Chapter III (3)

Italian opera was moulded to its present form chiefly by Gluck, before whose time it was less irrational than it became later. In the beginning it was music-drama of a pedantic kind; then it served as the opportunity for setting singers to deliver a series of beautiful songs for the delectation of an audience largely seated in the wings; and finally Gluck, with his immense dramatic instinct and lack of lyrical invention, saw that by securing a story worth the telling, and telling it well, and inserting songs and concerted pieces only in situations where strong feelings demanded expression, and making his songs truthful expressions of those feelings, a form might be created which would enable him to lever out the best that was in him. Of these three periods of opera, the second was the luckiest; for then the form entirely fulfilled its purpose. The sole function of the story was to provide a motive for song after song; so that no one was scandalised or moved to laughter when the death of the hero was re-enacted because his death-song pleased the audience, or when the telling of the story was interrupted on any other equally ridiculous pretext. The characters were the merest puppets, or shadows of puppets; and there was no reason why Julius Caesar should not be a male soprano and sing charmingly feminine florid airs. In a word, there was no drama nor pretence of drama in the old Italian form; and those who can accept it as it is will find in many old Italian writers some perfect music of its sort, and in the Italian operas of Handel the divinest songs ever written--songs even more divine than Mozart's. But the childish delight in lovely melodies and in absolute perfection of vocal art, at its highest in the early part of the eighteenth century, died out rapidly after 1750; and Italian opera became the medium of the vulgarest instead of the most refined kind of ear-tickling. How Gluck rebelled, and determined to "reform" the opera stage, and how in reforming it he was impelled to a large extent by a desire to find a medium through which he could express himself, are matters well enough known to everyone nowadays. Like every other teacher, he left no disciples; for Mozart, the next master of Italian opera, was a hundred thousand miles away from him in intention, in method, and in achievement. He commenced where Gluck ended his pre-Reformation period; and all his life his intention was to please first, and only in the second place to express himself. But so splendid were his gifts, so inevitably did he fit the lovely word to the thrilling thought, so lucky was he in the libretto of "Don Giovanni" (the luckiest libretto ever devised), that he went clean ahead not only of Gluck but of Beethoven and every composer who has written opera since.

His operas stand at the parting of the ways. In them we find the fullest measure of dramatic truth combined with the most delicious ear-tickling. But it is safe to say that Mozart is the only composer of Italian operas who ever succeeded in combining the two things thus, for in Gluck there is short measure of sheer beauty, and in Handel--who used the oldest form--no attempt at drama. Mozart, like Gluck, had no disciples--only the second-rate men have disciples; but their example, and the tendency which they represented, had a curious result. Before their time all opera-writers had been avowed ear-ticklers. But after them, and especially after Mozart, the old line of composers may be observed to have split up into two lines, the one doing the old ear-tickling business, the other trying to express dramatic movement, and their thought and feeling, in the old medium. The first of these lines has not been broken to this day: Rossini came, and, after Rossini, Donizetti, Auber, Bellini, Meyerbeer, and the rest; and ear-tickler follows ear-tickler unto this day. The second line in its turn quickly split into those who, not content with the form, sought to alter it, and those who, quite content with it, went gaily on, turning out opera after opera, dealing with modern subjects in the old-fashioned way. Of these last Gounod must be reckoned the chief; and he began, not where Mozart left off, but with the Mozartean method of the "Don Giovanni" period. Now, it is of the very essence of the Italian opera of the Gluck-cum-Mozart model that it enables a composer to represent moments. The drama does not unfold gradually, as it does in the music-play, with its continuous flow of music marking the subtlest changes. It unfolds in jerks, each number advancing it a stage; so that Gluck never got any appearance of continuity whatever, while Mozart got it only by the consummate tact with which he arranged his pictures, and by the exciting pace at which he passes them before us. The figures seem to move, as in the Kinetoscope, or its forerunner the Wheel of Life: the Mozartean opera, when most dramatic, is a musical Wheel of Life. Gounod possessed neither Mozart's tact nor his fiery energy. Neither was called for in "Faust," which is not a drama, but a series of scenes, of crucial moments, from a drama; and since the moments were moments charged with the one feeling which Gounod appears to have felt very strongly or to have had the faculty for expressing, he is here at his very best. There was nothing spiritual in love as Gounod knew it--it was purely animal, though delicately animal; and Marguerite remains, and will remain, as the final expression of the most refined and voluptuous form of sensuality. What he had done in "Faust" he attempted to do again, with sundry differences, in "Romeo and Juliet"; and here the method which had served him so faithfully and so well in "Faust" utterly broke down. In "Faust" there were virtually but two characters, Faust and Marguerite, while in "Romeo" the stage was encumbered with Tybalt, Capulet, Mercutio, Laurent; and what would have been Mozart's opportunity was his undoing. He could give none of them pungent or characteristic language; they are the merest Italian operatic puppets; and it is only when they are off the stage that the opera shows any signs of life. In the story of "Romeo" the passion is of a far more fiery quality than in that of "Faust"; and whereas in "Faust" the passion, once aroused, remains at an even level until the finale, where it becomes a little more intense, in "Romeo" it is passion which gradually amounts to a tremendous climax in the Balcony scene, and in the Bedroom scene is strangely blended with chilly forebodings of death. The Mozartean method did not permit Gounod to depict these metamorphoses and blendings of feeling. Mozart himself would have been hard pressed to do it; and, for want of the only method that might have enabled Gounod to do it,--the Wagnerian method of continuous development of typical themes,--the unfolding of the drama hangs fire in every scene, not a scene ends at a higher pitch of feeling than it began. The last scene of all, the scene where a more sincere composer would have made his most stupendous effect, demanded at least sympathy with emotions for which Gounod at no time showed the slightest sympathy. He could give us the erotic fervour with which Romeo looks death in the eyes, but the mood preceding and indeed leading up to that fervour he could not give us--the mood which finds the world barren, ugly, and so repellent that death itself appears beautiful by comparison, the mood to which Christianity makes its strongest appeal. But it was not the subject which led to Gounod's failure in "Romeo and Juliet." He failed in every opera excepting "Faust," and he failed because, lacking perfect sincerity and perfect knowledge of his own powers, he endeavoured to express feelings he had never experienced, in a form which he would have felt at once to be inadequate had he experienced them for ever so brief a moment. As Gounod failed in "Romeo," and failed in every other opera, so every modern composer who tries to treat dramatic subjects in the old undramatic form has failed, and will fail. The Italian opera was well enough for the purpose it was devised to serve; but as soon as composers seek to put strenuous action, elaborately worked-out situations, and the gradual growth and change of human passion into it, we feel that there must be a lack of artistic sincerity somewhere. Italian opera may offer all these things, the things that the age wants in its opera, but it can never be sincere in offering them, and art is the one place where insincerity is intolerable.

