Ring_ is not entirely innocent of what has been wittily called the "visiting-card" employment of motives, while in _Tristan_ the musical motive does not repeat, but rather supplements, the words, indicating what these have left untold, thus entering as truly into the substance of the drama as it does into that of the music.

The most important motive of all, the one which pervades the drama from beginning to end, is the love-motive. Its fundamental form is that in which it appears in the second bar of the Prelude in the oboe (No. 1).[35] Variants of it occur without the characteristic semitone suspension (1_a_) or with a falling seventh (1_b_). The cello motive of the opening phrase of the Prelude may also be considered as derived from the same by contrary movement (1_c_).

[Footnote 35: See the musical examples at the end.]

Of equal importance, though occurring less frequently, and only at important and decisive moments, is the death-motive (2). This motive is less varied than the last, recurring generally in the same key--A flat pa.s.sing into C minor--and with similar instrumentation, the bra.s.s and drums entering _pp_ on the second chord.

The second act opens with a strongly marked phrase which is the musical counterpart of the great metaphor so conspicuous throughout the act, of the day as destructive of love. The working out of this motive whilst the lovers are together is a marvel of musical composition, and it always returns in the same connection.

Perhaps we may also include among these fundamental musical-dramatical motives one occurring in the middle of the second act at the words "_Sehnen hin zur heilgen Nacht_" (No. 4). It is akin to the death-motive proper, but the solemn harmonies are here torn asunder into a strain so discordant that without the dramatic context it would scarcely be bearable. It is the rending of the bond with this life and with the day. The music here reminds us that, however heroically the lovers accept their inevitable end, they feel that it means a rough and painful severance from that life which was once so dear and beautiful.

Other motives are reminiscences more or less of a purely musical nature or connected only in a general way with scenes or incidents of the drama. They call back indistinctly scenes of bygone times, and will be spoken of as they occur in the work.

The best preliminary study for Wagner's use of motives is that of Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies. _Macmillan's Magazine_ for July, 1876, contains a valuable article by the late Mr. Dannreuther which will be useful as an introduction, and ought to be familiar to all who are interested in modern developments of music. Mr.

Dannreuther there treats of the type of variation peculiar to Beethoven, which he compares to the metamorphosis of insects or of the organs of plants: "It is not so much the alteration of a given thought, a change of dress or of decoration, it is an actual creation of something new and distinct from out of a given germ." He then proceeds to trace the principle in some of Beethoven's later works, and shows how for example the great B flat sonata (Op. 106) is built upon a scheme of rising tenths and falling thirds; the A flat sonata (Op. 110) upon two simple melodies. Wagner's procedure is similar; he takes a musical motive which has already been used and brings forth out of it something totally new, scarcely resembling its parent in external features, and yet recognizable as the same.

The problem before Wagner was how to render this new acquisition available for the drama, and we shall best understand him if we look upon him as all his life seeking its solution, each work representing an experimental stage rather than a perfectly finished model. In the earlier part of the _Ring_ he began with a purely conventional conjunction of a musical strain with a tangible and visible object--a ring, a giant, a G.o.ddess, etc. This is wrong method, and, although generally his instinctive sense of dramatic propriety kept him from going very far astray, the effects of his wrong procedure are occasionally visible. Why, for example, should a given melody in thirds on two ba.s.soons denote a ring? and why should it bear a thematic kinship to another melody denoting Walhall? The a.s.sociation is purely conventional and serves no purpose, for the material object, a ring, is fully expressed in the word; there is nothing more to be said about it than that it is just a ring, and we do not want the ba.s.soons to repeat or confirm what is quite intelligible without them.

In _Tristan_ this pitfall is mostly avoided, but it is in _Die Meistersinger_ and _Parsifal_ that we find the motives most skilfully employed.

A critical a.n.a.lysis of the harmonic structure of our work does not fall within the scope of this treatise. It will be found in text-books specially devoted to the subject. I can here only offer a few general remarks.

Modern harmonies are made theoretically much more difficult than they need be by our system of notation, which grew up in the Middle Ages.

The old modes knew no modulation in our sense, and in the seventeenth century, when the tempered system came into vogue, making every kind of modulation possible, the old notation was retained. How unsuited it is for modern music appears from the drastic contradictions which it involves. It is quite a common thing to see the same note simultaneously written as F sharp in one part and as G flat in another. This is what makes modern harmony seem so much more difficult than it really is, for when the music comes to be _heard_, these formidable-looking intervals resolve themselves into something quite natural and generally not difficult of apprehension by a musical ear.

