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The sort of stuff a purely dramatic musician produces when he
hampers himself with metric patterns in composition is not unlike
what might have resulted in literature if Carlyle (for example)
had been compelled by convention to write his historical stories
in rhymed stanzas. That is to say, it limits his fertility to an
occasional phrase, and three quarters of the time exercises only
his barren ingenuity in fitting rhymes and measures to it. In
literature the great masters of the art have long emancipated
themselves from metric patterns. Nobody claims that the hierarchy
of modern impassioned prose writers, from Bunyan to Ruskin,
should be placed below the writers of pretty lyrics, from Herrick
to Mr. Austin Dobson. Only in dramatic literature do we find the
devastating tradition of blank verse still lingering, giving
factitious prestige to the platitudes of dullards, and robbing
the dramatic style of the genuine poet of its full natural
endowment of variety, force and simplicity.
This state of things, as we have seen, finds its parallel in
musical art, since music can be written in prose themes or in
versified tunes; only here nobody dreams of disputing the greater
difficulty of the prose forms, and the comparative triviality of
versification. Yet in dramatic music, as in dramatic literature,
the tradition of versification clings with the same pernicious
results; and the opera, like the tragedy, is conventionally made
like a wall paper. The theatre seems doomed to be in all things
the last refuge of the hankering after cheap prettiness in art.
Unfortunately this confusion of the decorative with the dramatic
element in both literature and music is maintained by the example
of great masters in both arts. Very touching dramatic expression
can be combined with decorative symmetry of versification when
the artist happens to possess both the decorative and dramatic
gifts, and to have cultivated both hand in hand. Shakespeare and
Shelley, for instance, far from being hampered by the
conventional obligation to write their dramas in verse, found it
much the easiest and cheapest way of producing them. But if
Shakespeare had been compelled by custom to write entirely in
prose, all his ordinary dialogue might have been as good as the
first scene of As You Like It; and all his lofty passages as fine
as "What a piece of work is Man!", thus sparing us a great deal
of blank verse in which the thought is commonplace, and the
expression, though catchingly turned, absurdly pompous. The Cent
might either have been a serious drama or might never have been
written at all if Shelley had not been allowed to carry off its
unreality by Elizabethan versification. Still, both poets have
achieved many passages in which the decorative and dramatic
qualities are not only reconciled, but seem to enhance one
another to a pitch otherwise unattainable.
Just so in music. When we find, as in the case of Mozart, a
prodigiously gifted and arduously trained musician who is also,
by a happy accident, a dramatist comparable to Mohere, the
obligation to compose operas in versified numbers not only does
not embarrass him, but actually saves him trouble and thought. No
matter what his dramatic mood may be, he expresses it in
exquisite musical verses more easily than a dramatist of ordinary
singleness of talent can express it in prose. Accordingly, he
too, like Shakespeare and Shelley,leaves versified airs, like
Dalla sua pace, or Gluck's Che fare senza Euridice, or Weber's
Leise, leise, which are as dramatic from the first note to the
last as the untrammelled themes of The Ring. In consequence, it
used to be professorially demanded that all dramatic music should
present the same double aspect. The demand was unreasonable,
since symmetrical versification is no merit in dramatic music:
one might as well stipulate that a dinner fork should be
constructed so as to serve also as a tablecloth. It was an
ignorant demand too, because it is not true that the composers
of these exceptional examples were always, or even often, able to
combine dramatic expression with symmetrical versification. Side
by side with Dalla sua pace we have Il mio tesoro and Non mi dir,
in which exquisitely expressive opening phrases lead to
decorative passages which are as grotesque from the dramatic
point of view as the music which Alberic sings when he is
slipping and sneezing in the Rhine mud is from the decorative
point of view. Further, there is to be considered the mass of
shapeless "dry recitative" which separates these symmetrical
numbers, and which might have been raised to considerable
dramatic and musical importance had it been incorporated into a
continuous musical fabric by thematic treatment. Finally,
Mozart's most dramatic finales and concerted numbers are more or
less in sonata form, like symphonic movements, and must therefore
be classed as musical prose. And sonata form dictates repetitions
and recapitulations from which the perfectly unconventional form
adopted by Wagner is free. On the whole, there is more scope for
both repetition and convention in the old form than in the new;
and the poorer a composer's musical gift is, the surer he is to
resort to the eighteenth century patterns to eke out his
invention.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
When Wagner was born in 1813, music had newly become the most
astonishing, the most fascinating, the most miraculous art in the