But those who have heard "Romeo and Juliet" may possibly prefer even the insincere and unsatisfactory form of Italian opera which it represents to the perfectly sincere and perfectly satisfactory kind represented, say, by "La Favorita." For, as I said, when Italian opera is sincere it offers what no one wants--ear-tickling, and ear-tickling, moreover, of a sort which is gone completely out of fashion. Donizetti was a genuine descendant of the true line of opera-composers upon whom Gluck laid his curse, and he spent his life in devising pleasant noises to make his patrons' evenings pass agreeably. I cannot believe that anyone ever yet understood what "La Favorita" is all about, or that anyone ever wanted to understand. It is a series of songs of the inanest and insanest sort, without a single expressive bar, or a single tone-pattern which is beautiful regarded simply as a pattern. Even the famous "Spirito Gentil" is merely a stream of the brackish water that flowed, day and night, from Donizetti's pen, only it happens to be a little clearer than usual. But those tunes, so feeble and insipid now, pleased the ears of the time when Lord Steyne went to the opera for a momentary respite from boredom and to recruit his harem from the ballet corps; and Donizetti wrote them with no intention of posing as a grand composer, but simply as a humble purveyor of sweetmeats. In those days there was no music-hall, and the opera had to serve its purpose: hence the slight confusion which results in Donizetti, poor soul, being thought a better man than Mr. Jacobi is thought at the present time, although Mr. Jacobi cannot have less than a thousand times Donizetti's brains and invention. Mr. Jacobi's music is capital in its place; but I doubt whether it will be revived fifty years hence; and but for the fact that Donizetti was an opera-composer--and Mozart and Gluck were opera-composers too!--it is pretty certain that not the united prayers of Patti, Albani, Melba, and Eames would induce any operatic management to resurrect "La Favorita." Even up-to-date ear-tickling is not popular now in the opera-house: we go to the music-hall for it; and we don't want to pay a guinea at the opera to be tickled in a way that arouses no pleasurable sensations. Those terrific tonic and dominant passages for the trombones, sounding like the furious sawing of logs of wood, only make us laugh; and pretty tootlings of the flutes have long been done better, and overdone, elsewhere. Donizetti is amongst the dead whom no resurrection awaits.

