Chapter XII: Act V: The Forum (3)

No one of Wagner’s works enchains the imagination as does this glowing picture of love and despair. From the first beautiful prelude to Isolde’s exquisite death-song—one of those songs the world will not willingly let perish—we are as in a hypnotic trance. The action is psychologic rather than theatric. We are permitted to view two burning souls; we analyze, rejoice and suffer in their psychical adventures. This is not the drama of romantic wooing and the clash of swords; all conventions of music and drama are set aside, are denied. There is a love philter, but it is not the philter which arouses the fatal love; the love is implicit in the lovers before the curtain lifts.

We are given a night scene of magical beauty—yet how different from the usual banal operatic assignation. In an old-time, Old-World forest a man and a woman have revealed their souls; sobbing in the distance is the soft horn music of the kingly hunt. Now it is love against the world, the relentless instinct that mocks at conventional gyves. Was ever such an enchanting romance sung? The very moonlight seems melodious. After the storm and stress of the first act this scene recalls Heine’s This is the Fairy Wood of Old. Wagner’s philosophy should concern us but little; his music is his metaphysic; its beauty and dramatic significance are worth tomes of his theories. There is the superb web and woof of this tonal tapestry, the most eloquent orchestra that ever stormed or sighed; there is every accent and nuance of human speech, faithfully reproduced; and above all there hovers the imagination of the poet-composer. These thematic nuggets, these motives of love and death, which paint the lives of his men and women—are they not wonderfully conceived, wonderfully developed? Berlioz it was who confessed that the prelude to this music-drama proved ever an enigma to him. Wagner’s melodic curves of intensity mirror the soul’s perturbations. He is poet of passion, a master of thrilling tones, a magician who everywhere finds willing thralls.

And the music—how it searches the nerves. How it throws into the background, because of its intensity, all the love lays ever penned by mortal composer! How it appeals to the intellect with its exalted realism! This music is not for those who admire the pink prettiness of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet. It is music that would have been loved by that “fierce and splendid old man,” Walter Savage Landor, by Shelley, by Byron and Walt Whitman—the latter once confessed to me his love for Wagner; “it makes my old bones sweeter,” he said—but it would not have been admired by Wordsworth or Tennyson. Swinburne adores Wagner almost as much as he adores the sea, and he sings the praise of both with an absence of reserve that recalls the _mot_ of Vauvenargues: “To praise moderately is always a sign of mediocrity.”

Yet in Tristan and Isolde are the seeds of the morbid, the hysterical, and the sublimely erotic—hall marks of most great modern works of art. And there is, too, the _Katharsis_ of Aristotle, the purification by pity and terror. This dominating tragic principle places the drama within the category of the classic.

Ernest Newman, in his Study of Wagner, an epoch-making work in musical criticism, puts the question in its exact bearings. Wagner is a great _musical_-dramatist—his dramas alone could not stand on their legs, so otiose are they. His poetry, _quâ_ poetry, is second-rate; but as “words for music,” words that fly well in the wind of his inspiration, they are unique. This composer was harassed all his life long by the word “drama.” He believed that a perfect union of music and drama could be effected—vain dream—and wasted much valuable time and good white paper trying to prove his thesis. To the end his musical ruled his dramatic instincts; he was always the composer. Tristan and Isolde is the most signal instance of this. Its Greek-like severity of form in the book, its paucity of incident, were so many barriers removed for the poet-composer who, hampered by the awful weight of material in the Ring, had to write ineffectual music at times.

Newman thinks that the last scene of Act II of Isolde and Tristan is an anti-climax. From a theatric viewpoint, yes; but not so if Wagner the composer be considered. If he had dropped the curtain on the infatuated pair—as he does in Act I of Die Walküre—a whole skein of the moving story would have been missing. The action is pulled up with a jerk by Melot’s entrance; yet what follows is worth a volume of plays with the conventional thrilling “curtain.” Think of the drama without Marke’s speech, without that compassion and love which Isolde and Tristan exhibit, oblivious to all about them! Besides, the scene needs a quieter, withal more tragic, note than the endings of Acts I and III. Suppose that the King, Tristan’s uncle, had been like that other monarch sung of by Heinrich Heine:—

Oh, there’s a king, a grim old king, with beard both long and gray.
The king is old. The queen is young. Her face is fresh as May.
And there’s a lad, a laughing lad, so blithe and debonair,
The queen herself has chosen him, her silken train to bear.
How runs the tale, that good grave tale the peasant women tell?
“So both of them were put to death, for loving over well.”