world. Mozart's Don Giovanni had made all musical Europe
conscious of the enchantments of the modern orchestra and of the
perfect adaptability of music to the subtlest needs of the
dramatist. Beethoven had shown how those inarticulate mood-poems
which surge through men who have, like himself, no exceptional
command of words, can be written down in music as symphonies. Not
that Mozart and Beethoven invented these applications of their
art; but they were the first whose works made it clear that the
dramatic and subjective powers of sound were enthralling enough
to stand by themselves quite apart from the decorative musical
structures of which they had hitherto been a mere feature. After
the finales in Figaro and Don Giovanni, the possibility of
the modern music drama lay bare. After the symphonies of
Beethoven it was certain that the poetry that lies too deep for
words does not lie too deep for music, and that the vicissitudes
of the soul, from the roughest fun to the loftiest aspiration,
can make symphonies without the aid of dance tunes. As much,
perhaps, will be claimed for the preludes and fugues of Bach; but
Bach's method was unattainable: his compositions were wonderful
webs of exquisitely beautiful Gothic traceries in sound, quite
beyond all ordinary human talent. Beethoven's far blunter craft
was thoroughly popular and practicable: not to save his soul
could he have drawn one long Gothic line in sound as Bach could,
much less have woven several of them together with so apt a
harmony that even when the composer is unmoved its progressions
saturate themselves with the emotion which (as modern critics are
a little apt to forget) springs as warmly from our delicately
touched admiration as from our sympathies, and sometimes makes us
give a composer credit for pathetic intentions which he does not
entertain, just as a boy imagines a treasure of tenderness and
noble wisdom in the beauty of a woman. Besides, Bach set comic
dialogue to music exactly as he set the recitatives of the
Passion, there being for him, apparently, only one recitative
possible, and that the musically best. He reserved the expression
of his merry mood for the regular set numbers in which he could
make one of his wonderful contrapuntal traceries of pure ornament
with the requisite gaiety of line and movement. Beethoven bowed
to no ideal of beauty: he only sought the expression for his
feeling. To him a joke was a joke; and if it sounded funny in
music he was satisfied. Until the old habit of judging all music
by its decorative symmetry had worn out, musicians were shocked
by his symphonies, and, misunderstanding his integrity, openly
questioned his sanity. But to those who were not looking for
pretty new sound patterns, but were longing for the expression of
their moods in music, he achieved revelation, because, being
single in his aim to express his own moods, he anticipated with
revolutionary courage and frankness all the moods of the rising
generations of the nineteenth century.
The result was inevitable. In the nineteenth century it was no
longer necessary to be a born pattern designer in sound to be a
composer. One had but to be a dramatist or a poet completely
susceptible to the dramatic and descriptive powers of sound. A
race of literary and theatrical musicians appeared; and
Meyerbeer, the first of them, made an extraordinary impression.
The frankly delirious description of his Robert the Devil in
Balzac's short story entitled Gambra, and Goethe's astonishingly
mistaken notion that he could have composed music for Faust, show
how completely the enchantments of the new dramatic music upset
the judgment of artists of eminent discernment. Meyerbeer was,
people said (old gentlemen still say so in Paris), the successor
of Beethoven: he was, if a less perfect musician than Mozart, a
profounder genius. Above all, he was original and daring. Wagner
himself raved about the duet in the fourth act of Les Huguenots
as wildly as anyone.
Yet all this effect of originality and profundity was produced by
a quite limited talent for turning striking phrases, exploiting
certain curious and rather catching rhythms and modulations, and
devising suggestive or eccentric instrumentation. On its
decorative side, it was the same phenomenon in music as the
Baroque school in architecture: an energetic struggle to enliven
organic decay by mechanical oddities and novelties. Meyerbeer was
no symphonist. He could not apply the thematic system to his
striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metric patterns
in the old style; and as he was no "absolute musician" either, he
hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, which
were either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by
certain brusqueries which, in the true rococo manner, owed their
singularity to their senselessness. He could produce neither a
thorough music drama nor a charming opera. But with all this, and
worse, Meyerbeer had some genuine dramatic energy, and even
passion; and sometimes rose to the occasion in a manner which,
whilst the imagination of his contemporaries remained on fire
with the novelties of dramatic music, led them to overrate him
with an extravagance which provoked Wagner to conduct a long
critical campaign against his leadership. Thirty years ago this
campaign was mentably ascribed to the professional jealousy of a
disappointed rival. Nowadays young people cannot understand how
anyone could ever have taken Meyerbeer's influence seriously.