VERDI YOUNG, AND VERDI YOUNGER

And first, for the sake of chronology, Verdi younger. "La Traviata" was produced in 1853, says the learned Grove, which I have consulted on the point, and "Aida" not till 1871. And though Verdi was not young, for an ordinary man, in 1871, he was very young indeed for the composer of "Falstaff" and "Otello"; while in the "Traviata" period one can scarcely say he was doing more than cutting his teeth, and not his wisdom teeth. One finds it difficult to understand how ever the thing came to be tolerated by musicians. Of course the desire to find a counter-blast to Wagner has done much for Verdi; but while one can understand how Dr. Stanford and others hoped to sweep away "Parsifal" with "Otello" and "Falstaff," it is not so easy to see what on earth they proposed to do with "Traviata." It won fame and cash for its composer in the old days when people went to the opera for lack of the music-hall, not yet invented; when Costa still lorded it not over living musical London merely, but over all the deceased masters, and without compunction added trombones to Mozart's scores, and defiled every masterwork he touched with his unspeakable Costamongery; when Wagner was either unheard of or regarded as a dangerous lunatic and immoral person; and it shows every sign of having been written to please the opera-goers of those days. Curiously, the critics of the time, in the words of the "Daily Telegraph," saw in "the Bayreuth master another form of Bunyan's man with the muck-rake," who "never sought to disguise the garbage he found in the Newgate Calendar of Mythland, or set his imagination to invent," and they were disgusted, also like the "Daily Telegraph," by "approaching incest" in "The Valkyrie"; yet they saw no harm whatever in the charming story of "Traviata"--the story of a harlot who reforms to the extent of retaining only one lover of her many, and who dies of consumption when that one's father does his best to drive her out upon the streets again by making her give up his son. Far from condemning the story myself, I am glad Verdi or his employers had the courage to go boldly to Dumas for it; only, let us be cautious how we condemn the morality of other opera-stories while praising the immorality of this. Let us see how Verdi has handled it. The opera is built after the same hybrid model as Gounod's "Romeo"; it is neither frankly the old Italian opera, existing for the sake of its songs, nor the later form in which the songs exist for the sake of the drama, but an attempt to combine the songs with the continuous working out of a dramatic impulse in the modern manner. But the attempt is far less successful than in "Romeo"; and indeed it is a faint-hearted one. Whenever a song occurs, the action is suspended, and all the actors save the lucky vocalist of the minute are at their wits' end to know where to look, and what to do with their hands, feet--their whole persons in fact--and the parts they are playing. And the songs are far from being expressive of the feeling of the situation that is supposed to call them up. The drinking tune in the first act is lively and appropriate enough; and not much more can be said against Violetta's song, "Ah! fors' e lui," than that while rather pretty its endless cadenzas are more than rather absurd. But in the next act Alfredo sings of the dream of his life to a pretty melody until he is interrupted by his sweetheart's maid, who tells him that his joy is at an end, and then he howls "O mio rimorso" to a march-tune of the rowdiest kind. Equally undramatic, untrue, false in feeling, are the sentimental ditties sung by Alfredo's father. The last act is best; but I must say that I have always found it a tedious business to watch Albani die of consumption. At the production of the piece, a soprano who must have looked quite as healthy played Violetta, and it is recorded that, when the doctor told how rapidly she was wasting away and announced her speedy decease, the theatre broke into uproarious merriment. I respect Madame Albani too highly to break into uproarious merriment at her pretence of consumption; but no one is better pleased when the business is over, although the music is more satisfactory here than in any other portion of the opera. Anyone who has sat at night with a friend down with toothache or cholera will recognise the atmosphere of the sickroom at once. But it is not pleasant enough to atone for the rest of the opera. For, to sum up, there is small interest in the drama, and, on the whole, smaller beauty in the music, of "La Traviata." It was made, as bonnets were made, to sell in the fifties; like the bonnets sold in the fifties, it is hopelessly out of date now; and it wants the inherent vitality that keeps the masterworks alive after the fashion in which they were written has passed away. The younger Verdi is not, after all, so vast an improvement on Donizetti and Bellini. His melodies are too often sadly sentimental, and any freshness with which he may have endowed them has long since faded. True, they occasionally have a terseness and pungency, a sheer brute force, which those other composers never got into their insipid tunes; while, on the other hand, Verdi rarely shows his strength without also showing a degree of vulgarity from which Bellini and Donizetti were for the most part free.