There has been so much discussion over the so-called slow _tempi_ of Bayreuth that it is time to shatter the little legend with stern facts. A well-known conductor who has presided at Bayreuth relates that when an old man Richard Wagner would occasionally take up the baton and conduct Parsifal or Tristan at a rehearsal. His admiration for his own music—an admiration that was starved during his exile—manifested itself in a tendency to dragging _tempi_. The venerable composer retarded each bar as if to squeeze from it the last lingering drop of sweetness. This trait was noticed and copied by the younger generation of conductors. The elder group, Richter, Levi, and Seidl had and have the true tradition. The later one simply means that Wagner’s pulse beat was older and slower. To slavishly imitate this is but a sign of the humor-breeding snobbery now so rife at Wahnfried. The music itself is the best refutation of such folly.

Wagner lets Love beckon Death to its side, and together Love and Death, inseparable companions from time’s infancy, close the drama, the king sadly gazing at the meeting of the great clear sky and sea, while Brangaene, near by, is bruised and bent with immitigable grief.

What a picture, what a tale, what music!

“The world will find a wholesome reaction in the study of music from its spiritual side, its inner life. In the laws of tonality the most musical and the least musical will have a common ground of interest. By study of tone, character, or mental effects, we are led to realize that the marvellous intuition of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle was correct, that music is the basis of all human development.” This, by an author unknown to me, is a prophecy of the track that music must take if it is to ascend. Intellectual music, music that does not appeal merely to the feverish nerves of this generation, is what we need; and by intellectual music I do not mean too complex or abstract music, abstract in the sense of lacking human interest. Is there no mean between the brawls and lusts of Mascagni’s peasant folk and the often abstruse delving of Brahms? Surely to think high means to hear plainly—or else Wordsworth is mistaken. We fret, fumble, and analyze too much in our arts. Why cannot we have the Athenian gladness and simplicity of Mozart, with the added richness of Richard Strauss? Must knowledge ever bring with it pain and weariness of life? Is there no fruit in this Armida garden that is without ashes? Why cannot we accept music without striving to extort from it metaphysical meanings? There is Mozart’s G minor symphony—in its sunny measures is sanity. To perdition with preachers and pedagogues! Open the casements of your soul; flood it with music, and sing with Shelley:—

Music when soft voices die
Vibrates in the memory.

NOTE

Several of the foregoing essays have appeared in Scribner’s Magazine, the Musical Courier, Criterion, Harper’s Bazar, Metropolitan, New York Sun, and elsewhere. They have been greatly altered and amplified for republication. The study of Parsifal, the major part of which was first printed in the Musical Courier, has been rigorously revised and much enlarged. A few anecdotes of Richard Strauss must be credited to the London Musical Times.

Transcriber’s Notes

pg 12 Changed: at the end its feverish esctasy
to: at the end its feverish ecstasy

pg 20 Changed: significance of the development from Hadyn
to: significance of the development from Haydn

pg 21 Changed: serious influence of the Brahms Schicksalied
to: serious influence of the Brahms Schicksalslied

pg 29 Changed: A critic considers O warst du mein
to: A critic considers O wärst du mein

pg 51 Changed: his juggling with bizzare rhythms
to: his juggling with bizarre rhythms

pg 68 Changed: Invocation and Parsifal, Hunnenschlact
to: Invocation and Parsifal, Hunnenschlacht

pg 97 Changed: Romantics for knights, mediæval myssteries
to: Romantics for knights, mediæval mysteries

pg 100 Changed: which so often gravitates pedulum-wise
to: which so often gravitates pendulum-wise

pg 117 Changed: Like the Buddhistic Tripatka
to: Like the Buddhistic Tripitaka

pg 178 Changed: at the foot of the Vierge au donitaire
to: at the foot of the Vierge au donataire

pg 191 Changed: he loves to finger the georgeous
to: he loves to finger the gorgeous

pg 217 Changed: social democrat and freethinker; and Tschaïkowsy
to: social democrat and freethinker; and Tschaïkowsky