Those who remember how his reputation stood half a century ago,
and who realize what a nothoroughfare the path he opened proved
to be, even to himself, know how inevitable and how impersonal
Wagner's attack was.
Wagner was the literary musician par excellence. He could not,
like Mozart and Beethoven, produce decorative tone structures
independently of any dramatic or poetic subject matter, because,
that craft being no longer necessary for his purpose, he did not
cultivate it. As Shakespeare, compared with Tennyson, appears to
have an exclusively dramatic talent, so exactly does Wagner
compared with Mendelssohn. On the other hand, he had not to go to
third rate literary hacks for "librettos" to set to music: he
produced his own dramatic poems, thus giving dramatic integrity
to opera, and making symphony articulate. A Beethoven symphony
(except the articulate part of the ninth) expresses noble
feeling, but not thought: it has moods, but no ideas. Wagner
added thought and produced the music drama. Mozart's loftiest
opera, his Ring, so to speak, The Magic Flute, has a libretto
which, though none the worse for seeming, like The Rhine Gold,
the merest Christmas tomfoolery to shallow spectators, is the
product of a talent immeasurably inferior to Mozart's own.
The libretto of Don Giovanni is coarse and trivial: its
transfiguration by Mozart's music may be a marvel; but nobody
will venture to contend that such transfigurations, however
seductive, can be as satisfactory as tone poetry or drama in
which the musician and the poet are at the same level. Here,
then, we have the simple secret of Wagner's preemminence as a
dramatic musician. He wrote the poems as well as composed the
music of his "stage festival plays," as he called them.
Up to a certain point in his career Wagner paid the penalty of
undertaking two arts instead of one. Mozart had his trade as a
musician at his fingers' ends when he was twenty, because he had
served an arduous apprenticeship to that trade and no other.
Wagner was very far from having attained equal mastery at
thirty-five: indeed he himself has told us that not until he had
passed the age at which Mozart died did he compose with that
complete spontaneity of musical expression which can only be
attained by winning entire freedom from all preoccupation with
the difficulties of technical processes. But when that time came,
he was not only a consummate musician, like Mozart, but a
dramatic poet and a critical and philosophical essayist,
exercising a considerable influence on his century. The sign of
this consummation was his ability at last to play with his art,
and thus to add to his already famous achievements in sentimental
drama that lighthearted art of comedy of which the greatest
masters, like Moliere and Mozart, are so much rarer than the
tragedians and sentimentalists. It was then that he composed the
first two acts of Siegfried, and later on The Mastersingers, a
professedly comedic work, and a quite Mozartian garden of melody,
hardly credible as the work of the straining artifices of
Tanehauser. Only, as no man ever learns to do one thing by doing
something else, however closely allied the two things may be,
Wagner still produced no music independently of his poems. The
overture to The Mastersingers is delightful when you know what it
is all about; but only those to whom it came as a concert piece
without any such clue, and who judged its reckless counterpoint
by the standard of Bach and of Mozart's Magic Flute overture, can
realize how atrocious it used to sound to musicians of the old
school. When I first heard it, with the clear march of the
polyphony in Bach's B mmor Mass fresh in my memory, I confess I
thought that the parts had got dislocated, and that some of the
band were half a bar behind the others. Perhaps they were; but
now that I am familiar with the work, and with Wagner's harmony,
I can still quite understand certain passages producing that
effect organ admirer of Bach even when performed with perfect
accuracy.
THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE
The success of Wagner has been so prodigious that to his dazzled
disciples it seems that the age of what he called "absolute music
must be at an end, and the musical future destined to be an
exclusively Wagnerian one inaugurated at Bayreuth. All great
geniuses produce this illusion. Wagner did not begin a movement:
he consummated it. He was the summit of the nineteenth century
school of dramatic music in the same sense as Mozart was the
summit (the word is Gounod's) of the eighteenth century school.
And those who attempt to carry on his Bayreuth tradition will
assuredly share the fate of the forgotten purveyors of
second-hand Mozart a hundred years ago. As to the expected
supersession of absolute music, it is sufficient to point to the
fact that Germany produced two absolute musicians of the first
class during Wagner's lifetime: one, the greatly gifted Goetz,
who died young; the other, Brahms, whose absolute musical
endowment was as extraordinary as his thought was commonplace.