"Aida" is a different matter, though not so very different a matter. Here we have the young Verdi--Verdi in his early prime, for he was only fifty-eight; here also we have a story more likely to stir his rowdy imagination, if not more susceptible of effective treatment in the young Verdi manner. The misfortune is that the book is a very excerebrose affair. The drama does not begin until the third act: the two first are yawning abysms of sheer dulness. Who wants to _see_ that Radames loves Aida, that Amneris, the king's daughter, loves Radames, that Aida, a slave, is the daughter of the King of the Ethiopians, that Radames goes on a war expedition against that king, beats him and fetches him back a prisoner, that the other king gives Radames his daughter in marriage, that Radames, highly honoured, yet wishes to goodness he could get out of it somehow? A master of drama would begin in the third act, reveal the whole past in a pregnant five minutes, and then hold us breathless while we watched to see whether Radames would yield to social pressure, marry Amneris, and throw over Aida, or yield to passion, fly with Aida, and throw over his country. All this shows the bad influence of Scribe, who usually spent half his books in explaining matters as simple and obvious as the reason for eating one's breakfast. Verdi knew this as well as anyone, and used the two first acts as opportunities for stage display. For "Aida" was written to please the Khedive of Egypt; and Verdi, always keenly commercial, probably knew his man. Now, when the masters of opera--Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Weber--got hold of a bad book, they nearly invariably "faked" it by getting swiftly over the weak points and dwelling on the strong; and, above all, they flooded the whole thing with a stream of delicious melody that hypnotises one, and for the time puts fault-finding out of the question. Not so Verdi. He wrote to please his audience, and he knew that what one can only call dark-skinned local colour was still fresh in spite of "L'Africaine," and that the vulgar would find delight in a blaze of glaring banners and showy spectacle. So he set the two first acts as they stood, trusting to local colour and spectacle to make them popular; and, as we know, at the time they were popular, and the populace exalted Verdi far above such second-rate fellows as Mozart and Beethoven. But now, when local colour has been done to death, and when it has had a quarter of a century to bleach out of Verdi's canvases, what remains to interest, I do not say to touch, one? Certainly not the expression of Radames' or Aida's love, for here as everywhere Verdi fails to communicate any new phase of emotion, but (precisely as he did in "Falstaff" and "Otello") has written music which indicates that he had some inkling of the emotion of the scene, and could write strains calculated not to prevent the scene making its effect. That Verdi has no well-spring of original feeling, perhaps explains why he is so poor in the scenes with Radames, Amneris, and Aida. (Also, perhaps, it explains why he has fallen back in his best period upon masterpieces of dramatic art for his librettos. It is almost outside human possibility to add anything to "Falstaff" or "Otello"; and such success as Verdi has made with them is the result of writing what is, after all, only glorified incidental music--music which accompanies the play. To class these accompaniments with the masterpieces of original opera is surely the most startling feat of modern musical criticism.) Moreover, the plan of writing each scene in a series of detached numbers--for, even where song might flow naturally into song, the two are quite detached--breaks up the interest as effectually as it does in "Traviata"; and the songs do not themselves interest. Verdi's music is not based, like the masters', upon the inflexions of the human voice under stress of sincere feeling, but upon figures and passages easily executed upon certain instruments. The great composers strove to make instruments speak in the accent of the human voice, while Verdi has always tried to make the voice sound like an instrument. His roulades and cadenzas, for example, sound prettier on the clarinet than on the voice, as one hears when he sets the one chasing the other in "Traviata"; and if only our orchestral players would take the trouble to play with the same expression as the stage artists sing, we might soon be content to have a repetition (with a difference) of the feat of the old-world conductor who, in the absence of the hero, played the part upon the harpsichord with universal applause. The stock patterns out of which the songs are made soon grow old-fashioned, and are superseded by fresh ones: hence Verdi's songs are the earliest portions of his operas to wither. There are two powerful scenes in "Aida"--the second of the second act, and the final in the last act. The last is certainly terribly repulsive at the first blush; but the weird chant of the priestesses in the brightly-lit temple, where the workmen are closing the entrance to the vault underneath in which we see Radames left to die, contrasts finely with the sweet music that accompanies the declaration of Aida that she has hidden there to die with him; and, while guessing at the splendour of the music Wagner might have given us here, one may still admit Verdi to have succeeded well in a smaller way than Wagner's. But on the whole "Aida" is to be heard once and have done with, for save these scenes there is little else in it to engage one. Aida is alive, but Amneris is a hopeless piece of machinery--something between the stage conception of a princess and the Lady with the Camellias, any difference in modesty being certainly not in favour of Amneris. The music very rarely rises above commonness--that commonness which is proclaimed in every bar of Verdi's instrumentation, and in his shameless Salvation Army rhythms; and it is sometimes (as in the Priest's solo with chorus in the last scene of the second act) odiously vulgar. "Aida" is more dramatic than "Traviata," has more of Verdi's brusque energy, less of his sentimentality; but it has none of the youthful freshness of his latest work. The young Verdi has already aged--how long will the old Verdi remain young?

"THE FLYING DUTCHMAN"

Wagner took "The Flying Dutchman", "Tannhaeuser," and "Lohengrin," in three long running steps; from "Lohengrin" he made a flying leap into the air, and, after spending some five or six years up there, he landed safely on "The Nibelung's Ring." The leap was a prodigious one, and you may search history in vain for its like; and still more astounding was it if you reckon from the point where the run was commenced. "The Flying Dutchman" was avowedly that point. "Die Feen" is boyish folly, and "Rienzi" an attempt to out-Meyer Meyerbeer. But in the "Dutchman" Wagner sought seriously to realise himself, to find the mode of best expressing the best that was in him. That mode he found in "The Rheingold" and mastered in "The Valkyrie," with its continuous development and transmogrification of themes. And (to discard utterly my former metaphor) after steeping oneself for several nights in that last great river of melody, wide and deep and clear, it is interesting to be led suddenly to its source, and see it bubbling up with infinite energy, a good deal of frothing, and some brown mud.