Unfortunately we are compelled to learn music through the medium of a keyed instrument, generally through the most unmusical of instruments, the piano, and we learn theory largely through the eye and the reason instead of through the ear. The problems of harmony will seem much simpler if we remember that its basis is the _interval_--music does not know "notes" as such, but only intervals--that the number of possible intervals is very small and their relations quite simple, and that everything which is not reducible to a very simple vulgar fraction is heard, not as a harmony, but as a pa.s.sing note, an inflection of a note of a chord. In fact the advance made in chord combinations since the introduction of the tempered system is not very great. All, or nearly all, the chords used by Wagner are to be found in the works of Bach. The suggestion to explain Wagner's harmonies by a.s.suming a "chromatic scale" rests upon a misapprehension of the nature of a scale. Every scale implies a tonality, i.e. a tonic note, to which all the other notes bear some definite numerical relation.

There cannot be a chromatic scale in the scientific sense in music; what we call by that name in a keyed instrument is merely a diatonic scale with the intervals filled in; it always belongs to a definite key, and the accidentals are only pa.s.sing notes. It is in pa.s.sing notes that we must seek the key to Wagner's harmonies. With Wagner more than with any other composer since Bach the parts must be read horizontally as well as vertically. As long as we look upon harmonic progressions as vertical columns of chords following one upon the other we may indeed explain, but we shall never understand them. Each chord must be viewed as the result of the confluence of all the separate voices moving harmoniously together. This, too, will help us to grasp the character of "altered" chords, so lavishly employed by Wagner, and of "inflection," by which term I mean to denote all kinds of pa.s.sing notes, appoggiaturas, suspensions, changing notes, and the like. All are phenomena of harmonic notes striving melodically onwards, either upwards or downwards.

Although little has been done in the invention of new combinations, the character of the harmonic structure has changed considerably since the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is evident at first glance on comparing a score of Haydn or Mozart with one of Wagner or Liszt. There, although chromatic harmonies are not unfrequent, they occur only sporadically, the general structure being diatonic, whereas with the later masters the whole tissue is chromatic; the score fairly bristles with accidentals, and a simple major or minor triad is the exception. Very different too is the periodic structure. The phrases no longer fall naturally into eight-bar periods interpunctuated with cadences, but are determined by the text, and although the eight-bar scheme is generally maintained--much disguised, it is true, but still recognizable--it is determined not by half-closes at the sections, but by the eight beats of the two-line metre, while the periods follow each other in even flow without any indication of cadence. In other words the musical form is governed by the declamation.

Theory of harmony is one thing, living music quite another. The musical hearer of a work like _Tristan und Isolde_ will understand its harmonic structure, though he know nothing of the theoretical progression of the chords, provided the performance be good, i.e. correct, just as a man ignorant of grammar will understand a sentence which is clearly enunciated. The composer needs no theory of harmony; his ear is his only guide, as the eye of the artist is a sufficient guide for his colouring without any theory of colour. There is only one thing which the composer must keep before him and which the hearer must consciously be able to recognize--the Tonality. The problem of harmony therefore in practice reduces itself to that of modulation. To recognize the tonality quickly and certainly, look for the cadences. They are as it were landmarks, placed along the melodic road, indicating from time to time where we are.

I cannot dismiss the subject of harmony without mentioning the chord which from its employment at decisive moments and its extraordinary mystic expressiveness has been called the soul of the _Tristan_ music. Its direct form is

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as it occurs in the beginning of the Prelude.

The instrumentation of _Tristan_ does not present any special features different from that of Wagner's other works. It is less heavily scored than the _Ring_, and at the same time the instrumentation is more concentrated. Wagner usually employs his wind in groups of at least three in each colour--e.g. three flutes, two oboi and one English horn, two clarinets and a ba.s.s clarinet, etc.--and so is able to keep his colours pure. It is partly to this that the extraordinary purity of his tone in the tutti is due, partly also to the sonority imparted to the bra.s.s by means of the ba.s.s tuba, and still more to the consummate skill of the composer in the distribution of his parts.

There is an interesting note at the beginning of the score in which the composer seems to be trying to excuse himself for using valve instruments in the horns. While admitting the degradation of tone and loss of the power of soft binding resulting from the use of valves, he thinks that the innovation (which I need scarcely observe is not his) is justified by the advantage gained in greater freedom of movement.