Wagner had for him the contempt of the original thinker for the
man of second-hand ideas, and of the strenuously dramatic
musician for mere brute musical faculty; but though his contempt
was perhaps deserved by the Triumphlieds, and Schicksalslieds,
and Elegies and Requiems in which Brahms took his brains so
seriously, nobody can listen to Brahms' natural utterance of the
richest absolute music, especially in his chamber compositions,
without rejoicing in his amazing gift. A reaction to absolute
music, starting partly from Brahms, and partly from such revivals
of medieval music as those of De Lange in Holland and Mr. Arnold
Dolmetsch in England, is both likely and promising; whereas there
is no more hope in attempts to out-Wagner Wagner in music drama
than there was in the old attempts--or for the matter of that,
the new ones--to make Handel the starting point of a great school
of oratorio.
BAYREUTH
When the Bayreuth Festival Playhouse was at last completed, and
opened in 1876 with the first performance of The Ring, European
society was compelled to admit that Wagner was "a success."
Royal personages, detesting his music, sat out the performances
in the row of boxes set apart for princes. They all complimented
him on the astonishing "push" with which, in the teeth of all
obstacles, he had turned a fabulous and visionary project into a
concrete commercial reality, patronized by the public at a pound
a head. It is as well to know that these congratulations had no
other effect upon Wagner than to open his eyes to the fact that
the Bayreuth experiment, as an attempt to evade the ordinary
social and commercial conditions of theatrical enterprise, was a
failure. His own account of it contrasts the reality with his
intentions in a vein which would be bitter if it were not so
humorous. The precautions taken to keep the seats out of the
hands of the frivolous public and in the hands of earnest
disciples, banded together in little Wagner Societies throughout
Europe, had ended in their forestalling by ticket speculators and
their sale to just the sort of idle globe-trotting tourists
against whom the temple was to have been strictly closed. The
money, supposed to be contributed by the faithful, was begged by
energetic subscription-hunting ladies from people who must have
had the most grotesque misconceptions of the composer's aims--
among others, the Khedive of Egypt and the Sultan of Turkey!
The only change that has occurred since then is that
subscriptions are no longer needed; for the Festival Playhouse
apparently pays its own way now, and is commercially on the same
footing as any other theatre. The only qualification required
from the visitor is money. A Londoner spends twenty pounds on a
visit: a native Bayreuther spends one pound. In either case "the
Folk," on whose behalf Wagner turned out in 1849, are effectually
excluded; and the Festival Playhouse must therefore be classed as
infinitely less Wagnerian in its character than Hampton Court
Palace. Nobody knew this better than Wagner; and nothing can be
further off the mark than to chatter about Bayreuth as if it had
succeeded in escaping from the conditions of our modern
civilization any more than the Grand Opera in Paris or London.
Within these conditions, however, it effected a new departure in
that excellent German institution, the summer theatre. Unlike our
opera houses, which are constructed so that the audience may
present a splendid pageant to the delighted manager, it is
designed to secure an uninterrupted view of the stage, and an
undisturbed hearing of the music, to the audience. The dramatic
purpose of the performances is taken with entire and elaborate
seriousness as the sole purpose of them; and the management is
jealous for the reputation of Wagner. The commercial success
which has followed this policy shows that the public wants summer
theatresof the highest class. There is no reason why the
experiment should not be tried in England. If our enthusiasm for
Handel can support Handel Festivals, laughably dull, stupid and
anti-Handelian as these choral monstrosities are, as well as
annual provincial festivals on the same model, there is no
likelihood of a Wagner Festival failing. Suppose, for instance, a
Wagner theatre were built at Hampton Court or on Richmond Hill,
not to say Margate pier, so that we could have a delightful
summer evening holiday, Bayreuth fashion, passing the hours
between the acts in the park or ontheriver before sunset, is it
seriously contended that there would be any lack of visitors? If
a little of the money that is wasted on grand stands, Eiffel
towers, and dismal Halls by the Sea, all as much tied to brief
annual seasons as Bayreuth, were applied in this way, the profit
would be far more certain and the social utility prodigiously
greater. Any English enthusiasm for Bayreuth that does not take
the form of clamor for a Festival Playhouse in England may be set
aside as mere pilgrimage mania.
Those who go to Bayreuth never repent it, although the
performances there are often far from delectable. The singing is
sometimes tolerable, and some times abominable. Some of the
singers are mere animated beer casks, too lazy and conceited to
practise the self-control and physical training that is expected
as a matter of course from an acrobat, a jockey or a pugilist.