Compared with "The Valkyrie," "The Flying Dutchman" is ill-contrived and stagy. It is flecked here and there with vulgarity. It has far less of pure beauty; it has only its moments, whereas "The Valkyrie" gives hours of unbroken delight. "The Valkyrie" appeals to the primary instincts of our nature--instincts and desires that will remain in us so long as our nature is human; while for a large part of its effect the "Dutchman" trusts to a feeling which is elusive at all times and has no permanent hold upon us. Horror of the supernatural is not very deeply rooted in us, after all. Modern training tends to eliminate it altogether. In later life Goethe could not call up a single delightful shiver. There are probably not half a dozen stories in the world from which we can get it a second time. The unexpected plays a part in producing it, and the same means does not produce it twice with anything approaching the same intensity. Hence the Dutchman's phantom ship must be more ghost-like at each representation, its blood-red sails a bloodier red; and in the long-run, do what the stage carpenters will, we coldly sit and compare their work with previous ships. True, the music which accompanies its entry is always impressively ghastly; yet, while we know this, we are acutely conscious that our feeling is more or less a laudable make-believe--a make-believe that requires some little effort. Then Heine's notion, which seemed so brilliant at first, that the Dutchman could be redeemed by the unshakable love of a woman, has now all the disagreeable staleness of a decrepit and obvious untruth. It has no essential verity to give it validity, it is no symbol of a fact which is immediately and deeply felt to be a fact. The condition of redemption is entirely arbitrary: it might as reasonably be that the Dutchman should find a woman who would not shrink from eating his weather-stained hat. What was it to the Dutchman's damned soul if all the women in the world swore to love him eternally, so long as he was unable to love one of them? The true Wandering Jew is not the unloved man, but the man who cannot love, who is destitute of creative emotion and cannot build up for himself a world in which to dwell, but must needs live in hell--a world that others make, a world where he has no place. Wagner knew this, and makes the Dutchman fall in love with Senta; and that only leaves the drama more than ever in a muddle. One wants a reason for his suddenly being able to love. It cannot be because Senta promises to love him till death; for he has had hundreds of fruitless love-affairs before, and knows that all women promise that, and some of them mean it. Besides, the highest moment of the drama ought either to arrive when he feels love dawning in his loveless heart, or when he renounces his chance of salvation and sails away to eternal torment, believing that Senta made her promise in a passing fit of enthusiasm; and at one or other of those moments we ought to have some sign that he is redeemed. There is no such sign. The phantom ship falls to pieces, and the Dutchman is freed from his curse when Senta casts herself into the waves; and the highest moment of the whole drama is that in which the dreamy monomaniac, the modern Jeanne d'Arc, the real heroine of the opera, wins her own salvation, masters the world and makes it her heaven, by taking her fate in both hands and setting out to do the thing she feels most strongly impelled to do. If the Dutchman's salvation depends on himself, it is evidently unnecessary for Senta to be drowned; if it depends upon her, it only shows that Wagner, writing fifty years ago, and dazzled by the brilliance of a new idea, could not see so clearly as can be seen to-day that Senta was her own and not the Dutchman's saviour; and if (as it apparently does) it depends upon both Dutchman and Senta, then, at a performance at least, one can merely feel that something in the drama is very much askew, without knowing precisely what.

In minor respects "The Flying Dutchman" falls considerably short of perfection, even of reasonableness. For example, the comings and goings of Daland are fearfully stagy. But worst of all are the arrangements of the first act. I can go as far as most people in accepting stage conventions. If Wagner brought on a four-eyed, eight-horned, twenty-seven-legged monster and called it a Jabberwock, I should not so much as ask why the legs were not all in pairs, like the horns and eyes, so long as I saw in the animal's habits a certain congruity, a conformity to what I would willingly regard as Jabberwock nature. But who can pretend to believe in a ship which comes against the rocks in a storm and anchors there while the captain goes ashore to see whether shipwreck is imminent? That the majority of opera-goers cannot live near the sea is self-evident, and that few of them should ever have seen a shipwreck unavoidable; but surely anyone who has crossed the Channel must have a vague suspicion that to place this vessel against the rocks in a tempest is the last thing a seaman would dream of doing, and that, if he were driven there and managed to get ashore, he would call his men after him (if they needed calling), and trouble neither about casting anchor nor going aboard again. The thing is ludicrously stagy. I suppose that Wagner was too sea-sick to observe what happened during his weeks of roughing it in the North Sea. But the second scene is admirable. That monotonous drowsy hum of the Spinning song is exactly what is needed to put one in the mood for sympathising with Senta and her dreams. With the third there is an occasional return to the bad stagecraft of Scribe; but there are also hints of the simple directness of the later Wagner.

The music is like the stagecraft: now and then simply dramatic, now and then stagily undramatic; sometimes rich and splendid, sometimes threadbare and vulgar. And by this I do not mean that the old-fashioned set pieces are of necessity bad, and the freer portions necessarily good. Good and bad may be found in the new and the old Wagner alike. That sailor's dance is to me as odious as anything in Meyerbeer, and the melody which ends the love-duet is scarcely more tolerable. On the other hand, not even in "The Valkyrie" did Wagner write more picturesquely weird music than most of the first act. The shrilling of the north wind, the roaring of the waves, the creaking of cordage, the banging of booms, an uncanny sound in a dismal night at sea,--these are suggested with wonderful vividness. At times Wagner gives us gobbets of unassimilated Weber and Beethoven, but some passages are as original as they are magnificent. The finest bars in the work are those in which Senta declares her faith in her "mission," and the Dutchman yields himself to unreasoning adoration. Other moods came to Wagner, but never again that mood of rapturous self-effacement. It is perhaps a young man's mood; certainly it is identical with the ecstasy with which one contemplates a perfect piece of art, or a life greatly lived; and here it finds splendid expression.