In such matters one must be allowed to form one's own judgment, and though it may seem like trying to teach a fish to swim, a humble amateur may be permitted to wish that Wagner had here resisted the tide of progress. It is not only that the tone and power of binding are injured, but the whole character of horns and trumpets is altered when they are expected to sing chromatic pa.s.sages like the violin and the clarinet. As the point is of some interest, I should like to bring it before the reader with some examples. The essential character of the horns is nowhere more truly conveyed than in the soft pa.s.sage near the beginning of the overture to _Der Freischutz_, and it is the contrast between the two nature scales on the C horn and the F horn which gives the character to this lovely idyll. The trumpets are capable of even less variety of expression than the horns, as their individuality is even more strongly marked. How entirely that character is conditioned by the mechanism of the instrument may be ill.u.s.trated by an example. The third movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony contains an interlude _molto meno mosso_. The choral theme is accompanied by a continuous A, sustained in octave in the violins, which in the intervals between the verses descends to G sharp and returns

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The repeat at the end enters _ff._ after a strong crescendo, and at this point the sustained A is taken over from the violins by the trumpets and given forth with piercing distinctness above the tutti of the orchestra, the effect being one of extraordinary brilliancy. Now comes the point with which we are concerned. In the intervals the trumpet cannot descend to G sharp, because it has not got the note in its natural scale, and is therefore obliged to repeat

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Indisputably the composer would have written G sharp had the trumpet been able to play it; it was only the defective scale of the instrument which led him to write A, but the effect of hearing A when we expect G sharp is electrifying; the unbending rigidity of the trumpet is here expressed with a vividness and force which nothing else could have given.

Many more examples might be brought from the works of the great composers to show how the horns and trumpets have lost in expressive power by having adopted the chromatic scale of other instruments.

Wagner's use of the bra.s.s generally is most skilful; he is especially happy in avoiding the blatancy and coa.r.s.eness which soils the scores of some composers. Neither trumpets nor drums are much used continuously in the score of _Tristan_. The former are often employed in the lower part of their scale and only for particular effects. Trombones generally utter single chords, or slow successions of chords, adding solemnity to the sound, and crowning a climax. A favourite instrument with Wagner is the harp, and he uses it freely in _Tristan_. The effect is, as it were, to place the orchestra upon springs, adding lightness and elasticity to the tone, as may be noticed in the accompaniment to the duet at the end of the first act.

We often hear Wagner's melody described as if it were not melody in the ordinary meaning of the word, but a kind of "recitative" or "declamation." The great French singer, Madame Viardot Garcia, was asked on one occasion in a private circle to sing the part of Isolde.

She took the score and sang it _a prima vista_ to Klindworth's accompaniment. On being told that in Germany singers could not be found to undertake the part, alleging that it was too difficult and unmelodious, she navely asked whether German singers were not musical! a.s.suredly any person to whom Wagner's music, especially that of _Tristan_, appears unmelodious is unmusical, or at least defective in the sense for melody. Wagner's music is easy to sing; much easier, for example, than that of Mozart. This, however, is only true for singers who are highly musical. The great majority have not had any real musical education, and it is to these that the common notion that Wagner's music is unsingable, that it ruins the voice, is due. The notion that recitative and melody are things opposed to one another is itself a misunderstanding. The characteristic mark of recitative in the narrow sense is that it is not bound by rhythmic forms, and therefore has a somewhat dry, matter-of-fact character, which would become tedious if it continued unrelieved--as life would be dull without any sweets. Wagner says: "My melody is declamation, and my declamation melody." There is no line of demarcation; they are as inseparably united as emotion and intellect. But although the stream of emotion in human life is continuous, it is not continually at the same tension. Moments of high exaltation alternate with more subdued intervals, and a very large part of the mechanical routine of life is emotionally almost quiescent. In the drama the emotional element alternates with the narrative, and according as the one or the other predominates, the weight of the expression is in the music or the words; each therefore rises and falls in alternation. Even in Shakespeare's spoken drama traces of this ebb and flow may be noticed, the language becoming more musical under the stress of higher emotion.

In the opera the intervals between the lyric _arias_, etc., had to be filled in with dry explanation or narrative, and there arose the _recitative secco_, a rapid recitation in which the melody is reduced to a mere shadow. The German language was unfitted for dry recitative of this type, and these filling-in parts had therefore to be spoken--a device which proved intolerable, since it destroyed the illusion of the music. Wagner, as we saw, got over the difficulty by choosing a form of drama in which the emotional element was supreme, and the narrative filling in reduced to a minimum. We further saw how in _Tristan und Isolde_ the principle is driven to such an exaggerated extreme as sometimes to render the action almost unintelligible. Nowhere is the music unmelodious or uninteresting, but it is elastic and pliable and changes its character with the emotional intensity of the dramatic situation, being more subdued in parts of the first act, a.s.serting itself whenever rage, irony, tenderness, or other emotion call for expression; omnipotent in the great love-duet, culminating in the nocturne, and once more soaring in highest ecstasy in Isolde's dissolution, with endless gradations in the portions between. Hearers who are not accustomed to the dramatic expression of music attend only to those moments of intense lyric expression, just as in the opera they attend only to the _arias_; all else appears to them uninteresting and unmelodious. This is to miss the essential thing in Wagner's works--the drama itself; but it is precisely what is done by those hearers who are incapable of the effort of following attentively the dramatic development.