The women's dresses are prudish and absurd. It is true that
Kundry no longer wears an early Victorian ball dress with
"ruchings," and that Fresh has been provided with a quaintly
modish copy of the flowered gown of Spring in Botticelli's famous
picture; but the mailclad Brynhild still climbs the mountains
with her legs carefully hidden in a long white skirt, and looks
so exactly like Mrs. Leo Hunter as Minerva that it is quite
impossible to feel a ray of illusion whilst looking at her. The
ideal of womanly beauty aimed at reminds Englishmen of the
barmaids of the seventies, when the craze for golden hair was at
its worst. Further, whilst Wagner's stage directions are
sometimes disregarded as unintelligently as at Covent Garden, an
intolerably old-fashioned tradition of half rhetorical, half
historical-pictorial attitude and gesture prevails. The most
striking moments of the drama are conceived as tableaux vivants
with posed models, instead of as passages of action, motion and
life.
I need hardly add that the supernatural powers of control
attributed by credulous pilgrims to Madame Wagner do not exist.
Prima donnas and tenors are as unmanageable at Bayreuth as
anywhere else. Casts are capriciously changed; stage business is
insufficiently rehearsed; the public are compelled to listen to a
Brynhild or Siegfried of fifty when they have carefully arranged
to see one of twenty-five, much as in any ordinary opera house.
Even the conductors upset the arrangements occasionally. On the
other hand, if we leave the vagaries of the stars out of account,
we may safely expect always that in thoroughness of preparation
of the chief work of the season, in strenuous artistic
pretentiousness, in pious conviction that the work is of such
enormous importance as to be worth doing well at all costs, the
Bayreuth performances will deserve their reputation. The band is
placed out of sight of the audience, with the more formidable
instruments beneath the stage, so that the singers have not to
sing THROUGH the brass. The effect is quite perfect.
BAYREUTH IN ENGLAND
I purposely dwell on the faults of Bayreuth in order to show that
there is no reason in the world why as good and better
performances of The Ring should not be given in England. Wagner's
scores are now before the world; and neither his widow nor his
son can pretend to handle them with greater authority than any
artist who feels the impulse to interpret them. Nobody will ever
know what Wagner himself thought of the artists who established
the Bayreuth tradition: he was obviously not in a position to
criticize them. For instance, had Rubini survived to create
Siegmund, it is quite certain that we should not have had from
Wagner's pen so amusing and vivid a description as we have of his
Ottavio in the old Paris days. Wagner was under great obligations
to the heroes and heroines of 1876; and he naturally said nothing
to disparage their triumphs; but there is no reason to believe
that all or indeed any of them satisfied him as Schnorr of
Carolsfeld satisfied him as Tristan, or Schroder Devrient as
Fidelio. It is just as likely as not that the next Schnorr or
Schroder may arise in England. If that should actually happen,
neither of them will need any further authority than their own
genius and Wagner's scores for their guidance. Certainly the less
their spontaneous impulses are sophisticated by the very stagey
traditions which Bayreuth is handing down from the age of
Crummles, the better.
WAGNERIAN SINGERS
No nation need have much difficulty in producing a race of
Wagnerian singers. With the single exception of Handel, no
composer has written music so well calculated to make its singers
vocal athletes as Wagner. Abominably as the Germans sing, it is
astonishing how they thrive physically on his leading parts. His
secret is the Handelian secret. Instead of specializing his vocal
parts after the manner of Verdi and Gounod for high sopranos,
screaming tenors, and high baritones with an effective compass of
about a fifth at the extreme tiptop of their ranges, and for
contraltos with chest registers forced all over their compass in
the manner of music hall singers, he employs the entire range of
the human voice freely, demanding from everybody very nearly two
effective octaves, so that the voice is well exercised all over,
and one part of it relieves the other healthily and continually.
He uses extremely high notes very sparingly, and is especially
considerate in the matter of instrumental accompaniment. Even
when the singer appears to have all the thunders of the full
orchestra raging against him, a glance at the score will show
that he is well heard, not because of any exceptionally
stentorian power in his voice, but because Wagner meant him to be
heard and took the greatest care not to overwhelm him. Such
brutal opacities of accompaniment as we find in Rossini's Stabat
or Verdi's Trovatore, where the strings play a rum-tum
accompaniment whilst the entire wind band blares away,
fortissimo, in unison with the unfortunate singer, are never to
be found in Wagner's work. Even in an ordinary opera house, with
the orchestra ranged directly between the singers and the
audience, his instrumentation is more transparent to the human
voice than that of any other composer since Mozart. At the
Bayreuth Buhnenfestspielhaus, with the brass under the stage, it
is perfectly so.
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