"LOHENGRIN"

"Lohengrin" has been sung scores of times at Covent Garden in one fashion or another; but I declare that we heard something resembling the real "Lohengrin" for the first time when the late Mr. Anton Seidl crossed the Atlantic to conduct it and other of Wagner's operas. We had come to regard it as a pretty opera--an opera full of an individual, strange, indefinable sweetness; but Mr. Anton Seidl came all the way from New York city to show us how out of sweetness can come forth strength. Mr. Seidl was a Wagner conductor of the older type, and with some of the faults of that type; he knew little or nothing of the improvements in the manner of interpreting Wagner's music effected by Mottl, Levi, and that stupendous creature Siegfried Wagner; he was a survival of the first enthusiastic reaction against Italian ways of misdoing things; and he was, if anything, a little too strongly inclined to go a little too far in the opposite direction to the touch-and-go conductors. But there is so much of sweetness and delicacy in "Lohengrin" that the whole opera, including the sweet and delicate portions, actually gains from a forceful and manly handling--gains so immensely that, as already said, those of us who heard it under Mr. Seidl's direction must have felt that here, at last, was the true "Lohengrin," the "Lohengrin" of Wagner's imagination. It was a pleasure merely to hear the band singing out boldly, getting the last fraction of rich tone out of each note, in the first act; to hear the string passages valiantly attacked, and the melodies treated with breadth, and the trumpets and trombones playing out with all their force when need was, holding the sounds to the end instead of letting them slink away ashamed in the accepted Italian style. And not only were these things in themselves delightful--they also served to make the drama doubly powerful, and the tender parts of the music doubly tender, to show how splendid in many respects was Wagner's art in the "Lohengrin" days, and to prove that Maurel's way of doing the part of Telramund some years ago was, as Maurel's way of doing things generally are, perfectly right. Maurel, it will be remembered, stuck a red feather in his cap; and the eternally wise critics agreed in thinking this absolutely wrong. They told him the feather was out of place--it made him appear ridiculous, and so on. Maurel retorted that he was playing the part of a fierce barbarian chief who would not look, he thought, like a gilded butterfly, and that his notion was to look as ferocious as he could. Now the odd thing is, that though Maurel was right, we critics were in a sense right also. As the music used to be played, a Telramund one degree nearer to a man than the average Italian baritone seemed ludicrously out of place; and when, in addition, the Lohengrin was a would-be lady-killer without an inch of fight in him, Henry the Fowler a pathetic heavy father, and Elsa a sentimental milliner, there was something farcical about Maurel's red feather and generally militant aspect. What we critics had not the brains to see was that the playing of the music was wrong, and that Maurel was only wrong in trying to play his part in the right manner when Lohengrin, Elsa, King, and conductor were all against him in their determination to do their parts wrong. Mr. Bispham follows in Maurel's footsteps, as he frequently does, in a modified costume, but when for the first time the orchestra played right he would not have seemed ridiculous had he stuck Maurel's red feather into his helmet. The whole scene became a different thing: we were thrown at once into the atmosphere of an armed camp full of turbulent thieves and bandits itching for fighting, and wildly excited with rumours of conflicts near at hand. Amidst all this excitement, and amidst all the unruly fighters, Telramund, strongest, fiercest, most unruly of them all, has to open the drama; and to command our respect, to make us feel that it is he who is making the drama move, that it is because all the barbarians are afraid of him that the drama begins to move at all, he cannot possibly look too ferocious and hot-blooded, too strong of limb and tempestuous of temper. The proof that this (Seidl's) reading of the opera was the right one, was that, in the first place, the drama immediately interested you instead of keeping you waiting for the entry of Elsa; and, in the second place, that the noisy, energetic playing of the opening scene threw the music of Elsa and Lohengrin into wonderfully beautiful relief--a relief which in the old way of doing the opera was very much wanting. To play "Lohengrin" in the old way is to deny Wagner the astonishing sense of dramatic effect he had from the beginning; to play it as Seidl played it is to prove that the conductor appreciates the perfection of artistic sense that led, compelled, Wagner to set the miraculous vision of Lohengrin against a background made up of such stormy scenes. Had Seidl kept his vigour for the stormy scenes, and given us a finer tenderness in the prelude, the love-music, and Lohengrin's account of himself, his rendering would have been a flawless one.

