IV WAGNER So your fugue broadens and thickens -BROWNING. Once more he stept into the street And to his lips again Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane: And ere he blew three notes (such sweet Never gave the enraptured ear)— It is for the expert in music to give a study of Wagner the composer, the artist; for he alone is competent to sketch the history of music and to discuss Wagner's innovations in harmonics, characterization, and structure; to him alone can we look for a comparative study of scores and a subtle appreciation of musical resources. The time has come for such a study; Wagnerian music has emerged from periods of rabid abuse and blind idolatry, and readily submits to, in fact calls for, a critical estimate. Meanwhile there is for one who is not a musical expert a problem of great interest: the study of Wagner the essayist and reflective artist. Beyond a doubt Wagner takes himself very seriously as a Thinker, and seeks to develop and justify his artistic ideals in a series of essays; some of which are brief, like those on Beethoven, on acting and on the theatre, on opera, on composing, on the artist and the public, others long and constructive, like The Work of Art of the Future, Opera and Drama, Art and Religion and Art and Revolution. None of them is easy or attractive reading; they are top-heavy and lack the charming allusiveness of Rodin and the sparkle and fire of Nietzsche. Add to a sober and clumsy manner of thinking an enthusiasm that is not well mixed, and the result is at once heavy and yeasty. But for all that they are of value in helping disclose Wagner's development, and in showing how certain beliefs and dissatisfactions shaped themselves to an ideal of a true art and a music of the future. Wagner, like Rodin, for many years stood alone. A man so original and revolutionary in his views and his technique and of so hungry an individualism in thought and feeling would naturally draw criticism or expose himself to neglect. Matters would hardly be mended by his often tactless utterances and his tenacity in clinging to his ideal. For it was an ideal, an earnest desire to show the way to something better, and not presumption, that led to Wagner's attacks on Italian and French opera, and on musical and theatrical conditions in Germany. This is the high-pitched message of such early essays as Art and Revolution and The Work of Art of the Future; and there is always the shadowing and disheartening thought that things could not be worse. The refrain is throughout the same: there is no national theatre; the state does nothing for art; there `are no suitable conservatories and training schools for singers; the public is indifferent and flocks stupidly to artificial and ill rendered operas and ballets; music and poetry are feeble to the point of painfulness. While there is in all this more than a hint of Schiller, there is also a great deal of bitter first-hand experience with the state, the stage, and the art criticism of the day; an experience made all the more bitter because Wagner was a man of ideals and large ambitions. In 1851 in the preface to Opera and Drama he deplores the artistic conditions he sees everywhere; and in the preface to the second edition, written in 1868, he protests in a mood of discouragement against the stubborn and senseless way in which the public misinterpreted his theories and music alike. And yet in those seventeen years he had composed Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger, two of his greatest operas, and had written the text and much of the music of Der Ring des Nibelungen. For the bitter side of these controversies one must turn to the newspapers and the pamphlets of the time. The lighter side appears in cartoons and caricatures, many of which have been gathered by Kreowski and Fuchs in their Richard Wagner in der Karikatur. It is not a brilliant lot, but it shows plainly what the more unresponsive of his contemporaries attacked in Wagner: his use of dissonance; his noisiness; his musical innovations; his claim of being a poet and a prophet of musical and theatrical reform. Wagner is shown mounted, as the commander-in-chief of the German army, ready to put the French to flight with his music. Or in an orchestral scene dragons and long snakelike wisps of notes are escaping from the instruments. An Austrian cartoon pictures Wagner on his arrival in Heaven listening with a pained expression to the harp-music of the angels and calling for cymbals and trumpets. In 1869 there appeared in L'Éclipse a cartoon by Gill, which shows a huge ear within whose frame stands Wagner, a puny figure with a large head, hammering away at a long pin whose point is set against the ear drum. Quite as good is one by Doré. It gives a scene in the theatre after a Wagnerian opera has blared and blasted and blown its way across the orchestra to the balcony and the boxes, which are strewn with forms prostrate or bent this way and that-like corn-stalks after a hurricane. To the other group belongs an 1860 sketch by Cham in which the advocate of a music of the future is leading an orchestra of future musicians chubby-faced babies struggling with im mense horn instruments. An 1876 cartoon represents Wagner in the haughtiest of attitudes, accepting the homage of Eschylus and Shakespeare. 1876 was the year of the formal opening of the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, and Wagner, then in his sixty-fourth year, with much fine work to his credit and with the patronage of the King of Bavaria to back him, could afford to leave the satire of the cartoonist unnoticed, and to treat all adverse criticism with the self-assurance of a man who has worked out an artistic ideal and is watching its realization. He could enjoy success hard won, for even in the seventies difficulties arose which would have wrecked Wagner's project of an ideal theatre for the perfect blend of music and poetry, had it not been for his enterprise in taking hold, giving concerts, issuing shares. But these unpleasant experiences are not to be compared with the struggles and bitter disappointments of the forties and fifties. After the first failure of Tannhäuser at Dresden in 1845 Wagner wrote: "A feeling of complete isolation took possession of me. It was not my vanity; I had fooled myself with my eyes open, and now I was quite stunned. I had only one thought: to bring the public to understand and to share my views, and to accomplish its artistic education." There is then a background of personal experience, and there is the stress and strain of a visionary but strongly espoused ideal. Without them Wagner's |