And even as Seidl interpreted it, the supreme beauty of the music, the sweetness of it as well as its strength, were manifest as they have never been manifest before. "Lohengrin" is surely the most beautiful, the fullest of sheer beauty, of all Wagner's operas. Some thirty or forty years hence those of us who are lucky enough still to live in the sweet sunlight will begin to feel that at last it is becoming feasible to take a fair and reasonable view of Wagner's creative work; and we shall probably differ about verdicts which the whole musical world of to-day would agree only in rejecting. Old-school Wagnerites and anti-Wagnerites will have gone off together into the night, and the echo of the noise of all their feuds will have died away. No one will venture to talk of the "teaching" of "Parsifal" or any other of Wagner's works; the legends from which he constructed his works will have lost their novelty. The music-drama itself will be regarded by the Academics (if there are any left) with all the reverence due to the established fact, and possibly it may be suffering the fierce assault of the exponents of a newer and nobler form. Then the younger critics will arise and take one after another of the music-dramas and ask, What measure of beauty is there, and what dramatic strength, what originality of emotion? and in a few minutes they will scatter hundreds of harmless and long-cherished illusions that went to make life interesting. In that day of wrath and tribulation may I be on the right side, and have energy to go forward, giving up the pretence of what I can no longer like, and boldly saying that I like what I like, even should it happen to be unpopular. May I never fall so low as to be talked of as a guardian of the accepted forms and laws. But even if it should prove unavoidable to relinquish faith in Bach, in Beethoven, in Wagner, yet it is devoutly to be hoped that it will never be necessary to give up a belief in "Lohengrin"; for in that case my fate is fixed--I shall be among the reactionaries, the admirers of the thing that cannot be admired, the lovers of the unlovable. But indeed it is incredible that "Lohengrin" should ever cease to seem lovely--lovely in idea and in the expression of the idea. The story is one of the finest Wagner ever set; it remains fresh, though it had been told a hundred times before. The maiden in distress--we know her perfectly well; the wicked sorceress who has got her into distress--we know her quite as well; the celestial knight who rescues her--we know him nearly as well. But the details in which "Lohengrin" differs from all other tales of the same order are precisely those that make it the most enchanting tale of them all. Lohengrin, knight of the Grail, redeemer, yet with a touch of tragedy in his fate, drawn down the river in his magic boat by the Swan from a far mysterious land, a land of perpetual freshness and beauty, is an infinitely more poetic notion than the commonplace angel flapping clumsily down from heaven; and even if we feel it to be absurd that he should have to beg his wife to take him on trust, yet, after all, he takes his wife on trust, and he tells her at the outset that he cannot reveal the truth about himself. Elsa is vastly preferable to the ordinary distressed mediaeval maiden, if only because a woman who is too weak to be worth a snap of the fingers does move us to pity, whereas the ordinary mediaeval is cut out of pasteboard, and does not affect us at all. The King is perhaps merely a stage figure; Ortrud is just one degree better than the average witch of a fairy story; but Frederic, savage and powerful, but so superstitious as to be at the mercy of his wife, is human enough to interest us. And Wagner has managed his story perfectly throughout, excepting at the end of the second act, where that dreary business of Ortrud and Frederic stopping the bridal procession is a mere reminiscence of the wretched stagecraft of Scribe, and quite superfluous. But if there is a flaw in the drama, there cannot be said to be one in the music. The mere fact that, save two numbers, it is all written in common time counts for absolutely nothing against its endless variety. Wagner never again hit upon quite so divine and pure a theme as that of the Grail, from which the prelude is evolved; the Swan theme at once carries one in imagination up the ever-rippling river to that wonderful land of everlasting dawn and sacred early morning stillness; and nothing could be more effective, as background and relief to these, than the warlike music of the first act, and the ghastly opening of the second act, so suggestive of horrors and the spells of Ortrud winding round Frederic's soul. Then there is Elsa's dream, the magical music of Lohengrin's tale, the music of the Bridal procession in the second act, the great and tender melody first sung by Elsa and Ortrud, and then repeated by the orchestra as Ortrud allows Elsa to lead her into the house, the whole of the Bridal-chamber duet, and perhaps, above all, Lohengrin's farewell. To whatever page of the score you turn, there is perfect beauty--after the first act not a great deal that is powerful or meant to be powerful, but melody after melody that entrances you merely as absolute music without poetic significance, and that seems doubly entrancing by reason of the strange, remote feeling with which it is charged, and its perpetual suggestion of the broad stream flowing ceaselessly from far-away Montsalvat to the sea. "Lohengrin" is a fairy-story imbued with seriousness and tender human emotion, and the music is exactly adapted to it.

"TRISTAN AND ISOLDA"

Says Nietzsche (pretending to put the words into the mouth of another), "I hate Wagner, but I no longer stand any other music"; and though the saying is entirely senseless to those who do hate Wagner, the feeling that prompted it may be understood by all who love him and who stand every other music, so long as it is real music. Immediately after listening to "Tristan and Isolda" all other operas seem away from the point, to be concerned with the secondary issues of life, to babble without fervour or directness of unessential matters. This does not mean that "Tristan" is greater than "Don Giovanni" or the "Matthew" Passion--for it is not--but that it speaks to each of us in the most modern language of the most engrossing subject in the world, of oneself, of one's own soul. Who can stay to listen to the sheer loveliness of "Don Giovanni," or follow with any sympathy the farcical doom of that hero, or who, again, can be at the pains to enter into the obsolescent emotions and mode of expression of Bach, when Wagner calls us to listen concerning the innermost workings of our own being, and speaks in a tongue every word of which enters the brain like a thing of life? For one does not have to think what Wagner means: so direct, so penetrating, is his speech, that one becomes aware of the meaning without thinking of the words that convey it. Nietzsche is right when he says Wagner summarises modernism; but he forgot that Wagner summarises it because he largely helped to create it, to make it what it is, by this power of transferring his thought and emotion bodily, as it were, to other minds, and that he will remain modern for long to come, inasmuch as he moulds the thought of the successive generations as they arise.

"Tristan and Isolda" is one of the world's half-dozen stupendous appeals in music to the emotional side of man's nature; it stands with the "Matthew" Passion, the Choral Symphony, and Mozart's Requiem, rather than with "Don Giovanni," or "Fidelio," or "Tannhaeuser;" like the Requiem, the Choral Symphony, the "Matthew" Passion, there are pages of unspeakable beauty in it; but, like them also, its main object is not to please the ear or the eye, but to communicate an overwhelming emotion. That emotion is the passion of love--the elemental desire of the man for the woman, of the woman for the man; and to the expression of this, not in one phase alone, like Gounod in his "Faust," but in all its phases. It is a glorification of sex attraction: nevertheless, it refutes Tannhaeuser or Venus as completely as it refutes Wolfram or Elizabeth. Tannhaeuser, we know, would have it that love was wholly of the flesh, Wolfram that it was solely of the spirit. That there is no love which does not commence in the desiring of the flesh, and none, not even the most spiritual, which does not consist entirely in sex passion, that the two, spiritual and fleshly love, are merely different phases of one and the same passion, Wagner had learnt when he came to create "Tristan." And in "Tristan" we commence with a fleshly love, as intense as that Tannhaeuser knew; but by reason of its own energy, its own excess, it rises to a spiritual love as free from grossness as any dreamed of by Elizabeth or Wolfram, and far surpassing theirs in exaltation. This change he depicted in a way as simple as it was marvellous, so that as we watch the drama and listen to the music we experience it within ourselves and our inner selves are revealed to us. Nothing comes between us and the passions expressed. Tristan and Isolda are passion in its purest integrity, naked souls vibrating with the keenest emotion; they have no idiosyncrasies to be sympathised with, to be allowed for; they are generalisations, not characters, and in them we see only ourselves reflected on the stage--ourselves as we are under the spell of Wagner's music and of his drama. For "Tristan" seems to me the most wonderful of Wagner's dramas, far more wonderful than "Parsifal," far more wonderful than "Tannhaeuser." There is no stroke in it that is not inevitable, none that does not immensely and immediately tell; and, despite its literary quality, one fancies it could not fail to make some measure of its effect were it played without the music. Think of the first act. The scene is the deck of the ship; the wind is fresh, and charged with the bitterness of the salt sea; and Isolda sits there consumed with burning anger and hate of the man she loves, whose life she spared because she loved him, and who now rewards her by carrying her off, almost as the spoil of war, to be the wife of his king. It has been said that Tolstoi asserted for the first time in "The Kreuzer Sonata" that hate and love were the same passion. But the truth is, Wagner knew it long before Tolstoi, just as Shakespeare knew it long before Wagner; and the whole of this first act turns on it. Isolda sends for Tristan and tells him he has wronged her, and begs him to drink the cup of peace with her. Tristan sees precisely what she means, and, loving her, drinks the proffered poison as an atonement for the wrong he has done her, and for his treachery to himself in winning her, for ambition's sake, as King Mark's bride instead of taking her as his own. But the moment her hatred is satisfied Isolda finds life intolerable without it, without love; her love a second time betrays her; and she seizes the poison and drinks also. Then comes the masterstroke. Done with this world, with nothing but death before them, the two confess their long-pent love; in their exalted state passion comes over them like a flood; in the first rush of passion, honour, shame, friendship seem mere names of illusions, and love is the only real thing in life; and finally, the death draught being no death draught, but a slight infusion of cantharides, the two passionately cling to each other, vaguely wondering what all the noise is about, while the ship reaches land and all the people shout and the trumpets blow. What is the stagecraft of Scribe compared with this? how else could the avowal of love be brought about with such instant and stupendous effect? Quite as amazing is the second act. Almost from the beginning to close on the end the lovers fondle each other, in a garden before an old castle in the sultry summer night; and just as their passion reaches its highest pitch, Mark breaks in upon them. For Tristan, at least, death is imminent; and the mere presence of death serves to begin the change from the desire of the flesh to the ecstatic spiritual passion. That change is completed in the next act, where we have the scene laid before Tristan's deserted and dilapidated castle in Brittany, with the calm sea in the distance (it should shine like burnished steel); and here Tristan lies dying of the wound he received from Melot in the previous scene, while a melody from the shepherd's pipe, the saddest melody ever heard, floats melancholy and wearily through the hot, close, breathless air. Kurvenal, his servant, has sent for Isolda to cure him as she had cured him before; and when at last she comes Tristan grows crazy with joy, tears the bandages from his wounds, and dies just as she enters. This finishes the metamorphosis begun in the second act: after some other incidents, Isolda, rapt in her spiritual love, sings the death-song and dies over Tristan's body. What is the libretto of "Otello" or of "Falstaff" compared with this libretto? From beginning to end there is not a line, not an incident, in excess. Anyone who is wearied by King Mark's long address when he comes on the guilty pair, has failed to catch the drift of the whole opera--failed to see that two souls like Tristan and Isolda, wholly swayed by love, must find Mark's grief wholly unintelligible, and have no power of explaining themselves to those not possessed with a passion like theirs, or of bringing themselves into touch with the workaday world of daylight, and that all Mark's most moving appeal means to them is that this world, where such annoyances occur, is not the land in which they fain would dwell. They live wholly for their illusion, and if it is forbidden to them in life they will seek death; nothing--not honour, shame, the affection of Mark, the faithfulness of Kurvenal, least of all, life--is to be considered in comparison with their love; their love is the love that is all in all. It is entirely selfish: Mark is as much their enemy as Melot, his affection more to be dreaded than the sword of Melot.